'Grace Under Pressure: Re-reading Giselle' is a close reading of the Romantic ballet Giselle (1841) , focusing on the Birmingham Royal Ballet production of 3 March 1992. The Preface provides a personal introduction, and notes the status of ballet within dance studies and the aca…
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This study considers the work of three women poets writing in English during the period 1970-2000. I argue that the poets, Eavan Boland, Michele Roberts and Jackie Kay are all `hybrid' voices, positioned and positioning themselves on the borders between different cultures and tr…
This work comprises a critical thesis 'How Much Shall We Bet? Defining Surreal Futures', assessing the scope for stronger cross-pollination between poetry and futures studies and examining a potential hybrid poet-futurist praxis; and a portfolio of futures poetry in a range of l…
This study is a cultural materialist analysis of the spectacular commodity economy of the fin-de-siecle as mediated and represented in the iconography of the artist that Oscar Wilde and Henry James employ. The figure of the artist within the dominant social organisation of the f…
This thesis aims to reinterpret Tom Jones by putting it into some previously untried comparative contexts. As well as using the traditional points of reference such as Lucian, Swift and Sterne, I compare Fielding's satire with Flaubert's; his narrative poetics with Dickens's and…
This work is a study of the various concepts and theories of myth and ritual as they are found in some non-literary disciplines, especially anthropology, in literary theory, and in the criticism of Shakespeare. It is divided into two parts. Part I discusses various theories of m…
Moving on from Jackson's belief in fantasy as the literature of subversion, this thesis argues that by filtering Todorov's concept of the fantastic through a contemporary theoretical understanding of transgression, the stasis which has resulted from the obsessive desire to pin d…
In the light of Bakhtinian theories, this research focuses on Ulysses as a postcolonial modernist text, in which Joyce appropriates modernist aesthetic strategies to serve the purpose of narrating the nation. Bakhtin is helpful here, not only because his theories serve especiall…
This thesis addresses, from a comparative perspective, an important lacuna in the research devoted to German and English revolutionary literature in the period from 1819 up to the European revolutions of 1848/49. It illustrates that a major shift from a concept of political revo…
The investigation of Fitzgerald's equivocal success, of the decisive change in Britain's recent cultural perspective, involves raising questions around canon-formation, the consolidation of a national identity, strategies of writing, and the politics of reading. I have found it …
This thesis is divided into three parts – Word, Body and Transubstantiation. Collectively these are the central motifs of Catholicism’s Eucharist. According to Scripture, Christ is the word made flesh. The Eucharist recalls his words and actions at the Last Supper when he shares…
This thesis erects and defends the proposition that Jacques Derrida's readings of 'metaphysics in deconstruction' and his raising to theoretical consciousness of the 'differential matrix', have the capacity to inaugurate a 'brave new world' in this postmodern 'age of the aporia'…
This central premise of this thesis is that Lars von Trier is a political director. Through a detailed formal analysis of five films I proceed to discuss the political implications of form, something that has not been acknowledged by scholarship so far. In this thesis, I employ …
This thesis compares the reproduction of violence in the fictional writings of two contemporary Martinican authors, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant. While existing scholarship provides significant examinations of both authors individually, this study builds on these foun…
This thesis, ‘Broadcasting Modernity’ is an account of sound technology, namely wireless, as a feature of early twentieth century literature. If modernism is a historical-specific movement, and language a repository of time, then the advent of radio broadcasting cannot be ignore…
Desire and pursuit of the whole is the theme which animates all Rose Macaulay s fiction. Her literature-rich childhood nourished both an interest in mysticism and an ambition to write poems. It is in her verse that we first see emerging her careful symbolism of quest, her obsess…
This thesis is a comparative study of three overtly unrelated authors. Thomas Mann, Kafka and Cernuda, setting them in a European context of a 'crisis of faith' where doubt in the existence of an ordered universe ultimately governed by God is becoming widespread. Rather than a p…
This thesis is the first critical study to examine Miller across the full range of his intellectual contribution. Existing studies of Hugh Miller have been preoccupied with Miller’s biography and with the scandal of his suicide in 1856, with many commentators viewing Miller as t…
To analyse the essential themes of Women in Love: i.e. three successive phases in a breakdown of moral health and three aspects of its recovery. To trace their development in Lawrence's other novels. To examine the position of Women in Love in this development and especially its…