The purpose of this thesis is to explore a set of key issues and themes in the fiction of Stephen King, and then to present, in the form of a creative extract, a demonstration of an imaginative engagement with those same literary preoccupations mapped out in that opening critica…
This thesis engages in analysis and interpretation of certain ideas within the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969). These analyses are placed into a constellational relationship with some filmic works of Andrei Tarkovsky and Michael Haneke. In doing so, I aim to hig…
This thesis is a study of the twentieth-century debate between F.R. Leavis and F.W. Bateson. In it I explore the critical positions held by Leavis and Bateson in relation to the function of criticism and the role of the critic. The epistemological inquiry central to my analysis …
This thesis demonstrates how selected texts by J.G. Ballard—Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974) and High‐Rise 1975)—and Kurt Vonnegut—Player Piano (1952), Slaughterhouse‐Five(1969) and Galápagos (1985)—can be considered in terms of theoretical stances derived from posthumanism.…
This thesis recommends that the ‘ecocritical’ turn in American Literary Scholarship be brought into contact with ‘symptomnal’ forms of ideology critique, namely after the post-Althusserian thinking of Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek and Deleuze-Guattari. This recommendation is mad…
Focusing on approaches to place in selected novels by J. M. Coetzee and V. S. Naipaul, this thesis explores how postcolonial literature can be read as contributing to the reimagining of decolonised, decentred or multi-centred geographies. I will examine the ways in which selecte…
The thesis aims to propose a framework for poetry translation and its criticism. It is demonstrated how criticism on poetry translation can discuss the source text and target text in a way that they may well be two pieces of prose and miss a very important point: their aesthetic…
This thesis argues that in the plural cultural context of the twenty-first century the value of Shakespeare resides in his identity as a free and flexible resource. This adaptable Shakespeare is valuable to theatres because they are dialectical spaces. Free-resource Shakespeare …
This thesis is written to promote and pursue an understanding of lesbian fandom and its function on the Internet. It will demonstrate how a particular television text Xena: Warrior Princess (X: WP) and a dedicated online fandom „xenasubtexttalk‟ (XSTT) of diverse lesbian fan mem…
This thesis argues for, and conducts close reading on, lesbian pulp fiction published in the United States between 1950 and 1965. Though a thorough investigation of a lesbian textual community centred on the lesbian periodical, The Ladder (1956-1952), this thesis forms a lens th…
This thesis constitutes the first extensive study of tragedy during the Napoleonic era. The new tragic productions of this period have been sidelined by French theatre history, allegedly because they were tired copies of seventeenth-century classical models, conduits for propaga…
The thesis posits that the radical transformation in Carol Shields's writing during the 1980s, moving from rather conservative realist fiction to postmodernist metafiction, was influenced by practices and theories which reject 'totalising' concepts of the self, of language and o…
The primary aim of this thesis is to bring Allan Ramsay (1684-1748) and James Thomson (1700-1748) into close critical contact for the first time and, in so doing, deconstruct the paradigm of opposition which has previously attached to these two contemporaries. The thesis posits …
By narrowing the disparate and often contradictory trajectories of Romantic thought into a compressed framework, this thesis seeks to scrutinise the treatment of the Romantic ideal in the fiction of Muriel Spark. A number of recurring themes can be understood to collectively con…
In the European narration of the Orient, there is a deliberate stress on those qualities that make the East different from the West. In his Orientalism Edward Said offers perspectives for studying the Western works that depict the Orient and its people. He argues that the orient…
This thesis undertakes a literary study of contemporary novels published by metropolitan French writers between 1980 and 2000, and analyses their representation of the changing relationship between France and North Africa. It begins by analysing the specificity of the situation …
This study aims to establish the identity of the Saudi novel, which has been hitherto neglected by scholars whether Saudi or non-Saudi; to consider the emergence and development of tho Saudi novel during the past sIxty years (1930-90) and the reasons for these; to investigate th…
This thesis explores modernist narrative art embodied in modernist style of constructing narrative space. Within Chatman’s conceptual framework, narrative space can be divided into story-space (settings and characters) and discourse-space (focus of spatial attention). In a corpu…