This thesis researches the reception of British television political comedy from 1962 to 2012, exploring the continuities and contrasts in viewers' definitions, interpretations and evaluations of the genre. Television comedy scholarship has privileged the text but this first in-…
In my earlier work, 'First steps towards a rhetorical hermeneutics of literary interpretation' (2006), I argued that academic reading takes the form of an argument between readers. Four serious weaknesses in that account are its elision of the distinction between reading and dis…
Landscape in Roman literature is manifest with symbolic potential: in particular, Vergil and Ovid respond to ideologically loaded representations of abundance in nature that signal the dawn of the Augustan golden age. Vergil's Eclogues foreground a locus amoenus landscape which …
This dissertation is a close examination of the role of Iranian national cinema in the constitution of national identity both within and across geographic national boundaries. By focusing on specific moments of cross-cultural reception as dynamic processes of cultural exchange a…