http://hdl.handle.net/1842/146 2013-05-18T20:48:32Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6579 Title: Thread of Scottishness: mapping the allegorical tapestry of Scottish literature Authors: Liddle, Helena Francisca Gaspar Abstract: Scottish authors throughout the ages have linked their art to their nationality. When the contemporary writer A. L. Kennedy observes, 'I believe that fiction with a thread of Scottishness in its truth has helped me to know how to be myself as a Scot,' she pinpoints the value of literature for both her predecessors and peers. However, the idea of Scottish literature as an autonomous and coherent national literature is controversial. Questions concerning self-sufficiency, unity, and value continue to haunt the idea of a Scottish literary tradition. Many studies have attempted to address the stereotype of Scottish literature's fragmentation and its place as a sub-category within English literature; however, few critical works have considered specific literary forms as constituting a basis for the Scottish literary consciousness. 'A Thread of Scottishness' argues that Scottish literature uniquely sustains an allegorical framework traceable from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the present. Chapter one discusses allegory's history, definition and relationship with the reader. Chapters two, three, and four focus upon the specific theoretical strands of the Scottish allegorical form: nature, nationalism, and morality, respectively. Each of these three chapters begins with a discussion of works from the medieval period and follows the progression of the Scots' use of allegory through time. More modern works, including S. Ferrier's Marriage, R. L. Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae, N. Shepherd's The Weatherhouse, are shown to reflect the narrative traditions of medieval and Renaissance texts, such as R. Henryson's Morall Fabillis and The Testament of Cresseid, King James I's The Kingis Quair, and Sir D. Lindsay's Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. Thus, through a consideration of the use of allegory within specific Scottish texts, I posit continuity for Scottish literature as a whole. 2006-11-29T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6578 Title: Divided screen : the doppelgänger in German silent film Authors: Rashidi, Bahareh Abstract: The proliferation of the doppelgänger theme in so many films of Wilhemine and Weimar Germany raises the question of its historical significance, in particular during Germany’s “crisis of classical modernity”. While previous studies have addressed the double from a narrative perspective, focusing on its psychological significations as divided self, this thesis instead considers the theme from a structural and historical perspective: how, as a technical reproduction of the human body that is ontologically double, at once real and unreal, it serves as a site for reflection on the visual experience of modernity and on the medium of cinema. The thesis begins by considering the relationship between the theme of the double, born circa 1800, and the burgeoning visual regimes of modernity. Important aspects of this relationship are the abstraction of representation from stable referents in the aftermath of Kantian thought, the empirical study of the observing subject, and the development of new technologies of recording and projection. Nineteenth-century technologies of optical illusion, such as the phantasmagoria and lifelike automata, as well as the itinerant showmen who displayed them, gave rise to doubles of the human body with uncanny effects of ontological uncertainty. These not only influenced the doppelgänger stories of German Romanticism and after, but also were ancestors of cinema’s doubles and their showmen. This study considers the “cinematic” themes of a set of stories and films of the double, including repeatedly performed scenarios of exhibition and voyeurism, visual pleasure and anxiety, foregroundings of the narration, and allusions to the history of cinema and media technologies. The central chapters of the thesis offer readings of five classics of German film: The Student of Prague (1913), The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920), The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920), Waxworks (1924), and Metropolis (1926). Addressing the double as a reflexive theme of optical uncertainty, these readings focus on how moments of optical distress are depicted and how film language is used to construct a cinematic uncanny: an ontological problem arising from the ambivalent character of visual experience that affects the narrative and film form, characters and spectator alike. This perspective sheds light on the historical significance of the double theme, revealing its close relationship with the problematic status of vision and the observing subject in modernity, and with a special case of modern visual experience, the technological medium of cinema. 2007-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6536 Title: Study of the works of Philip Meadows Taylor Authors: Finkelstein, David Abstract: This thesis deals with the works of Philip Meadows Taylor, nineteenth-century British administrator and author of six novels on Indian themes. His works, published between 1839 and 1878, belong to the little researched early period of Anglo-Indian literature when popular fiction reflected the confidence and beliefs of British rule in India. Meadows Taylor worked in India as a political agent in various parts of Hyderabad from 1824 until his early retirement in 1860. His work, his close friendships with Indians, and his marriage to an Eurasian woman exposed him to various aspects of Indian life closed to many of his British contemporaries in India. This is reflected in his novels, of which the best known is his first, Confessions of a Thug, published in 1839. Subsequent works include Tippoo Sultaun: A Tale of the Mysore War (1841), Tara (1863), Ralph Darnell (1865), Seeta (1873), and A Noble Queen (1878). All these works present Indian scenery and Indian customs vividly and sympathetically, and are characterised by unusually liberal views on such things as interracial marriage, race relations and Indian religious practices; views at odds with those of many of his contemporaries. This thesis examines Meadows Taylor's works, and the connection between his portrayal of British conceptions of India and its people and the historical development of British rule in India. Ultimately Taylor's works illustrate his view that underneath the surface differences of race and religious creed lies a common human experience shared by both East and West, a view which differentiates him from other nineteenth-century writers on India. Other unusual thematic concerns include his use of Victorian concepts of domesticity in Indian settings, his presentation of strongly idealised Indian characters, and his frequent use as subject matter of "pre-colonial" Indian history. 1990-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6318 Title: Myth, memory, and narrative: (re)inventing the self in Canadian fiction Authors: Selby, Sharon Dawn Abstract: In this dissertation, I examine how the themes of memory, storytelling, and the construction of narrative identity develop in the works of Canadian authors Alistair MacLeod, Michael Ondaatje, and Jane Urquhart. As a means of delving more deeply into these themes, I focus on the specific narrative strategies that all three writers employ in the expression of the relationship between the individual and his/her community, as well as between physical and psychological realities. For the narrative voices in these authors’ works—given the different ways they envision and encode communal identity as constitutive of subjectivity—the past is inextricably embedded in the present. As they construct and record unfolding experience, a wider cultural history is written over with personal connections and significance. In the works of each of these authors, the act of telling stories (re)shapes people and events for the audience: speakers reform and reconstitute their experiences, allowing them both to rewrite the past and be haunted by it. Storytelling becomes an existential act in which personal landscapes are invested with structures of feeling that transcend local significance yet are manifested in everyday connections between ordinary people, and in daily (often unrecognized) struggles and acts of heroism. This includes a study of the means through which psychological evolution and trauma can be depicted. I also discuss how stylistic techniques such as fragmentation, repetition, self-reflexivity, and literary allusion function within these narratives. This aspect of my investigation provides the opportunity to engage more fully with the body of literary research that has already been produced on these authors. 2012-06-28T00:00:00Z