2024-03-28T20:34:50Zhttps://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/oai/requestoai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/29112019-03-29T16:00:12Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2012-07-04T10:35:44Z
urn:hdl:10023/2911
The Whalley Coucher Book and the dialectal phonology of Lancashire and Cheshire 1175-1350
King, Christopher D.
Jack, G. B.
An investigation by G. P. Cubbin into the local placename
sources of Lancashire of a time when the vernacular had
a low status isolated the Whalley Coucher Book as the one that
most seemed to deserve further scrutiny. That book therefore
forms the basis of the present study.
The Coucher Boook is a mediaeval work of monastic
provenance and is a compilation of deeds received by Whalley
Abbey over the period. The interest of the source lies in its
representation of many place-names by writers who may be
supposed to have been familiar with them. Whalley's placename
corpus affords scope for examination of variation that is
of dialectal significance.
A searching analysis is undertaken of the evidence
that the Whalley Coucher Book offers. Questions of dating, of
location of place-names, of the elements that compose them,
and of the status of the text have to be examined with a view
to elucidating the significance for phonology of this evidence.
Such examination is carried out at length, and it is hoped that
these aspects of the present work may be found to have
application in linguistic and historical inquiry both for the
actual results relative to the Whalley Coucher Book and for the
methodological demonstration.
A considerable amount of dialectal phonological
information from the source is presented in this thesis. It is
critically examined and collated and the attempt is made to
derive actual usage in the territory and period concerned. On
the whole the conclusion is that most of the evidence does
reflect the dialect and that it produces a believable distribution
of forms.
Some of the dialectal information thus acquired
appears as new. More commonly, however, this study confirms
the existing picture or makes it somewhat more precise. The
evidence does not escape the uneven coverage that is to be
expected in place-name evidence for dialect.
Although the amount of the evidence of the Whalley
Coucher Book and its general consistency are comparatively
good, the finding of this work is that they are not enough to
establish the original suggestion that the Coucher Book might
deserve reliance without reference to, and even in total
defiance of, other local sources. The present study concludes
that the best evidence consists of a select group of sources amongst which Whalley may be taken as pre-eminent.
2012-07-04T10:35:44Z
2012-07-04T10:35:44Z
1991
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2911
en
397
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/281182023-08-08T02:00:24Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2023-08-07T14:18:40Z
urn:hdl:10023/28118
Capturing moments : reading literature as an archive of photographic history c. 1839- c.1930
Pande, Meha
Raychaudhuri, Anindya
Gill, Clare
University of St Andrews. George Buchanan Scholarship
University of St Andrews. St Leonard’s College
Photography
Literature
Nineteenth century
Victorian
Doyle
Dickens
Levy
In this thesis I study three writers - Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Amy Levy (1861-1889) and Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) - for traces, nuances and evidences which capture the precarious position of photography and its evolution in the social and intellectual imagination between 1839-1930. Selected owing to their interest in and engagement with photography, my research combines a study of the literary output of these three writers with their personal writings, to trace photographic references in them. Using these references, I establish them as case studies which, through the intersections and overlaps between their fiction and their direct engagement with photography at the artistic, technical or professional levels, offer insights into the life of photography between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Schematically, the thesis is organized as per a rough chronology of these writers as they appear in history. I begin with Charles Dickens, in whose work and writings can be found crucial details of the early history and indeed, the prehistory of photography from the 1840s to the 1880s. Amy Levy and Arthur Conan Doyle arguably belong to the second phase of the evolution of photography in the nineteenth century as it yields to the twentieth, representing
and archiving two distinctive aspects of photography. Levy makes photography the avowed theme and context of her novel and documents the multifarious and often unexpected tribulations and possibilities that photography offers as it grows and flourishes into a commercial trade with all the professional wherewithal. As a practicing amateur photographer, Conan Doyle focuses on the artistic side of photography with a passion, and the evidence value of photography in his detective fiction. As photography makes a slow but permanent appearance in the world, this thesis intends to pluck out some of its significant socio-cultural moments which embedded themselves in the literary fabric.
2023-08-07T14:18:40Z
2023-08-07T14:18:40Z
2021-06-29
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/28118
https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/567
en
2027-07-16
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Restricted until 16th July 2027
314
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/293732024-02-29T03:00:41Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2024-02-28T16:19:45Z
urn:hdl:10023/29373
Miscegenation and the postwar nation : interracial love, desire and white British identity in fictions of Britain and empire, 1947-1965
Logue, Jamie Thomas
Plain, Gill
Raychaudhuri, Anindya
Ewan and Christine Brown Studentship
Interracial love
Miscegenation
Interracial relationships
Postwar fiction
Interracial literature
Postcolonial fiction
Anthony Burgess
Kamala Markandaya
Edgar Mittelholzer
Postwar British novel
This thesis examines fictional representations of interracial love, desire and sexual relationships – so-called miscegenation – in both Britain and empire across the two decades that followed the Second World War. With a specific focus on how fictional interraciality inflects and reimagines conceptions of white postwar British masculinity, this study explores how the interracial novel contributed to redefining racial, national and gendered identity at mid-century. Whilst existing studies of postwar miscegenation revolve around interracial dynamics between white British women and men of colour, this project foregrounds fictions of interraciality that explore white men’s relationships with women of colour. I investigate how the tenets of patriarchal imperialism were at once bolstered, resisted and reconfigured through novelists’ explorations of the complex and contradictory politics surrounding miscegenation. Primarily a work of literary criticism, this study draws upon the writings of thirteen authors to illuminate, analyse and deconstruct intersecting and discordant discourses surrounding miscegenation in the postwar. Focusing on noncanonical, underexplored and even forgotten texts, I aim to broaden, deepen and above all complicate knowledge of interracial literature of the period. By analysing the works of writers from differing imperial positionalities, I open up unlikely textual interactions that cross race and gender as well as genre and literary movement, in the process diminishing contemporaneous distinctions between highbrow, middlebrow and popular fictions. This thesis contends that, though previously largely overlooked by cultural critics, the interracial novel emerged in the postwar as a boundary-disturbing literary sub-genre that deeply troubled the inner workings of white British identity.
2024-02-28T16:19:45Z
2024-02-28T16:19:45Z
2024-06-11
Thesis
https://hdl.handle.net/10023/29373
https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/794
en
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
2029-02-26
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Restricted until 26 February 2029
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
210
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/148672019-03-29T16:00:15Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-03T15:54:47Z
urn:hdl:10023/14867
Peasant mandarins : four poets negotiating traditions after the Empire
Eskestad, Nils
Crawford, Robert
Danish Research Academy
The aim of this thesis is to examine Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Les Murray and Tony Harrison as important figures in contemporary English-language poetry. Writing in the aftermath of Empire, these four poets are all linked by being in some sense 'cultural provincials' who have sought to engage with an Anglocentric canon of English literature. The need to stay true to their indigenous regional, vernacular experiences as "peasant" poets has played a crucial role in the forming of their respective voices. However, this study also stresses the need to see Heaney, Walcott, Murray and Harrison as writers whose literary sensibility was formed during the late imperial period. Their formal education is discussed not merely as a culturally estranging experience, but also as a factor contributing to their strong sense of poetic tradition. It is through their negotiations across a broad cultural spectrum that these poets have turned their perceived cultural marginality into a strength. As "Peasant Mandarins", they have sought to balance their local cultural pieties with a sense of wider artistic autonomy that is not tied to a particular local or sectarian affiliation. Consequently, rather than examining Heaney, Walcott, Murray and Harrison merely as regional or national poets in a post-colonial context, this thesis draws attention to their role as international brokers of a shared, but polycentric and heterogeneous, tradition of poetry in English. While intended as a comparative study. Peasant Mandarins: Four Poets Negotiating Traditions after the Empire remains alert to the different cultural experiences of Heaney, Walcott, Murray and Harrison, and stays true to the distinguishing features of their respective voices. Four main chapters discuss each poet individually, while the Introduction and Conclusion assess their collective role as "Peasant Mandarins", linking them to the general climate of contemporary English-language poetry.
2018-07-03T15:54:47Z
2018-07-03T15:54:47Z
1999-08
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14867
261 p.
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/182612021-03-29T15:35:36Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2019-08-07T12:59:40Z
urn:hdl:10023/18261
Intuition
Saunders, Akencia
Hazzard, Oli
Intuition is a proud blend of speculative fiction and police procedural. It follows the story of
Danielle Thompson, a detective in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the year 2087. In this future,
humans evolved to have mental or physical abilities, called Extras. These abilities, or Extras, can
vary from the ability to fly—like the main character—to the ability to influence the emotions of
anyone around you. This evolution created a divide as society adapted. Supers, those with
Extras, and Non-Supers, those without. Intuition is set fifty years after Supers were initially
discovered, leaving our characters in a seemingly assimilated and accepting society.
Dani Thompson is a 28-year-old Super who works for the Pittsburgh police department and is
only just beginning to understand and accept her Extras. She works closely with her partner,
Dave Umbrage, and her boss, Elise Renault, in the Super Crime Unit to solve crimes specifically
related to and involving Supers in the greater Pittsburgh area. Intuition begins as Dani struggles
to control her second Extra, Intuition. And she discovers that a string of seemingly unrelated
cases may have a larger, more dangerous, connection.
Intuition works to examine the complexity and intrinsic nature of oppression through the lens of
speculative fiction. Using this genre, I hope to craft an exploration of discrimination while
maintaining a compelling narrative.
2019-08-07T12:59:40Z
2019-08-07T12:59:40Z
2019-06-25
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/18261
https://doi.org/10.17630/10023-18261
en
2024-02-14
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Electronic copy restricted until 14th February 2024
vi, 153 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/146582019-03-29T16:00:17Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-06-27T12:54:47Z
urn:hdl:10023/14658
Law, gender and culture : representations of the female legal subject in selected Jacobean texts
Roth, Jenny
Rhodes, Neil
This thesis addresses some of the extant gaps in law and literature criticism using an historical cultural criticism of law and literature that focuses on the Jacobean female legal subject in cases of divorce and adultery. It examines the intellectual milieu that constructs law and literature in this period to contribute to research on female subject formation, and looks specifically at how literature and law work to construct identity. This thesis asks what views Jacobean literature presents of the female legal subject, and what do those views reveal about identity and gender construction? Chapter one offers some essential historical contexts. It establishes the jurisprudential conditions of the period, defines the ideal female legal subject, touches on recent historical scholarship regarding women and law, explores how literature reveals law's artificiality, and links the Inns of Court to the theatres. Chapter two focuses on women and divorce. The first sections discuss the theology and ideology which impacted on divorce law. The latter sections examine Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam, ca. 1609, and two manuscript accounts of Frances Howard's 1613 divorce trial, William Terracae's poem, A Plenarie Satisfaction, ca. 1613, and The True Tragi-Comedie Formarly Acted at Court, a play by Francis Osborne, 1635. These texts reveal the legal construction and frustrations of married women, and illustrate a gendered divide in attitudes towards women's legal position. Chapter three examines women and adultery law. It then juxtaposes representations of women justly accused of adultery, like the real-life Alice Clarke, and the fictional Isabella in John Marston's The Insatiate Countess, 1613, and unjustly accused, like the virtuous wives in Marston's play. This chapter reveals how male anxiety creates the stereotypes that constrain the female legal subject within systems of patrilineal inheritance. As a whole, this thesis uses literature to explore the Jacobean female legal subject's relationship to her husband and to the law, and, in some cases, it challenges the assumption that women were effectively constrained by legal dictates which would keep them chaste, silent and submissive. Literature, in some cases, works alongside law to sustain constructed identities, but radical literature can undermine law by challenging the stereotypes and identities law works to maintain.
2018-06-27T12:54:47Z
2018-06-27T12:54:47Z
2003
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14658
en
387 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/292182024-02-13T03:00:38Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2024-02-12T16:30:31Z
urn:hdl:10023/29218
The prospectus
Levine Brislin, Gabriel
Solie, Karen
Poetry
‘The Prospectus’ is a collection of poetry comprising of three distinct but interrelated sections. The first part is comprised entirely of a long poem called ‘The Book of Esther’, a fragmented exploration of the writings of Dutch-Jewish diarist Etty Hillesum. Centred on Hillesum’s relationship to writing as a practice, the poem draws upon the supposed ‘ephemera’ found in the diary, and contrasts it with the idealised ‘book’ she consistently writes about one day completing. ‘The Book of Esther’ references writers such as Rahel Varnhagen and Walter Benjamin in order to draw out their historical and creative affinities with Hillesum’s thought. The second section contains a selection of lineated poems in a more lyrical or autobiographical mode, most of which address ideas around artistic production, the rift between artist and artwork, and the tension between praxis and poiesis, building on the questions about creation raised in ‘The Book of Esther’. In these poems, family emerges as a key theme alongside the repeated motif of painting and image-making. This section also contains the sequence ‘New Narratives’, which repurposes 10-syllable lines from a specific copy of Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’ to create a chain of sonnets that both evade and invite comparison to the source material, troubling distinctions between making and remaking. ‘Lead White’, the long prose-poem which makes up the entirety of the third section, furthers the investigation into artistic praxis and draws parallels between the techniques of various Old Masters and an oblique, circuitous narrative centred on affect and memory. The poem was written in response to the TV series ‘Tom Keating: On Painters’, in which the infamous forger and art restorer showed audiences how to convincingly copy paintings by Turner, Constable, Titian, etc. while teaching them about the lost techniques used by painters of a previous age.
2024-02-12T16:30:31Z
2024-02-12T16:30:31Z
2024-06-11
Thesis
https://hdl.handle.net/10023/29218
https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/751
en
52
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/151332019-03-29T16:00:19Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-09T13:51:17Z
urn:hdl:10023/15133
Some contexts for William Wordsworth's 'Recluse, 1770-1798' : education, politics and literature
Mishiro, Ayumi
The principal aim of this thesis is to illuminate some prefigurations of The Recluse from January 1793 (the publication of An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches) to early March 1798 (the first announcement of The Recluse in his letters). Three chapters and an appendix assert the importance of this period for Wordsworth's ideas of Nature, Man, and Society in referring to the social, political, and literary background 1770 -1798, and in particular to the influence of less well-known figures - John Langhorne, John Thelwall, and James Losh. Chapter One focuses on debate about the social utility of education in the explicitly radical milieux of the early 1790s, and suggests that educational interests provided Wordsworth, Thelwall, and Coleridge with a coherent frame into which the Recluse scheme would fit. Chapter Two explores similarities in Langhorne's, Thelwall's, and Wordsworth's ideas of Nature, Man, and Society, in particular in their treatment of the poor, and relates these contexts to The Recluse. Chapter Three and my Appendix suggest broad similarities between The Recluse and The Œconomist magazine, in which Wordsworth showed a keen interest in his letter to Losh of 11 March 1798. The thesis concludes by suggesting that the first announcement in early March 1798 of the 'utility' of The Recluse was retrospective - an expression of hopes, ideals, and more practical purposes that Wordsworth had perhaps already outgrown.
2018-07-09T13:51:17Z
2018-07-09T13:51:17Z
1997-06
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15133
en
v, 138 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/10012019-07-01T10:11:41Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2010-09-20T11:32:42Z
urn:hdl:10023/1001
A rhetoric of nostalgia on the English stage, 1587-1605
Johanson, Kristine
Hutson, Lorna
Nostalgia
Shakespeare
Rhetoric
Jonson
Drama
Renaissance
Reformation
In locating the idea of nostalgia in early modern English drama, ‘A Rhetoric of Nostalgia on the English Stage, 1587-1605’ recovers an influential and under-examined political discourse in Elizabethan drama. Recognizing how deeply Renaissance culture was invested in conceptualizing the past as past and in privileging the cultural practices and processes of memory, this thesis asserts nostalgia’s embeddedness within that culture and its consequently powerful rhetorical role on the English Renaissance stage.
The introduction situates Elizabethan nostalgia alongside nostalgia’s postmodern conceptualizations. It identifies how my definition of early modern nostalgia both depends on and diverges from contemporary arguments about nostalgia, as it questions nostalgia’s perceived conservatism and asserts its radicalizing potential. I define a rhetoric of nostalgia with regard to classical and Renaissance ideas of rhetoric and locate it within a body of sixteenth-century political discourses.
In the ensuing chapters, my analyses of Shakespeare’s drama formulate case studies reached, in each instance, through an exploration of the plays’ socio-political context. Chapter Two’s analysis of The First Part of the Contention contextualizes Shakespeare’s development of a rhetoric of nostalgia and investigates connections between rhetorical form and nostalgia. I demonstrate the cultural currency of the play’s nostalgic proverbial discourse through a discussion of Protestant writers interested in mocking the idea of a preferable Catholic past. Chapter Three argues that Richard II’s nostalgic discourse of lost hospitality functions as a political rhetoric evocative of the socio-economic problems of the mid-1590s and of the changing landscape of English tradition instigated by the Reformation. In Chapter Four, Julius Caesar and Ben Jonson’s Sejanus constitute a final analysis of the relationship between a rhetoric of nostalgia and politics by examining the rise of Tacitism. The plays’ nostalgic language stimulates an awareness to the myriad ways in which rhetoric questions politics in both dramas.
2010-09-20T11:32:42Z
2010-09-20T11:32:42Z
2010-06-22
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1001
en
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Electronic version restricted until 10th May 2020
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
260
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
School of English
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/177542021-03-10T16:06:10Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2019-05-23T13:44:05Z
urn:hdl:10023/17754
Title redacted
Owens, Mhairi
Paterson, Don
2019-05-23T13:44:05Z
2019-05-23T13:44:05Z
2018-08
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/17754
https://doi.org/10.17630/10023-17754
en
2023-08-20
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Print and electronic copy restricted until 20th August 2023.
viii, 40, xiv p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/68702019-03-29T16:00:19Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2015-06-29T12:25:41Z
urn:hdl:10023/6870
The metaphor imperative : a study of metaphor's assuaging role in poetic composition from Ovid to Alice Oswald
Cranitch, Ellen
Paterson, Don
Part I of the thesis considers the nature and function of metaphor in the articulation of both poetic theme and of poetic self. Using close analysis of texts by Ovid, Shakespeare, George Herbert and a number of contemporary poets, and drawing on material from both published and unpublished interviews which I undertook with Alice Oswald, Glyn Maxwell and Andrew Motion, (the transcripts of which are included in the appendices), this thesis uses metaphor theory, literary criticism and cognitive poetic criticism to argue that the assuaging role of metaphor is fundamental at critical junctures of poetic composition.
Chapter One provides a historical survey of metaphor theory.
Chapter Two, in order to determine the best methodology for my analysis of the key thesis texts, contrasts three different readings of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73. Chapter Three suggests the model of Ovidian metamorphosis as a means to examine the assuaging role of metaphor in crisis of consciousness and utterance. The dialectic of sameness and difference, a key property of metaphor, is shown to be intimately connected with the imperative for assuagement in the modern lyric poet.
Chapter Four explores a number of ways in which metaphor is deployed by George Herbert to overcome the personal and poetic inhibitions he experiences as a result of his intimate awareness of a listening God.
Chapter Five examines Andrew Motion’s movement away from the metonymic towards the metaphoric mode in The Customs House.
Chapter Six analyses how Alice Oswald, by creating a radically innovative metaphoric mapping between biography and simile pairs assuages the long litany of violent deaths drawn from Homer’s Iliad.
Chapter Seven examines the way Glyn Maxwell in The Sugar Mile, embraces dramatic analogue and metaphor as a means to address the horror of 9/11. All of the poets examined in the thesis are using metaphor to render the incomprehensible comprehensible.
Part II of the thesis consists of my own poems.
2015-06-29T12:25:41Z
2015-06-29T12:25:41Z
2014
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6870
en
Electronic copy restricted until 19th May 2019
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations
v, 231 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/151502019-03-29T16:00:21Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-10T08:06:41Z
urn:hdl:10023/15150
D. H. Lawrence's dualistic impulses in his writings about Italy
Spera, Giovanna
The purpose of the following study is to demonstrate Lawrence's belief that the whole of life is the manifestation of opposite wills always transcended by a third element which reconciles them in a dynamic state of equilibrium. His view of polarity is associated with precise spatial coordinates, Italy and England. The thesis consists of four chapters prefaced by an introduction to the background influences that dualism exerts on the artist, and ended by a conclusion on what Italy means to him. Attention is given to a varied range of Lawrence's works with an Italian element- philosophical writings, travel books, novels and poems- some of which have been given a more extensive analysis than others. His letters are used where appropriate to develop this study. The first chapter illustrates the development of Lawrence's dualism in his philosophical writings, particularly "philosophical" additions to essays in Twilight in Italy. Chapter Two examines his poetics of antinomies in the travel books. Chapter Three explores the evident dual nature rooted in three of Lawrence's novels as well as some of his short stories with an Italian connection. Chapter Four traces his conception of polarity permeating the poetry in an Italian context. The thesis concludes with observations highlighting the basic traits-d'union among all Laurentian works taken into consideration, that is, the central idea of unity in duality and the Italian connection.
2018-07-10T08:06:41Z
2018-07-10T08:06:41Z
1996-07
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15150
en
viii, 197 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/71192019-06-12T14:22:17Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2015-08-04T11:55:56Z
urn:hdl:10023/7119
George Paton; a study of his life and correspondence
Doig, Ronald Paterson
Falconer, Alexander Frederick
2015-08-04T11:55:56Z
2015-08-04T11:55:56Z
1956
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/7119
en
526 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/281472023-08-12T02:01:12Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2023-08-11T08:44:41Z
urn:hdl:10023/28147
Contemporary poetry translation into Scots – methods and meanings
Bramwell, Colin
Crawford, Robert
Mackay, Peter
Ewan & Christine Brown Postgraduate Scholarship in the Arts and Humanities
English literature
Scottish literature
Poetry
Translation
Scots
Spanish
German
Robert Garioch
Kathleen Jamie
Edwin Morgan
The following doctoral thesis is comprised of two parts. The first part, THE SET, is an essay on translating poetry into Scots at present day. The essay’s four chapters explore four central issues in contemporary Scots translation: (1) the relationship of the practice to national/nationalist concerns, (2) the issue of domestication/foreignisation, (3) addressing hystorical and metaphysical anxieties about language shift, and (4) negotiating English-Scots bilingualism on the page. Interpolated within the essay are original translations of poems by Nicanor Parra, Paul Celan, César Vallejo, Rosario Castellanos, Fernando Pessoa, Alejandra Pizarnik, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Jorge Luis Borges and Yang Mu. All original translations appear in parallel text, alongside the original texts translated from. Together, these comprise twenty-six pages of poetry, and prose stipulation of the St Andrews Creative Writing doctorate in its entirety. The remainder of the poetry (fourteen pages) is supplied by the second part, SUNSTANE, a translation of Octavio Paz’s Piedra de Sol into modern Scots (followed by a postscript from Andrei Tarkovsky.) I include two appendices, alongside a bibliography of all sources: a glossary of Scots words, and supplementary notes on the translations. My notes include a description of translation methodology in all cases. The reader can refer to these appendices throughout the course of the thesis, if seeking an explanation of an unknown word, or more information on certain poems.
2023-08-11T08:44:41Z
2023-08-11T08:44:41Z
2023-11-28
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/28147
https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/575
en
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/
2028-08-07
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Restricted until 7th August 2028
Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
282
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/7492019-07-01T10:17:23Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2009-09-16T15:02:15Z
urn:hdl:10023/749
Paradoxical solitude in the life, letters, and poetry of John Keats, 1814-1818
Theobald, John
Stabler, Jane
Keats
Solitude
Coterie
Cockney School
Travel
Fellowship
Identity
Wordsworth
Hunt
Partnership
Creativity
Independence
This thesis proposes two distinct but connected ideas: that John Keats’s idiom of friendship was haunted by “sequestered” longings and that he ultimately valued specific, one-on-one partnerships as a basis for his poetical character. The Introduction places the thesis within its critical context and outlines “paradoxical solitude,” a concept the poet expressed by joining a “kindred spirit” in a wilderness retreat in “O, Solitude.”
I begin by examining the evolving role of solitude in Keats’s literary predecessors (Chapter I). I then trace the development of ideas of creativity and solitude from his 1814-1815 verse, including his first association with a coterie and the influence of Wordsworth (Chapter II). Building on these findings, I explore the poet’s introduction to the Hunt circle in 1816, assessing his relationships with its members and their overstated roles in the production of Poems (Chapter III). I then discuss how Keats regarded the composition of Endymion in 1817 as a poetic “test,” specifically tailored to reinforce his identity as a solitary poet (Chapter IV).
I contend that Keats engaged in a dialogue of independence with Reynolds, adapted the theories of Hazlitt, and restlessly travelled throughout England as a means of rejecting the highly social periods of 1818 (Chapter V). I then consider the creative gains of his northern expedition with Brown in the summer of 1818. I argue that Keats exaggerated his development into a “post-Wordsworthian” poet, positioning himself outside both the coterie’s sphere and the reach of Blackwood’s criticism, and inspiring the theme of Hyperion (Chapter VI).
In closing, I analyze Keats’s advice to Shelley to be a selfish creator of his poetic identity. Only through paradoxical solitude, I argue, was Keats able to construct the poetic identity that led him to compose the poems on which his fame rests in the 1820 volume.
2009-09-16T15:02:15Z
2009-09-16T15:02:15Z
2009-11-30
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/749
en
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported
228
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/182632024-02-23T03:01:24Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2019-08-07T15:02:20Z
urn:hdl:10023/18263
Title redacted
Hall, Lucy
Plain, Gill
University of St Andrews. School of English. Daniel Rutherford Scholarship
Ewan and Christine Brown Studentship
2019-08-07T15:02:20Z
2019-08-07T15:02:20Z
2019-06-25
Thesis
https://hdl.handle.net/10023/18263
https://doi.org/10.17630/10023-18263
en
2024-02-20
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Print and electronic copy restricted until 20th February 2024
vii, 227 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/151862019-03-29T16:00:25Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-10T13:24:58Z
urn:hdl:10023/15186
Beyond the antisyzygy : Bakhtin and some modern Scottish writers
Bittenbender, J. Christopher
Crawford, Robert
This dissertation shows how beneficial the ideas of the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin are when used to investigate both classical and more recent Scottish writing. An exploration of how a desire for a Scottish literary identity early in this century became inextricably bound up with a sense of historical necessity and psychological division, known as the Caledonian Antisyzygy, forms the basis for the first section of this work. The limitations of this mode of thinking and its failure as a 'theory' are then exposed and compared with the greater benefits of Bakhtinian thought. Succeeding chapters lead the reader from the vision of an historically centered and 'fixed' perception of Scottish literature that dominated the early decades of this century, to one which offers the possibility of endless interpretation. Close analysis of works by Robert Burns, James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Hugh MacDiarmid investigate how useful Bakhtin's theories are for reinterpreting classic Scottish texts. The remaining chapters analyze works by a selection of contemporary Scottish poets and novelists (Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Tom Leonard, Edwin Morgan, Liz Lochhead, and Muriel Spark) in an effort to display both the continuity of a literary tradition and the applicability of Bakhtin's ideas of dialogic interaction and carnival response to recent fiction and poetry that is concerned with the preservation of unique yet pluralistic community identities. It will be shown how Bakhtin's work lends itself to the project of freeing cultural identity from the bonds of a linguistic, historical, and geographical determination that is based on sterile oppositional constructs.
2018-07-10T13:24:58Z
2018-07-10T13:24:58Z
1997-06
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15186
en
x, 405 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/275312024-03-09T03:01:21Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2023-05-09T09:22:02Z
urn:hdl:10023/27531
Girls are pretty, too
Blankman, Sofia
Hazzard, Oli
Sexuality
Non-fiction
Creative non-fiction
Abuse
Emotional abuse
Coming out
Queer
Bisexuality
Family
Relationships
Identity
“Girls Are Pretty, Too” is the writer’s journey of figuring out who she is and part of a larger project that focuses mostly on the personal memoir instead of essay topics that will be added in future parts. From her rough childhood to the growing pains of university, the author learns to accept who she is by first accepting her sexuality. This piece discusses topics of verbal and emotional abuse from a parent, the sometimes toxic and contradictory teachings of the Catholic church, and how the connections between friends and families can shape, repress, and nurture someone’s identity. Written in mostly first person—with a few difficult moments written in third—this work is incredibly honest and unflinching in delving deep into difficult subjects while also elevating some tension with a few comedic moments.
2023-05-09T09:22:02Z
2023-05-09T09:22:02Z
2023-06-13
Thesis
https://hdl.handle.net/10023/27531
https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/425
en
124
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/293742024-02-29T03:01:21Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2024-02-28T16:28:59Z
urn:hdl:10023/29374
Vanità : a screenplay
Massie, Catherine
Mannion, Jillian
Harris, Zinnie
Abstract redacted
2024-02-28T16:28:59Z
2024-02-28T16:28:59Z
2024-06-11
Thesis
https://hdl.handle.net/10023/29374
https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/795
en
2029-02-27
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Restricted until 27 February 2029
118
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/7102019-03-29T16:00:25Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2009-06-17T15:28:24Z
urn:hdl:10023/710
Crime fiction and the publishing market
Wallis Martin, Julia
Plain, Gill
Burnside, John
The thesis is mainly a substantial part of a crime novel, the title of which is 6, Vermillion Crescent. In that novel, a girl of 14 is murdered by her foster brother. On his release from prison, the former foster child goes in search of his victim’s mother with the intention of murdering her for betraying and abandoning him.
The idea for the novel was sparked by events that occurred over 18 years ago, and coincided with the publication of my first novel. There have been a number of changes within the publishing industry since then, and in the critical piece accompanying the novel extract, I explain the most significant of these changes. The critical piece includes a detailed synopsis of 6, Vermillion Crescent.
2009-06-17T15:28:24Z
2009-06-17T15:28:24Z
2008
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/710
en
vi, 294
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/153392019-03-29T16:00:27Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-13T08:23:10Z
urn:hdl:10023/15339
Voices in the clangour : the Second World War through the eyes of selected women writers in Britain and Italy
Sarli, Paola
Since early times, many women have been aware that their vision of war is one of the elements marking their difference from the opposite sex. The Greek poetess Sappho was the first to express clearly the fact that the feminine view of the universe is informed with love, while war, weapons and the ideals of heroism and honour dominate the masculine world. It is traditionally accepted that, throughout the history of Western culture, from the very beginning to the present age, women--both as writers and as individuals--have generally assumed a peripheral role in wartime; nevertheless, in twentieth-century literary productions, their attitudes towards war appear to be far more "aware" and active than one might suspect. In particular, by reading women's works written during and about the Second World War, the signs of their- development in war thought can be clearly seen. Even if love and sentiment have remained among the most common feminine feelings in wartime, a large number of women have put them into action, in order to help their men, their families and their countries in dangerous circumstances. Needless to say, female involvement--both "emotional" and "effective"--in war has been mirrored in written works belonging to different literary genres, as appears from even a first glance at some cultural European contexts--in this case the British and the Italian. The works of some British poetesses, a novel by the Italian Renata Vigano and the reports and memories of both British and Italian ordinary women--all produced during and dealing with the Second World War--offer adequate grounds for enquiring into the existence of a feminine dimension of war. The examination of two different geographical and cultural areas--instead of a single one--enables the discovery of the general features of women's war thought: in fact, while the obvious discrepancies might be basically ascribed to the peculiar events and aspects characterising our two countries, the affinities might be referred to the common circumstances and feelings experienced by contemporary women during wartime.
2018-07-13T08:23:10Z
2018-07-13T08:23:10Z
1997
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15339
en
vii, 120 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/262112022-10-20T09:41:22Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2022-10-18T10:03:53Z
urn:hdl:10023/26211
"t̶h̶e̶ ̶l̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶u̶c̶h̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶a̶ ̶v̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶f̶r̶i̶e̶n̶d̶l̶y̶ ̶h̶a̶n̶d̶" : style and the haptic in Jane Austen's manuscripts
Troivaux, Fabien
Stabler, Jane
University of St Andrews
Ewan and Christine Brown Studentship
Touch
Haptic
Style
Jane Austen
Manuscripts
Juvenilia
Letters
Persuasion
Tactile
This thesis focuses on Jane Austen’s surviving manuscripts: those of her extant letters, of her early fiction, gathered in three handmade books (commonly called ‘juvenilia’), of her later fiction, unpublished during her lifetime (commonly called ‘later manuscripts’), and the early draft of two chapters of Persuasion. These autograph manuscripts, because they have not passed through a full editorial process, display Jane Austen’s writing in its earliest stages, and permit an analysis of her writing process, and the development of her style.
After a survey of the scientific, philosophical and literary texts that informed the understanding of Austen’s time, this thesis analyses occurrences of touch and the haptic in these writings, and argues that they are central to understanding her narrative and stylistic choices. Touch was an important element of her early writings and personal letters, which Austen gradually toned down in her fiction and correspondence, but which resurfaces in her final works, Persuasion and ‘Sanditon’. Early drafts usually contain numerous haptic events, which are erased or minimised in revisions and corrections. The reader needs to infer these deletions in order fully to understand Austen’s prose.
This thesis argues that references to the haptic are essential to understanding Austen’s prose, because they are part of her writerly instinct, but only remain present in final drafts at critical moments, when they attain most narrative focus. It also argues that tactile and haptic instances inform Austen’s very style. The grammatical, semantic and figural structures that Jane Austen uses call on ambiguity and syntagmatic suspense, which elicit in the reader a physical reaction akin to touch. Austen’s style effects a mental dissonance or friction that stems from the seemingly irreconcilable elements she conjoins; these sensations are an integral part of the pleasure of the ideal reader, who is invited to be a participant in Jane Austen’s creative process.
2022-10-18T10:03:53Z
2022-10-18T10:03:53Z
2022-11-30
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/26211
https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/210
en
xi, 356 p.
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/187272021-02-24T14:34:23Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2019-10-21T16:14:51Z
urn:hdl:10023/18727
Title redacted
Clarke, Lily McClure
Jones, Emma
2019-10-21T16:14:51Z
2019-10-21T16:14:51Z
2019-06-25
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/18727
https://doi.org/10.17630/10023-18727
en
2024-03-20
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Print and electronic copy restricted until 20th March 2024
47 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/113792019-10-03T08:17:57Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2017-08-04T14:03:37Z
urn:hdl:10023/11379
'On mentioning the unmentionable' : feminism, little magazines, and the case of Rebecca West
Toms, Gail
Plain, Gill
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
Recent projects conducted by The Universities of De Montfort, Nottingham, and
Sussex, U.K. and Brown University in Providence, U.S.A., have highlighted the
wealth of under-researched material contained in early twentieth-century little
magazines. These niche periodicals, in a cultural materialist sense, provide a useful
entry point for the research, analysis, and recreation of the zeitgeist of what can be
loosely termed ‘the Modernist movement.’ One area in which these magazines are
particularly useful is in uncovering the genesis of modern or contemporary feminist
thought. In some respects it can be argued that despite their small circulation figures
and limited readership, magazines such as The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, and
BLAST reveal a groundbreaking shift in, and towards the ‘Woman Question’. Women
editors and writers such as Dora Marsden and Rebecca West, embraced new
continental philosophies and aesthetics, and used them to deconstruct the concept of
‘Woman.’ Grasping the idea of individualism, Marsden challenged the essentialist
language that controlled women through oppressive gender stereotypes.
This thesis will map out the feminist topography that influenced and
encouraged Dora Marsden in her quest for a more wholesale, psychological, female
emancipation, as opposed to continuing the singular pursuit of the franchise. Through
The Freewoman journals Marsden, and her protégée West, began to articulate new
modes of feminism that challenged the grand narratives of Edwardian society and
exposed the cultural and linguistic fault lines that created ‘woman’ as ‘the helpmeet’;
a subordinate and commodified adjunct to man. Far from being outmoded or
forgotten, Marsden’s ideas – particularly those concerned with language – have
filtered their way into modern consciousness through feminist writers such as West,
and at times prove prescient of the groundbreaking work of Simone de Beauvoir,
Monique Wittig, Judith Butler, and Julia Kristeva. Complementing the stimulating
research of Lucy Bland, Peter Brooker, Cary Franklin, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar,
Gillian Hanscombe, Sheila Jeffreys, Jane E. Marek, Maroula Joannou, Janet Lyons,
Jean-Michele Rabaté, Robert Scholes, Andrew Thacker, Virginia L. Smyers, and
Clifford Wulfman, this thesis will examine how Freewoman individualism helped
shape the early fiction of Rebecca West and influenced the masculinist ethos of its
contemporary little magazine, BLAST.
2017-08-04T14:03:37Z
2017-08-04T14:03:37Z
2014
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/11379
en
2024-05-19
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Print and electronic copy restricted until 19th May 2024
viii, 292 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/151922019-06-12T14:22:43Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-10T14:14:15Z
urn:hdl:10023/15192
A study of eighteenth century drama in Scotland, 1660-1760
McKenzie, Jack
Falconer, Alexander Frederick
2018-07-10T14:14:15Z
2018-07-10T14:14:15Z
1956-07
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15192
en
2 v. [391, 232 p.]
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/25832024-01-11T15:29:53Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2012-05-03T14:33:53Z
urn:hdl:10023/2583
'The divine voice within us' : the reflective tradition in the novels of Jane Austen and George Eliot
Pimentel, A. Rose
Stabler, Jane
Jane Austen
George Eliot
Tradition
Reflection
Development realist novel
Ethical role reader
This thesis argues that a ‘tradition of moral analysis’ between Jane Austen and George Eliot — a common ground which has been identified by critics from F.R. Leavis to Gillian Beer, but never fully explored — can be illuminated by turning to what this thesis calls ‘the reflective tradition’. In the eighteenth century, ideas about reflection provided a new and influential way of thinking about the human mind; about how we come to know ourselves and the world around us through the mind. The belief in the individual to act as his/her own guide through the cultivation of a reflective mind and attentiveness to a reflective voice emerges across a wide range of discourses. This thesis begins with an examination of reflection in the philosophy, children’s literature, novels, poetry, educational tracts and sermons that would have been known to Austen. It then defines Austen’s development of reflective dynamics by looking at her six major novels; finally, it analyzes Middlemarch to define Eliot’s proximity to this aspect of Austen’s art. The thesis documents Eliot’s reading of Austen through the criticism of G. H. Lewes to support a reading of Eliot’s assimilation of an Austenian attention to mental processes in her novels. Reflection is at the heart of moral life and growth for both novelists. This thesis corrects a tendency in Austen’s reception to focus on the mimetic aspect of her art, thereby overlooking the introspective sense of reflection. It offers new insights into Austen’s and Eliot’s work, and it contributes to an understanding of the development of the realist novel and the ethical dimension in the role of the novel reader.
2012-05-03T14:33:53Z
2012-05-03T14:33:53Z
2011-09-14
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2583
en
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
2025-03-01
Print and electronic copy restricted until 1st March 2025. Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
293
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/290842024-02-03T03:01:21Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2024-01-26T15:58:56Z
urn:hdl:10023/29084
The dagger
Maharaj, Armaan Miles
Nayeri, Dina
Novel
Fiction
American literature
Prose
Radicalization
This novel excerpt from The Dagger was started as an attempt to understand the rise of alt-right extremist groups in the United States, as well as the conditions that made their rise possible. It aims to accomplish this through the perspective of a fictional young man from a middle-class background, Tom, who reaches adulthood near the apex of the movement’s overt social influence between 2014 and 2017. In the novel, Tom is drawn to a self-help and meditation retreat at a place called Sun Ranch, located in the Inland Empire of Southern California. The retreat, which targets disaffected young men of primarily white backgrounds, is led by a charismatic but reclusive yoga teacher named Curtis. In his lessons, he blends Californian interpretations of Hindu and Buddhist mysticism with fascist political precepts. As the retreat goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that Curtis has more than his students’ wellness in mind, and that he has a plan for the rights-based society he sees as his enemy.
2024-01-26T15:58:56Z
2024-01-26T15:58:56Z
2024-06-11
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/29084
https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/711
en
131
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/41462024-02-01T03:01:22Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2013-11-04T12:08:06Z
urn:hdl:10023/4146
A Saxon state : Anglo-Saxonism and the English nation, 1703-1805
Frazier, Dustin M.
Jones, Chris
Luxford, Julian
Anglo-Saxonism
Cultural history
Medievalism
Antiquarianism
18th century
Old English
History painting
Local history
Political theory
Liberalism
English common law
Anglo-Saxon
Alfred the Great
Nationalism
For the past century, medievalism studies generally and Anglo-Saxonism studies in particular have largely dismissed the eighteenth century as a dark period in English interest in the Anglo-Saxons. Recent scholarship has tended to elide Anglo-Saxon studies with Old English studies and consequently has overlooked contributions from fields such as archaeology, art history and political philosophy. This thesis provides the first re-examination of scholarly, antiquarian and popular Anglo-Saxonism in eighteenth-century England and argues that, far from disappearing, interest in Anglo-Saxon culture and history permeated British culture and made significant contributions to contemporary formulations and expressions of Englishness and English national, legal and cultural identities.
Each chapter examines a different category of Anglo-Saxonist production or activity, as those categories would be distributed across current scholarship, in order to explore the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons were understood and deployed in the construction of contemporary cultural- historiographical narratives. The first three chapters contain, respectively, a review of the achievements of the ‘Oxford school’ of Saxonists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; antiquarian Anglo-Saxon studies by members of the Society of Antiquaries of London and their correspondents; and historiographical presentations of the Anglo-Saxons in local, county and national histories. Chapters four and five examine the appearance of the Anglo-Saxons in visual and dramatic art, and the role of Anglo-Saxonist legal and juridical language in eighteenth-century politics, with reference to discoveries resulting from the academic and antiquarian research outlined in chapters one to three. It is my contention that Anglo-Saxonism came to serve as a unifying ideology of origins for English citizens concerned with national history, and political and social institutions. As a popular as well as scholarly ideology, Anglo-Saxonism also came to define English national character and values, an English identity recognised and celebrated as such both at home and abroad.
2013-11-04T12:08:06Z
2013-11-04T12:08:06Z
2013-11-30
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4146
https://doi.org/10.17630/10023-4146
en
Embargo period has ended, thesis made available in accordance with University regulations
xii, 244, [15] p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/234422021-07-19T15:34:30Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2021-06-29T13:48:39Z
urn:hdl:10023/23442
The so-called New York School : a feminist (re)vision in six poets
Campbell, Rosa
Paterson, Don
Alfred Dunhill Links Foundation
University of St Andrews. School of English. Daniel Rutherford Scholarship
Poetry
American poetry
American poetry--20th century--History and criticism
American poetry--21st century--History and criticism
Contemporary poetry
Contemporary American poetry
Gender
Barbara Guest
V.R. Lang
Alice Notley
Bernadette Mayer
Anne Waldman
Eileen Myles
New York School
New York School poetry
Poetics
The ubiquity with which ‘so-called’ precedes critical iterations of ‘the New York School’ highlights the fundamental instability not only of this label, but also the concept of the poetic school more generally, yet bypasses much of the necessary work of destabilisation. This thesis is a critical examination of the ways in which the New York School has been conceived and constructed, and the marginalisations that occur as a result of such structures. Taking as its basis Griselda Pollock’s definition of the canon as ‘a discursive formation which constitutes the objects/texts it selects as the products of artistic mastery and, thereby, contributes to the legitimation of white masculinity’s exclusive identification with creativity and with Culture,’ it offers up a major revision to the way in which the New York School has been read, taught, and anthologised as a group of men. Since Maggie Nelson’s Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007), there has been little development of her ideas, particularly in light of the rapidly changing landscape of contemporary poetry, and scant work has been done on the poets that she omits.
Beginning with these theoretical problems, the thesis moves through six poets associated with the school — Barbara Guest, V.R. “Bunny” Lang, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, Anne Waldman, and Eileen Myles — making use of a socio-biographical approach and substantial close reading in order to reassess, reframe, or discuss their work for the first time. This study is as much a queer project as it is a feminist project-of-recovery; it does not strive to find feminist/proto-feminist poets or poetics, but rather to disrupt received hierarchies, paradigms, and entrenched critical positions. It aims not to replicate hegemonic systems of criticism by assimilating women poets into the canon of the New York School, but to question the foundation of that canon, reformulating the school into a lens through which these poets can be usefully viewed, whilst simultaneously suggesting that they form a significant part of that lens.
2021-06-29T13:48:39Z
2021-06-29T13:48:39Z
2021-06-29
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/23442
https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/82
en
2024-02-01
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Electronic copy restricted until 1st February 2024
viii, 208 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/4782019-07-01T10:07:19Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2008-05-14T15:46:47Z
urn:hdl:10023/478
The Ophelia versions : representations of a dramatic type, 1600-1633
Benson, Fiona
Rhodes, Neil
Sellers, Susan
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
Early modern women
Ballads and revenge tragedy
Madness and suicide
William Shakespeare
Francis Beaumont
John Ford
John Fletcher
Henry Chettle
‘The Ophelia Versions: Representations of a Dramatic Type from 1600-1633’ interrogates early modern drama’s use of the Ophelia type, which is defined in reference to Hamlet’s Ophelia and the behavioural patterns she exhibits: abandonment, derangement and suicide.
Chapter one investigates Shakespeare’s Ophelia in Hamlet, finding that Ophelia is strongly identified with the ballad corpus. I argue that the popular ballad medium that Shakespeare imports into the play via Ophelia is a subversive force that contends with and destabilizes the linear trajectory of Hamlet’s revenge tragedy narrative. The alternative space of Ophelia’s ballad narrative is, however, shut down by her suicide which, I argue, is influenced by the models of classical theatre. This ending conspires with the repressive legal and social restrictions placed upon early modern unmarried women and sets up a dangerous precedent by killing off the unassimilated abandoned woman.
Chapter two argues that Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen amplifies Ophelia’s folk and ballad associations in their portrayal of the Jailer’s Daughter. Her comedic marital ending is enabled by a collaborative, communal, folk-cure. The play nevertheless registers a proto-feminist awareness of the peculiar losses suffered by early modern women in marriage and this knowledge deeply troubles the Jailer’s Daughter’s happy ending.
Chapter three explores the role of Lucibella in The Tragedy of Hoffman arguing that the play is a direct response to Hamlet’s treatment of revenge and that Lucibella is caught up in an authorial project of disambiguation which attempts to return the revenge plot to its morality roots. Chapters four and five explore the narratives of Aspatia in The Maid’s Tragedy and Penthea in The Broken Heart, finding in their very conformism to the behaviours prescribed for them, both by the Ophelia type itself and by early modern society in general, a radical protest against the limitations and repressions of those roles.
This thesis is consistently invested in the competing dialectics and authorities of oral and textual mediums in these plays. The Ophelia type, perhaps because of Hamlet’s Ophelia’s identification with the ballad corpus, proves an interesting gauge of each play’s engagement with emergent notions of textual authority in the early modern period.
2008-05-14T15:46:47Z
2008-05-14T15:46:47Z
2008-06
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/478
en
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
401
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/38452019-03-29T16:00:30Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2013-07-15T11:25:08Z
urn:hdl:10023/3845
Pierre Viret and France, 1559-1565
Foster, Stuart
Pettegree, Andrew
2013-07-15T11:25:08Z
2013-07-15T11:25:08Z
2000
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/3845
en
286
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/149552019-03-29T16:00:31Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-05T08:42:14Z
urn:hdl:10023/14955
Misanthropy in the work of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope
Scruton, Thomas
This thesis investigates the use of misanthropy as a rhetorical tool in the work (in particular the satire) of Swift and Pope. It deals with the connection between these two writers' perception of society and their desire to attack it with satire, and also their own perceived positions in society. It examines precedent and tradition for their approach, and pinpoints their primary objectives as regards the rhetorical use of misanthropy. The investigation then attempts to identify a coherent agenda for the use of rhetorical misanthropy in the work of each writer, and examines how their relationship with society affects their respective satirical voices. It then examines their characteristic methods, and attempts to glean from these an outline of the general ideology to which each subscribes in his satirical agenda. Using Gulliver's Travels as its main point of reference, it then examines the attempts of the misanthropic thinker to find a satisfactory place in society, and the relationship this search bears to the intellectual development of each writer. The thesis then deals with Swift's and Pope's attitudes to women; it recognizes their place in the eighteenth century (and earlier) 'phallocentric' tradition, and details the methods they use to perpetuate this tradition. It examines the ways in which these writers attempt to present women as inherently detrimental to the progress of society, and also the techniques they propose for controlling this potential destructiveness. The thesis attempts to show how these writers felt they could remodel the structure of society, both in their own fields of knowledge and in general. It identifies the importance of a rhetorical persona as a satirical tool, and suggests that Pope and Swift may be set in a literary and philosophical context which opens the potential for mindless invective and groundbreaking dynamic satire in excitingly equal measure.
2018-07-05T08:42:14Z
2018-07-05T08:42:14Z
1999-12
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14955
en
iv, 91 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/190522022-10-06T15:59:22Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2019-12-03T14:01:37Z
urn:hdl:10023/19052
"With strange fantastic motions" : the development of the early Stuart antimasque
Horrocks, Rachel Pamela
Rhodes, Neil
Pettegree, Jane
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)
University of St Andrews. 7th century Scholarship
University of St Andrews. School of English. Professor A F Falconer PhD Scholarship
This thesis charts the development of the early Stuart antimasque, from its origins in
Elizabethan progress entertainments to its extended presence in the final Caroline masques.
Scholarship has traditionally located the antimasque’s inception in Jonson’s 1609 Masque of
Queens. Taking up Jonson’s description of the antimasque as a “foil or false masque,” critics
have spoken of the antimasque in primarily negative terms, focusing on instances where it is
wild, indecorous, or threatening. By focussing on a broader selection of masques written by a
range of authors, my study addresses the tremendous variety inherent in the antimasque and its
role as an essential element of the masque form.
The body of my thesis offers a chronological study of the antimasque. Each chapter
concentrates on the masques of a particular historical moment, exploring the antimasque-
masque relationship through a series of emerging metaphors. Chapter One studies the
antimasque’s precursors in Elizabethan progress entertainments. Chapter Two discusses the
masques of the early Jacobean period in connection with the metaphor of the Golden Chain.
Chapter Three applies Jonson’s foil metaphor to the Palatine wedding masques of 1613.
Chapter Four addresses the labyrinthine imagery in the masques of Buckingham’s ascendency
in the early 1620s. Chapter Five discusses the mirror metaphor within Charles and Henrietta
Maria’s Neoplatonic paired masques of the early 1630s. Finally, Chapter Six explores the
function of clouds in Davenant’s final Caroline masques.
Rooted in a close reading of masque texts, the present study provides an “imaginative
reconstruction” of a variety of masques to understand how their disparate elements produce a
unified aesthetic experience. Rather than a simple binary opposition, the antimasque-masque
relationship is continually regenerated according to cultural as well as political pressures, and
its development is central to the progression of the masque form as a whole.
2019-12-03T14:01:37Z
2019-12-03T14:01:37Z
2019-06-25
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/19052
https://doi.org/10.17630/10023-19052
en
2024-05-24
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Print and electronic copy restricted until 24th May 2024
x, 262 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/291302024-02-03T03:01:24Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2024-02-01T13:54:01Z
urn:hdl:10023/29130
The meetinghouse
Rattelle, Daniel Paul
Paterson, Don
Jones, Emma
2024-02-01T13:54:01Z
2024-02-01T13:54:01Z
2023-06-13
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/29130
https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/721
en
47
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/149452019-03-29T16:00:33Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-05T08:07:43Z
urn:hdl:10023/14945
Christian liberty and its problems as reflected in selected works of Golden Age literature
Carter, Robin
Woodward, L. J.
2018-07-05T08:07:43Z
2018-07-05T08:07:43Z
1972
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14945
en
vii, 384 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/287282023-11-24T15:21:18Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2023-11-17T11:58:50Z
urn:hdl:10023/28728
Garbett (1964-1967)
Irvine, Joseph William MacGregor
Burnside, John
This thesis is the opening section of a novel entitled “Garbett”. The novel covers 3 years in the life of John Garbett, a Scottish musician living in London in the mid-1960s. It is comprised of Garbett’s diary entries from late 1964 to early 1968. This extract covers the period from November 1964 to March 1965.
This section sees Garbett navigate his early success as part of the musical duo Garbett and Lindsay as well as his difficult relationship with his romantic partner and bandmate, Tom Lindsay.
2023-11-17T11:58:50Z
2023-11-17T11:58:50Z
2023-11-28
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/28728
https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/663
en
2026-11-15
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Restricted until 15th November 2026
130
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/7322020-10-19T16:51:37Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2009-08-05T13:56:50Z
urn:hdl:10023/732
Liturgy translated : languages of nature, man and God in Smart’s Jubilate agno
Powell, Rosalind
Jones, Tom
Eighteenth-century poetry
Smart, Christopher
Physico-theology
Language theory
Music
Liturgy
Translation
Religious sublime
This thesis explores Christopher Smart’s search for an ideal language of religious expression and its presentation in Jubilate Agno. The concept of translation is utilised as an interpretative tool to explore the poet’s understanding and manipulation of languages. My investigation of Smart’s translation in Jubilate Agno is divided into three categories: the language used to describe nature, the language of man and the language used to describe God. Chapter One explores Smart’s poetic emphasis on reading the world correctly. The analysis concentrates on four themes: the inability to express the divine and the risk of vanity in science in the early poems, anti-Newtonianism, Smart’s rejection of scientific language, and the poet’s catalogic and categorical impulses in Jubilate Agno. Chapter Two is concerned with human communication through reading, writing and speaking. I investigate how the religious poet aims to create a new kind of universal language as he attempts to dissolve the dichotomy between divine and human expression. Chapter 3 explores the poem’s “extra-lingual” modes of communication and Smart’s interest in other ways of reading, interpreting and communicating to achieve sublime, divine language through depictions of artistic beauty. The thesis concludes by comparing Smart’s poem to other liturgical forms.
2009-08-05T13:56:50Z
2009-08-05T13:56:50Z
2009-06-23
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/732
en
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
155
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/5542019-07-01T10:16:34Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2008-11-13T15:14:32Z
urn:hdl:10023/554
Translation as creative retelling : constituents, patterning and shift in Gavin Douglas' Eneados
Kendal, Gordon
MacLachlan, Christopher
Aeneid
Translation
Renaissance
Scots
Narrative
Hermeneutics
The Thesis analyses and evaluates how Gavin Douglas (Eneados, 1513) has refocused Virgil's Aeneid, principally by giving more emphasis to the serial particularity inherent in the story, loosening the narrative structure and involving the reader in its retelling.
Chapter I pieces together (from the evidence not merely of what Douglas explicitly says, but of what his words imply) what for him a "text" in general is, and what accordingly it means for a translator or a reader to be engaged with it. This sets the scene for what follows.
The next four Chapters look in turn at how he re-expresses important (metaphysical) characteristics of the story. In Chapter II his handling of time is discussed, and compared with Virgil's: the Chapter sets out in detail how Douglas consistently refocuses temporal predicates, foregrounding their disjunctiveness and making them differently felt. In Chapter III spatial position and distance are analysed, and Douglas' way of dealing with space is found to display parallels with his treatment of time: networks are loosened and nodal points are accentuated. In Chapter IV the way in which he presents individuals is compared with Virgil's, and a similar repatterning and shift reveals itself: Douglas provides his persons with firmer boundaries. Chapter V deals with fate, where Douglas encounters special difficulties but maintains his characteristic way of handling the story. The aim of these four Chapters is to characterise formally how Douglas concretises and vivifies the tale of Aeneas, engaging his readers throughout in the retelling.
Finally, Chapter VI looks at certain general principles of translation theory (notably connected with the ideas of faithfulness and accuracy) and argues for a way in which Douglas' translation can be fairly experienced by the reader and fairly evaluated as a lively retelling which (albeit distinctive) is fundamentally faithful to Virgil.
2008-11-13T15:14:32Z
2008-11-13T15:14:32Z
2008-11-21
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/554
en
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
252
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/293692024-02-29T03:01:38Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2024-02-28T15:28:50Z
urn:hdl:10023/29369
Miracle : the Pax Humana (Novel excerpt)
Edic, William Erickson
Nayeri, Dina
Science fiction
Creative writing
Solarpunk
Hopepunk
Neurodivergent
Prose
Utopianism
This thesis is an approximately 40,000 word-long excerpt of Miracle: The Pax Humana, a science fiction novel set in a "fallen-utopia" setting influenced by Golden Age science fiction, utopian literature of the Renaissance, John Milton's Paradise Lost, ancient Greek mythology, war poetry from WWI, and especially by the aesthetics of the emerging "Solarpunk" and "Hopepunk" subgenres of science fiction.
Miracle itself focuses on the travels of interspecies diplomat Cleito Lyth- a human rescued and raised by the Chorus of Masks, a species of enigmatic yet peaceful aliens- as she undertakes a perilous journey to flee war-torn human space with a precious cargo in tow.
Cleito's adventures across the shattered-yet-healing garden worlds of the Orion Arm allow Cleito and her companions to explore various ideas of what it truly means to be human—complicating Cleito’s increasingly dualistic (and often neurodivergent-coded) conceptions of identity, culture, and philosophy. Across Cleito’s growth as both a person and a human being, she must face the burning question of humanity's trajectory within their universe: are they architects of utopian wonder, or engines of apocalyptic horror?
The work is an experiment in writing science fiction that shifts perspectives on tropes commonly used by space opera and/or military SF, using the premise of a “post-war” space opera setting to loosely explore topics of irenology, anthropology, human development, and long-term consequences of warfare. Meanwhile, cultural and technological remnants of the setting’s “Golden Age”/“Pre-war” era also allow for indirect exploration of optimistic futures relevant to contemporary “Solarpunk”/”Hopepunk” SF writers, without sacrificing the conflict and intrigue that often makes far-future SF settings so engaging to their audiences.
This excerpt contains the Prologue and several chapters from the first "Act" of the novel, which introduces Cleito as a protagonist, establishes the themes and aesthetics of Miracle's post-war "Bloom", outlines exposition on the War, the post-war Turmoils, and some of the factions involved, and briefly introduces key characters within the broader story.
2024-02-28T15:28:50Z
2024-02-28T15:28:50Z
2024-06-11
Thesis
https://hdl.handle.net/10023/29369
https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/792
en
150
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/150272019-03-29T16:00:34Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-06T08:50:46Z
urn:hdl:10023/15027
Driven to distinguish : Samuel Johnson's lexicographic turn of mind : a psychocritical study
Avin, Ittamar Johanan
Ashe, A. H.
As a man of letters with an exceptionally extensive and diverse output, Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) has invited consideration from a variety of angles. The present study offers a 'reading' of Johnson as a framer of distinctions. His distinction-making activity is viewed as a capital feature of the oeuvre, characterizing it across almost its entire range, a very substantial body of evidence is adduced in support of this reading. Broken up by distinction-type, the mass of evidence sorts itself out into seventeen different categories themselves grouped under seven 'thematic' heads. The organization of the inquiry on taxonomic lines is intended both to throw into relief the multiform character of Johnson's distinction-making praxis (something not heretofore remarked) and also to provide a comprehensive, systematic and easily 'readable' account of it. That the evidence testifying to Johnson's distinction-making turned out to be so voluminous could not but occasion the thought that it might be an involuntary activity, a 'drive' grounded in the very 'set' of his psyche which comes in consequence to be viewed as in some sort 'formed for distinction-making'. This thought evolved into the thesis that the present study undertakes to defend, in doing which it becomes a psychocritical investigation inscribed within the theoretical frame of psychological stylistics whose aim is to make inferences and advance hypotheses about the build and workings of a mind from an analysis of the linguistic and stylistic data it generates.
2018-07-06T08:50:46Z
2018-07-06T08:50:46Z
1997-06
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15027
en
550 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/30262019-07-01T10:08:30Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2012-07-26T10:26:12Z
urn:hdl:10023/3026
Seamus Heaney and the adequacy of poetry : a study of his prose poetics
Dennison, John
Crawford, Robert
Murphy, Andrew (Andrew D.)
Heaney, Seamus
Poetics
Humanism -- 20th and 21st century
Poetry -- Social function
Literature and theology
Seamus Heaney’s prose poetics return repeatedly to the adequacy of poetry, its ameliorative, restorative response to the inimical reality of life in the public domain. Drawing on manuscript as well as print sources, this thesis charts the development of this central theme, demonstrating the extent to which it threads throughout the whole of Heaney’s thought, from his earliest conceptual formation to his late cultural poetics.
Heaney’s preoccupation with this idea largely originates in his undergraduate studies where he encounters Leavis and Arnold’s accounts of poetry’s adequacy: its ameliorative cultural and spiritual function. He also inherits, from Romantic and modernist influences, two differing accounts of poetry’s relationship to reality. That conflicted inheritance engenders a crisis within Heaney’s own early theorisation of poetry’s adequacy to the violence of public life. An important period of clarification ensues, out of which emerge the dualisms of his later thought, and his emphasis on poetry’s capacity to encompass, and yet remain separate from, ‘history’. Accompanied by habitual appropriation of Christian doctrine and language, these conceptual structures increasingly assume a redemptive pattern.
By the mid-1990s, Heaney’s humanist commitment to a ‘totally adequate’ poetry has assumed a thoroughly Arnoldian character. The logical strain of his conceptual constructions—particularly the emphasis on poetry’s autonomy from history—becomes acutely apparent, revealing just how appropriate the ambivalent ideal ‘adequacy’ is. The subsequent expansion of Heaney’s poetics into a general affirmation of the arts illuminates the fiduciary character of his trust in poetry while exposing the limits of that trust: Heaney’s belief in poetry’s adequacy constitutes a humanist substitute for—indeed, an ‘afterimage’ of—Christian belief. This, finally, is the deep significance of the idea of adequacy to Heaney’s thought: it allows us to identify precisely the Arnoldian origin, the late humanist character, and the limits of his troubled trust in poetry.
2012-07-26T10:26:12Z
2012-07-26T10:26:12Z
2011-11-30
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/3026
en
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Electronic copy restricted until 70 years after the death of Seamus Heaney. Print copy available only with the consent of the Head of the School of English
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
viii + 285pp
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
School of English
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/44602019-09-30T13:20:40Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2014-02-25T12:09:30Z
urn:hdl:10023/4460
George MacDonald's fairy tales in the Scottish Romantic tradition
Pazdziora, John Patrick
MacLachlan, Christopher
George MacDonald (1824-1905) is one of the most complex and significant Scottish
writers of the nineteenth century, especially as a writer of children’s fiction and literary
fairy tales. His works, however, have seldom been studied as Scottish literature. This
dissertation is the first full-length analysis of his writings for children in their Scottish
context, focusing particularly on his use of Scottish folklore in his literary fairy tales.
MacDonald wrote in the Scottish Romantic tradition of Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and
James Hogg; by close reading his works alongside similar texts by his compatriots, such
as Andrew Lang, MacDonald’s own idiosyncratic contribution to that tradition becomes
more apparent. His profound knowledge of and appreciation for Christian mysticism is
in evidence throughout his work; his use of folklore was directly informed by his
exploration of mystical ideas. Hogg is recast as a second Dante, and ‘bogey tales’
become catalysts for spiritual awakening. MacDonald’s fairy tales deal sensitively and
profoundly with the theme of child death, a tragedy that held personal significance for
him, and can thus be read as his attempt to come to terms with the reality of
bereavement by using Scottish folklore to explain it in mystical terms. Traditional
figures such as Thomas Rhymer, visionary poets, and doubles appear in his fairy tales as
guides and pilgrims out of the material world toward mystical union with the Divine.
2014-02-25T12:09:30Z
2014-02-25T12:09:30Z
2013
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4460
en
2020-08-08
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Electronic copy restricted until 8th August 2020
vi, 251 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/113832019-09-30T11:55:18Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2017-08-04T15:10:54Z
urn:hdl:10023/11383
A second violation : rape myths in contemporary, popular British and American writing; and, The Alden case
O'Hara, Shannon E.
Burnside, John
This thesis and related work of fiction explores the representation of rape in contemporary British and American writing, with a particular focus on the use of rape myths in narratives about sexual violence. It evaluates how this crime is portrayed in popular literature through the analysis of three works of fiction by two bestselling authors: Joyce Carol Oates and Jodi Picoult. It also examines newspaper reporting through the analysis of three
news events – one in the U.K. and two in the U.S. – that received a significant amount of coverage from an assortment of newspapers. Literature and newspaper reporting contribute to public views of rape as well as cultural attitudes towards women. People may reference rape narratives as they form opinions about sexual violence, therefore making it crucial that these acts are portrayed accurately. This thesis will examine the vehicles that frame the discussion of sexual assault. It will focus on the way each author depicts the victim(s) and perpetrator(s) and assess how the type of rape – whether date, gang, or stranger rape – affects its representation. It will also reveal if
contemporary British and American writing has tried to disprove misperceptions and accurately depict sexual violence or if it continues to propagate myths.
2017-08-04T15:10:54Z
2017-08-04T15:10:54Z
2014
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/11383
en
2024-05-27
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Print and electronic copy restricted until 27th May 2024
288 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/110462019-03-29T16:00:35Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2017-06-21T13:02:50Z
urn:hdl:10023/11046
English Renaissance paradox : intellectual contexts and traditions with particular reference to John Donne's ̀Paradoxes' and ̀Biathanatos'
Pagano, Richard
Rhodes, Neil
ORS
This study examines the intellectual background of the paradoxes of John Donne. In the first chapter, the classical foundations of the concept of paradox are detailed.
These foundations reflect basic philosophical differences which are manifest in a writer's approach to the defence of a paradox or uncommon opinion. The first
chapter also discusses the derivation of classical concepts of paradox by sixteenth century writers in an effort to correlate these concepts with the respective philosophical positions with which Donne would have been familiar. The second chapter focuses on the dialectical procedure of the thesis. Aristotle explicitly associated the thesis with paradox, and he delineated its fundamental role in the investigation of contested speculative questions. Cicero adapted it to his rhetorical theory but continued to observe its essentially dialectical character. In the sixteenth century, writers on both rhetoric and logic drew heavily on the works of Aristotle
and Cicero for their own formulations of the thesis. These formulations reflect precisely the relationship which Aristotle and Cicero observed between the paradox and the thesis. The third chapter begins by examining the challenge posed by Peter Ramus to the Aristotelian dialectic upon which the scholastic curricula of European universities was based. Donne's English contemporaries, Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe, disagreed on the value of Ramus' innovations, and their comments on them in their quarrel reveal an awareness of the profound epistemological ramifications of Ramus' denial of the sceptical use of the thesis which Aristotle had observed in his Topics. The fourth chapter details those epistemological theories which competed with Ramus' neoaristotelianism. The majority of these theories are neoplatonic; they exhibit the characteristic features of Platonic Idealism which Aristotle had rejected in his Metaphysics, and which would be later rejected by Aquinas. Donne was familiar with these neoplatonic alternatives and was not wholly unreceptive to them. However, he explicitly denies the value of neoplatonic theories of mind for the practical affairs of Christian life, and maintains that the doubt implicit in matters to which revelation and reason have not delivered absolute
precepts insures the viability of paradoxical opinions. The fifth chapter compares Donne's Aristotelian notion of paradox with other paradoxes of the sixteenth century. Through this comparison, the scholastic foundation of Donne's dialectical argumentation is exposed. Once exposed, his characteristic tentativeness with regard to the doctrinal differences of his day is understood to be a consequence of his Aristotelian and Thomist regard for the difficulty with which reason attains knowledge. The sixth chapter examines Donne's paradox and thesis, Biathanatos, in light of the Thomist principles which it employs in its exposition of the problem of suicide. Throughout Biathanatos Donne criticizes the value of Augustine's moral doctrine in practical life, and accepts an epistemological doctrine which accommodates doubt and error in the manner detailed by Aquinas and denied by Augustine. It is with this doubt and error in mind that Donne's paradox proceeds towards its conclusion's request for charitable interpretation, an interpretation which is informed specifically by Aquinas' doctrine of charity.
2017-06-21T13:02:50Z
2017-06-21T13:02:50Z
2000
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/11046
en
367p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/147082019-03-29T16:00:37Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-06-28T12:11:54Z
urn:hdl:10023/14708
A deeper "Well of English undefyled" : the role and influence of Anglo-Saxon in nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry : with particular reference to Hopkins, Pound and Auden
Jones, Chris
Alexander, Michael
This thesis challenges the assumption that Chaucer is the father of the living English poetic tradition. Nobody would deny that poetry existed in a form of English before the fourteenth century, but it is commonly assumed that linguistic and cultural changes have made Anglo-Saxon poetry a specialist area of concern, of no use or interest to modern poets. It is demonstrated that during the nineteenth century, advances in linguistic and textual scholarship made Anglo-Saxon poetry more widely available than had been the case, probably since the Anglo-Norman period. Knowledge of Anglo-Saxon literature is subsequently communicated to poets, particularly after the subject is institutionalized in English departments at British and American universities. Chapter One charts this rise in awareness of Anglo-Saxon poetry and considers its effects on several nineteenth-century poets (William Barnes, Henry Longfellow, Alfred Tennyson and William Morris). Major studies then follow of Gerard Hopkins, Ezra Pound and W. H. Auden and the uses that they make of Anglo-Saxon in their own poetry. It is argued that through these writers Anglo-Saxon has had a more important impact on modern poetry than has been thought previously. Moreover, Anglo-Saxon is often included as part of a poetics that might be called 'modernist'. For each of the three poets under study, the nature of their contact with Anglo-Saxon poetry is determined from documentary evidence (whether at university, or via secondary literature), and different stylistic debts are examined by close readings of a number of poems. No previous work has attempted a detailed analysis of the uses to which these three writers put Anglo-Saxon poetry. This thesis offers such an analysis and synthesizes the different approaches to Anglo-Saxon in order to provide an overview of this phenomenon in nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry.
2018-06-28T12:11:54Z
2018-06-28T12:11:54Z
2002
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14708
en
317 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/110452019-03-29T16:00:37Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2017-06-21T12:50:54Z
urn:hdl:10023/11045
The poetry of an artificial man : a study of the Latin and English verse of Robert Southwell
Oxley, Brian William
Rhodes, Neil
The subject of the thesis is the verse of Robert Southwell, both in Latin and English. It may be divided broadly into three sections corresponding to three main areas of interest. First, there
is a discussion of the character of Counter-Reformation, or to be more precise, of Jesuit Poetics, which is largely based on the 'De poesi…' of Antonio Possevino, a leading Jesuit scholar and educationalist. There follows an account of the Latin verse which Southwell wrote abroad before his return to England in 1586. The third and most substantial part of the thesis is an account of the English poetry which is given in four chapters. First, following a discussion of the textual situation, Southwell's shorter poems are discussed as a coherent and intelligible sequence. Next, there is an account of the distinctive character of Southwell's poetry as revealed in its recurrent themes and images. Here the continuity between the Latin and English verse is examined. Next there is an account of Southwell's masterpiece, 'Saint Peters Complaint', which is seen as the fulfilment of Southwell's poetic career, and as a microcosm of his poetic work, drawing together in a compact unity elements scattered and divided amongst the rest of his work. Finally, an attempt is made to identify Southwell's best poetry, and to give detailed readings of his best poems, with the intention that Southwell may be better represented in anthologies and literary histories. A brief conclusion suggests that artificiality, which in contrast with previous readings is seen as a central element of Southwell's poetry, is relevant to
understanding his life also.
2017-06-21T12:50:54Z
2017-06-21T12:50:54Z
1985
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/11045
en
257p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/219232022-01-31T17:12:22Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2021-04-08T08:59:26Z
urn:hdl:10023/21923
Holy Church, the simple soul and the literary articulation of an orthodox religious sensibility : the evidence of later Middle English texts
Williams, Bethan Arwen
Johnson, Ian R. (Ian Richard)
Through an historical and literary-critical approach to the analysis of a range of extant vernacular writings from the fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth centuries, this thesis aims to characterise certain aspects of the existence, workings and complexities of an orthodox, literary mainstream religious sensibility in later mediaeval England. The arguments this thesis propounds stem from a basic premise that acknowledges the presence of an undoubted mediaeval Christian faith in England in the later Middle Ages and, particularly, in the Middle English works under discussion. The texts that will be used to provide illustrative examples of this sensibility range from anonymous lyrics and pastoralia such as Handlyng Synne, The Lay Folk's Catechism and The Lay Folk's Mass Book through to more contemplative works such as the Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God, texts written for female religious, the treatises of Richard Rolle and Julian of Norwich and, finally, Nicholas Love's spiritual guide The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. Textual evidence will be used to illustrate the shortcomings of a critical approach that tacitly denies the existence of a sincere mediaeval Christian faith and certain modern academic interpretations of mediaeval orthodox religious beliefs and practices will be challenged. A freshly nuanced approach to the consideration of Middle English devotional texts will be put forward in place of existing interpretations that either see the authors of such works enthusiastically endorsing an oppressive ecclesiastical regime through their writing, or conclude that a seeming adherence to orthodox beliefs is a mask for the articulation of radical, anti- establishment beliefs. Working with a definition of Holy Church that allows for it to be conterminously understood as an institution endowed with the received authority of its founder, Christ, and also as an organisation run by an all too fallible clerical hierarchy, critical discussion of texts will centre upon their articulation of an orthodox approach to spirituality that is, perhaps, surprising in its latitude. This thesis also aims to show how such binary categorisations as public and private, institutional and individual, do not offer a fair representation of the complex relationships that might be seen to have existed between a man/woman and Holy Church; how, while playing an elementary, foundational role in orthodox religious practices, the Church did not, even within its own self-prescribed boundaries, discourage the development of direct, personal and prayerful relationships with God and Christ.
2021-04-08T08:59:26Z
2021-04-08T08:59:26Z
2006
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/21923
en
vii, 309 p 30 cm.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/168722019-04-22T08:16:22Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2019-01-16T09:30:02Z
urn:hdl:10023/16872
Chasing the absence : c. 40 pp. of verse
Nicholson, Helen
Paterson, Don
Chasing the Absence explores themes of absence and loss, containing poems on emotional loss, death, disconnection and other lacks or losses, including the frustrations of language, whether disfluency or the pains of realising a poem. Some poems explore connection or reconnection (eg with Scots); however, presence contains the possibility of absence. Several poems address the theme of work and making.
Specifically, the title comes from a poem in a sequence based on research into C19 Hamilton, Lanarkshire, and the entirely unknown family of my maternal grandmother: farmers, woodworkers and textile workers. The sequence grew from my struggles between duty to historical context and interpretation; awareness of projecting my emotions onto characters; and the capacity imaginatively to realise little-documented characters whose potential was limited by their socio-historical context.
Few of the poems are written metrically or in strict form. Rhyme is employed lightly, and is seldom sustained except in the few poems intended as light relief. Nevertheless, the poems are strongly patterned, mainly through attention to sound and rhythm. Two poems depend upon visual impact. Others use the page to explore distance and space, or depend primarily upon the syntax to determine pace.
The language is straightforward and direct, though diction varies. One concern is to pay attention to, perhaps to reify, objects or feelings not quite within grasp. Images relating to textiles recur. During writing, the absence of metaphor was troubling – yet the inability to find surprising yet meaningful comparisons is implicit in the intangibility of the unknown that is being chased. The pace of most poems is slow, a deliberate focusing of attention on the mundane, on what does not dazzle. In contrast to that meditative approach, some poems explore heightened energy, taking from projective verse, being propelled by kinetics, breath and typographical use of the whole page.
2019-01-16T09:30:02Z
2019-01-16T09:30:02Z
2017-04-04
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/16872
en
2022-05-04
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Electronic copy restricted until 4th May 2022
vi, 47 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/171892019-08-02T13:20:41Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2019-03-01T14:33:07Z
urn:hdl:10023/17189
'Nothing gold can stay' : the end of the poem and the poetics of closure
Baker, Jennifer
Paterson, Don
2019-03-01T14:33:07Z
2019-03-01T14:33:07Z
2018
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/17189
en
2023-11-20
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Print and electronic copy restricted until 20th November 2023
281
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/63932019-03-29T16:00:37Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2015-03-27T16:01:18Z
urn:hdl:10023/6393
A modern Wessex of the penny post’ : letters and the post in Thomas Hardy’s novels
Koehler, Karin
Mallett, Phillip
James Macpherson
Letters
Communication
Penny post
Telegraph
Thomas Hardy
Victorian culture
Letter writing
Technology
This thesis examines the use and representation of letters (and other written messages) in Thomas Hardy’s novels, and it considers how Hardy’s writing engages with Victorian communication technologies.
The 1895 Preface to Far from the Madding Crowd describes Hardy’s fictional setting as a ‘a modern Wessex of railways, the penny post, mowing and reaping machines, union workhouses, lucifer matches, labourers who could read and write, and National school children’. The penny post, a communication revolution with an enormous social, economic, and cultural impact, was introduced on 10 January 1840, just a few months before Hardy was born. This thesis aims to demonstrate how a consideration of the material, technological and cultural conditions of communication in Victorian England might reshape our understanding of Hardy’s novels, especially of the countless letters, notes, and telegrams which permeate his texts.
The written messages in Hardy’s novels serve as a means for exploring the process of human communication, and the way this process shapes individual identity, interpersonal relationships, and social interactions alike. Chapter I of this thesis relates Hardy’s portrayal of letters to the historical transition from oral tradition to written culture. Chapter II enquires into the relationship between letter writing and notions of privacy and publicity in Hardy’s novels. Chapters III and IV argue that Hardy uses letters so as to give a strikingly modern complexity to his representation of human subjectivity and intersubjectivity. The two final chapters investigate how the modalities and technological conditions of written communication influence the construction of Hardy’s narratives, the design of his plots. Taken together, the six chapters examine Hardy’s perception of one of the most fundamental human activities: communication.
2015-03-27T16:01:18Z
2015-03-27T16:01:18Z
2015-06
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6393
en
Electronic copy restricted until 28th November 2019
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations
vi, 244
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/34752019-03-29T16:00:38Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2013-04-11T09:02:48Z
urn:hdl:10023/3475
Concepts of folly in English Renaissance literature : with particular reference to Shakespeare and Jonson
Bulman, Helen Lois
Chapter 1 considers Barclay's 'Ship of Fools' in relation to other folly literature in English, particularly Lydgate's 'Order of Fools', Skelton's 'Bowge of Courte', and 'Cocke Lorrel's Bote'. Motifs, allegories and the woodcuts of the text are discussed and some are included in an Illustrations section. Chapter 2 discusses Erasmian folly looking back to the Neoplatonic writings of Nicholas of Cusa, and to the debt Erasmian exegeses owe to Origen. Erasmus' own philosophical and theological views are examined, particularly as they are found in his 'Enchiridion', and in the influence of Thomas à Kempis' 'Imitation of Christ'. A close textual analysis of the 'Moriae Encomium' is undertaken in this light. Chapter 3 defines the lateral boundaries of folly, where it blends into madness. In the context of Renaissance psychology sixteenth century medical works are analysed, including Boorde's 'Breviary of Healthe', Barrough's 'Method of Physicke' and Elyot's 'Castel of Helth'. Blurring between madness and sin, the negative judgments on the mad as demon-possessed, and the biblical models from which such judgments largely arose give alternative perspectives on madness and its relation to folly. Chapters 4-6 look at three Shakespearean comedies showing the development of a primarily Erasmian view of folly. This moves from overt references in 'Love's Labour's Lost' to natural folly, the folly of love and theological folly, through carnivalesque aspects of folly and madness in 'Twelfth Night', to an embedded notion of folly which influences and affects the darker comedy of 'Measure for Measure'. Chapter 7 considers satires of Hall, Marston and Guilpin, and looks at Jonson's Humour plays in this context. 'Volpone' and 'Epicoene', and 'The Alchemist' and 'Bartholomew Fair' are discussed in pairs, showing the softening of Jonson's attitude to folly, and his increasing representation of Erasmian folly reaching its full expression in 'Bartholomew Fair'.
2013-04-11T09:02:48Z
2013-04-11T09:02:48Z
1991
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/3475
en
ix, 292
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/150222019-03-29T16:00:39Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-06T08:04:11Z
urn:hdl:10023/15022
Sir David Lindsay of the Mount : political and religious culture in Renaissance Scotland
Edington, Carol
For too long Sir David Lindsay of the Mount has been almost the exclusive concern of literary critics and ecclesiastical historians. This thesis aims to demonstrate that Lindsay and his works represent an invaluable source for a much broader study of Renaissance Scotland and that placing each in a proper historical and cultural context sheds an important light on some of the ideas and attitudes which shaped Scotland's political and religious culture during this crucial period. The thesis falls into three sections. The first offers a detailed examination of Lindsay's career, tracing his arrival at Court, his experiences during the minority of 1513-28 and his employment as a herald. Looking at the events of the 1530s, it argues that Lindsay's position is best seen both in the light of a developing humanist- influenced court culture and the emergence of religious controversy. It is suggested that, following the death of James V, Lindsay was much less closely associated with the Court and that this had important consequences for his political, religious and poetic development. Part Two stresses the hitherto little appreciated point that Lindsay was very much a political writer. Analysing his discussion of government, the section looks in particular at ideas of kingship and commonweal, assessing the extent to which Lindsay variously questioned or endorsed traditional attitudes and assumptions. This also involves a study of Lindsay's position as court-poet and those occasions of public spectacle with which he was involved. Completing the examination of Lindsay and his works, the thesis turns to questions of religion. Arguing that his work represents a more complex, often more ambiguous, but ultimately more satisfying, source than is generally appreciated. Part Three considers Lindsay's religious attitudes, examining what his poetry can tell us concerning the situation in Scotland on the eve of the Reformation.
2018-07-06T08:04:11Z
2018-07-06T08:04:11Z
1992-07
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15022
en
461 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/1482019-07-01T10:13:07Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2007-01-11T22:56:41Z
urn:hdl:10023/148
Journey towards the (m)other : myth, origins and the daughter's desires in the fiction of Angela Carter
Jennings, Hope
Sellers, Susan
This study examines Angela Carter’s demythologising of origin myths and will
investigate the extent to which her fictions offer viable alternatives that allow for
productive representations of women and gender relations outside patriarchal paradigms.
In the first half of the thesis (Chapters 1-3), I will primarily focus on how several of
Carter’s earlier texts deconstruct existing mythical spaces, particularly the biblical
creation story in Genesis. The Genesis myth is central to socio-historical constructions of
gendered identities, and in itself, central to Carter’s imagination. She repeatedly returns
to this myth in her challenging of the ways in which patriarchal narratives construct
violent relations between self and other, specifically where ‘woman’ is situated as the
repressed other of male desires and fears. Alongside her demythologising of Genesis,
Carter deconstructs Freudian myths of sexual maturation, exposing where these also set
up a relationship of antagonism or enmity between the sexes. Although Chapter One will
explore how Carter attempts to revise these origin myths from a positive stance, Two and
Three will focus on the inherent difficulties faced by the female subject in her struggle
against patriarchal myths and their violent oppression of female autonomy. The second
half of the thesis (Chapters 4-6) will shift to an investigation of how Carter’s later texts
set up both possibilities and challenges for women when attempting to construct their
own narratives of origin. Through her problematising of matriarchal myths and feminist
fantasies of self-creation, Carter emphasises the need for confronting limitations rather
than celebrating transgressions as entirely liberating. The thesis will conclude, however,
with an examination of where Carter’s own attempts at remythologising opens up an
alternative space, or ‘elsewhere’, of feminine desires that allows for a refiguring of the
female subject as well as more reciprocal relations between the sexes.
2007-01-11T22:56:41Z
2007-01-11T22:56:41Z
2007
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/148
en
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Generic
v, 214 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/218092021-10-21T11:23:04Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2021-04-08T08:45:36Z
urn:hdl:10023/21809
A study of popular literature in Scotland, 1860-1900, with special reference to Dundee area periodicals
Duncan, Alan M.
Low, Donald A.
The respectability of periodicals was established by “quality” magazines of the early nineteenth century. Cheap periodicals which followed catered for a new mass audience, giving them entertainment and instruction. By the 1840’s “family” magazines were established providing entertainment mainly in the form of fiction. These magazines formed the future pattern.
The Scottish dimension in periodicals and their fiction stemmed from the debate on Scottish identity. Political and other developments in the middle of the century had failed to resolve the problem of identity. The timeless virtues of Scottish life and character were popularised by books on the subject and soon these images, reinforced with examples from literature, were accepted as the truth. The family life of ordinary men and women was central to this vision. By the end of the century therefore, magazines and fiction could confidently portray an acceptable image of Scotland. One of the successes of cheap Saturday papers of the 1850’s was John Feng's People's Journal. Reflecting his moral aims, it gave news and fiction of interest to the readers of the surrounding district. One of the results of its support of Scottish literature and literary competitions was the People's Friend in 1869. Fiction writers gained success and fame in its pages and the magazine became popular all over the world. It adapted to changing circumstances without deviating from its original aims among which was the portrayal of Scottish life. The moral framework of its fiction, presenting an ideal attainable by the readers, was established by the proprietor and his editors.
Plot dominated every story with the marriage of the hero and heroine as the ultimate goal. Characters were shown at times of crisis: the good overcame through their inner moral strength; the bad received a just reward. Stories showed an awareness of the lives of ordinary people although later in the century changes in emphasis appeared. Sometimes uneven in quality, Friend fiction sustained a clear view of human experience often reflecting the lives of its authors. John Leng's journalistic career began in his native Hull. Ideas developed there were put into practice in Dundee. A progressive and considerate employer, he gathered around him men of similar outlook. Leng writers of fiction recognised they were not writing great literature? a fact which helps in assessing their work. Wider recognition for Dundee-produced fiction came with the 'Kailyard’ movement. 'Kailyard' literature of the 1890’s varies from that produced by John Leng & Co. Sketches in the People's Friend had appeared many years earlier and those of the 1890’s grew out of this with a different emphasis from those of Barrie and Maclaren. The 'leader' of the 'Kailyard', William Robertson Nicoll, may well have been influenced by John Leng. There were many similarities yet each had a distinctive audience. Scottish sketches were but one strand in the fiction of John Leng & Co. which made the firm a major force in popular Scottish writing.
2021-04-08T08:45:36Z
2021-04-08T08:45:36Z
1978
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/21809
en
vii, 377 p
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/90732019-03-29T16:00:41Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2016-07-04T11:32:54Z
urn:hdl:10023/9073
The life and work of Willa Muir, 1890-1955
Allen, Kirsty Anne
MacLachln, Christopher
Crawford, Robert
The thesis reconstructs the first sixty-five years of the life of Willa Muir, and
provides a preliminary critical analysis of her pre-1955 works.
Wilhelmina Anderson was born in 1890 in Montrose where she spent the first,
formative seventeen years of her life before proceeding to St Andrews
University in 1907. Her university years produced academic and social
success, but also the pain of a disintegrating romantic relationship and the
horror of her brother's nervous breakdown. She spent the later war years in
London studying child psychology at Bedford College, and living in the city's
East End at Mansfield House University Settlement. She met Edwin Muir in
September 1918 and married him in June 1919 - a development which cost her
the vice-principal's post at Gypsy Hill Training College. They spent their first
difficult married years in London where Willa pursued subsistence
employment and struggled to contain the fears which plagued Edwin: but
they were overwhelmed by London life and escaped into Europe for three
years. This adventure included a period in Prague and one during which
Willa taught at A.S. Neill's school near Dresden. They returned to three
frustrating years in Willa's mother's Montrose house (where Willa wrote
Women: An Inquiry) and a damp Buckinghamshire cottage from which they
escaped to the cheaper, warmer climes of southern France. Five years in
Crowborough then ensued; Willa produced a son, an outpouring of
translations and a novel called Imagined Corners. The three years which they
then spent in Hampstead were amongst the happiest in Willa's life. She
produced her second novel, Mrs Ritchie, but also experienced her sons road
accident. This event drove them to seek a less populous location and they
moved to St Andrews. This was a nightmarish period in which they suffered
social ostracism, illness and the effects of the Second World War. Willa wrote
Mrs Grundy in Scotland. Edwin then began an eight year association with
the British Council which started with war work in Edinburgh and then took
them back to Prague. This was an initially happy experience which was
soured by internal machinations at the Council and the horror of the 1948
Communist putsch. They were physically and emotionally injured by this
experience but were healed by a second British Council posting to Rome. The
final chapter describes their residency at Newbattle Abbey College in
Scotland - where Edwin was appointed to the post of warden - and explores
Willa's crisis of confidence during this period. The thesis ends at the point of
the Muir's 1955 departure for Harvard University. It is a natural hiatus in
Willa's personal history and marks the beginning of a comparatively fallow
period in her creative life.
2016-07-04T11:32:54Z
2016-07-04T11:32:54Z
1997
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/9073
en
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
517 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/271702023-04-25T20:57:39Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2023-03-13T14:49:29Z
urn:hdl:10023/27170
Hill worms of England and Wales
Kaftal, Sophia
Paterson, Don
Imagination
Humour
Irreverence
Ars Poetica
Exploration
Creativity
Ekphrasis
Worms
Childhood
Grief
Experimental
Ecology
Rhythm
Surreal
Wit
Environmental
Nonhuman
Imagery
Mysterious
Poetics
Narrative
Epistolary
Letters
Aural
Anxiety
Capitalism
Voice
Glitch
Collage
Flowers
Trees
Horses
Music
Unpredictable
Prose poetry
Poetry
I believe part of the drive in my writing is an impulse to define poetry. The desire to fully satisfy
this curiosity is something I find endlessly interesting, and amusing. In conclusion, I have found
that a creative approach is the only authentic response. Therefore, my thesis has come to
represent a personal exploration towards this interest. I have used my writing to flesh out what
this might mean and always had the ambition these poems would add further mystery to the
question. This is the underlying ethos of my work. Here, I attempt to sometimes communicate
feeling more than sense, sensation over rational thought – all things I find poetry satisfies in
myself. This has encouraged me to use sound and sense in experimental ways, as well as further
investigate the spaces created by the imagination in the normal workaday reality of the world. As
a result, I discovered a surreal approach comes very naturally to me. However, I strive to create a
balance as well as a unique take towards this style. I think poetry should be fun to read, too.
Quiet and loud. Abstract and grounded. And I assert that prose poems can be just as poetical as
more recognisable forms. Just like the mythical hill worms talked about in ancient folklore, I
think poetry should be intangible and mysterious. Funny and profound. This also ties into other
themes which encourage my writing: childhood, imagination, love, art, animals, hobbies, our
environment, and perhaps an overarching theme of how our individuality interacts within these –
what I believe to be – spiritual spheres. And whether individuality as well as the imagination, like
poetry, is something that cannot be specified, and is perhaps, moreover, a complex, evolving idea
involving our geography and our shared and personal histories.
2023-03-13T14:49:29Z
2023-03-13T14:49:29Z
2023-06-13
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/27170
https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/341
en
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
53
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/9522019-03-29T16:00:42Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2010-07-01T11:07:19Z
urn:hdl:10023/952
The sixth sense : synaesthesia and British aestheticism, 1860-1900
Poueymirou, Margaux Lynn Rosa
Sutton, Emma
“The Sixth Sense: Synaesthesia and British Aestheticism 1860-1900” is an
interdisciplinary examination of the emergence of synaesthesia conceptually and
rhetorically within the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement in mid-to-late Victorian Britain.
Chapter One investigates Swinburne’s focal role as both theorist and literary spokesman
for the nascent British Aesthetic movement. I argue that Swinburne was the first to
practice what Pater meant by ‘aesthetic criticism’ and that synaesthesia played a decisive
role in ‘Aestheticising’ critical discourse.
Chapter Two examines Whistler’s varied motivations for using synaesthetic metaphor,
the way that synaesthesia informed his identity as an aesthete, and the way that critical
reactions to his work played a formative role in linking synaesthesia with Aestheticism in
the popular imagination of Victorian England.
Chapter Three explores Pater’s methods and style as an ‘aesthetic critic.’ Even more than
Swinburne, Pater blurred the distinction between criticism and creation. I use
‘synaesthesia’ to contextualise Pater’s theory of “Anders-streben” and to further
contribute to our understanding of his infamous musical paradigm as a linguistic ideal,
which governed his own approach to critical language.
Chapter Four considers Wilde’s decadent redevelopment of synaesthetic metaphor. I use
‘synaesthesia’ to locate Wilde’s style and theory of style within the context of decadence;
or, to put it another way, to locate decadence within the context of Wilde.
Each chapter examines the highly nuanced claim that art should exist for its own sake and
the ways in which artists in the mid-to-late Victorian period attempted to realise this
desire on theoretical and rhetorical levels.
2010-07-01T11:07:19Z
2010-07-01T11:07:19Z
2009-11
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/952
en
269
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/31232019-03-29T16:00:42Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2012-09-22T17:48:54Z
urn:hdl:10023/3123
T.S. Eliot among the Metaphysicals
Gray, Will
Crawford, Robert
Eliot’s admiration for the poetry of the seventeenth century is well known. However, the
several documents that explore the subject (thinly scattered across decades) fail to constitute
a full account. Drawing on manuscript and print sources, and tracing particularly Eliot’s
prose poetics, this thesis redresses the scholarly need for a nuanced account of Eliot’s role
among the Metaphysical poets.
The relationship ran in both directions, most famously in Eliot’s championing of the
poets and his urging that they find a new readership. His part in the revival of Metaphysical
poetry, though, has been greatly exaggerated and the record is here faithfully adjusted. He
was not in any way responsible for that revival, though he is its most important product, as is
shown by a careful reconstruction of turn-of-the-century transcontinental publishing and
reception.
Eliot’s criticism tells its own, largely unexplored story about the Metaphysicals and
their influence on his critical and poetic sensibility. Most scholars, for instance, know that
Eliot loved Donne, but few know the origin of that interest, let alone its brief nature or the
personal reasons that drove him to appreciate the poet’s audacity. Most also know the
Modernist dicta of Tradition, objective correlative and the dissociation of sensibility, but not
the fact that each owes something to Eliot’s thinking about Donne. Engaging with Harvard
class notes, under-consulted textbooks and a close study of Eliot’s articles from the 1910s,
two separate chapters investigate his education and early prose, along with their delicate
dance between impersonality and confessional criticism.
1921-1926 marks a crucial stage in Eliot’s writing, both for his poetry and his
criticism. The Metaphysicals provide the clearest barometer of that change as well as the
space where he approached conversion. This thesis is the first to trace the poets throughout
Eliot’s criticism, one of the first to engage with his Metaphysical-themed Clark Lectures, and
the first to move far past Eliot’s conversion, interpreting George Herbert as typical of his
late mindset. In 1961 Eliot claimed no one had been as influenced by the Metaphysical poets
as he had been. What this thesis offers is not only a more nuanced portrait of that influence
but also a glimpse into the educational, critical and reading cultures of the early 1900s.
2012-09-22T17:48:54Z
2012-09-22T17:48:54Z
2011
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/3123
en
Electronic copy restricted indefinitely.
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations
xii, 252
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/118252021-01-25T16:38:37Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2017-10-10T13:26:22Z
urn:hdl:10023/11825
Accounting for taste : the poetics of food and flavour in Virginia Woolf’s novels
De Santa, Jessica E.
Sellers, Susan
University of St Andrews
Scottish Overseas Research Student Awards Scheme (SORSAS)
Newark Academy (N.J.)
This thesis argues that tasting appears as an act of creative empathy and of knowledge acquisition in Virginia Woolf’s writing. First contextualising my discussion within Woolf’s own reading of the aesthetic and literary history of ‘taste’, I then use Cixous’ essay ‘Extreme Fidelity’ (renamed ‘The Author in Truth’) as a theoretical entryway to passages from The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room, A Room of One’s Own, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Orlando which centralise the role of gustatory pleasure in creativity and epistemology. Cixous elaborates an oral, ‘poetic’ and feminine ontology rooted in a receptivity to sensual pleasure, a concept that assists my reading of Woolf in several aspects. I suggest that in Woolf, both literal and figurative experiences of taste contribute to physical and psychic repletion, consequently eliciting empathy with the other (Cixous’ term). This empathy which originates in the body constitutes an epistemological source distinct from intellectual or emotional intelligences, but one equally integral to the creative process. I assert that empathy features in Woolf as an extension or enlargement of the imagination through which a subject incorporates knowledge of alterity, but without consuming the other - as in the act of tasting. This ideation differs from notions of empathy as an analogical mapping or projection of self onto other. I discuss the ways in which a ‘gustatory epistemology’ informs Woolf’s approach to her craft, shapes the interrelationships of her characters, and materialises stylistically in her development of a ‘poetic’ prose language.
2017-10-10T13:26:22Z
2017-10-10T13:26:22Z
2015-11
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/11825
en
2025-10-30
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Electronic copy restricted until 30th October 2025
v, 297 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/74182021-03-17T10:03:51Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2015-09-08T14:39:26Z
urn:hdl:10023/7418
Part 1: Thesis : 'True receivers' : Rilke and the contemporary poetics of listening ; Part 2: Poems : Small weather
Lawrence, Faith
Paterson, Don
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
Listening
Poetics
Rainer Maria Rilke
Ecopoetics
Don Paterson
Kathleen Jamie
John Burnside
Edward Thomas
Phonograph
Listening taxonomy
Sound
History of listening
A poetics of listening
Receivership
Hélène Cixous
The sonnets to Orpheus
'Finding your voice'
Martin Heidegger
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Jean-Luc Nancy
Embarrassment
Duino elegies
Primal sound
Ted Hughes
Part 1: ‘True Receivers’: Rilke and the Contemporary Poetics of Listening
In this part of this thesis I argue that a contemporary ‘poetics of listening’ has emerged in the UK, and explore the writing of three of our most significant poets - John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson - to find out why they have become interested in the idea of the poet as a ‘listener’. I suggest that the appeal of this listening stance accounts for their engagement with the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, who thought of himself as a listening ‘receiver’; it is proposed that Rilke’s notion of ‘receivership’ and the way his poems relate to the earthly (or the ‘non-human’) also account for the general ‘intensification’ of interest in his work.
An exploration of the shifting status of listening provides context for this study, and I pay particular attention to the way innovations in audio and communications technology influenced Rilke’s late sequences the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. A connection is made between Rilke’s ‘listening poetics’ and the ‘listening’ stance of Ted Hughes and Edward Thomas; this establishes a ‘listening lineage’ for the contemporary poets considered in the thesis.
I also suggest that there are intriguing similarities between the ideas of listening that are emerging in contemporary poetics and Hélène Cixous’ concept of ‘écriture féminine’. Exploring these similarities helps us to understand the implications of the stance of the poet-listener, which is a counter to the idea that as a writer you must ‘find your voice’.
Finally, it is proposed that ‘a poetics of listening’ would benefit from an enriched taxonomy.
Part 2 of the thesis is a collection of my poems entitled ‘Small Weather’.
2015-09-08T14:39:26Z
2015-09-08T14:39:26Z
2015-11-30
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/7418
en
2025-08-14
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Print and electronic copy restricted until 14th August 2025
ix, 213 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/119062017-10-23T15:03:48Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2017-10-23T14:52:23Z
urn:hdl:10023/11906
Ben Jonson and character
Shimizu, Akihiko
Hutson, Lorna
This thesis discusses Ben Jonson’s innovative concept of character as an effect of interactions in dramatic, political and literary spheres. The Introduction observes how the early modern understanding of ‘character’ was built on classical rhetorical theory, and argues its relevance to Jonson’s rhetorical and performative representations of characters. Chapter 1 looks into the bridge between epigrams and character writing, and examines the rhetorical influence of the grammar-school exercises of Progymnasmata on Jonson’s representation of characters in his Epigrams. Chapter 2 examines character as legal ethos in Catiline, analysing the discourse of law that constitutes Cicero’s struggle to issue senatus consultum ultimum and examining the way Catiline represents character and mischief to address the problematic issues of power and authority in King James’ monarchical republic. Chapter 3 explores Jonson’s challenge in his integration of the emblematic characters of Opinion and Truth in Hymenaei, and argues that the underlining contemporary medico-legal discourses help the masque to accommodate conflicting characters. Chapter 4 discusses the problematic characterization of news and rumours in Volpone, The Staple of News and the later masques, and considers the way Jonsonian characters strive to find trustworthy and legible signs of others in their exchanges of information. In Conclusion, the thesis confirms the need to re-acknowledge Jonson’s writings in terms of character as rhetorical effect of these imagined interactions.
2017-10-23T14:52:23Z
2017-10-23T14:52:23Z
2015-03
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/11906
en
2020-04-13
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Electronic copy restricted until 13th April 2020
vi, 341 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/55232019-03-29T16:00:45Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2014-10-02T15:11:29Z
urn:hdl:10023/5523
David Steuart Erskine, 11th. Earl of Buchan : a study of his life and correspondence
Lamb, James Gordon
Carnie, Robert Hay
Doig, Ronald P.
[From the Prefatory note]. All the biographical accounts of David Steuart
Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan, are slight, and often very
unsympathetic. Most have relied for factual information
on his obituary, published in volume 99 of The Gentleman’s
Magazine.
Malicious and distorted comments, particularly
by Sir Walter Scott, have been responsible for the growth
of a legend about Buchan’s eccentricity, although the
charge of absurd conduct was lodged against him in his
own lifetime. It is interesting to note that a tradesman in Galashiels, near Buchan’s former residence at
Dryburgh Abbey, was found to talk about Buchan’s patriotism,
but at much greater length about his oddities, as recently
as 1962.
Those who could have given posterity a fair
assessment of Buchan did not do so, and the way was left
open for those who saw him only as vain and self-seeking.
He was unlucky in living in the neighbourhood of Scott’s
house, Abbotsford, and because of this he has never had
his due, even in the Border Country where he spent almost
half his life. The cult of Scott flourishes there, but
to Buchan there is no memorial. Whereas Abbotsford is
much sought after, and is still in the possession of Scott’s
descendants, Dryburgh Abbey passed from Buchan’s family and was given to the nation. Scott would probably have been
amused had he known that the time would come when visitors
to the Abbey would seek out his grave whilst that of
Buchan goes unnoticed.
2014-10-02T15:11:29Z
2014-10-02T15:11:29Z
1963
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/5523
en
499
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/39722023-09-06T02:01:51Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2013-08-20T14:24:03Z
urn:hdl:10023/3972
Finishing off Jane Austen : the evolution of responses to Austen through continuations of The Watsons
Cano López, Marina
Lodge, Sara
Sellers, Susan
Jane Austen
Afterlife
Continuations
The Watsons
Reception
The unfinished
Popular culture
This doctoral thesis analyses the evolution of responses to Jane Austen’s fiction through continuations of her unfinished novel The Watsons (c.1803-5). Although the first full “appropriation” of an Austen novel ever published was a continuation of The Watsons and a total of eight completions appeared between 1850 and 2008, little research has been done to link the afterlife of The Watsons and changing perceptions of Austen. This thesis argues that the completions of The Watsons significantly illuminate Austen’s reception: they expose conflicting readings of Austen’s novels through textual negotiations between the completer’s and Austen’s voice. My study begins by examining how the first continuation, Catherine Hubback’s The Younger Sister (1850), implies an alternative image of the Victorian Austen to that propounded by James Edward Austen-Leigh, Austen’s first official biographer (Chapter 1). The next two chapters focus on the effects of World War I and II on modes of reading Austen. Through L. Oulton’s (1923), Edith Brown’s (1928) and John Coates’s (1958) completions of The Watsons, this study examines the connection between Austen’s fiction and different notions of Englishness, politics and the nation. Chapter Four addresses the contribution of the 1990s completions to the debate over Austen’s feminism. Finally, Chapter Five analyses recent trends in Austenalia, which thwart the production of successful completions of The Watsons. My thesis presents the first substantial analysis of this body of work.
2013-08-20T14:24:03Z
2013-08-20T14:24:03Z
2013-11-30
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/3972
https://doi.org/10.17630/10023-3972
en
vii, 254 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/217612021-07-27T10:09:28Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2021-04-02T10:07:17Z
urn:hdl:10023/21761
Aspects of Keats's theatrical experience, 1817-1819
Liu, Wing Yin Winifred
Roe, Nicholas
John Keats
Regency theatre
Edmund Kean
Otho the Great
Romanticism
This thesis explores Keats’s experience of live theatre during the years 1816-1819, focusing primarily on performances he saw in the London and provincial theatres, as well as the poet’s relationship with Regency actor Edmund Kean.
My introduction acknowledges previous scholarship pertaining to two fields: Keats’s understanding of Shakespeare, and his idea of ‘negative capability’, which came into existence after he attended the Christmas pantomime of December 1817.
In my first chapter, I discuss Keats’s visit to Margate in summer 1816 – few letters from this period have survived, so I use historical guidebooks to reconstruct Keats’s Margate and its theatre, and illustrate Margate’s theatrical background. My second chapter then addresses the poet’s frequent visits to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and Covent Garden in 1817, and using Keats’s theatrical reviews from this year, I assess his relationship with the actor Edmund Kean. Developing these findings, my third chapter underlines Keats’s attention to stage detail, and considers how his opinions on Kean differ from those of the rest of his coterie, such as Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt. Leaving London once more, my fourth chapter focuses on two previously unexplored areas: Keats’s visit to the theatres in Teignmouth and Inveraray in 1818. Finally, my fifth and final chapter evaluates Keats’s first play 'Otho the Great', which I consider to be a crystallisation of his earlier experiences of live theatre. I conclude by suggesting that 'Otho the Great' contains two sources of inspiration that were very personal to Keats: Edmund Kean, his theatrical presider, as well as his lover Fanny Brawne, who prompted Keats’s conceptualisation of jealousy in his play.
2021-04-02T10:07:17Z
2021-04-02T10:07:17Z
2020-12-02
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/21761
https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/50
en
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
2025-08-31
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Print and electronic copy restricted until 31st August 2025
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
vii, 176 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/29812019-03-29T16:00:45Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2012-07-13T10:19:26Z
urn:hdl:10023/2981
An investigation of the effects of phonics teaching on children's progress in reading and spelling
Watson, Joyce E.
Progressive child-centred education has led to the ascendancy of look
and say methods for children learning to read, perpetuating the use of a guessing
strategy and promoting a dependency culture. Explicit synthetic phonics with
direct teaching of the alphabetic principle has been replaced by gradual analytic
phonics or no phonics, leaving children to discover spelling patterns for
themselves.
This investigation was directed towards identifying the relationship
between different teaching methods and children's progress in word reading,
spelling and reading comprehension. Initially, such progress was monitored from
1993-1995 in 12 Primary classes. Analyses of the data collected indicated that
(a) accelerated letter-sound knowledge and the ability to blend letter sounds had
a significant effect on children's progress in reading, spelling and comprehension
and (b) the degree to which blending had been explicitly taught had a significant
positive effect on the proportion of spelling errors produced which encode
orthographic information.
The effects of accelerating letter-sound knowledge and sounding and
blending were then examined experimentally in Primary 1 children using two
experimental groups and one control group. It was found that explicit synthetic
phonics, which demonstrates how letters blend together to form words, (a)
accelerated reading, spelling and phonemic awareness more rapidly than just
learning the letter sounds at an accelerated pace and (b) produced a higher
proportion of mature orthographic spelling errors than in the other conditions.
It was found that the strategies children use for decoding and encoding
mirror the teaching methods they have experienced. Gradual analytiC phonics
teaching encourages phonetic cue reading, children only processing some of the
letters and sounds in words. Explicit synthetic phonics teaching encourages early
cipher reading, children processing all of the letters and sounds in words. This
method teaches children how to use their knowledge of the alphabetic code to
decode unknown words, thus establishing an orthographic memory for such
words.
2012-07-13T10:19:26Z
2012-07-13T10:19:26Z
1998
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2981
en
282p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/149932019-03-29T16:00:47Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-05T13:10:55Z
urn:hdl:10023/14993
Social change and the English novel 1843-1861
Dahlburg, Andrew Dickens
Mallette, P. V.
The nineteenth century was a period of turbulent change, marked by the growth of large cities, factories and the railway. Led by an enterprising middle class Britain became the 'workshop of the world'. The new conditions produced enormous wealth but at the same time also created an impoverished working class which was forced to labour for long hours in the factory and to live in the cheapest dwellings where the lack of sanitary provisions contributed to the spreading of disease. The gross inequalities between the rich and poor, expressed by the phrase the 'two nations', became the focus of a national debate. This thesis discusses the work of five writers who responded to the social and ethical implications of industrialism; Thomas Carlyle, the foremost of Victorian sages, and four novelists - Benjamin Disraeli, Mrs. Gaskell, Charles Kingsley and Charles Dickens. In the first chapter I discuss the process whereby Britain became the first industrial nation and try to place these writers in a proper historical context. The ideas and influence of Thomas Carlyle are explored in Chapter Two. Carlyle is an important thinker because he was one of the first Victorians to address those problems of industrialism which he termed the 'condition of England' question. Part of the argument of my thesis is to demonstrate the extent of Carlyle's influence, which explains why he receives special attention throughout this work. Chapter Three examines Disraeli's trilogy Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred, discussing the way he saw and presented the working class and sought to develop a new role for the aristocracy in nineteenth century Britain. Chapter Four examines two novels by Mrs. Gaskell, Mary Barton and North and South; there it is argued that Mrs. Gaskell's Unitarian views and her position as a minister's wife allowed her to present the poor more sympathetically than any other of the social novelists. Charles Kingsley came to consider the 'condition of England' question through his involvement with the Christian Socialist movement and from his parish work in Eversley. His novels Yeast and Alton Locke have the added interest of dealing with both the rural and the urban poor, and are studied in Chapter Five. Dickens's novels all deal with social questions in varying degrees. In Chapter Six I examine Hard Times, his most direct attempt to deal with industrial society, and great Expectations, which deals most profoundly with the question of wealth and success in relation to the moral character of mid-Victorian society. In the conclusion I try to assess the ability of these middle class writers to come to grips with working class life, and to establish the impact they had on their contemporaries.
2018-07-05T13:10:55Z
2018-07-05T13:10:55Z
1985-07
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14993
en
242 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/152692019-03-29T16:00:48Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-12T08:18:16Z
urn:hdl:10023/15269
Functional linguistics and a preliminary exploration into its possible relevance to language teaching, given the situation in Pakistan with regard to the teaching of English as a foreign language
Kamaluddin, Syed
Mulder, J. W. F.
British Council
University of Karachi
2018-07-12T08:18:16Z
2018-07-12T08:18:16Z
1973-02
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15269
en
viii, 287 p.
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/160282019-01-14T11:42:03Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-09-14T15:00:47Z
urn:hdl:10023/16028
The subtle ether : writing into the 'space between'
Clark, Samantha Jane
Burnside, John
George Buchanan PhD Scholarship
The ether was proposed by Enlightenment natural philosophers as an undetectable
substance filling the space between the stars, that held them in place and supported the
propagation of their light across space. In The Subtle Ether: A Memoir of the Space
Between, insights from the history of the ether are threaded through my experience of
clearing the family home after the death of my parents, and inform a reflection on ‘spaces
between’ memories, family members, and between ourselves and the world. This thesis
both proposes and practises writing creative nonfiction as a method of first person enquiry
that bears a familial resemblance to contemplative traditions, and that can acknowledge
and mourn the hiddenness of things by writing into the ‘space between’ ourselves and the
world. Seeking a new synthesis which meshes experience, emotion, observation, and
reflection on the insights of science, I employ mixed modes of lyrical, aesthetic,
philosophical and personal inquiry.
The central claim of this thesis is that awareness and acceptance of hiddenness as the
nature of all things counteracts human hubris. While drawing from the example of
continuous, open-ended questioning the scientific search for the ‘ether’ offers, this thesis
both argues and demonstrates that scientific and analytical methods alone cannot address
this hiddenness, and that creative practice can be an effective way to think about and
communicate what cannot be directly known. I argue that the desire for complete
knowledge is a form of acquisitiveness and control, and that recognising the limited scope
of human senses and reason undercuts human centrality and sole agency. Crafting an
artwork out of contemplation of that which cannot be directly observed opens a space of
reflection in which a paradoxical truth can be held in awareness; that the external reality
we observe is other than us but also inseparable from us.
2018-09-14T15:00:47Z
2018-09-14T15:00:47Z
2017-04-24
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/16028
en
2022-04-24
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Electronic copy restricted until 24th April 2022.
268 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/147512019-03-29T16:00:49Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-06-29T12:44:30Z
urn:hdl:10023/14751
Robert Garioch and aspects of the Scottish poetic tradition
Macintosh, Andrew J. R.
Crawford, Robert
This thesis is an examination of the work of Robert Garioch (1909-1981), and of his importance within the Scottish poetic tradition. It examines the way in which his reputation has suffered from too easy comparisons with Robert Fergusson, and seeks to reposition Garioch as a writer of greater breadth and depth than has often been acknowledged. The thesis takes in the gamut of Garioch's writing and treats it as a whole. Chapter I examines Garioch's kinship with Robert Fergusson and suggests that the connection between the two poets, while important, has often been over-emphasised, and suggests other equally important influences and precursors, while acknowledging Garioch's originality. Chapter II deals with Garioch's writing about Edinburgh in poetry, prose and drama. Chapter III is concerned with the longer poems and their importance, while Chapter IV deals with the translations, especially those from George Buchanan and Guiseppe Belli, and underlines their significance. Chapter V looks at Garioch's relationship with other twentieth century writers in Scots-both with his contemporaries within and outwith the Lallans movement and with his predecessors. By way of examining the whole of Garioch's work, including a significant number of his personal papers, and by contextualising it all, the thesis hopes to offer a more nuanced reading of Garioch's poetry, one which recognises his frequently undervalued poetic achievement.
2018-06-29T12:44:30Z
2018-06-29T12:44:30Z
2001
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14751
en
90 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/19862019-03-29T16:00:50Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2011-08-16T15:51:32Z
urn:hdl:10023/1986
Lives and limbs : re-membering Robert Jones : a biography
Bonetti (née Whiteley), Joanna
Mallett, Phillip
This is a biography of Robert Jones, 1857-1933. He was a surgeon, and is credited
with bringing orthopaedics from its quack past into its scientific present. This work
explores Jones’ life and times, and examines whether he is entitled to the epithet
‘father of orthopaedics’.
It looks at the history of bonesetting, the influences on Jones’ development
and medical training, and some key moments in his career – notably his involvement
in the building of the Manchester Ship Canal, the planning of Heswall Children’s
Hospital, and the Great War. It argues that although there are other medical men
who could have been credited with fathering orthopaedics, he is indeed the father –
at least of orthopaedics in Britain, if not internationally.
This version of Jones’ life begins with something of his biographer’s journey,
before it explores what and who influenced Jones, and in turn what his legacy has
been to the medical profession.
The accompanying Critical Commentary explores whether or not it is possible
to offer a definition of biography as a genre in the light of its history and purpose. It
examines critical views, considers the mythology that grows up around historical
figures, and also explains the rationale for the structure chosen for organising the
material presented in this new biography of Robert Jones, Live and Limbs: Re-membering Robert Jones.
2011-08-16T15:51:32Z
2011-08-16T15:51:32Z
2010
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1986
en
v, 297
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/149612019-03-29T16:00:52Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-05T09:13:11Z
urn:hdl:10023/14961
Shame in Shakespeare
Fernie, Ewan
Alexander, Michael
University of St Andrews. School of English
Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland
British Academy
This thesis is a critical study of the theme of shame in Shakespeare. The first chapter defines the senses in which shame is used. Chapter Two analyses the workings of shame in pre-renaissance literature. The argument sets aside the increasingly discredited shame-culture versus guilt-culture antithesis still often applied to classical and Christian Europe; then classical and Christian shame are compared. Chapter Three focuses on shame in the English Renaissance, with illustrations from Spenser, Marlowe, Jonson, and Milton. Attention is also paid to the cultural context, for instance, to the shaming sanctions employed by the church courts. It is argued that, paradoxically, the humanist aspirations of this period made men and women more vulnerable to shame: more aware of falling short of ideals and open to disappointment and the reproach of self and others. The fourth chapter is an introductory account of Shakespearean shame; examples are drawn from the plays and poems preceding the period of the major tragedies, circa. 1602-9. This lays the groundwork, both conceptually and in terms of Shakespeare's development, for the main part of the thesis, Part Two, which offers detailed readings of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. In Each case, a consideration of the theme of shame illuminates the text in question in new ways. For example, and exploration of shame in Hamlet uncovers a neglected spiritual dimension; and it is argued that, despite critical tradition, shame, rather than jealousy, is the key to Othello, and that Antony and Cleopatra establishes the attraction and limitation of shamelessness. The last Chapter describes Shakespeare's distinctive and ultimately Christian vision of shame. In a tail-piece it is suggested that this account of Shakespearean shame casts an intriguing light on a little-known interpretation of Shakespeare's last days by the historian E.R.C. Brinkworth.
2018-07-05T09:13:11Z
2018-07-05T09:13:11Z
1998-12
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14961
en
v, 249 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/153312019-03-29T16:00:55Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-12T15:51:41Z
urn:hdl:10023/15331
Studies in the element-order of selected works of Aelfric
Davis, Graeme John
Jack, George
University of St Andrews. Travel Fund
University of St Andrews. English Departmental Research Grant
British Academy. Major State Studentship
This thesis provides a descriptive study of element-order (or word-order) within clauses in a corpus drawn from Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies and Supplementary Homilies. A sample of 11,543 clauses has been analysed, divided into fourteen clause categories. A survey of element-order within each clause category is presented, with copious examples and full statistics. Attention is paid both to the order of single elements in relation to the verb phrase, and to patterns of clause order. An extensive description of the position of adverbial elements is included. Discussion includes a comparison of the rhythmic and non-rhythmic prose of Ælfric, showing that though there is broad similarity between the two styles, significant differences do exist. The results obtained reveal many regularities or marked tendencies in element-order, as well as a substantial measure of stylistic freedom.
2018-07-12T15:51:41Z
2018-07-12T15:51:41Z
1992-07
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15331
en
286 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/281052023-08-05T02:02:19Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2023-08-04T13:26:47Z
urn:hdl:10023/28105
Title redacted
Macpherson, Keren Aline
Paterson, Don
Abstract redacted
2023-08-04T13:26:47Z
2023-08-04T13:26:47Z
2023-11-28
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/28105
https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/564
en
2028-07-28
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Restricted until 28th July 2028
53
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/149122019-03-29T16:00:55Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-04T11:45:45Z
urn:hdl:10023/14912
The dream state : making, reading and marketing contemporary Scottish poetry
Fraser, Lilias
Crawford, Robert
This thesis investigates aspects of the writing, reading, and marketing of contemporary Scottish poetry, suggesting that readers of contemporary poetry are influenced in their reading by marketplace forces as well as by their early academic training. The thesis attempts to reflect this combination of influences on the reader, but it also seeks to reflect the awareness of these influences in the poets' work. The Dream State concentrates on factors which condition the reading of contemporary Scottish poetry, and on some of the poetry of seven poets who became established in the 1990s: John Burnside, Robert Crawford, W. N. Herbert, Tracey Herd, Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson and Robin Robertson. Alert to the political climate of Scottish devolution and to a literary climate which saw the simultaneous appearance of the anthology Dream State: The New Scottish Poets and the 1994 New Generation poetry promotion, the thesis examines the pressures of expectation on these Scottish poets writing in English and Scots during the 1990s. The thesis argues that the complexity of their poems and jobs as poets in this period is best understood by 'thinking together' (Steven Connor) the principles of Practical Criticism and publishing history's approach to literature in the marketplace; I draw on research fi-om a combination of critical sources in literary theory and criticism, book history and interviews/correspondence with poets, teachers and the booktrade. Chapters describing critical narratives which can pre-empt reading - the theoretical spaces of contemporary Scottish poetry, the origins of Practical Criticism, and academic/commercial expectations of the reader - are followed by chapters on the work of these seven poets. Chapter 4 examines longer poems as a reflection of the poets' concerns about personal and national identity, and Chapter 5 discusses the poets' exploration of their social and literary environments. The Conclusion discusses the significance of what I term the museum poem and of anthologies of twentieth-century Scottish poetry, drawing on Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project for an appropriate model of contemporary reading.
2018-07-04T11:45:45Z
2018-07-04T11:45:45Z
2003
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14912
en
365 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/150662019-03-29T16:00:58Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-06T14:47:03Z
urn:hdl:10023/15066
The unseen window - 'Middlemarch', mind and morality
Wright, Catherine
Great Britain. Scottish Education Department
Middlemarch is the novel at the centre of this thesis. George Eliot's writing, and Middlemarch in particular, is the paradigm of what has come to be known as Classic Realist fiction. In reading Middlemarch, it seems, one is introduced to a fictional world. The characters are psychologically complex, and they are presented with moral and social problems which are created and discussed with subtlety and intelligence. Until recently, critical assessment of Middlemarch has focussed on evaluation of Eliot's achievement in just these terms. The thesis begins with a question, how, and indeed is it possible for a novel to depict a fiction in this way? The introductory chapter proposes an answer to this question which opens the way to a radical critical appraisal of the status of Middlemarch as a psychologically realistic novel. The scope of the thesis is in one sense very narrow: it is on the ways in which George Eliot creates the moral psychology of her characters, and the ways in which she develops and sustains our interest in their motives, their emotions and in general their mental states and processes. My suggestion is that the language Eliot uses is deeply coloured by her commitments in the Philosophy of Mind. The argument will be that in order to take Eliot's fiction to be psychologically realistic, we are committed to sharing her unacceptable philosophical presuppositions. The second chapter of the thesis is a discussion of Eliot's novella The Lifted Veil. This is an odd piece of fiction, both technically and in subject matter. It does not fit easily into the Eliot canon, and until recently it has received little attention. The purpose of Chapter Two is partly to redress that balance but more to diagnose Eliot's philosophical commitments. The eerie fantasy of unnatural mind-reading reveals Eliot's ideas in a very explicit way. My suggestion is that in the struggle to make this fantasy coherent, a picture of the mind emerges which is both seductive and ultimately nonsensical. Narrow as the focus is, the arguments to establish my point take us deep into Wittgenstein's later Philosophy. The fundamental insight of Wittgenstein's work on the philosophy of mind was that in order to understand how it is possible to talk meaningfully about mental states and processes, we must resist the seductive, ultimately nonsensical picture seemingly imposed upon us by the grammar of ordinary psychological remarks. And if those arguments are thought to be convincing, the thesis has important negative implications for at least one important perennial question in the philosophy of aesthetics. The starting point of this thesis takes seriously the idea that novelists can, and ought to, examine themes of deep human significance. The larger goal of this piece of work has been to open up a line of enquiry which might examine, from within the Analytic tradition in philosophy, the extent to which that task is feasible. I have sought to establish an important connection between the creation of the moral psychology of fictional characters, and Wittgenstein's later work in the philosophy of mind. I believe that the examination I have conducted of the way issues in the philosophy of mind, especially those treated in the Philosophical Investigations, bear on the way Eliot writes places much of the psychological language of Middlemarch in a new light, and discloses certain quite general limits on what is possible in creating fictional minds.
2018-07-06T14:47:03Z
2018-07-06T14:47:03Z
1991-07
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15066
en
vii, 255 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/98252019-03-29T16:00:59Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23com_10023_29col_10023_70col_10023_874
2016-11-16T11:36:05Z
urn:hdl:10023/9825
Liminality as identity in four novels by Ben Okri and Tahar ben Jelloun
Taylor, Laurel
Milne, Lorma
Herbert, Michael
Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom
University of St Andrews
University of St Andrews. School of English
University of St Andrews. School of Modern Languages
This thesis compares two novels each by Nigerian writer Ben Okri and Moroccan
writer Tahar Ben Jelloun. By examining apparently transformative moments in the lives of each
protagonist, Azaro and Zahra, its principal aim is to show how liminality characterises their
identities, and is a source of personal and potentially political liberation, mirrored in the
narrative techniques.
The Introduction demonstrates the centrality of identity to these novels and the
domain of postcolonial studies and defines the key concepts in relevant literary, theoretical and
political contexts: identity, hybridity, liminality, magical realism and the
postcolonial/postmodern debate.
Chapter I establishes Azaro and Zahra as liminal beings from birth, whose childhood
rituals are incomplete and who continually subvert parental and social expectation. This
examination of liminality may be extended by reading the characters as emblems of their
respective nations-in-waiting.
Chapter II focuses on the tension between biology and culture within Zahra's gendered
identity and demonstrates empowerment in her choice to remain liminal in a 'potential space'.
Azaro's shifting sexual awareness is examined as a manifestation of his liminality. The
allegorical reading of Zahra's life is continued, and a connection made between sexual and
political corruption in the English texts.
Chapter III centres on the fluidity of Azaro's boundaries and perception. Like Zahra's,
his liminality is chosen, as he decides to live in a potential space between human and spirit.
Zahra, too, has a special relationship with the spirit world; she and Azaro are shown to have
revelatory visions of political significance.
The Conclusion brings together the analysis of Azaro's and Zahra's identities before
extending the liminal states of the protagonists to those of reader and artist. It concludes that
these texts offer new opportunities for the understanding of postcolonial texts and moving
beyond the duality of the postcolonial/postmodern debate.
2016-11-16T11:36:05Z
2016-11-16T11:36:05Z
2001
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/9825
en
171 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/151902019-03-29T16:01:00Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-10T13:52:24Z
urn:hdl:10023/15190
In search of a national voice : some similarities between Scottish and Canadian poetry 1860-1930
Knowles, Linda Christine
Doig, R. P.
The work is a study of poetry in Scotland and Canada in the period 1860-1930, with a special emphasis on the influence of nationalism. A discussion of the problems of literary nationalism in both countries is followed by a survey of national verse anthologies which illustrates the extent to which editors allowed their critical judgment to be coloured by the popular image of the national character. The importance of the Scottish vernacular and the Canadian wilderness to the establishment of a sense of national identity are considered in relation to a general discussion of language and nationalism. Two important elements in this discussion are the role of the untutored poet as a natural spokesman for his country and the swing from conservative poetic diction to a freer use of colloquial language during this period, and this portion of the thesis contains a survey of representative Scottish and Canadian poets. There is also a comparison of the difficulty of establishing an appropriate mode of expression in a new country with the problems encountered by Scots whose traditional way of life was being disrupted by the industrialization and urbanization of their society. The study concludes with a comparison of the two poets, E.J. Pratt and Hugh MacDiarmid, whose work marks a transition from poetic conservatism to the experimentation characteristic of many twentieth century writers. Finally, it is argued that although poets and critics lamented the failures of publishers and readers to support national poetry, there was considerable enthusiasm for local poetry in Scotland and Canada. It is maintained, however, that there was too clear a popular image of the Canadian or Scottish character, and that this prevented many poets from rising above mediocrity.
2018-07-10T13:52:24Z
2018-07-10T13:52:24Z
1981
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15190
en
480 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/31102019-07-01T10:17:12Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2012-09-20T20:44:43Z
urn:hdl:10023/3110
'Paper gypsies' : representations of the gypsy figure in British literature, c. 1780-1870
Drayton, Alexandra L.
Stabler, Jane
Roe, Nicholas
Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland
Gypsy
Gypsies
Gipsy
Gipsies
Matthew Arnold
William Wordsworth
Hannah More
George Crabbe
Samuel Rogers
Princess Victoria
Jane Austen
John Clare
William Cowper
George Eliot
Robert Browning
Walter Scott
Representations of the Gypsies and their lifestyle were widespread in British culture in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This thesis analyzes the varying literary and artistic responses to the Gypsy figure in the period circa 1780-1870. Addressing not only well-known works by William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, John Clare, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold and George Eliot, but also lesser-known or neglected works by Gilbert White, Hannah More, George Crabbe and Samuel Rogers, unpublished archival material from Princess Victoria’s journals, and a range of articles from the periodical press, this thesis examines how the figure of the Gypsy was used to explore differing conceptions of the landscape, identity and freedom, as well as the authoritative discourses of law, religion and science.
The influence of William Cowper’s Gypsy episode in Book One of The Task is shown to be profound, and its effect on ensuing literary representations of the Gypsy is an example of my interpretation of Wim Willem’s term ‘paper Gypsies’: the idea that literary Gypsies are often textual (re)constructions of other writers’ work, creating a shared literary, cultural and artistic heritage.
A focus on the picturesque and the Gypsies’ role within that genre is a strong theme throughout this thesis. The ambiguity of picturesque Gypsy representations challenges the authority of the leisured viewer, provoking complex responses that either seek to contain the Gypsy’s disruptive potential or demonstrate the figure’s refusal to be controlled. An examination of texts alongside contemporary paintings and sketches of Gypsies by Princess Victoria, George Morland, Thomas Gainsborough, J. M. W. Turner, John Constable and John Everett Millais, elucidates the significance of the Gypsies as ambiguous ciphers in both literature and art.
2012-09-20T20:44:43Z
2012-09-20T20:44:43Z
2011-11-30
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/3110
en
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
269
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/166092022-09-30T09:59:40Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-12-03T11:05:03Z
urn:hdl:10023/16609
Beyond the pale horse : animals, substitution, and the cost of romance in the 'Orlando furioso'
Grogan, Tess
Davis, Alex
Great Britain. Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission
Romance epic
Gender
Animal
Violence
Renaissance
This study responds to Patricia Parker's landmark account of endlessly expansive romance, suggesting that the genre's structural deferrals and excesses come at a steep hidden price. Like other early modern discourses—rhetoric, economics, empiricism—romance produces a fiction of unmitigated progress which assiduously obscures losses sustained along the way.
Ludovico Ariosto's ‘Orlando furioso’ is distinct from later romance epics because it refuses to conceal its own logic, instead staging scenes of cost openly and conspicuously. I suggest that the
brutal subroutines sustaining romance's narrative profusion are visible in the poem's
exceptionally strange and vital animal figures, which deviate sharply from more conventional
images deployed by Ariosto's successors. The first chapter considers the figure of the mother
predator, whose irate defense of her abducted offspring serves to augment the wrath of the
Furioso's male paladins. These indecorous comparisons destabilize the poem's justifications for
violence; by contrast, similar figures in Edmund Spenser's ‘The Faerie Queene’ and Torquato
Tasso's ‘Gerusalemme liberata’ reinforce normative hierarchies and place romance's violence
beyond question. The second chapter addresses Orlando's savage killing of a female packhorse
while in the nadir of his madness. With reference to the poem's other scenes of sexualized
violence, I respond to readings that situate Ariosto's mare as a symbol of humanist dialectic
advancement, suggesting that the mare's adamant suffering instead exposes the costs exacted by
that romance of progress, a disclosure which disappears in the later poems. The stakes of this
project are urgent: by attending to the ways in which romance linchpins arme and amori are
mapped onto women and female animals, it is possible to trace how sexual violence was
understood by a poem with a broad and enduring legacy, and to approach its disclosures as a
radical act.
2018-12-03T11:05:03Z
2018-12-03T11:05:03Z
2018-06-26
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/16609
https://doi.org/10.17630/10023-16609
en
vi, 135 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/35792019-07-01T10:11:17Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2013-05-31T09:11:30Z
urn:hdl:10023/3579
The Penitential Psalms in sixteenth-century England : bodies and texts
Wyma, Katherine Cooper
Davis, Alex
Penitential Psalms
Penance
Lock
Sidney
Foxe
Sacrament
Wyatt
Devotional practice
Body
Corporeal
Herbert
Psalms
At the center of this thesis are seven psalms, commonly known as the Penitential Psalms. The Penitential Psalms were often used in connection to corporeal expressions of the sacrament, and though sacramental practices changed, they retained this association, and even became a catalyst for literary change and experimentation. In this thesis, I will show how these psalms were connected to the sacrament of penance throughout the medieval period, and well into the religiously tumultuous sixteenth century.
This thesis explores four texts that take up the Penitential Psalms, adapting, refashioning, and reappropriating them to be used in different ways. The Introduction outlines the history of the Penitential Psalms and their interconnectedness with sacramental theology and practice; it further establishes the cultural and theoretical context within which the four examined texts must be considered. These sacramental ties with the Penitential Psalms are not found only in theological writings, but they also infused lay practice and experience, as I will show in Chapter One, where I examine the staunchly Protestant Actes and Monuments by John Foxe. Additionally, I argue that Foxe’s accounts of Marian martyrs point to Psalm 51 both as a text of protest and memorialization. Chapter Two then moves to Sir Thomas Wyatt’s A Paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms; there I examine the presence of the male body within the work, placing the text within the setting of a visual history that illustrates David’s illicit desire for Bathsheba. With this tradition in mind, I examine trajectories of ocularity within the narrative, tracing the redirection of sexual desire. Anne Lock’s Meditation of a Pentient Sinner is the center of Chapter Three. Meditation, when considered in relation to the dedicatory epistle, reveals connections to the standardized penitential process, and I argue that Lock presents a modified form of repentance to her reader. The final chapter looks at The Sidney Psalter’s Penitential Psalms, which reveal an incoherent view of the penitential body merging with the body of the dead war-hero, Philip. It is within this penitential affect that the penitent displays and partitions his or her own body slipping into an otherness predicated by sin.
2013-05-31T09:11:30Z
2013-05-31T09:11:30Z
2013-11-30
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/3579
en
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
319
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/26912019-03-29T16:01:08Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2012-06-08T11:28:16Z
urn:hdl:10023/2691
Thomas Hardy and the meaning of freedom
Badawi, Muhamad
Mallett, Phillip
This is a study of the
meaning of
freedom in Thomas Hardy's
fiction. The first section of the thesis is concerned with
the influences in Hardy's thought
and view of man and man's
position
in the universe. Attention
will
be
given mainly
to
three sources of influence on
Hardy's thought.
Darwinian theories of evolution and the secular
movement of
the nineteenth century and the
change they
brought
about
in
man's view of himself and his state in the
world can be seen clearly
in Hardy's personal writings as
well as his fiction. His childhood contact with
Dorset folk
beliefs
and superstitions can also
be
perceived
to have a
great influence not only on
his art but on his thought and
outlook as well.
In the second section an investigation in detail of the
meaning of
freedom in four
of
Hardy's
novels will
be carried
out. In the novels, man will
be seen as essentially
free
and not an automaton or a plaything of necessity or nature
or fate, for
example.
However, we shall see
that man's
freedom
of action as well as of choice
is severely
limited
but not annihilated by a number of
factors working
from
within and from
without man's character.
In this, nature
both as phenomena and as system plays a great part. Society
with its standards, norms,
laws and implied understandings
is another contributing
factor in
constraining man's
freedom. Man
also has his freedom limited by chance
happenings and coincidences that he cannot control.
"Character is fate", quotes Hardy from Novalis, and
everywhere
in the novels we see characters'
destinies linked
tightly with
their personal traits, unconscious urges and
peculiarities of character either passed to them by heredity
or formed by early
life conditioning or both.
Nevertheless, man
is responsible in Hardy's
view
because he has that essential sense of freedom;
and hence
that tragic flavour that tinges Hardy's fiction
which would
have been impossible
with machine-like people as characters.
2012-06-08T11:28:16Z
2012-06-08T11:28:16Z
1985
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2691
en
399
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/218662021-11-01T15:53:24Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2021-04-08T08:57:18Z
urn:hdl:10023/21866
Landmarks in the history of the English horror genre from Walpole to Stoker
Lindsay, Andrew O.
Doig, R. P.
2021-04-08T08:57:18Z
2021-04-08T08:57:18Z
1973
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/21866
en
ii, 253 p
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/63882019-07-01T10:13:19Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2015-03-27T11:50:39Z
urn:hdl:10023/6388
'Fairy' in Middle English romance
Cole, Chera A.
Purdie, Rhiannon
Middle English romance
Medieval literature
Fairy
Fairies
British literature
Medieval romance
This thesis, ‘Fairy in Middle English romance’, aims to contribute to the recent resurgence of interest in the literary medieval supernatural by studying the concept of ‘fairy’ as it is presented in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English romances. This thesis is particularly interested in how the use of ‘fairy’ in Middle English romances serves as an arena in which to play out ‘thought-experiments’ that test anxieties about faith, gender, power, and death.
The first chapter considers the concept of fairy in its medieval Christian context by using the romance Melusine as a case study to examine fairies alongside medieval theological explorations of the nature of demons. The thesis then examines the power dynamic of fairy/human relationships and the extent to which having one partner be a fairy affects these explorations of medieval attitudes toward gender relations and hierarchy. The third chapter investigates ‘fairy-like’ women enchantresses in romance and the extent to which fairy is ‘performed’ in romance. The fourth chapter explores the location of Faerie and how it relates as an alternative ‘Otherworld’ to the Christian Otherworlds of Paradise, Purgatory, Heaven, and Hell. The final chapter continues to examine geography by considering the application of Avalon and whether Avalon can be read as a ‘land of fairies’.
By considering the etymological, spiritual, and gendered definitions of ‘fairy’, my research reveals medieval attitudes toward not only the Otherworld, but also the contemporary medieval world. In doing so, this thesis provides new readings of little-studied medieval texts, such as the Middle English Melusine and Eger and Grime, as well as reconsider the presence of religious material and gender dynamics in medieval romance. This thesis demonstrates that by examining how fairy was used in Middle English romance, we can see how medieval authors were describing their present reality.
2015-03-27T11:50:39Z
2015-03-27T11:50:39Z
2014-06-24
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6388
en
Sir Orfeo
Melusine
Sir Launfal
Sir Degare
Eger and Grime
Partonope of Blois
Le Morte D'arthur
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
257
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/151542019-03-29T16:01:09Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-10T08:34:02Z
urn:hdl:10023/15154
A sense of place and community in selected novels and travel writings of D.H. Lawrence
Vacani, Wendy
Mallett, Philip
In 1919 Lawrence left England to search for a better society; his novels and travel sketches (the latter are usually seen as peripheral to the novels) continually questioned the values of Western society. This study examines D.H. Lawrence's great 'English' novels in the light of their vivid portrayal of place and community. However, to procure a new emphasis the novels and travel writing are brought into close alignment, in order to examine the way in which the sorts of philosophical questions Lawrence was interested in - ideas on human character, marriage, social structures, God, time, and history - influence his portrayal of place and community across both these genres. Chapter I, on Sons and Lovers, emphasises the way social and historical factors can shape human relationships as powerfully as personal psychology. In Chapter II, on Twilight in Italy, discussion of the effect of place on human character is broadened into a consideration of the differences between the Italian and English psyche; the philosophical passages are read in the light of revisions made to the periodical version. Chapters III and IV, on The Rainbow and Women in Love, conscious of the critique of English society that Lawrence made in Twilight, recognise that although Lawrence is concerned to show the flow of individual being he is no less interested in the relationship between the self and society, and the clash between psychological needs and social structures like work, marriage and industrialisation. Chapter V, on Sea and Sardinia, examines Lawrence's realisation that the state of travel engages with the present and impacts on individual needs and identity. Chapter VI, on Mornings in Mexico, studies the way Lawrence transcended the journalism usual to the travel genre and maintained a deep spirituality as he pondered the attributes of a primitive society and its appropriateness to Western Society. Because travel writing is both reactive and subjective (a writer's reaction to a country is underpinned by the metatext of his own concerns), I ask if Lawrence's presentation of experience can be thought of as accurate or whether places and people are constructs of his imagination. Chapter VIII examines Lady Chatterley's Lover as Lawrence's attempt to bring together the attitudes to sex, class and education witnessed on his travels with an English setting; to envisage a way of living that would meet the deep-rooted needs of man. Chapter VIII, on Etruscan Places, shows Lawrence conscious of encountering the ultimate journey, death, and pays tribute to the fact that while the book searches for philosophical answers on how to die, it is at the same time a paean to life and the beauty of landscape.
2018-07-10T08:34:02Z
2018-07-10T08:34:02Z
1995-07
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15154
en
vii, 271 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/148992019-03-29T16:01:11Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-04T09:41:35Z
urn:hdl:10023/14899
The style, literary methods and patristic background of Anglo-Saxon poetry as exemplified in Genesis A
Kinloch, Alexander Murray
Ramsey Research Scholarship
2018-07-04T09:41:35Z
2018-07-04T09:41:35Z
1956-07
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14899
en
xi, 471 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/53472019-07-01T10:13:14Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2014-09-04T14:32:45Z
urn:hdl:10023/5347
Authors and characters in search of the truth : a comparative study of Pirandello's 'Right you are (if you think so!)' and Pinter's 'The collection'
Nardiello, Irene
Herbert, Michael
According to some distinguished scholars, Pinter’s ‘The Collection’ and Pirandello’s ‘Right You Are (If You Think So!)’ display some similarities in the themes treated, mainly regarding the topic of the unverifiability of the truth. Far from being the proof of a supposed “philosophical” attitude shared by the two authors, the affinity between the two plays needs to be demonstrated through the more reliable criteria of a textual analysis. Thanks to this kind of examination, I have discovered that the resemblance concerning the main topic is accompanied not only by the occurrence of further common themes – i.e. attitude towards female characters and strong criticism of conventional social codes – but also by the presence of other similar elements (concerning the development of the dramatic action, the use of certain technical devices, the treatment of the characters, the exploitation – in renewed forms – of the traditional ‘well-made play’). Indeed, both playwrights have experimented with the new possibilities and the renewed expressive power of words after the collapse of the Naturalistic stage. Their main affinity in this respect is constituted by the occurrence in ‘The Collection’ and ‘Right You Are’ of a close link between a typically twentieth-century theme – truth – and a modern – though in different ways and degrees – use of linguistic/dramatic means: undeniably, it is the combination of these two elements that delimits the common ground. This similarity finds its most suitable expression in the farcical forms of tragicomedy: both ‘Right You Are’ and ‘The Collection’ are parodies of ‘pieces ben faite’, grotesque disguises of the nineteenth-century ‘comedy of manners’. That is the reason why the elements of analogy occurring also in other Pirandellian and Pinteresque plays appear particularly well defined in these two, which therefore might be considered emblematic of modern sensibility in art and culture. Significantly, similarities, especially concerning themes, crop up throughout the two authors’ major works as well as in their literary theories; yet it is through the similar dramatic structure, the similar plot and the parallel characters of these particular plays that they appear more clearly. The resemblance is too strong to be casual and, although there is no way to affirm that it proves Pirandello’s influence on Pinter, it nevertheless at least suggests the possibility of unsuspected links between different expressions of modern theatre.
2014-09-04T14:32:45Z
2014-09-04T14:32:45Z
1996
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/5347
en
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
119
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/19792020-04-01T02:02:38Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2011-08-15T15:03:12Z
urn:hdl:10023/1979
The life of Sir Walter Scott, [by] John Macrone ; edited with a biographical introduction by Daniel Grader
Macrone, John
Grader, Daniel
MacLachlan, Christopher
Lodge, Sara
Walter Scott
John Macrone
John Macrone (1809-1837) was a Scotsman who arrived in London around 1830 and became a publisher, in partnership with James Cochrane between January 1833 and August 1834, and independently between October 1834 and his death in September 1837. A friend of Dickens and Thackeray, he published Sketches by Boz and, posthumously, The Paris Sketch Book. One of his other projects was a life of Scott, which he began to write soon after the death of the novelist; but his book, chiefly remembered because Hogg wrote his Anecdotes of Scott for inclusion in it, fell under the displeasure of Lockhart, and was cancelled shortly before it was to have been published. A fragmentary manuscript, however, was recently discovered by the author of this thesis and has now been edited for the first time, together with a biographical study of Macrone, in which extensive use is made of previously unpublished and uncollected material.
2011-08-15T15:03:12Z
2011-08-15T15:03:12Z
2010-11-30
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1979
en
190
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/188262021-04-13T11:39:10Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2019-11-01T14:32:31Z
urn:hdl:10023/18826
‘Leav(ing) room for the reader’ : the agency of characters who read in the fiction of Ali Smith
Orr, Jessica
Sellers, Susan
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities (SGSAH)
Reader response
Ali Smith
Scottish literature
Embodied
Dialogic
Spectator
Contemporary literature
This thesis argues that characters who read are a recurring preoccupation in the work of contemporary Scottish writer Ali Smith, who foregrounds the act of reading as equal to, if not more important than, the act of writing itself. It begins by examining aspects of Smith’s own personal history as a reader, and establishing a critical framework for understanding this identification through two reader-response perspectives: Louise Rosenblatt’s ‘The Reader, The Text, The Poem’ and Wolfgang Iser’s ‘The Act of Reading’. These ideas counterpoint portrayals of reading as a passive and subordinate activity, as propagated by schools of thinking such as the New Criticism, and transform it into one of agency and participation. The three following chapters further evidence this re-conceptualisation of the reader’s role, drawing on different critical perspectives to examine more nuanced aspects of Smith’s representation. Firstly, ‘The Embodied Reader’ considers the – often explosive - physicality of the reader’s experience in the novels ‘Like’ and ‘Autumn’, drawing on three key essays by the feminist critic Hélène Cixous: ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’, ‘Difficult Joys’ and ‘Coming to Writing’, which similarly conceptualise reading and writing as visceral activities driven by bodily impulses and desires. Secondly, ‘The Dialogic Reader’ focusses on readers’ narrative interventions in ‘Artful’ and several of Smith’s short stories, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism in his essay ‘Discourse in the novel’ to suggest that the disruptive voice of the reader works to challenge the prevailing authority of the text. Thirdly, ‘The Reader as a Spectator’ considers characters who engage with contemporary visual technologies as part of a broader conception of who might be considered a ‘reader’ in Smith’s work. Supported by critical perspectives such as Laura Mulvey’s ‘Death 24x a Second’ and Mary Ann Doane’s ‘The Emergence of Cinematic Time’, this chapter argues that the adolescent protagonists of ‘The Accidental’ and ‘How to be both’ are encouraged to take similar control over what they see, as with what they read.
2019-11-01T14:32:31Z
2019-11-01T14:32:31Z
2019-12-04
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/18826
https://doi.org/10.17630/10023-18826
en
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
[6], 266 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/76482019-01-09T10:18:48Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2015-10-13T08:49:34Z
urn:hdl:10023/7648
Hardy's creatures : encountering animals in Thomas Hardy's novels
West, Anna
Mallett, Phillip
James Macpherson
Thomas Hardy
Animal
Creature
Animal studies
‘Hardy’s Creatures’ examines the human and nonhuman animals who walk and crawl and twine and fly and trot across and around the pages of Thomas Hardy’s novels: figures on two feet and on four, some with hands, all with faces. Specifically, the thesis traces the appearances of the term ‘creature’ in Hardy’s works as a way of levelling the ground between humans and animals and of reconfiguring traditional boundaries between the two. Hardy firmly believed in a ‘shifted [...] centre of altruism’ after Darwin that extended ethical consideration to include animals. In moments of encounter between humans and animals in his texts—encounters often highlighted by the word ‘creature’—Hardy seems to test the boundaries that were being debated by the Victorian scientific and philosophical communities: boundaries based on moral sense or moral agency (as discussed in chapter two), language and reason (chapter three), the possession of a face (chapter four), and the capacity to suffer and perceive pain (chapter five). His use of ‘creature’, a word that can have both distinctly human and uniquely animal meanings, draws upon the multiple (and at times contradictory) connotations embedded in it, complicating attempts to delineate decisively between two realms and offering instead ambiguity and irony. Hardy’s focus on the material world and on embodiment, complemented by his willingness to shift perspective and scale and to imagine the worlds of other creatures, gestures towards empathy and compassion while recognizing the unknowability of the individual. His approach seems a precursor to the kind of thinking about and with animals being done by animal studies today. Encountering Hardy’s creatures offers a new way of wandering through Wessex, inviting readers to reconsider their own perspectives on what it means to be a creature.
2015-10-13T08:49:34Z
2015-10-13T08:49:34Z
2015-09-07
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/7648
en
2020-09-07
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Electronic copy restricted until 7th September 2020
218
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/152822019-03-29T16:01:13Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-12T08:37:23Z
urn:hdl:10023/15282
Some literary translation problems posed by Salman Rushdie's 'The Satanic Verses' : with special reference to a published German translation
Westphal, Ina
Loughridge, Michael
Hervey, Sándor
The central concern of this thesis is with quality and quality assessment of translation. Constructive proposals are made with a view to facilitating improved quality assessment, especially with reference to the context in which the target text is presented. To assess the nature of that context, the notion of profiles (for source text and target text) is introduced in section 5.6. These profiles not only help determine what kind of translation suits a given context best, but also enable users to develop strategies and guidelines for the translation process with the aim of ensuring quality and consistency. The first five sections of this thesis examine the factors constituting the context of any translation situation and that of The Satanic Verses in particular: WHO (the author, the translator, the commissioner, the audience, the reviewer), WHAT (text-type and function; literary category, i.e. Magic Realism), WHEN and WHERE (the socio-cultural background), WHY (motivation and purpose), HOW (intercultural aspects of translation, loss and gain, prescriptive and descriptive approaches, translation quality and assessment). In sections 6, 7 and 8, the findings from the earlier sections are put into practice to develop my strategy and to discuss decisions of detail in TI1 and TT2. The discussion shows that the existing German TTs (TT1 and the Knaur reissue) would benefit from a careful and wide-ranging revision. Section 9 charts some of the changes a recent reissue of Die satanischen Verse made to the original TT. Section 10, recognising the special importance of TT context in this instance, briefly outlines the publication history of the ST and the German TT, and the impact of the fatwa. Section 11 contains my own TT of the novel's first chapter. The Angel Gibreel.
2018-07-12T08:37:23Z
2018-07-12T08:37:23Z
2000-07
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15282
267 p.
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/165662023-06-16T02:02:33Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-11-28T12:14:34Z
urn:hdl:10023/16566
'This may be my war after all' : the non-combatant poetry of W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas, and Stevie Smith
Lynch, Éadaoín
Mackay, Peter
Buchanan Scholarship
University of St Andrews. School of English. Professor A F Falconer PhD Scholarship
War
War poetry
Second World War
First World War
Second World War poetry
Poetic representation
Non-combatant
Non-combatant poetry
Poetic influence
War experience
Historiography
Poetic tone
Ethics of representation
War representation
This research aims to illuminate how and why war challenges the limits of poetic representation, through an analysis of non-combatant poetry of the Second World War. It is motivated by the question: how can one portray, represent, or talk about war? Literature on war poetry tends to concentrate on the combatant poets of the First World War, or their influence, while literature on the Second World War tends to focus on prose as the only expression of literary war experience. With a historicist approach, this thesis advances our understanding of both the Second World War, and our inherited notions of ‘war poetry,’ by parsing its historiography, and investigating the role critical appraisals have played in marginalising this area of poetic response.
This thesis examines four poets as case studies in this field of research—W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas, and Stevie Smith—and evaluates them on both their individual explorations of poetic tone, faith systems, linguistic innovations, subversive performativity, and their collective trajectory towards a commitment to represent the war in their poetry.
The findings from this research illustrate how too many critical appraisals have minimised or misrepresented Second World War poetry, and how the poets responded with a self-reflexivity that bespoke a deeper concern with how war is remembered and represented. The significance of these findings is breaking down the notion of objective fact in poetic representations of war, which are ineluctably subjective texts. These findings also offer insight into the ‘failure’ of poetry to represent war as a necessary part of war representation and prompt a rethinking of who has the ‘right’ experience—or simply the right—to talk about war.
2018-11-28T12:14:34Z
2018-11-28T12:14:34Z
2018-06-26
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/16566
https://doi.org/10.17630/10023-16566
en
vi, 263 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/28812019-03-29T16:01:14Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2012-07-02T10:17:36Z
urn:hdl:10023/2881
Shadows and chivalry: pain, suffering, evil and goodness in the works of George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis
McInnis, Jeff
MacLachlan, Christopher
This thesis argues that George MacDonald's literary influence upon C. S.
Lewis-concerning the themes of pain, suffering, evil and goodness-was
transforming and long-lasting. It is argued in the opening chapter that MacDonald's
work had a great deal to do with the change in young Lewis's imagination, helping to
convert him from a romantic doubter to a romantic believer in God and his goodness.
A review of both writers' first works suggests that such influence may have begun
earlier in Lewis's career than has been noticed. The second chapter examines how
both authors contended with the problems that pain and suffering present, and how
both understood and presented the nature of faith. Differences in their treatment of
these subjects are noted, but it is argued that these views and depictions share
fundamental elements, and that MacDonald's direct influence can be demonstrated in
particular cases. The view that MacDonald was primarily a champion of feelings is
challenged, as is the idea that either man's later writing displays a loss of faith in God
and his goodness. The third chapter, in specifically refuting the assertion that
MacDonald's view of evil was inclusive in the Jungian or dualistic sense, shows how
both authors' work maintains an unmistakable distinction between evil fortune and
moral evil. The next two chapters examine fundamental similarities in their treatment
of evil and goodness. Special care is taken in these two chapters to trace MacDonald's
direct influence, especially regarding the differences they believed existed between
hell's Pride and what they believed God to be. The fifth chapter reviews their ideas
and depictions of heaven in summing up the study's argument concerning the overall
influence of MacDonald's writing upon Lewis's imagination-in particular the change
in Lewis's understanding of the relations between Spirits, Nature, and God.
2012-07-02T10:17:36Z
2012-07-02T10:17:36Z
2004
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2881
en
474
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/270512023-06-30T14:56:36Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2023-02-24T11:28:56Z
urn:hdl:10023/27051
Title redacted
Zaffiro, Nicholas
Hazzard, Oli
Abstract redacted
2023-02-24T11:28:56Z
2023-02-24T11:28:56Z
2023-06-13
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/27051
https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/299
en
2028-02-17
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Restricted until 17th February 2028
137
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/51562023-03-21T09:58:50Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2014-08-14T13:25:22Z
urn:hdl:10023/5156
Thomas Hardy : folklore and resistance
Dillion, Jacqueline Marie
Mallett, Phillip
Thomas Hardy
Folklore
Customs
Frazer
Folklore Society
Novels
Hag-riding
Skimmington riding
This thesis examines a range of folkloric customs and beliefs that play a pivotal role in Hardy’s fiction: overlooking, sympathetic magic, hag-riding, tree ‘totemism’, skimmington-riding, bonfire nights, mumming, May Day celebrations, Midsummer divination, and the ‘Portland Custom’. For each of these, it offers a background survey bringing the customs or beliefs forward in time into Victorian Dorset, and examines how they have been represented in written texts – in literature, newspapers, county histories, folklore books, the work of the Folklore Society, archival documents, and letters – in the context of Hardy’s repeated insistence on the authenticity of his own accounts of these traditions. In doing so, the thesis both explores Hardy’s work, primarily his prose fiction, as a means to understand the ‘folklore’ (a word coined in the decade of Hardy’s birth) of southwestern England, and at the same time reconsiders the novels in the light of the folkloric elements.
The thesis also argues that Hardy treats folklore in dynamic ways that open up more questions and tensions than many of his contemporaries chose to recognise. Hardy portrays folkloric custom and belief from the perspective of one who has lived and moved within ‘folk culture’, but he also distances himself (or his narrators) by commenting on folkloric material in contemporary anthropological terms that serve to destabilize a fixed (author)itative narrative voice. The interplay between the two perspectives, coupled with Hardy’s commitment to showing folk culture in flux, demonstrates his continuing resistance to what he viewed as the reductive ways of thinking about folklore adopted by prominent folklorists (and personal friends) such as Edward Clodd, Andrew Lang, and James Frazer. This thesis seeks to explore these tensions and to show how Hardy’s efforts to resist what he described as ‘excellently neat’ answers open up wider cultural questions about the nature of belief, progress, and change.
2014-08-14T13:25:22Z
2014-08-14T13:25:22Z
2014-06-24
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/5156
https://doi.org/10.17630/10023-5156
en
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
215
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
School of English
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/146572019-03-29T16:01:15Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-06-27T12:41:33Z
urn:hdl:10023/14657
Imagining corrupt consumption : the genesis and evolution of the pox metaphor in sixteenth-century England (1494-1606)
Spates, William H.
Rhodes, Neil
Davis, Alex
This thesis attempts to examine the birth and development of the pox metaphor in sixteenth-century English literature. In researching this literary history of a disease---of syphilis' life as an early modem metaphor---I have attempted to contextualize the pox metaphor's development within the social and economic constructs that led to the early modern conflation of excessive consumption with poxy corruption. This conflation freed the metaphor from the confines of discussion on disease and allowed early modern authors the freedom to apply pockifed tropes to describe various social ills and abuses. Initially these pox metaphors were restricted to sexualized subject matter such as inconstant women, but through the rise of satire, the metaphor became a means of describing London as rampant, diseased and corrupt. Finally, Shakespeare was able to take the pox and apply it to the economic sickness that was affecting England by inscribing appetites with consuming pox-inspired qualities that were, in effect, a commentary on the uncontrolled rise of the capitalist state and the dangers of desire.
2018-06-27T12:41:33Z
2018-06-27T12:41:33Z
2005
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14657
en
vi, 324 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/19612024-03-22T03:02:41Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2011-08-10T14:01:43Z
urn:hdl:10023/1961
Words incarnate : contemporary women’s fiction as religious revision
Rine, Abigail
Sellers, Susan
Religion
Literature
Sexuality
Irigaray
Gender
Violence
This thesis investigates the prevalence of religious themes in the work of several prominent contemporary women writers—Margaret Atwood, Michèle Roberts, Alice Walker and A.L. Kennedy. Relying on Luce Irigaray’s recent theorisations of the religious and its relationship to feminine subjectivity, this research considers the subversive potential of engaging with religious discourse through literature, and contributes to burgeoning criticism of feminist revisionary writing. The novels analysed in this thesis show, often in violent detail, that the way the religious dimension has been conceptualised and articulated enforces negative views of female sexuality, justifies violence against the body, alienates women from autonomous creative expression and paralyses the development of a subjectivity in the feminine. Rather than looking at women’s religious revision primarily as a means of asserting female authority, as previous studies have done, I argue that these writers, in addition to critiquing patriarchal religion, articulate ways of being and knowing that subvert the binary logic that dominates Western religious discourse. Chapter I contextualises this research in Luce Irigaray’s theories and outlines existing work on feminist revisionist literature. The remaining chapters offer close readings of key novels in light of these theories: Chapter II examines Atwood’s interrogation of oppositional logic in religious discourse through her novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Chapter III explores two novels by Roberts that expose the violence inherent in religious discourse and deconstruct the subjection of the (female) body to the (masculine) Word. Chapters IV and V analyse the fiction of Kennedy and Walker respectively, revealing how their novels confront the religious denigration of feminine sexuality and refigure the connection between eroticism and divinity. Evident in each of these fictional accounts is a forceful critique of religious discourse, as well as an attempt to more closely reconcile foundational religious oppositions between divinity and humanity, flesh and spirit, and body and Word.
2011-08-10T14:01:43Z
2011-08-10T14:01:43Z
2011-06-21
Thesis
https://hdl.handle.net/10023/1961
en
Embargo period has ended, thesis made available in accordance with University regulations
258
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/21212017-10-23T09:35:42Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2011-12-19T16:06:15Z
urn:hdl:10023/2121
Part 1, The balance of where we are : a theory of poetic composition in relation to cognitive poetics ; Part 2, The secret uncles : poems
Manalo, Paolo Marko
Paterson, Don
Part 1 of the thesis, ‘The Balance of Where We Are: A Theory of Composition in
Relation to Cognitive Poetics’, considers a compositional theory of poetry, with particular
attention to the creative process, the poetic line, and trope. Drawing on from the disciplines of
creative writing and cognitive poetics, this thesis asserts basic and important considerations
for writing poetry.
Chapter One seeks a model for the creative process that will aid in sustaining poetic
composition but without dictating a specific method of writing. In presenting several theories
of creativity it discusses ways of understanding these mental processes in preparation for the
actual poem. It suggests an approach to poetry that will keep the writer focussed and aware of
his or her limitations.
Chapter Two establishes what it means to be writing poetry in an ‘age of cognitive
science’ where some literary scholars have made a ‘cognitive turn’, by explaining the field of
cognitive poetics. It considers specifically the cognitive poetics of Reuven Tsur as an
important theory to enhance poetic composition. It connects some of Tsur’s discussions on
poetic elements to enhance the craft-oriented approach to poetry.
Chapter Three examines the poetic line as the basic unit of a poem which any
compositional theory must consider. It reiterates the neural theory of the line as a ‘carrier
wave’ of conceptual information that is both pleasing to the ear and the mind. It then re-
evaluates specific poetic experiments concerning the line, and suggests a method of scanning
to help the contemporary reader’s awareness of poetic rhythms.
Chapter Four examines trope, specifically poetic metaphor in relation to the
assumption of conceptual metaphor theory that poetic metaphors are extensions of everyday
metaphors. It welcomes an alternative cognitive-literary explanation by re-iterating metaphor theories from Reuven Tsur and Don Paterson. Finally, it argues that the practitioner is always
writing the variation of the ‘one’ poem that he or she has discovered.
Part 2 of the thesis, ‘The Secret Uncles: Poems’, consists of my own poems.
2011-12-19T16:06:15Z
2011-12-19T16:06:15Z
2011-11
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2121
en
2019-05-15
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Electronic copy restricted until 15th May 2019, pending formal approval
ix, 157
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/41862019-09-30T09:55:56Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2013-11-12T14:43:50Z
urn:hdl:10023/4186
'Carnal acts' : from theory to publication
Johnston, Paul
Plain, Gill
Creative writing
Literary theory
Critical methods
Creative writing theory
Author/ reader/ text
Pseudonym
Title
Genre
Crime novel
Character
Plot
The body
Gender
Race
Class
Ideology
Publishing
The first part of the thesis comprises Chapters 1 to 40 of the novel, written
under a pseudonym, followed by a synopsis of the remaining
chapters, 41 to 155. The potential jacket copy will refer to the protagonists, a male and a female detective.
The second part of the thesis is a critical study of the novel. Literary theory
and critical methods are used to investigate the writing process and to explicate the
text’s layers of meaning, not all of which were clear to the author at the time of
writing. Chapter 1 considers literary and creative writing theory, paying particular
attention to conceptualisations of author and reader. In Chapter 2, the chosen
pseudonym is explained and compared with those of other authors; the novel’s title is
also examined. Chapter 3 covers the issue of genre, looking at theories and discussing
both crime novel and Gothic fiction. In Chapter 4, critical approaches to character are
applied. Chapter 5 does the same with plot. Chapters 6 and 7 take
account of the manifestations of power. Chapter 6 covers the body and gender, while
Chapter 7 deals with race and class. As a conclusion, Chapter 8 describes how the
first draft was transformed to one acceptable for publication.
2013-11-12T14:43:50Z
2013-11-12T14:43:50Z
2014-06-24
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4186
en
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
20123-10-30
Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Print and electronic copy restricted until 30th October 2023
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
310
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
School of English
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/150282019-03-29T16:01:17Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-06T09:10:19Z
urn:hdl:10023/15028
The Established Church in the work of William Blake, 1757-1827
Ramsey, Mary Kaye
Although the body of the critical work on William Blake's theology is vast, critics have overlooked the most obvious source of the poet's religious vision: the eighteenth-century Church of England. Throughout Blake's poetry, the Established Church plays a significant role. The early poetry seems to accept and to echo Church doctrine, often incorporating orthodox concepts and symbols. As Blake's disaffection with the Church-especially with the lethargic and corrupt clergy--become more pronounced, the Church assumes the character of the harlot of Babylon, or of the Archfiend, Satan. Even during this period, however, Blake does not reject the religion of Christ; his antipathy is for organized religion, for the Church. To Blake, the Church is no longer the Bride of Christ; she has become the whore of the state, the vassal of natural religion. Her character, inextricably intertwined with Man's Fall and fallen condition, is the subject of this study. This work is dedicated to Bill, Bob and Mary Ellen, for reasons understood but unexpressed.
2018-07-06T09:10:19Z
2018-07-06T09:10:19Z
1989-07
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15028
en
231 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/148952019-03-29T16:01:18Zcom_10023_67com_10023_23col_10023_70
2018-07-04T09:12:21Z
urn:hdl:10023/14895
"Harmless delight but useful and instructive" : the woman's voice in Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare
Tuerk, Cynthia M.
The changes and upheaval in English society and in English ideas which took place during the seventeenth century had a profound effect upon public and private perceptions of women and of women's various roles in society. A study of the drama of this period provides the means to examine the development of these new views through the popular medium of the stage. In particular, the study of adaptations of early drama offer the opportunity to compare the stage perceptions of women which were prevalent during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century with attitudes towards women which emerged during the Restoration and early eighteenth century; such an examination of these differing perceptions of women has not yet been undertaken. The adaptation of Shakespearean plays provide the most profitable study in this area; Shakespeare was not only a highly influential playwright, but was also one of the most adapted of all the early dramatists during the years of the Restoration. In order to facilitate this survey, I have selected plays which span the entire Restoration era, beginning with William Davenant's The Law Against Lovers and Macbeth as well as John Lacy's Sauny the Scot from the 1660's, through the late 1670's and early 1680's with Edward Ravenscroft's Titus Andronicus and Nahum Tate's The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth, and finally into the reign of Anne Stuart with William Burnaby's Love Betray'd. The study of these plays offers the best opportunity for the examination, through the medium of the theatre, of the changes which occurred in the perception of women and their changing identity with the rapidly evolving society of Renaissance and Restoration English society.
2018-07-04T09:12:21Z
2018-07-04T09:12:21Z
1998-06
Thesis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14895
en
356 p.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews
didl///col_10023_70/100