The polyphonic novel in contemporary British fiction: neoliberal individualism and collective narratives

This thesis offers an alternative history of contemporary British fiction by centralizing the conception of genre as a ‘way of seeing and conceptualizing the world. By recontextualizing and reintroducing the polyphonic novel as a distinctive, emergent (cf. Williams) genre that mediates the contradictions of neoliberal individualism and its cultural manifestation, postmodernism, this thesis offers a distinctive perspective on cultural diversity and social fragmentation in contemporary Britain and aims to complement aesthetic and postmodernist literary histories that prioritize diversity.Diese Dissertation bietet eine alternative Geschichte der zeitgenössischen britischen Literatur, indem sie das Konzept des Genres als eine "Art, die Welt zu sehen und zu konzeptualisieren" zentralisiert. Durch die Rekontextualisierung und Wiedereinführung des polyphonen Romans als ein charakteristisches, emergentes Genre, das die Widersprüche des neoliberalen Individualismus und seiner kulturellen Manifestation, der Postmoderne, vermittelt, bietet diese These eine charakteristische Perspektive auf kulturelle Vielfalt und soziale Fragmentierung im heutigen Großbritannien

From <i>Wessex Poems</i> to <i>Time's Laughingstocks</i> : An eco-critical approach to the poetry of Thomas Hardy

The aim of this thesis is to re-evaluate the poetry of Thomas Hardy from an ecocritical perspective, and in so doing, show how and in what ways Hardy's poetic oeuvre represents a revealing response to the environment, and an important and still relevant comment on humankind's relationship to it. As the Introduction explains in more detail, the thesis concentrates on the verse drama and verse collections published between 1898 and 1909. However, Chapter 1 opens with an eco-critical analysis of Hardy's earliest surviving poem, 'Domicilium', written 1857-60; the Chapter develops into a discussion of the origins of eco-criticism as a theoretical approach with a political edge. Chapter 2 discusses the complex Victorian concept of 'Nature', which shaped Hardy's own response to the environment. Chapter 3 engages with Hardy's career as a novel writer, and notes the way in which it informs his later poetry. Chapter 4 extends the eco-critical analysis to Hardy's poetry, focusing on Wessex Poems, his first verse collection. Although short, the collection shows how Hardy was already shaping his own poetic sense of the natural world. This theme is developed in Chapter 5, on Poems of the Past and Present, a collection notable for a series of poems with a bio-centric focus on the natural world in general and bird life in particular. Chapter 6 deals with The Dynasts, a retelling of the Napoleonic Wars through which Hardy dramatized his belief that all life on earth is connected by the workings of the 'Immanent Will'. Chapter 7 discusses Time's Laughingstocks, Hardy's bleakest reading of the human condition. The Conclusion analyses another individual poem, 'The Convergence of the Twain', written following the loss of the Titanic in 1912, and summarises Hardy's distinctive contribution to our emerging sense of what might constitute a meaningful 'eco-poetic'

'Lost years' : West Indian women writing and publishing in Britain c.1960 to 1979.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN023189 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed