STORRE Collection: Electronic theses of Literature and Languages eTheses students.
http://hdl.handle.net/1893/184
Electronic theses of Literature and Languages eTheses students.2024-03-19T04:03:23ZKafka's war
http://hdl.handle.net/1893/35702
Title: Kafka's war
Author(s): Colyer, Howard
Abstract: A biographical novel about Franz Kafka in the First World War - and a creative writing commentary: 'Silence and Legend'
.2023-11-01T00:00:00ZA corpus-based CDA study of ideological mediation through translation shifts: an analysis of the official Chinese-English translation of the governance of China
http://hdl.handle.net/1893/35685
Title: A corpus-based CDA study of ideological mediation through translation shifts: an analysis of the official Chinese-English translation of the governance of China
Author(s): Yang, Shu
Abstract: This study aims to explore the extent to which President Xi’s ideological message is mediated in the official Chinese-English translation of The Governance of China via various translation shifts and analyze the possible ideological reasons behind it. Unlike previous studies whose interpretation of translation shifts has been restricted to either the linguistic level or the speech situation, this research project focuses on exploring the translation shifts’ ideological significance within the broader sociopolitical context. It adopts a mixed-methods approach, merging critical discourse analysis (CDA) and corpus-based translation studies. A parallel corpus based on the source and target texts of President Xi’s domestic speeches to officials and Party members, published in The Governance of China, was built to ensure a quantitative and qualitative analysis. It is also noteworthy that this study concentrates on the key Chinese modality markers, transitivity processes, metaphorical expressions, and referring terms that stand out in the present research corpus compared to general Chinese discourse instead of all the existing or the most frequent ones. The overall results suggest that translation shifts in modality, transitivity, metaphor, and reference have slightly increased the ideological significance of strengthening the government and the Party’s self-discipline compared to other national issues, and exhibited a tendency to contextualize considering the foreign audiences’ ideological positions. Such shifts may be related to the translation agency’s commitment and the state’s current foreign policy. Ultimately, this study reveals subtle ideological translation shifts that will be buried if researchers treat source and target texts separately. It calls for translators to raise awareness of textual features’ ideological potential and encourages audiences to pay attention to the institutional and sociopolitical background of translated texts.2023-02-01T00:00:00ZPublishing in Scotland 1970–2020: from cultural heritage to global engagement
http://hdl.handle.net/1893/35683
Title: Publishing in Scotland 1970–2020: from cultural heritage to global engagement
Author(s): Piotrowska, Alice
Abstract: This study examines the history of the book publishing industry in Scotland from approximately 1970 to 2020. The main aim is to generate a history of the trade that goes substantially beyond existing literature by incorporating a business-oriented perspective and investigating how ideas of nationhood and culture interrelate with those of economics and commerce in the transition to a global marketplace. Using a combination of oral histories and archival research, the project addresses the following key questions: how has Scottish publishing developed in the past five decades, what have been its opportunities and challenges, and what is the relationship between these opportunities and challenges and the factors of conglomeration, internationalisation, and socio-political change? The thesis traces the development of the trade by considering the impact of conglomeration, the emergence of new independent presses, and the efforts to grow and internationalise the industry. Building on detailed case studies, it narrates the history of Scottish publishing from an industry operating ‘in’ Scotland – centred in Edinburgh and Glasgow while extending its reach across the British Empire – to one reclaiming its cultural heritage and political impact by publishing books ‘for’ Scotland and, finally, to one seeking growth opportunities beyond national borders. Overall, the study reveals the practice of cooperative competition as key in allowing the Scottish book trade to develop and withstand the political and economic turmoil of the past five decades. It emphasises the pivotal role of public subsidy in the development of publishing and examines the continued professionalisation of the trade, showcasing how the rejuvenation of the industry in the period related to ideas of publishing in national and transnational contexts.2023-08-01T00:00:00Z‘Like a bird caught in cobwebs’: gender and genre in Anglophone conspiracy fiction, 1959-2003
http://hdl.handle.net/1893/35675
Title: ‘Like a bird caught in cobwebs’: gender and genre in Anglophone conspiracy fiction, 1959-2003
Author(s): Babarczi, Zita
Abstract: This thesis examines the gendered dimensions of Anglophone, mainly American, conspiracy fiction in the period from the mid-twentieth-century to the beginning of the millennium. I posit that during this time, literary figurations of conspiracy in genre fiction are used to emplot gendered anxieties directly related to the political gains and losses of second-wave feminism. I trace the conspiratorial questioning, dissolution, and eventual reassertion of the patriarchal status quo through six novels and three genres: the Gothic novels of Ira Levin, the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, and the thrillers of Umberto Eco and Dan Brown.
Levin’s fiction exemplifies white, middle-class American women’s anxiety that their husbands’ real allegiance may lie with patriarchy and not their marriage, literalising patriarchal power as a conspiracy. Dick’s novels emplot the anxiety induced by rapidly changing masculine norms, imagining a conspiratorial will as the driving force behind these changes. Eco and Brown query conspiracy’s viability to counteract the anxiety generated by the unmooring of gender roles, alighting on essentialist notions of femininity through which a new, updated patriarchy may be inaugurated.
All four authors use the conventions of their chosen genre to colour and modify the core plot element of conspiracy. The mechanics of these generic conventions will be considered in each chapter. I pay further consideration to postmodernism’s impact on conspiracy fiction; in particular, the way in which the destabilisation of gender roles (the result of second-wave feminism) and the destabilisation of meaning (the result of postmodernity) becomes enmeshed in the American imagination. These novels depict the loss of traditional gender roles and the loss of faith in a knowable reality as functionally the same: a loss against which patriarchy reasserts itself via conspiratorial means. The politically, emotively, and generically heterogeneous expressions of patriarchy’s floundering and reassertion, as it is found in the selected genre texts of mid-to-late twentieth century Anglophone conspiracy fiction, is the topic of this thesis.2023-07-01T00:00:00Z