Electronic theses of Literature and Languages eTheses students. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/184 2026-09-25T11:50:55Z 2026-09-25T11:50:55Z Li, Shaona http://hdl.handle.net/1893/38334 2026-09-18T13:19:27Z 2025-09-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Translating Virginia Woolf's feminist perspectives in the 20th and 21st century Author(s): Li, Shaona Abstract: This thesis examines how Virginia Woolf’s feminist discourse has been translated, reframed, and ideologically negotiated within the Chinese context across different historical periods. Woolf’s narrative technique, especially the use of free indirect discourse, challenges established gender norms, making these four works—Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando: A Biography (1928), and A Room of One’s Own (1929)— exemplary texts for analysing gender representation in literature and society. Focusing on gender representation, linguistic transformation, and cultural adaptation, this study explores how Chinese translators have addressed Woolf’s complex feminist discourses and evolving constructions of gender, identity, and power. Based on Catford’s theory of "translation shifts" (1965) and Toury’s idea of "optional shifts" (1995), the research assesses how feminist roles and expectations are conveyed to Chinese audiences through these translations. A mixed-method approach is utilised, combining a self-constructed diachronic corpus with detailed textual analysis and content coding using NVivo and WordSmith 6 to examine the linguistic, cultural, and historical variations in Chinese translations. This study uncovers two main findings. First, it challenges the common belief that early Chinese translations of Virginia Woolf’s works were uniformly conservative. Instead, it shows that some early translators actively engaged with Woolf’s feminist ideas, sometimes even emphasising them despite prevailing historical and ideological limitations. Second, the analysis reveals a pattern where co-translated works tend to prioritise fidelity, and sometimes even amplify feminist ideas, whereas individual female translators are more inclined to employ interpretive strategies that emphasise gender critique. Conversely, male translators frequently downplay or domesticate feminist elements. These findings suggest that translator identity and the structure of collaboration significantly influence ideological positioning, regardless of the historical period. This research contributes to feminist translation theory and Woolf scholarship by highlighting the significance of translator agency and collaboration in shaping feminist discourse through translation.

2025-09-01T00:00:00Z Pontini, Francesca http://hdl.handle.net/1893/38225 2026-08-03T08:02:49Z 2025-10-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Reading the margins: investigating reading practices in early sixteenth-century Scotland Author(s): Pontini, Francesca Abstract: This dissertation examines the marginalia and other forms of readerly intervention found in early printed books owned and used in Scotland before and during the Reformation. It reconstructs how learned Scottish readers interacted with texts, demonstrating that their annotation practices formed part of a shared European scholarly culture. By analysing a corpus of annotated books preserved in Scottish and continental collections, the study identifies a consistent set of annotating tools—such as nota marks, manicules, keywords, and textual summaries—and writing practices which Scottish readers employed in ways comparable to their continental contemporaries. Methodologically, the thesis combines bibliographical and palaeographical analysis with approaches from the history of reading and intellectual history. Detailed case studies focus on William Scheves, readers associated with King’s College, Aberdeen—among them Hector Boece, John Vaus, and Theophilus Stewart and George Buchanan. The dissertation also includes anonymous or unknown readers whose annotations provide valuable evidence for understanding the Scottish cultural context. My thesis shows that learned Scottish readers of pre-Reformation books used a set of common annotating tools and writing practices which they shared with the mainstream of contemporary European scholarship. Through a close examination of marginalia across a range of theological, classical, and humanist texts, the study identifies recurrent features such as systematic nota marks, manicules, keywords, and schematic summaries that reflect the structured reading methods promoted in continental universities and humanist circles. These tools were not random scribal habits but deliberate aids to study, memory, and argumentation, revealing how Scottish readers approached books as active participants in a transnational intellectual culture. Their use of both secretary and italic hands, further demonstrate the permeability of Scottish scholarly practice to European models of learning. The consistency of these annotating techniques across diverse contexts—academic, ecclesiastical, and private—indicates that Scottish scholars were well-informed contributors to the methods and disciplines of scholastic and humanist scholarship. In tracing these practices, the thesis situates Scotland within a wider geography of reading that connected local academic communities to the evolving norms of Renaissance intellectual life.

2025-10-01T00:00:00Z Bia, Dyhia http://hdl.handle.net/1893/37992 2026-05-05T13:36:29Z 2025-06-11T00:00:00Z

Title: The politics and aesthetics of postcolonial disillusionment: transcolonial resistance in Algerian and Ghanaian literature (1960-1980) Author(s): Bia, Dyhia Abstract: This thesis explores the aesthetics and politics of postcolonial disillusionment through a transcolonial reading of Algerian and Ghanaian literature produced between 1960 and 1980. It examines how Rachid Boudjedra, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Kateb Yacine deploy formal disruption to critique the failures of decolonisation, unsettle nationalist ideologies, and resist the institutionalisation of myth, symbolic violence and historical erasure. Focusing on two distinct but complementary literary modes, the novel and theatre, this study is divided into two parts. Part one explores the ways in which Boudjedra and Armah reconfigure the novel to expose the ideological fragility of postcolonial nationhood, using disjointed temporality and grotesque realism to destabilize official historiography. Their works dismantle the myth of linear decolonisation by foregrounding bodily decay, disrupted temporality, and the psychic afterlives of colonialism, refusing redemptive closure, and opting instead for aesthetic rupture that allows suppressed histories and oppressed subjectivities to emerge. Part two turns to Kateb Yacine’s theatre where the stage becomes a site of insurgent performance. In La Poudre d’intelligence, the folkloric figure of Djeha embodies epistemic disorder and transgressive mobility, challenging patriarchal and religious authority. Mohamed prends ta valise (1971) and Boucherie de l’espérance ou Palestine trahie (1978) extend this critique to colonialism, Zionism, and postcolonial complicity, invoking Palestine as a geopolitical referent and a transnational symbol of betrayal and solidarity. By placing Francophone and Anglophone texts in dialogue, the thesis adopts a transcolonial approach that reveals shared strategies of resistance across linguistic and geopolitical boundaries. It argues that literature emerges as a fertile site for reimagining alternative ways of knowing and being. It reclaims postcolonial disillusionment as a generative critical condition, one that unsettles inherited narratives and opens new aesthetic and political horizons beyond national frameworks and the vertical axis of interaction. Instead, it foregrounds horizontal connections of shared narratives and aesthetic responses.

2025-06-11T00:00:00Z O'Callaghan Yeoman, Cleo http://hdl.handle.net/1893/37391 2025-09-19T07:08:06Z 2025-06-30T00:00:00Z

Title: Novel reading and self-improvement in Scotland, c.1800–37 Author(s): O'Callaghan Yeoman, Cleo Abstract: This thesis analyses the relationship between novel reading and self-improvement in Scotland during the early nineteenth century, focusing on the novels of Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier, and Elizabeth Hamilton. It contends that, through their self-conscious engagement with discourses on mental and moral improvement, these female novelists contributed something different to the novel from their male contemporaries – including John Galt, James Hogg, and, most famously, Walter Scott – thereby expanding the proliferation of alternative Scottish fiction that Scott’s Waverley Novels enabled. It complements the often male-centric studies of the novel in Romantic-period Scotland to date by elucidating Brunton, Ferrier, and Hamilton’s hitherto underappreciated development of the novel, identifying them as strategic, impactful participants in its generic evolution, whose legacies extend into Victoria’s reign. I argue that Brunton, Ferrier, and Hamilton redeploy longstanding antinovel stereotypes within their novels in satirical, sophisticated, and implicit ways, in order to promote a model of active reading, centring on distance, self-reflection, and critical readerly engagement. This enables their works to provide antidotes to the ostensibly corrosive effects of novel reading. I argue further that these novelists engage in complicated, performative, often subversive ways with familiar stereotypes pertaining to national identity and mental cultivation. In doing so, they encourage careful reading and present self-improvement as an iterative process comprising education and application. The first four chapters analyse this process and the distinction between what I term true and false improvement within the novels, alongside their treatment of common prejudices. The final chapter analyses historical readers’ responses to demonstrate the ways in which these novels were recognised as tools for self-improvement. Ultimately, this thesis argues that paying closer attention to the works of Brunton, Ferrier, and Hamilton, and especially the model of reading they promote, provides us with a new understanding of a pivotal phase in the novel’s development.

2025-06-30T00:00:00Z