STORRE

In Henry Austen’s ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’, written shortly after Jane Austen’s death in 1817, he dwells briefly on her artistic talents, focussing on her drawing, music and dancing, and then moving on to discuss her talent for reading aloud (which she did ‘with very great taste and effect’) and her reading choices (in which Henry emphasized ‘the natural discrimination of her mind’ and her excellent and judicious taste). Henry’s account was expanded and embroidered by James Edward ...

Internet memes have become a common communicative tool, blending images, text, and humour into complex multimodal units. Despite their prevalence, memes have been the subject of comparatively little linguistic study. In this thesis, I have undertaken an analysis of image macro memes from a linguistic perspective, drawing from a framework based on iconicity and metaphor. My approach was also informed by data from a review of 30 prevalent memes, an online survey of the Reddit forum r/memes, and...

The UK publishing industry has an equality problem. Recent research reveals systemic gender, ethnicity and class bias (Ramdarshan Bold 2021; Brook, O’Brien, and Taylor 2018; Saha and van Lente 2020; Marsden 2019). Focusing on gender, this thesis shows that Scotland is not exempt from inequality, despite ranking third in the world for female political empowerment (Paterson 2018). As such, this thesis examines the quantifiable difference between men’s literary sector output and that of women a...

This thesis investigates the construction and negotiation of cultural memory within the national archive. Emerging under the same specific historical circumstances, the nation and the archive operate as two sides of the same coin. The nation provides the defining framing in which archives have traditionally been understood to function, and the archive serves as the prism through which the national past and national future can be viewed and ‘read’. Evolutions in archival theory in the last cen...