104 research outputs found
Forecasts of the past: globalisation, history and contemporary realism
No full textDeposited with permission of the author. © 2008 Dr. Dougal Shelton McNeill.This thesis takes issue with Fredric Jameson’s suggestion that contemporary science fiction is sending back “more reliable information [about current political and economic organisation] than an exhausted realism” and it develops an alternative Marxist defense of contemporary realist fiction. Can realism's techniques adequately represent the complexity of contemporary political organization? The thesis presents readings of key realist texts — by Pat Barker, Maurice Gee, Kerstin Hensel, James Kelman and David Peace — testing their potential to produce the knowledge of history, industrial politics and the metropolis traditionally central to literary realism’s concerns. (For complete abstract open document)
Embodied Visions in William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion
No full textWilliam Blake characterised an abstract as “A murderer of its own Body,” an attempt to impose stable mastery on an unstable reality (E153). This thesis reads Blake’s illuminated poem, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, from the ‘unstable’ perspective of ‘Embodied Visions,’ based on the hypothesis that readings of the poem have often been distorted by the imposition of binary divisions: divisions that are undermined within the work itself. This approach to Visions of the Daughters of Albion is in three chapters: firstly aligning Blake’s work with Japanese manga artist Tezuka Osamu (1928-1989), tracing the construction of Blake in Japan, and how this can occasion new perspectives; secondly I read Visions with Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, placing both texts in response to oppressive sexual prescriptions of the 1790s, in order to chart where they concur and diverge; and finally I examine the effect of dualistic critical frames on readings of Visions, arguing that we must read the sections exploring perception as continuous with the rest of the poem in order to appreciate Blake’s engagement with an embodied reality
Primitive normalisers in quasipolynomial time
No full textFunding: The first author is supported by a Royal Society grant (RGF\EA\181005).The normaliser problem has as input two subgroups H and K of the symmetric group Sn, and asks for a generating set for NK(H): it is not known to have a subexponential time solution. It is proved in [Roney-Dougal & Siccha, 2020] that if H is primitive then the normaliser problem can be solved in quasipolynomial time. We show that for all subgroups H and K of Sn, in quasipolynomial time we can decide whether NSn(H) is primitive, and if so compute NK(H). Hence we reduce the question of whether one can solve the normaliser problem in quasipolynomial time to the case where the normaliser in Sn is known not to be primitive.Peer reviewe
Reading Nowhere in Erewhon: Bellamy, Morris, and New Zealand
No full textWhile scholars have discussed the success of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) in New Zealand, its rival Utopia, William Morris' News from Nowhere (1890) has not received the same attention. This essay reads these two works' New Zealand reception together, and traces in this international sources for local literary culture.Correspondence about this article may be directed to the author at [email protected] </jats:p
A Full, Particular and True Account of the Rebellion in the Years 1745-6 by Dougal Graham. The man, the myth and the modus operandi
No full textDougal Graham’s Full, Particular and True Account of the Rebellion in the Years 1745-46 is a ‘forgotten’ text of considerable historical and cultural significance. Between Christmas and Candlemas of 1745/1746 the West Central Lowlands experienced the presence of the Jacobite army, with those retreating from Derby reinforced by new recruits from the north east and French and Irish forces – about 80,000 in all. Quartered round Stirling in the depths of winter, this put considerable strain on local resources. With money and supplies from Glasgow, the rebels occupied Stirling, besieged the Castle, and fought off a British army at Falkirk, but then had to retreat north of the Forth, ultimately to face annihilation at the hands of the Duke of Cumberland. The Account was composed by an inhabitant of Stirlingshire and published in Glasgow six months after Culloden. It seems to be the earliest connected narrative of the 1745 Rebellion produced in Scotland.
The text shows clear evidence that the target audience was not a literary, or even necessarily literate elite, but the ‘meaner sort’ in the Glasgow hinterland, routinely supplied by chapmen with such cheap ‘sma’ books’. The Account reads almost like a special supplement for a 1746 tabloid. Unashamedly populist, it provides acceptably accurate information, entertainment, and a degree of sectarian triumphalism. It is journalistic, racy and fast moving with most of the editorial comment (in the form of supplementary poems) added at the end so as not to impede the action. The language is a somewhat archaic demotic Scots, written in the form of octosyllabic couplets, as used by Blind Harry and David Lyndsay, apparently the preferred reading matter of potential customers. This thesis will argue that since Dougal Graham’s Account can reasonably be regarded as reflecting the views of its projected clientele, the common people of the western Lowlands, it is scarcely feasible to achieve a full picture of Scotland in the aftermath of the rising without considering the text. It is therefore unfortunate that it was regarded as lost throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and ignored in the twentieth.
This thesis presents the first modern edition of Graham’s Account, in the form of a glossed and annotated transcript of the 1746 edition. The introductory essay considers myths about the author that developed in the subsequent century, and which are entirely at odds with a reading of the material. It looks at the way the book was promoted, both in contemporary advertising and in the prefatory material within the text, and goes on to consider the projected audience and potential customer base. Finally the circumstances surrounding the publication of the second edition are investigated, throwing further light on the situation in Scotland seven years after Culloden
Developing Water Areas for Outdoor Recreation
No full textWater and recreation go together. Iowa has many potential water recreation areas, including man-made or constructed lakes. The author gives a broad outline for those concerned with recreational development, indicating the many considerations for a sound project down to estimating costs for specific projects.</p
- …
