1,720,976 research outputs found
Robert Louis Stevenson : identity and ideology in the late Victorian British Empire
Full text linkThis thesis examines Robert Louis Stevenson's engagement with issues of cultural identity across a wide range of his writings, published as well as unpublished: romance narratives, historical novels, essays, letters, memoirs, neo-Gothic short stories, and Pacific travel writing and fiction. Beginning with a close examination of Stevenson's representation and interrogation of Scottish identities in domestic and British imperial contexts it expands outwards to show how Stevenson engaged with issues of identity within the late Victorian British Empire. This study challenges the compartmentalisation of Stevensonian criticism, and offers a detailed and holistic reading of his body of work, contextualising it within the social and ideological climate of the late Victorian era. It explores issues of cross-cultural contact and processes of negotiation and hybridisation, drawing upon colonial discourse and postcolonial theory. In addition it examines how Stevenson's own literary identity was formed, how Stevenson, coming from a position outside the prevailing stylistic 'schools' of Victorian literature, created, bulwarked, and argued his literary position, and how in so doing established a theoretical basis for the revival of Romance fiction. Further to that it explores the consistency of and changes to that identity over the course of his literary career and how Stevenson revisited, unsettled, and interrogated the themes and tropes of his own writing
Clothing the body: Representing femininity in Victorian narratives of selfhood
Full text linkThis thesis looks at the women who inhabit Victorian literature, focusing on the ways in which they are represented as well as the way in which they choose to represent themselves. I argue that this self-definition takes place consciously, and that Victorian heroines often choose to display their selfhood through sartorial austerity. Through resisting the inclusion in a scopic economy where worth is judged by appearance, these women make their choice of clothing a highly expressive medium for registering a critique of reading subjectivity through appearance, and the critique of a society where women’s bodies are constant loci of scrutiny. But it is also a choice that reveals their unease with their own sexuality, their struggles with their desires, as well as their attempts to exert control over their bodies. They instead manage to create a private space within a public mode of expression, a space from which to resist societal pressures.
The dressing room then becomes a significant site for the creation of female identity, as well as a certain kind of feminine intimacy. A room privileged as uniquely feminine, it provides the privacy for female friendships. Also central to this self-creation is the mirror, a fraught terrain where contemporary anxieties about women are relocated. But in numerous novels, this is not just a site for vanity and duplication of identity, but also for self-reflection. The thesis concludes with an examination of the literary representation of hair, its polysemic meanings, and its autonomous expressive quality. The writers focused on are Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Brad- don, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. The paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt also provide a double narrative to these literary representations
Botanical Journeys and China's Colonial Frontiers: 1840-1940
Full text linkOver recent years, a body of scholarship has emerged on the topic of European and American travel writing in China. This thesis contributes to this growing field by examining four writers who travelled in China and worked as plant collectors and botanists. Largely forgotten today, these writers were influential and successful in their own day. Despite differences in geographical location and historical period, there are a number of common links that make a comparison of these travel writings productive. As travellers seeking botanical rarity and novelty, these writers explored regions of China unknown in the West, which over a period of one hundred years expanded outwards from the fringes of the treaty port areas to more remote regions of China's southwest. These writers, therefore, were on the frontiers of Western knowledge of China, and an examination of their writing provides important insights into the ways in which racial, geographical, and ecological differences were articulated and understood in the context of colonial and scientific exploration. While discussing how such differences have imperial significance, this study will also call attention to the instability of colonialist discourse in the context of China. Rather than focus exclusively on questions of imperialism, this study will show how representations of China's periphery regions also speak to metropolitan literary and cultural concerns, and a close reading of these travel writings shows that China offered powerful imaginary landscapes for home audiences. This project is organised chronologically and the chapters are divided according to the authors, with the exception of the first chapter where I introduce the historical and theoretical framework of the study and the final concluding chapter where I consider the significance of this study in the context of modern China
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Representing missions: Christianity and colonialism in fiction by Joyce Cary, Elspeth Huxley, Chinua Achebe, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o
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