RSS 1.0English (Theses and Dissertations)
Recent Submissions
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Always Some New Frontier: Tourism and the Gothic Imagination in Late-Victorian Egyptian-Themed Fiction
(Trinity College Dublin. School of English. Discipline of English, 2025)This thesis takes late-Victorian authors of Gothic and Egyptian- themed fiction and studies their imaginative engagement with Egypt as both real-world travellers who wrote about their experiences, or others who wrote about ... -
An 'unburied corpse' : the 1798 Rebellion in fiction 1799-1898
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of English, 2006)The 1798 rebellion is arguably the most significant historical event in modern Irish history. It is an analogue not only of the contentious nature of Irish history but of the Irish historical experience itself, and its ... -
I am the Dark Mirror the vampire of my own heart' : the postmodern vampire in fiction, film and culture 1975-2008
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of English, 2009)This thesis explores the distinct shift of the vampire, in film, fiction and culture, from 1975 - 2008. Each chapter of this thesis represents four ‘cultural decades’ of change, through which we see the development of the ... -
Elizabeth Bowen : empire, gender and travel in the Twentieth Century
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of English, 2006)‘Elizabeth Bowen: Empire, Gender and Travel in the Twentieth Century’ examines how Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) uses travel and transport technologies figuratively throughout her writing to interrogate the historical breaks ... -
Unsettling America : the malevolent house motif in American fiction
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of English, 2009)In setting out to understand the exact nature of the American haunted house, I have endeavoured to become familiar with a wide range of novels and short stories by American authors, from the beginning of the nineteenth ... -
Writing, Reading and Collecting Girlhood: Maria Edgeworth in the Pollard Collection of Children's Books
(Trinity College Dublin. School of English. Discipline of English, 2025)This thesis is a sustained examination of the Pollard Collection of Children's Books which uses girlhood as a framework within the Collection. It contextualises the author Maria Edgeworth, the most prolific writer in the ... -
The Theology of Teresa Deevy, Exhuming the Playwright's Life and Later Works
(Trinity College Dublin. School of English. Discipline of English, 2024)In the first half of the 1930s Teresa Deevy, a deaf writer from Waterford, was one of the most prolific and acclaimed woman playwrights in the world. At the height of her career, Deevy was a favourite of the Abbey Theatre ... -
Doomsday machines : technological anxiety in nuclear culture
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of English, 2014)This work is an examination of nuclear war as it appears in the fiction, film and television of the Cold War, from roughly 1949 to 1991, proposing that the depiction of nuclear conflict in the mass culture Cold War constituted ... -
Theorising desert islands : the island trope in 20th and 21st Century popular culture
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of English, 2014)In 2013, the popular North American reality television show Survivor (2000- ) broadcast its twenty-seventh season, entitled Survivor: Blood vs. Water, in which contestants from previous seasons were stranded with their ... -
Temporality in early nineteenth-century Christmas writing
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of English, 2014)This thesis analyses the representation of time in Christmas writing published during the first half of the nineteenth century. At a time when the experience of temporality began to shift dramatically due to the innovations ... -
Representations of overpopulation in nineteenth-century British fiction
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of English, 2014)This thesis analyses representations of overpopulation in British fiction of the long nineteenth century, from the publication of Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) to the publication of ... -
An ecocritical reading of Ursula K. Le Guin's children's fiction
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of English, 2015)This dissertation articulates an ecocritical reading of Ursula K. Le Guin’s fiction for children, in particular her Earthsea sequence. Focusing on the formal narrative and visual structures that Le Guin uses to represent ... -
Electric fur, exhilarated birds : nature and animals in E.E. Cummings and Mina Loy
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of English, 2016)This thesis examines the role of nature and the animal both as subject and as symbol in the work of the modernist poet-polymaths E. E. Cummings and Mina Loy. Although they may be connected on many levels, Cummings and Loy ... -
We have to face up to who we are. Or who we aren't : Paul Auster's examination of truth and identity
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of English, 2016)Paul Auster has been publishing work for over thirty years. His novels display a fascination with the idea of identity, the nature of storytelling and the concepts of memory and truth, how they inform each other and how ... -
Irish writers and their London publishers c.1884 - 1922
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of English, 2016)From the mid-1880s to the First World War, the Anglophone publishing industry, centred in London, experienced an unprecedented period of significant growth and change during which interlocking structural, legal, financial, ... -
A mirror and an explosion : mapping the spaces of Roberto Bolaňo's 2666
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of English, 2016)This thesis analyses space and place across Roberto Bolano's 2666. It conducts an analysis of the architecture and the topography of the novel, addressing the ways in which Bolano's deployment of spatial images and his ... -
William Wordsworth's writings on war, 1793 - 1798
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of English, 2017)This thesis is about William Wordsworth's early literary engagement with the French Revolutionary Wars. The military conflicts lasted from 1793 to 1802, but I have taken the years between 1793-the year when the wars broke ... -
Will and poetry in the poetry of Thomas Hoccleve
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of English, 2016)This thesis investigates the ways in which Thomas Hoccleve's writing is conversant with the contested area of the human will, and its manifestation in diverse kinds of love. It originates at the nexus of two systems distinct ... -
Twilight zones : subjectivity, gender, and feminism in three 21st century popular vampire romance narratives
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of English, 2016)This thesis examines three century American vampire romance narratives: the Twilight novels (2005-2008) by Stephenie Meyer and their film adaptations (2008-2012), the HBO television adaptation of Charlaine Harris' Southern ... -
The intimate foreigner : the construction of subjectivity in Maori novels of the 1980s
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of English, 1998)This thesis examines four prominent Maori novels in English published in the 1980s, namely Keri Hulme's the bone people (1984), Witi Ihimaera's The Matriarch, (1986), Patricia Grace's Potiki (1986), and Alan Duff's Once ...
