This thesis investigates the role of rural, urban, and industrial landscapes in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Mary Barton....Show moreThis thesis investigates the role of rural, urban, and industrial landscapes in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Mary Barton. These four novels focus on the social turbulences surrounding industrialisation and are all set in an industrial town in the north of England. In each novel, the descriptions of rural, urban and industrial landscapes support that novel’s view on industrialisation and the subsequent social tensions.Show less
Drawing on Upheavals of Thought; The Intelligence of Emotions (2001), a book by classical scholar and public intellectual Martha Nussbaum on the ethical value of emotions, this study investigated,...Show moreDrawing on Upheavals of Thought; The Intelligence of Emotions (2001), a book by classical scholar and public intellectual Martha Nussbaum on the ethical value of emotions, this study investigated, in a chronological treatment of W.B. Yeats’s lyrical poetry, what views on suffering and compassion transpire from Yeats’s work during the early stages of his poetical development, up until he immersed himself late 1902/early 1903 in the work of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and by what these views may have been informed. Because much of Yeats’s work is openly or covertly autobiographical, dealing with the latter issue involved paying close attention to the development of Yeats’s personality, to the time and circumstances in which the poems were drafted or revised, and to both the people whose views may have significantly influenced Yeats’s emotional make-up and intellectual mind-set at the time, and those with whose suffering and misfortune Yeats was confronted. The focus of this study has been on the lyrical poems Yeats wrote (and cared to preserve) up to the publication of his collection Into the Seven Woods in 1903.Show less
This thesis examines the depiction of pastoral nature in four novels set in the Interbellum period and written in the 1940s, using ecocritical theory to explore how these authors view the English...Show moreThis thesis examines the depiction of pastoral nature in four novels set in the Interbellum period and written in the 1940s, using ecocritical theory to explore how these authors view the English landscape. The chosen novels, Philip Larkin’s A Girl in Winter, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh and L.P. Hartley’s The Shrimp and the Anemone, show different views on the English rural landscape but also share elements like childhood innocence and country estates. The analysis focuses on topics such as nostalgia, escapism and “Englishness”, using ecocritical concepts, for example retreat and return and the machine in the garden. The text argues that although nature is often idealised in connection with the past, the authors do not represent the landscape before the war as a merely idealised one. Realistic aspects disturb the harmony and nostalgic elements can become active examples for the future, which shows that the pastoral can be a functional genre in the field of ecocriticism.Show less
One thing that stands out when looking at Alfred Hitchcock's films is the director's interest in domestic space. By looking at the 'Hitchcock House' from top to bottom, from outside to inside, this...Show moreOne thing that stands out when looking at Alfred Hitchcock's films is the director's interest in domestic space. By looking at the 'Hitchcock House' from top to bottom, from outside to inside, this thesis argues that domestic architecture in Hitchcock's films has a symbolic function. Influenced by Victorian literature and German Expressionism, Hitchcock's 'topography' is characterized by houses whose architectural style, rooms and elements reflect the narrative and the protagonists' characters. In addition, Hitchcock's houses at times become characters in their own right, trapping and wounding their inhabitants. Besides that Hitchcock attributes a symbolic meaning to his domestic sets, he also uses them to play with the private/public contrast, one of the most important conventions of social space.Show less
