Department of English
Recent Deposits
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Literary Sophias: The Esoteric Female in Romanticism
This thesis explores the Romantic representation of femininity in relation to elements of the Western esoteric tradition. In particular, it discusses the presence of Gnostic themes and gender imagery and the ways in which ... -
/Ju:z/ are in the paddock eating grass : a study of the acceptance of grammatical variants among adolescents from Southland and Otago
A field experiment was undertaken to determine the usage of various grammatical and morphological variants in the speech of adolescents in the provinces of Otago and Southland, New Zealand. Eleven schools throughout the ... -
Becoming-Mystic: The Posthuman in Contemporary Fiction
The Posthuman in Contemporary Fiction is a full-length study of contemporary fiction from the perspective of critical posthumanism. Moving beyond the limitations of humanism, critical posthumanism is a discourse that builds ... -
God in the Machine: Depicting Religion in Video Games
This thesis shows that Dark Souls uses representations of fictive religion to comment on real religion. These representations are rooted in the affordances of the video game medium, meaning that even as Dark Souls comments ... -
Cultivating Place and Space: Seamus Heaney's Landscape Poetics
In its broadest terms, this thesis proposes reading Seamus Heaney’s landscape poetics through the lenses of cultivation, resistance, linguistic cartography, and memory. I assert that Heaney writes the landscape using ... -
Tom Hungerford: A Story of the Early Days of the Otago Goldfields
Tom Hungerford was inspired by the Otago gold rush of 1861, but is practically unknown as it was published only as a serial in the Tuapeka Times. The author, William Baldwin, a larger-than-life figure who was a runholder, ... -
Don DeLillo's White Noise and the Postmodern Economics of Displacement
The primary aim of this work is to investigate the definitively postmodern economy of Don DeLillo's novel, White Noise. Methodologically, this thesis creates a dialogue by comparatively analysing DeLillo's text, its ... -
‘Troy’ and ‘Trouthe’ in the Troilus and Criseyde stories of Chaucer, Henryson, and Shakespeare
The story of Troilus and Criseyde constitutes a metanarrative. This thesis is concerned with versions of the story written by Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Henryson, and William Shakespeare. In these three tellings, characters ... -
The Reception of Sean O'Casey's Early Works in New Zealand (1924–47): A Social, Cultural, and Political Reading of the Archive
This thesis recovers the New Zealand reception history of Sean O’Casey, the Irish working-class playwright who rose to prominence at the Dublin Abbey Theatre in the aftermath of the Irish revolutionary period. Until now, ... -
Re-staging history : historiographic drama from New Zealand and Australia
Since the 1980s, there has been an increasing emphasis on drama, in live theatre and on film, which re-addresses the ways in which the post-colonial histories of Australia and New Zealand have been written. Why is there ... -
University Study Abroad in New Zealand: Identity, Ideology, and Investment in English Language Learning
Study abroad experiences are often seen as being good for, or even necessary for, attaining a high level of second language (L2) proficiency. However, not all students achieve the same level of L2 proficiency from their ... -
The Window in Virginia Woolf's Early Novels
This thesis focuses on the window and the visual in Virginia Woolf's first three novels The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's Room (1922). It examines how the window enables Woolf to experiment with modes ... -
Pronunciation of L2 English in Afrikaans speakers who have relocated to Aotearoa-New Zealand
An ever greater number of South Africans are relocating to New Zealand and now comprise the fifth largest group of migrants in the country. Among this group, there are first language (L1) Afrikaans speakers who bring with ... -
Painted Poetry and Cross-Medium Collaboration in 20th Century Aotearoa New Zealand
This thesis shows that painted poetry collaborations, or cross-medium collaborations, were a defining part of New Zealand’s literary and artistic histories during the 1950s–1970s. As a product of the deep-rooted sense of ... -
Constructing Novel Iconic Signs Through Gesture
The origin of language has been a mystery for many years, with many possible theories offered as an explanation. One of the strongest theories states that human spoken language originated after the development of a gestural ... -
Post-colonial tensions in a cross-cultural milieu : a comparative study of the writings of Witi Ihimaera and Chinua Achebe
In many former British colonies independence from colonial rule has produced a myriad of post-colonial tensions. Increasingly, writers from the indigenous race in these former colonies have felt moved to respond to these ... -
Dialogue and didacticism : the influence of Lucian on the fictional works of Sir Thomas More and Erasmus
The literary debt which Erasmus and Thomas More owed to Lucian has been often acknowleged, and its influence on their major fictional writings has been explored. Too often, however, it has been assumed that the nature of ... -
A Poetics of Water: Cross-Cultural Ecopoetics in a Crisis World
This thesis yokes together ecocriticism, avant-garde poetry, and comparative literature to offer a new approach to studying literary responses to environmental crisis on a global scale. It develops this approach by examining ... -
Tom Hungerford: A Story of the Early Days of the Otago Goldfields
Tom Hungerford (1872) was inspired by the Otago gold rush of 1861, but is practically unknown as it was published only as a serial in the Tuapeka Times. The author, William Baldwin, a larger-than-life figure who was a run ... -
The Merry Marauders
The Merry Marauders (1913) recounts the humorous misadventures of an accident-prone theatre company, bringing to life the itinerant theatrical world and its struggles with the temperance movement and frontier environment. ...