Arts and humanities - English Language & Culture

MA Thesis, University of Eastern Finland 2020. This thesis focuses on the question of to what extent Michael Ondaatje uses historiographic metafiction to (re)write history from a postcolonial perspective in his novel Warlight (2018). In order to answer this question, Hutcheon’s notion of historiographic metafiction is first outlined by means of focusing on the four main characteristics of the postmodern concept. Additionally, the theoretical section also focuses on the compatibility of a postmodern approach to historical fiction and postcolonial concerns. What follows is a four-part close reading of Warlight, each revolving around one of the major characteristics of historiographic metafiction. Postcolonial issues that come to the fore in the novel through these aspects of historiographic metafiction are discussed throughout these sections.

Section 3.1 shows that Warlight challenges history because of the way it exposes the unreliability and subjectivity of principles key to the creation of history, such as a reliance on memory, textuality, and recording. Section 3.2 indicates how Ondaatje’s novel blurs the traditional distinction between history and art in several ways. Section 3.3 highlights that ex-centrics play a major role in Warlight. The ex-centrics in the novel are generally found to be marginalised due to spy fiction-related issues of invisibility, silence, and anonymity. Section 3.4 shows that quintessentially English forms of intertextuality feature frequently in Ondaatje’s novel, causing Warlight to resemble a postcolonial con-text which uses texts from the centre ‘against itself.’ In sections 3.1 to 3.4, each feature of historiographic metafiction is found to be working in tandem with the voicing of postcolonial critique.

As a whole, this thesis shows that Ondaatje’s Warlight is a contemporary work of historiographic metafiction which employs the postmodern approach to history for postcolonial purposes, suggesting that historiographical metafiction remains a viable postmodern framework through which to voice postcolonial critique.

This paper examines how the negotiation of the traumas of slavery and its legacies in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) deviates from traditional trauma literature in terms of its form and content. Gyasi’s novel is shown to be structured as a postmemorial family saga, allowing it to highlight the transgenerational and transtemporal effects of trauma in a way that differs markedly from the modernist aesthetics prescribed by traditional trauma theory. Homegoing features a confrontational approach, as it represents trauma directly and explicitly, whilst positioning the reader and several characters as implicated subjects. The novel moreover shows itself attuned to the complexities of trauma by featuring cases of insidious trauma and emphasising how traumas may be rooted in structural issues.

I would also like to thank the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, University of London, for access to the full-text version of EEBO, and Teo Juvonen and my anonymous reviewer for their invaluable comments and suggestions for this paper. 2 The "East Indies" had vague borders, but usually referred to all of South, SouthEast and East Asia. 3 The India Office Records at the British Library contain more than 14 shelf kilometres of both published and unpublished works spanning the years 1600-1948

Research into orthography in the history of English is not a simple venture. The history of English spelling is primarily based on printed texts, which fail to capture the range of variation inherent in the language; many manuscript phenomena are simply not found in printed texts. Manuscript-based corpora would be the ideal research data, but as this is resource-intensive, linguists use editions that have been produced by non-linguists. Many editions claim to retain original spellings, but in practice text is always normalized at the graph level and possibly more so. This does not preclude using such a corpus for orthographical research, but there has been no systematic way to determine the philological reliability of an edited text. In this paper we present a typological methodology we are developing for the evaluation of orthographical quality of edition-based corpora, with the aim of making the best use of bad data in the context of editions and manuscript practices. As a case st...

Research in the digital humanities and computational social sciences requires overcoming complexity in research data, methodology, and research questions. In this article, we show through case studies of three different digital humanities and computational social science projects, that these problems are prevalent, multiform, as well as laborious to counter. Yet, without facilities for acknowledging, detecting, handling and correcting for such bias, any results based on the material will be faulty. Therefore, we argue for the need for a wider recognition and acknowledgement of the problematic nature of many DH/CSS datasets, and correspondingly of the amount of work required to render such data usable for research. These arguments have implications both for evaluating feasibility and allocation of funding with respect to project proposals, but also in assigning academic value and credit to the labour of cleaning up and documenting datasets of interest.

This paper discusses the process of part-of-speech tagging the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension (CEECE), as well as the end result. The process involved normalisation of historical spelling variation, conversion from a legacy format into TEI-XML, and finally, tokenisation and tagging by the CLAWS software. At each stage, we had to face and work around problems such as whether to retain original spelling variants in corpus markup, how to implement overlapping hierarchies in XML, and how to calculate the accuracy of tagging in a way that acknowledges errors in tokenisation. The final tagged corpus is estimated to have an accuracy of 94.5 per cent (in the C7 tagset), which is circa two percentage points (pp) lower than that of present-day corpora but respectable for Late Modern English. The most accurate tag groups include pronouns and numerals, whereas adjectives and adverbs are among the least accurate. Normalisation increased the overall accuracy of tagging by circa ...

On December 13th 1937, the celebrated children's author Arthur Ransome wrote to J. R. R. Tolkien with a few comments on Tolkien's newly published book The Hobbit. Tolkien lost no time in replying, and his letter, held in the Brotherton Library of the University of Leeds, provides one of his earliest comments on his published fiction, and a relatively early explicit commentary on his mythic writing. This article publishes for the first time Tolkien's response to Ransome in its entirety, and answers some of the questions regarding the chronology of Tolkien's correspondence which arise. An analysis of the letter reveals that while, as many scholars have shown, the 'sources' and 'inspirations' of The Hobbit include the likes of Beowulf and the Poetic Edda, already in 1937-and contrary to his own later claims-Tolkien's principal primary source for fleshing out his prose stories with characters, places, and references to historical events was the vast legendarium he had created himself.

First, the idea was to provide diachronic continuity to the first part of the CEEC (finished in 1998, called CEEC-1998), in order to follow through the linguistic changes that were still ongoing in 1681, where the CEEC-1998 terminates (Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg 2003); and second, to track linguistic change in the long eighteenth century. The CEEC-1998 and CEECE allow tracking linguistic features over nearly four centuries from Late Middle English into Late Modern English (the entire CEEC family is consequently referred to as CEEC-400; see Kaislaniemi 2006; Nevala & Nurmi 2013). The compilation of the CEECE followed the completion of the CEEC-1998, which has its roots in the compilation of the Early Modern sections of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (or Helsinki Corpus for short; HC). After the completion and release of the HC, the compilers of the Early Modern section, Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, decided to pursue investigating language change in Early Modern English in more detail. To this end, they would compile a separate corpus of Early Modern English; and due to their interest in testing the applicability of modern sociolinguistic methods on historical materials, they decided to compile the corpus from personal correspondence. The project was initiated in 1993, and with the help of student assistants, the corpus was finished by 1998. The CEEC-1998 covers the period from about 1410 to 1681 and contains some 2.6 million words in nearly 6,000 letters from almost 800 informants. Due to copyright reasons (the CEEC corpora are compiled from published editions) the CEEC-1998 could not be released without acquiring permissions from the publishers. Unfortunately, not all publishers granted permission to publish their texts as part of the corpus, and the version released publicly in 2006, the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence