http://theses.ncl.ac.uk/jspui/handle/10443/71 2026-02-04T10:50:10Z http://theses.ncl.ac.uk/jspui/handle/10443/6641 Title: Wet Land, Dark Water, Crimson Blood: Liquid Fear and Fluid Threat on the Contemporary Gothic Screen Authors: Trotry, Pauline Abstract: This thesis evaluates the place occupied by liquids, flows and fluidity in contemporary English-speaking Gothic film and television texts. Historically, studies have approached the Gothic through the medievalist etymology of the word ‘Gothic’, pointing to a type of architecture associated with the supposedly barbaric past, leading to readings of the genre focusing on the return of the past within an antiquated space. Going beyond these tendencies, I read the Gothic through an overwhelmingly forgotten etymology of the word ‘Gothic’, that is, ‘to pour, to flow’, and , as such, focus on the overlooked fluids and fluidity. The various liquids permeating the contemporary Gothic (sea water, spring water, blood, clay, mud, etc.) materialise the suggested threat and unanchored fear specific to the mode. This thesis thus recontextualises and legitimises liquids and fluidity as a key feature of the contemporary Gothic mode. . While liquids as embodiments of fear are comparatively absent in twentieth century cinema and television, they pervade the postmillennial Gothic and, more widely, Horror screen. Primarily relying on post-millennial Gothic films and television series, this thesis also considers surges of liquid-coded threats in other genres and modes, e.g., Horror and Gore, across the same period. Close readings and materiality-driven analyses delineate a shift in the depiction of threat at the turn of the millennium. The drastically heightened visibility of fluids and focus on fluidity in contemporary fear-inducing cinema and television, what I call the gothicisation of Horror, reflects the liquefaction of threats and fears in the wider culture. Building on Zigmunt Bauman’s rich concept of Liquid Fear within an essentially post-modern liquid culture, I demonstrate that the materially and symbolically liquid threats and fears of the Gothic reflect the unanchored and free- floating anxiety permeating contemporary culture. Description: Ph. D. Thesis 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z http://theses.ncl.ac.uk/jspui/handle/10443/6553 Title: Being a woman and a warrior in modern China : Xie Bingying’s autobiographical practices, 1920s-1980s Authors: Li, Zheng Abstract: There are two prevailing public perceptions of Xie Bingying 谢冰莹 (1906–2000): as a rebellious daughter leaving the patriarchal family and as a courageous soldier dedicated to national salvation. The former aligns with the emphasis on women’s emancipation since the late Qing period, which intertwined individualism and nationalism and heralded a new page in modern Chinese literature. The latter stems from Xie’s involvement in the Chinese civil war and anti-imperialist struggles throughout the twentieth century. Both perceptions encompass Xie’s experiences of domestic, social, and national wars, establishing her as a recognised woman warrior and weaving her story into the spectrum of women warriors in Chinese history. Historians often rely on Xie’s autobiographical writings as primary sources to study Chinese women’s wartime involvement. However, less attention has been paid to the nuanced dimensions of Xie’s emotional struggles in factional conflicts, her construction and reconstruction of war memories, and her efforts to empower herself and ordinary women through the establishment of an intimate female community on the frontlines. Instead, her lived experience has often been reduced to a grand patriotic narrative centred around specific historical events rather than capturing the dynamic changes, ruptures, and continuity in her life. How did a female warrior situate herself in wars on various levels at different life stages? To what extent does her constant revision of memory relate to her geopolitical mobility from mainland China to Taiwan and the US? How did she navigate women’s wartime corps to reconcile ‘crisis femininity’ and the exploitation of women’s emotional labour by the nationalist agenda? Overall, what was a modern-day woman warrior, and how did she negotiate with herself and others? In China, the interpretation of first-person wartime accounts is still in its early stages, and the field has not yet fully developed a reading of traumatic experiences that distinguishes it from interpretations in Western warfare. Through a textual analysis of Xie’s autobiographical writing, this study aims to explore her gendered, transnational, and intergenerational war memories, with a particular focus on a woman warrior’s subjectivity in war remembrance. It also discusses how Xie worked into this seemingly nation-oriented and male-oriented discourse of war and reconciled its violence with individualistic humanity and female affect. Description: PhD Thesis 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z http://theses.ncl.ac.uk/jspui/handle/10443/6469 Title: The Representation of Masculinities in Edward Yang’s Films During Taiwan’s Rapid Transition into Modernity Authors: Poon, Ka Lai Carrie Abstract: This study explores the representation of masculinity through the lens of Edward Yang’s work. While the thematic and stylistic characteristics of Yang’s city films with Taipei as the main protagonist have been widely documented, the representation of masculinity has remained an under-researched area in Yang’s films. This thesis fills a gap in the study of Yang’s distinctive film language by articulating how his representation of Taiwanese masculinities reflects on and critiques the negative social-cultural impact experienced by Taiwanese society partly as a result of its complex colonial history and its rapid transition into modernity. This research also examines the representation of masculinities in pre-TNC Taiwanese cinema, and briefly discusses male identities shown in Hong Kong and mainland China Cinema, to situate Yang’s different perception and filmic representation of masculinity in the wider context of Chinese language cinema. Informed by a tripartite epistemological framework which consists of postcolonial, Chinese/Western masculinity and modernity theories, this thesis uses close textual analysis to explore the conundrum of Taiwanese masculinity formation through the lens of Yang’s film language. The close textual analysis to investigate Yang’s representation is based on his whole oeuvre of seven and a quarter feature films, with a special focus on his use of space, frames within-frames, and glass/ mirror/figurative reflections. Yang highlights the challenges of masculinity construction in a society with ever-shifting norms. The weakening colonial, patriarchal and Confucian influences in Taiwanese society, in combination with the consequences of different stages of modernity, contribute to a problematized, frustrated and entrapped Taiwanese masculinity. These findings add new insights to the study of Taiwanese masculinity and Taiwan’s vernacular modernity as represented in Taiwan cinema, in Taiwan’s own terms, instead of being subsumed within the larger sphere of cinematic representation of Chinese masculinity. Description: PhD Thesis 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z http://theses.ncl.ac.uk/jspui/handle/10443/6439 Title: Eye Will Tell You – How Gaze Aversion Reveals Trainee Interpreters’ Cognitive Load during Consecutive Interpreting Active Listening and Notetaking Authors: Guo, Wenbo Abstract: This thesis investigates trainee interpreters' Gaze Aversion (GA) - an overt strategy for regulating high cognitive load - from notepads during Consecutive Interpreting (CI) active listening and notetaking. The general aim of this project is to reveal the intricacy of GA in the context of CI active listening and notetaking and introduce it as a cognitive load indicator to Interpreting Studies. Specifically, the project fulfils several aims: to investigate if interpreters would conduct GA during active listening and notetaking when experiencing high cognitive load; to explore textual features that could potentially contribute to GA; to test if GA would enhance interpreters' performance. This PhD includes two studies: a corpus study and an experiment. The corpus study involved coding thirty videos of trainee interpreters performing English-to-Chinese CI. The experiment was conducted to corroborate the findings from the corpus study and further explore the intricacy of GA in a controlled environment. A mixed methods design involving the coding of GA, speech difficulty ratings, observation of features of the source text preceding GA, and priming was adopted for the investigation. Results indicate that GA was observed among participants, but the behaviour was subject to considerable individual differences. GA was associated with various preceding textual features, but complex syntactic structures and low-frequency words were potent GA inducers. Results also suggest that although GA reliably indicated trainee interpreters' high cognitive load, it did not enhance interpreting performance as hypothesised in previous studies. Instead, GA was associated with inferior renditions. The absence of performance-enhancing benefits could be explained by the possibility that trainee interpreters' cognitive load reached over a tipping point where GA would be futile in circumventing cognitive overload, suggesting that GA could indicate cognitive crisis. Description: PhD Thesis 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z