Mediate words: translation, nationalism, and religion in the works of Robert Browning and B. Kojo Laing

Thesis

This thesis mediates comparative encounters between two authors themselves interested in mediating between different linguistic and cultural communities. By reading the Victorian British poet Robert Browning and the twentieth-century Ghanaian poet and novelist Kojo Laing alongside one another, and by allowing the numerous and surprising points of similarity, congruence, and connection between them to organise critical reading, the three main chapters of this thesis explore the affiliative range of literary texts outside of their ‘format of habitual connection’. This entails developing a comparative criticism attuned to the ways in which congruent contexts (times of nation-building, tensions between liberalism and imperialism) and shared contexts (Anglicanism, English as a ‘global’, imperial language) relate to congruent and shared stylistic techniques (multilingualism and grotesque comedy, for instance). It also entails a revised notion of ‘world literature’ that reflects how a text’s tendency to gesture towards interrelationships past national borders might remain in tension with a reticence or uncertainty about the ways in which this gesturing can overlook local difference. Proceeding from an analysis of both authors’ translational desire to stretch the English language through the incorporation of foreign linguistic elements (Chapter One), and their different but related tendencies to interrogate the limits of nationalist discourse and national geographies (Chapter Two), to their shared interest in the relationship between religious and spiritual affiliative communities and comic and grotesque literary styles (Chapter Three), this thesis explores the manifold junctures between Laing’s and Browning’s texts—and, indeed, junctures between different ways of reading them. What emerges is a literary cartography capable of reflecting the ways in which texts that themselves attempt to think beyond the confines of national borders, cultural limits, and linguistic communities relate to one another.

Authors: Hankinson, J

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Postcolonialism; Comparative Literatire; translation; Victorian Poetry; Religion; Kojo Laing; World Literature; Ghana; Nationalism; Robert Browning
• Subjects: English literature--19th century; African literature (English); Comparative literature