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Entitled ‘Dams, Displacement and Development in Narratives of the Nubian Awakening’, this thesis is explicitly interdisciplinary and straddles the fields of literary, postcolonial, and critical development studies. It demonstrates how a literary approach to the study of Development-Induced Displacement and Resettlement (DIDR) can enhance our understanding of the long-term impact of forced displacement and resettlement on communities like the Nubian people of Egypt, whose historical homeland was flooded to make way for the Aswan High Dam in 1964. It examines how contemporary Egyptian Nubian fiction written between 1968 and the present day, particularly that associated with the revivalist movement known as the ‘Nubian Awakening’, has responded to, and represented, the legacy of dam-building on the Nile over the course of the twentieth century on Nubian culture and society. Speaking through the silences within hegemonic development discourses that celebrate large dams as symbols of economic, scientific and social progress while glossing over their local costs, I argue that the fiction of Muhammad Khalil Qasim, Yahya Mukhtar, Haggag Hassan Oddoul and Idris ‘Ali rewrites the postcolonial history of the Aswan High Dam from a subaltern perspective and constitutes a form of transnational cultural advocacy for Nubian rights. Moreover, by highlighting Egypt’s African identity, Nubian literature challenges hegemonic understandings of Egyptian national culture as Arab, thereby creating a more democratic space in which marginalised minority groups can claim a place for their subjectivities, political aspirations and cultural practices within the national imaginary.

This thesis examines the representation of water in Israeli and Palestinian literature, from the early years of Zionist settlement at the start of the twentieth century, to the daily violence of today’s ongoing occupation. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on disciplines including cultural geography, science and technology studies, and, inevitably, politics. At the same time, it situates these explorations in the context of the increasingly fevered contemporary debates on ‘water wars’, global water crisis, and the Anthropocene. In doing so, it demonstrates the many ways in which water intersects with Israeli and Palestinian cultures, at the same time as indicating the potential for literary approaches to deepen and critique existing political, scientific and corporate discourse on the future of the world’s water. Literary critics have so far had little to say about water. Land has always seemed more politically important and cultural meaningful. The significance of land appears dramatically amplified in the context of Israel/Palestine, where issues of land, borders and sovereignty remain painful and unresolved. This neglect of water exists in spite of a growing trend towards reading literature for its representations of resources, most prominently in the subject of ‘petrofiction’. No resource, however, is more fundamental than water. In bringing water to the forefront, this thesis has significant implications for future research in Israeli and Palestinian literary studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities. It demonstrates the potential for a focus on water to open up an array of new texts for exploration, and for literary research to productively complicate and enrich our understanding of, as well as our relationship with, the ubiquitous, and far more than merely ‘natural’ substance of water.

The aim of this thesis is to lay the ground for further work on interpreting Coleridge’s Logic and its relation to the rest of his philosophy, particularly the system of speculative metaphysics and theology presented in Coleridge’s Opus Maximum fragments. I do this by exploring the connections between Coleridge’s conceptions of the a priori, the cognitive faculties (or capacities), and the nature of logical theory. Part 1 seeks to place Coleridge’s views on logic in their broader historical and intellectual context, showing why Coleridge considered the investigation of the faculties, and the analysis of our cognitive operations and contents, to be fundamental to logical theory, and arguing that this position is a product of Coleridge’s critical engagement with the early modern logic of ideas and faculties. Part 2 gives a preliminary account of Coleridge’s interpretation of two key Kantian terms, ‘a priori’ and ‘transcendental’, exploring the analogies Coleridge uses to elucidate the nature of the a priori and the purpose of transcendental claims. Part 3 expands on this account, considering how Coleridge’s conceptions of the a priori and the transcendental inform his claims, especially in Logic, on the human mental faculties and their contribution to sensory experience and cognition; it focuses on Coleridge’s views on ‘the obvious threefold division’ of our cognitive capacities into sense, understanding, and reason, his descriptions of the formal (a priori) and material (a posteriori) elements of cognition, and his functional theory of the constitution of our faculties. Part 4 discusses the relations between Coleridge’s theory of the cognitive capacities and his conception of the a priori, focusing on Coleridge’s claims concerning the origins of a priori forms and contents in our cognitive capacities, and the transcendental method of inquiry which he contends is able to prove such claims.

This thesis examines literary representations which depict the evolution of capitalist development in narratives by Israeli, Palestinian and Sri Lankan writers. This comparative study is the first of its kind to bring the contexts of Israel/Palestine and Sri Lanka together. Collectively, my chapters analyse a range of literary texts by writers including Yosef Brenner, Sahar Khalifeh, Punyakante Wijenaike and Ambalavaner Sivanandan which explore the separatist ethnonational conflicts. I focus on narratives which critique the dominant discourse of development in their societies, through the formal and literary strategies that the writers utilise such as utopia, realism and melodrama. I argue that the texts I consider draw attention to the impact of uneven development on the content and form of literature in order to resist the current dispensation. This resistance is invaluable when one considers that development continues to be a contentious and divisive issue in Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka and beyond today, yet one that has clear implications for sustainable peace. As a result, my research highlights that literature can play an invaluable role in anticipating, if not imagining, alternatives to the current world order.