Search

The literature search that informed our review initially yielded 12,122 papers of potential interest, derived from seven databases. After applying a series of filters we arrived at 92 papers on which we base our findings, thoughts and recommendations for future work. Our methodological approach was informed by the systematic review guidance published by the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (2009), and the Arts Council definition of ‘arts activities’. Hence we considered papers reporting therapeutic arts interventions conducted on 'patients' which included some measurement of a health state. After excluding any research on people less than age 18, we selected studies where participants had active (as opposed to passive) engagement with the therapy/treatment/medium. Only study types which were\ud quantitative were included in this review. Rather than simply criticise the execution of the research we applied our own expertise to the process. It was immediately evident that definitions and categories would pose some difficulties as there is much variety in the language used to describe the arts, therapies and treatment. This\ud is a problem of indexing, causing the literature search and initial screening to be a laborious process. The most commonly reported art activities were: writing, music, art and dance. The most numerous health condition studied was mental health followed by cognitive function, stress\ud and cancer. Most research was carried out in the US and the UK. As a discipline, psychology featured regularly. When arts therapists were involved in the research the descriptions and possible effects of the art medium tended to be better elucidated. Future research into the use of art therapy in healthcare will benefit from a synthesis of approaches that can retain the more robust aspects of, for example, RCTs with the insights that\ud can be derived from qualitative methods.

This thesis presents a unified and innovative contribution to the field of cognitive poetics, and the \ud related field of cognitive stylistics. Its aims to establish the concept of relational deictic metaphors \ud (also referred to as RDMs) as a framework within cognitive poetic analysis. It also aims to extend and \ud augment the frameworks of cognitive deixis, conceptual metaphor, and text-world theory. In this \ud thesis, the discussion centres on the ways in which real readers negotiate their own understanding and \ud interpretation of the relational deictic information and conceptual metaphors they encounter in three \ud passage from three young-adult novels; Why We Broke Up (Handler, 2011), To all the Boys I’ve \ud Loved Before (Han, 2014), and Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (Albertalli, 2015). By \ud combining these frameworks in an in-depth cognitive poetic analysis, I aim to explore how relational \ud deixis and metaphor work together to inform and reflect social relationships and personal identity

Tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) provide a unique opportunity for the creation of LGBT+ characters and narratives. There is a gap in existing scholarship in this area, but the research that is available suggests that TTRPGs are likely to present LGBT+ themes in a manner that is biased to its authors views. This thesis aims to determine the ways in which TTRPGs engage with LGBT+ identities within their rulebooks, and the ways in which TTRPG players construct their LGBT+ characters as a result.\ud This study utilises mixed methods research, combining analysis of rulebooks focused on queer theory and ludology, and a survey of existing TTRPG players in order to achieve the aims set out above. The result of this research primarily discusses a demographic of young, queer adults who have consistently played as at least one LGBT+ character within a TTRPG.\ud Overall, this study found that indicates that the construction of LGBT+ identities within TTRPGs is ultimately a collaborative effort between the rules as written, and the player’s actionable usage of them within a game. With regards to the fluff reality of the game, this meant that players typically ignored game content in favour of creating their own, personalised lore to match their ideal game world. With regards to the mechanical reality of the game, this instead meant that, while rulebooks could provide a clear overview of the author’s intent towards the place of queer content within their game design, players could purposefully choose to ignore any information provided by the game, as they functioned as the final authority on what rules were allowed within the game.

Sperber and Wilson (1995:222) posit the term poetic effect for the peculiar effect of an\ud utterance which achieves most of its relevance through a wide array of weak\ud implicatures. Crucially, the input to pragmatic processing, which prompts the derivation\ud of a poetic effect, is achieved via some stylistically pronounced linguistic feature: for\ud example, a repeated lexical item, a peculiar syntactic form, a piece of alliteration, and so\ud on. However, what has never been considered to any great depth from a relevancetheoretic perspective is how unusual elements of visuospatial form might also impact\ud upon the reader’s basic understanding and wider interpretation of a given poetic text in\ud ways that result in the derivation of specialised poetic effects. Therefore, the thesis\ud posits a relevance-theoretic account of the cognitive-pragmatic effects of short linelength and line divisions, when employed and interpreted within complex forms of\ud poetry.\ud The account is split into two hypotheses relating to short line-length and line\ud divisions respectively. Hypothesis 1 states that the use of short line-length leads to the\ud majority of the text’s lexical material being perceived in a much slower, and therefore\ud intense fashion, which consequently causes the lexical and encyclopaedic entries that\ud such material links to within the mind to remain active for relatively longer periods of\ud time. During such extended periods of lexical and encyclopaedic activation, literary\ud readers are encouraged to inferentially process the text’s explicit-propositional content\ud in relation to a range of further items of encyclopaedic-contextual material, which can\ud give rise to arrays of additional contextual effects of a weakly implicit and therefore\ud poetic nature.\ud Hypothesis 2 states that line divisions are often intentionally utilised in poetic\ud texts by writers in order to visuospatially separate integral syntactic units upon the page.\ud This can encourage readers to pause and briefly consider, upon an anticipatoryhypothetical basis, the various possible pragmatic extensions of the text’s momentarily\ud incomplete logical and propositional status, pre-line division as it were. The various\ud pragmatic extensions may be formulated as arrays of weak explicatures, which for some\ud readers may achieve poetic effects (in the specialised relevance-theoretic sense of the\ud term). The process effectively constitutes the visuospatial equivalent of a deliberate\ud ‘pause for effect’, which triggers a considerable degree of further inferential processing,\ud and provides a distinct communicational ‘reward’ primarily at an explicit-propositional\ud level.