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This thesis seeks to advance literary theory and in particular the theory of poetic language by developing a theory of metonymy as a literary trope. After a critical assessment of available views on metonymy, the first part of the thesis sets out to explore and analyse the aesthetic status, structure and poetic function of metonymy on the basis of concrete literary material. Premised on the notion of poetic language as defamiliarisation and following the establishment of an operational definition of metonymy, a corpus of ancient Greek texts, chiefly from lyric poetry and tragedy, is examined and metonymic occurrences are isolated. Contrasting categories of metonymy are established as they emerge from the corpus and analysed in their individual structure and shared characteristics. Further examples from German poetry are adduced for illustration and comparison as and where appropriate. On this basis, a general theory of metonymy as a literary trope is developed, centred on the notion of contiguity as proposed by Jakobson but now re-interpreted as lexical contiguity: by way of revising the theory of semantic fields, it is suggested that metonymy is best understood as a shift within a semantic field, conceptualising the field itself as the result of regular collocations in ordinary usage. This proposition indicates why metonymy’s defamiliarising effects appear less intense than those of metaphor, explains the relevance of grammatical categories for metonymy and clarifies the relationship between metaphor and metonymy. The second part of the thesis refines this theory and considers some of its further implications in literary practice by assessing what happens to metonymy in translation, that is, under the impact of changed linguistic, syntactic and cultural contexts.

My research relocates Sappho's poetry in the history of sexuality as it intersects with literature, by focusing on the relationship between Sapphic poetics and reader-response. Historicising interpretations of eroticism commonly determine how Sappho's poetry is placed in the history of sexuality, as an ancient example of female homoeroticism. However, the crypto-biographical assumption that the author's persona is always 'in' Sappho's erotic fragments eclipses their striking tendency towards ungendered language and anonymity. Thus, the first chapter reorients our focus from Sapphic persona to poetics, showing that the author's predominant absence coincides with the consistent omission of contextualising social information about lover and/or beloved, even where homoeroticism is unambiguous. Concurrently, rather than identifying a particular sexuality in the text, Sapphic poetics provokes audiences and readers to imagine various erotic possibilities. What variety of viable interpretations around sexuality is made possible by Sapphic poetics? Moreover, on this basis, what counts as 'Sapphic' sexuality? A comparative reader-response approach illuminates both questions in studying creative Sapphic receptions by the Roman poet Catullus, the American trans author Daniel M. Lavery, and British gay activist Maureen Duffy. These reader-writers, firstly, dramatize contrasting ways in which ambiguities in Sappho's poetry can be concretised in reception. They thereby help isolate distinct meanings of 'Sapphic': although their receptions are all 'Sapphic' by responding to Sappho, their style is (mostly) not 'Sapphic' in the sense of being sexually ambiguous like Sappho's poetry. Secondly, they dramatize both moments drawn from the process of reading Sappho, and also the personal aftermath of concretising certain possibilities. They thereby show that a variety of sexual identities may be considered 'Sapphic' in the senses of drawing from and following after close interactions with Sapphic poetics. Thus, a range of 'Sapphic' sexualities, all made possible by Sapphic poetics, emerges, disrupting a tendency to equate 'Sapphic' with what is (only) 'lesbian.' Having shown that 'Sapphic' is defined by multiple relationships to Sappho and her fragments, it emerges that conceptions of Sapphic traditions unduly privilege relationships to the poet over the poetry. For example, although Wittig self-styles as 'Sapphic' qua Sappho's descendent, her novel, The Lesbian Body, is not like Sappho's fragments, because it does not guide readers to respond in the same way as Sappho's fragments. Consequently, writing 'like Sappho's poetry' is frequently neglected and excluded from how Sapphic traditions are framed. Remedying this, I draw out a 'Sapphic mode' of writing in Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, which guides readers to adopt the same intimate 'reading positions,' and to self-reflect consciously in the text's gaps, as Sappho's poetry does. Thus, I rethink 'the Sapphic' to centre what is 'like Sappho's poetry,' which helps us rethink how we create and curate Sappho's legacy and trans-historical significance for the history of literature and sexuality. The conclusion considers the interdisciplinary ramifications of relocating Sappho's poetry in the history of sexuality via a reader-response methodology and the newly conceived 'Sapphic mode.' By locating the text's meaning in the interaction between text and reader, the thesis contributes to classics, classical reception, queer and comparative studies, and the history of sexuality, while also drawing together these distinctive approaches.

This thesis, over six chapters, explores the reception of Latin and Greek literature in the writing of exiles from Nazi Germany. Noting that a number of leading literary figures turned to antiquity during the years of emigration, it examines Classical Reception in the exilic oeuvre of Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Stefan Zweig, Anna Seghers, Robert Neumann, Hermann Broch and Ödön von Horváth. It critically assesses the factors that catalysed their engagement with antiquity, outlining which facets of the Classical past they were drawn to. Do they use antiquity in a mood of affiliation, emulation and exemplarity - or rather one of opposition, repudiation and warning? What are the broad commonalities and patterns across Classical Reception in German-language 'Exilliteratur'? Conversely, what are the characteristic approaches of particular exile writers or groups? In addressing these questions, the thesis argues that émigré Classical Reception can be viewed as a mode of literary resistance - as a powerful intervention into a battleground of cultural conflict. It further argues that exilic recourse to the Classics reveals much about these authors' sense of self, and their conception of literature in times of crisis. Chapter 1, informed by recent scholarship on the Classics under Fascism and National Socialism, argues that there was a sustained, public and ideologically driven appeal to Classical antiquity within the Third Reich itself. National Socialism recast the Greeks and Romans as 'Nordic' forebears, and this doctrine was adopted and reflected across diverse channels of public life - from the academy to popular literature, from educational curricula to public art and propaganda. An exclusivist vision of the ancient past, marked by its monumentality and totality, provided a highly visual distillation of Nazi pretensions of grandeur, conquest and national rebirth - against which authors of exile could write. Émigré authors' challenge to this totalitarian appropriation of the past forms a unifying strand across my thesis. Chapter 2 examines how Bertolt Brecht uses antiquity in a mode of contestation, gainsaying received narratives and deflating the claims of 'great men'. Building upon, but moving beyond, Martin Vöhler's framework of '(Mythen-)Korrektur', it demonstrates how Brecht intervenes into established traditions, across varied genres and media - from poetry, to the short prose narratives 'Berichtigung alter Mythen' and 'Der verwundete Sokrates', to the plays 'Die Horatier und die Kuriatier' and 'Das Verhör des Lucullus', to the unfinished novel 'Die Geschäfte des Herrn Julius Caesar'. Embedded in the structure of Brecht's texts themselves is, the chapter argues, a methodology of scepticism, honed upon and targeted towards myths constructed around (and on the basis of) antiquity. This critical standpoint could then, in turn, be directed towards the political situation of the present. Chapter 3 is concerned with the historical novels of Lion Feuchtwanger. Beginning with Feuchtwanger's theoretical principles, as set out in his 'Centum Opuscula', it then traces how they are borne out in 'Der falsche Nero' and the 'Josephus' trilogy. Feuchtwanger's novels strongly thematise history-writing itself, revealing the subjectivity of the historical record, and thus (like Brecht) fostering a standpoint of scepticism. Feuchtwanger's focus differs from that of Brecht, however, in his overarching conception of history as a conflict between the poles of rationality and irrationality, internationalism and nationalism. My readings explore how Feuchtwanger's vision of the ancient world is innately transcultural, dwelling on the borderlands of the Roman East, the diverse peoples of the Hellenistic world, and the Jewish experience of rebellion and repression. In this regard, Feuchtwanger's presentation of antiquity is revealed as a close reflection of his own avowal of cosmopolitan ideals - ideals that were existentially threatened in the 1930s and 1940s. Chapter 4 examines the evocation of intermediary traditions: Stefan Zweig's appeal to Humanism in his 'Sternstunden der Menschheit' (specifically the 'Sternstunde' 'Cicero'), Bertolt Brecht's innovation on Hölderlin's 'Antigone', and Anna Seghers' commingling of Greek myth with the landscapes of central Europe in the 'Sagen von Artemis'. Comparing and contrasting these three cases, the chapter sets out a typology of different intermediaries - whether values, literary works and authors, or specific evocations of place and time. The traditions are evoked in a mood of reclamation, renewal and innovation, and my reading demonstrates how they set the present experience (both political and exilic) in a wider context, gesturing towards more optimistic transcultural and transtemporal perspectives. Chapter 5 considers how émigrés use Classical exempla to reflect upon the modern experience of exile. With reference to Anna Seghers' 'Die drei Bäume', Lion Feuchtwanger's 'Odysseus und die Schweine', and Robert Neumann's 'An den Wassern von Babylon' (specifically its ninth chapter, 'Marcus - oder die Emigration'), it demonstrates that the figure of Odysseus looms especially large, and argues that mythical archetypes are not deployed in a mood of affiliation alone: on the contrary, the principle of contestation predominates. If émigré writers problematise the mythical models of wandering and nostos, however, they also draw closely upon themes innate to the Odyssean tradition: questions of homecoming, narrative construction and self-perception, and the sense of a Heroic Age in decline. The chapter closes with an analysis of Seghers' 'Das Argonautenschiff', elucidating how these themes are reprised to convey the uncertainties of the exile's return in the immediate postwar period. Chapter 6, with reference to Brecht's 'Die Trophäen des Lukullus', Hermann Broch's 'Der Tod des Vergil' and Ödön von Horváth's 'Pompeji', assesses how the Classical inheritance offers the possibility of optimism, of hope for a world remade in the present. In Brecht's 'Die Trophäen des Lukullus', there is a utopian vision of peace and class solidarity, articulated with reference to the philosophy of Lucretius; Broch's 'Der Tod des Vergil' gives an idiosyncratic reading of Augustan Rome through the lens of 'Epochenwechsel' and the hope of salvation, informed by postclassical reception of Virgil; Horváth's play 'Pompeji' begins in the slave milieu of Roman comedy and ends in the Christian catacombs with the promise of emancipation. These texts, the chapter argues, are richly allusive, combining disparate genres from varied points in history, and by looking backwards also look forwards to the future, imagining new ages of renewal to come. Exilic Classical Reception, my thesis argues, is characterised neither by idealisation nor imitation, but rather by a willingness to probe, re-write and contest received truths. It is sceptical of archetypes, sceptical of the 'great', sceptical of established accounts. This is not to say that it rejects tradition outright: on the contrary, each of the authors in this thesis signals affiliation with models both Classical and postclassical. But it utilises these sources in a dialogistic mode: reworking them to foreground parallels with the contemporary experience, or re-imagining the past through modern ideological standpoints - and thereby incorporating new voices and new perspectives. In this respect, it enacts a principle of oppositional reading; and, by fusing the Classical canon with the unique insights of exile and the anti-Fascist perspective, it opens new avenues of interpretation on antiquity and its ongoing relevance in the modern age.

This thesis examines poetic representations of the male poet's body and masculinity as a nexus for metapoetic reflections in the works of major Augustan Latin and Romantic English poets. Metapoetic moments-that is, moments in which a poem addresses its literariness, poetics, and/or authorial creator-can involve numerous semantic fields: sometimes engaging through punning and wordplay with contemporary critical idiom, but more typically operating suggestively with expressions that are imbued with further (metaphorical, metonymic, or allegorical) meaning which pertains to the poetry itself. Feminist studies of Latin love elegy have productively exposed how the bodies of female beloveds function simultaneously as the human object of the male poet's erotic desire and-having been textually created, moulded, and assessed by the poet's eroticised gaze-also as signifiers for negotiations of the poet's compositions and his status in relation to his work. This thesis expands the scope and interpretative potential of such feminist readings of Latin love elegy in two mutually integrated ways: (a) by considering the explicit or oblique textual presence of the elegiac poet's male body and masculinity as a hitherto overlooked site with metapoetic significance, analogous to that of female beloveds; and (b) by extending this critical perspective beyond ancient literature to the comparative-contrastive study of the same phenomenon in Romantic English poetry. Drawing on recent developments in masculinity studies, it elucidates how representations of the poet's dissident masculinity, body, and sexuality relate to studied authors' poetics, to contemporary literary discourses, and to poetic self-fashioning in both periods.

This thesis historicises a mid-century phenomenon that saw increasing numbers of Chinese writers working in English. I study this "anglophonic turn" mainly through the lives and careers of four women-Yang Buwei, Ling Shuhua, Eileen Chang, and Nieh Hualing-all of whom produced original works, translations, or self-translations in English. Their works took stock of the successes and disappointments of Chinese modernity after the May Fourth era, while advancing stylistic experiments and political commitments through the tricky geopolitics of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Cultural Cold War. Taken together, their individual stories of linguistic and geographical migration offer a women-centred history of how English rose to power as a global lingua franca and as one dominant language of world literature. This corpus of anglophone Chinese writing offers fresh possibilities for comparative work in modernist studies. To this end, I adopt the orientational metaphor "beside/s" as a way of conceptualising these women's affinities with (hence "beside"), and divergences from ("hence besides"), anglophone modernism. "Beside/s" offers a mode of prepositional thinking that stresses the coeval and collaborative nature of the exchanges and contiguities between Chinese and high modernist writers. Their encounters are evidence of the overlapping intellectual networks that stretched across China, the U.K., and the U.S. during the first half of the twentieth century. By positioning these Chinese women beside/s modernism, I avoid the totalising risks of reading them for modernism, the antagonism of reading them against modernism, while sidestepping questions of "who/what came first?" that bedevil practices of reading before or after modernism. "Beside/s" fires at multiple levels of analysis. It co-implicates historical accounts of modern Chinese literature and Euro-American modernism. It draws attention to the neglected women beside/s the famous men of May Fourth literature and high modernism. It points to the minor genres beside/s revolutionary manifestoes and novels, which include self-help works, women's life writing, essays, short stories, and novellas. For scholars committed to the diversification of the New Modernist Studies, "beside/s" offers another interpretive tool for reading outside of the canon.