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Race remains one of the least discussed topics among Glasgow's critics and no consensus about her racial politics has been reached. Some critics argue that race is almost absent from Glasgow's agenda of social criticism compared to her more vocal feminist views. Other critics accuse Glasgow of outright racism, citing what they see as a condescending and racist characterisation of African Americans in her works. A third view defends the existence of a valid impetus against racism in Glasgow's works but refers to her attitude as ambiguous. While these researchers aid understanding of Glasgow's fiction, their critique is tied into the more conventional approach to race studies that concentrates on the effect of racism rather than the role of the racist subject. This study attempts to redress the limitations of the existing studies of Glasgow's works by incorporating her identity as a white southern woman and the identity of her white characters in the reading of race in her novels. My reading attempts to tease out the subtle or unconscious ideologies and practices of white identity that originated, transformed, and most importantly, naturalised the construct of race, gender, and class in the southern context. Thus, the approach taken is to focus on Glasgow's characters as identities shaped by a broad white culture that in itself was changing, affecting and effected by the South's historical, political, and social contexts. My approach is to embed close textual analysis of the novels within whiteness theories and within historical and social studies to render visible the multiple and changing origins of white identity. Focusing on six key novels: The Battle-Ground (1902), The Deliverance (1904), The Voice of the People (1900), One Man in His Time (1922), Vein of Iron (1935), and In This Our Life (1941), this research aims to analyse how Glasgow's aristocratic characters serve to critique white masculinity as a sustainable identity; how her poor white characters offer strategies to whiteness that challenge class exclusivity; and how her female characters adopt alternative approaches for self-realisation that negotiate with gender determinism.

This thesis examines the various theatrical Oliver Twists that appeared on the nineteenth-century page and stage; it pays particular attention to archival sources and the people who brought favourite (and some more unfamiliar) moments to a theatregoing public in London. While interested in Dickens's aesthetic and professional connections to the popular stage, this thesis is not primarily interested in Dickens's stage work or indeed his plays; instead, I seek to show that Oliver Twist took on a varied theatrical life outside of the limits of the novel. In doing so, I aim to highlight lesser known figures of the nineteenth-century popular cultural landscape - by moving attention away from Dickens, these forgotten figures can be brought more fully into critical discussion, and their work more fully appreciated and explored. We are, in the twenty-first century, astutely aware of the continued proliferation of adaptations bearing the name Oliver Twist or some variant. the most famous of which is situated at the intersection of the stage and page, theatre and television. Though one could point to David Lean's classic film (1948) as one towering example of an Oliver Twist made for the screen, Lionel Bart's sensationally successful (and itself continually adapted) Oliver! is surely the most embedded within popular cultural consciousness. In the edited collection Dickens and Modernity (2012), both Josh Marsh and Carrie Sickmann have contended that Oliver! surely 'marked a genuine 'revolution' in theatre history ... and spur to the Dickens adaptation industry'; they go on to relate how Oliver! has contributed to an ongoing process of adaptation, whereby the story of the orphan boy has been transported to new times and new places.

Natural language generation (NLG) is the process wherein computers produce output in readable human languages. Such output takes myriad forms, including news articles, sports reports, prose fiction, and poetry. These computer-generated texts are often indistinguishable from human-written texts, and they are increasingly prevalent. Yet NLG has not been subject to any comprehensive study within the humanities. This thesis represents the first such study. Through an interdisciplinary approach rooted in the humanities, but also drawing from the social sciences and computer science, this thesis explores the social and hermeneutic implications of NLG. More specifically, it examines how NLG challenges traditional understandings of authorship and what it means to be a reader. Any act of reading engages interpretive faculties, and readers tend to assume that a text is an effort to communicate a particular message. Readers ascribe authorial intention, hence developing a perceived contract between the author and the reader: ‘the hermeneutic contract'. Computer-generated texts in their current state bring the hermeneutic contract into question. The hermeneutic contract's communication principle rests on two assumptions: that readers believe that authors want them to be interested in their texts, and that authors want readers to understand their texts. The contract depends on an understanding of authorship as characterised by intention-driven agency. This thesis presents the results of a series of focus groups and an online questionnaire conducted to discern readers' emotional responses to NLG and how readers attribute authorship to computer-generated texts. The results of these studies indicate that readers assign a sense of agency to an NLG system, attempting to establish the hermeneutic contract even when faced with a computer-generated text. Consequently, I argue that a continuum from authorship to generatorship is perhaps a more suitable schema for considering computer-generated texts than a simple author-not author dichotomy. This thesis begins with a historical overview of salient narrative NLG systems. The discussion then shifts to a theoretical consideration of authorship and the role of the reader as pertaining to NLG systems. Then, the results of the abovementioned empirical studies are reviewed and analysed. The final chapter argues for a semantic shift from describing NLG systems as tools to social agents in themselves; the NLG system truly becomes an algorithmic author. NLG is here, and it is everywhere. This thesis explores what that means from a humanities perspective.

In this thesis I aim to make a distinctive contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the post-9/11 Anglophone novel. In each of four main chapters, which follow a substantial Introduction that seeks to contextualise the case studies to come by examining political, military, philosophical and artistic responses to the attacks and their aftermath, I offer analysis of two texts taken from either US or UK fiction. My principal intentions are twofold: firstly, to offer a multifaceted assessment of the post-9/11 novel, identifying some of its most significant formal and thematic variants and evaluating the ideological implications of these; secondly, to engage dialogically with the existing critical archive, for example by assessing the argument of Richard Gray and others that post-9/11 novels have tended - with politically regressive effects - to 'domesticate' their deeply troubling subject matter. The sequence of chapters is designed to move successively outwards from the events of September 11th. Thus, Chapter One is concerned with novelistic responses to the destruction of the Twin Towers itself, and it takes as its case studies Falling Man (2007) by Don DeLillo and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) by Jonathan Safran Foer. Chapters Two and Three are both concerned with fictional assessments of the impact of 9/11 and its aftermath upon particular population groups. In Chapter Two I explore representations of the post-9/11 condition of the 'white privileged', using as my examples Saturday (2005) by Ian McEwan and The Emperor's Children (2006) by Claire Messud; while in Chapter Three, in readings of Netherland (2008) by Joseph O'Neill and Brick Lane (2003) by Monica Ali, I explore subaltern or marginal perspectives that have often struggled for representational and discursive power in the face of hegemonic Western responses to 9/11. Chapter Four builds upon the preceding chapter by focusing upon representations of the figure of the terrorist himself and assessing what The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) by Mohsin Hamid and Terrorist (2006) by John Updike have to tell us about Islamic radicalisation in the modern era. These last two case studies also allow us to consider the historical and geographical range of the post-9/11 novel, since they resist interpretation of the events of September 11th as singular and localised happenings (an unfortunate tendency that is reinforced in much of the official response to 9/11).

This thesis contributes to the body of recent critical works which have sought to reinterpret the novels of Jane Austen, by restoring their historical context to reveal the breadth of her achievement. Demonstrating her awareness of illicit sexual behaviour during the Georgian era and showing that she weaves allusions to this pervasive aspect of her society throughout her works, it debunks claims that her novels are a product of rural isolation and that she was disengaged from the wider currents of her turbulent world. This thesis argues that Austen employs these references to engage with contemporary gender debates on the position of females within Georgian society, by showing that courtship could be a threatening arena within a hostile social structure that can lead a naïve, vulnerable woman to her downfall.

This thesis explores the relationship between Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee. The focus of the chapters that follow turns from the question of influence towards Coetzee's development of what I am terming a literary thinking. My approach is informed by current debates in literary studies and seeks to build upon Derek Attridge's claim for the distinctiveness of the literary. This thesis shows how Coetzee's complex and ongoing engagement with Beckett leads to an understanding of the ethico-political significance of literature precisely as distinct from other discursive domains. To reveal the ethico-political import of Coetzee's works I draw upon hitherto unexplored archival materials and trace throughout this project the way in which Coetzee's fiction interacts with his non-fiction (particularly regarding the commentaries on Beckett), starting from the earliest works of the 1960s and concluding with the most recently published novel, The Schooldays of Jesus (2016). Central to my contention about the ethico-political ramifications of Coetzee's literary thinking is the notion of life. Life explicitly demarcates the arena upon which Coetzee approaches Beckett. By adopting and adapting the latter's sustained critique of anthropocentrism and Enlightenment rationality, Coetzee's literary thinking situates life at the border between ethics and politics. Life, however, is also pivotal to my account of how literary works function as literature, as an affective and embedded mode of thinking that disrupts the static truths of philosophy. The greater ambition of this thesis is therefore to contribute to both the growing scholarship on Coetzee, especially in terms of his relation to Beckett and other modernist precursors, but also to larger contemporary debates about the relation between life and literature.

E M Forster's now-famous distinction between flat and round characters has become a widely accepted feature of creative writing practice and pedagogy, and of literary analysis. In this thesis, Forster's notion of roundness is a major point of departure, synthesised with the key features of intersectionality. Arising from its coinage in feminist legal theory, intersectionality appreciates identity as a matrix of simultaneous, mutually reinforcing points of privilege or marginalisation, for example, how Black women experience the double oppressions of racism and misogyny, or how class status complicates racial privilege. Intersectionality takes a particular interest in socially marginalised voices and the structures of dominance and oppression which maintain uneven social power dynamics. An intersectional approach to creative writing can serve the aesthetic interests of a work by using the political dimension of characters' lives to greater effect. Intersectionality can also challenge certain unspoken conventions in creative writing practice, such as the tendency to leave race - and particularly whiteness - unmarked, a move which passively reinforces the conflation of whiteness (and other normative identities) with the 'universal'. This thesis explores four contemporary, US coming-of-age novels which confront or confound some of these conventions by making political subject positions (here we look at race, gender, class and sexuality) more visible and active in character and plot formation. The practical element of this thesis demonstrates the execution of an intersectional approach. Cygnet is coming-of-age literary fiction told from the geographic and political margins, following a protagonist at the intersection of subordinated race, gender, class and age (youth). She lives temporarily in a diverse community defined by their marginalisation on the basis of old age. Her emergence into adulthood is burdened by her socio-economic position, lack of support structures and the particular vulnerability of marginalised people to the effects of climate change.

This PhD thesis consists of part of historical novel, Viking Fire, and an accompanying critical thesis. The novel recounts the life of Harald Sigurdson, King of Norway (c. 1015 - 25 September 1066) better known by his posthumous nickname Harald Hardrada. The work was published by Little, Brown, on September 22nd, 2016 and was selected by The Times as one of their Books of the Year, 2016. The critical essay will follow the novel. It is structured into four chapters. Chapter One will explain the initial inspiration for the series of novels and will examine how I navigated the major sources for the period and combined them with non-contemporaneous material in my creative process. Chapter Two will provide the theoretical framework for this thesis, reviewing some of the major theoretical modellings of the historical novel, address how the historical novel fits into a larger body of historical writing, and how the historical novel negotiates the patchy historical record. Chapter Three is designed to illustrate and explore further some of the theoretical models related in Chapter Two and, more importantly, to allow me to trace, selectively, some of the literary-historical developments of the historical novel in Britain, how the selected novelists responded to what might be called 'the historical sublime', how they brought a sense of verisimilitude to their work, and how they represented their own research for their novels. Chapter Four is a personal essay which deals at length with my aims and inspiration as a writer, the positioning of the novel, how I created a fictional Harald Hardrada, and the linguistic choices I made for the novel. Finally, this chapter will examine how this critical thesis informed the creative part of this thesis, and altered my own reaction to the historical sublime, that is the effect produced by the lack of evidence that the past presents to us.

This project explores the idea of 'uncriticizability', a term used on rare but significant occasions in Walter Benjamin's writing about literature, art, and criticism. Serving both as a framework for Benjamin's recognition of the foundational crisis undergone by criticism in the late eighteenth century and as a cornerstone of his concerns about the possibilities and limits of criticism in the 1920s and early 1930s, uncriticizability plays a multi-faceted but often enigmatic role in the history and philosophy of modern literature and literary criticism. The thesis begins by considering the diverse implications of Immanuel Kant's entanglement of poetic form and organic life in his Critique of the Power of Judgment. After outlining recursive tensions in Kant's attempts to find a place for poetry in the third Critique, I show how the theorists of early German Romanticism, rather than assuming Kant to have successfully closed his critical system, developed a theory that imagined literature's 'life' as its infinite capacity for critical renewal in historically diverse contexts. Through close engagements with Benjamin's early work on criticism and language, I offer a new reading of his doctoral dissertation, 'The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism', arguing that the idea of literature's 'criticizability' here arises as a conceptual solution to a singular linguistic problem, which 'uncriticizability' is more likely to capture. In registering the continued relevance of pre-Kantian philosophies of nature, uncriticizability, however, simultaneously confronts literary criticism with its own, apparently inescapable grounding in myth. This argument is pursued through readings of Goethe's Elective Affinities and Benjamin's essay thereon, as well as a range of other literary, philosophical, and scientific texts, both exalted and obscure. The problem of uncriticizability, I argue, captures a trait shared between poetry and politics: like literature, politics is irreducible to the temporal conditions that render it fully comprehensible.

During the final decades of the nineteenth century girls' culture flourished. As recent scholarship has shown, this culture pivoted on an engagement with fiction and particularly the periodical press. Magazines such as the Girl's Own Paper and the Monthly Packet provided spaces where girls could benefit from being part of a larger network of contributors. The reciprocal reading and writing culture accessed through periodicals epitomised the experience of a creative and intellectual adolescence for many girls during the late-Victorian era. This thesis explores a discrete girls' culture that was also cultivated in diaries and circulated manuscript magazines during this period. As these writings were shared with family or peers respectively, they can be viewed as tools of socialisation or 'apprenticeships' in writing, as well as in girlhood. Yet girls' writings were also sites of resistance; in responding to the model literary and print culture in which they were immersed, girls cultivated an autonomous writing culture which hinged on strategies of adaptation and appropriation. Sociological theories of youth culture have demonstrated that young people actively contribute to cultural reproduction and change. When combined with theories of literary appropriation in this thesis, these insights shed light on the specific types of authorship which reflect girls' simultaneous participation in and exclusion from a dynamic literary and print culture. This thesis analyses the development of girls' literary culture in the late-Victorian manuscript writings. Moreover it contextualises girls' appropriative writing culture in broader debates concerning late-Victorian literature and publishing, gender and Girls Studies. Through considering little- or never-before-studied girls' manuscripts and texts as integral to late-Victorian literary culture, this thesis makes a significant and original contribution to these flourishing research areas. It contributes to the lively debate in childhood studies which seeks to assign agency to children in the archive, as well as the ongoing feminist project to incorporate female writings into the study of literary history.

My PhD is entitled Sub-Versions of Reading. The thesis is concerned with critical refractions such as reading, interpretation, criticism, commentary ... activities which resemble each other in that they do not resemble that from which they derive; thus derived rather than original, secondary rather than primary, their status is also deemed second-rate. My aim has been both to reread their inferior plight and rewrite this plight through the theoretical insights culled from recent literary theory. I therefore compare two theoretical frameworks, one hermeneutic, the other post-structural both of which have contributed, each in different ways, towards a theorization of reading. Following this, I come to argue that the kind of Unitarian, totalizing hermeneutic approach, which seeks to reduce the original text's polysemantic possibilities, unlike a post-structuralist strategy which renders the "original” indeterminable and unleashes the isotropisms of textuality, can make no real critical difference to empower the refractor, be it the reader, critic or translator. Thus my argument finally uses translation, as the very site, that 'impossible place' where the multiple discourses on reading, re-reading, misreading, (un)readabl1ty, reading/as/writing connect, and where the (sub)version of translation can be theorized differently. Here, theories can be seen to multiply, and in multiplying, they not merely transform the "state" of translation (as a re/writing) but also the state of "theory" (as a multiplication of theorems).

This thesis investigates the representation of female emancipation through the complex interaction between the Bharata Natyam performer's dancing body and the postmodern and postcolonial space that the diasporic Indian woman occupies in Britain. Beginning with an examination concerning the historical rise of the female Bharata Natyam performer, this discourse provides a contextual and analytical framework for the critical exploration of Shobana Jeyasingh's contemporary choreography. The intention of this is to recognise that throughout antiquity, and as mentioned in several historical and religious Hindu texts, the South Asian woman has been responsible for articulating a vocabulary that assisted in elevating the status of the female Bharata Natyam dancer. This work also considers the decline of the female Bharata Natyam performer, as seen in 1892 through the "interference" of the coloniser and how this, in a curious subversion, gave rise to the rebirth of a dying art by female dance practitioners as Tanjore Balasaraswati (1918-84) and Rukmini Devi (1904-86). Further, this section investigates the influence of gender identity and the identity of the Indian nation through the efforts of the women mentioned above and how they were concerned in exalting the position of the female performer. Drawing upon this contextual scaffolding, the second half of the thesis explores Jeyasingh's biographical narratives and questions how her migratory journeys are replicated in her contemporary arrangements. Through an examination of these constructions, the thesis explores Jeyasingh's representation of the female migrant as positioned "inside" the geo-cultural boundaries of Britain and how her and her daughter's or daughters' identities denote a modification to Bharata Natyam. The compositions analysed range from Jeyasingh's Making of Maps, from 1992, to more recent arrangements like Faultline, staged in 2007. Finally, the thesis attempts to contribute to the academic discourse through its discussion of how the diasporic female dancer exhibits an empowered hybrid vocabulary that is associated with both the "past" and "present".

This thesis addresses the largely unchallenged assumption that the passivity of Jean Rhys’s protagonists is a dysfunctional limitation of agency. It proposes that Rhys’s critique of oppressive forms of power is at the heart of a passivity which is in opposition to dominant ways of being and thinking. It is argued that in Rhys’s four later novels there is a textual insistence on both the positive value of difference and the potentiality of difficult feeling. The study rethinks the value of Rhysian negativity using the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze as a presiding framework along with contemporary feminist theory, especially the work of Sianne Ngai and Sara Ahmed. Deleuze’s celebration of difference and his theorisations with Félix Guattari of minor literature and affect are used to interrogate the complexities of Rhys’s style and narrative strategies, and to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of her use of passivity as subversion and her exploration of becoming in the modern world. The thesis analyses how Rhys’s navigation of passionate dissent and morbid affects challenges the values attached to the less powerful and posits an alternative to the conventional quest for happiness. Focusing on failure, a textual death drive and the problem of female transmission, the study identifies in Rhys’s later four novels a preoccupation with the limitations of the literary text, and contends that her work conducts a ‘libidinal mapping’ which addresses the problem of complicity. It is argued that a search for the conditions of communality spans these novels. Deleuze’s intensive reading method is used to think through what emerges in Rhys’s inscription of difficult connection in numerous fraught scenes, and the thesis questions whether, ultimately, danger and negative affect attend or in fact permit the possibility of self-making for the emerging subject.

This thesis considers ways of reading posthumousness in narrative in various theoretical and literary constellations by focusing on temporality and historical time. Defining posthumousness in terms of a narrative perspective adopted after the death of a character or the narrator, I consider how writers reanimate historical characters, adopt imagined posthumous perspectives and reconstruct historical memory. I combine approaches to temporality by Paul Ricoeur and Mark Currie, incorporating elements of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory including Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s writing on crypts, Ned Lukacher’s analysis of primal scenes and prosopopoeia, and Jacques Derrida’s writing on the archive. Each chapter considers how historical time is imagined within narratives concerned with posthumousness. Chapter 1 considers how historical time is given a place within the posthumous narrative of Iain Sinclair and Rachel Lichtenstein’s Rodinsky’s Room. Chapters 2 and 3 develop ideas of historical time and the posthumous in relation to Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book. Chapter 4 compares Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and José Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Chapter 5 analyzes posthumousness in Bruno Schulz’s stories, and how these are reimagined by Jonathan Safran Foer (Tree of Codes), David Grossman (See Under: Love) and Cynthia Ozick (The Messiah of Stockholm). I focus on these novels’ engagement with posthumousness, including how primal elements of memory and historical time are given new presences. I consider how this approach to fiction and historical time gives the past a new life in narrative, giving time for what Schulz describes in his story ‘The Age of Genius’: ‘events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, divided and allotted; events that have been left ... hanging in the air, homeless and errant.’

This thesis considers James Joyce’s Ulysses as a text that plays with its own relationships to the author and the reader. It draws out the complexities and contradictions of a Joycean – and Barthesian – sense of ‘play’, by exploring the activity of reading prompted by the novel’s intertextuality and narrative. Alongside such investigation, I trace the history of approaches to the author within and without Joyce studies – to unravel how reading Ulysses interacts with such shifting sand. Through a methodology of ‘reading reading’, I analyse overlooked layers of Homeric orality and scholarship in ‘Eumaeus’, the development of Joyce studies from the 1920s to the present, modern understandings of the concept of the author, irreverent approaches to biography, and how reading ‘Calypso’ and ‘Wandering Rocks’ enacts a clash of readerly and authorial authority. This results in an unusual, looping structure, alternating analysis of Ulysses, Joyce studies, and other texts: exhibiting the impossibility of separately discussing author, reader, text, or – as chapters progress – critic. The thesis asks how one can place limits on where readings of Ulysses take us; how to discuss anti-authorialism in a field as author-centric as Joyce studies; and how the oft-asserted idea that opposites can be simultaneously true in Ulysses offers a valuable way to approach and query critical and theoretical understandings of how authors, readers, and texts interact. Writing ‘against Joyce’ (resisting, preparing for, leaning on) responds to theoretical and critical approaches and habits that pitch reader against author: that declare the birth of the reader must come at the cost of the author, or give greater currency – however veiled – to an author’s understanding of their text, over a reader’s. Above all else, this thesis proposes that to unpick the author question we should focus our attention on the activity of reading: self-aware, self-interrogative reading.

My thesis investigates the antithetical movements of self-destruction and of self-creation in a selection of works by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. In order to shed light on this paradox, I use the mythological figure of Thanatos, which is conceptualised as a principle of death within life as well as one of life within death. The figure of Thanatos will enable me to trace the ways in which various strategies in the writings both create, and destroy, the texts on multiple levels. I work with two distinct critical methods to illuminate these paradoxical movements. In the first part of the thesis, the analysis is foregrounded in a combination of French Existentialist theory with precepts from the American Transcendentalist tradition in order to define an American variant of Existentialism. This framework allows the trope of alienation, and its impact on both self and text in Big Sur [1962], to come to the fore. Big Sur is read as a novel that plays on motifs of self-destruction in an unprecedented way in Kerouac’s writing. In ‘Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ [1956], the figure of Moloch is interpreted as a principle of nothingness in the poem. Moloch is understood in relation to various forms of engagement both Existentialist and transcendental in essence. In Part 2, Kerouac’s Tristessa [1960] is analysed from the perspective of the Kantian Sublime. In Tristessa, the narrator’s desire for the eponymous heroine emanates from the projection of a romanticised form of deathliness that channels the Sublime, and that threatens the self and the text in return, thereby conjuring the paradox of Thanatos.

The thesis examines a variety of philosophical implications in Paul Auster’s works, crossing American culture with Continental thought. Focusing on such subjects as solitude, community, the idea of America, the idea of the work (of art), the ontology of film, the disastrous and the ordinary, it aims to develop intersections of Auster’s works with the thoughts of Stanley Cavell and Maurice Blanchot. Blanchot has already been introduced into recent Auster criticism. But this is not the main reason why I use Cavell, instead of Blanchot, to set the tone for my study. Contrary to past research, which tends to divide into discrete areas, emphasising either Auster’s postmodern textuality or critical engagement, his American roots or European affiliations, my study is concerned with how these divisions can be reassessed and negotiated. A Cavellian reading of Auster is valuable not only because the themes Cavell discovers in Thoreau and Emerson (such as Moral Perfectionism) provide insight into Auster’s engagement with American Transcendentalism, but also because his way of reading is indissociable from his interests in Continental tradition, as well as in film and literature. I share these interests in my own reading of Auster; they help reconstruct the pictures of life and work, of self and other, of singularity and commonality, of ordinariness and extraordinariness. Additionally, I look at certain Blanchotian aspects of Auster’s writing, highlighting what has not been previously noted, such as the withdrawal and exigency of community in Moon Palace. Blanchot’s ideas of unworking (désoeuvrement) and disaster further define the ethico-ontological dimension of being. This does not essentially counter Cavell’s emphasis on the ordinary but rather reveals its difficulty. On the whole my reading suggests a logic of eternal return that underlies the entwinement of Cavellian and Blanchotian strands in Auster, which reflects both human vulnerability and responsibility.

This thesis in Creative Writing comprises two parts. The memoir, Patchwork Someone, is a ‘coming of faith’ story that deals with themes of religious certainty and mental illness. It is set primarily in Hong Kong, in the period encompassing the region’s handover from British sovereignty back to China. The memoir recounts how, as a teenager engaged in a search for belonging, I encountered Evangelical Christianity, and found an allure in the church that was juxtaposed against the instability of mentally ill family members and my own experimentation with drugs. The memoir then describes a mental health crisis that followed more than a decade later, when, as a committed believer and church member, I had a serious incident of self-harming. Recovery follows, but the book departs from the classic conversion arc because it lacks an explicit conclusion and alludes, instead, to the value of negative capability. The accompanying critical work, Religious Memoir in a Secular Age, is a study of the influence of the Confessions of Saint Augustine on apparently non- religious contemporary life-writing. Although the Confessions is regularly cited as the first example of autobiographical writing, there has been little investigation into it by the creative writing community. This critical commentary seeks to address the shortage, and analyses how religious memoirists who strive for diverse audiences can gain insight from a close reading of the Confessions. It offers a brief history of religion in self-life writing, and identifies written forms of religious practices that are evidenced in the Confessions, namely prayer, confession, reflection and testimony. Contemporary articulations of these practices are identified in eight memoirs published between 1985 and 2016 for comparison. Regardless of the changing influence of religion in society, the urges that first prompted Augustine to write his memoir prevail, and continue to be expressed in contemporary literature.

Searching for Manila: Personal and Political Journeys in an Asian Megacity is an autobiographical travelogue based on a period I spent living and working in Manila, the Philippines in 2009-10, and on two subsequent visits to the city. The book, which is slightly abridged for this submission, addresses themes both personal (such as the difficult processes of deciding what to do with my life, of falling in love and of becoming a surrogate father) and political (the struggles of marginalised communities against official oppression, the impact of neo-liberalism on various aspects of Philippine society and the ideological reasons why Filipinos selectively remember national traumas). I interweave my lived, empirical experiences of people and places with data researched from other Manila-focused texts both historical and contemporary: novels, memoirs, travel books, media reports, statistical surveys and historiographical analyses. The critical commentary element of my thesis begins with an analysis of what I term ‘Manilaism’, a trajectory of Anglo-American travel writing, literary journalism and realist fiction set in Manila dating from the mid-Victorian era to the twenty-first century, and goes on to argue that Searching for Manila contests the reactionary and ethnocentric assumptions of these texts by employing a variety of research methods, narrative strategies and linguistic devices. The result of these creative decisions has been to situate Searching for Manila as a ‘radical travelogue’; that is to say radical according to both the formal and political senses of the word: my mobilisation of parody, self-reflexivity and inter-textuality are complemented by my endeavours to evoke Manila through the lens of my leftist commitments to peace, social equality, economic justice, anti-racism and anti-imperialism.

This creative writing thesis consists of a novel and a critical commentary, both of which explore the link between memory and narrative. The novel, Confession with Blue Horses, tells the story of Ella Valentin, an East German woman trying to piece together her family’s past. In the process, she is forced to confront her own partially suppressed memories. She is assisted by Aaron, an intern working at an archive in Berlin that houses the shredded surveillance records of the former East German security service — the Ministerium for Staatssicherheit, or ‘Stasi’. The commentary considers the relationship between memory and narrative from a critical perspective. It investigates how three writers and artists have fashioned stories out of similarly fragile and incomplete memories: the German artist Charlotte Salomon, the American graphic novelist Art Spiegelman, and the East German writer Christa Wolf. The critical discussion centres on Salomon’s multimedia memoir, Leben? Oder Theater? (Life? Or Theatre?), which was created between 1940 and 1942; Spiegelman’s graphic memoir, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986); and Wolf’s autobiographical novel, Stadt der Engel oder: The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (City of Angels or: The Overcoat of Dr. Freud, 2010). Chronologically, the three works roughly follow the trajectory of 20th-century Germany and the traumatic events that shaped it, from the Second World War and the Holocaust, to the country’s division, and the rise and fall of the dictatorship of the German Democratic Republic. The commentary also expands on some of the problems with narrating the past that emerged during my writing process, and suggests potential solutions, drawing inspiration from Salomon, Spiegelman and Wolf.

This fine art practice-led research sets out amongst the terrain of upland Britain. Impelled by the spirit of British Romanticism, Ancient Cynicism and the art of tactics in a contemporary context, the research interrogates language and employs writing to offer a new approach to landscape. Coleridge, Constable, Graham, Lanyon and Turner provide an art historical context to the idea of 'landscape'. From an initial methodological focus on Baradian diffraction, attention is shifted to the employment of her concepts of 'cutting together-apart' and intra-action. These latter are re-purposed as the more muscular intraruption in which an exertive tearing is both uncomfortable and beneficial. Further concepts are mobilised to explore the terrains of landscape and writing: Deleuzian becoming and Foucauldian parrhēsia are utilised to reanimate human relationships to and with landscape. As a result, this thesis disjunctively combines language and landscape to propose the new term and concept of langscape. A term that recognises the impossibility of a (human) union with nature through words and writing whilst simultaneously revelling in the possibilities that recognition of the difference provides in a form of becoming-landscape. This research further proposes exertion as a logic for the creative act by recognising and embracing the performative potential of long-distance walking and running, and their disruptive relationship to writing and thinking. The potential of writing (as both a verb and a noun) is explored in a fine art doctoral research context with specific attention paid to the strategy of 'art writing'. Resulting from this exploration, the binaric structuring of practice/theory is short-circuited by an exertive poiēsis that emerges from the performative activities of the research. The terrain and form of this writing enacts (and reconceives) the relationship of art and writing in and as the thesis. The thesis is written by the langscape.

In the preface to Select Hymns Taken out of Mr. Herbert's Temple (1697), the anonymous author identifies the 'general and deserv'd Acceptance' with which the poems of George Herbert's The Temple were met during the early-modern period, stating that he 'hath obtain'd by way of Eminency, the Name of Our Divine Poet'. This study examines George Herbert's admirers in the light of their textual borrowings from The Temple between 1633 and 1715, and interrogates the precise forms that this 'general and deserv'd Acceptance' took. In so doing, it more firmly situates Herbert's reception not only in the historical moments of that period, but also in the specifically literary dimensions of his admirers' borrowings, and examines the roles that Herbert was asked to play within their texts. The texts of little-studied writers like Thomas Edwards, Julia Palmer, Samuel Speed, and Nathanael Vincent are here considered alongside the works of well-known admirers of Herbert, such as Richard Baxter, Christopher Harvey, and Henry Vaughan. Examined in this study, therefore, are both previously identified sources in which writers made borrowings from Herbert, and previously unidentified sources, which also evidence borrowings from The Temple in either poetry or prose. Evidence of such borrowing is explored here through the lens of appropriative strategy and use of form: appropriations of poetic form; quotations and allusions in poetic content; and quotations, paraphrases, and citations in prose texts. Through its analysis, this thesis proposes three ways in which it is possible to frame the roles that Herbert was asked to play, demonstrating how Herbert's admirers turned to his poetry as a means of: finding an exemplar in his poetic forms that could provide comfort and consolation; claiming an ally through the appropriation of his imagery and vocabulary in verse; and positioning a spokesman by quoting from him in prose works. Ultimately, this study investigates the startlingly creative, inventive, and sometimes distinctly mischievous ways in which early-modern writers borrowed from, and, indeed, transformed the poems of The Temple. In so doing, it shows that, when it comes to questions of historical interpretation relating to textual reception, hermetic distinctions do not have to be made between gathering information about the contexts in which a text, such as The Temple, was disseminated and read, and examining the meaning apparently understood by its readers. The overarching purpose of this study, then, is to answer the question, 'Where did The Temple go and what did it do?'

This thesis focuses on the adaptation of well-known plays by Shakespeare in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuriesthrough theatrical production. I approach the topic as a theatremaker and practice-led researcher. The written element of the project sets the foundations for, charts the development, and analyses the outcomes of three research productions created between 2013 and 2015 which were adaptations of 'The Tempest', 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and 'Hamlet'. The artefacts of these productions (DVDs, scripts, photographs and programmes) are integral parts of this thesis. My main areas of focus are the theoretical and practical issues around adaptation, specifically intramedial adaptation (in this case, theatre-to-theatre); contemporary theatre-making and how one significant movement within it - immersive theatre - aligns with postmodern productions of Shakespeare's plays; and finally, I applyMarvin Carlson's theoretical work on 'ghosting' practically and thereby develop and build on his ideas. Key enquiries are into: (1) therange of ways in which adaptersdeal with Shakespeare's text; (2) how the contemporary theatre spectator can be seen - and treated - as an active agent in the adaptation process; and (3) the ways in which past iterations and incarnations of performance texts influence and 'ghost' new productions. Focusing on reception, I look at the fragmented audience with regards to their prior knowledge and related expectations of well-known texts and how these influence their experience of new adaptations. Other than Carlson, I draw on the work of Josephine Machon and Charles Marowitz as well as thepractices of Punchdrunk and Diane Paulus among others. I look at milestone productions of the last thirty years by primarily European and North American theatremakers and companies. I include analyses based on my own reception as an audience member of Punchdrunk's 'Sleep No More', RIFT'S 'Macbeth', Thomas Ostermeier's 'Hamlet', and the American Repertory Theatre's 'The Donkey Show'. The project has resulted in: • the creation of three pieces of theatre; • contributions to the current study of theatrical adaptation; • audience reception data and analysis which contributes towards conclusions on the spectator's position in contemporary theatre pieces; • findings based on a practical implementation of Marvin Carlson's theoretical work on ghosting. I argue for progressive approaches to adaptation theory, especially in the here-to underexplored area of intramedial theatricaladaptation; the establishment of the audience as collaborator and therefore crucial to the theatre-making process; and further research including intothe practical implications of Carlson'sghosting, in particular my notion of unscenes which has been developed by this research.

This thesis explores literary and visual representations of masculinities in Martinique and Guadeloupe from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The term ‘re-membering’ points to the importance of memory (specifically, the memory of slavery), as well as the prominence, and the vulnerability, of the ((dis)membered) male body, and in particular the male member, both in its sexual and reproductive associations and as a phallic symbol of dominance. The analysis is rooted in close readings of text and image, and draws on a number of theoretical fields, including postcolonial theory, literary criticism and theory, psychoanalysis, theories of visuality, and francophone masculinities studies, which intersect with black masculinity and Caribbean masculinities theory. It is informed by established paradigms of masculinities in the post-slavery context, including emasculation, male marginalization/victimization and compensatory hyper-masculinity, but brings these models into dialogue with other theoretical frameworks, including the carnivalesque and abjection, to explore the ways in which authors and visual artists represent, destabilize and transcend fixed gender paradigms. The thesis analyses a selection of novels by six key male and female authors from Martinique and Guadeloupe, published between 1972 and 2012, alongside examples of contemporary visual commemoration, primarily monuments erected in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as carnival performances documented during fieldwork conducted in Fort-de-France in 2014. While the study privileges contemporary works, it remains attentive to the impact of the historical trauma of slavery and the ways in which it continues to affect masculine identities, behaviours, gender roles and relations. This first full-length comparative analysis of masculinities in French Caribbean literature and visual culture thus reflects and progresses existing conceptions of Antillean masculinities, contributing to scholarship on Antillean literature, visual cultures, masculinities studies and francophone postcolonial theory.

This research project focuses on a selection of anglophone literary and anthropological texts written in the second half of the twentieth century in various nations of Africa and the Middle East, as well as India. The authors I will be looking at are Laura Bohannan, Amitav Ghosh, Ryszard Kapuscinski and V.S. Naipaul. I will be focusing on works that are closely related to the experience of travel and that narrate cross-cultural encounters, being aware that to elaborate a critical and literary project in the contemporary context one must move from those multicultural and dynamic sites where culture is increasingly produced. In the course of this work, I will move from the poetics of these texts as a starting point to address questions on power relations inherent to the process of writing. By focusing on the representational strategies employed, I will investigate the way in which the author provides a representation of Third-World society, which appears to challenge the paradigm of a totalizing, epistemic violence that - since Said's seminal work - has been considered a distinctive epistemological attitude of any text having an "orientalizing" tendency. Bakhtin's multifaceted theory of dialogue is of central importance to this study. It affords us the critical lens with which to investigate literary, linguistic, metalinguistic and psychological dimensions that lie beyond the "making" of the text. These represent important aspects of inquiry that have often remained uninterrogated. However, I will argue, they provide useful perspectives to reconfigure the problem of agency in a representative context, as this has remained one of the unsolved theoretical underpinnings of Gayatri Spivak's theory on subalternity. By unveiling, dissecting and reconstructing the silenced and uninterrogated intersubjective, dynamic - and often dialogic - processes that leave their traces inside the literary text (but that intervene behind or beyond its making), this work intends to suggest a new perspective to address the problem of agency, by providing a different answer to the critical and theoretical questions of how agency manifests itself in a representative context. By focusing on the forms and occurrences of dialogue that appear in this selection of texts, I intend to indicate a new direction that could prove useful in the attempt to reconstitute the discourse of cultural difference - as Homi Bhabha expresses in "The Postcolonial and The Postmodern" - as this has emerged as one of the principal theoretical aims of postcolonial literary criticism.

This PhD is part novel and part thesis. The novel, The Girl Upstairs (TGU), is in three parts. Parts one and two are included here in full. A synopsis of part three is included in the appendices. The thesis presents an original “action model” for Creative Writing (CW) called “fictive responsibility”. TGU can be treated as a case study, demonstrating the practical application of this new model. TGU follows a Bengali-Muslim family as they confront the wayward behaviour of Kifah Rahman, a feisty sixteen-year-old. Set somewhere in south-west England, Kifah’s misadventures start when she discovers an envelope discarded in a drawer. The address is her mother’s childhood home across the city, but she’s never heard of the addressee, Zubi Rahman. Kifah sneaks off school to investigate. Kifah’s clandestine visits incite rumours and soon Kifah is accused of tarnishing the family’s reputation. TGU confronts the difficult subjects of “honour”-based-violence (HBV), domestic violence and “crimes-of-passion”. By exploring different types of violence-against-women (VAW), TGU shows how perceived differences in, for example, “culture”, religion, or heritage, rather than dividing us, can present new ways to connect across moral values or lifestyles, ultimately promoting togetherness and empathy between different cultures. The thesis explores how the “political” relates to “literature” through the writer’s creative process, suggesting that all novelists are inherently politicised individuals and fictions are produced through an inherently politicised process. The significance of this is undermined by those who claim fiction writers just “make it up”. Failing to recognise the “politics of representation” that operates alongside invention in CW has contributed to the recent exacerbation around “cultural appropriation”. For some writers this presents a threat to “free” expression. For others, “free” expression must be treated with respect, especially when fictionalising characters that appear external to the writer’s own experience. Theoretical and conceptual analysis is drawn from cultural studies, ethnography, literary criticism and philosophy. Case studies include fictions with Muslim female characters in a post-9/11 setting. In addition to literary analysis, the thesis explores how “authenticity” interacts with an author’s perceived affiliation with characters or themes within the fiction.

The history that H. Rider Haggard writes about in his imperial adventure romance fiction is neither collusive nor consensual with the Zulu who are often the focus of his novels. He writes a complex colonial narrative that characterises the Zulu as a proud and mythic, yet ultimately doomed, race. His early twentieth century trilogy, Zikali, is unique in that he uses the three books, Marie, Child of Storm and Finished, to narrate three pivotal events in the nineteenth century history of the Zulu Kingdom. In Zikali, he simultaneously propounds the legitimacy of the colonial endeavour, so effectively that he rewrites history, to ensure the primacy of the Englishman in nineteenth century Southern Africa historiography, whilst aggrandising the Zulu kingdom. This reframing of the colonial narrative—to suit the Western interloper—would be evidence of what is a standard trope within imperial adventure romance fiction, were it not for the fact that Haggard is ambivalent in his imperialism. He is both recorder and creator of imperial history, bewailing the demise of the Zulu Kingdom whilst validating the importance of the role of the colonial white Englishman; he senselessly kills hundreds of natives within his books, yet privileges the Zulu. Referencing one of the primary motivational sources in Haggard's own colonial experience, Theophilus Shepstone, I propose to show Haggard's sublimation of Shepstone's ideas into his own African Arcadian romances, and his creation of a Zulu historiography, which would go on to be lauded by the early South African National Native Congress as being one of the foundations of early twentieth century native socio-political self-fashioning. Haggard's work provides a fragmentary and elusive insight into nineteenth century southern African history and offers an abstruse glimpse into colonial culture rarely found in other imperial adventure romance fiction.

In 1932, looking back on a decade characterised by radical shifts in the public consciousness, George Egerton spoke for a generation when she wrote I would unlock a door with a key of my own fashioning . Subsequent evaluations of the dynamism of the 1890s that focussed variously on the isms of Naturalism, Impressionism, and Modernism have fragmented our understanding of this discrete period in literary history. This study draws together these debates, and reads them in light of both textual materiality and the thematic concerns of the short story in order to facilitate a greater understanding of the radical changes that took place during the fin de siècle. This thesis will demonstrate how central realist traditions, tropes, and aesthetics are to any thorough re-examination of the short fiction written and published during the 1890s, and how the authors under consideration here were consciously developing realism, actively adding to realism s own primary time , and re-shaping the tradition that had schooled them. Re-situating the short fiction of George Egerton and Ella D Arcy using contemporary sources and the framework of cultural and literary production and consumption, this thesis will address their desire to express the interiority of experience, and explore the influence of Decadence in negotiating and characterising this period of change. By reading these negotiations through the lens of a realist tradition, this thesis will argue for the development of what is here termed Decadent Realism , and offer a new continuum for connecting understandings of traditional realism to early twentieth century modernism, re-defining the critically-accepted period of the Modernist break.

This thesis examines the work of a group of prolific New Woman writers of the fin-de-siecle. Mona Caird, George Egerton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Grand, Menie Muriel Dowie and Netta Syrett made a dramatic impact on their Anglo-American reading publics, both for their daring fiction and for their non-fiction prose, which rased issues of eugenics, education, employment, gender roles, marriage and female sexuality. Yet these prominent women were all but forgotten by the early decades of the twentieth century. Such rapid demise of New Woman fiction is often taken as evidence of its aesthetic limitations: for some critics this writing, while important for breaking a literary silence, is ultimately didactic andmonological, with only one story to tell - female oppression. A closer reading of these texts, however, reveals a number of complex narrative strategies at work, some of which participate in the non-verbal or pre-verbal aspects of communication. Specifically, the semiotic theory of Julia Kristeva can help to deepen the critical conversation about these writers and illuminate the tensions involved in identity formation. In the Introduction I pay attention to the notion of Language as a gendered construct, highlighting the difficulty facing women writers in the construction o f a female literary identity and voice. Chapters One to Four examine the musicality of language; the hysterical mother’s voice; fashion as language; gardens and wild spaces as discourse. Chapter Five analyses how collective female experiences and speech manifest in New Woman narratives as a dialogic semi-autobiographical voice.

In the preface to her play 'The Luckey Chance; or, An Alderman's Bargain', Aphra Behn invited 'any unprejudic'd Person [...] to read any of my Comedys and compare 'em with others of this Age'. This study examines Aphra Behn's comedies staged between 1678 and 1681 in light of their textual borrowings from mid- to late seventeenth-century French and English literature and drama, or 'others of this Age', in order to more firmly establish Aphra Behn's authorial contexts. Examined here, therefore, are both previously identified sources from which Behn made active borrowings, and previously unidentified sources, in both English and French, which also evidence indubitable borrowings by Behn in her Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis comedies. Evidence of such appropriation is explored here through the lens of Aphra Behn's treatment of material text, in the form of both letters and legalized documentation. Of especial consideration is how, through active revisions of, and departures from, her source texts, Behn explores the capacity of written texts to facilitate misdirections, arouse suspicion, highlight characters' interpretative limitations, and provoke laughter. Also highlighted here is the fact that the textual complexity of Aphra Behn's comedies staged between 1678 and 1681 lies partly in their own thematic concerns and internal structurings and parallels, but more so in their textual and performative allusions, the appropriative strategies that they evidence, and the range of literary networks that they operate within.

This thesis is a reading of Raymond Carver’s edited and unedited writing with respect to unsymbolised mental spaces. Carver’s edited writing is characterized by clipped sentences and solid silences and is often defined as ‘minimalist’. His unedited writing is more garrulous and sprawling, which has led critics to label it ‘realist’. I consider how these different forms of language present different kinds of resistances to clear meaning. I read these resistances in terms of different mentally unsymbolised spaces – unconscious spaces that resist symbolisation. In doing so, I consider the psychoanalytic thought of Lacan, along with Laplanche and Green, as well as Blanchot and Attridge’s writing on literary otherness. In the curt sentences juxtaposed with hard silences of Carver’s edited, so- called minimalist writing, I consider how highly fixed meanings are split from radically unsymbolised spaces. Here I find a theoretical echo in my reading of Lacan’s originary linguistic castration – his account of the first traumatic linguistic cut that is inflicted on the young infant, splitting the infant between a pre-linguistic state and a state of meaning. I suggest that Carver’s edited, minimalist language stages this original cutting into being. His language performs the very way in which everyday language inflicts a certain cut and his writing takes this cut to an extreme. In the more sprawling so-called ‘realist’ language of the unedited Carver, the unsymbolised and meaning entwine rather than split. Bringing together Carver, Lacan, and Blanchot, in the unedited realist prose I conceive unsymbolised spaces as held, sheltered, even quietly hidden but not annulled by linguistic meaning. Carver’s unedited writing stages psychical otherness as quietly imbricated in the texture of language, fostering a more bodily expression of the unsymbolised.

Place is both physical and conceptual; in fiction, place offers an initial basic orientation, but also fulfills many more complex roles. This thesis considers place in the Golden Age detective novels of Agatha Christie, Gladys Mitchell, and Dorothy L. Sayers to establish place as a point of critical engagement, and uses place to re-consider influential works in the genre. The exploration of place uncovers textual clues that are not necessarily detective clues, complicating these novels and dismantling deceptive assumptions about the homogeneity of the Golden Age. The evidential place, or “the scene of the crime”, provides a physical setting for the crime itself and the clues that it generates, but it is rarely the most important or revelatory place in a detective story. Christie developed a place-typology that defined much of her work: the house, the village, London, and the holiday convey distinct meanings from early in her career. These places evolve over decades of social commentary, but each maintains a core of structural meaning. Character and place often develop in tandem, and Mitchell is particularly interested in the distortions of the relationship between the two. She rejects the rationality of the genre, and uses place and focalization to embed psychological questioning in her novels. Sayers considers place a central “artistic unity” of the novel. She presents place as a socially constructed unit, and through notions of “belonging” or being “out of place”, she interrogates structures of milieu. Place becomes a central focal point in her later novels, through which she questions contemporary values and identities. In all of these authors’ work, the detective is a figure representative of modernity, developed through his or her relationship to place. Place also takes the investigation outside of purely plot-based channels, and into sociological and psychological areas of questioning.

The cruel woman is a recurring trope in Decadent literature and visual art. She is symbolic of the primary Decadent anxieties about nature and male authorship, and, as this thesis aims to show, is distinct from the generic femme fatale, the subject of numerous studies of nineteenth-century literature, most notably by Rebecca Stott and Bram Dijkstra. This thesis is the first full consideration of the cruel woman in English Decadent literature, and comprises an investigation of her appearance in the work of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Arthur Symons (1865-1945) and Ernest Dowson (1867-1900), the principal proponents of English Decadence from 1860-1900. I use the theoretical writings of Gilles Deleuze on masochism to illuminate the control of the masochistic writer over the figure of the written tormentor. Comparing the creation of the Decadent cruel woman to Ovid’s Pygmalion and his sculpture of his ideal female image, I analyse the power of the male masochist over the woman he creates and interrogate her supposed autonomy. In Poems and Ballads (1866), Swinburne’s poems address a series of cruel women as masochistic fantasies formed according to the speaker’s projected desires, whereas Wilde’s Salome (1894) deviates from this masochistic model. Salome is rendered fragile and delicate through the use of symbolic language. The dancing girls of Symons’s Silhouettes (1892, revised 1896) and London Nights (1895, revised 1897), have been miscast as femmes fatales. The dancer’s body is anatomized, never fully realised for the reader. The same is true of Dowson’s Verses (1896) and Decorations (1899), in which the cruel woman is diminished to a girl. Dowson’s poetry represents both the attenuation and refinement of English Decadence. He is a ‘reverse Pygmalion’ whose female figures are either dead or frozen into a perfect yet unreachable state.

This thesis identifies and explores three forms of play in poetry: specifically, the ‘interred’ (or etymological) pun, the hypogram, and the manipulation of what Johnson terms discordia concors, or harmonious discord. The precise mechanics of each are scrutinized with close readings of the work of Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon and Jen Hadfield. Extrapolating from these analyses, the behaviour and potential uses of play are examined more broadly in relation to formal play, sonic play, punning, and oppositional texturing. It will be shown that the more ludic a poem, the greater the risk that it will turn in on itself; the anatomy of the poem is therefore compared to its etymological counterpart, the riddle. The thesis concludes that play, in this context, should be viewed as a fundamentally telic activity. The forms of play examined all function as what may be termed a contrivance of coincidence; successful contrivance behaves surprisingly algorithmically, and sensitivity to its mechanics means that play may be put to poetic purpose. A collection of poems – Spook and the Jewel Thief – is submitted in support of this thesis, and demonstrates some of the ways in which play may be deployed.

In this thesis I extend the discussion of the works of W.G. Sebald beyond the more commonly discussed themes of melancholy, trauma, loss and memory. To this end I examine his long prose poem After Nature and his four books of prose fiction Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz to expose underlying pastoral modes and structural forms in these texts. In After Nature I make the case for this poem to be read as an anti-pastoral text which runs true to the elegiac form but exhibits a subtext of pastoral and anti-pastoral tension. The first published work of prose fiction, Vertigo, I argue demonstrates the pastoral structural device, integral to pastoral form, of the double-plot and in so doing, extend William Empson’s original thesis. In The Emigrants, I examine the parallels between Heimat and Pastoral by exposing the characters’ difficult relationships with displacement both physically and psychologically and argue for an anti-Heimat mode expressed largely in anti-pastoral imagery. The Rings of Saturn demonstrates the impossibility of utopia by constantly deferring a potential pastoral both spatially and temporally during the narrator’s “pilgrimage” across the Suffolk countryside. And finally in Austerlitz, we have a coalescence of pastoral modes structured as a discourse of retreat and return which, I argue, qualifies this work as a truly pastoral novel. In the final chapter I discuss the four short pieces of prose fiction in Campo Santo, which, although too brief to exhibit a pastoral form, demonstrate pastoral tropes commensurate with those discussed in the previous works.

Aldous Huxley’s writings, which exhibit his avid interest in all areas of knowledge, including the arts, the sciences, religion, politics, philosophy and psychology, display a tendency to adopt, and attempt to synthesise, the ideas of others, as well as a willingness to embrace unorthodox thinkers. This thesis examines how the works of Aldous Huxley were influenced by two men whose ideas focused upon the relationship between the mind and body: Frederick Matthias Alexander (1869-1955), inventor of the mind-body therapy known as the Alexander Technique, and Dr William Sheldon (1898-1977), a constitutional psychologist who developed a theory of mind-body types. The phrase ‘psycho-physical wholes’ in the thesis title is taken from a letter from Huxley to E. S. P. Haynes in March 1945: ‘Sheldon considers human beings as they really are – psycho-physical wholes or mind-bodies’.1 This is the central theme of the thesis; it will examine how Alexander’s and Sheldon’s particular conceptions of human beings as psycho-physical entities were profoundly influential upon Huxley’s writings. The thesis as a whole thus provides an important contribution to the study of Huxley’s conception of the relationship between mind and body, and the works he wrote which were impacted by this conception. It provides a contribution to the understanding of the influences that helped to shape the works of Huxley. It sheds further light on the origins of Huxley’s ideas and characters, thus providing additional insight into the often unorthodox ideas that influenced the works of writers and intellectuals in the interwar and postwar period.

This thesis comprises two components: an extract of The Angel of Ferrara, a historical novel, and a critical commentary entitled What is history doing in Fiction? The novel is set in the Italian city of Ferrara in February, 1579, a jewel of the Renaissance at the height of its powers but deep in debt. Amid the aristocratic pomp and popular festivities surrounding the duke’s marriage to his third wife, the secret child of the city’s most celebrated singer goes missing. A street-smart debt collector and lovelorn bureaucrat help her increasingly desperate attempts to find her son, their efforts uncovering the brutal instruments of ostentation and domination that gave rise to what we now know as the Renaissance. In the critical commentary, I draw on the experience writing The Angel of Ferrara, together with my own historical works, to explore the relationship between history and fiction. Beginning with a survey of the development of historical fiction since the inception of the genre’s modern form with the Walter Scott’s Waverley, I analyze the various paratextual interventions—prefaces, authors’ notes, acknowledgements—authors have used in their attempts to explore and explain the use of factual research in their works. I draw on this to reflect in more detail at how research shaped the writing of the Angel of Ferrara and other recent historical novels, in particular Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. I then examine the issue form the opposite perspective: the use of fictional devices such as narrative in history, considering whether or not this compromises or enhances the authority and validity of historical work. I end by critically examining the prevailing notion that the borderline between fiction and history has become blurred, arguing that, while each influences the other, the distinction is one of type rather than degree.

Have You Seen Simone? consists of a creative nonfiction book, Have You Seen Simone?, and a critical commentary on the process and context of writing it. The book investigates the suspicious death of German traveller Simone Strobel, who went missing in February 2005, in Lismore, Australia. After an inquest into her death in 2007, the police stated they believed that Simone’s boyfriend, Tobias Suckfuell was involved in her death, although he has never been charged with any offence concerning her death. I was captivated by the case, and with the agreement of the police I committed myself to uncovering the truth. The book is the story of my investigation; it analyses the evidence, explores new lines of investigation, and recounts my interviews with the couple’s friends and families; included also is an interview with Tobias Suckfuell himself, who remains the prime suspect. Having become intimately involved in the case, the narrative becomes something of an investigation of the self, heightened by the loss of my mother who dies during the writing process. It should be noted that some of the participants in Have You Seen Simone?, the suspects, have exercised a legitimate right to silence, and although it would be legally inappropriate to draw conclusions about this silence, I question the ethics of this decision, as the nature of their silence suggests they have something to conceal. Silence is at the core of this investigation: what does it mean to write about a legally irresolvable case where the who, what, why, where of the original series of events remains opaque? Navigating through contentious material and negotiating legal, moral, and empirical judgments in a case that has no preceding narrative or conclusion established by the courts is inherently problematic. What does this mean ethically, cognitively and poetologically for the narrative? Is it fundamentally doomed to fail? Or can a persuasively constructed speculative view illuminate a situation that remains largely opaque? Bearing these questions in mind, what follows in the critical commentary, after an exploration of the history of the genre—that is the context in which I position myself (from its precursors to its more recent developments)—is a discussion on why my particular work was suited to a reflective, personal account; this is in view of my background as a newspaper reader as opposed to a journalist who is trained in objective, third-person reporting. I go on to discuss and compare the similar works of Australian author Helen Garner who wrote Joe Cinque’s Consolation and The First Stone—in this chapter and the following—as I further elaborate on my particular methodology in relation to writing methods, and investigative methods involving elicitation and evaluation. I will end with a discussion on the ethics of writing, specifically on the subject of the participants’ right to withdraw data from a research project.

The critical commentary, Beyond Gentility: Violence in the Poetry of Sharon Olds, Pascacle Petit, Peter Redgrove and Robin Robertson focuses on interpersonal violence. It includes a discussion on A. Alvarez’s essay ‘The New Poetry’ and critical reactions to the poetry of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. The commentary defends the use of violence in poetry as a way of reflecting on the realities of contemporary society.

The aim of this thesis is to provide a new way of reading Henry Miller by drawing attention to his unlikely aesthetic and moral intersections with Ezra Pound. It traces the lineage of a particular strand of radical modernist expression that is exemplified in Pound’s critical essays between 1909 and 1938 and finds its way – incongruously - into Henry Miller’s semi-autobiographical novels of the 1930s. In the process, I will illuminate hitherto underexplored territory that is shared by two seemingly incompatible writers, pointing the way to a better understanding of the aesthetic and moral contradictions in Miller’s – and indeed Pound’s – work. Crucially, I propose that Miller’s literature is morally engaged rather than amoral or unwittingly counter-revolutionary, two common and reductive assumptions. By reading him in the context of Pound’s often suspect pronouncements on hierarchy and order it is possible to reassess George Orwell’s widely accepted conclusion that Miller is simply a ‘passive, unflinching’ recorder of life.* It is also possible to treat his textual violence as an important part of his aesthetic, rather than condemning or glossing over it. This thesis will define a set of aesthetics that are common to Pound and Miller and involve complex, often paradoxical impulses – most crucially between the desire to cultivate a radically inclusive artistic approach and the instinctive adherence to a set of absolute tastes and values. Taking as my starting point a little known review by Pound of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, I demonstrate that the latter’s often brutal, anti-humanist rhetoric enables rather than undermines his larger humanistic project. I show that Miller’s idiosyncratic assimilation of high modernist reactionary tropes and ideas were integral to his original and influential view of art, ethics and reality. Concomitantly, this comparison of two very different writers seeks to generate a new perspective on the slippage between retrograde and progressive elements in both their works as well as the period in which they were writing. *George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’ in Collected Essays, ed. by George Packer (London: Harvill Secker, 2009), pp. 95-137, p. 128. Originally published in Inside the Whale and Other Essays (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940).