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In my thesis, I apply a literary analysis to nineteenth-century recipes and cookbooks to interrogate the period's overarching discourses of historicity and innovation. I argue that food writing was a literary genre in which authors constructed, enacted, and questioned their relationship to the past, present, and future. I analyse the literary techniques that nineteenth-century authors utilised within recipes and cookbooks, arguing that they were inherently literary texts that communicated more than practical instructions. I demonstrate that recipes and cookbooks formed a vital part of the nineteenth-century literary marketplace, becoming sites where important debates concerning globalisation, class, and gender played out. Central to my analysis are the links between food writing and material technologies. I posit that recipes and cookbooks were literary technologies, written to help readers make sense of material implements and cooking processes. Authors wove narratives of tradition and innovation around material implements in their culinary writing, and I unravel those narratives to illuminate how technological discussions percolated through domestic texts. To investigate the preoccupation with historicity and innovation in food writing fully, my thesis contains a two-fold methodology and structure. Chapters One and Two are based on the structural breakdown of a data set of recipes which refer to specific material technologies. Chapter One investigates representations of the gridiron: an implement with a longstanding history of tradition and cultural symbolism. In Chapter Two I turn to tinned foods: an innovation that was new within my chosen period. This delineation of a data set of recipes allows me to analyse how technologies were interpreted by multiple authors and to argue that recipes are worthy of sustained analysis as individual literary forms. In Chapters Three and Four, I turn to entire cookbooks to investigate how authors utilised literary techniques across whole texts. In Chapter Three I study the cookbooks of Alexis Soyer, a chef with a marked interest in technological innovations and history. Chapter Four considers the works of Agnes Marshall and Georgiana Hill, two successful cookbook authors who employed very different kinds of rhetorical innovation to depart from traditions. I use this whole-text analysis to question how authors engaged with the wider literary culture of the nineteenth century, subverting the expectations that governed the cookbook genre to engage with discourses of historicity and innovation.

Emotive rhetoric was a significant element of British abolitionist literature in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Abolitionists argued that Black and White people experienced the same emotions, though differences emerged in the way that those emotions were expressed, which was somewhat dictated by contemporary social norms. The argument of emotional equality aimed to encourage the British public to sympathise with the emotional - rather than just the physical - suffering endured by enslaved individuals, in the hope that this would inspire abolitionist action. In this thesis, I argue that emotive rhetoric was used not only to portray the humanity of enslaved individuals, but also to encourage British readers to demonstrate their own humanity, emotional sensibility, and morality by campaigning to abolish first the slave trade and then slavery. Existing scholarship on the use of emotions in British abolitionist literature tends to explore each emotion separately, particularly sorrow. This study expands upon such scholarship by exploring the relationships between the different emotions that feature in abolitionist literature: specifically joy, happiness, sorrow, anger, fear, shame and guilt. It also explores White and Black writers alongside one another, as well as males and females from different class and religious backgrounds, in order to reflect the diversity of the abolitionist movement in line with recent debates about 'Black Romanticism' and 'transatlantic romanticisms'. The diverse nature of the abolitionist movement meant that a number of different approaches to emotive rhetoric emerged. Whilst most abolitionists advocated emotional equality between different races, they did not all believe that this racial equality extended to intellectual capabilities. This thesis shall consider these complex nuances within the abolitionist movement, and explore the extent to which abolitionist literature challenged - or upheld - the racial hierarchy of White supremacy. Despite these differences, abolition was predominantly depicted as an act of national self-interest, rather than just an act of benevolent philanthropy. This thesis shall therefore argue that abolitionists used emotive rhetoric to argue that abolition would benefit not only the enslaved, but also their enslavers, and the entire British nation, as abolition would allow Britain and its citizens to redeem themselves from the sins of slavery, and thereby re-establish its sense of morality.

This thesis is a new edition of the anonymous sixteenth-century Older Scots verse romance Clariodus, a translation from the French prose Cleriadus et Meliadice (c. 1440-4). While the field of Older Scots romance studies has recently seen a welcome surge of interest in the production of modern scholarly editions, Clariodus has continued to be neglected, hindered by the inaccuracy and inaccessibility of previous editions of the romance. As the first modern edition of Clariodus, this thesis seeks to engage with the flourishing critical interest in Older Scots romance and to promote further discussion of Clariodus itself. Volume 1 of this thesis contains an extensive scholarly study of Clariodus, the first such study to be undertaken. Ultimately, this study seeks to interrogate and fully establish the relationship between Clariodus and its French source through analysing the anonymous Clariodus-poet's approaches to translation, as well as placing Clariodus firmly within the literary milieu of the Scottish court under King James V (1513-42). Volume 2 contains the text of Clariodus itself, edited from its sole surviving witness, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates' 19.2.5., and is accompanied by comprehensive Textual Notes. Explanatory Notes are also provided in the Appendix.

This thesis examines late seventeenth-century meditation as a textual practice in manuscript and print. It considers textual meditations, prayers, scriptural paraphrases, letters, memoirs, and verse, which appear in miscellanies in the period of the Cavalier Parliament, 1661 - 1678. It argues that texts were essential to meditative practice, and these texts were composed either for the practitioner or with distinct readerships in mind. Therefore the project examines the complex and shifting triad of writer, reader, and text in each instance. In addition, it shows how notions of completion, privacy, publication, literariness, and singular authorship are not fully compatible with the iterativity of the textual practices associated with meditation. The study considers five meditative writers, found across social and confessional spectra: Katherine Austen, John Flavel, Elizabeth Delaval, Susanna Hopton, and Thomas Traherne. Each writer collates and composes texts - originated by themselves and others - into their miscellanies; and - often over long periods of time - edits, amends, or repurposes these texts according to individual circumstance. The writers deploy diverse devotional practices and textual genres including emblem, romantic fiction, and essay. Each chapter shows how differently these writers realise the general pattern described by the thesis The thesis offers a new appreciation of the diversity of meditative practices and the textual practices associated with them. It challenges earlier perceptions of meditation as an isolated, private, devotional practice, and of meditative texts as a separate literary product of meditative thought. The thesis describes meditation as a textual habit of thought, and a rich source of knowledge, which underpinned, theological, mercantile, social, and philosophical thought. In addition, the thesis demonstrates the value of interpreting meditative texts in their material, textual, biographical, and cultural contexts, and offers a reassessment of the critical and contemporary values placed on verse and prose forms in devotional writing.

This thesis focuses on the use of regional spaces in a corpus of forty-four female-authored novels set in Wales, the West Country, and the Midlands, published between 1810 and 1820. By so doing, it aims to address a gap in current scholarship on Romantic regionalism. It argues that these case study regions form a coherent grouping within the wider phenomenon of the English and Welsh regional novel, due to their contiguity, their many similarities, and their shared differences from other spaces. This study focuses on the 1810s as a significant point in the development of the regional novel genre. It considers trends which correlate with formal regional boundaries, as well as transregional themes, particularly remoteness and retirement. This thesis argues that there is a certain amount of regional distinctiveness in the representation of each of its case study regions. However, it also explores how this distinctiveness coexisted with prevalent stereotypical images associated with a generic rural ideal, which is often nationalistic and conservative. It considers women writers' approach to the relationship between literary space and female freedom, arguing that the corpus of novels which it discusses presents an overwhelmingly conservative vision of gender politics; it also highlights exceptional images of alternative gender performance, which primarily appear in Wales. This study aims to situate Jane Austen's use of regional settings in the context of her publishing contemporaries, drawing attention to those who represent these spaces in distinctive ways, particularly Catherine Hutton.

This thesis will explore how the fictional work of Lewis Carroll was influenced by mid nineteenth century eschatological ideas and controversies, particularly in relation to how eternity was understood and explored by F.D. Maurice and other Broad Church theologians who were friends and acquaintances of Carroll. As such, it is inevitably interdisciplinary in nature covering aspects of theology, Church history and Carrollian studies, and this is reflected in the bibliography. It will be argued that despite the plethora of biographical and literary works on Carroll, the theological aspects of the author's work have been under researched. Thus, the limited secondary (theological) material available means that this thesis has been significantly guided by the primary sources of the works and letters of Maurice and his contemporaries (including letters to Carroll that have not previously been published in their entirety). It is argued that a deeper consideration of Carroll's theological influences is a necessary element in understanding Carroll's works more fully, and that this thesis could inform further study on how the Broad Church eschatology of Maurice may survive most fully not through his own books and sermons, but in the popular imagination through the fictional fantasy writing he inspired in his contemporaries such as Carroll, Kingsley and MacDonald (whose works are considered alongside Carroll's in one of the chapters of this thesis). Maurice's eschatology, and its presence in these fictional works, is considered in relation to his understanding of justice, freewill and predestination, Broad Church philology and the relationship between eternity, space and time. The place of dreams and the idealized child in eschatological understanding will also be explored. It is hoped that this thesis will help to broaden the scope of Carrollian studies to consider more fully theological influences in his writing, and that it may have the potential to pave the way for further consideration of the importance of Broad Church theology in the development of British fantasy fiction.

Both William Blake's and W. B. Yeats' work is indebted to and driven by their spiritual convictions. Their engagement with the mystic and the esoteric within their social circles is mirrored across time. My thesis aims to make the case that the sources of these authors' mysticisms, and their engagement with mystic spirituality in a community context impacted both Blake's, and Yeats' critical and cultural reception. My thesis presents the first extended literary discussion of both Dorothy Gott and Joanna Southcott's work in comparison to Blake's, including the first analysis of Blake's Notebook fragment on Southcott, 'On the Virginity of the Virgin Mary & Johanna Southcott'. I examine Blake in connection with Gott in my first chapter and Southcott in my second to argue the importance of women's prophecy on Blake's work, and how women's prophecy is one of his major mystic influences. In my first chapter, I attempt to broaden the scope of Blake criticism on his women characters by arguing that women in childcare roles are spiritual teachers: Blake criticism, as I will explain in that chapter, often neglects women who aren't young and /or sexualised. My first two chapters explore Blake's neglected spiritual influences as well as his biblical and esoteric influences, with the aim of presenting a broader portrait of Blake's spirituality and contextualising Blake's reception as a 'mystic' by Yeats' circle. My third chapter examines Yeats' and Edwin J. Ellis' three volume book of Blake criticism, biography, and edited poetry reproductions, The Works of William Blake Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical (1893). I argue for its significance both to Blake studies as a predecessor of S. Foster Damon, Kathleen Raine's, and Kevin Fischer's work which connects Blake to esoteric and mystic traditions. I also argue for The Works of William Blake as a predecessor to Yeats' own A Vision, in which Yeats attempted to outline his own mystic system, and from which he later borrowed symbolism for his poetry. I demonstrate how Yeats' 1890s literary criticism in article and review form contributed to Blake's reception as a mystic, and how this created reputation of Blake allowed him to position himself and his circle as inheritors of Blake's mystic legacy. My third chapter explores Yeats' spirituality alongside that of George William Russell's and Fiona Macleod's/William Sharp's. The fourth chapter considers the power of George Yeats' and Iseult Gonne's influence on Yeats' archetype of the mystic, combined with Blake's, Russell's, and Macleod's. I offer a close reading of a number of texts by Yeats, Russell, and Macleod, as well as George Yeats' contributions to A Vision, in order to show how Yeats' contemporaries influenced him, rather than vice versa. My third chapter focuses on works from the fruitful and formative 1890s period when Yeats, Russell, and Macleod were most deeply involved in spiritual and esoteric communities such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (Yeats) and the Theosophical Society (Russell). My fourth chapter considers the period from 1906 to the publication history of A Vision up to 1925. I read Russell's The Candle of Vision (1918) alongside Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918) and A Vision in order to argue that Blake's influence on two writers from the same circle and with similar interests produced very different results. My fourth chapter builds on the discussion of gender and the spiritual in chapters one and two. It offers an extended consideration of gender's influence on mysticism in A Vision and explores how George Yeats and Gonne shaped the female examples of mysticism in this text. My thesis concludes that mysticism in the works of Blake and Yeats was transmitted through their communities, and that their spiritual work formed through collective, rather than individual, influences.

This thesis focuses on the writing style of John Banville and, more particularly, on one of the major narrative features in his works, that of the 'divided self'. As one of the recognised masters of style of our time, John Banville has honed his own unique style of writing. The typical Banville novel is a first-person retrospective narrative of an aging male character troubled by his painful memories of failure and loss. In a struggle to cope with their traumatic life experiences, Banville's protagonists attempt to find answers to haunting existential questions and rediscover their identities in the face of emotional fragmentation. This sense of dislocation and displacement thus emerges as a major theme of Banville's fiction and his works generally revolve around the internal conflicts of a 'divided self'. Although critics generally recognise the importance of the 'divided self' as a topic in Banville's fictional work, they hardly devote any attention to how the theme of splitting is embodied in his narratives. The aim of this thesis therefore is to fill this research gap in existing literature on the topic by investigating how the language of the novels reflects the inner split of the characters and what linguistic mechanisms Banville exploits to create the 'divided self' effect. My analysis surveys the presentation of the 'divided self' through the lens of three different overarching linguistic categories: sensory modality, tense shifts and pronoun alternations. Each category will be explored in a separate chapter and its examination will be supplemented with a large collection of textual samples form Banville which will be closely analysed in terms of consciousness presentation. In my discussion of the use of sensory modality, I investigate the function of particular modal stances for constructing the image of the split personality and for conveying self-detachment in retrospective novels. My analysis of tense shifts explains how spatio-temporal oscillations facilitate the expression of self-division by creating a destabilised reality in which the speakers' consciousness constantly fluctuates between the present and the past. By exploring pronoun alternations in the novels, I show how pronominal variations can act as an effective tool for embedding self-alienation and identity dissociation in the narrative composition. The exploration of the 'divided self' phenomenon in Banville's novels provides valuable insights into both the literary studies of John Banville and the narratological investigations of fictional consciousness in first-person texts. From a literary perspective, this analysis reveals the linguistic means through which the stylistic effect of division is achieved. From a narratological perspective, the main questions that are addressed concern the complex interactions between the narratological and ontological manifestations of the self in retrospective fiction - a significant, but not fully explored, aspect of consciousness presentation in first-person narratives. Thus, this research brings the two-fold benefit of providing an in-depth linguistic exploration of the theme of splitting in Banville's works, while also deepening narratological knowledge of the construction of point of view and consciousness in first-person texts.

In this thesis, I explore seven novels written by Sydney Owenson, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Charlotte Brontë, all major women writers of the early nineteenth century. I will argue that these women writers, often financially dependent on their pens, strategically created literary characters whose embodied experiences of time, space and motion seek to redefine and reconstruct their relationships with social spaces. I approach the spatial in their works by using Foucault's concept of heterotopia as a critical framework. Heterotopias are Other spaces, off-center in comparison with normal or everyday spaces, possessing manifold meanings. I aim to trace how heterotopias function in different cultural and historical contexts, arguing that heterotopias have the potential to transcend binary power structures and provide a space for otherness, although they fail to overthrow the dominant social order. I will also focus on frame narratives and the liminal space of annotation, following Foucault's notion of textual heterotopias that 'destroy "syntax" in advance', something that allows 'words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to "hold together"'.1 Ultimately, my thesis argues that the spatial is an important critical category to understand these women writers' engagement with a complex mesh of political, cultural and historical concerns. This thesis aims to provide a fresh perspective on the deictic functions of heterotopias in my chosen works. The introduction offers an outline of my theoretical approach, and a discussion of the concept of heterotopia, from its etymology to its literal and metaphorical usage. My main analysis comprises four chapters. Chapter One focuses on cross-cultural contact zones in Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and The Missionary (1811), where the liminal, often shifting identities of the Oriental Other pose a challenge to the assumptions of colonial authority. Following Edward Said and Homi K. Bhabha, I explore the concept of hybridity as an interstitial space to deconstruct oppositional discourses of dominance and resistance. The acts and artifice of storytelling form the focus of the second chapter, in which I argue that Shelley's use of frame narratives in Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826) reveals a non-linear understanding of history that contests Enlightenment ideas of progress and causation. Working with Foucault's fourth principle of heterotopias which emphasizes co-existence of diverse times in the same place, I argue that heterotopias arise as a hybrid effect of fiction and reality. Women's protean subject positions under benevolent patriarchy in Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814) are the focus of the third chapter. I examine how a heterotopic experience can promote female agency and destabilize binary gender relations, even while women are still restrained by patriarchal controls. In the fourth chapter, I turn to the private, inner world of the female character Lucy Snowe in Villette (1853), arguing that this is a heterotopia that facilitates the formation of a multifaceted self. The conflicted subject position occupied by Lucy reflects her difficult struggle to transcend gender and class boundaries. The Conclusion draws together my findings and argues that the analysis of these physical, psychic and textual spaces through the lens of heterotopias opens up the possibility for imagining a new embodied subaltern subjectivity.

While childhood and old age in Early Medieval England have already been studied, youth has received relatively little attention. This thesis aims to be the first (to my knowledge) study of youth in Early Medieval English literature. It explores how youth was represented in wisdom poetry (Chapter 2), hagiography (Chapter 3), and heroic verse (Chapter 4), and how it was employed: how did the descriptions of youth and young people contribute to the values in these texts? What themes did youth convey? For the purposes of this thesis, youth is understood in two ways: as a 'period of growth', that is as a period of personal, intellectual, and moral development between childhood and adulthood, discussed in chapters 2-4, and as a period of 'youthfulness', which does not entail any development (but still conveys textual values) in the Vita Bonifatii and The Wanderer (Chapter 5). Chapter 1, instead, functions as an introduction to the thesis, including a literature review on youth in medieval studies, interpretations of the concept of the 'ages of man' in Early Medieval English sources, terminology relating to youth and young people in Old English and Latin dictionaries, and provides an overview of my aims and methodology. In this way, I want to show that youth illustrated significant textual ideas: for instance, it conveyed Christian teachings in hagiography and heroic values in heroic poetry; but there were also important differences within the same genre, or even within the same text, which show that authors described and employed youth and young people according to their own purposes. Therefore, this thesis demonstrates that youth was an important theme in Early Medieval English literature, which occurs in a variety of texts and conveys different values, and it might help to understand better Early Medieval English literary sources.

A literary transformation, simplified, is a rewriting of an existing piece of literature such as a novel, a poetry collection or a work of non-fiction. This is a genre of growing popularity, in particular with a focus on contemporary female authors rewriting ancient Greek mythology. This thesis examines these acts of rewriting. The products of this process have been termed 'literary transformations' as a result of the scattered terminology surrounding this creative act. In order to better understand the creative decisions that take place during the literary transformation process, two texts are analysed alongside my own creative literary transformation. The two texts selected were Alice Oswald's Memorial, a rewriting of Homer's Iliad, and Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, a rewriting of Homer's Odyssey. Three translations have been used for each of Homer's epics in order to eliminate any potential bias from a singular translator. The analysis aims to evaluate the faithfulness, innovation and alternative points-of-view present within each of these literary transformations. From Memorial we learn that literary transformations can occur across language barriers, whilst The Penelopiad teaches us that literary transformations can emerge from a desire for representation. Similarly, my own practice demonstrated that literary transformations can be exceedingly personal and vulnerable to change as the conditions in which they are being written change. The creative component of this thesis is a literary transformation of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, where each chapter has been rendered into a prose poem with the aid of found poetry techniques. Overall, rewriting is an excellent way to engage both critically and creatively with historical works of literature, providing the author with writing constraints and found material. For the reader, a literary transformation provides alternative points-of-view to challenge their current perception of the original text and the opportunity to enjoy an expansion of the original work. However, the genre is not without its practical concerns. In response, topics such as copyright, cultural appropriation, and access and participation barriers have been explored in this thesis. There is a wealth of possibilities present in the practice of creating literary transformations and we have only scratched the surface of what can be achieved through this medium.

This thesis consists of two parts: a creative dissertation entitled Your Very Own Ecstasy: A Life in Verse of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and an accompanying critical commentary. Your Very Own Ecstasy is a verse biography of the British Romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Your Very Own Ecstasy is divided into three parts documenting Coleridge's life from 1772 to roughly 1804. It attempts to combine the generic form of a biography with the style and subject matter of a long poem in (mostly) pentameters, taking its cue from William Wordsworth's The Prelude. However, unlike The Prelude, Your Very Own Ecstasy is self-conscious of the historical and cultural distances which obtain between the composition of the verse and the subject whose life it attempts to describe; and itfluctuates between first- and third-person narration, with a gradual transition over time, from omniscient narration toward the ahistorical mode of the Romantic lyric. The critical element of this thesis is an extended commentary on the poem's three parts, plus a special chapter on the use of pentameters in the poem. This critical portion attempts to engage with a few poetical theorists throughout, especially Coleridge himself, who wrote extensively on the nature of poetry in Biographia Literaria. Critics in the fields of British Romanticism, philosophers of poetry, and scholars in Coleridge studies are likewise engaged. Some themes of the poem are identified, and topics like immersion, truth and fiction, narration, voice, and form are discussed in relation to the poem. The chapter on pentameters, which performs some metrical scanning, attempts to justify the use of pentameters throughout the poem, and draws especially on the work of George Wright. Wright's remarks on pentametrical versatility are read against more recent prosodists who would reject the utility of metrical analysis in favour of a more holistic, rhythm-based approach.

This thesis makes an intervention into the field of modernist legacies by investigating how a selection of British and Irish novelists are engaging with modernist legacies for their own creative practice. This thesis examines how contemporary writers are creatively reflecting on modernism in relation to their own artistic concerns with temporality, cognition, negation, and the limits of representation. A central undertaking of this thesis distinguishes modernist legacies from their dominant critical associations with influence and comparison, to reconsider what modernism means in practice for contemporary writers. While engaging with recent critical debates around modernism's shifting definitions and historical coordinates, this thesis is less concerned with fixed meanings of modernism, and more concerned with what the critical and creative genealogies of modernism can tell us about the developments of contemporary literature. Drawing on various kinds of temporal 'lateness' - late style, late modernism, historical lateness - catalyses this study's understanding of contemporary engagements with modernist legacies, across novels that are predicated on states of 'intransigence' and 'unresolved contradiction'. Authors like Eimear McBride, Mike McCormack, Zadie Smith, Rachel Cusk and Claire-Louise Bennett engage with a modernist inheritance as a complex point of departure for their novels. These authors are not recycling old styles but reconsidering how the problems posed by modernism are navigated in terms of their own literary innovations. In turn, this study examines how historical and material realities are rendered in contemporary literature - from the difficulty of narrating sexual assault and psychological trauma to the social and political fallout of the Celtic Tiger as experienced by a small community in Ireland, or in the emotional struggles with identity and the structures of racism in contemporary London. Consequently, I examine how various British and Irish novelists are renegotiating modernism, not as homage, but as a means of exploring the limits of representation to address pertinent political and ethical questions through the novel form.

This thesis sets out to examine Andrew Wyntoun's Original Chronicle as a key text within the older Scots tradition. It identifies the compilational form of the Chronicle as a vital element in understanding how the work functions as a holistic text. To do this, it places the writer and his text in the wider context of the growth of vernacular literature in medieval Scotland. Its survey of the Chronicle's literary reception suggests that its decline from its late medieval highpoint may be connected to its distinctive poetic, paratactic methodology. It assesses Wyntoun's prologues in the light of prevailing critical theories of medieval authorship and reveals Wyntoun as a self-conscious vernacular translator concerned with defending the rights of the Church, the independence of the Scottish kingdom and his own approach to poetry. It details the close connection between the Original Chronicle and Robert Mannying's Chronicle, a relationship not previously noted. The thesis goes on to identify Wyntoun's sources before demonstrating the use Wyntoun has put these sources to both in terms of translating and editing the individual sources but also in compiling those texts in a specific order. Wyntoun's role in introducing the medieval encyclopediaea tradition into Scots is recognised for the first ime. It contends that the act of compilation is deployed as Wyntoun's primary method of adding meaning and significance to his work. In providing representative examples of this approach from throughout the Chronicle, it offers a fresh perspective on the work as a whole and opens up new readings of its individual episodes. It then applies this understanding to the final section of the Chronicle, often considered as the work of an 'Anonymous Chronicler'. After reclaiming Wyntoun's personal authorship of much of this portion of the work it posits a reading which suggests that the Chronicle both offers a critique of the Scots nobility and a recognition of the crucial role of the commoners in Scotland's wars of independence.

This thesis argues that, rather than being viewed as an incidental feature of Old English literary texts, the group of creatures referred to as wyrmas should be viewed as a significant, symbolic feature of early medieval English culture. Wyrmas were a diverse category of creatures which included parasites, snakes, serpents residing in Hell, grave-dwelling creatures and even dragons; it is this diversity that allowed wyrmas to become synonymous with imagery of death and corruption, but also with the hope of resurrection in a developing Christian society. The significance of wyrmas will be demonstrated through an interdisciplinary study of literary and theological sources in Old English and Latin, alongside archaeological material; these sources will be considered alongside theoretical frameworks of taxonomy and categorisation in order to facilitate a greater understanding of the meaning of wyrmas. This thesis will examine the stages of the human experience as understood by early medieval English people - life, death and the afterlife - to demonstrate that wyrmas became a way to express the anxieties and hopes of early medieval people as they reconciled with Christian beliefs and doctrine.

This thesis studies peripheral maternal characters in 'bourgeois feminist fiction', written by and for the urban, upper-class, upper-caste, English-speaking population of India. It considers 10 novels by 4 authors in this canon, namely Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Manju Kapur, and Githa Hariharan. It attempts to reconfigure standardised readings of female agency and resistance in these novels by undertaking a tilted focus upon peripheral mother figures and analysing the forms of 'everyday resistance' and negotiation represented through them. Simultaneously, it traces the shifts in agential representation over the years from 1980 to 2009 (during which these novels have been published) in the context of rising Hindu nationalism and the advent of neoliberalism. It argues that the complex agential possibilities for women theorised by Indian feminists in relation to Hindutva and neoliberalism are particularly visible in the bourgeois feminist text's treatment of the peripheral mother character, who more easily presents the necessary negotiations within her discursive framework as compared to her feminist daughter, and the shifts in whose representation over the decades lends itself to a reading of shifts in literary and social perceptions of women's agency and feminism. Each chapter of the thesis concerns itself with a specific function afforded to peripheral mother figures, namely those of villainy, nostalgia and political action. The chapter on villainy studies texts from the 1980s which represent a negatively formed bond between mothers and daughters. The chapter on nostalgia studies texts from the 1990s that showcase the daughters' turning towards their mothers who become upholders of cultural identity. The chapter on political agency analyses texts from the 2000s that represent women's participation in anti�Hindutva activism. Overall, the thesis hopes to establish more complex methods of reading female resistance in feminist texts, while contemplating the intersectional and intertextual methods necessary to formulate a literary feminist tradition that accommodates women's agential capacities irrespective of their position in the framework of hegemonic discourses within which they undertake quotidian negotiations.

This thesis contends that small-town narrative exists as a discrete form in historic and contemporary American cultural production, and that its codification occurred in and around the interwar period. By parsing this narrative into four distinct themes - orality, spatiality, migration and mobility, and ritual and routine - I argue that small-town America, a ubiquitous community construct in American culture, endures because of its narrative accessibility, familiarity, and usefulness as a focaliser of both inclusive and exclusive American identity and experience. Developing contemporary American studies and cultural social geography, 'Talk of the Town' interrogates the national fascination with small-town America in textual and visual representation through the lens of genre, concluding that in both its dominant and counter modes there is a common syntax and language through which it is articulated.

Post 9/11 literature in English produced by local as well as diasporic writers from conflict-ridden countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan constituted a growing corpus over the past three decades. Most literature within this corpus considered and incorporated a whole range of crucial issues for the local populations, like health and gender inequalities, sexuality, racism, ethnic and class conflicts, failed or weak governance, global migration crisis, disability, environmental concerns and the Anthropocene, animal rights, trauma, marginality and indigeneity, religiosity, secularism, global security, neoimperial warfare, neo-liberalism, globalization and transgression of international law. Although laden with these contents, this corpus also drew attention to violent US-led Empire's interventionism in these regions and local armed or un-armed resistance that opposed them (both in South Asia and the Middle East) mostly after the Cold War and 9/11. The US, in turn, made use of various technologies of global governance (like cross-border interventions) to strengthen its image as a global imperial empire, even though the financial crash of 2008 and recent US-withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq display these interventions as weaknesses of its imperial pretensions. Terror, warfare and neoimperialism are therefore recurrent tropes throughout this Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani literary corpus. In this project, I investigate these technologies of governance and control in a complex juxtaposition of sovereignty, race and war as they evolved and operated against these countries in the US-led empire since the Cold War. Through a postcolonial lens, I analyze how these technologies were registered and investigated by literary writers (in their anglophone and non-anglophone literature) from the given regions, even though at times considered as 'native informants' and 'comprador intellectuals' yet indispensable to anti-colonial and anti-imperial resistances (Ball and Mattar 69). I also figure out the nuanced ways in which the social, cultural or political control of this empire was informed, driven and implemented by biopolitics, i.e. the political management of human populations. There have been previous critical inquiries into the war-on-terror and post-9/11 fictions like Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction; Beyond 9/11 (2015) by Aroosa Kanwal and Islamophobia and the Novel (2018) by Peter Morey, but these works mostly analyse literature in relation to religion and fundamentalism. There has not been even a single research study before this that specifically registers a collective and comparative response of Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani literatures towards the execution of the US-led Empire's governmentality over the given regions specifically in terms of biopolitics, sovereignty, race and war. This study fills this critical gap. It not only provides a critical introduction to post-9/11 Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani literatures but also analyses how such literatures were inspired by, or at times informed, prevailing political conditions. Through an analysis of post-9/11 Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani literatures, this study explores how these literatures reacted to ongoing international political developments and to the ensuing philosophical, social, cultural and economic changes that their respective regions faced. As biopolitics increasingly informed imperial power, the US-led Empire exercised its control across borders without the need to form territorial colonies like previous colonial empires. This study has thus provided a nuanced way of examining this transformed version of empire largely under US control in the past three decades that had adverse implications for the selected regions after 9/11. All research and analysis has been done within the bio-political frame of reference starting from Michel Foucault's theorizations of biopolitics to more recent additions by later Foucaultian scholars. These include Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Julian Reid, Thomas Lemke and some others. If America was an empire in the past few decades, what form did it take? How did it operate? What were its implications for those populations who found themselves on the wrong side of this empire, such as in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan? How did this specific political rationality along with its practical forms inform, and got informed by, literary creations from the given regions? These questions are raised and explored in this study.

This thesis offers a history of Shakespeare's Tempest in France and the Francophone world. After a brief overview of Shakespeare - and more specifically The Tempest - on the French stage up until the late nineteenth century, there is a focus on four main responses, written in French, which have themselves shaped the afterlife of the play around the world: Ernest Renan's 1878 sequel, Caliban, suite de la Tempête, Jean Guéhenno's Caliban parle (1928), Octave Mannoni's Psychologie de la colonisation (1950), and Aimé Césaire's Une tempête (1969). These adaptations and responses were all composed after, and shaped by, significant events in the history of France and the Francophone world: they are part of the play's post-Revolution, post-WW1, post-colonial journey. Renan's sequel translates Prospero, Caliban and Ariel to a new, urban, post-Enlightenment locale, disrupting the Prospero-Caliban power dynamic. Renan describes his sequel as attempt to show a development for the character beyond anything that Shakespeare might have imagined; I argue that his sequel is significant in its recognition of Caliban's revolutionary potential, and that this was shaped by the revolutionary events in France. Jean Guéhenno's Caliban parle (1928) is a response to Renan's sequel as much as it is to Shakespeare's Tempest. Guéhenno's conceit in this work - essentially an extended monologue - is that he will embody the character of Caliban and speak as him. With this text, Guéhenno enters into the dialogue instigated by Renan about Caliban's role in society. In his sequel, Renan establishes Caliban as a working-class man symbolic of 'the people'; Guéhenno continues this identification and attempts to create a background for the character as well as forging a new future for him. Renan and Guéhenno both focussed on Caliban's class status; the next text I consider is Mannoni's, which adds a racial specificity to the character. Mannoni's response, which offers a literary approach to a psychoanalytical treatise, was created against the backdrop of the 1947 uprising in Madagascar. I demonstrate that Mannoni's work, highly contentious, proved profoundly influential in the trajectory of the play - significant postcolonial figures (such as Fanon, Césaire and Memmi) reacted against this work, which Jonathan Bate describes as 'pioneering' in its consideration of the play in relation to colonialism. Mannoni's influence was not limited to theory: Jonathan Miller cites Mannoni as a source for his seminal 1970 production, which made the play explicitly postcolonial. I argue that Mannoni's reading of the Caliban-Prospero power dynamic undermines Caliban's legitimacy as a revolutionary. The final response I consider re-imagines Caliban through a Francophone postcolonial lens - Caliban is given back his legitimacy, his revolutionary power, and his voice, which he uses to diminish Prospero: this diminishing of the mage, which began with Renan's sequel, comes to fruition with Césaire.

From 1565 the anthropomorphic representation of God in new drama ceased and he apparently exited from the stage-world. This thesis tracks the emergence of a robust system of representation in post-Reformation English drama, that complicates the dominant scholarly narrative of post-1580 secularised drama. It identifies playwrights' creative ways of integrating God in plays written across the period 1559 - 1642. These include his internalisation within protagonists, frame narratives with God-substitutes managing characters' lives, character articulations of faith, and the activities of the Devil and his minions. The thesis asserts that these representations reflected and contributed to changing Reformation theology by illustrating a revised understanding of God's nature, offering audiences a bird's-eye view of divine control, and recalling God's constant presence in human lives. Finally, I assert that the late tragicomedies' providential solutions to seemingly insoluble differences reassured audiences facing similar real-world tensions. The explicitly divine nature of these plays' outcomes demonstrates a change in the genre's form, challenging received wisdom of genre theory. This thesis then rediscovers the 'absent' God, hiding in the play world.

This thesis addresses the affront of otherness in D.H. Lawrence's writings on travel. It offers the first extended study of Lawrence's writings in relation to the ontological and epistemological concerns of literary impressionism. It demonstrates how literary impressionism, as a way of engaging with the world, can illuminate the generative affront of otherness in these works. The thesis provides an effective and necessary framework for linking up existing critical approaches to the problem of otherness in Lawrence's writings. It is structured around three methods for approaching otherness in Lawrence's travel writings. The first method establishes how Lawrence's responses to the affront of otherness can be usefully situated in relation to Ford Madox Ford's ideas concerning the nature of the impression, and the theory and practice of impressionism. The second method addresses Lawrence's Mexico and New Mexico writings. It illustrates how his open-ended responses to otherness reflect an underlying hopefulness through comparison with Ernst Bloch's notion of the not-yet conscious. It shows how Lawrence anticipates, in rendering the impression of otherness, the possibility of determining a more intuitive understanding of the relationship between the self and the circumambient universe. The third method considers Lawrence's Etruscan sketches and demonstrates how his attitudes towards historiography illuminate the imaginative and educative value he attaches to the encounter with otherness. In its synthesis of critical approaches, the thesis breaks new ground in two ways. Firstly, it uses the term 'the affront of otherness' to theorise how Lawrence's writing productively mediates the relationship between self and other. Secondly, it demonstrates how the ontological and epistemological concerns of literary impressionism can aid us in tracing the developing nature of Lawrence's ideas, and his sustained interest in the suggestive and educational power of otherness.

This thesis explores some key areas of intercultural Shakespeare through Shakespeare translation and performance in Japanese. It argues that some cultures outside the West, such as Japan, may be able to provide access to and even augment the power of Shakespeare's plays in certain important ways. After detailing some of the history of Shakespeare in Japan, especially the contribution of the Shakespeare scholar, translator and director Tsubouchi Shôyô, the paper examines three areas of Japanese translation and production that may allow for this type of augmentation, especially through productions and translations of Hamlet. These areas are as follows: firstly, the socio-religious fabric of Japanese society; secondly, certain aspects of the Japanese language including the use of kanji characters and furigana gloss; and finally, the often visual nature of Japanese Shakespeare productions. Throughout, metaphor is found to be a useful tool for accessing Japanese Shakespeare and intercultural theatre. Within the central argument that certain parts of Shakespeare's work may fit better today in other cultures than in the West, some of the key findings include: the distance between Shakespeare's original work and productions in the present day West is, in certain ways, bigger than the distance between Shakespeare's original work and present day Japan; certain types of intercultural theatre may be better framed as acts of intercultural communication, especially as a type of conversation; and that native English speakers may actually translate Shakespeare using Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) in a fashion similar, although clearly not identical, to how non-native speakers of English must translate Shakespeare.

Failure is generative; it produces a form. The work of reading Beckett's poetry in this thesis is pledged to these singular acts of poetic form, which host complex and calamitous interactions between lyrical language, subjectivity, sound and the body. The ambition of this project is not limited to situating these formal measures in the context of modernist poetry or to address their neglect in Beckett studies, it is primarily to follow the rifts that Beckett's poetry opens between voice and writing, language and lack, desire and disaffectedness, futurity and stagnancy and, ultimately, life and death. The thesis argues that a chronological or a thematic analysis of Beckett's poetry is not helpful in explaining its aesthetic and political interventions, instead it is the various literary tactics, including specific kinds of voicing, muting and listening, where such an intervention resides. Divided in three chapters, namely 'Survival', 'Event' and 'End', the thesis reads poems from several phases of Beckett's career, his translations from French poetry and the poems of other relevant modernist poets, to discuss how these poems offer new imaginaries of both failure and form. Lyric, like the term 'failure', is used in this thesis in all its slipperiness, not as fixed frame of reference or a genre with an ideological totality, but as a prism through which form is at once constructed and destabilised. The promise of a Beckettian poem, this research contends, lies in demands it puts on poetic language, from staging failure to awaiting uncertain and indeterminate events to registering infinite beginnings. Following various gestures and disturbances of form in Beckett's poetry while tracing a broader relation between voice, sound, prosody and punctuation in poetic forms, this thesis provides a fresh context for reading his poetry and indicates the rewards that any such reading holds.

This thesis aims to contribute to both translation studies and Joycean studies. Firstly, my study aligns with recent developments in translation studies that dismiss translation's traditional ancillary role, arguing instead that translation can contribute to or complement literary criticism itself (Gaddis Rose 1997; Scott 2000; 2012a; Wright 2016). Following the assumption that the translator is a reader, and, in a post-structural context, a necessary interpreter of the source text (ST), this study explores the role of the translator as a stylistic reader (Boase-Beier 2021), as a "listener" and "performer" (Scott 2012a) of the language of the ST. This thesis argues for the first time in the field that "experimental translation", as a means of making the translator's "linguistic experience" (Scott 2012a, 11) of the ST visible, can become an ideal form of criticism where "musicalized fiction" (Wolf [1992] 2018) is concerned. Secondly, though the potential of translation as an interpretive tool for Ulysses has often been recognised in Joycean studies (e.g. Senn 1984), my study explores for the first time in the field the potential of translation to contribute to musico-literary studies of Joyce's "Sirens", which Joyce wrote intending to imitate a "fuga per canonem" (JJ 462). Dismissing formalist approaches that focus on the identification of the "Sirens" fugue form, this thesis aligns with recent studies in the field that encourage readers to mentally "perform" its language to appreciate its musical value (O'Callaghan 2009; 2018). In this context, "experimental translation" is proposed as one of the possible answers to Joyce's fugue claims. This thesis also includes an experimental re-translation into Italian of "Sirens" that makes visible my musical experience thereof. This translation is meant to be read as a complement to and trial of my arguments, and as a means of bringing theory and practice into dialogue.

This interdisciplinary academic project investigates the origins of the experiential consumer, an important figure who emerges in the early twentieth century in the metropolises of Western Europe, to model a new kind of modern consumption: experiential consumption. Closely linked to the experiential consumer are the imbrications between the groundbreaking approaches gaining prevalence in both the spheres of commerce and high modernist literature, specifically, the urban marketplace in the former, and the texts of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce in the latter. The study begins with an examination of how the internalization of the commodity form came to shape a consumer-oriented consciousness for the modern subject. The other key element in the development of experiential consumption as an increasingly significant mode of consumption, involves the evolution of late-nineteenth century aestheticism, which further promoted aesthetic engagement in modern individuals. At the outset of the 1900s, an important cultural institution gained sufficient everyday influence within the cityscape to provide a pivotal space for cultivating a new consumerist ethos based on experiential consumption: the department store. Though the connections between art and commerce are analysed in relation to the appearance of a new programme in the marketplace - modernist commercialism - which relied on some literary techniques and ideals, this thesis project also evaluates how the tensions in this relationship are addressed from a literary perspective. Thus, the study explores both Woolf's and Joyce's fascination with experiential consumption, including their treatment of it through the depiction of their most famous characters - Clarissa Dalloway and Leopold Bloom - who are crafted as exemplars of the modern subject as an experiential consumer. The investigation also includes how economic and commercial ideas, namely marketplace logic and a consumerist orientation, influenced their work as high literary modernists.

This thesis examines the under-studied manifestations of satire and the satiric apologia in middlebrow literature. In particular, the project considers Nancy Mitford's novels and journalism, G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories, and P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves saga as sites for the dissemination of a persuasive and efficacious form of defensible satire. The central argument of the thesis is that middlebrow satirists are ideally situated to enact and defend their satire, even when their censure is directed in politically incorrect or downright bigoted directions and despite the inherently transgressive nature of the mode. I argue that my subjects are capable of satirically attacking concrete figures such as women and Jewish people while successfully negotiating any readerly discomfort that might be incurred by this especially unpalatable wielding of satire's already transgressive power. Consequently, my analysis runs counter to a recent trend in the scholarship of literary satire which insists upon the mode's indeterminacy, instability, ambiguity, and ambivalence. Instead, I propose that the commercial forces and pleasant characteristics that respectively animate and define middlebrow works form a counter-intuitively powerful motive and means to defend the satire of Mitford, Chesterton, and Wodehouse, not only against the traditional accusations of impropriety and aggression associated with satire, but against the subtler objections raised by those theorists who insist upon the mode's paradoxical and self-undoing qualities. In so doing, I make the case for taking middlebrow literature seriously in satire studies, an area of research which often relegates middlebrow mainstays like Mitford and Wodehouse to the borders or fringes of the field. Discussing one author per chapter, I observe how each writer defends their satire while invoking idealised conceptions of the satirist as a heroic, morally upstanding figure, culminating in a final chapter which sees these invocations borne out in recent biographical fictions in which each middlebrow satirist is transmuted into a fictional hero, demonstrating the endurance and efficacy of these apologetic self-constructions. By extension, I argue that these remarkably upstanding depictions of my subjects constitute evidence that their apologias were successful-and that, consequently, their satire should be considered in terms of its capacity to persuade, reform, and possibly even inflict damage or harm through its charming influence.

This thesis is a search for female agency, unrecorded in theory and in history. My enquiry is also a bid to recover, through Shakespeare, the performative presence of the Victorian actress, Ellen Terry, hovering on the threshold of women's emancipation and our modernity. The lost female presence she represents is, I suggest, a gap in our Western social and political narrative, and in the philosophical investigations of personhood that have occupied thinkers since G. W. F. Hegel.

The femme fatale is a persistent cultural fantasy, emerging across film, television and literature during times of gendered social upheaval. She is elusive, seductive and dangerous. While critics of film noir have positioned the figure as a cultural effect of masculine anxiety and a signifier of changing social roles, others have argued for the potency of the figure - her strength and sexual allure - beyond the confines of narrative conclusion. In turn, studies of the femme fatale of the 1980s onwards have situated the figure in reference to a backlash against feminism, with the hyperviolent, hypercompetent femmes of this era representing concurrent anxieties regarding agentic career women. In the twenty-first century, the feminist potentialities of the femme fatale continue to demand critical attention. From Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (2012) and its filmic adaptation (2014) to Emma Cline's The Girls (2016), Sam Levinson's Assassination Nation (2018), the 2018 series of Killing Eve and Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman (2021), this thesis assesses how far the contemporary femme fatale can be read as a feminist analytical tool. I argue that the twenty-first century femme fatale continues to refract discourses around feminism and femininity, from Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train's (2015/2016) girlish subversion of the postfeminist ideation of domestic bliss to Good Girls' (2018-21) fatally deconstructive mums-on-the-run. Spanning genres and modes, this thesis explores the re-emergence of the twenty-first-century femme fatale, situating the promise and disappointment of the contemporary figure alongside the rise and decline of the #MeToo movement.

A Diamond Geeza is a Girl's Best Friend is a collection of short stories and vignettes that demonstrates predominantly working-class men, trapped within a toxic, patriarchal sphere and explores themes such as power, reclamation of honour and the changing cultural landscape of Great Britain. The main story from the creative folder, 'Author of His Own Doom' chronicles, through the first-person narrative, how the protagonist attempts to rise above his surroundings and baser instincts and works towards discovering his identity and self-respect. The accompanying critical study contributes to the knowledge of metafictional writing. The creative process contributes by acknowledging the existence of a limiting and often degrading space for working class men and the ways in which they may seek a redress. This study refutes the assumption that metafiction is elitist or passé and is instead a powerful social tool to understand both cultural perimeters and the self, demonstrating the value of building a narrative for men who may feel that they have little or no voice. The sources that support this research include creative and critical texts, as follows: Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, Martin Amis's Money, and Davis Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men; David Lodge's The Art of Metafiction, Robert Scholes' Fabulation and Metafiction, Patricia Waugh's Metafiction The Theory and Practice of Self- Conscious Fiction, William H. Gass's Fiction and the Figures of Life, Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Dan Ariely 's Predictably Irrational, Mary K. Holland's A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies and Jonathon Greenberg's Was Anyone Hurt: The End of Satire in A Handful of Dust.

This thesis explores the phenomenon of emotion in different cultural contexts, through the lens of Shakespearean performance. In particular, it investigates how differences in language may reflect, or even shape, how feelings in the playhouse are experienced, expressed, and emphasised. This involves the comparison of emotion concepts in early modern English to twenty-first-century English, as well as to untranslatable concepts in Russian, French, and German. The INTRODUCTION serves as an overview of the importance of both translation scholarship and emotion studies as they relate to Shakespeare and early modern England. CHAPTER ONE introduces the philosophical, scientific, and linguistic groundwork that will permit a confident exploration of the situated nature of emotions on the Shakespearean stage. In particular, this chapter presents a theoretical paradigm known as enaction, as well as the methodological tools of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. CHAPTER TWO focuses on the experience of lovesickness as it pertains to the character of Mariana in Measure for Measure. The chapter begins with a study of the idea of love melancholy and the many ways it was considered a serious illness in Renaissance England, and then examines how twenty-first-century productions of the play navigate the dramaturgical implications of Mariana's emotive improvisation. CHAPTER TWO then compares current English-language notions of lovesickness with the Russian untranslatable concept тоска (toska), and looks at how Russian productions of the play have embodied this emotion. CHAPTER THREE looks at Othello, through the lens of an emotion we tend to think of as positive: joy. However, in exploring the early modern English attitudes toward this particular feeling, this chapter uncovers the interrelatedness of Renaissance England's concepts of joy and death. CHAPTER THREE then turns to an examination of joy's French-language analogue: joie. An analysis of French translations and productions of Othello will show how joie carries surprisingly different connotations from the "joy" that native English speakers know. CHAPTER FOUR explores the concept of fear in Hamlet. The first half of the chapter examines the neuroscience behind the claim that fear is a universal human emotion, before demonstrating how fear in Renaissance England was bound up with concepts of the afterlife. The second half explores the German-language concept of Angst, and analyses how this emotion has coloured German theatre-makers' relationship with Hamlet. The CODA looks more closely at the practical, theatrical implications of the disparity between the emotion concepts that emerged from Shakespeare's specific time and those of today. In particular, the CODA outlines a means by which actors can use the Natural Semantic Metalanguage to deconstruct some of Shakespeare's emotions, which may be considered "untranslatable" today, and synthesise them into a culturally relevant mode of expression.

This submission contains a novel and a critical essay, each engaging with the philosophical ideals and narrative forms of male friendship within Western storytelling. Mr London, is a literary fantasy fiction novel which charts the tragic adventure of Benjamin Farthing as he travels through worlds and wars to save a friend. Along the way, Benjamin discovers that nobody is immune to the potential atrocities inspired by friendship, including himself. The final part of the novel is provided as a summary. The critical essay, Eight Tropes of Friendship Narratives, explores how fictional friendship seeks to identify and concretise itself within narratives, and how this influenced the writing of Mr London. The essay examines the commonality of the quest plot in friendship narratives and how the structure of the quest plot serves to build and explore friendship, before identifying eight narrative tropes of friendship - cohabitation, feasts, other realms, confessions, oaths, battles, sacrifice and leave-taking. Finally, the essay discusses friendship's tendency to disappear from fiction in order to fully realise itself, and how this process is used to shape the individual.

This thesis investigates the intentions behind the 2016 re-opening of the new The Other Place (TOP), the studio theatre of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in Stratford-upon-Avon. Erica Whyman, Artistic Director of the new TOP, summarises the spirit of the new building as 'Radical Mischief'. Using interviews, observational notes and publicity material, this thesis examines what 'Radical Mischief' means to the RSC and analyses whether such aims are visible in the work of the theatre through three case-study chapters - Mischief Festivals (annual or biannual showcases of new work), Research and Development projects, and the 2018 Radical Mischief conference, co-convened with the University of Birmingham. This research is the first to document the new TOP at length and sits within the body of literature already written about earlier incarnations of TOP: Alycia Smith-Howard's Studio Shakespeare (2006) and Colin Chambers' Other Spaces (1980). This thesis concludes that elements of 'Radical Mischief' have been visible in the work, but it has not been a consistent theme. The extent to which 'Radical Mischief' can impact the wider RSC and the University is questioned, and with the closure of the building in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is uncertain when TOP will re-open and if 'Radical Mischief' is still a key incentive.

The construction of Shakespeare as 'the poet of nature' in the long eighteenth century was a constant, yet changing, process that shifted as did contemporary philosophical and scientific views of the natural world. In this study, I examine how Shakespeare became 'the poet of nature' as a result of critics, adapters, and editors using metaphors of the natural world and cultivation to describe him and his writing during the era. I take a new approach by assessing these metaphors more literally, since the language critics used to assess Shakespeare's works from 1660 to 1799 reflected gardening practices and philosophical ideals of the times. The language of cultivation was a powerful tool for Shakespearean critics to use as it allowed them to apply metaphors that could show that Shakespeare's 'Beauties' coexisted with his 'Faults' or 'weeds,' while at the same time justifying their argument for the removal of the 'Faults.' My study shows how literary critics were influenced by philosophical ideals of cultivation, which shaped their adaptations and editions of Shakespeare's plays. I connect the long eighteenth century's shifting attitudes to Shakespeare with the changing perceptions of nature and gardening in this period. My study shows how Shakespearean criticism moved throughout the era from seeing Shakespeare as in need of cultivation to a national genius by the time of Garrick's 1769 Jubilee.

Scholars have observed an unprecedented upsurge in fictional creation with realist aesthetics in the core economies as a cultural response to the 2001 and especially the 2007-8 financial crashes. This dissertation examines American and British finance-crisis fiction relating to realist aesthetics, in the form of novels and films produced in the wake of the two post-millennial financial crises. The examination adopts a dual-track approach to; (i) showing particularities in the cultural representation of socioeconomic conditions and crisis experiences, and, in connection with the recent rise of realism, the ways of performing what has sometimes been reserved for the role of (post)modernism or rendered as burdens of realism; such as representing systemic totality and carrying out class critiques and presenting alternative imaginaries, and, (ii) demonstrating the denaturalising force of mainstream economic and neoliberal assumptions regarding finance, financialisation, and financial crisis. To investigate cultural dissent and class struggle, this research highlights the necessity for the economic and financial turn of cultural studies and examines the subject texts, using a strategically created critical framework called the 'salto mortale exchange framework'. This approach makes it possible to understand and interpret financialisation and financial crashes via utilising exchange mode-based Marxian theoretics, whilst also offering an alternative critical framework to that of cultural economic criticism. The research clarifies that the post-millennial finance-crisis fiction expresses changed understandings regarding finance and crisis, in conjunction with the transformation of financialised socioeconomic conditions into the twenty-first century. It also details how, with its realist aesthetics, the finance-crisis fiction performs as an evaluative critique for the crises, as well as for capitalist dynamics as a whole; such as (i) registering the financial crash as a long crisis innate to capitalism by illuminating incongruous temporalities of economic and cultural fixes; (ii) registering finance and the capitalist system as a crisis regime in its systemic critique of the historicity of national financialisation and associated world-systemic movement; (iii) revitalising class discussion; and, (iv) asserting the need for an alternative, non-capitalist global society. The research shows that such representations discontent, delegitimate, and denaturalise mainstream economics and neoliberal conjectures, such as assuming a more equal and classless society; normalising crisis as a deviated dent of supposed perpetual capitalist development; auspicious visioning of investor subjectivity and self-entrepreneurship; and the ultimate collective prosperity and a civilised growth of the world economy through capitalist logics and financialisation. The particularities of the post-millennial finance-crisis fiction addressed in this research position those fictions as a part of a new cultural front - a class struggle that inflects the capitalist revolution, characterising the contemporary phase of neoliberalism.

In a period where the eighteenth-century ethical worldview represented radically different and incompatible ways of conceiving of happiness in one and the same perspective, this thesis examines the key role played by the writing of Laurence Sterne in understanding happiness as it evolved from the eudaemonist happiness of classical theism, to the subjectivist, psychological concept of happiness advocated by Enlightenment philosophers. It demonstrates how enquires into the nature of happiness, and how to attain it, form a cornerstone of Sterne's sermons, a prominent theme in his novel Tristram Shandy and a preoccupation in much Sterneana. Its central argument is that, unlike most of his contemporaries, Sterne grasped the flawed logic and the worrying implications of the century's new subjectivist ethical impulse which became a defining characteristic of the Enlightenment. It examines how Sterne elaborates happiness within the framework of Christian eudaemonism in his sermons and articulates the ethical shortcomings of its rival, subjectivist concept of happiness. It examines how Sterne interrogates the new subjectivist happiness in Tristram Shandy and argues that he ultimately reconciles happiness and virtue by accommodating the subjectivist concept of happiness within the moral framework of Christian eudaemonism. It examines how Sterne refutes the notion that hedonism can be verified as an ethical principle, and that experiential happiness can ever be a criterion for guiding our actions. The novel's joyful portrayal of its characters' hobby-horsical pursuits means that the entelechy which gives the novel its ethical direction can, at times, appear ambiguous. In its examination of Sterneana, this thesis demonstrates that the two ways of conceptualizing happiness, (the subjectivist and the ethical) are often played out in the social and sexual sphere. The scribblers censure what they perceive to be the immoral and irreligious conduct of Sterne and his fictional creations or, alternatively, embrace him as a fellow rake, hedonist or sexual libertine. By utilizing parody, satire and the signifiers of erotica, the scribbling fraternity connect Sterne, and his alter-egos Yorick and Tristram, to a larger pattern of clerical and sexual misconduct. Sterneana also employ various iterations of the narrative of seduction in order to articulate conflicts that arise, not from the sum of shared values or a shared definition of happiness but conflicts arising from unshared values, unshared conceptions of happiness and therefore unshared ends.

This thesis is primarily concerned with the ideologies that structure Western narratives about psychedelic experiences. We are in a moment of unprecedented change regarding the legal, medical, and social status of psychedelic substances - what some refer to as the 'Psychedelic Renaissance'. But there are numerous incompatibilities between current psychedelic platitudes (and the dominant discourses of the West more generally) and the idea of 'altered' states of consciousness as an asset. Western psychedelic rhetoric is saturated with conceptualisations of personal growth and healing, part of a larger paradigm in which health - especially mental health - is pitched as the responsibility of the individual. This thesis questions the meaning of 'psychedelic integration' in a hyper-individualistic context in which wellness is being increasingly commodified; it explores why medicalisation ought to be just one of many socially sanctioned applications of psychedelics. Aldous Huxley's Island exemplifies radical agnosticism (among other things) through a pluralistic approach to psychedelics. Pala's psychoactive toadstool, moksha, is embedded within a pedagogical system that continuously questions the ideologies woven into the fabric of language and culture. With the conviction that a similar system could exist as yet undelineated outside Huxley's imagination, I use a combination of literary archival research and extensive linguistic, historical, philosophical, cultural, and scientific analysis to critique the contemporary psychedelic moment. With equal import, I also turn that critical lens back onto the imbalances of modern Western society, with a view to rekindling the neglected reciprocities between language, perception, and belief systems. I conclude that flexible semantic practises and adaptable philosophies are indispensable to the sustainability of any system-ideological or practical-that endorses perceptual modulations. I question not only the implications of corporatizing psychedelics, but also the implications of quantifying reality. I show how a greater understanding of one's own linguistic, perceptual, and philosophical predispositions can serve as a prophylactic against capitalist dogmas. In this way, the project has not only been about the role of semantics and metaphor in psychedelic preparation and integration, but about their role in the meaning of our lives.

This project takes an interdisciplinary approach to early modern drama, analyzing how playwrights conceive of and represent violence via the visual, material, rhetorical, and performance cultures that inform their work. It suggests that rhetoric and action are inextricably intertwined and that this intertwining is especially forceful, heightened, and affective during moments of staged violence on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English stage. As a result, violent speech generates not only meaning and feeling, but also material forms of violent action and impact, endowing the embodied act with particularly forceful potential. Rhetoric is not just heard in the theatre, it is enacted, it is felt, and it is experienced. As such, this thesis is attuned to and explores the violent potential of embodied rhetoric by examining premodern plays with a methodology that is positioned at the intersection between rhetoric and performance, using both textual analysis and practice as research to offer up a new critical approach that enables us to see the spectacular and affective power of violence in the rhetoric and performances of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century tragedies. As I unpick the linguistic roots of violence in these plays and the ways they manifest on stage, I define two specific and identifiable vocabularies of violence: the first, a descriptive vocabulary of language about violence and the second, a demonstrative vocabulary of violent language. Using these vocabularies, I argue that language plays an imperative role in generating and enlivening acts of violence on stage, in defining its performance, and in provoking an emotional response in both actors and audience members in the early modern period and today.

This thesis analyses the life and work of little-studied writer, Olive Garnett (1871-1958) and makes the case for reassessing her currently peripheral place in literary criticism. It contends that Garnett's works are substantially more than mere footnotes to those of her contemporaries. Garnett wrote with immediacy about a generation-defining moment in Russian history, with her short story collection, Petersburg Tales (1900) and novel, In Russia's Night (1918) charting the trajectory of the collapse of Imperial Russia. The period 1855-1917 saw instability in Anglo-Russian relations with the British public's mood oscillating between Russophilism and Russophobia. Garnett's career was mobilised against the backdrop of rampant tsarist policies on Russification that contributed to the mass exodus of political refugees from Russia who settled in more liberal western European cities, including London. The increase in Russian speakers in London resulted in an explosion of English translations of Russian literature, led by Garnett's sister-in-law, Constance Garnett (1861-1946), which fuelled the reading public's appetite for all things Russian. Olive Garnett responded to these developments, drawing in her writing from the experiences of her diverse literary and political network, which included famous translators, authors and Russian émigrés, and writing back to them, producing ambitious texts that both reflect and comment on this pivotal period in history. iii This thesis adopts a triangulated methodology, utilising Garnett's diaries, literature and life to perform a biographical and historical analysis of her published literature and some of her unpublished manuscripts to offer the first sustained analysis of Garnett's work. Each chapter is attentive to intertextual connections between the works of Garnett and her predecessors and contemporaries. These include significant political and literary figures such as Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-81), Anton Chekov (1860-1904), Sergei Stepniak (1851-95), Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), Henry James (1843-1916) and Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), whose collective reach spans across Russia, the United States of America and New Zealand. Garnett is not subordinate to these more famous figures, and in placing her work alongside them in a creative and critical dialogue this thesis showcases Garnett's talents as a writer. It also serves to highlight Garnett's overlooked contribution to the mediation of the political turmoil in Russian to British readers at the dawn of the twentieth century. Ultimately this project calls for a re-appreciation of Garnett's literary output and a repositioning of Garnett as an author in her own right, for her own narrative, rather than as part of someone else's story.

This Hollow Vale is an epic dementia fantasy that explores the nexus between time and narrative, music and memory, and identity and consciousness, in a creative attempt to represent the interior life of a protagonist with Alzheimer's disease. The novel reflects a growing contemporary fascination with the narrativisation of dementia, fuelled by constant media interest and burgeoning individual and societal experience of the syndrome. Nevertheless, despite the fact that there are now many cultural texts featuring dementia - including successful fictional representations across a wide range of genres, the use of epic fantasy in This Hollow Vale makes it distinctive, perhaps even unique. The novel draws attention to the plight of those living with a dementia diagnosis by presenting a mature female protagonist (a former opera singer) seemingly silenced by Alzheimer's. This Hollow Vale opens with 70-year-old Dame Josephine (Josey) Knight clinging to life in a nursing home, isolated by her dementia and largely forgotten by family and friends. When fire engulfs her room, death seems inevitable. Inexplicably, however, Josey sidesteps this fate and finds herself translated into a parallel world (the Vale of the title), a dystopia where music is outlawed, and singing is considered a dark art. On waking in The Vale, it seems Josey possesses strange powers linked to her voice that cause those she encounters to believe that she's the reincarnation of a saint. Josey becomes a figurehead for The Vale's rebel movement, and her adventures while trying to find her way back home form the greater part of the novel. In two sections, the accompanying exegesis considers how the fantasy novel has been employed to effect this representation. It focusses on a key aspect of the narrativisation process - the use of time - before going on to offer a comparison between the way characters with dementia are represented in This Hollow Vale, and in three other novels featuring protagonists with similar diagnoses: Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante, Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey, and Naomi Krüger's May. Far from being an inappropriate vehicle for the exploration of radical or ethically complex issues (such as those faced by someone living with Alzheimer's), the fantasy genre not only provides opportunity for the temporal experimentation which has been central to this interpretation of the subjectivity of dementia, but more importantly, it also offers an imaginative platform from which the stifling conventions of ageing and illness in our society can be challenged. In a time of mass upheaval and moral uncertainty, where the vital function of elderhood seems to have been lost, and when our response to diseases such as Alzheimer's often calls into question our understanding of what it means to be human, it has never been more important to actively engage in re-imagining dementia. This Hollow Vale sets out to show this process at work, and by exploring the intricate consciousness and undeniable humanity of a protagonist with dementia we are asked to pause and reflect on our own consciousness and humanity, a request that is as crucial as it is timely.

The novel 'Dark Tide' forms the creative element for the thesis. It offers a fictional exploration of the origins, lives and legacies of the black residents of the Yorkshire Dales and Lancashire coast in the long eighteenth century through the character Jack Moss, former slave and machete man at the Bay View Plantation on Plantashion Island (Barbados). The narrative of 'Dark Tide' is roughly apportioned into four parts. The first examines the geographic origins of African slavery, the second, colonial exploitation and racial polarisation in pursuit of economic gain, the third, returning to England, represents the movement of social consciences and the isolation of colonial slave colonies in a world where abolition was gaining momentum. Finally, part four is intended to provide an examination of how black people could have arrived in the Yorkshire Dales and Lancashire coast in the long eighteenth century and integrated into rural working-class communities. The narrative begins on Jack's last night before trial for murder when he is visited by the unique Bajan demon, the Heartman. After brief introductions the pair travel back to the origins of slavery on the west coast of Africa where they experience the dehumanisation of sorting slaves (men, and women and children) in the 'dark room' and sail in the horrendous slave hold of the ship 'Hope' on the middle passage to the Caribbean. The racially polarised lives of those who lived on a British colonial sugar cane plantation is witnessed first-hand before Jack's owners take him with them as they sail back to England. En-route, Jack fights and kills plantation overlooker, Charles Inman, but because on board 'Hope' British laws are in force as opposed to the colonial slave code, he must stand trial at Red Rose City (Lancaster). In England, the socio economics, class and race of pre-industrial revolution Britain are examined as Jack escapes transportation to integrate via an interracial marriage into the working-class communities of the northern uplands. The unreliable narration of the Heartman and magical realism allow the narrative to explore the lives of those who were merely numbers in ships ledgers, assets on plantation records and names on moss covered tombstones in quiet corners of northern graveyards, in unique, insightful and challenging ways. The critical exegesis is an accompaniment for the fictional narrative, and it contextualises the historical research that underpins the fiction. It offers a discussion of the anticolonial counter narratives the creative element offers, examines where this narrative sits alongside other literature and suggest ways it makes a unique contribution to literature and history.