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Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (An adaptation of Joseph Campbell's work on the Hero's Journey), created a storytelling paradigm that works foremost as an individual narrative, structured around a 'Hero'. Storytelling exercises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and the Baahubali franchise immerse the audiences into intricate, sprawling universes that follow different trajectories with multiple foci. Using the Baahubali franchise for the scope that it offers, this work points to certain limitations of the storytelling paradigm suggested by Vogler. In addition to re-establishing the intricate relationship between mythical and modern narratives, especially cinema, this work furthermore proposes that the building blocks for a new kind of narrative journey already exist in Indian Mythology, specifically the Mahabharata, a megalithic story that unravels without a central heroic figure and comprises multiple intricately connected narratives, extending in different temporal and geographical directions. Section 1 of this work makes an argument for this storytelling paradigm and then establishes its schema in detail. Section 1 ends with a discussion on the possibilities and scope of this unified narrative model that would help storytellers craft these complicated universes, from start to finish, across various mediums. Section 2 (submitted separately) contains the creative work, an adaptation of the Mahabharata in two screenplays constructed using this paradigm. It can be viewed in hard copy at the National Library for Wales and the Arts and Social Studies Library at Cardiff University.

Liz Lochhead (b. 1947) is one of Scotland's most decorated contemporary writers, however, an extensive study of her poetry and drama is lacking to date. Drawing on perspectives included in Robert Crawford's and Anne Varty's Liz Lochhead's Voices (1993) and Varty's Edinburgh Companion to Liz Lochhead (2013), which provide a foundational understanding of her work, this thesis considers Lochhead's arrival as a poet in 1970s Scotland and charts her progression to the role of Scots Makar in 2011. A study of the critical landscape has revealed a gendered approach to Lochhead's corpus. Taking its cue from Lochhead's varied output, this thesis interrogates readily accepted assumptions of Lochhead's work, that it is merely Scottish, female, funny, and feisty, as established in early reviews by Stewart Conn, Robert Garioch, and Alexander Scott. It argues that Scottish female experience is at the centre of Lochhead's corpus, but by illuminating the other themes present in her writing, we can refine our understanding of Lochhead's work, making new connections between Lochhead and her contemporaries. This thesis undertakes a close analysis of a range of Lochhead's publications, contextualised with reference to cultural politics, interviews, and archival research of unpublished material held in the University of Glasgow's Special Collections. A chronological approach, informed by the publication or performance dates of Lochhead's work, has enabled this thesis to trace the development of a writer, from a young woman writing semi-autobiographically to the public face of poetry in Scotland. Meanwhile, a holistic examination of Lochhead's original work and her beginnings at Glasgow School of Art presents her development from painter to poet, to poet and playwright, and the development of voices in tandem with this. By unearthing Lochhead's collaborations, revues, and original unpublished drama, and by casting new light on the importance to her work of the visual arts and her relationships with artists, this thesis gives rise to a new narrative. Through her choice of subject matter and a variety of written voices, Lochhead emphasises the importance of democratising the arts, therefore making poetry and drama accessible to a new audience.

Despite the wider cultural progress of gender equality, game content which perpetuates sexist beliefs about gender is uncomfortably common. Games have historically used narrative and programmed mechanics to advocate that women are valuable only when performing exaggerated femininity - they must look and behave biologically female, even when playing as non-human races. Game content suggests that women desire play such as fighting from a distance, healing, and otherwise supporting the masculine, combative role while being denied equal agency. From this viewpoint, women are at their most feminine - their 'ideal' state - when they are objectified, and as cultural artefacts games reveal society's adherence of the same values: sexist content articulates the dichotomy of man=capable, woman=incapable that structures Western culture. Yet there are signs of change in both games and the industry, and the thesis explores the power of sexist representations and the progress toward inclusive game content. The industry is increasingly representing women and marginalised groups in ways which highlight intellectual solutions over the use of force, explore non-heterosexual sexuality, or feature cooperation that encourages relations of equality beyond gender boundaries, as well as empowered female characters whose stories overcome sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression. 'RPG: Role-Playing Gender' looks at games using a mixed-methodological approach which combines 'close readings' of games as texts alongside other popular culture and art forms, ethnographic surveys of game communities, and interviews with members of the gaming world. What do sexist representations communicate to players concerning female power and gender roles? What specific gender-based characteristics do players adopt for in-game gender performance? How do game communities facilitate player/player interaction, especially those based on assumptions about gender trends, in ways non-virtual spaces cannot? What stories and mechanics might games adopt to represent women and marginalised groups in ways which normalise and celebrate diversity?

This thesis analyses Young Adult Dystopian Fiction (YADF) published between 2005 and 2018. It develops a theory of the female protagonists featured in these texts, identifying them as a recurring literary type which I name 'the dystopian girl'. I define the dystopian girl as encoding the hegemonic ideologies of this time period, particularly postfeminism, post- racial colour-blindness, and neoliberal subjectivity. My reading is enacted against the grain of the texts, which project the dystopian girl as a revolutionary hero, and intervenes in critical debates which have either lionised this figure as a feminist icon, or disparaged YADF as an inferior form of the dystopian genre. This thesis argues that the dystopian girl is an intrinsically ambivalent and latently utopian figure, who encodes an understanding of girlhood as a site of political agency, and who occasionally undermines normative narratives of adolescent development. I argue that YADF is an important site of contemporary political imagining, and that the dystopian girl encompasses a contradictory range of social and political desires. I also trace how delineations of this figure have shifted over the course of a decade, in a manner which registers the re-emergence of feminism and social justice movements in the western cultural mainstream. I identify Scott Westerfeld's Uglies trilogy (2005-2007), Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy (2008-2010) and Veronica Roth's Divergent trilogy (2011-2013) as epitomising the dominant mould of the dystopian girl type, while also analysing other examples, including Saci Lloyd's The Carbon Diaries duology (2009-2010), Teri Terry's Slated trilogy (2012-2014), the television adaptation of Kass Morgan's The 100 (2013-2015) and Kiera Cass's The Selection trilogy (2012-2014). In the final chapter, I identify how this now established type is complicated and critiqued in more recent novels, primarily Naomi Alderman's The Power (2017) and Anna Day's The Fandom (2018).

This study seeks to determine whether video games, specifically narrative role-playing games, have matured enough as a narrative medium to be remediated by their predecessors. Whilst scholars have already begun documenting how cinema has begun incorporating elements unique to video games, no such research has been conducted on whether video games have begun to impact print literature in a similar way. Writers have often used ludic strategies such as elaborate puzzle-solving and labyrinthine narratives to keep the reader engaged, such as is found in an analysis of the ergodicity and immersive qualities of Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel Pale Fire. However, such pre-digital texts provide a physical interaction on the part of the reader but only through narrative means. Writers of hypertext fiction have explored using the computer's multimedia capabilities to create a sense of reader immersion; however, as shown through a breakdown of James Pope's analysis of the four major problems to 'mainstream' hypertext fiction, such limited and scripted interactions do not capture the mainstream reader quite like video games do. Video games, however, have created new strategies while remediating older ones, particularly through tying the player's ergodic agency and decisions to both a ludic progression in the game as well as a narrative one. Bethesda's continually popular and critically acclaimed virtual role-playing game, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), is used to explore these immersive elements and how they are accomplished differently from postmodern ergodic texts and hypertext fictions. Finally, in comparing the elements of Skyrim to those present in J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst's S. (2013), a text published after the rise of contemporary video game consoles, and contrasting S. to the earlier ergodic text House of Leaves (2001) by Mark Z. Danielewski, a pattern of current and future back-and-forth remediation emerges, solidifying video games' structural impact on current and future print literature.

This thesis studies the element of poetic address in the work of two poets for whom address is a relational element that is connected to an awareness of finitude: Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan. Their poems privilege the idea of sending rather than saying; and focus more on addressing, challenging, and diverting yet calling the reader rather than on building meaning. This relational emphasis is also at the center of a discussion on community and literature held between Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy in the 1980s, which is predominantly studied from political perspectives that regard their concern with the literary as imprecise or secondary. I claim that, in their quest to think of an alternative form of community that is not based on the production of a common essence by its members, the State and institutions, they privilege and revalue literary address. By thinking about literature in the light of dying and finitude, Blanchot and Nancy stress its potential to open up relations with others at the limit of what is common, present, and representable. Their reflections thus provide an illuminating framework to help us understand the notions of address developed by both poets. Moreover, I seek to show that the differences between these two philosophers' positions correspond to certain significant differences in the notion of address in Dickinson and Celan's work. This allows me to develop a comparative reflection on the pairs Blanchot-Dickinson and Celan-Nancy.

'Never Forget Your First' presents the story of Gillian - a young woman who, from a young age, expresses an attraction to violence. Following an encounter with her father - in the course of which he suffers a fatal injury - Gillian begins her journey towards her first murder. Never Forget Your First aims to illustrate how contemporary authors can deviate from narrative norms in regard to representing female violence. Complementary to this, the critical portion of this thesis, Violent Women: Representations of Female Violence in Muriel Spark's 'The Driver's Seat', Virginie Despentes's 'Baise-Moi', Gillian Flynn's 'Gone Girl', and C.S. Barnes's 'Never Forget Your First', discusses how depictions of female violence in fiction remain heavily gendered. Through an analysis of three novels- Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat (1970), Virginie Despentes's Baise-Moi, trans. by Bruce Benderson (1993), and Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (2012)- this essay aims to highlight that even innovative narratives of female violence remain, to some extent, governed by gendered expectations. This analysis also draws on feminist theory, above all on Betty Friedan's and Judith Butler's work. The critical essay highlights problems with the gendered representation of violence in fiction and calls for a revision of literary tropes governing the representation of violence.

This study brings together for the first time four non-canonical memoirs written by women from various backgrounds who emigrated from Germany to the United States in the early post-war years and whose texts were published in English in the United States between 2004 and 2011: Irmgard Powell, 'Don't Let Them See You Cry: Overcoming a Nazi Childhood' (2008); lrmgard A. Hunt, 'On Hitler 's Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood' (2005); Maria Ritter, 'Return to Dresden' (2004); Sabina de Werth Neu, 'A Long Silence: Memories of a German Refugee Child 1941-1958' (2011). The memoirs chosen for this study were written by women who were born in Germany between 1932 and 1941 . These memoirs address an American readership and entered the American public sphere via the popularity of the contemporary misery memoir. I demonstrate how the trope of the innocent child, articulations of citizenship and confessions to guilt and shame construct the necessary framework of German culpability for the Nazi past to enable a testimony to the victimhood of the protagonists, their families and, in part, the wider German population. The memoirs of childhood are, therefore, expressions of personal, collective and transnational memory. This study contributes not only to memory and literary studies but also to a historiography of National Socialism that includes diverse individual stories from the bottom up, of women belonging to the Kriegskinder generation who now live in the United States.

Over the past two decades, scholars have shown that the modernist ‘Great Divide’ between high and low culture is culturally-constructed, reductive and oversimplified. Yet, despite these critical disavowals, the field of modernist studies is still informed by the Divide’s binary systems of evaluation and classification. ‘High’ and ‘low’ texts are studied in isolation and modernism is privileged over popular culture. This thesis argues that we must address the Great Divide’s structure if we are to move beyond it. The Divide is underpinned by three structural myths: that of essence (texts are inherently high or low), mutual exclusivity (texts are either high or low) and precedence (high texts come before low ones). Over the course of four chapters, this study seeks to define, challenge and reconfigure the Great Divide, exploring new approaches which allow us to study texts from across the cultural spectrum together. After an initial chapter which maps out the Great Divide in early-twentieth-century Britain, the following three chapters interrogate the structural myths in turn. Chapter 2 disputes the myth of essence, arguing that both ‘little’ and ‘popular’ magazines are shaped by external factors; Chapter 3 considers travel posters, showing that they exhibit apparently mutually-exclusive aesthetic and publicity functions at once; and Chapter 4 examines the extent to which innovations in mass-market fashion predated their modernist counterparts. Informed by theory but rooted in print culture, this thesis combines cultural history and deconstruction to displace the Great Divide as a system of classification and reinstate it as an object of study. Only by viewing high, low and middlebrow texts together can we trace the effects that socio-economic conditions, prevailing aesthetic norms and audience demands had on a text’s production, circulation and reception.

This thesis constitutes the first extensive study of tragedy during the Napoleonic era. The new tragic productions of this period have been sidelined by French theatre history, allegedly because they were tired copies of seventeenth-century classical models, conduits for propaganda, and suffocated by censorship. I challenge this judgement by excavating this period’s theatre and by applying renewed critical approaches, notably André Lefevere’s notion of rewriting which posits that all productions are subject to poetics and ideology. This thesis is comprised of two principal axes. The first focuses on poetics to contend that new productions were not simply copies of classical plays. Although tragedy was based on the imitation of seventeenth-century models, which scholars refer to as classiques, these examples were rewritten during the eighteenth century, an activity which continued under Napoleon. Therefore, there was no stable example to imitate, rather there was a particular contemporary understanding, which I label the ‘classique’ model to underline its specificity. Using contemporary treatises to form a generic framework, I examine how new tragedies performed at the Comédie-Française depart from this inheritance, reconsidering the passage from theatrical Classicism to Romanticism. The second axis engages with Napoleonic cultural politics by rethinking the terms ‘propaganda’ and ‘censorship’. Although tragedy was used for its propagandistic properties, this policy was not always successful. Moreover, the works’ reception reveals that playwrights and the public appropriated tragedy’s rewriting of historical narratives as a means of mediating the Revolution. Finally, I examine censorship, investigating how the State’s bureaucratic and the Comédie-Française’s lateral systems combined to control and tailor tragedies in performance and print for contemporary audiences. Consequently, this thesis sheds light both on the transition from Classicism to Romanticism in the theatre, and the public and the regime’s use of tragedy as a means of reconstructing the French nation after the Revolution.

In this thesis I explore the possibility of developing an approach to literary criticism oriented by the work of the British psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion. Although his work is the subject of renewed interest within clinical psychoanalysis, Bion's theoretical ideas and standing as a writer have not yet been the subject of sustained interest within the field of literary criticism. I seek to demonstrate how his ideas can generate productive readings of literary texts in ways that extend existing scholarship or supplement the insights of a Freudian literary criticism. The thesis draws widely from Bion's clinical contributions from the 1960s (Learning from Experience, Elements of Psycho-Analysis, Transformations and Attention and Interpretation), the later collections of seminars and lectures, and his final experimental autobiography, A Memoir of the Future. I reference a number of his theoretical insights, including his theory of thinking (thoughts without a thinker, the container-contained relationship), his description of 'psychotic' modes of functioning (beta-elements, bizarre objects), the theory of transformations and the caesura. Although his work is oriented to the clinical context, the idiosyncrasies of his written and pedagogical style, along with his deep attention to the language and imagery of a number of thinkers and poets, open a rich seam of critical resources for the literary critic. Each chapter of the thesis develops a critical reading of an individual text: Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology, Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper, B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, Mary Butts' short story 'With and Without Buttons', Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, J. G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, Nicholas Royle's Quilt, and Wilfred Bion's A Memoir of the Future. The last of these, exploring Bion's late foray into experimental literary writing, also considers Bion's interest as a writer.

This thesis looks at the engagement of English-language poets with the writing of Roland Barthes, and considers how a reading of Barthes may help understanding of a range of challenging experimental work. The introduction to the thesis lays a groundwork of how Barthes has been read in English since the first widely available translations of his work appeared in the 1960s, and thus establishes the intellectual context in which poets have written since. Beginning in the first chapter with Veronica Forrest-Thomson, the first of these poets to have looked at Barthes in detail, it looks both at poetry and of poets’ writings in the fields of criticism and poetics. From Forrest-Thomson the thesis moves in the second chapter to North America and considers the place of Barthes, particularly his Writing Degree Zero, in the intellectual context out of which emerged what has come to be known as ‘language writing’, combining a survey of this writing with close readings of the work of Ron Silliman, Ray DiPalma, Lyn Hejinian, Bernadette Mayer, and others. In the third chapter, the investigation of this diffuse tendency in poetry is followed through various strands, focussing in particular on periodicals and archival material. Finally, the fourth chapter looks at Anne Carson, Deborah Levy, and Kristjana Gunnars, and considers Barthes’ relevance to their texts’ thinking about writing. The intersection of theory and the emotional life is explored using the theoretical lens of Chris Kraus’ experimental fiction, particularly her notion of a ‘lonely girl phenomenology’. Barthes has had a diverse range of effects on poets’ thinking about writing and their writing practices, and our understanding of Barthes as a writer, what we mean by the ‘Barthesian’, and individual notions of his such as the ‘death of the author’ and his work on the possibilities of the fragment, have changed over time. The thesis considers the potential of Barthes’ writing to help us think about literature and its future utility for poetry studies.

This thesis is the first full-length study on T. S. Eliot and the mother in thirty years. Responding to a shortfall in Eliot studies in understanding the true importance of Eliot’s poet-mother, Charlotte, to his life and works, it rethinks Eliot’s ambivalence towards women in the context of mother-son ambivalence, and shows his search for belief and love as converging with a developing maternal poetics. Utilising the work of feminist and psychoanalytic thinkers seeking to reinstate the mother against Oedipal models of masculinity, it looks at Eliot’s changing representations and articulations of the mother/mother-child relationship—from his earliest writings to the later plays. Particular focus is given to mid-career works: ‘Ash-Wednesday’, ‘Marina’, ‘Coriolan’ and The Family Reunion. Drawing on newly available materials, this thesis emphasises Charlotte’s death as the decisive juncture marking both Eliot’s New Life and the apotheosis of the feminine symbolised in ‘Ash-Wednesday’. Central to this proposition is a new concept of maternal allegory as a modern mode of literary epiphany. This thesis breaks new ground revealing the role of the mother and the dynamics of mother-son ambivalence to be far more complicated, enduring, changeable and essential to Eliot’s personal, religious and poetic development than was previously acknowledged.

In this thesis I develop a critical approach to self-writing and especially to the 'deliberately introspective' diary. An important element in the work is an analysis of how issues surrounding the discussion of the self, free-will, and voice have been negotiated by critics of self-writing and two exemplars of deliberately introspective writing: Marcus Aurelius and Susan Sontag. It is proposed that consideration of the deliberately introspective diary - by being so obviously personal and therefore concerned with issues bearing on the elusive concept of self - uniquely energises discussion of the self and self-writing. Close analysis of current self-writing commentary finds that critics tend to become entangled in futilely reconciling what the thesis argues are unavoidable contradictions between and within two competing accounts of the self and personal autonomy, broadly to be characterised as Humanist and 'post-modern'. Criticism is also found to stumble on the ineluctable complexities of such concepts. Philippe Lejeune (in, On Diary); Jacques Derrida (in, The Postcard: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond and, Writing and Difference); Ihab Hassan (in, 'Quest for the Subject: The Self in Literature'); Patricia Meyer Spacks (in, 'How to Read a Diary'); Shirley Neuman (in, 'Autobiography: From Different Poetics to a Poetics of Differences'); and Susan Sontag (in her critical work and diaries) are signal amongst several astute critics of self-writing. Even amongst these there is some critical confusion and even angst. As a remedy, a critical approach of 'deliberate eclecticism' is developed. The approach is designed to prompt and enable the critic to interrogate and to deploy the merits of competing and conflicted interpretative perspectives without attempting to resolve their irresolvable tensions. Having developed the case for deliberate eclecticism the thesis returns to intertextual analysis of the deliberately introspective writing of Aurelius and Sontag and finds that the approach is robust. It is concluded that the approach, the strategy of judiciously deploying different vantage points at different times, is a useful analytical tool and frees criticism of self-writing from dialectical partisanship. It is more tentatively concluded that the critical approach of deliberate eclecticism can be applied to wider literary criticism, and to any other discipline that returns to consideration of the self and free-will.

This thesis examines the work of a group of African women writers who have emerged over the last forty years. While figures such as Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri and Wole Soyinka are likely to be the chief focus of discussions of African writing, female authors have been at the forefront of fictional interrogations of identity formation and history. In the work of authors such as Mariama Bâ (Senegal), Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), and Leila Aboulela (Sudan), there is a clear attempt to subvert the tradition of male writing where the female characters are often relegated to the margins of the culture, and confined to the domestic, private sphere. This body of work has already generated a significant number of critical responses, including readings that draw on gender politics and colonialism; but it is still very much a minor literature, and most mainstream western feminism has not sufficiently processed it. The purpose of this thesis is threefold. First, it draws together some of the most important and influential African women writers of the post-war period and looks at their work, separately and together, in terms of a series of themes and issues, including marriage, family, polygamy, religion, childhood, and education. Second, it demonstrates how African literature produced by women writers is explicitly and polemically engaged with urgent political issues that have both local and global resonance: the veil, Islamophobia and a distinctively African brand of feminist critique. Third, it revisits Fredric Jameson’s claim that all third-world texts are ‘national allegories’ and considers these novels by African women in relation to Jameson’s claim, arguing that their work has complicated Jameson’s assumptions.

Using an approach that distinguishes between the epistemologies of critical theory and creative practice, this study investigates notions of originality and influence in literary theory and considers their applicability to the teaching of creative writing and creative writing practice. It argues that current paradigms offer limited and contradictory explanations of these phenomena and makes the case that, through the assimilation of recent philosophical and scientific perspectives into a framework of socially-situated theory, a fresh approach can be developed that acknowledges the embodied experience of the writing process. The study consists of two main research areas: qualitative and literary/theoretical. The literary/theoretical research falls into two strands of enquiry that are closely linked and run parallel to each other throughout the thesis. One strand is concerned with the need to find an ontological structure for creative writing that accommodates practical and theoretical approaches and provides a conceptual framework that allows issues of originality and influence to be seen from both inside the writing process and from an external theoretical perspective. The second strand, evolving within the former, analyses notions of originality and influence historically and more specifically within romanticism and the socially situated theory of Mikhail Bakhtin. The qualitative research was designed to offer a practical and experiential set of findings that could be used to guide the theoretical research. In this research project, using a phenomenological methodology, a group of part-time adult creative writing students (14 participants) were asked to reflect on their perception and experience of originality and influence in the writing process. Their responses were returned in the form of questionnaires and the findings were collated into fourteen key themes. The theoretical research contextualizes the study within debates with student writers in writing workshop sessions about issues of influence and originality in critical peer review. After a discussion of the pedagogic and theoretical issues that these debates generated, including an analysis of the impact of romanticism on contemporary notions of creativity and a survey of developments in pedagogic theory in creative writing, the literary/theoretical research goes on to explore notions of originality and influence in the work of Bakhtin and romanticism in greater detail. It develops a critique of Bakhtin's socially-situated theory of creativity and argues that this is due to a weakness in the ontological premises of Bakhtin's conceptual framework. Moving to a study of romanticism it proposes that Bakhtin's socially-situated theory fails to fully understand or assimilate embodied emotionality into its ontology and that the embodied emotionality in romanticism, when seen through a more contemporary paradigm of embodied realism reveals the shortcomings in socially-situated theory. The final section on embodied realism and the impact of neuroscience on studies of the body and emotionality argues for a fresh ontological perspective, which would resolve the paradoxical nature of the relationship between an epistemic, socially constructed view of reality and a more biologically determined notion of human nature. In the discussion of key findings and in the conclusion to the research the thesis shows how, by adopting the ontological perspective of embodied realism and incorporating it into socially-situated theory, new perspectives on originality, influence and creativity can be developed that fully integrate epistemologies of theory and practice, and offer a grounded theoretical position from which to construct a viable pedagogy for creative writing. Finally, the thesis offers ideas for further research and discusses ways in which this combined approach can be applied to teaching practice, offering examples of exercises developed during the course of the study and covered by the main topics of research.

This thesis interrogates various accounts of the relationship between the biological and social. Often the biological is conceptualised as built upon, or originating from, the foundation of the social (or vice versa). I suggest an alternative approach, using various resources and approaches from the sciences and from social theories, to reconceptualise the biological and social as always already entangled. I develop an account of the entanglement of the biological and social that also entangles the ontological and epistemological, matter and meaning. I begin by exploring feminism and sociobiology in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly feminist standpoint and postmodernist epistemologies. Building on this, and developing my approach (particularly in terms of conceptualising material and more-than-human agency), I explore queer and deconstructive approaches to sexuality alongside the Human Genome Project and genetic determinism in the 1990s, and more recent theories of kinship from gender and sexuality studies alongside insights from animal studies and critical posthumanisms. Finally, I interrupt this trajectory, suggesting that the so far uninterrogated opposition of living/non-living that structures biological science is threatened by the liminal status of viruses. More importantly, people living with viruses can become liminal in relation to this and other binary oppositions, with consequences for their health and ability to live well. I propose an approach to living well that is both ecological and queer; connections, symbioses and entanglements are crucial throughout. I argue that attention to the entanglement of the biological and social offers a way of interrogating narratives of biological determinism and for countering the effects of patriarchy and heteronormativity in the theory and practice of science. Furthermore, this approach can offer ways of rethinking the production of scientific knowledge and the effects this has on the possibility of living well as biopolitical citizens in the more-than-human world.

This thesis analyses the notion of "author" as a "critical category" in literary interpretation, i.e. the extent to which author-related knowledge is used to make claims about a literary work which exceed what could have been said of the text alone. Chapter 1 gives an account of the principal theorisations made about the critical category of the author in literary theory and analytical aesthetics. It is argued that ontology is a central dimension of these theories, and in particular that the notion of the “author” as a relevant element for interpretation is logically dependent on a "thick" ontology of the literary work, i.e. on considering the work as irreducible to its textual manifestation. It is argued that the "author" in literary interpretation is typically constructed out of notions that come from two different sources, namely the text and the writer. The historical situatedness of this "thick" ontology in a modern conception of copyright law is also briefly analysed. Chapter 2 tackles the use of the category in the British and French culture of the second half of the nineteenth century. It is argued that the dominant critical paradigm in the age was “authorialist”, i.e. it considered the author as always relevant for an understanding of the work. A case is made for this tendency being a part of a larger tendency within that culture to consider phenomena in terms of their genesis. The practical consequences of this in the literary interpretation of the time are then considered. Chapters 3 and 4 propose a series of close readings of literary works of the same area and period, mainly associated with the Decadence (Swinburne, Pater, Mirbeau, Wilde). The focus is on the issue of whether and how their textual features comply with or resist the "authorialist" readings to which they were subjected.

The critical reflection at the start of this thesis outlines the ideas that have informed the production of my novel Any Belgian. The novel explores how cities offer creative possibilities for a writer, particularly in suggesting locations and for influencing the development of character and plot. The critical reflection also surveys the work of writers and critics who have commented on the nature of cities as palimpsests, and as places that serve as an emotional refuge. It also reflects on the creative processes involved in constructing my novel, detailing the decisions made about its form. The use of images in the novel is also discussed and a justification is made for their use as a device to deliberately involve the reader in the construction of meaning. References to cinema and other visual arts are prominent in the novel, and there is a reflection on how they are used as an effective way to express the thoughts of the narrator in his attempts to make sense of a set of multi-layered past experiences. It was also important to undertake fieldwork for research in the writing of the novel. This process is described and related to the writings of critics such as Walter Benjamin and other writers who have recorded their walks in urban locations. The narrative for Any Belgian works on several levels and the complexity of its layers are addressed in the conclusion to the thesis. What has been produced is a novel that attempts to raise questions about the possibility of accurately recording urban experiences, especially when a narrator is confronted with the challenge of describing the permanently shifting relationship between recollections and the city locations which give rise to those recollections.

This thesis is a study of the twentieth-century debate between F.R. Leavis and F.W. Bateson. In it I explore the critical positions held by Leavis and Bateson in relation to the function of criticism and the role of the critic. The epistemological inquiry central to my analysis asks: is literary criticism and the study of literature antithetical to the construct of a discipline, which by definition presupposes objective standards and criteria. My research concludes that the views contested throughout the Leavis-Bateson debate stem from pre-conceived and implicit notions regarding what Leavis and Bateson deem literary art ought to be. As such, their methodological principles and critical ideologies can be seen as practical extensions of subjective values. In the later sections of the thesis I examine the key issues of the debate in relation to wider critical discourse in which the principles of literary evaluation are subject to applied autotelic and meta-critical analysis. I conclude my work with the assertion that due to the inherency of subjectivism in processes of critical performance, the systematic application of determinable validity to critical methods or judgments within fields and disciplines of knowledge, occurs not through deference to verifiable domains of aesthetic or nomothetic truth, but rather through functions of power, position, and bad faith.

This thesis recommends that the ‘ecocritical’ turn in American Literary Scholarship be brought into contact with ‘symptomnal’ forms of ideology critique, namely after the post-Althusserian thinking of Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek and Deleuze-Guattari. This recommendation is made on the basis that the ecocritical turn has neglected to apprise itself of a thoroughgoing prehistory; by bringing together the lessons of Marx and Lacan, post-Althusserian thinking enables us to address the disavowal of formal and theoretical concerns constitutive of first-wave ecocriticism, and to acknowledge this as symptomatic of North American cultural and political pluralism more broadly. Where such disavowal promoted a widespread rejection of poststructural theories of immanence in the Americanist milieu of the 1980s, I consider how it effectively blocked psychoanalytic and Marxist approaches to literary form and human subjectivity. Following an initial examination of ecocriticism after Althusser and Balibar’s thesis on ‘symptomnal reading’, my study goes on to reassert issues of subjectivity for ecocriticism. Žižek’s subjectivist approach to ideology critique enables a diagnosis of the legacy of modern epistemology and thereafter analysis of ecocritical motivations of sublime aesthetics. By pursuing broader, ‘valetudinary’ issues in relation to literary form, the latter half of the thesis exceeds the former’s emphasis on ideology critique, moving instead to engage the post-subjectivist, ‘schizoanalytic’ project of Deleuze and Guattari. Predicated upon an a-subjective philosophy of differential relations, schizoanalysis enables us to reappraise eco-literary and eco-philosophical concerns, chiefly after post-symptomatological analyses of the relationship between high modern literature, pre-personal affect and the ‘eco-social’ coding of desire. It is in this way that I assert the ‘body without organs’ as the privileged clinical figure with which to address eco-social organisation, and thus, exceed the subjectivist logic of the symptom.

My thesis considers the profound effect of the all-pervading late Eighteenth-Century revolutionary climate on the evolving religious and political views of the young Coleridge, and their expression through his published works from 1794-1800. I consider how Coleridge‘s continuing use of religious imagery evolved, following his transition from the established tradition of Dissenting religion, towards a more personal form of Dissent, grounded in Pantheism. Chapter One considers how Coleridge‘s sonnets, lectures and periodical (The Watchman) of 1794-5 articulated his developing radical political and Dissenting religious views. Fundamental to Coleridge‘s views was a notion of the Establishment Anglican Church as a hollow Christian sham, needing a spiritually renewed form of religion to bring it back to God. Chapter Two compares Religious Musings and Fears in Solitude, examining how Coleridge‘s political and religious views matured in the intervening four years. I also focus on iconic and archetypal figures featured in The Wanderings of Cain, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Christabel. A key figure is the Wanderer, who appeared in different guises in Coleridge‘s works of this period. I also examine the protean nature of Geraldine, from Christabel, as a rare female manifestation of the Wanderer, as well as the iconic and archetypal guises of serpent, Lamia, Lilith, and succubus. Chapter Three considers Coleridge‘s exploration of the relationship between power, politics, and religion, in his translation of Schiller‘s Wallenstein trilogy, through a comparison of Wallenstein and the archetypal figures of Satan and Faust. I consider how Coleridge has used the vehicle of translation as a creative space, allowing him to articulate and develop his changing religious and political opinions. The notion of translation as creation has not previously been considered. Chapter Four examines Coleridge‘s influence on second-generation Romantic Period writers, specifically Mary Shelley. I discuss the evidence for Coleridge‘s influence on her novels and short stories, also drawing attention to her religious and political expression in microcosm, compared with Coleridge‘s macrocosmic political views.

Imagery of enclosure [...] constantly threatens to stifle the heroines of women's fiction. This thesis seeks to develop recent research into Russian literature, which has applied semiotic theory to a feminist critique, to explore how spaces may be gendered as feminine or masculine. This thesis will adopt a similar feminist and semiotic approach, but will focus not upon gendered spaces, but barriers, the 'imagery of enclosure'. I will argue that barriers are both 'engendered', and 'gendered', in the sense that they often relate to female characters. These barriers are sub-divided into three distinct types, which will be termed 'textual', 'actual' and 'perceived' barriers. This revisionist semiotic approach will be used to explore the Woman Question within a comparative framework, in a discussion of midto late-nineteenth-century English, German and Russian literatures. Drawing upon the work of literary theorists Mikhail Bakhtin and Yuri Lotman, alongside key concepts in feminist criticism (such as Simone de Beauvoir's notion of woman as 'other'), this thesis will consider textual, actual and perceived barriers in selected works of Charlotte and Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Theodor Storm, Theodor Fontane, Ivan Turgenev and Lev Tolstoy. In doing so, it will trace the development of the 'superfluous woman', a new character type, who is the superfluous man's counterpart. The fundamental aim of this study is to make an original and innovative contribution to the field of comparative European literary studies. Furthermore, and what is perhaps most exciting about this research, is that it offers a new methodological framework within which any literary text may be considered.

The Early Modern Irish recension of the tale relating Cú Chulainn’s death, Oidheadh Con Culainn, has received comparatively little scholarly attention, especially compared with its Early Irish counterpart, Aided Con Culainn. Consequently, little is known about the textual transmission and manuscript tradition of the Early Modern Irish tale. The present thesis seeks to rectify this and give a more accurate view and preliminary analysis of the extant manuscripts, concentrating on the manuscripts that date to before the 19th century. A core element of this thesis is a draft catalogue of these pre-19th-century manuscripts. Taking advantage of the tale’s prosimetric structure, it will be argued and demonstrated that it is possible to classify the manuscripts of Oidheadh Con Culainn into distinct groups. Within the extant manuscripts preserving the tale we can identify a number of versions of it, differing most notably in the poetry that they contain. The classification of the manuscripts into groups can be established on the basis of the poetry that a version of the tale contains; the emerging groups thus established can be used to comment on the transmission of the tale. In order to corroborate the argument for the manuscript groups, we will explore a number of aspects of the text and the manuscripts, such as textual comparisons on both intra- and inter-group levels, possible relations (e.g. geographical) of the scribes, linguistic and metrical variations, the ‘rhetorics’, and different versions of the tale written by the same scribe. The thesis will further investigate the most famous poem from the text, Laoidh na gCeann (‘The Lay of the Heads’), in order to establish to what extent the evidence from the poem can be used to add to our understanding of the transmission of the overall tale.

This thesis erects and defends the proposition that Jacques Derrida's readings of 'metaphysics in deconstruction' and his raising to theoretical consciousness of the 'differential matrix', have the capacity to inaugurate a 'brave new world' in this postmodern 'age of the aporia'. Beginning with an examination of Derrida's readings of Husserl and Saussure, it is argued that the radical historicity uncovered here qua an originary synthesis of language, time and the other, opens the possibility for greatly more democratising and emancipating self-creations and human solidarities to be thought. In terms of 'self-creations', and borrowing from the work of Elizabeth Deeds Errnarth, Chapter Two follows Derrida as modernity's sovereign subject and its 'History' are dis-placed by an absolutely affirmative postmodern subjectivity whose axiom might be 'I inherit, therefore, I am ... yes, yes ... ' Construed through his deconstructive reading of Kant, Derrida shows the way in which this postmodern subjectivity without alibi, makes of us all (like it or not, know it or not) resistance fighters, so many singularities existing in constant tension with all normalising/totalising tendencies (social, economic, techno-scientific, political, legal etc ... ) which profess to know the secret. Turning to co-extensive 'human solidarities', Chapter Three subsequently demonstrates the way in which Derrida's call for a 'New International', orientated through a 'new figure of Europe', enables us to imagine new polysemic communities (local, national, international) founded on the 'aporia of the demos', a 'foundation' that construes its hyper-relativity as a positive (ethico-political) condition of decision in terms of a radical responsibility (on an individual and communal level) for the moral/aesthetic decisions we make. It is thus that I will argue that Derrida's vision for a 'new world order' is born out of an aporetic condition which is both a risk and a chance of both the best - and the worst - happening; as someone who shares Derrida's desire for a fairer, freer, more peaceful world, one respectful of difference and otherness, I believe this to be a 'poker like gamble' well worth taking. Chapter Four offers a comparative analysis between the work of Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, two theorists counter-signing differently many of the 'same' discourses/ traditions/cultures/languages, etc ... to which they are both heirs. The chapter examines their respective 'quasi-philosophies of the limit', together with their differing conceptions of the issues surrounding globalisation and universalisation, as well as Baudrillard' s elevation of America (as opposed to Europe) as the exemplary site of resistance against the dangers of totalisation in 'postmodem' societies. The central argument here, in line with my previous remarks, is that Derrida's thought arguably remains 'the best' way to navigate the postmodem condition and the challenges it produces. The originality of this thesis lies in two main areas, the first having to do with my presentation and conception of Derrida's oeuvre and the second having to do with the comparisons made in this study between Derrida and Ermarth and Derrida and Baudrillard. In terms of the former, I offer what I consider to be a unique, sustained, in-depth analysis of the 'development' (on a theoretical and practical level) of the thematics of 'radical historicity' and of 'post-historical man' - effectively the development of Derrida's quasi-philosophy of history- from his earliest works so that they can be seen to inform his later intervention(s) in what are conventionally understood as ethical and political matters; transforming this understanding in the process and, after the end of history's ends (upper case, lower case and the totalising 'history of meaning' per se), quite literally and radically changing the way we see what we call 'the world'. For while in the conventional literature Derrida's politics come late, I argue here that his indeed later political work is but an emphasis of constant political thematics acting as a leitmotif from beginning to end. Turning to the latter, in terms of the comparisons I make - first between Derrida and Ermarth in Chapter Two and more especially between Derrida and Baudrillard in Chapter Four - the claim to originality lies in the fact that there is no comparison of any note or depth in the literature between these thinkers; nothing that compares Derrida's 'affirmative postmodem subjectivity' and its 'inheritance' with Ermarth's 'rhythmic time' and 'muIti-level consciousness', and nothing comparing Derrida's corpus - specifically his optimistic emancipating and democratizing hopes for the future - with Baudrillard's more pessimistic conceptualization of 'simulation society' and the loss of our European universal values under the hegemonic, globalising movement of the 'American model'. The aim of these two comparisons is to support my claim that Derrida's historico-political position is the 'best' way of essaying the quasi-ground of an in(different) politics in such a way that it keeps the future open to what he calls a 'better world' to come, a world without ends.

Writers, mental scientists and spiritualists at the fin-de-siècle were haunted by their impossible desire to contain the inchoate elements of the supernatural within the fixity of print. By examining technologies of writing such as the automatic writing of the spiritualist séances, discursive technologies like the telegraph and the photograph, different genres and late nineteenth-century technologies of mental science, this thesis will show that despite writers’ attempts to use technology as a way of translating the supernatural, these tools are incomplete and the supernatural remains only a partially legible script. In addition, the thesis examines how both new technology and explorations into the ghostly aspects of the mind problematised agency. Is the author dictating to the typewriting machine, or is the machine the secret dictator regulating the author’s stylistic choices? Is the spirit at the séance ghostwriting the text? Issues of uncanny authorship are explored in the first chapter, in particular through a close reading of Henry James’s ‘The Private Life’ (1891). The uncanny effects of new technology on the body are also explored in James’s ‘In the Cage’ (1898), and Kipling’s ‘Wireless’ (1901). Chapter Two takes the example of Doyle and how he used the photograph as a technology to attempt to capture the supernatural. Chapter Three looks at mesmerism as a technology of the mind. Chapter Four indicates that traditional notions of Victorian womanhood, as well as writings on mental science, implied that women themselves were ghostly. Chapter Five turns to Vernon Lee, for whom the ghost story blurs literary genres, making indistinct fiction and non-fiction, ghost story and critical essay. Chapter Six returns to a discussion of the ways in which paranormal perception inspires women writers. An examination of Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book (1897) and George Paston’s A Writer of Books (1898) implies that New Woman writers find the altered states they access in their writing both ecstatic and agonising. A re-examination of the uncanny effects of technology through a close reading of Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl (1897) shows that in New Woman fiction, women have the freedom to engage with writing technologies like the typewriter either actively or passively.

This thesis is the first critical study to examine Miller across the full range of his intellectual contribution. Existing studies of Hugh Miller have been preoccupied with Miller’s biography and with the scandal of his suicide in 1856, with many commentators viewing Miller as the quintessential ‘divided man’. This thesis, however, seeks to demonstrate that, far from producing a work of irreconcilable tensions, Miller’s work, taken as a whole, demonstrates a remarkably coherent response to the many contemporary intellectual and social issues he engages with. Part One examines the politicised literary climate of nineteenth-century Scottish letters, and in particular the cultural phenomena of the ‘peasant poet’ made fashionable after Burns. I examine Miller’s entrance into literary circles as the self-fashioned persona of ‘the Cromarty stonemason’. Pat Two traces Miller’s search for an authoritative vehicle of self-expression across the genres of poetry, short fiction and folklore before attaining recognition as a man of science and an influential social and religious commentator as editor of The Witness newspaper (1840 – 1856). In Part Three two significant features of Miller’s socio-literary approach are considered. Chapter ten examines Miller’s broader socio-literary agenda, which insisted upon autobiography’s capacity to reclaim a marginalised working-class voice, and his tentative moves towards the exposition of a working-class canon. The final chapter attempts to place Miller in his proper relation to the intellectual thinking of the time and to suggest that his adherence lay toward intellectual moderation and liberality rather than the religious partisanship with which he has become associated.

This thesis compares the reproduction of violence in the fictional writings of two contemporary Martinican authors, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant. While existing scholarship provides significant examinations of both authors individually, this study builds on these foundations to carry out the first single extensive comparison of Chamoiseau and Confiant’s novels. Chamoiseau and Confiant’s literary and political movement of créolité has been the basis of much critical attention in recent years but the theme of the representation of violence in their novels remains relatively unexplored. This thesis explores how – and even whether – fiction can be a way of coming to terms with the brutal violence of their past. This study therefore examines – through close textual analysis – the literary strategies employed by the authors in their representation of the origins of the Antilles in order to address the painful, difficult issues arising out of these origins. In its comparative approach to the authors and in its focus on the reproduction of violence, this study makes two original contributions to the study of Antillean literature. In the Introduction, I outline the tensions surrounding the process of writing in the Antilles. Within this specific historical context the figure of the writer – real or imaginary – becomes a complex and difficult one, as it is clear that the violence of the colonial past continues to affect the authors and their writing. In the first chapter, I therefore return to those same brutal origins of the Antilles, examining how they are constructed in the author’s fiction. Chamoiseau and Confiant imply that the violence of the past acts as a mechanism of oppression. Drawing on colonial theory, the next chapter explores closely how this mechanism is represented in the author’s fictional work as a repetition of the original violence and one that continues to structure Antillena society, and from which no escape seems possible.

This thesis is about the inter-relationship between migrancy and narrative. It is based on research carried out among expatriate Nigerians, studying the stories that they told of their time abroad and of their relationship with Nigeria. It is also based on research examining the cross-cultural reception of two contrasting novels in various parts of Scotland, and in Plateau State, Nigeria. The thesis argues that western cultural history from the 1980s forwards had tended to celebrate migrancy in general, and the migrant intellectual specifically, in a way that privileges homelessness over residence, and in a fashion which allocates an undue voluntaristic power of achievement to acts of imagination, ignoring the delimiting effects of class position and economics on individual subjects. This aggrandisement of the migrant, it is argued, is part of a long-standing western romantic tradition in which the outsider is seem to hold a unique, vatic perspective on social life. While there is some sociological truth in such a proposition, the research presented here demonstrates how such a dominant intellectual attitude exerts a pressure against the production of fiction written locally in Africa, for African readers. It also demonstrates how the privileging of the distanciated perspective can give the cue for migrancy to become, in itself, a form of symbolic capital held over and against the sedentary local. In both of these cases what appear to be purely cultural effects - changes in perspectives and attitude - are at the same time disguised expressions of an economic privilege. The contribution of this dissertation then, is to examine these cultural questions from a materialist position and to suggest how it has come about that even in its discussion of migrancy, the deterritorialization of identity, and the death of the nation, western cultural theory has managed to re-enforce its own hegemonic and institutional grip.

This thesis examines the visions of Scotland that come across in the inter-war writings of Hugh MacDiarmid, Neil Gunn, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Edwin Muir in relation to the ideas of the Scottish Literary Renaissance as a whole. The initial part, "Into the Renaissance", consists of a historical account of Scottish political and cultural nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, followed by an examination of the ways in which the authors associated with the Scottish Renaissance participated in the construction of Scotland as an imagined community. Geography, history, religion, language and literature are identified as the five predominant themes in the inter-war tradition, on the basis of which the intellectuals created an image of the nation that could express their twin philosophies of nationalism and modernism. The second part, "Four visions of Scotland", is composed of close readings to the work of High MacDiarmid, Neil Gunn, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Edwin Muir in that order of appearance. The MacDiarmid chapter begins with a discussion of the poet's call for a Scottish Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s. It is argued that MacDiarmid set out with a strong belief in his own ability to awaken the nation, but that he became increasingly disappointed with the Scot's lack of response to his programme towards the end of the 1920s. This disillusionment resulted in a change of strategy in the 1930s when, on the one hand, he exchanged the politics of the National Party for his personal ideology of Scottish Republicanism, while, on the other, he abandoned previous attempts to reform the Scottish nation favour of an idealised vision that was more compatible with his poetic aims.

Isaac Rosenberg was more than just a war poet, and a general failure to take this into consideration has contributed to the belated recognition of the distinctions of his work. He started writing long before the Great War and, as a working-class London Jew, he schooled himself to respond to issues of class, culture, art and poetry. It was this combination of dependency and self-sufficiency which sustains his mature work; and which gave him a sense of himself as an Anglo-Jewish poet. In order to illuminate Rosenberg, Chapter One considers the conditions ofthe Jewish community in the East End of London at the turn of the century, and examines the writer's attitudes to the Zionism in vogue at the time. Chapter Two investigates the striking echoes of Freudian psychology which feature in Rosenberg's work, and which are related to the Jewish heritage of both writers. Chapter Three investigates Rosenberg's feminine principle, suggesting that, as part of an Orphic vision of art, it fused an allegorical 'female god', with seductive females familiar from Jewish narratives, effectively combining English and Hebrew cultures. Chapter Four traces Rosenberg's working-class literary heritage, and suggests that his treatment of class differs from his Gentile contemporaries in that it parallels Freudian and Marxist perceptions, while manifesting a modem Jewish insight. Chapter Five details the role class and race played in the critical marginalising of Rosenberg; special attention is given to the 'Georgian' literary ideals of the period, against which Rosenberg reacted and which influenced his reputation and the reception of his poetry. Chapter Six focuses on Rosenberg's debts of origin, and his 'anxiety of influence', uncovering his revision of his precursors, in light of a modem urban, and Jewish perspective. The thesis concludes by examining Rosenberg's idea of language as a vehicle for mental essence, suggesting that the roots for this perception lie in the painter's mind, along with class and race associations.

Cultural materialism has become an influential discipline in recent years, particularly so in 'Renaissance' studies, but also more generally in 'English', as well as departments defined as practising 'cultural' or 'communications' studies. The phrase is usually linked with the name of Raymond Williams, but a cursory examination of Williams's own work quickly establishes that it is a phrase he rarely uses, and only schematically attempts to define. The thesis therefore takes the form of an investigation into the way cultural materialism has come to be understood, by examining in detail the trajectory of Raymond Williams's theoretical development, and how his own engagement with various theoretical positions has helped to set 'limits' on the meaning of cultural materialism. Chapters 1 and 2 deal with some of Williams's earliest work, particularly Reading and Criticism, as a way of investigating how reasonable it is to tag him as a 'Left-Leavisite', arguing that Leavis's undoubted influence is resisted (though not entirely rejected) from a very early stage. The first chapter considers in detail Leavis's work at Cambridge, the influence of Eliot, and the significance of the 'Organic Community'. Chapter 2, which is based around a comparative analysis of Williams's and Leavis's readings of Dickens, argues that Williams rejects the 'organic community' in favour of his 'knowable community'. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with specific 'theoretical' issues: the first, based around a reading of Terry Eagleton's critique of Williams's use of the Marxist metaphor of 'base and superstructure', shows some of the problems which arise from Williams's cultural model, as well as suggesting refinements; the second deals with the influence of Volosinov's theories on Williams. Chapter 6 comes out of Williams's readings of the 'Country-House' poems in The Country and the City, showing how his practice of literary criticism relies on an acceptance of 'ideology' apparently denied in his more 'theoretical' writings. This analysis is extended as a result of investigations into the 'De L'Isle' manuscripts relating to the Penshurst estate. Chapter 7 argues that it is possible to see the work of Fredric Jameson as developing Williams's cultural materialism into Jameson's debates on postmodernism. In the Introduction and Conclusion, I have taken the opportunity to look briefly at the activity of cultural materialism as it has developed since Raymond Williams's death in 1988. The Introduction emphasizes what I see to be important methodological differences between 'cultural materialism' and 'new historicism'; the Conclusion deals with the continuing debate over the value of a cultural materialist approach by considering the 'appropriation' of Shakespeare.

Since the mid 1980's it has been unthinkable for white feminist literary critics to neglect race in their theoretical work. Strong challenges from black feminists have been effective in placing race high on the critical agenda. No longer is the kind of exclusivity that marked early (white) feminist literary theory possible. However, despite the evident commitment to addressing the race question in their work, the black feminist challenge has been greeted with a considerable degree of anxiety by white feminist critics. I suggest that the main source of anxiety is a failure to square the pressing need to 'include' race on the feminist agenda with doubts about straying into what is perceived to be black feminist territory. In other words, white feminist critics have yet to resolve their relation to the black feminist project. This anxiety has meant that a concern over the notion of exclusion has given way to that of appropriation. This has tended to place the white feminist reader in the paralysing position where there seems little available ground between the twin poles of exclusion and appropriation. Typical questions that have arisen out of this dichotomy are: should white feminists teach black women's writing? Should white feminist critics produce critical readings of texts authored by black women? Can white women readers read black women's writings without imposing onto them their own critical agendas? Is a non-appropriative reading relation possible? How should white feminists deal with the fact of their own race privilege and what bearing does this privilege have upon the readings they, potentially, might produce? This project examines some of the ways in which white feminists have attempted to address their relation to the race question in feminist literary criticism. Over the space of six chapters I focus on a number of specific reading strategies offered as positive critical interventions. My main contention is the impossibility of a guaranteed anti-imperialist theory or reading position. I also argue for the necessity of asking the question: whether the imperialist can read, as a complement to that of whether 'the subaltern can speak'. Chapter 1 questions the white feminist ambition of arriving at the truth of the black text as a means of decolonising the text. Through an examination of the Rodney King events some of the perils of appeals to pure seeing are highlighted. Chapter 2 explores the implications of white feminist abstention from the race debates. Chapter 3 looks at the issue of identification as a basis for reading. Chapter 4 questions the identifications that inhere in applying theory to a text. Chapter 5 challenges the use of contextualisation as a source of textual limits. Chapter 6 examines the limits of self-reflexivity as an anti-imperialist method.

This thesis is a study of the use of the concepts of Action and Character in Modern drama, with the theories and practice of Bertolt Brecht and T.S. Eliot as example of characteristic Twentieth century limitations and modifications. The first two chapters are an attempt to establish a theoretical foundation for these originally Aristotelian concepts, which derives from more modern literary practice. In chapter one I have taken four poems, by Oliver Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Browning and T.S. Eliot, and analysed the various relationships between the speaker, the figures and objects in the poems, and the reader, in order to distinguish between the status of characters and their modes of inter-relation. Chapter two extends the discussion by examining the concepts of dramatic distance and meaning in relation to action and character, using a distinction arrived at in the previous chapter, between a direct and an indirect intentional relationship between a speaker and reader or audience. The following three chapters examine the work of T.S. Eliot in the light of the preceding observations. Chapter three is an analysis of the philosophical foundations of his dramatic theory, particularly his conception of action and character, pointing to the characteristic dramatic limitations of his neo-Romantic standpoint. Chapter four analyses Murder in the Cathedral, indicating that play's dramatic dependence upon its Greek model, and chapter five analyses The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party, stressing the dominance of rhetorical rather than dramatic qualities. Brecht is dealt with in a similar manner in chapters six to ten. Chapter six examines his philosophical background and its relation to the conflicting express­ionistic and non-expressionistic aspects of his theory. Two early plays (Baal and In the Jungle of Cities) are analysed in chapter seven, to indicate similarities to and differences from the concepts of action and character in expressionist drama, and in chapter eight two 'Lehrstlicke' (The Measures Taken and The Mother) are taken as examples of parables which fail dramatically because of their direct intentional relation to the audience. The first two versions of The Life of Galileo are compared in chapter nine, to indicate the fund­amental relationship between dramatic structure, characterisation and action. Finally, chapter ten examines the development of a dramatic parable form in Mother Courage and her Children and The Good Person of Setzuan. The thesis concludes by pointing out the differing success with which the two writers shape a dramatic form to cope with the predominant world-view of the early Twentieth century, and the central place of character, action and distance in dramatic, as opposed to other modes of expression.

This work is a study of the various concepts and theories of myth and ritual as they are found in some non-literary disciplines, especially anthropology, in literary theory, and in the criticism of Shakespeare. It is divided into two parts. Part I discusses various theories of myth and ritual and the relation of these theories to literature in general. It consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 discusses the allegorical theory of myth, and tries to show that the idea of myth as allegory persists in literary criticism, even though it has generally been discarded in theory. It suggests that the majority of criticism in terms of myth and ritual can, in fact, be seen as the extension to literary material of the kind of allegorical and typological exegesis that has been widely practised in scriptural hermeneutic from very early times. This suggestion is tested with reference to Shakespeare-criticism in Chapter 6 in Part II. Chapter 2 discusses the idea of ritual and the specifically anthropological theories concerning the connexions between myth, ritual, and drama. It is suggested here that the idea of ritual as such, and a psychological-cum-sociological extension of the concept of the scapegoat may be critically more valuable than the mere tracing of the origins of works of art in primitive rituals. Chapter 3 discusses ideas concerning a special mythical mode of thought, emphasis being placed here on the theory of Ernst Cassirer. Chapter 4 is concerned with the theories of Northrop Frye and Levi-Strauss, who are both, in their very different ways, interested in the 'structural' approach to myth. Chapter 5 surveys theories concerning the social role of myth and ritual and also discusses the relation between myth and ideology. It is proposed here that application of anthropological theories of myth and ritual in literary criticism should logically lead to a sociological approach to the work of art. Part II is also divided into five chapters, each surveying the existing 'myth' criticism of Shakespeare in the light of the theories outlined in the corresponding chapter in Part I. It emerges from this survey that contrary to the common impression, the influence of anthropological theory, especially of the theories that come after Frazer and the 'Cambridge' anthropologists, has been relatively slight where actual criticism is concerned. In fact, we find that the overwhelming majority of the criticism of Shakespeare in terms of myth is really an extension of allegorical mythography to secular, literary works. In such criticism there is usually an assumption that the work under consideration is of mythical or scriptural status and hides some profound and universal truth. Sometimes, however, such criticism may also be seen as an attempt to raise the work of art to the status of myth.