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This thesis analyses self-Orientalist representations in the Algerian postcolonial novel produced in both Arabic and French, using postcolonial literary criticism, and the historical contextualisation of the novels to reveal how colonial tropes have survived in late colonial and post-independence Algerian literary productions. I argue in this thesis that the encounter between the Orientalist and the colonial legacies and the postcolonial literary thrust, together with the influence of the historical and the political interplay between Western-inspired value systems and indigenous contexts, triggered the re-creation of the clichéd representations that dominated the colonial and the Orientalist discourses about Algeria. As a result, self-depiction in Algerian postcolonial literature reveals regular occurrences that display the features of self-Orientalist perspectives. The internalisation of biased representations of Algeria in Algerian literary output is vividly illustrated in many themes which are covered in this thesis through three main parts: the representation of people and places, beliefs and customs, topics related to politics and linguistic identity. Through these three parts, this project establishes different nuances in the perpetuation of the stereotypical renderings of Algeria, varying from fully-fledged, through ambivalent and reluctant self-Orientalist stances, which are continuously influenced by the historical and political circumstances inherited from the colonial era, and subsequent events such as the Black Decade and the process of Arabisation, among others. The analysis of the self-Orientalist discourse in Algerian postcolonial literature showcases the everlasting influence of the colonial legacy on Algerian literary self-representations and highlights the importance of the Algerian case in the academic debate about Orientalism and self-Orientalism.

After the 2008 financial crisis in Europe, and the 2010s economic collapse of the Chavista project in Venezuela, Spanish and Venezuelan literary criticism have analysed the role of literature to convey social, economic, and political crisis. I argue that the main underlaying methodological approach in this area stems from ideological criticism: In order to consider a text within the 'crisis literature cannon', it must uncover hegemonical ideology, making readers aware of the class relations shaping their reality. However, in this thesis, I ask how, if we consider cynicism as the main ethical ideology of the 2010s, can the role of literature be to make readers aware of the conditions of possibility that they disavow? In order to answer this question, I analyse four Spanish and Venezuelan short fiction, flash fiction, and poetry books from the 2010s and contend that in these books we see what I call wound literature. Following a Lacanian and Hegelian approach, I propose that wound literature attempts to overcome cynicism by reconciling readers with their status as lacking beings. That is, that there is no object that will make (or has made) us whole. This shared concerned with lack and contradiction in the 2010s Spanish and Venezuelan literature help us understand the decade as a moment of global readjustment in the history of capitalism and what the role of literature can be in short-circuiting people's own investment in the capitalist logic of exploitation.

Biophilia, namely the partially innate and culturally mediated "tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes" (Wilson, 1984, p.1), tends to be understood ecocritically as 'nature love'. Over the course of its evolution, however, biophilia has evolved into a postcognitive conception of the mind-body-environment and ecological strategy for harnessing attention and affect. In particular, the subsequent biophilic design movement considers living, constructed and virtual landscape forms, or 'patterns', to elicit a state of 'open attention' or 'fascination', enhance positive affect and potentially generate empathy for other species. This dissertation is the first to apply biophilic patterns to literary landscapes and to William Shakespeare's plays. More specifically, it is concerned with the construction of a new method of biophilic 'ecoformalist' analysis for Shakespearean ecocriticism and ecotheatrical adaptation. Discussion borrows and builds upon the term "ecology of form" (Gruber, 2017, p.10) through developing an original biophilic framework. It asks whether a biophilic close reading of Shakespeare's textual landscape might reveal biodiverse multiplicities beyond those identified within the current literature. It seeks to contribute to affective ecomaterialism and prismatic ecology through further refracting 'green' arboreal, 'blue' nautical and even 'grey' atmospheric ecocritical foci into a more multi-hued kaleidoscopic encounter. It develops an original methodological framework incorporating cognitive ecology, ecological aesthetics and biophilic pattern analysis for 'gathering' Shakespeare's biophilic (positive) and biophobic (negative) patterns into a 'biophilic ecopalette'. These are sifted across a spectrum of affective human responses ranging from estrangement to enmeshment, with an emphasis on seeking both increased conceptual and decreased material ecological impact. The thesis is structured in three parts, traversing Part One's background, literature review, biophilia critique and methodology, Part Two's research and development and Part Three's application to ecocriticism and ecotheatre. Research is divided into two phases: firstly, the 'biophilic scansion' of thirty-eight individually or co-authored plays for their potential biophilic and biophobic content, which are then cross analysed with existing biophilic frameworks' 847 patterns. The resultant pattern trends are collated and distilled into an original 'ecopalette' and applied to ecocritical case studies of the Henry the Sixth trilogy and Timon of Athens and an ecotheatrical production of Twelfth Night. The thesis concludes by examining posthumanist possibilities for reading Shakespeare's landscape biophilically. In applying an updated postcognitive biophilic perspective, this thesis seeks to forage from Shakespeare's diverse textual landscape to explore the archaeology of language and reveal the embeddedness of word-within-world against the rapidly disintegrating backdrop of the Anthropocene.

This thesis investigates the multiplicity of the definitions of irony in Italian culture (1980s-present), and their significant dependence on ideological positions on history, history as a literary object, and literary history. This study follows two interlinked threads. First, it focuses on the use and analysis of irony in the theory and historical novels of Umberto Eco and Wu Ming. Secondly, it reconstructs the development of an Italian mode of writing about history, bringing to the fore its connection with Carlo Ginzburg's historiography. The first aim of this thesis is to assess the politicisation of irony in recent and current cultural debates, as well as to determine what the implications that diverging positions on irony are for Eco's and Wu Ming's historical narrative. The second aim is to evaluate the political and aesthetic effects of a series of reciprocal influences between historiography and literature on contemporary Italian fiction. The first chapter outlines key terms for the subject, such as the history of irony, postmodern irony, and the centrality of irony within the current Italian literary debate. The second chapter considers Eco's theory and historical fictions; in particular, it highlights the political incisiveness of Eco's novels and use of irony in relation to intertextuality. The third chapter compares Eco's and Ginzburg's ideas about the conjectural paradigm and the question of myth, and also examines the literary influence of Ginzburg's historiography. The fourth chapter reads Wu Ming's historical novels as examples of an allegorising mode of writing about history; in particular, it discusses Ginzburg's legacy in the novel Q, Wu Ming's rejection of irony, and their affinity to a leftist melancholic tradition. Through its analysis, the thesis both challenges the idea of irony as synonymous of disengagement, and critically assesses the transmigration of epistemological ambitions from historiography to literature.

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.

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 thesis considers the role of the male body in the construction of a Northern English place-myth in fictional film and television. As scholarship of the region's representation acknowledges, masculinity is dominant within the production of a Northern imaginary. However, critical discussion of this masculine coding frequently overlooks the male body itself. Consequently, this body has been produced as a taken-for-granted formation; an obvious figure carrying a limited set of meanings. In contrast, this thesis argues that representations of male embodiment are complex sites of meaning which must be read, textually, to be understood, culturally and historically. In its methodology, the thesis combines textual analysis with an examination of aesthetic, social and political contexts. By treating text and context as reciprocal, I chart how fictional representations of the male body both respond to and actively produce our sense of the North's meanings and values at specific points in time. The first part of the thesis establishes an intellectual and cultural history, by asking what precedent exists for describing representations of male embodiment as specifically Northern. In Chapter One's literature review, I demonstrate how the Northern male body has pervaded scholarship on the region as a concept with an implicit but influential presence. Chapter Two examines the relationship between male bodies and the production of historical narratives of the North according to a canon of film and television texts. This is a critically complex task which requires, firstly, reproducing a canonical screen history in order to map how male bodies have mediated changing notions of Northern identity, and, secondly, critically querying the representational politics of a 'Northern' canon. The second part of the thesis involves an investigation of contemporary representations of the male body. The primary field of investigation is the representation of male embodiment in texts produced between 2008 and 2020. This period has seen the re-emergence of the North as culturally significant in the mediation of a post-recession structure of feeling, in part through the popularity and controversy of releases such as I, Daniel Blake (2016), Happy Valley (2014 -), and God's Own Country (2017). Across three chapters, I examine three modalities of male bodily representation in this period, which I term, respectively: the deteriorated body, the youthful body, and the racialised body. By treating deterioration, youthfulness, and racialisation to be specific, if overlapping, processes in the representation of Northern masculinity, these chapters emphasise the rhetorical nature of these bodies and locate social and ideological meaning in the contradictions that result from this rhetorical specificity.

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.

Film sequels have usually been looked down upon by fans and film critics alike, as well as overlooked by most film theorists. However, sequels provide a rich layering of intertextuality that create all kinds of new meanings worth looking into more closely. This dissertation investigates the type of sequels in which the passing of time, both inside and outside of the story, becomes a key feature of the films themselves. I focus on sequels that acknowledge, incorporate, and specifically reflect on the duration between one film and the other often with ten, twenty or even over thirty years passing between instalments. My research focuses on their use of temporality, developing the vocabulary to speak about them and how they convey the passage of time. I primarily analyse the character development and the longterm gaps, which, even if inconspicuous and until now ignored, play an essential part in the intertextuality of the films. When we look at these sequels in depth, we discover they provide a new way to look at narrative time closely related to real-life time. This intersection of the two allows for a new way to think about time and its effects in the long term, both regarding character development and the social contexts around them. This study provides a new perspective to look at sequels and the temporal intertextuality between them. My purpose is to define this type of sequel as a 'time-critical sequel' and show how they operate by enhancing an old story while telling a new one.

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.

Translating one of the most important works in the humanities and social sciences, Michel Foucault's Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (1975), is a challenging enterprise. This thesis explores the way in which the English translation by Alan Sheridan, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (1977), and the German translation by Walter Seitter, Überwachen und Strafen. Die Geburt des Gefängnisses (1977), significantly differ from the original French and from one another. The differences, especially regarding the key concepts in the book, arguably enable interpretations that Foucault did not intend or that rest upon words with multiple meanings in other languages. To this end, I have identified a number of central concepts, which I analyse alongside the different semantic fields in which they are situated. I argue that the translation choices made by Sheridan and Seitter must be critiqued on the basis of the historical differences between criminal procedures and punishment (the concept of supplice), intellectual influences denoting specific theories of the body that get lost in translation (the concept of the body following Nietzsche), a theoretical misdirection of the Foucauldian relationship between power and violence (the concept of pouvoir), and finally the cultural particularities of the concept of la surveillance, which problematise the power of the gaze and the production of behaviour beyond questions of technological automatization. Through the critical analysis of translation, this thesis offers a comprehensive study of the central ideas in one of Foucault's most renowned books. Unlike all previous studies, this thesis combines Foucauldian thought with the fields of modern languages, translation studies and theory, and philosophy in order to visualise their multilingual connections in philosophical writings. I suggest that reading foreign authors only in translation is insufficient to understand their intellectual development and their contribution to scholarship.

This thesis examines the ethics and politics of cosmopolitanism beyond the Anthropocene by interrogating the presentation of the human in relation to other-than-humans in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, and David Mitchell. The mounting global uncertainty and environmental crises have heightened fears that humanity may not survive beyond the third millennium, but these apocalyptic predictions reveal an anthropocentric concern with the planet's ability to sustain human life in capitalist societies rather than the wellbeing of the planet. I argue that ensuring the survival of humanity and the planet demands a new vision of cosmopolitanism that recognises the planetary interconnectedness and interdependence of all present and future beings who share the biosphere. This proposition calls for a redefinition of the human and an expansion of the communities that humans belong to and coheres with the aim of eco-cosmopolitanism to connect the human, nonhuman, and the ecological. Using the lenses of posthumanism, ecocriticism, and cosmopolitanism, I examine how, despite their speculative content, the three authors' novels convincingly portray the experience of 'dislocation' brought about by globalisation and provoke fundamental questions about what constitutes the human and how this human subject might relate to nonhuman and posthuman others ethically and equitably. Through the interrogation of these issues, this thesis also shows how these works transcend the confines of fiction to inspire and challenge our current practices of cosmopolitanism.

This thesis examines a selection of Madeleine L'Engle's children's and adolescent literature series, using a theoretical lens derived from ecopsychology and its praxis, ecotherapy. The three series I draw from are the Austin family series, the Time series, and the O'Keefe family series. All are situated in L'Engle's fantastic universe, bringing fantasy and reality together in her work across a continuum ranging from the highly realistic events of her Austin family novels to the highly fantastic events of her Time series. However, very little scholarship addresses the interconnectedness of the three sets of novels. As a result, it seems very important to address some of the possibilities inherent in this neglected overlap between them. In addition to observing that there is movement between the fantastic and the realistic in these novels, L'Engle is adept at building a deep relationship between her human characters and the nonhuman aspects of their world(s), including both the living, organic creatures and the non-living, inorganic features of the landscapes she develops. These relationships bring this range of novels firmly onto ecopsychologist Andy Fisher's human-nonhuman kinship continuum (Fisher, 2013). Combined with the relationships between the fantastic and the realistic in L'Engle's novels, this second continuum allows the audience to anticipate how the experience of reading these novels might lead to reimagining the attachments that can be formed between human and nonhuman outside of the book, and the ways in which those attachments might be mutually beneficial and psychologically, and even physically, healing. In all three series of novels, it is often the case that the nonhuman is important in helping humans resolve problems they face. This thesis will use ecopsychology and ecotherapy to closely examine the relationships L'Engle develops for her characters along the human-nonhuman kinship continuum. This will be accomplished by looking at pairs of novels from the fantastic and the realistic series, as well as at single novels which stand out as slightly different from the most prominent genre in a given series. In this way, the thesis also shows L'Engle's movement back and forth along the fantasy/reality continuum and demonstrates the integration of the three series with each other. Importantly, through examining these relationships and this movement along continuums in these novels, the thesis demonstrates how ecopsychology and ecotherapy provide a strong and important critical lens through which to read children's and adolescent novels.

Faërie, being the realm or state in which fairies have their being (OFS: 32), was a central element to Tolkien's fantasy literature, artwork, even his academic teaching, yet little attention has been paid to how his vision of this concept changed over his lifetime. This might stem from the fact that much of the academic work on Tolkien has focussed on Middle-earth, a world which by necessity is constrained, for a successful imaginary world requires keen and clear reasons for its form and function and overall consistency (OFS: 5). Although often neglected by scholars, Tolkien's non-Middle-earth poetry serves as an important resource to rectify this deficit in scholarship for: i) it falls outside his legendarium thus allowing Tolkien to give full reign to his imagination; ii) Tolkien continued to write poems throughout his lifetime allowing scholars to examine different phases of his exploration of Faërie; and iii) he often revised or rewrote poems at different stages in his life and the subtle changes in imagery and language point to changes in his vision of Faërie. This thesis analyses the themes, language, and folklore of Tolkien's nonMiddle-earth poetry, arguing that it is possible to see three sometimes overlapping phases in Tolkien's changing vision of Faërie: an initial phase when he explored who and what the fairies were, a second divergent phase where Tolkien at once studied the worlds and poetic styles of the medieval works he taught at Oxford yet also used his Faërie poems to protest the excesses of modern living, and a third phase where he increasingly merged his Christian beliefs with his concept of Faërie. It concludes by demonstrating how Tolkien utilized the threads generated in his poems to form his final image of Faërie, Smith of Wootton Major, revealing how his non-Middle-earth poetry acted as a kind of sandbox for his construction of Faërie.

This thesis examines the presence of German author Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) in the works of the anglophone authors John Banville (b. 1945) and David Constantine (b. 1944). Presenting analysis of translations, adaptations and works from the wider oeuvres of the English-speaking authors, the thesis identifies aspects of theme and style in their texts that have arguably been influenced by their engagement with Kleist. Additional insight is provided by an interview with each anglophone author. The analysis allows the thesis to explore the wide-ranging implications of Kleist's presence in the oeuvres of Banville and Constantine. In this way the thesis aims to demonstrate that, with regard to Banville and Constantine, Kleist has a more significant presence in the anglophone literary scene than may have been widely acknowledged. Finally, the thesis discusses the disparate attitudes demonstrated by Banville and Constantine towards translation and intertextuality.

This thesis examines the portrayal and significance of science fiction in contemporary British theatre. Analysing twenty-two texts and productions in their original performance contexts, I make critical comparisons between their science-fictional narratives and the anxieties of the present moment, including social instability, accelerating technological innovation, institutional violence, neoliberal exploitation, and climate collapse. By exploring how theatre practitioners are increasingly intervening on matters of national and international urgency via the lens of a speculative tomorrow, this thesis ultimately argues that science fiction constitutes a new method of political engagement within twenty-first century British theatre. This thesis is structured as a series of case studies built around science-fictional subgenres, each of which is mapped across an interdisciplinary scholarly framework. My introduction lays out the broad theoretical concerns and organisational choices that underpin these case studies, before examining the (limited) existing publications in the field and and locating my approach within scholarship allied to the interests of science fiction, such as robots in performance, digital technologies, and the staging of political theory. Opening with an examination of post-apocalyptic plays, chapter one examines how these productions communicate intense social, political and economic anxieties by making links to the familiar yet alien landscape of the modern post-industrial ruin. Chapter two focuses attention on Anne Washburn's Mr Burns (2014) and draws on cultural memory to explore how the play's post-electric narrative intervenes on notions of remembrance, national identity and belonging. Chapter three considers the depiction of the android in contemporary theatre, framing this figure as a posthuman agent that troubles ontological binaries including human/nonhuman, biological/artificial and object/subject. Concentrating its gaze on RashDash and Unlimited's dance-theatre piece Future Bodies (2018), chapter four considers how this production utilised a range of embodied performance choices - including song, dance and movement - to interrogate and resist the technological erasure of the human body. Finally, chapter five examines the staging of dystopia in numerous recent productions by drawing on scholarship concerning precarity and systemic violence. Combining science fiction, theatre studies and wider academic discourse, this thesis both documents an expanding performance practice and pioneers a new interpretation of political representation within contemporary British theatre-making.

This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying the cultural and theatrical performance of Shakespeare in minority languages. It combines archival research with live performance and audience analysis to evaluate how Shakespeare's works and legacy can be transformed within diverse cultural and linguistic contexts, and the subsequent sustained social impact of performing Shakespeare in translation in a minority language. By focusing on under-researched areas of performance history, this thesis contributes to wider discussions of what 'global Shakespeare' means, and the role Shakespeare has played in shaping contemporary society in three distinct locations: Wales, the Basque Country and New Zealand. These marginalised communities decentre the dominant cultural narratives of their regions through decolonising Shakespeare to tell their own unique stories. The Other becomes the home territory for the playwright as theatre-makers syncretically 'tradapt' his work in rhizomatic, exciting and invigorating ways. By doing so, these minorised communities claim ownership over their own unique heritages and identities - and over Shakespeare - in order to educate, rejuvenate and preserve minority language and culture. Chapter One offers a broad study of minority languages and cultures and their interactions with Shakespeare. It is organised around five key areas: adaptation, language, national identity, space, and festivals. This exploration of minority Shakespeare reveals a rich tapestry of traditions, in which I situate the work of theatre-makers from Wales, the Basque Country and New Zealand. Each of the following three chapters focuses on one of these main locations, and is divided into two parts. The first part of each chapter provides a detailed account of the history of translation and performance of Shakespeare's works in Welsh, Euskara and te reo Māori, and his influence on local social and cultural practices. The second part presents a case-study of live performance from 2016-2020. By analysing recent productions, this thesis offers a new perspective on the current state of intercultural Shakespeare performance studies.

Since the National Theatre (NT) broadcast All's Well that Ends Well (2009) live from the Olivier stage, criticism of Shakespearean performances in the live theatre broadcast medium has been growing. While attention has largely been focused on how the theatrical production is mediated and experienced by cinema audiences, the role of the framing materials that accompany the performance has been greatly overlooked. Over ten years on from NT Live's All's Well, the canon of Shakespearean live theatre broadcasts produced by RSC Live and NT Live is populated by a rich and diverse range of broadcast paratexts. These span from advertising slides that preface the live transmission of the broadcast, to pre-recorded short films and even post-performance credits. This thesis examines the role of broadcast paratexts in mediating Shakespearean performances broadcast by these two major theatrical institutions. Drawing from the paratextual function as outlined by structuralist Gérard Genette, this thesis proposes that broadcast paratexts perform significant transactions of meaning in relation to the Shakespearean performance and to broader ideas of Shakespeare's cultural value. Part I of the thesis consists of three chapters in which broadcast paratexts are explored and explained, convention by convention. Chapter One explores the abundance of pre-performance paratexts, detailing how these materials offer preliminary thresholds of interpretation for cinema audiences. Chapter Two demonstrates the role of interval paratexts in mediating an important juncture of the Shakespearean performance, challenging the assumption that the interval is an interpretively passive space, and Chapter Three rethinks the terminal paratexts of bows and credits. In Part II of the thesis, the functions established in these chapters are explored thematically, in case study chapters that focus on recurring narratives of Shakespearean value in the broadcast paratexts. Chapter Four scrutinises the ways in which the NT and RSC imbue the space and place of performance with Shakespearean meaning. Chapter Five analyses the role of high-profile performers as mediators of the Shakespearean work, while Chapter Six looks to the fringes of the Shakespeare canon to uncover how the playwright's lesser-performed works are framed for cinema audiences. Chapter Seven examines arguments of Shakespeare's contemporary relevance in broadcast paratexts. Across this study, I argue for the role of these materials in negotiating Shakespearean value as well as mediating the theatrical performance, situating these paratexts as the latest in a long history of attempts to reshape ideas of the playwright through the framing of his works.

Despite its claim to have never been officially colonized, Victorian England had a tremendous influence on Thailand - economically and culturally - especially after the signing of the Bowring Treaty in 1855. When the first generation of Thai royal scholars started to return home from England in the 1890s, they played an important role in conveying Victorian literature into the country. In the following decades the works of Marie Corelli, H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, and William Le Queux, among others, enjoyed popularity in Thailand. As the book publishing industry rapidly expanded in the 1920s, the Thai literary sphere was flooded by translations, adaptations, and imitations of the Victorian novel. This flood ushered in a 'chaos in Thai letters', and it was not until 1929 that the Thai novel proper began to consolidate. This thesis focuses on recovering the direct links between Victorian Britain and Thailand in the production, consumption, and appropriation of Victorian fiction. Grappling with transgender studies, book history, translation studies, and the world-literary system, I dive into the chaos to scrutinize what I shall call the trans-Victorian: the makeover of modern Thai literature via textual manipulations and Victorian literary elements. Trans-Victorian, hyphenated, embodies the non-binary, ambiguity, and deception, and will open a new space for discussion on literary hybridity and serve to connect the different literary spheres. The thesis will tackle this complex category, providing a nuanced understanding of both Thai and Victorian literature in the evolving field of world literature.

This thesis is concerned with creative responses to the 2015-16 Calais Jungle and the 'refugee crisis' in Europe. Departing from studies that approach the Jungle as a 'state of exception', it draws instead upon the overdetermined notions of 'refugee voice' and 'refugee storytelling' to consider how 'humanity' has been negotiated, granted and revoked in Calais. I argue that creative representations of the Jungle signal a new chapter in refugee humanitarianism: one in which the 'human' of human rights, and the 'human' of humanitarianism, have become discursively entangled. I chart an emergent language of grassroots refugee solidarity through texts, plays, documentaries, films, installations, exhibitions, and visual artworks produced about the Jungle between 2015 and 2020. I demonstrate the ideological role that refugees and asylum seekers have played in shoring up the spatiotemporal boundaries of the European nation during the 'refugee crisis', via a rhetorical process termed here 'the affective economy of hopes and dreams'. Finally, the thesis argues that the Calais Jungle was not the edge, limit or 'other' of Europe. Rather, for British and European citizens, the camp has played a pivotal role in rethinking Europe as a geopolitical construct, and 'Europeanness' as a cultural concept, in the post-Brexit age.

This dissertation fills research gaps in general historiography, film historiography and exile historiography alike by presenting the first ever monography on the German plurilingual multiple artist Walter Rilla (1894-1980) whose filmography of 200+ titles developed parallel to his similarly huge German-British stage, radio, literature and television work. My study period 1921-1957, politically highly charged, covers decisive decades of Rilla's professional career 1913-1978 during which he was likewise a musician, intellectual, publisher and political theorist. While primarily analysing Rilla's European and anglophone films - including their actant roles in contemporary ideological discourses - I equally outline Rilla's network and specify both his star rank and brand on the backgrounds of his press, audience and advertising reception. My original contribution to knowledge redresses the hitherto chronic research marginalisation of this NS-exiled artist via my transnational and transcultural theory approach which finally puts Rilla, consistently the equal of top star colleagues from both sides of the Atlantic, back on the map of top film artists of European, transcontinental and global fame, where this star actor, producer, director and musician belongs. My film exile and exile film definitions enable an exemplary litmus-test interpretation of Rilla's multifaceted transnational and transcultural work that challenges both nation-based culture models and exile research binaries. Not least due to his transnational European film network acteur position as unearthed by me, he retained his transcultural Weimar Cinema career level during and beyond his 23-year British exile. Most of his 110-112 films made in 1921-1957 alone, hitherto largely overlooked by research, were, as I have proven, aesthetic and commercial European to global successes, including transcultural adaptations I have identified amongst 30+ British export versions. As I have demonstrated, Rilla's hitherto largely dismissed wartime BBC German and Home Service radio propaganda work constitutes an outstanding contribution of global impact to Britain's war effort.

While the city has been central to the Indian novel in English since the 1980s, the profusion of urban novels, essays and literary reportages published since the 2000s has triggered a formal and thematic renewal of the literary discourse on the Indian city. At the crossroads of literature and urban studies, this thesis locates this literary phenomenon in the context of India's embrace of global capitalism in the 1990s, which has resulted in the accelerated expansion and transformation of Indian cities, inspired by the model of the global city. Based on a corpus of fictional and non-fictional texts on Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata, I study the development of a critical urban imaginary which expresses the contradictory experience of this urban metamorphosis through the interplay between two major aesthetic modes, and challenges both orientalist and nationalist discourses on the Indian city. These texts oscillate between an epic mode, which defamiliarize urban modernisation and amplifies the collision between antagonistic global social forces in the city, and an ordinary mode, which explores this historical process at the scale of the locality through the lens of everyday life, obliquely shedding light on structural violence but also on tactics devised by urban outcasts to reclaim urban space. These two modes are considered as the two faces of a critical literary approach of the city, which rests on the strong historical consciousness of the writers. Their works unveil the multiple layers of a fragmented urban history which contemporary urban planning endeavours to erase.

Described politically as propagandistic: the imposition of political dogma on creativity; the literature of a party disguised as the literature of a class and often dismissed as: conservative; lacking in invention, or simply the naive emulation of bourgeois realism, attempts to define 'Proletarian', or 'Working-Class' fiction and vouchsafe the 'authenticity' of its creators have continually proven resistant to any single or easy definition. This thesis will argue that the narratives of the Birmingham group rather than constrained by such narrow and negative assessments, present instead as a direct challenge to and refutation of them. Departing from traditional views of working-class writing as a genre informed by male-oriented notions of class-solidarity or contemporary critiques which, during a period of representational experimentation, had somewhat perfunctorily seen working-class literature indebted to the more individualistic concerns of bourgeois realism, this thesis will suggest that the narratives of the Birmingham group are more accurately characterised by the diversity of their innovative and formal approach. Far from politically quiescent they operate in the liminal space between overt propaganda and addressedness to reveal how intersections of class, gender and sexual identity frequently overlooked due to the critical legacy of patriarchal and workerist assumptions, were, from the outset not only present in their narratives but also prescient of political and formal issues raised in the more recent discussion of working-class literature.

This thesis examines the connections between Robert Burns and John Steinbeck in order to determine whether the American author was influenced by the Scots poet and, if so, to what extent. There has been a tendency, both culturally and academically, to presume an influence given the latter's appropriation of Burns's phrase from 'To a Mouse' for the title of his 1937 novella, Of Mice and Men. Often, those who reference this link do not delve deeper into Steinbeck's reasons for the naming of his novella. The thesis explores how Steinbeck was exposed to the work of Burns as he grew up and developed his writing career in the early decades of the twentieth century. It also looks at Burns's more general influence in the United States during this period. The thesis further examines evidence of the influence of Burns in Of Mice and Men and other Steinbeck novels, and considers the similarities in outlook, experience and political ideology between the two writers. Thus, this in-depth study into the influence of Burns on Steinbeck seeks to address the common assumptions about the connection between the two writers which, until now, have been based solely on Steinbeck's usage of the title Of Mice and Men.

The Quick is an autotheoretical narrative thesis - a hybrid work of biography, memoir and essay - and a meditation on the figure of the mother, the postpartum matrescence, grief and loss, domestic coercion and state control. It is concerned with the mother figure within neoliberalist systems of value, the unyielding myth of maternal virtue and the factions of, and between, creative production and reproductive labour in the context of socio-politically controlled conduct. The figure of the mother emerges from expectation, her identity is produced from heavily regulated practices and her sentience ascribed from the metaphorical figures or mythological subjects used to signify particular representational modes. Therefore, the thesis is a biomythographical undertaking and its questions are characterised and situated in the biomythographies of Audre Lorde (1934-1992) Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Chantal Akerman (1950-2015), Doris Lessing (1919-2013), Agnes Martin (1912-2004) and Tillie Olsen (1912-2007), and extended within autobiographical non-fiction and critical theory. Multiple narratives and fictions coexist to form portraits of 'waywardness' that are studied apropos the writing and theories of Jacqueline Rose, Adrienne Rich, Lisa Downing, D. W. Winnicott and Rose Laub Coser, examining the political divisions of the home plot and mother as fettered subject position. The thesis includes: The Quick, a lyric essay in three parts; 'Topologies of Syncope', a Critical Afterword; an Index of key figures, diction and synonyms and an Addendum of works cited, credits, glossary and endnotes. The architecture of The Quick connects variant genres: critical memoir, reportage, biography, art and literary history and criticism. The thesis methodologically considers the personal-political as contemporary post-critical device and literary genre, examining the politic of bricolage within the personal essay and of the composed interrelationships between the positional autobiographical, the theoretical and forms of institutional or ideological critique. The Quick-in its topological multiplicities and associative dream of wayward mothers-operates as a meta-critique or metonym of its own means, where a primary concern is how first-person observation, inflected by affect, intimacy and the quotidian, acts as a crucial intervention in the means, production and historiography of art, literature and its discourses.

This thesis explores the work of Giorgio Manganelli (1922-1990), a member of the 1960s Italian neo-avant-garde, through a sado-masochistic reading. The existing literature has paid little attention to the areas of gender and sexuality in Manganelli's work, with the exception of some recent studies that emphasise the hetero-aggressive, sadistic drives underpinning his writings and highlight his construction of masculinity as self-sufficient and based on the exclusion of woman. These studies, however, fail to take into account Manganelli's insistence on tropes of self-victimisation and fantasies of self-shattering - as seen in Dall'inferno's (1985) emblematic image of a male body tortured by a cannibalistic doll - as well as Manganelli's radical renunciation of authorial power and his depiction of the author as a 'slave' of language. One of the goals of this thesis is to answer the question: what is the meaning of the sado-masochistic motifs and of this logic of self-victimisation in Manganelli's work? Drawing upon the theories about the cultural meaning of masochism put forward by Gilles Deleuze (1967), Kaja Silverman (1992), David Savran (1998) and Nick Mansfield (1997), this thesis delves into the ambiguity and contradictoriness of Manganelli's treatment of gender power relations. This thesis also investigates sado-masochism in Manganelli as a means of relating to both readers and medium and evaluates the impact on Manganelli of Vladimir Nabokov, one of the authors who is most frequently associated with sadism and a point of reference for literary games based on the acting-out of power structures. On the one hand, my exploration of Manganelli's construction of a 'deviant', masochistic model of authoriality and subjectivity seeks to illuminate his ever greater self-consciousness with regard to the limits of the patriarchal models of creative engagement (related to notions such as authority and language ownership) as well as his attempt to release the self from culturally imposed identifications. On the other, I show that masochism and self-victimisation also function in his work as an oblique power strategy to recuperate authority and centrality.

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.

American novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937) is best known today for her tales of the city and the experiences of patrician New Yorkers in the "Gilded Age". She does not seem to be a very obvious candidate for the type of academic scrutiny synonymous with "ecocriticism". On university syllabi Wharton often features as a novelist of manners par excellence, whose fiction documents in coruscating detail the cossetted inhabitants of well-appointed libraries and drawing-rooms. My project seeks to push against the grain of critical orthodoxy by prioritizing other "species of spaces" in Wharton's work. For example, how do Wharton's narratives represent the organic profusion of external nature? Does the current scholarly fascination with the environmental humanities reveal previously unexamined or overlooked facets of Wharton's craft? My Introduction proposes that what is most striking about her narrative practice is how she utilizes, adapts and translates pastoral tropes, conventions, and concerns to twentieth-century American actualities. It is no accident that Wharton portrays characters returning to, or exploring, various natural localities, such as private gardens, public parks, chic mountain resorts, monumental ruins, or country-estate "follies". Such encounters and adventures prompt us to imagine new relationships with various geographies and the lifeforms that can be found there. My first chapter - "The Pastoral Cosmopolitanism of the (not so) Secret Garden" - shows how some of Wharton's moneyed, boundary-crossing characters yearn for a return to the native, the sheltered nook or the pastoral retreat. In so doing, Wharton invites us to reappraise "cosmopolitanism" as an analytic category. In her 1934 autobiography A Backward Glance, Wharton refers to her own literary production as her "secret garden". What my chapter demonstrates is that the private park or the public garden becomes a site for staging (and engaging with) tensions between the cosmopolitan and the pastoral, the exotic and the endemic, elite and mass culture, the globe-trotting and the parochial. The second chapter is entitled "'Endless Plays of Mountain Forms': Mapping the Mountains". In a letter to Nicky Mariano on 31st May 1932, Wharton described the Sibylline Mountains thus: "The run today was indescribably beautiful, with changing skies & such endless plays of mountain forms". Her response to the shape-shifting plasticity of this terrain is suggestive of the ways in which rocky peaks and summits operate in Wharton's fiction more broadly. Her writing enterprise, I argue, evinces an abiding and acute fascination with the metaphorical, aesthetic and cultural aspects of mountains. By construing key Wharton texts through an ecocritical lens, I propose that her fictional summits and hills can be understood as "edgelands at an altitude". The third and final chapter - "Romantic Ruins? Edith Wharton's Sedimented Vision" - addresses Wharton's representation of the "ruin" as a space between the natural and the man-made. That monumental ruins and garden "follies" carry such affective and symbolic resonance in her oeuvre is owing partly to her incisive treatment of John Ruskin's cultural theories, especially his powerful conception of the "voicefulness" of crumbling masonry, where the living and the dead seem to be in complex and eerie dialogue. Overall, then, Wharton's oeuvre can be construed as a form of "imaginative archeology", in which she excavates personal experience with a view to restructuring it in her fictions.

This thesis explores the unique lives women lead in Ottoman and post-Ottoman spaces as represented across six different works of modern and contemporary literature. The cultural, economic, and socio-political impacts of the Ottoman Empire are central to the various lifestyles women lead across post-Ottoman societies today. Nevertheless, due to factors such as orientalism, feminism, and ongoing political affairs, the Ottoman era has not been examined from a postcolonial perspective. As such, the era's influences on post-Ottoman cultures and in turn on women's status are under-researched. The interest I found in creating Ottoman fiction has not yet received adequate or necessary attention from critics. On the one hand, this poses a challenge to the ideas explored in this thesis in that academic interest in this area is rather low and thus research about the Ottoman era around culture and social dynamics is also limited. Through this project, I attempt to initiate conversations around post-Ottoman women and post-Ottoman societies by studying the multiple influences of the Ottoman era historically, politically, and socially. Additionally, this project aims to shed light on the elements affecting women's roles, their rights, and their empowerment. This analysis is done by reading and examining literary works that produce cultural experiences and deliver the private and individual conditions affecting women's daily lives. In terms of literary works, the Ottoman Empire seems to be of great interest to authors. There are numerous popular perceptions of Ottoman spaces and of Ottoman women in particular, and these are evident across the six novels studied in this thesis. Although the worlds in these texts are fictional, in their own distinct ways these six books challenge the exotic and erotic narratives that often characterise the portrayal of Ottoman woman and spaces. In fact, some of the novels utilize this orientalist framework to challenge mainstream perception and reconstruct Ottoman women's stories.

This thesis identifies and evaluates the nature of poetic influence, building off Harold Bloom's interpretation of poetic influence as expressed in his The Anxiety of Influence and The Anatomy of Influence. It is separated into two components. The first is a series of poems taking structural and thematic influence from Dante Alighieri's Inferno. Groups of poems are divided and modeled after the Inferno's circles of Hell on either a technical level or through a group of poems' shared content. The second component is an extended lyric essay which presents examples of poetic influence throughout the history of poetry, including contemporary examples set alongside the author's work. By examining how a later poet's work is informed by an earlier poet's work through close readings and extensive looks at Bloom, the thesis also aims to show how poetic influence functions differently in certain contexts and under certain conditions. The role of academia and its modes of teaching poetry in Creative Writing courses is one such context, and the form of the lyric essay allows for the author's reflections of poetic development in such a context to help explain how poetic influence has worked within the poetry of the first component.

Generational labels, e.g. 'millennial', provide a shorthand for conceptualising social change over time. The notion that a particular generation are 'digital natives' offers representable solidity for writers seeking to depict how today's digital media technologies shape individuals and societies in increasingly complex, obscured, and unpredictable ways. Synthesising literary and media theory, this thesis examines how recent novels construct, complicate and subvert techno-generational frameworks for representing social change. Chapters offer analyses of Jonathan Franzen and Nathan Hill's fixations on digital natives from self-consciously 'elder' perspectives; Tao Lin and Olivia Sudjic's use of 'flat' aesthetics to represent the affective perspectives of the 'digital native'; Natasha Stagg and Tony Tulathimutte's efforts to apprehend emergent material relations in digital platform capitalism; and Tommy Orange's enunciation of an indigenous digitality. Acknowledging limitations in popular use of the term, this thesis approaches the 'digital native' as a performative identity. Literary engagements with techno-generational frameworks do not only reflect pre-existing realities but play an active role in producing new social identities. They demonstrate that debates over generational labels in contemporary cultural discourse-particularly among those who might otherwise be described as 'middle class'-produce models of social identification that frame a fast-changing and increasingly digital socioeconomic milieu.

Previous scholarship has established that the Comentum of Giovanni Bertoldi da Serravalle on Dante's Commedia (1416-1417) was influenced by the recollectae (student notes) of lectures on the poem delivered at Ferraraby Benvenuto da Imoladuring 1375-1376, with codex Ashburnham 839 held in the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence being the only manuscript version to have survived substantially intact. The first objective of this dissertation is to offer further detailed study into how Serravalle incorporates the recollectae, or a version related to it, into his Comentum. The second objective is to investigate the influence of the Council of Constance (1414-1418) on Serravalle's commentary. To facilitate the second objective, three themes were chosen, namely Dante's treatment of Florence, his understanding of the effect of Anglo-French relations on the politics of Western Europe, and his condemnation of heresy, schism and simony. The dissertation comprises six chapters. Chapter 1 discusses Serravalle's career, his relationship with the recollectae, and judgments on the Comentum. Chapter 2 presents an overview of the Council itself and its deliberations. Chapter 3 provides new research with an in-depth investigation into the influence of the prologue of Benvenuto's recollectae on the wider ranging preambula provided by Serravalle as an introduction to his commentary. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 investigate the three themes noted above, by comparing relevant passages drawn from the recollectaeand the Comentum. A new understanding is provided of Serravalle's practice of embedding the often sparse material of the recollectae into a longer gloss where a terse contribution is enhanced with his personal insight. It is shown that, although there are some hints of the deliberations of the Council infiltrating the Comentum, there is little hard evidence to demonstrate that they provided a major influence on Serravalle's commentary.

This thesis aims to re-energize metafiction studies through the frameworks of performativity, neocybernetics, and diffraction. My contention is that the human experience can be viewed as a metafictioning manifold, i.e., an active self-perpetuating entanglement and emergence of narrativizing structures. Metafictions, then, are living artifacts that model the metafictional processes of our constructed realities, while also actively re-organizing our experiences, and acting as heuristics for engaging with the world in metafictional ways. Renewed attention should be given to metafictionality, and in particular to metafictional artifacts, so as to better engage with our material reality as co-participant storytellers alongside the objects and systems around us. The introductory chapter sets the critical and methodological stage. Chapter One uses David Markson's This is not a Novel (2001) to demonstrate the performativity of metafictions and objects. Chapter Two discusses The Third Policeman (1967) by Flann O'Brien and identifies metafictions as living systems. Chapter Three looks at Jerzy Kosinski's Being There (1970) in order to theorize the agential natures of such object-systems. Finally, Chapter Four investigates the heuristic ethos of a metafictioning manifold through Mark Z. Danielewski's The Familiar (2015).

From mechanomorphic ants to slovenly rats and raining fish-lizards, this thesis explores connections between the scientific contexts of behaviourism, entropy and Gaia theory and sf's animal characters. I position this research within the contextualist school of stylistics, arguing that such an approach is necessary not only because of sf's constitutive relationship with science (Parrinder 1979, Landon 2014), but also because the genre's privileging of ideas over character development means flat characters predominate in sf (Amis 1960, Gunn 2002). To conduct my analyses, I employ Culpeper's (2001) framework, the most comprehensive characterisation framework, and amend its categories for use with animal characters. This framework is combined with a variety of corpus linguistic methods which have been at the forefront of stylistic explorations of literary character (Archer & McIntyre 2010, Bednarek 2011, Mahlberg 2012, Balossi 2014). My focus on scientific contexts and animal characters addresses large gaps in stylistics research. It is the first attempt within stylistics to consider the influence of scientific contexts on characterisation, the first to engage exclusively with animal characters, and the first to rework a characterisation framework for use with animal characters. In addition, this research attempts to connect stylistics with the contemporary field of animal studies research.

This thesis tracks the editorial development of John Middleton Murry (1889-1957), a prolific writer of criticism, fiction, and poetry, and the editor of some of the twentieth century's most influential artistic and literary magazines. Five of them are examined in this thesis: Rhythm (1911-1913), the Blue Review (1913), the Signature (1915), the Athenaeum (1919-1921), and the Adelphi (1923-1927). This thesis aims to reinsert Murry into the modernist dialogue by affirming both the importance of editorships to periodical studies and the influence of his editorial practices on twentieth-century art and literature. The thesis highlights his developing editorial aptitude and the influence he wielded as a magazine editor. Chapter 1 examines Rhythm, the Blue Review, and the Signature. During these early editorships, he learned many of the techniques that would become identifying features of his editorial career, such as methods of interacting with his audiences. Chapter 2 tracks his editorship of the literary review the Athenaeum and examines the ways in which he transformed the struggling review into a critical success, in spite of suggestions by scholars that his editorship was a failure. Chapter 3 addresses the first four years of Murry's editorship of the Adelphi, the magazine he founded in 1923 to combat the mechanistic and, in his opinion, inaccessible nature of literary criticism. While Murry's seemingly sudden turn from a well-respected critic to an anti-critical editor shocked many of his fellow writers, this thesis demonstrates how his desire to make literature and art more accessible was evident throughout his editorial career and was refined as his editorial confidence increased. Examining Murry's editorial development alongside the cultural and personal motivations for his decisions, this thesis delivers the only book-length editorial study of one of the most overlooked figures of twentieth-century literature while drawing attention to the value of editorial studies, and of Murry's editorships in particular, to periodical modernism.

In Authorial Intent: A Historical Survey I set out to document the history of authorial intent, tracing its path through philosophy, history, and literary theory, from ancient Greece up to the present day. My aim in doing so is to create a comprehensive account of the term's development and use that will provide a broad historical context for understanding authorial intent, and reconsider its place in the current academic debate, specifically in Shakespeare studies. In embarking on a historical survey of authorial intent I make a number of a priori assertions, among them that the author's intentions have historically been considered significant, that they continue to hold significance to present readers, and that by attempting to dismiss them we risk impoverishing the text itself, the reading experience, and the scope of our criticism. The parallel I see between the authorial intent of times past and that of current criticism springs in part from these assertions, in part from the perspective my survey adopts. The period a historical study chooses to focus on will always to some degree dictate the outcome of that study. In reaching back to the Pre-Socratic thinkers my survey implies firstly that similarities between current and ancient thought on this subject exist, and secondly that these similarities are fundamental to a full understanding of authorial intent. While I believe this to be a provable hypothesis, it is also a stance born of the survey's goal: its final purpose is to enter into dialogue with the editorial treatment of William Shakespeare's texts. Therefore, the period ranging from the Renaissance to the recent past of High French Theory is considered the most significant to my study. Although the scope I adopt is broad, the subject at the core of my survey is narrow. It involves philosophy, literary theory, and criticism, as these contribute to the definition and use of authorial intent. As the study progresses through history to the present day, its historical scope will therefore gradually narrow, moving from general stimuli to settle on specific, direct influences, from Classical philosophy to Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, and onward to the present day.

The intention of this thesis is to investigate engagements with the pastoral mode in the poetry and plays of Derek Walcott. This will be achieved through a focus upon four key areas: Edenic symbolism, classical reception, allusions to the visual arts, and pastoral drama. The pastoral is a complex mode, with a long literary history. I argue that Walcott engages with the mode in a process of transformative interactions with the legacy of Eurocentric representations of Caribbean settings, the notion of the Caribbean as an Edenic space, the classical tradition including the pastorals of Theocritus and Virgil, the tradition of landscape art and both the piscatory pastoral and pastoral drama. These engagements allow for the subversion of generic expectations, and a revisionary, transformative approach to the pastoral mode and its many associations. This results in a distinctly Walcottian type of pastoral, one which evades reductive idealisation and restrictive uses of aesthetic models, in favour of a creative and profound engagement with pastoral's core themes.