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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.

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.

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

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

This thesis 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.

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.

This thesis re-examines and redefines the structuring paradoxes of the post-war American South through a sustained interrogation of its literary lawyers. Alert to overlapping spaces of race, law, history, and violence, I argue that the fictional lawyer sheds new light on the critically neglected pre- civil rights era by connecting the Cold War American novel to the contradictory discourses of the American South's shifting social and legal terrain. In an era caught between localised reassertions of racial hierarchy and the broader national claims of emancipatory justice and equality, I contend that my four central writers - William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Jesse Hill Ford, and Ann Fairbairn - employ their legal characters to embody the unsettled meanings of law and justice in a region poised on, but still awaiting, the transformative changes wrought by later civil rights legislation. Reacting to a growing body of scholarship that bears scepticism toward dominant claims of the neutrality, objectivity, and color blindness of American law, and refracting these theories through a careful explication of the specific dilemmas fictional Southern lawyers faced during the turbulent post-war era, I maintain that such characters operate in distinctive ways. Rather than simply reasserting that Southern texts degenerate into populist narratives reinscribing the lenticular logics that have, for decades, neatly partitioned race and racism from American law, I demonstrate instead that these legal characters - appearing in texts published between 1946 and 1966 - uniquely focus and embody the emerging narratives of race and law that characterised the regional and national politics of the civil rights struggle.

This thesis represents a journey of interlocked explorations on experimental themes that are rooted within the spirit of empathy on the basis of moments of the everyday. These universalities serve as my fulcrum as I make the pitch for The Poetry School of Experience. Also found within this thesis are thematic works coupled with a significant focus on craft as these relate to poetic techniques. I make the case through my own autobiographical approach as this relates to my being inspired by writers who share the view of poetry both as a vehicle for redemption and as a method for unification. It is also through my argument in favor of poetry being universal as well as through the introduction of original forms that I base my authorial intent as I state the critical controversies as these relate to my own writing practice and to the work of published writers. The literary criticism contained in my essays on The Poetry School of Experience as well as the poems found within my poetry manuscript Nomad oppose elitism and nepotism in the art of poetry by advocating through the poems of experience that are rooted within the elements of the human condition on the basis of addiction, war, loss, recovery, love, work, parenting, caretaking and fear that all people encounter either directly or indirectly.

Riot Grrrl, a hardcore feminist punk movement that emerged in the early 1990s in America, is often contemplated through a subcultural studies lens. As a result, its status as a political movement and social phenomenon still overshadows its status as an artistic movement in its scholarship. This thesis applies a literary studies lens to Riot Grrrl, examining specific devices employed in the movement’s literature and tracing these back to an experimental literary avant-garde, to fortify its status as an artistic movement. I argue that Riot Grrrl practitioners appropriate much of their artistic investments from American punk-feminist writer and postmodernist, Kathy Acker, who is frequently cited as a precursor to Riot Grrrl. Building on recent studies that have begun to demystify Acker’s influence as manifest in Riot Grrrl zine writing, I ask: to what ends do Riot Grrrls incorporate devices from Acker’s literary critique of patriarchal culture in the 1980s into their later critique of patriarchal culture in the 1990s? Following the successes of second wave feminism in gaining women’s liberation, their art responds to the media-driven backlash against feminism that emerged in the 1980s, which resulted in the concept of ‘post-feminism’ gaining traction in the 1990s. Two key manifestations of this backlash were the discrediting of working women, as well as attempts to reassert control over female sexuality, which mutated into postfeminist trends in the 1990s that similarly hinged upon the themes of work and sex: ‘New Traditionalism’ and ‘Do-Me’ feminism. I focus on Acker’s 1980s novels that influenced Riot Grrrl writing, such as Great Expectations (1983), Blood and Guts in High School (1978; published in 1984), and Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream (1986), tracing her ideological and aesthetic influence into Grrrl zines sourced from The Riot Grrrl Collection archive at New York University’s Fales Library and Special Collections. This analysis reveals how the critical function of avant-garde literary devices, inherited from Acker by Riot Grrrl zinesters, shifts according to gender developments being made in the 1990s that posited a stratification of feminist definitions.

This work comprises a critical thesis 'How Much Shall We Bet? Defining Surreal Futures', assessing the scope for stronger cross-pollination between poetry and futures studies and examining a potential hybrid poet-futurist praxis; and a portfolio of futures poetry in a range of lyrical and conceptual modes, The Bunny Assembly. Presented prior to the critical thesis, a fragmentary essay 'Weak Signals' introduces the main themes of this research through an account of my experiences attending the 2016 annual meeting of the World Futures Society. Chapter 1 describes the origins and rationale for the research, key lines of enquiry and underpinning conceptual frameworks adopted, including a discussion of why the topic was explored using the methodology of creative Practice-as-Research. Chapter 2 gives an overview of the academic discipline of futures studies and assesses how contemporary futures studies balances analytic and imaginative techniques to identify possible, probable and preferable futures, in order to identify any existing links to poetic techniques. Chapter 3 demonstrates how, although the roles of poet and prophet are historically linked, much contemporary poetry has had unexpectedly little to say on the topic of the future. It is shown through a quantitative review of sample texts that where recent poetry has addressed the topic of the future, it has more often presented clichéd declinist or dystopian visions Sixteen distinct strategies for developing poetic futures are identified in Chapter 4 by combining the steps of a typical forecasting methodology used in futures studies with a simple classification of lyrical and conceptual poetic approaches. These strategies are then evaluated to identify the extent to which they are useful in generating novel and provocative insight about the future. This chapter concludes with discussions of three features which proved effective in writing about the future: ethnographic writing, humour and aphorism. Chapter 5 consolidates poetic and futurist activities into a proposed praxis for the poet-futurist: what one should do differently as a poet if one is a futurist, and vice versa. This praxis is reviewed in the context of competing visions of the future of poetry. To conclude, the thesis assesses the value of systematic poetic investigation of the future with a particular emphasis on the role of poetry in challenging clichéd declinist or dystopian forecasts and inspiring action to realise more hopeful futures.

The purpose of this thesis is to look into the Leavis-Eliot relationship, connecting it with the broader discourse of English Studies as a university subject that developed in the first half of the twentieth century. It surveys all the many writings of Leavis on Eliot, to see how Eliot is formative for the theory and practice of Leavis’s literary criticism in both positive and negative ways. It conducts a detailed investigation of D. H. Lawrence’s significance in relation to Leavis’s changing attitude to Eliot, and examines how profound differences in social, cultural, religious and national thinking strengthened Leavis’s alliance with Lawrence to the detriment of his relationship with Eliot. These differences are presented as dichotomies between nationalism and Europeanism or internationalism, ruralism or organicism and industrialisation or metropolitanism, and relate to the differences between the two men’s views about literary education, the subject of English and the position of the classics in the curriculum. Leavis’s increasingly conflicted feelings towards a figure to whom he owned an enormous critical debt and inspiration, but whose various beliefs and literary affiliations caused him much misgiving, results in a deep sense of division in Leavis himself which he sought to transfer onto Eliot.

This thesis proposes that a body of British writing has emerged since the early 1980s which could be called ‘British New Journalism’. In defining a new category of literature, the creative and critical elements of this thesis offer an original contribution to knowledge. In Part I, this discrete genre is exemplified in a fictional biography, A Funny Thing. Underpinning the novel is a set of emerging ‘rules’ which are influenced by, but distinct from, those of American New Journalism. The narrative is set between the 1960s and the present day and follows the impact of Motor Neurone Disease on Norman and Freddy, a C list double act. It culminates in the mercy killing by Freddy (the narrator) of his partner. It is suggested that the integration of real, historical detail with fiction, unconventional use of footnotes and scripted material and implied critique of post-war British society locate this work within British New Journalism. In Part II, a critical work defines the genre and examines how novels and non-fiction books within it appraise society through the lens of real lives. Gordon Burn is located as the most significant writer in this field. His role is initially traced through a study of the influence of American New Journalism on his storytelling and reference to ‘rules’ articulated by Tom Wolfe and exemplified by Norman Mailer and Truman Capote. Through detailed analysis of Burn’s novels, biographies, and ‘true crime’ works which best illustrate emerging genre conventions, it is shown that British New Journalism differs from the US genre in its extension of real, fictional, famous, and ordinary lives as cyphers for dysfunction in communities and wider society. Finally, the ongoing impact of Burn and his hybrid version of New Journalism on subsequent British writers is exemplified by close reference to the works of David Peace and Andrew O’Hagan. The thesis concludes that, while more extensive study of a wider range of writers will be useful, the research offers sufficient evidence that British New Journalism is a distinctive genre that continuous to develop and adapt to current societal strands.

This thesis consists of two parts: a creative work and two critical essays on translingual writing. The creative component, Then the Cicadas Sang, is a novel set in 1940s Malta. It is a story about love and aspiration. As a teenage girl, Mari vouches she will do anything to leave the tiny island she lives on. Foreigners – the British who governed the island at the time – and books give her a glimpse of the world beyond her shores. But she craves for more, unaware of what she risks losing by chasing her dreams. The novel deals with how books shape our imagination, how the languages we speak give us access to different systems of conceptualizing the world and how we navigate the spaces in between. It does this through the protagonist, Mari, and the people who help shape who she is, in particular Mrs Applegate, a British evacuee who sought shelter in Gozo in the midst of the Blitz. But as much as it is a story of a girl turning into a woman, the novel is also the story of an island. It sits between Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Elena Ferrante’s The Neapolitan Series. The extract submitted is Book One in a series of two. The critical essays explore the poetics of multilingual writing. They analyse the linguistic, political and cultural stratifications in multilingual writing, with a focus on the perception and reception of Maltese literature written in English. I ask if a multilingual writer’s role can be akin to that of a cultural translator. They investigate whether, unlike the monolingual writer, a writer’s multilingual background gives him or her access to different systems of conceptualizing the surrounding environment and how this informs the creative process. This study informs my own process of writing Then the Cicadas Sang, with a particular regard to self-translation and how one language can carry another on the page. In this case the languages I am working with are English, Maltese and Italian.

This doctoral thesis examines the representations and dynamics of crime and inner punishment in a range of European literary works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: F.M. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Преступлeние и наказaние, 1866), L. Rebreanu’s Ciuleandra (1927) and P. Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985), while tracing the developments of crime fiction and the changes in criminal legal system over the span of one hundred and nineteen years. Utilising the methodology of comparative literature, I argue that the interiorized punishment - which I identify, after Foucault, as a new episteme - is a narrative thread that runs through all three novels, and informs much other writings in the same period. Informed by different socio-cultural, temporal, political, and stylistic backgrounds, each novelist utilizes distinct narrative techniques and strategies to configure their protagonists in such a way that permits the reader to get an insight into their psyches. The present study locates the literary tendency to fuse the character of the protagonist/hero and the perpetrator/anti-hero into one narrative entity and examines the literary representation of the factors that trigger the guilt or need for punishment in this entity. To this end, I focus on the narrative structure, temporal framework, geographical setting as well as the protagonists’ relations with other characters within the texts. The idea of self-punishment, its representations and manifestations, is explored through the lens of psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan and Otto Rank. My psychoanalytical readings of the texts are furthermore complemented by the theoretical frameworks offered by Mikhail Bakhtinʼs theory of polyphony, Linda Hutcheonʼs account of historiographic metafiction and relevant philosophical perspectives such as Søren Kierkegaardʼs and Jean-Paul Sartreʼs existentialisms.

This thesis is concerned with situating the works of Anna Kavan (1901-1968), Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984) and Ann Quin (1936-1973) within a discussion of British mid-twentieth century fiction. The relative neglect of these authors in academic criticism may be due to the fact that much British experimental writing has previously been ignored in surveys of this period. This thesis argues that a study of their work warrants a more nuanced understanding of the mid-twentieth century literary landscape than conventional accounts have allowed for. In that sense, it aims to contribute to research undertaken in more recent years which is concerned with revising dominant accounts of this period. The broader framework for the thesis is provided in Chapter 1 which examines past and present accounts and categorizations of mid-twentieth century British fiction. The remaining three chapters then focus on the 1940s work of Kavan, the fiction written during the 1950s by Trocchi and Quin’s novels of the 1960s. As well as contributing to research concerned with overviews of this period, this thesis furthers individual studies of each of the novelists presented here. By drawing on archival material and reading their works in conversation with their time and place, it attempts to understand the ways in which the experimental fiction of these three authors responded to the social, cultural and historical forces at work in Britain between the forties and the sixties. Whilst all three authors started out from a strategy of subjectivity, rooting their experimentation in a turn inwards, their works, as this thesis suggests, can be construed of as political in their concern with drawing attention to the osmotic effects of exteriority on interiority.

By tracking the intersection of contemporary fiction and the information technologies of the digital age, this thesis argues that the narratives being produced over the past ten years have evolved into a distinct genre of literature, one where the aesthetics of fragmentation and postmodern uncertainty must confront the new realities of a digitally saturated culture and society. In order to demonstrate this alteration in contemporary fiction, this thesis considers novels written within the past ten years that reflect on this new form of textuality, namely Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) and David Eggers’ The Circle (2013). These texts demonstrate a paradigm shift in contemporary literature, a new kind of fiction in which American society, culture, economics, and politics, are all directly affected by various forms of digital mediatisation. These authors reflect an altered cultural zeitgeist within their fiction—writings which can be differentiated from the postmodern literary aesthetic—prompted by neoteric digital technologies coupled with the ubiquitous nature of the Internet. Although this topic is broad and covers multiple fields of scholarly interests, my thesis nonetheless concerns itself with a very specific line of questioning: will our authors have the imaginative wherewithal and social sensitivity to keep pace with changes brought forth by the explosion of information technologies? If so, what type of fiction is likely to emerge from this new digital environment? By taking a focused approach and using contemporary literature as representative of these massive social, economic, and political transformations, my research recalls Kurt Vonnegut’s “Canary in the Coal Mine” dictum: the writer has always been the first to notice the dramatic effects of technology on the individual and the culture at large.

In the twenty-first century, the remix, the mashup, and the reboot have come to dominate Western popular culture. Consumed by popular audiences on an unprecedented scale, but often derided by critics and academics, these texts are the ‘monsters’ of our age—hybrid creations that lurk at the limits of responsible consumption and acceptable appropriation. Like monsters, they offer audiences the thrill of transgression in a safe and familiar format, mainstreaming the self-reflexive irony and cultural iconoclasm of postmodern art. Like other popular texts before them, remixes, mashups, and reboots are often read by critics as a sign of the artistic and moral degeneration of contemporary culture. This is especially true within the institutions such remixes seem to attack most directly: the heritage industry, high art, adaptation studies, and copyright law. With this context in mind, in this thesis I explore the boundaries and connections between remix culture and its ‘others’ (adaptation, parody, the Gothic, Romanticism, postmodernism), asking how strong or tenuous they are in practice. I do so by examining remix culture’s most ‘monstrous’ texts: Frankenfictions, or commercial narratives that insert fantastical monsters (zombies, vampires, werewolves, etc.) into classic literature and popular historical contexts. Frankenfiction is monstrous not only because of the fantastical monsters it contains, but because of its place at the margins of both remix and more established modes of appropriation. Too engaged with tradition for some, and not traditional enough for others, Frankenfiction is a bestselling genre that nevertheless remains peripheral to academic discussion. This thesis aims to address that gap in scholarship, analysing Frankenfiction’s engagement with monstrosity (chapter one), parody (chapter two), popular historiography (chapter three), and models of authorial originality (chapter four). Throughout this analysis, Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein remains a touchstone, serving as an ideal metaphor for the nature of contemporary remix culture.

This thesis considers the works of six major literary figures in the context of their engagement with the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. These writers are, in order of analysis, Edwin Morgan, J.K. Rowling, Liz Lochhead, Alasdair Gray, Kathleen Jamie, and John Burnside. Each has produced a significant literary oeuvre which is examined here in relation to each other's work and to the Referendum debate. The multifaceted relationship between literature and politics is investigated through the lens of the Referendum, utilising these six figures as interrelated case studies. Chapter One explores Edwin Morgan and J.K. Rowling in relation to each other and the concept of nationalism as manifested in the Referendum period. Chapter Two focuses on postcolonialism and the work of Alasdair Gray and Liz Lochhead in that same context. The third and final chapter is concerned with Kathleen Jamie's and John Burnside's preoccupation with ecopoetics, and how that concern overlapped with Referendum discourse. This thesis provides new readings of these six writers in the context of the Referendum. It sets out to establish that, while their published literary works are often connected to the spectrum of stances these writers took regarding the Referendum, these works need to be considered with respect to the nuanced attention all six had previously given to key themes of the Referendum debate in the decades leading up to that political moment.

This thesis is composed of two parts, encompassed in a third: a poetry collection; a critical dissertation; and an artist’s book. The thesis as a whole is entitled Florilegium. This title, from the Latin flos, or ‘flower’, and legere, ‘to gather’, refers to the medieval system of collecting extracts from various authors to form a larger body of work. It is also applicable to flower-treatises, dedicated to their ornamental nature rather than medicinal or scientific. The critical dissertation comes in the form of a glossary. It intends to show that the flower plays an essential role in linking Modernist poetics with that of its Romantic predecessors and beyond. In isolated and ‘illuminated’ examples from Aristotle to Zukofsky, it examines the lineage of botanical poetry, in the light of its unique linguistic makeup: a vernacularized scientific lexicon established in the Latin of Carl Linnaeus. While the critical component of the thesis is an interrogation of botanical language, the poetry collection is its living representation. To enhance the living nature of the text, I have designed and printed an artist’s book, which also acts as an herbarium for floral specimens collected and pressed over the duration of my degree. The design of the book is in keeping with traditional florilegia, incorporating historic binding techniques, typography, paper, and size.

This thesis comprises three main components: firstly, close readings and critical analyses of four major poetical works by W.H. Auden—“The Watershed”, The Sea and the Mirror, “New Year Letter”, and “In Time of War”; secondly, ten semi-informal letters addressed to W.H. Auden; and thirdly, a serial poem consisting of short and long poems based on the speeches of the public figure, Barack Obama. The thesis proposes a creative writing discipline founded on the productive and intensive exchange between reading and writing poetry, and reflection through letter writing. The chapters of critical analysis argue the following: firstly, that through his idiosyncratic handling of syntax and voice in poems like “The Watershed”, Auden introduced a new element of the uncanny into English poetry; secondly, that in The Sea and the Mirror, Auden re-evaluated his poetics and altered his poetic voice in response to a new reading public; thirdly, that in the “New Year Letter,” Auden uses tone to expand the range of his poetic voice; and fourthly, that in the sonnet sequence “In Time of War”, Auden uses parable to combine lyric and narrative elements in order to universalise the Sino-Japanese War. Some of the issues raised in the chapters of critical analysis, such as poetic truth, poetic voice, the lyric subject, and parabolic writing, are elaborated on in the letters to W.H. Auden. Finally, the Serial Poem presents 74 short and long poems produced using appropriative writing procedures. The idea that runs through all parts of this thesis is that speech, voice, and parable are crucial elements in the poetic practice of W.H. Auden, and that close attention to these three elements through all stages of this project— critical reading and writing, letter writing, and creative writing—has contributed to the development of a rich and productive poetic writing practice.

The aim of this thesis is to amalgamate philosophy and history of science with literature to achieve an overview of changing ideas of the animal/human divide during the nineteenth century. Drawing on the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Friedrich Nietzsche, Julia Kristeva and Giorgio Agamben. I consider this divide and its contents, often regarded as an abyss. The study is written like a time line, starting at the beginning of the nineteenth century and finishing at the end. I split the nineteenth century into four time periods centred around the emergence of Darwinian theory, considered by this study to be the single most prolific scientific event to have occurred during the nineteenth century. These time frames are the pre-Darwinian, the early Darwinian, the late Darwinian and the post-Darwinian. The study is split into four chapters which coincide with these time frames, covering four different novels which exemplify contextually relevant ideas of the abyss. These are Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky and The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells. During the course of this study I consider various ideas applied by the authors about the abyssal limits and what they consist of. These include considerations on reason, society, morality and spirituality, all ideas used in various different manners to attempt to explain the abyss. From these various deliberations I formulate a conclusion which takes into account the various nuances which would have effected each of the writer’s formulations of the abyss.

This thesis examines the depiction of the country estate in English women’s poetry, 1650-1750. The poems discussed belong to the country house genre, work with or adapt its conventions and tropes, or belong to what may be categorised as sub-genres of the country house poem. The country house estate was the power base of the early modern world, authorizing social status, validating political power and providing an economic dominance for the ruling elite. This thesis argues that the depiction of the country estate was especially pertinent for a range of female poets. Despite the suggestive scholarship on landscape and place and the emerging field of early modern women’s literary studies and an extensive body of critical work on the country house poem, there have been to date no substantial accounts of the role of the country estate in women’s verse of this period. In response, this thesis has three main aims. Firstly, to map out the contours of women’s country house poetry – taking full account of the chronological scope, thematic and formal diversity of the texts, and the social and geographic range of the poets using the genre. Secondly, to interrogate the formal and thematic characteristics of women’s country house poetry, looking at the appropriation and adaptation of the genre. Thirdly, to situate the selected poetry both within and against the extensive and formally published male-authored canon and the more general literary and historical contexts of the early modern period. Across these related strands of discussion, the study has two important implications for our understanding of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century poetry: it adds to our knowledge of women’s poetic practices of the period and extends and complicates our understanding of the country house genre. Each chapter highlights a particular engagement with the genre responding to a complex of historical contexts, literary trends and personal circumstance. Chapter one will explore the contexts which prompt the emergence of the country house poem and the shape and detail of the genre, 1600–1650. It also examines where the specific gendered contexts of women’s writing practices are relevant to the selection of texts. Chapter two focuses on the thematic and formal interplay in Katherine Austen’s manuscript miscellany ‘Book M’ and role the country house genre plays in exploring and negotiating women’s relationship to property. Chapter three shares many of the same historical and literary contexts but from a different religio-political standpoint and focuses on Lucy Hutchinson’s manuscript collection ‘Elegies’. Chapter four examines the appropriation and re-positioning of the country house genre in the poetry of Anne Finch and Jane Barker, arguing that as the post- Restoration period began, the motivation to explore the country house as a symbol of legitimate political power, a location and symbol of retirement and retreat and the site of financial and cultural investment did not wane, but was reworked by Finch and Barker to explore their political sympathies for the Stuart monarchy. Chapter five explores the use of the country house genre by poets associated with Whig political sympathies: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Anne Ingram. Largely unaffected by socio-economic or political marginalisation, both Montagu and Ingram enter into a public, and politically inflected, debate on the importance of taste. Chapter six explores two writers, Mary Leapor and Mary Chandler, who belong to an emerging body of writers of mercantile or labouring class. The discussion will focus on Leapor’s ‘Crumble-Hall’ and Chandler’s A Description of Bath and the contexts of consumerism and tourism to which both poems respond.

The primary aim of this thesis is to bring Allan Ramsay (1684-1748) and James Thomson (1700-1748) into close critical contact for the first time and, in so doing, deconstruct the paradigm of opposition which has previously attached to these two contemporaries. The thesis posits that the separation of Ramsay and Thomson has been effected, retrospectively, by the twentieth-century Scottish critical tradition. The narrow, cultural essentialism exhibited by this body of scholarship has been effectively challenged in recent decades by the work of Gerard Carruthers, and revisionary ‘Four Nations’ approaches to late eighteenth-century British literature have done much to reinstate the importance of what were previously viewed as marginal or peripheral literary locations. Ramsay and Thomson, however, have never been fully united in literary and cultural terms. This thesis demonstrates that Ramsay and Thomson shared, not only a chronological context, but also a creative context informed by a reciprocal engagement with the work of the other and posits that the relationship between these two lowland Scottish writers can be conceived of in terms of a sustained mutual gaze. James Thomson remains entrenched within an English literary canon, despite the efforts of Mary Jane Scott to reclaim him for his native country. Conversely, Allan Ramsay remains firmly rooted in his native Scottish soil as the father of the vernacular revival and the epitome of literary and cultural resistance to a supposed English cultural hegemony in the wake of the 1707 Act of Union between Scotland and England. It is true that Ramsay’s and Thomson’s creative trajectories exemplify the literary choices and cultural paths available to a Scottish writer in the years immediately following the Union of Parliaments, but to set them in creative opposition as a result of these choices is a critical commonplace which this thesis challenges. Thomson spent the greater part of his literary career in and around London, whilst Ramsay remained in Edinburgh until his death; clearly the corpora of these two writers were conditioned by the locations of their production. Hence, the thematic structure of this thesis relies on the notion of location, both physical and literary. The first two chapters of this thesis, ‘Edinburgh’ and ‘London’, illustrate the urban contexts of both writers; in so doing they suggest that a mutual gaze was sustained, not only between Ramsay and Thomson, but that a similarly reciprocal relationship and network of influence existed between the literary and cultural centres of Edinburgh and London. The third chapter of this thesis, ‘Nation’, traces the fluid and nuanced literary responses to the concept of nation in a period when national and literary boundaries were in a state of flux. The fourth and final chapter of this thesis, ‘Land’, explores the shifting aesthetic landscape of the period and, with an emphasis on mode and genre, demonstrates Ramsay’s and Thomson’s original contribution to an emerging British poetic, elucidated by an extended analysis of their poetry of place.

This project explores the nature and extent of the relationship between Blake and Whitman. I examine their works to find affinities in tone, style and themes and seek to understand the origin of these affinities. The resultant discoveries, however, lead to the conclusion that, because of Whitman’s lack of exposure to Blake’s work, these affinities must be accounted for through a coterie of indirect influences on Whitman. Over the course of the introductory chapter, I establish the critical proclivity of connecting William Blake and Walt Whitman, providing examples of such critical interpretation; in addition, I provide an introduction to the key figures, terms, and works with which this thesis engages. The work of the second chapter of this project is to uncover in Whitman’s work, before he could have read Blake, those elements that are read as points of contact between them. Through close readings, I show that those aspects of Whitman’s work which are read as points of contact between Blake and Whitman predate Whitman’s exposure to Blake’s work, and so necessitate an engagement with influences shared by Blake and Whitman. The third chapter articulates the notion that a variety of influences affected Whitman’s composition of Leaves of Grass, and these various influences serve as an explanation for those apparent similarities between Blake and Whitman discussed in chapter two. The final element this chapter engages with is that of nineteenth-century periodical culture; this aspect of the influences articulated in this chapter provides a secondary explanation for the similarities discussed in the second chapter. The fourth and fifth chapters focus on the 1860 and 1867 iterations of Leaves of Grass and the 1867 and 1871–72 versions of Leaves of Grass, respectively, both with special emphasis on the poem that would become “Song of Myself.” The changes seen throughout these iterations will be used to understand Whitman’s evolving prosody as well as his changing public persona. These chapters also engage with the work of Swinburne, in chapter five, and of Gilchrist, in chapter four, as integral elements of this mediated influence of Blake on Whitman. In the final chapter of this work, I summarize my findings, suggest possible avenues for further inquiry, and discuss the implications of this research. There is a trend in Anglo-American literary criticism to see the relationship between America and England as adversarial rather than generative. The concluding chapter of this work will explore the idea of the Anglo-American literary tradition as a continuum—a complex of acceptance, extension, transformation, and refusal—and place the relationship of Whitman to Blake accurately on this continuum.

Tha an tràchdas seo a’ coimhead air buidheann de dhàin fhada a nochd aig toiseach an fhicheadaimh linn. Cha deach cus ùidh a shealltainn sna dàin seo bho sgrùdairean Gàidhealachadh sa chiad dol a-mach. Bho chrìoch an fhicheadamh linn, tha ùidh air nochdadh sna dàin seo a-rithist, gu h-àraidh An Cuilithionn, Aeòlus agus Balg agus Mochtàr is Dùghall. Ach ’s e an tràchdas seo a’ chiad sgrùdadh domhain air a’ bhuidheann seo de dhàin nan aonar. Gus an rannsachadh seo a dhèanamh thèid corpas a lorg am measg leabhraichean agus irisean bhon àm, agus na co-chruinneachaidhean a chaidh fhoillseachadh nas anmoiche. Thèid taghadh a dhèanamh a tha a’ riochdachadh prìomh fheartan nan dàn seo. Thèid rannsachadh a dhèanamh air cuid de dh’eisimpleirean bhon 18mh agus 19mh linn ann an Caibideil 2. Air sgàth ’s an uidhir de shurbhaidhean nas fharsainge a tha ri fhaotainn de litreachas na Gàidhlig, seallaidh an sgrùdadh sin air feartan sònraichte. Chìthear mar a chleachd bàrdachd Mhic Mhaighstir Alasdair cruth a’ chiùil mhòir gus gnè-sònraichte ùr de dhàin fhada a chur air bog ann an 1751. Ghabhar sùil mar an ceudna air Uilleam MacDhùn-Lèibhe air tàilibh a bhuaidh air Somhairle MacGill-Eain, agus gu robh amasan nàiseantach agus socio-cànanachais an Ìlich ri fhaicinn anns a’ mhòr-chuid de bhàird a’ chorpais cuideachd. Seallaidh Caibideil 3 air na bàird fhèin, gu h-àraidh na beachdan aca agus na ceanglaichean eatorra. Bha iad seo ri fhaicinn ann an saoghal litreachais agus poilitigs. ’S e prìomh amas na h-anailisean (Caibideilean 4-10) tuigse nas fheàrr fhaighinn an dà chuid air na dàin fhèin agus air ceistean teòiriceil a tha a’ buntainn ris a’ chorpas. ’S e an dàrna amas barrachd dhòighean-obrach teòiriceil a chleachdadh sa Ghàidhlig gus bruidhinn air litreachas na cànaine. Stèidhicheadh na h-anailisean air na feartan a bha ri fhaicinn anns gach dàn, a leithid iar-phlanntachais ann am Mochtàr is Dùghall, air neo air coimeasan a bha gus tuigse nas fheàrr a thoirt seachad air a’ chorpas shlàn. Bidh na h-anailisean seo a’ dearbhadh cuid de na ceanglaichean cudromach a th’ aig litreachas na Gàidhlig ri litreachasan Eòrpach eile, air uairean airson a’ chiad uair. Tha an co-dhùnadh a’ tilleadh do sealladh nas fharsainge air a’ chorpas. Chìthear gu bheil buidheann sònraichte de dhàin ri fhaicinn bhon chiad leth den fhicheadamh linn, dàin nach deach a sgrùdadh còmhla riamh. Tha na dàin seo ceangailte ann am meud, cuspairean, iomraidhean agus amasan nam bàrd. Leasachaidh tuigse nas fheàrr air na dàin seo an t-eòlas a th’ againn air bàrdachd na Gàidhlig, gu h-àraidh sna bliadhnaichean nuair a bha na nua-bhàird a’ nochdadh an toiseach.

This thesis is the first ever survey of Shetland’s literature. The large body of material the thesis covers is not well known, and, apart from Walter Scott’s 1822 novel The Pirate, and Hugh MacDiarmid’s sojourn in the archipelago, Shetland is not a presence in any account of Scottish writing. ‘The Literature of Shetland’ has been written to address this absence. Who are Shetland’s writers? And what have they written? These are the fundamental questions this thesis answers. By paying close attention to Shetland’s writers, ‘The Literature of Shetland’ extends the geographical territory of the Scottish canon. ‘The Literature of Shetland’ covers a chronological period from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Virtually no creative poetry or prose, either written or oral, survives in Shetland from before this time so, after a brief discussion of the fragmentary pre-nineteenth century sources, the thesis discusses the archipelago’s literature in eight chronologically arranged chapters. Chapter One concentrates on a group of three obscure early nineteenth-century Shetland authors – Margaret Chalmers, Dorothea Primrose Campbell, and Thomas Irvine – and also explores Scott’s involvement with the northern isles. Chapters Two and Three discuss an important period at the end of the nineteenth century, in which books and newspapers were published in Shetland for the first time, and in which a number of pioneering and influential local writers emerged. Jessie M.E. Saxby became the first professional writer from Shetland and, in the work of George Stewart, James Stout Angus, Basil Anderson, and especially J.J. Haldane Burgess, the Shetland dialect developed as a serious literary idiom. These writers laid down foundations for much of what came next. Chapter Four discusses the end of this period of growth, with James Inkster posed as the last significant figure of his generation, and the war poet John Peterson as the first local writer to depart from the literary principles which developed in the Victorian era. Chapter Five looks at the work Hugh MacDiarmid did in Shetland from 1933-1942. MacDiarmid is not really part of the narrative of the thesis, but the work he produced in the isles is vast. Because he does not need to be introduced in the way the other writers do, this chapter takes a different approach to the rest of the thesis and looks at MacDiarmid’s Shetland-era work alongside that of Charles Doughty. Doughty was a crucial presence for MacDiarmid during his time in the isles, and considering their work together opens up a better understanding of the work MacDiarmid did in Shetland. Chapters Six and Seven discuss the second major period of growth in Shetland’s literature, focussing on the writers associated with the New Shetlander magazine, an important local journal which emerged in 1947. The final chapter then looks at contemporary Shetland authors and asks how they negotiate the literary tradition the thesis has worked through. This chapter also discusses the Shetland-related work of several non-native authors, Jen Hadfield being the most well known. In moving through these authors, as well as providing necessary introductory material, several general questions are asked. Firstly, because almost all the writing studied emerges from the isles, the question of how each writer engages with those isles is consistently relevant. How do local writers find ways of writing about their native archipelago? Do writers who are not from Shetland write about the islands in different ways than local people? The thesis shows how Scott and MacDiarmid, the two most famous non-native authors dicussed here, draw on earlier literary sources – the sagas and the work of Doughty – to construct their respective creative visions of the isles. And, in discussing the work of local authors, it will be shown that, in the early period covered in Chapter One, landscape is the most prominent idea whereas, from the Victorian era to the present day, the croft provides the central imaginative space for Shetland’s writers. A second question that runs through the thesis is one of language. Almost every local author has written extensively in Shetland dialect, and this study explores how they have developed that language as a literary idiom. The thesis shows how Shetland dialect writing gets underway in the 1870s, and how writers have continued to expand and diversify that literary tradition. The two most innovative figures to emerge are J.J. Haldane Burgess and William J. Tait and, after demonstrating how the corpus of writing in Shetland dialect has grown, the thesis concludes by examining the ways in which contemporary writers engage with the vernacular legacies their predecessors have left. Extensive use of the local language gives Shetland’s writing a regional distinctiveness, and this thesis shows how some writers have been enabled and inspired by that idiom, how some have taken dialect writing in exciting new directions, but also how some have felt limited by it and how, by not using the language, some writers have been unfairly ignored by local editors and critics. The thesis also shows that, in its two main eras of development – at the end of the nineteenth century and in the middle of the twentieth – Shetland’s writers took their cues from the general movements in Scottish writing. In the Victorian period, developments in local letters paralleled the interest in regionality and upsurge in vernacular writing that are marked characteristics of Scottish writing at the time. And, in discussing the emergence of the New Shetlander and the writers associated with it, the thesis demonstrates how the second period of flourishing in Shetland’s literature is part of the wider cultural movement of the Scottish Renaissance. The picture of Shetland’s literature the thesis offers is a self-consciously heterogeneous one. Despite the marked use of the vernacular, the thesis resists moving towards an encompassing definition of the large body of work covered, preferring to celebrate the diversity of the writing that Shetland has inspired during the last two centuries. Questions of engagement with the local environment and the use of the local language are constantly asked, but the primary scholarly contribution offered by ‘The Literature of Shetland’ is a realignment of Scotland’s northern literary border.

Britain imported a vast number of cashmere shawls from the Indian subcontinent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These were largely male garments in India at the time, which became popular dress accessories for British women. The demand for these shawls was opportune for textile manufacturers at home – particularly in Edinburgh, Norwich, and Paisley, who launched a thriving industry of shawls, ‘made in imitation of the Indian’. There has been considerable scholarship on cashmere shawls and their European copies in textile history. However, it has enjoyed no such prominence in literary studies. This PhD thesis examines Cashmere and ‘Paisley’ shawls in works of literature. Indian shawls are mentioned in a number of literary texts, including plays, poems, novels, opera, and satire. A wide variety of writers such as Richard Sheridan, Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and Wilkie Collins (to name a few) depict these textiles in their works. For these writers, I argue, shawls provide a means to explore Britain’s changing social and imperial identity through the prism of material culture. The sheer incidence of ‘shawls’ in printed discourse furthermore suggests that they went beyond the realm of everyday fashion to constitute one of the important narratives of nineteenth-century Britain. In emphasising the significance of material culture and recovering new historical contexts, this investigation raises important questions relating to the links between industry and trade, and literary production. I rely on literary criticism, scholarship on India, and textile history to examine the phenomenon of cashmere shawls. In the wider context of postcolonialism, the research suggests that instead of the Saidian model which viewed the East as an abject ‘Other,’ colonies actually exerted a reverse and important influence on the imperial centre. A new emphasis on Indian things in literature, this work hopes, will contribute a fresh strand of thought to studies of imperialism.

This history of Dostoevsky’s reception in France draws from critical responses, translation analysis, and the comparative analysis of adaptations as well as intertextual dialogues between fictional, critical and philosophical texts. It begins from the earliest translations and critical accounts of the 1880s and 1890s, such as Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé’s seminal moralist reading. It then traces modernist responses and adaptations from the turn of the century to the twenties. Existential readings and re-translations dating from the arrival of émigré critics and religious philosophers in the wake of the Russian Revolution are examined, assessing the contribution of these émigré readings to emerging existential readings and movements in France. Finally, French existentialist fiction is analysed in terms of its intertextual dialogue with Dostoevsky’s work and with speculative and critical writings of French existentialist thinkers on and around the philosophical reflections expressed in Dostoevsky’s fiction. By following specifically the existential and existentialist branches of Dostoevsky’s French reception, an overlooked aspect of the history of French, Russian and European existentialisms comes to the fore, reframed within a pivotal period in the history of European intercultural exchange, and of transmodal literary and philosophical discourse.

Bagpipes and pipers, as cultural identifiers, are embedded within their national culture, charged with symbolisms. British authors have often viewed bagpipes as cultural icons, endowing them with connotations from devilish to virtuous, from rural to military. By analysing literary and artistic references one can perceive how the attitude towards the bagpipe changes with the evolution of Britain’s internal dynamics. Jacobitism contributed in casting a particular light on the bagpipe: it was the ‘voice of the rebellion’. In Scotland this constituted a reason for national pride, while in England the ‘common denominator’ of the Scot-enemy charged the bagpipe with the worst connotations. After Jacobitism stopped being seen as a threat, authors and artists came to view the bagpipe in a different light: the once negative icon was now imbued with ancestral values. The Scot – and the bagpipe by synecdoche – was romanticised: as James Boswell wrote, “The very Highland names, or the sound of a bagpipe, will stir my blood, and fill me with [...] a crowd of sensations with which sober rationality has nothing to do” (1785). The words of many Romantic authors contributed in characterising the instrument, endowing it with implications the influence of which is still relevant today.

The thesis regards the extraordinary power of Sappho in the 1860s as resulting in a form of “Sapphic Possession” which laid hold on Swinburne, shaped his verse, produced a provocative new poetics, and which accounted for a critical reception of his work that was both hostile and enthralled. Using biographical material and Freudian psychology, I show how Swinburne became attracted to Sappho and came to rely on her as a substitute mistress and particular kind of muse, and I demonstrate the pre-eminence of the Sapphic presence in Poems and Ballads: 1, as a dominant female muse who exacts peculiar sacrifices from the poet of subjection, necrophilia, and even a form of “death” in the loss of his own personality; as a result, he is finally reduced to acting as the muse’s mouthpiece, a state akin to that of Pythia or Sibyl. Verse written under such duress instigates a new poetics where the demands and constructs of the muse produce a sublime composed of aberrance, fracture and the darkness of myth. To explicate this argument I read Poems and Ballads: 1 through carnival, a form of Bacchanal or Sapphic Komos which has the effect of blurring the boundaries between life and lyric, and which demands a joyous and reciprocal response from its readers, in which they must acknowledge their own attraction to the Sapphic sublime.

This thesis examines the performance history of Shakespeare focusing on those productions performed as a period analogue of the nineteen-thirties. It engages with the material in two ways. It first attempts to locate influences that have led to the development of this style of performance, finding correlations with both theatrical and televisual drama. It then examines the productions as performed, focusing on the construction of scenography and actor performances. Throughout the analysis, this thesis engages with shifts in the representation of the historical past on both stage and screen.

This thesis argues that in the plural cultural context of the twenty-first century the value of Shakespeare resides in his identity as a free and flexible resource. This adaptable Shakespeare is valuable to theatres because they are dialectical spaces. Free-resource Shakespeare is able to contain a range of different cultural values and theatres provide a space for producers and consumers of culture to negotiate between them. It has been established that tensions of cultural value, for example innovation/tradition or commercial/non-commercial govern the production, dissemination and critique of culture. Building on this idea, this work shows that when tensions are dealt with as negotiations rather than confrontations, new cultural value is generated. It identifies Shakespeare as a site for the debate of value tensions and contends that he can be simultaneously commercial and non-commercial, traditional and innovative. Cultural value is thus created because Shakespeare is reinvigorated and redefined through a process which negotiates between tensions. In publicly-funded theatre this process manifests itself in an ambiguous relationship to the market, myriad adaptations and a move towards event-theatre. The cultural value of Shakespeare in publicly-funded theatre mirrors the continual redefinition of the Shakespearean object and, rather than being a concrete ‘thing’, is better defined as a constant process.

Tracing Masculinities in Twentieth-Century Scottish Men's Fiction takes account of the representation of masculinities in a selected group of novels by twentieth-century Scottish male authors. Rather than attempt a chronological survey of fictions during this period, the argument proceeds by analysing groups of texts which are axiomatic in specific ways: the Glasgow realist novels of the 1930s and post-1970s, from the works of James Barke and George Blake to those of William McIlvanney and James Kelman, which offer particular perspectives on relationships between men of different class identifications; fictions reliant upon existentialism, which intersect with the masculinist values of the Glasgow tradition in the figure of Kelman, but are also produced by Alexander Trocchi and Irvine Welsh; and novels which employ the technique of 'cross-writing', or literary transvestism, from the Renaissance fictions of Lewis Grassic Gibbon to the postmodern works of Alan Warner and Christopher Whyte. In a critical field which has always been concerned with a tradition of largely male-produced texts privileging the actions of male characters, but has neglected fully to consider the production and reception of those texts in terms of their specific articulations of gender positions, this thesis employs theories of masculinities developed in the study of American and English literatures since the 1980s in order to provide new perspectives on Scottish novels. It also draws upon the materialist theory of Louis Althusser for a model of ideological identification, as well as utilising several psychoanalytic and deconstructive approaches to gender formation in Western culture, epitomised by the work of Judith Butler and Kaja Silverman. The various perspectives on masculine gender and sexual identities thus assembled are primarily directed towards considering the novels under discussion as 'men's texts' - texts not only by or about men, but often directed towards men as readers too.

A large part of the extant criticism of Evelyn Waugh's fiction is orientated towards either a biographical or a literary-historical interest: there are comparatively few detailed surveys of the novels themselves. This study attempts such a survey, and in particular examines the tension which inheres in the relationship of Waugh's poised, urbane narrators to the social and moral chaos they depict. I have been interested in the source and management of that poise, the testing, as it were to destruction, of a series of narrative positions. There is a very modern equation to be observed in Waugh's fiction, between the potentially anarchic mode of fiction and what Waugh felt to be the actual anarchy of contemporary civilisation. His novels can with interest be read in terms of a comic exploitation of this equation, and subsequently, as the writer aged, of his attempts to evade its logic, to discover a 'voice of authority'. Apparently secure narrative stances are repeatedly undermined, and a succession of 'realities' compromised - Tony Last's, William Boot's, John Plant's, Guy Crouchback's. It is this awareness and exploitation of the reflexive quality of fiction, and its use in disclosing the nature of his age which lends Waugh's writing its real and enduring interest. I seek to draw out this awareness through detailed examination of the different novels' precise narrative stance, the source of their 'voice', and have been largely content to let stand other commentators' descriptions of Waugh's broader thesis. My method involves close attention to Waugh's language, from the conviction that nuances of tone and the development of marginal allusions and metaphors are the keys to many of his characteristic effects.

The primary impulse for this dissertation was the striking disparity between the initial critical reaction to Doderer's works in the 1950s and early 1960s, and the long-term evaluation of his literary stature • .In the Introduction, an outline of the theoretical foundations of the study is followed by a brief survey of the academic criticism devoted to Doderer. This survey attempts to establish whether the 'new beginning' in Doderer criticism inspired in the mid-1970s by Anton Reininger and Hans Joachim Schroder has succeeded in clearing the way for a more balanced approach to Doderer's work. The survey reveals, however, that recent Doderer criticism has seen an alarming increase of interest in Doderer the man, as opposed to Doderer the writer. Chapter One is devoted to the reception accorded to Doderer's Ein Mord den jeder begeht. The critical reaction to Doderer's novel can be directly linked to suggestions made by his publishers in their 'Verlags- . prospekt' as to how the novel ought to be read, namely as anything but a detective novel. A detailed examination of Doderer's use of motifs familiar from detective fiction indicates that the author so consistently 'breaks the rules' of classical detective story writing that Ein Mord den jeder begeht might justifiably be regarded as a forerunner of the parodies of the detective novel so common in modern literature. An examination of Doderer's novel in the context of its first publication in 1938 reveals how uncannily closely the detective element in Ein Mord den jeder begeht resembles the official Nazi line on detective fiction, and this throws up the vexed question of whether Doderer's 'anti-detective novel' was an attempt to placate the Nazi censor. However, a comparison with Friedrich DUrrenmatt's anti-detective stories shows that the ideology of the irrational which informs Doderer's novel is not necessarily fascistic in nature, as some of Doderer's critics imply. A brief 'Excursus' on Claus Hubalek's television adaptation of Ein Mord den jeder begeht is intended to illustrate the difficulties involved in transferring Doderer's work to a visual medium. The critics' reactions to Hubalek's play provide a useful up-to-date picture ofoDoderer's current literary standing. In Chapter Two, the focus is turneq on the critical response provoked by Doderer's most controversial work, Die Merowinger. The outrageous plot and 'scurrilous' style of this novel present the reviewer with an unenviable dilemma, for he is confronted with a new work by a major titerary figure which does not conform with the pattern of the author's past successes. The survey of the reception of Die Merowinger is intended to illuminate how the reviewers were so prejudiced by their familiarity with what many regard as a 'Viennese trilogy', Die strudlhofstiege, Die erleuchteten Fenster and Die D~onen, that they were unable to arrive at a reasonably open-minded evaluation of Die Merowinger. The key problem in Doderer reception is the identification of the author with the image of an amiable Viennese raconteur. An examination of the reception of Doderer's works in America reveals that the author's very conscious 'Vienneseness' presents a major obstacle for many non-Austrian readers, and accounts to a large extent for the accusations of parochialism not infrequently levelled at Doderer. Yet, paradOXically, it is undoubtedly to his realistic depictions of Vienna, allied to an apparently apolitical ideology, that Doderer's success in the 19506 must be attributed. In view of the grossly oversimplified identification of Doderer with the image of the chronicler of Vienna, and the increasing politicization of literature in the 1960s, it is perhaps understandable that Doderer has gradually become little more than a peripheral figure in German literature today. The dissertation is supplemented by a Doderer-bibliography of some 1,955 titles. Although it makes no claims to be comprehensive, ·the bibliography is nevertheless a first attempt to collate the diverse material on Doderer which can be found in the archives in Munich and Vienna.

This dissertation first sets out to place Du Bartas' Les Semaines in its religious and epic setting, and argues that the poem's mission is to exist as poetry and as religious instruction at the same time. From this and its philosophical backdrop emerges a poetry that emphasises equation, or fusion, over comparison. Antique-type similes are therefore summarily examined and connected with the "primary" sensibilities of Homer. The proper fusive style and language of Sylvester's translation are then considered. Its style is found to be conscious to a degree, relying especially on repetitional devices of catechistic value, such as anaphora and symploce; on devices of oxymoronic and paradoxical metamorphosis, such as agnominatio; and on devices of epigrammatic summary, such as chiasmus. The language of Sylvester's Du Bartas is then examined closely in two domains, those of its scientific and natural description. The two are not wholly separable. It is found that Sylvester's language, as Du Bartas, must be interpreted at more than its literal level; that three levels of interpretation along the lines of three levels of allegory are implicit. This is so in respect the italicised language so prominent in Divine Weeks, discussed in Chapter 5, and in respect of the adjectival and verbal language discussed in Chapter 7. One way of designating the organising principle lying behind these language hieroglyphs is as emblem book turned purely into words. This is insensitive to the poetic third level of Operation, which seeks to do more than teach, which seeks to inspire. This dissertation relates Sylvester's language to two traditions of English poetry, as different one from the other as noun is from adjective: the metaphysical school and the Augustan period. It argues that metaphysical poetry is enthralled with Du Bartas' conceits in Sylvester's translation, is influenced by them, and takes them up. These conceits are nonetheless often one-word, substantive, and hieroglyphic. Augustan poetry on the other hand takes up a Sylvestrian diction, often unaware of its implications, because it deems this language the true language of poetry. The rather dramatic place given to Divine Weeks in the development of English poetic diction is dealt with at a statistical level in an excursus on Sylvester's word and language formulations.

It has often been stated that sea poetry, that is to say literature in which the sea and sea faring find poetic expression, first makes its entry into German literature in the year 1826. The prominent position of the sea and of ships in nineteenth century poetry requires no proof. There is not yet in existence, however, a comprehensive study of the part played by the sea in the corpus of German literature as a whole. The present dissertation represents an attempt to marshal and characterise the materials for such a work.