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This thesis examines the interface of literature and birdlife as a means to interrogate the relationship between literary inheritance and ecological legacy. Perhaps more than any other animal, birds have a strong literary lineage. Their use in literature often draws on their associations with ritual and ways of relating to the past; yet birds also are figures of augury and future-telling. Metonymically linked to what we conceptualize as "nature" and "environment"-and since the middle of the twentieth century, increasingly understood to be at risk from anthropogenically-driven decline or extinction-birds, too, have become potent symbols for ecological mourning. This thesis shows that, as literary emblems and real animals, birds are entangled in temporally-bound questions of history, representation, authenticity, authority, inheritance, futurity, endangerment, absence, mourning, timings, and ways of telling time-subjects that are inextricable from those at the heart of ecological crisis. Bringing together prose writing and poetry from either end of the modern ecological movement, coincident both with the onset of the Anthropocene and its emergence as a key vector of contemporary ecological awareness, I examine and trace the literal, literary, and figurative "flight ways" of birds from literature of two periods roughly half a century apart. In order to demonstrate most effectively the development of approaches across these two periods, this thesis is structured chronologically in two parts. Part one examines texts from the 1960s, the beginning of the modern eco-movement. Chapter one explores the literary inheritances in Rachel Carson's avian case studies of Silent Spring (1962), reading the text as anticonsolatory and anticipatory ecological elegy. Chapter two demonstrates the ways in which Basil Bunting's poems 'A thrush in the syringa sings' (1965) and Briggflatts (1966) interrogate the anthropocentric inheritances of a lyric tradition of voicing songbirds. Chapter three discusses the role of the spectral and acts of haunting in J. A. Baker's work of lyric prose, The Peregrine (1967). Part two turns its gaze to twenty-first-century writing partially influenced by the works above and considers the ways in which birds continue to figure centrally in contemporary literature of the environment. Chapters four and five demonstrate contemporary responses to the challenges of Anthropocene avian encounter: these texts not only address inherited conventions but are self-consciously attuned to their own complicity in and anxiety about literature's (ecologically) authentic, redemptive or recuperative capacities. Chapter four dissects the strange migrations at work in the encounters between humans and endangered birds in Kathleen Jamie's prose collection, Findings (2005), and chapter five examines Elisabeth Bletsoe's 'Birds of the Sherborne Missal' (2008), a poetic sequence in which, I argue, ambivalence towards lyric and avian textual inheritances functions to engage in an attenuated ecomimesis. In recent years, animal studies and ecocriticism have begun to look to birds in literature. My thesis offers a valuable contribution to these emerging debates around multi-species representation by revealing the ways in which birds function across both periods as vehicles for addressing multi-species relations. It shows that the ubiquity of birds in what we consider broadly as "nature writing" as a literary-historical category belies their role in subverting, inverting, and unsettling inherited categories of both environment and literary- generic form. Through their birds, these texts question inherited modes of relating to, reading, and writing "nature", and engage with the ethics of aesthetic response and ecological legacy.

To be embodied is to be vulnerable. At any point, one can fall sick, be injured, be disappointed, have one's heart broken, fall out of love, be left at the roadside or be tossed in a rogue wave when one was expecting to swim on through. One can fail to be heard, understood, cared for, held or accepted, and ultimately one will fail altogether, to die. How then can one think, speak and be with others and take action within this world, despite these risks? What forms of life, of enlivened being, are possible within this inescapable vulnerability? How are they enacted within the public sphere, and with others? This thesis enfolds and examines these experiences within a paratactical and interdisciplinary methodology, through fiction and storytelling, curatorial work and reflective writing, to ask, how can we be vulnerable within the public sphere? And how can one be both a political and vulnerable body? Further, how is a resilient subject cultivated, as one who can remain vulnerable in the public sphere? In addressing these questions, the thesis mobilises three areas of inquiry: curatorial projects, reflective critical writing, and creative writing. The thesis thus comprises three component parts that relate equally: (i) curatorial projects, including an exhibition project titled Convoluted Beauty: In the Company of Emily Carr; an art writing symposium titled Never the Same: what (else) can art writing do?; and a final exhibition project, Person/ne; (ii) reflective critical writing, in which aspects of the curatorial projects are mobilized in three reflective writing chapters which consider the work of three writers: Emily Carr, Chris Kraus and Lisa Robertson; (iii) a collection of short stories entitled Dead Peasant that engages imagination and detail to cultivate an understanding and empathy that might otherwise be neglected, and to employ observation in fiction as a form of power. These three distinct but related areas of practice are crucial in investigating vulnerability within public life since, as the thesis progresses, the figures of artist, curator and writer become enjoined, their convergence marking a point of entry into the public sphere: 1. The figure of the artist as curated by the curator, 2. The figure of the curator as told by the storyteller and 3. The figure of the storyteller as written by the artist/art writer. The thesis sections thus work cumulatively to address the following phases: entry into the public sphere (Arendt, 1958; Cavarero, 2000); vulnerability and precarity as pressures which inform public life in art contexts (Belcourt, 2019; Butler, 2016; Feher, 2009; Rankine, 2014; Sharpe, 2016; Tiqqun, 1999); refusal/non-productivity; shame, resistance; bullying/troublemaking (Ahmed, 2010); retreat; compassion and knowledge experienced as affect and emotion (Berlant, 2011; Ngai, 2005); and finally, collaboration, community and ethics of care (Reckitt, 2016), and how a resilient subject emerges from these forces and gestures. Throughout, the thesis employs and examines forms of memoir, poetry, art writing and fiction as storytelling practices to explore what writing and language can do (Robertson, 2012; Riley, 2000), and how these might inform art and curatorial practices, working in public and with vulnerability as a form of political agency.

During the sixteenth century clerical masculinity underwent a fundamental transformation. The reverberations of the social and cultural change to the status of the clergy was felt not only within the Church, but throughout the rest of society. This thesis provides a case study of how clerical manhood and masculinity was redefined during the period from 1520 to 1570, through the examination of printed polemical works produced to debate clerical marriage and celibacy. A close examination of the marriage versus celibacy debate during this period contributes new knowledge by providing an understanding of the subtle differences which formed during the process and the substance behind them, as well as explaining how positions on both sides became more polarised and well defined over the course of the argument. It also contributes further by seeking to bridge the historiographical divide between the study of theological debates such as clerical marriage, and the study of gender, marriage, and the family.* Clerical marriage was not simply an abstruse theological matter but a profound social and cultural change whose real and imagined practical implications exercised the pens and imaginations of many sixteenth-century authors. This study makes further contributions to scholarship in a number of areas. Specifically, these include, the influence of Europe on the English Reformation, Elizabeth I's religious conservatism, the Marian Counter-Reformation, and ideas of 'commonwealth'. From 1570, the clerical man could choose to be a husband and a father, whose masculinity resembled closely that of his neighbours. No longer perceiving the need to partake in a debate to establish their right to clerical marriage, the clergy turned their attention to articulating the value of the clerical household through conduct literature.** This thesis extends this argument by suggesting this is why the polemical debate on clerical marriage fell from prominence after 1570 in the English context, as the clergy focused their energy on gaining further levels of gentility and civility.

This thesis is the first full-length study of Woolf's preoccupation, across her writing, with Darwin's works. I will draw on the recent animal turn in literary criticism to provide original insight into the politics of Darwin's animal tropes, and Woolf's Darwinian animal tropes. My central research questions are how, to what extent, and with what effect, did Woolf engage with Darwin's works, particularly his animal tropes? I will make two key claims in this thesis. First, I will argue that Woolf's engagement with Darwin's works - particularly the critically overlooked Descent of Man (1871) - was more sustained, extensive, and subversive than previously recognised. Both Darwin and Woolf were concerned with the limitations and (r)evolutionary potential of figurative language, in Darwin's case to describe the world, and in Woolf's case to constitute the world. I use the term (r)evolutionary to invoke both Darwin's revolutionary theory of evolution and the revolutionary potential of Woolf's evolving, Darwinian, beastly 'chain of tropological transformations' (de Man 241) to reconstitute the world. I will demonstrate that both writers' works swarm with literal (yet always already discursive) and figurative animals which operate as signifiers overloaded 'to the point of Benjaminian allegorical ruin' (Goldman 2010 180). These tropes often gesture towards women, people of colour, and the working classes, and animals themselves. I will argue secondly, therefore, that analysing these unstable animal tropes can provide insight into the gender, racial, class, and animal politics of each writer. I will show that while Woolf embraced Darwin's radical levelling of species she challenged the proto-eugenicist and misogynist aspects of his work. More specifically, I will analyse Woolf's (r)evolutionary Darwinian pedigree politics of breeding figuration in chapter two; her anti-eugenicist dogs in Flush: A Biography (1933) in chapters three and four; her (anti)imperialist feathers in 'The Plumage Bill' (1920) in chapter five; and her 'dictator' worms (TG 135) in her feminist polemics A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), in chapter six.

This thesis examines the corporeal identity of the knight as depicted in late medieval English culture. Critical readings of Middle English romance, chronicles, medical texts, and natural philosophy identify a set of morphological and physiological motifs by which the knight was characterised in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. The thesis argues that the late medieval knight can be examined through the lens of embodiment theory, as expounded on in the works of sociologist Bryan Turner (1984), philosopher Gail Weiss (1999), and psychologist Elena Faccio (2014). Embodiment describes the phenomenon of 'being' rather than 'having' a body, drawing attention to the ways in which particular socio-cultural identities become essentialised within select physical types. Like bodies themselves, however, embodied identities are not fixed but are instead always in the making. The thesis evaluates the constituent parts of the knight's embodiment, arguing that embodied knighthood is a chimeric construct, reliant on diffuse medieval ideas regarding the body, lifecycle, physical trauma, fashion, and human encounters with nonhuman things. The thesis uses four chapters, each discussing one of the 'bodies' which contributed to embodied knighthood.

This thesis explores how contemporary Muslim novels shed light on the diverse experiences of Muslims within the modern world-system of capitalist modernity, while also asking how we can read Muslim literary productions without succumbing to Orientalist stereotypes regarding Islam and Muslims. Through a comparative close reading of six novels written since 1980 and set in six different countries, the thesis examines how contemporary Muslim writers make use of a popular genre (magical realism), and draw on Islamic traditions (especially Sufism), as well as local myths and forms, to engage with the pressures of modernity, as they are experienced in their own communities. This thesis extends the notion of a world literary system developed by scholars such as Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, and the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), in a manner that also rejects essentialist ideas of a fixed Muslim identity, as well as a singular literary form or mode. By comparing different Muslim magical realist texts, the thesis complicates the idea that the magical realism of Salman Rushdie, for example, is a normative model for other Muslim writers. While I broadly agree with critics that magical realism has become a global genre, I argue that a comparison of magical realisms from across the Muslim world can help us to think in more nuanced ways about the relationship between literature, religion, and modernity.

This thesis in comparative literature explores the meanings of poetry beyond verse and the ways they influenced the creation of poetic effects in the prose of two early twentieth-century writers: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and the Italian essayist Emilio Cecchi (1884-1966). Both authors believe that poetry, as a quality independent from verse, can be conveyed through prose, but they explicitly distance themselves from the kind of writing referred to as prose poetry or poetic prose. By addressing the question of poetry in prose from the perspectives of these two writers, who worked in different languages, genres and contexts, this study proposes a new method to approach the elusive category of poetic style, without reducing it to a set of techniques and devices borrowed from verse, or to a generic quest for beauty and emotional suggestiveness. I reconstruct Woolf's and Cecchi's notions of poetic quality as time-bound and culturally specific ideas, emerging at the crossing between intellectual influences, the reception of older literary traditions, and personal creative associations. By analysing the two authors' prose through these lenses, I argue that for both of them engaging with poetry involves experimenting with multiple styles, where poetic and prosaic qualities are closely tied together and set in contrast in order to offer a double perspective on the topics treated or narrated. I identify different categories of poetic effects, classified according to their literary sources and/or their features: 'Romantic-lyrical' and 'dramatic-choral' in Woolf's novels, 'of contrast' in Cecchi's essays, and 'of pure form' in both authors. The thesis shows how Woolf's and Cecchi's ideas of poetry in prose strikingly overlap, particularly in associating poetry with an epiphanic feeling and an abstract design, but also stress different aspects of its broad spectrum, concluding that, to bring these specificities into focus, poetic effects in prose are best understood through cross-cultural enquiries.

Ecological criticism (ecocriticism) bifurcates between two paths that offer alternative definitions of ecology as a structure. One leads to a fixed, cyclical model, the other moves in a dynamic, evolutionary direction. These differences of orientation frame ecocritical responses that appear irreconcilable to each other. This research provides a way of reading the structure of fantasy texts as parallel to ecological structure in a way that brings the two definitions of ecology into dialogue. The divergence in approaches to ecocriticism has caused a chasm to open between the respective ends of an ecocritical spectrum in the polemical positions of deep ecology and ecohumanism. These positions reflect fundamental differences over the structure of ecology and tend toward mutual antagonism. This research addresses division in facilitating dialogue through analysis of structural ecological positions as a binary that creates meaning. Such a comparative approach leads to a nuanced understanding of ecological structure and its articulation through narrative design. The reading draws out structural ecological meaning, highlights inconsistencies and weaknesses, and reconciles divergent polemical positions as complementary. The general principle of reading the quest hero as exemplifying ecological structure has been used by Rachel McCoppin in her analysis of mythological texts to identify 'botanical heroism'. McCoppin chose to map myths from pre-Darwinian ages to a simple seasonal cycle of nature as her structural model. As such her research does not deal with the complex and nuanced twentieth-century confusion over ecological structure. My research confronts that problem, proposing a method for understanding discontinuities that are, in any case, ecological in nature. I arrived at an alternative to the cycle of nature that articulates the struggle to define a pattern of ecological relationships, in the form of the labyrinth. The labyrinth comprises a dichotomy. On the one hand a unicursal model articulates structure as a series of concentric loops that act as boundaries and lead toward a point of illumination. This model incorporates the cycle of nature within a more complex scheme than McCoppin's seasonal model of regeneration. On the other hand the labyrinth in multicursal form comprises a maze that resists regularity, replacing certainty with choice leading either to continued progress or dead-ends. The labyrinth as a symbol of alienation, disorientation and confusion captures the ambition of ecological readings of quests to reconcile humanity and nature. I apply the eco- labyrinthine model to my reading of two of the twentieth-centuries most popular quest fantasies, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. The following study shows that an eco-labyrinthine approach to reading modern fantasy quest provides a way of bringing together alternative perspectives of ecological structure in a dialogue that undermines claims to mutual exclusivity. By way of answers the eco-labyrinth provides a spectrum, or continuum, against which to plot inconsistencies. It opens up questions about heroism mapped against an ecological model. This thesis illustrates how an eco-labyrinthine exegesis works in relation to certain texts to reassess their ecocritical meaning. Some of the questions this research raises about how authors engage with ecology, biodiversity and evolution through structural modelling of fictitious worlds, reflected in narrative structure, will necessarily benefit from a lively and continuing debate.

French colonialism, with its brutal history of transplantation, slavery, and migration, was founded on displacement; the experience of the Caribbean subject is thus axiomatically one of travel, exile, and scission. While postcolonial studies are increasingly turning to transnational paradigms, translocal discourses produced by Caribbean and Guyanese writers from the first waves of transatlantic migration are still neglected. Their writing, however, is strongly imbued with notions of (dis)placement and flux. This thesis aims to address these lacunae by exploring the textual representation of interstitial, unstable, and travelling identity from works written by authors who were part of the first transatlantic Caribbean diaspora and born before the end of the 1910s. Indeed, the lives of Martinican Joseph Zobel, Guadeloupean Guy Tirolien, and Guyanese René Maran were punctuated by transnational and peripatetic mobility. Thus, this thesis advocates for the impact of movement, within and between the Caribbean, France, and Africa (only Tirolien returned to Guadeloupe) - on the themes, style, language or even the very emergence, of their works. The methodology situates close readings of the primary texts within a multidisciplinary conceptual framework incorporating theories of travel and mobility, as well as postcolonial theories. The thesis thus examines how travel and displacement provide an exploratory framework to investigate identity and culture in the chosen corpus. Here, mobility is a biographical reality, but also an intellectual and a diegetic one, as well as a literary trope. This malleable approach to travel thus allows the study of its paradigmatic manifestation in a multigeneric corpus (novels, poetry, short story, biography): Les Jours immobiles (1946) and Les Mains pleines d'oiseaux (1978) by Zobel, Balles d'or (1961) and Feuilles vivantes au matin (1977) by Tirolien and Livingstone et l'exploration de l'Afrique (1938) by Maran. The experience of multipolar mobility and crossing, and of cross-cultural influences and encounters, resulted for these writers in the creation of an unstable and ambivalent, and (self)referential writing, caught in a complex nexus of (sometimes competing) cultural and geographical relations. Central to these works is a (dis)located and transnational discourse, which in turn allows for the textual representation of the interstitial and the travelling self, resisting all unilateral categorisation.

This project is an attempt to capture a particular impulse within the current wave of cultural production emerging from Africa and its new diaspora. It is a reading of five contemporary writers whose works indicate an awareness of the intellectual genealogies of African cultural productions but reflect a departure from the modes of realist documentation of history and the everyday in Africa and its new diaspora. Departing from the methods, suspicions, and anxieties of existing theoretical frameworks, I anchor my reading on the texts themselves and the series of affinities that emerge at the levels of style, intertextuality, focalization, and aesthetic inclinations. Guided by traces of referentiality and self-reflexivity within the texts, as opposed to an existing theoretical frame, I read for the affiliative impulse, conceptions of 'home,' and negotiations of identity in the works of Petina Gappah, Teju Cole, Jamal Mahjoub, E. C. Osondu, and Nthikeng Mohlele, with a focus on re-negotiations of existing affiliative tendencies in African literary practices. While the chapters on Cole and Mahjoub emphasize strategic itineracy and 'critical Afropolitanism' as alternatives to the 'natural synthesis' that marked early postcolonial writing, the chapters on Gappah and Osondu highlight the inherent simultaneity and affiliative possibilities in the narrative of historical encounter in Africa. The chapter on Mohlele considers the movement away from writing back to Europe to negotiating its localized legacies in Africa. The chapters are propelled by the intention to trace threads of past literary impulses while noting points of re-negotiation and departure.

Compelling theories as to the socially produced nature of 'place' exist, which open up the possibility for analysis of and reflection on the ways in which we construct 'place'. Thinking about 'place' as socially produced, rather than as material, is valuable for exploring and for perhaps negotiating some of the problems and challenges associated with today's globalised, interconnected spatial and human geographies, such as social inequality. This thesis contributes to these discussions on the constructed nature of 'place' through the literary and cultural analysis of two novels and two films set in London after the beginning of the twenty-first century, those being Ishtiyaq Shukri's novel The Silent Minaret (2005), Rachid Bouchareb's film London River (2009), Zadie Smith's NW novel (2012) and Sally El Hosaini's film My Brother The Devil (2012). The analyses of the case studies presented in this thesis are theoretically framed by Marc Aug.'s concept of the 'non-place' as discussed in his text Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1992). As Aug. states, the idea of the 'non-place' is directly associated with social isolation and the dissolution of community. This thesis therefore fills a gap in existing literary and cultural criticism by applying the framework of the 'non-place' to the analyses out of an understanding of 'place' as socially produced, and, moreover, by situating and validating the analyses of the primary material within a postcolonial methodology with a view to developing postcolonial scholarship. Given that the idea of the 'non-place' is linked to social polarisation and excessive individualisation, this piece of research concludes that the novels and films analysed here are of importance as they open up questions as to whether we might imagine 'place' differently in order to reflect on, if not to negotiate, the welfare and cohesion of contemporary human societies.

Through the analysis of women's experimental writing, this thesis examines the significance of touch in exceeding individual and social boundaries, contending that touch has the radical potential to elicit transformation. This thesis explores the way in which touch materialises throughout the experimental works of Audre Lorde, Anaïs Nin, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Kathy Acker, arguing that experimental writing facilitates an affective language of touch and sensation that resists and moves beyond societally gendered, racialised, and compulsory heterosexualised constructs of tactile relations. By doing so, this research gestures toward the queer nature of touch to exceed normative frameworks and boundaries posed by conventional language, illuminating, in the readings of these experimental texts, new orientations for thinking through the radical potentials of touch, as a site of resistance that disrupts conventional modes of relation. Within these experimental texts, a politics of touch materialises both thematically and contextually, as well as through the experimental form itself, that operates as a site of counter politics to mainstream ideas of sexual relations. By engaging with contemporary feminist studies that take up issues of touch, such as Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006), this thesis proposes that touch functions as an 'orientation device' that informs what it means to be in relation to another. Touch has radical potentialities for transformation through its ability to orientate, reorientate and disorientate the subjects' bodies. Touch, therefore, precipitates change when bodies no longer follow the lines that have previously orientated them, but instead envision new orientations.

This thesis analyses complex and contradictory discursive articulations of gender, modernisation, and nationalism, focusing on the case of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. Coming from an understanding of the 'archival turn', it engages with the concept of 'feminist genealogy' and investigates subjectivities, negotiations, and normativities in the discourses of urban Muslim Ottoman women. The thesis examines the first 100 issues of the women-only magazine, Kadınlar Dünyası (Women's World), published in Istanbul in 1913. This magazine is well-known in the feminist literature on Ottoman women's movements, most of which has been written from a 'herstory perspective'. This thesis builds on a poststructuralist feminist methodology, making the argument that analysing the constructions of subjectivities by negotiating normativities opens a space to further question discourses, rather than pre-given subjects. With this aim in mind, this thesis unpacks the discourses on 'Europe' developed by the Kadınlar Dünyası writers through Meltem Ahıska's concept of Occidentalism. By investigating the complex and contradictory ways in which KD writers used 'Europe' to support demands for Ottoman Muslim women's engagement with modernisation, it analyses the construction of binaries between the categories of 'Orient' and 'Occident'. The thesis suggests these binaries both challenge and reproduce normative binaries regarding femininities and masculinities. This research positions demands for women's engagement with modernisation as a negotiation of changes and continuities. It analyses these negotiations by focusing on sexual normativities and productions of subjectivities in relation to 'Other' categories such as 'rural Muslim' Ottoman women and 'non-Muslim' Ottoman women. The negotiations included strategic usages of certain normative positions, such as motherhood, which are conceptualised with their affective constructions. This thesis also develops the concept of a 'mood of commitment', inspired by Sara Ahmed's conceptualisation of 'mood', to explain the affective 'atmosphere' of the modernisation discourses during the late Ottoman Empire period.

This thesis, through a detailed study of 'The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne' and its four surviving manuscripts (London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 491a; Lincoln, Cathedral Library, MS 91; Princeton, University Library, MS Taylor 9; and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 324), builds on existing research into Middle English romance manuscripts, identifies a diverse audience of reader/listeners and makes the argument that the booklet may be the typical material and literary form of Arthurian romance in the fifteenth century, with significant implications on how we interpret the use and survival of these texts. Taking a combined textual, literary, codicological and biobibliographical approach, this thesis confirms a wider circulation of the poem, beyond its four surviving manuscript versions. A feminist critical reading of the 'Awntyrs' provides the first extended literary analysis of the poem to reveal that women were not only the implied audience of the poem, but active participants in its circulation and important consumers of Middle English romance. The study connects the 'Awntyrs' to canonical texts, including Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde', 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' and the alliterative 'Morte Arthure' through its literary analysis, whilst research into the textual communities of the poem shows that multiple copies of the Awntyrs circulated in London, produced as part of a large, collaborative commercial enterprise alongside texts by Chaucer, Gower, Langland and Hoccleve.

This study focuses on the representation of masculinities in texts written by women who have immigrated into France or Canada from a range of geographical spaces. Centring on the premise that the migratory experience creates a form of tabula rasa which destabilizes identity, I chart the various ways in which the texts examined permit a reconfiguring of masculinities within the migratory spaces represented by France and Canada. I explore texts by Léonora Miano (Cameroon), Fatou Diome (Senegal), Assia Djebar, Malika Mokeddem (Algeria), Ananda Devi (Mauritius), Ying Chen (China), and Kim Thúy (Vietnam), to gauge the extent to which migration generates new ways of understanding and writing masculinities. I draw on a range of theoretical perspectives, including Postcolonial theory, Affect theory, Critical Race theory, amongst others. Through the lens of hospitality as theorized by Jacques Derrida in De l’hospitalité (1997a), I examine Miano’s, Diome’s, Chen’s and Thúy’s texts to investigate the ways in which both the host country and, sometimes, the migrant’s own reluctance to cede to the new paradigms presented by a new society, have a role to play in the inhospitality experienced by (im)migrants. In Chapter Two Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of community in La Communauté désoeuvrée (1983) and Être singulier pluriel (1996), is deployed as a means of interrogating the positioning of Afropean masculinity in France. The concept of an emergent Rancierian improper community is foregrounded in Mokeddem’s text, as a woman’s discordant voice is heard against hegemonic masculinities, while Devi develops the concept of a writing community comparable to Nancy’s own theory. Chapter Three discusses women’s writing as a means of speaking with men and creating new modes of communication which allow for an equal and mutually understanding relationship with masculinities. Drawing on Hélène Cixous’s Coming to Writing (1991), Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988) as well as Djebar’s own Ces Voix qui m’assiègent (1999), the final chapter delves into the ways in which immigrant women writers are re-inscribing new modalities for reshaping masculinities within the narrative space.

This thesis analyses the way that women prepared their manuscripts for publication in the mid-nineteenth-century to understand the prescriptions on gender that influenced the development of their texts. It considers markings, deletions, and cuts to contribute to 'manuscript textuality' which informs an interpretation of self-reflexive images within the text. The project argues that women embrace self-reflexivity as a means to engage in an active negotiation of gendered discourses in the nineteenth-century marketplace. By analysing the ways in which texts are edited with a view to reception, this methodology opens up new opportunities for interpreting the gendered dimensions to transformations of form. Revision often allows women to mitigate the impact of their language, while refining self-reflexivity in the text hints at something potentially transgressive which has been taken out. Chapter one analyses how the collaborative way that Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte is revised engages with clear social imperatives involved with life writing. Collaboration allows Gaskell to shift the narrative voice between ambiguity and authority in order to manage the distance between the author and subject. Chapter two then turns to Charlotte Bronte's cuttings on the manuscript of Villette to understand how her representation of an unconventional female subject is influenced by an awareness of the text's reception. Excisions reveal how Bronte embraces silence as a productive narrative mode for her protagonist, which enables her to maintain control over the way she is represented and received by Victorian society. Chapter three examines Elizabeth Barrett Browning's revisions of Aurora Leigh, which allow her to refine her challenge to poetic traditions in the mid-nineteenth-century by embedding it within the very rhythm and sounds of her lines. Attending to the manuscript not only provides new perspectives on well-trodden material; it allows us to understand how women were not silenced by gender prescriptions in the mid-nineteenth-century but actively negotiated them through the act of revision.

The past forty years have witnessed the progressive shift of neoliberalism from economic and political doctrine to ontological imperative (Huehls and Greenwald Smith, 2017). So pervasively has neoliberal ideology bled into previously non-economic areas of social life that it is now perceived as a natural, inevitable and unquestionable brand of Gramscian ‘common sense’. This inescapability of the neoliberal hegemony has led critics such as Slavoj Žižek and Fredric Jameson to affirm that it is now easier to imagine the end of the world than the breakdown of late capitalism. Through an analysis of literary representations of what has effectively been the neoliberalisation of work, space and leisure, this thesis explores the ways in which contemporary literature challenges the indisputability of the neoliberal discourse and rejects the unimaginability of any alternative to the status quo. In so doing, this thesis reasserts the committed character of contemporary literature and its role in exposing the socially constructed nature of the neoliberal consensus. By means of a comparative analysis of novels published from the 1980s to the 2010s in Britain, the United States and Italy, this work brings into dialogue the literary traditions of the more prototypically neoliberal British and American economies with that of a country where the process of neoliberalisation was more recent and arguably only half-hearted. In order to decode the authors’ portrayal of the existential condition under neoliberalism, this thesis avails itself of the conceptual framework of ‘liminality’ in its recent applications to advanced, industrialised societies (Turner, 1974; Szakolczai, 2014; Thomassen, 2014). This research recognises in liminality a recurring feature of contemporary society and it interprets it as both symptomatic of an increasing precarisation of existence and, by virtue of its associations with transitional and transformational states that render it a fertile terrain for the emergence of counter-hegemonic discourses, as an instrument of systemic critique.

This thesis will demonstrate that the literature of Wales and Catalonia, two small stateless nations that are dominated by larger states with a different majority culture (the United Kingdom and Spain), can be read as resistance literature. However, crucially, it will focus on authors that write in English or Spanish, rather than in Welsh or Catalan. Traditionally Welsh and Catalan literature has been defined as that written in Welsh/Catalan. English and Spanish are often seen as foreign languages, or even as the ‘oppressor’s tongue,’ and texts written in those languages have, until recently, been excluded from the national literature. This thesis will argue, however, that these texts can espouse some type of national resistance, in spite of the language in which they are written. This thesis will draw on the work of the theorists Barbara Harlow, Benita Parry and E. San Juan Jr., particularly the latter two’s critique of postcolonial studies, and works by anticolonial writer activists like Frantz Fanon and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, in order to establish a resistance literature paradigm. It will also draw on the work of Albert Sánchez Piñol and Daniel G. Williams to differentiate between two types of resistance and consider whether each type is helpful or harmful to the nation. It will then apply this paradigm to the English-language Welsh authors Harri Webb, R. S. Thomas and Rhys Davies, to the Spanish-language Catalan novelist Eduardo Mendoza, and to a Spanish-language text by Albert Sánchez Piñol who has published in both Spanish and Catalan. The thesis will highlight many attributes of resistance literature in their work; the most important and prevalent being: political content, a focus on the message of the text as opposed to its form, an understanding that all struggles against oppression, be it oppression of class, nationality, ethnicity or gender, are part of the same struggle, and an attempt to produce a history of their nation that challenges the account promulgated by the state (the United Kingdom/Spain).

With the help of a discourse-historical approach, a textual corpus composed of the talk pages of three controversial, socio-political Wikipedia articles about ongoing wars was analyzed in order to shed light on the way in which conflict is represented through the editing and discussion process. Additionally, a rational discourse was employed in order to unravel communication distortions within the editing process in an attempt to improve communication and consensus-seeking. Finally, semi-structured interviews of participating contributors within studied articles were used in order to better understand Wikipedian experience in a controversial collaboration scenario. Results unveiled a set of discursive practices in which Wikipedians participate, as well as the creation of a Wikipedian argumentation topoi framework useful for further Wikipedia-specific discourse analysis involving the content change-retain negotiation process.

This thesis examines the politics of touch in contemporary world literature through readings of texts by four twenty-first century authors: Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole, South Korean author Han Kang, Ukrainian-Jewish-German writer Katja Petrowskaja and American poet Claudia Rankine. From different standpoints, all the authors address the intertwined legacies of major sites of modern violence, including the Holocaust, colonialism and slavery. They search for a creative form that records this violence, yet also resists modernity’s ideological grammars. Through innovative formal strategies, they attempt to reroute modernity’s ideological formations, not only interrogating fixed national borders and global hierarchies, but also resisting the abstraction that such formations inscribe. Many radically reconfigure the relationship between language and the body, initiating new potential temporalities in which to imagine and enact political change. In this way, the texts are creative and political interventions: they both inhabit an already-existing world and generate possibilities for thinking beyond it. The worlds from which the texts depart not only comprise hegemonic political formations but also established literary and critical-theoretical discourses. Drawing on diverse bodies of theoretical work including postcolonial trauma studies and queer phenomenology, I argue that in the process of rerouting modernity, the texts also intervene in debates around contemporary world literature. In contrast to critical approaches which read world literary politics as a worldly extension of (post)modern self- reflexivity, many re-imagine resistance through their engagements with touch. Interrogating modernity’s oppositions between legibility and illegibility, they also implicitly demand a new form of world literary reading. Departing from both the neat equivalences of comparative literature and the postcolonial politics of untranslatability, the texts suggest that new imaginaries for resistance may emerge from reading frictions.

The aim of this thesis is to establish a critical methodology which reads for fictional worlds in literature and film. Close readings of literary and cinematic texts are presented in support of the proposition that the fictional world is, and arguably should be, central to the critical process. These readings demonstrate how fictional world-centric readings challenge the conclusions generated by approaches which prioritise the author, the reader and the viewer. I establish a definition of independent fictional worlds, and show how characters rather than narrative are the means by which readers access the fictional world in order to analyse it. This interdisciplinary project engages predominantly with theoretical and critical work on literature and film to consider four distinct groups of contemporary novels and films. These texts demand readings that pose potential problems for my approach, and therefore test the scope and viability of my thesis. I evaluate character and narrative through Fight Club (novel, Chuck Palahniuk [1996] film, David Fincher [1999]); genre, context, and intertextuality in Solaris (novel, Stanisław Lem [1961] film, Andrei Tarkovsky [1974] film, Steven Soderbergh [2002]); mythic thinking and character’s authority with American Gods (novel, Neil Gaiman [2001]) and Anansi Boys (novel, Neil Gaiman [2005]); and temporality and nationality in Cronos (film, Guillermo Del Toro [1993]), El espinazo del diablo (film, Guillermo Del Toro [2001]), and El laberinto del fauno (film, Guillermo Del Toro [2006]).

This thesis offers a reappraisal of the recurring figure of the femme fatale within Decadent art and literature of the nineteenth century. Despite the ubiquity of studies concerning the femme fatale, most notably within genres such as Film Noir and Romanticism, the Decadent femme fatale has often been relegated to a single chapter or footnote within these studies. It is here the purpose of this thesis to rectify this critical disregard. Combining multiple disciplines (literature, aesthetics, history, mythology and psychology) each of the four chapters of this thesis will locate the femme fatale within nineteenth-century European Decadent texts as represented as a specific objet d’art: the haunted portrait, the corpse-doll, the fragmented sculpture, and the mutilated and/or sculpted body of the androgyne. Invoking Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, the influence and trajectory of each chapter’s respective femme fatale will be traced from the midnineteenth century through to the fin de siècle. By tracing the lineage of the aesthetic impression made by French Decadent writers of the mid-nineteenth century (such as Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire) upon subsequent French and British writers and artists of the latenineteenth century (such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, Rachilde, and Vernon Lee), this thesis interrogates how the re/construction and usage of the Decadent femme fatale was utilized as a means of exploring ulterior philosophies of classical beauty and a fluid range of forbidden sexualities, including androgyny and homoeroticism. Offering interdisciplinary readings of the nineteenth-century Decadent femme fatale, this thesis shows the different ways in which nineteenth-century Decadent writers and artists move beyond the femme fatale’s malevolence, though without losing sight of it, to explore the mysterious relationships between life and death, art and artifice, pleasure and pain, and the seen and unseen.

In 1939, the English painter and writer Leonora Carrington was hospitalised against her will in Santander, while Spain was under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. Carrington suffered a mental breakdown as a response to the outbreak of WWII and the arrest and deportation of her partner, Max Ernst. The account of her journey into madness is presented in her memoir of illness Down Below (1943). In 1964, the Italian poet Alda Merini was hospitalised in Milan at the request of her husband, as the result of a violent fight. From that day, Merini would spend ten years in and out of hospital, until the Basaglia Law closed the asylums at the end of the 1970s. Merini’s experience in the asylum is narrated in her memoir L’altra verità. Diario di una diversa (1986). By analysing Carrington’s and Merini’s memoirs of illness as feminist narratives, this study seeks to explore what the cross-cultural and interdisciplinary comparison of the writings of two women creators who experienced psychiatric hospitalisation in 20th century Europe tells us about the relationship between mental health and the construction of female subjectivity in a society that stigmatises mental illness and oppresses women. The two main themes to have emerged out of this critical comparison are that there is a nexus between the transformation of the hellish space of the asylum into a sacred and liminal place, and the conversion of the authors’ ordeal into a journey of mystical ascent. I argue that the two memoirs can be read as examples of both ‘scriptotherapy’ and écriture féminine, in which Carrington and Merini are able to merge the therapeutic and political functions that characterise these forms of writing to create empowering narratives that are subversive in scope. Ultimately, I argue that the theories presented in this thesis could be conceived of as a more wide-raging framework within which other underexplored autobiographies of illness written by women might be examined.

This thesis brings together three well-known authors of the early 20th century, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, in order to explore the similarities and divergences in their work when it comes to the treatment and depiction of museums and galleries. Each author differs in their interpretations of such spaces but, significantly, engages with a number of related discourses: the consequence of a rising materialism in society, the risks (and rewards) of collecting, and the importance of history for both societies and individuals. As each of these authors has been extensively studied since rising to renown, the scope of my investigations is broad and spans a number of areas of scholarship in order to draw together what I see as their responses to what Peter McIsaac calls the ‘museum function’. I also make use of their correspondence and nonfiction writings in order to build as comprehensive a picture as possible. The Introduction provides a short history of the development of museums in the Western world, as well as looking at the work of several authors such as H. G. Wells and Edith Wharton, in order to assess the cultural impact of museums throughout their rise and heyday towards the turn of the 20th century. My first chapter looks at the work of Henry James, especially his interest in collectors and their motivations, as well as questions of aesthetics and historicity, as expressed in such signal texts as The Portrait of a Lady and The Golden Bowl. I have endeavoured to engage with ‘minor’ texts of James’s such as The Spoils of Poynton and The Sense of the Past. My second chapter is concerned with exploring James Joyce’s construction of an aesthetic practice predicated around resistance (in many forms) to the power of institutions such as the National Library of Ireland and, in a more abstract sense, the legacy of colonialism as exemplified in monuments such as the Duke of Wellington’s obelisk which still stands in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. I demonstrate how Joyce uses humour as his main weapon in the dismantling of such spaces and sites in order to argue for the primacy of individual agency. My third chapter deals with Marcel Proust’s multifaceted interest in museums, galleries, and the visual arts, which he makes use of in sometimes contradictory ways throughout his writing, both fictional and otherwise. I contend that Proust believes a ‘Museum of Memory’, built along exacting lines, to be the solution to a wider memory crisis afflicting French society as typified by the upper classes at the end of the 19th century. In my conclusion I discuss the possible legacies of these literary treatments of museums, bringing modern-day writers such as Orhan Pamuk and Daljit Nagra to the fore.

This thesis proposes and maps a nascent subfield of scholarship within the science-and-religion field that examines the intersection of science, religion, and literature; simultaneously, it draws out and argues for the benefits of incorporating literature into science-and-religion studies. The suggested label for this body of scholarship is the science-religion-and-literature field. Scholarship within this proposed field is relatively new and has yet to be thus brought together. The mapping of this field is done by considering how literature is incorporated into science-and-religion studies. Although there is a growing body of scholarship that incorporates literature into science-and-religion studies, scholarship has yet to address how incorporating literature benefits the wider science-and-religion field. Therefore, this thesis argues that there are ways to incorporate literature that allow literary texts and the tools of literary analysis to bring insights to the science-and-religion field. This thesis is composed of four parts. Part one introduces and maps the subfield of science-religion-and-literature by defining and, at times, coining key terms and phrases, providing an overview of method within the larger science-and-religion field, and mapping the proposed subfield by reviewing exemplary studies. Part two examines the use of literary theory at the intersection of literature with society, religion, and science. Part three portrays a use of particular literary texts (the case study: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy) that seeks to bring insight to the science-and-religion field. The study concludes in part four by assessing various methods that have been portrayed throughout this thesis, articulating the benefits of studying literature within the science-and-religion field, and suggesting further directions of research.

This thesis argues that fantasy literature carries unexplored potential for articulating queer and feminist theologies and religious imaginaries. Adopting a deconstructive methodology within a Christian theological framework, it posits that fantasy texts can serve as fictional spaces in which theology can be reimagined, and potentially transformed, from queer and feminist standpoints. My argument considers fantasy as a genre with potential not only for communicating religious doctrines, but also for interrogating them, holding them to account, and transforming them. Throughout, the novels Till We Have Faces (1956) by C.S. Lewis, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin, and The Passion of New Eve (1977) by Angela Carter serve as close reading case studies, with intermittent discussion of other fantasy texts. Chapter One of this thesis, ‘Saving Face?’, elaborates a theory of fantasy as a deconstructive opening toward the other in theology, examining existing theories of fantasy in relation to the deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida and the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Chapter Two, ‘Dragons in the Neighbourhood’, carries this discussion of alterity into an exploration of the relationship between fantasy and the concept of écriture feminine (feminine writing) developed by Hélène Cixous, considering the extent to which fantasy can be read as a disruptive counter-discourse to theology. Meanwhile, Chapter Three, ‘Hetero-doxies’, initiates a much more ambivalent engagement with Luce Irigaray’s quest for a feminine incarnation of the divine. While Irigaray’s project is indispensable for re-visioning the sexual and gendered nature of Christianity’s theological imagination, it also shores up the difficulty of creating an alternative imaginary without re-inscribing patriarchal exclusions and hierarchies. These discussions open onto the further horizon of queer theology and fantasy. Chapter Four, ‘Theology in Drag(ons)’, draws on the queer theologies of Marcella Althaus-Reid and Linn Marie Tonstad, as well as queer theories elaborated by Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam, to suggest that fantasy literature is theology dressed in drag.

This thesis uses cognitive-stylistic techniques to analyse rhetorical effects in a collection of non-fiction writing about illness. It draws on a broad range of related disciplines, including discourse analysis and cognitive psychology, and uses these approaches to conduct a close linguistic analysis of the texts analysed. The results of this analysis are linked to existing research in the medical humanities, specifically in relation to illness and narrative. In particular, this thesis describes how readers utilise certain linguistic features in order to construct a coherent mental representation of a text. It argues that certain strategies employed by readers to create these interpretations have rhetorical effects which go beyond coherence building. To begin, I provide explicit definitions for some of the key terms which feature prominently in this thesis: illness writing; coherence; and rhetoric. Following this, I introduce the corpus of texts which from which are drawn the examples used throughout this thesis. Alongside this, I introduce the specific linguistic features which will be studied in the subsequent analysis chapters. These features are introduced and analysed at increasing levels of linguistic abstraction, from more concrete to less. The analysis begins with a subset of English personal pronouns, before moving on to describe discourse structure in the form of repeating patterns of textual organisation. I then consider the role of external, ‘real-world’ knowledge in the construction of discourse coherence, before demonstrating how this knowledge can be blended to create new, creative ways of thinking about illness. The thesis closes with a summary of these results, along with some suggestions for potential future research. Finally, I conclude with a reflection on the methods and results found in the thesis and point towards their wider applicability in the field of medical humanities more generally. The original contribution of this thesis is therefore twofold. From a cognitive-stylistic perspective, it contributes to the understanding of the relationship between coherence-building strategies and their rhetorical effects. However, it also aims to contribute to the ongoing work in medical humanities, which seeks to advance our understanding of the lived experience of illness.

This thesis explores the interaction of four female writers with the monopolistic and paternalistic BBC during the first half of the twentieth century. Radio was the dominant information technology in Britain from the BBC’s inception in 1922 until 1956, when television licences overtook radio licences for the first time. This was a period of rapid development in technology, listenership, and ideology for the Corporation. Existing scholarly work has tended to focus on the way that mid-century writers were imaginatively influenced by broadcasting, attending to instances of radiophonic style in their literary and creative work. What is not yet understood is the role that gender played in brokering professional relationships between prominent writers and the BBC as it sought to become a cultural authority on literary discourse. In this thesis, I argue that the Corporation relied on successful, socially elite women writers at moments of tension and growth for the broadcaster. The BBC believed women writers were more amenable to its mission of cultural uplift and would appeal to a wider audience than many of their male peers. However, while the Corporation wanted women writers to provide quaint talks on approved topics, once in the BBC’s studios, the wireless women in this thesis set out to redefine literary discourse on-air. Vita Sackville-West imbued the early years of radio with an aristocratic validity and developed a rebellious reading manifesto in her book reviews from 1929-1932. Una Marson leveraged her social network to support BBC broadcasting to the Caribbean during the Second World War, developing an inclusive West Indian identity that was founded on the dissemination of diverse voices. In the immediate post-war period, Rose Macaulay justified the BBC’s decision to stratify its programming into three distinct strands, defending, as she did, the existing cultural hegemony beyond the BBC’s own expectations. And finally, Elizabeth Bowen reluctantly legitimised the Corporation’s educational agenda, following the 1944 Butler Education Act, despite arguing against the academisation of literary education in Britain. Together, the women of this thesis expanded their broadcasting remits from within the BBC, broadening the parameters of literary discourse on-air to acknowledge and display their professionalism, legitimacy, and influence as wireless women writers.

This thesis presents a multi-disciplinary analysis of the ethics and politics of narrating trauma in institutional contexts. Drawing on the philosophical works of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, this thesis studies the norms, discourses and power relations that impact survivors’ narrations of trauma in, for example, medical and legal settings. Through a use and application of Foucault’s ideas, it is argued that while self-narration is a diversified activity, discourses and power relations function to regulate, circumscribe and constrain the forms in which traumatised individuals must narrate trauma in order for their narrative to be favourably treated by institutions who encounter trauma. Building on Foucault’s views and feminist applications of his work, it is shown how possibilities of resistance – or, of narrating otherwise – are co-existent with exercises of power, despite the power imbalance that typically characterises the encounter of traumatised individuals with institutions. This thesis also focuses on Butler’s work as complementing Foucault’s views on how self-narration is entangled with discourses and power relations, and considers how her ideas on vulnerability, precariousness and relationality inform her account of self-narration. Butler’s critique of the conception of self-narration based on the sovereignty, coherence and mastery of the narrating subject is elaborated further in relation to issues in trauma theory, where it is argued that narrative coherence often functions as a hegemonic norm. This analysis of narrative coherence is pursued by a study of how survivors’ testimonies of sexual trauma in legal and political contexts is circumscribed, facilitating certain forms of self-narration while silencing others. Narrative coherence is also shown to be a dominant norm in the psychological sciences, whose theories and practices have an influential bearing on how trauma is narrated by traumatised individuals. This thesis also presents an analysis of the different levels of inequality that determine the worth and currency of trauma narratives in the asylum seeking process. Tying together the different concerns pursued throughout this work, the thesis concludes with a critical consideration of the discursive.

This thesis contains two linked parts: (1) my memoir, 'The Black Turnip'; and (2) a contextualizing essay, 'The "Fantasy Of Flight," Or, Escape In Contemporary Jewish Narrative: Reading My Memoir Through The Jewish Picaresque'. The memoir, 'The Black Turnip', is narrated by a young, naive, bumbling Jewish American woman who accepts an invitation to a theatre conference in Poland. While learning more about the country from which her grandfather escaped, she becomes obsessed with Polish theatre. Improbably, she decides to become a Polish theatre artist herself. This story is my own story, drawn from memory. In the contextualizing essay, I read 'The Black Turnip' in the company of four works that influenced my writing: one critical analysis and three narratives. I consider Miriam Udel's 'Never Better! The Modern Jewish Picaresque' (2016) and novels or memoirs by Philip Roth (1979), Jonathan Safran Foer (2002), and Roz Chast (2014). I explore how features of Miriam Udel's Jewish picaresque (i.e., escapism, avoidance of adulthood, episodic narrative, etc.) manifest in my memoir and other American Jewish narratives. Throughout this thesis, I examine the literary strategies that American Jewish writers use to portray the desire to escape from some part of their family, history, culture, or circumstances. I intend for this thesis to be read by fellow writers, especially those working with Jewish narrative, writing from diaspora cultures, or exploring avoidance in the context of cultural memory. I seek to demonstrate that a writer's escapism can be productive from a literary standpoint, and generative of renewed cultural understanding. I hope this thesis will be of interest to other writers of diaspora literature, especially those who are working with the memory of a shared, complex, and sometimes troubling historic past. This thesis may shed light on the possibilities of a picaresque sensibility for such projects.

Using cognitive narratology, this theoretical thesis examines how the three linked concepts of empathy, ethics and justice are created and communicated in children’s war literature. Due to the divisive nature of war literature, the basis of this thesis lies on the in- and outgroup theory of empathy, according to which the extend of our empathy is strongly tied to who we identify as “like us” (ingroup) or “unlike us” (outgroup). The limits of our empathy have a direct influence on both our moral frameworks and our ability to perceive the ethical implications of textual actions and characterisation; if we are not empathically engaged, the consequences of a character’s motivations and actions are irrelevant to us. In complex situations like those in war stories there is another layer of moral importance; justice. The reason for going to war, how it is conducted, and how it is resolved are so specific that they have their own justice philosophy. Children cannot be assumed to be aware of this, or to have the power to influence it. Yet it plays a significant part in children’s war literature. This thesis argues that in children’s war literature empathy, ethics, and justice build on each other in a bottom-up manner. It then further examines how this is achieved in the genre, and what its potential impact on the reader may be. The thesis examines this by analysing the construction and communication of each concept separately in a bottom-up approach, starting with empathy and ending with justice. These sections are divided up into two chapters dedicated to the narrative techniques most relevant to the concept analysed, in a top-down approach, starting with narrators and ending with scripts. A different novel is analysed for each technique, both to demonstrate the argument using the most appropriate example, and to showcase the patterns within the genre. The thesis concludes that through these narrative techniques a complex web of empathy, ethics, and justice is constructed, in which each technique plays a direct role in the concept communicated to the reader. Because young readers are still developing cognitively, as well as building their life experience and reading skills, children’s war literature can provide a strongly influential training ground for them to learn and grow as empathic and moral people.

This thesis constitutes the first comprehensive literary examination of the relationship between architectural objects, whiteness and higher educational spaces. Focusing specifically on the post-Civil Rights period, I investigate the metaphorical and material impact windows, desks, desk-tops and doors have on Black students attending elite universities and colleges in Northeast U.S. In order to conduct this research, I focus on four main texts; critically close reading Joyce Carol Oates’s Black Girl, White Girl (2007), Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s Americanah (2014), Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2006) and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996). Framed by Critical Race Theory and drawing on methodologies from Hip Hop Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies and Educational research, my analysis addresses intersecting systems of power, such as gender, class, dis/ability and nationality, to show the specific ways in which Black students, occupying different social locations, are effected by architectural objects in higher education institutions. Research on architecture, race and higher education often focuses on overtly racialised objects, such as statues and portraits of colonialists and slave owners. This thesis makes an important contribution to current scholarship by revealing how more foundational and seemingly mundane objects, typically deemed neutral in the university space, also fundamentally shape the physical and ideological structure of higher education. I show how within a wider network of white bodies and discourse, these objects perpetuate and intensify the containment, coercion and control of Black students at elite, predominately white institutions. I also demonstrate how the investigative and imaginative power of literature and other cultural media can help better identify, extrapolate, examine and dismantle invisible and allusive expressions of systematic white dominance, impressing the value of a methodological approach that can be productively applied to further studies of systems of power in higher education and beyond.

Interest in new and re-emerging diseases as well as a developing language of informational contagions has led to a wave of interdisciplinary analyses of contagion narratives and contagion metaphors in the fields of literary studies, cultural theory, philosophy and medical history. This thesis makes a contribution to the growing field of “contagion theory” exploring the ideological implications of narratives of contagion through a historically situated analysis of the relationship between contagion narratives and governmental efforts to manage contagious disease in the 19th and late 20th centuries. I explore contagion narratives in the work of a range of Gothic and science fiction writers writing during times of crisis and change: Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Bram Stocker, Harriet Marryat, Elizabeth Barren Brown, Michael Crichton, Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy. Through a highly interdisciplinary analysis, I put these fictional texts in conversation with contemporary political and medical representations of contagion in order to understand how historical changes in the expansion of biopolitics and, in particular, the rise of liberalism and neoliberalism have shaped contagion narratives. Given Foucault’s description of popular imaginaries of contagion (which he terms, “the haunting memory of contagions”), a side-byside exploration of the development of biopolitics and evolution of contagion narratives also makes an important intervention in theoretical debates on Foucauldian biopolitics. This thesis argues that contagion narratives help negotiate tensions between the expansion of biopolitics and (neo)liberalism’s hostility to state interventions by conceptualising acquired resistance or immunity to transmissible disease as an result of liberal individualism and rational selfgovernance and, secondly, of governmental interventions in private health as a necessary, educational corrective to lack of self-government of illiberal subjects, rather than as an extension of quarantine.

Historicising the geography of sexuality within the milieu of literary modernism, the subject of this thesis is the relationship between queerness, space and place as mediated by modernist texts. Focusing on the work of E. M. Forster, H.D., Katharine Burdekin and Christopher Isherwood, the thesis aims to examine the impact that the taxonomizing of sexual orientations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has on the textual geographies of modernist literature. Though the relationship between modernism, space and place has been well mined by critics, scholarship has yet to produce a sustained inquiry into the imbrication of queer subjectivity and modernist geographies. The purpose of this thesis is, therefore, to make an interjection that offers a queer reading of the modernist relationship with space and place. After beginning with a theoretical unpacking of the generative term ‘sexual orientation’, Chapter One engages with the queer inheritance of the Oscar Wilde trial and its shaping effect on Forster’s Maurice (1971), widely recognised as one of the first homosexual novels. Following this, Chapter Two turns inwards to examine the relationship between psychoanalysis and the queer subject in H.D.’s short stories ‘Kora and Ka’ (1934) and ‘Mira-Mare’ (1934), works which straddle the analysis that the poet undertook with Sigmund Freud in 1933. Akin to this, Chapter Three examines the relationship between Burdekin and Havelock Ellis, positioning that the novels Proud Man (1934) and Swastika Night (1937) fold together sexuality and space through eugenic thinking. Finally, Chapter Four traces the ends of queer modernist geographies in Isherwood’s early novels All the Conspirators (1928), Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). Tempering the discourse of sexology and psychoanalysis with a critical theory approach, these chapters offer an account of the rich and diverse ways that the pluralistic categorisation of queerness shapes textual geographies in the 1913-1939 period.

This thesis explores live literature and its cultural value through experiential literary ethnography. Focusing on fiction in performance, it features ethnographies of two contrasting live literature events: the Hay Festival and the Polari Salon. Although live literature has grown fast to become a central part of contemporary literary culture, it has been neglected in scholarship until recently, particularly in relation to fiction, and in terms of performance, reception and value, and through phenomenological research. My experiential literary ethnographies are composed using creative writing techniques in order to evoke and recreate key elements of participant experience at live literature events. Participants include both author-performers and reader-audiences. From the ethnographies, I distil key insights into each event, and into live literature and its cultural value. I argue that experiential literary ethnography is an approach that has the capacity to illuminate the value of other arts-based events and cultural practices, and the potential to be fruitfully applied in arts practice, evaluation and funding contexts, as well as in scholarship. An interdisciplinary project, this research draws upon scholarship rooted in anthropology, literary studies, publishing studies, performance studies and neuroscience among other fields.

This thesis accompanies the digital edition of the 'Crónica particular de San Fernando', and includes a rationale for and an explanation of many of the implications of the decisions taken in the preparation of this edition. The edition is used as a case study for the digital editing of medieval prose in Castilian at the present time. To this end, there is an in-depth examination of the history, context and current situation of the digital editing of medieval texts, focussing specifically on prose, and in particular prose in Castilian. The text and contact of the Crónica particular de San Fernando are also studied, to inform the preparation of its digital edition. My central thesis is that the decisions made when preparing a digital edition should take into account the perceived needs of edition users, including both contemporary users and, as far as possible, future users. These decisions should be informed by the nature of the text itself, its context, and transmission, as these will affect how and by whom the edition is used. They should also be informed by an understanding of how digital editions differ from their print counterparts, in both preparation and usage.

Technology has become an increasingly significant element of humans' lives in recent years, and it continues to shape them in ways hitherto only imaginable in science-fiction. Moving beyond humanism, the human/technology relationship has caused the question of what it means to be human to be considered through posthuman thought. I see the reality of technology's effect on human lives giving rise to the figure of the posthuman, in which aspects of the human are replaced or enhanced by technology. Through the posthuman subject, I propose the idea of a postchild and the notion of a posthuman trialism as new ways in which to examine representations of posthumans. Texts aimed a teenage readers frequently offer perspectives on questions of identity formation and the need for adolescent protagonists to find their place in the world. I use a range of young adult texts, with a variety of different types of posthuman protagonists written over the past twenty years, to explore how the posthuman is represented through the narratives, and how power structures and ideologies are conveyed. Through my analyses I demonstrate that, despite technology's apparent superiority, it is human qualities that remain more important in the posthuman, although the extent to which the human is prioritised depends on the way in which technology is employed. My findings provide a clear illustration of how teenage readers are being shown about the ways in which technology can be used and viewed in their lives, and how the human/technology relationship may shape their lives. While the presentations do not portend the dystopian vision of the future still prevalent in many people's minds, they stress the need for humans' use of technology to be questioned by its users and those with power in societies. My new approaches to the posthuman also mean that my work gives ways in which representations of the posthuman in any media can be critically examined.

This comparatist analysis of Japanese, French and English travel writings representative of the exchange process between Europe and Japan during the Meiji era (1868-1912) after the forced opening through the Perry ships in 1858 critically examines the constitution of a national narrative in the fin de siècle. Following the purely aesthetic fine arts-Japonism, subsequent to the World Exhibitions in London in 1862 and Paris in 1867 (Yumiko Iida), this discussion considers the semi-autobiographical uncanny literary works of Pierre Loti, Lafcadio Hearn, Ōgai Mori, and Sōseki Natsume to depict the intercultural formation of Modern Japan's transnational imaginary with a constructivist approach to modern national identities (Joep Leerssen, Benedict Anderson). Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical concept of the 'uncanny' ('Das Unheimliche', 1919) was adapted for fantastic or exotic literature (Tzvetan Todorov, Homi Bhabha, M. D. Foster), so that these supernatural semi-autobiographical writings will be approached with different traditions of autobiographical or I-novels and the recent comparatist transnational world literature-perspective on the travel of genres (David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova). The very first Japanist novel, Pierre Loti's Madame Chrysanthème (1887), tells the story of his marriage to a commercial Japanese bride, the marriage lasting just as long as his brief journey to Japan. The novel portrays the destabilisation of the Western gaze in the 'Far East' (an apprehension of the 'crisis of the novel'; Hélène de Burgh). Seen from the framework of 'eclectic hybridity', this happened in the aftermath of inner-European post-Napoleonic rivalries, when Japan replaced France as first model of modernity with Germany, as a response to the Prussian victory in 1871. This thesis juxtaposes Madame Chrysanthème with Irish-Greek born writer Lafcadio Hearn's modernist essayistic novels like Kokoro (1896), as well as the anglophone Japanese ghost story collection Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904). Hearn's (whose pen name and naturalised Japanese name was Koizumi Yakumo) supernatural stories are based on both oral and written collections of old Japanese folktales, and their conjugal creation from his wife Setsu Koizumi's so-far neglected translation, retelling and even theatrical performance of these tales represent another form of subversion of modern hermeneutical authorship (Barthes, Foucault). His unique anglophone intervention into Japan's folklore around 1900, posthumously retranslated into Japanese, was historically compared to the Brothers Grimm's Märchen in German Romantic nationalism or Hans Christian Andersen's invention of Danish fairy tales in early to mid-nineteenth century, even similar to the classic French Orientalism of Antoine Galland's Thousand and One Nuits from the seventeenth century (Jack Zipes, Marina Warner). Hearn's biographically rooted exoticism of 'Hoichi the Earless' or 'The Snow-Woman' links ancient or medieval tales with the Victorian and Irish Gothic or with British Hellenism, to form literary discourses of intercultural hybrid Shinto Buddhist restoration and ancestor worship (Sukehiro Hirakawa). This 'auto-exotic' (a term fully developed in the thesis) emergence of modern Japanese literature in Meiji is traced in Ōgai's acquisition of the modernist genre of the novella in his semi-autobiographical 'The Dancing Girl'/'Maihime' (1890) (Yoda Tomiko, D. Washburn a.o.) about the mid-Meiji Japanese adoption of Germany's 'late' (Ben Hutchinson) modernisation, and, Sōseki's Anglo-Japanese novella 'The Tower of London'/'Rondon-tō' (1904) about historical ghosts re-enactment (Susan J. Napier). The thesis compares these to Ōgai's semi-autobiographical novel Vita Sexualis [Uita sekusuarisu] (1909), written in the tradition of the Bildungsoman, which portrays the hybridised legacy of Edo Japan's sexual culture regarding prostitution, homoeroticism, and marital customs, as well as to Sōseki Natsume's epistolary novel Kokoro (1914) on the moral struggle around love, friendship and suicide in Meiji Japan (Stephen Dodd, Vincent Keith). The central concept of 'eclectic hybridity' follows Rumi Sakamoto's exegesis of Yukichi Fukuzawa and is based on Bhabha's non-biological notion of hybridity for modern Japan as an Eurasian 'in-between' (Hutchinson/Williams), close to Yōichi Komori ambivalent idea of a 'self-colonisation', developed for Sōseki Natsume's literature as national allegory of Japan's rise from an almost colonised Asian nation to the Westernised imperialist nation of its own. Modern Japan's standing even as another 'third space' examines the relativisation of Edward Said's Orientalism or Gayatri Spivak's subalterity by under the egis of exoticism by Jennifer Yee, Japanologist use of the 'contact zone' (Mary Louise Pratt) by Karen Thornber, or Sowon S. Park's East Asian 'adaptive comparative'. In Michel Foucault's theoretical traditions of epistemes for modernity as well as constructivist approach to modern national identities, the development of literary Japanism is analysed within 'planetary' world-literary translation processes (Wai Chee Dimock, Franco Moretti, Emily Apter) and a genre-historical focus on the novel(la), the ghost story or fairy tale (N. Paige, F. Mussgnug).

This practice-based, Creative and Critical Writing PhD consists of eight short stories that tell a history of transgender (hereafter trans: a label that covers transsexual, transvestite, transgender and non-binary) people in the United Kingdom from the Victorian period to the present, and a critical thesis about the uses and possibilities of such a project after nearly a century of writing by transgender people that has almost exclusively been autobiographical or theoretical, putting my stories (or ‘Variations') into their historical, political and theoretical contexts. Between them, the Creative and Critical aspects of my PhD demonstrate not just the infinite possibilities of gender self-identification, but also the possibilities for their creative expression, helping to ignite a British literary culture that is not just transgender but also trans-genre. Based on extensive reading, interviews and research, my creative practice moves from the constitution of trans identities via urbanisation (shown in my first story, A Night at the Theatre), legal persecution (A Wo/Man of No Importance) and sexological definition (Reconfiguration) to the challenges of the media ‘outing' transsexual people (Dancing with the Devil), the marginalisation of trans people within gay and lesbian-led political movements (Never Going Underground) and the portrayal of trans people within mainstream UK cinema during the 1990s (‘The Twist'). Moving into the 21st century, it looks at some of the fractures that made it harder for trans people to organise outside of mainstream political parties or LGB (and not always T) institutions (Crossing) and the frustrations of trying to work within the mainstream media, to make trans people not just more visible in themselves, but also to raise awareness of their social concerns (Tipping Point). The stories are set in a variety of locations – several take place in London, but others play out in Cardiff, Manchester, Brighton and Belfast. They feature a range of protagonists, starting with male-to-female cross-dressers, taking in the country's first transsexual men of the inter-war period, to the transsexual women who found themselves on the fringes of the gay liberation movement after the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, and the emergence of non-binary people in the 21st century. The Critical Commentary builds on this process of creative-critical practice. It looks at how and why memoir became the dominant mode of trans writing, with autobiographical texts becoming a crucial means for trans authors to counter the tropes of exploitative press coverage. It also asks how transgender theory arose (almost exclusively in North America) through critiques of those memoirs, addressing the work of Kate Bornstein and Sandy Stone in particular. It looks at the reasons for those two genres forming the framework for nearly all writing by trans people about trans people until very recently. It concludes by proposing that new forms are needed that will enable more complicated contracts between authors and readers than have been possible in non-fiction works; and enable us not just to bridge, but to transcend the divide between ‘memoir', which has long been characterised as written for ‘outsiders', and ‘theory', positioned as being written for ‘us' [trans people]. In this light, it concludes that fiction, because of its capacity to speculate about characters' motives rather than simply describe their actions, might be able to provoke people to think about the historical presence of trans people, and the formation of a ‘community' with shared social and political concerns, in different ways.

In this thesis I examine contemporary life writing about mental illness published in the UK and USA. I focus on memoirs that exceed and disrupt conventional narrative typologies of overcoming, triumph, and quest, which dominate in contemporary culture and critical thought. I analyse prose and graphic texts that self-consciously experiment with methods of narrating experiences of mental illness and, subsequently, complicate how such stories are read. To achieve this I develop a feminist methodology that brings together theory and approaches from the critical medical humanities, critical disability studies, critical trauma studies, autobiography studies, and, in the final chapter, comics studies. This commitment to interdisciplinarity allows me to negotiate the complex entanglements of mental illness, madness, psychiatric disability, trauma, and distress. As such, my thesis responds to and extends calls within the critical medical humanities to adopt interdisciplinary methodologies; to attend to complicated acts of narrative; to interrogate practices of reading illness narratives; and to analyse the polyvalent work they perform. My readings explore writers' critiques of their diagnosis, the intersections of mental illness and histories of sexual violence, relationality and interdependence, and the embodied nature of mental illness. Through these textual analyses I identify a set of critical strategies - including ambiguity, entanglement, polyvocality, and hybridity - through which my selection of writers convey their lived experiences of mental illness. My sustained emphasis on process and form is not merely driven by aesthetic interest, but by a recognition that these kinds of transgressive narratives, precisely because of their difficulty, have much to say about the ongoing complexities and messiness of living with mental illness. I argue that these writers use such critical strategies not only to destabilise assumptions about living with mental illness, but also to disrupt attempts to contain, control, and categorise how such experiences are told in narrative.

This thesis explores the reading and reception of contemporary postcolonial literatures. It develops an innovative theory of reading postcolonial literatures, which views reading as dialectically material and textual, as affective, and as ethical and political. This theory democratises the reading of postcolonial literatures. It legitimises a greater variety of reading-positions as compatible with postcolonialism, as a project of contesting the material and epistemic legacies of empire. It also accounts for readings which are not postcolonial. The thesis proceeds to place this theory of reading in conversation with actual responses to contemporary postcolonial literatures, recorded in world media, critical studies, personal blogs, and the social media platforms Amazon UK and Goodreads. I focus specifically on the reception of The Satanic Verses (1988), A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007), and Harare North (2009). By testing and refining my theory of reading in these three reception studies, this thesis draws three main conclusions about reading. First, reading is intrinsically hybrid, conditioned by intersecting material and textual activities. Second, reading is essentially diverse and never wholly determined in advance by material, institutional, cultural, religious, geopolitical, or national associations. Third, and finally, reading is a form of non-understanding. This thesis therefore works against postcolonial scholars’ prescription of more and more ideal readings. Its sustained theoretical and empirical engagement with actual reading in fact makes clear that postcolonialists’ purported textualist or materialist reading-positions are essentially comfortable fictions that deny the hybridity of reading. This thesis also intervenes in postcolonial scholars’ tendency to uncritically denigrate ‘Western’, ‘European’, or non-professional readers as incapable of reading and realising postcolonial literatures. There is no coherent ‘Western’ (or, for that matter, ‘Muslim,’ or ‘Chinese,’ or ‘African’) way of reading. Moreover, the non-professional readings considered here repeatedly demonstrate such readers’ capacity for (self-)critical insight.

What role does literature play in mediating, contesting and reconfiguring the relations between humanity and animality? How do authors tell stories about human mastery over animals? And what capacity does literature have, both formally and thematically, to position the human with and alongside animality, rather than against it? In this thesis, I offer an answer to these questions by exploring the writing of three late-twentieth-century authors - W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee, and Mahasweta Devi - who each developed a literary attentiveness towards the animal. The burgeoning discipline of critical animal studies teaches us that literature plays an important role in dramatising the relations between the species. Elsewhere, theories of biopolitics, feminism and critical race studies reveal that the 'human' is discursively produced in contradistinction to what is deemed not-human. But until now, animal studies has tended to concentrate on the representation of animals; and biopolitics has tended to prioritise the human over the animal. This thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge by introducing the term creaturely forms in order to analyse how the representation of both human and nonhuman life is inextricable from questions of literary form, and how the politics of literature is connected to the question of who or what counts as 'human'. Informed by the recent re-emergence of the concept of the 'creaturely' in critical theory, this thesis argues that writers such as Sebald, Coetzee and Mahasweta develop creaturely forms: they reshape literary forms so as to accommodate animality, to unmake hegemonic modalities of subjectivity, and to question literature's role in reproducing the human over the animal; in doing so, these forms of writing affirm a less narrowly human, and hence more creaturely, form of life.

My PhD thesis addresses the question of how multilingual and exophonic writers used 'other' languages to express distinct cultural and identity concerns. I argue that writers have used languages in their fiction to negotiate the new voice of a migrant/minority community with the dominant culture and to challenge the mainstream reader to find new ways of reading the migrant/minority experience. In the critical thesis I explore such themes as writing in exile, narrative fugues, rhizomatic writing as they weave into my writing poetics. I use the concepts of a musical fugue and a rhizome to explore the politics of identity and language in the context of migration and displacement. These concepts offer a new way of reading the migrant experience by reframing it as the polyphony of multiplicity rather than the monophony of difference. Through my essayistic exploration, the critical thesis becomes a commentary on the novel and my manifesto as an exophonic writer who has chosen English rather than Polish as the main literary language. I have used the results of my research to write Homeland Variations, a novel merging the interweaving stories of various migrants (Jan, Janine, her parents, Małgosia, Uncle Jurek, Maria, and Sophie in Amsterdam) into one fugal narrative and exploring the questions of language, identity, and place. The novel consists of two parts: Jan's and Janine's stories which stand in a counterpoint relation to each other and exist independently, just like two melodies in a fugue, connected through themes, languages, a character Maria, and a place - Edinburgh where both stories end. The two stories stand independently also with regards to the narrative style, as Jan's narrative is surrealist, while Janine's is realist. Homeland Variations portrays the loss of the mother tongue, the loss of social environment, and all the connections that make us feel that we belong. Through the voices of migrating characters, it looks at interactions within linguistic landscapes, at the distance and separation from everything anyone who lives 'in exile' desires to call home. In the novel I merge languages on the page to show the multiple, centri-fugal, rhizomatic nature of being a migrant and writing in a foreign language. My creative vision goes against the monolithic "one nation-one state-one language" approach to both writing and migration. Both the critical thesis and the novel are my attempts to find language to talk about language in the acceptance of our state of being unsettled.

This thesis comprises a novel and a critical essay. Both investigate the philosophical, political and aesthetic implications of trying to understand and write the real, focusing on mimesis, interpretation, boundary-making and the possibility of connection. Although each piece can stand-alone, they have been developed in tandem, with each feeding into and informing the other. My critical essay draws on a wide range of theoretical arguments to explore the possibilities for a new multidisciplinary understanding of realism. The importance of the mimetic faculty in our existential reality and a focus on the materiality of language are crucial to my argument. I explore how pattern decipherment is a fundamental part of our being-in-the-world and offer a re-working of the post-structuralist split between word and thing. Responding to arguments discussed in the essay, my novel questions the idea of fixed boundaries and the dangers of binary thinking. It consciously shows how narrative is co-created through a cognitive, pattern-making desire to form a whole from disparate parts, problematizing any realism that claims to impart a fixed truth or objective 'external' reality. The novel explores the material and linguistic ways in which narratives are created, incorporating discourses of epigenetics, big data and psychometric testing. Its fragmented style combines theory, scientific discourse and autofiction to create the experience of an everyday in need of constant interpretation, a dissonant paradox that combines a deeply interconnected materiality reality with an experience of it that is continually interrupted and alienated. Through fragmentation and the play of the seemingly random, I critique the information-overload of our contemporary digital everyday, exploring how the logic of equivalence and simultaneity can affect the sense-making patterns that structure our reality. The novel functions as a constellation, achieving narrative through a mimetic reading of relation, resemblance and analogy. I argue that the constellation - as an arrangement of the unfixed yet readable, and the creation of meaning through open, changing relations rather than fixity - offers a form able to interact with, and write, the interdependent, symbiotic real it exists within.

The primary aim of this thesis is to investigate the complex relationship between contemporary trans rights discourses and contemporary trans fiction by trans authors with a critical framework informed by scholarship in the field of trans theory. Trans theory cannot exist separately from lived experience, and I argue that trans authored texts are the written equivalent of lived experience. I state that trans theory is uniquely positioned to consider the impact of theoretical concerns on subjective experience and the ways in which seemingly disparate communities may be linked through shared oppression. In showing that trans theory may be thematically applied to trans texts, this thesis provides the basis for a framework of trans literary analysis that may be applied to all texts. The analysis is presented thematically, covering the topics of essentialism, passing, representation and violence. Each theme is discussed theoretically and then used to analyse two trans authored fiction texts. In order to provide my analysis, I have used and modified Judith Butler's work on cultural intelligibility and viability (1990, 2008), and Johanne Galtung's work on types of violence (1969, 1998) as lenses for analysis to better account for the specific ways in which societies have an impact on trans lived experience and oppression. An objective of this thesis is to highlight the importance of trans narratives in society and how their analysis is beneficial both theoretically and socially. My main contributions to knowledge within this thesis are twofold: I create a paradigm for the development of trans theory as a method of literary criticism; and I apply this to the previously under acknowledged genre of trans fiction.