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This study investigates what it meant to choose to be a pirate in early modern England. It examines a range of texts primarily from the period 1580-1680 and explores how the choice to participate in piracy was perceived by participants, by the law and by wider society. The texts discussed include manuscript writings of seamen, legal and ecclesiastical texts, and popular literature including news pamphlets, travel writing, drama and ballads. The thesis reads these texts together to uncover the complexity of contemporary attitudes towards piracy. Each of the chapters is structured around a pivotal moment of choice in the lives of seamen and pirates: choosing a career at sea, turning to piracy, becoming a renegade, and the final choice of how they represented themselves at execution. The focus on these moments of transition reveals how piracy and the sea were perceived by seamen, some of the aspirations they held, and how they were able to act on their choices. These decisions all placed seamen in conflict with authority -parental, legal, religious and state -and each evoked a wealth of textual responses from a range of perspectives which the study contrasts to illuminate wider social responses to piracy. Analysing this material together, the study unearths evidence of robust social networks which supported and sustained pirates. The thesis argues that piracy was viewed as a means of achieving wealth and status outside orthodox social hierarchies and, as such, was variously perceived as both opportunity and threat.

Over the nineteenth century, Britain and France underwent an ongoing process of bureaucratisation, whereby informal, customary, or patrimonial social structures were progressively transformed into impersonal administrative systems typified by delineated hierarchies and standardised procedures. Bureaucratic organisation clustered around an emergent workplace, the office, its tasks were fulfilled by an ever-growing clerical workforce, and, in turn, these phenomena gained a newfound position in French and British culture. The clerk in particular figured in nineteenth-century literature as an archetype of social ambiguity and often mind-numbing, inconsequential work, epitomised by Charles Dickens as 'no variety of days' - and critical analysis of this literature has since continued to focus on the clerk as a rather tragicomic social enigma. While I do not dispute the conclusions derived from this approach, in this thesis I shift critical attention from social issues pertaining to the clerk toward the broader aesthetic implications and context of nineteenth-century bureaucratisation - represented here through the history of a genre that I call 'office literature'. Through a comparative analysis of French and British office literature (texts that give substantial attention to the portrayal of office life) I argue that this genre offers an insight into the material and conceptual development of office work and bureaucratic structures over the nineteenth century, but that this genre was also subject to its own logic of development, one determined by changing aesthetic and cultural preoccupations as much as by social factors. As such, office literature cannot simply function as a window onto historical bureaucratisation, but neither is it wholly detached from the realities of its subject-matter: rather, it represents a bundle of influences and preoccupations - historical, social, epistemic, aesthetic, and generic - whose predominance and interaction shift over time, and which therefore need outlining and examining before the historical pertinence of this genre can become apparent.

This thesis examines the railway space between 1860 and 1880. By railway space, I mean the entire assembly of seemingly discrete parts (stations, carriages, tunnels, and tracks both above and below ground) brought together into one unified locality that is at once open and off-limits, accessible and regulated. My argument draws on Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space (1974), alongside other more recent works of spatial theory, to explore how the railway space is represented in mid-nineteenth-century British literature as an ideological product of Victorian society. As such, it perpetuates all the principles of the capitalist culture that built it; namely, the mercenary and consumeristic nature of nineteenth-century industrialism, the repurposing of nature and pre-existing places, the mechanisation of individuals, and the forced obedience to its systematic rules. Through analysing novels, novellas, and short stories by George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, and Charles Dickens alongside poems by Alexander Anderson and pieces from a variety of Victorian periodicals, this thesis provides a wide-ranging intervention into the field of railway studies in nineteenth-century literature. Each chapter centres around a specific space that the railway produced: the arrival of railway space, the junction space, the London Underground, workers on the tracks, and the violent destruction of space during accidents. The first three chapters of this project explore the literary representations of the network's production and solidification, focusing on its impact on the old places and ways of life, the costs upon those who fully integrate with it but equally the impact on those who fall outside of its progress, and repeatedly ask what is gained and lost by these new transportation spaces. In contrast, the final two chapters explore how writers sought a renegotiation of the terms of spatial production, with Chapter Four reclaiming the workers at the heart of the railway space, and Chapter Five demonstrating how railway crashes unified the press against railway directors and how passengers found ways to escape, fight back, and bring change when faced with the violence of accidents.

This thesis explores the representation of utopian spaces as a form of opposition to capitalism in contemporary literature and poetry. The spatial focus of the thesis is the commons - a form of spatial, social, and political organisation which, I argue, has been undergoing a decade-long resurgence in literature as well as activist theory and practice. At the same time as commons are witnessing renewed interest, I position the previous decade as defined by interlinked capitalist crises of inequality, political representation, mobility, and climate change, which expose a growing section of the planetary population to precarity. The thesis distinguishes a corpus of texts from the wider field of contemporary political and speculative literature, identifying these texts as commons utopias. Commons utopias are united by a set of valuable features: they build on the forms of earlier utopian literature, particularly the 'critical utopias' of the 1960s-70s; actively oppose contemporary capitalism; depict the crises of the present alongside the utopian spaces which emerge within it; and make use of a commons poetics, a toolkit of literary techniques which captures the politics, subjectivities, and spatialities of oppositional utopian commons. The thesis assembles and examines five commons utopias: the poetry collection That Winter the Wolf Came by Juliana Spahr (2015); and the novels Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (2017), New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson (2017), The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch (2017), and Walkaway by Cory Doctorow (2017). I also examine the film Snowpiercer, directed by Bong Joon-ho (2013), as a proto-utopian text which illustrates contemporary modalities of precariousness and crisis. I hope that this study succeeds in identifying and critiquing a valuable recent tendency in contemporary literature and poetics; in contributing to ongoing debates in the field of utopian studies; and in furthering the productive relationship between utopianism and oppositional political theory.

Literary trauma theory, in tandem with the clinical understanding of trauma, has been evolving rapidly since the mid-1990s. In this thesis I will examine how emerging and shifting theories have intersected with my own writing on trauma in relation to civil conflict. Until recently, trauma theorists have largely and unquestioningly viewed the portrayal of trauma in fiction as important for its ability to create empathy in readers. However, empathy alone has not been the primary goal of my own writing and I question its usefulness as an end in itself. Rather, and by describing my process and the evolution of my own creative thinking, I have strived over nearly twenty years of writing and publishing at prompting from my readers an engagement with the narrative that goes beyond empathy, one which might promote internal change which would in turn produce a fresh perspective. I challenge reflexive assumptions about trauma and describe the ways in which literature might offer victims, in place of pity, the possibility of healing and even transcendence.

'Intermezzo' is an ekphrastic text that seeks to synthesize the painterly musical language of Claude Debussy's Préludes for piano in the form of a novel. This commentary gives some context to Debussy as a composer, offers a rationale for the elements of the music affecting a listener that seemed most pertinent for an apparatus against which to write a novel, and then a description of these with explanation on how they are transposed into text. The Préludes, composed between and 1909-1913, comprises a set of twenty-four short pieces, written in two volumes numbered one to twelve. For clarity those in Book I are referred to as I-XII and those in Book II as XIII to XIV. Each is about the length of a modern popular song — averaging a little over three minutes in length each. They embrace, in part, a tradition of preludes in piano music, but are not written in all twenty-four major and minor keys signatures, unlike Bach's or Chopin's, and do not exhibit an easily discernible overall structure. Indeed, some pieces were intended to be enjoyed by the player, as if in some reverie on their own. Debussy never performed his Préludes as a cycle, and in their first public performance in 1910 Debussy played I, II, X and XI from Book I, and subsequent performances were of groups or individual preludes (Walsh 2018). Each prelude is numbered on the musical score, but then appended with a title (listed in Table 1 on page 13), drawn mainly from literary sources, which provides a clue as to the image Debussy was seeking to evoke. The placing of the title at the end was to allow the listener to hear the music unaffected by a prescribed image or description. He had broad musical tastes, from music hall to folk, ballet and non-Western European influences (Bruhn 2010); his artistic milieu included poets, other composers, novelists, playwrights, poets, painters and sculptors, and his interests extended to film, illustration and photography and his interests inspired both his composition and fuelled the subsequent analysis by others of his music (Walsh 2018). The titles are not included in the text of Intermezzo; this was decided on with consideration of the reader who might be distracted, misled, or confused by them.

This thesis investigates the theological underpinnings of Geoffrey Hill's work, by focusing on how Christianity inflects his poetry, and the rhetoric of his sermons. Christianity is a constant presence pervading Hill's work, but the way in which it is allowed to shape his poetical writings and sermons is highly particular and at times unorthodox. Hill's approach to Christianity rejects an unquestionable espousal of doctrine, and is instead crystallised around a process of exploration of faith as anchored in immediate experience. The abstraction of theological thought and doctrine is made material within the poetic act, and within the rhetoric of his sermons. Hence his poetry tackles Christianity in a materially-engaged manner and engages with particular artistic and devotional forms in an attempt to concretise the intangibility of the divine. This thesis explores architecture, music, and prayer, as three artistic and devotional forms, which emerge as fundamental in anchoring his theological thought in the materiality of experience and of the natural world. In his sermons, theology is explored in a similarly engaged way, with his rhetorical choice being carefully considered, and religious exposition often hinging on a more immediate domain, such as literature, history, and Hill's personal experience of faith. The material anchoring of his poems and sermons, considered together, provides a new and useful lens into how Christianity finds its way into Hill's thought and works.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the cultural, political and ideological objectives that led to the issuing of British and Irish literature in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and to analyse the socio-cultural dimensions of the reception of British literature in the GDR between 1949 and 1989. Its purpose is to examine the complicated relationship between the political organisation of the GDR and the prevailing ideology with regards to British and Irish literature. The motivation for this choice of topic derives from a lack of a comprehensive academic work on the subject of the publication and reception of British and Irish literature in the former GDR. The study examines to what degree the function of imported British and Irish literature was to praise Marxism and bring the population of the GDR to a better understanding of socialist ideology. Consequently, English classics-the social novels of prominent 19th century British writers-and those of post-war anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, social realist and modernist British and Irish authors are evaluated with reference to their reception in the GDR. Given the fact that these works were not written to meet the requirements of Socialist Realism, the objective is to assess the reason(s) for their translation and publication in the GDR. This is achieved by tracing the outline of socialist ideology in the political works of the founders of the GDR by examining archival documents; by studying the publications of the GDR's literary critics, scholars, editors and officials; and finally, by analysing the relevance of this to published works of British and Irish literature. Key issues-like the reception of British and Irish literature in socialist society, the relationship between realism and modernism in literature, and the complex relationship between publisher, ideology and cultural politics-are examined by regarding these as more than purely theoretical issues or abstract cultural problems. Instead, these are considered to be social issues that can only be settled at the level of practice. Consequently, in conjunction with socialist ideology, the project examines to what degree East German intellectuals (publishers, censors, scholars and politicians) were bound by both their history and the socialist ideology and culture they wished to establish. It will also consider the extent to which this influenced publication strategies for different genres of British and Irish literature. Additionally, the focus lies on the examination of strategies for the avoidance of conflicts between the ruling party and presiding authorities. The analysis is supported by an evaluation of the relationship between the development of socialist literary theory and the process of cultural transformation in the GDR. A close textual analysis of a large number of British publications (poetry, drama, fiction), and the study of socio-cultural, ideological and political conditions in the GDR, reveals that publication strategies match the course of socio-cultural change. The analysis is based on academic works written by leading (former) East German scholars of literature (Marxist literary critics) as well as on a variety of sources such as historical documents available at archives, censorship reports and contemporary literary scholarship. The study is substantially based on historical sources.

This thesis argues that contemporary mixed-race authors, such as Zadie Smith, are central cultural figures through which narratives of British mixed race have been constructed and circulated post-2000. This thesis argues that the discourses of race constructed and disseminated to the wider British public by external agents, such as journalists, publishers, reveal the persistence of limiting narratives of mixed race in Britain today. Taking a case study approach, this thesis analyses ideas of mixedness that are established through the media coverage surrounding their work, alongside the modes of mixedness made available through their work, arguing that their texts provide a crucial intervention into narratives of mixed race, and race more broadly, in contemporary Britain. Alongside this analysis of external representations of mixedness, this thesis also examines the representation of mixed-race identity made available through the work of the authors themselves, arguing that these insider-led explorations of mixedness speak to, and against, mainstream narratives of mixedness and offer new representations and interpretations of mixedness. This thesis takes within its scope the ways in which ideas about mixed race have peaked throughout the twenty-first century, from the release of Zadie Smith's White Teeth in 2000 through to the present day. The authors I focus on are Zadie Smith (White Teeth, 2000, Swing Time, 2016 and Feel Free, 2018), Hari Kunzru (The Impressionist, 2002 and White Tears, 2017), Monica Ali (Brick Lane, 2003) and Diana Evans (26a, 2005 and Ordinary People, 2018).

This thesis considers the imbrications created by James Joyce in his writing with the work of John Milton, through allusions, references and verbal echoes. These imbrications are analysed in light of the concept of 'presence', based on theories of intertextuality variously proposed by John Shawcross, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and Eelco Runia. My analysis also deploys Gumbrecht's concept of stimmung in order to explain how Joyce incorporates a Miltonic 'atmosphere' that pervades and enriches his characters and plot. By using a chronological approach, I show the subtlety of Milton's presence in Joyce's writing and Joyce's strategy of weaving it into the 'fabric' of his works, from slight verbal echoes in Joyce's early collection of poems, Chamber Music, to a culminating mass of Miltonic references and allusions in the multilingual Finnegans Wake.

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

This thesis examines a number of texts from the mid-nineteenth century which portray the land of Palestine. A 'biblical' land may seem familiar but in actuality naturalises a combination of that historical and geographical concepts to produce an identity for the land that overrides contemporary experience of it. In the context of an Evangelical movement that sought the conversion of Jews, representations of the land link the restoration of the Jews to Palestine. Jews' link to the land became exploited by Protestants because of the changing circumstances of the Eastern Question. The texts below confront the relationship between cliché and geographical actuality, recognizing an indigenous Christianity at odds with the restraint of Protestant worship. By following the chronological development of the Protestant view of Jews I argue that there is an apparent warmer portrayal of Jewish characters in fiction, corresponding to increased interest in the land yet whether there is lessening anti-Semitism is questionable because the Jewish characters become agents of Evangelical prophetic fulfilment rather than independently drawn characters. Language used to describe the land increasingly reflected a Protestant and imperial topography as Palestine was increasing imagined as part of the western economy and potential western polity.

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

This thesis traces British responses to the French Revolution between 1790 and 1795 in the work of three women writers: Helen Maria Williams (1761-1827), Charlotte Smith (1749-1803), and Mary Wollstonecraft (1756-1798). I am concerned with their changing ways of responding to the situations in France between 1790 and 1795, and the choices in genre that they made to express their opinions on the Revolution. These writers continued to publish works related to the Revolution, in defiance of hostile British reactions to the Revolution. This thesis also explores the personal correspondence that Williams, Smith, and Wollstonecraft exchanged with their friends, and reveals the dynamics of their friendships in relation to the writers' support for the Revolution. By reading their publications and personal letters together, this study aims to tell stories of their lives between 1790 and 1795.

This thesis demonstrates that Tudor councillors and their clients raided the armoury of rhetoric to condemn sedition for over thirty years, using persuasive techniques which crossed confessional lines. It reconstructs, in fuller detail than has ever been attempted, the Tudor literary campaigns against rebels, tracing the origin and development of the anti-sedition oration. It begins by proposing a systematic framework for classifying early modern persuasive writings. Then, in analysing the major Tudor rebellions, it argues that governments employed a highly communicative style of politics at times of crisis. They opened emergency channels of communication with subjects, condemning disobedience but nonetheless listening to rebel grievances. Loyalist authors did not intend to subject government policy to public approval, or to communicate with the monarch by garnering public support: they were simply applying the Ciceronian idea that oratory is the best way to persuade the multitude. Tudor authors normally defend government policy not by appealing to the king's absolute authority but by pointing out that policy had been approved by the king in Parliament.

This thesis is a historical, biographical and literary investigation into modern poets' diverse engagements with the visual arts and ekphrasis. The project situates contemporary poets in the context of the age of digital reproduction, which evolves from the Benjaminian age of mechanical reproduction, and re-frames ekphrastic poetry within an intricate network of relations between poets and the visual arts. Earlier studies of ekphrasis postulated a competitive relationship between poetry and the visual arts, but critics have now turned to recognise modern poets' readings of not only works of art but their representations of life subjects. In line with this critical paradigm shift, I argue for a current, ongoing moment of a kind of biographically-inflected ekphrasis in the lengthy history of modern ekphrasis and poetry. I suggest that modern poets return to exploring the complex relations between visual artworks, artists, and viewers. The main body of the thesis is made of the case studies of three contemporary poets Pascale Petit, George Szirtes, and Tamar Yoseloff, chosen for their lifelong commitment to the visual arts and ekphrasis. I call them 'ekphrasists' and suggest that they take their bearings from their poetic, artistic and critical predecessors and contemporaries. Drawing on psychoanalytic and life-writing theories, especially Christopher Bollas' 1987 notion of the transformational object, the case studies read their bio-ekphrastic oeuvres as three sustained life-writing projects about the transformational agency of art. This interdisciplinary project reveals new dimensions to modern poets' engagements with the visual arts and ekphrasis as extremely fertile grounds for their various autobiographical and biographical purposes.

This project focuses on American art and fiction in the long nineties (1989-2001). Specifically, it explores the critical strategies that artists working in this decade employ in their efforts to challenge aspects of the political philosophy of neoliberalism, in the wake of the declining power of postmodern aesthetics. My approach to this topic is structured around a series of readings of genres. This structure imitates Hal Foster's recent work Bad New Days, in which Foster engages with four 'terms', noting that 'some are closer to strategies, others to predicaments.' As for Foster, each genre I engage with contains elements of both strategy and predicament: they generate new ideas about remaking the word - strategies that might be considered post-postmodern - as well as manifesting intractable political and aesthetic situations beyond which the artists working in this period struggle to move. Each genre ultimately represents one specific critical approach to neoliberalism in the 1990s, from the withdrawal central to the slacker narrative to the mediation by which suburban fiction engages with financialisation, to the abject art that forces a confrontation with the outer limits of what fiction can represent and accomplish.

The foundation of the Republic of Turkey, and the Republic's subsequent reforms, have marked an era from 1923 onwards where not only politics, but also many aspects of quotidian life have been defined according to a division of secular Left versus religious Right. Adherents of both views have since been living within these constructs whereby the other end of the spectrum is viewed as an enemy. Yet from the 1990s onwards three novels have been published, which transgressed this binary regardless of their authors' leftist alignment. These are Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book (1990), Elif Shafak's The Forty Rules of Love (2010), and Ahmet Ümit's The Dervish Gate (2008). In order to do so, these texts revisited the life of a thirteenth-century Sufi poet, Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi. Providing a brief history of the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey, I turn to these novels and ask why, and how, these three prominent Left-aligned novelists write about Rumi's life in their major novels. I argue that their engagement in this rewriting is a self-reflection of the camp they identify with, and that they use Rumi's life as a platform to criticise the Republican ideology and its reforms. In my close reading of the novels, I apply theories of allegory, metaphysical detective fiction, crime fiction, epistolarity, the fantastic mode, Rebecca Walkowitz's coinage of "born translated", and the concepts of conviviality and pluralism. These concepts and theories have either never been considered in depth or have been overlooked by existing criticism on the novels. Reading against the grain in this way, I not only make use of the political ideas of the novelists and the history of the Turkish Republic, but also explore the references the authors make to the Qur'an and to Rumi's major works and teachings.

This thesis examines the prospect of translating Shakespeare's sexual double meaning by means of the vocabulary and behavioural traits pertinent to Mexican albur - a variety of friendly verbal duel with sexual puns. Following the functionalist approach of Skopostheorie, which focuses on purpose as the primary guideline for translational action, I deliver an overview of contemporary Mexican culture and society as a way of understanding how better to fulfil the purpose of my translation, which is to successfully convey sexual double meaning as a way of bringing Mexican audiences closer to Shakespearean theatre practice. Accordingly, I provide a description of albur and its particular dynamics in Mexican culture and consider the history of Mexican Shakespeare translation, which is inevitably tied to issues of colonialism and the strong influence of early Iberian translations. I then offer commentary on some relevant examples of easily accessible translated text for which the original displays sexual double meaning. Finally, I propose my own translation of selected sections of Shakespearean sexual double meaning as proof to the potential of my approach. The theoretical ground provided by Skopostheorie allows me to pursue a fluid translational action as opposed to a finished target text, therefore encouraging diversity in translation choices and signalling a more dynamic conversation between Mexicanity and Shakespeare tradition.

This thesis argues that the concept of apocalypse, or revelation, is central to the theology of Nick Cave as expressed in his body of written and performed work. It examines this work, with particular reference to his lyrics, as expressing a systematic theology rooted in divine revelation. In so doing, the thesis argues the virtues of taking Cave seriously as a contemporary artist engaging with theological concerns, as well as placing him in a literary tradition of writers who have made (particularly, but not solely, Christian) theology a central concern in their work from a position outside and/or critical of an established church. The thesis takes on wider concepts such as Cave's relation to tradition and the importance of individualism in his work, clarifying these large questions by arguing that they are best approached from a theological standpoint. As well as being an intervention in the nascent and presently stagnant field of Cave studies, the thesis offers a literary paradigm for the reading of lyrics which seeks to emphasise both the continuity and the discontinuity between song lyrics and lyric poetry. In doing so, it synthesises this literary approach with the influence of sociological popular music studies in outlining how media and audience reception operate in relation to the text and the performer.

This thesis explores the relationship between literature and the public sphere in the internet age. The introduction identifies gaps on these three topics in current academic work, and outlines the need for clarification of the links between them. The chapters go on to explicate these links with reference to the work of four contemporary authors, namely Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace. In their writing, these authors all identify different challenges to the public sphere in the internet age and, in response, 'model' alternative modes of being in the public sphere. These modes of being emerge from the particular formal affordances of literature, and are described here as forms of 'literary publicness.' The thesis situates these authors on a spectrum of discursive agency, ranging from a view of the public sphere in which writers are seen as authoritative, to a view in which reading processes are prioritised. Each chapter also addresses how these authors have themselves been considered as figures in the public sphere. As such, the story that this thesis tells both helps to clarify the role that culture plays in the public sphere, and reveals the concept of the public sphere itself as a key locus of the relationship between contemporary literature and the internet.

This thesis explores the writing of a large selection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century East and West Yorkshire poets, making a case for Yorkshire as a poetic place. The study begins with Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, and concludes with Simon Armitage, Sean O'Brien and Matt Abbott's contemporary responses to the EU Referendum. Aside from arguing the significance of Yorkshire poetry within the British literary landscape, it presents poetry as a central form for the region's writers to represent their place, with a particular focus on Yorkshire's languages, its identities and its crises. Among its original points of analysis, this thesis redefines the narrative position of Larkin and scrutinizes the linguistic choices of Hughes; at the same time, it identifies and explains the roots and parameters of a fascinating new subgenre that is emerging in contemporary West Yorkshire poetry. This study situates its poems in place whilst identifying the distinct physical and social geographies that exist, in different ways, throughout East and West Yorkshire poetry. Of course, it interrogates the overarching themes that unite the two regions too, with emphasis on the political and historic events that affected the region and its poets, alongside the recurring insistence of social class throughout many of the poems studied here. Moreover, this study reflects on contemporary Yorkshire poetry alongside the rhetoric surrounding Britain's decision to Leave the European Union in June 2016. It comprises the first substantial study of several contemporary poets, whilst conducting the first detailed literary and sociolinguistic examination of poetic responses to the Brexit crisis, as ongoing in 2019. Ultimately, this thesis concludes with substantial in-depth evidence to argue not only Yorkshire's validity as a poetic place, but that East and West Yorkshire (historically the places of Larkin and Hughes) are, to this day, poetic in their own right.

This thesis examines contemporary literary texts in English from the Caribbean, South Korea, Nigeria, Japan, the U.S., the U.K., and India, and their representations of the embodied resistance practices of people who are marginalised under contemporary globalisation. It also draws upon a play, a film, and an art installation to support these readings. The thesis goes about this through four chapters, considering in sequence how, in these texts, these people enact their own agency and resistance through their bodies in the globalised contexts of new sexual politics, mediatised war, technology, and neo-colonial development. It is attentive to how in each of these contexts and texts, the lived experiences of marginalised peoples are suppressed in various ways: by silencing, making invisible, technologically instrumentalising, and energetically exploiting their bodies. The thesis reads these literary texts as registering bodies that are actively resisting their marginalisation. These texts represent these resistance practices through bodily kinaesthesia, which refers to a body which is sentient and which moves and engages with the world through a form of corporeal consciousness-the lived body. The thesis uses a methodology that takes the lived body as its starting point, which means that the literary text is analysed as a kind of testimony-taking the form of performance and event-that bears witness to marginalisation. Ultimately, by attending to literary representations of bodily kinaesthesia, we can understand how marginalised subjects account for their own particular lived experiences of a globalising world and begin to effect change in embodied ways.

This thesis explores the interplay between reflective objects (mirrors, mirror-like surfaces, but also representational media such as painted portraits) and female figures in nineteenth-century British literature and visual art. The theme of the woman with or at the mirror is a persistent presence in art and literature throughout the nineteenth century, as in Alfred Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shalott' and its pictorial interpretations, Pre- Raphaelite and Neo-Pre-Raphaelite depictions of 'woman with / at the mirror'. This interplay is here considered as a significant cultural phenomenon. The thesis argues that an engagement with its expressions can help us understand the aesthetic and social means of negotiating female identity in this period. The overall argument is that the various interpretations of the 'woman / reflective object' juxtaposition throughout the nineteenth-century self-consciously use the reflective objects as a means of engaging with a traditional dichotomous understanding of femininity and of questioning its validity. In the period under scrutiny, the mirror appears as a symbol of the knowledge and development of feminine identity, as it alternately reveals or conceals the self and/or reflects the world to which the self is tied. Additionally, the mirror often creates an intimate space for femininity, opening up to the woman, but guarding against the intrusion of an external viewer by refracting his or her gaze. These readings are made in light of the historical importance of the mirror as a household object, especially in considering its role within the female sphere. What emerges from the consistent juxtaposition between women and mirrors in nineteenth-century British imagination is the beginning of a cultural dialogue about notions of womanhood: female figures are shown increasingly not just as 'either/or' entities (angels or demons, Magdalens or Madonnas), but potentially as 'both/and' (both angel and demon, virgin and whore).

The last two decades have witnessed a series of spectacular failures which have had severe and widespread global consequences, from the global financial and banking crisis, to the rising threat of climate change, to increasing global wealth inequity. Within academic scholarship, however, failure has often been conceptualised on the level of the individual. This has resulted in a narrow focus on the failed individual and how the individual copes and negotiates with failure, while overlooking its broader causes. In order to address this issue, my thesis approaches failure as a method of characterising global and localised systems and institutions. I identify a sense of global failure which I define as comprising global inequality, economic crisis, and ecological disaster, which informs and is informed by failures specific to localised contexts. I shall define the localised failures in relation to the four novels that constitute my corpus: Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Julia Kristeva's Possessions, and Basma Abdel Aziz's The Queue. I have selected the quest narrative as an ideal vehicle through which to examine failure, due to its particular association with success and its long tradition of adaptability to changing concerns. Being an extremely goal-oriented genre, quest narratives often depict an individual hero, his journey, and the ultimate achievement of his goal. Therefore, by shifting focus away from the individual and his success, this thesis ultimately explores how the contemporary failed quest can function as critiques of the socio-political conditions that rendered failure inevitable.

The phenomenon of celebrity translation in the British theatrical system raises many hitherto unanswered questions about how we evaluate theatre translation using existing theories of translation. It also invites an exploration using a theoretical framework based on Relevance Theory, which examines the effects that a text potentially has on the receiver’s cognitive state in the light of the contextual background of the text, its author and its receivers. With the support of analysis of the source and target texts, audience data, reviews, blogs and social media posts, I explore the extent to which audiences are likely to infer the celebrity translator’s own voice from their translations because of the way in which the celebrity translator’s contextual background (i.e. their assumed style, values, agenda, personality, and so on) influences the reception of his or her text. I then question the implications of celebrity translation for the marketing of translated theatre in the UK, and argue that we should celebrate the way in which celebrity translators increase the visibility of the act of translation and showcase the genre of plays in translation. My assessment of the likely cognitive state of spectators attracted to a play because of the pull of a celebrity translator sheds new light on some of the existing ideas within translation studies regarding the role and responsibilities of the translator. It also adds to our growing understanding of the role played by the receiver’s cognitive context in his or her evaluation of translation and the relationships between source-text author and translator, and between source and target text. As well as adding to scholarly debate about the practice of theatre translation, my research is designed to encourage stakeholders in the UK’s theatrical system to further question the way in which translated play texts are commissioned, funded, marketed and critically evaluated.

This thesis stages an encounter between theories of World Literature and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, using the concept of the line of flight as philosophical motif and methodological refrain. Initially, this will take the form of a critique of representational and metaphorical modes of reading in the work of two prominent world-literary theorists, Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova. In contrast, the second chapter develops a materialist semiotics of world literature referred to as a geoliterature, utilising the concepts developed by Deleuze in collaboration with Félix Guattari and with special focus on Francophone Algerian literature as its practical elaboration. The third chapter extends this theorisation to present an alternative philosophy of postcolonial difference to dialectical models, reading Deleuze's early work on Henri Bergson and his critique of Hegelian dialectics alongside the fiction of Zimbabwean novelist Dambudzo Marechera. The fourth chapter argues that this postcolonial Bergsonism makes Deleuze's philosophy of time, as presented in Difference and Repetition, already a postcolonial alternative to theories of the subject belonging to European modernity. This argument is made by reading Deleuze's 'three syntheses of time' through three contemporary world- literary works by J.M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh and Alexis Wright respectively. In each chapter the line of flight returns as a conceptual motif (whether as the scream in Assia Djebar's work, the rejection of recognition in Dambudzo Marechera's Black Sunlight, or the disjunctive synthesis of the future embodied by Alexis Wright's The Swan Book). The Coda draws these readings together, arguing for a speculative cartography which thinks the becoming of world literature via the aesthetic figure of the line of flight and an ethics of fabulation rather than representation, taking the study of world-literary theory beyond the paradigms of nationalism and globalism which have thus far structured its theoretical development in the field.

This thesis investigates the centrality of non-portable property - the house - in Austen's fictional landscapes, in particular her portrayal of the ways in which her female characters establish feelings of ownership and belonging towards houses they are not legally entitled to own. Austen's novels therefore offer ways of thinking about property that would not be legitimised by the law for several decades after her death. As I demonstrate, through her novels Austen offers more than just a critique of the current property laws and the ways in which they leave women in a precarious situation: she shows how women can circumvent the limitations of the law, in order to develop a sense of purpose for themselves and express their identities through the spaces they create and occupy. In doing so, she legitimises female ownership of property in a way that is distinctly emancipatory. This work is interdisciplinary in nature, in the sense that it draws on the dialogue on women and property, management, education and accomplishments as present in such non-fictional sources as conduct books, diary entries and letters, as well as fictional works of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It at once engages with and challenges social history by exploring the ways in which fiction can represent experiences of ownership that a sole focus on legal discourse would overlook. Through my analysis of Austen's representations of the various relationships women can form with the spaces they inhabit, I encourage a revision of the common conception we currently hold of ownership as something that is dependent on a legal right. This conception, as I argue, is unhelpful in understanding Austen's depiction of women's relationships with property, as well as the ways in which people more generally conceptualise such relationships.

'A Global Schema: The Graeco-Roman Underworld in Ireland and the Caribbean' is an investigation of the complex and multifaceted relationships that postcolonial writers in Ireland and the Caribbean establish with classical antiquity. Acknowledging the thorough classical education system writers like Derek Walcott, Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and Wilson Harris were part of, I place my primary focus on the ways in which these writers position themselves in relation to the classics in their creative work. In my dissertation, I use an investigation of these writers' refigurations of the underworld myth as a basis to argue that it is specifically mnemonic connections that these writers form with antiquity. The connections they form are not defined by a 'filial' relationship with a canonical, European tradition that was forcibly introduced into their countries and that might be seen as evidence of 'anxiety of influence' on their part. Instead, these writers charter their own, self-determined 'frail connections' to antiquity, as Emily Greenwood might phrase it, as they explore the complicated relationships between an increasingly globalised version of antiquity - which they adapt and refigure in their writing - and their own, modern context. This dissertation locates itself in the fields of classical reception, memory studies, critical theory, postcolonial literature, and world literature. It seeks to use the vocabulary and methodologies of memory studies to re-conceptualise the ways in which classical receptionists have understood postcolonial uses of the classics. I propose that the classics have taken on the role of travelling schemata, whereby connotations of ancient images, characters, and narratives have been assimilated into a transcultural mnemonic imagination and are then adapted into a variety of different cultures and contexts. Through this project I hope to show how much both the concerns and methods of classical reception, memory studies and postcolonial literature overlap.

This practice-based creative writing doctorate supports the creation of a novel that is in part, historical fiction, based on research focusing on the discrepancies in the perceived status of women between the pre-Victorian and the postmillennial periods in India. The accompanying component of the doctorate, the analytical thesis, traces the course of this research in connection to the novel's structural development, its narrative complexity and its characters. The novel traces the journey of two women protagonists - each placed in the 18th- and the 21st-centuries, respectively - as they reconcile to the realities of their individual circumstances. The introduction to the critical thesis gives a brief synopsis of the novel. It also explains the rationale behind the approaches used in the novel, and in adopting a post-postcolonial and progressive voice throughout the fictional work. The first chapter in the critical thesis demonstrates how findings from the primary and secondary research have been applied to inform the writing of the novel. It also explains the influence of the Indian oral narrative tradition and its related approaches on the creative process with regards to the novel. The second chapter briefly surveys traditional assumptions about the liberal attitudes to female sexuality in ancient and pre-Victorian India through literary examples. It identifies possible reasons for the changing status of women in contemporary Indian society, specifically in Kerala, which forms part of the settings in the novel. The third chapter in the thesis examines Ambilli's process of self-acceptance or making peace with her past trauma. It draws on the Indian notion of karma, the folktales and storytelling tradition of south India, which believes in the philosophy that stories are one of the means by which women can reconcile to reality. The fourth chapter elaborates upon the narrative devices used in the novel; its metafictional element and the inspiration for it. The thesis concludes by analysing the process of the writing practice and places it within the context of the aims of the research subject: the changing status of women in India over the past three centuries with regards to their sexuality. Finally, the study contributes to contemporary literature by bringing to light some fascinating aspects of the public role of women in ancient and pre-Victorian India as well as some lesser-known historical incidents, and re-interpreting these in the novel in an engaging and informative narrative.

This dissertation will explore the contemporary value of early Daoism, a Chinese indigenous philosophy established prior to the Qin period (221 B.C.E.). It will suggest, as we enter the Age of the Anthropocene, that early Daoist thinking is useful to present-day ecocriticism. In short, it offers a way of restoring spiritual concerns to our thinking about environmental crises that we often presently consider in purely physical and material ways. After setting out the principles of early Daoism and suggesting its usefulness to contemporary ecocriticism, this thesis will consider the poetry of Edward Thomas as a case study of how early Daoism can offer new insights into canonical western literature. It will show how Daoist thinking offers re-readings of Thomas’s poetry that bring spiritual matters to the centre of our understanding of the present environmental quandaries. My project intervenes in the literary field in three ways: firstly, it is a contribution to the literary critical field of Edward Thomas studies; secondly, it brings the tradition of Eastern thought firmly into the realm of ecocriticism; thirdly, it works more broadly to raise the profile of Chinese thinking and further dismantle Euro-American literary and cultural hegemonies.

Many studies on Welsh Writing in English dismiss texts from before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: my thesis adds to the growing field of scholarship on pre-nineteenth century Welsh Writing in English, which primarily focuses on eighteenth century texts, to show the need to also be inclusive of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sixteenth and seventeenth-century Wales was a very different country from what it would become in later centuries, owing to its relative autonomy under the administrative jurisdiction of the Council of Wales and the Marches and its legendary status resulting from the legacy of Geoffrey of Monmouth. As a result, Welsh Writing in English from this period of time is different than that from later eras; it is about a country finding its place in a still relatively recent political union. The texts discussed include English translations of the Latin texts of Humphrey Llwyd and John Owen, as well as English language writing by David Powel, Henry Vaughan and Morgan Llwyd. While all of these writers were born in Wales, I will also consider the writing of two non-Welsh writers based in or around Wales, Katherine Philips (often described as an ‘English exile’ in Wales) and Thomas Churchyard, from the nebulous borderland region of the Marches who has been likened to a ‘ventriloquist’. The first chapter concerns itself with Humphrey Llwyd’s The Breviary of Britain and the way in which Llwyd uses chorography in order to depict the landscape and language of Wales. Chapter two’s focus will be on David Powel and his Historie of Cambria where I will analyse how Powel depicts the history and culture of Wales, while also circumnavigating the politics surrounding his patron, Lord Sidney, and the Council of Wales and the Marches. In the third chapter, I examine the poetry of Henry Vaughan and Morgan Llwyd, two seventeenth-century poets of opposing religious and political ideologies, from their regional contexts in Brecknockshire and Wrexham respectively. The fourth chapter inspects the way in which Thomas Churchyard’s Worthines of Wales and the poetry of Katherine Philips reflect perceptions of Wales during their particular eras in order to see what impact Wales had on the socio-political fabric of the islands. Finally, in the fifth chapter I explore several different English translations of the epigrams of John Owen, an ex-recusant Welsh poet who had moved to England, to assess to what extent translation affected the meaning of Owen’s repertoire: this chapter focuses on the epigrams that most concern Wales. My aim in this thesis is to investigate the ways in which Welsh identity manifests itself in writing landscape, language, history, religion, myth and politics, as well as through hiraeth – a feeling associated with sadness and nostalgia for what has been lost – in order to establish a body of texts for early modern Welsh Writing in English.

Across the work of eleven key authors — Caradoc Evans, Gwyn Thomas, Glyn Jones, Nigel Heseltine, Dylan Thomas, Lynette Roberts, David Jones, Dorothy Edwards, Margiad Evans, Brenda Chamberlain, and Tony Conran — this thesis analyses the output of an Anglophone cultural formation of modernist writers in Wales, whose literature comprise a major — yet neglected — strand of European modernism. The introductory chapter engages with the history of the idea of ‘Modernism’, and the current state of modernist studies within and beyond Wales, arguing that conventional notions of ‘Modernism’ as a fixed, monolithic period confined to the major metropolitan areas of Europe and America are no longer sufficient in light of recent developments in the field. The second chapter examines the controversial writer Caradoc Evans, once considered the ‘father’ of what was commonly called ‘Anglo-Welsh’ literature, whose incendiary 1915 short story collection My People serves as the explosive genesis of Anglophone Welsh modernism. I compare Evans’s work with a later author, Gwyn Thomas, whose 1946 novella Oscar depicts a nihilistic void under the guise of a bleak South Walian valley. Across the following two chapters, I explore the work of writers connected to a cultural formation of Anglophone Welsh modernist writers, utilising the term ‘formation’ as conceptualised by Raymond Williams in Culture (1981). This ‘formation’ occupied the cultural space cleared by Caradoc Evans, used Wales as their social and literary nexus (the magazine was edited by their mutual friend, Keidrych Rhys) and included in their number key writers examined in the thesis, such as Glyn Jones, Nigel Heseltine, Dylan Thomas, Lynette Roberts, and David Jones. In the fifth chapter, I analyse the ‘Gothic Wastelands’ of two recently recovered women writers, Margiad Evans and Dorothy Edwards, who were tangentially connected to the formation. In the sixth chapter, the thesis explores the modernist life-writing of Brenda Chamberlain and Tony Conran, as well as their position as the last members of this particular cultural formation. Finally, the thesis concludes by asking a question which becomes increasingly obvious in the face of the strength, vitality and diversity of Welsh modernism as demonstrated by this thesis: what brings us here so late?

This thesis looks at the interpenetration of mysticism and modernity in the writings of Rabindranath Tagore and William Butler Yeats. The relationship of these poets from Ireland and India, and their analogous ambivalence about the nationalist politics of their respective countries have received some critical attention. My thesis, by contrast, explores their involvement in mystical spirituality of both orthodox and heterodox kinds, arguing that in both of these poets’ works mysticism is not put to the service of their modern(ist) poetic projects, but deeply forms and informs those as well as their modern sensibilities. While this study revises tired readings of these poets’ relationship and offers some comparative insights into their mystic modernity, after the introductory chapter I deal with them separately in individual chapters in order to offer some in-depth reading of their works. Chapter 1 historicises the formation of Tagore’s mystic-modern orientation by studying his complex engagement with Brahmoism, Hinduism, and Western humanist ideas, while concentrating on his pre-Gitanjali poetic development. Chapter 2 examines Yeats’s early mystical associations with particular emphasis on his foundational engagement with Indian spirituality, both philosophically and poetically understood, as well as its repercussions in and relevance to the creative, mystical, and cultural-political activities of his early career. Returning to Tagore in Chapter 3, I focus on his mid to late career works in order to analyse the development of his mystic-modern notion of the spiritual evolution of man. The chapter particularly examines his complex engagement with astronomical and evolutionary sciences and his attempt to synthesise them with his eclectic mystical vision. Finally, Chapter 4 shifts to Yeats’s antithetical vision, as expressed in his mystical system and related poetry. This chapter also explores the congruity between Yeats’s later interest in Eastern Christianity and his revived enthusiasm for Indian mysticism.

The thesis examines the way writers use fiction as a rhetorical vehicle to thematise and to theorise the project of autobiography — a transformation of life into narrative that involves a negotiation between aesthetics and ethics. It analyses four fictional autobiographies, published since 1988, by Paul Auster, Julian Barnes, Lydia Davis, and Philip Roth. Each text presents an autodiegetic narrator narrating crucial moments in her/his life; they are ordered progressively according to the way each engages with the issue of narrative artifice on the narratorial and/or authorial level. I explore what makes the character narrator’s life-story work, that is, the way s/he negotiates the possible tension between form and ethics, the resolution of which is what I call narrative integrity. The double meaning of the word “integrity”, as a formal and an ethical quality, encapsulates the dual demands of formal coherence and ethical commitment inherent in the challenges of autobiography. This thesis discusses four forms of narrative integrity — contingency, consistency, coherence, and counterpoint — and suggests ways in which they are interpreted differently on the representational and the rhetorical level of the text. Adopting a rhetorical approach to fiction, I address the way the particular representation of autobiography in each text is used rhetorically, not autobiographically, by the author to theorise certain aspects of self-representation in general. I argue that integrity as a critical concept helps elucidate the complications involved in life writing by foregrounding the issue of form, which is necessary, if also potentially problematic, for the articulation of personal truths. This project situates itself within the broad field of ethical criticism in literary studies and explores the relationships between fiction, narrative ethics, and life writing.

This project seeks to examine and analyse motherhood as presented by selected Indian women writers, paying particular attention to selected works by Ashapurna Debi, Mahasweta Devi, Shashi Deshpande, Anita Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Nandita Bagchi. My research engages with their literary representation of motherhood for a number of reasons. First, their works are illustrative of the discursive norms of the particular society and culture ‒ or intersection of cultures – in which they were produced. Second, and perhaps more importantly, their creative portrayals provide a “space of contention” that contributes to re-conceiving prevalent ideas of motherhood and thus offers alternative visions. Drawing upon feminist scholarship on motherhood and postcolonial feminism, this thesis, in the course of its four chapters, focuses on four thematic areas, namely maternal subjectivity and agency, the mother-daughter relationship, motherhood and diaspora and non-biological motherhood. It attempts to understand the literary ramifications of these concerns in order to identify the ways in which the representations reconceptualise the notion of motherhood from and against multiple perspectives. Another concern is whether these Indian women writers’ visions furnish readers with any different understandings of motherhood (a term which is in turn intimately linked to our understanding of womanhood) as compared to dominant Western feminist discourses. Exploring connections between the fictions’ content and form, the thesis interrogates which literary modes the writers mobilise and how they variously articulate their visions. In conclusion, I argue that this project furthers feminist literary criticism in the specific area of Indian women’s writing and the overarching area of motherhood and literature by suggesting a complex constellation of ideas concerning motherhood – one which is ambivalent, diverse, contingent, grounded in a specific location, and yet well placed to converse with discourses emanating from other times and places.

This study aims to redress the almost complete critical marginalisation of Ann Radcliffe’s post-1797 works, published in a four-volume collection entitled "Gaston de Blondeville, or the Court of Henry III Keeping Festival in Ardenne, a Romance; St. Alban’s Abbey: A Metrical Tale, with some Poetical Pieces by Ann Radcliffe, to which is Prefixed a Memoir of the Author with Extracts from her Journals" (1826). I examine the major works of this collection, beginning with Radcliffe’s last novel, "Gaston de Blondeville," before providing a critical analysis of her two longest narrative poems, "St. Alban’s Abbey" and "Salisbury Plains: Stonehenge." In arguing for a widening of the bounds of Radcliffean scholarship to include not just her well-known Gothic romances of the 1790s, but also her later works, I contextualise Radcliffe’s post-1797 texts alongside Sir Walter Scott’s "Ivanhoe" (1820) and his earlier narrative poetry. Examining Radcliffe’s later work in the context of Scott’s historical fiction allows us to see Radcliffe’s innovation as a writer post-1790s. It also highlights the striking thematic reciprocity which exists between Radcliffe’s post-1797 texts and Scott’s historical fiction. These works display varying responses to a larger revival of interest in Britain’s early heritage, exemplified through Radcliffe’s and Scott’s exploration of the nature of antiquarian study and medieval romance forms. In tracking this thematic reciprocity, this study uncovers a little-acknowledged "conversation," initiated by Radcliffe’s post-1797 works with Scott’s oeuvre. The forthcoming chapters define the specific nature of this "conversation," in which Radcliffe first anticipates and then responds to Scott’s unprecedented literary success in the field of historical fiction.

In recent scholarship, the Icelandic fornaldarsögur - legendary, "mythic-heroic" sagas - have typically been regarded as a locus for literary fiction in medieval Iceland, owing in part to their genetic and generic relation to romance literature. This thesis aims to redirect the debate and argues for the historiographical function of these sagas. Following a discursive introductory chapter, each of the three main chapters analyses the various narrative and rhetorical strategies of individual fornaldarsögur in comparison with contemporaneous historiography, with particular emphasis of their prosimetrical form. In Chapter 2 I analyse how the comic and folktale elements of Gautreks saga serve to historicise its moral exempla, and, drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Mikhail Bakhtin, argue that the saga's representation of geography and space serves to compartmentalise its fictionality in discrete "chronotopes." I also demonstrate how the quotation of poetry in Gautreks saga, modelled on the konungasögur ('kings' sagas'), serves to authenticate the prose narrative. In Chapter 3 I analyse how the author of Vǫlsunga saga drew on genealogical and biographical models of historiography to expand the Poetic Edda's account of the early Vǫlsung dynasty and Sigurðr Fáfnisbani's early life. Numerous verses in Vǫlsunga saga are quoted to corroborate the prose, but, I argue, they appeal to the anonymity and continuity of the oral eddic tradition for their authority, in contrast to the skaldic tradition of the konungasögur. In Chapter 4 I analyse how many of the verse quotations of Ragnars saga loðbrókar authenticate the prose narrative, despite their presentation as direct speech. I go on to analyse the significance of the Ragnarr legend in skaldic poetics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries - in particular, the remembrance of Ragnarr as a poet himself - and argue that this lent weight to the verse quotations in the saga as direct testimonials. I conclude by analysing the geography and spatial representation, genealogical structures, and the prosimetrum of other fornaldarsögur, demonstrating that studying these texts in relation to medieval historiographical discourse furthers our understanding of the both the genre and thirteenth-century Icelandic literary culture more widely.

This dissertation’s main purpose is twofold, on the one hand it gives new insights into the construction and meaning of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, on the other hand it makes a contribution to the field of cognitive narratology, furnishing a complete practical example of the application of cognitive narratology’s tools to a relevant literary work. I take the Alice books as a case study to illuminate the working of cognitive narratology as an interdisciplinary project, relying both on classical narrative studies and on methods taken from the cognitive field. This focus also serves a synthetic view of cognitive narratology itself, which is in its essence a combination of the revaluation of classic narrative concepts and the introduction of new ones. A useful theoretical concept to give a general understanding of my methodology as the tying together of different overlapping approaches, is the idea of the Alice books as a cognitive playground, a huge mental landscape where different intellectual suggestions and speculations coexist with experientiality and affections. Wonderland and the Looking-Glass land are thus presented as fantastical cognitive playgrounds where different minds interact with each other creating the big and complex aesthetic space of the literary text. Each of my chapters examines a specific topic in relation to the minds of the author, the readers and the characters. After a preface and a first chapter outlining the main theoretical currents of cognitive narratology and pointing out the special fit of the Alice books for this kind of analysis, the subsequent chapters are: “Virtual Alice”, “Mirrored Alice”, “Emotional Alice”, and “Unnatural Alice”, each of them offering different, although interconnected, insights into the peculiar dialogue which can be established between the Alices and the cognitive narratological approach.

Since the 1970s, the world has seen the ascendance of a new form of global capitalism and, underlying it, a new ideology with its own set of core beliefs and assumptions: neoliberalism. The rise of neoliberalism has had a profound effect on society, culture, and life worldwide. This thesis offers an analysis of one part of that broader socio-cultural picture. It explores how a specific cultural form with a particular societal focus, the literary genre of the Bildungsroman, has been adapted by authors seeking to use the genre to address the dominant political-social system of their day. The Bildungsroman has its roots in the rise of capitalism, and the exploration of certain socio-political problems is central to the genre through its core focus on the relationship between human development, the individual, and society. As such, the rise of a new, dominant form of capitalism has particular significance for it. Taking four novels by four significant authors from across the lifespan of neoliberalism – Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2004) – this thesis examines how each author has sought to examine, reclaim, redeploy, and problematise the genre in order to address neoliberalism. Two key features of neoliberalism are of particular significance here: neoliberal ideology’s individualised models of human behaviour and societal functioning, and neoliberal capitalism’s global dominance and systemic functioning. Each case-study demonstrates something about how these aspects of neoliberalism have overlapped with, co-opted, and undermined core elements that enable the Bildungsroman to function as a tool for socio-political exploration and critique, and so about how neoliberalism functions culturally. Through these analyses, this thesis explores not only what neoliberalism can tell us about the Bildungsroman but also what the Bildungsroman can tell us about neoliberalism.