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This creative thesis comprises a book length collection of poems entitled Box Of Chalks, and an accompanying prose commentary exploring issues of research, drafting and the forming of a narrative sequence of poetry. The book of poems is based on the experience of Polish boys and men forcibly conscripted into the German Army by National Decree, 4th March 1941. This enforced conscription remains a little acknowledged fact which I discovered is still refuted in some Polish communities. The poems are written from the viewpoint of one conscript. They consist of dramatic monologues, a duologue and a voice of the Valksliste. The poems cover a period from boyhood to old age. The accompanying prose commentary on the process of researching the historical material and the artistic drafting of the poems is formed of six chapters. Chapter One explores the genesis of the poems in the historical events of German conscription in Silesian Poland. Chapter Two discusses the ethics of using another's voice and the painful experiences. In this chapter, I trace the creative choices made from composite experiences as the voice of the sequence gradually developed. In Chapter Three, I show how facts, memories and experiences were gleaned through interviewing survivors and one survivor in particular. This chapter further examines the history of the Polish war experience and shows how oral reminiscence is linked to historically recorded events. The chapter shows how gleanings from these 'rememberings' formed the basis of individual poems and discusses the difficulties of opening up delicate matters linked to emotions of shame and guilt in the surviving community. Chapter Four examines the difficulties and rewards in finding the most appropriate opening for the narrative. I aim to demonstrate how the sequence of poems benefited from structuring techniques and a 'layering of imagery and sound', which, although discovered late in the process, helped to form a cohesive narrative. Chapter Five discusses the drafting of key poems and the challenge of unexpected inconsistencies encountered when designing the poetic sequence. Here, I explore the demands of forming a longer narrative out of individual poems, for example the need for bridging poems, continuity and telling the larger story mainly through one voice. Chapter Six demonstrates how a large part of the sequence was written transposing some of my own historical and cultural experiences through corresponding physical detail. Here, I explore experiments in creating characters and physical details to develop the world of the narrative and its accumulative progression. I conclude this thesis by acknowledging that the consequences of conscription continued long after the war had ended and has had an effect on later generations.

The thesis is a Critical Edition of Derek Walcott’s Omeros, consisting of a Critical Introduction and Annotations. The Critical Introduction analyses: - Narrative - Settings - Metaphor and Paronomasia - Symbolism - Historiography - Intertexts - Dualism - Autobiography - Dialects - Prosody. The Annotations comment on more than 1000 references that may be obscure and on specifics of narrative, language and prosody. This study presents new conclusions about some aspects of Omeros: - It challenges the prevailing view that the work is written substantially in a variation of terza rima and shows that regular quatrains predominate. - It demonstrates ways in which the metrics follow the sense of the narrative and takes a more balanced position on the use of Caribbean as opposed to classical metrics than that put forward previously. - It identifies a paragraphic structure to the verse. - It proposes a new prosodic structure for the significant Chapter XXX/iii. - It extends Walcott’s recognised use of numerology into word counting the names of characters. - It develops the idea of Walcott’s dualism and his use of pairing and contradiction as a dialectical method. - It defines his wide use of paronomasia and shows that many of the puns have a metaphorical aspect beyond mere word-play. - It analyses some of Walcott’s symbolism. - It identifies intertextual links to his earlier works and to some thirty other writers, and suggests homage to Hemingway and possibly Heaney. - It provides the first complete analysis of Walcott’s rhyme types in Omeros. In its analysis of Omeros and in the Annotations it has included commentary from across the critical literature, to provide some sense of other views on Walcott’s writing, and has included as many as possible of Walcott’s own comments on Omeros and on the writer’s task, as a background to understanding the poem.

This thesis considers the development of Evelyn Waugh's and Graham Greene’s Catholicism between 1928 and 1939. Focusing predominantly on Waugh’s and Greene’s novels, it investigates how their writings express Catholic ideas, as well how their faith informs their views of human nature, their political sympathies, and their criticisms of modern secular civilization. While it recognizes the important differences between Waugh’s and Greene’s thinking in this period (such as their diverging political sympathies and their uses of different forms and genres of writing), it also establishes some significant affiliations between their Catholic points of view. Both authors associate the increasingly secular condition of English society with themes of decay and disintegration, acknowledge the reality of Original Sin, and believe in a supernatural reality distinct from its earthly counterpart. The Introduction provides an overview of Greene and Waugh scholarship, noting that there is currently no critical study devoted to the topic of early affiliations between these authors’ Catholic principles. The first two chapters propose that the beginnings of Waugh’s and Greene’s Catholic perspectives can be detected in their early fiction. Chapter Three examines in relation to each other Waugh’s and Greene’s novels between 1930 and 1935. Chapter Four charts the development of their respective vantage-points in the period 1936-1938. The final chapter looks at the year 1939 and assesses the nature of these authors' Catholic views prior to the outbreak of the Second World War.

This thesis addresses the concept of the contemporary muse in the work of six late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century women poets. In my introduction, I detail the history of the muse in literary tradition. I examine the problems that the gendered dynamic of poet/muse presented, by restricting women to a passive, inspiring role. I argue that, due to these problematic aspects, contemporary feminist criticism of the woman poet’s muse has often elided the homoerotic desire and power-play that structures these relationships. To rectify this, I focus on contemporary, living muse figures. I emphasise why these kinds of figures (as opposed to dead, historical or mythological muses) were particularly inspiring to women poets in the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth centuries. I also address the specific ethical dilemmas of claiming a living muse. My four main chapters detail and theorise the dynamics between poets and their contemporary muses: Michael Field and Bernard Berenson; Olive Custance and Lord Alfred Douglas; Amy Lowell and Eleonora Duse/Ada Russell; and H.D. and Bryher. My conclusion draws these individual studies together to emphasise their illuminating similarities, including the increased fluidity between the roles of poet/muse, destabilisation of gender categories, and the presence of a third term that mediates the muse/poet relationship.

This thesis examines the role played by philosophy in the poetry and criticism of Geoffrey Hill. Despite countless references to philosophy throughout Hill's critical authorship, there exists no study of any length on this vital aspect of his thought. Through close readings of his poetry, criticism, and archival material, I attempt to demonstrate that philosophy has played a more crucial role in Hill's work than has hitherto been assumed. Hill's sceptical attitude to philosophy is intimately connected with his understanding of poetry as a sensate form of cognition. My thesis examines the ways Hill's poetry and criticism responds to the challenges imposed upon this scepticism by a tradition of philosophy that emphasises the importance of the aesthetic to its analyses of modernity's contradictions. I argue that a tradition of Anglophone Idealist thinkers, from S.T. Coleridge, via T.H. Green and F.H. Bradley, to Gillian Rose, is of sustained relevance to Hill's work, shaping the way he thinks about politics, ethics and literature. In particular, German Idealism's attempts to negotiate universality and particularity via an emphasis on the aesthetic bases of critical thought lay the groundwork for an understanding of poetry as a mode of cognition. Reading Hill's poetry from For the Unfallen to Oraclau/Oracles, I try to show the ways in which problems traditionally conceived of as philosophical can be cognised in prosody and syntax. In part a vindication of Hill's elevation of poetry over philosophy, these readings also show the degree to which Hill's ‘craft of vision' is indebted to conceptual and aesthetic models supplied by philosophy.

This thesis examines the poetry and critical work of Veronica Forrest-Thomson, arguing that her poetic project is characterised by her ‘struggle with forms'. Forrest-Thomson developed many formal models of poetry in her critical writing which acted as ideals to be enacted in practice. The broad struggle in Forrest-Thomson's poetic project is, then, between the formal projections of theory and a variety of forms of poetic practice; between, that is, the fixed and totalising frames of theory and the local patterns of form and meaning which exceed the logic of an ideal model. This thesis examines the struggle between theoretical and practical forms through consecutive stages in Forrest-Thomson's career. First, I examine Forrest-Thomson's attempt to combine Romantic, formalist and modernist poetic theories in an early manifesto. Her early, conflicted theoretical perspectives, I argue, transferred to her poetry as tensions between a use of traditional poetic forms and a variety of free, formal modes. Second, I demonstrate how conflicts between traditional and innovative form in the poems were exacerbated by Forrest-Thomson's developing interest in artistic theory and concrete poetry. Third, I assess the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein's linguistic philosophy on Forrest-Thomson's theory and practice, concentrating on her use of his notion of ‘language-games' to inform collage-like poems and the idea that the poem is a ‘context' absorbing and transforming others. At this stage, Forrest-Thomson's theory and poetry also exhibit tensions between modernist and post-modernist perspectives which induce an anxiety of losing control at the level of poetic form for which she compensates with an emphasis on traditional literary figures and forms. Fourth, I examine Forrest-Thomson's Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry as an example of a particular type of formalism where fixed metaphors of poetic form comprise both the polemical strength and conceptual weakness of her poetic theory. Lastly, I outline the struggle between formal and semantic control and excess in Forrest-Thomson's late theory and poetry, arguing that her quest for what she calls ‘writing straight' is impeded by her conflicted assessment of the role and status of complex poetic form.

In this thesis, I will be examining selective works by the novelist Doris Lessing. The aim of the thesis is to examine Lessing’s oeuvre by approaching her fiction as an attempt to understand the subject as an effect of intersubjectivity. The thesis approaches the question of intersubjectivity through a broadly psychoanalytic framework, not only engaging with Lessing’s own particular interests in psychoanalysis, but also standing back and reframing her work through approaches to intersubjectivity available in work by Freud and Jung, Klein, and object relational and existential dynamic psychologies. The thesis will, throughout, endeavour to situate psychoanalytic approaches in specifically historical and political contexts, also drawing on phenomenology to examine Lessing’s depiction of a transcendental mode of experience which is reached through an ongoing evolutionary consciousness. Her dialectical positioning of the subject reveals a restless struggle towards a conciliation between self and others. The thesis reflects a trajectory of Lessing’s work from her earlier African novels to later writing, The Fifth Child and Ben, in the World. The thesis begins by examining the structure of the family and mother-daughter relationships in the context of the historically specific political milieu of post-war apartheid in South Africa; it ends by examining the question of the availability of an ethics of care in Thatcherite Britain as reflected in the Ben novels. Melanie Klein’s work and the later object-relations theory influenced by it, are adopted to provide a frame through which to try to illuminate Lessing’s concern with the possibility of motivating positive interactions between self and others, and as an alternative to the tragic liberal view of the self as an anxious isolate proposed by Freud. In each chapter, the thesis focuses on the variety of Lessing’s formal experiments in her attempt to develop a late ethics of care built on a foundation of intersubjectivity. This emergent vision of the self opens up the possibility of reconstituting new modes of interaction between the self and the outer world: Lessing uses her fictional worlds to posit visionary possibilities in the world outside the fiction. Often employing critical modes of the Utopian and Apocalyptic, Lessing envisions the possibility of a new and fluid community that is constituted on the foundation of a revised albeit fragile ethics of care. Her fiction suggests that the power of creation and imagination necessary to realise such a vision belongs not only to the artist, but is also available for development in the psychosocial journey towards a new democratic subjectivity that might realise a new public order.

The thesis discusses the subject of time as dealt with in the writings of Edwin Muir, exploring the ways in which his poetry, novels, and critical writings articulate a range of perspectives regarding the nature of time and its relation to human experience. Following the adaptation of ideas through Muir’s career, a trajectory is traced from his early writings in which time is seen as a destructive power antithetical to life through to the celebration of mortality in his late writings. Integral to this development was his persistent interrogation of the relationship between time and eternity. Identifying the important role of Muir’s autobiographical method, this thesis begins by exploring his desire to obtain an objective view of human life by establishing a critical distance in his writings between the subject being presented and the imagination that presents it. To this end, his creative writings often incorporate myths, biblical allegories, heraldic symbolism, and surreal abstractions to present archetypal or timeless events and situations. In doing so, Muir is seen drawing on an array of literary and philosophical influences, many of which relate to his adolescence and formative adulthood in Glasgow. His rural childhood in Orkney and his early contact with Presbyterian and Evangelical Christianity made a lasting impression on his imagination with the resultant preoccupation with Eden and the Fall being dominant features of his poetry. Often dealt with in an abstract way in his poetry, Eden is frequently associated with his childhood on Wyre in his autobiographical writings, with the Fall, in Muir’s theorizing, forming the moment at which time becomes of relevance to humanity. Critically under-appreciated as ephemera and juvenilia, Muir’s earliest prose and poetry in The New Age magazine between 1913 and 1923 convey a strong sense of his desire to engage with the popular debates of the day regarding contemporary literary and social matters. For this reason, a significant amount of space has been given in this thesis to allow these writings to be re-evaluated; not just as portents of his later work, but also as important contributions to the vibrant journal and magazine culture of the period. Offering substantive detail to sketch the relevant biographical context, the essays, critical monographs and volumes of poetry are discussed chronologically and with reference to each other to allow the development of Muir’s ideas to be seen as an organic evolution rather than as a series of philosophical epiphanies. However, the significance of Muir’s reconciliation to Christianity in 1939 is highlighted as the single most important creative breakthrough of his mature adulthood. The extensive range of Muir’s critiques of Scottish and European culture, and his essays on the relationship between literature and society more generally, underline his position as a modernist writer immersed in the affairs of his time. Through detailing Muir’s creative and philosophical struggles with himself and modernity (which he felt he had fallen into through a time-accident) he is seen repeatedly reaffirming his commitment to exploring the nature of time and its meaning for human society.

This thesis examines the impact of early twentieth century physics, particularly the sciences of astronomy and cosmology, on the work of W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. I seek to find and make critical use of the traces of Einstein’s cosmic revolution in the aesthetic and philosophical trajectory of modernism. In the chapters that follow, I examine Yeats, Joyce and Beckett as test-cases for modernist aesthetic responses to a universe that had been newly imagined by scientists. In different ways the new cosmology offers a rich source of imaginative as well as narrative and poetic possibilities for these writers. Moreover, although I discuss their work in separate chapters, I have found many connections between their responses, particularly in terms of the new idealist philosophy that came out of popularisations of the new physics. In this sense my approach also offers new ways of talking about Yeats, Joyce and Beckett in relation to each other. The opening chapter begins with a history of relativistic science and its popularisation, then moves on to discuss the reception of relativistic science both within modernism and in the wider contemporary culture, reframing modernism in relation to scientific ideas and discourses. I explore aesthetic responses to this science by authors as different as Thomas Hardy and Ezra Pound, with a view to situating Yeats, Joyce and Beckett within this culture and highlighting their greater receptivity to such ideas. The chapter then moves to a specific consideration of the specialised fields of astronomy and cosmology, explaining the major changes wrought by the Einsteinian revolution and preparing the ground for a discussion of their effect on the works of my authors. The second chapter addresses Yeats’s complex engagement with the new physics and its cosmology, reading against naive critical portrayals of him as entirely anti-scientific. The chapter also offers an account of science in relation to a narrative of Yeats’s whole poetic career, moving from discussions of his longing for an alternative to Newtonian physics in his portrayal of the unpredictable stars in the poems of The Wind Among the Reeds to the strange cosmic, astronomical and occult shapes of A Vision and the later poetry. The third and fourth chapters discuss Joyce’s interest in astronomy and cosmology; in chapter three, I focus on the inspirational power of cosmology in relation to the development of his oeuvre from Portrait to Finnegans Wake. The fourth chapter offers an extended close-reading of a passage from II.1 of the Wake, in which the sudden appearance of the cosmic science of spectroscopy transforms the children’s game of riddles depicted in the chapter into a much more complex problem. In both these chapters, I suggest the salutary aesthetic potential of the difficulty of the new physics when juxtaposed with the difficulty of Joyce texts; the more complex, contested and puzzling universe of contemporary physics suited Joyce much better than the Newtonian science which he sometimes parodied as imperial and monological. Finally, I turn to Beckett’s late modernism in the fifth and sixth chapters. The fifth chapter addresses his novel Murphy in relation to his portrayal of cosmic connections between chaos and absurdity. Beckett’s novel seems increasingly unlike a Newtonian world, as realist frameworks are deliberately undermined by a far more relativistic and chaotic narrative technique. By ‘The Trilogy’, the subject of my sixth and final chapter, which focuses on cosmic and astronomical light in these three novels, Beckett has created a semi-relativistic cosmos in which realist narrative and Newtonian causality are, at first, in Molloy, radically compromised, and finally, in The Unnameable, proved untenable.

This thesis examines the Faust myth in post-war American fiction, giving special consideration to works of William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon. I present these works, which are underrepresented in broader studies of the literary tradition of the myth, as substantial contributions to the latter, while demonstrating how their thematic and stylistic proximity can be explained through their use of the myth itself. I thereby meet two desiderata: a location of Gaddis’s and Pynchon’s Faustiana in specific currents of twentieth-century intellectual history and a qualitative comparison between both authors against the background of postmodern mythography. Locating their works in the tradition of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Thomas Mann, I analyse how both authors employ the myth in order to satirise the underbelly of Western modernity. In turning the myth against the founding principles of America itself, they suggest that the vision of a New Eden has been a Faustian wager from the start. In doing so, they transform the image of the heretical soul-seller into that of a representative of the dominant forces of their time. Playfully demonising the reckless individualism, technicism, and voracious materialism of their contemporaries, they provide an astonishingly differentiated portrait of human self-aggrandisement that reverts into mechanisms of dehumanisation, a feat that is reflected in their manifest use of the works of Oswald Spengler, Max Weber, Eric Voegelin, Norman O. Brown, and Herbert Marcuse. While Gaddis’s and Pynchon’s early novels remain a matter of negative theology in refraining from providing totalising suggestions as how to fare with the sold ‘soul’ of the West, I argue that these satirical disputes, via their use of apophaticism, indirection, and allusive complexity, convey a distinctly ethical message that speaks against the alleged nihilism and relativism of postmodern fiction.

Fictions of the Postcolonial City studies representations of the city of Bombay-Mumbai as a locus of modernity in urban novels, written by primarily Indian authors writing in English. This thesis documents the prolific literary output that has emerged from the postcolonial city in the aftermath of the Emergency in India, and focuses specifically on the forceful nature of the urban sphere which offers alternative discourses of modernity to the prevalent nationalist version. The spectral presence of a colonial past which shadows many aspects of the city's thriving present is both acknowledged and disturbed in the many works of fiction and theoretical perspectives which I examine. The prominence of Bombay-Mumbai as a hub of commerciality, culture and cosmopolitanism, its eclectic and interpolative blend of traditions and modern practices, its infinitely capacious nature which accommodates an ever-increasing influx of migrants, the provincial politics which has tainted the city's secular repute and fuelled inter-community conflicts, the gendered spaces of the city, and the visual codes which circumscribe the urban sphere, are extensively analyzed in the course of this thesis. I argue that the contemporary city of Bombay-Mumbai has achieved literary prominence in its postcolonial and global stagings of modernity and has superseded both the Indian nation and other major metropolitan centres to form the principal landscape against which this modernity is played out. The writers discussed in this study are Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Anita Desai, Vikram Chandra, Suketu Mehta, Leslie Forbes, Shashi Deshpande, and Thrity Umrigar.

Conceptualisations of modern literary history are premised upon a series of dynastic successions, whereby one is able to trace, albeit simplistically, the evolution of the novel through its realist, modernist and postmodernist manifestations. Considered in this linear manner, the emergence of altered cultural movements is ordinarily attributed to a crisis within the former mood; as society ruptures and alters, existing modes of representation prove inadequate to reflect, or else engage with, the emergent structure of feeling. As an event with far-reaching implications, many critics and cultural commentators have attributed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 with the inception of an altered global mood. Moreover, in the days and weeks following 9/11, the publication of a number of articles penned by authors emphasised the extent to which the event had precipitated a profound crisis in representation. As an ever greater number of articles and studies emerged proclaiming the final death knell of postmodernism and the emergence of a more anxious global mood, so the myth of 9/11 quickly developed. The thesis rests upon a very simple question: to what extent has 9/11 precipitated a change in the novel? Through examining a wide range of fictions published largely within Britain in the last fifteen years, the study explores and ultimately dispels the assumptions of the myth. Rather than examining the fictional representation of 9/11, the study’s focus is on assessing the significance of the novel after the event, and moreover on interrogating the manner in which the terrorist attacks might have engendered a shift in the contemporary mood that is reflected in the subsequent novels published. Through emphasising the novelistic concerns and themes that transcend the assumed cultural rift, the thesis proposes that the ‘post-9/11 mood’ might more usefully be interpreted as an exacerbation of an already existing structure of feeling that responds to the banal superficiality of the postmodern condition.

Rethinking Urban Space in Contemporary British Writing argues that the prose literature of its featured authors offers a unique forum through which to perceive and account for the multifarious agency of urban space. Chapter one examines the limitations of using the Marxist spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre, widely adopted by literary scholars, to account for the widespread appearance of abandoned, subterranean and transient spaces in contemporary British writing. The thesis then develops new ways of reading which, unlike Lefebvrean theory, allow such spaces to emerge as affective and narrative agents, shaping narrative form and action. Chapter two focuses upon reading abandoned spaces in the work of Iain Sinclair and Cheshire-born author Nicholas Royle; chapter three examines the agency of the subterranean city-space in narratives by Neil Gaiman, Tobias Hill and Conrad Williams; and chapter four interrogates the agency exerted by the hotel space in contemporary hotel novels by Ali Smith and Monica Ali. Throughout, the materialism of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer is combined with affect theory to stress the narrative and affective agencies achieved by such urban spaces, precisely due to their transcendence of the networks of production and exchange which dominate the capitalist-driven cities of their fictional worlds.

This project challenges a series of common interpretations of Hulme's work: that his arguments are contradictory; that his career can be separated into distinct “phases”; that he endorsed other thinkers' ideas uncritically; and that he promulgated authoritarian politics. Chapter 1 examines the entries in Hulme's notebooks that relate his views on the nature of reality and language. Read through ideas in the works of Bergson, Nietzsche and Ribot, these rudimentary notes present a coherent “anti-intellectualist” philosophical position, consistent with claims made in his later writings. Chapter 2 focuses on “A Lecture on Modern Poetry.” Hulme's rejection of nineteenth-century verse was part of a broader campaign by poets in London to find new ways of expression, yet his ideas stand independently of claims made by Flint, Storer and Pound. Hulme's greatest contribution to Imagism is the emphasis he put on the use of images in poetry, a method that follows from the distinction he drew in the notebooks between “direct” and “indirect” language. Chapter 3, which examines Hulme's essays and lectures on Bergson, demonstrates that, although he embraced Bergson's philosophical method, Hulme remained critical of many of Bergson's theories. This discredits the claim that he was simply reiterating Bergson's ideas. Ultimately, Bergson's “intuition” enabled Hulme to develop his earlier description of “modern” poetry and to recast it as “classic” poetry. Chapter 4 investigates Hulme's political essays. Together with Storer, Hulme participated in a debate in the Commentator concerning the parliamentary crisis of 1910. It was as part of an attempt to create an efficient propaganda strategy for the Conservative party that Hulme postulated his famous antithesis between Romanticism and Classicism. Hulme's analysis of the process of political conversion shows that in 1910-12 he had not abandoned elements in his thought from Bergson's philosophy. Moreover, far from sharing the authoritarian political views of the Action Française, he can be more accurately described as a “moderate Conservative.” Chapter 5 demonstrates that claims Hulme made in his art criticism are consonant with the general reaction in 1913-14 against representational art. While drawing heavily on Worringer's anti-materialist conception of art history, he was using it to defend his contemporaries' experimentation with geometric forms, in a way similar to Fry and Bell. Although, like Worringer and Ludovici, Hulme campaigned for antihumanism and mixed aesthetics with politics, the model of art he proposed did not carry the authoritarian implications of those of Worringer and Ludovici. Finally, Chapter 6 explores Hulme's war writings. Hulme was not a militarist; rather, he supported Britain's involvement in the war on the grounds that war against Germany would protect the British political institutions. He stayed true to his Conservative principles, using ideas from Sorel and Proudhon to dissociate the “democratic” from the “pacifist” ideology. There is also evidence that, despite his explicit rejection of vitalism in “A Notebook,” Hulme continued to value Bergson's method of “intuition” right up to his death in 1917. This project, therefore, argues for a re-interpretation of Hulme's work and shows the value of scrutinising the intellectual and political context in which he was writing in understanding the precise nature of his thought.

According to Pierre Nora, “[m]emory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition”. Drawing on theories of memory and psychoanalysis, my thesis examines the role of memory as a narrative of the past in late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century Scottish literature. I challenge Nora’s supposition that memory and history are fundamentally opposed and I argue that modern Scottish literature uses a variety of forms of memory to interrogate traditional forms of history. In my Introduction, I set the paradigms for my investigation of memory. I examine the perceived paradox in Scottish literature between memory and history as appropriate ways to depict the past. Tracing the origins of this debate to the work of Walter Scott, I argue that he sets the precedent for writers of modernity, where the concerns are amplified in late twentieth and twenty-first century literature and criticism. While literary criticism, such as the work of Cairns Craig and Eleanor Bell, studies the trope of history, Scottish fiction, such as the writing of Alasdair Gray, James Robertson, and John Burnside, asserts the position of memory as a useful way of studying the past. Chapter One examines the transmission of memory. Using George Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe, I consider the implications of three methods of transferring memory. Mrs McKee’s refusal to disclose her experience indicates a refusal to mourn loss and to transmit memory. Skarf’s revision of historical narratives indicates a desire to share experience. The Mystery of the Ancient Horsemen demonstrates the use of ritual in the preservation and the communication of the past for future generations. Chapter Two studies the Gothic fiction of Emma Tennant and Elspeth Barker. I examine sensory experience as indicative of the interior and non-linear structure of memory. I argue that the refusal to accept personal and familial loss reveals problematic forms of memory. Chapter Three traces unacknowledged memory in Alice Thompson’s Pharos. I use Nicolas Abraham’s theory of the transgenerational phantom to consider the effects of this undisclosed memory. I argue that the past and its deliberate suppression haunt future generations. Chapter Four considers the use of nostalgia as a form of memory. I investigate the perceptions and definitions of nostalgia, particularly its use as a representation of the Scottish national past. Using Neil Gunn’s Highland River, I identify nostalgia’s diverse functions. I examine nostalgia as a way in which, through the Scottish diaspora, memory is transferred and exhibited beyond national boundaries. Chapter Five builds on the previous chapter and extends the analysis of the ways nostalgia functions. I study nostalgia’s manifestations in the diasporic Scottish-Canadian literature of Sara Jeanette Duncan, John Buchan, Eric McCormack, and Alastair MacLeod.

This thesis is a study of the changing ways in which novels by women of Indian ethnic origin have represented the relationships between spaces and identities and by extension, 'constructed' particular visions of both. Spaces, in this context, have been taken to refer to the larger concept of India, aswell asthe specific locations of homes, work-places etc, whilst identities refer, in this thesis, to women protagonists. My thesis builds upon cultural geographers' propositions that spaces and identities are mutually constructed (constructing) entities by suggesting that gendered experiences are also written about in gendered ways. Both experiences and representations are mediated by traits inescapable in a sprawling, hierarchical and unevenly populated country. Some of the most important of those factors, apart from gender are caste and/or class loyalties, as well as locations in rural or urban milieu within India, or outside of its geographical boundaries. The primary questions are these: are recognisably similar constructions of spaces and identities, (more specifically, 'India' and 'Indian women'), met with within the pages of the novels, or, do the differences take on recognisable patterns? The fact of these writers being women of Indian-ethnic origin, writing in English, adds another dimension of complexity, outside the worlds of the texts, but impacting those within; it is with these issues that Chapter 1 engages. The novels chosen for the purpose of this study have been grouped thematically (spatially), having first been divided into two categories based on the primary locations of the protagonists, within or outside India; these form the basis for Chapters 2 and 3. Not surprisingly, the characters' spaces mirror those of the novelists themselves and this thesis argues in Chapter 4, that the writers are constructed by their own environments even asthey re-fashion them through their writings.

This thesis argues that the short fiction of Elizabeth Bowen is acutely preoccupied with reading emotion. Despite the growth of Bowen criticism, her stories remain understudied and this project proposes that their marginal status corresponds to this preoccupation. Through a close engagement with the literary representations of emotion at work in selected Bowen's stories, read alongside Bowen criticism, short story theory, and work on emotion, however, I show how her stories not only anticipate, but radically disrupt, current emotion theory. Recent theorisations of, and research on, emotion and affect across the disciplines tend to rely on the readability of emotion, emphasising the interpretation of specific emotions and reviving practices of affective criticism. Yet Bowen‟s short fiction foregrounds emotion‟s textuality: rather than allow us to read emotion „in‟ literature, I argue that her stories theorise the literariness of emotion. The project begins by suggesting a correspondence between her stories‟ engagement with emotion and their status, both within her literary oeuvre and in Bowen scholarship, to suggest that the complexity of her short fiction is often under-represented by occluding the deconstructions emotion mobilises. This enables us to map critical debates amongst Bowen scholars about the radicality of Bowen‟s fiction onto wider narratives about emotion and critical resistances to its textuality. I go on to undertake close readings of selected stories to show how Bowen‟s short fiction destabilises, rather than reinforces, the geographies of subjectivity, reality, time, and materiality to which emotion is presumed to belong. This project extends Bowen criticism that observes the ways her work anticipates psychoanalytical and Derridean readings, but through its focus on the short story it offers the second focused study of Bowen‟s short fiction, and the first study of her short fiction to be informed by critical emotion theory. Not only does this thesis carve out a new territory within Bowen scholarship, but it offers a timely contribution to problems in thinking emotion and affect in literary criticism and theory. More broadly, it is my hope that my reading of Bowen demonstrates the necessity of attending to the textuality of emotion in the reading and theorisation of emotion across the disciplines.

This thesis examines the dynamic relationship between realism and experimentalism in the 1940s and mid-century fiction of James Hanley and Patrick Hamilton. It is argued that the work of both writers during this period, although it might utilise realist forms and techniques, is not characterised by reversion to a traditional and outmoded model of novel writing that predates modernism, but rather, is engaged in a productive and sometimes tense dialogue with the gestures, manners and experiments of the avant-garde. In so doing, Hanley and Hamilton are read as key exemplars of a varied and adventurous literary moment that has been frequently overlooked within the broad narrative of twentieth century British fiction. It is argued that these works complicate the vocabulary of literary realism by suggesting the novel as a hybrid form: an aesthetic which privileges fidelity to a contemporary ―real‖, especially the conditions of wartime and post-war and the shifting configurations of social and economic relations, even as it simultaneously projects a deep estrangement or satirical detachment from a sense of unified reality. Whilst registering the manifest differences between the two writers, the thesis explores their fiction‘s varying reactions towards and absorption of avant-garde idioms, such as the surrealist and expressionist, and analyses the affective qualities of that ―heightening‖ of language in the construction of their realist narratives. All the novels discussed, in a series of close readings, possess a stylistic or tonal singularity that tangibly frames their narratives, a process of divergence that contests and reconceptualises the concept and aims of literary realism. In historicising this phase of literary change, the thesis draws on the work of various cultural theorists and historians and elaborates the interpretive framework in which the literary 40s and the fiction of Hanley and Hamilton can be recast.

Focusing on approaches to place in selected novels by J. M. Coetzee and V. S. Naipaul, this thesis explores how postcolonial literature can be read as contributing to the reimagining of decolonised, decentred or multi-centred geographies. I will examine the ways in which selected novels by Naipaul and Coetzee engage with the sense of displacement and marginalization generated by imperial mappings of the colonial space. My chosen texts contribute to the decentralizing tendencies of postcolonialism by deconstructing the tropes of boundaries from the perspective of those who have been marginalized on the basis of their race, gender or geographical origins. The work of Edward Said, bell hooks, Edward Soja, Gillian Rose and Homi Bhabha provide a means for me to explain how the displaced subjects relate to places in the postcolonial context. Accordingly, Coetzee's and Naipaul's visions of place and geography are examined in this study in relation to the situational complexity of their habitats. Naipaul's view of place in terms of the binary oppositions between the colonial and metropolitan places is discussed in relation to the sense of displacement that is generated by his colonial upbringing. On the other hand, Coetzee's view of place as the product of imperialist divisive discourses is also interpreted against the historical contest over land and belonging in South Africa. It is argued that both writers contribute to the decentralizing mission of postcolonialism by locating themselves in the margins and advocating sensitivity towards the tropes of boundaries that subject people to displacement and marginalization. Part I discusses A House for Mr Biswas, The Enigma of Arrival, Half a Life and Magic Seeds. I will explore how Naipaul's sense of marginality results in his view of the world in terms of a binarism between the centre and the margin. However, I will argue that among these novels, the last three acknowledge that the longing for homeliness is an unlikely quest for a displaced subject, and that the imperative of the postcolonial world requires the displaced to see the world as unhomely, changing and hybrid. Part II interprets Coetzee's experience of apartheid in South Africa as a legitimate reason for resisting the ways in which the dominant powers in the social and cultural spheres implement marginality. In Waiting for the Barbarians, and Life and Times of Michael K and Foe, Coetzee deconstructs boundaries and asserts the entitlement of the displaced and the marginalized to the land and its representation. The distinctive approaches taken by these two canonical writers remind us of the increasing necessity, yet the complexity, of moving towards a decentralised and dynamic view of the world.

This thesis investigates the manner in which an understanding of the spatial nature of the contemporary lyric poem (broadly reducible to the poem as and the poem of space) combines with voicing and affect in the act of reading poetry to create a third way in which space operates in the lyric: the ‘vocalic space’ of the voiced lyric poem. Together with the poem as and of space, the vocalic space of the contemporary lyric poem gives way to an enunciating I and eye with which we, as reader, identify and which we voice, in a process of ‘affective mapping’. Voice, and the spaces the I/eye of the contemporary lyric poem visualises and articulates, is affective, contested, and multiple. Visual and vocalic identification with the voice of the poem through this free, fragmented, or multiple, I/eye leads us to understand more fully the poem on its own terms. The chapters of this thesis offer readings of John Montague’s The Rough Field, Thomas Kinsella’s A Technical Supplement, Kathleen Jamie’s This Weird Estate, and Alice Oswald’s Dart, as well as the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Thom Gunn and Mimi Khalvati, in order to investigate the implication of this thesis on the way we read, voice, and analyse contemporary British lyric poetry. The work of each poet offers different perspectives on perception, place, and space, and different engagements with the voiced and textual spaces of poetry, from the more formal poetics of Heaney, Jamie, and Gunn, to the experiments with text and image of Montague, Kinsella, and Jamie, the use of different languages by Montague, Jamie, and Khalvati, and the manipulation of the space of the page and angle of poetic vision and voice by Montague, Khalvati, and Oswald. The chapters work almost chronologically from The Rough Field (1972) to Dart (2002) with an emphasis on the importance of space, voice, and affect to the readings of the poems and poets in question.

This thesis proposes that Northern Irish elegy is a distinctive genre of contemporary poetry, which has developed during the years of the Troubles, and has continued to be adapted and defined during the current peace process. It argues that the practice of writing elegy for the losses of the Troubles has established a poetic mode in which Northern Irish poets have continued to work through losses of a more universal kind. This thesis explores the contention that elegy has a clear social and political function, providing a way in which to explore some of the losses experienced by a community over the past half-century, and helping to suggest ideas of consolation. Part one focuses on three first generation Northern Irish elegists: Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. Heaney is considered in a chapter which takes in a poetic career, through which might be traced the development of Northern Irish elegy. Following this are two highly focused studies of the elegies of Longley and Mahon. The place of artifice in elegy is considered in relation to Longley's Troubles elegies, while Mahon’s irony is discussed in relation to his elegiac need for community. Part two looks at a second generation, represented by Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon. Carson's elegies for Belfast are read in a discussion of the destruction and reconstruction that occurs during the process of remembering. This study explores the idea that elegies might also be written for places and temporal spaces. Carson's interest in poetic form is shown to be intricately related to his elegiac practice. The chapter on Muldoon surveys a career which has interrogated the connections between art and suffering. Muldoon raises questions of poetic responsibility, and also challenges poetry itself, on a formal and linguistic level. As his career develops, he includes not only the local threats of Troubles violence within his elegies, but also the global threats of disease, violence and terror. Part three starts with Medbh McGuckian, whose work is discussed in relation to the third generation poets Sinead Morrissey, Leontia Flynn and Colette Bryce. As McGuckian's poetry is perhaps the least immediately accessible of all the poetry covered here, the thesis considers ways in which her work might be read, before her poems are discussed as Northern Irish elegies. Following this are readings of poems from Morrissey, Flynn and Bryce, noting ways in which this generation works to develop the genre of elegy, working in the same broad themes that have been charted throughout this thesis.

This thesis examines political and social thought in dystopian fiction of the mid-twentieth century. It focuses on works by four authors: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and John Wyndham’s postwar novels (especially The Day of the Triffids (1951), The Kraken Wakes (1953) and The Chrysalids (1955)). The central concern of this thesis is how political and social ideas are developed within a literary mode which evolved as response to both literary concerns and political ideas, including on the one hand literary utopias, science fiction, satire, and literary modernism; and on the other hand modernity, social Darwinism, apocalypse, war, and changes in gender roles in the broader culture. It is argued that the narrative structures of these novels are crucial in enabling them to perform such critical tasks. These texts use fictionality to enact self-reflexive critiques of the disasters of their age that both acknowledge their own emergence from the post-Enlightenment tradition in the history of political ideas, and criticise the failings of this very tradition of which they are part. The work of a variety of critical theorists, including Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt and Raymond Williams inform this analysis. This thesis aims to demonstrate how comparative readings of critical theory and literature can reveal their mutually interactive significance as cultural reactions to historical events. Dystopian fictions of the mid-twentieth century are both important documents in cultural history, and valuable literary examples of the development and diffusion of a plurality of modernisms within popular fiction.

Throughout her literary oeuvre Iris Murdoch displayed a preoccupation with the theme of incest, a consideration which has not previously been examined in a full length critical study. Her portrayal of the incest taboo is examined here in relation to incest as an abusive practice, which is the predominant image of the subject throughout her fiction. Examining the changes in scientific and cultural attitudes to incest in the post-war era, this thesis explores Murdoch’s literary interaction with these developments and how her writing reflects and challenges the social perspective contemporaneous with her individual works. The argument is concerned with the relationship between intertextuality and incest in Murdoch’s fiction and how she utilises an intertextual approach to confront dominant literary trends within the Western canon, occasioning the reader to reconsider the views presented by well-known literary and cultural narratives and their modes of expression. The examination of other ‘texts’ is not limited to the written word but to any art object which conveys a culturally recognised narrative and which relates to her presentation of the incest taboo. Incest was brought to the public forum partly by the second wave of feminism and the revelation of incest abuse coincided with the public recognition of child abuse more generally and thereby occasioned concern over the rights of children. Accordingly, therefore, this thesis focuses on the impact of a history of patriarchal domination on the suppression of women and children, and how this has affected the ability for incest victims to find a means of expression within a language, and therefore a literary culture, defined and designed by others. Murdoch is approached here through her concern with gendered stories and gendered means of communication, not in order to privilege one sex over the other but, anticipating third-wave feminism, employing them as a means to dispense with sexual difference and sexual expectations, in order to reach an androgynous narrative. Such literary concerns can be seen to draw not only from a process of the cultural evolution of narratives, but also out of the wider literary sphere, to affect social change.

Back/Side Entry examines contemporary queer fiction in English from South Asia and its diasporas. It underscores the critical significance of a double-pronged theoretical approach by combining insights from queer and postcolonial scholarship. Building upon recent research that re-maps queer discourses through an encounter with postcolonial theory and narratives, this thesis argues that South Asian queer fiction disputes the Western bias in queer paradigms, and challenges the elision of sexual and gender non-normativity in postcolonial studies in order to make both queer and postcolonial sites truly transformational. It interrupts routine practices of absorption and gradual obliteration of non-Western/non-White subjects in standard accounts of queerness and concur-rently locates queer self-representation from postcolonial/diasporic South Asian writers as central to a discussion of the larger conceptual debates in queer theory. Queer narratives from South Asia and its diasporas emphasise the significance of postcolonial, diasporic, ethnic, racial, religious, class, caste and linguistic formations in addressing questions related to the representation of alternative genders and sexualities. Through a close reading of novels by Hanif Kureishi, Leslie de Noronha, P. Parivaraj, Shyam Selvadurai, Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla and R. Raj Rao, this thesis analyses South Asian queer formulations, which simultaneously continue and contest Western models of queer identity. The focus on unconventional arrangements of gender and sexuality in the postcolonial site of South Asia repositions the field of queer studies towards non-Euro-American contexts and legitimates the status of “queer” as a pluralistic critical formation. This thesis extends the transnational/trans-disciplinarian academic framework that registers a rising discontent with Western models of global queerness and contributes to the growing presence of non-white, non-Western and Third World voices in queer studies. Adding to newly emergent discussions of queer subjectivity in South Asia, it offers an original contribution to the field through a thorough investigation of current South Asian queer fiction.

Over and above applying Sartrean literary philosophy to Banks and Kelman this thesis therefore also offers a model of literary criticism that can be applied to a number of other contemporary Scottish authors. In conclusion, this thesis suggests that Sartre’s theories of literature can assist in the attempt to better understand the value of the writer in society, and of Kelman and Banks in particular. The comparison and contrast between Banks and Kelman makes clear the importance of contextualising the individual writer not only with the work of their contemporaries, but with the time, place and position in which they are writing. The intention of the thesis is to discover how Sartre’s ideas of existentialism and literature can be applied to writers and their work in a way that allows ‘the critic’ to analyse both the novelist’s fictional technique and to gauge the value of their role in society – in other words, how Sartre’s theories allow us to better understand the individual writer in a social, political and moral context, both nationally and internationally.

Through an analysis of the work of Virginia Woolf and T.W. Adorno’s theory of the aesthetic, this dissertation seeks to develop a poetics of criticism that takes account of the philosophy of the non-identical in subjective experience. As the subversion of the positivist and subjectivist tendencies of identity thinking, Adorno’s negative dialectic is read here in parallel with Woolf’s work as an example of a discourse that preserves the particularity of experience. Much of Woolf’s writing about music is in the form of diary entries, letters and notes or jottings and is singularly unfinished. Her writing about music pushes her to the extremes of essayistic practice where she is forced to improvise and invent a musical-critical voice. This dissertation argues that subjectivity and aesthetic experience are constructed negatively in Woolf’s diaries, letters and essays and by reading her tendency to resist describing musical experiences as a resistance to the domination of conceptual subsumption, I hope to show that Woolf’s writing could offer a new perspective on criticism. The present work attempts to develop a three-fold thesis, the presentation of which will constitute a poetics of criticism. Firstly, Woolf’s attempts to write a critical selfhood actually serve as a critique of transcendental subjectivity and undermine the ideology of a priori subjectivity. Secondly, Woolf’s essays complement work done by Adorno on genre theory which asserts that contradiction remains essential to the critical essay, contradiction which secures the identity of negative dialectics and a contradiction that can simultaneously be read as fundamental to the architectonics of a modernist subjectivity. Woolf’s essays, therefore, will be read for their potential status as a means of critique. And thirdly, the technique of parataxis as a form of writing that Adorno thought best expressed the inaccessibility of objectivity will be shown to be decisive in analyzing Woolf’s fragments. What I hope to assemble, therefore, is a constellation of ideas that map several points ofconnection between Adorno and Woolf.By effecting a salvaging of Woolf’s musical marginalia this thesis argues that ostensibly ill-informed or naïve testimony can be given legitimacy within contemporary music criticism. In addition, this thesis presents all the references to music found in Woolf’s diaries and letters, and, as such, the appendices found at the back of the dissertation constitute not only the first attempt to bring this material together, but are also presented in such a way so as to reinforce the paratactical nature of Woolf’s writing about music. That is to say, structurally, the appendices appear as they appear in Woolf’s original texts, and this thesis has, self-consciously, tried to resist the conceptual overdetermination of these fragments. This structural consideration implies that this dissertation fulfils a performative, as well an analytical function.

The purpose of this thesis is to contextualise the interwar writing of T. S. Eliot within the broader discourse of state reform that carne to define the British welfare state. Eliot was especially concerned by what he perceived to be the ideological direction of the education system, as this system played a fundamental role in his account of cultural transmission. In order to evaluate the critical tendency which suggests that Eliot's late poetry became asocial, the thesis employs post-structural discourse theory to trace a growing anxiety in his work about the very language of democratic reform and public mediation. It surveys a range of pro-reform discourse, from contemporary sociological texts to newspapers, all of which sought to hegemonise social organisation by recourse to a putative idea of democracy. It pays especial attention to the writing of H. C. Dent, editor of the Times Educational Supplement, with whom Eliot pursued a detailed critical engagement. By exploring the degree to which Eliot's poetry rehearses or interrogates these discourses, the thesis argues that from the outset his poetry was preoccupied with the calculation and formalisation of social space by recourse to a modernist aesthetic under perceived threat from secular state planning. Eliot's account of national collective life as a historical process of tradition and orthodox observance contrasts with the popular attempt to programme national life according to future-oriented prescription. From a deep sense of personal crisis described in the early poetry, this preoccupation develops into a classically mandated recognition of social consensus, which reaches its fullest realisation in Four Quartets. The thesis concludes that while Eliot's attempt to propose an alternative to centralised national direction may not have been ultimately successful, it nevertheless demonstrates a particularly significant intellectual and poetic negotiation of social organisation and public discourse.

Seamus Heaney's prose poetics return repeatedly to the adequacy of poetry, its ameliorative, restorative response to the inimical reality of life in the public domain. Drawing on manuscript as well as print sources, this thesis charts the development of this central theme, demonstrating the extent to which it threads throughout the whole of Heaney's thought, from his earliest conceptual formation to his late cultural poetics. Heaney's preoccupation with this idea largely originates in his undergraduate studies where he encounters Leavis and Arnold's accounts of poetry's adequacy: its ameliorative cultural and spiritual function. He also inherits, from Romantic and modernist influences, two differing accounts of poetry's relationship to reality. That conflicted inheritance engenders a crisis within Heaney's own early theorisation of poetry's adequacy to the violence of public life. An important period of clarification ensues, out of which emerge the dualisms of his later thought, and his emphasis on poetry's capacity to encompass, and yet remain separate from, ‘history'. Accompanied by habitual appropriation of Christian doctrine and language, these conceptual structures increasingly assume a redemptive pattern. By the mid-1990s, Heaney's humanist commitment to a ‘totally adequate' poetry has assumed a thoroughly Arnoldian character. The logical strain of his conceptual constructions—particularly the emphasis on poetry's autonomy from history—becomes acutely apparent, revealing just how appropriate the ambivalent ideal ‘adequacy' is. The subsequent expansion of Heaney's poetics into a general affirmation of the arts illuminates the fiduciary character of his trust in poetry while exposing the limits of that trust: Heaney's belief in poetry's adequacy constitutes a humanist substitute for—indeed, an ‘afterimage' of—Christian belief. This, finally, is the deep significance of the idea of adequacy to Heaney's thought: it allows us to identify precisely the Arnoldian origin, the late humanist character, and the limits of his troubled trust in poetry.

This thesis provides a theory of exceptional sex through close readings of contemporary novels by male British and American writers. I take as my overriding methodological approach Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, which is a juridico-political state in which the law has been suspended and the difference between rule and transgression is indistinguishable. Within this state, the spatiotemporal markers inside and outside also become indeterminable, making it impossible to tell whether one is inside or outside time and space. Using this framework, I work through narratives of sexual interaction – On Chesil Beach, Gertrude and Claudius, Sabbath’s Theater, and The Act of Love – to conceptualise categories of sexual exceptionality. My study is not a survey, and the texts have been chosen as they focus on different sexual behaviours, thereby opening up a variety of sexual exceptionalities. I concentrate on male writers and narratives of heterosexual sex as most work on sex, time and space is comprised of feminist readings of literature by women and queer work on gay, lesbian or trans writers and narratives. However, in the Coda I expand my argument by turning to Emma Donoghue’s Room, which, as the protagonist has been trapped for the first five years of his life, provides a tabula rasa’s perspective of exceptionality. Through my analysis of exceptionality, I provide spatiotemporal readings of the hymen, incest, adultery, sexual listening and the arranged affair. I also conceptualise textual exceptionalities – the incestuous prequel, auricular reading and the positionality of the narrator, the reader and literary characters. Exceptional sex challenges the assumption in recent queer theory that to be out of time is ‘queer’ and to be in time is ‘straight’. Furthermore, exceptionality complicates the concepts of perversion and transgression as the norm and its transgression become indistinct in the state of exception. In contrast, exceptionality offers a new, more determinate way to analyse narratives of sex.

This thesis takes its cue from Roy Fisher's comment, in 1971, that his poems are 'to do with getting around in the mind'. This getting around, however, is not quite the simple process of 'propositions or explorations in aesthetic ideas', which Fisher suggests. This thesis discusses the relationship between Fisher's poetry and the empirical reality which his poems actually do describe and engage with. The thesis suggests that this engagement is of a mystical nature, in which Fisher's sense of linguistic play is allied to an acute awareness of instabilities in both the self and the empirical world. Such play in language and content makes Fisher's poetry a unique site, in contemporary poetry, for his further engagement with a mystery which is ineffable. Yet, this ineffability is held and controlled by Fisher so that it does not have a theological teleology. Fisher's poetry does not point towards a mystery which finds its manifestation and exploration in ways which are recognised within a contemporary religious framework. The thesis is organised into four chapters. The first chapter outlines some of the history and context of Roy Fisher's writing. It outlines the early critical reception of Fisher's first substantial publication, City, and his publications in the nineteen sixties. It then discusses some of the interviews that Fisher has given. These interviews are placed in the context of the critical reception of Fisher's work, during this time, that aligned Fisher with the avant-garde and 'Linguistically-Innovative' poetry of the period. In the second chapter, the thesis examines Fisher's relationship with the 'self' in his poetry. In the light of a sense of instability perceived in the self in Fisher's writing, the idea of the 'mystical' is introduced and defined. This is particularly relevant in the light of Fisher's tussles with the empirical world. A further exploration of the 'other' in Fisher's poetry is undertaken in the third chapter, which examines Fisher's relationship with the urban, the abject and the woman. In the final chapter, Fisher's long poem from 1986, A Furnace is discussed in the light of the foregoing, to highlight its own exploration of mysticism. The second half of the thesis consists of a portfolio of original poetry

This thesis traces Huxley’s abiding preoccupation with mysticism, from his first collection of poetry to his final novel Island (1962). The function of mystics, Huxley argues in Grey Eminence (1941), is to dispel the ignorance of our benighted world by letting in the light of ultimate Reality. A world without mystics, he writes, would be ‘totally blind and insane’, and he laments that at present ‘[w]e are dangerously far advanced into the darkness’. Chapter 1 examines the influence of mysticism on Huxley’s early work. Several of his poems betray a mystical yearning; Gumbril is tantalised by intimations of the divine Ground; however, it was not until Those Barren Leaves (1925) that Huxley created a character who actively investigates ultimate Reality. Huxley’s disenchantment with mysticism has traditionally been ascribed to the influence of D.H. Lawrence, but the supposedly Lawrentian doctrine of life-worship that Huxley advocated was essentially humanist, whereas for Lawrence life was a metaphysical force. Chapter 2 analyses what it was that Huxley responded to in Lawrence, and the extent to which life-worship actually conforms to Lawrence’s ideas. Chapter 3 examines Huxley’s transition from intellectual elitism in the 1920s to his re-engagement with mysticism in the mid thirties. As a result of his friendship with Gerald Heard, Huxley joined the Peace Pledge Union, and it was a pacifist lecture tour that catalysed Huxley’s emigration to America in 1937. In California, Huxley grew exasperated with Heard and increasingly turned to Jiddu Krishnamurti for spiritual advice. Chapter 4 assesses the influence of these ‘problematic gurus’. The final chapter examines the treatment of sex in Huxley’s work, from the disillusioned romantics of his early fiction, to the reformed libertines who embrace celibacy in an attempt to lead a more spiritual life, to the inhabitants of Pala, for whom sex is a sacrament.

Established approaches to contemporary British literature frequently focus on how novelists from the UK have engaged with the complex account of culture that was developed on the Left during the 1980s as a response to Thatcherism. Freedom and the City shifts the terms of this debate in a new direction by using the thought of Hannah Arendt to reappraise the relationship between culture, Left politics and the British novel in the contemporary period, and to reveal a previously unstudied political and narrative logic I term the “cultural politics of disenfranchisement”. This logic grew out of a model of freedom advanced by leftist cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy during the 1980s and early 1990s, which identified urban subcultures as a substitute for the formal freedom associated with established political structures. Through close readings of six contemporary authors—Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi, J.G. Ballard, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Maggie Gee—I uncover the process by which British writers working after Thatcher came to believe that one of the consequences of this experiment with freedom has been a disastrous abandonment of politics in its formal sense: as a clearly delimited and agonistic public space in which a plurality of subjects is recognised and their actions invested with political meaning. Because of this abandonment, I argue, in less than two decades the coexistence of flexible cultural identities and urban space has become a virtual narrative impossibility: today, the British novel is frequently marked by structures of failed utopianism, frustrated or incomplete experiments and even withdrawal and quietism.

This thesis offers a reading of Eliot as a philosopher and poet whose creative career develops against the backdrop of a phenomenological world-vision which identifies reality with experience and defines experience as the interpretative process of perception. Eliot’s career appears as a series of attempts to express this world-view: he elaborates this notion of reality in his philosophical writing, translates it into a set of premises on aesthetics in his criticism on anthropology and Shakespeare, and embodies it – as a realisation of these philosophical and aesthetic tenets – in his poetry. Part I traces the development of Eliot’s aesthetic world-vision in his theoretical writing. Chapter 1 foregrounds the dichotomy that I see underlying Eliot’s thinking throughout his career, the dichotomy between linguistic structure and pre-articulate extra-linguistic experience. I interpret Eliot’s definition of the Absolute as the ideal of the linguistic order, while immediate experience is a term for the lived reality as meaningful, its meaningfulness shaped within and supported by language. Chapter 2 examines the relationship between Eliot’s thought and non-analytic philosophical schools, namely Indic traditions and ontological hermeneutics, in their common attempt to answer the question of how experience is inscribed into the linguistic structure articulating its meaning. Eliot’s philosophical work answers this question by insisting on and elaborating the definition of reality as dependent on the intrinsic connection between direct experience and linguistic meaning, while his turn from philosophy to poetry appears as a turn to the most adequate discourse of truth. Eliot’s conception of reality underlies his notion of a work of art, the subject matter of Chapter 3. In his critique of anthropology and related literary criticism, Eliot identifies ritual as the perfect form for meaningful experience and as the prototype of the work of art: both are constructed forms that signify experienced reality, and both demand the immediate involvement of the sensing body in the act of interpretation. I demonstrate that this double requirement – for a work of art to be, paradoxically, both a form of mediating meaning and of immediate experience – determines the shift over time in Eliot’s response to Hamlet, and define the Eliotic notion of aesthetic unity as the moment in which the two aspects of aesthetic effectiveness merge into the event of lived meaning. Part II examines how Eliot’s poetry realises, intensifies and extends his aesthetic conception of reality. Chapter 4 shows The Waste Land to be a poem that overwhelms readerly perception with aborted possibilities of meaningfulness without articulating the event of meaning. This poem mimics in its language the structure of disordered reality, relying on the reader’s natural inclination to construct meaningful unities in the interpretative act of reading. The poem’s resistance to meaningful aesthetic unity is witnessed most clearly by the functioning of the Grail legend and of the Tiresias figure, both presented as centring forces but failing to serve this purpose. Chapter 5 looks at Hamlet as a textual bridge between the two poems, containing models of aesthetic representation of both the structures of immediate effects that dominate The Waste Land’s vision of disorder and those of the unifying function found in Four Quartets. Chapter 6 reads Four Quartets as a quintessential poetic performance of the Eliotic aesthetic unity. This poem plays out the perceptual-and-signifying process of interpretative activity in which the world appears as a meaningful totality, directing the interpretative act towards the figure of complete meaningfulness that encloses the poem’s multiple motifs: the composite image of the fire and the rose articulates the oneness of the two constituents of meaningful experience, the fire representing the experiential immediacy and the rose the structural unit that signifies the experience.

This thesis explores debates about plagiarism in post-apartheid South Africa, focussing on two highly-publicised cases, Antje Krog's Country of My Skull and Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness. Through close reading, and by presenting such reading as culturally meaningful rather than forensic, I argue that in each text plagiarism acts as a contestation of cultural authority and a type of symbolic violence. Each text consciously affiliates itself to a particular literary tradition, occluding those sources that trouble the limits of these traditions, and re-appropriating cultural prestige. Re-establishing context illuminates the violent transculturations that underwrite South African cultural production and how national literatures are fields of contestation, rather than organically developing, self-contained formations. Chapter One considers the dispute between Stephen Watson and Krog over their respective poeticisations of |Xam narratives, contextualising it within a long history of appropriative white writing about indigenous peoples. Chapter Two considers Krog's alleged plagiarisms in Country of My Skull; notes other instances of unacknowledged copying; and relates Krog's borrowings to her use of testimony, arguing that a number of testimonies are fictionalised, and that Krog's borrowings and fictionalisations work together to lend her text a first-hand authenticity marked as specifically African. Chapter Three considers Mda's alleged plagiarism of Jeff Peires's The Dead Will Arise and notes how, contrary to Mda's claim that there is no written record for the Khoikhoi stories he retells in his novel, there is one, Theophilus Hahn's Tsuni-||Goam. Mda's borrowings serve to reinscribe an originary Xhosa identity, relatively uninflected by Christian,colonial influence, and to affiliate his work with African orature, rather than print culture. The afterword comments on the wider cultural and ethical implications of plagiarism; the ‘counter-narratives' that Krog and Mda's borrowings reveal; and the relationship of their borrowings to the metaphorical 'forging' of a 'new' South Africa in post-apartheid authorship.

This dissertation argues that traditional models of 'place' based on the city-country dichotomy do not adequately represent the complexities of contemporary British space. Prompted in large part by the epochal restructuring of capitalism in the 1970s, the urban problematic profoundly changed the production of space. Far from heralding an 'end of geography' commonly associated with globalization, the urban problematic recognizes that the ontological character of 'place' was transformed to such an extent that it problematizes and ultimately renders obsolete the city-country dichotomy. To understand this process, and raise the insufficiencies of conventional approaches among literary criticism typified by Raymond Williams's seminal text The Country and the City, the methodology of this thesis cross-reads literary texts with theoretical and analytic works. Using the works of J.G. Ballard, John King, David Peace, and Niall Griffiths alongside those of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey, and with extensive reference to the social, political, and economic history of Britain, this dialectical approach problematizes conventional distinctions between 'fiction' and 'theory' as much as it critiques commonplace ideas of space. With reference to Ballard's Concrete and Steel Trilogy, Chapter One establishes the threshold of the urban problematic, identifies its constitutive features, and provides a theoretical framework that structures the discussions in the subsequent chapters. The important subjects of gentrification, the privatizatlon of municipal housing, and the commodification of culture are addressed in Chapter Two through the revisionist accounts of London and the Thames Valley in the works of King. Chapter Three considers the sustained critique of Thatcherism in the works of Peace, which use the breakdown of the city-country dichotomy to map out the social effects of deindustrialization. As part of a codified response to the urban problematic, Griffiths's works provide Chapter Four with the materials necessary to revise traditional ideas of landscape. Meanwhile Chapter Five utilizes Ballard's later works to illustrate the virtual city, a concept which represents the most systematic response to the contemporary urban problematic in this thesis.

This thesis focuses on Welsh writing in English of the mid-twentieth century, examining it comparatively alongside Welsh-language writing, as well as some examples of contemporary work from Ireland and Scotland. It takes 1925 as its starting point, the year in which Plaid (Genedlaethol) Cymru was founded, and ends in 1966, when Gwynfor Evans became its first Member of Parliament, essentially legitimizing it as a mainstream political party. It is argued, with particular reference to the roughly similar position of Scottish Nationalism and writing at this time, and the effect that the foundation of the Irish Free State had on Irish writing, that during this transitional period in which Welsh Nationalism was not represented in Parliament, Nationalism was expressed most prominently in literature. It is concluded, through a thematic survey which incorporates writers from a range of ideological positions, that writers not usually considered to be supportive of Nationalism, and occasionally thought of as hostile towards it, actually express ideas which are broadly sympathetic to the Nationalist cause, and that expressions of sympathy with Nationalism are far stronger and more numerous in Welsh writing in English during this period than has previously been accepted.

This thesis examines constructions of Jews and Jewishness in British children’s literature from the eighteenth century to the present. It demonstrates that this literature has often sought to determine the place of Jews in Britain, and that this endeavour is linked to attempts to define the English sense of self. This discourse is often politicised, with representations influenced as much by current events and political movements as by educational objectives. The main focus of the thesis is on works published from World War II through 2010, with Chapter One providing a historical context for the later material and offering an overview of key motifs from the eighteenth century to World War II. Works by authors such as Maria Edgeworth, E. Nesbit and Rudyard Kipling are discussed alongside rare texts which have not been examined before. Chapters on gender, refugees, multiculturalism and heroes and villains reveal developments as well as continuities from earlier periods. The chapter on multiculturalism draws on unpublished interviews with authors including Adele Geras, the late Eva Ibbotson and Ann Jungman. The sometimes competing and conflicting representations in literature which has been influenced by the impact of the Enlightenment, the Empire, the Holocaust, cultural diversity and 9/11 demonstrate that there has been no teleological progression over the centuries from anti-Semitism to acceptance, or from ‘outsider’ to ‘insider’. Instead, many of the recurring themes in these texts reveal an ongoing concern with establishing, maintaining or problematising the boundaries between Jews and Gentiles. This tension is present in a substantial body of texts across age ranges, genres and time periods. It demonstrates that the position of Jews in Britain has been ambivalent, and that this ambivalence has persisted to a surprising degree in view of the dramatic socio-cultural changes which have taken place over two centuries.

The central focus of this thesis is the storytelling of place and the place of storytelling. These elements comprise the geoliterary terrains of narrative, the cultural matrix in which texts are sited, produced and received, including the lifeworld of the author. The texts under scrutiny in this research have been written by women during the interwar years of the 20th Century in Britain and Australia. One of the primary aims of the thesis is to explore the geoliterary terrains (including the space known as the middlebrow) of these texts in light of their relative neglect by contemporary critics in comparison with the prominence given to works written by men during this period. Analysis of the texts through the lens of locational feminism (Friedman, 1998, p.5) provides the framework for an interdisciplinary inquiry that draws on geography, feminist literary criticism and new historicism. The examination of the first of the texts, Hostages to Fortune (1933), is centred on the politics of the domestic space and the main character, Catherine’s experiences of domestic life. The chapter dealing with the second novel, A Charmed Circle (1929), while still engaging with the politics of domesticity and the everyday, also pursues the more psychological space of individual and family life as well as locating the interior spaces of the author’s lifeworld. The inquiry broadens out into spiritual and regional landscapes in the probing of The Nine Tailors (1934) which is set in the Fens of East Anglia. Expanding still further into empire, nation and identity, the fourth of the novels, The Invaluable Mystery, set in Australia, is explored in terms of the politics of place. More discussion of these sub-themes ensues as the therapeutic landscape of High Rising (1933) located in an imagined setting, is investigated and the links between the author and the writing of the novel are under scrutiny. The substantive themes of domesticity, home and nation are found to be embedded in these works and in the lifeworlds of their authors. The critical neglect of the texts is located within a set of cultural and material practices that marginalised women writers during this period. This marginalisation is in turn located within a longer historical practice of attempting to silence women’s narratives. Operating beside/against these practices are the imperative of storytelling and women’s ‘will to be known’ through narrative.