The Introduction to this thesis includes a brief discussion of various understandings of what torture is, and a statement of the definition of torture adopted for the purposes of this study. Torture, as it is examined in this study, is not so much an act of violence as it is a violent process; that is, torture is a means, not an end in itself, and torture always presupposes intent and causality. Chapter One provides the historical and legal contexts for later literary and theoretical discussions of torture. This chapter is divided into two parts, the first dealing with instances of torture which appear in Anglo-Saxon historical records, and the second dealing with legal codes which are concerned with torture. In the course of this chapter it becomes apparent that torture as a public act serves as a document of sorts, sometimes recording and sometimes interpreting political realities. Any study of torture must be grounded in an understanding of pain, and Chapter Two is concerned with the nature of pain, and with its relationship to torture. The paradox of pain is that it is universal and at the same time isolating and inexpressible. In Chapter Two, a close examination of the language and structure of The Dream of the Rood serves to illustrate that the Anglo-Saxons understood this paradox. The graphic and sometimes almost loving detail with which the poet describes the passion of Christ functions as a language "of weapons and wounds", and helps to convey, in some measure, the almost incommunicable nature of intense physical pain. Chapter Three explores the way in which torture acts may function as language acts, and the necessarily public nature of such performative language. This chapter begins with a discussion of linguistic theories concerning pragmatics and performative language acts. Then, drawing upon textual examples from such Old English sources as Elene, Juliana and Daniel, this chapter examines how torture may be construed as a form of language, and how the performative nature of an act of torture articulates that act's context of power and politics in the culture at large.

This research considers the impact of Scottish romanticism on the construction of literary identity in the Canadas prior to Confederation (1867). I argue that early Scottish dominance in literary Canada, and similarities faced by both countries in defining a sense of self—including participation in a wider empire (or Union), populations divided by language and religion, and the need for a distinct identity in the face of a dominant neighbour to the south—all contributed to a tendency on the part of Canadians to look to Scotland as a model. Through an examination of early Canadian literature and on-going British constructions of the colony, the thesis considers the manner in which Scottish romantic strategies of literary nationalism are deployed and manipulated in the process of articulating a Canadian identity. Particular attention is paid to the works of John Galt and Major John Richardson, while tropes examined include the construction of landscape and settlement narratives, stadial histories, the historical novel, national tale and the depiction of a national history, and the manipulation of a romanticised Scottish military past in constructing Canadian history.

Over the last two decades, our understanding of Samuel Beckett’s life and work has been expanded by an unprecedented number of biographies, memoirs and personal correspondence published for the first time. As a result, academic research has been able to plot a series of connections between the writer’s literary work and the cultural and historical moments that shaped it. Beckett has been hailed as a poet whose work engages like no other with the atrocities of the Second World War. This thesis takes as its starting point an issue that often arises in evaluations of the writer, but which has never before been explored in detail: the theme of trauma. With reference to the work of prominent contemporary theorists, this project elucidates what we mean by the term trauma, and why it can be useful to our understanding of Samuel Beckett’s work. Drawing on the writings of Sigmund Freud, Cathy Caruth, and others, this thesis diagnoses traumatic symptoms and gestures in Beckett’s post-war writing. It identifies the role that ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ plays in some of his late theatrical texts. And, moreover, the thesis begins to trace the role that trauma can play in our understanding of language and meaning. Adopting a broadly poststructuralist view, this study engages with texts by Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida to ask how trauma challenges the status of language and the Western humanist subject. It will demonstrate how how trauma problematises our understanding of walking and thinking in Beckett’s post-war prose; where the presence of live theatrical production is unsettled by traumatic repetition; and why Beckett’s plays for radio undermine our expectations of twentieth-century modernity. While charting the way that Beckett uses and adapts traumatic themes and ideas, the thesis observes how the term signals a broader crisis in Western humanist understandings of time, place and identity.

This thesis analyses how the British South Asian diaspora is conceptualized, understood and reflected in a selection of female-authored literary texts which engage with the multicultural policies of the British state from the 1950s to the present. The primary sources include Attia Hosain’s Phoenix Fled (1953) and Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), Kamala Markandaya’s Possession (1963) and The Nowhere Man (1972), Ravinder Randhawa’s A Wicked Old Woman (1987), Meera Syal’s Anita and Me (1996), Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Shelina Zahra Janmohamed’s Love in a Headscarf: Muslim Woman seeks the One (2009) and Rosie Dastgir’s A Small Fortune (2012). I conceive of British multicultural state policies as unfolding in three major phases: Assimilation (1950- 1979), Integration (1980-2001), Social Cohesion/Interculturalism (2001- present). The thesis examines these policy changes and illustrates how these shifts are mirrored in and shape the character of British South Asian women’s writings. In the light of this I argue that British South Asian women writers’ engagement with a sense of exile, dislocation or a ‘teleology of return’ along with a symbolic longing to create imaginary homelands has produced new alliances which exist outside what has been called the national time/space in order ‘to live inside, with a difference’. Through the selected writers’ individual attempts to configure new fictional home spaces, a new architecture for the diasporic imagination is constructed around the poetics of home and the multicultural politics of identity. Such cross-cultural literary interventions exist both within and outside colonial and postcolonial genealogies, reconfiguring the critical geographies by which they have been mostly defined. The first two chapters of the thesis attempt to define the complex configurations of the concept of multiculturalism and its interconnections with the terminology of diaspora. I have adopted a reading strategy tracing the South Asian migration history to Britain and the early literary representations which powerfully illuminate the fragmented imagination of the South Asian diaspora in terms of contemporary theoretical paradigms. The next three chapters analyse literary representations by Attia Hosain, Kamala Markandaya, Ravinder Randhawa, Meera Syal, Monica Ali, Shelina Zahra Janmohamed and Rosie Dastgir, who highlight and complicate the issues of race, ethnicity and gender in relation to the rhetoric of multiculturalism and multicultural policies. The writers use various strategies that testify to the innate relation between the political ‘real’ and the literary ‘imaginary’ and explain how real life experiences provide fuel to the ‘diasporic imaginary’ and affirm the transnational potency of literature.

The twentieth and the twenty-first centuries have Catholicised Shakespeare. At the heart of this movement lie the so-called Lancastrian theories: that Shakespeare spent some time during his `lost years' in Lancashire and that he is to be identified with `Will[i]am Shakeshafte' in the will of the Catholic magnate, Alexander Hoghton of Lea. Although the proponents of the theories - aptly called `Lancastrians' - agree in terms of the identification of `Shakeshafte' with Shakespeare, their arguments vary and sometimes even contradict each other. We have, therefore, Lancastrian theories (plural). They are attempts to investigate the whereabouts of Shakespeare during the `lost years' and to find out the means by which he entered the London theatre. The Lancastrian theories can be seen in part as a counter-movement against recent Shakespeare scholarship that has been preoccupied with theory. Paradoxically, another stimulus for the revival of biographical studies is literary critics' interest in early modem history, which materialist criticism, especially new historicism, has brought in since the 1980s. Religion has become a major issue in Shakespeare studies. The modem historiography of the English Reformation, especially `revisionism', which emphasises the continuation of medieval Catholicism after the Reformation, has provided significant energy for the development of the Lancastrian theories. Furthermore, the Lancastrians have their own agenda - personal ambitions and motivations, some of which are not altogether scholarly. However, these theories are for the most part based on a chain of speculations, and tend to state them as fact. The biographers, whether Lancastrians or not, who believe Shakespeare and his family to have been Catholics are unfamiliar with the religious condition in Elizabethan England, including anti-Catholic acts and the penalties imposed on recusants. Their arguments also neglect other Elizabethan customs. These biographers' lack of profound knowledge of socio-political and religious history of Elizabethan England has produced inaccurate dramatisation of Shakespeare's life. One other disabling tendency among these biographers is to neglect negative evidence and disregard alternative interpretations. Their approaches to Shakespeare biography simplify the complexity of documentary evidence and produce narrowness of view. In Elizabethan England a series of continuous religious negotiations and renegotiations took place. Through this struggle, the clear-cut division between Catholicism and Protestantism was deconstructed, and there emerged `religious pluralism' -a compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism. It was in this complex matrix that Shakespeare was born, grew up and wrote plays and poems. It is against this cultural background that we should study Shakespeare's life (or lives).

This thesis examines the strategies, diversity and evolution of political, religious, and philosophical dialogues between the publication of Sir William Jones’s The Principles of Government (1782) and Robert Southey’s Colloquies on Society (1829). The dialogue genre during the Romantic period has received scant critical attention, and little is known about its evolution between the ‘death’ of the ‘Dialogues of the Dead’ style towards the end of the eighteenth-century and the satirical and literary innovations demonstrated in the dialogues of Peacock and Landor. This thesis elucidates the very significant changes that occurred in dialogue writing during this period in relation to wider contemporaneous issues concerning the Revolution Controversy, evangelical ‘enthusiasm’, reading audiences, the formation of class identities, the diffusion of knowledge, and the burgeoning of the novel to name but a few. Central to my argument is the notion that dialogue enacts a form of mentoring – a procedure that is intended to either directly or indirectly facilitate a ‘conversion’ within the reader, (and which ultimately becomes subverted only in satire). Such tactics go to the heart of debates concerning education, didacticism, and the reading process itself. Dialogue’s encapsulation of the primal constituent in communication - linguistic interchange - raises fundamental questions regarding the exchangeability of ideas, power relations and ideological manipulation, and as such, I look at how writers and propagandists used dialogue to bolster or critique various ideological standpoints, whilst constantly interrogating the many philosophical and textual problems that the genre poses. I argue that such questions, coupled with the increasing sophistication and interpretative capabilities of reading audiences, made the didacticism of the mentoring scenario untenable by the 1820s. However, I conclude that philosophical dialogue becomes an ‘impossible’ venture without some form of direction and coercion, and following this realization, the satirizing of philosophical debate and the process of dialogue itself became a more viable way of dialogue writing.

This thesis investigates the limitations and capacities of genres of the fantastic in their ability to represent the “break” between agency and structure, specifically the transformation of the former into the latter on the scale of radical social and political change. The transformation of utopian impulse to utopian programme is traditionally understood to present a representational impossibility—a “break”—and to require a shift into a less rigorous fantastic or magical representational register. This thesis considers this apparent impossibility to be a product of an ontology of atomised individualism that informs texts from mainstream Hollywood blockbusters to more putatively radical works of literature. It argues that these representations of agency, conceptually limited to individual action, occlude the reality and possibility of communal political agency. This thesis takes contemporary neoliberalism’s transformation of social structures and subjectivities to be driving this specific limiting effect on the ability to imagine alternative patterns of social relations and on the scope and potential of the imagination as such. Beginning with the development of a new political theoretical approach to fantastic literature, this thesis seeks to identify, through a series of close readings, the mechanisms by which this ideological work is performed by sf and fantasy texts, and then seeks to identify alternative representational techniques and strategies that overcome these limitations, allowing the societal imagination to think communal political agency, and move beyond the imaginative confines of the neoliberal horizon. Culminating in the work of China Miéville, this thesis finds that the effort to represent the “break” requires techniques and tropes taken from various genres, in order to capture the becoming—the producing and being-produced—of the world, of social structures, of communities and of subjectivities. The resulting literature has the potential to recruit the reader into occupying a position of radical, critical subjectivity—one which not only understands the malleable, constructed nature of social reality, but understands their own part in its reproduction, and the potential they wield, along with others, to alter it.

Within the last few decades much interest has arisen around the growing field of black British and “multi-ethnic” literature, yet the presence of protagonists of mixed origin in these works has been widely overlooked. The aim of this thesis therefore is to explore these characters across a range of genres, using Mixed Race Studies and other critical approaches in order to discover whether contemporary British writing challenges or perpetuates preconceived notions about mixed race subjectivity. Thematically structured, the thesis uses selected texts by authors such as Jackie Kay, Charlotte Williams and Lucinda Roy to investigate how contemporary literature provides a platform for self-expression in the form of the autobiography; explores gender and sexuality; challenges notions of British national identity and national narratives; and (re)considers the problematic concepts of “race” and “belonging”. Furthermore, in the last chapter, the thesis discusses the presence of the mixed race character within picture books for children and young adult fiction. In this section the thesis suggests that such characters can become a strategic tool for the promotion of a culturally diverse nation, whilst also providing young people with coping strategies against racism and introducing the reader to alternative histories. Wishing to employ a comparative and interdisciplinary framework, the thesis draws upon research from a range of different fields, analysing the discourse of “race” and the construction of “mixed race” with the support of writers such as Robert J.C. Young, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Miri Song, Suki Ali, and Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe.

This thesis explores the relationship between fin-de-siècle anti-emigration propaganda and fiction written by upper middle-class Irish women. Specifically, it examines the ways in which Catholic authors used the medium of fiction to propound an anti-emigration message analogous to that found in Catholic and nationalist press. Often at stake in their work is the degree to which the peasant female emigrant is to blame for the act of emigration, and the degree of agency she possesses in relation to the events or conditions that lead to this event. Class is a dominant determinant of agency in the depiction of the emigrants’ actions and decisions, as peasant and gentry emigrants are treated differently; the authors’ own class is also key in determining the stance they take on these decisions. In all of these treatments, the common themes throughout the study are the construction of Ireland as ‘Holy Ireland’, a haven of moral safety and spiritual regeneration, the ways in which the difference in authors’ political intent affects their treatment of the emigrant female, and the degree of realism with which the protagonist and her context are addressed. The authors under discussion, Mary Butler, Katharine Tynan, Rosa Mulholland, and Geraldine Cummins, though well-known in their time, have been almost completely forgotten, along with their literary and cultural contribution to Ireland’s history. Aside from contemporary criticism and reviews of their work, relatively little information exists about the authors under discussion. Consequently, this study seeks to initiate a conversation about the authors and the way their adaptation of Catholic nationalist discourse participated in emigration debates. This thesis is the first full-length study to examine the works of authors who adapted literary themes in order to create a discourse that actively discouraged young women from leaving Ireland during a period of female-dominated emigration.

Using Jerome J. McGann’s suggestion that the earliest fragments of Manfred might have been written during his Levantine Tour (c 2 July 1809 – 14 July 1811), this thesis aims to offer a new perspective on Byron’s Manfred, taking into account issues inherent in Byron’s patrician upbringing, his experience of Ottoman Greece, his notion of a Classical tradition, and his previous Byronic heroes. The majority of motifs previously perceived as “Gothic” can thus be seen in a new light, namely, as “Greek”. Another inspiration for a “Greek” reading of Manfred has been the fact that Western-European formative education and the literary canon have been based on works written by fifth-century BC Athenian writers, works which evoke a model of intellectual and political sophistication which I call, “the Greek imaginary” on the basis of its essentially fictive quality. However, the Greek imaginary formed part of a nobleman’s education from the days of fifth-century Athens until well after Byron’s age, by the time of which “Greekness” was a form of noblesse oblige amongst privileged North-Western Europeans, while “Greece” denoted a sense of the (imaginary) origin of Western-European culture. In effect, this thesis offers an insight into Byron’s Greek imaginary, shaped by the poet’s Classical education, his loyalty to the British patrician class, and his choice of reading matter from childhood onwards, as well as by what I call, his “inner Greek landscape”, namely an inner mental construct formed during his Levantine Grand Tour, wherein the “Oriental” Greek landscape was tempered by the literary landscapes of his Classical primers. This study provides a detailed account of the ideological and cultural traditions in which Byron’s intellect was formed, showing how the landscapes of Western Greece and Switzerland were conflated with the literary landscapes of Pausanias, Longinus and English pastoral poetry. The Introduction surveys the Greek imaginary, its historical dissemination, its respective appropriations by the Roman Empire and by North-Western Europeans, especially by British Whigs, and its legacy within British poetry, especially regarding the description of mountain landscapes. Aiming to facilitate an insight into Byron’s formative experiences, the chapter offers a survey of eighteenth-century Philhellenism and its socio-political conditions, namely the institution of the Grand Tour, burgeoning Orientalism, Winckelmann's aesthetic reassessment of the plastic arts (followed by the trends of antiquarianism and the picturesque in British painting) and the French Revolution. Here, I draw an ideological and aesthetic distinction between the Greek imaginary and Gothicism and then I outline Byron's Greek imaginary. Chapter One assesses Byron’s intellectual formation from the time he was taught to read until the moment of his Grand Tour (c 1794 – 1809), reviewing it within the cultural and ideological framework of the British Whigs, whose education was based on the study of Ancient Greek and Latin and whose adult culture displayed the dissemination of tropes taken from Classical texts, for example the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, within Whig gentlemen’s clubs, and pastoral and travel writing. In effect, both Byron’s comprehensive knowledge of Ancient Greek history and literature and his Enlightened Orientalism can be read as a product of his patrician upbringing. Chapter Two follows the movements of Byron and John Cam Hobhouse in Western Greece prior to their arrival in Athens (c October – December 1809) with Pausanias and the Arnaout servants of the tyrant Ali Pasha as their guides and protectors. It is argued that Byron’s “inner Greek landscape” (a collection of motifs which appear in all of his works from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and which I see epitomized by Manfred) was formed during the initial three months of his Grand Tour. Here, various elements of that “landscape”, both topographical as well as literary and metaphorical, are established. This chapter also surveys Byron’s antiquarianism, scholarly Orientalism (namely his studies in Romaic philology) and his divided attitude to the abstract legacy of Classical Greece and the contemporary Greeks. The last issue was epitomized by the concepts of the “mark of Cain” and the Byronic hero’s tragic love for his other, (apparently a native of Ottoman Greece), which I see as the two leitmotifs of Byron's poetic fictions featuring the Byronic hero (namely from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage until Manfred). The chapter also charts the Platonic notion of eros and a quest for the Kalon, pivotal to Byron's concept of love as absent presence, and key to the Byronic hero's self-torture and self-sufficiency. Chapter Three considers the events preceding and surrounding the composition of Manfred (April 1816 – May 1817), following Byron on his second Continental Tour, where his Greek imaginary was displaced onto the Belgian plains, German hills, Swiss mountains, the city-state of Venice and the Mekhitarist monastery of St Lazarus. This chapter observes the impact of Thomas Taylor's Neo-Platonist treatise, A Dissertation of the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, matched by the impact of Byron’s new friend, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, on Byron's subsequent composition of Manfred. The influences of Taylor and Shelley are evident in Byron's respective views of suffering in life as a part of the soul’s philosophical journey, and in his approach to the Promethean myth, Classical democracy, and the Gothic trope, the last serving as an excuse for a series of sceptical discussions culminating with the Diodati contest. Lastly, this chapter traces the influence of Shelley and his friend Peacock on Byron's reassessment of the Promethean and Christian myth during the time of his collaboration with the Mekhitarist monks of St Lazarus, when he was simultaneously writing Manfred and translating the apocryphal words of St Paul the Apostle, which can be read as approving of Manfred’s ultimate self-sufficiency. Following insights from the previous chapters, Chapter Four provides a close reading of Manfred, assessing the play as a form of simultaneous dialogue between Aeschylus, Plato, and Byron’s own hero. While the hero’s musings and monologues are seen as a reiteration of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, and while his notion of a (deflected) eros seems inherited from the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Oriental Tales, the plot of the play seems to follow the course of an initiation rite (theoria) evoked in Plato’s (and Taylor’s) notion of the Eleusinian and Bacchic mysteries. During the course of the play, Manfred is seen as an initiate reclaiming his lost eros, which then enables him to behold the highest good, the Kalon, and to come to terms with the fact that he was, and will be, his own destroyer, whereby displacing the Almighty as the (unjust) ruler of the Universe. In the conclusion, I recapitulate the key terms and concept of my thesis, the function and dissemination of Manfred as an ontologically subversive and politically ambitious reading play and as a contemporary myth. Lastly, the conclusion outlines the significance of Manfred within Byron’s subsequent artistic development by ushering in a shift of Byron’s focus onto collective and cosmic forces, and a more and more impersonal hero.