This thesis focuses on the critically neglected short film adaptations of Lawrence’s short stories. Building on recent advances in adaptation studies, it looks beyond ideas of fidelity to emphasise how each film adaptation functions as a creative response to a written text (or texts), foregrounding the significance of the fluid text, transtextuality, genre and the role of the reader. The films analysed in the thesis represent a body of work ranging from the very first Lawrence adaptation to the most recent digital version. The three case-study chapters draw attention to the fluidity of textual and visual sources, the significance of generic conventions and space in adaptation, the generic potentialities latent within Lawrence’s short stories, and the genetic nature of adaptation and genre (which combines replication with variation). By considering Lawrence’s short stories through the lens of these rare short films, the thesis provides a fresh, forward-looking approach to Lawrence studies which engages with current adaptation theory in order to reflect on the evolving critical reception of the author’s work.

The aim of this dissertation is to trace the development of Lawrence’s thought about the interdependence between language, selfhood and otherness in the period between the composition of Women in Love and the closing years of his literary career. Around the time of Women in Love’s inception, Lawrence saw the relationship between self and language in terms of the gap separating the speaker’s experience from his utterance. This gap, Lawrence believed, could be bridged through a type of verbal expression that was qualitatively different from the static language of representation on which Western rationalism was predicated. In “Foreword to Women in Love” this authentic mode of expression is referred to as “the new idea” arising out of the individual’s “struggle for verbal consciousness” (276). However, the complexity of linguistic signification, revealed on the dramatic plane of the novel itself, proves the one-to-one correspondence between expression and experience impossible to achieve. Lawrence’s exploration of the interdependence between selfhood and language continued with his essays on psychology, which followed chronologically Women in Love. In both Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence describes the ego as a rational construct analogous to the static language of representation. This structural homology allows the full verbal representability of the ego whilst rendering un-signifyable all those facets of subjectivity which transcend reason. The argument of Lawrence’s psychology essays can therefore be said to introduce an important twist in his earlier views on the interrelation between self and language. If the “Foreword to Women in Love” envisaged at least the possibility for an absolute coincidence between experience and verbal expression, the psychology essays reveal this at-oneness as virtually unattainable. With the hindsight of the late twentieth century developments in psychoanalytic thought, the argument put forth in Psychoanalysis and Fantasia can be said to foreshadow certain aspects of Jacques Lacan’s and Julia Kristeva’s views on subjectivity. The completion of the psychology essays left Lawrence undeterred in his quest for a new mode of signification able to reveal the entirety of the human self. Since all his attempts to elicit a solution from within Western ontology proved futile, he turned his attention to a variety of non-European civilisations, which the science of the time believed to share a mode of being different from the one engendered by rationalism. This essentially primitivist image of the non-European other had a profound impact on Lawrence who was fascinated to discover that societies so radically different from his own were predicated on the same state of at-oneness between experience and language which he himself hoped to achieve in the present. It was with these thoughts that Lawrence departed to the United States to familiarise himself with the traditional, non-European culture of the Native Americans and find inspiration therein. In other words, Lawrence’s impulse to travel to the New World was rooted in preconceived ideas which tend to transform the other into a projection issuing from the self. These ideas influenced in varying degrees Lawrence’s account of the indigenous people throughout his stay in North America, yet, in time, he began to develop a more authentic sense of their otherness which was reflected in his narrative technique. The Native American essays included in the collection Mornings in Mexico demonstrate how Lawrence began to, literally, write himself out of his own projections by creating what can be referred to as a self-conscious discourse on alterity. The specificity of this discourse lies in its capacity to foreground its very own cultural bias and thus bracket off, as it were, the truth that it ostensibly affirms. In this sense it prefigures the methodological adjustments that Jacques Derrida prescribed to late twentieth-century science of ethnology. The signifying logic of Lawrence’s discourse on alterity is applied further in some of his later works which examine cultural otherness in terms of a particular mode of expression epitomised by the symbol. The symbol, conceived of as a particular type of language, functions in accordance with the same logic of transcendence that we found in the discourse of the Native American essays in Mornings in Mexico, in the sense that it simultaneously affirms and subverts a particular meaning. However, if the essays’ narrative leaves an unbridgeable gap between the European observer and the indigenous people, the symbol creates a signifying space where self and other can genuinely interact. Thus the collection of Places elaborates a social model allowing culturally diverse communities to co-exist without infringing upon each other’s difference. Using Julia Kristeva’s theory of inter-subjective relations across a cultural divide, put forth in her work Strangers to Ourselves, I will try to demonstrate that the social model Lawrence develops in Sketches of Etruscan Places is based on a fundamental re-conceptualisation of the correspondence between selfhood and language, conceived as symbolic discourse. Since the symbol contains its own undoing in the dynamic flux of experience, its meaning is characterised with a semantic surplus, an otherness, that can never be fully explicated. Symbolic discourse can therefore signify the ever changing and ultimately unknowable dimension of the self, which Lawrence calls variously dynamic consciousness or the unconscious, and which the static language of representation is unable to express. In other words, the symbol can accommodate both the self-sameness of the ego and the otherness of the non-cerebral self. By positing in language the decentred human subject, never at one with itself, the symbol renders hollow the idea of a homogenous society based on individual selfsameness. Since the subject is always at variance with itself, social cohesion begins to appear possible only if predicated on difference, a difference that all the members of society share. This sameness in difference creates an open and inclusive social framework able to integrate people irrespective of their cultural background. In this sense, the essays included in Sketches of Etruscan Places create a new balance between the notions of language, selfhood and otherness that is both similar and different from the one we described in Part I of this thesis. The correspondence between self and language, i.e. the speaker and his utterance has been regenerated at the cost of a radical redefinition of the notion of language. This redefinition, in turn, has been made possible by Lawrence’s recourse to cultural otherness and has led to the development of a model of self-other interrelation whereby self and other can coexist in difference.

William Shakespeare has led a rich and varied afterlife in Ireland. That this history documents the development of distinct Shakespeares in circulation during different periods also reveals unique possibilities for understanding the relationship between the literatures of England and Ireland at particular cultural moments. Shakespeares Wake: Appropriation and Cultural Politics in Dublin, 1867-1922, interrogates the ways in which the contentious Anglo-Irish cultural politics that obtained in Dublin between the Fenian and Easter risings shaped the Shakespeares of Matthew Arnold’s lectures On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), Edward Dowden’s Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875), and the early essays of W. B. Yeats first collected in Ideas of Good and Evil (1903) and The Cutting of an Agate (1912). But James Joyce’s own (ab)use of the Shakespearean text in Ulysses (1922) underscores the instability of the binary oppositions with which Arnold, Dowden, and Yeats had each constructed their appropriations, demonstrating the pernicious manner in which the terms of Anglo-Irish cultural politics had come to mediate the relationship between the colonial reading subject and its object in Dublin during the late nineteenth century. Joyce’s Shakespeare in this way marks the point where the discourse of literary history ends and that of the literary as such starts.

John Eliot (1601-1690) was one of the first English missionaries to settle in the New World. Over the past four centuries his life and missionary work with the Algonquian Indians of Massachusetts Bay, New England, have been documented in various forms including biographies, poems, fiction and children's stories. In addition to his active missionary work, Eliot was also a profile writer and translator: he contributed to many promotional pamphlets, authored one of the most controversial commonwealth treatises of the seventeenth century, published fictional dialogues of Algonquian Indians, composed language and logic primers to help in the translation of Massachusett into English and vice versa. His most ambitious and famous publication is his translation of the Bible into the Massachusett dialect of Algonquian. Throughout the twentieth century, Eliot's reputation as a missionary and a translator has received much critical attention, especially from historians of the colonial period. However, given recent moves to expand the canon of colonial literature, it is surprising that there is no book-length literary analysis of his work. In order to redress this balance and consider Eliot's work from a literary rather than a historical perspective, this thesis considers the written records of direct speech, conversations, speeches, dialogues and deathbed confessions of Algonquian Praying Indians, in order to investigate the use and manipulation of written and spoken communicative strategies. By considering Eliot's work in terms of speech, text and performance, this thesis traces the performative nature of cultural identity through the emergence and inter-dependence of English, New English, Indian, and Praying Indian identities.

In 1792, the inventor and illusionist Paul Philidor unveiled the ‘Phantasmagoria’ to the people of Paris. Coined by combining the Greek words ‘phantasma’ (appearance, vision, ghost) and ‘agora’ (assembly), Philidor had intended the name to suggest a vast crowd of the undead, a riotous carnival of phantoms. He promised his audience that, using the projections of a magic lantern and other ingenious mechanical devices, he would show them the illusory shapes of ghosts and monsters, reunite lovers separated by death, and call fiends out of hell. However, this exhibition of illusory spectres was to become something far more than a mere footnote in the history of Romantic popular entertainment. The Phantasmagoria was to assume a metaphorical function in the mindscape of the period; this cavalcade of spectres was to come to serve as an image for not only the fantastic terrors of dreams and hallucinations, but also for the unbounded creative power of the imagination. Besides this, the metaphor of the phantasmagoria was to subsume into itself an idea which had its origin in the ‘Curiosity Culture’ of the previous century: the curious collection. As time wore on, this Curious – or Phantasmagorical – collection became a symbol by which writers of the late Nineteenth Century could signal their resistance to bourgeois conformity and their own paradoxical celebration and rejection of consumer culture. This work examines the evolution of the Phantasmagoria metaphor as well as the development of its associated aesthetic: the aesthetic of the curious collection – the collection of weird and fabulous objects that astonishes the senses and confuses the mind, erasing the boundaries between reality and fantasy.

Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha offers the most comprehensive study to date of an intriguing but understudied body of plays. It undertakes a major reconsideration of the processes that determine the constitution of the Shakespeare canon through study of that canon’s exclusions. This thesis combines historical analysis of the emergence and development of the "Shakespeare Apocrypha" with current theorisations of dramatic collaboration. Several new theoretical and historical approaches to early modern authorship have emerged in the last decade. This thesis breaks new ground by bringing them together to demonstrate the untenability of the dichotomy between Canon and Apocrypha. Both within and without the text, the author is only one of several factors that shape the plays, and canonical boundaries are contingent rather than absolute. Chapter One draws on the New Textualism and studies of material print attributions, viewing the construction of the apocryphal canon alongside the growth of Shakespeare’s cultural prestige over three centuries. Chapter Two applies recent repertory studies to authorship questions, treating five anonymous King’s Men’s plays as part of a shared company practice that transcends authorial divisions. Chapter Three seeks dialogue between post-structuralist theory and "disintegrationist" work, revealing a shared concern with the plurality of agents within disputed plays. Within all three models of authorship, the divisions between "Shakespeare" and "not Shakespeare" are shown to be ambiguous and subjective. The associations of many disputed plays with the Shakespeare canon are factual, not fanciful. The ambiguity of canonical boundaries ultimately demonstrates the insufficiency of the "CompleteWorks" model for study of Shakespeare’s drama. Chapter Four confronts the commercial considerations that impose practical limitations on the organisation of plays. In so doing, this thesis establishes the theoretical principles by which the neglected plays of the Apocrypha can be readmitted into discourse, dispersing the fixed authority of the authorial canon.

The nineteenth and early twentieth century habit of comparing Dickens and Thackeray sprang from the existence within the early and mid-Victorian consciousness of certain diametrically opposed ideas: empiricism and intuitive Carlylean spirituality; yearning Romantic subjectivism and a belief in objective authoritarianism and duty; and, in 11terature, realism and the idealism of romance. Reacting against the excesses of the immediate past, the men of the 1830’s and 40’s were yet unable to ignore the impressions left by these. In particular, they were affected by the scepticism of the empiricists, and this produced in their minds a tension between faith and doubt, which, when suppressed by those unwilling to face their own divided nature, found an outlet in externalised comparisons such as that between Dickens and Thackeray. In criticism of Dickens in the 30’s and 40's, he was separately admired as optimist and attacked as pessimist, but only in the early 50's was the dichotomy of hope and scepticism openly stated, in the shape of his antagonism with Thackeray. In the late 40's, the latter’s stylistic purity had seemed more objective than the self-indulgent mannerisms attributed to Dickens, but later, when the centre of contrast shifted to a distinction between optimism and cynicism, the balance inclined in Dicken’s favour, though the darker vision of his rival, mirroring the repressed fears of the age, could never be ignored. Many of the other strands of comparison - the ascription to Thackeray of restless self-consciousness and to Dickens of objectivity; the contrast between the real and the ideal instituted byDavid Hasson - related back to this focal point of hope and doubt, which continued to lie at the heart of the opposition in the 70's and 80's and even in criticism of the 1900's. From the 80's onwards, however, interest in the traditional comparison was declining. The polarity of Dickensian heart and Thackerayan head reflected an important aspect of nineteenth century experience, but it was often a distorted reflection, since the ideas of Victorianism were being used by writers lees conscious of the problems of the time than men such as Carlyle who had created the Victorian ethos. Concepts of optimism, objectivity and realism were more naively and rigidly applied than by the minds (themselves often naive and inconsistent) which had originally formulated them.

The dissertation considers the English morality plays as explorations of inner conflict. The pre-Reformation moralities use personification-allegory as a means of analysing the conflict which takes place within the soul of man between his attachment to this world and his other-worldly aspirations. The social ethic of Reformation theology, however, introduces a new interest in social relationships. The moralities of the post-Reformation period retain allegory to analyse the inner process which lead to ethical choice,but they also incorporate literal dramatis personae in order to express social themes, and the proportion of personification-allegory correspondingly decreases. The early popular Elizabethan "tragedies” are predominantly literal, but they tend to retain personified abstractions as a means of expressing inner conflict. It is suggested that in the transition from this hybrid form to purely literal tragedy, the allegorical technique of the earlier plays is absorbed rather than discarded, that the deliberative soliloquies of later tragic heroes are a development of the analysis of inner conflict leading to ethical choice which is central in the morality tradition.

<p> Late medieval English texts often represent unfinished quests for obscurely significant objects. These works create enchanted worlds where more always remains to be discovered and where questers search for an ur-text, an authoritative book that promises perfect knowledge. Rather than reaching this ur-text, however, questers confront rumor, monstrous babble, and the clamor of argument, which thwart their efforts to gather together sacred wholeness. Yet while threatening, noise also preserves the sacred by ensuring that it remains forever elsewhere, for recovering perfect knowledge would disenchant the world. Scholarship on medieval noise often focuses on class: medieval writers tend to describe threats to political authority as noisy. These unfinished quests, though, suggest that late medieval literature&rsquo;s complex investment in noise extends further and involves the very search for the sacred, a search full of opaque language and unending desire. Noise, then, becomes the sound of narrative itself.</p><p> While romance foregrounds questing most clearly, these ideas appear in a variety of genres. Chapter 1 shows that in the <i>House of Fame</i> rumor both perpetuates and undermines knowledge, so sacred authority must remain beyond the poem&rsquo;s frame. Chapter 2 juxtaposes the <i>Parliament of Fowls</i> and the <i>Canon&rsquo;s Yeoman&rsquo;s Tale</i>, in which lists replace missing quest-objects, the philosopher&rsquo;s stone and certainty about love. Chapter 3 centers on <i>Piers Plowman</i>, which becomes encyclopedic as one attempt to &ldquo;preve what is Dowel&rdquo; leads to another, and Will never definitively learns how to save his soul, the knowledge he most wants. Chapter 4 turns to Julian of Norwich&rsquo;s search for divine &ldquo;mening&rdquo; and her confrontation with an incoherent fiend, an anxious moment that aligns her with these less serene contemporaries. Chapter 5 argues that Thomas Malory&rsquo;s elusive, noisy Questing Beast at once bolsters and undermines chivalry. The final chapter looks ahead to Book VI of <i>The Faerie Queene</i>, where the Blatant Beast, a sixteenth-century amalgam of the fame tradition and the Questing Beast, menaces Faery Land yet, as a figure for poetry, also contributes to its enchantment. In trying to locate and maintain the sacred, these unfinished quests evoke worlds intensely anxious about &ldquo;auctoritee.&rdquo;</p>

This thesis consists of two parts: a creative work and a reflective essay. The creative work is a novel entitled Hartsend. In a village in Central Scotland, the characters assemble at the funeral of Mrs Crossthwaite, a domineering woman whose middle aged daughter Lesley must now make her own choices. Four people in particular, teenagers Harriet and Ryan, and middle aged friends Duncan and Lesley attempt to cope with their private pain and the damage done to them in the past, in order to make sense of their lives. Is forgiveness necessary, or even possible? Meanwhile, out of everyone’s sight, another kind of damage is taking place which will affect the entire village. The reflective essay examines first the origins of the novel, those external events which over a number of years preoccupied me and the personal circumstances which intensified my concern. It then considers the factors involved in its writing. These include: the difficulties involved in becoming a writer, the depiction of a paedophile, an exploration of the key concept of ‘Noticing’, the use of the Enneagram in developing characters, the Mindmap as a tool for plotting the novel, the usefulness of experts and the place and purpose of writing in an aleatory world. Examples from several writers including Nadine Gordimer, Carol Shields, Raymond Chandler, Margaret Atwood and William Trevor, whose words have contributed to my ideas about writing and whose work has modified my writing style, substantiate this analysis.