This thesis, titled ‘An Evolutionary Definition of Magical Realism’, studies the changing meaning attached to the term in the secondary literature and, more importantly, contextualizes the criticism with a detailed analysis of key literary texts from throughout magical realism’s more than eighty years of evolution. The work of Jorge Luis Borges and Alejo Carpertier is used to elucidate the magical-realist pre-history, with particular focus on two tropes: the ‘neo-fantastic’ (a term created by Jamie Alazraki for a notion first outlined by Tzvetan Todorov) and ‘recasting of history’. The thesis subsequently analyses the presence of these two tropes in five test-cases taken from various stages in magical realism’s evolution: Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien Años de soledad, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, Toni Morrison’s Son of Solomon, and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. The thesis’s final goal is to demonstrate that magical realism is a combination of the neo-fantastic and recasting of history and with this definition and the close-readings which support it, confront the critical imprecision which has beleaguered the magical-realist debate for many years.

This study of the Moscow-based, Russian-language 'thick' journal, Nash sovremennik, with special reference to Russian nationalism, in the last decade of the Soviet polity (1981-1991), is based on a distinction between popular and statist Russian nationalist tendencies. In the conditions of an 'imperial state', such as the Soviet Union, it is argued, nationalist ideology exhibited a strong polarisation between a 'popular' tendency, oriented towards the idea of the nation; and a 'statist' tendency, oriented towards the state. The exigencies of Soviet politics meant that both popular and statist nationalist tendencies appeared in the journal in 'truncated' form: the popular nationalist tendency lacked an idea of statehood appropriate to its vision of the nation; and the statist tendency was inhibited from advocating a policy of thorough-going cultural Russification, appropriate to its views of the state. In the Gorbachev period, while Westernisng policies tended to make nationalists of both types oppose reform, the issue of the state was fundamental in determining the conservative political orientation of nationalists. There are five conclusions of the study, with regard to the period 1981-1991: 1 Nash sovremennik played an important role in the articulation of Russian nationalist ideology; 2 the publication policy of Nash sovremennik was strongly influenced by the appointments to the key internal posts, not only of chief editor, but also of deputy chief editor; 3 conservative political elites in the Soviet Union sought to use nationalist ideology to control and limit reform; 4 Russian nationalist ideology was characterised by a marked polarity between statist and popular tendencies; 5 the 'imperial' nature of the Soviet state, and the ethnic heterogeneity of Soviet elites and masses alike, made Russian nationalist ideology unsuitable, as an ideological instrument, for Soviet political elites.

This thesis critically examines the potential benefit of using drama with offenders in prison and on probation. In recent years a range of interventions and alternatives to custody have been theoretically evaluated and discussed by various criminologists and sociologists. Despite an array of literature on these matters, the possibility of drama as an intervention has escaped the interest of researchers and publishing houses alike. This thesis aims to redress the balance in detailing the considerable amount of Drama Work being conducted in British prisons and probation centres, by companies and individual practitioners forming a chronology of such and critically examining the process and results. Through employing drama as a means of addressing offending behaviour, it is possible for Drama Work to play a part admittedly a small one, in combating recidivism. While proving such may be problematic this thesis sets out to test this theory drawing conclusions and making recommendations for the future of Drama Work in prison.

This thesis examines the paintings of Henriette Browne and George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda in order to explore the ways in which European women contributed to imperial cultures of the second half of the nineteenth century. In contrast to many cultural histories of imperialism which analyse Orientalist images of women rather than images by women, the thesis argues, first, that women did produce imperialist images and, second, that an analysis of the production and reception of images by women will develop an understanding of the interdependence of ideologies of race and gender in the colonial discourse of the period. To this end, the representations selected for study are read largely through their reception in the British and French critical press in order to assess the ways in which the gender-specific and author-centred criticism of the time produced a range of (often contradictory) meanings for women's texts and identities for their authors. It is argued that women's differential, gendered access to the positionalities of imperial discourse produced a gaze on the orient and the Orientalized 'Other' that registered difference less pejoratively and less absolutely than is implied by Said's original formulation (Said, 1978). Thus, the thesis contributes to critical debates about imperial subjectivities; argues for a more complex understanding of women's role in imperial culture and discourse; intervenes in George Eliot scholarship; and provides the first detailed analysis of Browne's work. As an initial exploration of women's involvement in Orientalist art, the thesis also aims to indicate the existence of a larger, as yet unexplored, field of women's visual Orientalism and demonstrate the benefits of taking an interdisciplinary approach to the examination of women's interaction with and contribution to colonial and imperial cultures.

This thesis accounts for the influence on the mainstream American comic book industry of a group of comics creators from the cult British science fiction magazine 2000AD in the early 1980s. It details the way in which these creators developed new methods for approaching politics in comic books and delivering that to a more diverse group of readers as a response to censorship in Britain of the boys magazine Action. The thesis looks at the way the medium's publishing history has interacted with the development of its modes of communication; in particular it explores how the reader in comics is positioned in relation to character and narrative development. To support this argument two chapters are devoted to the methodology and discussion of how the medium works. Comics consist of sequences of images that require reader input to produce a narrative. The chapters on form explore the implications this has for close analysis. These chapters use Hergé's iconic character Tintin and Grant Morrison and Chas Truog's surreal Animal Man: Deus Ex Machina as examples and draw upon and critique the theoretical work of Scott McCloud and Thierry Groensteen, among others. The core of the thesis revolves around close analysis of eight texts, three from the UK and five from the USA. These are grouped into categories that broadly represent the different phases of the phenomenon. The first includes John Wagner, Alan Grant and Ian Gibson's RoboHunter: Play It Again Sam; Alan Moore and Ian Gibson's The Ballad of Halo Jones and Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta. These readings are then tested against roughly contemporary American published comics in the form of Chris Claremont and John Byrne's X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga and Frank Miller's Daredevil before looking at Alan Moore, Steve Bissette and John Totleben's Saga of The Swamp Thing as a direct transferral of values developed on 2000AD to the American market. The thesis then moves on to consider how British creators influenced American comics moving forward by looking at an example that was clearly influenced by the movement in Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns again using his earlier comic Ronin for comparison. Throughout the thesis these readings are used to show how these comics imagined new political configurations in response to the right-wing politics of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and attempted to do so while engaging a more diverse readership than was previously the case in either the British or American adventure comics mainstream. The thesis as a whole advances comics studies in terms of contributing to theoretical work on how the medium communicates and by providing a detailed look at this period in the history of comics. It also contributes to a framework for future research in cultural studies to approach different aspects of the medium.

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