This thesis seeks to advance literary theory and in particular the theory of poetic language by developing a theory of metonymy as a literary trope. After a critical assessment of available views on metonymy, the first part of the thesis sets out to explore and analyse the aesthetic status, structure and poetic function of metonymy on the basis of concrete literary material. Premised on the notion of poetic language as defamiliarisation and following the establishment of an operational definition of metonymy, a corpus of ancient Greek texts, chiefly from lyric poetry and tragedy, is examined and metonymic occurrences are isolated. Contrasting categories of metonymy are established as they emerge from the corpus and analysed in their individual structure and shared characteristics. Further examples from German poetry are adduced for illustration and comparison as and where appropriate. On this basis, a general theory of metonymy as a literary trope is developed, centred on the notion of contiguity as proposed by Jakobson but now re-interpreted as lexical contiguity: by way of revising the theory of semantic fields, it is suggested that metonymy is best understood as a shift within a semantic field, conceptualising the field itself as the result of regular collocations in ordinary usage. This proposition indicates why metonymy’s defamiliarising effects appear less intense than those of metaphor, explains the relevance of grammatical categories for metonymy and clarifies the relationship between metaphor and metonymy. The second part of the thesis refines this theory and considers some of its further implications in literary practice by assessing what happens to metonymy in translation, that is, under the impact of changed linguistic, syntactic and cultural contexts.

This thesis explores the functional dynamic of a theatrical phenomenon which has for a long time been treated as a given, a convention or a device: direct address to the audience. It is frequently mentioned by scholars and critics, but en passant; its matter, though not its manner, is sometimes dealt with at length. Until recently, however, the significance of direct address has received surprisingly little attention. My MPhil thesis unpicked the strategies of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne using rhetoric as its principle analytical tool. It concluded that this apparently chaotic work of narrative fiction reveals the straight lines of its intent when it is seen as organized by the act of communication between Shandy and his readers rather than by the story it might seem to be trying to tell. Teaching at the Guildford School of Acting, combined professional and academic interests and provided a context in which to investigate the effect which direct address might have in the theatre, where it is both more possible and less surprising than in a work like Tristram Shandy. The research represented in this thesis is founded in my professional practice as well as in the literature. Examined through English Renaissance theatre and its secular and sacred roots, direct address reveals itself as not merely incidental or coincidental: it signals a fundamental interest in communication which is intimately bound up with the persuasive enterprise of rhetoric. It founds a relationship between action and audience which enables a rich and varied play and interplay of idea and story, of suppose and reality, involving audience in the act of theatre both as collaborator and as objective. Though the conventions of naturalism erected a fourth wall, rendering the audience voyeurs rather than participants, Meyerhold and Brecht are shown to have stepped backwards to re-member the self-conscious reflexivity which direct address signals, and recent theatre practice is considered for its exploitation of this key element of theatre.

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Many computational models of narrative have focussed on the structure of the narrative world. Such models have been implemented in a wide variety of systems, often linked to characters’ goals and plans, where the goal of creating suspenseful stories is baked into the structure of each system. There is no portable, independently motivated idea of what makes a suspenseful story. Our approach is instead to take the phenomenon of suspense as the starting point. We extend an existing psychological model of narrative by Brewer and Lichtenstein (1982) which postulates suspense, curiosity and surprise as the fundamental elements of entertaining stories. We build a formal model of these phenomena using structures we call narrative threads. Narrative threads are a formal description of a reader’s expectations about what might happen next in a given story. Our model uses a measure for the imminence of the predicted conflict between narrative threads to create a suspense profile for a given story. We also identify two types of suspense: conflict-based and revelatory suspense. We tested the validity of our model by asking participants to give step- by-step self-reported suspense levels on reading online story variants. The results show that the normalised average scores of participants (N = 46) are in agreement with the values predicted by our model to a high level of statistical significance. Our model’s interface with storyworld knowledge is compatible with recent developments in automatic harvesting of world knowledge in the form of event chains such as Chambers and Jurafsky (2008). This means that it is in principle scalable. By disentangling suspense from specific narrative content and planning strategies, we arrive at a domain-independent model that can be reused within different narrative generation systems. We see our work as a signpost to encourage the further development of narrative models based on what we see as its fundamental ingredients.

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This submission of published work consists of a number of different modes of writing that interrelate as the concerns of a poet, essayist and teacher. There are twenty-seven separate publications, presented under six categories headings: (A) poems, including prose-poems, written for the page; (B) prose-fiction, represented through a single work; (C) visual poems; (D) enquiries into aspects of a general poetics, including questions about 'situatedness' or 'implicatedness', genres of discourse and their related modalities, poetics and grammar, and a poetics of reading; (E) critical and celebratory readings, mostly of contemporary poets and poems; (F) meditations on institutionalised divisions and modalities of knowledge and practice and their implications for arts pedagogy. These six categories are intended to open out on to each other, to constitute an exploration of writing and reading that is always more than the sum of its parts. With the exception of one article published in 1992 all work was published- or will have been - between 1996 and 2005, a period that coincides with the consolidation and development of a field of study and practice at Dartington College of Arts named Performance Writing. The poems and prose fiction exemplify specific practices within this field and the articles are attempts to develop theoretical and critical instruments within it, especially as they apply to poetry. The articles move between close readings of poetic texts and broad enquiries into reading, writing and the operation of texts within their social, spatial and temporal contexts, such as domestic settings or bereavements. Three articles address 'grammar for performance writers'; three others focus on reading and its relation to knowledge, form and setting; another three, including a review, are enquiries into discipline and interdisciplinarity.

The creative text and its accompanying critical thesis explore how - through the writing of memoirs - ex-members of total institutions justified their acceptance of institutional controls. The critical thesis uses narratives within the sub-genre of apostate memoirs to support a sociological understanding of social dynamics within religious and political total institutions. It draws on theories concerning women’s experiences in new religious movements (NRMs), as well as studies of disaffiliation from NRMS. The creative text is a personal memoir, exploring the author’s experience of living within the Hare Krishna movement. The creative component of this thesis and the exegetical component are a bi-partite entity. Sociological and stylistic theories are informed by the nexus of the memoir writing and analysis of existing memoirs; the creative component is informed by the sociological theories of religion explored in the critical component. Both components address the same research question: Why do members of total institutions accept the controls placed on them? As a subset, additional questions are addressed. These include how a memoirist reveals the stage of disaffiliation they were in at the time of writing the memoir, and whether they can be positioned as apostate or defector. There is a focus on how dyadic relationships are controlled by institutional practices. A feminist perspective is used to understand the ways women in total institutions adopt cognitive justification strategies as coping mechanisms within these patriarchal environments.

This thesis examines, in theory and practice, how a 'poetics of rescue' might inform a contemporary biography of Grace Darling. The guiding philosophical principle is Hans-Georg Gadamer's humanist 'fusion of horizons'. This principle informs the research methodology, which tacks between the 'shores' of past and present, subject and object, foreign and familiar. Correspondingly, this hermeneutic 'play' suggests a poetics of retrieval. Key to that poetics is metaphor, and the creative possibilities afforded by an exchange between 'homeland' and 'Other'. The guiding image throughout is that of sea rescue, an image key to the life of Darling herself. The thesis blends critical commentary and poems into one text. This is intellectually consistent with the research methodology, and the creative element: the aim throughout is to close distances, 'fuse horizons' and engage in dialogue rather than definition. The blended style invites readers to 'play' between conventional academic discourse and creative writing. Chapter 1 shows how hermeneutics might inform the methodology of humanist biography. The discussion centres on prejudice and tradition, and how these factors influence biographical research and writing. This chapter also engages with the comparative biography of Darling, challenging past biographers' claims to have written 'definitive' versions. Chapter 2 focuses on museum and archive materials, and how these began to generate the abecedary sequence, 'Grace Darling's ABC'. This chapter considers the role of the curator, and how this parallels the role of the biographer. Theories of museology and display culture give rise to the beginnings of a poetics of biography. Chapter 3 illustrates this poetics more fully, with metaphor and metonymy being key to the discussion. This chapter makes a case for poetry-biography as a 'U.L.O.', an Unidentified Literary Object whose form acknowledges multiple realities. In conclusion, this thesis suggests that genre and biography, and perhaps even academic discourse, need to shape-shift if they are to remain effective.

No description available.

This Life Writing research thesis is a ‘biography’ of a private dining society, popularly known as the Crimes Club, that was founded in 1903 by a group of professional men who were fascinated by the Law and the psychology of criminals. ‘Our Society’ is the group’s official name, and it boasted among its early members such notable figures as Professor John Churton Collins, Arthur Diósy, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Edward Marshall Hall, Sir Travers Humphreys, H. B. Irving, Arthur Lambton, William Le Queux, A. E. W. Mason, Samuel Ingleby Oddie, Sir Max Pemberton, Bertram Fletcher Robinson, George R. Sims, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, P. G. Wodehouse and Filson Young. These barristers, actors, academics, journalists, authors, and scientists were fascinated by the criminal mind, and over regular dinners discussed notable villains such as ‘Jack the Ripper,’ Charles Peace, the Tichborne claimant, Kate Webster, Neill Cream, Dr. Crippen, George Joseph Smith and many others. Inspired by famous crimes and trials of the late Victorian era when they had been young men, the members of the Crimes Club came together in the early years of the twentieth century, at a time when both criminals and the justice system were becoming more professionalised. Members were able to use their influence to help with cases of injustice, and campaigned on behalf of Adolf Beck, George Edalji, and Oscar Slater. Their actions helped to bring about the Court of Criminal Appeal Act 1907. Drawing on material from published memoirs, biographies, newspapers and journals, public and private archives; this thesis explores how the members of Our Society, although they met in private, came to shape the public’s understanding of crime, justice, and forensic science at the beginning of the twentieth century.