This thesis comprises edited and annotated transcriptions of four of the six known journals of Adlard Welby, (1776 – 1861), Lincolnshire landowner and traveller. The transcriptions have been made from the original manuscript journals, housed in the Lincolnshire Archives and the Sleaford Museum Trust. They cover the periods 1832 to 1856. Welby’s domestic life was unusual, in that he had two families, one with his wife Elizabeth, and a second, with his mistress Mary Hutchinson. The Italian Journal (1832-1835), is a detailed record of his first three years in Italy, where he lived with Mary and their ten children, after giving up his family estate. The remaining three journals, dating from 1841 to 1856, are a record of his travels in Europe and his experiences following Mary’s death in 1840. He was a thoughtful and outspoken diarist, and the journals provide a unique record of his view of the world he lived and travelled in. The Introduction considers the contents of these Journals together with references to other manuscript letters and documents, the remaining two journals and his only published work, A Visit to North America and the English Settlements in Illinois, (1821). Welby’s writing is placed in the context of nineteenth-century life writing and the travel writing of the period. The journals also provide a perspective on English attitudes to life on the continent at the time. The journals are prefaced by headnotes which give bibliographical details of the manuscripts and the principles of transcription. Each journal is accompanied by an itinerary. The editorial notes provide contextual material, and identify contemporary and historical references. The fifteen appendices include a family tree, details of his reading, illustrations of journal pages, notes on The Fourth Journal and the transcription of a bastardy bond signed by Welby.

At the intersection of life writing and travel writing, relocation narratives form a distinct subgenre of contemporary travel memoirs concerned with the inter-subjective and intra-subjective experiences of travellers who become settlers in foreign locales. Lured by the dream of the ‘good life’ abroad, transnational writers detail their post-relocation experiences in autobiographical accounts that seek to educate and entertain global readers about what it means to accommodate to a new life in a new land. This study examines the entwined processes of identity (re)formation and place attachment represented in recent relocation trilogies set in Italy, highlighting the tension between reality and illusion in the pursuit of la dolce vita in the adopted homeland. Focusing on Frances Mayes’s popular Tuscan texts, Annie Hawes’s Ligurian trilogy, and Tim Parks’s memoirs set in Verona, the study addresses how their accommodation over a period of long-term foreign residency is represented in multipart nonfiction accounts. Are their memoirs of ‘becoming Italian’ merely an exercise in social distinction that appropriates Italian ‘authenticity’ and packages it for global tastes? Or does dwelling in cultural difference over time lead to the development of an intercultural competence that is one aspect of an engaged form of cosmopolitanism? A close reading of the language, stylistics, and form of relocation narratives reveals a tension between colonial and cosmopolitan orientations as strategies for cultural representation. By re-positioning themselves across geographic, conceptual, and generic boundaries, relocation writers are mapping out new possibilities for identity-making through new patterns of home-making within contemporary transnational lifestyles. Their deep immersion in place enables the production of situated readings of Italy, Italians and Italianness that avoid essentialising otherness through the recognition of dialogical subjectivities. Keywords: travel writing; autobiography/memoir; lifestyle migration; cosmopolitanism; identity formation.

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This thesis is an ethnographic study of the craft of writing in U.K. sociology. Centred around key concepts of consecration and value, the thesis uses Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice to examine the relationship between the craft of writing and becoming or feeling legitimate within sociology. The thesis sits within a context of debates in sociology which have examined the idea of disciplinarity: what is sociology’s history, practice, and purpose? However, whilst sociologists have paid significant attention to the construction of the discipline and even how ‘the discipline’ writes, no one has yet examined this from the perspective of individual sociologists and the everyday of their writing practices and processes. This thesis addresses the gap in the research. The work here is based on a year-long ethnography of ten academics working in U.K. sociology departments. The thesis contributes significantly to understanding the relationship between macro-level structures of power and domination (institutional power and structural social inequality), and how this is felt and engaged with on a micro/everyday level, through writing. It adds an original perspective to considering how legitimacy is produced in sociological knowledge, and understood to reside in/with sociologists themselves. Crucially, the ethnography adeptly demonstrates that underpinning these consecrated intellectual and institutional positions are structures of ‘race’, class, and gender inequality. As such, the thesis shows how legitimate(d) ideological disciplinary positions interpolate with institutional racism, sexism, and classism in elite and exclusionary fashions. Thus, this study of the craft of writing in sociology gives original access to means by which the reproduction of power and privilege is done on a micro, everyday level. Moreover, the research here gives cause for hope: participants’ accounts show where hegemonic power may be challenged and interrupted. They mark where change may begin.

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This thesis presents a practice‐based exploration of the relationship between narrative and the use of the book form in artists’ books and children’s picturebooks, placing emphasis on the experiential qualities of the physical book. Most of the academic literature on the relationship between artists’ books and children’s picturebooks focuses on the finished book. Taking a practice‐based perspective, I approached this project as a book artist and explored my attempts to make a children’s picturebook. My analysis of the creation of a series of books contextualised with a discussion of literature on artists’ books and children’s picturebooks led to an investigation of the structures of children's picturebooks and the ways in which it overlaps with artists’ books. As a book artist, I had not anticipated my use of the book form to present significant creative challenges. However, the picturebook form imposed a more direct story than I would usually work with when creating artist’s books; new ways of using the book form emerged. My depictions of narrative became more figurative and my use of the book form took on greater subtlety. A key outcome of this research was a discussion from the book artist’s perspective of the process of creating a children's picturebook. An analysis of my practical work demonstrated the possibility of taking an interdisciplinary approach as a way for practitioners to discuss work in progress and finished work, offering insights into the process of both creating and interpreting practical work while investigating the relationship between artists’ books and children’s picturebooks.

This thesis examines travel and the configuration of the desert within literary works by Roberto Bolaño and Juan José Saer. Travel is considered not only in literal terms but as a journey that occurs within the writing itself. The deserts where these authors set their texts - the Sonoran desert and Patagonia - have been sites through which complex questions of historical and personal identity, migration, crime and colonialism have been explored. This thesis demonstrates how the work of both authors engages with traditions of writing about travel and the desert which range from conquest and captive narratives to biblical crossings and migration. Through close readings of their fictions, and drawing from a number of critical, theoretical and philosophical frameworks, this thesis also examines how Bolaño’s and Saer’s texts present us with essential considerations about literature and ways of reading. The first part of the thesis deals with three novels by Juan José Saer in which travel is at stake, two of which re-enact journeys through or to the desert. An evident dialogue with history also runs throughout the thread of these novels. The second part of the thesis focuses on two novels by Roberto Bolaño that have the desert and travel at their core. Both texts mark their particular stance with regards to experiences of reading and writing in relation to notions of space and travel. Among this thesis’s central research questions are: How do these authors tackle and reformulate the historical, political and biblical traditions of travel and the desert? What are the implications of their depictions of space and travel and why are they so central to their narratives? What types of reading are proposed by their works? The examination and consideration of these questions point to how Bolaño and Saer, while borrowing from traditions of both travel and the desert, transgress them, offering meaningful and ground-breaking literary works. Likewise, the analysis that results from addressing those central questions is situated in the context of current academic interests in issues of travel and space.

The thesis is an investigation of the relation between generic indeterminacy, narrative time and figuration through a comparative analysis of three generically ambiguous texts: Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory(1951/1966), Georges Perec’s W or the Memory of Childhood (1975) and Javier Marías’s Dark Back of Time(1998). Those issues will be examined with the help (or the hindrance) of a metaphor —the “curiosity”. Although it was initially employed by Brian Richardson to describe the non-mimetic temporal structure of Speak, Memory, the figure is used here not only in relation to narrative time but also as an alternative way of exploring the critical debates around the definition of autobiography as a literary genre. The “curiosity” metaphor is first considered in relation to other figures of definition and indefinition employed in critical discourses about autobiography. The metaphor articulates the tensions between boundary-based definitional models (such as Philippe Lejeune’s), hybrid “renaming” approaches (as evidenced in portmanteau tags such as ‘autobiografiction’ or ‘autofiction’) and anti-models such as Paul De Man’s, suspicious about the possibility of containing, defining or naming autobiography (highlighted by their use of temporallyimpossible or paradoxical figures). Through the curiosity (a figure of generic oddity defined against a norm it disturbs), the thesis explores the problematic nature of boundary-based definitional approaches and argues that it is only by an explicit and immersive mirroring of the circular and seemingly paralysing nature of autobiography (and its definition) that the genre can be described and kept alive. The thesis’s “curious” approach to autobiography involves a joint study of the metaphor not only in relation to genre but also to questions of narrative time and temporal indeterminacy (the “origin” of the figure). It seeks to explore this twinned process of indefinition through the medium of figurative mirrors—in particular, through self-referential and paradoxical devices such as mise en abyme. The procedure for this study involves a series of obsessive and patient readings of three “curiosities”: Speak, Memory, W or the Memory of Childhood, and Dark Back of Time. Their use of mise en abymedevices will be examined in parallel to their generic indefinition and their temporal structure. Narrative time will be analysed both through classical narratological models (such as the fabulaand sjuzhetdistinction) and “fuzzier” approaches to narrative temporality (as David Herman’s concept of polychrony). The thesis thus seeks to gather together a series of ambiguous figural and temporal motifs in the three texts (some of them left “uncollected” by previous critical approaches) in order to determine whether it mightbe possible to approach autobiography through less confining frames than those of the frontier/boundary/hybrid models.

This thesis looks at travel writing about China crossing three main research axes. The main one is represented by the comparison between Western-authored contemporary travel books and travel blogs. The majority of studies on Western travel writing about China focuses on pre-modern and modern texts, while much less attention has been dedicated to contemporary travelogues. At the same time, by projecting the genre onto the web, this study offers a mapping of the blogosphere and questions the literary and epistemological status of travel writing. Through a close reading analysis, the aim is to outline medial and rhetorical differences and similarities between travel books and blogs, particularly in terms of how China is represented, as well as the way in which travel writers perceive themselves. In this latter respect, interviews with travel authors and bloggers are also included. The second research axis explores the diachronic evolution of Western-authored travel books about the Middle Kingdom. Building on the findings of the first part of the thesis, the analysis looks at texts from the end of the 19th century throughout the 20th century, complementing the attention to pre-modern and modern travel accounts of earlier studies on travel writing about China. The goal is to understand if and how the genre and the representation of China have changed over the last century. The third axis is cross-cultural: in the last chapter a number of contemporary Chinese-authored travel accounts are analyzed. Referring to existing literature about Chinese travel writing, to be highlighted are the rhetorical and medial differences between “classic” and contemporary texts, as well as between books and blogs. Concerning the first research axis, findings suggest that Western travel books are more diversified generically speaking than travel blogs. Moreover, while the former provide a rather composite representation of the country, the latter are mainly devoted to deliver objectified touristic information. As for the second research axis, no substantial shifts were detected in the genre’s features, or in the way in which China has been represented in Western travel writing during the 20th century. Lastly, it is advanced that Chinese travel books are deeply politicized, while travel blogs tend to convey a contemplative representation of the country, more in the spirit of “classic” Chinese travel writing. However, differently from Western writers, both Chinese authors and bloggers manage to portray China from a variety of points of view.

Life in Transit: Travel Narratives of the British Governess argues that on entering the profession of governessing, women embarked on a new, more mobile existence of travel and relocation on a local and global scale. At a time when gentlewomen rarely travelled far without a chaperone, governesses left home and travelled unaccompanied across counties, countries and even continents for the purpose of work. Some relocated to wealthy households in Britain, some toured with families on the Continent, and others voyaged out to the colonies to work for expatriates or members of the Eastern aristocracy. Previously, however, scholars have tended to consider the governess in light of her unusual social status between the middle and working class. Studies of this kind do much to highlight the complexity of the governess’s situation, but by developing new theoretical perspectives which focus on the governess’s mobility, this thesis demonstrates how the impact of travel is fundamental to this. Highlighting the interplay between the governess of fact and fiction, Life in Transit defines the ‘governess travel narrative’ as a literary strand present in the canonical novel, and a sub-genre of women’s travel writing. Beginning with a re-reading of the governess novel, it considers Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) to explore the governess’s journey in England. Moving its focus across the Channel, it then examines how the semi-autobiographical governesses of Anna Brownell Jameson’s Diary of and Ennuyée (1826) and Brontë’s Villette (1853) experience life on the Continent. Crossing the border of fact and fiction into the genre of travel writing, the thesis considers the work of the lesser-known Emmeline Lott and Ellen Chennells, and examines governess travel narratives produced at the height of the British Empire. Finally, it analyses the journeys of Sarah Heckford and Anna Leonowens, who travelling in the 1870s and 80s, reached as far as South Africa and Siam, extending the scope of women’s travel and pushing the boundaries of the governess profession. In this way, Life in Transit re-reads the governess’s plight as both a physical and psychological journey in which she attempts to understand her place in the world. Incorporating theories of travel, space, translation and ‘things’ into a framework through which to examine her experience, it builds on Marxist and feminist approaches to the governess’s position. Allowing for further analysis of the governess’s unusual status, this approach shows how, from within the liminal space of her displacement, the governess experiences her life through spatial above social relations, and provides a unique voice in nineteenth-century Britain’s conception of self and world.