This thesis is submitted in conjunction with published works of fiction for the qualification of PhD in English (Creative Writing) at Nottingham Trent University. The essay is a critical commentary and reflection upon the conception, construction and revision of two published works in particular, Smoking Poppy (2001) and Leningrad Nights (2000). The thesis argues that principal impulses in creative writing can be seen in emblematic form in the ancient, proto-musical story accompanying instruments of the drum and the lyre. The drum marches the narrative towards its ritual ending, while the embellishments of the lyre seek to lift the story out of the flow of time. It is the job of the writer to resolve these often conflicting impulses, and considerations of authorial voice inform that resolution.

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My thesis applies the concept of schizoanalysis developed in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia project to the reading of subjectivity in Gothic fiction, via case studies of texts by H.P. Lovecraft and William S. Burroughs. I argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis provides new perspectives on the ongoing influence and effects of that theory within the field of Gothic criticism. Interrogating this influence, I develop the concept of a ‘Schizo-Gothic’ modality which provides the means to detect previously occluded dynamics of schizoid becoming and subjective multiplicity within Gothic fiction. I argue that this approach opens up new conceptual and methodological possibilities for Gothic criticism, which I then apply to my analysis of exemplary texts by my selected authors. While my readings are designed to contribute to the growing body of scholarship surrounding Lovecraft and Burroughs, they also work to highlight the more widespread presence of schizoid subjective operations within the Gothic mode. Considering this force of schizoid subjectivity in the light of Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of subjectivation in the modern capitalist socius, my thesis thus offers a theoretical intervention into the field of Gothic Studies, providing new ways to understand the mode’s engagement with the politics of subjectivity.

This thesis comprises an original work of fiction, entitled Liberty Horses, and a commentary which explores and compares postmodern English and American fiction, locating my own creative writing practice in that field of contemporary writing. My original work of fiction, Liberty Horses, is divided into two parts, being 'Part One: Liberty Horses' and 'Part Two: Dreamland'. The critical section of this thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter One, 'American Postmodernism', shows how American writers, such as Richard Brautigan, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo, continually re-interpreted American fiction in regard to its Anglo-American tradition and explored the nature of Consumerism and Corporatism within American society and how such writers refuted the implications and ideals of the American Dream. Chapter Two, 'English Postmodernism', examines the development of postmodern theories within English fiction. In particular it discusses the ideas of History and Myth, as employed by such writers as Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, Peter Ackroyd, Angela Carter and Christine Brooke-Rose. The chapter also discusses the part played by the Booker Prize in the rise in commercial popularity of these writers as well as the acceptance of postmodern writing within a wider readership. Chapter Three, 'The Making of Liberty Horses', explores the ideas which went into the creation of my novel, namely the image of the circus, paranoia and social, political and sexual impotence, as well as the writers, including Patricia Duncker, Richard Brautigan and Don DeLillo and other artists, namely Andy Warhol, David Lynch and Wim Wenders, who directly influenced the work

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'The hand that rocks the cradle' is a phrase indicative of motherhood, the world, and change. When applied to women's criminographic narratives, it can be read in terms of a challenge to the hegemonic belief in male writers as the founding 'fathers' of the crime and detective genre. This study will examine women's criminous narratives in Britain, North America, and Australia from 1860-1880, with the purpose of bringing to light women writers who have hitherto and for the majority been excluded from what has been seen as the masculine crime canon. Men have long been expounded in critical work on crime and detective fiction and women writers have frequently been eclipsed by male authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and Arthur Conan Doyle. I seek to redress this masculine-centric view of the genre and its development: I aim to show that contrary to this viewpoint, women were both present from the start and were significantly contributing towards the formation of the crime and detective genre as we now know it. The period chosen has recurrently been perceived as an interstitial space, though I contend that this epoch, rather than representing vacuity, is central to the formation of the crime and detective form: while the genre was still nascent, the melange of sub genres in this period saw the establishment of the foundations for what was to follow. Authors considered from Britain include Catherine Crowe, Caroline Clive, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Mrs Henry (Ellen) Wood. From North America, I discuss Harriet Prescott Spofford, Louisa May Alcott, Metta Victoria Fuller Victor, and Anna Katharine Green, and from Australia, the writing of Celeste de Chabrillan, 'Oline Keese' (Caroline Woolmer Leakey), Eliza Winstanley, Ellen Davitt, and Mary Helena Fortune. This thesis inspects these women's work in terms of that of their male contemporaries and of their national/historical and societal background. The importance of their crime writing demonstrates the need for a feminine reconstruction of the canon of crime/detective fiction.

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This thesis singles out point of view (POV) as the governing technical choice in creative writing. As such it integrates creative practice with an essay on the theoretical basis for a POV across remote contexts. The methodology follows Mikhail Bakhtin’s call for a new story telling position through an enquiry into Western literary history, Classical Chinese novels and Gao Xingjian’s partitioning of POV by narrative angle. Part One Chapter one establishes the importance of POV to motives in my own creative work and sets out the case for Bakhtin over normative theorists, calling for a reconfiguration of POV to withstand contextual aberrations arising from cultural or historical differences, or from the boundaries of what Bakhtin refers to as Small Time presentism. Further, it argues against Tzvetan Todorov’s generic view of the novel as a property of discourse, an ahistorical constant, by considering Bakhtin’s meta-historic survey of Western literature with periods of intensified novelistic discourse in given contexts. Chapter two considers POV in the separate context of Chinese literature focussing on the historiographic POV taken in Classical Chinese novels, namely The Four Great Works. Comparisons are drawn between these and Western short story cycles noting forms given in Andrew Plaks’ Chinese Narrative (1977) and aesthetics in François Cheng’s Chinese Poetic Writing (1982). Critical contemporary concerns arising between Classical and Modern Chinese are addressed with reference to essays by Xi Chuan, Yang Liang and Henry Zhao. Chapter three begins with reflexivity as an inherent property of what Bakhtin identifies as discrete double voicing and draws parallels with the bi-polar unity of Daoism and its Chan iv (Zen) hybrid, consulting Victor Sōgen Hori’s studies of capping phrases and contemporary techniques in the fiction, drama and essays of Gao Xingjian. Part Two Creative enquiry takes the form of a novel, Interesting Times, (working title: The Enigma of Development), in which a first person protagonist’s narrative alternates with third person short stories embedded in a historical schema. The novel depicts economic development through the construction of a power station, following a schema of short story settings in one location from pre-industrial salt making to sophisticated intellectual piracy, indentured peasant labour to chaotic collateral debt finance. These short stories alternate with chapters from the linking protagonist whose narrative encircles the whole from the rural location of his family’s ancient English heritage. With the cognitive ground of one POV set against that of the other, the resulting novel is intended to create an interpretive domain for the reflex between the two, in this case a cyclical relationship between exploiter and exploited, interchangeable as subjects and objects.