This thesis aims to make an intervention in contemporary metaphor studies. It eschews the problematic simplifications of most of the research stemming from cognitive linguistics, and also challenges the view of the relations between sensible and intelligible as a 'correlationist circle' put forward following the publication of Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude. In contrast, it argues that a further development of the projects of philosophers such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Lyotard offers a way to re-examine the relationship between sensible and intelligible, to explore what metaphor might tell us about a properly post-Kantian materiality. That is to say, this thesis aims to develop a materiality different to that of positivism, a materialism which embraces the vertigo induced by attempting to leap the abyss between intelligible and sensible, sensible and intelligible. To achieve this aim, it starts with a simple hypothesis: that what we call 'metaphor' is the privileged manifestation of the abyssal relationship between sensible and intelligible, and that, to cite Jean-Francois Lyotard, 'one never touches the thing itself but metaphorically'. We then proceed to work through a number of examples to try to follow the folds and reversals of this relationship, or perhaps rather these relationships. First, we re-examine the ninth of Walter Benjamin's 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', in Harry Zohn's idiosyncratic but now iconic translation, to examine not how it expresses or relates to Benjamin's wider corpus, but rather how the relationship of this text with its textual double serves to resist the repeated imprint of cliche. Secondly, we return to the scene of Jacques Derrida's 'Khora' and investigate how the 'metaphorical' schema of Plato's Timaeus, a creation myth about the construction of the universe from the intelligible eidos, seems to open up a fissure in one of the foundation stones of metaphysics. In order to help dispel one of the persistent metaphysical fallacies about metaphor, we then attempt to follow the return of this text to the sensible, in the form of architecture, as Peter Eisenman and Derrida's proposed garden for Bernard Tschumi's Pare de Ia villette in Paris. Finally, we examine Catherine Malabou's reworking of Hegelian 'plasticity' in relation to neuroscience and try to work through the ways in which she attempts to control the disseminative and metaphorical properties of the concept and its relation to capital. Throughout this text we seek to push logos to master a rhetoric or muthos to which it is not adequate, and thus both show the fissures through which we might feel the draft of the abyss below and better understand the phantasmal bridge that constitutes that abyss in the very movement of its construction.

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My thesis creates a comparative framework for understanding representations of Jewishness in Jewish, postcolonial, and Palestinian literature in response to particular historical events such as the Holocaust, the creation of the state of Israel, the first intifada, and the siege of Ramallah during the second intifada. Central to my study is the shift from Jewish identity in Europe before the creation of Jewish settlements in Palestine – as a minority identity in the Diaspora, facing discrimination and persecution in Europe, which culminated in the Holocaust – to Jewishness as Israeliness, defined in relation to the state of Israel, Zionism, and settler-colonialism. My study contests ahistorical and decontextualised uses of Jewishness and each chapter proposes a different angle to engage with ideas of Jewishness in their specific historical context. I examine narrative fiction and travelogues, published between 1971 and 2008, by Jurek Becker, Anita Desai, David Grossman, Shulamith Hareven, Edgar Hilsenrath, Sahar Khalifeh, Caryl Phillips, Anton Shammas, Raja Shehadeh, and A. B. Yehoshua. Through these examples, I interrogate the political and stylistic reasons underlying the inclusion and appropriation of ideas of Jewishness in literature. I suggest that literature offers alternative models of Jewishness which question received notions of Jewish victimhood and powerlessness. By determining the ways in which ideas associated with Jewishness travel across different geographical locations and examining adaptations of these concepts in non-Jewish contexts, I illustrate the centrality of ideas of Jewishness in the construction and definition of identities for both Jewish and non-Jewish writers and readers and indicate the global ramifications of engaging with Jewishness for contemporary literature and culture.

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There are many studies that discuss the image of the "other" in the Arab heritage and the image of the Arab heritage from the 'perspective of the "other." However, most of these studies focus on the present era and the western "other". This study is different in theme and period than studies which have been done previously. Its theme is the image of Turkey and the Turks in a work which belongs to Arab travel literature and which was written more than three centuries ago. There is a noticeable lack in studies that examine the image of the "other" in Arab travel literature by writers belonging to the Arabian Peninsula. The travelogue of Ibrāhīm al-Khiyārī is a literary work written by one of the citizens of that area, therefore, the researcher hopes that his effort will represent an approach which contributes to filling this gap and which sheds light on the cultural production of intellectuals from the Arabian Peninsula in the past centuries. Using the descriptive analytical method, this study has tried to cover aspects of the topic within the conditions available and has written six chapters on the following topics: previous studies on the subject, histories of the Ḥijāz and the Ottoman Empire, the classification of travel writings, a presentation of the travelogue as an object of this study as well as the author and his context, Turkey in the seventh century, its civilization and culture, and finally, the image of non-Muslims in Turkey in the text of the writer. Through an extrapolation of texts that talk about the "non-Muslim other" it is clear that the author of this travelogue - like many writers in past and present - was under the influence of cultural and historical influences especially with regards to the aforementioned minorities, as bias seems to be evident in multiple texts. It therefore seems as though he was writing a personal impression of the "other" rather than simply describing what he saw and experienced.

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There are two key problems in the field of autobiography: (i) How does one choose which scenes from a life to include? (ii) What is the most effective way of presenting those scenes? This thesis investigates structures that address these two issues of autobiographical content and presentation. It deals with the question of what to put in, and also examines the related concerns of who presents the content (narration of self) and the techniques by which they present it (style). The primary research questions are: (1) Is it possible to construct a coherent and involving piece of memoir if the author relinquishes some degree of control over the book’s content and, instead, is prepared to make decisions about what goes into the book based on the guidance of an external device? (2) Is it possible to reveal more of the author’s character and also enrich a reader’s emotional engagement with a memoir if, along with the written text, the author also expresses aspects of their life through a second creative voice? The creative element of this thesis is a memoir that engages with the past in order to build a present and future narrative. Its starting point is a lost path: the one my nineteen year-old self embarked upon when he left law school in the hope of becoming a pop star. My fifty-year old self then reengages with the intervening years and asks what happened? and what might I and others learn from what happened? I was a professional comedy writer and I use comedy to engage the reader in my story, but comedy can also be a way of evading deeper issues. My motive for writing a memoir was to learn how to stop evading deeper issues and start revealing them, and to find a voice that could encompass human frailty in a way that might have value and resonance for the reader. The chapters are coupled with an album of related songs, which represent my second creative voice. The exegesis examines the interactive process of joint creation and how, in the case of a memoirist, a second creative voice might deepen that of the primary writing one, or, at least, deepen the impact of the memoir as a whole for both author and reader. For my external device I used the song categories of the medieval troubadours. The arbitrary dictates of the song categories (celebrating youth, offering political comment, lamenting dead patrons, etc.) not only provoked a re-evaluation of my past, but also propelled me into immersive, forward-looking research. Focus on the troubadours’ secular breadth of commentary led me to examine how, in practice, I might exemplify some of their social relevance to develop a form of memoir that looked out as well as in. This practical application of an external device and a second creative voice create possible new frameworks for a memoir that aims to push the field forward. [Each song corresponds to a chapter in the creative part of the thesis called: I Was Young. To enjoy the concept as intended, I would be grateful if you read the chapter first before playing its song partner. The songs are also available online along with the university’s publication of this thesis].

‘Morgan le Fay and Other Women’ is an interdisciplinary study that seeks to rationalise the various manifestations of a universal Other in medieval culture. Using Theresa Bane’s statement that ‘Morgan le F[a]y is a complicated figure in history and mythology; she has had many names and fulfilled many roles in religion and folklore’ as a focal argument, I present a methodology that identifies these ‘many names’ from what might be described as a primarily medieval perspective. Exploring the medieval notion of ‘character type’, this establishes a series of defining attributes that the culture of the period likely regarded as a ‘standard list’ for Morgan’s underlying identity: the Other Woman. Asserting that Morgan’s role in the medieval tradition is largely an attempt on to manifest this age-old concept in a variety of forms appropriate for different authors’ milieus and genres, this thesis suggests that medieval writers project onto the character a series of attributes recognised as Other from their own contexts. By applying this method, which has a basis in medieval semiotics and philosophy, to a range of characters, I propose that derivatives of the ‘Morganic’ persona might be found in a range of genres including medieval romance, drama, folklore, and, in my final chapter, the tradition of male outlaws.

This thesis explores the representation of the contemporary secular angel in children’s literature, focusing on the works of three authors: David Almond, Philip Pullman, and Cliff McNish. In the works in question, the secular angel has been removed from all religious frameworks, including its traditional allegiance and obedience to a God or Devil figure. This absence, however, does not negate the existence of a moral compass, nor the importance of free will, which is bestowed upon and used by angelic and human characters alike. Transformation, one of the thesis’s key themes, becomes significant as I argue that the angelic figures bring about a transformation in the novels’ protagonists. Intertextuality forms an integral part of the analysis as the works of John Milton and William Blake are key reference points. The Introduction traces the angel’s trajectory from its scriptural tradition in the Middle Ages, to its progressive secularisation in the 20th century, and a chapter on each author follows. The thesis concludes by arguing that these angels’ role in children’s literature is to challenge and complicate notions of religion, innocence and experience, and science vs. faith, as they become representatives of a contemporary, secular philosophy, while retaining and embracing the spiritual.

Over the past two decades, scholars have shown that the modernist ‘Great Divide’ between high and low culture is culturally-constructed, reductive and oversimplified. Yet, despite these critical disavowals, the field of modernist studies is still informed by the Divide’s binary systems of evaluation and classification. ‘High’ and ‘low’ texts are studied in isolation and modernism is privileged over popular culture. This thesis argues that we must address the Great Divide’s structure if we are to move beyond it. The Divide is underpinned by three structural myths: that of essence (texts are inherently high or low), mutual exclusivity (texts are either high or low) and precedence (high texts come before low ones). Over the course of four chapters, this study seeks to define, challenge and reconfigure the Great Divide, exploring new approaches which allow us to study texts from across the cultural spectrum together. After an initial chapter which maps out the Great Divide in early-twentieth-century Britain, the following three chapters interrogate the structural myths in turn. Chapter 2 disputes the myth of essence, arguing that both ‘little’ and ‘popular’ magazines are shaped by external factors; Chapter 3 considers travel posters, showing that they exhibit apparently mutually-exclusive aesthetic and publicity functions at once; and Chapter 4 examines the extent to which innovations in mass-market fashion predated their modernist counterparts. Informed by theory but rooted in print culture, this thesis combines cultural history and deconstruction to displace the Great Divide as a system of classification and reinstate it as an object of study. Only by viewing high, low and middlebrow texts together can we trace the effects that socio-economic conditions, prevailing aesthetic norms and audience demands had on a text’s production, circulation and reception.