This study investigates the relationship between language, ideology and literature in popular children's fiction over the last one hundred and fifty years. In Chapter One criteria are established for the compilation of a computerised database of Victorian and Modern texts. The usefulness of computational techniques for linguistic analysis is demonstrated and discussion of genre, social institutions and writer / reader relationships follows. Chapter Two sets out to consider ideology in general and from the perspective of adults and children in particular. A framework for the operation of ideology in society is then discussed and examples of its 'modes and strategies' are given from the corpora. A 'toolkit' for linguistic analysis, notably, but not exclusively, collocation and transitivity, is then presented. Chapter Three is the first of the chapters concerned with detailed language description. Selected nineteenth century boys' texts are presented and analysed in respect of their religious and imperial 'messages'. Chapters Four and Five concentrate on Modern Children's Fiction. In Chapter Four the work of Nina Bawden and Roald Dahl is discussed and texts from both authors analysed. The 'realistic' novel for adolescent readers is the focus of Chapter Five. I consider, there, the representation of subjects formerly taboo in children's fiction such as sexual relationships. Chapter Six summarises the results of the investigation and notes that although children's narratives reflect major social changes they are still powerful carriers of ideology. Recommendations for further comparative and contrastive studies are made.

While the field of narrative persuasion has widely stressed the persuasive power of (fictional) stories, the framing research tradition has overlooked the role of narrative properties in framing. Neither field has examined news as narrative and the influence that it might have on audiences through mechanisms of narrative persuasion. Because character is an integral component of the very definition of narrative, it is investigated in this project both as textual cue and reception process that can account for the persuasive power of news frames on audiences. The first stage of the research involved a qualitative study of character at the textual level. Narrative devices used to portray individuals involved in a newsworthy event and to present their point of view were analysed in two framing analyses. Excerpts from crime news coverage clearly linked narrative devices pertaining to the treatment of character with the available frames about the crime. These devices were used in the news stories to invite readers’ engagement with certain characters instead of others and to transmit the frame accordingly. The effect of character-based frames on reader engagement was then tested in two experimental studies that manipulated the perspective from which the crime events were presented by selecting appropriate excerpts from authentic news media materials. Readers’ engagement with characters was measured as the mediating mechanism based on a theoretical model which is developed throughout this thesis. The results of the experimental studies showed that the news frames successfully transferred to audience frames constructed through readers’ engagement with the individual from whose perspective the story was narrated. These findings provide evidence for the persuasive power of character engagement in news narratives, which had only been found previously with fictional narratives. The findings confirm that frame setting can occur through mechanisms of narrative persuasion and that news are indeed perceived as narrative.

For centuries, the significance of storytelling in developing the way we see the world has been acknowledged and analysed. In a time when we are facing such huge global issues as climate change, resource depletion and species extinction, what sort of stories should we tell our children? The truth is that adults have little idea of how to tackle the issues and it seems clear that our attitude towards the natural world has contributed to many of the problems that their generation will inherit. In recent years there has been a call from many environmentalists to find a new approach to story: one which will help us to form a more life-sustaining relationship with our natural environment. Deep ecology as a worldview offers one way of developing such a relationship through reconsidering anthropocentric viewpoints and extending the sense of the self to encompass the whole of life in all its many forms. In light of David Abram’s call for writers to reconnect the written word with the land, this thesis explores the practice of creative writing in order to express some of the concepts of deep ecology in children’s fiction. Specifically it draws out issues of developing a stronger connection with the natural world as reality and of reconnecting logic with intuition. The thesis is comprised of two elements: the first part is a novel for children aged between ten and thirteen years as an experiment in putting theoretical ideas into practice and second part is a critical reflection on my own experience of deep ecology in relation to the writing of the creative piece.

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The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the trope of the store that recurs in five colonial novels set in Africa: Mister Johnson (1939) by Joyce Cary; The Heart o/the Matter (1948) by Graham Greene; The Sheltering Sky (1949) by Paul Bowles; The Grass is Singing (1950) by Doris Lessing; and Justine (1957) by Lawrence Durrell. My overarching argument is that the store functions proleptically in relation to a postcolonial trajectory of resistance. My reading of the selected novels, with reference to the trope of the store, demonstrates correspondence between selected aspects of colonial discourse and postcolonial paradigms of liberation. This dissertation provides a tropical reading of colonial discourse by focusing on the trope ofthe store as an aporia that encourages us to read colonial novels in a different way. The store is read as an ambivalent trope because it can be considered a microcosm of colonialism and of decolonization simultaneously. Chapter One provides a foundation for the central argument, by way of a reading of postcolonial tropes in colonial texts: darkness in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and pharmakos in Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson. Chapter Two focuses on the store as a contracolonial trope of resistance, assessing the emancipatory or postcolonial potential that is already there in the colonial novel. Chapter Three presents a close reading of the colonial store in Mister Johnson, The Grass is Singing, and The Heart of The Matter. Chapter Four assesses different types of stores in colonial settings represented in The Sheltering Sky and Justine. The Conclusion argues that some colonial novels do not merely historicize the agonies of co Ionizers and colonized, and that it should not be necessary to limit the focus of literary analysis of colonial novels to cultural and political conflicts.

This dissertation examines the issues of food, voice and hospitality in nineteenthcentury Gothic fiction, from Frankenstein to Dracula. Together with these two Gothic texts the study analyses three other novels, Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and Florence Marryat's The Blood of the Vampire, and one short story by E. A. Poe, 'Bon-Bon'. The study looks at the representation of bodies, the monstrous and the normal, and at what happens when bodies are engaged with eating and speaking, with things that happen at the edge of the mouth. From such a bodily threshold the study then moves into a discussion of hospitality, at the level of macro and microspaces, from public to private places, all involving transactions of food and voice. This dissertation explores the complex interactions between food, voice and hospitality, and makes explicit connections between the theoretical dimension of hospitality and its material and bodily practices. Although orality has undergone substantial metamorphosis and extraordinary prosthetic evolution, it still continues to happen at the edge of the mouth. The alimentary function of the mouth is distinguishable from the linguistic function but both engage with a separation between inside and outside. This threshold has a literal and figurative value which is expressed in the Gothic. Whether literature of 'terror' or of 'excess', the Gothic is a body-centred mode. Gothic literature deals with the physical body, the corporeal whose acts of eating and voicing are regulated by social and cultural norms. The nearest element to a socially regu lated access, a kind of prosthetics of the body, is given by hospitality. Hospitality represents the moment in which what is taken for granted is put into discussion. The dissertation considers the 'appetite' for the Gothic text; how the Gothic deals with the discourse of food; the border between normal and monstrous appropriation of food, voice and space; embodied and dis-embodied voices; the voice as a means for the negotiation of social and cultural practice; the tension between speech and writing.

This thesis places late Victorian medical, biological, and psychological studies of laughter alongside classic examples ofjin-de-siecle gothic fiction in order to consider the discursive links between laughter and pathology. Through an investigation of scientific and pseudoscientific texts that discuss laughter's physicality, as well as its psychological effects, spiritualistic properties, and sound qualities, I suggest that laughter occupied an important and hitherto unexamined role in the cultural history of late Victorian Britain. Stratified into normal and inappropriate forms of expression by a host of medical doctors and social theorists, excessive laughter was systematically pathologised as a physiognomic defect, a sign of atavism and criminality, a symptom of hysteria, and a pathogenic form of contagion. By studying the late Victorian fascination with the pathological side of laughter rather than its traditional comedic associations, my thesis offers new ways of approaching popular gothic texts including H. Rider Haggard's She (1886), H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The Invisible Man (1897), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), as well as lesser-known novels and short stories by Richard Marsh, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle. I suggest that moments of laughter in these stories - whether they be hysterical, degenerate, animalistic, disembodied, or monstrous - should be read as textual focal points for complex engagements with a variety of scientific, social, and cultural issues that came to define the late Victorian era

The short story is often characterised as a form best suited to the expression of disconnectedness, fragmentation or, as Michael Trussler has it, the ‘melancholy moment’. A rhetoric of pathology and ‘deathliness' pervades this critical field. This thesis seeks to overturn the apparent negativity of these assumptions and reposition the short story as a form that can encompass the tensions between death and life, between mortality and natality. Where others conceptualise the short story as the ‘unrealizable element contained within the unrepeatable conditions that form its own passing’ (Trussler), I look to these elements and conditions as expressions of contingency. Where the ‘unrepeatable’ becomes a source of trauma, I seek to position the unpredictable as a source of hope: dangerous, yes, but not melancholic. Arendt, as the great political and philosophical theorist of natality, provides the theoretical backbone for my argument. Where she writes that ‘Man is put into a world of change and movement as a new beginning because he knows that he has a beginning and will have an end; he even knows that his beginning is the beginning of his end’ she gives us a temporality whereby our human natality (birth) allows for other forms of natality in the radically new, the unforeseeable, the unexpected. She writes, in The Human Condition, ‘with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world’ which enables, paradoxically, the idea that ‘the unexpected can be expected’ from each unique being. Close reading stories by Katherine Mansfield, Grace Paley and Ali Smith, this thesis demonstrates how character, genre and form can embody, describe and perform a philosophical attitude that allows for hopefulness in contingency. With this model of hopeful contingency in view, I then present my own collection of short stories as further potentialities of the form.

Science fiction in the developed world has for centuries provided a fertile space for explorations of human and cultural phenomena, on the one hand underpinning philosophical conceptions of humans and human nature, and on the other acting as a fictive mirror in which the aspects and impacts of our technoscientific cultures are reflected. Between nature and culture stands the figure of the posthuman, whose ancestry can be traced as far back as the Talmudic golems, but whose presence is most keenly felt in the genre since the mid-twentieth century, where the science has caught up with the fiction. Resurfacing in post-industrial, secular society, alongside technologies newly able to render it into being, the posthuman reminds us of our position in relation to evolutionary laws, inviting speculation upon its future, and thus, by default, upon our own. In 2002, Francis Fukuyama used two seminal works of science fiction – Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) – to trace ‘a tale of two dystopias’, or how two fields of technoscience are currently pushing us into a posthuman stage of history. Biotechnology and communications are, as Donna Haraway has put it, ‘the crucial tools recrafting our bodies’ – moreover, they provide the discursive spaces within which we now so consciously write and rewrite our presents, pasts and futures. This thesis follows the dovetailing trajectories of Fukuyama’s ‘two futures’ hypothesis by presenting, in two sections, a range of posthuman figures in contemporary science fiction novels, short stories, comics and films. Beginning with Philip K. Dick’s genre-defining Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and ending just over four decades later with Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman’s milestone Internet documentary Catfish (2010), the four textual analysis chapters delineate an evolution of the posthuman in fiction (and reality) from cyborg to cyberpunk, showing how the ground is quickly closed up between the human and the posthuman. Much excellent scholarship, following Haraway’s ground-breaking “Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985), has been produced on the cyborgian/posthuman figure in science fiction and practice alike; the posthuman as the ultimate Other for our technoscientific world. This thesis takes a new approach in refocusing upon the posthuman in love, responding to the growing insistency in science fiction texts to foreground romantic relationships between posthumans, between humans and posthumans, and between humans enframed by the technoscientific. The close readings of these eleven primary sources are underpinned by four chapters devoted to constructing a philosophical framework which marries the cyborg theory of Haraway and the virtual posthumanism of N. Katherine Hayles with the history of the philosophy of love in the continental tradition, specifically the late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century writings of Alain Badiou. Working from Badiou’s central tenets of love – difference, disjunction, and the encounter – and analysing the move to posthuman selfhood alongside the seemingly anachronistic pursuit of love in late modernity, this thesis seeks to explore and explain the presence and meaning of love in high-tech society. If the posthuman is an emergent figure portending the end of history, as many postmodern thinkers have argued, then how can we understand its relationship to the love paradigm, which turns on the perpetuation of a conception of metanarrative that, in current modes of criticism, has fallen out of fashion?

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