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This dissertation explores the trajectory of theories of literary fantasy derived from the works of Tzvetan Todorov, Eric Rabkin and Rosemary Jackson, amongst others, with links to Freud, Jung, Lacan, Kristeva and psychoanalysis. The potential value of these perspectives as critical methods for biblical studies is explored. My basic thesis is that the fantastic elements simply could not be ignored, marginalised, diminished or displaced, but must be interpreted in their literary contexts, as integral to the meta-narrative. I investigate the conditions of: hesitation, uncertainty, doubt, incongruity, ambiguity, metamorphosis and liminality, as they arise in the texts of the Book of the Twelve. The fantastic elements in my choice of texts confound central dichotomies - hope/horror; utopia/dystopia; benign/malign; natural/supematural; interiority/ alterity (more commonly referred to as ‘self and ‘other’); status quo/transformation. I also take into consideration some of the key themes in recent biblical studies, synthesised from my initial reading. Certain trends have emerged which I endeavour to address when appropriate including: gendered language and metaphors as vehicles for political commentary and validity of feminist criticism as a reader-response method. Biblical texts selected from the voices of the Book of the Twelve focus upon YHWH and the themes of violence and visions within the prophetic context. My method of choice is Autobiographical /Biblical Criticism. In each case, the element of the fantastic is signalled by hesitancy in the reader, a sense of the uncanny (Freud’s das Unheimliche), an uncomfortable occupancy between the real world and an imaginary or utopian world which is tinged with the supernatural.

This thesis explores digital-age literary and reading practices as they were influenced by participatory culture at the turn of the century. Participatory culture is analysed here through the work of Henry Jenkins, Hans Heino Ewers, Margaret Mackey and Katy Varnelis and is recognised as one in which individuals are socially connected to each other in an environment that offers support for creating and sharing interpretations and original works. It has relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic participation, and fosters the sense of community growing around people’s common interests and ideologies, as expressed through performative manifestations such as gaming and fandom. Because juvenile fantasy fiction generally, and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997-2007) specifically, were at the centre of significant developments in response to participatory culture, Rowling’s books are used as a case study on the basis of which changing practices of reading, writing and interpretation of story, principally by children and young people, are mapped and appraised. One aim of this thesis is to evaluate how far participatory culture has affected what it means to be a reader of a text that exists in multiple formats: how each version of the text constructs and addresses its readers/viewers/players/co-creators, and the dynamics and interdependence between the different versions. A second but related aim is to test the claims of new media theorists, including Janet Murray, Pierre Lévy and Marie-Laure Ryan, among others, to establish how far texts, readers and the processes of reading have in fact changed. Specifically, it looks at how far the promises of reader participation and co-creation have been fulfilled, especially within the genre of children’s literature.

Beyond the Sense of an Ending: Post-Apocalyptic Critical Temporalities argues that recent post-apocalyptic fictions written by non-science fiction authors subvert the apocalyptic understanding of time and history at the core of western modernity. In accord with the postmodern narrative turn in historiography, the novels expose the apocalyptic totalising teleology as a narrative construct deeply enmeshed with power structures. Emphasising the connection between apocalyptic End and narrative endings, the texts articulate critical temporalities through their narrative structures. Contemporary postapocalyptic fiction is beyond the apocalyptic “sense of an ending” (Kermode), for it critiques the epistemic primacy of the End - namely, its sense-making function - in history and conventional narratives alike. The chapters trace a trajectory from “antiapocalypse” (Quinby) to “counter-apocalypse” (Keller), that is, from novels which challenge apocalyptic history without acknowledging their dependence on apocalyptic discourse to novels which recognise this double bind through parody. After an analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse (2007) as antiapocalyptic critiques of America’s ideological core, the thesis turns to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), focussing on their subversion of the deterministic teleology of apocalyptic history through plots which eschew linearity. Will Selfs The Book o f Dave (2006) and Sam Taylor’s The Island at the End o f the World (2009) are then discussed as counter-apocalypses which parody apocalyptic discourse as the self-referential construction of unhinged minds. Finally, the thesis foregrounds both negative and potentially constructive aspects of the postmodern critique of metanarratives through Douglas Coupland’s apocalyptic Girlfriend in a Coma (1998) and his counter-apocalyptic Player One (2010), respectively.

This thesis examines the portrayal of gentleman collectors in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century literature, arguing that they often find themselves challenged and destabilised by their collections. The collecting depicted contrasts revealingly with the Enlightenment practices of classification, taxonomy, and commodification, associated with the growth of both the public museum and the market economy. The dominance of such practices was bound up with the way they promoted subject-object relations that defined and empowered masculine identity. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer note that “[i]n the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty” (3). That being so, this study explores how the drive to classify and commodify the material world found oppositional, fictional form in gothicly inflected texts depicting a fascinating but frightening world of unknowable, alien objects and abject, emasculated subjects. The study draws upon Fred Botting’s contention that gothic extremes are a reaction to the “framework” of “reductive and normalising limits of bourgeois morality and modes of production” (89). Examining novels and short stories by Richard Marsh, M.R. James, Arthur Machen, Vernon Lee, George Gissing, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, Mary Cholmondeley, and Mary Ward, the thesis shows how gothicised instances of unproductive-masochism, pathological collecting, thwarted professionals, and emasculated heirs broke down the “framework” within which men and material culture were understood to interact productively and safely. Individual chapters dealing respectively with acquisition, possession, dissemination and inheritance, respond to the recent “material turn” in the humanities, bringing together literary criticism and historically grounded scholarship to reveal the collector and the collection as the locus 3 for concerns with masculinity and materiality that preoccupied a turn-of-the-century mindset.

This thesis analyzes discourses of identity construction in the production and consumption of translated fiction in the contemporary British book culture. Drawing from ethnographic methods, it investigates what middle class, engaged readers make out of the translated novels they read, particularly in the ways that these books have been produced and marketed to them. The study concludes that translated fiction illustrates the multilayered meaning structures regarding taste and identity in reading communities and in the publishing industry in contemporary Britain. The theoretical framework of the thesis is based on sociological and anthropological studies on identity, intercultural communication and the consumption of art, alongside theories of reading and literary exchange from literary studies and translation studies. Data for the analysis on reading has been collected through participant observation/focus groups at over 30 book group meetings. Research methods also include interviews with individual readers and publishing industry professionals. Analysis of reading communities concentrates on responses to translated novels as texts that have undergone linguistic transference and as stories that portray other cultures. These responses are contextualized with the value orientations that arise from current trends of cultural consumption in the UK, such as monolingualism, cosmopolitanism and omnivorousness. The thesis also includes a case study on Turkish literature, exploring recent trends in literary production and the cultural role of literary translators. The study reveals the complex inflections of taste and identity in the practices of the agents of print culture. The textual-linguistic dimensions of translated texts are often the subject of negative evaluations when readers do not recognize the agency of the literary translator as an artist. Moreover, the opportunity of cultural encounter enabled by the reading experience activates varying discourses of intercultural communication, depending on readers’ cultural capital, their level of commitment to cosmopolitanism and the orientation of the book group’s discussion. In the production and consumption of translated fiction, the tension that arises between the pleasure and distinction dimensions of literary products translates into dilemmas between exoticism and cosmopolitan egalitarianism.