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The thesis argues for a form of kynical cosmopolitanism in the late work of Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee. Broadly sympathetic responses to these three writers conflate their writing style and their personal habits, and identify them as stoics. Broadly unsympathetic responses conflate their choice of theme and their apparent political quietude, and identify them as cynics. Instead of finding them aligned with stoicism or contemporary cynicism, the thesis draws on work by Peter Sloterdijk and Michel Foucault to recuperate kynicism (ancient cynicism) as a heuristic to explain how the writers consciously exploit a combination of style, theme, habit and political perspective in their late works. The late works of all three writers turn on a performance of the self that takes autobiographical enactment as the starting point for exploring political subjectivity. Following Diogenes of Sinope, who labelled this performative political subjectivity ‘cosmopolitanism’, this thesis argues that the late works of Borges, Beckett and Coetzee must be understood as creating a self-reflexive kynical cosmopolitanism, in which the role of the writer in the world becomes an aesthetic device for engaging with cosmopolitan political subjectivity.

This thesis critically explores the conjunction of cosmopolitanism and contemporary black British writing, a hitherto little acknowledged field of investigation. I argue that a problematic lacuna exists within black British literary scholarship, which renders theoretical and textual engagements with cosmopolitanism as incommensurable with the “authentically” located political and discursive formation of black Britain. This thesis proposes that an examination of cosmopolitanism within the study of black British writing remains both vital and crucially generative for the field. I formulate cosmopolitanism as a critical praxis and expression of a certain aesthetic modality that captures the provocative ways in which twenty-first-century black British authors have uncovered translocal, outer-national and cross-cultural histories of alliance in their work. The writers examined in this thesis – whose work ranges across established and innovative cultural forms – resource the past as a means to compose their particular literary enunciations of cosmopolitanism. Each writer imagines a specific “sign of history” (in Jean-François Lyotard’s usage) that reconstitutes the recent past in the service of excavating distinctive cosmopolitan histories, affinities and opportunities. The chapters in this thesis, which are organized around three pivotal historical signs (1948; 1981/1982; 1989), closely examine the work of James Berry, Andrea Levy, Alex Wheatle, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Zadie Smith, Mike Phillips and Bernardine Evaristo. By delineating how these writers envision historically inspired worldly imaginaries (whether in pejorative or salutary ways), I offer a critical revaluation of black British writing, one that enables new interpretative avenues from which to appraise and critique the field’s burgeoning cosmopolitanism.

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This thesis seeks to develop recent research into Russian literature, which has applied semiotic theory to a feminist critique, to explore how spaces may be gendered as feminine or masculine. This thesis will adopt a similar feminist and semiotic approach, but will focus not upon gendered spaces, but barriers, the ‘imagery of enclosure’. I will argue that barriers are both ‘engendered’, and ‘gendered’, in the sense that they often relate to female characters. These barriers are sub-divided into three distinct types, which will be termed ‘textual’, ‘actual’ and ‘perceived’ barriers. This revisionist semiotic approach will be used to explore the Woman Question within a comparative framework, in a discussion of mid- to late-nineteenth-century English, German and Russian literatures.

This thesis looks at literary responses to the Bomb as the greatest threat to humanity, examining English-language texts written between the destruction of Hiroshima and the break-up of the Soviet Union. Specifically, it investigates the representation of nuclear paranoia and the desert as a site of Cold War experience. The Cold War security-state used discourse about the threat of the Bomb to inspire conformist paranoia among its citizens. However, excessive paranoia can lead to dissociation and non-conformity. Those in dissociative states commonly display pre-emptive tendencies, desiring to make their environment conform to their world-view. Accordingly, the Cold War citizen might wish for the Bomb to drop in order to escape their paranoia. Since the Bomb turns society into a wasteland, flight to the archetypal wasteland of the Sahara effectively precipitates nuclear-apocalypse. Free from the shadow of the Bomb, the desert can become the site of a society free of fear. By travelling from Jean Baudrillard's 'desert of the real' to the real desert, however, these citizens move from a place of paranoia to the birthplace of the Bomb. Their perception of the desert as a space outside society shows that they have not escaped society's constructs. The desert's disruption of these constructs, however, offers a perspective on their cultural formation and so a new narrative by which to live. The thesis examines texts which feature Westerners travelling to the African desert by Paul Bowles, Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, Lawrence Durrell, Penelope Lively and Michael Ondaatje. It argues that the Bomb lurks in the unconsciousness of the writers and their protagonists, inducing the individual to travel. With this in mind, it investigates whether the age-old idea of flight to the desert can resolve the stand-off within the individual between the narratives imposed by society and those constructed through personal experience.

The turnpike roads that covered most of Britain between 1720-1820 had a transformative effect on British culture. They altered the experience of mobility, changing the way people moved through the landscape, and this had important consequences for the way the novel developed. The rapid rise of the novel is co-terminous with the rise of the turnpike system. The novel thrives on what is new, and the turnpikes fed this desire for ʻnovelʼ places to describe. While turnpikes have long been a subject for economic historians and geographers, their cultural impact has been underestimated. Interest in the ʻruptureʼ event of the railways has tended to belittle the changes to domestic travel made before 1830. In fact, many of the changes ascribed to the railway age – a focus on destination, a new speed-up of society, the dullness and flattening out of travel – were instigated by the turnpike network. Turnpikes were the tipping point where the accelerated culture associated with modernity first started to take hold. Turnpikes were also a specific type of road, changing topographies in a very distinct way that tended to make travel commodified, constricted and quotidian. Each chapter explores different effects of the turnpikes, and the ways in which they changed the novel, with chapters on roads and class; the politics of routes and modes of transport; roads and narrative; roads and landscape; roads and gender and roads and ʻspaceʼ. Each section focuses on one author, with chapters on Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Austen and Scott, while bringing their work into contingency with a number of lesser-known authors. The approach uses historical and geographical analysis to inform the study of narrative to see how a societyʼs infrastructure relates to the structure of its fiction. Reading eighteenth-century fiction through the turnpike revolution demonstrates how models of movement are central to the dynamics of the novel.

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This thesis examines pastiche in contemporary American women’s graphic memoirs. It investigates how the visual/verbal combination of the genre performs the contemporary women artists’ engagement with the male literary and artistic canon towards feminist reparative ends. Taking Phoebe Gloeckner, Lynda Barry and Alison Bechdel’s works as representative examples of the genre, I argue that pastiche reacts against the injuries inflicted on their autobiographical subjects by abusive parents, as well as the injuries inflicted on women artists by the marginalisation of their art. Chapter 1 examines Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic memoirs A Child’s Life and Other Stories and The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures. It demonstrates how the girl protagonist is formed through the visual/verbal medium and allusions to previous texts, both of which negotiate the status of the female body – underage and adult – as a passive sexual spectacle under the authoritative male gaze. In addition, it shows that, while referencing those texts, Gloeckner’s graphic memoirs simultaneously undo and challenge their meanings towards the autobiographical subject’s reparation and the feminist reconfiguration of the female spectacle. Chapter 2 considers Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! and What It Is in relation to canonical verbal/visual texts that engage with the subject of gender ambiguity and maternal monstrosity. It analyses how previous meanings and formal characteristics are repeated and revised in Barry’s works for the formulation of the autobiographical subject as reunited with the maternal body. It also demonstrates how Barry’s texts perform a feminist deconstruction of the boundaries between high and low art in a way that foregrounds the significance of everyday domestic artistic production. Chapter 3 investigates how Alison Bechdel’s engagement with the male homosexual literary canon in Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic allows the Oedipal reunion of the lesbian daughter with the closeted homosexual father. By showing how the canonical literary past is translated into the verbal/visual register of comics, this chapter introduces the potential of the medium for the performance of denaturalised and complex formations of gender and sexuality that repair the autobiographical subject’s injuries and underscore the cultural significance of the artistic daughter’s work. The conclusion draws my arguments together and underlines the function of pastiche as reparation and the cultural significance of American women’s graphic memoirs. It also briefly refers to two examples that demonstrate the continuity and variations of pastiche in contemporary texts, which call for academic attention and foreground the availability of comics to perform complex subject formations and a productive engagement with past traditions.