This thesis examines the dialogue genre in seventeenth-century England. In 1681 when Henry Care established his periodical The Popish Courant he chose the format of a dialogue because people were ‘so set upon dialoging.’ Care’s choice of dialogue for his periodical is indicative of the popularity of dialogue in the seventeenth century. Yet, despite the popularity that dialogue enjoyed in this period it has not received comparative attention by scholars. This thesis seeks to address this gap and make two specific historiographical contributions. Firstly, it demonstrates how the digitization of early modern sources can enable scholars to approach literary history from perspectives that physical books prevent. Using the digital collections of Early English Books Online, British Periodicals Online, and Eighteenth Century Collections Online for its source material this thesis has used a database of dialogues to analyze the genre and provide contextual knowledge about the genre as a whole that can illuminate the rhetorical objectives behind specific uses of dialogue. This is particularly exposed in the final chapter that utilizes this contextual information to understand the appeal of dialogue in Roger L’Estrange’s Observator. Secondly this thesis adds to the growing number of studies of early modern genres such as pamphlets, newspapers, ballads, and chapbooks. The period under discussion was one of significant change in terms of political and social circumstances and this thesis demonstrates that dialogue was sensitive to these political events. By situating the dialogue within the broader print landscape of seventeenth-century England the thesis maps how dialogue adapted to changing circumstances with pamphlet dialogues, periodical dialogues, and dialogues of the dead, in particular emerging in response to social and political events. Looking at the dialogue in the context of other literary forms this thesis argues that the appeal of dialogue was its flexibility and ability to educate a broad range of people across all demographics of seventeenth-century England.

Over the last decade, research in characterisation has proliferated in (cognitive) stylistics, with investigations exploring the different avenues concerning the conceptualisation and presentation of fictional characters. There is a wealth of theoretical work on the definition of character, yet a weakness lies in the lack of unification of this information into a systematic method of analysis that can holistically represent characters as the unique individuals they are. This thesis sets to fill this hiatus by developing an adaptable, strategic method of analysis to comprehensively represent characters. Beneath fictional characters’ familiar and recognisable exteriors, is an interconnected network of linguistic strategies that encode their identities and situate them in the storyworld. To successfully account for this, I argue that a working knowledge of the different levels involved in communicating character—from the atomistic textual level to macro storyworld level—as well as the reader’s perceptual and cognitive capacities is required. To grasp these different facets, I dovetail their key components in conjunction with reader response data to develop a Character Tracking Model (CTM). Drawing on corpus stylistic techniques, the CTM is designed to render the storyworld spatiotemporally and mentally track characters throughout the narrative, allowing it to reveal the fundamental elements that are the impetus behind character portrayal. To demonstrate the CTM’s potential and flexibility, it is deployed in an analysis of Gavin Extence’s novel The Universe Versus Alex Woods wherein the protagonist experiences an epileptic seizure. I highlight the subtle linguistic patterns and textual cues that communicate the character’s highly subjective seizure experience. I further use the case study to signal how cognitive stylistics can productively be used as a rich resource for exploring the experiences of epileptic seizures; something which has not yet been addressed by cognitive stylistics or in epilepsy research, but has the potential for positive impact in the public health sector. Overall, this thesis presents an integrative application of cognitive stylistics, examining both character and reader to propose a universal way of approaching characters.

This thesis explores literary representations in white male discourse of the voices of the racial Other. Tracing a chronological development from colonial to postcolonial texts, it closely analyzes the wider political and ethical implications of these representations in Daniel Defoe’s "Robinson Crusoe", Joseph Conrad’s "Heart of Darkness", Albert Camus’ "L’Étranger" and ‘L’Hôte’, J.M. Coetzee’s "Foe" and "Disgrace", J.M.G. Le Clézio’s "Onitsha" and Cormac McCarthy’s "No Country for Old Men". At the core of my research is the question how can white male writers resist the dominance of Eurocentric consciousness and be a witness to the racial Other and articulate his/her voice without recourse to prejudice and stereotyping. The representation of the Other transitions from the anonymity of slavery in colonial texts to identified and identifiable individuals in postcolonial writings. Through these novels the impact of national Independence, freedom from racial oppression and immigration − all legal expressions of freely articulated voice − can be observed on the traditional colonial power relationship. As a consequence, dominated, silenced voices gradually develop into silent refusals of acquiescence that withhold information. The impact of such resistance is frequently paralleled by a crisis of male identity and the declining stature of the white male protagonists who suffer imprisonment, death, sickness, confusion or defeat, as gestures symbolic of the decline of white patriarchal systems and challenges to accepted concepts of identity, humanity, justice, good and evil. In a globalized world the category of the Other encourages us to think beyond the known and recognize the validity of ideologies that challenge the authority of our own.

The work here seeks to revamp the way that we read, write and understand the postcolonial during an era in which the field's modishness has receded somewhat, but when its historic objectives remain. Broadly speaking, the thesis is an attempt to examine the ideas that, merged together, equate to the current geography of the postcolonial world. In the first section, I look to the production of value – and specifically, to the process of valuing cultural capital, which delivers to us an important logic: that the postcolonial world appears to us not as it really is, but how it has been written into being over time. The second section reflects upon the settler polities of Australia and South Africa, where I read the works of Archie Weller and Zakes Mda and posit the notion of an arc in their writing, a trajectory that over time sees the novel gradually recede from its engagement with the explicit discourses of colonialism and postcolonialism. Thereafter I turn to recent rise of non-fiction writing to prominence in India. Here the focus concerns the way that the Indian city has been written into the public imagination crudely, as an apparently reasonable synecdoche of all Indian life. I explore the way that the visible spectacle has come to stand at the zenith of representational forms, with the corollary that the written word has lost something of its authority. I introduce recent works of non-fiction that seek to respond to these simplified projections by literarily occupying small-scale Indian spaces: Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Suketu Mehta's Maximum City and Amit Chaudhuri's Calcutta: Two Years in the City. In the final section, I argue for revamped postcolonial reading strategies that are better able to reflect the concrete worlds that literary texts address. I encourage a wider and indiscriminate constellation of non-white British literatures, before offering individual readings of Monica Ali's Alentejo Blue and Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World.

This thesis examines the work of a group of African women writers who have emerged over the last forty years. While figures such as Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri and Wole Soyinka are likely to be the chief focus of discussions of African writing, female authors have been at the forefront of fictional interrogations of identity formation and history. In the work of authors such as Mariama Bâ (Senegal), Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), and Leila Aboulela (Sudan), there is a clear attempt to subvert the tradition of male writing where the female characters are often relegated to the margins of the culture, and confined to the domestic, private sphere. This body of work has already generated a significant number of critical responses, including readings that draw on gender politics and colonialism; but it is still very much a minor literature, and most mainstream western feminism has not sufficiently processed it. The purpose of this thesis is threefold. First, it draws together some of the most important and influential African women writers of the post-war period and looks at their work, separately and together, in terms of a series of themes and issues, including marriage, family, polygamy, religion, childhood, and education. Second, it demonstrates how African literature produced by women writers is explicitly and polemically engaged with urgent political issues that have both local and global resonance: the veil, Islamophobia and a distinctively African brand of feminist critique. Third, it revisits Fredric Jameson’s claim that all third-world texts are ‘national allegories’ and considers these novels by African women in relation to Jameson’s claim, arguing that their work has complicated Jameson’s assumptions.

This thesis reports on a Critical Stylistic analysis of representations of men in a corpus of women’s magazines, with the aid of corpus linguistic methods. Focusing on four ‘textualconceptual’ (Jeffries, forthcoming) functions of text; Naming and Describing, Equating and Contrasting, Representing Processes/Events/States, and Assuming and Implying, it shows how the texts construct ideologies of masculinity that constitute the magazines’ performances of masculinity for a female audience. I identify five central ideologies of masculinity, and gender more broadly, that occur across all four of the tools: • Men are either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ • Men are driven by their carnal instincts • Men are naturally aggressive • Men and women are essentially different • Heterosexuality is normative These unifying themes are shown to be consistent with the forms of masculinity associated with the New Lad figure, linked to representations of masculinity in the ‘lads’ mags’ of the men’s magazine market. Alongside these unifying themes, I also show how different kinds of masculine identity are emphasised depending on the kind of text they appear in, and in which genre of women’s magazine they feature. These differing representations are interpreted in terms of the flexibility of gender performance. This thesis argues that Butler’s theory of performativity can be applied to texts such as women’s magazines in two ways: women’s magazines form part of the “rigid, regulatory frame” (Butler, 1990: 33) which determines what constitutes acceptable performances of gender for society, and that they are also in themselves performances of gender. They are also “a set of repeated acts [...] that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance of a natural sort of being” (Butler, 1990: 33). The linguistic images of men inscribed in the pages of women’s magazines are repetitions that have become part of the naturalized, accepted performances of masculinity. The ideologies of masculinity discussed here are potentially harmful from a feminist perspective, because if men are consistently shown to be aggressive or sexually driven, women may come to expect men to behave in this way.

The purpose of this study was to test the application of two linguistic models of narration and one linguistic model of speech and thought presentation on comic texts: Fowler's (1986) internal and external narration types, Simpson's (1993) narrative categories from his 'modal grammar of point of view' and Leech and Short's (1981) speech and thought presentation scales. These three linguistic models of narration and speech and thought presentation, originally designed and used for the analysis of prose texts, were applied to comics, a multimodal medium that tells stories through a combination of both words and images. Through examples from comics, I demonstrate in this thesis that Fowler's (1986) basic distinction between internal and external narration types and Simpson's (1993) narrative categories (categories A, B(N) and B(R) narration) can be identified in both visual and textual forms in the pictures and the words of comics. I also demonstrate the potential application of Leech and Short's (1981) speech and thought presentation scales on comics by identifying instances of the scales' categories (NPV/NPT, NPSA/NPTA, DS/DT and FDS/FDT) from comics, but not all of the speech and thought presentation categories existed in my comic data (there was no evidence of IS/IT and the ategorisation of FIS/FIT was debatable). In addition, I identified other types of discourse that occurred in comics which were not accounted for by Leech and Short's (1981) speech and thought presentation categories: internally and externally-located DS and DT (DS and DT that are presented within (internally) or outside of (externally) the scenes that they originate from), narratorinfluenced forms of DS and DT (where narrator interference seems to occur in DS and DT), visual presentations of speech and thought (where speech and thought are represented by pictorial or symbolic content in balloons) and non-verbal balloons (where no speech or thought is being presented, but states of mind and emphasized pauses or silence are represented by punctuation marks and other symbols in speech balloons).

This thesis explores the relationship between postdramatic theatre and écriture féminine using a practice-as-research methodology. Its claim is that Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine is revitalised as a source for feminist theatre studies through the emergence of postdramatic theatre. The project’s practice-led research identified and extracted principles from Cixous’s prose writing that are especially compelling for theatre and explored these through laboratory practice. The primary sources for doing this were Cixous’s novels Inside (1969) and The Book of Promethea (1983), as well as her writing on Clarice Lispector. The exploration of these materials was a creative and transformative activity that identified equivalent strategies between the two media – prose writing and theatre – while at the same time revealing significant differences and tensions. The practice is documented in the thesis via research logs and video evidence. The written reflection draws attention to the specific potentialities that theatre brings to écriture féminine and discusses how the outcomes of the practice-led research resonate with postdramatic aesthetics. While the research findings accumulated strategically across the series of three performances, and the performances built upon each other iteratively, each of the findings chapters focuses in detail on one aspect of the practice: specifically, semiotics, dramaturgy and feminine epistemology. By pinpointing and discussing nodal points at which postdramatic practices and écriture féminine intersect, this thesis aims to show that postdramatic theatre has the potential to be – and thus frequently is – feminine. Indeed, the overall aim of this thesis is to advance the emerging field of study of feminism in postdramatic theatre by exploring the feminine potential of postdramatic theatre and proposing that Cixous’s écriture féminine offers a way of framing the poetics of postdramatic theatre in relation to feminist politics. The findings have potential utility for theatre-makers seeking a feminist method in the postdramatic as well as scholars of postdramatic theatre and feminism.

This thesis provides a comparative analysis of late-twelfth and early-thirteenth century Tristan verse narratives from the French- and German-speaking worlds, in order to gain a more nuanced picture of how these specific writers reflect contemporary debates on interpretation and fictionality in their own works. While there is a vast body of critical literature on these texts, and a large amount of this scholarship examines the way that interpretation functions in these works, critics have so far not adequately considered how the Tristan texts from this period as a body engage with contemporary medieval debates on the relationship between truth, lies and fiction, particularly in relation to fiction as a new category for vernacular literary culture. Therefore, this thesis analyses how literary practice during this period is reflected in these texts, particularly regarding truth, lies, interpretation and authority. The first part of the thesis thoroughly studies the use of verbal and visual signs in the texts, focusing on the way that characters both construct and interpret those signs. The second part of the thesis examines storytelling in these texts. This focuses firstly on the narrators’ interjections into their works, discussing for example their relationship to their sources. Secondly, this analyses how the characters within the texts tell stories to each other, particularly those relating to their own pasts. Together, these two parts argue that interpretation and authority are key concerns for the writers of these texts. In conclusion, this thesis proposes that the writers of the Tristan verse narratives are participating in a dialogue about literary practice, interpretation and authority as they attempt to engage with the new narrative mode of literary vernacular romance.

As no single English study of the mise en abyme with its examples in our late-modern world has been undertaken, this thesis concerns the mise en abyme in English literature. In approximately the last third of the twentieth century, the concept has increasingly been associated with ‘postmodernism’ and the essential groundlessness of all claims to general or universal truth. In this thesis, I argue that the mise en abyme has become such a broad staple of character and narrative study that its meaning is diffuse in the extreme. First celebrated in the 1980s and 1990s, by several literary thinkers as a figure capturing the spirit of postmodernism, the eventual symptomatic dissipation of the mise en abyme in literary studies resulted from critical suggestions that the mise en abyme was after all, perhaps, bogus. It subsequently became associated with aesthetic phenomena far beyond its initial characterisation by André Gide in 1893. I argue that it has now become a trope of things wider than Gide’s initial allusion and has become a metaphor for abyssal - and abysmal - things. This thesis seeks to consider the history of the mise en abyme and to offer a contemporary account of what it might mean: it does this by uncovering the latent rhetorical figures which preceded the name ‘mise en abyme’. Formal readings of the play within the play in Hamlet and the gothic story read in The Fall of the House of Usher are both starting points to relink Gide’s idea to its, more common, metaphorical applications. Thus, metaphors of the abyss, the dark, the occulted, the uncanny and, most precisely, the ‘sinister’ are examined in this dissertation. The thesis first evaluates the theoretical inheritance of Gide’s work and then, in the second part, applies, through close reading, the meaning of Gide’s idea to recent, and representative literary examples. The thrust of the argument is that the reason many definitions, and applications, of the mise en abyme are such a source of problems, is because the mise en abyme, as an English literary phenomenon supporting the broad thesis of postmodern Gothic aesthetics, is concerned with representing abyssal metaphors. A clear delimitation of the mise en abyme is difficult whenever connotations of the abyss, the dark, the occult and the sinister are overlooked. So, this dissertation gives a circumspect view of what is designated as mise en abyme, and argues that, in late-modernity, its meaning is closest to the rhetorical figures named ekphrasis, metalepsis, and epanalepsis. This study concludes that, realistically, there is probably no such thing as the mise en abyme and instead, there are only rhetorical figures and metaphors of the sinister and of the abyss.