This thesis revisits the question of time in the novel. It does so by questioning whether this genre tells us anything new about temporality. In particular, this thesis looks at the novel's capacity to depict different temporal forms such as the representation of simultaneous action and whether such a capacity is constitutive of its "novelness".

Narrative inquiry refers to a complex research approach that uses multiple methodologies, across multiple disciplines and in many different ways, to research phenomena. Taking Denzin's naming of postmodern detective writing as 'the superordinate discourse to which all other discourses should now be compared' (Denzin, 1997: 164), I explore how detective fiction might show the processes of doing narrative inquiry. The aim of the research is to explore the processes of narrative inquiry through detective fiction. In doing so, I use fiction as my research method to compose a detective fiction that mimics narrative inquiry in its processes. Its effectiveness is reliant upon reading through the metaphor of detective as researcher, conducting an investigation using processes that mirror those of narrative inquiry. The central section of the dissertation is a detective fiction Body in the Square, a novella in thirteen parts, through which the main character of Cowell, a police detective investigates a murder case. Body in the Square is followed by an analytical section. This is organised through the three dimensional lenses of narrative inquiry: temporality, relationality and place, suggested by Clandinin and Connelly (2000) as an approach to narrative inquiry. Through close analysis of the novella and to literatures informing narrative inquiry, I show how detective writing can show processes in narrative inquiry. In a final reflective section I assess the effectiveness of fiction in exploring narrative inquiry processes. I conclude that detective fiction offers the reader to experience the intensity, complexities and difficulties of narrative inquiry processes, in an accessible and engaging way.

Always a story about a story, the vampire tale is forever in dialogue with the past, conscious of its own status as a rewrite. This makes the vampire a figure onto which readers and authors can project ambivalence about writing – the gothic of living with texts. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) vividly illustrates this connection. The novel presents textual interactions as both dangerous and pleasurable. What is more, Dracula has accumulated significance through criticism and adaptation. These retellings tie the novel even more closely to the processes of writing and rewriting. This thesis will begin by examining Dracula’s gothic of reading and writing. After this follows a consideration of the vampire fiction preceding Stoker’s novel, beginning with the figure of the embodied author in early nineteenth-century works like John William Polidori’s The Vampyre’ (1819), and James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney, the Vampyre (1845-47). The thesis will then address the gothic of scientific and institutional language in the vampire fiction of the mid nineteenth-century, including Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ (1872). A return to the fin de siècle follows, with a consideration of degeneracy and art vampirism outside Dracula, and discussion of works including Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897) and George Sylvester Viereck’s The House of the Vampire (1907). The thesis will proceed to the twentieth century, studying the gothic interplay of film and literature in works like F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). It will then trace the resemblance between Victorians and their modern adapters, suggesting that re-imaginings of Dracula, like Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), betray an affinity between Victorians and the ‘enlightened’ twentieth century. The thesis will conclude by examining the vampire as a figure of intertextuality, and considering the way in which postmodern vampires like those of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) acknowledge that their world is comprised of other texts. Buffy offers the possibility that the world shaped by narratives may also be rewritten, with results that can be either terrifying or liberating.

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This thesis presents the first cognitive-poetic account of the dystopian short story and investigates the experience of dystopian reading. In doing so, it takes a mixed-methods approach that draws upon various types of experimental and naturalistic reader response data in support of my own rigorous stylistic analysis. The study focuses upon four contemporary short stories published within the last ten years: George Saunders’ ([2012] 2014g) ‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’; Paolo Bacigalupi’s ([2008] 2010a) ‘Pump Six’; Genevieve Valentine’s ([2009] 2012) ‘Is this your day to join the Revolution?’; and Adam Marek’s ([2009] 2012b) ‘Dead Fish’. These texts were selected for their focus upon socially relevant thematic concerns, their cultural resonance and their inherent didacticism – attributes which I argue determine the dystopian reading experience. In moving beyond the periodic demarcations imposed on dystopian narrative by traditional literary criticism, this study argues for a reader-led discussion of genre that takes into account reader subjectivity and personal conceptualisations of prototypicality. My research therefore offers a new contribution to the area of dystopian literary criticism, as well as advancing research in cognitive poetics and empirical stylistics more broadly. Framed within Text World Theory (Gavins, 2007; Werth, 1999), my thesis builds upon existing research and advances text-world-theoretical discussions of world-building, characterisation and reading experience. In particular, I argue for a more nuanced discussion of paratextual text-worlds and propose a systematic account of social cognition that can be applied in Text-World-Theory terms. As an original piece of stylistic analysis, this thesis challenges traditional conceptions of genre and aims to extend existing discussions of the emotional experience of literary reading. As a result, several contributions are also made to the field of empirical stylistics, as I test multiple reader response methods and combine key findings from each case study to present a multifaceted account of dystopian reading.

This thesis traces the literary course of gothic narrative elements as they appear within children’s fiction, beginning from the late eighteenth century and concluding at the close of the nineteenth century. The thesis presents evidence and potentialities for children’s appropriation of gothic fiction written for adults, and links them to the contemporaneous development of gothic devices in fiction written for children. These are argued to reflect a single phenomenon: The burgeoning relevance, literary and social, of the adolescent, in whom gothic and children’s fictions find a natural point of crossover. This thesis contextualises critical negativity towards the gothic and particularly to potential adolescent audiences, highlighting how contentious and therefore radical their relationship was. Nonetheless, the thesis introduces two hitherto obscure examples of early gothic children’s fiction from the end of the eighteenth century which provide initial evidence of this trend, alongside readings of parodic representations of adolescent gothic consumption. This is developed in an analysis of twelve early nineteenth-century gothic bluebooks, examples of short, cheap gothic fiction, for their relevance and, more significantly, accessibility to potential adolescent readers. This point suggests mechanisms by which the very means used to acquire fiction can foster the development of the adolescent social unit. The adolescent, or maturing child, is then considered as a specifically literary figure, with the character-type’s role, both in major canonical works of fiction and more esoteric texts aimed at narrower and often younger audiences, scrutinised for continuing gothic resonance particular to their immature age and experience. The conclusion of this reading of literary and social history for evidence of the joint occurrence and significance of gothic and adolescence produces a theory regarding gothic fiction’s significance to the understanding and acceptance of the adolescent in society, and the success of the seemingly unlikely partnership of the gothic in children’s fiction.

Early Gothic novels produced between 1764 and the 1800s developed the literary tropes and mechanisms which define an enduring and complex genre. As such, the ubiquitous servant characters in the British Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries play particularly important roles as highly self-conscious Gothic narrators and storytellers, roles which have not been fully acknowledged or explored within Gothic criticism. Servant characters ‘narrate,’ verbally and through a physical performance, stories and constructions of identity in the works of the most critical early Gothic writers, namely Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and Charlotte Dacre. Such narratives deconstruct and interrogate social and personal identity through their manipulation of Gothic anxieties, and are critical to fully understanding the development of the Gothic genre. The earliest Gothic servant narrators, found in the works of Horace Walpole and Clara Reeve, help develop a new kind of ‘romance’ novel within a national literary identity. Later authors extend this further by casting servants as authorial metonyms who investigate the boundaries of the genre and techniques of Gothic storytelling. Ann Radcliffe demonstrates a conscious engagement with her servants as narrators, and her works provide great insight into the political, psychological, and literary potential of servant narratives. Matthew Lewis and Charlotte Dacre expand on these techniques by not only illustrating their characters’ authorial identities more overtly, but by also emphasizing their servants’ ability to create physical Gothic realities which correspond with their narrative goals. Thus servants within the Gothic literary tradition reflect generic goals by destabilizing hegemonic methods of ‘knowing’ and ‘performing’. They assert their own counter-narrative and therein compromise the identities of those around them. This dissertation will prove that Gothic servant narratives have a profound impact on readings of the individual texts, of the Gothic genre, and on narrative studies in general. This research will ultimately ensure that the Gothic servant narrative’s incorporation into developing literary criticism will open new doors for Gothic and literary studies, as well as providing significant insight into established areas of academic inquiry.

This thesis explores late-nineteenth-century theories on suicide that emerged alongside a perceived ‘epidemic’ of suicides in Western societies, which brought the question of suicide into the public domain. Suicide was clearly a subject that fascinated and simultaneously horrified many Victorians and became a recurring theme in late-nineteenth-century Gothic fiction. However, it has received little critical attention, with the most extensive investigation into suicide in Victorian literature having been carried out by Barbara Gates in 1988. There has been no sustained investigation into the recurrent use of suicide in many late nineteenth-century Gothic novels, both the canonical and lesser-known stories. This thesis examines the extent to which some authors of late-Victorian Gothic fiction engaged with specific concerns, fears and suppositions relating to the perceived increase in suicide rates at the end of the century. It investigates how the authors of the ‘second wave’ of Gothic fiction incorporate ideas of suicide into their texts amid wider-reaching late-century fears and anxieties. Using primary sources including newspapers, various journals and periodicals, psychiatric and medical reports, reviews and case studies, the thesis examines the many speculative opinions about the era’s perceived ‘suicide epidemic’. It also explores the multiple ways in which authors of this Gothic fiction contextualised their own understanding of current debates, drawing into their works of fiction not just suicide theory but related themes such as inheritance, transgression, degeneration, social hypocrisies, egoism, passion, emotional and moral insanity. This gives a fascinating insight into the mutually informing relationship between the Gothic genre and medical, psychological and sociological theories and documentation pertaining to suicide in the era.

Choose Me is a literary novel about abortion. In the dark basement of an Islington flat, a woman lies chained to a double bed. She is Grace Walker – forty-three, single and childless. Her captor is Anna Carmichael, a nineteen-year old girl with a gun. Anna, the disturbed only child of a wealthy couple, has always been haunted by memories of a past life and believes she is reincarnated. She is certain that Grace is the mother who aborted her twenty years ago and has tracked her down in order to execute her revenge. The novel switches between the viewpoints of mother and daughter as they struggle with their feelings towards each other and confront the day of the abortion and its aftermath. The critical component of the thesis, ‘Letting the Foetus In’, explores the process of writing this novel. It highlights the issues encountered whilst drafting an earlier science fiction version by comparing this version with novels such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor. It then goes on to discuss the transition from using a science fiction premise to one closer to magical realism, looking at issues of voice and character creation. Examples of ‘abortion-literature’, such as Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and Louise L. Lambrich’s Hannah’s Diary are also analysed. In the final chapter, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is examined to see what narrative and stylistic devices the author employs to realise her premise.

This thesis explores the relationship between evolutionary theory and the weird tale in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through readings of works by two of the writers most closely associated with the form, Arthur Machen (1863-1947) and H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), it argues that the weird tale engages consciously, even obsessively, with evolutionary theory and with its implications for the nature and status of the "human". The introduction first explores the designation "weird tale", arguing that it is perhaps less useful as a genre classification than as a moment in the reception of an idea, one in which the possible necessity of recalibrating our concept of the real is raised. In the aftermath of evolutionary theory, such a moment gave rise to anxieties around the nature and future of the "human" that took their life from its distant past. It goes on to discuss some of the studies which have considered these anxieties in relation to the Victorian novel and the late-nineteenth-century Gothic, and to argue that a similar full-length study of the weird work of Machen and Lovecraft is overdue. The first chapter considers the figure of the pre-human survival in Machen's tale of lost races and pre-Christian religions, arguing that the figure of the fairy as pre-Celtic survival served as a focal point both for the anxieties surrounding humanity's animal origins and for an unacknowledged attraction to the primitive Other. The second chapter discusses the pervasiveness of degeneration theory at the fin de siècle, and the ways in which works by both Machen and Lovecraft make use of it to depict the backsliding of both the individual human subject and of wider society, raising the suggestion that the degenerate is always already present within the contemporary human. In the third chapter, portrayals by both authors of hybridity come under consideration. The chapter places these tales in their historical context, with reference to the cultural anxieties surrounding the decline of empire, the rise of anti-immigration sentiment in the United States, and the emergence of the eugenics movement, and argues that these fears become tied to notions about the fitness or otherwise to survive of a "human" associated with Anglo-Saxon whiteness. The fourth and final chapter discusses Lovecraft's portrayals of highly-advanced extraterrestrial civilisations, arguing that these stories partake of a Utopian impulse that nonetheless expresses itself via contemporary racist discourses, and that they both maintain the notion of a horrific primitive Other within the human and attempt to open up the possibility of a transhuman or posthuman future. The thesis concludes by considering these works in relation to the cyborg theory of Donna Haraway, suggesting that their portrayal of the necessity of inhabiting flux offers a new and less straightforwardly horrific way of thinking about human identity.