This practice-as-research thesis is in two parts. The first, Kitch, is a fictional biography of Aldwyn Roberts, popularly known as Lord Kitchener. Kitch represents the first biographical study of the Trinidadian calypso icon, whose arrival in Britain onboard The Empire Windrush was famously captured in Pathé footage. In the critical essay, contextualising Kitch, I argue that rite of passage theory, in particular, liminality theory, as defined and developed by Victor W. Turner, offers a valuable alternative to theories of hybridity and fragmentation hitherto applied to the postcolonial Caribbean and its literature. To support this position I offer close readings of two iconic works of postwar migratory fiction; George Lamming’s The Emigrants (1956) and Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956), showing how aspects of rite of passage and liminality theory illuminate these novels. My critical reflection on Kitch examines the marked absence of auto/biographical work on or by calypso artists in ethnomusicology or mainstream publishing. This absence is disproportionate both to the numerous studies of the calypso which approach the form homogeneously, at the expense of its individual artists, and, to the socio-historical importance of the calypso to the Caribbean and its disapora. Since Kitch is a fictionalised biography, I provide a brief exploration of the genre by drawing on the work of Michael Ondaatje and Earl Lovelace. My argument here is that the multitudinous and liminal approach of Kitch offers a more plausible alternative to linear, single narrator approaches since it mirrors both the process of research, and the manner in which a community of non-hierarchical voices may contribute to the construction and memorialisation of a calypsonian’s life.

This thesis focuses on the roles of memory and identity in Octavia E. Butler’s novels: Kindred, Lilith’s Brood, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, and Fledgling. By using material from such diverse disciplines as philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and sociology, I have treated the characters in Butler’s novels as individual selves; selves narrated by a living Butler. In current identity studies, the thought is that the self is constructed through narrative; therefore, what better way to analyze individual characters and communities than through the narrative provided by Butler. These selves are, of course, fictional, but how often are the selves we present, even temporarily, to the world in a given situation a fictional construction. We use many different critical tools to interpret and understand the world around us. While it is important to acknowledge the insightful implications of Butler’s work in regard to African American, gender, and feminist studies, there are unexplored approaches to her writing that can contribute to understanding the intricacies of Butler’s writing. This look at Butler’s texts shows that by opening up the ways we traditionally look at certain texts we can gain a more multi-faceted view of those texts, which are sometimes viewed through a type of tunnel vision. My discussion begins with a look at the theories used in the analyses of Butler’s novels. First, I look at Kindred and a discussion of individual identities and how they are deeply connected to group affiliations, as well as history. Then I move on to how group identities are created and influenced by collective memories in Lilith’s Brood. The Parable novels are the focus of my discussion on the construction of self through narrative. I end my analyses with a look at neuroscience and memory pathology through the amnestic protagonist of Fledgling.

This thesis presents an existentialist reading of William Faulkner’s early fiction (1925-31). Moving away from a regionalist perspective the thesis argues that Faulkner’s work can be viewed as part of a universal and aesthetic exploration of the human condition. By focusing specifically on Jean-Paul Sartre’s early philosophy (1930s-40s) and the concepts of consciousness, the duality of being: being-in-itself (the world of objects) and being-for-itself (human consciousness), the thesis investigates the way in which consciousness operates ontologically in Faulkner’s prose. It argues that a decidedly existentialist consciousness can be traced in Faulkner, one in which a linked relationship between imagination and reality lays bare the fragility of the characters and a sense of displacement in Faulkner’s fiction. Within the context of existentialism, the thesis also emphasizes the importance of the artist figure within Faulkner’s writing. As the embodiment of existential action and choice, the artist in Faulkner’s fiction reflects a sense of liberation and freedom. In this context, the existentialist reading re- examines the way the artist’s sense of reality hinges on the interaction between human consciousness and the world of objects, between Faulkner’s representation of art (text, painting and sculpture) and form and technique (fragmentation and multiple perspective).

While the long history of the fantastic is often critically examined, contemporary epic fantasy requires attention. This thesis will address a gap in genre scholarship and will focus on authors who have published from 1990 onwards. While this thesis will focus on close readings of a select few authors in order to delve into the complexity of these texts in greater detail, a wide sample of exemplars will be referred to, establishing the significance of this study on contemporary genre fantasy as a whole. This thesis introduces new ways of perceiving current productions of fantasy genre. It explores how the subgenre of heroic epic fantasy fiction exhibits a conscious awareness of its own form. By examining repetitive patterns of genre fantasy, the thesis argues that, rather than being simplistic, reductive, and formulaic, these structures create a layer of complexity and depth with each iteration. In doing so, heroic epic fantasy uses a resonance similar to that of epic mythology in order to create a new world with its own rational laws, one which follows the rationale of our own world. Thus, the thesis investigates structural and narrative patterns of heroic epic fantasy using models from science and philosophy. In this way, although the genre is generally viewed as irrational, the structure of the narrative reveals logical devices derived from real-world principles. Fantasy fiction is not an illogical form. It is, in fact, governed by a sense of rules and structure, one that reflects our current understanding of space-time and cosmology. More importantly, these real-world models are themselves an embedded facet of the narrative and essential to the way both story and character develops. Accordingly, the thesis depicts how these models are an integral part of the structure of heroic epic fantasy itself.

This thesis is in two parts. First, a novel that explores motherhood, community, silence, identity, family, stereotypes and racism to illustrate the legacy of slavery by implicitly drawing parallels between the American past and the American present. The novel explores answers to questions about silence, reuniting the Black American family after the Emancipation, representing diverse characters, ethically portraying emancipated slave characters, and writing about slavery. In 'Remembered', a framed narrative, the past haunts the present in the form of Tempe, in the structure of the novel, and in the central conflicts within the narrative. In the second part of the thesis I draw on explicit parallels between the past and the present to investigate the legacy of slavery both on the page and in contemporary American society. Throughout the creative reflection I examine the silencing of Black America both in life and in literature. This discussion explores the legacy of slavery including structural racism, lynching, denial and the erasure of black voices. In Chapter Two, I discuss the power of literature to build community, the importance of writing to reclaim story and identity, and the ethics of doing so. Chapter Three of the thesis is a creative examination of my writing practice. In this chapter I create a fictionalized version of my practice-based research project North West Literary Salon to reflect on my aims, challenges and process. The thesis concludes with Chapter Four, a discussion of motherhood that focuses on representations of black mothers in literature. The discussion examines close readings of selected texts including ‘Remembered’ to demonstrate the importance of context. Overall, my thesis aims to provoke dialogue that challenges the rhetoric of oppression, that gives voice to diverse characters, and that shatters silences. Unless Americans recognize the importance of diverse stories and diverse characters both on and off the page, like Spring, we will forever be haunted by the past.

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This thesis examines how six contemporary novels variously intervene in the current crisis of climate change. Through close readings of J G Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) and Hello America (1981); Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006); Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963) and Galapagos (1985); and Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010), the thesis aims to identify how the narrative and generic resources of contemporary fiction might help readers to think through and beyond the consequences of anthropocentric ways of thinking about the biosphere. Drawing upon the concept of the Anthropocene – and in particular the account of this concept provided by the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty – the thesis suggests that these novels raise profound questions about how climate change is represented and understood. If accounts of the human history of modernity have until recently overlooked the complex ways in which both the human species and its contemporary fossil fuel cultures are intertwined with the geologic history of the planet, how has contemporary fiction attended to this oversight? What light can imaginative apocalyptic future histories of the biosphere, such as those presented in the fiction of Ballard, Vonnegut and McCarthy, shed on predominant understandings of climate change? How has fiction highlighted the ways in which the insights offered by the Anthropocene complicate the promises of scientific ‘reason’ to explain and provide solutions to anthropogenic climate change? How do fictions such as those of Vonnegut and McEwan contribute to a more nuanced account of the limits of such reasoning? To address these questions, the thesis draws upon Martin Heidegger’s account of the anthropocentric enframing of nature through technology, and suggests a re-thinking of Louis Althusser’s account of ideology through which we can begin to understand how anthropocentric perspectives are naturalised in ways that illuminate some of the difficulties identified by Chakrabarty. By bringing these three perspectives together, the thesis seeks to develop a distinct critical approach to reading the responses of these literary fictions to climate change. The first section of the thesis examines how the generic resources of apocalyptic fiction defamiliarise assumed relationships between the human subjects and societies of industrial modernity and the biosphere. Chapter 1 suggests that J G Ballard’s novel The Drowned World (1962) imaginatively connects geologic and human history in order to disrupt key anthropocentric assumptions concerning the relationship between humanity and the biosphere, whilst his later novel Hello America (1981) foregrounds the anthropocentric inscription of industrial modernity through a self-consciously hallucinatory re-imagining of American history. Chapter 2 examines Cormac McCarthy’s recent novel The Road (2006), and suggests that the text presents a particular form of apocalyptic narrative that complicates the anthropocentric sub-text of traditional apocalyptic narratives. The second section of the thesis examines how the fictional representation of science and scientists can help to illuminate the ways in which an anthropocentric faith in the technoscientific promise of human power over nature serves to legitimate an illusion of human mastery over the biosphere. Chapter 3 considers how Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle (1963) offers a counterpoint to this faith by ironically depicting scientist characters whose assumptions of beneficial technoscientific progress are undermined by complex interconnections between individuals and the biosphere – connections that have apocalyptic consequences. Such complex interactions are also a feature of the insights offered by ecology and evolutionary science. Reading Vonnegut’s fiction after the Anthropocene underlines the ways in which Vonnegut’s literary techniques can help readers to think through and beyond the complex connections between natural and human history that these scientific disciplines begin to elucidate. As chapter 3 suggests, Vonnegut’s later novel Galapagos (1985) provides a particularly imaginative account of this complexity through its fictional narrative of an evolutionary future history across the longue durée of geologic time. Building on the insights developed in chapter 3, chapter 4 considers the significance of Ian McEwan’s ironic depiction of a fictional scientist who is unable to restrain his own overconsumption of resources in his novel Solar (2010). In my reading, McEwan’s scientist figure functions as an allegory for the paradoxes of a technoscientific culture that seems unable to apply scientific reason in meaningful responses to the dangers of the Anthropocene. In so doing, the chapter illustrates how the use of allegorical codes and irony in Solar draw attention to the ways in which a faith in technoscientific reason to provide solutions to anthropogenic climate change is misplaced. This misplaced faith also naturalises the on-going enframing of nature as a resource, with potentially apocalyptic consequences. The apocalyptic narratives of the Ballard and McCarthy novels can be understood as quasi-scientific literary speculations, which disrupt anthropocentric assumptions through the experimental futures they depict. Similarly, the ironic depictions of scientists and scientific thinking in the Vonnegut and McEwan novels draw attention to the anthropocentric limitations of conventional scientific thinking for fully understanding and productively responding to the apocalyptic implications of climate change. In bringing these readings together, the thesis attempts to provide valuable and timely insights into the techniques through which the literary fiction of Ballard, Vonnegut, McCarthy and McEwan can help readers to think differently about the complex relationship between human life and the biosphere. These readings also trace how such fiction can draw attention to the ways in which anthropocentric patterns of thought contribute to the catastrophic climatic implications of technoscientific culture.