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This work is a study in urban dialectology, sociological linguistics, and generative phonology. It takes the form of an urban dialect survey of the city of norwich, England, and is particularly concerned with the correlation between phonetic and phonological aspects of English, as it is spoken in Norwich, and various sociological parameters.

The Sleep Orchard is a collection of poetry written in response to the life and artwork of Arshile Gorky. By mapping the differences as well as the deepening intersections between Gorky and the author, these poems highlight the complexities inherent in attempting to understand another’s life and art within the frame of one’s own consciousness. In addition to meditating on various paintings and the subsequent thoughts they inspire, the text shifts between reflection, recollection, description, confessionalism, and collage, ultimately carving an intimate trajectory through history, memory, vibrancy, and loss. The Invisible Foxglove Spine is a collection of ekphrastic poems in which personal and historical resonances often strive to transcend the purely visual realm of the paintings that initially inspired them. Notions of religion, gender, family, as well as avenues of human connectivity are addressed. The critical commentary explores notions of truth in biographical writing, the relation of this to my poetry collection The Sleep Orchard, as well as voice appropriation in connection with my manuscript on Arshile Gorky. Also investigated are notions of ekphrasis and gender in my shadow collection The Invisible Foxglove Spine, as well as the relationship between ekphrasis and the confessional as considered through the work of contemporary poets Pascal Petit and Deryn Rees-Jones.

A historical novel set in a fictionalised version of St Ives, Cornwall, spanning the period 1875-1936, during which time pilchard fishing is replaced by tourism as the main industry in coastal communities. Silver and Salt shows the effect of this shift in industry and identity through the eyes of local woman Pearl who experiences confusion and distress at the changes in her home. She cannot separate the past from the present and is haunted by the disappearance of Nicholas, her great love, in 1889. During a riot caused by disputes over Sunday observance, based on the real-life Newlyn Riots, he vanishes. As her confusion in 1936 increases, Pearl believes that her memories show her what really happened to him. The critical commentary which accompanies the novel focuses on perceptions of Cornwall and discusses Silver and Salt’s efforts to offer a fresh construction of place through the foregrounding of the women of the Cornish pilchard industry, a group marginalised by Cornish history, academia and fiction. The commentary examines the relationship between fiction and tourism promotion in creating perceptions of Cornwall as a timeless exotic ‘other’, focusing on the work of Daphne du Maurier and the Cornish Riviera campaign of the Great Western Railway. In addition, the commentary explores the role of women in the Cornish pilchard industry, how the industry attempted to control their behaviour through its language and system of beliefs, and how the women resisted traditional ideas of femininity through their work. There is also a discussion of the narratological decisions behind the writing of the novel.

Many studies on Welsh Writing in English dismiss texts from before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: my thesis adds to the growing field of scholarship on pre-nineteenth century Welsh Writing in English, which primarily focuses on eighteenth century texts, to show the need to also be inclusive of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sixteenth and seventeenth-century Wales was a very different country from what it would become in later centuries, owing to its relative autonomy under the administrative jurisdiction of the Council of Wales and the Marches and its legendary status resulting from the legacy of Geoffrey of Monmouth. As a result, Welsh Writing in English from this period of time is different than that from later eras; it is about a country finding its place in a still relatively recent political union. The texts discussed include English translations of the Latin texts of Humphrey Llwyd and John Owen, as well as English language writing by David Powel, Henry Vaughan and Morgan Llwyd. While all of these writers were born in Wales, I will also consider the writing of two non-Welsh writers based in or around Wales, Katherine Philips (often described as an ‘English exile’ in Wales) and Thomas Churchyard, from the nebulous borderland region of the Marches who has been likened to a ‘ventriloquist’. The first chapter concerns itself with Humphrey Llwyd’s The Breviary of Britain and the way in which Llwyd uses chorography in order to depict the landscape and language of Wales. Chapter two’s focus will be on David Powel and his Historie of Cambria where I will analyse how Powel depicts the history and culture of Wales, while also circumnavigating the politics surrounding his patron, Lord Sidney, and the Council of Wales and the Marches. In the third chapter, I examine the poetry of Henry Vaughan and Morgan Llwyd, two seventeenth-century poets of opposing religious and political ideologies, from their regional contexts in Brecknockshire and Wrexham respectively. The fourth chapter inspects the way in which Thomas Churchyard’s Worthines of Wales and the poetry of Katherine Philips reflect perceptions of Wales during their particular eras in order to see what impact Wales had on the socio-political fabric of the islands. Finally, in the fifth chapter I explore several different English translations of the epigrams of John Owen, an ex-recusant Welsh poet who had moved to England, to assess to what extent translation affected the meaning of Owen’s repertoire: this chapter focuses on the epigrams that most concern Wales. My aim in this thesis is to investigate the ways in which Welsh identity manifests itself in writing landscape, language, history, religion, myth and politics, as well as through hiraeth – a feeling associated with sadness and nostalgia for what has been lost – in order to establish a body of texts for early modern Welsh Writing in English.

Across the work of eleven key authors — Caradoc Evans, Gwyn Thomas, Glyn Jones, Nigel Heseltine, Dylan Thomas, Lynette Roberts, David Jones, Dorothy Edwards, Margiad Evans, Brenda Chamberlain, and Tony Conran — this thesis analyses the output of an Anglophone cultural formation of modernist writers in Wales, whose literature comprise a major — yet neglected — strand of European modernism. The introductory chapter engages with the history of the idea of ‘Modernism’, and the current state of modernist studies within and beyond Wales, arguing that conventional notions of ‘Modernism’ as a fixed, monolithic period confined to the major metropolitan areas of Europe and America are no longer sufficient in light of recent developments in the field. The second chapter examines the controversial writer Caradoc Evans, once considered the ‘father’ of what was commonly called ‘Anglo-Welsh’ literature, whose incendiary 1915 short story collection My People serves as the explosive genesis of Anglophone Welsh modernism. I compare Evans’s work with a later author, Gwyn Thomas, whose 1946 novella Oscar depicts a nihilistic void under the guise of a bleak South Walian valley. Across the following two chapters, I explore the work of writers connected to a cultural formation of Anglophone Welsh modernist writers, utilising the term ‘formation’ as conceptualised by Raymond Williams in Culture (1981). This ‘formation’ occupied the cultural space cleared by Caradoc Evans, used Wales as their social and literary nexus (the magazine was edited by their mutual friend, Keidrych Rhys) and included in their number key writers examined in the thesis, such as Glyn Jones, Nigel Heseltine, Dylan Thomas, Lynette Roberts, and David Jones. In the fifth chapter, I analyse the ‘Gothic Wastelands’ of two recently recovered women writers, Margiad Evans and Dorothy Edwards, who were tangentially connected to the formation. In the sixth chapter, the thesis explores the modernist life-writing of Brenda Chamberlain and Tony Conran, as well as their position as the last members of this particular cultural formation. Finally, the thesis concludes by asking a question which becomes increasingly obvious in the face of the strength, vitality and diversity of Welsh modernism as demonstrated by this thesis: what brings us here so late?

This dissertation will explore the contemporary value of early Daoism, a Chinese indigenous philosophy established prior to the Qin period (221 B.C.E.). It will suggest, as we enter the Age of the Anthropocene, that early Daoist thinking is useful to present-day ecocriticism. In short, it offers a way of restoring spiritual concerns to our thinking about environmental crises that we often presently consider in purely physical and material ways. After setting out the principles of early Daoism and suggesting its usefulness to contemporary ecocriticism, this thesis will consider the poetry of Edward Thomas as a case study of how early Daoism can offer new insights into canonical western literature. It will show how Daoist thinking offers re-readings of Thomas’s poetry that bring spiritual matters to the centre of our understanding of the present environmental quandaries. My project intervenes in the literary field in three ways: firstly, it is a contribution to the literary critical field of Edward Thomas studies; secondly, it brings the tradition of Eastern thought firmly into the realm of ecocriticism; thirdly, it works more broadly to raise the profile of Chinese thinking and further dismantle Euro-American literary and cultural hegemonies.

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This thesis reassesses a corpus of Old Norse words which previous scholars claimed to have been loaned from English. It has been over sixty years since the last concerted study of these purported borrowings, and research has not moved much beyond the foundations laid by Absalon Taranger in 1890. This thesis seeks to establish a more plausible corpus of English loanwords in Old Norse, focusing particularly on lexical material relating to the spheres of Christianity and literacy. Chapter 1 offers a detailed survey of the literary material relating to language contact between English- and Norse-speakers, with a special focus on the English missionary effort. I suggest that we should see the Anglo-Saxon church as a distinctly international, multilingual institution during the Viking Age. A case study focusing on the twelfth-century First Grammatical Treatise contributes to the debate over Anglo-Norse mutual intelligibility and explores Norse-speakers’ integration within a wider European cultural sphere. In Chapter 2, I assess 113 supposed English loanwords in Old Norse in order to ascertain which ones we can confidently ascribe as English borrowings. I suggest that the number of loanwords that are unambiguously English in origin are fewer than previous scholars have suggested and that some conceptual fields demonstrate more English influence than others. I also indicate that a large number of purported English loans are more likely to be polygenetic in origin. Chapter 3 categorises and interprets the reanalysed lexical items. I devise a number of new categories into which our corpus of loanwords can be grouped. I use these new groupings to reflect on Anglo-Norse language contact more generally, and place my work within the context of recent research on institutional religion as an engine for language change and the emergence of Anglo-Scandinavian identity in England.

This thesis explores the relationships between knowing and feeling in the fiction of four late modernist writers: Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, John Banville, and J. M. Coetzee. My approach is informed by and builds upon Derek Attridge’s claim that literary works are best understood as ‘events’ performed through acts of reading. The thesis shows how these writers’ works explore knowing and feeling both through the description of characters’ experiences and through the cognitive and affective experiences these descriptions give rise to in readers. Capturing this demands a slower and more textually immersed mode of close reading than is customary in academic criticism, and my chapters therefore focus on a single text by each author: Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor (1969), Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said (1982), Banville’s Ancient Light (2012), and Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). The introduction to this thesis argues that contemporary criticism continues to be shaped by the epistemological bias which has been present in literary studies since the heyday of the New Critics. This bias is conspicuously evident in critical accounts of Nabokov, Beckett, Banville, and Coetzee, and the originality of my readings partly derives from the predisposition of other critics prematurely to resolve the cognitive and affective uncertainties generated by these authors’ works. I argue that these writers stage intensely enigmatic feelings which their subjects try to know, and that these experiences of knowing and not knowing are themselves affective. Each chapter examines an epistemological-affective state which is particularly prominent in the author’s work, namely: ambivalence, undecidability, disorientation, and uncertainty. In a coda to the thesis, I suggest that, beyond contributing to critical understanding of Nabokov, Beckett, Banville, and Coetzee, the larger ambition of this study is to argue for and exemplify a mode of close reading which is better able to capture the singularity of aesthetically difficult literary fictions.