This thesis asks how four South Asian Muslim novelists have responded to the challenge of writing about Islamic faith ties in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre and the ensuing “war on terror”. This is a period when Muslim writers and commentators have come under increasing pressure to “explain” Islamic affiliations and affinities, and – as Pnina Werbner (2002: 1) has put it – to ‘disclose where ... the centres of their subjective universe lie’. Focussing on the international novels of Nadeem Aslam, Mohsin Hamid, Salman Rushdie, and Kamila Shamsie, this thesis explores the hypothesis that they can be read as part of a post-9/11 attempt to revise modern “knowledge” of the Islamic world, using globally-disseminated literature to reframe Muslims’ potential to connect with others, whether Muslims who subscribe to other versions of Islam, or non-Muslims. It considers how the “world literature” these authors create and shape maps spheres of Islamic affiliation and affinity, questioning where their subjects turn in seeking a sense of connection or identification, and why. It provides a detailed examination of the inter-cultural and intra-cultural affiliations and affinities the characters pursue in these texts, asking what aesthetic, historical, political and spiritual identifications or commitments could influence such connective attempts. It also analyses popular discourses and critical discussions surrounding the novels, offering a critical examination of the explanations offered by their authors in their non-fiction writing and commentary for privileging, problematising or prohibiting one (Islamic) affiliation or affinity instead of another, and scrutinising how the writers are appropriated as authentic and hence authoritative spokespeople by dominant political and cultural forces. Finally, it explores how, as authors of Indian and Pakistani origin, Aslam, Hamid, Rushdie and Shamsie negotiate their identities and the tensions of being seen to act as Muslim spokespeople in (conscious) relation to the complex international and geopolitical context in which they write.

The overall image of giftbooks remains very negative for much of their critical history,and their contents are frequently depicted as unworthy of further attention. As a result, little is known about the social influences literary annuals triggered. By analysing the mediations between annuals and the context in which these books evolved, this thesis firstly tries to demonstrate their high popularity. As a social phenomenon of the nineteenth century, literary annuals cannot longer be ignored. To validate this proposition, advertisements published in periodicals of the years 1827, 1828, 1829, 1832, 1835 and 1838 have been analysed and some critical reviews written by several contemporary critics, especially William M. Thackeray and Christian Isobel Johnstone have been explored. Even though annuals were very popular with the reading public in the early nineteenth century, their negative reputation persists. Therefore, by examining the Keepsake from 1829 until 1839, in terms of numbers of male and female contributors, this project seeks to show that although male writers felt threatened by female authors their fears were groundless. However, the bad perception of annuals affected works by canonical authors such as Mary Shelley, whose tales have often been excluded from the recognised canon. This thesis is therefore focusing on the short stories Mary Shelley has provided for the Keepsake, in order to show that the techniques (frame narratives, first person narratives and the introduction of Gothic elements), she used, permitted her to write stories dressed up for the Keepsake audience by including moral behaviour. That annuals were sources of morality and public education cannot only be seen in these writings but also in the engravings and themes depicted. In addition, this project will contribute to future research on literary annuals as it reveals both the importance of tales over poetry, and the importance of Gothic and Oriental writing in the culture of the 1820s and 30s.

For too long the term “the canon” has been used to denote a static system of literary judgements that puts the power of canonical choices outside of the control of the everyday reader. Canonisation in reality is the change in textual composition and alignment for a population over successive generations that may be caused by natural selection, for example by textual preference manipulated by environment, by conscious hybridisation of texts, by textual mutation through the spontaneous expansion of writing by new authors and artists, and finally by the reproduction of successful texts and textual styles. A text can be added to the canonisation process, but that doesn’t mean that it will necessarily become part of canonical reading because canons depend on social validation. Superhero characterisation and superhero canonisation share with English literary canonisation the public opinion that better representation is needed in order to maintain social relevance, but in a society where multiple personal and professional identities can be created on the internet outside of physical identifiers, attaching identity to purely physical aspects of the self is quickly becoming outmoded. In recent debates about what should be included in current canons the push to diversify canonical reading to include more texts by marginalised authors is strong. As a writer, though, I am wary of having my writing classified or preferred on the foundations of my physical body. For marginalised writers, canonical representation based on physical identity creates boundaries that are limiting to writers, writing, and interpretations of writing. The associated political identities prescribed to the physical body are only one facet of a writer, and the political ideologies of these identity groups can be applied to writing in such a way that it limits the full scope and impact of the text. Identity labels which once opened canonisation to a range of new and exciting voices are now confining writers and writing to a series of identity based tick boxes where writing that falls between groups, or is counter to the political agenda of an identity group, is discarded in favour of unity. The call for representation in literature should not be about expanding political identity groups, or attempting to homogenise humanity with claims that we are all the same, but instead should be about developing multifaceted individual characters whose development is linked to the story they were created for. An outside reader coming into canonical debates faces challenges such as proprietary language, canonical suspicion and prejudices caused by a misunderstanding of how canons are formed, and the anxiety of undoing the progress that has already been accomplished by a multicultural approach to canonisation. Because of the complexity of these issues, debates about canonisation have broken down into populist arguments in academic journals where political identity groups argue with aesthetic canon supporters about what the public should read. I believe that the public should have an opportunity to take part in this debate. My collection is intended to subvert expectations brought on by the identity based category of Southern Women’s Writing and to underline the inherent flaws of basing a textual hierarchy and classification system on the physical body of the writer rather than on the textual content of the writing. My Mother’s Handbag uses superheroes as a mode of taking identity apart so that readers from outside English academia can contextualise canonical concerns such as gendered language, identity performance, gender essentialism, disability, and the flexibility of what it means for writing to be literary. By using popular genres such as science fiction and superheroes, this collection is meant to demystify canonisation and attract a wider range of readers to participate in the debates about what it means to be literature.

This study examines the evolution of British women travel writers’ engagement with the Risorgimento during a decisive period preceding Italian reunification, from the infamous letter-opening incident of 1844 to the eve of the Second Italian War of Independence (1859-1861). Despite being outwardly denied a political voice back home, British women were conspicuous in their engagement with the Italian question. Italy’s allegorical personification lent itself well to female-oriented interpretations of the Risorgimento, with many women seeing Italy’s political oppression under Austria as analogous to their own disenfranchised condition in Britain. The rise of mass tourism on the Continent made Italy increasingly accessible to Victorian women travellers, not only as a locus of culture, but also of political enquiry. The generic hybridity of travel writing further enabled Victorian women’s political engagement by granting a degree of fluidity between traditionally feminine and masculine genres. In turn, Italy played a foundational - albeit somewhat equivocal - role in British women’s literary professionalization as travel writers. My research focusses on the intersections between political advocacy, gender ideologies, national identity, and literary authority in women’s travel accounts of Italy. It contributes to current literary scholarship on the Risorgimento by providing a sustained analysis of Victorian women’s non-fiction travel writing as an under-represented genre in Anglo-Italian studies. Encompassing both published and unpublished travel writing across a variety of media, it aims to represent a broader diversity of literary responses to the Italian question. Through a comparative framework, I position prominent figures like Mary Shelley, Florence Nightingale and Fanny Kemble alongside marginalized writers such as Clotilda Stisted, Selina Bunbury, Mary Charlton Pasqualino, Maria Dunbar, Janet Robertson and Frances Dickinson, with fruitful intersections. My findings identify a number of shared discourses across these women’s travel accounts in response to discrete political moments 3 within the process of Italian reunification. By attending to such moments as unique discursive events, this study interrogates teleological narratives of British writers’ engagement with the Risorgimento. My analysis shows such discourses to be temporally contingent, being shaped not only by the episodes themselves, but also by extrinsic political and commercial considerations. Personal factors also differentiate individual responses to Italy, with many women travellers parallelling their autobiographical journeys with the peninsula’s political travails. However, my findings equally undercut a mutually reinforcing, proto-feminist narrative of women travellers’ liberal engagement with the Risorgimento. Instead, this study delineates the tensions as well as the synchronicities between representations of the female travelling self and Italy, revealing them to be often competing sites of authority.

This thesis examines selected literary representations of personal and political panic in the period 1899-2005, with a particular focus on the way in which literary languages are able to mediate issues around embodied experience. The main emphasis of this thesis is to demonstrate how nervous conditions, informing embodied phenomenological experience and existentialist insights, can be politically subversive in their un-learning of interpellated knowledge. In its opening section, this work studies a novel published in 1899 that depicts contemporary fears about nervous degeneration and offers an interrogation of the ideology of masculinity corresponding to the expansionist era of European imperialism. The trauma of First World War shell-shock and the nervous anxiety of colonial ‘white’ masculinist performance feature in the second and third sections respectively. These study literary texts that juxtapose masculinity crisis with the politics of identity and the articulation of the related problematic of agency. The final section studies a novel that depicts neo-Darwinism and genetic determinism in an age of political terrorism and counter-terrorism post-9/11 and before the 2003 Iraq War. It investigates the novel’s suggestion that bio-political reifications may be resisted by the exercise of emotional empathy and existentialist ambivalence. The thesis as a whole explores how masculinity and existentialist crisis can produce emotional and epistemic interruptions in ideologies that inform normative bodily and social behaviour. In order to offer deeper analyses of nervous conditions and cultural cognition, this work attempts to incorporate various tenets and experimental findings of modern neuroscience with ideas and theories from philosophy of mind. Through a study of selected literary texts, the thesis is offered as a small contribution to the understanding of the nature of human agency, empathy and identity in the changing political world of the last and the current century.

This thesis examines the role of supernatural transformation in medieval English romance. It explores corporeal changes of humans transformed into animals, monstrous men, loathly ladies, as well as the transformative effects of death. However, transformations could also alter one’s identity and interior states of being. Transformation in these texts is revealed to affect the body as well as the spirit. This symbiotic relationship between outward body and interior spirit is first demonstrated between two separate persons, and progresses to become localized within the one body and the same soul. Illicit practices of magic as well as the supernatural, powers of the faery otherworld as well as divine might, initiate these transformations. While romance transformations occur through various sources, both licit and illicit, the authors and redactors of these romances consistently employ religious imagery or belief at moments of transformation. This engagement with religious precepts proves to be surprising and unorthodox. As such this thesis explores the relationship between religious belief and the politics of disenchantment.

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This thesis examines the concept of nostalgia as depicted in visual and literary representations of London published in the early nineteenth century. It aims to expand our current understanding of the varying definitions and uses of nostalgia present in literature of the period. Rather than confining itself to the well-served notion of ‘Romantic London’, this thesis focuses upon the period falling between ‘Romanticism’ and ‘Victorianism’, and in doing so broadens current critical understanding of London’s literary history. Chapter one outlines three modes of viewing the urban landscape (the prospect view, the panorama, and the picturesque) and analyses their uses to Cyrus Redding and Pierce Egan in containing the social tensions between history and modernity visible in the city’s landscape. Chapter two considers the affective metaphor of national ruin in Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Mary Shelley’s futuristic visions of London, and compares these descriptions of imperial decay with George Cruikshank’s illustrations of domestic ruin wrought by the construction of new suburban housing. Chapter three offers an alternative definition of ruin by focussing upon localised pockets of the city overlooked by urban improvement, and examines nostalgic illustrations of lost London neighbourhoods by John Thomas Smith and William Hone. Chapter four examines how antiquarian representations of the London poor (namely prints, engravings, paintings, and slang dictionaries) use nostalgia as a strategy of containment, reducing the poor to stock figures or anecdotes of London life in a polite literary format. Chapter five compares the narrative techniques and publishing strategies of Charles Lamb, William Hone, and Leigh Hunt in their appeal to an ideal readership characterised by convivial sociability and common London nostalgia. The conclusion brings together the many temporalities of nostalgia at play in these texts and suggests possible routes for tracing the afterlives of urban nostalgia into the twenty-first century.

This study examines the instructive aspects of visual material in medieval romance texts and their illuminated manuscripts. Medieval romance contains an extensive array of visual references, and the present discussion focuses on the phenomenology of these episodes: depictions of the aesthetic and intellectual aftereffects of sight, and the imagination at work. Such instances are often related within the text to the act of reading itself, and through them the author encourages correct and effective practices of reading. In romance texts the characters often struggle to interpret such signs, sometimes with disastrous consequences, and their reactions in turn become lessons for the reader. The first section of the discussion focuses on romance texts, and particularly on depictions of image-crafting, the imagination at work, and the recognition and interpretation of visual signs. The discussion in the second section concentrates on illuminated romance manuscripts, and examines the authorial perspectives expressed through narrative illustration. The visual material of medieval romance is largely concerned with communication, and the didactic conversation that occurs between author and reader is implicit within the romance text. This study therefore demonstrates that the visual material in medieval romance narratives often has a practical function: to establish a dialogue between the author and reader, and sometimes the limner and reader, concerning good reading practices.