Chance, and its representation in literature, has a long and problematic history. Our human instinct to rationalize chance, and thereby to impose order on the disorder of life, is threatened by the meaninglessness implied by pure randomness. And yet chance is also evocative of rationality: if we can order life into mathematical probabilities, then uncertainty itself becomes that which mediates experience, rationalizes it, and offers an explanation for events. In this sense, our distrust of randomness finds its best expression in the artistic impulse: the human need to impose order on disorder, and form on reality, thus always speaks of the desire to suppress contingency. This paradox, which lies at the heart of literary representations of chance, forms the basis of this study, which addresses questions of chance and the aleatory in novels by four mid-twentieth century writers: Samuel Beckett, Henry Green, B. S. Johnson and Iris Murdoch. I argue that chance's significance for the novel of this period (1945-1978) is closely connected with other developments in the culture of the time: existential philosophy's preoccupation with questions of chance and possibility, the avant-garde's increasing elision of chance and randomness with formal experimentation, and an increasing movement, amongst writers such as Samuel Beckett and Henry Green, away from authorial omniscience and omnipotence and towards an acceptance of the contingent and the partial. The growth of the aleatory technique in art in the sixties, influenced by the Dadaists, in part grew from this new idea of chance, and the way that writers reconfigured their engagement with related concepts. In this way, chance became allied with attempts to reinvigorate the novel form. Chance's representation in narrative manifests itself variously as a concern with causality, contingency, and as a formal engagement with randomness. Throughout the thesis I address the complex ways these ideas become encoded into the construction of texts. The saturation of the literary culture with depictions of, and anxieties about, chance at this time, eventually represents an age-old battle between freedom and determination, recast as a mid-twentieth century refiguring of the relationship between author and narrative.

Isaac Rosenberg is by now a celebrated poet although very few of his poems are generally known. The purpose of this thesis is to trace Rosenberg's poetic development with close analysis, starting with a biographical study and then treating the poems in chronological order. Much space is devoted to the almost totally neglected Earlier Poems of 1905-1915, focussing on their unity and on evidence of Rosenberg's poetic growth: these poems are studied in thematic groups so that recurrent uses of words and ideas can illuminate each other. The unity of theme and treatment helps to underline the fact that in the Trench Poems the writer emerges as an artist, rather than primarily as a propagandist, which sets him almost alone among the poets of the Great War. Rosenberg's published texts are in some instances incomplete and this study will aim to correlate what is published to the unpublished versions of Moses as well as manuscript variants of a number of his poems. Close examination of these throws light both on Rosenberg's methods of composition and code of the themes and symbols which give a certain unity to his work, from its rather imitative beginnings to its climax in the plays and Trench Poems. Rosenberg's relationship with his poetic contemporaries who belonged to a different ethnic background and came from a different class are considered, and it is suggested that his comparative isolation as a poet was more a source of strength than a cause of weakness. In the course of this study it has been possible to make corrections of, and emendations to, Rosenberg's received text which, in some cases, clarify his meaning. Above all, this thesis is exploratory rather than evaluative: it was not undertaken without the realization of Rosenberg's early potentiality and final achievement as a poet.

A textual study of the College note-books, in which Lawrence collected his early manuscript verse, is correlated with biographical data from the Eastwood and Croydon periods. Some new information on the life is deduced, and a chronology of the early verse is constructed. The chronology enables a systematic study of Lawrence's poetic development, clarifying his affinities with the English Romantics. "Dim recollections", an unpublished poem, displays a debt to wordsworth, and echoes of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats are discovered. An historical comparison is made between the Romantic imagination, or the imaginations of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, and Lawrence's sexual and sensory metaphysic, as revealed in his poetry. The comparison centres on the 'glinting web', a symbol for the interrelatedness of man, woman and natural vitality. Another chapter considers the contributions made by Swinburne, Meredith and Hardy to Lawrence's understanding of sexuality and death. Analysed as a narrative and symbolic progression, LOOK! We Have Come Through! points to similarities and differences in Keats's and Lawrence's transcendent moments. The symbolism of Birds, Beasts and Flowers also links poem with poem by patterns of apocalyptic recurrence and the figure of the dark man. The volume's metaphysic, 'physicalism', radically alters the underlying idealism of the Romantic imagination. Lawrence's sensitivity to physical immanence is reinforced by his reading of the anthropologists Frazer, Tylor and Harrison. Utilizing his knowledge of primitive attitudes to the world, Lawrence reinvigorates Romantic Nature, opening new dimensions of myth by techniques comparable to those of other modernist poets - to T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land, for example. Last Poems again sounds the mythic potential rooted in our perception of the phenomenal world.

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