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This thesis is a study of the changing ways in which novels by women of Indian ethnic origin have represented the relationships between spaces and identities and by extension, 'constructed' particular visions of both. Spaces, in this context, have been taken to refer to the larger concept of India, aswell asthe specific locations of homes, work-places etc, whilst identities refer, in this thesis, to women protagonists. My thesis builds upon cultural geographers' propositions that spaces and identities are mutually constructed (constructing) entities by suggesting that gendered experiences are also written about in gendered ways. Both experiences and representations are mediated by traits inescapable in a sprawling, hierarchical and unevenly populated country. Some of the most important of those factors, apart from gender are caste and/or class loyalties, as well as locations in rural or urban milieu within India, or outside of its geographical boundaries. The primary questions are these: are recognisably similar constructions of spaces and identities, (more specifically, 'India' and 'Indian women'), met with within the pages of the novels, or, do the differences take on recognisable patterns? The fact of these writers being women of Indian-ethnic origin, writing in English, adds another dimension of complexity, outside the worlds of the texts, but impacting those within; it is with these issues that Chapter 1 engages. The novels chosen for the purpose of this study have been grouped thematically (spatially), having first been divided into two categories based on the primary locations of the protagonists, within or outside India; these form the basis for Chapters 2 and 3. Not surprisingly, the characters' spaces mirror those of the novelists themselves and this thesis argues in Chapter 4, that the writers are constructed by their own environments even asthey re-fashion them through their writings.

I confirm that the thesis is my own work and that all published or other sources of material consulted have been acknowledged in notes to the text or the bibliography. I confirm that the thesis has not been submitted for a comparable academic award. This dissertation considers space, the figure of the ghost and the practice of haunting in contemporary fiction. Through textual analysis of contemporary literary hauntings, the principal argument throughout this thesis is that haunting highlights an enigmatic, multifaceted violence within space. Such violent traces disturb a preexisting historical trauma that punctures all spaces; an obscure scarring that philosophy attempts to erase, contributing its own violence as it does so. Through the remainder of the trace, the insecurity of a philosophical system based upon binary oppositions is disclosed. Hence, this study is predominantly theoretical and philosophical in its approach. Texts under examination are Lunar Park, House of Leaves, The Sea, Beyond Black, The Gathering, The Sea, The Sea, and Life: A User's Manual. Chapter One evaluates how the impossibility of mourning results in a haunted memorial crypt that incorporates the mourned within the mourner, and Chapter Two expands on the cryptiike nature of writing, as exemplified through the sending and receiving of letters. The relation of the law, finance and textual material of ownership (as outlined through mortgage) is the focus for Chapter Three, and Chapter Four considers the inheritance of the gothic trace; the influence of haunting upon the patriarchal lineage of father to son. Chapter Five explores the relationship between language and space, in particular, the ability to build through writing. Chapter Six examines the complex relationship between creation and erasure, and the ethics of the gift of death. Finally, Chapter Seven surveys the significance of the border crossing guest: a threshold anxiety experienced through the law of Hospitality

This study of Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) is divided into two sections. Part I consists of a concise biography, which is based on Wilfred Owen's Collected Letters, Harold Owen's Journey from Obscurity, and several other oral and written sources. The main topics of Part I are Owen's vocation to become a poet and the development of his personality from 1915 to 1917. Many details about Owen's life contribute to the subsequent explication of his poetry_ Part II of this dissertation begins with an attempt, as far as it is possible from those of Owen's MSS. that are now accessible, to advance the editing and dating of his published and unpublished poems. The appendices contain, firstly, a list of precise and approximate dates for those of Owen's poems which have either been published, mentioned in print, or made available in MSS. in the British Museum and elsewhere; and secondly, edited transcripts of the unpublished poems to which I refer in my text. The remainder of Part II comprises an evaluation and interpretation of Owen's poetry. My criticism of Owen's early and mature poems traces the way in which he explored the meaning of violence and death, the relationship between man and Nature, and the lineaments of love and sacrifice. This analysis discusses how Owen's mature war poetry relates to his previous use of poetic imagery and to his early exercises in the use of various forms and techniques: in his accomplished war poems, his parodies and ironic inversions of conventional imagery and forms helped to revitalize the Romantic tradition of English poetry. The concluding chapter assesses Owen's place in modern English literature and his influence on later British poets.

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This study examines Mina Loy's unpublished autobiographical writings and challenges the existing critical myth of Loy as the 'modern woman'. Between 1920 and the late 1940s Loy wrote four overlapping versions of her autobiography: 'The Child and the Parent', 'Goy Israels', 'Islands in the Air' and 'Insel'. This study develops a chronology for Loy's autobiographies and it examines each version's engagement with constructs of the 'modern' and of the 'modern writer'. Since the 1980s scholars have primarily focused on the 'modernist' techniques Loy employed in her early poetry. Often these critical surveys exclude texts that cannot be grouped under the heading 'modernism' in order to justify Loy's inclusion within the movement. Her poetry and her autobiographies written after the late 1920s suggest a shift in her aesthetics away from her earlier 'modernist' work. Till now her prose and her poetry written after 1925, about two-thirds of her total output, have been excluded from critical evaluations of her writing. Through readings of Loy's unpublished autobiographical manuscripts alongside her later, neglected poems this analysis argues for a broader and less exclusive understanding of Loy's entire oeuvre. In particular, it will address Loy's belief in modernism's 'prophetic' potential and how this relates to her autobiographical writings on consciousness and on loss. The study begins with a discussion of 'modernism', 'modernity' and the 'modern', and charts how these terms are defined in Loy's own essays on literature and art. It also examines Loy's depictions of Victorian femininity in the context of constructions, then and more recently, of the fin-de-siecle 'New Woman' and of the twentieth-century 'modern woman'. My analysis considers how Loy arrived at her current status, via editors, critics and her fellow poets. Ultimately I argue that Loy's autobiographies portray the inability of 'modernity' to exclude the past.

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