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This thesis examines four novels by Virginia Woolf – Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves and Between the Acts – for the purposes of, firstly, establishing the specificity of literary language and, secondly, showing that such specificity is a form of access to basic structures of the human condition. I propose a reading of these novels on the basis of a theory of literary language articulated onto a fundamental anthropology. My starting point is a discussion of the tension between a force of unification and one of disintegration in the four novels, because such a tension is a theme of these novels; it is also seen as the spring of the literary experience by theorists such as Paul Ricoeur and Wolfgang Iser, who are the sources of inspiration of this thesis; and most importantly, such a tension is an avatar of aporia, which I consider one of the characteristics of literary language. I define literary language both negatively, along the lines of its demarcation from ordinary communicative language, and positively, in terms of performativity, figurality, fictionality and aporia: language in literature, rather than being a tool of communication, elicits a drift towards performativity of which the symptoms are figures of speech, referential irrelevance and contradictions. Such a theory of literary language is present in Woolf’s four novels, thematically, as a reflection, rudimentary and fragmentary, on artistic practice; it is also present on a formal level, as the active principle of her literary practice. To those strictly literary concerns, I add an existential depth: the specificity of literary language is seen as a mode of access to a fundamental dimension of our human condition. I discuss such a dimension, philosophically, under the name of ‘fundamental anthropology’ with the help of Emmanuel Lévinas and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I conclude my thesis by showing how, in the context of Woolf’s work, theory of literary language and fundamental anthropology are articulated onto each other.

This thesis examines constructions of Jews and Jewishness in British children’s literature from the eighteenth century to the present. It demonstrates that this literature has often sought to determine the place of Jews in Britain, and that this endeavour is linked to attempts to define the English sense of self. This discourse is often politicised, with representations influenced as much by current events and political movements as by educational objectives. The main focus of the thesis is on works published from World War II through 2010, with Chapter One providing a historical context for the later material and offering an overview of key motifs from the eighteenth century to World War II. Works by authors such as Maria Edgeworth, E. Nesbit and Rudyard Kipling are discussed alongside rare texts which have not been examined before. Chapters on gender, refugees, multiculturalism and heroes and villains reveal developments as well as continuities from earlier periods. The chapter on multiculturalism draws on unpublished interviews with authors including Adele Geras, the late Eva Ibbotson and Ann Jungman. The sometimes competing and conflicting representations in literature which has been influenced by the impact of the Enlightenment, the Empire, the Holocaust, cultural diversity and 9/11 demonstrate that there has been no teleological progression over the centuries from anti-Semitism to acceptance, or from ‘outsider’ to ‘insider’. Instead, many of the recurring themes in these texts reveal an ongoing concern with establishing, maintaining or problematising the boundaries between Jews and Gentiles. This tension is present in a substantial body of texts across age ranges, genres and time periods. It demonstrates that the position of Jews in Britain has been ambivalent, and that this ambivalence has persisted to a surprising degree in view of the dramatic socio-cultural changes which have taken place over two centuries.

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The introduction to this thesis argues that it is not yet possible to exclude awareness of the social and political development of the West Indies from any adequate appreciation of the West Indian novel. It is suggested that national identity and cultural values in the region are so fluid as to make a rigorous defence of the autonomy of the work of art inappropriate. A brief description of West Indian society is provided. The factors which make it possible to regard the West Indian territories as a single region are discussed. Individual national characteristics are mentioned and the class structures and racial compositions-of the territories are examined. Literary criticism in the thesis is divided into three sections; the intention, in each case, is to show the way socio-cultural developments in the area have produced common themes in a wide range of West Indian novels. The first section suggests that there have been attempts by novelists to apply the concept of romantic love to man-woman relationships in the West Indies. It is further argued that the concept is alien to working class West Indian setting and that the European ideal of love has. been used as a criterion by which West Indian man-woman relationships are very often judged and presented as inadequate or negative. I suggest that an image of womanhood a West Indian literary concept of femininity - arises from the conflict between the European ideal and West Indian social reality. The second section is concerned with the growing West Indian need for a history and a way of seeing the past. I suggest that the matriarchal family-structure of the West Indian working-class has presented Caribbean novelists with a ready metaphor for examining history in fiction. The special importance of motherhood at one level of West Indian society has led to the use of the mother-child relationship as a convenient metaphor to describe the relationship between the society and its history and identity. The third section concerns attempts to redress the balance between the illegal occult practices of the West Indian folk (obeah) and the legal and "respectable" Christian religion. These attempts may depend on equal condemnation of obeah and Christianity as superstitions or on the presentation of both faiths as equally valid. The literary consequences of these two methods are examined.

All the articles on, and references to, Lewis which I have consulted are listed in the Bibliography. As for as I am aware, there has been no previous full-length treatment of Lewis's fiction. the most complete study of his thought known to me is Chad Walsh's C.S. Lewis; Apostle to the Skeptics (1949) , which deals, often briefly, with Lewis's fiction, though not, of course, with 'The Chronicles of Narnia' and Till We Have Faces, As indicated at several points in the thesis ,I find myself in general agreement with Chad Walsh, whose book I was not able to utilize until revising my first version. John Wain's recent autobiography, Sprightly Running (1962), appeared in time for me to quote its account of Lewis's views on romance (Chapter XIX of this thesis ), but too late for me to supplement my brief description of Lewis In life at Oxford (Chapter II of the thesis ). It gives a fascinating account of Lewis and his circle in wartime Oxford.

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This thesis examines language in a range of modern and contemporary dystopian literary fiction, and argues for a reinterpretation of Whorfian linguistics as a means of advancing understanding of the dystopian genre's acknowledged propensity to influence the habitual world-view of its readership. Using close stylistic analysis, and with an emphasis on textual patterning, it identifies and examines two distinct and characteristic `languages' of dystopia, and considers the ways in which these discourses contribute to linguistic relativity as a dynamic process in the reading of these fictions. Chapter one defines more precisely the literary genre of dystopia, particularly in relation to notions of space and time, and emphasises the genre's necessary participation in the socio-historical circumstances of its conception and production (the site of a discourse here termed reflective language). The (re)placement of these environments in a futuristic setting is also examined and is shown to be marked by a second discourse, termed speculative language. Chapter two outlines the theoretical foundations of the study and supports its positioning at the interface between the study of language and the study of literature by drawing on theories from both disciplines to orient its subsequent analyses. In this chapter, the concept of linguistic relativity, or Whorfianism, is re-figured as a process intrinsic to the reading of dystopian narratives, and is combined with the more literary critical theory of cognitive estrangement. In order to maintain focus on the reader-text relationship, and to locate the analyses from a readerly perspective, some common, or `folklinguistic', beliefs about translatability and the `inadequacy' of language are also invoked. Chapters three, four, and five are devoted to case studies: chapter three discusses the non-Newspeak speculative language in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and chapter four begins with an analysis of reflective language in the same novel before looking at three other twentieth-century dystopian texts (Katherine Burdekin's Swastika Night, L. P. Hartley's Facial Justice, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale). Chapter five brings together speculative and reflective language in its consideration of Atwood's Oryx and Crake, which also serves to bring this study into the twenty-first century. A summary and conclusions follow in chapter six.

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