'As for teaching---I quite like talking to myself in public. The thing is to look at the blackboard or anyway not at the assembled frogs. They can read what you write on the board though they can't understand what you say. If you write steadily on the board and keep up a spoken patter, never waiting for signs of intelligence or making jokes, the hour gets through all right' (SL 40). Thus wrote William Empson from Japan in a letter to John Hayward in 1932. Empson's early experience as an English teacher in the Far East helped shape the formation of his ambivalent attitudes towards the varied audiences he felt himself compelled to address as a publicly-minded intellectual who always wrote in fear of the charges of elitism and solipsism. Yet there is a sense in which Empson was not always altogether able, nor perhaps even willing, to resist the trappings of solipsistic eccentricity. Aware of his own idiosyncratic critical vision, Empson struggled with the social and theoretical implications of the ultra-refined rationalising drive that motivated his analytical concentration on 'the words on the page'. And though as a critic with distinct and highly sophisticated philosophical inclinations, he was not averse to engaging in spirited controversy with contemporary academic theorists and philosophers, still he was also keen to foster a sense of common belonging with the 'ordinary tolerably informed reader', to cultivate a sense of pastoral intimacy with a broader, non-specialised community, the 'assembled frogs' in the classroom and beyond. The resulting tension in his work between the democratic, commonsensical impulse of a publicly-minded intellectual speaking for our common 'social experience' (a key Empson phrase), translating for the greatest possible number, and the unarticulated, elitist products of an idiosyncratic critical consciousness, is the central topic of this dissertation. Empson scholar-theorists have often dealt elliptically with this sturdy resistance to theory by stressing the man's 'common sense rationalism' (Christopher Norris), the 'reasonableness' (Paul Fry) of a 'reluctant metacritic' (John HafTenden) keen to resist the professionalization of Eng. Lit. in its varied 'bother-headed theoretical' forms. Yet both Empson's homespun rationalism and his resistance to theory are shot through with tensions similar to those which structure his difficult attempt to reconcile the conflicting voices of articulate populism and elitist marginality. The recent publication of Haffenden's two-volume biography (OUP 2005-2006) and of his edition of the Selected Letters (OUP 2006), as well as the forthcoming publication of a collection of essays edited by Matthew Bevis entitled Some Versions of Empson (OUP 2007), give Empson scholars and enthusiasts an opportunity to reflect on the ambiguities of Empson's theoretical and pedagogical legacy.

This dissertation was prompted by Barthes' ironic injunction that 'No "thesis" on the pleasure of the text is possible'. With characteristic playfulness, Barthes here outlines a counter thesis on the nature of writing, one outside the usual boundaries of hypothesis- argument-conclusion and that points to the difficulty of conveying the concept of a text of pleasure in formal academic discourse. The present thesis represents a response to this problem, with two columns of text juxtaposed on the pages of the four sections that follow the introduction. Both columns are part of the same process of critical-creative writing that informs the thesis but they are presented in different styles: formal critical commentary in the right-hand column and a critifiction in the style of an e-mail monologue on the left. The title of the thesis, In a message dated has particular reference to the fiction in the left-hand column that was developed from an e-mail exchange between the author ('A') and Raymond Federman CM*), one of the theorists/ writers who informs the ideas of this work. Each of the sections in columns approaches issues about the pleasure of the text, but from different standpoints: souvenirs, cyberspace, madness and abjection. These perspectives provide the triangulation necessary for the author to get closer to the central purpose of her thesis: an investigation into her own unorthodox style of writing, one which defies any convenient genre. By placing herself at the centre of the investigation, both as a writer and as a fictional character, a process of self-discovery takes place. What she discovers is the difficulty of connecting the pleasure of her dispersed and fragmented writing into a coherent whole. Maurice Blanchot has described this search for wholeness as a 'curious kind of crab's progress', that 'at the moment it is about to emerge makes the work pitch strangely. Ultimately, all that can be established is that writing took place. E-mail was chosen because it provided an economy of language and seemed to be the ideal medium to capture the spontaneity necessary to engage fully in the pleasure of writing. The context in which e-mail operates is universally understood it can dispense with formal grammar, punctuation and spelling fragments of unconnected text can exist with no further explanation. These features provided the freedom of the left-hand column of the thesis which was then put into a context and supported by the formal commentary on the right. To engage with a language of pleasure involved giving oneself over (in the e-mail fiction at least) to a seduction, a desire for the other's words. It also involved abandoning a previously written text, called Souvenir. This is attached as an appendix to the thesis as a physical reminder of the souvenir it represents. The fifth and final section of the work, a third-person narrative called 'Paris', reflects back on a first and second meeting of the e-mail correspondents in Paris a year apart. It provides, however, neither a conclusion to the critique nor a climactic fictional ending. Instead, here the columns of the first four sections dissolve into a single body of text, free from the constraints of both the critical commentary and the e-mail discourse, now no longer necessary as the couple have met in actual time. It is an outcome of the thesis, but one that could not have been known in advance. It is a culmination but not a resolution of a problem or argument. In this it supports the kind of critique highlighted by Barthes in the opening sentence above, that the pleasure of the text is always a matter of potential, not of conclusions.

This thesis proposes that while the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) offers an official lens through which to read South Africa's traumatic past, it has generated a highly problematic historiography. I conceive of apartheid as posing a crisis of representation which presents literary authors, who both support and critique the "healing" process that the government wants to initiate, with a contradiction. In the light of this I argue that post-apartheid fiction writers' engagement with national history exceeds the placatory and symbolic agenda of the TRC, to restore a necessary element of violence to South Africa's process of decolonisation. The first two chapters of the thesis illustrate that the TRC (an institutional response to trauma) attempts to fuse nationalism and psychotherapeutic principles in a hegemonic spectacle of confession, which aims to construct a new national imaginary based on a collective approach to apartheid as historical trauma. I examine testimony, the TRC's published Report and entries to the Register of Reconciliation to show how the form and content of memorial texts are manipulated to predispose public responses to the past, and that it is necessary to go beyond their words to read apartheid's ongoing trauma. The final three chapters analyse fiction and autobiography by Andre Brink, J M Coetzee, Antjie Krog, Rian Malan and Zoe Wicomb, who respond to apartheid's crisis of representation by deliberately agitating the metanarratives of South African literature. The writers use various strategies to restore some of the missing violence to national political transition: a range of literary devices indicates the texts' function as national allegories, in Fredric Jameson's sense. These enable a democratisation and honouring of the past that troubles the grand narratives of nation and affirms the transhistorical potency of literature.

This thesis focuses on Welsh writing in English of the mid-twentieth century, examining it comparatively alongside Welsh-language writing, as well as some examples of contemporary work from Ireland and Scotland. It takes 1925 as its starting point, the year in which Plaid (Genedlaethol) Cymru was founded, and ends in 1966, when Gwynfor Evans became its first Member of Parliament, essentially legitimizing it as a mainstream political party. It is argued, with particular reference to the roughly similar position of Scottish Nationalism and writing at this time, and the effect that the foundation of the Irish Free State had on Irish writing, that during this transitional period in which Welsh Nationalism was not represented in Parliament, Nationalism was expressed most prominently in literature. It is concluded, through a thematic survey which incorporates writers from a range of ideological positions, that writers not usually considered to be supportive of Nationalism, and occasionally thought of as hostile towards it, actually express ideas which are broadly sympathetic to the Nationalist cause, and that expressions of sympathy with Nationalism are far stronger and more numerous in Welsh writing in English during this period than has previously been accepted.

Hilda Vaughan was a successful writer from the 1920s to the 1950s whose novels, short stories and plays, largely depicting the Welsh countryside, found international renown. Married to the celebrated author and playwright, Charles Morgan, she moved in illustrious literary circles both in London and in Wales. The second half of the twentieth century saw her writing fall into critical neglect, in part due to Vaughan's elevated social class, which distanced her work from that of many of her Welsh contemporaries. Vaughan inhabits a complex ideological position: she was a Welsh writer, writing in English, who lived for the majority of her life in London. She wrote novels that depicted the lives of working-class agricultural communities, though she was herself descended from the class of small-landowners. Much of her work is set in her beloved Radnorshire / Breconshire birthplace and this area close to the Welsh / English border, with its dual cultural influences, informs much of her writing. This thesis examines the negotiation and renegotiation of identity in Vaughan's work, with particular emphasis on the construction of nation, the depiction of gender and the effect of social class in her narratives. Chapters one to four of the thesis explore Vaughan's texts as they engage with contemporary issues, such as the scientific ideas of Social Darwinism and anthropology at the beginning of the twentieth century, the expansion of mass Anglo-American culture during this period and its effect on Wales, the emerging roles for women at this time, and the First and Second World wars and their destabilising influence on Welsh and British identities. Chapters five to seven examine Vaughan's depiction of the landscape, folklore and language of Wales as her work reforges connections with an 'estranged' Wales, rebuilding and reinforcing a sense of Welsh identity in the novels.

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In this thesis, I will be examining selective works by the novelist Doris Lessing. The aim of the thesis is to examine Lessing’s oeuvre by approaching her fiction as an attempt to understand the subject as an effect of intersubjectivity. The thesis approaches the question of intersubjectivity through a broadly psychoanalytic framework, not only engaging with Lessing’s own particular interests in psychoanalysis, but also standing back and reframing her work through approaches to intersubjectivity available in work by Freud and Jung, Klein, and object relational and existential dynamic psychologies. The thesis will, throughout, endeavour to situate psychoanalytic approaches in specifically historical and political contexts, also drawing on phenomenology to examine Lessing’s depiction of a transcendental mode of experience which is reached through an ongoing evolutionary consciousness. Her dialectical positioning of the subject reveals a restless struggle towards a conciliation between self and others. The thesis reflects a trajectory of Lessing’s work from her earlier African novels to later writing, The Fifth Child and Ben, in the World. The thesis begins by examining the structure of the family and mother-daughter relationships in the context of the historically specific political milieu of post-war apartheid in South Africa; it ends by examining the question of the availability of an ethics of care in Thatcherite Britain as reflected in the Ben novels. Melanie Klein’s work and the later object-relations theory influenced by it, are adopted to provide a frame through which to try to illuminate Lessing’s concern with the possibility of motivating positive interactions between self and others, and as an alternative to the tragic liberal view of the self as an anxious isolate proposed by Freud. In each chapter, the thesis focuses on the variety of Lessing’s formal experiments in her attempt to develop a late ethics of care built on a foundation of intersubjectivity. This emergent vision of the self opens up the possibility of reconstituting new modes of interaction between the self and the outer world: Lessing uses her fictional worlds to posit visionary possibilities in the world outside the fiction. Often employing critical modes of the Utopian and Apocalyptic, Lessing envisions the possibility of a new and fluid community that is constituted on the foundation of a revised albeit fragile ethics of care. Her fiction suggests that the power of creation and imagination necessary to realise such a vision belongs not only to the artist, but is also available for development in the psychosocial journey towards a new democratic subjectivity that might realise a new public order.

This thesis proposes that Northern Irish elegy is a distinctive genre of contemporary poetry, which has developed during the years of the Troubles, and has continued to be adapted and defined during the current peace process. It argues that the practice of writing elegy for the losses of the Troubles has established a poetic mode in which Northern Irish poets have continued to work through losses of a more universal kind. This thesis explores the contention that elegy has a clear social and political function, providing a way in which to explore some of the losses experienced by a community over the past half-century, and helping to suggest ideas of consolation. Part one focuses on three first generation Northern Irish elegists: Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. Heaney is considered in a chapter which takes in a poetic career, through which might be traced the development of Northern Irish elegy. Following this are two highly focused studies of the elegies of Longley and Mahon. The place of artifice in elegy is considered in relation to Longley's Troubles elegies, while Mahon’s irony is discussed in relation to his elegiac need for community. Part two looks at a second generation, represented by Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon. Carson's elegies for Belfast are read in a discussion of the destruction and reconstruction that occurs during the process of remembering. This study explores the idea that elegies might also be written for places and temporal spaces. Carson's interest in poetic form is shown to be intricately related to his elegiac practice. The chapter on Muldoon surveys a career which has interrogated the connections between art and suffering. Muldoon raises questions of poetic responsibility, and also challenges poetry itself, on a formal and linguistic level. As his career develops, he includes not only the local threats of Troubles violence within his elegies, but also the global threats of disease, violence and terror. Part three starts with Medbh McGuckian, whose work is discussed in relation to the third generation poets Sinead Morrissey, Leontia Flynn and Colette Bryce. As McGuckian's poetry is perhaps the least immediately accessible of all the poetry covered here, the thesis considers ways in which her work might be read, before her poems are discussed as Northern Irish elegies. Following this are readings of poems from Morrissey, Flynn and Bryce, noting ways in which this generation works to develop the genre of elegy, working in the same broad themes that have been charted throughout this thesis.