One of the ways to understand literary modernism is to see it as a response to the crisis of Western ocularcentrism. First taking up E. M. Forster as a main figure and later shifting its point of focus to Virginia Woolf and finally to a contemporary author Zadie Smith, this dissertation examines how literature can respond when our long-standing belief in the sight’s ability to reach knowledge is challenged. Forster’s novels, written at the dawn of the twentieth century, can be read as a remarkably honest record of the age’s epistemological anxiety and puzzlement at the recognition that the equation of seeing and knowing in its familiar Cartesian guise was hardly possible any more. The dim feeling of unfitness that Forster felt about realism at the beginning of his career seemed to accompany him to the end, until he felt that he could not produce any more novels after A Passage to India (1924). For Woolf, on the other hand, whose prime as a novelist came later than that of Forster, this condition appeared not so much as a “crisis” of ocularcentrism but rather as a stimulus to invent her new feminist aesthetics of the visual, which is positively assisted by the concept of sight as physical. It culminates with Lily Briscoe the painter’s effort to seize her vision in To the Lighthouse (1927), onto which Woolf may have projected her own venture, which was to grow out of the realist method of writing. The last chapter casts light on a moment that could be called an emergence of a new ocularcentrism by exploring Smith’s latest novel On Beauty (2005), which is based on Forster’s Howards End (1910) and prominently focuses on the meaning that the act of seeing can have in our postmodern world.

The purpose of this study is to make the case that Ted Hughes (1930-1998) is one of the pre-eminent elegists writing in English in the latter half of the twentieth century. Whilst his poetry has been widely criticised for its apparent preoccupation with violence and death, it is puzzling that the links these topics have in common with elegy have never been clearly verified. This might be because Hughes's elegies do not appear to bear the characteristics frequently associated with traditional poetic laments; however, as this study shows, closer scrutiny reveals not only many similarities, but also acts of resistance within the broader scope of elegy. Drawing on both established and contemporary critical debates surrounding Hughes and elegy, this study undertakes a comprehensive reading of the poet's major works from The Hawk in the Rain to Birthday Letters, whilst also paying attention to limited editions of his verse, including Recklings, Capriccio and Howls & Whispers. Posthumous publications, including the Collected Poems. Selected Translations and Letters of Ted Hughes, are accounted for. so that (alongside the chronological reading of the poems) Hughes's development as an elegist is fully realised. One of the aims of the thesis is to demonstrate that the poet's elegies are unified in presenting what I term the ‘actual'; that is to say, that Hughes does not fabricate sensations or forge experiences that purport to be beyond the realm of recognisable human endeavour. This I term his 'unfalsifying dream’. This is striking because quite often traditional elegies appear to present the opposite: a language which is ๐mate and images which are close to beatifying the deceased, putting them at a remove from human experience and existence. 'The Hawk in the Rain' is used to illustrate Hughes's theoretical position, especially in the case of his earlier war elegies and the circumstances of Remains of Elmet and Moortown Diary. He is both the observational, seemingly dispassionate poet (the hawk), capable of a detaching himself from the experience he wishes to relay in his verse, and yet, he is also the wanderer 'in the rain, one who is immersed in the momentous instant of his own language and experience. Like his personas, Hughes is divided. He is complicit with many of elegy's practices and traditions, but he is also a reformer and renovator of elegy, writing invigorating verse which brings the realities of mortality closer to the reader. In doing so, he reaffirms the significance of life and how this life might be better lived in closer harmony to poetry and contemporary ecological urgencies. 'The Elegies of Ted Hughes' aims to prove that far from being just a 'poet of nature', Hughes has been an exemplary elegist in our own time.

Back/Side Entry examines contemporary queer fiction in English from South Asia and its diasporas. It underscores the critical significance of a double-pronged theoretical approach by combining insights from queer and postcolonial scholarship. Building upon recent research that re-maps queer discourses through an encounter with postcolonial theory and narratives, this thesis argues that South Asian queer fiction disputes the Western bias in queer paradigms, and challenges the elision of sexual and gender non-normativity in postcolonial studies in order to make both queer and postcolonial sites truly transformational. It interrupts routine practices of absorption and gradual obliteration of non-Western/non-White subjects in standard accounts of queerness and concur-rently locates queer self-representation from postcolonial/diasporic South Asian writers as central to a discussion of the larger conceptual debates in queer theory. Queer narratives from South Asia and its diasporas emphasise the significance of postcolonial, diasporic, ethnic, racial, religious, class, caste and linguistic formations in addressing questions related to the representation of alternative genders and sexualities. Through a close reading of novels by Hanif Kureishi, Leslie de Noronha, P. Parivaraj, Shyam Selvadurai, Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla and R. Raj Rao, this thesis analyses South Asian queer formulations, which simultaneously continue and contest Western models of queer identity. The focus on unconventional arrangements of gender and sexuality in the postcolonial site of South Asia repositions the field of queer studies towards non-Euro-American contexts and legitimates the status of “queer” as a pluralistic critical formation. This thesis extends the transnational/trans-disciplinarian academic framework that registers a rising discontent with Western models of global queerness and contributes to the growing presence of non-white, non-Western and Third World voices in queer studies. Adding to newly emergent discussions of queer subjectivity in South Asia, it offers an original contribution to the field through a thorough investigation of current South Asian queer fiction.

This work first investigates the apparent connections between the temporal and historical from each author’s point of view, then argues for methodological and cognitive commonalities evident among the temporal and historical perceptions of all three.  The philosophy of Henri Bergson is regarded as a prominent influence on all three authors’ perceptions of temporality, and discussion of temporality in the work of each author contrasts the Bergsonian notion of the inherent subjectivity of memory and experience with the standardised units of duration used by Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).  Analysis of each author’s treatment and understanding of history focuses on the distinct methods through which each sought to relate the historical past to present experience. Chapter One outlines scientific, technological, and cultural developments which drew attention to issues of temporal and historical perception in the late Victorian and early modernist period.  Bergson receives special attention as the philosopher whose distinctions between subjective and objective renderings of time influenced Conrad, Eliot, and Joyce most strongly.   Chapter Two argues for the probability of that influence on Conrad, and goes on to discuss Conrad’s perception of temporality as expressed in <i>Heart of Darkness</i> and <i>Lord Jim</i> before reading <i>The Secret Agent</i> as a parody of standardised temporal systems.  Chapter Three turns to Eliot, establishing the presence of Bergsonian notions of temporality in Eliot’s early poems. The chapter challenges the common critical opinion that Eliot was no longer influenced by Bergson when writing <i>The </i><i>Waste</i><i> </i><i>Land</i><i>.</i>  Chapter four reviews Joyce’s familiarity with Bergson before discussing perceptions of temporality expressed in the ‘Lestrygonians’ and ‘Wandering Rocks’ episodes.  Analysis of Joyce’s perception of history relates Paul Connerton’s concept of ‘social remembering’ to Joyce’s challenging of ‘official’ historical accounts of the Phoenix Park Murders and the death of Charles Stewart Parnell.

Harold Pinter famously described the function of speech as a deceptive 'stratagem to cover nakedness'. This study reads the drama of Marina Carr as engaging with this assertion, and explores her preoccupation with the tensions between overt, forceful, and often violent vociferation, and the resonance of unvoiced privacies. Throughout the study, therefore, silences are read in terms of such linguistic strategization as Pinter foregrounds, each chapter engaging with the fraught endeavours of Carr's protagonists to establish linguistic (self)-definition. Close readings are made of all of the plays in order to expose and explore the 'language locked beneath' these Pinteresque 'torrent[s] of language'. The silences discussed range between the familial, cultural, and individual, and the study is, thus split into three distinct parts. Part One focuses on familial silences, exploring the economics of grief and loss, the self-impoverishment engendered by chronic dependency and melancholia, and the problematics of individual and collective memories as (re-)constructions of past familial narratives. This section also explores the playwright's preoccupation with death, and the circumstances of death, as the central significance in the existential process. Part Two reads Carr's work in terms of interrogative social critique, discussing the means by which this playwright foregrounds cultural phenomena: specifically, the existence of an endemic yet glossed-over racism in Irish society, and the equally disregarded issues of social exclusion which lurk beneath the overt economic advantages of the Celtic Tiger. It also highlights and discusses her engagement with a contemporary cultural conversation which has pitched sociosexual matters from the absolute silence of taboo, to the forefront of public awareness. Carr's work is an integral and vibrant part of an Irish dramatic tradition of silence, and Part Three of the study juxtaposes her plays with those of her dramatic exemplars within this tradition, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, and Tom Murphy. This section also reads the individual silences in two of Carr's plays from a psychological perspective, through recourse to both the linguistic psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, and R.D. Laing's exploration of ontological insecurity and split subjectivity in The Divided Self.

This thesis examines the profoundly influential but generally neglected contribution of Alice Milligan (1888-1953) to Irish cultural politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Besides her voluminous literary output - encompassing four novels, eleven plays, a political travelogue, a biography, numerous articles, short stories and poetical works - Milligan was also a tireless political activist. A vital force in the Gaelic League and the Irish Literary Societies of Dublin and London, she was also a founding member of the Irish Women's Association, the Women's Centenary Union founding member of the Irish Women's Association, the Women's Centenary Union and the Henry Joy McCracken Literary Society. In Belfast Milligan established and edited two seminal nationalist journals. The Northern Patriot and the Shan Van Vocht. However, Milligan has consistently caused problems for historians of the Irish cultural renaissance. As a northerner, she operated outside the centralised cultural focus of Dublin. As a Protestant Irish republican, she compromised the traditional dualisms structuring the Irish political unconscious. As a woman, moreover, she was inevitably cast - and indeed volunteered herself - as the handmaiden of a male-defined history. Milligan's occlusion from the historical record was further ensured by her commitment to a localised politics of community participation. A principal difficulty in charting a coherent map of Milligan's work and career is that the bulk of her writing remain buried in private archives and obsolete publications. As a result, much of my research activity has taken the form archaeology; over the past four years, I have unearthed many previously unknown archival traces of Milligan. Drawing upon this new documentation the thesis explores Milligan's previously unexamined work in drama, <I>tableaux vivants</I>, newspapers and political organisation.

This thesis investigates the emotional experience of literary discourse from a cognitivepoetic perspective. In doing so, it combines detailed Text World Theory analysis with an examination of naturalistic reader response data in the form of book group discussions and internet postings. Three novels by contemporary author Kazuo Ishiguro form the analytical focus of this investigation: The Remains of the Dt!)' (1989), The Unconso/ed (1995) and Never Let Me Go (2005), chosen due to their thematic engagement with emotion and their ability to evoke emotion in readers. The central aims of this thesis are to develop cognitive-poetic understanding of the emotional experience of literature, and to advance cognitive-poetic and literary-critical understanding of the works of Ishiguro. As a result of the analytical investigations of the three novels, this thesis proposes several enhancements to the discourse-world level of the Text World Theory framework. In particular, this thesis argues for a more detailed and nuanced account of deictic projection and identification, proposes a means of including readers' hopes and preferences in text-world analyses, and reconceptualises processes of knowledge activation as inherently emotional. Detailed, cognitive-poetic analyses of Ishiguro's novels elucidate literary-critical observations regarding Ishiguro's shifting style, and present new insights into the cognitive and emotional aspects of the interaction between the texts and their readers. This thesis aims primarily to be a contribution to the fields of stylistics and cognitive poetics. It approaches this theoretically through the application and enhancement of cognitive poetic frameworks, analytically through the investigation of Ishiguro, and methodologically through the utilisation of reader response data in order to direct and support the investigations. However, incidental contributions are also made to cognitive and social emotion theories, and the discussion raises several suggestions for continued interdisciplinary research in the future.

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Associationist concepts in aesthetic theory are usually assumed to have died with Coleridge's attack on Hartley. In fact, the explanation of the reader's experience of literature developed by David Hume and Archibald Alison in the eighteenth century continues throughout the nineteenth and is pervasive in the critical thinking of W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. The essential postulate of associationist theory is that the reader does not respond to the communication of the words on the page, but responds indirectly through the images and feelings stimulated in him by the work. The greater the quantity of associations generated by the work, the more aesthetically effective it is. Yeats derived his associationist thinking from Hallam's essay in defence of Tennyson, Eliot his from Remy de Gourmont and, in a modified form known as 'redintegration', from Bradley. The work of both poets is deeply influenced by these assumptions, for what it implies is that every poem is an incomplete object, whose full existence is only in the combination of what the poet gives and what the reader's associations provide out of his own memory. Thus the aesthetic largely deprives the poet of control over the reception of his poem, since it depends on the contents, mostly accidental, of the reader's personal memories. The central problem of Yeats' and Eliot's criticism is how to correlate the associations out of which the poem is created with those in which it will be experienced. Yeats's prose writings assert at different stages in his life a special connection between the poet and some social group - the Irish peasantry, the occult initiates, the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, the community of spirits in the afterlife - whose memories will be the appropriate associations for which his poems are written and within which they will have their full existence. Eliot's 'objective correlative' is similarly an attempt to justify a direct link between the poet's associations and the reader's; its failure leads to the emphasis on a certain tradition which will define the appropriate associations and later on the delimiting context of Christian symbolism. With both poets the theory leads to the construction of poems which will be unfinished on the page and which demand completion in the reader's associations: Yeats's poems strive for a climactic image which will set in motion a chain of associative connections which are integral to the experience of the poem. Eliot's use of disjunctive images insists on meanings which each reader constructs out of the attempt to harmonise conflicting associations. Yeats's search for the primal images in the Great Memory is for those images which have developed the greatest quantity of associative potential; Eliot's use of allusion offers a similar increase in association and, in 'The Waste Land', creates a poem which is completely open in structure and exists only in conjunction with the reader's associations. To write an entirely associational poem is, however, impossible, but the non-associative content of the works of both poets is deeply engaged with the issues of associational thinking. Prime among these is the role of memory and the search for a memory which will transcend the limits of the individual's personal, limited associations. Yeats's poetry falls into four distinct phases related to his belief in the effectiveness of such suprapersonal memory: an early period in which Irish myths or occult symbols represent a memory which is instantiated in a community and transcends ordinary memory, so permitting, us access to transcendent insight; a period from 1902 to 1912 when, having lost faith in memory, he sees the poet's role as essentially denied by the modern world and man cut off from eternity. From 1912, under the stimulus of writing his autobiography and renewed occult experiments, he gradually rediscovers the potentialities of suprapersonal memory, and this memory is revealed as the ontological structure of the universe in the spirits of Per Amica Silentia Lunae. In this phase the symbol is seen not as a transcendence of time but as complicit with the temporal associations by which it is experienced. Time and eternity are not separated as in the early poetry, nor mutually forgotten, but are each other's creation, just as the image is the product of association and leads back into it. It is this process which is described in 'Byzantium'. In the final stage of his career the world's failure to meet the potentialities of his art with a significant social memory leads him to revoke his own associational technique. Eliot's poetry undergoes a parallel development. Monologues such as 'Prufrock' or 'Gerontion' are associative poems which operate by making the consciousness of the character identical with the form by which the poem is to be experienced. Thus the reading experience is reflected in the content of the poem, and it is an experience of isolation. 'The Waste Land' seeks for some communal layer of memory in the reader by acting through his associations towards the uncovering in personal memory of a mythic, unconscious memory by which poet and reader are linked. The shift to Christian associations in 'Ash Wednesday' leads later to a poetry of statement which is intended to create the context of associations in which poetry can again be fully experienced. Personal and Christian memory, associational and non-associational poetry are resolved in 'Four Quartets'. The associationist aesthetic is necessarily past directed: all meaning lies in conjunctions of past experiences. The only way that the poet can be sure of the response to his poems is if history has provided an audience with a shared set of associations. The failure of history, which Yeats and Eliot both feel to have occurred in their time, leads to a necessary engagement of the poet in politics in order. to create the continuity between past and present within which memory can be quantitatively sufficient for the existence of art. The openness of associative art, separating poet from reader, leads both poets into trying to close off the multitudinous meanings of their works by the assertion of a single, closed system of politics. The divorce between artist and audience which such politics tries to put right is, however, essential to the very nature of associationist art, and it is only poets from the peripheries of English culture, for whom that break is already a reality, for whom there is in fact no real continuity of memory inside a single tradition, who can fully exploit the potentialities of this kind of poetry. Their personal situation reflects the problems of the aesthetic and so can find expression through it. The history of poetry in Britain in the twentieth century is the history of the opposition between associational and non-associational modes, the former utilised successfully by those from cultural peripheries, the latter by those from the cultural core.