My purpose in this thesis is to explore the work of Nineteenth Century Condition of England novelists and to identify how and to what extent they addressed issues of industrial safety and used their skills to identify problems. I looked at the developing law of negligence over the period 1830-1880 with particular reference to compensation for injured workpeople and to the role played by the common law judiciary. My researches revealed that one judge, Baron Bramwell, carried great influence but used the common law as a tool to prevent injured employees from recovering damages. I identified Charles Dickens, who was acquainted with Bramwell, as the novelist who had the skills and outlets to make the greatest impression in the fight for reform. I consider whether there was any common ground between Dickens and Bramwell and thus seek to use Literature as a comfortable adjunct to Legal History in telling the story of the law’s development over the period in the field of industrial safety and of the search for an humane compensation system.

This thesis develops from the belief that young people construct identities for themselves which inevitably surprise their parents, particularly where so much of their coming-of-age is influenced by hidden virtual experiences. The novel which explores this is Morph . Joey, the protagonist, is uneasy about her gender. She has a loving family, intelligence, a satisfying way of life, but loathes her body. She investigates alternative futures, initially online. Her closest friend also has a secret, revealed after a suicide attempt that Joey averts: sexual abuse by her father. Each has to discover how to live with the evolving sense of self. If Joey wishes to change gender her character may alter, too; she finds she can be violent when confronting the abusive father. The story is told through Joey’s eyes and activities in cyberspace, which she thinks of as a free place, parallel to the mountains over which she loves to run. She feels at ease in both places. Eventually she decides to live as both male and female (Other) because she does not have a ‘condition’ needing to be cured. Classification in the natural world allows for infinite variety, and she want similar opportunities for herself. The critical aspect of the thesis begins with those aspects of my experience which affect my conception of the narrative, including how, as a teacher, I drew upon insights from neuroscience about the malleability of the self. I analyse a series of interviews with young people about how they present themselves online. Since the trigger for the novel is online disclosure of gender variance, I explore what is available online, current medical attitudes and policies; I set the interview findings in the context of theoretical frameworks for personal and group identity. I conclude that where young people lack frameworks for interpreting virtual experience, the emerging sense of self may be destabilised, or even impaired.

This thesis explores representations of culture amongst the prolific twice-displaced Gujarati East African diaspora in Britain. I argue that the paucity of fictional literatures written about, or by, this community demonstrate that the ‘double diaspora’ often favour forms of embodied narrative. Using the literary critical interpretive practices of close reading, I thus analyse a range of cultural ‘texts’. Through this approach of investigating both the written text alongside the nontextual embodied narrative, the thesis broadens the remit of literary studies and subsequently addresses a lacuna in scholarship on cultural representations of the ‘double diaspora’. Whilst the thesis intervenes in contemporary literary postcolonial debate, interdisciplinary connections between diverse disciplines, such as performance, trauma and diaspora studies, are established. Following my introduction, the thesis is divided into three main chapters: each considers a form of embodied cultural representation significant to the migrant who has been displaced from India to Britain, via East Africa. Beginning with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s The Settler’s Cookbook – one of the few examples of a written representation of twice-migrant culture – I explore culinary practices as a mode of individuated and collective identity articulation. In my third chapter, I develop my argument to read the Gujarati dances of dandiya-raas and garba, played during the Hindu festival of Navratri. Finally, before concluding, the fourth chapter moves to explore visual materials gathered from personal kinship networks. In identifying embodied narratives as significant to the double diaspora, my thesis uncovers the performance of complex and multiple selfhoods and collectivities within this community. Whilst there are instances of a surprising convergence of modern and traditional identities, there is too the emergence of an Indian national identity, which is complicated by regional Gujaratiness. In closing, I propose a Gujarati East African vernacular modernity, which demonstrates how this progressdriven diaspora simultaneously looks in two directions.

Framed around an investigation into the public sphere in Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this thesis explores how the public sphere is constructed and reflected upon by James Joyce in Ulysses. It recognises that in order to exist in a society that is increasingly influenced by print media, communication and commodity, the public sphere must be able to function beyond the limits of a set location or place. I therefore explore two versions of the public sphere. The first, as set down by Jurgen Habermas in his study 'The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere', began with the Enlightenment and relies on fixed locations such as reading rooms and coffee houses. In the second, I introduce a possible alternative to the Habermasian historical understanding of the public sphere. This argues that networks of communication form reading communities which are created through the movement of newspapers and other objects of print ephemera, and that are read out loud in groups or move through the narrative as pieces of paper paraphernalia. These communities-created through the communal experience of reading and discussing news-exist in Ulysses on a virtual level, often recognised solely by the reader, but they can also be identified in Joyce's wider context. Here I discuss Benedict Anderson's theory of imagined community and the rise of nationalism, with specific reference to Ireland. The changing shape of the public sphere is integral to understanding the relationship between print media and the individual. Its potential has yet to be fully recognised in the scholarship surrounding Irish Studies and James Joyce. It provides a framework through which to analyse the connection between the political climate, the rise of new communication methods, and the role of the individual in Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. By setting up such a discussion surrounding the public sphere, I am able to re-evaluate Joyce's use of print media in Ulysses, and explore the implications that this brings.

This thesis seeks to address the question, 'which stories might we be telling now in the hope of forming part of a 'coherent and useful response' to environmental crisis?' In so doing, a novel, The Returning, is submitted. Set on Dartmoor, in the south-west of England, and in shifting time frames, characters variously seeking healing or retreat are depicted in the novel, and their relationship with landscape, each other and ecosystems is explored. Parallels are made between human and non-human experience, notably the hazards faced by Second World War escapee prisoners and migrating swallows on their journey north from Africa. The novel also makes use of fairytale to question the role of nanative in relation to environmental sustainability. Informing the narrative, and explored in the rationale, Current ecological predicaments are reviewed and cited as an impulse behind the work. Environmental reports, including those by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2007), the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB 2009, 2012, 2013), and the United Nation's (UN) Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (Sarukhan, J and Whyte, A Eds 2005) are drawn upon, as is my own awareness of the flora, fauna and ecosystem services of Dartmoor.

Within H.G. Wells's (1866-1946) short novel The Time Machine (1895) a peculiarly resonant sense of materiality is articulated. The novel can be defined in terms of the ways in which not just objects, but rather a more encompassing sense of materiality has been meticulously arranged so as to convey a detailed, familiar environment into which a fantastic element is introduced. This sense of a graspable everyday setting is dependent on a solidity of detailed materiality, as are the fantastic elements that disrupt them. This suggested quality of materiality and material culture relates not only to recognisably object-based artefacts but also to notions of selfhood. From this single text, I will attempt to construct a speculative notion of material culture, or rather, I will be analysing the presence of material culture and materiality, and attempting to build upon it. In this way, I will move towards the construction of a speculative notion of material culture, making the case for the novel as a valuable and privileged form as a generator of hermeneutic possibility.

This study investigates the Arab novel written in English, notwithstanding its exclusion from postcolonial writing of minorities who live in the Anglophone world. It focuses on how identity is constructed and how it becomes problematic through cultural politics of nationalism, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion and political history. It explores theories of cultural, regional, national and gender identities. It also examines theories of discursive and dispersive identities. Reading strategies are derived from such theories that address two questions: what are collective identities and how do individuals formulate their identities? The writers construct their identities by positioning themselves in relation to particular social conditions. Such positions and conditions are formed vis-a-vis the issues of cultural politics. Identity crisis emerges when the individuals struggle to reconcile the conflicting and transitional conditions of their positions inside and outside the 'nation-state'. Also, the differences of the social conditions and positions mould the 'hybrid' aspects of the individuals to the extent that there are types of hybridity which become a means of critique of the affinities of individuals with society and national identity. The predication of identity representations is not who we are but what identities are for. Textually, identity constructions are revealed through specific affiliations to the literary and religious traditions, The Arabian Nights, travel writing, the Qur'an and al-Manamat. The writers' engagement with these texts is part of their discourses on identity and can be described as modernist uses of the tradition. The texts express different affinities with the Arabic tradition and sphere. There are texts that have affiliations to the Arabic tradition and themes of Arab culture. There are texts that are only affiliated to the Arabic tradition. There are texts that only represent themes of Arab culture. Then, there are texts that have no affinities with the Arabic tradition and do not represent themes of the Arabic sphere. All these types of works are examined in this thesis in order to reveal complex aspects of what has been called 'The Problematic of Identity'.

My PhD examines how writers at the fin de siècle responded to new understandings of smell, smells and smelling in their representations of the supernatural, demonstrating how those understandings were harnessed to nascent disciplines and technologies concerned with the limits and potential of the human subject. It recovers a lost history of smell and explains how shifts in the meaning of ‘smell’ (verb and noun) were witnessed and interrogated by writers in the period. Drawing attention to significant omissions from foundational accounts of olfaction in the nineteenth century, the thesis performs five key reclamatory readings to illuminate a number of supernatural stories. Firstly, it considers cross-channel influences on the articulation and reception of smell- description, drawing out a specifically British experience of scent that relates to the defaecalisation of the River Thames between 1858 and 1875. It then uncovers the origin, and demonstrates the literary manifestation, of analogies between music and scent. The thesis analyses how smells and noses in fin-de-siècle supernatural tales responded to new discursive possibilities afforded by late nineteenth-century developments in rhinoplasty, anaesthesia, nursing and Tractarian theology. The possible over-estimation of H. G. Wells’s reputation for early alignment with Darwinian theory is also considered through a recuperation of George William Piesse’s The Art of Perfumery (1855). Finally, it considers smellers and noses in Henry Rider Haggard’s She (1887), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and a range of prose fiction by Vernon Lee and Arthur Machen. Overall, it argues that in fin-de-siècle supernatural fiction the epistemology of smell, smells and smelling provided writers with new ways of testing, expanding and representing the boundaries of human identity.

Summary Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) became a virtual recluse after the death of his wife in 1858. However, after this date he published much of his best work, mostly on supernatural themes. This thesis uses Freudian psychobiography to explore this paradox, examining Le Fanu's preoccupation with the subject of death and the after-life. Chapter One - explains the psychobiographical methodology; establishes the biographical facts that are connected with symptomatic features of Le Fanu's fiction; and introduces certain Freudian concepts that are relevant to Le Fanu's case. My aim is to construct a psychobiographical profile of Le Fanu based on Freud's theory of the death drive, in order to relate a key phase in his life - namely, the death of his wife - to the subsequent development of his writing. Chapter Two - applies Freud's theory of the death drive and the repetition compulsion to an interpretation of Le Fanu's fiction. I examine the main tenets of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which encompasses Freud's theory of the repetition compulsion operating at the heart of the death drive, to offer an explanation for the extraordinary patterns of repetition in Le Fanu's fiction. I explore Le Fanu's development of repetitive narrative techniques; his repetition of names and settings (where the central image of a great house is linked with the human psyche); his repetition of images; and his obsession with suicide. Chapter Three - shows how the sense of guilt that Le Fanu developed following his wife's death led him directly into a fictive exploration of a continued state of existence between the realms of life and death. I begin with a literary history of the vampire and show how Le Fanu recreated the vampire myth. Consideration is then given to Freud's theory of 'The Uncanny' and to the psychological implications of Le Fanu's creation of a sensual, female vampire, and his introduction of the suggestion of lesbian love into vampire fiction. Attention is also given to the collapse of the life/death dialectic in Le Fanu's fiction, to show how Le Fanu confuses the issue as to whether characters are living or undead. Chapter Four - explores Le Fanu's conception of the after-life using Swedenborgian analogies. I examine Swedenborg's philosophy through a detailed study of the central concepts of Heaven and Hell, before providing an analysis of Le Fanu's so-called 'Swedenborgian' texts, which are concerned with a visit to the underworld and the opening of man's interior sight. I compare Swedenborg and Freud's understanding of man's dual nature, and refer to the late eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers who acknowledged their indebtedness to Swedenborg. The chapter concludes with a close reading of Le Fanu's Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram Haugh.

This thesis explores the representations of the blind, deaf, and physically disabled in literature of the nineteenth century. Focusing upon literature published around the mid-century, the texts discussed are: American Notes, Charles Dickens (1842), ‘The Cricket and the Hearth’, Charles Dickens (1845), Olive, Dinah Craik (1850), ‘The Deaf Playmate’s Story’, Harriet Martineau (1853), Hide and Seek, Wilkie Collins (1854), ‘Dr Marigold’s Prescriptions’, Charles Dickens (1865), A Noble Life, Dinah Craik (1866) and Poor Miss Finch, Wilkie Collins (1872), all of which include portrayals of disability in a primarily domestic setting. It explores the effects of class upon the experience of the afflicted, as well as the state of society in terms of its attitude towards gender roles and familial modes, as well as marital and maternal roles and adoption. Many of the texts explored in this thesis include adoption plots of some form, which serves to argue that the disabled person, with no expectation of becoming part of a new generation of a biological family, is able to fulfil their familial desires. By investigating these disabilities alongside each other, this thesis is able to illuminate great differences in the experience and cultural approach to different afflictions. The afflicted had to work hard to carve out identities that reached beyond their crippled legs or useless eyes, and yet the results of this study show surprising outcomes to this. The disabled individuals discussed in these pages are not housed in freak shows, put on display, or taken advantage of, but rather they exist in a primarily domestic setting, attempting to carry out their daily lives in much the same way as their able-bodied counterparts. The question is, of course, how far Victorian society, in light of the newly emerging discoveries in the scientific and medical fields, would allow this.