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Martin Amis is one of the most prominent figures in contemporary British fiction, and his work has been developed during a period of huge social transition. Emerging at the end of the sixties, Amis's writing has adapted to tackle the establishment of the information era and the emergence of increasingly transnational cultures. In this thesis, I will attempt to examine how Amis's work reflects these changes, as he tries to reconcile an uncertain future with a past that seems increasingly distant from the modern world. Engaging with his changing critical reputation, I will locate his work within a theoretical framework that encompasses posthumanism and other conceptual areas. In particular, I will focus on Paul Giles's concept of sentimental posthumanism. Built upon the perceived marginalisation of the human and the potentially dehumanising effects of posthumanism, I use the term to refer to a discourse that attempts to reinstate the human essence within a posthuman society. The thesis will examine four different aspects of Amis's work in the framework of sentimental posthumanism, designating a chapter to each of these topics: America and the transatlantic exchange; the increasing importance of artifice and the loss of affect within society; the posthuman conception of corporeality; and morality and mortality in the posthuman context In my conclusion, these threads are pulled together to assess the extent to which Amis's recent work represents a continuation of, or departure from, his previous work

This study is concerned with redefining and providing a theoretical framework for the analysis of the vigilante in select works of contemporary fiction. Vigilantism is a concept that has no stable definition and varies in terms of the vigilante' characteristics, motivations and aims. Popular culture manifestations of the vigilante portray the figure as an avenger, seeking vengeance for personal injury as well as for other helpless members of society. Historical and political studies of the vigilante reveal the figure variously as a revolutionary, an upholder of the status quo, a prejudiced and occasionally cowardly individual afraid of social change. This thesis departs from reductive definitions of vigilantism and instead pays attention to the complex and contentious nature of the phenomenon that emerges from contact with an ineffectual State that is unable to protect the rights and liberty of its citizenry. I examine the ways in which the contemporary vigilante of fiction is birthed and how the figure functions within the different spaces of the State. The various genres that I use, ranging from superhero tales to crime fiction, horror and postapocalyptic fiction offer a variety of milieus for the investigation of different types or strains of vigilantism: motivated by factors other than revenge, where the enforcement of enshrined values of society is no longer a vigilante prerogative and where vigilante characteristics spread among individuals and communities to assume epidemic, endemic and pandemic proportions.

The thesis offers a comparative analysis of the fiction of John McGahern (1934-2006) and explores transatlantic and gendered aspects of his work. It argues for the development of a varied cultural and communicative network between Ireland and America throughout McGahern's career as a writer, primarily investigating patterns of encounter with texts by American writers in his fiction. Case studies provide definitive and speculative arguments for his experimental incorporation of American intertexts, reimagining Ireland th~ough the lens of another culture. On a secondary level, his construction of masculinity is clarified by the comparisons between Irish and American texts. His fiction represents a struggle between male generations in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, following the experiences of the younger generation into the latter half of the century. The semiotics of masculinity and its expression in his prose operates through intertextual engagements, literary manners, and stylistic clarity. The first chapter investigates how and why in 'Korea' from Nightlines (1970), his first collection of short stories, McGahern principally constructs the intergenerational dynamic between father and son around 'Indian Camp' from In Our Time (1924), Ernest Hemingway's first collection of short stories. The second chapter examines thematic possibilities surrounding male aggression and passivity that arise from placing other texts by Hemingway in admittedly speculative but productive tension with 'The Key' and 'Peaches', two stories from Nightlines. The third chapter explores McGahern's fascination with Herman Melville's short story 'Bartleby, the Scrivener' (1853), which informs the representation of male autonomy in 'Christmas' from Nightlines as well as metatextual concerns in 'Doorways' from Getting Through (1978). The fourth chapter argues for intertextual correspondences between McGahern's That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002), Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), and Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854), in their shared concern with the male subject's experience of loss and his immersion in the local. The conclusion turns to Memoir (2005), indicating further applications of a gendered thematic to McGahern's intertextual practice.

The theme of this thesis is the use of rogue characters and picaresque conventions in fiction relating to Ireland in the period from 1660 to 1790. The thesis provides an account of how a tradition of prose fiction concerning Irish criminals was shaped into an Irish novel in the eighteenth century. The picaresque has often been highlighted as an influence upon the beginnings of the Irish novel. My thesis builds on recent scholarly work which has expanded the corpus of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Irish fiction, investigating how this body of writing responded to the example of the picaresque. The picaresque is not interpreted here as an a historical genre but as an adaptable set of conventions, Spanish in origin, which combined with English criminal literature in the seventeenth century. The first two chapters examine a little-read group of fictions which, it is argued, constitute an essential subtext for the Irish novel. Chapter I focuses upon Richard Head's The English Rogue (1665-71), and Chapter 11 analyses narratives about Irish criminals published between 1680 and 1750. This body of texts construct the Irish rogue as a protean, mobile figure with the capacity to embody a range of classes and peoples. The narrative of rogue mobility is exploited by Irish novelists after 1750, as Chapters Ill, IV and V demonstrate with readings of novels by William Chaigneau, Thomas Amory, and Charles Johnston respectively. Their novels recast stock representations of the Irish current at the time. It is argued that in the decades between 1750 and 1790, the Irish rogue narrative becomes national in its scope, and able to represent the complexities of eighteenth-century Irish culture and history.

This PhD thesis is engaged in examining the racial stereotypes of the Oriental Other in Ulysses (1922) and the possibility of reading them as a critique of the dominant cultural discourses of Otherness. Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), and the studies of colonial and postcolonial discourses which followed, most canonical writers have been examined in terms of their engagement in the discourse of Orientalism created by the dominant imperial powers and propagated by the makers of their culture. The thesis argues that the distinctive contribution James Joyce (1882-1941) made in his representation of the Orient in Ulysses lay in the subversion of the perceived notion of the Orient in Western Culture. Chapter one investigates Joyce's experimentation with literary techniques to summarizes the language and imagery of Orientalism in order to challenge them. The chapter also argues that Joyce's approach towards the fabricated stereotypes about the East has a significant bearing on Ireland and the Irish, a people who have suffered for centuries of stereotyping prejudice under the English domination. In the course of the discussion, the thesis also demonstrates how the Oriental references are neatly constructed in Ulysses to the extent that they are configured with the major themes of the novel such as belonging, self-realization, Otherness, homecoming, history and betrayal. The second chapter examines the Oriental motifs in connection with the theme of history that resonates throughout Ulysses to dramatize the Oriental fantasies which provide the Irish with glimpses of liberation, in the same manner that the Irish legends of Oriental origin provide Ireland with possibilities of freedom from the Irish colonial history. The final chapter of the thesis concentrates on the centrality of The Arabian Nights in Ulysses and how it is effectively incorporated in the structure of Joyce's novel. The chapter also proposes that the combination of Joyce's multiplicity of perspectives along with the evocation of a text like The Arabian Nights which is characterized by its proliferation of narratives provides a reading of the theme of betrayal from different perspectives.

This thesis investigates the forms and functions of flash-presentations, particularly flashbacks, in John le Carre's (2001) novel The Constant Gardener and in its film by Fernando Meirelles (2005). The concept of distorting the chronological order of events to 'travel back' in time to see what happened in the past, originates from written literature. Traditionally, temporal backshift has been discussed by narratologists under the term anaiepsis, initially introduced by Genette (1980: 40). In many cases, analepsis has been treated as a synonym of flashback, a narrative technique originally adopted in the filmmaking industry and applied by critics in relation to films. I argue, however, that these two terms do not refer to exactly the same concept. Whereas Genette's term, analepsis, refers to the general notion of backward temporality, regardless of how they are presented textually, flashback is concerned mainly with the vivid and 'flashy' realisation of this temporal backshift in the narrative. To demonstrate this I begin with an examination of Genette's concept of analepsis and a consideration of its relation with flashback. I suggest that what contributes to the effect of flashiness includes (1) how abrupt the current context switches to the new spatio-temporal domain, (2) how specific the new context is depicted, and (3) how dramatised the events in the new context is presented. To account for the processes by which readers come to the identification of a flashback, I adopt a cognitive approach, based on deictic shift theory and contextual frame theory, to examine exactly how readers/viewers arrive at the identification of a flashback in the narrative. Additionally, narrative often involves other types of shifts that are not necessarily temporal backshift. These include (a) temporal forward-shift, and (b) a spatial shift without any temporal alternation. Based on this, I move on to consider another two types of flashes that are less common than flashback, namely flashforward and flash-sideways. I then bring together the techniques discussed in the thesis in an extended analysis of the flashes of The Constant Gardener. I begin with the film and then move to the novel, to examine the similarities and differences in how a flashback is established in novel and film. Finally, I suggest that detailed stylistic analysis and a cognitive approach, such as demonstrated in this thesis, could lead to a better understanding of temporal/spatial shifts in literature and film in general.

During her lifetime, the modernist novels and short stories of Mary Butts (1890 1937) were championed by luminaries such as Bryher and Ezra Pound. Thereafter her work fell into neglect. Since 1984 Butts has been the subject of renewed critical interest which has gathered pace over the last decade. Still, much of her oeuvre is yet to receive sustained attention, and scholars are divided over whether Butts' sacral modernism should be championed as a harbinger of liberatory subjectivities or denounced as validating a racial nationalism. Whereas critics have tended to emphasise one of these elements of Butts' oeuvre to the exclusion of the other, this thesis uses the concepts of the sacred and the esoteric to illustrate their intermeshed nature. Butts' preoccupation with spiritual experience produces not doctrinal constancy, but constellations of syncretic and geographically contingent practices. The term sacred describes Butts' hope that her literary rituals would rejuvenate the "Waste Land" of interwar culture. This attitude prevails in her work of 1916 - 1928, and correlates with a phase of "flight" which sees her react against dispossession from her native Dorset, absorb continental influences, and explore the fractal subjectivities of the city. Chapter Two sees Butts developing a Bergsonian optics which posits the redemption of her "war-ruined generation" from the urban "logic of solids". Chapter Three considers transitional texts in which the object is deployed to probe the ontological limits of the sacral text. Butts' work from 1928 onwards is marked by a shift to esoteric poetics: it encodes a process of "settlement" which retreats from modernity into centripetal, exclusionary metaphysics. In Chapter One, analysis of the holographs of The Crystal Cabinet (1937) shows how a conflicted attitude to the body restricts Butts' palingenetic autogeographics to esoteric registers of meaning. Chapter Four explores the revisionary, homosocial politics of her 1930s classical novels and shows how the rarified psychological spaces privileged here are invested in violence against the African 'other

Eva Shell is a contemporary version of the epistolary mode, with the inclusion of text messages, email and various other media. As the narrative unfolds, the reader gradually comes to realise which texts are attributed to each character. It is a novel positioned in the twenty-first century against a city backdrop. The novel itself is set largely in Cardiff, but also in Ghana and Normandy between 1989 and 2003. The narrative follows the lives of two sisters. Eva and Sally, as they begin to travel, embark upon careers and experience their first formative relationships. For Eva this is her first lesbian relationship of importance while for Sally it is prospective parenthood with a man whom we come to realise has sinister connections as an influential member of the Front National. Finally, through the erosion of their relationships and the death of their only surviving parent. Matthew Shell, Eva and Sally become closer than ever. This is when they realise that they have only just begun to mature into adulthood. 'The Morning Book', a poetry journal that Mr Shell kept for most of his adult life, is finally left to Eva upon his death. The events referred to in it pre-date much of the main action of the text and centre on the destructive relationship, silence and loss that Mr Shell experiences in his marriage. The 'Morning Book' exposes Eva to the realisation that her parents' relationship had been volatile and fraught. This in turn answers the questions she had while growing up about her father's silence around the topic of her mother. The novel is followed by a critical commentary that is divided into five sections. I start with a section entitled 'Narrative and Theme' in which I explain my plot and the reasoning behind my choice of themes. This is followed by a section called 'Form' in which I explain the approach behind my decision to use a variety of media to convey the narrative of the novel. In this section I also explore how my understanding and knowledge of the common ground shared between poetry and prose informs my own writing. 'The Writing Process' is a section in which I tackle some of the technicalities of writing Eva Shell, such as the difficulty I had in producing a text that is not displayed chronologically. 'Influences' is an area of the commentary that focuses on my critical influences through which I seek to demonstrate the importance of critical enquiry in relation to my creative process. In this section I also offer an understanding of how my writing can be read with reference to particular artistic movements and critical trends. I end with some 'Final Thoughts' on the writing process in relation to my critical ideas and original ambitions.