The novel of utopianism and prophecy has become increasingly popular since 1871) as a result of the growing hopes and fears of the future and a rapidly changing world. Not only does this kind of novel reflect the climate of opinion of the time, but its reception is often influenced by contemporary beliefs and prejudices.

Standing Stone, a novel, and the accompanying commentary, Stepping Stones to Standing Stone, form this thesis. The title, Standing Stone, refers to both the Rollright Stones and the journey to self-actualisation of the American protagonist, Barbara Shaunaky, as she gradually develops inner strength and independence. In seeking to understand the mystery shrouding her birth, Barbara travels through contemporary Wales, back in time to nineteenth century England and earlier still to the fifteenth century and Mother Shipton to whom myth credits the formation of the Rollright Standing Stones. The maid/mother/crone triptych as archetype forms a repeated thread throughout the novel as an ancient choice affects consequence influencing each succeeding time period. The commentary seeks to understand and classify Standing Stone within works of fiction. The nature of story is explored by examining what story is and how Standing Stone is positioned in relation to genre – specifically historic, supernatural, and magical realism as well as classification – particularly Young Adult, Adult and Crossover fiction. In doing so I explore the relation of plot and theme, language, symbols, archetypes, as well as fore- and backshadowing. Standing Stone is analysed by comparing the works of Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, Kate Mosse and others. My intent in both Standing Stone and its accompanying analysis, Stepping Stones to Standing Stone, was to understand the concept of story; the classifications of story; and to examine and understand the term ‘Crossover’ in relation to fictive genre literature.

This thesis disrupts competing interpretations about Eliza Haywood’s sexual attitudes and political alliances by focusing on the innovative elements of her work that foster the multiguity that leads to such debates. Specifically, this thesis argues that, throughout her work, Haywood is in dialogue with the maledominated sceptical tradition. Haywood, by employing the narrative elements of various genres that put pressure on the tensions between scepticism and credulity—genres such as apparition narratives, mock-history, travel narratives, and legal discourse—engages with debates about knowledge and judgment that troubled her contemporaries and dominated print culture. By doing so, she unsettles and challenges conventional understandings of scepticism that privilege custom and tradition. Most studies of eighteenth-century scepticism and literature neglect work by women writers, including Haywood; therefore, this study also challenges conventional understandings of what constitutes sceptical literature in the eighteenth century. As a woman writer, Haywood privileges scepticism over credulity even as she challenges custom and seeks to discover a reliable standard of judgment that is functional in a liberal society. To this end, Haywood fosters and develops the judgment and autonomy of her readers by either shifting authority onto them, or by offering model standards of judgment for them. This thesis examines four works from four genres across four decades of Haywood’s career: A Spy Upon the Conjurer (1724), The Adventures of Eovaai (1736), The Female Spectator (1744-1746), and The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753). The first two chapters discuss the nature and development of Haywood’s extreme scepticism in the 1720s and 1730s. Chapters three and four show how, in the 1740s and 1750s, Haywood introduces processes of sociable judgment that begin to mitigate the scepticism of her earlier work.

Bordersands is a crime-thriller set in and around the Flintshire lowlands in northeast Wales written in response to M. Wynn Thomas's notion that the region has yet to capture the public and literary imagination. By asking what it means to be from the Flintshire lowlands and the places contained within it - such as Holywell and the Greenfield Valley -, the novel explores notions of place, belonging and displacement. In addition to presenting the Flintshire lowlands as a place with its own distinctive character, it shows that there are multiple notions of a given place, highlighting the complexities of what it means to be both 'inhabitant' and 'visitor.' The critical commentary explores other fictional representations of the Flintshire lowlands, and in relation to Bordersands shows how Flintshire-born writers have portrayed place and asks whether such portrayals have been used to raise awareness of the region's local history, geography, cultural identity, and relationship with the Welsh language. Furthermore, it discusses how variations of the Welsh regional novel can provide wider explorations of belonging and place through the crime-thriller genre, and, in relation to my own regional thriller, how this genre can be used to provide both a balanced and authentic sense of place.

This thesis examines the role of the deviant individual in four twenty-first century novels - Sebastian Faulks’ Engleby (2007), Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003), Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal (2003) and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005) - and uses a number of recent media figures – Anders Breivik, Jeremy Forrest and Joanna Dennehy – as cultural reference points. The thesis explores the narrative ways in which the deviant individual and their anti-social or transgressive acts are reconfigured in terms of madness and abnormality. Through this process of defining the individual as mad, the thesis examines how these four novels in particular draw attention to profound structures that underpin the way notions of normality and sanity are also defined in contrast. Through an examination of the socio-cultural representation of diagnostic categories such as personality disorder, and legal clauses such as the diminished responsibility clause of the Homicide Act, the thesis looks at the way contemporary society categorises the human subject in the aftermath of a violent or deviant act, as a means of restoring social order. The thesis goes on to explore the notion of the mad individual being positioned in the role of scapegoat, by being expelled from society through these discursive structures, resulting through this process, in the re-establishment of the contemporary social status quo. The novels examined in this thesis are integral in facilitating this critical analysis of contemporary culture. The thesis examines the metafictional tropes used by the authors to draw attention to these profound social inequalities, which has the effect of galvanising the reader into reconsidering their own role in the interpretation of and reflection on these events, and crucially, these human subjects.

The modern road novel is a genre that originated in the middle of the twentieth century, and attained wide recognition with the publication of Jack Kerouac's On The Road in 1957. The roots of the genre, however, date back much further, and encompass a diverse range of historical lineages. Among others, these include the picaresque tradition, pilgrimage stories, and quest narratives (which in turn connects to the monomyth and Jungian psychology). In addition, since the publication of On The Road, the genre has not limited itself to prose fiction; it is also features prominently in films, poetry, folk and rock songs, and creative nonfiction. Since each of these areas has influenced, and been influenced, by the others, the road story genre can thus only be understood in a postmodern and a multimedia context. This creative-critical thesis draws on the genre's historical roots as well as its contemporary, multimedia influences. These have informed the creation of a new, postmillenial road novel, The Drive, which seeks to both pay homage to and subvert the traditions of the genre, particularly in relation to narrative point of view, gender roles, and cultural perspectives. The novel consists of 77 chapters and forms the creative part of the thesis. The novel is complemented by a reflective-critical essay (Roadworks) that sets out to analyze the specific historical roots and contemporary influences of the road story tradition, and examines how the genre has changed over time. In so doing the essay establishes some of the common tropes and structures of road stories, explores the key works that influenced the writing of The Drive, and then suggests the ways in which novel establishes its distinct identity and contributes something new to the tradition.

This thesis examines the significance of the category of the masculine in fiction produced in two decades after the Second World War. It argues that masculinity has an influence not just within the delineation of gender roles, but also upon literary narrative, style and definitions of selfhood. It takes as its focus the work of the white, middle-class, English, fiction-making majority, or rather, a group of male writers who strove to interpellate both themselves and their peers as such. Selected novels by authors such as Kingsley Amis, William Cooper, John Fowles, Andrew Sinclair and Colin Wilson are considered in the social and cultural context of the newlyestablished Welfare State, a time of accelerating capitalism and consumerism. Though they are habitually derided for being apathetic, I will argue that novels of this period have a profoundly political aim: the reassertion of male power and solidarity at a time in which its influence was perceived to be waning. Importantly, these texts are produced before the concerted promptings towards a renegotiation of the concept of gender by Second Wave feminism, and before the publication of Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, which exploded the traditional literary connection of the male with the universal. Chapter One establishes the theoretical and epistemological framework surrounding the category of masculinity, and examines recent critical considerations of a gendered relationship between reader and fictional narrative. Chapter Two posits the category of the 'masculine text'. Such a text functions to channel its reader's desire for traditional narrative pleasure and a privileged cognitive role into the acceptance of a range of masculine definitions and principles, most particularly that of a rational and essential masculine self. Chapter Three examines the influence of existentialism. It argues the potential of the philosophy to deconstruct essentialist masculinity, and assesses the extent to which this radicalism is realised in English fiction of the time. In the light of the developing argument for the influence of masculinity on narrative structure and style, Chapter Four examines some of the formally experimental novels of a 'long Sixties', including those by Thomas Hinde, B. S. Johnson and Colin Maclnnes. It considers the way in which gendered conceptions of subjectivity, sexuality and youth both compromise and are compromised by masculine narrative tropes. This study serves to undermine the idea of masculinity as a stable, definable concept. It ultimately establishes gender as a complex and paradoxical illusion, but an illusion capable of enormous influence over the fiction of the post-war period. Its conclusions extend beyond the two decades of its focus to interrogate the gendered nature of any relationship between reader and text.

This thesis consists of a novel, Notes to Self, and an extended essay examining the composition of that work, its processes and contexts. Notes to Self is the fictional autobiography of my pseudonym, Ted Bonham. It has been assembled from textual fragments of differing lengths, including many that derive from found texts from both literary and non-literary sources. These fragments are written in a diverse range of styles and set in a variety of geographical locations and historical periods, from Neanderthal tribe story to contemporary lab report and from nineteenth century novel to amateur internet polemic. Taken together, these disparate textual fragments reveal Ted's life story. The narrative tells this story approximately chronologically, but within this broad structure fragments are also organised by associative and thematic principles more often discussed in relation to poetry or visual collage. The essay examines the assemblage composition of Notes to Self and its use of the fragment as a unit of composition. It uses analogies to collage and montage to extend critical discourse around the assemblage-text, helping to provide both a vocabulary for practitioners to discuss their work and the theoretical basis to defend it. It also examines how Notes to Self, as the notional autobiography of my pseudonym Ted Bonham, addresses themes of identity and self-narrative and how its fragmentary structure creatively explores and represents our experiences of consciousness and how we construct our narratives of selfhood. In doing so, it seeks to examine how we can make use of assemblage compositions to create new prose work, what these prose works might look like and how these methods can be contextualised and articulated.

This thesis will examine how Charles Dickens’s characters have enjoyed numerous afterlives beyond the original work in which they were created, ultimately seeking to understand better Dickens’s legacy in literature through the cultural memory of his characters. I begin by looking at how the idea of ‘character’ has been presented in literary genres and in literary theory, using Dickens’s SBB to illustrate how Dickens developed the literary genre of Charactery. Before looking at how Dickens’s characters have lived outside of their novels, I will look at a few of Dickens’s manuscripts and selected letters to see how Dickens originally wrote these characters. I will use Dickens’s own words to try to understand Dickens’s relationships with his characters and apply this to readers’ relationships with Dickens’s characters. I will then use terms and ideas borrowed from trans media studies (including fandom and fanfiction) to illustrate how Dickens’s characters’ afterlives create an archive of character; this means that the many adaptations and appropriations of Dickens’s characters are all significant attributions of the ‘original’ character. Working from this idea, I will then look at how Dickens’s characters materialise in things, memorabilia and household items, and how these things contribute to the character ‘afterlife’ not only in their visual representation but also in the choice of item in which they are represented. In the final chapter, I will use the recent BBC series Dickensian as a current practical representation of the direction of Dickensian studies and Dickens in popular culture; the basis for the creation of the show being Dickens’s characters themselves. Ultimately, by considering Dickens’s characters as archontic, allowing that their meme-like nature continually contributes to their archive and thus, every attribution in their afterlives is significant to how they are remembered even if anachronistic.

This dissertation, taking George Gissing as its central example, argues that Shakespeare and his writing both provide late-Victorian writers with a vocabulary for self-expression and urge them to see their work as part of a larger national project. Gissing is a particularly interesting case study because he, alongside his close contemporary C. H. Herford, had more Shakespeare at school than most of their generation, and because he actively responds to the forms and stories of Shakespeare’s work in his own prose and poetry. This thesis examines the nature of Gissing’s intense lifelong engagement with Shakespeare, and inspects Shakespeare’s canonicity in the late nineteenth century in the context of the imaginative literature of the time. It attends to some of the ways in which Shakespeare enters the Victorian education system, in which his language is imbricated in Gissing’s writing, and in which he changes his views about theatre and the novel—about the theories, potentials, and limits of both forms. My aim is to show that Shakespeare not only offers Gissing and his contemporaries rich material, but also informs their formal and narrative strategies. Drawing on archival findings about Gissing’s schooldays (1872-76), material that has not been discussed previously, and through close readings of Workers in the Dawn (1880), The Nether World (1889), New Grub Street (1891), Gissing’s writing on Dickens (1898-1903), and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), this dissertation investigates the symbiosis between Shakespeare and the late-Victorian novel and imaginative response to the dawning of twentieth-century modernity, to demonstrate that this relationship affects our understandings of his reception in and Victorian literature and culture. This thesis offers the first single unified account of Shakespeare’s influence on Gissing and suggests that Shakespeare’s authorship operates as a formative model for Gissing and his contemporaries in their figuring of the life of writing, and in its impact on British national identity. It concludes that we can learn more about both Gissing and the changes to English language, literature, and identity at the end of the nineteenth century by documenting and historicizing this connection.