This thesis argues that the disciplines of genre studies and postcolonial criticism can usefully be brought to bear upon one other in order to interrogate constructions of Britishness in contemporary fiction . I understand Britain as a postcolonial country and attempt to rectify the frequent sidelining of genre fiction from criticism of postcolonial literature by opening up discussion of a wider range of postcolonial authors and topics. Contrary to popular understandings of genre that tend to operate around rules and conventions, I define genres according to the sets of desires that they engage with, such as fear, lust or consumerism. The overarching questions that I ask of the texts and films regard the negotiation, repression and expression of desires related to hopes and fears about postcolonial Britain and variously expressed through the genres of Bildungsroman, Gothic, comedy, national romance and subcultural urban fiction. This thesis uniquely combines postcolonial theory, genre criticism, psychoanalytic and economic constructions of desire, and contemporary literature, in order to analyse contemporary constructions of Britishness. Each chapter begins with analysis or Saliman Rushdie's The Satal1ic Verses (1988), the publication of which created a violent collision between ideas of Britishness, immigration, politics and fiction. By considering The Satanic Verses in relation to genres in which it participates - allowing the text to speak as a work of fiction, rather than polemic tract appropriated to suit the agendas of rival ideologies - I shift the parameters of critique and breathe new life into debates surrounding the text. This has the added benefit of illustrating how even the most prestigious postcolonial novels participate in genres, and in doing so concurrently raises the profile of postcolonial genre studies

The novel, The Buyer, uses the idea of the corporate environment as a dystopia of sorts for an exploration of identity, power, and meaning -who controls them and where they lie- in its depiction of the narrator's struggle to resolve these issues. My interest in the hyperreality surrounding the events of 9-11, my disquiet at the political and military reactions to those events and to the growing catastrophe in our climate, have also informed the writing of The Buyer. Set in a corporation that functions like a totalitarian state, the novel also imagines a wider society in which security measures used to combat terrorism have been taken to an extreme, and in which more and more state-run institutions have been ceded to the private sector, set against a backdrop of sudden climate change. The critical thesis, A Study ofthe Dystopian Genre in Recent British Fict{on, examines recent definitions of dystopia as a genre and applies them to a number of recent novels including my own. If genres are historically fluid cultural institutions in which novels participate rather than belong then the circumstances that give rise to their participation is of importance. Authors of dystopian literature use defamiliarised settings to create distorted versions of the societies in which they write allowing readers to perceive their current political or social circumstances anew. The challenges faced by the dystopian novelist trying to imagine settings outside the collapsing time-space horizons of postmodernity is analyzed along with the techniques adopted to bypass these problems. The extent to which The Buyer and the other texts discussed participate in the dystopian genre is interrogated as well as the possibility that recent dystopian fiction responds to new global uncertainties.

This thesis is the first biography of the novelist, critic, editor, bookseller, publisher, historian and literary translator David Garnnett (1892-1981). It places his writing and literary work within an historical, critical and cultural framework which goes some way towards restoring his literary reputation and status. The thesis charts Garnett's life from birth to death, bringing in certain perceptions of heredity and antecedents which were important to him. It explores the influences on his writing and on the life choices he made. It places him in the context of other writers and artists, particularly those of the Bloomsbury Group with whom he was closely associated. But it also reveals that such affiliations were part of a much broader connection of cultural networks within Britain, Europe and, at times, the USA. Today, Garnett is mostly remembered as a self-confessed libertine, and for ma11'ying the much younger daughter of his former male lover. In contextualising the belief systems which motivated Grunett's emotional choices, in examining his personal life from his perspective, this thesis elucidates and situates the libertine stereotype which has so influenced his afterlife and reputation.

This thesis examines the sensation novels of the' mid-Victorian period, focusing particularly on the work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Mrs. Henry Wood. Whereas previous studies of sensation fiction have concentrated attention onto the decade of the 1860s, I have widened the parameters of the discussion to demonstrate that 'sensationalism', as it was broadly understood by the Victorians, was neither new precisely at the beginning of the sixties, nor did it disappear in the following decade. The thesis contends that by thus extending the field of enquiry the response in the 1860s is more clearly elucidated and shown to be motivated, to a considerable degree, by concerns about the status of art and the perceived corruption of 'high' culture by commercial, popular forms, concerns which were often expressed through a gendered and classed discourse. I argue that sensation fiction was a category largely devised by contemporary reviewers as a means of focusing and addressing anxieties concerning the growth of popular fiction, and which, in fact, grouped together a varied collection of authors, diverse in ideology, methods, form, and often content. The thesis offers detailed readings of novels written between 1852 and 1888, in part to establish the heterogeneity that I assert was evident among the authors labelled sensation novelists, and also to suggest that the label itself was often employed ideologically to devalue the work ofspecific authors. The thesis is divided into two sections. The first section is chronological, showing the development of the discourse on sensation through the periods immediately prior 'to and following the decade of the 1860s. The second section is organized thematically, each chapter dealing with a specific aspect of the sensation debate, such as morality, crime, genre and canonicity.

This thesis offers a detailed, work-by-work chronological study of the picturesque in a small number of carefully chosen country house screen narratives, from the period 1949-1982. Each chapter deals with one of these works: Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949); The Go-Between (Joseph Losey, 1971); The Ruling Class (peter Medak, 1972); Brideshead Revisited (Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay-Hogg, 1981); and The Draughtsman's Contract (Peter Greenaway, 1982). These screen fictions are not representative of country estate screen narratives in general, nor are they typical of their directors' oeuvres. The most significant trend is a topos; they all feature a specific type of figure set in a picturesque landscape: a male protagonist who visits a country estate and whose status as an outsider there is largely articulated through his perception of the landed family and its estate. Each figure performs in a picturesque landscape; in the process, he alters, and is altered irrevocably by, the estate. He becomes its genius loci (spirit of place). What was, in 1949, a somewhat unusual landscape narrative, became a small, but highly significant, groundbreaking genre between 1971 and 1982. Through this combination of case studies, I chart a history of innovation in the deployment of country estates in post-Second World War film and television. Heritage criticism tends to see landscapes in screen fictions as pauses in, or distractions from, narrative. This thesis develops an alternative approach to analysing and historicising audiovisual narratives set in picturesque landscapes. It examines the way the chosen works establish a reciprocal relationship between location and narrative. It argues that landscape history plays an integral role in such fictions and that landscape historiography is, therefore, a valuable hermeneutic tool for the analysis of these narratives, yielding new insights into a distinctly English genre.

The Lamarckian thought of Samuel Butler (1835–1902) has been much observed in relation to his evolutionary works, but my thesis offers a wider ranging examination, and argues for the pervasiveness of Lamarckian ideas across the whole breadth of Butler’s varied oeuvre. In his intervention into evolutionary debate, Butler differentiated between Darwinian luck and Lamarckian cunning, and I show how this distinction informs his notions of authority and authorship, and how he employs Lamarckian concepts in his attempt to fashion for himself an authoritative position as a man of letters. Via an examination of two of his earliest works on evolution, Chapter 1 demonstrates how Butler satirically subverts the argument by analogy employed by theologians Bishop Butler and William Paley, as well as by Charles Darwin, in order to highlight the dangers of logical argument as a means of establishing authority. Chapter 2 extends this critique through a consideration of Butler’s more mature evolutionary works. These amount to a condemnation of what he believes to be the underhand means by which Darwin had sought to appropriate evolutionary theory as his own, without acknowledging the efforts of earlier evolutionists. Chapter 3 describes Butler’s developing epistemology through the lens of his theological writings. It concludes that his epistemological trajectory is best read as a ‘reconversion narrative’, in which reason is subordinated to faith, and which is a necessary consequence of his evolutionary theory. In Chapter 4 I argue that Butler’s writings on art constitute a ‘Lamarckian aesthetics’ that offers both a new reading of the Renaissance, as well as an optimistic alternative to ideas of fin-de-siècle cultural degeneration. Finally, in Chapter 5 I show how Butler’s last works are the culmination of his self-fashioning as he sought to position himself favourably for posterity.

Charlotte Bronte, Guida and Grant Allen are known for their novels that engage with the issue of gender, race and Empire within the context of nineteenth-century representations of French-colonised North Africa and Algeria. An analysis ofcolonial discourse, engaging specifically with Edward Said's Orientalism, is helpful in understanding the underlying anxieties and ambivalences regarding these issues that are present in these writers' works, and in particular Bronte's Villette, Guida's Under Two Flags and Allen's The Tents ofShem. Not only do the novels provide a chronological analysis ofthe gradual transformations underwent by representations ofArabs in English literature from their portrait as courageous freedom fighters, in the middle of the nineteenth century, to a mass of blood-thirsty savages less than fifty years later, they also demonstrate shifts in the types ofanxieties that colonial discourse underwent during this period; from fears regarding possible contaminative effect that the East was said to assert on the treatment of women in the West in Bronte's novel, through a more ambivalent attitude towards sexual practices in the region in Guida's work and, finally, the tension that results from racial encounters and the fear surrounding degeneration in Britain in Allen's novel. While novels by Bronte and Guida imply the sources ofthese anxieties as coming from outside Britain, Allen's writings reflect his fear that the future of the English race was being threatened by a surplus of childless and unmarried women within the metropolitan centre. In fact, the narratives studied here deeply imbricate the race and character of the English with gendered representations of North Africans during that period. Even though colonialism is perceived as consolidating the superiority of the English race in comparison to other races, increasing encounters between it and these 'others' at the periphery, in particular North Africa, inevitably expose anxieties to be a significant part of the English colonial identity.

This thesis explores the representation ofmasculinity within a number ofNorthern Irish novels written in the last 15 years. The main focus is the novels of Eoin McNamee, Glenn Patterson and Robert McLiam Wilson, although the works of a number of other authors are also discussed. This thesis has taken a thematic approach to the contemporary Northern Irish novel and attempted to analyse the myriad facets of masculinity as it is imagined in this fiction. This analysis encompasses ideas of femininity and maternity, class and the dominant discourses of masculinity, as they exist in academia and beyond. Masculinity in Northern Ireland is influenced by both the social landscape ofNorthern Ireland and wider social trends, as the novels under consideration are affected both by the forms of masculinity they represent and the formal constraints of the tradition of the novel. One ofthe key aims of this thesis is to disrupt notions of a hegemonic Northern Irish masculinity, based on violent conflict and hyper-masculine sectarian rhetoric, as the only option available to Northern Irish men. The three sections of this thesis were designed to represent the three key facets of Northern Irish manhood; their bodies, their performances and the way in which their subjectivity has been bound up with violence.

Ian Rankin is one of the world's best-selling authors of crime fiction. His series of Inspector Rebus novels, set in contemporary Edinburgh, have been translated into thirty-six languages and have achieved wide critical and commercial success. Yet for all its global reach, the Rebus series collectively asserts a more nuanced story: that of modern Scotland. The first novel, Knots & Crosses, was published in 1987, in the years after the failed devolution referendum of 1979 and in a decade of industrial tumult. In 2007, as 01 John Rebus was compelled to retire from Lothian and Borders Police in Exit Music, Scotland was an altogether different nation: now devolved from Westminster, with a definitively Scottish Parliament situated in Edinburgh, and the Scottish National Party elected to government for the first time. During the twenty years in between, Rankin's sustained crime fiction initiated the nation's first true crime writing tradition. This study explores the ways in which this series of crime novels collectively asserts a distinctive narration of modern Scotland. To do so, the series is 'de-integrated' for close, chronological study: the thesis is organised into four key chapters, and is bookended by introductory and concluding sections. Chapter 1 studies Rankin's first four Rebus novels, alongside influential themes of Scottish crime and literary history. Chapter 2 explores, via his next three novels, Rankin's representation of Edinburgh, and the sub-genre of crime fiction his work initiated. This chapter also includes specific analysis of his breakthrough novel, Black & Blue. Chapter 3 looks at how a pivotal two-book sequence 'disrupted' Rankin's narrative project, in light of his series' commercial success and its changing imperatives. Scotland's renewed selfdetermination is also explored briefly in relation to its symbiotic relationship to the growth of Scottish crime fiction. Chapter 4 explores the series' 'valedictory' novels, as we follow Rebus through to his statutory retirement. Crucially, the introduction presents selected ideas on narrative of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, which I apply to the collected Rebus series. Through these ideas, Rankin's 'epic' story of modern Scotland can be discerned. The (in)conclusion considers briefly the possible future - or not - for crime fiction in Scotland as the nation prepares for its 2014 referendum on full independence from the United Kingdom. It is anticipated that this study will contribute to the growing corpus of literature seeking to understand the development of crime fiction in Scotland, and lan Rankin's work in particular. It is hoped - by its end - that it will assist in Rankin's selfconfessed interpretation of his Inspector Rebus series as a serious means of understanding contemporary Scotland.

This thesis is an examination of the semiologies of age in modem and contemporary prose. The chapters that follow emerge from my continuing interest in how anti-senescence medicine, gerontophobia, and the commodification of immortality in discourses of consumerism have impacted literary representations of time, organic decay, and the meaning of death. Each chapter deals in different ways with the question of how to represent mortality in the context of a culture incredulous of ageing and the laws of nature, and a populace seeking to aestheticise, medicalise, and verbalise its way out of the ageing process. Paradoxical though it is, I argue that Anglo-American culture's jejune and oneiric fantasies of immortality, rejuvenation, and perpetual youth are not located in science fiction, mythos, extropian philosophy, or trans-/posthumanist discourse, but in the literature of ageing and the very spectacle of decay. The contemporary literature of ageing offers a clear thematic preoccupation with the pathos of mortality and senility. However, at the same time, the conventional or canonical indices of decay and decline are replete with counterrealist inflections and semiotic echoes of immortality. From the prose and dramaturgy of Samuel Beckett to post-2000 Alzheimer's fiction, the literature of ageing, I argue, transforms the depreciation of old age readily into its ideality, and makes the reader cognisant of the realities in which we, as members of a culture at once ageing demographically and anti-ageing ideologically, currently operate.