My thesis comprises twenty-five short stories and a long essay wherein I discuss the stories in the light of Welsh writing in English which has shown considerable engagement with America. Central to my discussion is the view that my creative work has been enriched by American example, most especially as it applies to the writings of Raymond Carver.

This thesis investigates representations of dancing women in three postmodern novels, arguing that their radical revisions of traditional texts offer readers steps to be taken in the future. Resistant and troublesome dances are deployed here to address feminisms, multiple and contradictory subjectivities and intertextuality. I suggest that a consideration of a nuanced view of multiple subjectivities can benefit women more than striving towards an illusory, autonomous identity. Intertextuality invites contemplation of the dance between different texts and the meanings invoked as a result. Not only are the texts' meanings unstable, but the novels themselves dance with other texts, taking them into account and departing from them by taking different steps their instability of meaning and lack of absolute origins and authority allows them to become sites of resistance to dominant values. My research primarily draws on work by Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. Eilis Ni Dhuibhne's The Dancers Dancing is a postmodern text, which deals with the influence of nationhood on Irish women, and in which Irish subjectivity confronts irreconcilable alternatives. This chapter poses the Irish dance as a space where a new generation can come to terms with their past and reconfigure it. Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry rewrites the tale of 'The Twelve Dancing Princesses' and in the process challenges patriarchal marriage and heterosexuality as norms. The text 'dances' between traditional and postmodern historical representations of seventeenth-century England, offering readers conflicting versions of history and time. In Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle, the secret writing of gothic romances alerts readers to the influence of art on life. The novel takes into account, but steps beyond, those narratives that have encouraged readers to believe that they will have their feet cut off if they resist tradition. All three texts offer readers resistance to convention enlisting them in a metaphorical dance, where the steps are not known in advance.

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This thesis consists of a selection of my published work from 1989-2015, accompanied by an essay and a bibliography. The essay looks at the ways in which I am drawn towards marginal and liminal zones within fiction, including the areas between Young Adult (YA) and Adult fiction, crime fiction and literary fiction, and that between depicting reality and fictionalising it. I also consider the use of narrative mode in defining these liminal areas. By 'liminal', I mean occupying a position at, or on both sides of a boundary or threshold, rather than the word's other, looser sense, where it means 'vague'. The examples of fiction selected are intended to display the range of my published work since joining Nottingham Trent University. The order in which the pieces are discussed is broadly chronological. There is an introductory section about and brief examples of my work prior to 2002. While the work selected has been chosen primarily to be representative of my published work, they also illustrate the liminal and marginal zones referred to above. The majority of the extracts and stories that follow are taken from those published during the thirteen years I have worked at Nottingham Trent University. The texts used are taken from the published versions. Consequently the editorial conventions applied to chapter headings, double or single speech marks et al. are not consistent. While I have endeavoured to correct typographical errors that appeared in the original publications, I have not attempted to improve the style.

This thesis examines the ways in which performances of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) navigate the boundary between reading and writing. I consider the extent to which performances enact alternative readings of Finnegans Wake, challenging notions of competence and understanding; and by viewing performance as a form of writing I ask whether Joyce’s composition process can be remembered by its recomposition into new performances. These perspectives raise questions about authority and archivisation, and I argue that performances of Finnegans Wake challenge hierarchical and institutional forms of interpretation. By appropriating Joyce’s text through different methodologies of reading and writing I argue that these performances come into contact with a community of ghosts and traces which haunt its composition. In chapter one I argue that performance played an important role in the composition and early critical reception of Finnegans Wake and conduct an overview of various performances which challenge the notion of a ‘Joycean competence’ or encounter the text through radical recompositions of its material. In chapter two I discuss Mary Manning’s The Voice of Shem (1955) and find that its theatrical reassembling of the text served as a competent reading of the Wake’s form as an alternative to contemporary studies of the book, and that its specific ‘redistribution’ of the text accessed affective and genetic elements that were yet to be explored in Joyce scholarship. In chapter three I consider several decompositions of the Wake by John Cage (1975-1983) and find that by paying attention to the materiality of the book rather than its ‘plot’ or ‘meaning’ his performances reencountered the work concealed in Finnegans Wake’s composition. In chapter four, I document and analyse my own performance, About That Original Hen (2014), a ‘research-as-performance’ lecture which re-enacts a visit to the James Joyce Archive. By reconfiguring Finnegans Wake in relation to a marginal figure from its composition process and a contemporary act of protest within the university, this performance explores how a diachronic re-animation of archival materials can engage with the ghosts which haunt its composition and enact a political reading of the text’s production and subsequent archivisation. I conclude the thesis by arguing that these performances repeat the contingencies, misreadings and appropriations and collective acts of reading and writing that were integral to the composition of Finnegans Wake.

Comprising three novellas and critical research, this project defines and examines the possibilities of creative writing to expound upon and provide insight into issues of citizenship, belonging and memory. This interplay of narratives (creative and critical) speaks to the complex and intertextual nature of my research and is reminiscent of bricolage, defined by Matt Rogers as a 'multi-perspectival, multi-theoretical and multi-methodological approach to inquiry […] based on notions of eclecticism, emergent design, flexibility and plurality'. My thesis makes use of autobiography as case study and creative practice as research to illuminate the personal experiences of mothers and daughters separated by global movement and to study the role that the mother's storytelling plays in fostering the daughter's nostalgia for home and quest for belonging. By conducting interviews with my mother and utilising my own personal experiences as an exiled daughter to inform both my critical research and my ficto-autobiographical novellas, I have been able to draw more widely-applicable insights into the process of self-fashioning. This autoethnographical methodology bridges the gap between the personal and the public, and in the words of Heewon Chang 'transcends mere narration of self to engage in cultural analysis and interpretation'.

Diction and Narration in I. Compton-Burnett’s Novels (1925 – 1939) Compton-Burnett (1884 – 1969) wrote the nineteen novels of her canon between 1925 and 1969. Compton-Burnett wrote retrospectively: her settings were the large country houses of the upper middle class during the late Victorian era and the early years of the twentieth century. Critiques of her work have often taken the form of challenges to what has been perceived as excessive dialogue and a consequent lack of description, narrative, and exposition. This thesis will analyse the many devices of Compton-Burnett’s diction which, subtly but powerfully, succeed in conveying to the reader that which more conventional novelists achieve by means of their lengthier passages of narration, description, and exposition; it will contend that despite the preponderance of dialogue the narrative voice is not only audible but strongly so; it works to support, amplify, and enrich the dialogue and hence make clear the narrative position. Thus the narrative voice is not as detached as has been supposed: it should be heeded. Looking back with a penetrating and ironic eye, and informed of the progress of the landed gentry by the passage of time, the novelist discerns the undercurrents which worked to subvert the status quo, thus bringing about the beginnings of the dissolution of the upper middle class and subsequent movements during the twentieth century. She focuses on the significance of the Church, specifically the Anglican Church, on traditional gender roles, and on the effects of large-scale societal changes and developments on this class.

This thesis aims to broaden the scope of inquiry into castaway fiction for or about children by mapping the changing epistemological approaches to subjectivity, within five castaway novels spanning the early nineteenth century to post-World War Two. The novels include The Swiss Family Robinson (Johann Wyss, 1816), The Coral Island (Robert Ballantyne, 1857), Kidnapped (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886), A High Wind in Jamaica (Richard Hughes, 1929) and Lord of the Flies (William Golding, 1954). Taking close textual analysis as my default research method, this thesis is concerned with analysing how the child castaway materialised and evolved out a shift from religious hegemony and Humanist pedagogy operating in The Swiss Family Robinson to that of scientific rationalism and post-war postmodernism in Lord of the Flies. As a means of identifying and exploring the castaway child through these paradigm shifts, I have developed a psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theoretical framing for my analysis that draws on Jacques Lacan’s The Mirror Stage As Formative Of The Function Of The I As Revealed In Psychoanalytic Experience (1966), and Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980). These theoretical approaches to the relationship between subjectivity and language enhance my readings of how these castaways advocate historically specific language structures through which subjectivity is produced and can be read dialogically. Chapter one will analyse how the castaway child materialises in The Swiss Family Robinson as a ‘knowable’ subject of Enlightenment pedagogy influenced by three key works: namely John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1919). Developed through this intellectual triad, I interpret Wyss’s novel as representing the beginnings of the epistemological child castaway, which evolves dialogically. The following chapters will investigate how this ‘knowable’ child is gradually destabilised through increasingly fragmented representations of the castaway child, developed through the epistemological contexts of scientific rationalism, Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and post-war postmodernism.

In this thesis I undertake a comparison of novels and video games in order to clarify the ontological and ethical processes involved in reader construction of fictional characters. I demonstrate how the sequences of novels necessitate inference of textual authority. In contrast, although video games offer control over sequence, such control is unstable and can be compared with the effects of reader emotional engagement where inference as to what might happen in a narrative will often transform into what should happen next on behalf of various characters. Furthermore, I argue that as all characters must be constructed and staged on an ongoing basis for any feeling of allegiance to be sustained, identification should be seen as representing the ongoing construction and evaluation of all fictional characters in a given text. As a result of these arguments, I propose the concept of reader/player causality, by which I refer to the general philosophical orientation underpinning what the player brings to the text in this regard even beyond what textual revelations can erase. In video games, for example, players seem synonymous with their avatars, but frequently game narratives will provide explanations for player actions that are inconsistent with the real life player’s intention, with the player’s initial bias still affecting the character produced. Reader causality operates in a similar way where the reader’s wish for certain events to occur will likewise affect interpretation and identification even if subsequent narrative events contradict prior assumptions or wishes. In turn, the reader’s acceptance of such additions or alterations to characters carries with it ethical responsibility and choice. In this manner, I define identification as the imposition of reader causality/feeling combined with the absorption of diegetic rewriting of all characters in a text on a moment-by-moment basis with new versions negotiated in contract with inferred authority.

The mid-Victorian novelist George Eliot had a keen interest and expertise in mathematics, which she studied throughout her life, and this had a profound influence on her work as a novelist. Not only does mathematics appear overtly in several of her novels, and particularly in the first two, but her mathematical way of thinking also informs the way in which she structures her novels and her arguments. In the first novel, the eponymous hero, Adam Bede, is a mathematically-minded carpenter and his thoughts about mathematics recur throughout the novel. This novel and Eliot’s second novel, The Mill on the Floss, include discussions of mathematics education that demonstrate the author’s awareness of curricular and pedagogical issues. Eliot’s imagery frequently makes use of mathematics and mathematical physics, which she offers the reader with the deftness and clarity of an expert. Her logical mathematical thinking helps her to structure her novels, and the epigraphs in her last two novels, which contribute to this structuring, frequently have a mathematical basis. Eliot’s narrators continually philosophise, and the arguments they offer the reader are repeatedly informed by mathematical and logical thinking. This is particularly true of Eliot’s philosophising about gender, and about the way in which women are frequently seen as different from men, particularly in the context of education. Eliot has a notorious concern for truth, and mathematical argument enables her to distinguish the certain from the uncertain, and to mock absurd presuppositions. Eliot was aware of current mathematical controversies regarding the teaching of mathematics and regarding non-Euclidean geometry; these appear in the novels. Mathematicians are often characterised as having a narrow and unimaginative view of the world – this view is counteracted by Eliot’s novels, which demonstrate how it is possible to use mathematics to engage our sympathy.