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SELF-IDENTITY AND CERTAIN ANGLOPHONE AFRICAN AND WEST INDIAN NOVELISTS, IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE The issue of self-identity is at the heart of black Anglophone African and West Indian literature. The dual processes of slavery and colonialism conspired against the black man's sense of himself. Slavery irrevocably divided a once unified people into African and West Indian, and consigned them to second-classs tatus. Colonialism reinforced this by assertingw hite political overlordship on black societies. This study examines the attendant problems of self-identity from the point of view of certain black Anglophone African and West Indian novelists, in comparative perspective. These comprise George Lamming, Vic Reid, Wilson Harris, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, and Wole Soyinka. The historical legacies of these writers is stamped indelibly with pain and loss. And yet, through their creative talents, they have translated the sufferings of their people into major works of fiction, producing two of the most vibrant and exciting literatures of our time.

Among the Indian novelists writing in English, Mulk Raj Anand is pre-eminent for the seriousness and fullness of his commitment to bring about a new Indian society. He is a novelist with an idea of himself and a conception of life which have been evolved from many influences, mainly western European, but with Indian sanctions and traditions. His humanism, new termed Karuna Rasa or compassion, is the natural outcome of his searching and sufferings arising from the crises in his life. According to Anand, he writes because there is this compulsion to express his feelings, his inner convictions and beliefs that have made him accept life. His autobiographical novels, Seven Summers, Morning Face and Confession of a Lover, and the novels that developed from his 'Confessional' of two thousand pages, are distinguished by this Indian personality, the people that touched his life, and the events that constitute the rich history of India in pre-Independence days.

This thesis explores how children's writers have participated in the process of representing and constructing the identity of the North East of England. It argues that there exists a dominant North-East aesthetic which has become deeply embedded within British children's fiction, and that several of its key motifs (labour, industry and decline; traditional gender roles and landscape) recur frequently within portrayals of the region in writing for the young. This aesthetic contributes to a perception of the region as both marginal and marginalised, and masks realities about the North East. Following an overview of children's literature set in the region, from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries, the focus moves to the work of Robert Westall, a major children's writer who was born in Tyneside and set much of h'is fiction within the region. The Westall chapters draw on the Robert Westall Collection at Seven Stories: The Centre for Children's Books. The more recent work of North-East writer David Almond is considered in the closing chapters which also draw on unpublished material and interviews for this thesis. Key works discussed: Robert Westall, Falling into Glory, Fathom Five, The Kingdom by the Sea, The Machine Gunners, A Time of Fire, The Wind Eye, The Watch House; David Almond, Clay, The Fire-Eaters, Heaven Eyes, Kit's Wilderness, My Dad's a Birdman, The Savage, Secret Heart, Skellig.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the symbolism and meaning of the figure of the 'lost child' within the works of the two authors. My argument extends from the work of these authors to discuss the importance of the 'lost child' within Anglocentric culture and society. I will also discuss the authors' presentation of language as both restrictive and potentially transformative. My Introduction sets out the theoretical and historical associations of childhood with language and with memory. The modem conception of memory developed alongside modem concepts of childhood as a distinct state, separate from adulthood. The idea of a ' lost child' within the self implies a gap between past and present which is perhaps fundamental to fragmentations within individuals and society. The argument of this thesis begins from a broadly " physical" or material perspective, looking at the social and individual fragmentations surrounding the figure of the child, as represented specifically in short stories by Malouf and Frame. The stories discussed are most notable for their presentations of family trauma and social violence. I then discuss, through reference to the authors' life-writing, how writing is a "doubling" of the physical self and world. Following the theory of Derrida that '[d]eath strolls between letters' I argue that the figure of the lost child is an absent presence moving through the gap between signifier and signified. I develop the concept of death, along with silence, as essential to positive transformation of being and language respectively. acknowledging a beyond outside of signification. My thesis then proceeds from the analysis of how language restricts and categorises behaviour, to the ways Malouf and Frame advocate the power of the imagination and creativity to make the "gaps" - in life, in society, in the self - sites oftransfonnation .

This thesis contains a detailed study of the genre of contemporary South Asian women's writings in English. It is still a relatively young literary subculture, and thus the majority of the works here discussed are those produced from the 1980s onwards. The study takes into account the postcolonial legacy of a culturally, racially and religiously diverse South Asia as well as the current social changes and upheavals in the region. The study encompasses the works of those writing both from within and without South Asia, noting the different social patterns emerging as a result of the geographical locations of the authors. The research primarily investigates issues pertinent to these writers; as women writers, as South Asian writers, as South Asian women writers, and as South Asian women writers writing in English. One key issue is the negotiation by these writers between the English language and the South Asian reality. Because it is literature written by the women of a traditionally proudly patriarchal society where the position of women has mostly been one of subservience, another form of negotiation in the literature is that between the centre and the periphery, the Self and the Other. In the course of this study, it will be seen that South Asian women writers have carved out a space for themselves on the literary scene, and staked an intellectual, literary and emotional territory of their own. The thesis focuses in particular on the representation of women, within the genre as well as in other contexts. Their literature creates images and identities of and for South Asia, South Asians, and South Asian women. The diasporic writers in particular play a vital role in the promotion and distribution of these images. The research also considers how readers respond to this literature and how publishers market the same.

Much of the literature of the early post-war period (1946-1966) was characterised by an interest in fictitious places. Popular landscapes ranged from exotic corners of the known world and fantasy planets to post-apocalyptic civilizations and projected dystopias. Within the gothic, several sub-categories determined by location and landscape – including ‘suburban gothic’, ‘Southern Ontario gothic’, and even ‘Tasmanian gothic’ – also emerged. This thesis proposes a new category, which comprises works set in and defined by ‘the suspended island’. The suspended island refers to a specific type of psycho-geography characterised by identification with the concerns of a specific time or historical period; in this instance, the spatial anxiety and social dislocation of the immediate post-war period. Suspended islands feature in such novels as Lord of the Flies (1954), Island (1962), and The Magus (1966), as well as in the present novel, Silent Noon: a book about outsider characters and their relationship with the un-spaces and anti-places they inhabit, alter and try to flee. In all these works, a sense of suspended time and displacement resulting from historical trauma combine to render the island a spatial and temporary no-man’s land. Most feature the archetype of a stranded outsider encountering an island madman. Hauntings, both real and metaphorical, abound. Ultimately, escaping the purgatorial world of the suspended island means finding a way out of the shadow of ‘big’ history. As this investigation will demonstrate, this can present as much a challenge for the author as for his characters. Meeting this challenge has been a process led by creative exploration and by consideration of works written during the early post-war period – many of which are characterised by themes of memory, guilt, adolescent disinheritance and contested ownership of recent history.

This study investigates the norms in the translation of fiction from English into Chinese in the period 1979 to 2009 by considering five Chinese translations of Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations produced by Wang Keyi (1979), Luo Zhiye (1994), Chen Junqun (1997), Zhu Wan and Ye Zun (2004) and Jin Changwei (2009). In addition, and in order to give proper weighting to para-textual elements, three adaptations for younger readers form the second part of the main analysis: those produced by Liu Lianqing and Zhang Zaiming (1980), Huang Qingyun (1990) and Wang Bei (2004). An examination of Chinese versions of Great Expectations (first published in 1861) is worthwhile for three reasons: 1.) it was the first novel by Dickens to appear in print after the Cultural Revolution which had not been published before in Chinese; 2.) it held a special meaning for Chinese readers due to its deep cultural resonance, especially in China after 1976; 3.) since the translations of the novel have hitherto not been examined by scholars in the field of Translation Studies, it offers an ideal opportunity to consider Gideon Toury’s norm theory within a non-European cultural context. There is a particular focus in this study on norms in the linguistic aspect of the eye-dialect words, malapropisms, sociolects, idiolects, slang, and cultural references; translation strategies form a key part of the main analysis; para-textual elements will provide additional evidence. The conclusion argues for an expansion of Toury’s original model to include greater emphasis on the extra-linguistic, historical and sociological context. Building on the work of other leading TS scholars, it is argued that a ‘hybrid Toury model’, including multi-level norm analysis, is necessary for any consideration of the complexities of a Chinese case study.

This thesis explores Henry James’ engagement in his relatively neglected early fiction about Italy with material from contemporary magazine culture. By bridging the gap between critics who focus on James’ relationship with Italian culture, and those who examine James’ relationship with his publishers and audience, it aims to explore how he uses interest in Italy manifested in literary magazines to develop his writing and build his reputation. The first part of the thesis explores how James writes about Italian culture in his first tales in ways with which his audience would be familiar, in order to cultivate his readership. The first three chapters deal with ‘Travelling Companions’ (1870), ‘At Isella’ (1871), and ‘The Madonna of the Future’ (1873) respectively. Looking at how magazines represent contemporary debates about the Italian artists and works of art that James depicts, I study the way James draws on this context to emphasise the relationship between culture and character in his fiction. The second half examines his fiction after 1873 in the light of James’ sense of his emerging literary reputation. Aware of his growing fame, James began to write tales incorporating material from his own serialised travel writing, thus reinforcing his reputation as a writer about Italy. The penultimate chapter explores this aspect of ‘The Last of the Valerii’ (1874) and ‘Adina’ (1874). In the last, discussing his first novel, Roderick Hudson (1875), I examine how James draws together material from his earlier tales to construct this longer narrative, and presents the overlapping themes in a way that allows his informed readership an enhanced appreciation of some elements of the plot. The conclusion briefly explores how James’ later fiction engages with his readership in a similar way, depending on the magazine he is writing for.

Ivy Compton-Burnett's inter-war novels have rarely been closely considered in relation to that period's dominant sociocultural paradigms. Counteracting the existing critical tendency to consider her work as eccentric and a-historical, this thesis situates the novels within a succession of aesthetic, political, and social discourses in order to foreground their radical reshaping of prevailing modes of thought and expression. Compton-Burnett's mordant chronicles of family life typify inter-war literary culture's rejection of its Victorian and Edwardian heritage and its critique of their lingering post-war presence through an examination of apparently defunct conservative and increasingly nostalgic constructions of individual and national identity. The thesis is constructed in two parts; the first considering the broad cultural positioning of her work, the second focussing more closely upon its interaction with specific literary, commercial, and sociological models. Beginning with Compton-Burnett's juvenile novel Dolores, I will consider the relation between her early education and reading and the evolution of her mature literary style by tracing an emergent comic subversion of the melodramatic plots of nineteenth-century fiction which culminated in an idiosyncratic form of neo-Victorianism. The following chapter examines her work's early critical reception, its alignment with certain precepts of modernist form associated with a Post-Impressionist Bloomsbury aesthetic, and the adumbration of a specifically 'high-brow' identity. Building upon this foundation, the subsequent chapters consider Compton-Burnett's work thematically in terms of: late twenties and early thirties constructions of gender and sexuality in a climate of censorship and coincident taste for literary deviance; the Golden Age detective novel and psychological investigations of violence and criminality; and the English country house as a site of cultural and historical fragmentation. Together, these chapters reconstruct an essentially avant-garde identity which the author's perceived focus upon middle-class domesticity, her longevity and incremental inscription as a minor British institution have in recent decades eroded.