This thesis traces the cultural construction in fiction and journalism of Bloomsbury in the nineteenth century, a part of London whose streets and squares were largely laid down from the late 1790s to the 1820s, by master-builders such as Thomas Cubitt, on Bedford and Foundling Estate lands. As E. V. Lucas put it in 1906, Bloomsbury 'gives the lie to the poet's statement that East and West can never meet', being situated between other parts of London that had a more stable social identity - rich or poor, residential or commercial. As such, nineteenth-century Bloomsbury harboured a particularly mixed and complex demographic, including professionals, intellectuals, artists and immigrants, and this geographical particularity produced specific narratives, which I examine through a range of canonical and noncanonical fiction from the period. In my introduction, following Franco Moretti’s call for ‘distant reading’, I make a case for the need for critics to develop a fuller repertoire of spatial scales when reading literature, including the local map as well as the atlas. In my first chapter, I address the silver-fork aristocratic satirical construction of newly built Bloomsbury’s aspirational middle-class identity, and this spin’s long cultural afterlife, the first phase of which Dickens and Thackeray participated in. In my second chapter, I trace Bloomsbury’s social decline and its impact on the gendering of the area, showing how by the 1860s, upper-middle-class families, in fiction by Trollope and Braddon, were ‘evacuating’ the place and leaving it to bachelors, many of whom worked in the legal chambers of Holborn nearby. In my third chapter, I explore the area’s increasing association with advanced social medicine, and demonstrate that the figure of the financially compromised and questionably altruistic Bloomsbury doctor is in the latter part of the century a common problematic feature of the local cultural imagination. In the fourth chapter, continuing from Chapter 2's analysis of urban space and gender, I read the prevalence of independent women walkers in fiction set in the area as metonymic of Bloomsbury's growing connection with feminism, through its bi-gendered educational institutions. In the fifth chapter, I discuss the thematization of writing as material practice around the fin-de-siècle, analysing the presence of the British Museum, prime site of literary production in the English-speaking world, in novels by Gissing, Morris, Du Maurier and James. The thesis both attempts a new kind of history of the nineteenth-century novel - one framed by local urban geography - and also makes an argument for the centrality of Bloomsbury to literature in the period, illuminating just how associated with writing the area was long before the Bloomsbury group emerged when Virginia Stephen moved to Gordon Square in 1904.

The present study aims to expand recent scholarship on modernism’s engagement with space by uncovering the centrality of “the room” in Woolf’s writings. Although the iconic “room of one’s own” has long been considered the cornerstone of Woolf’s feminist politics, criticism has been slow to recognise the significance of the multitude of rooms in her œuvre, from rooms evocative of domestic, national and colonial space in the works of fiction to rooms as loci of memory in “A Sketch of the Past.” This thesis argues that Woolf’s writings not only foreground such spatial representations but also model ways of reading and understanding space which anticipate current theoretical observations. The spatial formation of rooms sits at the heart of Woolf’s interweaving of the political and the aesthetic, yielding an understanding of space itself as dynamic, layered and relational. Previously unexplored “common readers’” responses to A Room of One’s Own preface the discussion. This allows new reader stories to emerge and offers a fresh perspective on the impact of the 1929 polemical essay on its historical readers. The focus then shifts to Woolf’s debut novel, where the room trope configures a symbolic space of ideological constraints bound up with patriarchal ideas of women, empire and the nation. Night and Day overlaps the material and the textual to critique memorialization practices and negotiate Victorian legacies, a negotiation also thematised in The Years, where rooms chart a family’s progress through modernity. The chapter on Jacob’s Room tells the story of an absence, reading the novel’s university rooms in conjunction with women’s struggle for education at Cambridge. Finally, rooms are shown to map out a geo-history of the self in “A Sketch of the Past,” weaving personal history and wartime trauma.

This thesis sets out to contribute to the literature on back translation, a mode of translation that has not been seriously investigated. The study aims at investigating the reliability of back translation as a research tool with particular emphasis on the issues of explicitation and implicitation shifts. The investigation corpus consists of two contemporary American-English novels, At Risk by Patricia Cornwell and The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and their translations into Arabic as "قلب الخطر" and"الطريق" respectively. One chapter from the former novel and a number of sections from the latter novel are selected, and their Arabic translations are examined in order to identify examples of explicitation and implicitation shifts. The identified examples of the translation are back translated into English by two professional translators. A categorisation of explicitation and implicitation shifts identified in the corpus is discussed using Klaudy's Model (1996), and the extent to which meaning is retained using Larson's framework (1998). This study consists of seven chapters. The first chapter serves as an introduction. The second chapter discusses the two translational phenomena of back translation and intermediate translation. The third chapter is to examine the tension between meaning and translation. The fourth chapter provides a comprehensive account on the two main concepts that will frame the analysis of the shifts: explicitation and implicitation. The fifth chapter provides an overview of the study of the corpus and presents the methodological approach. The sixth chapter provides a number of explicitation and implicitation shifts and their back translations, to establish the reliability of back translation in retaining the explicitation and implicitation shift and its meaning. The seventh chapter presents the conclusions and recommendations of this study. The main contribution of this study is to show that even though back translation is often used as a research tool, its validity and reliability are taken for granted. However, it is shown that the back translation might not retain the explicitation and implicitation and or its meaning and thus impair its usefulness as a tool for comparing a text and its translation.

This thesis examines the way in which modern women writers use non-realistic literary forms in order to create new role models of and for women. The work of six authors are analysed in detail - Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ and Kate Wilhelm. I argue that they share a discontent with the conventions of classic realism, which they all regard as perpetuating ideologically-generated stereotypes of women. Accordingly, they move away from mimetic modes in order to formulate a discourse which will challenge conventional representations of the 'feminine', arriving at a new conception of the female subject. I argue that although these writers represent a range of feminist responses to the dominant order, they all arrive at a s1mil~r conviction that such an order is male-dominated. All exhibit an awareness of the work of feminist critics, creating texts which consciously interact with feminist theory. I then discuss how these authors use their art to examine the their own situation as women who write. All draw the attention to the existence of a tradition of female censorship, whereby the creative woman has experienced, in an intensified form, the repression experienced by all women in a culture which privileges the male over the female. All these writers exhibit a desire to escape such a tradition, progressing towards the formulation of a utopian female subject who is free to be fully creative a project they represent metaphorically in the form of a quest.

British identity has undergone a dynamic transformation over the past fifty years. The debates surrounding multiculturalism and the extent to which non-white Britons have genuinely integrated into mainstream British society have given rise to a generation of writing that arguably contends with these issues. Anglophone writers such as Monica Ali, Jamila Gavin, Maggie Gee, Raman Mundair, Ravinder Randhawa, Kami/a Shamsie, Zadie Smith and Meera Syal are amongst those contemporary writers who portray diverse aspects of Asian British communities, in which the Asian British characters arguablv subvert the Orientalist, colonialist binary of white over brown. Writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Arundhati Roy and Vikram Seth fictionally represent Indian students who come to Britain as temporary migrants on foreign study sojourns, using these students to interrogate the significance of an English education. These novels explode the reductive myth of Asian Britons as nice, well-behaved members of our multicultural society. This thesis demonstrates how these texts indeed interrogate depoliticised, sentimental portrayals of Asian Britons as harmless.

This research presents a literary and political biography for Penelope Aubin. Aubin, the natural daughter of Sir Richard Temple and Anne Charleton (who was the daughter of Walter Charleton, Royal physician and natural philosopher), was a poet, novelist, translator, Orator and playwright. Penelope Charleton married clandestinely and young, like the heroines of her novels. On her marriage Penelope Aubin joined a family of merchants trading from Jersey and the City of London, and with family members in Barbados and Jamaica. Within five years of entering the mercantile world Aubin's expertise of trading ventures was being sought by investors, and she was called to give evidence to the Board of Trade. Aubin's early poetry is a statement of her Royalist and Anglican heritage, but her novels of the early 1720s are a reflection of her knowledge of trade, the threat of piracy and of the natural disasters that occur at sea. However, by the later 1720s Aubin's works were more obviously politically engaged, reflecting the changing hopes of the Tory party and its supporters under a Hanoverian monarchy. Then, in 1729, when she opened her Lady's Oratory, intending from the outset to discuss ':Ministers of State' and how they behave in office, Aubin very publicly added her voice to the wave of political opposition to Robert Walpole.

There is an ongoing debate into whether contentious issues, such as sex, drugs and alcohol, should be contained in young adult fiction (YAF). In this debate, the popular press most often represents the view that children, including young adults (YA), should be protected, and thereby remain innocent, thus characterising the inclusion of sensitive topics in children's fiction (including YAF) as an unacceptable assault on that innocence. Conversely, and as explored in this thesis, there are others, especially authors and academic critics (including myself) who suggest that fiction is an ideal place to explore such issues because of the nature of the vicarious experience it offers. This thesis is presented in two parts. The first is the creative aspect which is a YA novel entitled Ham & Jam. This is the story of four students on a school trip. They embark on a mission to save a young Afghan girl who had been trafficked and was being sold for sex. 'The novel developed out of the research undertaken for the second aspect of this thesis which is a critical exploration into how the contentious issues of sex, drugs and alcohol have been represented within YAF since 1996. Using Melvin Burgess's novel, Junk (1996) as a starting point, and his representation of sex, drugs and alcohol as a benchmark, a selection of British contemporary realist YAFfrom 1996 and for each subsequent year up to, and including, 2010 were compared critically and culturally from the dual perspective of writer and reader. The cultural research involved understanding society's perception of these contentious issues by examining current statistics and government reports. The results of which were used as a form of narrative system, enabling me to critically compare the representation of sex, drugs and alcohol in YAFwith this 'perceived' reality.

The creative component of the thesis consists of a novel entitled Mrs Engels. Mrs Engels is a first-person narrative from the perspective of Lizzie Burns, the Irish lover of the Communist leader Friedrich Engels. The action of the novel is focused on the years 1870-72 when Lizzie and Friedrich move from Manchester to London in order to be close to the Marx’s and the active international Communist scene there. The critical component consists of an essay entitled ‘Illusions of Truth’. ‘Illusions of Truth’ is a meditation on some of the questions raised when we speak of the category of ‘historical fiction’. It is a response to the fact that, often, discussions of historical fiction view ‘the past’ as textual and therefore to some degree unknowable, while taking for granted the knowability of ‘the present’. In other words, in order to assert the textuality of the past, many discussions of historical fiction juxtapose it to an immediately knowable present, sometimes called ‘direct’ or ‘present experience’. But is it true that the present is a more solid, knowable form of human experience than the past? Is direct engagement with reality even possible? Does the present exist at all, except as an historical fiction? The essay uses the theory of Michel Foucault, specifically his ‘archaeological’ and ‘genealogical’ approaches to history, as lenses through which to examine these questions. Grouping its analyses around the larger themes of time, space and truth, it considers whether anything in human experience can, in fact, be present and non-historical (and therefore entirely knowable and true). Can conscious human experience be anything other than historical and fictional? If indeed it cannot, is ‘historical fiction’ as a separate literary classification sustainable?

This thesis examines Elizabeth Taylor’s twelve novels through the lens of the interlinked concepts, anachronism and anachorism, an approach that enables an analysis of the structural, thematic and stylistic engagements with time and place in her fiction. Blending theme with chronology, the study attaches a particular topic to each decade between the 1940s and the 1970s: war and its aftermath are considered in Taylor’s 1940s novels; the servant-figure in those of the 1950s; feminine constructs in the 1960s; and death and dying in the 1970s. The study argues that while Taylor’s texts look back to previous literary periods and, increasingly, to earlier parts of the century, they simultaneously speak to their particular historical moment. The thesis contributes to recent scholarship that has sought to reappraise the fiction of neglected mid-twentieth-century writers, uncovering an altogether more innovative and complex fictive form than previously recognised. Taylor’s oeuvre is positioned firmly within this more nuanced and complicated literary landscape. Anachronism and anachorism frame and shape an analysis of those aspects within the structure and content of Taylor’s novels that are unexpected, out of place even, within the genre of domestic fiction. To facilitate the analysis, the study introduces the metaphor of ‘the scalpel within the kid glove’, which points both to the way Taylor writes and to a way of reading her. The distinct contribution the thesis makes to current scholarship is to demonstrate that Taylor’s novels are altogether more strange, more angry, more political and more philosophical than generally acknowledged. They destabilise reader expectation even as they disrupt the conventions of realist fiction. Taylor emerges as an ‘after-modernist’, a classification that exhibits both temporal and aesthetic qualities, signalling a writer engaged with the after-effects of war, while at the same time in conversation with the legacy of modernist poetics.

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