This thesis comprises original readings of David Foster Wallace's (1962-2008) novels and short stories which demonstrate the centrality of 'embodiment' to those works. The thesis highlights the diverse and changing ways in which Wall ace portrays the perils of corporeality, while at the same time identifying continuities in his engagement. Through an analysis of Wallace's interest in - among other somatic concerns - dualism, disability, ageing, agency, sexual desire, the body and identity, I argue that Wallace's understanding of the relationship between individuals and their often wayward bodies is one that takes all bodies to be inherently disabling. The central claim made by the thesis is that in Wallace's fictions, person's wills are subordinate to their body's drives, and that as a result personal freedom and incarnation are radically incompatible. Although clearly central to Wallace's work, embodiment has yet to receive critical attention. This thesis is an attempt at 'instigating a new era for Wallace studies.

This thesis explores the principal of genre in a divided, yet interconnected form: it comprises of a critical study of genre and an original novel - Shrapnel - which is in part a discussion of genre itself and serves as an object of study for the theoretical discussion of genre. Importantly, the critical element of this thesis informed the construction of the novel and the construction of the novel facilitated and augmented the critical component's discussion of genre. The thesis interrogates the principal of genre by triangulating theoretical understandings of genre, the views of writers and publishing industry professionals and my own experiences of writing a novel that has a problematic relationship with genres whilst being an exploration of genre itself.

No description available.

This thesis reads selected works of fiction by three mid-Victorian writers (Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot) alongside contemporaneous innovations and developments in moving-image technologies, or what have been referred to by historians of film as ‘pre-cinematic devices’. It looks specifically at the moving panorama, diorama, dissolving magic lantern slides, the kaleidoscope, and persistence of vision devices such as the phenakistiscope and zoetrope, and ranges across scientific writing, journalism, letters, and paintings to demonstrate the scope and popularity of visual motion devices. By exploring this history of optical technologies I show how their display, mechanism, and manual operation contributed to a broader cultural and literary interest in the phenomenological experience of animation, decades before the establishment of cinematography as an industry, technology, and viewing practice. Through a close reading of a range of mid-Victorian novels, this thesis identifies and analyses the literary use of language closely associated with moving-image technologies to argue that the Victorian literary imagination reflected upon, drew from, and incorporated reference to visual and technological animation many decades earlier than critics, focusing usually on early twentieth-century cinema and modernist literature, have allowed. It develops current scholarship on Victorian visual culture and optical technologies by a close reading of the language of moving-image devices—found in advertisements, reviews, and descriptions of their physiological operation and spectacle—alongside the choices Victorian authors made to describe precisely how their characters perceived, how they imagined, remembered, and mentally relived particular scenes and images, and how the readers of their texts were encouraged to imaginatively ‘see’ the animated unfolding of the plot and the material dimensionality of its world through a shared understanding of this language of moving images.

Frances Burney is often praised for her skills at capturing faithful portraits of contemporary society in her novels. Yet throughout her narratives are many scenes of unnatural, improbable and violent events which are normally associated with earlier traditions of romantic and sentimental fiction. Critics have attempted to resolve this seeming inconsistency in a variety of ways, some dismissing the strange juxtaposition as artistic immaturity. More recently critics have argued for a multifaceted Burney, who implements both scenes of sensational violence and polite etiquette. Pursuing instead a narratological approach, this thesis examines four innovative techniques that Burney uses to present sensational events in unconventional ways: the Non-Event technique, the Off-Page Event technique, the Split-Focus Event technique, and the Almost-Event technique. By using these narrative methods while foregrounding the conventionality of her plot material and working against generic expectations, Burney develops new ways of focusing the text upon the protagonist. Thus rather than the sensational events being evidence of her inability to liberate herself from earlier non-realistic traditions, they are instead an essential element to her influential methods of capturing 'life'.

No description available.

Focusing on Irish women's novels set in Paris, this thesis interrogates an underrepresented tradition that reveals complex and nuanced engagements with the development of selfhood and modern capitalism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The writings of Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), Maria Edgeworth, Edith Somerville and Martin Ross (Violet Martin), and Kate O'Brien, spanning from the early-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, . provide a broad scope to view the long waves of this tradition. While these texts are not reducible to mere treatises on modern economics, their focus on individuals and their development provides the foundation for a literary tradition I have described as the economic Bildungsroman, This tradition demonstrates the way capitalism functions as a socialising system, building upon the theories of Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, and Franco Moretti. Such a framework allows these writers to emphasise the human, and especially the gendered, experience of and response to modern capitalism capitalism. As similar claims have been made for leading European writers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Honore de Balzac, and Emile Zola, this study firmly situates the economic tradition of Irish women's writing within a Continental framework, providing a fuller comparison with their European. counterparts than has hitherto been made.

The thesis is in two parts: a creative component comprising a historical novel Obélisque concerned with psychoanalysis and self-identity, and a critical component that investigates the role of therapeutic language in the formation of identities in the period 1909-1939. Obélisque fictionalises the performance of psychoanalysis in mid-1930s Paris. Set around the Obelisk Press publishing house, the novel explores how new forms of psychosurgery (the lobotomy) and psychoanalysis were assimilated into culture as methods of self-control, forced onto physical bodies and mental selves. It tells the story of an editor at the Obelisk who enters analysis, and creates a dialogue with the history of psychoanalysis as it affected creative practice. The critical component is in three parts. The first offers an overview of theories of affect in relation to psychoanalytic language and therapy culture. It brings together the work of theorists Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich and Eva Illouz in studying affect to find alternatives to neoliberalism. It argues that such alternatives can be found in the modernist period, in moments of resistance to therapeutic narratives as they were being absorbed into consumer practices, legitimating the ‘acceptable’ forms that a ‘self’ could take. The second part examines Norah James’ Sleeveless Errand, banned on publication in 1929 and subsequently published by the Obelisk Press. Sleeveless Errand is a study of an ambivalent self produced in reaction to cultural standards. The third part examines the psychoanalytic work of Marion Milner and her interwar experiments in self-analysis, which resisted emerging therapeutic languages in an attempt to find a method for self-making that was her own. This thesis, then, seeks to assess how such emotional therapeutic narratives of psychoanalytic language shape the self. It explores what these historical moments of counter-cultural resistance to the dominance of therapeutic narratives can offer for contemporary examinations of self-making.

This thesis examines to what extent modern genetics has influenced novelists to adopt a more deterministic view of human beings. It has been claimed that molecular biology, behavioural genetics and evolutionary psychology have challenged traditional ideas about humankind. My hypothesis is that if gene-centred disciplines changed the way we see ourselves, then this would have implications for the literary novel, a genre that depends greatly on representations of humans. In analysing how genetics was incorporated in contemporary British fiction, I try to uncover the ways in which the human characters deal with – or are constrained or empowered by – scientific products or concepts. In addition, I seek to understand what novelists know and think about human genetics, and whether they believe it influenced their stories. Attention is also paid to novelists’ relationship with scientists’ cognitive authority. Specifically, I am interested in whether experts and scientific knowledge were positioned hierarchically above lay audiences and other forms of knowledge. To answer those questions, extended semi-structured interviews and textual analysis were chosen as main research methods. Six literary novels were selected for analysis. This corpus consists of: A.S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman, Carole Cadwalladr’s The Family Tree, Margaret Drabble’s The Peppered Moth, Maggie Gee’s The Ice People, Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. The main conclusion of this project is that novelists are able to incorporate ideas about genetics in their texts without simply perpetuating reductionist discourses. Literary novels offer several advantages compared to the expository writing: they are a flexible literary form; deal imaginatively with the human experience; and effortlessly accommodate multiple perspectives, open-ended questions and complex ideas such as doubt and ambiguity. As such, this genre affords the opportunity to explore contemporary science as a provisional, contingent and socially-embedded endeavour.

This thesis seeks to re-examine the philosophies of some key French thinkers, as it places these alongside both historical and contemporary theory and criticism, in order to launch a new phenomenological investigation of the theatrical and literary works of Samuel Beckett. The writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and his contemporaries were once applied to the Beckett canon in order that this might be placed firmly in its historical, post-war context, and the so-called French existentialists contributed greatly, though unwittingly, to the birth of that now rather dated conceptual framework which we have come to know as The Theatre of the Absurd. This study, rather than enforcing notions of a theatrical age of nihilism, draws upon the theories of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and peers, not in an attempt to dwell upon the meaning(lessness) of being that is the focus of traditional existentialist analyses, but so that an ontology of the Beckett character can be established. Over the course of the five chapters which comprise this work, I aim to change the focus from that which has been categorised as existential and/or absurd in Beckett s oeuvre, to the phenomenological points of interest that are manifest in that same. I will demonstrate, for instance, that by employing Sartre s lengthy and intricate exposition of being-for-itself as a model for the human consciousness, and using this as something of a touchstone as both complementary and competing philosophies are also considered (including the subjective idealism of Bishop Berkeley and the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida), we can begin to see some of the complexities inherent in the diverse modes of human being that can be discerned in Beckett s works. Existentialism has become, in reality, no more than the once-popular, historically-situated face of phenomenological philosophies which actually deal not so much in the overt pessimism that they (and Beckett) are charged with, but in explicating those facets of existence that we recognise as constitutive of the human experience; our being as both mind and body; our presence in temporality; our religious and/or spiritual being; our sense of self and other ; and our gendered being or, more importantly, the lived, bodily experience of being a woman, the second sex , in a patriarchal society. By exploring the regions of being that are made visible in the Beckettian landscape, this work layers phenomenological philosophy with, amongst others, philosophies of theatre aesthetics, of mind and of gender, and offers forth theories that contribute to the development of research in the fields of Beckett and phenomenology/existentialism and Beckett and women/gender/feminism , whilst adding something both original and tangible to the vast spectrum that encompasses Beckett and philosophy , even theatre/literature and philosophy , as a whole.