D.H. Lawrence's interest in male relationships, and its manifestation throughout his work in the theme of male friendships, suggests an approach to his achievement as novelist and thinker which previously has not been adequately explored. Lawrence's attempt to understand and eventually to provide a rationale for his psychosexual feelings and impulses towards homoerotic comradeship began to assume thematic and aesthetic importance in The White Peacock and continued for the duration of his career. An illuminating starting point for the discussion of male relationships is the story "The Prussian Officer," in which Lawrence establishes the techniques of imagistic and thematic expression which frequently recur in his subsequent treatment of male homoerotic relationships. The recognition that erotic tenderness can exist between men results in Women in Love in the advocacy of a male complement to conventional heterosexual relationships, although this awareness is complicated by Birkin's explicit homosexual responses in the unpublished "Prologue" to the novel. After his initial adumbration of the theme in Women in Love, Lawrence's discovery of the potentiality inherent in male relations is explored in the "power" novels which follow---Aaron's Rod, Kangaroo, and The Plumed Serpent. Utilizing his own theories stated in such discursive writings as Fantasia of the Unconscious, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, "Democracy," "Education of the People," and his understanding of Whitman, Edward Carpenter, and esoteric tradition, Lawrence consolidated the various ways in which relationships between men could create a new and positive social experience---what he called a "new adjustment." The communion between men, which is expressed through a homoerotic embrace, is transformed into a "communion in power"; in the later novels Lawrence attempted to posit a masculine power ethic which would facilitate the establishment of a positive and valuable place for male relationships in all human endeavour. However, Lawrence's later response to the ideas of Dr. Trigant Burrow, Rolf Gardiner, and John Hargrave in his Confession of the Kibbo Kift, as well as his own experience of the realities of political power, led to a revaluation of the communion in power, and the notion of its dependence upon homoerotic relations.

'Pattern' is here used to mean, not merely the 'structure' of Jane Austen's novels (that is, the artistic relationship of their parts to their wholes), but the total relationship of this artistic structure to the moral substance of the novels. The thesis is (as stated in the Introduction) that Jane Austen's powers of selection and arrangement serve a number of mutually consistent purposes: 'She carries out the novelist's obvious and elementary duties, to sustain interest in her stories and characters, and to render the events plausibly and the characters convincing; she manoeuvres her events and characters into an artistic form that has both proportion and inevitability; and she makes the form embody a moral assessment, first of her characters and their acts, and then, through them, of man's conduct in society.' In support of this thesis, Jane Austen's six completed novels are analysed in the following sequence: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion. In the course of analysis, comparisons are made between the various novels in order to display 'a clear line of development', and to show the different ways in which, for different purposes, Jane Austen handles her material. The purpose of the dissertation is not to revalue her works, not to propose novel interpretations of their meaning, but 'to reveal more clearly the essential nature of known excellences'.

In an attempt to assess the influence of Wells's scientific background on his work and the originality of his contribution to literature this thesis presents first a survey of earlier literature dealing with the concepts of science, utopias, journeys in space and time, and the figure of the scientist. It is concluded that these predecessors had relatively little influence on Wells's work. His own background in science is examined and an assessment made of the scientific validity of his thinking. There follows a discussion of Wells's pre-occupation with the role of science in society - science and technology, science and government, waste and disorder - and in the life of the individual - free-will and predestination as understood in science, and the mythic and mystical elements of science. The influence of science on Wells's approach to characterization is considered - his concept of the individual, his awareness of psychology as a science and his development of the figure of the scientist as a literary character. Finally some analysis is made of Wells's techniques of presenting a scientific dimension in his work and rendering it credible and interesting to a reading public largely ignorant of scientific method and the progress of science. This leads to a discussion of Wells's concept of Art and his debate with Henry James about the role of the novel. Wells's most significant contributions to literature are seen to be his 'discovery of the future', his expansion of the scope the novel to include the concerns of science and the figure of the scientist, and his role as an integrator of several apparently diverse disciplines and interests.

This thesis attempts to take a fresh look at the long-running critical debate regarding Hardy's attitude to women as revealed in his prose fiction. Writing in a predominantly male literary tradition, and sharing a Christian ethic which held women responsible for the shattering of Edenic bliss, Hardy's fiction sometimes betrays certain misogynic traits as the author/narrator seems trapped in the gender-stereotyping so characteristic of his age. Reductive generalizations regarding woman's nature, often crudely bio-determined, pepper Hardy's novels even as late as Jude. Conversely, Hardy's sincere sympathy for woman as victim of patriarchal repression and exploitation emerges powerfully not only in Tess but also in those unjustly neglected short stories of the 1890s which reveal certain radically feminist tendencies, e.g. on eugenics. This study draws on unpublished letters and manuscripts in the Dorset County Museum and also on Hardy's marginalia, his published letters, literary 'Notebooks', and autobiography, as these offer interesting sidelights on authorial intentions and attitudes. The insights from these extra-textual sources are used to complement the textual analysis of one 'minor' and one 'major' prose work from the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. The study then examines Hardy's attitudes to his two wives vis-a-vis their literary ambitions: his strange unconcern regarding his first wife's creative efforts, in sharp contrast to his active promotion of the careers of his (would-be) second wife and a couple of other aristocratic literary 'pupils'. Following this is a detailed exploration of Hardy's relations with some of his contemporary female writers. The picture that finally emerges is of an artist who is often unable to transcend the blinkered male attitudes of his age, yet who courageously espouses certain revolutionary ideas on women's rights. This ambivalence is typical of a man who claimed to be content with tentativeness and disavowed any consistent 'philosophy' -- feminist or otherwise.

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This thesis examines the influence that Spanish literary culture had on Kate O'Brien's work. There are overt Spanish elements in a number of O'Brien's writings; however upon a closer inspection of both her fiction and her non-fiction, this research reveals how a more subtle influence of Spain runs through the core of all her work and that her experimental writing style is inextricably linked to Spanish literary culture. As such, this thesis illuminates the way in which O'Brien's engagement with the writings of Concha Espina, Jacinto Benavente, Miguel Cervantes and Teresa of Avila provided her with a model with which to negotiate the social, religious and familial restraints faced by a female Catholic novelist in post-independence Ireland. The thesis is structured in four parts with a chapter devoted to the unique influence of each writer on O'Brien. Importantly, the thesis confronts some received critical assumptions about O'Brien. More specifically, it challenges the idea that O'Brien was a conservative writer whose work was stylistically timid and outdated in tone. In doing so, this re-assessment of O'Brien's work offers a new approach to her writing, as it situates her in both an Irish and an international context of writers who are regarded as modernist novelists.

This thesis is the first to argue that existentialism is the very crux of Alexander Trocchi's work and his self-fashioning as a 'cosmonaut of inner space'. Using a lens of existential enquiry, it determines how and why being a 'cosmonaut of inner space' shaped Trocchi's oeuvre. This thesis makes use of a variety of sources - some previously unpublished - from archives including the Trocchi Papers at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. Chapter One contextualises Trocchi's developing interest in existential philosophy, first catalysed by his studies at the University of Glasgow, to his relocation from Glasgow to Paris in the early 1950s. The chapter highlights the notable impact that this relocation had on Trocchi's sensibility of radical subjectivity, and argues that existentialism became not an abstract philosophy but a strategic means to achieve existential freedom from authoritarian systems. Chapters Two and Three consider Trocchi alongside two of his most notable contemporaries, R. D. Laing and William Burroughs. All three men shared a profound belief in the authenticity and freedom offered by inner space, and in Chapter Two, I explore how this manifests in, and impacts upon, Trocchi's fictional characterisation using R. D. Laing's seminal existential theories. In Chapter Three I argue that Burroughs' and Trocchi's radical experimentalism - in both narcotics and literature - saw them break with the past practice of three writers with whom Trocchi self-identifies: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Cocteau. The chapter also asserts that Trocchi is even more extreme, or 'far out', than Burroughs because he continually sought to idealise and propagandise drug addiction throughout his multifaceted oeuvre. Chapter Four considers Trocchi's fictional work alongside Michel Foucault's theory of heterotopia - a space of dualism and displacement - to determine how l and, through incorporating Maurice Merleau-Ponty, phenomenological terms.

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