This thesis looks at the conception and representation of military men in British and French literature 1740-1789 as the military man moved from non-national ‘archetype’ (warrior, knight, noble) toward nationalised professional (officer, soldier, sailor). The dates that frame the corpus contain the last two European wars before the French Revolution: the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48) and the Seven Years War (1756-1763). In literature, the ancient concepts of heroism and glory had to contend with newer models of merit and virtue. Drawn together by warfare, this transformation also united British and French culture via two factors that lay outside the limits of national identity: shared origins in the dynastic realm and the public’s growing taste for narratives with contemporary settings and moral themes. The methodologies employed permit an examination of the cultural and historical dimension of identity construction: Judith Butler demonstrates how gender ‘styles’ are brought into being through performative acts, giving them coherence through repetition; styles of masculinity were re-imagined in eighteenth-century literature. Benedict Anderson’s explanation for the rise of nationalism reveals a process begun in the late eighteenth-century, displacing ancient and deeply held relationships. Five thematic chapters treat: the sword as ‘signifier’ for an ancient and founding masculinity and its relation to honour culture; young military men advancing merit and subalternism as alternatives to hierarchical models; the veteran, created by society and functioning as the ideological ‘other’ to the new civilian; the mercenary soldier and the moral significance of markets in men; and finally, the justicier, an eighteenth-century literary figure who combines a new model of chivalry with military authority to pursue ‘poetic justice.’ It is my contention that in this period, with the ‘nobleman’ long gone, the military man, not a ‘civilian’ and no longer associated with the ‘aristocrat’, became a separate class of man.

This is a practitioner writer’s comparative study of two novels; 'The Secret River' by Kate Grenville, and 'Heaven on Earth' by Rachel Bentham. The focus is on the techniques used to depict characters of markedly different cultures to that of the writers particularly the characters and culture of indigenous people, in the context of the historical novel. The research methods and the creative process used to develop indigenous and other characters are explored, providing a detailed critique of the creative work in terms of writerly choices of focus, narrative, imagery and voice. Both novels will be contextualised in terms of the writer's other works, with reference to 'otherness', anthropology and historical fiction generally. Overall, I shall be comparing the gains and losses resulting from the methods employed.

As part of a PhD by Publication, this contextualising thesis explores the contribution that Green's novels make to contemporary realistic fiction for young adults. Julia Green describes her development as a writer. She traces the themes and preoccupations in her young adult novels which link them as a significant body of work, and explores the connections with an older tradition of writing in terms of narrative style, language, depth of characterization and issues of interiority. Green writers as a practitioner critic, drawing on her close reading of texts (her own, and others') and using her own journals and other forms of writing such as blog posts and online articles as evidence of her writing process, alongside academic books and articles. The thesis is likely to be of interest to other writers as well as those studying children's literature.

This dissertation explores the relationship between transport and representation in James’s later fiction. Each chapter adopts a particular route: by carriage, boat, train, bicycle and automobile, examining its function and resonance within the Jamesian narrative. Texts discussed include What Maisie Knew (1897), The Sacred Fount (1901), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904), as well as lesser-known tales such as ‘The Patagonia’ (1888), ‘The Papers’ (1903), and ‘The Velvet Glove’ (1903). The thesis assumes a historical basis, addressing the considerable developments in transportation that occurred between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their appreciable impact upon manners and readerships. James’s texts are read alongside the bicycle’s association with media and print culture, the literature known as ‘railway reading’, and the cabby’s superior knowledge of geographical and sexual ‘relations’, as enlisted by the detective story and divorce-court narrative. At the same time, the project seeks to draw attention to the consonance between transport and the Jamesian, countering longstanding treatments of the author’s characters, person and aesthetic as implicitly static. As I argue, transport is not only materially crucial to James’s fictions, but informs aspects of style or subject deemed characteristically Jamesian: a preoccupation with belatedness (for the train traveller), an aversion to exposure or publicity (for the cyclist), and the cab journey’s association with a local and costly knowledge. Above all, I will argue, transport articulates James’s complex preoccupation with relationality, an investment which ranges from the intense subjectivity of his fictional worlds to their series of transatlantic encounters.

The starting point of this dissertation is a methodological question: how can corpus stylistics be used to analyse the syntax of literary fiction? A comparison of the syntax of Henry James’s late style in The Golden Bowl (1904) and his early style in Washington Square (1881) was used as a case study. While James’s late style is very widely discussed by literary critics and often seen as ‘difficult’, there has been very little evidence offered to substantiate this description. Within the extensive field of Henry James studies, there have been few linguistic descriptions of James’s prose. To remedy this, I compiled The Henry James Parsed Corpus (HJPC) from five chapters from each of the two novels. My analysis of the corpus showed that The Golden Bowl is more syntactically complex than Washington Square in a number of ways but only in sentences which do not contain direct speech. James’s idiosyncratic use of parenthesis was defined precisely using syntactic criteria and named delay. The Golden Bowl has more delay than Washington Square but also only in non-speech sentences. Only a small number of sentences have very high numbers of dependent clauses and/or delay. I argue that these exceptional sentences create the impression that the later text is homogeneously difficult. My research shows that this impression is deceptive; in fact the overwhelming majority of sentences in The Golden Bowl are no more syntactically complex than those of Washington Square. A secondary use of the HJPC is to assist close reading. Chapter outlines of the central chapter of each novel were generated and were found to mirror plot developments and dialogue sections. Salient sentences highlighted many key moments in the plot, or revealed aspects of characters’ personalities.

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This Ph.D. submission includes both an original novel, Myra, Beyond Saddleworth, and a commentary on the writing of the novel. Myra, Beyond Saddleworth takes as its premise the idea that Myra Hindley did not die when the authorities said she did, but was released and given a new identity before she eventually dies of lung cancer. The narrative addresses the themes of desire, evil, and personal responsibility through Myra's interaction with the contemporary world. The novel is set against the background of the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003. A parallel narrative features Beth Hunter, who knew Hindley when they were growing up. Her son Will is a soldier drawn into war crimes by his passion for a female fellow soldier. Personal responsibility, the potentially corrupting power of passion, and criminal abuse are explored as the two characters develop in the context of the legitimated violence of war. Interwoven with the contemporary story is that, told through analepsis, of the developing relationship between Hindley and Ian Brady as it led to the Moors Murders. This is focalized through Brady, and provides a context for the past. His contemporary story offers a contrast to Hindley's lack of moral engagement with the nature of her crimes. In the commentary on the writing of Myra, Beyond Saddleworth, I deal with the challenges presented by my material, and offer an account of the narrative strategies deployed as well as a rationale for structuring it as three interwoven narratives. The essay discusses my research for the novel, its intertexts, the historical background to events, and the problems of combining fact and fiction, all of which are considered in terms of the contemporary discourse of historiographic meta-fiction. The conclusion explores the ethical problems of using transgressive material in fiction, particularly as it relates to real life characters.

This thesis addresses the scarcity of critical material on Hilary Mantel’s writing in the academy. It questions the suitability of the ‘origin’ paradigm within the criticism that is available, which closes off the excess of Mantel’s texts through attempts to ‘unite’ her corpus. The ambiguity of her writing, and its suspicions, suggest Jacques Derrida’s thought as a pertinent means to read the differences in her work differently. The proximity of Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy with Derrida’s thought allows the significance of ellipsis to surface as a liberating catalyst for weaving the implications of Derrida’s thinking through the writing of Mantel. This synthesis constitutes my original contribution to knowledge because Mantel’s corpus has not been closely studied, Derrida’s notion of ellipsis has been eclipsed by philosophy, and the combination of these two ‘invisibilities’ is seminal. The structure of the first four chapters is closely informed by Nancy’s claim for elliptical description of Derrida’s thought. Each approaches an ‘origin’, undermining it through its paradoxical parallels with an aspect of Derridean thinking in order to demonstrate the in-excess of the Mantel text under scrutiny. First, the ‘origin’ behind the criticism is exploded, primarily that of the gothic/historic, via Derrida’s notion of play. Then the ‘gothic’ in Fludd is undermined in terms of space because it cannot be ‘placed’. The bodies in Beyond Black echo Derrida’s revenant, a connection that challenges bodily solidity as ‘arrival’. Finally, the ‘I’ of Giving Up the Ghost is read in terms of khōra, which allows autobiography, or autho-biography, to emerge as a nonplace that receives all properties while in itself possessing nothing. Chapters five and six describe a matrix of inquiry informed by Derrida’s thought, so as to understand the ‘frame’ of silence within Mantel’s work and its implications. The writing of this effacement gestures towards the ‘gift’ of the ex-centric centre, which constitutes the adestination of this thesis.

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