This project consists of a reappraisal of children’s historical time-distort literature and a children’s novel within the genre, entitled The Serpent House, aimed at readers aged 9 -12. The submission consists therefore of a critical piece of academic research into the genre, which reflects throughout on how the two pieces of work have informed each other. The research component of the project argues that the critical consensus, which suggests that children’s historical literature employing time-distort elements is prone to conservatism and convention, misrepresents this body of writing. As I show from its earliest examples, it has been a genre at least as progressive as any other in children’s literature. An overview and two detailed case studies demonstrate these innovative elements. The chronological overview and the texts that make up the case studies illustrate ways in which writing of this kind has been and continues to be experimental at a variety of levels. Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988) was chosen for its challenging content and Gary Crew’s Strange Objects (1990) for its experimental form. Analysing the primary texts and the related scholarship was part of the process by which I shaped my aspirations and creative decisions while writing The Serpent House and so the academic submission leads into a reading of my children’s novel, which forms 70 per cent of the submission.

The literature of the Troubles has nearly always been thought of in terms of male writing whilst female authors dealing with the same topic have been comparatively neglected by critics. With a focus on Troubles short fiction, this thesis aims to examine the literary and cultural significance of a group of women writers' responses to the Northern Irish conflict. The thesis explores (in chapter 1) why Northern Irish women writers have not gained the same widespread recognition as their male counterparts, how and to what degree their fictional treatment of the Troubles differs from that of male authors, and what are the attractions of the short story form for the female imagination in the context of the Troubles. The textual analysis of the short stories is informed by cultural materialist, Marxist and feminist theories and is theme-based, covering victimhood (chapter 2), intimidation (chapter 3), romances across the divide (chapter 4), paramilitarism (chapter 5), and political incarceration (chapter 6) as major topics. The analysis shows that women's Troubles short stories tend to be concerned with how political violence affects women at a private/domestic, psychological and material level. Through the use of a primarily realist aesthetics, these writers demythologise conventional constructs of gender and cultural myths ingrained in Northern Irish society. They also challenge hegemonic notions of the nation by integrating the domestic plot into the larger historical context of political violence. Northern Irish women writers of Troubles short fiction offer alternative female riented narratives of the conflict that oppose the dominant discourses coming from male authors and from male-dominated groups and institutions (police, military and paramilitary forces, government, political parties, and churches). This thesis concludes that these women writers have rewritten the Troubles by paying more attention to private histories that highlight the quotidian, the domestic, the personal and the feminine than to a public History that has mainly centred on the doings of men and the binaries of colonialism and anti-colonialism.

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Early in her long essay On Violence, Hannah Arendt says “no one engaged in thought about history and politics can remain unaware of the enormous role violence has played in human affairs, and it is at first glance rather surprising that violence has been singled out so seldom for special consideration.” In the more than four decades since the publication of her book, much has been done to remedy this omission. Violence is everywhere now. As, through the eyes of our novelists, philosophers and cultural theorists, we look back on the wreck of the twentieth century, we see it as Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History perceived it, as a constellation of violence piled upon violence, a chaotic record of man’s brutality against man. This thesis sets out to chart the presentation of violence in the modern novel, looking specifically at the work of JM Coetzee and WG Sebald, two writers who have not only given us detailed accounts of the operation of violence in their work, but whose novels perform the ethical uncertainties of writing within a tradition that has been tainted by that violence. Using theorists from Benjamin to Arendt to Giorgio Agamben, I will look at the ethical and aesthetic decisions that each writer has made and question how and with what success Coetzee and Sebald have managed to write within the wreckage of a tradition scarred by violence. In wrestling with the subject of violence, modern novelists have had to discard many of the formal certainties of previous ages, tainted as they are by historical violence. I will show how violence, and the need to shape a narrative mode with which to address a debased modern existence, has led to formal inventiveness, to generic hybrids, to complex philosophical performances wrapped within the covers of books calling themselves “novels.” I will look at Sebald and Coetzee’s use of silence, of history, of other writers’ work in their attempts to find a voice with which to narrate the violence of modernity.

This thesis examines the London novel of the 1930s, with a focus on texts that made the ordinary, or typical, Londoner’s visual experience of the city their subject. While the main emphasis is on works by Patrick Hamilton, Jean Rhys, Storm Jameson, and George Orwell, several less-known and neglected London writers of the period are also considered. While the curiosity about the inner lives of ordinary city dwellers was not new in the 1930s, the rendering of Londoners’ interiorities through their visual perceptions became a prominent trend in the London novel during the decade. Importantly, visual experiences of the city in the novels under discussion are no longer the exclusive property of a sensitive, omniscient narrator. Rather, London is increasingly seen from the unexceptional, typically lower-middle-class observer’s point of view. The London novels discussed here were set in the city's spaces of leisure - cinemas, teashops, café bars, and the brightly lit streets of the West End. For the writers under discussion, these were much more than just settings. The spatial organisation of London’s public sphere between the Wars shaped not only the external appearance of the city, but also modes of being within it. In this thesis, then, the cultural history of 1930s London informs readings of the period’s writing. Readings of 1930s photographs form an integral part of the thesis. Literature and photography, insofar as the ordinary Londoner was concerned, occupied similar fields of enquiry. As the art form that was not only itself visual, but that frequently made others’ looking its subject, photography is closer to the 1930s London novel than any other mode of expression, and photographs both illustrate and illuminate the literary works under discussion.

Around 1840 the Continental watering place took off as a destination of international appeal—and as a topic in an internationalizing print culture. My thesis, drawing on a broad range of theories of intertextuality, uses the case of the waters to model the farrago of transmissions, contacts and collisions that go into the making of a common-place in discourse. In particular I show how writing from multiple genres and national literatures helped establish the spa's identity as a deeply ambivalent locus of encounter—a venue that both tickled and deflated cosmopolitan ambition. Key points of reference include Dostoevskii'sThe Gambler, Edmund Yates's sensation novel Black Sheep (both 1867) and Henry James's spa fiction (‘Eugene Pickering’, Roderick Hudson and Confidence)—but also Punch and the Russian satirical journal The Alarm Clock (Budilk’nik), the travel writing of Joel Tyler Headley and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Murray's Handbook for Travellers on the Continent. The elaboration of a topic is above all an exercise in collective (if not concerted) sign-making; and like any potent sign, I suggest with reference to temporally outlying works of resort fiction by Bruce Chatwin, Mikhail Tsypkin and W.G. Sebald, the nineteenth century's 'watering-place text' stubbornly refuses confinement to the age that produced it.

This thesis constitutes the first detailed attempt to compare British and German contemporary prose fiction in relation to the representation and transmission of collective memories of the Second World War. The primary aim of this comparison is to establish the existence of a transnational literary approach adopted by authors to address questions of how to remember the events that occurred during the Second World War in the absence of living memory. I will argue that prose fiction contributes to the interdisciplinary field of what could be loosely called 'memory studies' and that the similarities between British and German fictional responses to the Second World War indicate that there is a development towards a subgenre of memory fiction that transcends national boundaries. The work has identified the origins of platoon firing, its earliest form and its subsequent developments during the War of Spanish Succession, thereby correcting the long standing misidentification of the form that it first took and the idea that it remained largely unchanged from the 1680s to the 1740s. It has also identified when changes occurred and analysed the implications for the effectiveness of the firepower and, in some instances, been able to demonstrate in absolute terms, the effectiveness of that firepower. This work will enable military historians to achieve an understanding of how British infantry fought, how they achieved what they did, rather than simply what those achievements were. In using a practical military history approach it also proposes a new approach to military history that will enable an analysis of events to be given, rather than a simple narrative.

The figure of the artist-hero has dominated literary narratives since the Romantic period. With the development of the first wave of feminism and the New Woman, the artist- heroine began to emerge in the literature of the twentieth century. This marks a shift from the traditional Bildungsroman narrative, which typically ends in marriage, to the Künstlerroman as female protagonists were increasingly depicted as autonomous artists. Modernist women writers, in particular, engaged with the figure of the woman artist, and issues surrounding gender and artistry. This thesis explores the intersection of modernism, gender and creativity in the work of Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Vita Sackville-West. Often misclassified as Bildungsromane, the question of whether the female protagonists in these novels are read as developing artists is not a mere issue of taxonomy: it is about women’s autonomy, education, professionalisation, and their right to individual self-expression as artists. Whilst some critics believe the boundary separating these two genres is virtually nonexistent, there is, in fact a dividing line which women have been barred from crossing as professional artists. These modernist women writers, in their representation of the woman artist, engage in much wider questions about the patriarchal, imperial and national narratives which contain and define women and their artistic endeavours. In The Voyage Out, for example, Rachel Vinrace’s death operates as a refusal of a system which would define her as imperial wife and mother, but would also limit her musicality. These writers explore the division between the amateur and the artist, the training and public role of the woman artist at the turn of the twentieth century. Furthermore, they examine and reinterpret the necessary conditions needed to achieve artistic fulfilment. The thesis situates this writing in the context of women’s education; May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier (1919), for example, questions the boundaries of acceptable female education by focusing specifically on Mary’s interest in Greek studies. In Pilgrimage (1915-67), Richardson radically redefines what constitutes the art object through the creative process of everyday life. The question of marriage and motherhood recurs throughout these texts and, except for Lady Slane in All Passion Spent (1931), the other artist-heroines reject these domestic roles. These authors, including Sackville-West, examine the compatibility of the professional life of the woman artist with wifehood and motherhood. Crucially, this thesis investigates the stylistic choices— whether stream of consciousness, the second person perspective—these modernist writers employ to investigate women and creative expression.

This PhD thesis explores the reviews of George Eliot, Geraldine Jewsbury and Margaret Oliphant to demonstrate their contributions to the evolution of a theory of the novel in the nineteenth century. In particular, it examines Eliot's reviews in the Westminster Review and the Leader in the 1850s, Jewsbury's reviews in the Athenaeum from 1850 to 1870 and Oliphant's reviews in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine from 1850 to 1870. The analysis of Eliot's, Jewsbury's and Oliphant's criticism of the nineteenth-century British novel focuses on such key concepts as genre (realism, sensation fiction, etc.), characterisation, plot, story and narrative structure. It shows how the reviews by these women helped to shape the methods and the discourse of literary criticism. This thesis also includes an exploration of Victorian periodical culture in connection with economic, cultural and social questions of the mid-nineteenth century, especially relating to the literary marketplace including book publishing practices, the purpose of fiction and the role of the critic, novelist and reader. Since Eliot, Jewsbury and Oliphant reviewed anonymously, they were able to engage in a literary dialogue about the purposes and practices of fiction in an arena where the question of their gender was not in the foreground. This thesis does, however, demonstrate the different career paths open to women in the Victorian literary marketplace. Comparing and contrasting the literary criticism of these three reviewers, this study evaluates their work from new perspectives and argues for greater recognition of the role of these writers to the development of the discipline of literary criticism. It thus constitutes an original contribution to existing scholarship. Overall, this thesis contributes to and extends research in three major areas of literary study: Victorian periodicals; the literary criticism of Eliot, Jewsbury and Oliphant; and the history of literary theory.

The study examines the nature and functioning of genre in the commercial marketplace and the negotiations concerning genre labelling that a contemporary writer must undertake in relation to publishers’ decisions, reader expectations and critical responses. Part One assesses and theorises some problems of genre by means of an exploration of the terms ‘crime fiction’ and ‘literary fiction’. Focusing on the perceived conventions and boundaries of the two genres and some important sub-genres, it explores the extent to which such perceptions not only reinforce the notion of a divide between novels labelled as ‘crime’ and novels labelled as ‘literary’, but also perpetuate a debate about the ranking of texts on a ladder of literary merit. Part Two is a self-reflective critical appraisal of my eight novels, written over the fifteen-year period between 1998 and 2013, which underwent this process of commercial classification in both Britain and America, the main English language markets in which they were published. It offers a literary analysis of the novels in the context of their critical reception and in the light of my growing perception of the limitations of crime genre conventions on my choices as a writer and, incrementally, my attempts to outdistance those limitations. Part Three consists of conclusions: these concern the influence of a reader’s knowledge of genre on the reading experience as well as on reader expectations, the influence of a writer’s reputation for one kind of fiction on any aspiration to be recognised as having written another, and the tension, in the lived experience of a fiction writer, between the theoretical fluidity of genre boundaries and their rigidity in practice.