This critical commentary argues that the novels submitted (emphasis on Ammonite, The Blue Place, and Hild, with three others, Slow River, Stay, and Always briefly referenced), form a coherent body of work which centres and norms the experience of the Other, particularly queer women. Close reading of the novels demonstrates how specific word-choice and metaphor locate the examination of a focalised character’s body in its physical and sensory setting. This examination of the body is referred to as embodiment. The commentary argues that embodiment of the focalised character activates neural mechanisms within the reader to create and sustain narrative empathy. It explores the creation of focalised heterotopias and the narrative consequences for characters traditionally marginalised in our society but not in their own.

This thesis takes as its starting point the idea that the postcolonial is always in some way colonial and belated. It combines theories from Homi K. Bhabha and Rosi Braidotti, arguing that close readings of postcolonial texts should attentively investigate political and personal interconnections with the past, present and future. The thesis provides close readings of novels by Jean Rhys (1890-1979) and Hella S. Haasse (1918-2011). Both authors were born into colonial families in former colonies: Rhys in the former British West Indies; Haasse in the Dutch East Indies (now: Indonesia). They moved to Europe over the period of decolonisation. The close readings focus on critical nostalgic processes in Rhys’s and Haasse’s work, as published in the U.K and the Netherlands. Critical nostalgic processes draw attention to the authors’ insights into colonialist strategies, and connect such insights to contemporary politics in the U.K. and the Netherlands. The thesis further explores nostalgic perceptions of Rhys’s and Haasse’s work in contemporary newspaper reception, thus providing an overview of attitudes to cultural expressions of loss of the colonies at time of publication in the U.K. and the Netherlands, providing contemporary context to the authors’ critical insights. Rhys’s and Haasse’s novels demonstrate their awareness of violence done by colonial politics on a personal level. Both authors use themes of friendship and belonging to highlight the ambivalent split in colonialism. They foreground the workings of colonialist discourses and show limitations to the Self/Other dichotomy. Critical nostalgic processes thus shed new lights on violent histories of colonialism. The close readings demonstrate that Haasse’s and Rhys’s postcolonial imaginations enable ethical engagements with violent colonial pasts. As such, literature and imaginations of colonial history can provide alternatives to rigid identity politics in the postcolonial present, moving towards a truly post colonial future.

This thesis is a two-part exploration of a new type of novel-cum-short-story-collection hybrid - 'splice-fiction' - that has become increasingly prevalent over the last decade. The first part is an academic inquiry into the emergence and nature of the form. It charts the rise of splice-fiction amid changing notions of what a novel is / can be and considers what forces (market pressure, fractured life experiences, changing global realities, crossover influence from cinema) might have called the form into being. " Through examination of contemporary examples (eg. Tim Winton's The Turning, Sarah Hall's How to Paint a Dead Man, David Mitchell's Ghostwritten) in the light of authors identified as forerunners (V. S. Naipaul's In a Free State, Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women ... ), as well as secondary material and interviews with some of the authors, it seeks to discover the form's essential characteristics. The second part is a novel, Africa Junction, which exemplifies the form and articulates these characteristics, which include a wide geographical and time range, polyphony, a multi-strand narrative, tangential connections .

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This thesis analyses four texts produced during the so-called ‘devolutionary period’ in Scotland, between the referendum of 1979 and the opening of the Parliament at Holyrood in 1999. Due to the particular political exigencies of the time, texts from this period have often been read through the prism of cultural nationalism. One particularly influential such characterisation argues that ‘in the absence of elected political authority the task of representing the nation has been repeatedly devolved to its writers.’ Such a critical paradigm can impose a limiting and distorting framework on these texts, reducing the scope and complexity of their political interventions by insisting too exclusively upon reading them through the lens of nation. Therefore, in this thesis, I undertake an analysis of these novels not as documents of cultural nationalism, but through Gramsci’s description of times of interregnum. Gramsci suggested that the crisis precipitated at moments of regime change as one that ‘consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; and in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ This delineation of the fraught character of interregnum seems an apt and helpful way to elucidate the tensions and fault lines within devolutionary Scottish fiction, and help to evade the pitfalls of readings that would recruit these writers into a narrative of resurgent national confidence directly connected to the political process of devolution. In order to explore the dynamics of interregnum at work in devolutionary fiction, I will analyse four key canonical texts from 1979–1999; James Kelman’s How Late it was, How Late (1994), Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989), Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995) and Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998). I will be attentive to the ways that these novels literalise the figurative suggestions of Gramsci’s aphorism; probing instances of death, woundings/illnesses and interrupted reproduction. Within my discussion, I will be attentive to the fault lines within Scottishness explored by these texts, in particular paying attention to the way that the nation has been gendered in damaging or occluding ways. I will also contend that the interregnum liminality of these texts is also enacted in their spatial negotiations, as the novels repeatedly press against spatial boundaries. I hope to offer a perspective on this period in Scottish literature that complicates and refines the predominant cultural nationalism that has coloured their critical reception.

The ambition of this project is to demonstrate the cultural and literary importance of the maritime supernatural of nineteenth century literature. Addressing literary manifestations of the experience of being haunted at sea, I both expand and adjust the work of key scholars of maritime literature and history, who prioritize adventure narratives over the supernatural and focus on what they argue is the “real” experience and impetus of sea-faring, ranging from labour to adventure to empire-building. However, ghosts, legends and the supernatural are equally indispensable to the “real” experience of sea-faring. This thesis traces the maritime supernatural as a response to the anxieties arising from the imperial, religious and technological formations of the nineteenth century. Chapter one constructs a theoretical framework based on shipboard life and labour and the uncanny. Working within this frame, chapter two considers three key elements of the maritime supernatural – supernatural actor, haunted space and haunting environment – demonstrating the particular ways in which this literary genre overturns maritime lore and challenges norms and conventions. This leads to analyses of works of three popular sailor-authors, Frederick Marryat (1792-1848), William Clark Russell (1844-1911) and William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918). These three authors, well-known in their own time, are now often overlooked in studies of maritime literature, mostly because their narratives do not have the literary quality of canonical works. However, their contemporary popularity does not only indicate their writings resonated with their audiences; their apparent lack of literary quality highlights the immediacy of their concerns. Frederick Marryat’s The Phantom Ship, serialized between 1837 and 1839, seizes the supernatural element in order to interrogate Christianity. After a hiatus in the mid-nineteenth century when no new maritime supernatural narratives were published, William Clark Russell essentially revived the genre with The Death Ship in 1888. Russell’s nostalgic tale both expresses a longing for the past and anxiety for the future of shipboard labour. By the early 1900s, William Hope Hodgson’s early weird fiction gives a new spin to the genre, remythologising the sea into modern tales that reflect contemporary crises of maritime representation. This draws to a conclusion that complicates the notion of the maritime space as unproblematic site of nostalgia, modernity, religion or empire, and shows that a serious consideration of the maritime supernatural genre enriches the current discourse of maritime literature.

Emerging work in animal studies and posthumanist theory has revealed the species boundary to be a site of contestation, where species identities are dissolved and refashioned according to the pressures of historical contingency. Cold War cultural criticism has shown that the years following the Second World War were marked by anxieties concerning the hegemony of technological reason, and in particular the new potential for mass death made possible by the technological militarism of the Cold War states. This period might be understood as a transition to ‘late modernity’, where the classical subject of humanism is everywhere being put under erasure by the emergence of technological forces which appear to diminish human agency and autonomy. For postwar critics of technology, these new forces threaten to bestialise the human, and I aim to show how figures of animality are central to the cultural work of respecifying human subjectivity in response to its dispersal by technology. This thesis traces the points of connection between the discourses of animal studies and Cold War criticism. Animal studies provides an account of the formation of the humanist subject of modernity through its abjection or transcendence of animality. I contend that this analysis must be supplemented by a closer attention to the culture of the postwar decades, where the more confident humanism of ‘high’ modernity is placed into crisis by the dominance of technological reason. At the same time, I aim to contribute to Cold War criticism through my contention that its key preoccupations—including individualism and mass culture, social conformism, technological anxieties and nuclear conflict—are articulated through a discourse of species that has remained largely unexamined. This thesis covers a range of materials including mid-century farm fictions, science fiction critiques of mass culture, critical-theoretical indictments of instrumental reason, and the military discourses of nuclear strategists. I argue that in all of these textual locations human subjectivity is revealed as precarious, threatened by the dual pressures of technological development and imperfectly transcended animality.

This project is an investigation into the character of the Christian imagination. It examines in depth three central aspects: paradox, anarchy and the childlike, acknowledging that within each category there is something of the unreasonable or nonrational. Rather than trying to iron out or explain away the logically problematic, the thesis explores the possibility that an idea can be contrary to rationality and yet be true and meaningful. It is demonstrated that a number of central tenets of the Christian doctrine require a faith that often goes beyond reason or does not exclusively identify with it. The study involves the systematic analysis of central stylistic features of literary nonsense using Lewis Carroll's famous Alice stories as exemplar. The construction of a nonpejorative model of nonsense is then used to introduce analogous components of Christian theology with a particular focus on the doctrine of Salvation. Sparked by G. K. Chesterton's description of the Fall as the condition of ‘being born upside-down', soteriology is conceived of as a tospsy-turvy reorientation of the will and an imaginative attunement to the absurd. The project culminates in the setting-up of a nonsense theology by considering the practical and evangelical ramifications of associating Christian faith with nonsense literature; and conversely, the value of relating theological principles to the study of literary nonsense. Ultimately, the research suggests that faith is always a risk and that a strictly rational apologetic misrepresents the nature of Christian truth.

My PhD theses explore how the role of music in novels can move beyond simple inspiration to active, working component, through use of musical reference, form, and structure. My two doctoral dissertations seek to explore how this breed of intermediality, when successfully rendered, can yield new insights and revelations to the prose itself, specifically in terms of characterization. My primary thesis (creative thesis) is a new novel, '14 Variations From White', with characterization based on structures and instrumentation found in Elgar's 'Variations on a Theme' ('The Enigma Variations'). Principally, it addresses the issue of characterization in light of this intermediality from the creative side of things: what specific instrumental association can bring to the process of writing novelistic characters. The critical component of my project explores how, in existing literature, the linking of novelistic characters with particular pieces of music can affect their process of characterization, with a specific focus on 'The Song Beneath the Ice' by Joe Fiorito, 'The Time of Our Singing' by Richard Powers, and 'An Equal Music' by Vikram Seth.

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