This thesis analyses the representation of the novelist as a fictional character in British and Irish literary fiction from the late 1920s, when the character first began to appear concurrently in the work of numerous authors, until the end of the twentieth-century. In the twenty-firstcentury the character has retained its prominence, which is why selected supplementary novels written post-2000 have been included in the early chapters (although not the case studies) in order to demonstrate ongoing critical issues and suggest opportunities for further study. The most recently written novel to appear centrally – that is as a case study – is William Boyd’s Any Human Heart – which was actually published in 2002. However, as Logan Mountstuart was originally conceived as part of Boyd’s 1998 Nat Tate: An American Artist, 1928-1960, I believe that Logan’s inclusion is justified within the twentieth-century time frame. Although the specific novelist-character (as opposed to the more general artistcharacter) does feature within the nineteenth-century British novel, notably in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) and George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), the character only begins to appear with increased regularity at the end of the 1920s with Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928) and W. Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale (1930). The aim of this thesis is to interrogate the variety of metafictional purposes and metaphorical which the novelist-character can serve within the narrative, and to explore a range of critical issues that the presence of this character raises. This thesis also argues that the specific novelist-character is subject to a more cynical portrayal than the idealised artist-character/hero found in eighteenth and nineteenth-century novels, and examines causes behind this contrasting treatment. In order to qualify as a novelist-character, the character in question must identify or define themself explicitly as a novelist rather than as any other kind of writer or artist. They must also demonstrate evidence of (or a preoccupation with) undertaking the process of writing a novel, and awareness of their position as a novelist. Many of the novelist-characters looked at are also the first person narrators of their novels; however it does not necessarily follow that all first person narrators are also novelist-characters. Although first person narrators may be seen to be telling a story, the novelist-narrators selected for this thesis explicitly identify as novelists, and repeated references are made throughout the novel to their own writing. In several instances they also appear to author some or all of the narrative in which they feature. Post-WWI, instances of generally artistic protagonists diminish, whilst the novelist-character begins to proliferate and continues to do so throughout the twentieth-century and into the twenty-first. This thesis will look at a range of historical, critical, and cultural reasons to sug-gest why this shift – from artist to novelist-character – occurs and why the novelist-character comes to be represented in such a distinct way. Depictions of the novelist-character are seen to be influenced by various, often contradictory, theoretical and historical thinking on the fig-ure of the novelist, in comparison with the figures of the artist, the author, and the writer. These are explored in Chapters One and Two. Preliminary study indicated that there was no true progressive chronological deterioration of the novelist-character. Although appearances of the character in the 1980s-90s are seen as increasingly ambiguous, the character’s representation does not necessarily become more negative towards the end of the century. Instead it becomes apparent that the character was, from the outset, typically depicted with derision – in fact the earliest novel looked at, Hux-ley’s Point Counter Point, contains one of the most negative portraits. Whilst this does not preclude the impact of certain historical factors upon the portrayal of the novelist-character it dictated a thematic rather than chronological organisation of the case studies, which make up Chapters Three, Four, and Five. The scope of this study, along with the lack of preceding work on the analysis of the novelist-character, has necessitated the wide range of novels ex-plored within this thesis. Each of the case study chapters focuses on a particular purpose which the novelist-character is seen to serve within the novel and examines it along with similar or comparative utilisations of the character. The three different aspects of the novelist-character’s function explored in Chapters Three-Five are (i) autobiographical – in which the writer utilises their own biographical material in the depiction of the novelist-character; (ii) framing device – in which the novelist-character is employed as part of a metafictional frame narrative; (iii) metaphorical – in which the novelist-character is seen to perform a role which acts as a metaphor for the function of the novelist.

This study identifies and explores a recurrent trope in transatlantic literature by women in which the fictional female reader is used as a site on which to explore the anxiety of female authorship. Through their configurations of the reading woman in their fiction, the female authors examined in this thesis attempt to reconcile themselves with the established opposition between femininity and creativity that persisted in transatlantic literary criticism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. As a writer who was a literary icon for subsequent women writers, and who explores this trope in a complex and often ambivalent way, George Eliot is central to this tradition. Her masculinisation in literary criticism, combined with her failure to commit fully to her androgynous model of female authorship – a model which asserted women’s capacity to write in both a ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ way – had serious, long-lasting repercussions for subsequent female authors. Women writers were faced with an inescapable female literary role model who was at once proof of the compatibility of femininity and artistry, and yet who was frequently presented as an exception to other female authors and used to reinforce bias against women writers. In responding to Eliot’s reception and appropriating her use of the female reader in their fiction, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Edith Wharton and Dorothy Richardson added their own voices to the discussions about female authorship taking place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. For these authors, Eliot became a point of reference from which to articulate their own attitudes towards bias against women that persisted in some branches of literary criticism. In defining their attitudes towards Eliot and the contradictory ideas she and her fiction presented, they were exploring their identities as female artists.

This thesis examines representations of undeath in relation to political power over life in a selection of contemporary British novels published between 1990 and 2010. The novels I focus on draw significantly on themes and imagery from the Gothic genre in order to reflect on the ways in which political, legal and social institutions both produce and depend on certain constructions of human life; on the one hand, the construction of life that is considered worthy of being supported and preserved; and, on the other hand, the construction of life that is judged to be a threat to the health of a population, and is thus abandoned to the experience of legal or social ‘undeath’. Although this thesis begins by situating this form of undeath in relation to Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics, it draws primarily on subsequent philosophical reflections on the intersection of politics and life in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Jacques Derrida. All of these thinkers pose crucial questions concerning the relationship between life and politics, law, and sovereignty, as well as interrogating divisions between life and technology and between human and animal life which prove critical in decisions on which lives will be fostered and which lives abandoned. I argue that the Gothic genre constitutes a key resource for contemporary British writers whose work displays an insistent concern with the relationship between political power and biological life; moreover, I also argue that the novels in question often point to moments where theories of ‘bare life’ and of biopolitics in their current forms sometimes struggle to fully account for diverse experiences of being undead before political power over life in the contemporary period.

This thesis examines the way in which a number of contemporary Australian novels use the contested figure of the early convict to reflect on, and participate in, the recent heated debates over Australian history and culture. It argues that while these novels represent an attempt to challenge the traditional narrative of the nation’s past promulgated by the Anglo-Celtic settler population, they predominantly reproduce rather than overturn the myths and stories that have been the hallmark of settler Australia. I examine the novels in three overlapping contexts: in relation to the way in which Australia’s convict history has shaped and influenced contemporary perceptions of nation and belonging; in relation to the tradition of convict fiction from Marcus Clarke onwards; and in relation to contemporary debates about Australian identity and history. I start with two contextual chapters: the first considers the foundational role of early convictism in creating the myths and stories that Anglo-Celtic Australians use to order their lives and how the convict legacy has left its mark on contemporary Australian society; the second examines the way in which early convict fiction established key aspects of settler history and identity, before considering how the genre of convict fiction responded to challenges to the nature of Australian society in the 1960s and 1970s. I then go on to examine critically the response of contemporary convict novels to the more fundamental challenges to traditional representations of Australian history and identity posed in the period immediately following the Bicentenary of British settlement, considering them in the contexts of Aboriginal dispossession, myths of exile and settler relationships to the land. I conclude that while these novels seek to reconceptualize the past they mostly fail to imagine an alternative vision for the country and consequently endorse rather than undermine the narratives they seek to challenge.

This thesis argues that Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell employ textually important objects to explore women’s demeaning status in patriarchal societies and their construction of agency in such circumstances. In their novels, both Austen and Gaskell portray female characters as interacting in various ways with material things: the characters experience objects through their five senses, create them, recycle them, inhabit them, or purchase and possess them. It is true that not every item connected with the novels’ heroines bears the same significance, but those that play a prominent part in the plot or receive unusual descriptive attention convey messages that the novels do not express explicitly. This thesis follows thing theorists’ call for a reading that begins with objects, in particular the paradigm Elaine Freedgood offers of recovering literary objects’ materiality and socio-historical backgrounds before incorporating those veiled meanings into novelistic interpretation. Nevertheless, this work also differs from the thing theory studies by which it is informed in that it is centred upon the perception that the meanings of things are gendered and relies heavily on the narrative framework of a text in its choice of objects for discussion. In my five chapters, I investigate each of the two novelists’ object worlds and focus on things with which their female characters directly engage, mainly domestic interiors and luxuries. My examination follows a rough chronological order, beginning with Austen’s six major works before moving on to Gaskell’s novels. This thesis suggests that Austen and Gaskell, despite the separation of three decades, use objects in their writing to explore an issue that is relevant not only to their female characters but also to women in general: the construction of agency within the existing patriarchal structure.

In this thesis, I trace the representation of different forms of female cultural, economic and political activism in a selection of novels by the South African novelist, J. M.Coetzee, and the Palestinian novelist, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. Using Edward Said’s contrapuntal theory as a critical method, the thesis investigates the interaction between politics and literature, focusing particularly on the representation of women, in South Africa and Palestine, which are both viewed as territories under apartheid. It analyses the differences and the similarities in the ways the notions of female nationalism and identity are represented in the selected novels, identifying a shared humanist perspective on female resistance, expressed by all three authors. Such a humanist-oriented, contrapuntal perspective is sustained by a secular understanding and a hybrid interpretation of different socio-cultural groups, which question established norms and traditions, expanding the boundaries of established cultural identity to emphasize acceptance of diversity, nonviolence, and co-existence. The three authors demonstrate that political polarization perpetuates antagonism and violence, while political-cultural dialogue helps to shift the focus onto possible paths of mutual understanding and cooperation. In this way, female resistance in the chosen novels symbolizes a humanist effort not only to redefine exclusive and hierarchical cultural notions of nationalism, authenticity and identity, but also to build inclusive socio-cultural orders free of gender bias.

This thesis examines the way in which four women writers of the 1790s appropriated the architectural metaphors of the Revolution debate in their Gothic novels. By transforming the political metaphor of the Gothic building into a material environment in their writing, this thesis argues that Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Robinson, and Jane Austen staked their own variant positions in contemporary debates regarding revolution and reform. In the 1790s, the more general struggle for political and social improvement was linked by writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft to the need for reform of sexual inequality in society. By closely examining the Gothic building – typically a hostile environment for its female inhabitants – this thesis argues that the Gothic house or castle functions in these novels as a critique of domestic, as well as state, politics. Chapter one begins by exploring the synergies between architecture, politics, and the Gothic novel in the eighteenth century. In this way, this thesis contributes to a neglected yet emerging area of Gothic scholarship: the complex and symbiotic relationship between architecture and the Gothic novel. Chapter two considers the way in which Charlotte Smith exploits contemporary associations of Gothic architecture in The Old Manor House (1793) to subvert the political ideology embedded in the architectural metaphors of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In chapters three and four, the architectural descriptions of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Robinson are read in dialogue with those of Edmund Burke, Hannah More, John Thelwall, and Mary Wollstonecraft: in Radcliffe and Robinson's novels, this thesis argues, the simple structure of revolutionary reform is favoured over the ancient castle of counter-revolutionary custom. Finally, chapter five challenges the critical conception of Jane Austen as a political reactionary by examining the way in which her depiction of architecture in Northanger Abbey (1817) destabilises the most perniciously gendered aspects of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Violence and Dystopia is a critical examination of imitative desire, scapegoating and sacrifice in selected contemporary Western dystopian narratives through the lens of René Girard’s mimetic theory. The first chapter offers an overview of the history of Western utopia/dystopia with a special emphasis on the problem of conflictive mimesis and scapegoating violence, and a critical introduction to Girard’s theory. The second chapter is devoted to J.G. Ballard’s seminal novel Crash (1973). It is argued that the car crash functions as a metaphor for conflictive mimetic desire and leads to a quasi-sacrificial crisis as defined by Girard for archaic religion. The attempt of the medieval propheta-figure to resolve the crisis through violence fails and leads to potential violence without end. The third chapter focuses on the psychogeographical writings of Iain Sinclair. Walking the streets of London he represents the excluded underside of the world of Ballardian speed. The walking subject is portrayed in terms of the expelled victim of Girardian theory. The fourth chapter considers violent crowds as portrayed by Ballard’s late fiction, the writings of Stewart Home and David Peace’s GB84 (2004). In accordance with Girard’s hypothesis, the discussed narratives reveal the failure of scapegoat expulsion to restore peace to the potentially self-destructive violent crowds. The fifth chapter examines the post-apocalyptic environments resulting from failed scapegoat expulsion and mimetic conflict out of control, as portrayed in Sinclair’s Radon Daughters (1994), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003) and Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006). In conclusion it will become evident that Girard’s theory forms an indispensable analytical tool uncovering the pivotal themes of imitation and scapegoating in the discussed narratives: themes largely ignored in current scholarship on dystopia and secondary literature on the focussed authors.

This thesis investigates Free Indirect Discourse for speech presentations [FIS] in the work of Jane Austen, and presents the discovery that it is a substantial feature of her narrative style, unexpectedly versatile, performing various functions and effects, ranging from the basic to the sophisticated. Critics have often discussed the primary function of Free Indirect Discourse for both speech and thought presentations [FID] as a means of merging the voices of the narrator and a character. They have focused especially on Free Indirect Discourse for thought presentations [FIT] as an important vehicle for presenting the heroine’s subjective ideas within the narrative. A primary function of FIS identified by previous critics is, on the other hand, the narrator’s mimicry of a character’s speech, owing to the gap in the dual perspectives of the narrator and a character. I have made a strict distinction between FIS and FIT and conduct a full survey of Austen’s FIS with a stylistic approach, which demonstrates that Austen’s FIS is not limited to the basic functions formerly discussed. I propose that it serves at least eleven functions, both satirical and non-satirical. I have given names to these functions, for example, FIS for ‘Formal Politeness’, ‘Condensed Conversations’, ‘Voices in Harmony’ and ‘Filtering Information’. The narrator in Austen’s novels sometimes restrains her subjective view and exists as a transparent mediator to present a character’s speech, as in modernist novels. Austen uses these different functions of FIS in specific episodes to silently guide the reader’s interpretation. On a larger scale, Austen uses the embedded nature of FIS in contrast with FIT or Direct Thought in the foreground, which is similar to the painter’s technique of using ‘light and shade’ to create perspective. As a case study, I have analysed Austen’s technique of FIS for ‘Concealment of Plot Development’ in Emma. As part of my survey, I also revise the origin of Austen’s FID. Critics have presumed that Austen must have discovered FID in the work of immediate precursors, particularly Frances Burney. It is true that the writers of the late eighteenth century sporadically used FIT. However, in respect of FIS, I argue that its origin can be traced back to the early eighteenth century, and changes in punctuation marks for speech in English typesetting. Proto-FIS and FIS occasionally appear in the work of major writers of the eighteenth century, such as Samuel Richardson, Joseph Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Austen may have gained ideas about FIS from the limited usage in their works. However, while FIT became a feature of the fiction of some writers, such as Charlotte Smith and Ann Radcliffe in the 1790s, FIS was rarely used in this period. Austen excavated the proto-style and developed it with remarkable speed. Austen is not just the first writer who employed FIS in a substantial way, but a brilliant exponent of the technique.

With a language, landscape and culture unfamiliar to the majority of British readers, Latin America is a puzzling and anomalous presence in British modernist fiction. Yet, in the work of Conrad, Lawrence and Lowry it is also a setting that constitues a minor tradition in its own right and one that offers a distorted reflection of the concerns an anxieties back home: from uncertainties over the future of the British Empire to the traumatic recogntion of loss that attended the First and Second World Wars. In addition to these political and historical concerns, the representation of Latin America in British modernist fiction is also entangled with a corresponding crisis of culture. Consistently Latin America offers itself to writers in English as a suitable correlative to concerns which range from disturbing visions of the natural worls to the disorientation that attended the engagement with the culturally unfamiliar along with the uncertainties that were related to the emergence of a truly global economy in which Britain modernist fiction is far from static. As this interest in Latin America matures, there is a progressive movement from the initial sense of doubt (Conrad) along with a contrary sense of desperation (Lawrence) towards a final sense of resignation (Lowry). As such, Latin America can be thought of as a fictional space in the British modernist novel - in the end, more of a fantasy than a reality - that reflects the frightening apprehension of a new world in which British fiction had found a suitable place to come to terms with some of its deepest fears and anxieties.