British Children’s Literature has a long and distinguished history. In fact it could be argued that in the late seventeenth and increasingly in the eighteenth century, Britain took the lead in developing a new kind of literature especially designed for children. The Puritans were the first to recognise the potential for material specifically targeted at children as a means of reforming the personal piety of all individuals, including children. As a result, educational, instructional and religious books for children began to appear followed later by books retelling myths, legends and oral tales and later again books intended to entertain and engage children at all stages of their development. Included as part of British Children’s Literature was the work of Scottish authors. Indeed writers such as Sir Walter Scott, George MacDonald and J.M Barrie produced works that have since become Children’s Literature classics and they themselves had significant influence on diverse children’s authors including writers such as Lewis Carroll and C.S.Lewis. Though the work of Scottish authors was included in British Children’s Literature, it was not recognised specifically for its distinctively Scottish elements. In fact, increasingly from the nineteenth century, it began to be labelled as ‘English’ Children’s Literature even though it meant ‘British’. Scotland had been a separate nation until the Act of Union in 1707. After that, even as a ‘stateless nation’, Scotland retained its own education system, its own legal system and its own national church. Scottish Literature continued to flourish during this period making use of English and Scots language, as well as Gaelic, to produce an illustrious and influential literature of world renown. As Roderick Watson has observed, “the main ‘state’ left to a ‘stateless nation’ may well be its state of mind, and in that territory it is literature that maps the land.” (Watson, 1995: xxxi) Since devolution in 1997, Scotland’s literature sector has undergone an unprecedented period of rapid, sustained and dramatic expansion, a process paralleled by the growing profile of Scottish writers internationally. During the same period Scottish Children’s Literature and Scottish children’s writers have not received the same attention, though their progress has been just as significant. In the year 2000 the Modern Language Association of America recognised Scottish Literature as a national literature, and presumably Scottish Children’s Literature is included as part of that, but it was not specifically highlighted. Even up until 2006, Scottish Children’s Literature was not generally included or even mentioned in Scottish Literature anthologies or histories of Scottish Literature. When in January 2006 the Scottish Executive unveiled Scotland’s Culture, its new cultural policy, it gave Scottish Literature a prominent place. At the same time this document also acknowledged the importance of education in giving access to and highlighting Scotland’s literary heritage. It became all the more important then to recognise the existence of a corpus of work that is recognisable as Scottish Children’s Literature existing separately from but complementary to English Children’s literature and which could be used in schools by teachers and read by children in order to explore and interrogate their own cultural history and identity. This thesis seeks to investigate whether a distinctive Scottish Children’s Literature exists and, if so, to identify those aspects that make it distinctive. Further, if Scottish Children’s Literature exists, how does it become a repository for the formation of culture, identity and nationhood and how does this impact on young Scottish readers? In order to carry out this investigation the study adopts an integrated, humanistic and multi-dimensional approach towards Scottish Children’s fiction. It draws selectively and discursively on theories of reading, reader response and close reading skills for heuristic purposes; that is, on methods that further the overall hermeneutical task of enlarging understanding of the phenomenon, though no particular theoretical approach to analysis has been privileged over another. It draws on a range of overarching theoretical perspectives that work effectively in illuminating the characteristics of particular texts with and for readers. As such, the study does not pretend to provide a specific theoretical basis for the reading of Scottish Children’s Fiction. The approach adopted requires an immersion in the narratives, making unfamiliar texts familiar in order to do the work of projecting a distinctive Scottish perspective. Given that this study is among the first of its kind, it provides a base-line for others to apply specific theoretical filters to Scottish Children’s Literature for further study. Using what cultural typology and the semiotics of culture would recognise as a retrospective approach, this study intends to identify children’s texts that are recognisably Scottish and which may be considered to form a corpus of work which can be celebrated as a central part of Scottish Children’s Literature. WATSON, R. (1995) The Poetry of Scotland, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.

Envisaged as vehicle for social cohesion in post revolutionary South Africa, ubuntu means 'humanness' and 'goodness' ; however, the optimistic post-apartheid discourse of ubuntu contrasts with the bleak post-apartheid fictions. These reflect a social and political landscape that does not live up to the optimistic ideology of the Rainbow Nation. This thesis argues that ubuntu - as a 'return to tradition' - is a problematic narrative of social cohesion because as an innate and essential aspect of African identity, ubuntu risks cultural simplification, it depends on ideas of racial polarization and the homogenisation of black African culture, and it legitimises the implementation of coercive social practices. The major literary texts examined are Zakes Mda's novels 'The heart of redness' (2002) and 'Ways of dying' (1995), Sindiwe Magona's 'Living, loving and lying awake at night' (1991). 'To my children's children' (1991), 'Forced to grow' (1991) and 'Mother to mother' (1998). Kgebetli Moele's 'Room 2017' (2011) and 'The book of the dead' (2009), Phaswanr Mpe's 'Welcome to our hillbrow' (2001), K. Sello Duiker's 'Thirteen cents' (2008) and Kopana Motlwa's 'Coconut' (2007). Each of the four chapters addresses ubuntu in relation to differences that are already embedded in discourses of ubuntu: that is, 'modernity' and 'tradition', gender, rural-urban migration, and the occult. These subject positions are then embedded in wider contemporary debates about a nation in transition: post-apartheid South Africa and where necessary the apartheid past. Ubuntu fails to offer a coherent programme for political change and now functions as a floating or empty signifier.

This thesis investigates the relationship between gender and the visual in texts by Virginia Woolf and Angela Carter. Drawing on visual studies, gender studies and film theory, I argue that my selected texts present the gendered visual field as dynamic and layered, foregrounding both a masculine economy of vision and the possibility of alternative forms of gendered subjectivity and ways of looking. The Introduction discusses the key methodological frameworks used in this thesis, including Jonathan Crary’s account of the historical construction of vision, the debates around gender, mobility and visuality centred on the figure of the flâneur, and Laura Mulvey’s account of the cinematic male gaze. I argue for the importance of recognising that the field of vision is a site of contestation composed of an interplay of connected gendered looks. Chapter One focuses on the unresolved tensions between different gendered looks in Mrs Dalloway (1925) which take place across a number of spaces and are mediated by a variety of visual frames. Chapter Two turns to Orlando (1928) to explore Woolf’s playful subversion of a masculine visual economy through a protagonist who changes sex and dress. In addition to this vacillation of appearance, I argue that the text’s representations of London in the 1920s, in particular the department store and motor-car, contribute to a proliferation of gendered looks. In turning to The Passion of New Eve (1979), Chapter Three shows how Carter foregrounds the violence involved in the performance of gender, particularly as mediated through the cinema, and further subverts masculine vision by representing gender as a masquerade. The fourth chapter focuses on The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) and argues that, despite its intended revolutionary purpose, Hoffman’s optical invention fails to transform the gendered visual field and instead reinscribes the patriarchal conventions of gender and looking that it has the potential to subvert. Ultimately, this thesis suggests that the works examined foreground the gendered visual field as a site of contested forms of gendered subjectivity and ways of looking. The texts map out an unresolvable tension between the masculine, hegemonic conventions which exert a powerful influence in everyday life and the possibility of going beyond them.

This dissertation presents four texts: • Cath Leitreach Ruibhe, Dublin, RIA, MS. 1234 (C i 2), 19v-23r • Ferchuitred Medbe (ibid.), fols. 11r-13v • Oidheadh na Seacht Maine, prose text beg. Ri rogabustair airdrige for eirinn .i. eochaid feidliuch ... (ibid.), 27r-29r • Untitled metrical text beg. Cruacha Cathair Cloindi Cuind ..., Dublin, RIA, MS. 535 (23 P 2), 85a-86a All are unedited except the first listed. This study concluded they are Early-Modern Gaelic; the metrical text is dated by the scribe (1395), while language analyses places the others in the thirteenth-century. This study has five sections: 1. Introduction to tales' subject matter, manuscripts, previous research, and a suggested 'suite' of tales. I argue previous research is sparse, open to criticism, and academics disagree on composition purposes. External references and possible compilation sources are presented. I conclude the texts are 'products of their time' (Early-Modern Gaelic) – yet external evidence shows some of these tales existed in prose and metrical form in Middle- Gaelic. 2. Cath Leitreach Ruibhe and an English translation. Its language is analysed statistically and compared to the only other Early-Modern Gaelic text of it: Edinburgh, NLS, MS. 72. 1. 5. I argue both texts are post-1200 and closely linked. This tale was specifically mentioned in the 'Book of Lecan' (c.1395) by scribes. 3. Ferchuitred Medbe, and an English translation. Language analyis suggests thirteenth- 3. Ferchuitred Medbe, and an English translation. Language analyis suggests thirteenth-century. The same tale (Cath Bóindi) is in the 'Book of Lecan' (c.1395). 4. The untitled metrical text is presented with standardised Classical Gaelic and English versions. I argue this poem demonstrates skillful use of the deibhidhe metre. The poem is dated by the scribe (1395). 5. Oidheadh na Seacht Maine, and an English translation. Language analysis suggests thirteenth-century. I argue this tale is better dated by external sources used in composition, as it is clearly not as novel as the other two prose texts examined.

Pakistani female writers in English continue to highlight the struggles of women within patriarchal Pakistani society. The emphasis of my research project has been to explore and analyse the struggle and resistance of female figures against patriarchal structures as presented through the fiction of my chosen female writers. I have analysed the works of Pakistani Anglophone women writers, Bapsi Sidhwa and Qaisra Shahraz. The thesis concludes with the analysis of a novel by a contemporary Urdu Pakistani female writer, Umera Ahmad. Analysing an Urdu feminist writing along with feminist writing in English has allowed my thesis a broader scope as Urdu feminist writings are an indispensible part of the Pakistani literary canvas in general and feminist literary canvas in particular. Through sexual awakening, sexual victimisation (rape, forced marriage) and sexual discrimination Sidhwa, Shahraz and Ahmad’s women learn of the gendered oppression that works through their bodies. Grappling with a range of victimisations, the female figures, from across the chosen works, expose how female sexuality and bodies are defined, controlled and exploited by men under the guise of socio-cultural and religious traditions. My research explores both the violent and subtle ways in which patriarchy represses female sexuality to control and restrict women in Pakistani society. A further underlying motive of my research has been to stress the importance of writing in allowing the female figures a ‘voice’ to aid their struggle against patriarchal structures. I believe feminist writings, specifically by female authors, both in English and Urdu, are a much needed contribution to the already existing Pakistani literary canon. Therefore, the works of chosen female writers are critically examined in order to understand their role and importance towards addressing, exploring and devising solutions, through a literary medium, to the issues women face in patriarchal society.

We all claim to ‘know’, in some manner, what a child is and what the term ‘child’ means. As adults we designate how and when children should develop and decide what is ‘good’ for them. Worries that childhood is ‘disappearing’ in the global North but not ‘developing’ sufficiently in the South propel broader discussions about what ‘normal’ development, individual and national, local and global, should mean. The child is also associated across artistic and cultural forms with innocence, immediacy, and simplicity: in short with our modern sense of ‘interiority’, as Carolyn Steedman has shown. The child is a figure of the self and the future that also connotes what is prior to ‘civilised’ society: the animal, the ‘primitive’ or simply the unknown. The child is, according to Jacqueline Rose, the means by which we work out our relationship to language and to the world and, as Chris Jenks expresses it, ‘the very index of civilization’. In this study I begin with the question that Karin Lesnik-Oberstein asks: ‘why is the child so often portrayed as ‘discovered’, rather than “invented” or “constructed”?’. I am concerned with how the child is implicated as ‘knowable’ and with asking what we may lose or gain by applying paradigms of childhood innocence or development to the nation as it is imagined in British and Indian literature at the ‘zenith’ of the British Raj. In order to unpick the knot of factors that link the child to the nation I combine cultural constructivist approaches to the child with the resources of postcolonial theory as it has addressed subalternity, hybridity and what Elleke Boehmer calls ‘nation narratives’. In the period that I concentrate on, the 1880s-1930s, British and Indian discourses rely upon the child as both an anchor and a jumping off point for narratives of self and nation, as displayed in the versatile and varied children and childhoods in the writers that I focus on: Rudyard Kipling, Flora Annie Steel and Mulk Raj Anand. Chapter 1 begins with what have been called sentimental portrayals of the child in Kipling’s early work before critiquing the notion that his ‘imperial boys’, Mowgli and Kim, are brokers of inter-cultural compromise that anticipate a postcolonial concern with hybridity. I argue that these boys figure colonial relations as complicated and compelling but are caught in a static spectacle of empire in which growing up is not a possibility. Chapter 2 turns to the work of Flora Annie Steel, a celebrated author in her time and, I argue, an impressive negotiator between the positions of the memsahib (thought of as both frivolous and under threat) and the woman writer determined to stake her claim to ‘knowledge’ of India across genres. From Steel’s domestic manual, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, to her ‘historical’ novel of the Indian Mutiny, the child both enables the British woman to define her importance to the nation and connotes a weakness against which the imperial feminist defines her active role. In Chapter 3 I discuss the work of Mulk Raj Anand, a ‘founding father’ of the Indian-English novel, who worked to unite his vision of an international humanism with the Gandhian ideal of a harmonious, spiritually inflected Indian nation. I look at Anand’s use of the child as an aesthetic position taken by the writer from the colonies in relation to the Bloomsbury avant-garde; a means of chronicling suffering and inequality and a resource for an idiosyncratic modernist method that has much to say to current theoretical concerns both with cosmopolitanism and materiality.

This thesis posits Enlightenment articulations of sympathy, in its capacity for establishing connections and its failures, as an appropriate methodology to articulate transatlantic literary exchange. Focusing on the sympathetic gap, the space sympathy must traverse, this thesis investigates the effect of emigration and place on genre and follows the trajectory from documentary to fictive forms and from a small gap to one unable to be bridged. Because the gap of sympathy is a spatial argument, the distance between is crucial as it indicates relationship. The introduction outlines my argument, with particular attention to transatlantic criticism, what is meant by the gap of sympathy, and the triad of place, emigration and genre. The first chapter discusses how Adam Smith articulated how one person is able to maintain a stable identity and is able to connect with another through imaginative comparison. The chapter establishes the trajectory of sympathy as the gap moves from smallest to unbridgeable, through comparison, sympathy and the failure of sympathy. In a series of case studies, Chapters Two through Five test out Smith’s theories in literary works; they examine the trajectory of transatlantic sympathy, where the gap moves from rhetorically being small to gaping, and moves generically from documentary forms to fiction. Chapter Two uses emigration guides written by British emigrants, who, because of their emigrant status, write from both an American and British perspective. The guides, because of their promotional intent, tend to underplay the gap of sympathy. Although they could be read as documentary and objective, the guides evidence ideological and rhetorical similarities to transatlantic fiction and thus serve as an entrance into the themes and stylistics one tends to associate with literary genres. Chapter Three examines the transatlantic correspondence of the Kerr family. As the Kerr family corresponds transatlantically (separated in space by the Atlantic and in time by more than 50 years), the issue of space becomes paramount to understanding the correspondence as well as if sympathy works in this generic register. Generically, the transatlantic letter is meant to provide virtual presence amid long stretches of absence; it also becomes an analogue for the absent other and the means by which the family may continue to be imagined across the gap of sympathy. Chapter Four examines Susanna Rowson’s transatlantic works, particularly Charlotte Temple, Slaves in Algiers, and Reuben and Rachel. Rowson’s own emigrant experience provides an entrée to the pain of transcultural sympathy that we see most clearly in Reuben and Rachel. Throughout her works Rowson also advocates a sympathy that is active and moral, rather than emotionally vacuous. Reuben and Rachel illustrates the gap of sympathy being bridged most effectively in cross-cultural adaptations and yet finally settles for a sympathy that must acknowledge separation and difference as well. Chapter Five explores the failures of sympathy and sociability present in Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic novels, Wieland and Edgar Huntly. Characters’ frontier locations and claustrophobic versions of sociability, as well generically, the gothic turn and failure of epistolary exchange, signals the moral ambiguity connected with becoming ‘this new man’ of America. Brown’s epistolary fiction briefly considered offers another generic attempt to examine how the gap of sympathy may be bridged and extend beyond the confines of the family. The Afterword points to the total breakdown of sympathy as a turn inward and away from sociability, where the self becomes frantic and frenetic (as evidenced by Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer); it points to some useful applications to the gap of sympathy for transatlantic literary studies.

This thesis explores the depictions of the relationship between utopia and ideology by looking at metaphors of the wall in of utopian and dystopian science fiction, such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic. The wall is an image symbolising the ambiguity between ideology and utopia: the wall could be perceived to be the barrier protecting utopia while it is in fact the symbol for ideological restrictions and containment which are generating dystopia. The thesis looks at how these novels engage with the theme of the wall: it is used as an image altering history, constricting space and as a linguistic barrier. The characters' presence in and experience of the worlds is restricted by the ideological walls, and an alternate reality is created. The thesis looks at how the novels create such alternate, ideological realities and how the wall becomes the entity altering time, history, space and language. This alternate reality is used as an image of stability, but this takes on negative connotations: it becomes a constrictive force, embodying Fredric Jameson's idea that science fiction creates images of “world reduction”, caging the characters' desires, disabling the utopian impulse. The thesis therefore instigates the possibility of utopia: the wall negates all possibility of change and denies the hopes of the utopian impulse; however the characters' desire to regain humanity by destroying the ideological walls offers hope and opens up utopia, thus concluding that utopia is change and progress.

This thesis explores the effect produced when contemporary novelists write about fellow authors. Since the mid-1990s, the biographical novel, which fictionalises the lives of real-life historical authors, has become an increasingly popular literary genre in Britain and the United States. This contemporary exploration of authorial subjectivity, viewed here through the lens of life-writing, provides a reengagement with debates surrounding the crisis of the author-figure (exemplified by Roland Barthes), and the unreliability of biography as a discourse of subjectivity at the turn of the twenty-first century. Through its inherent self-reflexivity (with its exposure of both the author-biographer alongside the author-subject), I consider how the biographical novel succeeds in reconciling the author-figure with the literary text in new ways. While critical interest in the biographical novel has tended to focus on a limited number of texts, little attention has been paid to their status as an emergent sub-genre of life-writing. Through the exemplary figures of Sylvia Plath, Henry James and Virginia Woolf and their corresponding biographical novels, I draw together a core body of texts to demonstrate their unity as a literary form. With an emphasis upon the role of life-writing in the construction of authorial subjectivity, I consider how each of the three author-subjects have cultivated — and been cultivated by — particular recurrent motifs: firstly through their own texts (whether fictional or biographical), then as they become manifest once again in the writing of the contemporary biographical novelists. Modernist developments in biographical modes, particularly Woolf's revision of the relationship between the biographer and his or her subject, provide both context for the biographical novel, and a rich framework upon which to build contemporary forms of life-writing and authorial subjectivity. Taking these as a starting point through which to view the 'author question', my thesis reveals how the genre of the biographical novel offers a redefinition of both the author as a multiple, progressive and changing figure, and a highlighting how the reinterpretation of life-writing in fictional form both enhances and supports the future of biography and autobiography as an equally evolutionary form.

This Ph.D. thesis consists of a novel, EXEUNT, and research associated with it, both being specifically concerned with literary/cultural representations of love and relationships over the age of sixty-five. In consideration of the changing dynamics of ageing, declared internationally by gerontologists during the 1990s, the research investigates the perceptions of British writers, publishers and readers regarding their acceptance of late-life sexuality in British contemporary novels. It identifies key stakeholders in specific interest groups, and operates within an interpretive perspective as a suitable analytical framework for a pragmatic mixed methods investigation. Although the initial focus of the research was on publishers and writers, the inclusion of readers resulted in wider consequences that call for more transparency and a fuller understanding of concepts linked to ageism. Having explored the dynamic between author, publisher and reader, the study concludes there is a superficial disharmony between them, whereas in fact they are mutually complementary. This dichotomy appears to be due to misunderstanding, and lack of trust. In reality, a large percentage of readers, in line with recent research on film audiences, feel it acceptable for people over the age of sixty to have such sexual needs and desires. This acceptability and the new dynamics of ageing inform the novel which places the research in a wider context and constitutes the second part of the Ph.D. The multi-layered novel EXEUNT, in part ontogenetic, works against ageism within current prejudice by depicting the lovers in their fifties, sixties and seventies, and by doing so reveals the wide gap between subjective reality and the perceived public image. Their relationship is accepted by the British woman s friends, family and contemporaries, so that the epistemology of age is acquired only through negative opinions or actions, with the narrative embodying much of current research on the subject. Contrasting attitudes to ageing are found within the ethnographic detail of Romania during the period of communism, revolution and consequential freedom: 1982-2005. The frameworks of the fiction are encapsulated in the concept of Theatre as an analogy for life and death with a unique structure that portrays an ontological viewpoint. This underpins a reality where the attention of the reader/audience is disrupted by an intermittent reminder of the analogy. The term fictodrama has been used to describe this combination of fiction and theatrical effects.