My novel, Away, is mainly the story of a woman travelling alone, leaving all friends and relatives behind. She seeks out remote, beautiful and difficult places where, firstly, she has travelled to before and, then, different locations that she hasn’t known in the past. We discover that, through trauma, she has lost her sense of identity – she is in the midst of a psychological crisis that becomes clear only after the journey has been underway for some time, when circumstances force her to accept help from others. With the protagonist my aim was to portray a permanent and continuous possibility of ending, stretching endlessly. This idea is irretrievable from the notion of space, as conceived here. In Part I, I explore how not only this main character, but also, Fred embody space. Here, I examine the conception of space, taking in various perspectives raging from philosophy, geography, culture and literature studies, where we find an interdisciplinary approach to space. My contention, drawing on mainly Lefebvre’s and Massey’s investigations, is that space is produced and is simultaneously a product embodied by the characters. In addition, I analyse how a particular territory – the desert – enacts the nature of space, as defined before, in selected works by T. E. Lawrence, Wilfred Thesiger and Paul Bowles. Also, I argue that this conception of space is explored in some narratives of Paul Auster - CG, MC and CLT - in part II. Further, I examine other features of space. I contend that Auster’s writing explores space as a realm upon which Auster’s characters engage in a process of construction and disintegration both of space and their identity. Therefore, here, space is considered as a sphere constituted by a process of an ever-opened, changing and ongoing interrelation with the characters and the text. Finally, although space is presented in this essay as the major tool for investigation through composition and critical analysis, other tools, intrinsically, and I argue inseparable in fact, I proceed to an investigation, in part III, of notions of time, identity, writing and narrator in my creative work. Beside these, I investigate particularly the relationships between characters. The thesis concludes by demonstrating that writing as space evolves in more subtle, more transient and labyrinthian ways through the reference to other writers whose writing has significantly influenced my creative work.

This study is an examination of the hero image in the work of G.A. Henty (1832-1902) and George MacDonald (1824-1905) and a reassessment of the hitherto oppositional critiques of their writing. The argument driving the reassessment is that their writing is not oppositional but is complementary and that the ideology embedded in their work is communicated through the character of the hero through genre and through their interpretation of their historical period. The central hypothesis is that the reflexive characteristics of the hero image demonstrate a complete identity commensurate with the hero figure of the Victorian ideal. This hypothesis is demonstrated through the analysis of chosen texts from the work of Henty and MacDonald categorised by critics as written for children and by the application of ethical, genre and new historic theory. The relationship between the expansion of the British Empire and youthful heroism is established through investigation of the Victorian political, social and religious milieu, the construct of the child and the construct of the hero. The connection between the exotic geographical space of empire and the unknown psychological space is conducted through examination of the representation of the ‘other' in the work of Henty and MacDonald. The study demonstrates that Henty’s work is more complex than the stereotypically linear, masculine, imperialistic critique of his stories as historical realism allows and that MacDonald’s work displays more evidence of historical embedding and ideological interpellation than the critical focus on his work as fantasy and fairy tale considers. The contribution of this study to existing research on Henty and MacDonald is firstly by an examination of the ideology embedded in the construct of the hero figure as this construct impacted Victorian culture and secondly by reassessing the existing criticism of their work. Greater understanding of the effect of this heroic ideal on nineteenth century society leads to a greater understanding of the implications for subsequent cultures including that of the twenty first century. This aspect is examined in relation to the current reprinting programmes for Henty and MacDonald and is proposed as a subject for continued research.

The emergence of novelists such as Kazuo Ishiguro and Timothy Mo in the final decades of the twentieth century has often been taken as evidence of an increasing multiculturalism both in Britain and the wider world, as well as in British literature itself. With their dual British-Asian heritage and their interrogation of notions of history, identity and agency, these authors are often celebrated as proponents of the cosmopolitan novel, a genre which rejects binary notions of East and West or national interest in favour of a transnational mode of cooperation and cohabitation. Reading against the grain of such celebratory notions of the cosmopolitan, this thesis suggests that if the novels of Ishiguro and Mo are concerned with the exigencies of the cosmopolitan world, then they portray that world as one which remains split and haunted by divisions between East and West, past and present, self and ‘other’. That is, they present a cosmopolitan world in which the process of negotiation and contact is difficult, confrontational and often violent. Drawing upon Fredric Jameson’s notion of the ‘political unconscious’, I suggest that these novels in fact reveal the origins of the rather deeper divisions which have emerged in the first decade of the twenty first century, analysing the ways in which they reveal a degree of cultural incommensurability, frustrated cosmopolitan agency and the enduring power and appeal of the nation state. I also suggest that the contemporary critical obsession with the spatial – whereby cosmopolitanism’s work is carried out in ‘Third Spaces’, interstitial sites, and border zones – fails to recognize the importance of temporal concerns to the experience of cosmopolitan living. My analysis of the novels of Ishiguro and Mo is thus concerned with the way in which the temporal is a key concern of these works at both a narratological and thematic level. In particular, I identify a curious ‘double-time’ of cosmopolitanism, whereby the busyness which we might expect of the period is counterpointed by a simultaneous sense of stasis and inactivity. I argue that it is within this unsettling contemporary ‘double-time’ that the cracks and fissures in the narrative of cosmopolitanism begin to emerge.

This thesis examines the representations of housing in the fiction and non-fiction texts of Gordon Burn, Andrew O’Hagan and David Peace. This thesis will explore the relationship between housing and class in all three writers’ work and consider the ways in which housing displays and conceals class. These three writers have never been critically examined together, and their similar subject matter provides interesting points of contrast and comparison. ‘Housing. The Greatest Issue of Our Poor Century’ writes Andrew O’Hagan in his novel Our Fathers (1999) and this is a sentiment shared by Burn and Peace throughout their texts. All three writers depict the ways in which housing has changed over the course of the twentieth century, as against the slum clearances of post-World War II Britain, Modernist tower blocks were erected. Against these visual changes there was a sustained campaign, by all major political parties, to increase home ownership. A succession of Acts throughout the latter half of the twentieth century saw council houses being sold to tenants and a subsequent decrease in the construction of council houses. These Acts promoted, and made easily achievable, home ownership and ingrained within society the idea that owning property was a symbol of success and security. By examining changes in housing Burn, Peace and O'Hagan consider the fate of the working-class in the latter half of the twentieth century, and this thesis will explore to what extent, and in what ways, housing displays and conceals class. Chapter One will consider the changes in housing policy over the latter half of the twentieth century and the ways in which government policy affected issues of class. This chapter will look at the ways in which Burn, Peace and O’Hagan consider issues of class and will argue that by examining issues of housing all three are examining the fate of the working-class. Issues of housing are inexorably linked with issues of class and this chapter will form the basis on which the remaining chapters’ arguments are based. Chapter Two will explore issues of housing in the cases of Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West, specifically the ways in which housing both concealed and motivated their crimes and how in turn assumptions about class hide their murders within plain sight. Chapter Three will examine the construction of high-rise tower blocks and the ways in which the creation of housing allowed for social crimes to be committed for both political and economic gain by various individuals. Chapter Four will look at the underground spaces of the houses featured in the previous chapters and will consider to what extent the underground reflects the issues of the over-ground and the significance of the underground in debates about class. The final Chapter, Chapter Five, will look at depictions of the celebrity house and will consider how the house of the celebrity fits into narratives of twentieth century housing and how the inhabitants are as hidden and revealed as their working-class counter parts.

Focusing on the stories of three women shaped by the expectations and attitudes of the times in which they live, my novel covers the periods 1921-1937, 1937-1972, and 1973 and participates in the discourse on women's changing historical circumstances and new class and gender identities. It therefore can be read in the category of a novel of manners or a middlebrow novel. My purpose has been to explore, through creating my own characters and story, the dramatic social, cultural and economic changes that have taken place in the middle part of the twentieth century for Western women. In tracing the trajectory from one generation to the next, my fiction responds to and is inflected by the style of narration obtaining at the time. It engages, for instance, with the "reality" constructed by writers such as Virginia Woolf, Christa Wolf, and Margaret Drabble within the genre of women's fiction: of women writing for each other, in a small-scale and intimate way, and integrating the story of an individual life with the circumstances of the time. My aim has been, through writing fiction, to re-examine certain concepts of the past for myself and for the contemporary reader in order to reach slightly different conclusions and to begin to understand the past in a new way.

This thesis examines conceptions of time and history in five American novels published between 1995 and 2012 which take as their subject matter events associated with the counterculture and New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. The thesis is organized around close readings of five novels. The first chapter focuses on Jennifer Egan’s The Invisible Circus (1995) and argues that it incorporates a number of problematic temporal experiences which have the effect of establishing a key tension of all the novels considered here: the concern with contextualizing and historicizing particular events and cultural atmospheres while remaining faithful to utopian ideas of radical change. Chapter two argues that Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document (2006) is oriented both structurally and thematically towards a future in which the relationship between the 1960s and 1990s will more clearly understandable. The third chapter examines the way Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance (2005) explores the multiplicitous nature of historical narratives, and how he distinguishes between those narratives and a conception of the bare events beneath them. The focus of chapter four is Lauren Groff’s Arcadia (2012) and examines how conceptions of the relationship between humans and nature influence theories of time, mythic histories and post-apocalyptic narratives. The final chapter on David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011) argues that the tension between continuation and change found in the conversion narrative is partly reconciled by a conception of time that allows the moment of radical utopian change (the moment of conversion) to be one of re-entrance into history. At stake throughout is the way these novels’ interpretation of particular events and larger cultural tendencies reveals and makes manifest various processes of historicization. I maintain a dual focus on the way these novels present historicization as something undertaken by individuals and societies and the ways in which these novels themselves not only engage in historicizations of the period but are in various ways self-conscious about doing so. If contemporary scholarship on the emergence of what has been called post-postmodern literature (Stephen J. Burn, Andrew Hoberek, Adam Kelly, Caren Irr) identifies a return to temporal concerns in recent fiction, the readings that comprise my thesis also make use of conceptions of time and history by Mark Currie, Jacques Derrida, Reinhold Niebuhr, Norman Mailer, Christopher Lasch, and Robert N. Bellah (among others) in order to ask: what are the particular material contours of the experiences of time and history manifested in these recent examples of the ‘sixties novel’?

This thesis is an extended reading of the topos of the ghostly as it is staged in the modernist writings of T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and D.H. Lawrence. As I argue, their distinct appropriations of haunting are innately tied to their individual theories of the aesthetic; there are also a number of recurring motifs throughout their respective oeuvres, which time and again evoke a ghostly register. Consistently appearing in the texts I read here, most of which were published between the years 1919 and 1935, are figurations of the ghostly as a symptom of ‘ontological uncertainty’, as well as renderings of purgatorial subjectivity, and aporias of mourning. I locate my reading in response to the scholarly fields of haunting studies, mourning modernisms and Gothic modernisms. In a move common to contemporary theoretical studies of haunting, I draw also from the latter work of Jacques Derrida, a theoretical lens that facilitates my reading of a complex modernist ethics of mourning and alterity, one that often courts the ghostly, but resists what Derrida terms ‘hauntological’ work. The Derridean figure of the ethical apparition, in its status as the Absolute Other, is consistently complicated or rejected in these texts. This resistance mirrors a purgatorial mode of subjectivity that recurs in a range of guises in the modernisms I read here. In uncovering the economies that lie beneath these haunted subjectivities Jacques Lacan’s metapsychology of the subject helps also to conceptualise Bowen and Lawrence’s handling of the spectral. Bowen’s is a distinctly visual imagination, and her staging of a haunted subjectivity is elucidated by calling upon Lacan’s formulation of the gaze. Lawrence, whose work is consistently concerned with a-symbolic bodily registers, bypasses a number of the purgatorial aporias staged in the writings of Woolf, Eliot and Bowen. Viewing his appropriation of haunting through a Lacanian understanding of feminine jouissance suggests Lawrence’s welcoming of a radical ghostly other that may transcend the aporias of subjectivity, ethics and mourning that characterise these haunting modernisms.

In the following thesis, two interrelated arguments are offered: firstly, a re-appropriation of the passing figure from an African-American context to the Anglo-Indian context is suggested, which it is argued, will allow new methods for the study of the hybrid figure in British literature to develop. Secondly, the thesis works to critique the relationship between poststructuralism and postcolonialism, suggesting a move away from a discourse concerned with anti-reality and its linguistic-theoretical focus to a framework with stronger roots in the study of postcoloniality as a real, lived condition experienced by a large number of people. The above arguments are realized through a reading of Anglo-Indian literature which closely aligns both the displaced postcolonial figure and the passing figure through a shared ability to perform multiple identities. In adopting the passing figure, Anglo-Indian literature illustrates the rejection of in culture forms of rigid and constraining essentialisms and the commitment to modernist and contemporary cultural discourses of identity construction in the hybrid figure of postcolonial works. Such cultural discourses of identity presuppose the intervention of performativity in the negotiation of multiple selves. Both the hybrid postcolonial figure and the passing figure display an adoption of performance in identity construction. In a theoretical reflection of the multiplicity offered by the passing figure, a number of diverse critical approaches to these Anglo-Indian texts are introduced. Specifically, the aim is to suggest alternative theoretical approaches to the hegemonic poststructuralist critical view. I will argue that the reliance upon poststructuralist theory can be detrimental to the full exploration of the postcolonial identity, due largely to the tendency to privilege textual fee-play over experiential analysis. I am proposing a modification to the relationship between deconstruction and postcolonialism, whereby certain selected deconstructive techniques are appropriated alongside more existentialist concerns that reflect the real, lived conditions of postcolonial environments. In relocating textual critique within an approach more concerned with the real-life experience of multiplicity, this study advocates a continuing relevance of a more existentialist mode of postcolonialism, as exemplified by Sartre and Fanon, and other adjacent theorists. An example of this is that popular and contemporary authors such as Naipaul, Rushdie, Kureishi and Malkani are read in light of “dialogical self theory”, R.D. Laing’s “false-self system”, Fish’s “interpretive communities” thesis and Goffman’s concept of “front”. Dialogical self theory and the false-self system ensure a firm underpinning of the internal psychological structure of the passing figure’s psyche, establishing a discourse of postcolonialism that is centred on the real experience of multiplicity. The following work on interpretive communities and front allow for the connection of the internal construction of self to the wider social environment through the relocation of the passing figure’s identity in relation to the interpretations of the audience.

Academic study of women and WW1 literature has taken place since the 1970s, with a focus on female novelists published pre-1939. Despite the variety of studies, questions remain as to whether the breadth of women’s roles in WW1 is accurately represented in fiction. The purpose of this study was to examine female characters in WW1 novels (published in Britain) who challenge traditional war binarisms i.e. war (male)/peace (female), by taking on war work. It specifically compared novels published pre-1939 and historical (post-1939) novels written by both female and male novelists. The methods employed were the critical reading of forty novels, as well as data collection related to the roles of female characters and the language used to describe them. he study found that there is little representation of women’s war work in the forty novels. A key factor is that they are by middle class authors and written from a middle class point of view. Although historical novels are often used to re-imagine the role of women, WW1 is an exception. Key factors here include the perpetuation of stereotype and nervousness around detracting from the horrific experiences of the male soldier. Challenges to binarisms in subsequent wars (e.g. women in the armed services) have not stimulated a re-visioning of women’s roles in WW1. Society will continue to accept and endorse traditional binarisms, if they are not challenged by cultural representations of war. There is no novel based on the female military experience of WW1. In response, I was inspired to write a historical novel: The Half-Painted War. The protagonist is a female artist who enrols in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC). It is intended as an act of remembrance but also allows the reader to consider the role of women in the military, both in WW1 and today.

This thesis argues for a revised understanding of time in modernist literature. It challenges the longstanding critical tradition that has used the French philosopher Henri Bergson's distinction between clock-time and durée to explicate time in the modernist novel. To do so, it replaces Stephen Kern's influential understanding of modernity as characterized by the solidification of a homogenous clock-time, with Peter Osborne’s notion of modernity as structured by a competing range of temporalizations of history. The following chapters then read the fictional and historical writings of H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf alongside such a conception of modernity, and show that all these writers explored different versions of historical time. Wells explored geological time in The Time Machine (1895) and An Outline of History (1920), Lawrence adapted Friedrich Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence in Women in Love (1920), Movements in European History (1921) and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), and Woolf imagined an aeviternal historical continuity and a phenomenological historical time in Between the Acts (1941). By addressing historical time, this thesis enables a reassessment of the politics of modernist time. It challenges the view that the purported modernist exploration of a Bergsonian private time constitutes an asocial and ahistorical retreat from the political. Rather, by transferring Osborne's notion of a 'politics of time' to the literary sphere, this study argues that the competing configurations of politically-charged historical time in literary modernism, form the analogue of the competing versions of such a time within modernity, emblematized by the contrasting accounts of historical time of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin.