This study uses cultural and literary theory and contemporary metropolitan post Second World War postcolonial fictions to revisit the concept of displacement allowing for an affirmation of the specificity and beginnings of displaced writers' identities and a reassertion of the significance of their starting points meanwhile resisting, precluding, falling into the dangers of cultural and mental ghettoisation and defensive and/or vulgar nationalism. Burdened with colonial history and being 'out of place', writings by displaced writers with their hyphenated identities have altered the literature of England both in its language and its cultural identity. This has promoted the rediscovery, as in the Freudian psychoanalytic context, of materials that have been repressed or 'pushed aside' in cultural translation, but which continue to cause trouble and restlessness in the perpetual journey of displacement. Displacement also troubles the ideas of citizenship and national belonging and offers to the noncitizen the freedom to be 'out of place' which opens doors for cultural translation and filtration. Displacement falls therefore somewhere between nationalism (Oedipal, rigid, imposed, created, closed) and nomadology (anti-Oedipal, open, flexible, creative, free) allowing critical and aesthetic distance, and balancing the central authority between past and present, tradition and modernity, by translating (between) them. Revisiting displacement produces therefore an oscillation between the two at will. It thus celebrates multiplicity and hybridity/syncreticism without falling into the anti-memory and history-free, spatially-attenuated, free-floating, aloof and ontologically rootless concept of nomadism, or the nomadic rhizome. In revisiting the concept of displacement, this thesis is skeptical of nomadology's total and complete transcendence of national and Oedipalised territorial frameworks.

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This thesis provides a comparative study of male shame in Hanif Kureishi's Intimacy (1998), Philip Roth's Everyman (2006) and Portnoy's Complaint (1969), and finally Hubert Klimko- Dobrzaniecki's Raz. Dwa. Trzy (2007). As this reading of the novels reveals, shame in the male characters results from a failure to measure up to the hegemonic ideal of masculinity promoted in their respective cultures. This study shows that shame is an emotion, which conditions masculinity protecting the powerful hierarchies that exist between different masculinities and between men and women. This reading of shame as applied to masculinity in Polish, British and American contexts aims to expose those hierarchies demonstrating the liberating potential of shame, which can queer traditional masculinity allowing new forms of masculinity to emerge. The analysis of male shame illuminates further the clash between male gender, constructed primarily as a symbol of power, and shame considered as a disempowering and emasculating emotion. The writers selected for this analysis hold a status of the cultural other: Kureishi as British- Pakistani, Roth as Jewish-American and Klimko-Dobrzaniecki as bom in Silesia, a borderline region between Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic. The writers' status and personal experience is mirrored in their male protagonists' sexuality, ethnic and class belonging. Significantly, in their texts, the writers represent diasporic masculinity which clashes with the hegemonic ideal promoted by their respective cultures. Drawing on David Gilmore's concept of 'achieved manhood', Elspeth Probyn's notion of 'belonging' and Raewyn Connell's concept of 'masculinity crisis' this study explains why shame occurs as a result of the male protagonists' failure to secure their place within the realm of the hegemonic masculinity. The interdisciplinary approach taken in this study draws heavily on a post-colonial conceptual framework mainly due to the status of shame as both an individual and social emotion; it can be used as a means of social control as well as being a private feeling. This methodological approach facilitates the literary analysis of shame, embodied for instance in the images of the penis as expressing or failing to express virility and potency in the characters, as well as investigation of narrative expressions of shame examined through different concepts linked to the emotion, namely, gaze in Kureishi's Intimacy, hardness and softness in Roth's novels Everyman and Portnoy's Complaint, and dirt and disgust in Raz. Dwa. Trzy by Hubet Klimko-Dobrzaniecki.

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This study examines the fiction of Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) in relation fundamental structures and forces which shape narratives. It contends that Ford's novels contain, and attempt to contain, 'destabilising narratives' which frustrate, whilst simultaneously activating, the reader's desire for narrative coherence. The major contention of this study is that by reading Ford's novels as 'destabilising narratives' we stand to gain in our understanding both of Ford's writing and of narrative itself: the ways in which narratives function, the needs and desires they fulfil, and how they work on us as readers.

In this thesis I explore the nineteenth-century legacies which inform Woolfs work, with specific reference to those of three of her forebears: Julia Margaret Cameron, Anny Thackeray Ritchie and Julia Prinsep Stephen. I analyse lines of descent to show that the work of these women are textually, artistically, biographically and genealogically embedded in Woolfs own; thus shaping Woo If as a writing woman. Woolfs complex, paradoxical, relationship with Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen in particular, reveals her conflicted relationship with her past in general. Each relationship is characterised by inconsistency and ambivalence. Woo If s lack of overt acknowledgement of the achievements of these forebears, and of her debt to them, does them a disservice. It contradicts her avowed intention to value and retrieve the work of earlier women writers. However, ambivalence is also part of their legacy to her. It is a creative aesthetic in the artistic work of all four women. Ambivalence allows Woo If to recycle and renegotiate narratives of her past; to explore different angles of vision; and to create boundaries as porous. Woolfs writing reveals her life-long engagement with her past and with Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen. Their lives and art are integrated into Woolf s own through her transmission of their photographs, her fictional portraits of them, resonances of their work, and their symbolic association with her iterated tropes. Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen are significant intertexts in the novels which frame this thesis: Night and Day and The Years. Woo If structures each novel through polarities but ultimately she disrupts all fissures; privileging wholeness, and cycles. Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen become part of this continuity from past to present and into the future, which Woolf proposes.

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