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While Conrad's representation of London has previously been discussed, these readings have not considered his auditory impressions of the city. This thesis explores this neglected area, in the context of London's changing 'soundscape' in the late-Victorian and early Edwardian period. These changes encompassed a reconstructed topography and conflicts over public spaces, in addition to the appearance of new auditory technologies. The thesis argues for the significance of Conrad's sound impressions in this urban context, posing the original question of whether his fictionalized city 'sounds modern'. Alongside the rapid development of a popular press, the 1890s also witnessed a resurgence of interest in oratory, as the power of the 'platform' played its own part in influencing social change. Chapter I focuses on The Nigger of the 'Narcissus ' and considers Conrad's representation of London's social agitators, together with his auditory impressions of the city's vast crowd. More broadly, the chapter also explores the contemporary figure of the 'workman orator', as characterized through The Secret Agent's Verloc. Chapter 2 focuses on the silences and noises of 'The Return' , arguing that these express much about London's social topographics and contemporary fears about urban disorder. Chapter 3 traces the progress of the 'news' across the city in The Secret Agent, arguing that this novel reflects its transitional era, when the newly literate negotiated the move from a traditionally oral- to print-based culture. Finally, Chapter 4 argues for the influence of music hall on Conrad's work, in particular the contemporary interest in the verbal artistry of its comedians. Marlow's comedic tone in Chance is, located in this context, as an expression of popular performance from a notably modem and urbane figure. The thesis concludes by identifying some interrelated themes which reveal the significance of Conrad's sound impressions to wider discussions about the modernity of his fiction.

In this thesis, I am attempting a reading of D.H. Lawrence which concentrates on the representation of women in his fiction, something that is revealing, not only of his attitude towards women, but men too. This is because Lawrence always maintained close connections between his fiction and his theories about the relationship of the two sexes and how their union can lead to real consummation and ultimately to spiritual rebirth. He believed ardently that men and women need to rediscover their true original instincts which have been distorted and debilitated by the evils of modern mechanistic civilization. In this quest for the original “other” self, the woman plays the most important role. Endowed, according to Lawrence, with natural intuition and strong instincts, but burdened with arbitrary, suffocating, social rules, she must find the way to her authentic female self and to do so she must follow a path which usually involves an experience of nature and leads to a meeting with the man who will help her reclaim her womanhood and waken Aphrodite, the erotic goddess dormant inside her. This is a long, arduous process, a descent into the dark depths of the human psyche, what the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung called an “individuation” process, which takes the human being to the very core of existence and provides crucial glimpses into the real meaning of life. This other self is often identified by both Jung and Lawrence as the innocent, primitive and long forgotten self, which instinctively knew how to appreciate life in its original demonstrations, the self which was still in an infant state, spontaneous and authentic, and thus healthy and pure, uncontaminated by the corrupt materialistic outlook of modern society. iii Woman, by her very nature, is much closer than the man to this “unconscious” self, the place where instincts, urges and drives reside. This can be seen as a dark underworld, the Hades in the depths of the human mind, where the woman will descend after passing through various phases of mythicization: She is Persephone seeking Pluto, or in the eyes of her perplexed and often alarmed male companion, a frightening Maenad, the mysterious feminine force, a redoubtable goddess of another world. In her closeness to nature, the typical Lawrencian heroine shows an Artemislike independence and self-reliance, and in her communion with man she turns, by invoking Eros, into a passionate Aphrodite, ready and keen to abandon herself in the sacred union with the male other. In his descriptions of this mythicization process undergone by his female characters, Lawrence often employs what Hélène Cixous has defined as a feminine language, a language springing from the fertile emotional other of the female nature, the “semiotic” language of the feminine body. I use Julia Kristeva’s term “semiotic” to signify this other “land” of the unconscious, which, in D.H. Lawrence’s fiction, is often connoted by the real land where the action takes place, a land representative of these valuable human instincts. Although Lawrence’s approach to woman may be thought of as essentialist, there can be no doubt that such a view of the female is one of the outstanding characteristics of D.H. Lawrence’s work. After all, there is something totally fascinating about the way his female characters refuse to succumb to stereotypes, social and literary, but think, feel and act with maturity, intelligence and resoluteness that distinguishes them from the males. It shows them to be not only individual and free within their fictional context, but also independent from the very man who made them.

For many in Britain, the interwar period was a time of significant social, political and cultural anxiety. In the aftermath of the First World War, with British imperial power apparently waning, and with the politics of class becoming increasingly pressing, many came to perceive that traditional notions of British, and particularly English, identity were under challenge. The interwar years saw many cultural responses to the concerns these perceived challenges raised, as seen in H. V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927) and J. B. Priestley’s English Journey (1934). The sense of socio-cultural crisis was also registered in children’s literature. This thesis will examine one significant and under-researched aspect of the responses to the cultural anxieties of the inter-war years: the ‘camping and tramping’ novel. The term ‘camping and tramping’ refers to a sub-genre of children’s adventure stories that emerged in the 1930s. These novels focused on the holiday leisure activities – generally sailing, camping and hiking - of largely middle-class children in the British (and most often English) countryside. Little known beyond Arthur Ransome’s ‘Swallows and Amazons’ novels (1930-1947), this thesis undertakes a full survey of camping and tramping fiction, developing for the first time a taxonomy of this sub-genre (chapter one). It also investigates the cultural meanings of the principal activities that quickly became characteristic of camping and tramping novels (chapter two). Besides this survey and accompanying analysis, this thesis also undertakes a thorough examination of the contexts of camping and tramping fiction. It firmly situates camping and tramping novels within the socio-cultural debates and anxieties from which they emerged and with which they continually engaged. Chapter three concentrates on how camping and tramping fiction responded to the challenges posed by the democratisation of leisure and particularly demands for more open access to the countryside. Chapter four is also focused on exploration of the land, but examines the novels through the lens of contemporary colonial and cartographic discourses. Chapter five turns to consider more specifically the maritime traditions with which camping and tramping fiction engaged, in particular Ransome’s ‘Swallows and Amazons’ series. It is argued throughout this thesis that camping and tramping fiction responded to perceived challenges to Britishness by creating a powerful myth of nationhood as rooted in rural and, maritime traditions. This reformulation sought to manage changes to national identity by endorsing largely middle-class social and cultural agendas and validating middle-class values. This thesis argues for the cultural significance of camping and tramping fiction, something previously largely unnoticed. These novels were fully engaged in the social, cultural and political debates of the time and, as such, can be viewed as both reflecting contemporary cultural anxieties and as helping to construct new narratives of national identity.

This thesis investigates body language in the letters, diaries, and novels of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf It engages with literary critical readings of their work, research from non-verbal communication studies, and philosophical accounts of the body in order to offer detailed readings of their presentation of non-verbal behaviour. Throughout the thesis, the term "body language" is used to describe the writing of the body and non-verbal communication within certain texts and the way in which the language of these texts is inflected by the body. One particular concern of the study is the importance of embodiment to the writing of perception in these works. The phenomenological writing of Maurice Merleau-Ponty is therefore a touchstone for readings which foreground the senses and a sensuous engagement with space. This strand of the thesis is informed by theories of space as well as situating itself amongst contemporary accounts of the Modern period that consider the influence of technology on these very senses. A further concern of the thesis, then, is to examine the vocabulary developed and employed by these Modern writers in order to write this new relationship of the human with technology and space. Their turn towards a posthuman poetics of perception gives voice to these new imbrications and to their appraisal, through the senses, of what it means to be human. This is in keeping with the general purpose of the thesis, namely, to evaluate the techniques and styles that these authors use in order to write the body and body language, ones in which they confront the paradox of writing non-verbal behaviour within their inherently verbal modes.

This thesis rejects conventional critical work on appropriation, using The Lord of the Rings to illustrate a theory of appropriation as being an integral part of the creative process. Current researchers, exemplified by Sanders, argue that appropriation is characterised by a political agenda, and intention. The thesis argues that appropriation can be both deliberate and unconscious and demonstrates the difficulty of distinguishing between these states. Chapter one connects modem fantasy to imperial ideology by identifying the links between Tolkien and empire adventure writers. Tolkien's appropriations of northern European myths and medieval literatures have been extensively investigated; the few studies of his appropriation of more contemporary texts focus on The Hobbit.

The chapters of this thesis analyse Virginia Woolf's novels and private writing, concentrating largely on the representation of early childhood symbols and language in her work. The aim of this thesis was to try to discover why Woolf used the perambulator motif so frequently in her novels. Counting the frequency of images in literary texts is usually one aspect of scholarship which can be fruitless but there are occasions when the results can be startling; for example the fact that the motif of the perambulator dominates almost all of her novels. In her novels, there is generally a surface narrative but I have looked beneath the surface at the multitude of symbols and language from early childhood that she uses. Underpinning all of this is the fact that Woolf never had children of her own. Chapter one begins with a description of Woolf's own early childhood, which she wrote extensively about, using various sources, most notably Hyde Park Gate News. An indispensable reference for trying to glean an understanding of Woolf's early development is 'A Sketch of the Past' which can be found within the collection entitled Moments of Being. Memoirs such as this, her diaries and letters, also provided useful evidence to assist me in the analysis of her childhood. Moments of Being was central to Woolf's fiction and experience and it is within her memoirs, in particular that we discover the remembered world of childhood, both in 22 Hyde Park Gate, London and Talland House, St. Ives. Woolf's relationship with her father and mother will be examined and a separate discussion will explore the effect her parents had on her writing, focusing mainly on The Years and To the Lighthouse. Interwoven with this will be an examination of the concept of memory; the fallibility of memory, current psychological theories of memory as well as Freud's notion of screen memories and their importance in relation to Woolf's own childhood memories. Chapter two focuses exclusively on childhood language and Woolf's use of pre-verbal language and nursery rhymes in her fiction. Three of her later novels show the prominence of pre-verbal language and provide the best examples of the nursery rhyme motif. The Waves is considered as it was this novel that Woolf used to break free from the constraints of plot and characterisation: she began to experiment with pre-verbal rhythms. Two other novels The Years and Between the Acts are analysed in relation to the nursery rhyme motif. Chapter three begins with an examination of the reasoning behind Leonard Woolf's decision for the couple not to have children. Reading Virginia Woolf's work alongside her letters and diaries reveals how closely related the theme of children/childhood was in her own life. This is an area of her writing which warrants investigation in relation to the prominence of the perambulator motif and which advances our understanding of Woolf's own experience as a writer, sister, wife, aunt, daughter and childless woman. The final chapter is divided into two sections allowing discussion of the nursemaid and the perambulator: both significant motifs from early childhood that Woolf utilises in her novels. The two fictional nursemaids focused on in this section are Mrs Constable in The Waves and the figure of the nurse in Mrs Dalloway who is found on a bench in Regent's Park. The short story 'Nurse Lugton's Golden Thimble' will also be examined. Chapter four looks in closer details at the technologies of childhood and the reoccurrence of the perambulator motif in her novels. Starting with Night and Day this section considers, in chronological order, each reference to the perambulator and suggests why Woolf has given prominence to this particular symbol. There will also be a brief discussion of The Voyage Out and why this is the only book that has no perambulator motif. My thesis presents a new way of approaching Woolf's work and a small glimpse into the wishes and regrets of this renowned literary figure.

This thesis explores May Sinclair's female protagonists in her Modernist texts, 1910-1923. 1 look at how Sinclair's work bears witness to her scene of writing and offer an analysis that places Sinclair, most centrally, in a dialogue with contemporary literary, psychoanalytical, and cultural influences.1 draw upon a wealth of unpublished material, medical archives and journals, newspapers, propaganda, novels of fellow female writers, and other artefacts of the day. By appraising these works together, the critical distinction between Modernism and the topical issues of early twentieth century Britain is seen to dissolve, and Sinclair’s writing emerges as an important oeuvre for reading the life of the modem woman. Women’s fiction of the period typically searches for autonomy and agency. However, as 1 show, the desire for radical social change is problematic and often in conflict with the prescribed code of an idealised, fixed female identity. Through an exploration and development of her own concept of sublimation, Sinclair confronts these complex ideological structures in her engagement with the position of women in her fiction. She places her women in a variety of situations—from the tightly knit, domestic home to the unfettered, open terrain of wild landscapes—and analyses the forces that hold women back or set them free. In my study of Sinclair's Modernist texts, 1 argue that Sinclair urges for psychic freedom for women from their cramped, repressive conditions; this is achieved through sublimation.

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