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This thesis examines the significance of a ubiquitous presence of fictional letters and diaries in neo- Victorian fiction. It investigates how intercalated documents fashion pastiche narrative structures to organise conflicting viewpoints invoked in diaries, letters, and other addressed accounts as epistolary forms. This study concentrates on the strategic ways that writers put fragmented and found material traces in order to emphasise such traces of the past as fragmentary, incomplete, and contradictory. Interpolated documents evoke ideas of privacy, confession, secrecy, sincerity, and seduction only to be exploited and subverted as writers idiosyncratically manipulate epistolary devices to support metacritical agendas. ..iJ~1 Underpinning this thesis is the premise that much literary neo- Victorian fiction is bound in an incestuous relationship with Victorian studies. This can be identified and analysed in works that metafictionally and self-consciously engage the- nineteenth century. My study therefore examines a diverse critical awareness refracted through epistolary strategies, investigating how neo- Victorian writers collaborate with or contest critical ideologies by way of perceptual and interpretative manipulation afforded by both diaries and letters. Diary form particularly refracts reflexive critical commentary on the novel and its processes and this study consequently sustains a greater focus on diaries than letters as strategic narrative devices in neo- Victorian fiction. In five chapters, I examine five novels by writers who share a common characteristic of critical, theoretical, and academic backgrounds. Chapter one investigates how A. S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance (1990) employs techniques of epistolary seduction to support a critique of fictional academics who construct Victorians to fit their own critical agendas. Chapter two considers the ways in which Sarah Waters's nov el, Affinity (1999), parodically foregrounds the Foucauldian 'gaze' with two diarists and secret letters that engage critical discourses of Victorian sexualities and nineteenth-century spiritualism. Chapter three examines Alias Grace (1996) to consider Margaret Atwood's interrogation of the textual re-construction of past lives by way of a diary-style voice. Chapter four discusses Katie Roiphe's 2001 novel, Still She Haunts Me, which plays to contemporary unease about Charles Dodgson's relationship with Alice Liddell by exploiting archival gaps with invented diary entries that eulogise desire. My final chapter explores Mick Jackson's The Underground Man (1997), which interpolates a diary with 'official accounts' in a form of textual autopsy that defends personal liberty and an eccentric viewpoint against communal testimony. This study demonstrates that neo- Victorian writers use documents creatively to interrogate history and our understanding of it in diverse strategic and intertextual ways. My study is grounded in theories of pastiche and builds on Linda Hutcheon's work on historiographic metafiction. It is also informed by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose discussion of heteroglossia coincides with theories of diary form's dialogic double- voicedness outlined by Loma Martens's work, The Diary Novel (1985). My study investigates the intertextual processes of metafiction in neo- Victorianism as an area that has as yet received little critical attention, with no specific investigation of epistolary forms in the genre.

The 'obese' female body has often been portrayed as the 'other' to the slender body. However, this process of 'othering', or viewing as different, has created a repressive discourse, where 'excess' has increasingly come to be studied as a 'physical abnormality' or a signifier of a 'personality defect'. A tendency to stabilise the implications of obesity through medical, biological or statistical data has been a recurring characteristic of Westem society's current cultural view of obesity.

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This thesis explores how the authors Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Fred D' Aguiar represent Britain's involvement in the transatlantic slave trade in their recent fiction, poetry and non-fictional works. My approach is enabled by the novel engagements I make across postcolonial, poststructuralist and Holocaust theory, and my readings are also informed by a close attention to the history of Britain's involvement in slavery between the mid-sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. I explore each author's imaginative return to slavery in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries, and the diverse problems experienced by Phillips, Dabydeen and D' Aguiar in so doing. I contend that three central concerns in returning to this past are: the history of slavery, the ethics of representing the trade, and the difficulty of how to remember slavery. In my first chapter, I explore Phillips's interest in, and concerns with, the historical archive and the voices missing from received history. In my second chapter, I discuss Dabydeen's struggle with the ethics of representing slavery and the problems of articulating this past. The third chapter focuses on the work of D' Aguiar, foregrounding his difficulties with the memory of slavery and the importance of counter-remembrance of this past. The UK's involvement in slavery has often been overlooked by historians or, when remembered, the focus tends to fall upon Britain's abolitionists; these authors arguably write partly in response to this inadequacy. To this end, this thesis is divided into three chapters: one on each of my primary authors. These chapters are preceded by a general introduction to the ethical, creative, historical and theoretical issues surrounding an imaginative return to the past of British slavery. I conclude by exploring the divergence and convergence of these varying issues in the works of Phillips, Dabydeen and D' Aguiar. Ultimately, this thesis asserts that imaginatively returning to the past of slavery" is all too necessary when faced with the struggle of multiculturalism in late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century Britain.

This study explores the shifting notions of postmodernism developed through Muriel Spark’s fiction, and thereby clarifies this artist’s own postmodernism. I use Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of the notion in his The Postmodern Condition (1979), that there is no grand narrative, as my starting point, and deploy various postmodernist theories, which can illuminate Spark’s art and can in turn be illuminated by her art, in my arguments. Throughout the thesis, I focus on two of Spark’s most important themes as crucial keys to understanding her postmodernism: the theme of individual subjectivity and the theme of the interplay of life and art. The thesis begins with the claims Spark makes for her individuality and her individual art through the voice of “I”. Chapter I considers issues about being a woman and an artist, which Spark raises around the narrator-heroine of a fictional memoir, A Far Cry from Kensington (1988). Here I present this heroine as a definition of the strength of Sparkian women who liberate themselves by practicing art. Chapter II discusses Loitering with Intent (1981), a fictional autobiography of a fictional woman novelist, alongside Spark’s own autobiography and her various biographical works. This section illustrates Spark’s notion of the “author” in relation to the “work” - and an author in control in her sense - by investigating the dynamic interplay of life and art in the form of this novel. Chapter III analyses The Driver’s Seat (1970), the novel which most shockingly elucidates the postmodern condition according to Spark and demonstrates her postmodernist narrative strategies. Her concern with the crisis of the “subject” in the world in its postmodern phase is observed in the figure of the heroine, a woman who has tried and failed to be an author in control. I argue that Spark here theorises the notion of subject, by providing her own version of the psychoanalytical “death drive” and also represents the Lacanian real as the unfigurable with this figure. Chapter IV and Chapter V follow the developments of Spark’s discussion of the crisis of the “subject” in two of her later novels. Chapter IV concentrates on the theme of Otherness in Symposium (1990). Chapter V discusses Reality and Dreams (1996), in which Spark pursues the theme of excess and opens up the contradictions inherent in this notion to bring about a new philosophy of life by art as excess.

This thesis looks at a selection of novels by diasporic writers which engage significantly with the domestic sphere and its associated practices in their narratives of migration to Britain from postcolonial spaces. Employing a feminist postcolonial approach to works by Buchi Emecheta, Monica Ali, Andrea Levy, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Leila Aboulela, this thesis challenges dominant readings of migration fiction that have been shaped by postmodern and diasporic frameworks of displacement and rupture, emphasising instead placement, dwelling and (re)rooting as important features of the migratory process. It also aims to re-centre the domestic, private and ‘everyday’ in conceptions of home in current debates about migration, while also generating a productive theorisation of 'home' which synthesises its feminist and postcolonial critiques. My approach is about reading more than the allegorical into literary representations of home-spaces, as I trace the interdependence of public and private, domestic and political, across both form and content in the novels covered. Through my analysis of individual texts, I show how writers draw on the colonial and postcolonial politics of home and domesticity as discursive resources in their narratives of cross-cultural encounter, challenging the devaluation of the private sphere as a static, unproductive and uncreative space. I unpack how these texts engage with the domestic as a material space of inspiration, but also as a political space constructed by histories of colonialism and immigration, as well as by policy and academic scholarship, showing how they respond to and subvert these discourses. Through their engagement with familiar tropes of house and home, many of these works challenge representations of migrant women as passive recipients and reproducers of an externally defined ‘culture’. Instead, I argue, they offer alternative interior geographies which re-map both the British domestic space and that of the home-culture, reframing the home as an important carrier of meaning but one that is constantly in flux, remaking itself according to the needs and desires of those who dwell within its walls.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 84-91) / My thesis focuses on the representation of marginalized voices and trauma in the selected fiction of Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera. I analyze three novels written by the Yvonne Vera—Without a Name (1994), Under the Tongue(1996) and The Stone Virgins(2002) set during the Zimbabwe liberation struggle period and postcolonial Zimbabwe dissident era respectively and Nervous Conditions(1988) and its sequel, The Book of Not (1996), by Dangarembga set during the 1960s to 1970s colonial Rhodesia period (the colonial name for Zimbabwe) and during the period of white‐minority rule in Rhodesia to the attainment of independence in 1980. I analyze these novels from the feminist/womanist, gender and postcolonial literary models. The rational for grouping these theoretical models in the analysis in this thesis is that they commonly highlight from a gender perspective the complex factors which oppress and marginalize women in the colonial and postcolonial contexts in which the two authors set their writings. These literary paradigms highlight the oppression of women from an African perspective and all acknowledge the need to address all factors which oppress and subordinate women (gender, race, class) if total emancipation for them is to be achieved. I also posit that Vera and Dangarembga offer discourses that challenge the silencing of narratives of oppression and violation in their novels selected for analysis in this thesis. The thesis has five chapters. In Chapter 1, I set out the argument of the thesis and give a brief history of gendered colonialism and the historical period which provides a setting for the fiction of the two authors. Next, I describe the conceptual framework I will use in analyzing the works of the two postcolonial Zimbabwe female writers. Then I will outline the research questions and hypothesis and expose the research methodology and approach that will serve as my vehicle for data collection, analysis and interpretation. In Chapter 2, I will focus on gender, class and race and discuss the ways Dangarembga explores these factors in Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not. I will also discuss innovate ways women explore to champion their freedom and voice in the fiction of Dangarembga. Chapter 3 focuses on the novels of Yvonne Vera— Without a Name, Under the Tongue and The stone Virgins —which articulate narratives of violated subjects and silenced voices. I will discuss the ways Vera explores to show how narratives of violated subjects are silenced by patriarchy, colonialism and masculine narratives of nationalism in these novels. Chapter 4 focuses on narratives of trauma. Using theories of trauma, I will analyze Without a Name, Under the Tongue and The Stone Virgins by Vera and show how these narratives articulate colonial and postcolonial trauma and female child trauma. I will also discuss The Book of Not by Dangarembga and show how the novel articulates colonial and racial trauma. My discussion of the novels of Vera and Dangarembga in this chapter will show that these novels work out traumatic experiences in the colonial and postcolonial eras and will also reveal the challenges of representing tra / English Studies / M.A. (English)

Literary representation of character in South Africa is not just problematic but also complicated by racial dynamics, which easily lead to prejudiced portrayal by most writers. Mphahlele's reaction to White writing's "distortion" of the image of Blacks, in his critical texts resulted in his being labelled a protest writer. Concerning his creative writing, he admits that he initially couldn't portray the character of a white person roundedly due to limited acquaintance with him. What he only knows about him and therefore depicts in his early writings is the White stereotype. His acquaintance with the White world through varied interaction gives a leverage that improves his portrayal of the White character. Consequently his later works reflect objective representation of characters from different races. The study therefore concludes that he falls outside the bracket of protest writers, as his literary works prove to transcend the limitations of stereotypical character representation. / Afrikaans and Theory of Literature / M.A. (Theory of Literature)

This study is, by its intention at any rate, an attempt at assembling the scattered fragments of Can Themba’s life to make a composite being out of the various existing phenomena that shaped the contours of his life in both literary and literal senses. Given the disjunctive manner in which Can Themba and his work have been represented thus far, a combination of Historical and Biographical research methods will underpin the approach of this study. The resultant approach is the Historical-Biographical method of research. According to Guerin et al (2005, 22) the Historical-Biographical approach “sees the work chiefly, if not exclusively, as the reflection of author’s life and times or the life and times of the characters in the work.” This research is premised on the conviction that an individual is a constellation of multiple factors that play a pivotal role in the construction of their persona. These factors will be traced from his family background, early schooling, tertiary education, socio-economic conditions as well as his contribution to various newspapers and journals. While so much has been written about Themba and his work, there is no comprehensive biography of Can Themba as a person. Most importantly, the factors that contributed to his making as well as his breaking, or destruction, have not been interrogated in a form of comprehensive academic research. Rightly or wrongly, Themba’s meteoric rise into the South African literary canon is often traced from the moment he won the inaugural Drum Magazine short story competition. Themba became one of the most popular journalists and rose within the ranks of Drum to become the Assistant Editor. However, my research demonstrates that winning the Drum short story competition was the culmination of a literary talent that was developed and had been simmering for a number of years. Themba studied at the University of Fort Hare between 1945 and 1951 alongside the likes of Dennis Brutus, Ntsu Mokhehle, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, and many other prominent individuals. He was a regular contributor to The Fortharian, a university publication that published opinion pieces, poems and short stories. This is a vital component of Themba’s intellectual growth and it remains the least explored aspect of his life. As a result, what has been discursively documented by various scholars, writers and journalists, thus far, is a very parochial representation of Can Themba’s oeuvre. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English Literature)