This thesis critically explores how the representation of male characters in two texts is reinforcing, shaping or challenging contemporary notions of masculine identities. The thesis draws extensively on sociological theory in order to exemplify the links between fictional texts and some key ideological positions relating to the globalisation in the real world contexts surrounding the texts. The thesis utilises discourses of globalisation, neoliberalism and masculinity to analyse fictional male characters and explores the nature of reflexivity and the formation of contemporary masculine identities. Two texts analysed are Caught in the Crossfire by Alan Gibbons (2003) and Unarranged Marriage by the British Asian author Bali Rai (2001). The two texts are analysed initially using grounded theory and then feminine critical discourse analysis is applied within the final stages of the analysis, emphasising the place of gender within the study. The findings are presented in two chapters and reveal the emergence of a masculine hierarchy related to levels of anxiety, cultural and social capital. The first analysis chapter presents characters that represent hegemonic male figures, individual who are highly reflexive. The second chapter presents the analysis of more marginalised, less reflexive males. The findings give an insight into how the desired subjectivities required by globalisation are represented in texts for young people and how they reveal the complexity of contemporary identities. The thesis utilises a range of sociological discourses to analyse fictional texts. It builds on previous work but extends this further by analysis of contemporary masculine identities in texts.

The first part of the thesis is a novel that examines aspects of religion in contemporary British society. Is it possible for atheists or agnostics to fInd sustenance in religious concepts and practices? Are there ways to embrace spiritual ideas without religious institutions and doctrines? Is secular society in the process of becoming a postsecular society? The novel takes Alcoholics Anonymous as its backdrop. The narrator, Nadine, is a recovering alcoholic trying to get to grips With AA's insistence that she find some kind of 'higher power' or a 'God of her understanding'. When she goes on a trip to Jerusalem to look for her missing father, the Holy City only raises further questions in her mind. The second part of the thesis is a contextualising essay that examines how contemporary fiction deals with the subject of religious experience. Many Western novels focus on the demise of traditional Christianity or are concerned with the rise of fundamentalism. However, other novels respond to religion in ways that are particularly relevant to postmodern society. My essay focuses on postsecular concerns with particular reference to Richard Keamey's Anatheism and Don DeLillo's White Noise. 111

This thesis contains an original novella, Desk, fifteen accompanying microfictions, and a critical commentary linking the genres of the novella and microfiction. The thesis examines the forms of the novella and microfiction, and aims to demonstrate some of the similarities between the two forms, as well as exploring the notion of genre. The microfictions reflect the themes of Desk, dealing with sex, love, fear and imagination, but also hint at larger stories which their small space seems, at first glance, to refuse. Both the microfictions and the novella, however, seem to have a shared purpose of epiphany and of writing in ways other than novels or poetry use, yet paradoxically, microfiction and the novella often draw on these genres. Again, the novella's narrative is itself reflected in the microfictions, thus suggesting that there is some unity of the two genres, despite their palpable differences. Complementing the creative work, the critical commentary explores both the forms of microfiction and the novella, and also the notion of genre itself, and argues that both the novella and microfiction are inter-generic, using techniques often associated with other genres as part of their effect. The commentary also explores the creative process underpinning each of the pieces, and shows how and why this may be relevant to understanding generic purposes. The concluding chapter of the commentary suggests that genre as a concept is more open and fluid than it may first appear, and may be more fruitfully defined through creative writing, rather than formal critical history, or abstract definitions.

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This thesis consists of two parts, each separate but linked by common themes and influences. The main part of the project is The Drop Room, a contemporary crime novel, which explores the manner in which fictions and narratives shape lives and govern behaviour and how they connect with the body - a theme that crosses over into the discourse of women crime writers and the relationship of their work with the body. The choice of a female pairing of investigators addresses a lacuna in the genre, while the emphasis on the personal in the lives of the women protagonists follows a strong trend in contemporary women's crime fiction. The background to the antagonist's misogyny is explored, partly by first person narrative which allows a narrowing of the gap between writer and reader. As a hybrid of the sub-genres of psychological thriller, serial-killer narrative and female PI novels The Drop Room explores the concept of the monstrous as abject and its causation as well as its effect.

The creative element of this practice-based thesis comprises extracts from a fictional work for children, The Gideon Trilogy. A time-travelling fantasy set in England and America, the novels straddle the late eighteenth- and twenty-first centuries and feature a large cast of child and adult characters. Extracts have been selected either to demonstrate the character development of the Tar Man (an eighteenth-century henchman and eponymous protagonist) or to give a sense of how I have 'choreographed' different locations, times and sets of characters within the narrative framework. The critical commentary has two aims. First, it interrogates difference and congruence in narrative techniques in the novel and the screenplay. I reflect, in broad terms, on the nature of adaptation and on the historical relationship between film and the novel. I argue that predominantly negative attitudes to novel-to-screen adaptations have defined the discipline's preoccupation with authenticity and fidelity to the source text. Drawing on theoretical debates surrounding how narrative functions in prose fiction and cinema, and supporting my arguments with analyses of novels and screenplays, I discuss the creation of narrative viewpoint and the function and usage of character and dialogue in these two forms. Second, using my own work as a test case, I discuss the outcomes of developing a narrative in two media, using sequential and parallel adaptation, and ask if adaptation might be used as a developmental tool in the creation of narratives

The purpose of this study is to find which practical aspects of craft are open to the realist novelist when writing philosophical fiction. Plato began a long tradition of intelligent thought on the subject, but even amongst novelists the discussion does not often sit at the practitioner's level, and does not address the how-to questions that arise when an author tries to write philosophical content into a fictional narrative. In Section I, this study defines 'philosophical content' to characterise not only a body of enquiries that belong to western philosophical discourse, but also the mode these enquiries take, which, it is contended, is that of directness and discursiveness. The study then explores how such content can enter a novel's narrative in a way that is not unduly compromising to either the philosophy or the novel. The author's own novel, All Is Song — which is the creative counterpart to this study -provides the portal for this exploration. Sections II, V and VII revisit the philosophical content of a particular scene in the novel to see how it evolves with each rewrite and to trace the decision-making involved in the management of that content. Section III deals with an objection to the study's definition of philosophy and a 'philosophical novel', after which the remaining sections, IV, VI and VIII look respectively at the problems abstract ideas pose to literary realism, some responses to those problems as they pertain to the author's novel writing, and the degree to which All Is Song could be considered successful in fulfilling both its philosophical and literary aims. Through this analysis and reflection, the study finds that while dialogue, in the Socratic tradition, is and remains one key way of realising discursive philosophy within a narrative, a far wider and deeper structuralising of that content is needed to make the contending ideas lived and felt. It holds that once such structuralisation has taken place, a novel is not bound to the full execution of a discursive argument of the sort that exists in Platonic dialogues, say, and can express and sort philosophical ideas using an array of literary tools. The Conclusion (Section IX) suggests that this in part signals a move towards a less Platonic, more phenomenological sense of the way in which ideas can be given reality, and thus given form in the realism of the novel. The study does not conclude, however, that all discursive content should thus be 'dissolved' into extra-philosophical situations and events, but that the latter should act always to structuralise, exemplify, amplify and animate an idea or principle, and to give it as full a literary life as possible.

The aim of Earhart County was to create a book which would bring the world of World War Two aviation to a mainstream audience, utilising the magic and durability of folklore to mythologize the incredible feats of Churchill’s finest generation. Whilst entertaining its audience, it aims at giving them a glimpse at the many lives and aircraft that flew during the war. Research was conducted mainly through the study of autobiographical and biographical accounts of both famous and unknown aircrew, as well as post-war and contemporary fiction, aircraft manuals and books detailing the various aeroplanes flown throughout the war. Research was also made into the Russian wondertale and Vladimir Propp’s morphology. The result was the novel Earhart County, a novel which was planned using the structures and devices of the wondertale whilst constantly referencing the world of aviation.

Anglophone African writing is often compared to or contrasted with translation. One of the differences between the two is that in the former source and target language come into contact not only in the process of creating the text, but also in the reality portrayed in this text, as this reality itself constitutes an arena of past and ongoing translation. Translation is therefore not only the medium, but also often the object of representation in Anglophone African literature. The distinction between translation as medium and translation as object forms the backbone of this thesis. Rather than conceptualizing Anglophone African writing - and by extension the linguistic hybridity that is typical of these texts - as a form of self-translation on the part of the author, as has hitherto been the case, it approaches the issue of linguistic hybridity by making a distinction between (i) the self-translation of an embodied textual agent, (ii) other-translation in the form of narratorial intervention, and (iii) translation that functions merely as medium, without being attributable to a textual agent. A theoretical framework of linguistic hybridity is built up that integrates the relation between medium and object and thus enables us to investigate whether and how linguistic hybridity potentially has an impact on the mental representations the reader constructs when interacting with the text and, consequently, whether and how target-text shifts in linguistic hybridity can affect the text's meaning potential. In particular, it investigates how linguistic hybridity interrelates with the reader's construction of (i) the perspective from which the story events are perceived, (ii) the textual agents' cultural identity and (iii) the narrator's attitude towards the narrated cultures. If target-text shifts in linguistic hybridity affect the target-text reader's mental representations of the text, it follows that these shifts potentially also have an impact on the world-view the target-text reader constructs for the implied author and the world-view she constructs for herself.