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The present thesis examines the representation of the impotent body and mind in a selection of Samuel Beckett’s dramatic and prose works. Aiming to show that the body-mind relation is represented as one of co-implication and co-constitution, this thesis also takes the representation of memory in Beckett’s work as a key site for examining this relation. The thesis seeks to address the centrality of the body and embodied subjectivity in the experience of memory and indeed in signification and experience more generally. In these terms, Chapter 1 analyzes the representation of the figure of the couple in Beckett’s drama of the 1950s – as a metaphor of the body-mind relation – and, in light of Jacques Derrida’s theory of the supplement and Bernard Stiegler’s theory of technics, it discusses how the relationship between physical body and mind is defined by an essential supplementarity that is revealed even (or especially) in their apparent separation. Furthermore, the impotence that marks both elements in Beckett’s writings, when it is seen to lay bare this intrication, can be viewed, in important respects, as enabling rather than merely privative. Chapter 2 discusses the somatic structure of memory as represented in four of Beckett’s later dramatic works composed in the 1970s and 1980s. Similarly to Chapter 1, the second chapter focuses on the more “extreme” representation of bodily impotence in Beckett and demonstrates that rather than a merely “mental” recollection, memory in the work of Beckett is presented as necessarily experienced through, and shaped by, the body itself. In this light, then, it is shown that despite the impotence that marks the body in Beckett’s work of the 1970s and 1980s, the body is a necessary site of memory and retains or discovers a kind of activity in this impotence. Finally, Chapter 3 shifts its attention to Beckett’s prose works in order to explore how such works, reliant on language rather than the physical performance of actors onstage, sustain questions of embodied subjectivity at their heart. Specifically, the chapter argues that, on closer inspection, Beckett’s “literature of the unword” is not an abstention from meaning and its materialization, but one that paradoxically foregrounds that “something” which remains an essential part of it, that is, an embodied subjectivity.

This thesis examines the memoirs of contemporary, young, female celebrities with a particular focus on gender, agency in self-representation, and ghostwritten authorship. Although the thesis explores examples which range across fiction, photo-diary, comic-strip, and art anthology, as well as more ‘traditional’ autobiographical forms, it argues that a strong set of representational conventions is at play, prescribing particular constructions of female subjectivity. These memoirs exist within what this thesis terms a wider economics of access, in which young, female celebrities trade the appearance of access to their commoditised subjectivity and/or exposed bodies. This thesis investigates both the demands of the genre, and the potentially resistant strategies which may work to temper them. Yet even the most seemingly non-conforming examples evidence the weight of convention upon them and point to the limits of the representational possibilities for highly visible young women. This thesis contends that such questions of access and self-representational agency must be interrogated in relation to the genre’s visible mediation. These texts, which are widely understood to be ghost-written, invite consideration of how can we understand collaborative construction and its implications for both agency and ‘authorship’. Case-studies have been organised around female celebrities from different media ‘fields’ - reality TV stars, popstars and ‘glamour’ models - and the thesis explores the examples of Jade Goody, Paris Hilton, Katie Price, Pamela Anderson, Jenna Jameson, Lady Gaga and M.I.A - examining the ways in which self-representation is shaped by the media specificities of the particular celebrity’s domain. By theorising celebrity memoir - as gendered, as ghost-written, as an agentic intervention, and as a negotiated terrain which makes its negotiations exceptionally visible on the page – this thesis provides new ways in which to understand the modes of self-representation available to women on a public stage, and the discourses which structure and limit them.

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This thesis explores how mid-Victorian representations of the wrist, neck, and waist can be read as expressive of female sexuality. I read the appearance of these pieces of the body for their potential to contradict, challenge, or elude ideologies of nineteenth-century sexual regulation and control of women. In studying how desire could be displaced to portions of the body whose display was sanctioned, I draw together two key mid-Victorian preoccupations: the visibility of female sexuality and the subjectivity of artistic consumption. Successive chapters focus on different art forms between the 1850s and the 1870s, including some of the most popular works of the period, alongside critical and social perspectives on the era. I examine how concepts of agency of expression and interpretation negotiate with the strictures, social and physical, that shaped and curated the display of the female body. In doing so, I perform readings of poetry, painting, illustration, photography, art criticism, fashion journalism, and novels. The first chapter examines the representation of the neck in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Other Poems, both in the titular poem and illustrations by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I interpret the neck as a spatially and sensually disruptive element of these works, which can facilitate a subjective physical experience of art by the consumer. In the second chapter I scrutinise the appearance of the waist in the photographs of Lady Clementina Hawarden, and in fashion criticism written by women. I analyse how women exercised creative agency by shaping representations of themselves, through the use of the corset and the camera. The final chapter looks at representations of the wrist and its coverings in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. I read the wrist’s erotic significance in these novels, not as a space of subjugation or repression, but as one of sensual agency.

In this thesis I situate Kipling’s shaping of Buddhist ideas in Kim against the background of Victorian constructions of the religion, deriving from scholarly, popular, Christian and theosophical positions. Kipling’s presentation of the lama in Kim challenges many of these interpretations since Kipling fashions himself as one who ‘knows’ about Buddhism, just as he claims to be one of the ‘native-born’ who understands India. I trace Kipling’s hostility to the missionary endeavour and also show his deep-rooted antagonism to theosophy, as manifest in three of his short stories as well as in Kim. Comparing Kim and The Light that Failed, I show that both novels deal with Kipling’s childhood experiences in Southsea, the one imagining the adult he could have been, and the other a fantasy of what life could have been like had he stayed in India and fully immersed himself in its religious life. Kipling’s biographical self-positioning thus motivates various degrees of resistance to and recrafting of the Victorian construction of Buddhism. The thesis presents a reading of Kim in which consideration of its religious ideas takes precedence over the post-colonialist analysis that has dominated critical approaches to the novel in recent decades.

This thesis challenges the literary tradition of reading Bunyan's narrative works separately from the theology that fundamentally informs them. It argues that a full understanding of texts like Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and The Pilgrim's Progress is possible only through a more accurate appraisal of Bunyan's religious doctrines, and a critical practice that pays due attention to Bunyan's Nonconformist poetics. 'Grace-ful Reading' regards Bunyan's theology in terms very different from those of the abhorrent Calvinism that studies often emphasise. Bunyan's narratives are understood here as propounding a doctrine of Law and grace that is essentially accommodating and comforting. Moreover, in terms of the experimental nature of Bunyan's theology, this thesis aims to demonstrate that his narrative works are constructed according to a specific purpose - to teach the reader about reading the self and the Word in terms of a faith that is experimental rather than rational. Consequently, 'Grace-ful Reading' views Bunyan's narrative works as attempting to elicit a specifically doctrinal reader-response, one that foregrounds spiritual understanding over anything knowable and reasonable. Indeed, Bunyan's texts teach about grace, faith, and spiritual perception by frustrating the reader's rational expectations of them as narratives. Hence, Bunyan's textual procedures are considered as essentially anti-narrative, his spiritual autobiography and spiritualised allegories effectively curtailing any 'historical' interest in them as moralistic or imaginative fables. 'Grace-ful Reading' offers a more detailed and contextually situated understanding of Bunyan's doctrines while exploring the textuality of his writings through a contemporary, even postmodernist narrative discourse. This study is organised into six chapters. Chapter 1 specifically addresses Bunyan's theology while Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim's Progress receive extensive analysis in chapters 2 and 3, 4 and 5 respectively. Chapter 6 assesses The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, The Holy War, and The Pilgrim's Progress, Part II as sequels to Bunyan's most popular allegory.

This thesis argues that Wilkie Collins demanded radical reassessment of his culture through his writing and anticipated post-modern theories of discourse, identity and gender. It will propose that Collins perceived reality as a linguistic creation, gender as a destructive evasion and truth as an elusive desire. Collins' fiction will be seen as palimpsestic narratives which, through buried texts and sub-texts, embrace a Conradian heart of darkness and pursue a non-teleological format. I will particularly focus upon the later novels which I believe have been long neglected and undeservedly disparaged. However, this work will pursue a thematic rather than chronological approach and will study the dominant issues of discourses which fascinated Collins throughout his career. The argument will utilise Foucauldian and Lacanian philosophies and will demonstrate how Collins perceived social systems and hegemonic utterances as terrified partriarchal defences against the primordial chaos which haunted his imagination and characters. I will specifically focus upon issues of gender and demonstrate how discourses of masculinity, both modern and Victorian, stunt individual development, suffocate women, warp human relations and ultimately destroy men themselves. The first chapter will explore this theoretical base and introduce the various concepts of masculinity and the chief discussions pertinent to gender constructs utilised in this thesis. Within each chapter I will examine the irreparable damage inflicted upon femininity and marginalised others by masculinity and the fear and loss endured by men themselves. Collins was, however, a white, middle-class, heterosexual man who benefited from the very tenets he despised and I will thus explore the inevitable tensions this generated throughout his work. I will reveal how the secret or truth, central to each novel, transpires to be this very phallocentric abuse and oppression and the revelation of the fragility and destructiveness of gender constructs themselves. And in exposing this Collins necessarily underscored the limits and inadequacies of language itself thus undermining the very essence of his own productivity.

This thesis is an examination of language in general and literary language in particular through a close reading of some key texts by Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin. Based on a comparative study of deconstruction and theological discourse, it identifies three paradoxes in literary language and argues that this can deeply affect the act of literary reading. The thesis is divided into three sections. Each section deals with a particular paradox and stages a theoretical discussion of the relation between two oppositional forces and ends with a reading of a literary text. Part I is a study of the relation between the notions of singularity (originality) and generality (multiplicity). I contend that these two poles are not oppositional in a literary text. While the translated text always bears the singular mark(s) of the original text within it, the singularity of the text demands further translations. I read Jorge Luis Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" and argue that singularity and multiplicity interconnect in this text. Part II examines the representational aspect of language against the self-referential (immanent) one. It then explains how referentiality takes the meaning effects of the text to both the edges and the centre. I look at these points in relation to Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 in which I suggest a labyrinthine structure illustrates this 'tug of war'. Part II focuses on the notion of negation in language and its relation to Derrida's thought. I explain how in theological discourse, language is perceived as both negative and affirmative and later explain the curious relationship between deconstruction and negative theology. I also examine Samuel Beckett's The Unnameable to argue how the notion of 'silence' as the negative side of language cohabits with the literary text. Finally, I ask to what extent literary discourse - through deconstructing the oppositions of singularity/multiplicity, representation/immanence, negation/affirmation - can take language to the limits of its metaphysical existence.

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