Iain Sinclair’s London is a labyrinthine city split by multiple forces deliriously replicated in the complexity and contradiction of his own hybrid texts. Sinclair played an integral role in the ‘psychogeographical turn’ of the 1990s, imaginatively mapping the secret histories and occulted alignments of urban space in a series of works that drift between the subject of topography and the topic of subjectivity. In the wake of Sinclair’s continued association with the spatial and textual practices from which such speculative theses derive, the trajectory of this variant psychogeography appears to swerve away from the revolutionary impulses of its initial formation within the radical milieu of the Lettrist International and Situationist International in 1950s Paris towards a more literary phenomenon. From this perspective, the return of psychogeography has been equated with a loss of political ambition within fin de millennium literature. However, the tangled contexts from which Sinclair’s variant psychogeography emerges have received only cursory scholarly attention. This study will unravel these contexts in order to clarify the literary and political ramifications of the seemingly incompatible strands that Sinclair interweaves around the term. Are Sinclair’s counter-narratives to the neoliberal consensus of the early twenty-first century comparable to the critique of capitalism and urbanism advanced by the Situationists? Or is his appropriation of psychogeography emblematic of a broader contemporary recuperation of the oppositional tactics and strategies associated with counter-cultural currents from a more politically adversarial era? Is Sinclair’s transition from the margins of experimental poetry to the literary mainstream correlative with urban gentrification? By examining these questions through the orientating device of a series of psychogeographical plaques tournantes with which Sinclair is preoccupied, this study facilitates a more nuanced evaluation of Sinclair’s compulsively associative use of psychogeography to navigate the split city of London.

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This thesis critically examines the earliest creative work of J.R.R. Tolkien, from which the first version of his mythology would emerge, as one coherent whole, rather than a series of individual creative acts. It argues that all aspects of Tolkien's creativity worked in a dialectic way to bring to life an invented secondary world the complexity of which fantasy literature had not seen before. In examining Tolkien's early creative process this study also offers an alternative profile and assessment of J.R.R. Tolkien, in contradistinction to the popular image of him as the elderly Oxford don, by critically reading him as a young man, student, budding philologist, soldier and World War One survivor. The scope of this thesis is a holistic examination of Tolkien's earliest creative output comprising poetry, prose, language invention and visual works and includes analysis of several of Tolkien’s early creative works which remain either unpublished or under-analysed. The study uses several contextual frameworks to offer an in-depth analysis of Tolkien’s early imaginative language invention, a neglected area in Tolkien studies, in spite of being at the core of Tolkien’s creative process. This thesis, therefore, is critically responding to a gap in Tolkien and fantasy literature scholarship, and offers new insights on the earliest writing phases of one of the most influential fantasy authors of the 20th century. The introductory chapter presents an overview of Tolkien criticism and defines the scope and range of the thesis. Chapter two examines how myth-making and language invention came together in Tolkien’s earliest works and argues that these two key elements become inextricably intertwined in the first full expression of Tolkien’s early mythology, The Book of Lost Tales. Chapter three explores the underlying religious underpinnings of Tolkien's mythology and his early attempt to employ overt Roman Catholic words and ideas into his emerging secondary world. This chapter goes on to demonstrate how Tolkien combined Roman Catholic ideas with elements of both pagan mythology and Victorian spiritualism into the fabric of his secondary world. Chapter four focuses on the role of visual expression in Tolkien's early mythology by reading two major groups of documents from this period: published drawings and paintings in which Tolkien expressed his early mythic ideas; and a group of visually oriented ‘para-textual’ elements, such as maps, charts and samples of Tolkien’s invented writing systems. These visual representations are explored as ‘trans-medial’ components which, along with layered narratives and language invention, make up the fabric of Tolkien’s invented secondary world. The last chapter of this thesis explores several ways Tolkien experimented with in order to link his growing body of mythology to the primary world. It examines Tolkien’s first ‘framework’ of transmission which relied on dreams, and dream vision, to attempt this link. The second half of this chapter explores how Tolkien developed a parallel narrative transmission ‘framework’ through the re-imagining and re-purposing of Germanic myth and legend. The thesis also includes a series of appendices: a chronology outlining Tolkien’s creative works from this time; a list of the books he borrowed from the Exeter College Library as an undergraduate; a detailed list of examples of Tolkien's early language invention from the time; and a transcript of a report on the literary talk Tolkien gave at Exeter College on the Anglo-Catholic poet Francis Thompson.

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The body of poetry and prose produced by Iain Sinclair between 1975 and 2002 represents a sustained engagement with the question of the role of art and literature in the representation and comprehension of the city. This thesis reads Sinclair's work as a political intervention in the relationship between literature, urban space, and history, and takes its theoretical stance from the body of critical approaches to the city first articulated in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. The thesis proceeds on a broadly temporal and geographical basis from the East End of the author's 1975 poetic work Lud Heat to the suburbs of the capital in 2002's London Orbital, and is split into three sections of two chapters each, entitled 'Form', 'Place', and 'Memory' respectively. This structure periodises the author's oeuvre, demonstrating the ways in which his work responds to a series of historically specific cultural and political constellations; the titles name the perennial themes and critical concerns of Sinclair's writing, and allow the investigation of the ways in which these are instantiated and elaborated in his texts. Sinclair's earliest work builds upon the formal innovations and ambition of modernist poetics. Through an analysis of his first major collection of poetry, Lud Heat (1975), and his first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), the first part of the thesis - 'Form' - argues that these texts constitute an interrogation of the institutions of literature in postwar Britain in the wake of what Peter Burger identifies as the failure of the historic avant-gardes. These opening two chapters contextualise Sinclair's work so as to reveal its anti-establishment, oppositional character; the second section of the thesis - 'Place' - moves on to examine how these concerns are expressed in relation to urban space. Chapter 3 turns to the figure of the flaneur in his second novel, Downriver(1991), and demonstrates how this work at once radically decentres this subjectivity and is conditioned by his limitations. Downriver marks a moment of political nihilism in Sinclair's work, neither able to bring to representation Fredric Jameson's aesthetic of 'cognitive mapping', nor the emancipatory potential of postmodernism. His later 'psychogeographic' writing articulates a response to this impasse: chapter 4 demonstrates the ways in which Sinclair's use of this term at once divests it of the utopian character of its Situationist origins and transforms it into a dissenting, heterogeneous, literary mode. The final two chapters - 'Memory' - investigate the political potentialities of the models of history expressed in Sinclair's work. Chapter 5 turns to the author's use of the Gothic in relation to Benjamin's 'messianic' notion of 'the what has been', and argues that whilst such strategies can be of great critical potential, they at once risk collusion with that which they attack. Chapter 6 then analyses 2002's London Orbital, and argues that this work's ironic, tentative nostalgia for both the author's anti-establishment past and for the utopian character of former socio-political projects represents an attempt to find a way beyond the political malaise that Sinclair's London corpus identifies.

The focus of this thesis is The Family Instructor by Daniel Defoe. There are two books: Volume I, first published in 1715, and Volume II, published in 1718. In both cases I have used the Pickering and Chatto edition, published in 2006 and edited by P.N. Furbank. The thesis examines The Family Instructor, in the contexts of family, religion and of its style, to argue that, although usually classed as a conduct book, it is not easily categorised, reflecting as it does Defoe‘s transitional status between ancient and modern times. The Introduction gives my argument. After the opening chapter, which contains critical remarks on Defoe‘s work, Chapter Two considers The Family Instructor in the context of contemporary representations of the family. The older, patriarchal model is examined. In this the husband/ and father is responsible for the entire household, whereas the modern, ―nuclear‖, version, which is also examined, relies less on status and more on contractual and emotional relationships. Chapter Three looks at religion, beginning with an overview of the many sects which are significant for an understanding of The Family Instructor. The chapter argues that although Defoe is at times close to the Latitudinarian position and despite his claim that the work is designed to apply both to Anglicans and Dissenters, his overall position is that of a Dissenter. Chapter Four examines the conduct book genre and goes on to compare the style of The Family Instructor with that of Robinson Crusoe in particular, arguing that the former does not qualify as a ―conduct book‖ and that many of the devices which Defoe uses in his first long narrative are present in The Family Instructor. The Conclusion draws together the arguments of the preceding chapters.

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Samuel Beckett’s writing stalks the progress of twentieth century art and culture. Seen as both symptomatic of the practices of high Modernism, as well as influential within the fragmented tropes of postmodernity, his drama is often referred to as exploring the limits of an incrementally reductive approach to performance in which fine margins – through time and space; sound and image – are used in the determination of an authentic rendering of his work. This study argues that it is the figure of the actor, in all its rich signifying complexity, which provides us with a lens through which we can evaluate Beckett’s work for theatre and other media. In considering the Beckettian actor, the study grounds a poetics of performance in a principally phenomenological discourse in which theatre history and popular culture throughout the twentieth century is seen as a key factor both in Beckett’s writing and theatre directing, as well as in the often contested development of the actor’s craft. Throughout, it is the theme of music and musicality that provides the actor with a starting point, or modus vivendi, in which the individual self or personality of the actor is valorized alongside other practices based on acquired technique and its application. This study does not propose instruction or a range of techniques for the actor to pursue in furthering their understanding of Beckett’s canon. Instead, this work establishes an understanding of the Beckettian actor in which strategies of implication, born out of sometimes paradoxical representations of silence, absence and abstraction, subordinate acting pedagogies based on programmed curricula. This examination of an implied actor illustrates the various ways in which notable, as well as relatively unknown, actors have sought to reconcile some of these issues. In doing so, the study also interrogates my own creative practice as a director and performer of Beckett’s drama over a fifteen-year period.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Uppsala : Univ., 2004. / Härtill 5 uppsatser.