This dissertation is a study of the relationship between the modern Künstlerromane of Arnold Bennett, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf and issues of embodiment. Born of the field of aesthetics, the literary genre of Künstlerroman inherits its conflicts. The chief dilemma of the form is how an isolated artistic consciousness connects with the world through a creative act. Bennett, Joyce, and Woolf offer different and contradictory resolutions. By examining how each writer conceives the body, I discover in Woolf the idea of an ethical aesthetics that contravenes the assumed polarity between mind and body, between self and other, and between material and ideal. Written only a few years apart, Clayhanger (1910), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and The Voyage Out (1915) tell a compelling story of the relationship between embodiment and a creative life.

From the first electric lights in London along Pall Mall, and in the Holborn Viaduct in 1878 to the nationalisation of National Grid in 1947, the narrative of the simple ascendency of a new technology over its outdated predecessor is essential to the way we have imagined electric light in London at the end of the nineteenth century. However, as this thesis will demonstrate, the interplay between gas and electric light - two co-existing and competing illuminary technologies - created a particular and peculiar landscape of light, a 'lightscape', setting London apart from its contemporaries throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, this narrative forms the basis of many assertions made in critical discussions of artificial illumination and technology in the late-twentieth century; however, this was not how electric light was understood at the time nor does it capture how electric light both captivated and eluded the imagination of contemporary Londoners. The influence of the electric light in the representations of London is certainly a literary question, as many of those writing during this period of electrification are particularly attentive to the city's rich and diverse lightscape. Though this has yet to be made explicit in existing scholarship, electric lights are the nexus of several important and ongoing discourses in the study of Victorian, Post-Victorian, Modernist, and twentieth-century literature. This thesis will address how the literary influence of the electric light and its relationship with its illuminary predecessors transcends the widespread electrification of London to engage with an imaginary London, providing not only a connection with our past experiences and conceptions of the city, modernity, and technology but also an understanding of what Frank Mort describes as the 'long cultural reach of the nineteenth century into the post-war period'.