The objective of the following thesis is to demonstrate the conceivability that the various romances relating to King Arthur may be used to reconstruct some of the many Welsh literary sources that have been lost to us over the past fifteen centuries. To do this, I will examine two stories written by one of the earliest and the most influential of all the Arthurian romance writers, Chrétien de Troyes. These are the abduction of Guinièvre and the grail. The Preface and Introduction will explain the broad assumptions upon which I base my present volume. First, that there was a British Heroic Age between the fifth and early seventh centuries. Second, that it did produce several literary works of historical value. My theory is that some of these literary sources were at one point written and, though badly marred by progressive influences, have survived in the form of romances. If this theory is correct, the study of all extant early variations of what is essentially one story should reveal a series of independent connections to the Dark Age British. In addition, there is a high probability that this story will be able to be seen in the context of fifth or sixth-century British culture. This is what will be attempted with the abduction and grail narratives. In the second chapter I will summarize the influences of the known sources of Chrétien de Troyes in writing Le Chevalier de la Charrette. This will have two purposes. First, it will serve to point out the degree of influence Chrétien's patron had on him. Second and what is more important, this will lead to the conclusion that Chrétien's primary importance to the stories is his creative manipulation of his knowledge and sources around his patrons' desires; he has not simply invented any aspect of the Matter of Britain.

Shakespeare's presence in Blake's poetry has been virtually unrecognised by scholarly criticism except, of course, for Jonathan Bate's groundbreaking work of 1986. Bate has had no major successors, so this thesis is, then, an attempt to close to lacuna, to restore Shakespeare to the place that was recognized by Blake himself, as a major influence on his work. In my introductory chapter, I offer a brief sketch of the manner in which Shakespeare informed the culture of the later eighteenth century of which Blake was a product. I survey Shakespearean production, staging and acting techniques, and the history of textual reproduction, before turning to an aspect of the Shakespearean tradition of particular importance to Blake, the production of illustrated editions of Shakespeare's work, and the recourse to Shakespearean subject matter of the painters of the later eighteenth century. I end this chapter with an account of Blake's own Shakespearean illustrations. In Chapter 2, I focus on the earliest of Blake's poems to show a clear Shakespearean influence, the dramatic fragments: "Prologue to King John", Edward the Third, and "Prologue to Edward the Fourth". The major model for these early poetic experiments is, of course, the Shakespearean history or chronicle play, but I argue that even in these apprentice works Blake's appropriation of the Shakespearean model is complex. Shakespeare's history plays celebrate the emergence of an England that, as the defeat of the Spanish Armada demonstrated, had emerged as one of Europe's most powerful nation states. The most pressing political context for Blake's dramatic fragments is England's loss of America, its greatest overseas colony. The fragments are addressed, then, not to a confident nation, proud of its newfound position in the world, but to a nation that had very recently suffered a major blow to its confidence. Already evident, too in these early fragments is Blake's distrust of the Shakespearean notion, flamboyantly expressed in a play such as Henry V, that a nation's greatness might appropriately be measured by its military successes, particularly in war against another state.

Chapter One: (pp. 1 -87) Landscape, Society and the Individual in Cormac McCarthy's Novels This chapter considers the incursion of a form of Emersonian transcendentalism in the earlier Southern novels. The second part focuses on the Western novels and includes discussion of the relationship between man and nature and the influence of the ideologies which underpin both nationalism and Manifest Destiny. The gradual conflation of landscape and text in the western novels, the increasing internalisation of landscape and the tendency towards erasure that threatens to subsume/ absorb the traveller/ narrator, are also addressed. Chapter Two: (pp. 88 - 147) A Consideration of Corpses: Literary and Cinematic Autopsy in Cormac McCarthy's Prose The second chapter examines the various narratorial strategies employed by McCarthy, focusing on the image of the corpse in his first three novels. The influence of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Joyce on McCarthy's narrative strategy and the role of the 'author' in his work are considered in the introduction. In The Orchard Keeper, the position of the reader as 'spectator' is examined and finds that the anamorphosis of the narrative style mimics cinematographic changes in perspective and point of view. The voice of a sadistic and misogynist narrator is addressed with reference to Child of God, which also draws on feminist theories of voyeurism and scopophilia. The relationship between the author and the 'spectator/ reader' is related to classic films (Hitchcock's Psycho and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, for example) and issue of identification practices and specular relations are discussed with reference to film theory. The depiction of 'death hilarious' in Outer Dark compares McCarthy's conflation of horror and humour with both the earlier prose of Flannery O'Connor and contemporary cinema.

This thesis deals primarily with Renaissance tragedy and with Milton's Paradise Lost. It is structured around three main Sections each of which identifies a dominant theme in the drama/poetry of the period 1580-1670 and considers the way in which it is utilised in order to express or represent what was arguably the most pressing concern of the age - the concept of individual identity, or 'selfhood'. Section One takes as its theme 'death', or more specifically 'death scenes'. It considers the way in which the battle for what I have chosen to term 'directional control' in the death scenes of both playhouse and scaffold shapes the symbiotic relationship between the two, and can be viewed as a vital component in the rhetoric of identity which emerges from plays such as Shakespeare's Macbeth, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Webster's Duchess of Malfi, and scaffold texts of the period. Section Two deals with the remaining Shakespearean mature tragedies - Hamlet and King Lear - as well as with Marlowe's Dr Faustus. It takes as its focal point the viability - or otherwise - of the 'interiorised contexts' which such plays construct. This Section contends that these (relative) microcosmic interiors are, in fact, limited by the 'absolute' of death. The third and final Section of the thesis consequently addresses the implications, for the contextualised self, of removing this limiting factor. The text which lends itself most naturally to this is Paradise Lost, and Section Three concludes by placing Milton's epic alongside a small selection of contemporaneous poetry by Traherne.

The task has been to show that Spenser imagined Faeryland according to his own travel experience in England. The geography of The Faerie Queene 1 - the only book of the poem not set in the South, and the only book without coastlines - reveals Spenser's experience and interest in the North and the Northern Rebellion of 1569. We explore The Faerie Queene 1 (possibly quite extensively planned and drafted before the poet set sail for Ireland in August 1580) as a discrete geography, finding it quite unlike the terrains of the books which follow. This is so because Spenser almost certainly had never gained any substantive travel experience in the South West, where are found the coastlines he came to know during his brief and prolonged returns to England during 1580-96. Written during Spenser's life in Ireland, The Faerie Queene 2-6 is enacted on English soil where, I argue, Spenser's journeys to and from the South West - the coastlines, forestry, settlements and towns - can often be traced and mapped in the journeys of the poem's travellers. The travels of Artegall, Britomart, Guyon and Calidore establish the western terrain and the western and southern coasts of the poem. Such is the importance of the travels of these knights to the poem's geography, that we can establish Artegall's journey to the West Coast, and Britomart's journey to the same place. Britomart knows the coast to which Artegall is bound is the place where she will find him. Distractions during the journey keep him from the 'appointed tide' and Britomart having arrived at Artegall's intended coast, journeys inland from the Rich Strond (Plymouth) to find him - somewhere along the western route between London and Plymouth.

The key to Shelley's thought system lies in understanding that the thing and its opposite, the idea and its contrary, are brought together simultaneously. Shelley tries to resolve in one way or another the contradiction between transcendentalism and immanence, essentialism and socialism, and finally thought and object. He makes the unity of life his manifesto and yet does not deny the diversity of beings. The ontological clearly has a place within his system and nonetheless the phenomena are considered epistemological divisions, non-essential and insubstantial. He believes in the existence of a comprehensive sign system with no transcendent meaning and yet speaks of an absolute incomprehensibility of a transcendent being which defies words and signs. In short, beings for him are only relationships with no essence, and existence is still one essence in which none of these relations holds true. In harnessing the contraries Shelley's thought cannot be categorised as reductionist, dialectical, or deconstructionist. The logic he follows denies neither of the two opposites nor does it link them dialectically through accepting a third element, but resolves the opposition through a shift of perspective. Existence is both transcendent and immanent, essential and relational, and comprehensive and ineffable. This dissertation attempts to show that from such a perspective the rhetorical or deconstructive coincides with the grammatical or the metaphysical. Although the opposition set by the deconstructionists between the rhetorical and the grammatical readings is assumed by Shelley to exist between the metaphorical and the literal, nevertheless he accepts them as two epistemes; the ontological remains existing but unreadable, and the text is only its expression.

This thesis is an examination of Liz Lochhead's three published plays: Blood and Ice (1982), Dracula (1989), and Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1989). Each of these three plays deals centrally with a literary or historical pre-text: the life of Mary Shelley and the ideology of English Romanticism in Blood and Ice; Bram Stoker's novel Dracula and late-Victorian British ruling-class culture in Dracula; and sixteenth-century Scottish and English history in Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off. Given these dramatic emphases, the critical emphasis of this thesis is the plays' reassessment of their pre-texts, and particularly of those pre-texts' power to exercise and selectively to confer cultural authority. The thesis argues that the plays critically re-cast their pre-texts, re-interpreting those texts and compelling audiences to do the same. Altering diegetic emphases, the plays emphasize and interrogate the perhaps dubious function of their pre-texts to narrate and legitimate certain cultural groups' dominance and others' subordination. And using narrative forms which contrast in significant ways with those of the pre-texts, the plays demonstrate alternative, less prescriptive narrative forms. The effect of these textual re-interpretations and alternative narrative forms to intervene in hegemonic operations of power is important not least because each of the pre-texts, in different ways, thematically and/or formally, is ostensibly committed to the "fair" distributed of power. Romanticism claims commitment to the liberation of humanity. The protagonists of Stoker's Dracula fight avowedly to protect the superiority of their "good" Western humanity over Dracula's "bad" Eastern monstrosity. And orthodox histories, including those of Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I of England, frequently function to absolve present communities' responsibility for their "closed" histories, but also for their histories' legacies, and, thus, for responsibility for the present.

The predicament of human isolation and alienation is a pervasive theme that has not been sufficiently studied in Thomas Hardy's fiction. This study investigates the theme of alienation focussing on Hardy's major novels. Although the term 'alienation' is one of the most outstanding features of this age, it is not very clear what it precisely means. The writer has to draw extensively on Hegel, Marx, Fromm and other thinkers to understand the complex ramifications of the term. The numerous connections in which the term has been used are restricted to include only a few meanings and applications among which the most important refers to a disparity between one's society and one's spiritual interests or welfare. The theme of alienation, then, is investigated in representative texts from the wide trajectory of Victorian literature. It is clear that the central intellectual characteristic of the Victorian age is, as Arnold diagnosed it, "the sense of want of correspondence between the forms of modern Europe and its spirit". The increasing difficulty of reconciling historical and spiritual perspectives has become a major theme for Hardy and other late Victorians. Next, each of Hardy's major novels is given a chapter in which the theme of alienation is traced. In Far from the Madding Crowd, Boldwood's neurotic and self-destructive nature makes him obsessed with Bathsheba, and as a result, murders Troy and suffers the isolation of life imprisonment; Fanny Robin's tragic and lonely death, only assisted by a dog, is a flagrant indictment of society. In The Return of the Native, Clym is the earliest prototype in Hardy's fiction of alienated modern man. He returns to Egdon Heath only to live in isolation unable to communicate with the very people whom he thought of as a cure for his alienation. Eustacia has consistently been leading a life of alienation in Egdon Heath which leads to her suicide. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Henchard's alienation may be more ascribed to his own character, recalling Boldwood, than to incongruity with society. Yet Hardy emphasises the tendency of society towards modernity which Henchard cannot cope with. In The Woodlanders, not only does wild nature fail to be a regenerative and productive force bet also human nature fails to be communicative and assuring. The people of Little Hintock fail to communicate with iry other. The relationship between Marty and Giles is an "obstructed relationship"; Giles dies a sacrificial death, and Marty ends as a wreck in a rare scene hardly credible in a newly emerging world. Fitzpiers and Mrs Charmond, on the other hand, are isolated in the sterile enclosure of their own fantasies. Grace, anticipating Tess and Sue, is torn in a conflict between two worlds, neither of which can happily accommodate her. In Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Tess, after her childhood experiences at Marlott and later at Trantridge, soon discovers how oppressive society is,particularly when she is rejected by Angel, whom she loves and through whom she aspires to fulfil herself. Angel suffers from self-division in his character, and the conflict between received attitudes and advanced ideas leaves him an embodiment of an alienated man hardly able to reconcile the values of two worlds. Jude the Obscure is Hardy's most complete expression of alienation. Jude's alienation is explicitly social and implicitly cosmic, and his failure to identify himself in society constitutes a major theme of the novel. The novel foreshadows the modern themes of failure, frustration, futility, disharmony, isolation, rootlessness, and absurdity as inescapable conditions of life. In conclusion, the theme of alienation in the major novels of Thomas Hardy is a pervasive one. Nevertheless, not all his characters are alienated; however their happy condition, like that of the rustics in Gray's Elegy, is seen to stem from their intellectual limitations.

This thesis uses the hostile reception of The Satanic Verses, the 'Rushdie Affair', as a paradigm for studying immigrant writing from the Indian Subcontinent today. Looking at a selection of authors who specifically write on topics of migration, travel and migrant communities in the West, it considers the political implications of texts that represent marginalised immigrant communities, and inevitably offer them to the gaze of a mainstream readership, thus entering a peculiar power relationship. The introduction looks at the position of Edward Said as exiled intellectual and cultural critic, and the location of travel and migrant identity within postcolonial criticism. Chapter I discusses the reception of The Satanic Verses, particularly by the Muslim Asian communities in the UK, and the conflicting definitions of Indian and Muslim 'authenticity,' as well as political loyalty and accountability at its basis. Chapter II discusses the definitions of expatriation and immigration that occur in Bharati Mukherjee' writing, placing her within a tradition of criticism that has made use of such categorisation. It also looks at the class basis of her own categorisation, and the way this translates to functions of voice, vision and definition in her writing. Chapter III examines Hanif Kureishi's textual strategies for engaging with issues of representation and reception, by looking at his early plays, and focusing particularly on My Beautiful Launderette and The Buddha of Suburbia. It also emphasis Kureishi's particular position as a second-generation immigrant, and makes references to a number of other writers with comparable voices. Chapter IV discusses the influence of Midnight's Children on Indian literature in English, and its redefinition of postcolonial Indian selfhood with reference to alienation and minority status, and metaphorical and actual migration.

This project aims to explore the fictional image of the feral child through practice-based and critical research. The novel Consider The Lilies, comprising the main body of the thesis, explores the relationship between Vicky, a woman who suffered isolated confinement as a child, and Jack, the main narrator, as he searches for his lost identity. In the critical component, analysis of the image using historical perspectives locates its function within the text as one of radical critique, reviewing existing social practices from a defamiliansed perspective. Exploration of contemporary texts focuses this critique on the role of language in the formation of the individual consciousness. The application of psychoanalytic theories, in particular the work of Julia Kristeva on the semiotic chora, identifies the function of the fictional image of the feral child as a catalyst permitting the expression of the semiotic in the text. An examination of a specific text, Jill Dawson's Wild Boy (2003) tests this proposition and evaluates the poetics involved in the composition. The simultaneous development of practice-based and critical research is discussed in the chapter on the poetics of wildness which traces the writing process and its motivation. The concluding arguments consolidate the position that the fictional image of the feral child acts as a catalyst permitting an address to the unspeakable and the expression of the semiotic in the text which carries a revolutionary potential but recognise that this image is only one means of making such address, situating this research as part of an ongoing poetics which will continue to influence future writing.