This thesis is the first sustained critical and sociological reappraisal of the poetry produced by Scottish poets who came of age during World War Two and a selection of those who were old enough to have experienced the previous conflict whilst still responding in their art to World War Two. This thesis carves out a critical space for World War Two poetry beyond the poetry of pity and loss espoused by poets of World War One. It also takes into account the conditions and circumstances that mark out Scottish poetry of this conflict from English poetry of the same era, for programmatic, political, poetic and linguistic reasons as well as re-configuring the definition of World War Two poetry to encompass the experience of women poets. At the core of this thesis lies the idea that the Scottish poetry of World War Two was committed to something more than anti-fascism. These poets did not simply oppose a tyrannical, fascist force in their work, they were also developing ways in which their work and art could contribute to a better post-war Scottish society and in many ways espousing both internationalism and proto-transnationalism as well as anti-imperialism. All of these poets contributed in both practical and intellectual ways to post-war Scottish society. In this, this thesis takes its lead from Alice Templeton’s literary theory of a war poetry of ‘possibility’ that transcends both the trauma, witness and outrage of reactions to war. The cumulative effect of the work of these poets is a legislative and educational impact made on society, that poets could have a say in their work on how post-war society could be reconstructed in fairer and more equitable ways. This poetry is both modernist and romantic in the sense that it desires a change and sees life and potential that is being denied by imperial super-powers and structures while it invests the poet with an empowered voice. From the home-front to the front-line, diverse avenues of experience are treated as being of vital importance. The first chapter of this thesis explores the Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica and a number of folk songs by Hamish Henderson, to show his unique commitment to post-war Scotland in his folk-song work. Chapter two compares and contrasts the work of Alexander and Tom Scott, showing their range of reaction from the epic to the highly personal elegy. The thesis then moves into an analysis both of George Campbell Hay’s war poetry, which sympathised with the native Arab populations during the desert war, and the work of Sorley MacLean, who found his political certainties shaken. From this point the thesis explores the anti-heroic work of Edwin Morgan and Robert Garioch as well as the political and personal reasons for refusal of conscription expounded by Douglas Young and Norman MacCaig. The thesis closes with a discussion of women’s experience and poetry of World War Two, and an in-depth a look at the major influential figures on the poets of this time, Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir. Between these figures we shall see a range of experiences, but each poet is united in their struggle, dramatized in their work, for a better post-War Scotland, a drive which this thesis explores and discusses for the first time in detail.

This thesis takes its direction from the belief that the preoccupations of a period are often most helpfully discussed through the work of its so-called minor writers. Such writers also enable the critic to articulate and clarify the concerns of other writers more firmly established in the canon. At the same time, of course, the minor writer is inevitably given importance and position within the context of the period, in a fruitful two way process. This is particularly the case with the Victorian writer Augusta Webster since her use of a wide variety of literary genres helps to express the breadth of literary culture in the period. At the same time, since she is a woman and a woman writer, subject to the historical circumstances peculiar to her sex, a study of her work enables the articulation of the linked literary, social and political concerns that surround the problem of identifying how writers construct and are constructed by gender. Positioning Augusta Webster, which is what this thesis seeks to do, thus unavoidably involves a discussion of the Victorian context within which she works and, I hope, goes some way to illuminating both the writer and the context. I begin by offering a literary and biographical overview with the aim of identifying the major issues both formal and historical which she encountered as an aspiring writer and semi-public figure. I try to show that her growth as a writer was linked to her preoccupations with the 'woman question', specifically with the education, work and political situation of women. I try also to show how these issues were those of the time and how Augusta Webster's treatment of them affected contemporary responses to her work. The Introduction is followed by a chapter on Webster's novel, Lesley's Guardians. My next chapter engages with Webster's translations of Æschylus and Euripides. The central section of my thesis is devoted to Webster's most famous work, A Castaway, which notoriously provides the fallen woman, here a middle-class prostitute, with a voice. Dickens, Gaskell and Barrett Browning are also introduced in their treatment of the fallen woman. Portraits, in the next chapter and the way in which the outsider is employed as social critic is analysed. Chapter five deals with Webster's closet dramas. I begin with brief outlines of these little known works; place them among other nineteenth century dramas and note that they were generally well reviewed. The sixth chapter takes Webster's writing life towards its conclusion with a discussion of her fantasy for girls. Daffodil and the Croäxaxicans. This story of the adventures of a young girl in a frog kingdom is situated within the genre of Victorian writing for children. I conclude with some speculation about the reputation of Augusta Webster. Beginning with Theodore Watts-Dunton's prediction that Webster would, like many others, probably be forgotten after her death, I suggest that although the factors that shape the subsequent reputation of a writer are extremely complex, some possibilities may be put forward to explain why Webster is only now becoming known again.

This study tracks tensions between different modes of knowledge in a body of eighteenth-century fictions centered around themes of detection and punishment of crimes, exemplary among which are Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun (1689), Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724), Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794). Focusing on crimes as varied as forgery, rape, and murder, this set of fictions raises important questions about eighteenth-century narrative techniques and formal elements. For example, why is the narrator of Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun at once omniscient and limited? Why does the ending of Defoe’s Roxana seem abrupt and inconclusive? Critics struggle to find satisfactory answers to these questions because they often read intrusive narrators, abrupt conclusions, and disconcerting tonal shifts as stylistic faults or as ineptitude at realistic narration. I argue that formal peculiarities of eighteenth-century fiction about criminal investigation are in fact revealing narrative symptoms of an attempt to resolve conflicts between competing theories of knowledge rooted in theology, empirical philosophy, probabilistic reasoning, and other modes of understanding.

My dissertation examines the significance of sacred poetry in English to the political and social identity of the English church, from England’s conversion at the end of the sixth century to the flourishing of England’s vernacular theology in the fourteenth. I show that the vernacular literary culture of Anglo-Saxon England was fostered in part by the distinction between the spirit and the letter of the Bible, which enabled speakers of Old English to regard their own literary cultures as potentially sacred and inspired. Turning to the later part of the medieval period, I examine the “spiritual sense,” or level of figural meaning, of sacred texts in Middle English. I demonstrate that the spiritual sense of Middle English religious poems is often designed to communicate an idealized history of English Christianity, as Middle English poems often use inventive typologies to represent the miracle of Anglo-Saxon England’s conversion as a source of sacred authority for the English language. This idealized religious history typically imagines the Church, not as a homogeneous community of Latin speakers, but as a diverse community characterized by heterogeneity and multilingualism. My focus on the distinction between the spirit and the letter, and its significance to medieval multilingualism, enables me to showcase an aspect of the cultural identity of medieval Catholicism that has often gone overlooked. While scholars have long been interested in the cohesion of medieval Catholic literary cultures across Europe, they have often sought to elucidate this area of research by focusing narrowly on medieval authors’ shared possession of Latin texts. I demonstrate that, throughout the Middle Ages, English Christians explained the unity of their shared tradition not in terms of the sacred authority of Latin, but in terms of the sacred authority granted to the many vernaculars spoken within the Roman Catholic Church. In making this argument, I re-examine the historical development of sacred texts in English, seeking to transform this story from a straightforward progress narrative into a complex story of multilingual and transhistorical transmission and encounter. This dissertation is organized chronologically. In my first chapter, “Gehyre se ðe Wille: The Old English 'Exodus' and the Reader as Exegete,” I show that the insular nation of Anglo-Saxon England employed the spiritual sense of Scripture to identify itself implicitly with other originally “pagan” nations, such as Egypt and Ethiopia. Within Anglo-Saxon studies, these African nations have often been treated as the fantastic realm of the Other; my dissertation shows that they also offered Anglo-Saxon England a site of historical identification. This transnational identification was made possible by figural reading, which enabled medieval readers to imagine the Roman Catholic Church as a dynamic world religion, and thus to conceive of a place for England within the Church. In my second chapter, “‘For nu mine hyge hweorfeð’: ‘The Seafarer,’ Grammatica, and the Making of Anglo-Saxon Textual Culture,” I argue that “The Seafarer” reworks standard figural images drawn from the liturgical tradition in order to reimagine them as entirely English. By engaging its readers with the spiritual or figural sense of sea travel, and then reworking that sense in the language of the Old English liturgy, the text makes implicit claims for the sacredness of the vernacular literary tradition. Rather than relegating the vernacular to the expression of “barbaric” or “pagan” ideas, I show that “The Seafarer” invests English with a range of possibility equal to that of the Latinate tradition. Ultimately, I read the poem’s relationship to its Latin intertexts as an early example of vernacular theology, one that makes implicit claims for the potentially sacred authority of English literary traditions. In my third chapter, “‘All forr ure allre nede’: The Ormulum, the Long Twelfth Century, and the Invention of the Vernacular,” I argue that the English language lost much of its imagined spiritual authority during the post-Conquest clerical reforms of the English church and became primarily a vehicle for literal meaning. Against this backdrop of reformist centralization and standardization, I examine the Ormulum, a metrical gospel paraphrase most famous among medievalists for its inexplicably standardized spelling. I argue that, in keeping with contemporary views about the limitations of the English language, Orm focused his efforts on perfecting the letter of English rather than its spirit. In my fourth chapter, ‘‘To Hippe Aboute in Engelonde’: Langland’s Alternative Typology and The Conversion of Anglo-Saxon England,” I argue that the distinction between letter and spirit enabled readers of Middle English to read figural poems for idealized representations of English religious institutions. I examine the re-emergence of a fully developed spiritual or figural sense in the English texts of late medieval England. In particular, I turn to the historiography of William Langland, found in Passus XV of Piers Plowman, where the poet uses the enigmatic phrase “Peter, i.e. Christ” to introduce a long and disordered chronicle of English church history. The equation of Peter with Christ is a clear invocation of figural reading practices; Langland’s innovation, I argue, is to synthesize figural reading practices with specifically English history-writing. Thus, in Passus XV, Langland uses the spiritual sense of his text as an opportunity to put forward his own vision of the ideal English church and its place within world history: as a convert nation, England derives its place within world Catholicism from the authority of its miraculous conversion from paganism to Christianity.

This thesis explores the depiction of masculinity by one of literature's most famous female masculine writers, Radclyffe Hall. Chapters One and Two discuss two extremes in the reception of Hall's work: one a successful poem, 'The Blind Ploughman' (1913); and the other, The Master of the House (1932), a novel that was a commercial and critical failure for Hall. Both 'The Blind Ploughman' and The Master of the House depict spiritual, sensitive working class men who are different. While these texts are often mentioned in Hall scholarship, they have rarely been discussed individually. Chapter One addresses the impact of 'The Blind Ploughman' and its success as poem/song through association with the war wounded and how this, in turn, influenced Hall's depiction of damaged/different masculinity and its relationship to homosexuality. Chapter Two explores Hall's engagement with themes that were also being explored by modernist writers, in particular D. H. Lawrence's reimagining of the Christ story in his novella, 'The Escaped Cock' (1928); the chapter argues that The Master of the House uses Christianity to disguise the homoromantic subtext of the novel. In contrast, Chapter Three explores the more familiar topic of female masculinity in relation to Hall, but instead of focusing on male masculine identities, it presents evidence that Joan of Arc, one of history's most famous crossdressing women, was a female masculine role model for Hall. The influence of Joan of Arc is present both in Hall's understanding of her own female masculine identity and in the representation of her female characters. The aim of all three chapters in this thesis is to present a new way of viewing Hall and her work in order to demonstrate that she is more than just a writer of lesbian fiction.

This dissertation consists of a collection of short stories titled The Head Knows What Lies Near the Heart and an accompanying critical commentary. These tales look to question the ways women relate to their body through examining and emulating certain aspects of traditional fairy tales. While previous feminist examinations of the topic engaged with fairy tales to subvert and rewrite social expectations of the female body (for example, Angela Carter in 1979 or Suniti Najomshi in 1981), the stories in this collection find a middle ground, neither re-writing fairy tales nor completely eschewing them. In my tales the body is used as a starting point; concentrating on a particular body part (head, hands, feet, etc.) per story to narrate the different ways women relate to and approach embodiment. The critical commentary, presented in three chapters, returns to the themes I touched on in my creative work through an analysis first of the use of the body and the motif of mutilation in “Cinderella”, “The Little Mermaid”, and “The Girl Without Hands”, then through the examination of metamorphosis in contemporary texts of magical realism (Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes and Karen Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves). Each of these chapters is accompanied by a critical reflection on the way the research impacted the creative practise. This self-criticism is expanded in the third chapter, where I engage with Julio Cortázar’s principles of the short story and Hélène Cixous écriture féminine to further analyse my work.

This thesis investigates the relationship between women's writing and domestic architecture in London during the four decades around the turn of the twentieth century. It foregrounds novels written by women in order to investigate the ways in which this literature grapples with new forms of urban housing that emerged in order to accommodate economic, political and cultural changes in the city. This period of study is roughly framed by the Married Women's Property Act of 1882, legislation that allowed women to exist legally outside the family structure, and the end of WWI, which initiated a movement towards suburbanisation that was intended to alleviate the necessity of housing the city's labour forces locally. While scholarship to date has been attentive to the ways that women have been denied participation in the production of urban environments – through professional exclusion and social marginalisation – this thesis argues that their creative engagement with the city should be understood as an important contribution to its growth and development, imaginatively and materially. Central to this thesis is a consideration of the ways in which changing gender ideologies initiated new patterns for domestic architecture, but were also responses to the new social relationships that took shape as a result of their construction. It looks closely at women's literary engagement with domestic architecture in order to gain insight into the ways that the representative spaces of these texts interact with the city's built environment. In Chapter 1, I begin with an examination of the ways in which women's fiction engages with the political and legislative developments that initiated slum clearance and city improvement projects, and which led to the construction of model dwellings and early local authority housing. In Chapter 2, I trace the origins of purpose-built housing for women, or 'ladies' chambers', and consider its treatment in contemporaneous novels and journalism. In Chapter 3, I examine the ways in which the settlement movement challenged conventional notions of home and labour by studying its representation in two novels that construct these concerns within discussions of sexuality. I conclude this thesis with an investigation of the development of Hampstead Garden Suburb, and of the ways its design and representation sought to redress the social and political uncertainties that emerged in late nineteenth-century London and its literature.

This thesis explores Doris Lessing’s writing of evolution and genetics in her space fiction through two contexts: first, through a historical global crisis for capitalism in the 1970s following a temporary breakdown of post-war Euro-US financial hegemony; and second, through a philosophical shift in scientific discourse from an age of reductionism to an age of complexity or emergence. After almost two decades of writing realism, Lessing started writing what she calls ‘space fiction’ in the late 1960s in the final section of The Four-Gated City (1969), and she did not stop for over a decade, with The Sentimental Agents of the Volyen Empire (1983). Focusing on Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and the Canopus in Argos series (1979-83), I argue that space fiction allows Lessing two modes of inquiry, the first based in realism and the second on speculation: first, to explore the human body as a political object, or the biopolitical; second, speculations on resistance to biopolitical governance through living ambivalently (not competitively), for the sake of metabolic survival, or biosociality. If biopolitics is enabled through reductionist constructions of ‘the body’ as a unit of analysis (‘bio’ signifying ‘type’ or collection of genes), then biosociality understands ‘bio’ as metabolic systems that extend between individuals, across species differentiations. The posthumanism of biopolitics leads towards transhumanism, while the posthumanism of biosociality is what Eugene Thacker calls ‘peripheral life’: ‘life that is perpetually going outside itself’. The vehicle of this critique is what I call ‘epigenetic poiesis’. I develop this term throughout the thesis to describe literary and cultural representations of epigenetic changes, using ‘poiesis’ to describe how these changes emerge through responses to chance events which put subjects out of equilibrium, enabling or forcing fast adaptation to changed contexts (a forced displacement to another planet, an arranged marriage, an ice age). Lessing’s sf novels express modes of survival activated outside the restrictions of biopolitical control, chance responses to the end-game of a world-system that exploits, determines and tracks the bio-energy of the living matter under its dominion for the sake of accumulation and expansion. The novels also anticipate biopolitics under neoliberalism as a matter of data control, rather than the discipline of individuals. Throughout, the narratives disturb the construction of a liberal subject under capitalist modernity by staging a broader speculation on the intricacy, interdependency and interpretative activity of ‘life itself’ with regard to all kinds of material relations. The texts are literary engagements with what Nikolas Rose calls ‘vital politics’, both a reflection on the governmental co-option of life processes, and an exploration of the multifaceted dimensions of ‘life itself’ loosened from anthropocentric categorisations.

This thesis attempts to understand, through a study of postcolonial Indian novels, the nature and character of Indian (post)colonial modernity. Modernity is understood as the social condition that (post)colonial modernisation and development have given rise to. This condition underlies a historical crisis which is manifest in various kinds of catastrophic events – famine, peasant insurgency, caste violence, communal riot, state repression, and so on. By analysing three of these historical events – the 1943-44 Bengal famine, the Naxalbari Movement (1967-1972), and the State of Emergency (1975-1977) – this thesis argues that a careful reading of the dialectic between event and crisis can offer crucial insights into the conditions of postcolonial modernity. It claims that novels that register these events are able to capture the event-crisis dialectic through their use of form and mode. Socially committed writers adopt the realist form to represent the historical aspects and traumatising consequences of the events. However, because the nature, form, and orientation of these events are different, their realisms undergo immense stylistic improvisation. These stylistic shifts are shaped primarily by the writers’ adapting of various literary modes to the specific requirements (i.e. the historical context). Modes are chosen to represent and historicise the specific character and appearance of an event. In order to represent the Bengal famine, the thesis argues, Bhabani Bhattacharya and Amalendu Chakraborty use analytical-affective and metafictional modes, while Mahasweta Devi and Nabarun Bhattacharya deploy quest and urban fantastic modes to register the Naxalbari Movement and its aftermath. For the Emergency, writers such as Salman Rushdie, O. V. Vijayan, and Arun Joshi use magical, grotesque and mythical modes, and Nayantara Sahgal and Rohinton Mistry employ critical realist modes, defined sharply by the writers’ class- and caste-based perspectives. These modes shape the realisms in the respective texts and transform realist literary form into a highly experimental and heterogeneous matter. Contrary to the prevailing academic belief that modernity breeds modernism, the thesis posits that, in the postcolonial Indian context, the conditions of modernity have provoked a historically conscious, experimental, and modernistic form of ‘crisis realism’.

This study investigates the politicisation of Arthur John Arberry’s and Desmond O’Grady’s translations of the seven Mu‘allqāt, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory. It presents a sociology of translation that is based on five of the conceptual tools that Bourdieu employs in understanding social reality in studying the influence of the social norms on the two translators’ decisions. The study foregrounds the fact that Arberry’s and O’Grady’s translations were similarly produced in highly politicised societies due to the British and later the American involvement in the Middle East, and it argues that British and American propaganda respectively formed the doxa about Arabs at the times the translations were produced and influenced the representation of Arabs in each translation. The study aims to advance the understanding of the influence of the socio-political context on poetry translation which has rarely been studied. A review of extant English translations of the Mu’allaqāt defines the boundaries of the field; specifies its key players, and the factors that shaped their habitus; highlights the major types of capital over which these players struggle; and thus helps to situate Arberry’s and O’Grady’s translations in the field. The theoretical framework of this study draws on Bourdieu’s sociology in order to establish the link between politics and Anglophone literary fields during the time the translations were produced. It thus tests Bourdieu’s sociology in the study of poetry translation. The theoretical framework employs Skopostheorie to explain the different approaches that the two translators adopt to the translation; it also draws on the domestication/foreignisation model. The study analyses and compares the two translators’ choices of methodologies which ultimately result in characterising their representations of the Arab reality described in the Mu‘allaqāt by essentialism, absence, and otherness that have been the three characteristics of Orientalist representation of the non-West since the eighteenth century. The analysis reveals how the decisions of both translators result in problems such as distorting or altering Arab reality, or in obstructing the message of the original qaṣīdas. The study concludes that the socio-political context had its impact on Arberry’s and O’Grady’s translation choices in spite of the different purposes of their translations. It also concludes that the socio-political context seems to have influenced O’Grady’s choices relating to style. Furthermore, it sheds light on the problems that result from the influence of the socio-political circumstances on the translators’ decisions, and offers suggestions for avoiding such problems.