This thesis focuses on fiction and poetry written by women who have migrated from former British colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and South Asia, to Britain or North America; it explores how issues of race, gender, sexuality, belonging and power are raised through the writings‘ accounts of migration, displacement and changing identity. The thesis stresses the importance of these writings in addressing key issues in feminist politics and in women‘s lives, and in making significant contributions to these debates. It argues that women‘s migration, and literary accounts of migration, are important to feminism, as is feminism to understanding migration. Key texts include Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga; The Unbelonging, by Joan Riley; Lucy, by Jamaica Kincaid; and No Language is Neutral, by Dionne Brand. I also draw on a number of other novels, poems and anthologies of migrant women‘s writings. The diversity of the texts by migrant women that form the basis of the thesis has shaped my understanding of the issues they raise; the breadth and variety of the writing calls for a wide range of critical approaches in order that the writing is, as far as possible, illuminated rather than constrained by any one critical model. I am committed throughout the thesis to a feminist approach which incorporates an attention to women‘s activism along with 'the theoretical'; and which takes seriously the personal/emotional implications both of the kinds of imbalances of power which many migrant women explore and resist in their writings, and of feminist theorising and practice. The thesis consists of six chapters, the middle four of which are organised into two pairs. I begin the thesis with a chapter looking at accounts of women‘s decisions and journeys of migration, and the personal, political and historical contexts in which their migration takes place. Chapters Two and Three, which are paired under the title 'Women and Place', examine the impact of migrant women‘s changing relationships with place, before and after migration, on their sense of home, belonging and identity. In Chapters Four and Five, I move on to address the significance of these writings in terms of feminist politics and contemporary debates about identity, difference and racism. I have paired the chapters under the common title 'Literary Activism' in order to highlight connections between reading, writing and political activism. In conclusion, the thesis looks at representations of women‘s emotional and bodily experiences of the liberatory and/or oppressive aspects of their migrations. It addresses the possibilities –or impossibilities—of migrant women living with, coming to terms with, and resisting their oppressions, both personally and politically. This final chapter brings together, and takes further, various issues addressed throughout the thesis, in terms of writers‘ portrayals of both the effects of migration on women‘s sense of themselves, and of their explorations and responses to the impact of migration.

Memory is among the most important of themes that form the basis for the novels of contemporary British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (1954 -). The theme of memory pervades all of Ishiguro's six novels to date, and has proved to be a hallmark of his writing and a theme that he constantly returns to examine in his work. The significance of memory in Ishiguro's novels has often been mentioned by both critics and academics alike, but there has been very little research undertaken specifically on the work of memory in his novels.

This thesis investigates Beckett's interests in the seventeenth-century philosopher Arnold Geulincx, tracing these interests first back to primary sources in Beckett's own notes and correspondence, and then forward through his oeuvre. This first full-length study of the occasionalist philosopher in Beckett's works reveals Geulincx as closely bound, in changeable and subtle ways, to Beckett's altering compositional methodologies and aesthetic foci. It argues that multifaceted attentiveness to the different ways in which Geulincx is alluded to or explicitly cited in different works is required if the extent of Geulincx' importance across Beckett's oeuvre is to be properly understood. Chapter 1 presents a lineage of correspondence dating from 1936 to 1967 in which Beckett cites or alludes to Geulincx. It introduces Geulincx' occasionalism and Beckett's transcriptions from his works. Chapter 2 builds upon this empirical groundwork by arguing for a proposed chronology of Murphy's composition. This focuses Geulincx' importance to Murphy as a frame of reference located predominantly in the novel's latter stages. Chapter 3 investigates Geulincx' explicit presence in manuscript drafts of Watt. It argues that this particular presence is refined out of the novel's final stages at the same time as it is thematised. Chapter 4 focuses in on a specific paragraph that cites Geulincx in La Fin/The End and Suite. The different versions of this paragraph stage a number of textual manoeuvres in revisions and translation that are revealing about Beckett's attitude towards Geulincx as a source. Chapter 5 traces the consequences of this aesthetic attitude through imagery derived from Geulincx in Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, this latter as a novel that seeks to enact certain of Geulincx' ethical principles as narrative voice. The final chapter argues that there are highly refined and abstracted reappearances of Geulincx to be located in How It Is and in the television plays as a reinvigorated fascination with puppetry that also owes a debt to Beckett's reading Heinrich von Kleist. While Geulincx has long been thought of as a fleeting presence in Beckett's oeuvre, this full-length study finds that the philosopher's altering and recurring presences bear closer scrutiny. Geulincx' presences are more deeply embedded in Beckett's work than previously noted by critics, and in this they frequently reflect Beckett's broader changing aesthetic concerns as Beckett developed what he called his ‘series' of works.

This thesis examines the relationship between the work of the sixteenth century English poet Edmund Spenser and the popular press. Previous critical debate has focused upon Spenser‟s debt to the classical traditions of epic, pastoral and georgic, and the work of Italian poets such as Ariosto, rather than considering the role played by more ephemeral and cheap English publications; my research helps to readdress this imbalance. By combining a close reading of Spenser‟s work with an analysis of widely available publications such as almanacs, books of husbandry, calendars, Elizabethan storybooks, the book of Raynarde the Foxe and the Golden Legend, I have endeavoured to open out Spenser‟s literary environment to include the popular. This has involved an analysis of popular publications in relation to theories of copia and encyclopaedic reading practices and demonstrates that Spenser was fascinated by the process of publication as well as the mental and physiological effects of reading. My research includes an analysis of the continuities between medieval and early modern texts, the body as text and the text as relic, the eye as a conduit for lust and iconographic creation, the problems of defining readership and reader response, the blurring of religious iconography across the boundaries of Protestant and Catholic expression, the mutability of time systems and the ramifications of counsel and censorship. This work contributes to studies concerned with the history of the book and the rise of print culture, while also adding to the critical body of Spenser studies. This thesis has an interdisciplinary focus and draws upon the work of historians such as Peter Burke, Tessa Watt and Elizabeth Eisenstein alongside works of literary criticism.

This thesis seeks to provide a new perspective on storms in Shakespeare. Rather than a recurrent motif, the storm is seen as protean: each play uses the storm in a singular way. The works of Shakespeare's contemporaries are explored for comparison, whilst meteorological texts and accounts of actual storms are examined for context. Using close reading and theories of ecocriticism throughout, I show that Shakespeare's storms are attentive to the environmental conditions of experience. Although the dominant practice of staging storms in early modern England is to suggest the supernatural, Shakespeare writes storms which operate quite differently. I argue that this is a compelling opportunity to see Shakespeare develop a complex engagement with audience expectations. Five plays are explored in separate chapters, each with respect to performative conditions and through close reading of the poetry. Firstly, I argue that the Globe's opening in 1599 demanded a spectacular showcase, to which Julius Caesar responded, shaping the play's language and staging. With King Lear (c.1605), the traditional, non-Shakespearean location of the heath betrays a tendency to misread the play in terms of location rather than event. King Lear's storm withholds the supernatural, a manifestly different approach from that in Macbeth (c.1606); Shakespeare both adheres to and resists convention in this respect. The relationship between storm and the supernatural in Macbeth is shown to be fundamental to the play's equivocation. Shakespeare's next storm is in Pericles (c.1608), which also contains a storm by George Wilkins. The two writers' approaches are explored with respect to the Bible, alluded to extensively throughout the play. Finally, with The Tempest (c.1611), I argue that Shakespeare's manipulation of audience expectation through the storm demands a reading which combines the metatheatrical and the ecocritical. Foregrounded as expressions of dramatic and environmental awareness, I bring new insights to Shakespeare's storms.

Victorian literary criticism has within it a longstanding tradition of inquiring about the degree to which literature of the period reflects the realities of nineteenthcentury Christian faith. Many of these studies are admirable in the way that they demonstrate the challenges confronting religion in this period of dynamic social, cultural, economic, political, and scientific change and growth. Similarly, this study will examine the critical intersections between nineteenth-century Christianity and literature. However, this project is unique by virtue of the methodology used in order to access both the expressed and latent perspectives on Victorian faith at play within a given text. I propose that that a spatial, place-based reading has heretofore been largely ignored in critical explorations of nineteenth-century faith and literature. While, literary criticism utilising concepts related to spatiality, geography, topography, and place have increased within recent decades, these critical works are largely silent on the issue of the narrative representations of “place” and the expression and understanding of Victorian Christianity. This project suggests a model for just such a reading of nineteenth-century texts. More specifically, this thesis proposes that by reading for sacred place in the Victorian novel one is able to explore the issue of Christianity and literature from a unique and neglected point of narrative and critical reference. Using Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure as primary texts, this study demonstrates that a careful exploration of sacred place within a particular narrative reflects an author's and, more broadly, a culture's perceptions of a faith. Reading Victorian religion from the vantage point of place acknowledges that place is itself an inescapable and fundamental medium through which individuals and cultures mediate the most mundane and the most exhilarating of their personal and collective experiences and beliefs. Similarly, faith, especially in nineteenth-century England, is a dominant and pervasive metaphysical ideology that is connected to and possesses repercussions for virtually all aspects of individual and social life. A critical reading that unites place and faith – these two fundamental paradigms of human experience and understanding – will inevitably provide fertile soil for a productive reading of the texts under consideration.

The thesis examines the historical and contemporary engagements of philosophical anarchism in the selected writings of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Dambudzo Marechera in a bid to establish an anarchic poetics that emerges between them. Both use poetry and prose to express opposition to values and relations characterising authoritarian societies while also expressing alternative social, political and personal values. The unusual pairing of two writers who wrote and lived in very different times inevitably prompts an enquiry into the various trajectories of philosophical anarchism, Romanticism and postcoloniality in world literature. The aim is to blur the stereotypical nature of writers and writings from specific regions of the world and instead argue for an interliterary and intertextuality tradition as the new critical idiom. This thesis also analyses the social functioning of poetry and fiction in social reform and political revolution. Juxtaposing the perspectives of and writings from different spatio- temporal and cultural locations is necessary to emphasise the continuity of ideas, the evolution of theory and philosophy and the historical interconnectedness of humanity as explained by Edward Said's notion of 'contrapuntal juxtaposition.' The writings of Shelley and Marechera do raise important questions about society and the state and continue to address serious political issues. As will be demonstrated, the literature of Shelley and Marechera is not static, it grows and develops with each new reading, it is continually changing, and for this reason it is essentially moving. This study contributes to the fields of literary anarchist theory, postcolonialism as well as Romantic studies by extending a conceptual bridge between the political and literary histories of ideas in which Shelley and Marechera are both ambassadors.

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The thesis seeks to demonstrate that Conrad does not fit at all into the manly-heroic tradition which his work is often approached as belonging to. By tracing the entwining of masculine and homoerotic imagery in his major and minor works, as well as in the often neglected late novels, it is possible to discover ample evidence to suggest that he would be more accurately- if somewhat shockingly for critical tradition placed in the tradition of homosexual literature. Appended to the main body of the thesis is a glossary of homosexual codewords- words that were widely understood to refer to what was then the otherwise unmentionable crime of homosexuality from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This glossary is drawn both from the homosexual prose and poetry of the era, as well as from what evidence we have of wider public usages in contemporary newspapers, court-reports, diaries, letters, etc. At present, there is no recognition of, or collation of, the vast majority of these words in any dictionary of historical or sexual slang.

This thesis examines how and why the English clown emerged and declined by focusing on jest-books and comic actors such as Tarlton, Kemp and Armin. The jest-book, Tarlton’s Jests is the key publication in the development of jester-clowns in Renaissance drama. This account traces the authoring, editing, and printing of jest-book publications, along with the transmission of their copy-texts to clarify the dissemination of theories of clownery. The thesis explores the English clown tradition based on the presences of Kemp and Armin, who in their writing practices link the development of clowning in print to the theatre stage. This study then offers a critical analysis of the influence of jesting heroes on comic characters in play-texts from Shakespeare to Dekker and Heywood. By considering the rich resources of jests appropriated by these playwrights, the various forms of the clowns’ development are clarified. The tradition and characteristics of the English clown resulted from a unique cultural synergy: the connection between the stage clowning of the time and its underlying theories. This interaction between societal change and the resultant cultural products is considered as an achievement of the Early Modern interdependence between print and performance.