From its initial publication until the feminist recovery project, amatory fiction was mostly depicted as a popular, but immoral, trivial, and aesthetically underdeveloped genre in comparison to the emergent realist novel. More recently, the genre’s feminocentric treatments of gender difference, erotic love, seduction and betrayal have been discussed in terms of their proto-feminism, whilst its thematic explorations of duty and disobedience have been recognised as evidence of the genre’s Tory-oriented intervention in partisan politics. Tracing the origins of some of today’s critical perspectives on femininity, writing, performativity, and the body, ‘The “Little Arts” of Amatory Fiction: Identity, Performance and Process’ argues that these texts are characterised not so much by their proto-feminism or political alignments, as by their proto-queer strategies. The structure of the chapters works from the outside of amatory texts – their reception and their construction in chapters one and two – to their content in chapters three and four, and then back outwards again in the final chapter which considers their lasting influence. The chapters redefine the genre according to its self-conscious and theoretically sophisticated engagements with identity, authorship, materiality, power, and desire, and suggest that such a redefinition serves to widen the pool of amatory texts for consideration. Chapter one explores the interrogation of prescriptive gender constructions in amatory texts and the feminist readings that this interrogation has provoked, suggesting that a reading that attends to the queerness at work in amatory fiction can yield a clearer understanding of the genre’s ambiguous ideological position, which goes beyond transgression. Chapter two identifies the ways in which self-conscious textuality, evasive strategies of authorship, and (dis)embodiment function within these texts to posit a constructivist understanding of identity, and as demonstrations of artistry and agency. It argues that identifying amatory fiction according to its play with notions of authorship, rather than as author-based, allows for the inclusion of lesser known writers such as Mary Hearne, writers not traditionally considered amatory, such as Penelope Aubin and Jane Barker, and anonymous and pseudonymous amatory texts, within an amatory canon traditionally constituted by Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood. Chapter three reads amatory fiction alongside Judith Butler’s work on performativity, and charts the way in which amatory fiction experiments with the possibility of disrupting processes of identity construction using masquerade and mimicry, and creating its own discursive forms of repetition and performativity in ways that prefigure Butler. Chapter four examines how amatory texts subject these configurations to the material effects of passion and power, using materialist feminist theory to posit that the body is recognised in these texts as a place of excess beyond the limits of discursive performance. The final chapter outlines the afterlife of amatory fiction, demonstrating the ways in which intertextuality and borrowings are used to create a community of readers and writers working in an amatory tradition both within the early eighteenth century and beyond. At a time when some scholars are turning away from the popular fiction by women unearthed during the recovery project in favour of revisionist formalist approaches, this work is both crucial and timely, demonstrating amatory fiction as formally innovative, theoretically engaged, and vital both to understandings of the queer eighteenth century, and to genealogies of feminist and queer theories.

This study uses an ethnographic approach (participant observation in conjunction with indepth group and individual interviews) to closely examine how Zimbabwean print journalists in the state-controlled and private press deploy new K'Ts (the Internet; email; and the mobile phone) in their everyday professional practices. It explores how immediate conditions of practice and broader social circumstances set conditions for distinctive forms of new technology use, as well as how the technologies are impacting on traditional journalistic standards, values, and practices. The study rejects deterministic approaches to technology and argues that to understand the impact of new technologies on journalism practice in Africa, we must put journalists into a critical analytical context that takes into account contextual factors that coalesce to structure and constrain the uses of the technologies. To conceptualise the structuring impact of context and the degree of agency available to journalists in their deployment of new technologies, the study reinvigorates the sociology of journalism and social constructivist approaches to technology. The findings of the study offer insider perspectives of the practices and cultures around new technology use in the newsrooms and point to complex individual and socially patterned explanations of the appropriations of the technologies. While newsroom practices and cultures examined here broadly affirm early studies by showing: how new technologies impact on journalists' work routines; the news content they produce; the structure of their work environment; and their relationships with sources and readers, a closer analysis points to a number of contextual factors that collectively shape and constrain the uses of the technologies. These factors result in 'local context' appropriations that move beyond a simple substantiation of early studies. Thus, while the technologies offer journalists a wide range of resources and technological possibilities to work with, they also pose ethical and professional challenges. These and other findings highlight the deficiencies of deterministic or 'technicist' approaches to technology and their claims for a straightforward causal connection between technology and society. The study should thus be read as a challenge to the popular and utopian assumptions about the impact of new technologies on African journalism and as a dialogue with constructivist approaches that see technologies as inherently open to interpretive flexibility.

Things That Flicker, Things That Fade is a collection of short stories which, together with a poetics essay, works through questions raised by themes of time and memory, their representation, their relationship with technology and the possibilities of mental disturbances once that representation and relationship are questioned. It sees the emergence of hauntings as a rupture between time and memory (memory considered as both public memorial and personal recollection.) Both the fiction and the poetics look at photography as a form of memory, narrative and self-representation. They also consider how technologies of communication (most notably the railway) reconfigure the individual’s relationship with time, and from that, the individual subject itself. The poetics investigates some of the themes which emerged during the practice-led research in more detail, notably theories of time in St. Augustine and Henri Bergson, their relationship to narrative as considered by John Berger and Walter Benjamin, mental disturbances in some of the work of Denise Riley, Julia Kristeva and Marina Warner, and how the themes running through the collection and the work of these philosophers and critics emerge in short fiction by Dickens, Kipling, Nabokov and Ballard. The poetics concludes by relating some of these ideas back to the Things That Flicker, Things That Fade stories and looking at how they influenced their production. It closes by looking ahead to potential future generation of more stories working around these themes.

The twenty-first century has been marked by an unprecedented intensification in globalisation, transnational mobility and technological change. However, the resulting global interconnectedness reveals the continuation of deeply unequal power structures in world society, often exposing rather than ameliorating cultural imbalances. The emergent globalised condition requires a form of narrative representation that accurately reflects the experience of existing as a constituent member of an interconnected global community. This study of cosmopolitanism in contemporary British and American fiction identifies several authors who demonstrate a willingness to forge new and intensified dialogues between local experience and global flows, and between transnational mobilities and networks of connectivity. Various theories of cosmopolitanism will be examined in order to assess their efficacy in providing direct responses to ways of being-in-relation to others and answering urgent fears surrounding cultural convergence. The five chapters of the study will examine works by David Mitchell, Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Dave Eggers and Hari Kunzru, and Philip Pullman. By envisioning how society is shaped by the engendering of shared fates brought about by globalisation, the selected fictions by these authors imagine new cosmopolitan modes of belonging and the development of an emergent global consciousness founded on the cross-cultural interdependencies of the post-millennial world. Despite providing unique and divergent perspectives on the contemporary moment, the fictions indicate that cosmopolitical concerns and crises weaken calls for more progressive and productive forms of harmonious global interconnectedness, and retain a scepticism of more utopian discourses. Cultural relations are increasingly mediated through the awareness of inhabiting a shared, but not unified, world. The study will conclude by arguing that the selected fictions point towards the need for an emergent and affirmative cosmopolitics attuned to the diversity and complexity of twenty-first century globality.

This study interrogates the ways in which biopolitics, as represented in Anglophone theatre from the 1970s to the present day, coerces and regulates postcolonial subalterns within the contemporary socio-political milieu. Using seven plays from three postcolonial regions – South Africa, India and Sri Lanka – the thesis comparatively investigates how internal and global biopolitical operations culminate in overt violence. Research questions explore the nuances of biopolitical trajectories, their tragic resonances and the way these biopolitical stratagems are theatrically articulated and challenged. This study is also concerned with the extent to which biopolitical praxis and consequent violence in these postcolonial territories is shaped by Western colonialism and its legacies. The corpus of plays encompasses: Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972) and The Island (1973); Mbongeni Ngema’s Asinamali! (1985); Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084 (1973); Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest (1999); Ernest Macintyre’s Rasanayagam’s Last Riot: A Political Fiction for the Theatre (1990) and Irangani: A Tragedy of Our Times (2009). The research frames its argument through current scholarship on postcolonial criticism, and draws on the works of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. Foucault’s work on the regulation of human beings through the production of power/knowledge serves as an initial medium of investigation into the praxis of biopolitics. Agamben probes the covert and overt presence of biopolitical violence in contemporary society, particularly through his concept of state of exception. By exploring convergences and divergences of biopolitical subterfuges, and through the juxtaposition of the subalterns’ subjection to violence, the study reflects critically on contemporary biopolitics through Foucauldian and Agambenian lenses. The thesis suggests that postcolonial Anglophone theatre foregrounds a potential to understand the biopolitical logic more meaningfully, and to be resistant to its strategies of coercion: Anglophone plays may contribute to the decolonisation processes, to react against internal and global forces of suppression.

This thesis takes the form of three linked works centred around the fictionalised story of a young Scottish soldier of the 4th Cameron Highlanders from the years 1938 to 1946. These three works are: 1. An epistolary novella comprising the 17 letters of a found manuscript. 2. A feature film screenplay adapted from the letters. 3. A reflective essay on the creative process. The fictionalized narrative is based on the real life experiences of a small group of Scottish soldiers from several different regiments of the 51st Highland Division catalogued in books, memoirs and in personal recollections. They were amongst the 9,000 men who surrendered at St Valery-en-Caux on June 12th 1940 , and subsequently escaped. Through a varied range of routes, they made their way back to Britain. An even smaller group joined the re-formed 51st, and after bloody campaigns in North Africa, took part in the D-Day invasion. On the 2nd of September, 1944, the battalions of The 5th Camerons and the 5th Seaforths returned to the scene of their surrender, and liberated St Valery-en-Caux. Their collective experience encapsulates one small but little known part of the story of World War II.

This critical study of photography between 1840 and 1880 focuses on the medium’s complex role as a mediator of the ideology of domesticity in an era of intense industrialisation and far-reaching popularisation. In doing so, photographic production and consumption are located within the wide, hybrid framework of print and commodity culture, with particular emphasis placed on the patterns of communication emerging through the new network of family periodicals. This methodological approach serves in part to overcome the considerable difficulties of bringing amorphous voices vying for discursive control over photography into focus. More importantly, however, it is proposed that this journalistic field testifies to the conflicting appeal photography held for a domestic readership, and the intricacy of combining a family orientated agenda with the challenges presented by a modernising world. The turn towards a more divisive perspective on photography in the mid-1850s is fundamentally bound up with extraneous conditions, circumstances which shaped patterns of discourse, professional practices and ordinary usage: urbanisation, an enlarging consumer market, social and demographic change and evolving anxieties around identity, gender and domesticity in light of all these permutations. As indicated by articles, published correspondence, advertisements and publicity, photography responded to conflicting desires and impulses present in culture and society at large. Liminal by nature, the medium figures as a powerful symbol of domestic boundness but also as the embodiment of a swelling engagement with the metropolis, a site of hazard and iniquity, but also an advancing arena for bourgeois social performance and play. Thus, this study, like the Victorian photographer, traces the ideological construction of the Victorian family through multiple lenses - comic, architectural, artistic, familial, institutional, topographical and social.

In the field of Creative Writing, much is written about narrative form and narrative voice. Narrator and narrative voice have always been important to me, and they were essential to the creation of my own novel, Over the Kite Path. It is my intention that this thesis (incorporating the novel itself, and the supporting dissertation) captures the creative process in a way that will be useful to other practitioners and writing scholars, by articulating complex and often abstract concepts in an accurate and unique way. The success of my novel was largely dependent on the success of my handling of its narrator and narrative voice, and my ability to create the illusion that my narrator was real. But how could this be measured, and – ultimately – how did extensive research and close analysis of my working practice contribute to this? While writing my novel, I researched many topics (including historical research, research on other practitioners in the field, and also the consideration of some of the philosophical and psychological aspects of my creativity), with a particular focus on the development of narrator and narrative voice. Within this context, I considered the novel’s place within the fields of literature and creative writing and compared my work – and my working practice – with other authors, in order to help me understand and analyse how my narrative voice had developed. As a result of this analysis and research, my novel has an original and convincing narrator. Whilst I am aware that the narrator can never be ‘real’, I am also comfortable with creating and maintaining the illusion of the narrator’s ‘reality’ for the reader. In addition, I have demonstrated the importance of this illusion to the writer during the creative process. Via a deeply analytical account my own experience while writing this novel, I have documented how my own creative work was enhanced by my research, and I believe I have provided new approaches and theories on the creative – and often existential - qualities of the writing process. It is my hope that these new approaches and theories make an original contribution to the field of Creative Writing, and will enhance the way in which the craft of writing is considered in the future by practitioners, critical theorists, and literary scholars alike.

This study examines the claims for a privileged status for the language of science fiction. The analysis of a series of invented languages, including 'nadsat', 'newspeak' and 'Babel-17', establishes that beneath these constructions lie deep-seated misconceptions about how language works. It is shown that the various theories of language, implicitly or explicitly expressed by writers and critics concerned with invented languages and neologism in science fiction, embody a mistaken view about the relation between language and the imagination. Chapter two demonstrates, with particular reference to the treatment of time and mind, that the themes on which science fiction most likes to dwell, reflect very closely the concerns of philosophy, and as such, are particularly amenable to the analytical methods of linguistic philosophy. This approach shows that what science fiction 'imagines' often turns out to be a product of the deceptive qualities of the grammar of language itself. The paradoxes of a pseudo-philosophical nature, in which science fiction invariably finds itself entangled, are particularly well exemplified in the work of Philip K. Dick. Chapter Three suggests that by exploiting the logically impossible, by making a virtue of the tricks and conventions which have become science fiction's stigmata (time-travel, telepathy, etc.), Dick indicates a means of overcoming the genre's current problems concerning form and seriousness. In conclusion it is demonstrated through the work of J. G. Ballard, that any attempt to throw off science fiction's 'pulp' conventions is likely to lead the genre further into the literary wilderness.

Over the last decade, research in characterisation has proliferated in (cognitive) stylistics, with investigations exploring the different avenues concerning the conceptualisation and presentation of fictional characters. There is a wealth of theoretical work on the definition of character, yet a weakness lies in the lack of unification of this information into a systematic method of analysis that can holistically represent characters as the unique individuals they are. This thesis sets to fill this hiatus by developing an adaptable, strategic method of analysis to comprehensively represent characters. Beneath fictional characters’ familiar and recognisable exteriors, is an interconnected network of linguistic strategies that encode their identities and situate them in the storyworld. To successfully account for this, I argue that a working knowledge of the different levels involved in communicating character—from the atomistic textual level to macro storyworld level—as well as the reader’s perceptual and cognitive capacities is required. To grasp these different facets, I dovetail their key components in conjunction with reader response data to develop a Character Tracking Model (CTM). Drawing on corpus stylistic techniques, the CTM is designed to render the storyworld spatiotemporally and mentally track characters throughout the narrative, allowing it to reveal the fundamental elements that are the impetus behind character portrayal. To demonstrate the CTM’s potential and flexibility, it is deployed in an analysis of Gavin Extence’s novel The Universe Versus Alex Woods wherein the protagonist experiences an epileptic seizure. I highlight the subtle linguistic patterns and textual cues that communicate the character’s highly subjective seizure experience. I further use the case study to signal how cognitive stylistics can productively be used as a rich resource for exploring the experiences of epileptic seizures; something which has not yet been addressed by cognitive stylistics or in epilepsy research, but has the potential for positive impact in the public health sector. Overall, this thesis presents an integrative application of cognitive stylistics, examining both character and reader to propose a universal way of approaching characters.