Since the publication of Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America in 1972, drag performance has been an object of fascination for many French and Anglo-American queer and feminist theorists. Employing an intersectional, transfeminist approach, I explore central preoccupations traversing diverse theories of drag, focusing particularly on three issues: the relationship between drag and performativity, the assumption that a drag performer’s gender differs from the gender they perform on stage, and the positioning of drag as necessarily either subversive or reactionary. Analysing the flaws and benefits of these conceptual trends as they appear in a representative selection of French and Anglo-American queer and feminist theoretical texts, I challenge the perception of drag as subverting or upholding the status quo, suggesting that this understanding creates reductive generalisations and cannot account for the diversity and complexity of many current drag scenes. Further, I contest the definitional focus on a presumed opposition between the gender of the performer and the gender they perform on stage. Although a performer’s gender can shape their experience and understanding of drag performance, the focus on this presumed opposition erases certain performers’ identities and distracts from what is actually happening on stage. While my first two chapters concentrate on selected queer and feminist theorizations of drag performance, my final chapter considers the relationship between Butlerian gender parody, intramural parody, and extramural satire in Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and Monique Wittig’s Le Corps lesbien. Here, I develop the frame of ‘textual drag’ to describe the interactions of these forms of parody and satire in these texts, while highlighting their authors’ interrogations of norms of gender performance, gender identity, and embodiment. I then conclude by demonstrating how existing insights into drag performance can be combined with my own findings to create a particularizing, transfeminist approach to drag.

It has been observed that ‘the literary influences on Beckett have been far more important than has been acknowledged, and more important indeed, than the philosophical influences’ (Smith 2002: 3). The truth of this statement is evidenced by the description that scholars have given of Samuel Beckett’s relationship to seventeenth century French classicism. To date, critical interest has been limited for the most part to the figure of the philosopher René Descartes on the (fragile) grounds that Beckett was exclusively concerned with the Cartesian imperative of clarity and order, the fundamental dualism between body and mind, and Nominalism. Together with the assumption that Beckett’s vision was essentially Cartesian, his literary filiation with Pascal was suggested by critics, but only in terms of Beckett’s formal approach to the theatre. In his short article on En attendant Godot in 1953, the playwright Jean Anouilh was among the first reviewers to suggest that Beckett’s drama synthesizes the encounter between ‘classicism’ and a ‘modern’ form of art. It is well known that Beckett retained a lifelong admiration for Pascal – indeed, Pascal was one of his ‘old chestnuts’ (Knowlson 1997: 653). Little attention has been paid, however, to the originality of Pascal’s thought, the specific nature of his prose, and the impact these might have had upon Beckett’s mature work, especially the trilogy and the subsequent short prose. Yet, in the literary and philosophical context of post-war France, Beckett’s filiation with Pascal, their corresponding preoccupations, were evident to his contemporaries, who identified Pascal as an underlying presence in his works.

This thesis explores one aspect of the ‘inward turn’ that is a significant feature of English poetry in the later eighteenth century. It claims that a representative group of poets construct an authorial ‘self’ in which the personal pronoun ‘I’ becomes an authoritative guarantor of social and moral judgements. It suggests that this move was a response to Lockeian ideas of personal identity and economic individualism which were subsequently refined and developed by theoreticians such as David Hume and Adam Smith such that the ‘self’ was conceived not merely as the site of the sensorium but also the site of moral judgement. It identifies Thomas Gray as the initiator of this development, arguing that his earlier poems, and particularly his Elegy, were revolutionary in their attempts to accommodate Locke’s ideas as a means of combating both the fissiparous nature of the literary market place and the hegemonic practices of the aristocratic class. The reception of the Elegy led Gray to believe he had failed, but his construction of the ‘swain’s’ dual identity who both judges and is judged was to resonate in the persona of Goldsmith’s narrator of The Deserted Village. Goldsmith’s essentially conservative outlook meant that this poem was fractured and it was not until Cowper’s The Task that a fully coherent realisation of Gray’s poetics was achieved. The thesis finally considers Ann Yearsley’s work, arguing that her construction of a ‘self’ as narrator and social judge was fraught with difficulty both because of her position as a female labouring-class poet, and because of the repressive response to the French Revolution. The concluding chapter draws together the implications of the preceding chapters.

Empire Day: a novel and critical commentary consists of my novel, Empire Day, and a critical commentary discussing the process of writing it, and the problems of form and theme with which the narrative engaged. The novel documents the military service of conscripts fighting in an unnamed, undefined colonial conflict on the eve of independence. The novel is split into two narrative strands, one presented from the perspective of Martin Welles, a war poet, and the other from the perspective of Amanda Budden, a university friend of Martin’s who has given up on her own writing. Against a backdrop of violence, they struggle to find a moral standpoint that corresponds to their status as invaders, while at the same time they uncomfortably avoid trauma from their past. The commentary addresses the issues of style, theme, character, setting and method. It surveys the war literature which provides context and conversation for Empire Day. The commentary includes entries from a journal maintained during the writing of the novel, which record events in the development of the fiction.

Approaching Grail narratives as a distinct subgenre of medieval romance, this thesis compares five Old French and Middle English Grail texts: Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval (c.1190), the Didot-Perceval (c.1200), Perlesvaus (early thirteenth century), the Vulgate Cycle Queste del Saint Graal (c.1225) and Thomas Malory’s Tale of the Sankgreal (1469). Through detailed analysis of the ways these texts explore three primary areas of Christian experience – sight, space and time – this thesis illuminates both concepts shared across these Grail narratives, and characteristics that distinguish them from each other. The comparative analysis of this thesis shows how the Grail romances operate according to a distinct form of logic that furthers their interests in spiritual instruction. This thesis opens with an introduction to the five texts under consideration and an overview of previous scholarship on the Grail narratives. The introduction also discusses some of the conventional features of Arthurian romance and foregrounds the ways in which the Grail romances disrupt and distort these familiar expectations. Chapter One, ‘Hermeneutic Progression: Sight, Knowledge, and Perception’, explores the ways in which the Grail narratives utilise medieval optical theories to highlight hermeneutic contrasts between normative Arthurian aventures and Grail aventures. The knights’ failures in perception in the latter are marked by a geographical disorientation. Chapter Two, ‘Spatial Perception: The Topography of the Grail Quest’, argues that once the knights embark upon the quest of the Holy Grail, they enter a separate temporal framework in which their physical progression is dictated by their spiritual improvement. Chapter Three, ‘Temporal Transformations: Grail Time’, suggests that in the Grail narratives, concepts of time are transformed to allow readers and Grail knights to travel between the Arthurian present and the biblical past. It is through interpreting and understanding the relationship between past and present that the significance of the Grail aventures emerges. The conclusion to this thesis explores contemporary medieval ideas of demonstrative and dialectic argumentation to suggest that the Grail romances function as a visual form of demonstrative argumentation. This thesis argues that this logic distinguishes the Grail narratives from more secular Arthurian romances and enables both Grail knights and readers to develop their appreciation and understanding of the Grail miracles themselves.

This project contains the novel 'Life! Death! Prizes!' which was published by Bloomsbury in the UK in April 2012 and in the USA in September 2012. 'Life! Death! Prizes!' was later translated into German as Wir Kommen Schon Klar and published by Berlin Verlag in 2013. The novel was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and The Guardian Not The Booker Prize. The commentary which accompanies the novel explores the starting points for the book, which were my dissatisfaction with my work as a television storyliner on Emmerdale and my discovery of the world of story contained within ‘real life’ magazines such as Chat, Bella, Pick It Up, Love It, Take A Break etc. In the commentary I will explore the narrative strategies used to build an accessible literary novel that borrows from the structure of a ‘real life’ magazine story while observing closely the society we are living in. A novel that explores the nature of the contemporary family and what it is to be a young man trying to build a life in 21st century Britain. In the first chapter I look at how my ostensibly realist and voice-driven novel uses the folk tale Hansel and Gretel and techniques borrowed from ancient Greek drama, as well as exploiting the possibilities and challenges offered by the use of both generic instability and unreliable narration. The second chapter investigates more explicitly the politics of the novel. In this chapter I seek to address how the police, education, local government workers, the law and social services are represented in popular culture and how far these representations are supported, critiqued or challenged by the unreliable narration in 'Life! Death! Prizes!' In both chapters I will assess the current landscape of contemporary fiction and describe where my novel fits within it.

This research aims to shed fresh light on our understanding of how (im)politeness manifests itself as a discursive phenomenon by examining invitations and gift-giving (henceforth I&G) in pre-modern Chinese. To this end, a corpus of I&Gs from Feng Menglong’s (1574-1646) trilogy of vernacular stories was analysed using a pragmaphilological approach that emphasizes the contextual analysis of texts. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data show that the interactional elaboration and selection of the strategies of pre-offers, head acts, modifications and responses were highly context-dependent. Hence, the present study provides empirical evidence that I&Gs are far more complex than previously assumed and extends our understanding of them beyond the contemporary limit. In line with the discursive or post-modern approach to (im)politeness, I argue that it is essentially the interactants’ contextualized evaluations of the I&Gs that determined whether an offer counted as polite or impolite behaviour. By challenging the conceptual bias of the modern approach to (im)politeness towards speech production, its assumed link between indirectness and politeness and the empirical applicability of positive and negative politeness distinction and also the overemphasis in Chinese politeness scholarship on modesty and rituality, this research contributes to the possibility of developing alternative (im)politeness theories by explicating how I&Gs in Chinese, which have long been stereotyped as interactionally elaborate and intrinsically polite, were judged by participants in relation to (im)politeness.

Through a reading of the heroic, female bodies available in Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books (1983–2011) and Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles (2012–2015), this thesis demonstrates how mythopoeic YA fantasy contests the dominant, hegemonic narratives of female adolescence. Owing to the system of binary oppositions structuring this space, the adolescent girl is offered— through the heavily stylised and always-edited images of popular and media culture—a very narrow and limited means of becoming self, one insisting on a discourse of self-through-appearance at the expense of the body’s fleshiness. Demonstrating a creationary or world-building mind-set, this vein of speculative fiction offers a sub or counter-cultural space in which alternative frameworks of living and being an adolescent female body are possible. Through the sometimes-fantastical transformations of the body in Pierce and Meyer’s fantasy, this thesis engages liminality, focusing on the adolescent (between child/adult), the body (between self/other), and young adult literature (YAL) (between children’s/adult literature). Drawing from a variety of fields: YAL and feminist theory, studies of myth and folklore as well as popular culture and cultural anthropology, this thesis speaks to and from the places between oppositions, and does so in order to refuse the individuality and isolation required by hegemonic models, while also offering a re-mapping of the body’s curves and contours, one that takes “lumps,” “bumps,” and “scars” into account. To counter the dominant framework of adolescence, this thesis concludes by offering, through a metaphor of “the Pack,” a model of interdependency and relation. Formed by repetition and connection, this model frustrates the economy of opposition, while also taking into account the body’s raised and irregular surfaces and demonstrating how individuals may be “scored into uniqueness” through relationality.

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A PhD In Creative Writing by Publication, comprising a trilogy of published novels – Wolfhound Century (2013), Truth and Fear (2014) and Radiant State (2015), described collectively as the Wolfhound Century trilogy – and an accompanying commentary. The published novels are historical fantasy thrillers, engaging with Russian (predominantly Soviet) history and culture of the period approximately 1900 to 1960. The novels do not portray Russia directly, but create a refracted, re-imagined world of Russian-ness, troped as 'the Vlast'. The commentary discusses the writing of the novels as practice-based research. It explores how the trilogy puts into practical fiction-writing use some concepts about literary tradition, genre and intertextual allusions which I first developed as an academic researcher in literary history. It describes the results of a writing process based on the use of wide-ranging and deliberate allusiveness and multiple, shifting genres and narrative voices, ranging from those of popular fiction to the highly literary and poetic: a practice which grew out of my prior study of literary modernism and classical and Renaissance epic. It explores how these formal strategies are used to extend and complement the novels' thematic concerns with the interaction between the totalizing, collectivizing state and the openness and plenitude of individual human consciousness. The commentary also discusses my novels as a contribution to knowledge, specifically to certain genres of fantasy writing and to the interface between fiction seen as popular or mass market and fiction seen as literary. It examines the relationship of the Wolfhound Century trilogy to fantasy thriller, alternate history, historical fantasy, steampunk, and cultural/historical mashup and pastiche. It describes how my novels adopt aspects of those genres but also reshape and extend them by integrating heightened and more 'literary' modes of writing and an extensive and programmatic allusiveness to literary and cultural texts and ideas which lie outside the conventional boundaries of current fantasy and science fiction writing. It concludes that while the Wolfhound Century trilogy is related to and engages with a number of different genres, its foundational and driving creative purpose is ultimately that of high (or epic, or heroic) fantasy.