The development of the video game industry and the increasing popularity of the medium as a form of entertainment have led to significant developments in the discipline of game studies and a growing awareness of the cultural significance of video games as cultural artefacts. While much work has been done to understand the narrative aspect of games, there are still theoretical gaps on the understanding of how video games generate their narrative experience and how this experience is shaped by the player and the game as artefact. This interdisciplinary study investigates how meaning is created in Western Role Playing Games (WRPGs) video games by analysing the narrative strategies they employ in relation to those commonly used in Heroic Epic and Fantasy narratives. It adopts the Bakhtinian concepts of chronotope and dialogue as the main theoretical tools to examine the creation and integration of narratives in WRPGs with a special focus on the time-space perspective. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Dragon Age Origins were chosen as representatives of the WRPG video game genre while Beowulf and the tale of Sigurd, as it appears in the Poetic Edda and the Volsung Saga, were chosen as representatives of the Heroic Epic poetic tradition. References are also made to Fantasy novels, especially the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. Textual analysis along with some techniques employed by researchers working with visual methodologies and compositional interpretation were used to analyse relevant aspects of the texts and games. The findings suggest that intertextual and genre materials considerably shape the narrative of WRPGs and exercise a profound dialogical effect on the ludonarrative harmony of the games investigated through their interaction with the game world and gameplay systems. This relationship is most visible in the chronotopic (time-space) aspect of the chosen games. The findings also suggest that Epic material dialogically orients the WRPG players' experience and adjusts their expectations and understanding of the fictional world. This study as well as the refining of chronotopic analytical tools to encompass chronotopic awareness, transportation, and flow may be of use in further chronotopic investigations of different games, literary genres, and/or other media artefacts.

“Hostages in Old English Literature” examines the various roles that hostages have played in Anglo-Saxon texts, specifically focusing on the characterization of Æscferth in The Battle of Maldon. Historical context is considered in order to contextualize behavioral expectations that a 10th century Anglo-Saxon audience might have held. Since the poem was composed during the reign of Æthelred the Unready, an examination of hostages and incidents recorded in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle during his rule helps ground a socio-cultural approach. Furthermore, since Æscferth is among only a handful of named hostages in Old English literature, these other hostages have been analyzed and compared with him in order to further contextualize the hostage character. These hostages have been identified based on a broadened concept of the term “hostage” to include the social expectations of a medieval stranger. Through a consideration of these other hostages, a continuum for changing hostage loyalty emerges and reflects the evolving warrior ethics at the end of the 10th century. Based on the presented evidence, this thesis concludes that Æscferth, as a hostage, best symbolizes The Battle of Maldon’s call for English unity at the end of the 10th century.

During the age in which Beowulf was written, Christianity was the prevailing cultural force. Since early medieval religion was rooted in biblical typology, the principles of which were widely disseminated by the liturgy of the Church, we may assume that the resulting Weltanschauung also influenced Old English literature. While it is increasingly being recognized that the poetry of the Anglo-Saxons is the product of the typological imagination, Beowulf is usually regarded as somewhat of an exception. Until now, no typological study of the poem as a whole has appeared. In order to interpret its major symbols and illuminate its perennial cruces, Beowulf needs to be studied in its literary context. An understanding of the poem is therefore promoted by a consideration of its relationship to the literature of the typology-based tradition: other Old English poetry (which is mostly biblical or hagiographic in theme), the liturgical texts (in which the Scriptures, especially the Psalms, are the prominent sources), as well as the exegetical and homiletical writings of the Church Fathers and their medieval successors. The soundness of taking such material into account in the study of Beowulf is demonstrated by the fact that this method yields not only explanations of many individual elements but also a unified interpretation of the poem in its entirety. The meaning of Heorot, the goldhall, can thus be determined by comparing it to structures that are discussed in similar terms in the literature known to the Anglo-Saxons --for example, the temple or the newly created earth when it is described as a building. As a result it can be shown that, contrary to what some have argued, neither the perfect beginning of the hall nor the misery subsequently caused by the monster Grendel is evidence of the sinful pride of Hrothgar, its builder. Heorot's typological --and, hence, also baptismal --connotations lead us to the conclusion that Hrothgar's seemingly reprehensible inertia in the face of Grendel's attacks is entirely appropriate in one who, like the mournful ones in the Old English Advent, can only await deliverance. Adiscussion of the spring motifs in the poem helps to identify Beowulf as the heroic redeemer which the situation calls for. Numerous other details, when examined in a typological perspective, help to confirm this identity. Furthermore, Beowulf can be defended against those who cast aspersions on his desire to defeat the dragon and win its gold for his people. The role of the thief provides important clues to the meaning of Beowulf's own spoiling of the dragon's hoard. It can be shown that Christ's rifling of the devil's hoard constitutes the paradigm. Like Beowulf's cleansing of Heorot, the plundering is a redemptive activity. Moreover, since the poet presents it as a doomsday motif, it forms an extension of the Flood and baptism typology to which he repeatedly alludes in the earlier presentation of Beowulf's fights with the Grendel kin. Time and again the Beowulf poet's choice of words and details reveals that he practised his craft within a tradition in which his creativeness was bound and disciplined by the objectiveness of a particular structure of images. We perceive in all the rich variety of his work the unifying effect of the typological imagination. It is in the typological mode of Beowulf that the key to its meaning and artistry is to be found. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis provides the first study of the representation, performance, and reception of Shakespeare’s ageing women in early modern and present-day England. It contributes an exposition of the physiology and theory of early modern ageing, drawing on this original material to make an argument for the ageing woman as a source of anxiety within the plays as they were originally staged, and as they are performed and received today. It finds the old and ageing woman in Shakespeare’s drama to be represented as physically and verbally excessive; the thesis also identifies a corresponding urge in the plays and in their reception towards the ageing woman’s containment and control. This containment is exercised in the text, the rehearsal room, the theatre, and the public space of performance reviews. My introduction determines my methodology and establishes the terms of reference for the project. The first chapter defines early modern old age and delivers a study of the early modern literature and theory of the ageing body. Each of the four subsequent chapters explores an ageing female character or characters through the lens of a theme: magic, motherhood, sexuality, and memory. The characters studied are drawn from The Merry Wives of Windsor, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, Coriolanus, King John, All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and Richard III. Some brief concluding remarks complete the thesis. The larger project of the thesis is a cultural study. Throughout, I am keen to learn how characters are talked about as well as written and performed. My effort to understand the work which Shakespeare’s older women are asked to carry out in the present day defines my methodology: I draw on prompt books, production recordings, reviews, costume, photographs, programmes, and interviews with actors and directors to aid my investigation, juxtaposing these with close study of the written plays and the early modern culture and knowledge which underpins them. The word count, exclusive of bibliography but inclusive of all footnotes and an appendix, is approximately 92,000.

This thesis examines the degree and nature of D.H. Lawrence’s interaction with the concept of evolution, as manifest in his novels and the longer of his short stories. It addresses both Lawrence’s engagement with evolutionism directly informed by biology and his relationship with extrapolations of evolutionary ideas from outside the scientific sphere. In particular it considers the theories of Henri Bergson, and theosophical and occultist appropriations of evolutionary concepts. Instead of approaching Bergson as a philosopher of time, as has much previous research into Bergson’s impact upon modernist literature, the thesis considers how the Bergsonian notion that a ‘need of creation’ drives evolutionary development is reflected in Lawrence’s fiction. Chapter One investigates the role of the imagination in interaction with nature in Lawrence’s earliest novels, in particular The White Peacock (1911). It suggests that while creative imagination may appear to give a distorted impression of wider nature, it is nonetheless seen to be necessary for contact with the world to be enriching. Chapter Two considers the relationship between creativity and development in The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), suggesting that creative force is seen to provide a means to resist the effects of wider cycles in nature between evolution and dissolution. In Chapter Three, Lawrence’s novels of migration and self-discovery, The Lost Girl (1920) and Aaron’s Rod (1922), are suggested to employ intricate Bergsonian structures, whereby the respective protagonists simultaneously explore multiple paths of evolutionary development, despite the ostensible paradoxes which result from this. Chapter Four, focusing upon Lawrence’s Australian fiction, considers the relationship between the hostile environment of Australia and the evolutionary development of its inhabitants. Chapter Five considers the importance of occultist evolutionism to Lawrence, using his annotations to P.D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum as a means to better understand the mystical aspects of the fiction he wrote while in North America. Finally, Chapter Six addresses the presentation of illness and injury in Lawrence’s work, particularly in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), examining the relationship between the composition of an individual and his or her ability to fit into the structures of wider nature.

This thesis examines the role of spatial representation in Old English poetry. Focusing on the presentation of setting and spatial relationships in narrative poetry, it argues that sensibility towards the creative potential of spatial representation within a conventional tradition constitutes a significant element of Old English poetic technique. It emphasizes the importance of intertextual reading practices which recognize the dialectics of text and tradition underlying spatial representation in individual examples. Chapter one introduces the subject, outlining the relevant critical contexts in which the thesis stands and describing the methodology that is followed in the subsequent chapters. It also describes the connection between the representation of space and critical assumptions regarding vernacular poetic composition. Chapter two focuses on poetic accounts of the angelic rebellion. The presentation of this event as a territorial and spatial conflict establishes a contrast between vertical and horizontal spatial relationships which relates to concerns prevalent throughout the Anglo-Saxon period over conflicting models for power relationships. The prominence of vertical spatial relationships in these accounts serves to legitimize hierarchical power structures. Chapter three considers territorial conflict in Old English battle poetry. Similarities in the use of setting and the construction of a sense of place in these texts suggest the influence of established poetic conventions. However, poetic artistry is evident in the ways in which spatial representation contributes to the wider thematic and artistic concerns of these texts. Chapter four examines poetic representations of the prison. Whilst such representations do partially reflect conceptualizations of the prison current in Anglo-Saxon England, they also demonstrate a deeper interest in the valence of enclosed space. The chapter extends the intertextual approach of the thesis to consider the possibility of direct borrowing between poems. Chapter five clarifies the argument of the thesis regarding the relationship between spatial representation and poetic technique and identifies some directions for further work.

Using Gillian Beer's suggestion that literature and science 'share the moment's discourse' (Open Fields, 1996), this thesis explores the ideas associated with Albert Einstein's three revolutionary 1905 papers, examining the ways in which similar concepts appeared across disciplines during the early part of the twentieth century, and focusing in particular on their manifestation within the literary works of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. The study seeks to distinguish between instances of direct influence and a shared contemporary discourse, arguing that the analysis of both is essential to studies within the field of literature and science. Part I focuses on concepts of duality and complementarity, considering Max Planck's introduction of the quantum, Einstein's development of light quanta, Louis de Broglie's wave-particle duality and Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity. It analyses other contemporary discussions of duality and complementarity, and explores Virginia Woolf's attempts to simultaneously express both sides of dualistic models, suggesting that Woolf is a complementary writer. Part II focuses on Einstein's theories of relativity, exploring D. H. Lawrence's adoption thereof in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), in particular his claim that 'we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity'. It argues that this proposed theory is directly relevant to Lawrence's fictional works, both those that precede Fantasia and those that follow it. It also analyses the impact on Lawrence of contemporary ideas of relativism, especially those of William James as expressed in Pragmatism (1907). Part III explores the ways in which both Woolf and Lawrence write about individuals within crowds. It considers the possible links between such scenes and Einstein's paper on Brownian motion as well as contemporary studies of crowd psychology. It suggests that individual characters within modernist works can be considered as similar to the individual particles suspended in a mass which exhibit Brownian motion.

This thesis examines the production of the Middle English poetic manuscript. It analyses the mise-en-page of manuscripts created during a crucial period for book production, immediately after 1400, when there was a sudden explosion in the production of vernacular manuscripts of literary texts, when the demand for books increased, and the commercial book trade swiftly followed. It offers a close analysis of the mise-en-page of the manuscripts of three central authors: Chaucer’s, Gower’s, and Hoccleve’s manuscripts were at the heart of this sudden flourishing and were, crucially, produced when scribal methods for creating the literary page were still unformed. Previous studies have focused on the localised readings produced by single scribes, manuscripts, or authors, offering a limited examination of broader trends. This study offers a wider comparison: where individual studies offer localised analysis, the multi-textuality of this thesis offers broader perceptions of book production and of scribal responses to the new literary texts being produced. In analysing the layout of seventy-six manuscripts, including borders, initials, paraphs, rubrics, running titles, speaker markers, glosses and notes, this thesis argues that scribes were deeply concerned with creating a manuscript page specifically to showcase texts of poetry. The introduction outlines current scholarship on mise-en-page and defines the scribe as one who offers an individual response to the text on the page within the context of the inherited, commercial, and practical practices of layout. The three analytical chapters address the placement of the features of mise-en-page in each of the seventy-six manuscripts, each chapter offering three contrasting manuscript situations. Chapter 1 analyses the manuscripts of Chaucer, who left no plan for the look of his page, causing scribes to make decisions on layout that illuminate fifteenth-century scribal responses to literature. These are then compared to the manuscripts of Gower in Chapter 2, directly or indirectly supervised by the poet, which display rigorous uniformity in their layout. This chapter argues that scribes responded in much the same way, despite the strict control over meaning. Chapter 3 focuses on Hoccleve’s autograph manuscripts which are unique in demonstrating authorial control over layout. This chapter compares the autograph to the non-autograph manuscripts to argue that scribal responses differed from authorial intentions. Each of the three chapters analyses the development of mise-en-page specifically for literary texts. Focussing on the mise-en-page, this thesis is able to compare across a range of texts, manuscripts, scribes, and authors to mount a substantial challenge to current perceptions that poetic manuscripts were laid out in order to assist readers’ understanding of the meaning of the texts they contain. Instead, it argues that though there was a concern with representing the nuances of poetic meaning, often scribal responses to poetry were bound up with presenting poetic form.

This thesis investigates models of subjectivity and agency in early twenty-first-century pop-feminist fiction and non-fiction. Non-fiction accounts of subjectivity (Haaf, Klingner and Streidl, 2008; Valenti, 2007; Moran, 2011 et al.) draw on poststructuralist notions of incoherent, performative identity, yet retain the assumption that there remains a sovereign subject capable of claiming full autonomy. The pop-feminist non-fictions reflect a neoliberal model of entrepreneurial individualism where self-optimisation replaces an ethics of intersubjective relations. In exploring the theoretical blind-spots of pop-feminist claims to female autonomy and agency, this thesis sets out to demonstrate that pop-feminist non-fiction lacks an actual feminist politics. My methodology is comparative and primarily involves the close reading of a corpus of pop-feminist texts from the Anglo-American and German contexts. I utilize my corpus of current essayistic pop-feminist texts as a fixed point of reference, deeming them to be representative of a pervasive kind of contemporary postfeminist thinking. Through the employment of the first-person narrative voice the literary authors explore how subjects are constituted by discourse but also how the subject may shape her choices/actions. Subjectivity becomes a generative capacity characterised by expansive and self-reflexive negotiations between self and other. The fictional portrayal of this process prompts an imaginative and extrapolative process of identification and dis-identification in the reader which opens up a site for the exercise of critique. Through my close readings of the novels (Riley, 2002; Walsh, 2004; Thomas, 2004; Grether, 2006; Roche, 2008; Bronsky, 2008; Baum, 2011; Hegemann, 2010) I develop a model of intersubjective dependency, drawing on Judith Butler’s later work (1994, 1999, and 2005), and identify versions of this model in the 1980s-1990s work of American postmodern feminist writers Kathy Acker and Mary Gaitskill. My thesis reveals hitherto un-discussed lines of literary and critical influence on the contemporary British and German novelists emanating from Acker and Gaitskill, suggesting that their texts may be viewed as representative of a critical pop-literary interest, spanning approximately three decades and shifting across cultural contexts, in the encounter between female subjectivity and agency in the face of late-capitalist manifestations of social constraint.

This thesis investigates the representation of the human life course in Old English poetry. It attends to constructions of the lifespan as a durational unit, as well as the ‘stages’ or discrete age-related experiences which together form patterns for life development, shared across a diverse range of texts. Throughout this study, the importance of close-reading is emphasised; the bulk of the analysis is concerned with issues of style, lexis and narrative. By these means, it becomes possible to perceive how concepts of the human life course shade into other networks of meaning: these include ideas of ensoulment and embodiment, life experiences of non-human entities, wider narrative patterns which impact representations of life progression, mechanisms and hierarchies of social role and communal existence, and systems of memory collection and the nurturing of ‘wisdom’. The introductory chapter addresses various possible modes of ‘life course’ structuring, in both Anglo-Saxon writings and modern scholarly traditions. Latin and Old English vocabularies of ageing are summarised and an overview is given of previous scholarship attendant on the Anglo-Saxon material. The following three chapters of the thesis then assess representations of different parts of the life course in different groups of texts. The second chapter is concerned with depictions of early life in the Exeter Book Riddles; it contends that these texts have been unduly passed over in discussions of ageing in Old English, seemingly due to their (mostly) non-human subjects. The third chapter addresses the treatment of early and late adulthood in the verse holy lives Andreas, Guthlac A, Juliana and Judith: it is in this chapter that concepts of the life course most clearly intersect with issues of social organisation. The fourth chapter is concerned with the characterisation of old age in Beowulf and Cynewulf’s epilogue to Elene, alongside other texts; the concept of ‘wisdom’ acquired through experience is closely scrutinised, and the verbal and poetic elements of good judgment are elucidated. This thesis concludes that Old English poetry presents human ageing in a manner which encompasses a diverse range of experiences and interrelates with a multitude of wider conceptual frameworks. As such, the texts do not subscribe neatly to an ‘ages of man’ idea. Nonetheless, attention paid to the patterns of human ageing which do emerge from the poems can facilitate more sensitive and productive readings of the texts themselves. The thesis closes with some examples of passages which may be newly interpreted and appreciated in the light of how the life course is conceived across the Old English poetic corpus.