This thesis investigates—and seeks to address—the excision, marginalization and sequestering of female work within the elegiac tradition. Beginning with an analysis of key texts in elegy scholarship from the last thirty years, and the ways in which they participate in—and perpetuate—this marginalization, the thesis develops a transhistorical sketch of the elegiac tradition. This sketch examines the evolution of elegy as a genre, outlining Western cultural frameworks for understanding mourning, and historical perspectives which consider grief expression as a threat requiring constraint; as well as significant shifts in medical, theological and philosophical conceptions of melancholy—in order to delineate how and why women’s elegiac work has been marginalized within the traditional canon. This includes an in-depth critique and analysis of Freud’s 1917 paper ‘Mourning and Melancholia,’ upon which much of current elegy scholarship depends, approaching both the gendered binary within Freud’s model, and the framework of economics which he uses to illustrate this model. This analysis is then extended through the post-Freudian work of Irigaray and Kristeva, as well as subsequent feminist thinkers, in order to question how we might begin to rectify the marginalization of female work without effacing the contexts within which it has been marginalized. These ideas are then extended and developed through the close reading of contemporary elegies by Susan Howe, Kristin Prevallet, Anne Carson, Maggie O’Sullivan and Claudia Rankine, investigating, among other things, erasure; resistance to closure; error and failure; disruption of reading practices; lyric instability and possibilities of shared grief. The length of the critical section of the thesis and extensive use of footnotes have both been agreed with my supervisory team on account of the scope of the project, and the examples required to demonstrate its argument. The critical section is followed by a collection of poetry made up of four interrelated sequences. These sequences seek to continue the arguments raised in the thesis, and reflect on the research demonstrated therein, specifically interrogating master narratives such as language, myth and history, in order to question notions of lament and pastoral; exploring the limits of the lyric and the possibility of speaking with, rather than speaking for an other; and the poential for harm within processes of textual recovery and memorialization.

This thesis focuses on predisciplinary dialogue in the Romantic periodical press, and in particular, on the influence of medical thinking and the science of the mind on the writing of James Hogg (1770-1835). The applicability of twentieth-century psychology to Hogg’s masterpiece, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), is largely responsible for Hogg’s entrance into the modern world canon, and the tension between rational scientific and traditional supernatural explanations in Hogg’s corpus is now a critical commonplace. However, critics have been hesitant to recognise Hogg’s voice in the proto-psychological polemics of his era. The ongoing publication of the Stirling/South Carolina Research edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg has catalysed revisionist scholarship in Hogg studies and is leading to a growing recognition of his pervasive connections within the diverse intellectual culture of the era. This thesis examines his connections to the little-known Glaswegian surgeon and writer, Robert Macnish (1802-1837). Like Hogg, Macnish was an active contributor of short prose fiction and poetry to the Romantic periodical press, and at the same time, he worked as a practicing surgeon in Glasgow, publishing three popular medical texts: The Anatomy of Drunkenness (1827), The Philosophy of Sleep (1830), and An Introduction to Phrenology (1836). These texts engage with popular debates in the periodical press, including the reciprocal relationship between the mind and body, particularly regarding altered-states of consciousness, as well as methodologies in the science of the mind. Macnish’s literary contributions to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country under his pseudonym, ‘A Modern Pythagorean’, deal with similar themes, and by examining Hogg’s literary and biographical connections to Macnish, a clearer picture of Hogg’s engagement with medical thinking and the science of the mind is created. Macnish’s dedication of a dream-poem to ‘The Ettrick Shepherd’ and the utilisation of an extract from Hogg’s poem The Pilgrims of the Sun (1815) as a headpiece in The Philosophy of Sleep (1830) are the starting points for the first section, while Karl Miller’s assertion in Cockburn’s Millennium (1975) that Hogg’s Confessions may have influenced Macnish’s Blackwoodian prose fiction is examined in the second section. The final section questions why Macnish chose to use ‘James Hogg’ as his nom de guerre for his short prose tale, ‘A Psychological Curiosity’, published in The Scottish Annual (1836), and examines Miller’s assertion that Macnish’s Blackwoodian tale, ‘The Metempsychosis’ (1826), may have influenced Hogg’s tales, ‘On the Separate Existence of the Soul’ (1831) and ‘Strange Letter of a Lunatic’ (1830), both published in Fraser’s. It is concluded that Hogg and Macnish shared numerous preoccupations and influenced one another’s writings over the course of many years. The connection between moral virtue and health pervades both authors’ corpuses, as the relationship between cause and effect is literalised through physically and therefore mentally transformational experiences. The engagement of both authors with the debate surrounding the explained supernatural has a profound impact on their writings, and both are preoccupied with the methodologies of the science of the mind, including the metaphysics of the common sense philosophers and the ‘bump-reading’ of the phrenologists. By the end of his career, Macnish fully ascribed to the explanatory power of phrenology. In contrast, Hogg remains resistant to place full faith in modern conceptualisations of natural law, while also forwarding an embodied theory of the imagination, the mind, and the soul. For Hogg, one comes closest to a divine understanding of the natural world through aesthetic experience and imaginative belief, which ready the mind and body for the joys of the world to come. Finally, Hogg, as an autodidactic peasant-poet, was himself an object of study in the science of the mind, but an examination of the relationship of his life and writing to that of Macnish reveals that he was both ‘a psychological curiosity’ and psychologically curious.

This thesis examines the treatment of failure in the experimental fiction of Alan Burns, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson and Ann Quin in order to reconsider their work’s faltering relationship to postwar British culture. The thesis reassesses the significance of failure in these authors’s experimental fiction by drawing on Ewa Ziarek’s analysis of the affiliation between modernism’s aesthetics of failure and the deconstruction of scepticism. Following Ziarek, it reads failure in the experimental texts of Burns, Figes, Johnson and Quin through the lenses of the philosophical revision of scepticism and of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the Other to argue that we can rethink these novelists’s haunting relationship to postwar British culture by tracing their works’s ethical dimension. This methodology allows for a critical reinterpretation of the relationship between these experimental fiction writers and the postwar British public as it was imagined by a key supporter and funder of their work – the Arts Council of Great Britain. Though the Arts Council’s subsidization of postwar culture enabled the production of these experimental fictions, this thesis suggests that it also inhibited their modes of articulation through its subtle marshalling of the norms and conventions of the public, and thereby contributed to a tendency to misrecognize the significance of failure in these authors’s works. The first chapter introduces Burns, Figes, Johnson and Quin by sketching their fleeting formation as a group in the late nineteen-sixties, and their relationship to the Arts Council. The chapter then elaborates on the thesis’s methodology by exploring how a sense of failure also haunted Raymond Williams and Doris Lessing’s attempts to rethink the relationship between culture and community in postwar Britain. The chapters that follow focus in turn on texts by Figes, Johnson, Burns, and Quin in order to outline the relationship of their work to different discursive communities and to devise new ways to read the ethical significance of failure in their experimental fictions. As a whole, the thesis argues that a rereading of failure in the texts of Burns, Figes, Johnson and Quin can shed light on the lasting legacy of experimental writing in postwar British culture.

This thesis comprises an original novel, Reading Through Binoculars, and a critical commentary: a story about stories. Binoculars charts the journey of Miti Popov, as he goes in search of his missing mother across Bulgaria. An avid reader, the books Miti reads begin to impose themselves upon the people and places he encounters on his travels. Side by side with Miti’s narrative are a series of short stories, the stories on the wind, written when he is much older, and extracts from his father’s notebook, a sense of history: a blind man’s view of Bulgaria. The critical commentary explores the processes of writing the novel and how theories of intertextuality and relationships between text and the reader, the construction of national identities in Bulgaria’s past and present, and notions of cosmopolitan theorist’s awareness of difference were all influential upon, and filtered into, the writing of binoculars.

This thesis examines three novels written by the Jewish-American author Philip Roth, collectively known as the Kepesh novels: The Breast (1972), The Professor of Desire (1977) and The Dying Animal (2001). Based on a desire to re-evaluate the critical position of these works within Roth’s oeuvre, this thesis offers an analysis of each novel based upon a critical methodology supplied by an examination of the role of fetishism in psychoanalytic theory. Fetishism, an ambiguous theory within psychoanalysis, has been adapted and deployed by a range of post-Freudian theorists for a number of purposes. Utilising fetishism as both a theme found in these novels and a methodology for their interpretation, this thesis attempts to form a new means of analysing these novels that pays heed to the different ways that they combine themes within the trilogy. With this diversity in mind, this thesis explores the reception of the Kepesh novels in periodicals and academic research, as well as using a range of theoretical strategies and comparative readings with other literary works. This supports and influences close readings of each text in turn. This thesis argues that these novels are dependent upon Roth’s subversive attitude towards the protagonists that narrate them. This is enabled by the variety of themes used by Roth in each text, but is most telling in his approach to describing debate and communication within each novel. This thesis incorporates and advocates for the playfulness that these novels demonstrate; they can thus be re-examined as works whose perspectives on sexuality are more nuanced than has previously been acknowledged.

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‘Violent Southern Spaces’ examines the narratives, archetypes and metaphors of memory, myth and the body that writers from South Africa and the American South have used to contest histories of racial oppression and segregation. In so doing, it seeks to identify significant transnational interactions and connections between the aesthetic forms, politics and histories of literary texts from South Africa and the United States. By analysing texts and situations that are both analogous and singular, this thesis utilizes Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community as well as Sam Durrant’s Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning to depict how works of literature interrupt Southern and South African forms of community as well as the myths upon which they are founded. Chapter One examines the tension between the narrative and anti-narrative dimensions of trauma in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story and considers the conditions under which cultural trauma not only exposes the subject as a singularity, but also serves to create community via a collective identification with a mythic past. In their focus on the interruption of community as well as the disruption of the trauma narrative, these texts help us to better understand how certain myths have come to define the nation or region. Chapter Two considers the manner in which community is enacted through departure in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit. Depicted as either a movement towards a more traditional notion of community and communion, or an exposure of the limits of community, there is a certain type of freedom evidenced in such departures—a freedom intimately connected to the being-in-common of community. Finally, in Chapter Three Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina and Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf are compared in order to demonstrate how both writers interrogate the excessive accessibility that has come to define the poor white community whilst also writing communities akin to Nancy’s ‘community without unity’. This chapter further examines how both texts depict community as an active, interruptive idea, a continual unworking of totalising and exclusionary myths of collectivity upon which community (and the nation) is formed.

This thesis argues that case variation in English conjunction is best analysed as being the result of underspecifcation in the morphosyntactic features of lexical items(LIs). This supports the argument made by Adger and Smith (2005, 2010), Adger(2006), Biberauer and Richards (2006), Biberauer and Roberts (2005) inter alia: namely, that morphosyntactic variation does not require any variation-specific mechanisms and can be explained within a Minimalist framework by recourse to either morphosyntactic features or PF-based operations. An examination of the existing studies of case variation in conjunction shows that there is little consensus regarding which case forms are grammatical and the precise nature of the attested variation: whilst some assume that only acc+acc combinations are grammatical, others claim that all combinations are possible regardless of their syntactic position; and the proposals based on the possibility of intra-speaker variation are contradicted by those which assume that only inter-peaker variation exists. A new data set is collected in order to resolve this empirical uncertainty. It shows that nom+nom, nom+acc and acc+acc combinations are grammatical in subject position, but that only acc+acc combinations can be generated in object position. Furthermore, both inter- and intra-speaker variation is attested, with some speakers accepting all three subject-position variants and others accepting only one or two. Having shown that none of the existing analyses can satisfactorily account for both how all variants are generated and for the presence of inter- and intra-speaker variation, I develop an alternative using optional feature underspecification (Adger 2006) to show that all variants can be generated within a single grammar (thereby accounting for the intra-speaker variation) and that this grammar can be restricted to account for the attested inter-speaker variation. The contribution made by this thesis to our overall linguistic knowledge is three-fold. Firstly, it robustly establishes the pattern of attested case forms in English conjunction and demonstrates that both inter- and intra-speaker variation can be observed. Secondly, I identify the mechanisms of Case and feature assignment/agreement within conjoined phrases, and finally, I show how the Minimalist Program can accommodate both inter- and intra-speaker variation within the existing constraints of the programme.

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No description available.