This thesis explores representations of the self in Rousseau's Émile (1762). Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). It uses the idea of 'the orphan' not in a strictly literal sense, but in order to explore representations of the self that stress an individual's autonomy, and thus tend to minimise the importance of society and cultural inheritance to the formation of the self. Crucial to understanding this model of the self is the idea found in Émile of autonomous natural growth: the idea that a child brought up in relative seclusion in the countryside, and offered the minimum of assistance from its adult carers, is capable of developing naturally, seemingly under its own volition. Rousseau believed that such a child would have an authenticity lacking in those children unduly contaminated by external cultural factors. The model of autonomous growth proposed by Rousseau relates to the discourse of possessive individualism and to the idea of the self-made man, beholden to no one, and free to make his own way in the world. This model of the self influenced Wordsworth and Mary Shelley, who both respond to and react against Rousseau's thinking. The thesis explores the contradictions implicit in this model of self-formation. It stresses the impossibility of keeping children free from external human factors, looking at the way that physical and mental development is necessarily accompanied by a child's acculturation, for example in relation to language acquisition. It explores the complications that arise from this in relation to questions of autonomy. The thesis highlights the sense of alienation and the emotional cost experienced by the child who is brought up to perceive itself as set apart from 'others', as exemplified by the loneliness felt by the most isolated of the 'children' under discussion, Victor Frankenstein's creation. In contrast to the discourse of possessive individualism this study persists in treating the self as historically situated, and inhabited by the culture that surrounds it.

As a material possession and as an imagined space of belonging, land was the principle draw for European settlers in southern Africa from the 17th century onwards. The legacy of racial dispossession and conflict that ensued still resonates in the 21 st century, as post-colonial nation-states face up to the daunting task of redistributing land between newly enfranchised peasants, commercial farmers and displaced communities. Representations of 'the land' in literature signal not only geographical entities but also a variety of social and cultural landscapes. In literature written in English from southern Africa the semantic terrain of 'the land' is thus constituted by a diverse range of experiences, encounters and ideologies, testifying to the manifold contradictions that settler colonialism produced. The primary concern of this thesis is to examine how writers from Zimbabwe and South Africa have engaged with these experiences and articulated them as historical 'structures of feeling' (Williams 1978) in their work. In particular, it explores the relationship between representations of 'the land' and the articulation of nationhood and nationalism in selected novels. It argues that certain structures of feeling rival official nationalist discourses in varied and subversive ways. As a comparative project, it focuses on literature produced at important historical moments both before and after the transition to majority rule in South Africa (1994) and Zimbabwe (1980). A transition between two major structures of feeling is identified within this comparative horizon. This thesis explores how representations of 'the land' both propagate and question an ideology of (revolutionary) repossession in the 1970s, but also of (reconciliatory) reform in the 1990s.

The written word is one important way through which people come to think about themselves and the world they live in. Reading and writing are experiences which are both personal and political. They are closely connected to the development of a sense of self. In order to explore the specific ways in which this development takes place, and the possibilities offered by particular literary genres, I interviewed four working-class women writers about their reading and writing histories from childhood onwards. I use these interviews to construct a series of case studies, each of which allows me to focus on a different genre or area of concern, expressed by the writer herself, and examine in detail the specific identifications and pleasures it offers. In doing so I use a reformulated reader-response criticism to analyse the ways in which these women use reading and writing to make sense of the world and of themselves, and to create meaning. I argue that the value of reader-based criticism lies in its ability to account for the uses made of texts by individual, historically-situated readers.

The thesis operates upon the premise that there has been, in the course of the last two centuries, a radical transformation in narrative presentations of exceptional states of consciousness. It sets out to identify the main characteristics of the fictional transformation, and to situate them in the context of wider cultural shifts. I decided to rest my approach upon the relatively conservative sense that, roughly speaking, the structural and linguistic analysis of a narrative topos - that is to say the protagonist's madness - can elicit a clearer understanding of the changing, underlying dynamics and thematics of fictional works as they emerge over a given historical period. The thesis is set out in two parts; Part I explores nineteenth century uses of madness, and Part II compares and contrasts more recent treatments. The study of the different presentations of madness in fiction is organized diachronically for heuristic purposes, although the typological emphasis of the thesis must eventually take precedence over the imposition of a rigid historical framework. In the nineteenth century it is predominantly an intellectually marginalized kind of fiction (often termed 'gothic') which deals with exceptional psychic experience. It does so in a way which engages with the treacherous 'otherness' of mad experience, which is often aligned with the supernatural. In these texts the position of the narrator in relation to such phenomenon is of paramount importance. More recent treatments of 'madness' display a tendency to undermine its 'otherness' and to move towards narrative identification with such states. The method of investigation functions upon several levels. In order to provide a constructive counter-perspective upon fictional treatments of madness and to forge the link with contemporary methodologies, the study commences with the narratological analysis of a work written by a (clinically diagnosed) psychotic author which has achieved the status of a classic within psychiatric, psychoanalytical and even recent cultural theory. The narrative structure of D. P. Schreber's Memoirs finds its equivalent in a kind of fiction identified in this thesis as 'paranoid'. Twentieth century clinical discourse increasingly has recourse to the very broad term 'schizophrenia' as a synonym for the outmoded term 'madness'. The current emphasis upon linguistic concerns in the definition and location of psychosis allows the critical grouping of certain kinds of texts under the heading of 'schizoid', due to the discovery of analogous characteristics at work within their (anti)narrative strategy. Again, these terms are heuristically intended and cannot be scientifically precise. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the current centrality of a terminology of psychopathology to the ways in which fictionists, critics and theorists describe, prescribe and understand the 'postmodern' self and world. This project offers an overview of attitudes to madness as they are transformed in fiction in the course of a historical period. The way in which madness functions in these texts is, first of all, not only as the instrument of literary exploration but also as a means of transgressing boundaries between sanity and insanity. The period is crucial, further, in its radical transitional nature with regard to concepts of fundamental import for the novel form: most particularly, ideas of the 'self' and ideas of 'reality', as objectively stable or as sub. iective and illusory. For the fictional articulation of these, the topos of 'madness' serves as the ultimate measure.

This thesis argues that a study of literary genres from the seventeenth century pertaining to death and inheritance in the family yields evidence about the way in which inheritance was understood and interpreted by early modern society; these genres include parental legacies, women writers’ interpretations of Genesis, Anne Clifford’s personal account of her struggle to gain her inheritance, plays (comedies and tragedies) and elegies on the death of children. A study of literature related to the topics of wills, legacies and lineage imparts insight into early modern concepts of family relations and parental roles, and challenges Lawrence Stone’s views on the late development of the affective family. The textual legacies of Elizabeth Joceline, Elizabeth Grymeston, Dorothy Leigh and Edward Burton, and the elegies of Ben Jonson and Katherine Philips will be used to demonstrate emotive parenting and the extension of parental roles beyond the death of the parent or beyond the death of an heir. Familial texts can be used to study the familial and political environments and attitudes, but as will be proved in the thesis, literature, especially in the form of legacies, elegies and exegeses, also had agency in creating new definitions of inheritance external to the formal patriarchal basis of land and power transference which many historians have considered the prime focus of study in the seventeenth century. In addition Rachel Speght, Alice Sutcliffe, and Amey Hayward produced interpretations of Genesis as literary testaments, asserting women’s role in the creation of a less sinful, less patriarchal lineage. The ‘prodigal’ play structures of Thomas Middleton and Aphra Behn compared with patriarchal political texts, and a comparison of two versions of King Lear byWilliam Shakespeare and Nahum Tate address the temporary interruption of patriarchal succession and highlight post- Restoration changes to the ideological functions of inheritance.

This thesis engages in a study of the construction of identity as “process” in four contemporary English-Canadian novels. The novels under discussion are: Cereus Blooms at Night, by Shani Mootoo; Life of Pi, by Yann Martell; Fugitive Pieces, by Anne Michaels; and Childhood, by Andre Alexis. It offers a transnational model of analysis in relation to each of the novels, which enables the investigation of the “multiple” and “fluid” cultural identities in the four examples of contemporary Canadian fiction under scrutiny.

Univ., Diss., 2002--Kassel

The object of this thesis is to analyse the sources, expression and consequences of the nihilism which appears in the last decades of the nineteenth century in France, as this nihilism is mirrored in the literature of the time. Chapter I outlines the subject and defines the terms used. Chapters II and III discuss the philosophical evolution which lies behind this nihilism and examine the role of scientific developments - in particular the impact of the ideas of Darwin. The decline of belief in the various 'absolutes' of the earlier nineteenth century is stressed - amongst them the belief in 'Nature' and faith in ‘Science- - along with the metaphysical ‘void’ which ensued. Chapter – IV examines with the vague and ambiguous 'pessimism' of the literary and intellectual youth of France in the 1880's and 1890's and the part played by Schopenhauer in its dissemination - showing that the term 'pessimism' refers to, amongst other things, a view of the 'absurdity’·of existence and of the non-justification of all values, and that the vogue of Schopenhauer’s philosophy owes much to its apparent confirmation of many of the conclusions of contemporary science. Chapter V analyses the 'idealism' of many of the symbolists and its supposed sources in Schopenhauer. It shows how the former tends to become a nihilistic solipsism, and, the ambiguous role played by the 'anti-positivist reaction’and 'idealist revival' of these years. Chapter VI explores the political and social factors Which underlie and help to explain the vogue of this 'idealism' - the profound sense of alienation or separation from the values of the bourgeois world around them felt by many young writers and intellectuals towards the end of the nineteenth century. It examines the way in which this sense of alienation contributes to the nihilism of these years, and the various ways in which it finds expression. The following four cchapters analyse the elements of nihilism in the work of four writers – Jean Lahor, Jules Laforgue, Maurice Barrès and Alfred Jarry -, all of whom, despite their apparent diversity, reveal the influence of some or all of the factors discussed in the previous five chapters. All four are considered here not from a 'literary' point of view, but as intellectuals reacting to certain ideas and situations. The exact sources and nature of the nihilism of each is explored, and the attempts of Lahor, Laforgue and Barrès to struggle against and to overcome this nihilism - all with only partial success - are stressed, as is also Jarry's resolute acceptance of this nihilism and its systematisation in his . 'science of pataphysics. A penultimate chapter is devoted to an analysis of four works by other authors - Huysmans' A rebours, Villlers de l'Isle-Adam's Axël, Bourget's Le Disciple and Claudel’s Tête d'Or - all of which reveal various facets of the nihilism of these years. The concluding chapter outlines the pattern which has emerged from these detailed analyses, and stresses the significance of the nihilism studied as well as certain consequences of the reaction to it - amongst them the rise of a widespread anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism, the growth of various forms of an 'As if' philosophy, and the attempt to create new 'myths' or 'fictions' which will again provide a source of meaning and values for human existence. Finally, it indicates briefly the relationship between the nihilism studied in this thesis and that of the twentieth century.

This thesis starts from the premise that medievalism is an important yet under-recognised seam in British modernist culture. Untangling and examining the medieval threads that weave throughout the modern interest in the new, I supply an important link in the chain connecting modernism to postmodernism. Specifically, I consider medievalism through the lens of gender. Suggesting that women’s prolific engagement with medieval culture during the modernist period has been mysteriously neglected, I illuminate modernist women writers’ creative engagement with the Middle Ages by focusing on two writers in particular – Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Lynette Roberts (1909-1995). By means of historicist cultural analysis and close reading, I show that the Middle Ages emerge in their work as an important imaginative structure for thinking about questions of war, gender, and national identity. My central argument is that Woolf’s and Roberts’s representations of medieval culture are strongly implicated in their wider reassessment of national identity and women’s relation to national tradition in the first part of the twentieth century. Re-visioning the Middle Ages from a new angle, Woolf and Roberts recast the foundational myths on which the categories of gender and national identity were based. This project, as I see it, is twofold: recuperating a female-oriented past through a close attention to the ‘details of life’, and inventing a tradition for use in the present day. Returning to the Middle Ages, Roberts and Woolf salvage a ‘usable past’ with which to construct a new form of national culture for the future – one that admits women and ‘outsiders like ourselves’. There is a political, recuperative impulse behind my decision to pair Woolf, a modernist who is ubiquitous and canonical, with Roberts, a writer who, partly due to her gender and Welsh affiliations, remains an obscure and marginalized voice even today. Establishing a dialogue between Roberts’s ethnographic poetry and Woolf’s poetical prose, I use Roberts’s positioning on the cultural margins in order to attain new purchase on Woolf’s complex approaches to empire and national belonging. On the other hand, Woolf’s feminist polemics help to uncover the feminist components of Roberts’s cultural vision, indicating the ways in which her feminism intersects with her nationalist and socialist commitments. I show that, in spite of their cultural differences, Roberts and Woolf both use the medieval past in order to articulate those marginalised experiences, at once ‘travelling’ and ‘native’, that remain unassimilated to the colonial experience. While, for Roberts, the act of historical re-writing opens out the possibility for a new, postcolonial awakening for Wales, for Woolf, it provides the basis for reconceiving the nation on new ‘common ground’ for the postwar future.

Cult (redacted) The first component of the thesis is a composite novel called Cult which falls into two parts with seven narratives in each. Part 1 tracks the protagonist, Ellen, from her first involvement with the cult through to her eventually leaving it. Although fiction, the first half of the book answers the kinds of questions the author is asked when people discover that she was once a sannyasin (a follower of the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh). While the experiences of meditation, group therapy and communal living are all faithfully rendered within the stories, the need for strong characters, narrative drive and a lightness of touch takes precedence. Part 2 picks up Ellen’s story some twenty or so years later and explores what becomes of her in middle age. It also looks at other groups in society, such as academia, the law and the internet dating community which each have their own jargon, hierarchies, rituals and rules but are not considered to be cults. The book examines the question raised in the Epigraph, ‘how do we be together when we feel so alone’ with a focus on relationships other than the familial and the romantic. Collisions, Chasms and Connections: a Performative Exploration of the Composite Novel Form The second part of the thesis is both a critical and creative response to three contemporary American books: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout; A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan; and Legend of a Suicide by David Vann. The critical element comprises a close reading of the three books; a chronological reconstruction of their overarching storylines; and a consideration of what their authors have said about writing the books. It concludes that, in the composite novel, the simultaneous presentation of multiple views and storylines operate much like a 3D image to give the impression of depth to the characters and situations rendered. The creative element of the essay is a playful and personal response to the texts.