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.

This thesis is in two parts: a creative work of fiction and a critical reflection on writing from an identity of expatriation. The creative work, a novel entitled Running on Rooftops, revolves around a fictitious community of expatriates living and working in China. As a new college graduate, Anne Henry, the novel’s protagonist and narrator, decides to spend a year teaching English in China. Twelve years later, though still unsure of how to make sense of the chain of events and encounters that left her with an X-shaped scar on her knee, she nevertheless tells the story, revealing how “just a year” can be anything but. The critical reflection, entitled Writing on Rooftops, explores the nature of expatriation as it relates to identity and writing, specifically in how West-meets-East encounters and attitudes are depicted in literature. In it, I examine the challenges and benefits of writing from an identity and mindset of expatriation as illustrated in the works of Western writers who themselves experienced and wrote from viewpoints of expatriation, particularly those Western writers who wrote of expatriation in China and Southeast Asia. The primary question addressed is how expatriation influences perception and how those perceptions among Western foreigners in China and Southeast Asia have been and can be reflected in literature. In the end, I argue that expatriation can be a valuable viewpoint to write from, offering new ways of seeing and describing our world, ourselves and the connections between the two.

This thesis uses the narrative framework developed by Theresa de Lauretis’ essay ‘Desire in Narrative’ (1984) to shed new light on the development of male and female characters in texts by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Isaac Babel, Mikhail Bulgakov and Boris Pasternak. De Lauretis’ narratological framework is based on work by Vladimir Propp and Yury Lotman. She draws attention to the inherently masculine identification of heroes, and argues that it is the development of these masculine heroes that drives narrative. I apply this insight to nineteenth-century texts including Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, War and Peace, Anna Karenina and a selection of Tolstoy’s short stories. From the twentieth century, I consider Red Cavalry, The Master and Margarita and Doctor Zhivago. This range of works, by five different writers spanning two centuries, draws out themes in the portrayal of male heroes changing and developing, spiritually and intellectually ‘moving’, throughout narratives. I show the variety of ways female characters act as helpers, or donors, to their male counterparts; and also as the prize awaiting them at the end of their successful quest. This re-reading highlights the significance of cycles of death, transformation and rebirth for the development of masculine heroes. While in texts by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, male heroes strive for intellectual and rational mastery, in twentieth-century texts the focus shifts to male characters’ abilities to exercise artistic and creative freedom. In contrast to the cerebral and imaginative freedom associated with masculine heroes, I highlight portrayals of physical and sexual violence against women’s bodies, showing that female charcters are associated with their physical bodies to a far greater extent than male heroes experience embodiedness. The intellectual freedom and development of masculine heroes is privileged, while female characters remain in static positions, more defined by bodily limitations and vulnerabilities than male protagonists.

In a literary era seemingly obsessed with transgression, Valerius’ own interest in the theme should come as no surprise. For the Romans, the Argo was the first ship in existence; thus the entire Argonautic enterprise is underpinned with transgression. This study sets out to interrogate the complex ways in which Valerius engages with transgression, offering new readings of his Argonautica in the process. He presents a world where expected boundaries are tested, or entirely collapsed, and where the characters and the narrator, grasping for something familiar upon which to hold, are left wanting. This thesis focuses on three major areas of enquiry, all fruitful in making useful conclusions when thinking about transgression in Valerius Flaccus. Firstly, the location of Jason and Medea’s wedding on the island of Peuce is examined, a seemingly insignificant departure from Apollonius Rhodius’ narrative. In fact, a number of transgressive issues are conflated at the point at which their marriage begins, enhancing the sense of unease at the union. The second section springs from the transgressive nature of Peuce’s landscape itself, in that caves, whilst suitable for weddings and sometimes the site of rapes, are often the home of monsters. Monsters pervade the text, appearing at familiar junctures (such as the Harpies, Amycus, and the sown men), but also at unexpected moments, where, for example, gods display monstrous characteristics. The ocular activity of ‘real’ monsters is shown to foreshadow the same curious phenomenon in Medea herself. She is revealed to be a potently transgressive character, and in assuming the hybrid role of character in the work and Muse, she is able to step out of the poem into a position of narrative control. The final section considers the technological aspects of Valerius’ poem against a background of science fiction receptions of the Argonautic myth, all of which are particularly concerned with exploring ideas of technological advance. Modern science fiction writers such as H. G. Wells and Robert J. Sawyer ‘use’ Argonautic themes, imagery and motifs in their work to routinely explore the hazards of progress. These modern receptions allow us to revisit the ancient material Valerius’ Argonautica, and to see that a world without boundaries is not a consequence-free world, since the far-reaching ramifications of technological advance are brought sharply into focus when read through the ‘lens’ of science fiction. The Argonautica, a poem rich in transgressive themes, is a work which poses more questions than it answers. In that final quality, the significance and potency of its transgression is revealed.

This project consists of a series of performance events presented under the title 'Bodies of Crisis' between 2011 and 2013 in the UK and Germany, an exhibition of objects, and textual commentary. The commentary reflects on the theoretical and practical underpinning of a performance model for the transcultural translation of memories of everyday life around 1989/90 (the Wende). In twentyseven interviews, East German women recollected their everyday during the transition from a socialist to a capitalist state. The material was developed in nonverbal performance to open up access points for a transcultural translation of experience involving creative practitioners. Tracing the intermedial translation process, the performance model, studio work, and exhibition are analysed. The suitability of the performance model for the transcultural mediation of social conflicts is scrutinised. With its emphasis on everyday, somatic practices, the project argues for reconsidering approaches to the historical experience of 1989. Including women with little liberating experience, it explores ways in which memories of 1989 impact upon 'the body'. The ‘industry of forgetting’ related to both the somatic and the everyday of 1989/90 is analysed, as is the cultural stereotyping at the heart of many German memory discourses. The study argues for the suitability of the embodied quotidian as a research perspective for evaluating how a political crisis (and concomitant discourses) is mapped onto the individual body and reflected upon. Centring on topics such as changes in sensory experience, body awareness and the pathological body of 1989, ambivalences of – and resistance to – change are considered as well as strategies for self-reinvention. The practice-as-research project created a performance frame that shows translation as event: a time-based, somatic and provisional agreement of all participants, supporting development of what Judith Butler has termed 'bodies of alliance' to engage with past experience and its impact on present concerns.

This project undertakes an in-depth, qualitative investigation into queer-themed ‘Boys Love’ microfiction within the realm of Chinese cyberspace, with the aim of further understanding both the features of the genre and the motivation for production and consumption among its primarily heterosexual female user-base. Expanding upon previous studies, which have focused primarily on investigation into the consumer groups of such fiction, this project seeks to establish links between the linguistic/discursive features of queer Chinese-language microfiction and observable social phenomena or cultural frameworks. Using and developing Gee’s tools of inquiry (2014) for textual analysis, this project explores the situated meanings, figured worlds and Discourses embodied in very short fictional stories representing male same-sex intimacies and queer sexualities. In doing so, I proposes a development of Johnson’s circuits of culture model (1986), in which I hypothesize that, confronted with heteronormative social structures—constructed along a gender binary and framed through patriarchal familial and social relationships—China’s cyberspace has offered a new platform for marginalized individuals (both queer-identified and those heterosexual consumers who enjoy fantasizing about same-sex intimacies) to engage, navigate and negotiate space to tell their stories. In doing so, they find opportunities to renegotiate citizenship based on sexual identity. Therefore, this study creates a ‘circuit of queer cyberculture’ framework through which to analyse queer-themed microfiction. This framework proposes that, through an emerging form of ‘cultural self-determination’ rooted in sexual and gender identity and the declaration and negotiation of sexual citizenship, netizens who experience social marginalization in the real world through their attraction to representation of queer lives begin to indigenize circuits of popular culture observable in mainstream media platforms by creating and distributing their own works of art and fiction online. Through a combination of Critical Discourse Analysis of 40 selected works of microfiction and applied thematic analysis of 39 interviews conducted with producers and consumers of the genre in Mainland China, this project therefore assesses the development of the Boys’ Love genre into a microfiction format, distributed via a publicly visible online platform. Investigation of the defining characteristics of the genre, in combination with data gathered from interviews, allows this project to demonstrate how this new empirical data can expand our global and local knowledge of theoretical and conceptual debates regarding identity, gender, representation, queer sexualities, sexual citizenship and circuits of culture.

The work here seeks to revamp the way that we read, write and understand the postcolonial during an era in which the field's modishness has receded somewhat, but when its historic objectives remain. Broadly speaking, the thesis is an attempt to examine the ideas that, merged together, equate to the current geography of the postcolonial world. In the first section, I look to the production of value – and specifically, to the process of valuing cultural capital, which delivers to us an important logic: that the postcolonial world appears to us not as it really is, but how it has been written into being over time. The second section reflects upon the settler polities of Australia and South Africa, where I read the works of Archie Weller and Zakes Mda and posit the notion of an arc in their writing, a trajectory that over time sees the novel gradually recede from its engagement with the explicit discourses of colonialism and postcolonialism. Thereafter I turn to recent rise of non-fiction writing to prominence in India. Here the focus concerns the way that the Indian city has been written into the public imagination crudely, as an apparently reasonable synecdoche of all Indian life. I explore the way that the visible spectacle has come to stand at the zenith of representational forms, with the corollary that the written word has lost something of its authority. I introduce recent works of non-fiction that seek to respond to these simplified projections by literarily occupying small-scale Indian spaces: Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Suketu Mehta's Maximum City and Amit Chaudhuri's Calcutta: Two Years in the City. In the final section, I argue for revamped postcolonial reading strategies that are better able to reflect the concrete worlds that literary texts address. I encourage a wider and indiscriminate constellation of non-white British literatures, before offering individual readings of Monica Ali's Alentejo Blue and Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World.

This thesis considers the triangular relationship between reading, domesticity, and the body, and it does so through an interrogation of the way the woman reader and the child reader are represented in nineteenth century literature. It argues that anxieties surrounding readers outside of the text are represented and responded to inside of them. The act of reading is highlighted as one that represents a point of anxiety because it can be an act that threatens the reader or an act that educates them. This causes tension, I argue, because while texts that address women and children wish to do so from a didactic perspective, by engaging with the act of reading they open the door to acts of transgression that must be prevented. The ideal domestic space is, I argue, one shaped by acts of reading and one that then goes on to shape the ideal reader. Discussions of reading are also closely tied to the body through transgression and tropes of appetite and consumption, and these discussions enter into a debate over appropriate models of gender for the woman and the child reader. In this way both the relationship between reader and domesticity, and reader and the body, are implicated in a conversation taking place over gender. The figure of the reader is uniquely positioned to represent these anxieties and to act didactically in all of these areas. I argue that cultural fantasies about how reading takes place in the nineteenth century alter the way in which people read, creating a cyclical relationship in which the reader inside the text and the reader outside of it are constantly remaking one another. Through this research this thesis seeks to celebrate the role of the reader as one of enduring power and importance.