A Ph.D. by publication comprising two of my books The Death Of Bees and Closed Doors exploring the impact of experience on creative writing practices and techniques used when writing from personal experience. The exegesis is accompanied by a reflective and critical examination aiming to analyze how authors creatively translate experience into their work. Reflecting on my own creative process, I propose a critical inspection of the autobiographical and the personal influences that impacted the creation of various narrative personas behind The Death Of Bees and Closed Doors. Specifically, this thesis reveals the negotiation between real and fictive in order to preserve the truth. The exegesis will also look at how an experiential autoethnographic approach can raise awareness of key social and political issues through the invention of narrative derived from recognizable experiences. In conclusion, I propose narrative persona is inextricably linked to personal experience in all my published work and this contention can be proved within the exegesis, meaningfully contributing to literary discussion regards creative techniques used by authors to translate the autobiographic in their creative work. This unique research and revelation reinvigorates the debate around the impact of creatively sharing trauma in fiction and the effect this has on the reader seeking authentic narratives reflecting a shared and universal experience.

'Pilgrimage' (1915-1938/67), Dorothy Richardson’s long modernist novel of female consciousness, has a history of mischaracterisation. The first novel to be termed stream of consciousness, Pilgrimage offers an account of New Woman, Miriam Henderson, as she comes of age in fin-de-siècle Britain and becomes a writer in the first decades of the twentieth century. Adhering strictly to Miriam’s consciousness, Pilgrimage is often read as a byword for high modernist style: hermetic, elitist, and anti-democratic. By examining the power relations behind Pilgrimage’s other key formal system of representation, not stream of consciousness but intertextuality, this thesis offers a new understanding of Pilgrimage as a vital text of democratic modernism. Dialogic, diffuse, and dissensual, Pilgrimage’s intertextuality provides a counter-balance to the novel’s stream of consciousness, revealing the diverse and polyphonic voices of which Miriam’s subjectivity is composed. By staging its intertexts in relation to the perceiving subject, Pilgrimage constructs a space of democratic intertextuality: a space between texts where hierarchical distinctions between text and intertext, author and reader, self and other break down. This in turn points to the need for other equally open spaces of representation to emerge for women, not just in the artistic sphere but also in the socio-political arena. Using four case studies – Pilgrimage’s recourse to the personal letter, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Richardson’s nonfiction for The Crank and The Saturday Review, and Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique – this study examines how the intertextual replaces distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art with an understanding of art as a node of intersubjective connection and play. Moreover, by dramatising the acts of reading and interpretation, Pilgrimage reframes textual ‘value’ in contingent terms that invite readers to apply the same principles to itself. As such, Richardson’s novel of the single female consciousness opens itself up to the processes of democratic contestation, debate, and reform.

This thesis mainly consists of two artifacts: a creative text followed by literary criticism. The research draws on the theoretical intervention of the flâneuse I have posited as a way of reading home in fiction. Not withstanding commentaries on the flâneur in the social sciences and cultural studies, no literary study yet has posited the connection between flânerie and home, let alone theorized the notion of the flâneuse as a subversive figure that can be deployed in creative, and then critical, writing to make intelligible the possible variants of home in the present-day fictions of Lebanon and Syria. I thus propose a redefinition of the term in a way that may also apply to readings of the trope in a literary text: I read the flâneuse as a determined woman whose acts of street-walking, or of movement from one place to another, are enacted on two levels in such a way that her physical journeys – in search of, or as a return to, her own conceived notion of home – intersect with an emotional itinerary that traces her development against, and resistance to, a backdrop of patriarchy and conflict. My PhD novel, I Am Not Naked, is a first in marrying the Lebanese and Syrian contexts and in appraising the subversive quests for home of their fictional female characters, both heterosexual and non-heterosexual, from the theoretical lens of the “flâneuse,” against the setting of two civil wars, the Lebanese Civil War (1975—1990) and the Syrian Civil War (2011—present). In the second section of the thesis, I shift rhetorical gear from creative to critical discourse in order to situate the novel, and henceforth its analysis of home and patriarchy that I read through the different theoretical imports that attach to the flâneuse, in relation to new creative narratives from Lebanon and Syria. Hence, in reference to three novels in which the trope can be culled – I Am Not Naked (Sleiman El Hajj, 2016, Lebanon and Syria), Cinnamon (Samar Yazbek, Syria, 2012), and An Unnecessary Woman (Rabih Alameddine, Lebanon, 2013) – I argue that the notion of the flâneuse I have postulated is reified in characters who defy patriarchy by employing flânerie as a multilayered vector for fulfilling the homing desire that drives their respective journeys. Necessarily, I hyphenate the intervention with relevant strands of criticism to better invigorate my reading of home-as-emotional-space, as opposed to a fixed place, in the three novels, hence the feminist flâneuse, the postcolonial flâneuse, and the queer flâneuse, terms unused in previous scholarship. My thesis also contributes to the nascent body of creative writing on the Syrian Civil War and the refugee crisis, and supplements the growing interdisciplinary corpus of research on (mostly male) homosexuality from a queer-female literary angle, given my novel’s focus, in part, on same-sex female affects through its characterization of Teta – a queer Arab grandmother figure – a representation still unexplored in extant Lebanese and Syrian literature of the 21st century.

PN code synchronization is a common and essential task at the receiver in CDMA communication systems. In most literatures, there usually exists assumption of synchronization between the received spreading sequence and a locally generated replica. Few practical and detail synchronization schemes are showed in literatures. Moreover, there are no sufficient knowledge about operation characteristics of loop elements and operation strategies. Hence, in this thesis we propose some schemes about PN code synchronization and then do some analysis to compare performance of those schemes in AWGN channel. Code synchronization at DSSS receivers is performed in two steps. One is code acquisition and the other is code tracking. In acquisition process, we propose so called some ¡§auxiliary decision criterions¡¨ in multiple-dwell detection strategies. Analytical results are validated with computer simulations. By use of auxiliary decision criterions, the acquisition process is outperforms the conventional multiple-dwell and single-dwell detection strategies in AWGN channel. In code tracking process, we use coherent DLL. Loop filter parameters are tuned by observing phase-plane trajectories to acquire stable lock points and convergence property. In addition, we proposed a coherent DLL chip implementation, and accomplish the design flow that includes verification, synthesis, place and route, and simulation.

This study investigates the exports , deposition rates and budgets of particulate carbon and nitrogen in the Gaoping river-sea system. Concentrations of dissolved materials in the Gaoping River ( GPR ) downstream were generally lower in the wet season than in the dry season due to the dilution effect of runoff. However, concentrations of particulate matters were higher in the wet season than in the dry season, arisen largely from high physical and chemical weathering rates in the wet season. Total suspended matters ( TSM ), particulate organic carbon ( POC ) and particulate nitrogen ( PN ) in the GPR existed mainly in 10-63 £gm particles during the wet season and in 3-10 £gm particles during the dry season. Particulate inorganic carbon ( PIC ), however, was associated with different particle sizes and its pattern was no significant difference between dry and wet seasons. The GPR carried about 1.88 ¡Ñ 1010 mol C yr-1 POC, 1.04 ¡Ñ 1010 mol C yr-1 PIC and 1.07 ¡Ñ 109 mol N yr-1 PN into the Gaoping coastal sea during the study period. The total particulate carbon was approximately consisted of 64 % POC and 36 % PIC. Distributions of particle sizes in Gaoping coastal sediments were largely < 63 £gm as fine particles were generally carried by the coastal current, wave, tide and deposited on places away from the coastal line. The mean burial flux was 2.25 mg cm-2 yr-1 for particulate carbon ( PC ) and 0.27 mg cm-2 yr-1 for PN, equivalent to 5.7 ¡Ñ109 mol C yr-1 ( 6.84 ¡Ñ104 ton C yr-1 ) for PC and 1.0 ¡Ñ 108 mol N yr-1 ( 1.41 ¡Ñ 103 ton N yr-1 ) for PN in the study area. The buried PC was consisted of 58 % POC and 42 % PIC. The geochemical features of core sediments in the Gaoping Submarine Canyon ( GPSC ) show that the sedimentation was not steady in places near the canyon head affected obviously by extreme events and those cores were not used for determining sedimentation rates. In addition to GPSC, the shelf on the northern side of GPSC was apparently prominent in receiving river borne sediments. The southern shelf sediment of GPSC, however, was significantly influenced by Liuchiu Islet and showed relatively high concentrations of PIC. In general, concentrations of particulate organic matters ( POM ) in sediments decreased as the core depth increased, but dissolved organic matters ( DOM ) and dissolved inorganic matters ( DIM ) in pore water increased as the core depth increased. The contents of clay, POM and POC/PN in sediments and concentrations of dissolved organic and inorganic carbon in pore water increased as the distance of sampling station increased from the coastal line. The burial efficiency ( BE ) of carbon and nitrogen was estimated from the burial fluxes of particulate matters in core sediments and the diffusion fluxes of dissolved materials across the sediment-water interface. The BE of carbon and nitrogen ranged from 50 % to 85 % ( ave. 84 % ) and from 30 % to 95 % ( ave. 45 % ), respectively in the Gaoping coastal sea. The deposited carbon and nitrogen account for only 23.4 % total PC and 20 % total PN derived from the river loads or 3.6 % total PC and 0.9 % total PN derived from the river loads and the net ecosystem production ( NEP ). The results imply that most particulate carbon and nitrogen derived either from the Gaoping River or NEP may be partly recycled in the water column or largely moved off the study area to the deeper ocean.

This study deals with the origins of The Daily Telegraph & Courier, during a period of social change, under the direction of two successive proprietors from 1855 to 1865. Extensive research was undertaken to examine the proprietors’ control of the newspaper - with particularly significant findings on the founders, their policy and how this changed following the handover. As a result it has been possible to rectify repeated inaccuracies concerning the newspaper’s ownership and editorial development. Further original findings have contributed to a fuller awareness of Lt Col B.W.A. Sleigh, the founder of The Daily Telegraph & Courier, the progenitor of the current Daily Telegraph.

This thesis critically engages with Amin Maalouf’s (b. 1948) contribution to the pressing socio-cultural debates of the contemporary world. By drawing implicitly on Lucien Goldmann’s concept of worldview, it traces the development of a number of ideas across Maalouf’s work, including revivalism, tradition, modernity, cosmopolitanism, globalisation and identity. I argue that although Maalouf’s oeuvre is an attempt to ‘reclaim’ history from the gaze of the ‘Other’, seeking self-representation through a ‘native’ perspective and bridging the chasm between East and West, it fails to transcend the discourses of ‘inferiority’ manifest in orientalist writings about the ‘Arab World’ and the ‘Third World’ in general. Maalouf’s self-claimed role as a cultural interpreter and mediator is put into question by reading his works against two contexts: Arab cultural debates and postcolonial debates that are centred around the classical ‘self/other’ dichotomy. I place special emphasis on the historical context of those debates and demonstrate how ideas of ‘failure,’ ‘backwardness,’ ‘cultural malaise’ and ‘the absence of democracy’ stand in contrast to Western notions of ‘progress,’ ‘civilisation,’ ‘development’ and ‘modernity’. In doing so I underline how these conceptions of civilisational difference did not originate with contemporary theorists (for example, Samuel Huntington). Maalouf’s obsession with ‘failure’ is no coincidence but rather the symptom of a theoretical preoccupation that can be traced back to the very formation of modern Arab subjectivity during the Arab Renaissance or Al-nahdah Al- Arabiyah. Ultimately, I argue that Maalouf’s body of work fails to distinguish itself from the widespread conceptions that understand the ‘European’ model of economic and political development as representing the only path to modernity. I try to show that Maalouf subscribes to a particular version of universalism involving what Samir Amin has described as a twofold ‘cultural involution’: on one side of the ledger he places European/ Western provincialism, thereby confirming Western exceptionalism; on the ‘other’, he places reactionary Third World fundamentalism, which in its corresponding provincialism affirms a totalising cultural Otherness vis-à-vis the West. The thesis is divided into two sections. In the first of these, I engage thematically with six of Maalouf’s novels, discussing his representation of the contest over cultural ‘authenticity’ in ‘the Arab world’, his suggestion (advanced most centrally in The Rock of Tanios) that the Arab peoples have failed to ‘enter’ or ‘realise’ modernity, and his mobilisation of the idea of cosmopolitanism, notably cast in his work in terms of a nostalgic figuration of a better world, now ‘lost’. The second part of the thesis engages with Maalouf’s non-fiction. Its objective is to trace the development of Maalouf’s understanding of identity in the ‘era of globalisation.’ My engagement with this body of work draws upon a range of critical methods and conceptions – cultural studies as well as Marxist, postcolonial and world-system theories – as I attempt to situate Maalouf work in the context of wider Arab considerations of identity, modernity, secularism and globalisation.

The twentieth century saw capitalist growth accelerating the pace of urban life and transforming cities ever more clearly into sites of uneven and combined development. The result, for novelists, was an intensification of the problem of representing urban form – both as unmappable totality and as subjective experience of fragmentation, distraction and unexpected connection. In line with David Harvey's thesis concerning the 'space-time compression' endemic to modernity, I claim that not only are technological advances in urban transport and communications reflected in the shifting registers of novelistic characters' perception of their environment, but that this change in perception embodies a break with the unilinear logic of sequence and setting to encompass what Ernst Bloch terms 'the synchronicity of the non-synchronous,' or an uneven spatial simultaneity, characteristic of modern fiction. In Part I, by comparing the New York of John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer (1925) with the Istanbul of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar‘s Huzur (1949), I elucidate the differential stakes of modernist representations of the city, the core and the periphery, as the conjoining of contemporary and archaic forms. In both novels, I argue, the motifs of music and transport function in analogous ways – fragments of song intersect with details of urban journeys to point up the sharply variegated and unequal terrain of the twentieth century metropolis. In Part II, I examine Paul Auster‘s and Orhan Pamuk's postmodern city novels of the 1980s, which diverge from the experimental realism Dos Passos and Tanpınar adopted in the 1920s and 1930s. The economic transformation that both cities underwent from the 1950s on increasingly served to undermine the coordinates of historical memory within the new urban environment, widening the subjective gap between past and present. In this context, I argue that the conflict between the apparent freedoms of globalization and the increasing entrapment of the postmodern subject constitutes the main dilemma of postmodern aesthetics. Auster's City of Glass and Pamuk's The Black Book register this postmodern dilemma in their respective forms through recourse to the metaphor of the 'city as illegible text' and to the broken signifying systems of postmodern allegory. Focusing on these two literary techniques, I examine their differential appropriations in the core and the periphery of the world literary system in order to gauge how the experience of urban modernity – as shaped by particular cultural, social and economic developments – contributes in turn to the shaping of literary form.

This thesis is a materialist study of memory in contemporary writings. Situating itself in the emergent field of memory studies, this thesis is an attempt to go beyond the stretched horizon of traumatic recollection that is commonly regarded as part of contemporary postcolonial and diasporic experience. Apparently, in the contemporary world the geographical mapping and remapping and its concomitant sense of displacement and the crisis of identity have become an integral part of an everyday life of not only the post-colonial subjects, but also the post-apartheid ones. This interconnectedness between memory, place, and displacement as an outcome of colonisation, migration and the apartheid lays conceptual background for my study of memory in the literary works of four contemporary writers, namely Jhumpa Lahiri, Monique Truong, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ivan Vladislavić. This study is a scrutiny of some key issues in memory studies: the working of remembrance and forgetting, the materialisation of memory, and the commoditisation of material memory. In order to restore the sense of place and identity to the displaced people, it may be necessary to critically engage in a study of embodied memory which is represented by the material place of memory - the brain and the body - and other objects of remembrance.

My thesis explores London’s and Brighton’s Romantic-period affluent residential suburbs as represented in fiction by Charlotte Smith, Medora Gordon Bryon, Elizabeth Helme, Jane Austen, and Elizabeth Sandham. While scholarship is still small in size and scope, literary critics, historians, geographers, and architects have increasingly recognized the importance of this period for understanding suburban histories and geographies more generally. At this time, the middling ranks began to move en masse to the suburbs, distinctly suburban architecture and developments proliferated, and unprecedented acceleration in the growth of suburban population and infrastructure occurred. My thesis is the first full-length assertion of the suburbs’ significant re-ordering of society and the built environment in this period, a transformation that anticipates today’s ubiquitous Anglo-American suburbs. I ground my study in Romantic-period suburbs by using the work of J.C. Loudon, whose The Suburban Gardener, and Villa Companion (1838) was the first in-depth treatise on explicitly suburban homes and gardens. Furthermore, I spatialize the suburb, extending current criticism on Romantic-period homes, suburbs, and cities, and applying the ideas of postmodern geographers and spatial theorists. I define the suburban by focusing on how characters experience domestic space’s geographical location, material features, and social spaces. These elements of space, along with the connections between time and suburban space, reveal how the suburb is implicated with the urban and the rural and with issues of management and power. Characters experience suburban space differently depending on factors such as socio-economic status, lifestyle, gender, and space of primary identification. Multiple and diverse versions of suburban homes emerge. Invariably, the novels all prize some kind of peaceful retreat—a space of reflection, emotional tranquillity, intimacy, or physical rest. I interrogate how and why fictional narratives condone or condemn particular strategies of suburban space-making in order to elaborate on wider cultural implications.