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.

This thesis is in four parts: a brief Introduction; a novella, Grass; a novel, Winter Park; and a critical essay, “Consciousness in Fiction”. The Introduction explains why Grass, Winter Park, and “Consciousness in Fiction” together form a cohesive and integrated thesis; the chief reason is a shared concern with consciousness, i.e., perception and reflection. Grass is a coming-of-age story about a boy and his lawnmower (and his edger) set in East Texas in the nineteen-seventies. It is written from the perspective of its protagonist, Henry, in first person present tense, but there are no moments of internal reflection, only perception, leading one to wonder whether there is something wrong with Henry. The story’s sparse style is inspired by Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy and is intended to allow for maximum reader engagement and creativity. Grass is also supposed to be funny, albeit darkly. Winter Park is a tale of two unlikely friends: Eric Swanson - a drug-addled philosopher from Colorado who suspects he has committed some terrible misdeed, and Harris Birdsong - an epileptic, synaesthetic savant from the deep south who has memorized a dictionary. The two meet at a rodeo college penal camp in West Texas called Dude Ranch, where their friendship develops and their individual philosophic and romantic dreams begin to materialize. Part I of the novel is from Swanson’s perspective; Part II through the end, from Birdsong’s; both Parts are in first person present tense. The novel explores the relationships between perception and reflection; evidence and certainty; and words, concepts, definitions, and the external world. Winter Park, too, is supposed to be dark and funny. “Consciousness in Fiction” is an investigation into the structures of human consciousness and the various ways in which those structures appear in select literature. In the essay, I compare the various presentations of consciousness in Ulysses (Joyce), As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), Jealousy (Robbe-Grillet), and American Genius (Lynne Tillman) with a model of consciousness derived from philosophy (Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty), psychology (James), and contemporary cognitive science (Noë and Baars).

Godot ke Intezar Mein (Hindi), Godor Pratikshay (Bengali), Eppo Varuvaru (Tamil), Kalpo Ke Kalpana Mari Parvari Chhe (Gujarati), Edin Ahibo Teu (Assamese), Su Yee (Kashmiri): these are just some of the translations and adaptations of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot into Indian languages. They reveal how Beckett's chef d'oeuvre has reached every corner of the country, from Tamil Nadu in the South, to Kashmir in the North, Assam in the East, and Gujarat in the West. Just as Honoré de Balzac's fictitious Godeau returns prosperously from 'Les Indes' in Le Faiseur (1848), Beckett's Godot gains from the remarkable dissemination through a multilingual, multicultural, social, and political space of post-independence India. This thesis, divided into three parts, is a comparative study of the relation between Samuel Beckett's works and Indian prose fiction, drama, and cinema, from the moment when Beckett's oeuvre was first introduced in India. Engaging with recent debates on the concept of world literature, it assesses three phases that are pertinent to the three parts and the circulation of Beckett's works through India: 1) the topical-planetary phase: Beckett's influence on Anglo Indian novelists, starting with Salman Rushdie; 2) the world-making phase: the circulation of Beckett's works amongst Indian playwrights, based on themes, writing techniques and style; and 3) the canonical phase: Beckett's pervasive presence rather than direct influence in Indian mainstream and experimental cinema. Put together, these three parts form a three-phase evolution, and a conceptual framework for world literature. In exploring Beckett's influence, circulation, and pervasive presence in Indian literature, alongside adaptations and re-creations of Beckettian motifs, characters, and stylistic techniques, this thesis not only re-conceives of Beckett's place in world literature today, but it also presents a process by which his works achieve canonicity. Starting with the works of Rushdie, the thesis charters new territories where Beckett's works have found a place, while the comparative approach draws attention to the heterogeneous and complex nature of modern Indian literature.

From its initial publication until the feminist recovery project, amatory fiction was mostly depicted as a popular, but immoral, trivial, and aesthetically underdeveloped genre in comparison to the emergent realist novel. More recently, the genre’s feminocentric treatments of gender difference, erotic love, seduction and betrayal have been discussed in terms of their proto-feminism, whilst its thematic explorations of duty and disobedience have been recognised as evidence of the genre’s Tory-oriented intervention in partisan politics. Tracing the origins of some of today’s critical perspectives on femininity, writing, performativity, and the body, ‘The “Little Arts” of Amatory Fiction: Identity, Performance and Process’ argues that these texts are characterised not so much by their proto-feminism or political alignments, as by their proto-queer strategies. The structure of the chapters works from the outside of amatory texts – their reception and their construction in chapters one and two – to their content in chapters three and four, and then back outwards again in the final chapter which considers their lasting influence. The chapters redefine the genre according to its self-conscious and theoretically sophisticated engagements with identity, authorship, materiality, power, and desire, and suggest that such a redefinition serves to widen the pool of amatory texts for consideration. Chapter one explores the interrogation of prescriptive gender constructions in amatory texts and the feminist readings that this interrogation has provoked, suggesting that a reading that attends to the queerness at work in amatory fiction can yield a clearer understanding of the genre’s ambiguous ideological position, which goes beyond transgression. Chapter two identifies the ways in which self-conscious textuality, evasive strategies of authorship, and (dis)embodiment function within these texts to posit a constructivist understanding of identity, and as demonstrations of artistry and agency. It argues that identifying amatory fiction according to its play with notions of authorship, rather than as author-based, allows for the inclusion of lesser known writers such as Mary Hearne, writers not traditionally considered amatory, such as Penelope Aubin and Jane Barker, and anonymous and pseudonymous amatory texts, within an amatory canon traditionally constituted by Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood. Chapter three reads amatory fiction alongside Judith Butler’s work on performativity, and charts the way in which amatory fiction experiments with the possibility of disrupting processes of identity construction using masquerade and mimicry, and creating its own discursive forms of repetition and performativity in ways that prefigure Butler. Chapter four examines how amatory texts subject these configurations to the material effects of passion and power, using materialist feminist theory to posit that the body is recognised in these texts as a place of excess beyond the limits of discursive performance. The final chapter outlines the afterlife of amatory fiction, demonstrating the ways in which intertextuality and borrowings are used to create a community of readers and writers working in an amatory tradition both within the early eighteenth century and beyond. At a time when some scholars are turning away from the popular fiction by women unearthed during the recovery project in favour of revisionist formalist approaches, this work is both crucial and timely, demonstrating amatory fiction as formally innovative, theoretically engaged, and vital both to understandings of the queer eighteenth century, and to genealogies of feminist and queer theories.

This study uses an ethnographic approach (participant observation in conjunction with indepth group and individual interviews) to closely examine how Zimbabwean print journalists in the state-controlled and private press deploy new K'Ts (the Internet; email; and the mobile phone) in their everyday professional practices. It explores how immediate conditions of practice and broader social circumstances set conditions for distinctive forms of new technology use, as well as how the technologies are impacting on traditional journalistic standards, values, and practices. The study rejects deterministic approaches to technology and argues that to understand the impact of new technologies on journalism practice in Africa, we must put journalists into a critical analytical context that takes into account contextual factors that coalesce to structure and constrain the uses of the technologies. To conceptualise the structuring impact of context and the degree of agency available to journalists in their deployment of new technologies, the study reinvigorates the sociology of journalism and social constructivist approaches to technology. The findings of the study offer insider perspectives of the practices and cultures around new technology use in the newsrooms and point to complex individual and socially patterned explanations of the appropriations of the technologies. While newsroom practices and cultures examined here broadly affirm early studies by showing: how new technologies impact on journalists' work routines; the news content they produce; the structure of their work environment; and their relationships with sources and readers, a closer analysis points to a number of contextual factors that collectively shape and constrain the uses of the technologies. These factors result in 'local context' appropriations that move beyond a simple substantiation of early studies. Thus, while the technologies offer journalists a wide range of resources and technological possibilities to work with, they also pose ethical and professional challenges. These and other findings highlight the deficiencies of deterministic or 'technicist' approaches to technology and their claims for a straightforward causal connection between technology and society. The study should thus be read as a challenge to the popular and utopian assumptions about the impact of new technologies on African journalism and as a dialogue with constructivist approaches that see technologies as inherently open to interpretive flexibility.

Things That Flicker, Things That Fade is a collection of short stories which, together with a poetics essay, works through questions raised by themes of time and memory, their representation, their relationship with technology and the possibilities of mental disturbances once that representation and relationship are questioned. It sees the emergence of hauntings as a rupture between time and memory (memory considered as both public memorial and personal recollection.) Both the fiction and the poetics look at photography as a form of memory, narrative and self-representation. They also consider how technologies of communication (most notably the railway) reconfigure the individual’s relationship with time, and from that, the individual subject itself. The poetics investigates some of the themes which emerged during the practice-led research in more detail, notably theories of time in St. Augustine and Henri Bergson, their relationship to narrative as considered by John Berger and Walter Benjamin, mental disturbances in some of the work of Denise Riley, Julia Kristeva and Marina Warner, and how the themes running through the collection and the work of these philosophers and critics emerge in short fiction by Dickens, Kipling, Nabokov and Ballard. The poetics concludes by relating some of these ideas back to the Things That Flicker, Things That Fade stories and looking at how they influenced their production. It closes by looking ahead to potential future generation of more stories working around these themes.

The twenty-first century has been marked by an unprecedented intensification in globalisation, transnational mobility and technological change. However, the resulting global interconnectedness reveals the continuation of deeply unequal power structures in world society, often exposing rather than ameliorating cultural imbalances. The emergent globalised condition requires a form of narrative representation that accurately reflects the experience of existing as a constituent member of an interconnected global community. This study of cosmopolitanism in contemporary British and American fiction identifies several authors who demonstrate a willingness to forge new and intensified dialogues between local experience and global flows, and between transnational mobilities and networks of connectivity. Various theories of cosmopolitanism will be examined in order to assess their efficacy in providing direct responses to ways of being-in-relation to others and answering urgent fears surrounding cultural convergence. The five chapters of the study will examine works by David Mitchell, Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Dave Eggers and Hari Kunzru, and Philip Pullman. By envisioning how society is shaped by the engendering of shared fates brought about by globalisation, the selected fictions by these authors imagine new cosmopolitan modes of belonging and the development of an emergent global consciousness founded on the cross-cultural interdependencies of the post-millennial world. Despite providing unique and divergent perspectives on the contemporary moment, the fictions indicate that cosmopolitical concerns and crises weaken calls for more progressive and productive forms of harmonious global interconnectedness, and retain a scepticism of more utopian discourses. Cultural relations are increasingly mediated through the awareness of inhabiting a shared, but not unified, world. The study will conclude by arguing that the selected fictions point towards the need for an emergent and affirmative cosmopolitics attuned to the diversity and complexity of twenty-first century globality.

This study interrogates the ways in which biopolitics, as represented in Anglophone theatre from the 1970s to the present day, coerces and regulates postcolonial subalterns within the contemporary socio-political milieu. Using seven plays from three postcolonial regions – South Africa, India and Sri Lanka – the thesis comparatively investigates how internal and global biopolitical operations culminate in overt violence. Research questions explore the nuances of biopolitical trajectories, their tragic resonances and the way these biopolitical stratagems are theatrically articulated and challenged. This study is also concerned with the extent to which biopolitical praxis and consequent violence in these postcolonial territories is shaped by Western colonialism and its legacies. The corpus of plays encompasses: Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972) and The Island (1973); Mbongeni Ngema’s Asinamali! (1985); Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084 (1973); Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest (1999); Ernest Macintyre’s Rasanayagam’s Last Riot: A Political Fiction for the Theatre (1990) and Irangani: A Tragedy of Our Times (2009). The research frames its argument through current scholarship on postcolonial criticism, and draws on the works of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. Foucault’s work on the regulation of human beings through the production of power/knowledge serves as an initial medium of investigation into the praxis of biopolitics. Agamben probes the covert and overt presence of biopolitical violence in contemporary society, particularly through his concept of state of exception. By exploring convergences and divergences of biopolitical subterfuges, and through the juxtaposition of the subalterns’ subjection to violence, the study reflects critically on contemporary biopolitics through Foucauldian and Agambenian lenses. The thesis suggests that postcolonial Anglophone theatre foregrounds a potential to understand the biopolitical logic more meaningfully, and to be resistant to its strategies of coercion: Anglophone plays may contribute to the decolonisation processes, to react against internal and global forces of suppression.

This thesis takes the form of three linked works centred around the fictionalised story of a young Scottish soldier of the 4th Cameron Highlanders from the years 1938 to 1946. These three works are: 1. An epistolary novella comprising the 17 letters of a found manuscript. 2. A feature film screenplay adapted from the letters. 3. A reflective essay on the creative process. The fictionalized narrative is based on the real life experiences of a small group of Scottish soldiers from several different regiments of the 51st Highland Division catalogued in books, memoirs and in personal recollections. They were amongst the 9,000 men who surrendered at St Valery-en-Caux on June 12th 1940 , and subsequently escaped. Through a varied range of routes, they made their way back to Britain. An even smaller group joined the re-formed 51st, and after bloody campaigns in North Africa, took part in the D-Day invasion. On the 2nd of September, 1944, the battalions of The 5th Camerons and the 5th Seaforths returned to the scene of their surrender, and liberated St Valery-en-Caux. Their collective experience encapsulates one small but little known part of the story of World War II.

This critical study of photography between 1840 and 1880 focuses on the medium’s complex role as a mediator of the ideology of domesticity in an era of intense industrialisation and far-reaching popularisation. In doing so, photographic production and consumption are located within the wide, hybrid framework of print and commodity culture, with particular emphasis placed on the patterns of communication emerging through the new network of family periodicals. This methodological approach serves in part to overcome the considerable difficulties of bringing amorphous voices vying for discursive control over photography into focus. More importantly, however, it is proposed that this journalistic field testifies to the conflicting appeal photography held for a domestic readership, and the intricacy of combining a family orientated agenda with the challenges presented by a modernising world. The turn towards a more divisive perspective on photography in the mid-1850s is fundamentally bound up with extraneous conditions, circumstances which shaped patterns of discourse, professional practices and ordinary usage: urbanisation, an enlarging consumer market, social and demographic change and evolving anxieties around identity, gender and domesticity in light of all these permutations. As indicated by articles, published correspondence, advertisements and publicity, photography responded to conflicting desires and impulses present in culture and society at large. Liminal by nature, the medium figures as a powerful symbol of domestic boundness but also as the embodiment of a swelling engagement with the metropolis, a site of hazard and iniquity, but also an advancing arena for bourgeois social performance and play. Thus, this study, like the Victorian photographer, traces the ideological construction of the Victorian family through multiple lenses - comic, architectural, artistic, familial, institutional, topographical and social.