The aim of this thesis is to re-evaluate the literary work and reputation of the novelist and dramatist, John Galsworthy. It concentrates mainly on the social novels that were written between 1904 and 1915, and presents a critical analysis of these major works. In particular, it examines Galsworthy’s technique and his engagement with contemporary problematic social issues, drawing comparisons with the work of other major Modernist and Edwardian writers. It observes that Galsworthy’s reputation has never recovered from the partisan attacks and general disparagement of his work by writers of the early phase of literary Modernism such as D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. It argues that these negative evaluations of Galsworthy are not only motivated by the interests of the self-appointed literary elite, but also a poor and misleading account of his work on both aesthetic and ideological grounds. This thesis attempts an intervention into literary history that will by establish a fairer evaluation of Galsworthy’s work by analysing the self-serving Modernist construction of Edwardian culture as stylistically and politically retrograde, a phase of post-Victorian stagnation, and fundamentally a prelude to Modernist experimentation. The apparent need for Galsworthy to epitomise this situation has resulted in an enduring distortion of his narrative style, and especially his socially progressive ideals; the narrative of Galsworthy as retrograde Edwardian was perpetuated throughout the subsequent twentieth century by the influence of Leavis. In attempting to redress this legacy of misreading the thesis develops a working distinction between the terms ‘Modernism’, as both affiliation and critical idea, and ‘modernising’ as a more judicious evaluation of Galsworthy’s achievement.

Blowback, my biography of the international drug smuggler Michael Forwell, has, since its publication, been marketed within two commercially and culturally recognised categories, namely true crime and biography. In a commercial sense these titles act as signifiers of content, communicating in broad strokes what the reader can expect from the work, where it might lie within their own view of the cultural landscape and therefore whether or not they find engagement with the work appealing. In a practical sense (i.e. from the point of view of the practitioner, the writer), these categorisations bring with them expectations of both form and content, which influence the work produced within that category to varying degrees, either by their inclusion or their absence. I intend to look at these generic and cultural expectations in relation to my own book Blowback, as well as true crime’s most consistently popular, influential and lauded texts, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry’s Helter Skelter, in order to examine the extent to which these expectations shape the work. I will also engage with the work of relevant theorists, including Christian Metz, Steve Neale and Mark Seltzer. I also intend to provide context for both my own creative practice prior to writing Blowback and the extent to which the fiction I wrote went on to influence the ‘true’ crime described within the book. Any study of true crime must wrestle with the genre’s relationship with truth, a relationship I will contextualise via a history of the genre which examines its long, complex and symbiotic relationship with fiction. The true crime shelves are where we store our monsters, and I aim to investigate how those monsters’ brushes with true crime (and with fiction) alter our relationship with them. Interesting notions of truth exist within the study of biography too, and I will look at these where they apply to my portrayal of Michael and his world and where I, the writer of somebody else’s story, might be located within that world.

A range of critical approaches, popular, feminist and structuralist, to women's writing is examined and the strengths and weaknesses of each evaluated. On the basis of this discussion, an attempt is made to develop a critical method more appropriate to the area of women's fiction. This method is eclectic, combining elements of each of the forms of criticism previously discussed with an analytic framework comprising three major categories of women's experience. These are defined as the 'female', or biological elements; the 'feminine', or socially ascribed nature and role of women; and the 'feminist', a response to the 'feminine which offers some form of challenge to its assumptions. This methodology is employed in studies of selected twentieth-century women novelists whose works encompass a variety of fictional modes and styles and a range of different perspectives on women's biological and social experience. Works of Virginia Woolf, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Elizabeth Bowen are taken to represent women's writing in the first half of the century. Novels by Radclyffe Hall, Djuna Barnes and Michele Roberts are considered together in order to trace certain stylistic and thematic changes in women's fiction between this period and the 1960s and 1 70s. The genre of domestic realism in these later decades is examined through the work of Margaret Drabble, Fay Weldon and Penelope Mortimer, whilst Doris Lessing, Joanna Russ and Ursula Le Guin illustrate alternatives to literary realism in modern women's writing. The findings of this approach are summarised, and its effectiveness as a critical tool evaluated.

This thesis is a study of the discourse of sensibility in Romantic-period fiction. It suggests that sensibility was not, as has often been assumed, merely a transient and fashionable mode that peaked in the mid eighteenth-century before its association with radicalism and subsequent demise in the 1790s. Instead, it was redirected and refashioned during the first decades of the nineteenth century, functioning in effect as a metanarrative for the Romantic novel. The discourse of sensibility was both a formative influence on and a central ideological component of literary Romanticism and this thesis reads it as a creative, protean and self-conscious force that is capable of challenging many of our assumptions about the Romantic period. Analysing representative fictions by Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Dacre, William Godwin, Sydney Owenson and Walter Scott, each chapter traces the complex interactions of eighteenth-century discourses of moral philosophy and perception in the sub-genres of the gothic novel, the Jacobin novel, the national tale and historical fiction. In doing so, the evidence of sensibility’s pervasive influence destabilises any notion of discrete and fixed generic categories by suggesting widespread correlations and overlaps. Likewise, this generic assimilation and mutation that operates under the banner of sensibility proposes a challenge to conventional notions of Romantic aesthetic unity and spontaneity, suggesting instead a self-conscious and experimental engagement with genre. Finally, the novels considered depict a hybrid model of sensibility in which Enlightenment formations of feeling and perception as a means of social coherence coexist with Romantic models of alienated selfhood. As a result, the exploration of the discourse of sensibility in the Romantic novel provides an opportunity to reassess the complex and often contradictory relationship between the aesthetics of Enlightenment and Romanticism.

The Roxburghe Club has an unbroken publishing history from 1814 to the present day. Since the Club’s edition of Havelok the Dane appeared in 1828, the Roxburghe has gained a reputation as a producer of valuable editions of manuscripts and reprinted early books. The founding period of the Club, however, has been viewed with less approval, often seen as a frivolous, unscholarly period of wasted years when little of value was produced by a membership composed of dilettante aristocrats. Examination of contemporary sources presents an alternative narrative of the formative years of the Club showing that the early members of the Roxburghe, rather than being frivolous bibliomaniacs, were in fact educated men with serious literary purpose and ability. The origin of the inaccuracies about the Club’s history is shown to be traceable to one malicious source and an accurate alternative biography of the Club is presented in correction of this version. The books produced by the members during this period were important texts that contributed to the emerging field of English Literature. By examining the political and religious affiliations of the members, it is demonstrated that the social and political makeup of the early group was far more complex than previously acknowledged; a change of perspective that in turn has implications for the texts that were presented to the Club. The early Roxburghe represented a significant potential forum for the exchange of important ideas about early authors and texts.

This thesis investigates the relationship between gender and the visual in texts by Virginia Woolf and Angela Carter. Drawing on visual studies, gender studies and film theory, I argue that my selected texts present the gendered visual field as dynamic and layered, foregrounding both a masculine economy of vision and the possibility of alternative forms of gendered subjectivity and ways of looking. The Introduction discusses the key methodological frameworks used in this thesis, including Jonathan Crary’s account of the historical construction of vision, the debates around gender, mobility and visuality centred on the figure of the flâneur, and Laura Mulvey’s account of the cinematic male gaze. I argue for the importance of recognising that the field of vision is a site of contestation composed of an interplay of connected gendered looks. Chapter One focuses on the unresolved tensions between different gendered looks in Mrs Dalloway (1925) which take place across a number of spaces and are mediated by a variety of visual frames. Chapter Two turns to Orlando (1928) to explore Woolf’s playful subversion of a masculine visual economy through a protagonist who changes sex and dress. In addition to this vacillation of appearance, I argue that the text’s representations of London in the 1920s, in particular the department store and motor-car, contribute to a proliferation of gendered looks. In turning to The Passion of New Eve (1979), Chapter Three shows how Carter foregrounds the violence involved in the performance of gender, particularly as mediated through the cinema, and further subverts masculine vision by representing gender as a masquerade. The fourth chapter focuses on The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) and argues that, despite its intended revolutionary purpose, Hoffman’s optical invention fails to transform the gendered visual field and instead reinscribes the patriarchal conventions of gender and looking that it has the potential to subvert. Ultimately, this thesis suggests that the works examined foreground the gendered visual field as a site of contested forms of gendered subjectivity and ways of looking. The texts map out an unresolvable tension between the masculine, hegemonic conventions which exert a powerful influence in everyday life and the possibility of going beyond them.

This thesis investigates representations of the pregnant body in works by women writers in the period from 1818 to the present day, tracing the multiple connections between the actual bodily experience of pregnancy and its use as metaphor for literary production. Setting a diverse corpus of work by women poets and novelists in dialogue with medical constructions of the pregnant body – from eighteenth-century anatomical atlases to contemporary ultrasound images – it offers a provocatively feminist contribution to the field, by defining ‘poetic pregnancy’ as a fertile, corporeal and important variant on the childbirth metaphor. In so doing, it both explores women's writing as a site of resistance to the objectification of the pregnant subject by medical discourse and traces the ways in which this might also challenge traditional constructions of the dominant male canon. Chapter I explores the early stages of pregnancy, from Consummation to Quickening, in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse-novel Aurora Leigh (1857). By examining Barrett Browning's poet-heroine as a pregnant subject, it considers the gestation of the book/baby in relation to nineteenth-century theories of ‘maternal impressions’. Chapter II, on Miscarriage, begins by conceptualising the nineteenth-century female body underneath the corset, before investigating what happens when the girdle is unclasped and the waistline is dropped during the early twentieth century, by uncovering the non-reproductive, ‘mis-carrying’ silhouette of the flapper in Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) and Rosamond Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets (1936). Chapter III identifies and explores the phenomenon of ‘Ultrasound poetry’ written by contemporary women poets such as Kathleen Jamie, Pat Borthwick and Leontia Flynn, a phenomenon spawned from twentieth- and twenty-first century developments in New Reproductive Technologies. This chapter analyses two particular characteristics of the ultrasound poem: firstly, the conjuring of an unspecified, atavistic past; secondly, the emergence of the futuristic and spectral foetal spaceman. Chapter IV, on Labour, moves back to the nineteenth century, by examining Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, Frankenstein. Situating the text in terms of its medical and scientific context – the rise of the man-midwife and the entry of the anatomised headless image of the pregnant torso into popular medical discourse – this chapter offers a fresh way of reading Frankenstein, not only as a 'birth myth', but as a text engaged with the increasingly medicalised pregnant body. This thesis’s structure thus replicates thematically the rounded shape of the pregnant belly, offering a critical re/membering of the pregnant subject that foregrounds both the embodiment of pregnancy and its metaphorical significance for these women writers. Overall, it argues that the pregnant body, which is often Gothicised, obscured and made spectral in representations, is also resistant, disruptive and potently corporeal. The metaphor of poetic pregnancy, like the childbirth metaphor, is not fixed and singular, but comprised of metaphorical matrices, which generate multiple meanings.

In this thesis I argue that matron lit gives over-forties women a voice within contemporary popular fictional texts that they have previously been denied. This genre began to emerge around the turn of the twenty-first century as a sub-genre of chick lit and is now firmly entrenched in the mainstream of popular fiction. Contemporary popular fiction aimed at the baby-boom market has established its readership steadily. For the first time older female readers of popular fiction have heroines to whom they can relate. Matron lit discusses the gains and losses that are encountered by ageing women in Western society. Cultural attitudes about ageing and gender operate together to marginalise older women. Matron lit contributes to the debate around ageing and gender by reporting and exposing gendered and ageist discourses. In order to explore the impact of fictional narratives that represent the lives of older women, I draw on the work of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. These theorists provide a frame of reference that assist an understanding of the constructive discourse which promotes normative cultural concepts of ageing and gender. In reporting on gendered ageist discourses matron lit exposes the repetitive linguistic process that undermines mature, female identities. While matron lit sometimes simply recites ageist discourses, it occasionally challenges them directly and frequently subverts them through irony. The particular issues which I explore over five chapters are: The importance of body image and sexuality, in the lives of matron lit heroines. The effect of ageist attitudes on wellbeing. The significance of home for matron lit heroines. The relevance of relationships and friendships to mature women. The pursuit of ‘liminal’ space where post-reproductive women can re-evaluate their purpose.

The development of the West German press in the 1970s has so far been described as a transition from a period of concentration (1954-1976) to stabilisation (1976-1985). The analysis by Schütz and others has several short-comings: firstly, the argument is implicitly based on a vague empirical definition of pluralism that is understood as the number of daily newspapers with an independent editorial department in a given market. Secondly, the analysis is almost exclusively based on the daily press and ignores the impact of new journals, regional editions, weeklies, and the ‘alternative’ press on the press market of the 1970s. Finally, the turning points of 1954 and 1976 do not relate to wider changes in circulation figures and other important aspects of press history. This thesis presents a new analysis of the history of the West German press during the period from the protests of the late 1960s against ‘opinion monopolies’ to the early 1980s deregulation of the West German broadcasting market. The introduction, i.e. the first chapter, provides a detailed criticism of the current historiography and explains why the new analysis rests on the following pillars: a new periodization, a broader look at various segments of the press, including dailies and weeklies, a clearer delineation of local, regional, and supra-regional markets, a more precise and critical engagement with the ideas of contemporaries on pluralism, and a more comprehensive analysis of the relationship between the press and television in the 1970s. The second chapter engages critically with the current periodisation of press history. The chapter establishes several criteria in order to provide a more accurate picture. These include circulation figures, wider market developments, public debates, laws, and the internal organisation of the press. It analyses the development of the press from 1945 to the student protests against Axel Springer in 1968. It identifies the fact that the press underwent three phases after 1945, the ‘occupation period’ (1945-49), the era ‘between expansion and restauration’ (1949-1957), and an era characterised by ‘criticism of the government and debates over the press’ (1957-1968/69). The chapter concludes that the changes between 1968 and 1969 constitute the starting point of a distinct period in West German press history, the ‘long social-liberal 1970s’ between 1968/69 and 1982. The third chapter analyses two new contemporary concepts of press pluralism that shaped the policy debates of the long 1970s, namely social pluralism and free-market pluralism. The former was championed by scholars such as Peter Glotz and the governments of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt. It envisaged a protection of a socially and politically diverse press and provided the wider framework for new laws and regulations such as the so-called Law on Merger Control in the Press (1976). These market interventions were opposed by the conservatives at the time, who championed the idea of free-market pluralism. The fourth chapter shows how this struggle over the proper role of the democratic press between state and society escalated on the left and right of the political spectrum. The new social movements discussed the idea of a ‘counter public’ existing in opposition to the ‘established’ media. As a result, several hundreds of ‘alternative’ papers were founded in the segment of the weekly, monthly, and irregular press that contributed to a high point of market diversity in the 1970s. These papers found their counterpart among intellectually elitist journals that portrayed themselves as a conservative ‘counterweight’ to the assumed leftist mass press and pluralisation at the time. The fifth chapter then shows that the debates over press pluralism, new laws and policies, and the developments in the political weekly and monthly press as well as the ‘alternative’ press reshaped the core of the West German press market in the 1970s, namely the regional and local daily press. Finally, chapter six addresses the existing historiography on the role of the press in the overall media ensemble. It shows that new concepts of press pluralism, the transformation of the press market, its particular role in the regions, and unique press-government relations added to the elevated position of prestige of the press vis-à-vis television and contributed to its role as a partial political lead medium within the ‘new culture of political participation’ emerging towards the end of the decade.

This project contains a collection of original short fiction due for publication by Valley Press (January 2016). In addition to the publication of the single collection, most of the stories have been previously published separately in magazines, journals and anthologies. A full publication list is provided. The commentary which accompanies the collection explores my own research into structure and viewpoint. In the commentary, I will show my development from a scriptwriter for theatre, radio and television to short fiction writer; from epical story structures to more lyrical ones. I will explore structure in short fiction from my wide reading of the various theorists, such as John Gerlach, L Michael O’Toole, Paul March-Russell, and J Berg Esenwein; practitioners such as Anton Chekov, Katherine Mansfield, Raymond Carver and Helen Simpson; and broad practice-based experience as a professional writer. I will examine my own experiments with form, viewpoint and aspects of realism in short fiction. The contemporary literary short story favours lyrical over that of epical structure. As a result of my background in scriptwriting, my stories combine epical and lyrical elements. The lyrical story has largely been associated with realism. My collection uses the lyrical story structure in combination with non-naturalistic elements, in order to ‘reboot’ the lyrical form. In addition, choice of viewpoint and an innovative approach to its novel use, form a thematic thread throughout my work. This exegesis outlines aspects of craft and technique pertinent to my background as a writer, which will demonstrate the distinctiveness of my short story collection.