This thesis explores America’s fascination with its own sports as purveyors of national identity. American literature has found unique inspiration in sporting competition, not only depicting professional athletes, but drawing from the experiences of fans and amateurs. While the athlete’s heroism and eventual fall has been analysed in previous discussions of this topic, my route of inquiry positions decline and defeat as more central and complex concepts. The focus of this thesis is on the remarkably diverse ways in which contemporary writers reimagine aspects of sporting failure both for their characters and within their own creative process. The centrality of failure seems an affront to the United States’ celebration of success and victory. However, the common strand in the most ambitious contemporary sports writing is to portray experiences of loss and failure as paradoxical routes to self-affirmation. Postmodern writing on sports has taken from the drama and narrative implicit in sporting contest, but uses this framework to question ideas of masculinity, ethnicity, memory and myth. The writers I discuss incorporate failure into these themes to arrive at points of redemptive discovery.

This thesis consists of a short story collection and an accompanying critical commentary. The story collection comprises ten linked stories all set in a fictional small town in southern England: the eponymous Sudleigh. The cycle examines ordinary lives within that landscape. While the stories may vary in their naturalism, they are linked by a common setting and a scrutiny of the sociological and political nuances of small-town England. The accompanying critical commentary examines, through the lens of writing technique, how writers have used the realist short story not just to portray snapshots of the human condition but also to engage with the issues central to the societies they inhabit. Through the analysis and discussion of various stories by such writers as Chekhov, Joyce, Mansfield, Hemingway, Carver, Simpson, Kelman and Munro, the four chapters respond to several questions. How can the writer renew the realist short story and make it relevant? How can the writer make the short story both represent and interrogate reality? What role does the evocation of place play in the realist short story and its capacity to construct socio-political implication? It also explores the capacity of the story cycle to expand the short story’s socio-political potential, and the suitability of its fragmentary form to portray a fragmented society. In light of the modern, realist short story tradition, the final chapter offers a detailed reflective commentary on the processes and choices made in the writing of Sudleigh. As well as exploring such issues as voice, style, compression, structure, endings, editing practice, constructing the fictive town and binding the cycle, the reflective commentary also weighs the nature of my own socio-political engagements, and my efforts to renew the form.

This thesis explores the writing life of the Northumbrian labouring-class poet Robert Story (1795-1860) who, during the political turmoil of the 1830s, achieved national celebrity for writing a series of songs and poems for Peel’s Conservative party. In his unpublished autobiography (c.1853) he alludes to building an archive of his work. Drawing on these manuscripts, all of which have until now remained hidden, and his published writing, this thesis investigates the relationship between Story’s apparent political conservatism and his progressive and experimental approach to writing. The study is organised into three main parts. The first forms a study of Story’s biographical manuscripts, using his accounts of reading to raise the wider complex theoretical questions that inform the thesis. It goes beyond Story’s connection with the pastoral tradition and hypothesises that Story’s writing was always rhetorical. Tracing Story’s circle of ‘brother’ poets, part two locates him in a distinctly labouring-class canon, imagined or otherwise, that he believed was at least equal to the polite realm of literature. This phase of research also resituates Story’s satirical modes of writing and his party ballads within the great body of political literature produced by working men during the first half of the nineteenth century. Story’s importance lies not only in his pursuit of politics but also in his cultural ambition: the third part of the thesis examines formal hybridity in his writing. It reveals how Story was searching for new forms of self-expression and asks to what extent his pursuit of literature was politicised and predicated on the belief that social and economic emancipation was contingent on cultural equality. Overall this thesis argues that Story was using literature to challenge the political, social and cultural boundaries imposed on him as both a workingman and a labouring-class writer.

Consumer participation in the production of information, knowledge and culture has become increasingly popular in the last three decades. Although these participatory practices have been successfully incorporated into business models in many sectors, media and entertainment industries are still quite reluctant to invite audiences to create canonical content for their storyworlds. Media conglomerates hold a firm grip over their intellectual property and only allow selected parties to participate in the production of official content for their franchises. In contrast, participatory worlds are fictional worlds which allow audiences to contribute with canonical additions to their expansion. In participatory worlds, audience members are welcome to contribute to the content production chain and/or decision-making processes, having the chance to become contributors and co-authors of the texts. This thesis critically examines participatory worlds with the aim of understanding what they are and how they operate within the industrial context. This research introduces two models of participatory worlds, the ‘sandpit’ and ‘spin-off’ models, based on the location and medium where audience participation takes place, primary or ancillary works, and uses one case study to illustrate each of these: the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Lord of the Craft (2011- ) and Grantville Gazette (2003- ), an e-zine rooted in the 1632 Universe. These case studies are compared with commodities produced and systems employed by media conglomerates in the management and canonical expansion of their fictional worlds in order to establish similarities and differences among them and determine where participatory worlds stand in respect to the media and entertainment industries. The concept of ‘intervention’ is introduced to define the capabilities that audience members are given to contribute canonically and make an impact in a storyworld. This thesis explores the factors which determine the degree of ‘intervention’ given to participants in participatory worlds by examining two further case studies, the web drama Beckinfield (2010-2013) and the TV show Bar Karma (2011), in addition to the aforementioned. The comparison of the four case studies reveals different approaches to audience participation within these practices.

This thesis examines the work of Greek postmodern filmmaker Nikos Nikolaidis with a specific focus on female representation. I examine Nikolaidis as an auteur and I trace elements throughout his oeuvre that contribute to the formation of his authorial signature. Nikolaidis’s work is autobiographical and highly political. Nikolaidis’s cinema does not abide by the traditional theories of ‘Greekness’, and his main influences are American cinema, and specifically for film noir, rock ‘n’ roll culture and his antiauthoritarian ideology. All these elements are combined together within his work through the use of pastiche. I examine Nikolaidis’s work according to Richard Dyer’s notion of pastiche. Through pastiche he expresses nostalgia for rock ‘n’ roll culture and film noir, but also he expresses his concern for the future. Nikolaidis pastiches a selection of film genres and specific films in order to appropriate the elements that interest him. His pastiche work shows that the filmmaker addresses cineliterate audiences that would ideally understand his dialogue with the different genres and films he pastiches. With regards to female representation in Nikolaidis’s films, women are given leading roles, exhibit varying degrees of agency, and are presented as stronger and more powerful than men. However, their representations remain paradoxical, complex and misogynistic. While on the one hand, women are portrayed as powerful, independent, and able to subvert patriarchy, on the other hand, they are often used as props, rendering their representation inconsistent and problematic. Nikolaidis differentiates and juxtaposes two types of women throughout his work: the powerful women versus the unimportant women. Those who do not conform to the powerful female characteristics are characterised within the second category. Since Nikolaidis was highly influenced by film noir, his female protagonists pastiche the classic film noir figure of the femme fatale.

The thesis begins with an exploration of the conversational mode of reading, modelled by Cixous, with which I bring Cixous‟s and H.D.‟s texts into dialogue. A crucial point of contact between H.D. and Cixous is their exploration of the sacred in relationship to creativity and materiality. This project is situated in the context of critical studies of H.D. as a visionary poet, while I foreground her religious sensibilities through an exploration of the religious syncretism of her writing from the Second World War. The discussion of critical context leads to an outline of the theoretical tools employed through the project, which include trauma theory‟s engagement with the categories of testimony and witness, performance approaches to ritual theory and Paul Ricoeur‟s work on metaphor, imagination and ways of being in the world. This chapter presents my thesis that Cixous and H.D. write a material mysticism through their engagement with alterity, the sacred and the materiality of writing as a creative practice. Chapter Two examines the ways the voices of the dead function in H.D.‟s autobiographical novels, or „spiritual autobiographies‟, The Gift and The Sword Went Out to Sea. In these texts, H.D. draws upon her personal vision and experiences of spiritualism and Moravian history for the resources for a creative and spiritual response to the traumas of war. The chapter draws upon trauma theory‟s elaboration of testimony and witness as a way of speaking the unspeakable, of giving voice to trauma and providing the support and receptivity to allow testimony to emerge. Chapter Three explores the complexities of H.D.‟s religious syncretism through the lens of ritual. It uses performance approaches to ritual to consider the productive meaning-making dynamic of Greek drama and ceremonial processions in The Sword, Moravian litany in The Gift, and Hermetic alchemical ritual in Trilogy. The literal transformation of words in Trilogy links the activity of ritual to that of language. This leads to a discussion of H.D.‟s and Cixous‟s emphasis on writing itself as a ritual. Chapter Four draws upon Paul Ricoeur‟s understanding of metaphor as mobilised by the internal dynamic of sameness and difference to examine the ways in which Cixous and H.D. deploy the images of the orange and the bee. The proliferation of these images across Cixous‟s and H.D.‟s writing allows creative explorations of how spirituality and creativity inheres in encounters with others, subjectivity and embodiment. Chapter Five considers the spatial context of Cixous‟s and H.D.‟s attention to writing as a mode of creative transformation. I explore two spatial metaphors in Cixous and H.D.; the garden, with the associations of grounded, particular places, and flight, as the movement between places. The conclusion recapitulates the concerns of the thesis and considers ancient wisdom as a locus for understanding H.D.‟s texts and a resource for approaching the role of the imagination in literary Modernism.

Russian people living in Scotland – and the UK more broadly – are exposed to a political climate where Russian domestic and foreign policy is the subject of intense media scrutiny and, often, criticism. This thesis explores the intersection between UK and Scottish media discourse on Russia and Russian people, Scottish public attitudes towards Russia and Russian people, and the everyday lives of Russian migrants living in Scotland. The thesis is based upon data gathered from a critical discourse analysis of 1200 Scottish and UK newspaper articles, two surveys carried out with approximately 400 Scottish and 100 Russian respondents, and interviews conducted with 24 Scottish and 21 Russian participants. The thesis argues that Russia is ‘othered’ in UK and Scottish media discourse, frequently associated with negative characteristics such as aggression and dishonesty. Through such discursive strategies, Russia is portrayed as fundamentally different from the UK, Europe and the West. While identifying some positive media engagement with Russian culture and travel, I highlight the way in which such coverage often relies upon exoticised and orientalised tropes. My findings show that there is limited press engagement with Russian people, other than President Vladimir Putin. I demonstrate that Putin has become intrinsic to contemporary imaginings of Russia, often represented as ‘Russia personified’. Ultimately, I suggest that the way in which Russian and Russian people are represented in media discourse reflects contemporary and historical power dynamics between the UK and Russia. The thesis explores how these findings intersect with Scottish participants’ attitudes towards Russia and Russian people, analysing the way in which interviewees articulated and differentiated Russian, Scottish or British, and Western identities. Throughout my discussion of both popular and media perspectives, I stress the ongoing significance of the Soviet legacy upon perceptions of contemporary Russia. I suggest that there is a complex relationship between media discourse on Russia and popular attitudes towards the country, arguing that, while Scottish participants often challenged the ideas about Russia put forward in the press, they nevertheless reproduced dominant discourses. The thesis explores this process of challenging, but nonetheless internalising, dominant media narratives. Finally, I examine how media and popular representations of Russia affect the lived experiences of Russian migrants in Scotland. I suggest that representations of Russia can have a stigmatising effect, creating ontological and social insecurities for Russian people. I suggest that such vulnerabilities often result from day-to-day encounters in seemingly banal settings, such as on public transport or in the pub. However, I emphasise the complexity of the way in which Russian participants responded to public attitudes, exploring times when they felt stereotyped, cases when interviewees were misrecognised as Polish migrants and, finally, drawing attention to positive experiences. Finally, I stress the ways in which close and trusting relationships, as well as managing media consumption, can play a key role in coping with and mitigating everyday experiences of vulnerability. The thesis makes several original contributions to knowledge. I build upon a small, but growing, body of work on the representation of Russia in contemporary media discourse. My focus on the UK and Scottish media environment, as well as the use of critical discourse analysis to critique media sources, differentiates the thesis from existing work within the field. Further, I add a contemporary perspective to existing literature on British representations of Russia, most of which has focused on receptiveness to Russian culture, particularly during the Tsarist and early Soviet periods. My use of empirical – rather than archival or secondary – data further distinguishes the thesis, with this research offering the first detailed and critical account of British popular perceptions of Russia. More broadly, I offer a bottom-up perspective into the ways in which Western (and Eastern) identities are represented and utilised on an everyday basis. The emphasis upon the stigmatising effect of media and popular attitudes towards Russia upon Russian migrants living in Scotland is also distinctive, as well as my exploration of the social and ontological vulnerabilities such stigmatising experiences can create.

For the past fifty years, critics and scholars have been searching for a critical language to explain the work of Britain’s most successful playwright, Harold Pinter. One of the richer paths of enquiry has been to analyse the plays using a psychoanalytic vocabulary. In general terms, however, most of these studies have been restricted to using a Freudian terminology. This study develops the psychoanalytic tradition of Pinter studies by applying the theories of one of Freud’s successors, Melanie Klein. The study has been undertaken through an analysis of play texts to develop a synthesis of Kleinian theory and Pinter. Klein’s work develops Freudianism by exploring the primitive building blocks of the infant’s mind. Chapter 1 introduces the thesis argument and gives a detailed introduction to Pinter’s background and his work as writer. Chapter 2 provides an examination of the fundamental elements of Klein’s theories in the context of Freud’s own ideas. Chapter 3 uses Klein’s theory of dreams to analyse Pinter’s earlier work and argues that the plays explore complex unconscious phantasies of relations to bad and good objects. A further contribution is made to psychoanalytic vocabulary with the introduction of the notion of the split object. Chapter 4 explores the manic- depressive aspects of The Dwarfs, whilst Chapter 5 is a close reading that argues that The Caretaker can be read through the lens of the characters’ anxious attempt to repair ‘objects’ damaged in phantasy. Chapter 6 provides a detailed Kleinian exegesis of The Homecoming and then Pinter’s later work in considered: his memory plays, and his work after 1980, including his overtly political work and his last plays including Ashes to Ashes and Celebration. In this chapters Kleinian lexis is employed to get at the unconscious undercurrents of the plays. Throughout, along with a specific emphasis on the characters’ unconscious anxieties and relations to objects, the relationship between society, the historical moment and the text are considered.

This thesis explores the connections between the nineteenth century periodical press and the development of detective fiction, between approximately 1840 and 1900. It argues that these two Victorian developments were closely interrelated, and that each had significant impacts on the other which has hitherto gone underexplored in academic scholarship. The thesis argues that the relationship between the police and the periodical press solidified in the mid-Victorian era, thanks to the simultaneous development of a nationwide system of policing as a result of the passage of the 1856 County and Borough Police Act and the abolition of the punitive 'taxes on knowledge' throughout the 1850s and early 1860s. This established a connection between the police and the periodical, and the police were critically examined in the periodical press for the remainder of the nineteenth century from various perspectives. This, the thesis argues, had a corresponding effect on various kinds of fiction, which began to utilise police officers in new ways - notably including as literary guides and protectors for authors wishing to explore growing urban centres in mid-Victorian cities which had been deemed 'criminal'. 'Detective fiction' in the mid-Victorian era, therefore, was characterised by trust in the police officer to protect middle-class social and economic values. Towards the end of the nineteenth century however, everything changed. The thesis explores how journalistic reporting of a corruption scandal in 1877, as well as the Fenian bombings and Whitechapel murders of the 1880s, contributed to significant changes in the detective genre. This was the construction of the image of the 'bumbling bobby', and the corresponding rise of the private or amateur detective, which ultimately led to the appearance of the character who epitomised the relationship between the police and the periodical - Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.

This thesis traces the ways in which David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, and Colson Whitehead react against the historical, institutional, and formal limits imposed upon contemporary fiction and culture. It argues that in order to counteract such constraints, they embrace and co-opt older forms and values as enabling for their fiction. To map these processes and relationships, I read these five writers as engaging with and reflective of the concept of cultural reproduction. Building largely from Raymond Williams’s definitions, the lens of cultural reproduction acknowledges what Williams terms the ‘limits and pressures’ of the contemporary – such as the inheritance of postmodernism, creative writing programs, technological changes, and commercial demands – but also how these writers display agency in reaction to such limits. Chapter One uses pragmatist philosopher John Dewey’s theories of habit to suggest Wallace’s work explores the way culture is reproduced habitually. Chapter Two contends that Franzen’s attention to these processes is distinctly melodramatic, and his writing embodies melodrama, rather than his stated realism. Chapter Three examines Chabon, Egan, and Whitehead as representative of the ‘genrefication’ of contemporary American fiction, and how each embrace genre forms to respond to different elements and processes of cultural reproduction.