This thesis foregrounds Virginia Woolf’s 1921 volume of short fiction, Monday or Tuesday, examining its aesthetic qualities and formal strategies through the lens of the literary sketch. ‘Sketch’ is a term that has been invoked in criticism of Monday or Tuesday since its publication, but the provenance of the sketch as a literary genre and its centrality to Woolf’s aesthetic practices have not yet been fully examined in Woolf studies. The idea of the sketch is most often raised in analysis of her unfinished memoir, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, and as a descriptor for the general plotlessness of her short fiction; yet, the historical specificity and formal strategies of the sketch as an established literary genre have largely been elided in such discussions. Attending to the frequency and precision of Woolf’s own use of the term ‘sketch’, and particularly to her declared intention to ‘keep the quality of the sketch in the finished and composed work’ (D II 312), this thesis elucidates the sketch as a key mode of writing for Woolf. It argues that she achieved her desired combination of the sketch and the finished work most fully in the first Hogarth edition of Monday or Tuesday. A set of texts more usually encountered in anthologies or integrated with Woolf’s other short fiction, Monday or Tuesday has itself occupied a relatively marginal place in the critical construction of Woolf’s oeuvre. Although there has been a recent surge of work on the short fiction, Monday or Tuesday has yet to be foregrounded as the sole object of a monograph, or to appear as a scholarly edition. This thesis reads Monday or Tuesday in its entirety, in the specificity of its original publication by Woolf’s Hogarth Press, and considers what is at stake in reading this work as a collection of literary sketches. The analysis performed is grounded in the material qualities of the first UK edition, where the woodcuts by Vanessa Bell and the uncorrected mistakes made in the hand-printing of the book contribute to the effects of the sketch as it appears in print. In these aspects, the thesis builds on the substantial body of scholarship on the Hogarth Press and Bloomsbury aesthetics to discuss Monday or Tuesday as a printed sketchbook. It shows how the sketch manifests in Monday or Tuesday’s material appearance, where it combines the ‘evanescent’ and ‘engraved’ qualities later formulated alongside ‘the life of Monday or Tuesday’ in Woolf’s manifesto for ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925). Utilising Woolf’s own terminology throughout, the thesis explores the simultaneous ephemerality and permanence of the sketch, as something which can project into a future moment of writing, and whose significance can be realised belatedly; as something which works explicitly with the surface impression but which also layers moments of making. The thesis begins by drawing on recent scholarship to outline a history of the sketch as a literary genre which was popular throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and America, and identifies examples of this tradition with which Woolf was familiar. Woolf’s deployment of the term ‘sketch’ is discussed in detail, from her early journals and juvenilia to her memoir, and the thesis proceeds to study the ways in which the sketch is at work in Monday or Tuesday. It examines the book’s contents under some conventional categories of the sketch: the scene, the character, and the political sketch. The central chapter of the thesis discusses the poetics and narrative strategies of scene-making and character-sketching, and Chapter Four highlights the feminist political inflections of Woolf’s use of the sketch. These readings show how the literary sketch is not defined simply by its fragmentary, ekphrastic or unfinished qualities, but also utilises narrative strategies of suggestion, deferral and interruption. The thesis reaches for finish in the final chapter by examining the material qualities of the book, including an examination of key variants between the first British and first American editions. While it makes serious strategic claims for the sketch as one possible genre through which to approach Monday or Tuesday, the thesis does not claim to definitively categorise these texts as sketches once and for all. Rather, in the attempt to treat these texts in broad-stroke but incisive detail, it acknowledges the procedures of the sketch itself – its representative provisionality, its potential to function as a detailed study, and its creation of a basis for re-working. It takes the idea of the sketch as a critical apparatus by which to perform the experimental reading that Monday or Tuesday’s own narrative strategies invite. The thesis ultimately seeks to foreground the work of both Monday or Tuesday and the literary sketch in Woolf’s modernist aesthetics, and to prepare the ground for future study of their significance for modernism more generally.

This thesis examines representations of Welsh masculinity in six South Wales anglophone novels: Gwyn Jones’s ‘Times Like These’ (1936), Lewis Jones’s ‘Cwmardy’ (1937), Menna Gallie’s ‘Strike for a Kingdom’ (1959), Ron Berry’s ‘So Long, Hector Bebb’ (1970), Roger Granelli’s ‘Dark Edge’ (1997), and Kit Habianic’s ‘Until Our Blood is Dry’ (2014). Understanding masculinity as a cultural construct, the following chapters analyse the interconnection between the patriarchal, industrialised social context from which such masculinities emerge, as well as the generic forms through which they are fictionally inscribed in these novels. This thesis applies a broad range of literary and gender theories to close readings of Welsh industrial fiction. Specifically, it draws extensively on R. W. Connell’s formulation of hegemonic masculinity, supplemented by the prominent work of Judith Butler, Michael Kimmel and others. Pierre Macherey and Raymond Williams inform much of the understanding of the interrelationship of culture and society. And the work of Stephen Knight, Katie Gramich and Dai Smith, among many others, has been vital to this study’s understanding of the broad field of Welsh fiction in English. Chapter One adapts Raymond Williams’s tripartite schema of ‘dominant’, ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ energies in social process to read masculinities in ‘Times Like These’ as studies inflected through a historicised perspective. Focusing on the construction of the individual rather the politicising of the community in ‘Cwmardy’, Chapter Two examines how the coercive paradigms of patriarchal masculinity in the novel fragment both the debilitatingly sensitive Len Roberts and his physically robust, though emotionally suppressed father, Jim. Chapter Three examines how Menna Gallie’s whodunnit ‘Strike for a Kingdom’ manipulates a traditionally patriarchal sub-genre to feminise and infantilise Welsh miners, thereby challenging both the gendering and genre of earlier male-authored industrial novels. Chapter Four diverges from considering masculinity as a cultural construct to argue that in Ron Berry’s paean to ‘authentic’ masculinity, ‘So Long, Hector Bebb’, Hector is an intertextualised amalgam of heroic, mythical characteristics whose lineage extends back to antiquity. The final chapter analyses how, in ‘Dark Edge’ and ‘Until Our Blood is Dry’, the 1984-85 miners’ strike subjects Welsh masculinities to fundamental challenges of self identity when confronted by a radical government and a politically engaged feminism. Although the critical field devoted to studying masculine representations in the Valleys is expanding, it remains relatively small. With the passing of the mining industry and its associated signifiers like boxing, a whole tranche of Welsh literary history is threatened with elision from public consciousness, or incorporation into a mythical retrospective of stabilised masculinity predicated on unassailable patriarchal hegemony. As becomes apparent in the following chapters, a gendered reading of the texts exposes ‘masculinity’ as an elusive concept, as capable of incarcerating men in a patriarchal code of practice as of liberating them.

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By narrowing the disparate and often contradictory trajectories of Romantic thought into a compressed framework, this thesis seeks to scrutinise the treatment of the Romantic ideal in the fiction of Muriel Spark. A number of recurring themes can be understood to collectively constitute this Romantic ideal. These include Coleridge’s theory of the power of the imagination to coalesce disparities into unity and harmony. The relationship between creativity and psychosis in The Comforters (1957) is considered within a wider discussion on the nature of creativity and the conception of the visionary Romantic artist. This leads to an investigation of the Romantic Movement’s emphasis on interiority and the self, and the influence of John Henry Newman in The Mandelbaum Gate (1965). The resulting discussion treats the concepts of transfiguration and the sublime as they relate to individual subjectivity in The Driver’s Seat (1970). The Romantic fascination with the reinvigoration of myth, legend and oral narrative cultures is examined in relation to The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), and the discussion returns to unity, harmony, vision, and the artist in The Finishing School (2004). The investigation of these elements of the Romantic ideal highlights a number of corollary questions. The emphasis on the self prompts the examination of Spark’s engagement with the themes of solipsism, ego, and performance, while Keats’ ‘Negative Capability’ is considered in the attempt to comprehend the other. The methodology will be comparative textual analysis with reference to relevant extant criticism, alongside consideration of literature from anthropology and folklore studies. By illuminating previously overlooked connections with Romanticism and Romantic literary methodologies, this interdisciplinary approach will assist in ascertaining whether Spark’s sustained engagement with these themes is evidence of a complex, multivalent relationship with the Romantic ideal, or whether recent criticism positing her rejection of Romanticism can be upheld.

This thesis uses previously unstudied female authored blog narratives to explore the role the author’s anonymity plays in the way they textually construct themselves and their offline experiences. It thereby reconceptualises not only what it means to be anonymous online, but also how anonymity is utilised by users regardless of their perceived level of hiddenness. Unlike previous research into the genre, it considers blogs as part of the trajectory of life-writing, which includes autobiography and diaries, and therefore examines the narratives using close textual literary analysis. The thesis also acknowledges the fact that the content of blogs is inherently influenced by the form itself, and therefore looks at the texts in the context of their online platform and its technological features. It subsequently shows blogs to be a constantly updated example of contemporary culture, which represent not just an individual voice, but new ways of examining broader social realities. The analysis examines how the blogosphere could specifically offer a platform for women, who are often discouraged from speaking up in the offline public sphere, to share their stories and have a ‘public’ voice online. It therefore provides a detailed insight into a selection of female authors who have chosen this medium, interrogates the ways in which they utilise the potential anonymity that the online world offers them, and demonstrates to what extent the blogosphere could therefore be regarded as a space where women can represent alternative, and potentially transgressive, performances of self. Its methodology and theoretical framework mean that the analysis provides a more detailed insight into how and why women are seen to dominate this platform than existing research has thus far been able to. The findings therefore go beyond previous conceptualisations of female blog users, and of the blogosphere more broadly; highlighting the extent to which the medium of blogging represents a powerful place for women to write themselves.

Despite the vast scholarship on war writing and trauma, a focused study on the connection between individual and collective war traumatic affect and their representation in literature has not been written. This study close-reads and analyzes war writing between 1916 and 2006 in order to trace the narrative tropes that are recurrent in war narratives of that era. The exposition of these tropes is informed by Hayden White’s study Tropics of Discourse, Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of the ‘chronotope’ in The Dialogic Imagination, Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, and Cathy Caruth’s writings on trauma theory. The narratives examined are Stratis Myrivilis’s novel Life in the Tomb (1923), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5 (1969), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), and Anna Kavan’s collection of short stories I am Lazarus (1945). The analysis of these seven narratives yields the identification of a range of tropes which underpin the representation of war traumatic affect. The identified tropes include the synecdochical relationships between body and nation, the chronotopic connection between traumatized body and warscape, the traumatized mind and the repetitive narration, as well as the proleptic anticipation of traumatic future. In turn, it will be argued, these tropes form assemblages between the individual and the collective and operate on a textual continuum sustained by the representation of past, present, and future war traumas.

In considering the once highly visible and vibrant amateur film club culture of the United Kingdom the 1980s is arguably a pivotal, but controversial, historical decade in accounts of marginal film history. These years witnessed the end of the Scottish International Amateur Film Festival, a perceived sense and feeling of decline in club membership and vitality, and even a displacement of the film medium itself, with the arrival of domestic-level, narrow-video technology in the form of Betamax, VHS and other multifarious magnetic formats. Distinct feelings of loss are evident in amateur film journals of the time, while memories of the era among surviving practitioners are often characterised by senses of watershed and narratives of betrayal and distrust with manufacturers and consumer technology. This thesis through the discovery, analysis, and criticism of original visual and written empirical material will counter such understanding of the 1980s amateur cinema period, by exploring changing nomenclatures, technologies and leisure trends in this era. It will begin to define an increasingly diffuse, ambivalent and problematic narrative of this period, where many assumptions about traditional cinematographic, celluloid technology, the arrival of magnetic recording, and digital editing can be challenged. ‘Common-sense’, popular and individual accounts of this transitory era tend to argue that video was a predominant factor in the overall cultural amnesia that the amateur social world experienced. The critical endeavour of this thesis will be to construct a sophisticated and nuanced narrative of this time that counters and challenges elements of these accounts. Rather than asking what magnetic recording, or video, limited, I will discuss what it inspired and what it promoted in a scene that contrary to popular belief actually flourished, and was invigorated, by the new narrow technology on offer. That there is such discordance between different methodological processes also poses a series of larger meta-historiographical concerns around the primacy of oral history and assumptions of reliability. Questions around the diffusion and dissemination of novel technology into existent specific cultural practices will also be at the forefront of analysis. This project collates amateur film texts (archival and internet-based) and amateur journal material (Movie Maker, Making Better Movies, Videomaker and Amateur Film Maker) in providing an alternative narrative of these developments. Emphasis will be placed on both a specific canon of amateur videos identified within the holdings of the IAC Film and Video Institute Library, and by a collection of interviews with prominent amateur film-makers, whose practice has been permanently shaped by their experience of the transitions in the 1980s. Conjunctural readings of film form, technology, genre, aesthetics, production behaviour, and practice will be developed and illustrated through reference to this canon, with a view to extending the existing historiography of amateur cinema in the UK. Focus will be placed on periodising the amateur’s transitory practice, behaviour and language from the film, to the video, to the digital era, and challenging assumptions of decline, contraction and anachronism. Questions centre on three distinct phases of amateur cinematography and new practice indexed by technological innovation: the obsolescence of film technology in the late-1970s; the impact of early three-way video systems in the 1980s and; the use of computer editing software in the mid-1990s. Considering the prior status and vitality of UK amateur film-making, the thesis will expose a hidden history of amateur film-making post-celluloid, and place considerable emphasis and value on this under-researched and burgeoning area of interdisciplinary scholarship. In conclusion, the thesis will provide an important examination of the transitory stage between film and new digital technologies, and promote further public and academic engagement with this lost leisure community. With a recent focus on digital humanities, the bridge that early narrow-track video technology creates, between amateur cinema's celluloid-past and digital future, remains a significant area for exploration. Three narrative arcs follow, each containing an illustrative micro-historical case study, alongside critical writings on language, behaviour and practice specific to video technology and the magnetic image. These arcs will explore and extrapolate the larger attitudes and values of a social world that underwent technological shifts, not necessarily perceived as positive, or progressive.

This study is an exploration, on a professional and personal level, of metaphor as both an object of, and a tool for, research. The methodology used is qualitative, and overall the approach is phenomenographic. The research develops through three stages. Firstly, through an analysis of the metaphors found in the discourse of students, teachers and the government, a model of metaphor has been developed and used to give a framework for the examination of metaphor as the object of research. Secondly, the model has been extended to identify the metaphors by which the reality of the research process is constructed. Metaphor has then been used as a tool of research in order to identify and analyse the metaphors by which the research process has been framed by two researchers working with the same teacher. The three key metaphors identified through this application of the model; narrative, story and voice, have been explored to consider their applicability and relevance as ways of conceptualising research. Finally the implicit metaphor by which this entire study has been framed, research as metaphysics, has been explored through a personal reflection on the reality of the research process for the researcher. The study is located within a postmodernist paradigm through an exploration of the applicability of postmodernist assumptions to this research process. Throughout the work the voice of the researcher narrates her reality contextualising the research process.

Cyberpunk fiction has been called “the supreme literary expression, if not of postmodernism then of late capitalism itself.” (Jameson) This thesis aims to analyse and question this claim by rethinking cyberpunk Action, postmodernism and late capitalism in terms of three - interlocking - themes: cybernetics, the Gothic and fiction. It claims that while what has been called “postmodernism” has been preoccupied with cybernetic themes, cybernetics has been haunted by the Gothic. The Gothic has always enjoyed a peculiarly intimate relation with the fictional. Baudrillard's theories, meanwhile, suggest that, in a period dominated by (cybernetic) simulation, fiction has a new cultural role. By putting “theory” into dialogue with “fiction”, the thesis examines Baudrillard's suggestion that the era of cybernetics (what he calls “third order simulacra”) “puts an end to science fiction, but also to theory, as specific genres”. The version of the Gothic the thesis presents is one stripped of many of its conventional cultural associations; it is a material (and materialist) Gothic. The machinery for re-thinking the Gothic comes from Deleuze-Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Deriving not from the familiar literary sources (the so-called Gothic novels of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth century) but from Wilhelm Worringer’s work on “barbarian art”, Deleuze-Guattari’s version of the Gothic departs from any reference to the supernatural. The crucial theme in Worringer, Deleuze-Guattari establish, is that of nonorganic continuum. Following Deleuze-Guattari’s lead, the thesis analyses key cyberpunk texts such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and William Gibson’s Neuromancer in terms of what it calls this “hypematuralist” theme. While these texts have often been analysed in terms of “postmodernism” and “cyberpunk,” they have rarely been discussed in terms of the Gothic. Here, though, it will be shown that these texts, and important precursors, such as Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, are centrally concerned with the breakdown of the boundary between the animate and the inanimate. (A theme that cybernetics has also confronted). The thesis aims to demonstrate that, in its fixation upon catatonic trance, bodies that do not end at the skin, and agency-without-subjectivity, cyberpunk or “imploded science fiction” converges the Gothic with cybernetics on what, following Gibson, it calls the flatline. The flatline has two important senses, referring to (1) a stale of “unlife” (or “undeath”) and (2) a condition of radical immanence. The thesis is divided into four chapters, each of which considers the flatline under a different aspect. Chapter 1 concerns the flatlining of cybernetics and postmodernism; Chapter 2 deals with the flatlining of the body, paying particular attention to the Deleuze-Guattari/Artaud concept of the Body without Organs; Chapter 3 focuses upon the flatlining of reproduction, opposing both sexual and mechanical reproduction to Deleuze-Guattari’s idea of (Gothic) propagation; Chapter 4 considers the flatlining of fiction itself in the context of (Baudrillard’s) hyperreality.

By looking at a representative sample of Old English poetry, this thesis questions the long-held notion that the individual, or personal-self, was not a reality in the western world until the Renaissance. This research makes use of a variety of recent and past methodological approaches to the self, so that we may apply these theories to a study of the individual in Old English literature, and by extension Anglo-Saxon culture more generally. The four-chapter layout showcases how we may approach and answer the question of self in a variety of Old English verse—from elegies and didactic religious, to the heroic. Each study is unique yet complements that which preceeds and follows it, so as to highlight how the study of self is really an inquiry of only seemingly disparate concepts. The outcome of this analysis demonstrates that the individual, or personal self-concept in Anglo-Saxon England was a reality, and consequently challenges past beliefs that the individual is a relatively modern notion. Thus opening the dialogue once more, my research ultimately asks how we may proceed with the question of self in different contexts, historical eras, and eclectic methodological avenues of inquiry, that we may further develop our understanding of one of the most important and ancient questions in humankind’s story.