Following the abolition of Transatlantic slavery, the British introduced a new scheme of labour to replace the former. 'Indian indentureship', as it was referred to, affected nearly 2 million Indian coolies who defied the traditional ban against crossing the kala pani (dark waters) in order to work on plantations in countries such as British Guiana, Trinidad, Malaya, South Africa and Fiji. In effect, the Indian labour: diaspora emerged and established itself across the globe. Despite over 100 years of labouring and contributing to the development of their new homes, the coolies and their descendents still face political, social and cultural marginalization. The aim of this thesis is to explore the consequences of indentureship in various societies through a parallelization of inter-national coolie conditions as represented by writers of the diaspora. The three areas selected for this study are Guyana, Malaysia and Fiji. David Dabydeen (Guyana), K.S.Maniam (Malaysia) and Satendra Nandan (Fiji) all share the impetus to disclose the past as a portal into the present, thereby dismpting normative time, and by implication, a fixed sense of history. However; the most striking similarity between these writers, despite their geographical and social distance, is their literary method which centres on the theory of coolitude. Coolitude was coined by Khal Torabully as a means of recuperating the voiceless coolie, firstly, by re-membering the sea voyage across the kizla pani and secondly, by highlighting the coolie's place in the mosaic of multicultural societies. Chapter 1 details the historical, theoretical and methodical foundations of the thesis. Chapter 2 explores Dabydeen's novels The Counting House and Our Lady of Demerara while Chapter 3 is a detailed study of Maniam's novels The Return and In A Far Country. The final chapter considers Nandan's novel The Wounded Sea and collection of poetry Lines Across Black Waters. Each literary analysis seeks to understand how coolitude, as a means to historically and politically place the coolie in the current world,: links spaces between countries both through a shared colonial history and a common postcolonial condition.

Within the range of literary reviews in Twentieth-Century France, none has a more highly-esteemed reputation than la Nouvelle Revue Francaise, originally founded in 1909 by Andre Gide and his friends. Resuming in 1919 in a world profoundly shaken by the upheaval and consequences of the First World War, the NRF, at first under Jacques Riviere and then, from 1925 (for the rest of the Inter-War period), under the editorial control of Jean Paulhan, re-established itself at the forefront of literary and critical creativity. Informed by much of the unpublished correspondence of Paulhan, this thesis shows that the NRF was not exclusively literary. An examination of Paulhan's role, and of his editorial policy (Chapter One) precedes the identification of a number of themes. Already sensitive to topical questions, the NRF debated the role and responsibilities of the intellectuals (Chapter Two), whose attitudes tended to become more politicized as they grew more aware of the deficiencies of the Third Republic (Chapter Three). Their preoccupations reflected major themes, in particular Franco-German relations (Chapter Four), Franco-Soviet relations (Chapter Five), and the Jewish question (Chapter Six). Of course the writers involved with the NRF continued to consider political and international issues in the light of their own preferences and prejudices.; yet their reactions and interpretations show that they were ever-more conscious of the crucial, historical importance of the period. Indeed its nature was such that History forced the NRF, eventually, into adopting a partisan position which was Antifascist, anti-Munich, and which even prefigured the Resistance (Chapter Seven).

Only recently has our perception of the computer, now a familiar and ubiquitous element of everyday life, changed from seeing it as a mere tool to regarding it as a medium for creative expression. Computer technologies such as multimedia and hypertext applications have sparked an active critical debate not only about the future of the book format, ("the late age of print" {Bolter} is only one term used to describe the shift away from traditional print media to new forms of electronic communication) but also about the future of literature. Hypertext Fiction is the most prominent of proposed electronic literary forms and strong claims have been made about it: it will radically alter concepts of text, author and reader, enable forms of non-linear writing closer to the associative working of the mind, and make possible reader interaction with the text on a level impossible in printed text. So far the debate that has attempted to put hypertext fiction into a historical perspective has linked it to two developments. Firstly the developments in computer technology that made hypertext not only possible but also widely accessible and secondly a tradition of postmodern theory, where characteristics attributed to hypertext echo concepts of fragmentation, multiplicity and instability that theorists like Barthes and Derrida have formulated previously and that have led to the notion of hypertext as an "authentic, yet functional postmodern form" {Roberts} A third element that is not generally subject to critical evaluation is the practice of (post)modern writing in which a number of authors consciously break with the linearity of print conventions in favour for a more fragmented narrative and presentation as well as actively inviting the reader's participation in what Barthes calls "writerly" text. There are two reasons why these "proto-hypertexts" have been widely ignored or dismissed: Hypertext is still widely define as exclusive to the electronic realm and is furthermore generally perceived in oppositional pairs in contrast to print, i.e. non-linear vs. linear and interactive vs. passive, which conceptually does not leave room for a study of an "evolution" out of existing forms of writing practice. By examining hypertext fiction in a context of print experiments (Cortazar, Borges, B.S. Johnson, Andreas Okopenko, Raymond Queneau, Miroslav Pavic, Italo Calvino) and also in a context of other forms of digital literary experimentation (collaborative projects and computer-generated writing), this thesis aims to, on a diachronic level, reincorporate hypertext fiction into an evolutionary (though radical) literary tradition and examines the manner in which concepts which originated in this tradition have been taken over often very literally and without much redefinition. On the a-historical, synchronic level, this study explores some of the possible formats for literature in the new electronic textual media: hypertext fiction, collaborative writing projects, computer-generated writing and the different challenges these present to our understanding ofliterature. After an introduction in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and 3 discuss two of the keywords of hypertext theory, its "grand narratives' (non-linearity and interactivity) and the appropriation of the terminology to hypertext theory and to hypertext fiction. Chapter 4 and 5 will look at alternative, though related, approaches to electronic fiction: Chapter 4 will examine aspects of collaborative writing in both a print and a digital environment while computer-generated writing stands at the centre of Chapter 5.

The thesis is concerned with the relationship between psychoanalysis and tragedy, and the way in which psychoanalysis has structured its theory by reference to models from tragic drama - in particular, those of Sophocles and Shakespeare. It engages with some of the most recent thinking in contemporary French psychoanalysis, most notably the work of Jean Laplanche, so as to interrogate both Freudian metapsychology and the tragic texts in which it claims to identify its prototypes. Laplanche has ventured an ‘other-centred’ re-reading of the Freudian corpus which seeks to go beyond the tendency of Freud himself, and psychoanalysis more generally, to unify and centralise the human subject in a manner which strays from and occults some of the most radical elements of the psychoanalytic enterprise. The (occulted) specificity of the Freudian discovery, Laplanche proposes, lies in the irreducible otherness of the subject to himself and therefore of the messages by which subjects communicate their desires. I argue that Freud’s recourse to literary models is inextricably bound up with the ‘goings-astray’ in his thinking. Laplanche’s work, I suggest, offers an important perspective from which to consider not only the function which psychoanalysis cells upon them to perform, but also that within them for which Freud and psychoanalysis have remained unable to account. Taking three tragic dramas which, more or less explicitly, have borne a formative impact on Freud’s thought, and which have often been understood to articulate the emergence of ‘the subject’, I attempt to set alongside Freud’s own readings of them, the argument that each figures not the unifying or centralising but the radical decentring of its principal protagonists and their communicative acts. By close textual analyses of these three works, and by reference to their historical and cultural contexts, the crucial Freudian motif of parricide (real or symbolic) which structures and connects them is shown ultimately to be an inescapable and inescapably paradoxical gesture: one of liberty and autonomy at the cost of self-division, and of a dependence at the cost of a certain autonomy.

L2 creative writing research is a relatively unchartered area. Pedagogical discussions on L2 creative writing activities often focus on manifestations of L2 learners' language learning, writing improvement, or expressions of emotion. There is a lack of research investigating the underlying identities of L2 creative writers as social agents. The present research targets the L2 creative writers who are interested and experienced in certain forms of creative writing. It investigates if and how L2 creative writers' emergent identities enacted in their online cognitive writing activities under particular tasks are mediated by the writers' 'autobiographical identities' (Clark and Ivanič, 1997) rooted in their life histories. Fifteen L2 creative writers from diverse sociocultural and academic backgrounds participated in the research. Firstly, the participants' 'autobiographical identities' were explored through eliciting their retrospective life-history accounts in in-depth interviews. Secondly, the research implemented two think-aloud story-writing sessions (Autobiographical writing & Prompted story-continuation writing) to capture the writers' emergent identities instantiated in their cognitive writing processes. Subsequently, the interconnectedness between these two types of identities was sought. Two parallel data analyses were conducted: 1) quantitative data coding targeting all fifteen L2 creative writers and 2) qualitative discussions concentrating on five selected focal participants. These two levels of analyses together show that the participants' cognitive writing processes as evinced through their engagement in these creative writing activities (i.e. their task-situated emergent identities) are mediated by the writers’ previous participation in multiple discourses and social worlds up to the moment of writing (i.e. their autobiographical identities formed throughout their life histories). The findings suggest certain directions for theory development in L2 creative writing research as well as in L2 writer identity research. Regarding L2 creative writing research, L2 teachers' practice could be enhanced by a deeper understanding of how creative writing is employed by L2 individuals not only for language or literacy acquisition purposes, but also as a self-empowering tool to achieve particular social positioning. Secondly, regarding L2 writer identity research, more research needs to be done regarding this micro and dynamic view of writer identity which resides in the movements of the writers' emerging thoughts situated in an immediate creative writing context and mediated by the writers' previous sociocultural experiences.

Newspaper editorials have a special role within the pages of the press, as they are openly persuasive and there is less emphasis on objectivity (Lee and Lin, 2006). They represent the participation of the newspaper in public debate (Le, 2003) and are sites where the ideological stances of a newspaper can often be found (Hackett and Zhao, 1994). Editorials frequently focus upon issues surrounding national politics, often discussing political leaders and the decisions taken by leading politicians. This thesis investigates four British newspapers, The Guardian, The Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Mirror, in order to assess the different ways in which identities have been constructed over the past thirty-five years by the newspapers for the political leaders featured in the editorials. The thesis utilises a novel analytical framework that modifies Critical Discourse Analysis by incorporating theories of performed identities and metaphor with a "Discourse Historical" approach to critical analysis. The creation of identities, alongside the stance adopted towards individuals and political issues, are found to both help create an ideological identity for the newspaper itself while simultaneously encouraging readers to conceptualise events in such a way that serves the ideology in question. The findings show a series of strategies used by newspapers to evaluate political leaders and their decisions in ways that serve the newspapers' ideologies. Differences in the linguistic strategies used to reflect stance in tabloid newspapers when compared to broadsheet newspapers are also found.

This dissertation provides a close textual analysis of a selective number of New York and Shanghai novels published since the 1980s. It focuses on the formal and thematic features of these novels through comparative analyses of the themes of commodification and crime. Part I draws on the work of Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Candace Bushnell, Wei Hui and Wang Anyi. It examines how commodification has become not just a feature of global fiction but how writers are drawn to a narrative of excess in their representations of it. Wei Hui's "body writing" shares the same materialistic emphasis as New York "Brat Pack" writing but in their criticism of material excess, their approaches are different. The markets in which these writers and their novels circulate also show how commodification can take control of their reception and lead to different interpretations and misinterpretations. Part II of the dissertation draws on the work of Qiu Xiaolong and Linda Fairstein. Through a close analysis of the representation of time and space, this part argues that both authors' deployment of time and space serves as a strategy to reveal the different social contexts that form the latent causes of individual crimes. By introducing a comparative analysis, this dissertation demonstrates that the shared themes of commodification and crime need to be contextualized within the two cities in order to understand the varied manifestations of the ongoing process of urbanization and its consequences for the literatures and cultures of New York and Shanghai.

The purpose of this thesis is to present a new theory of creative stylistics as an antithesis to traditional description-oriented stylistics. For this purpose it undertakes: (1) a selective historical survey of stylistics with special attention to its academic formation in the context of the theoretical dissociation between linguistics and literary criticism (Chapter 1), (2) a theoretical survey of stylistics with special attention to the way it has been defined and subcategorized (Chapter 2), (3) a rearrangement of various stylistic theories according to the criterion of purpose, and a cognitively oriented demonstration of redefined linguistic, literary, and pedagogical stylistics (Chapter 3), (4) a theorization of creative stylistics as a prescriptively oriented discipline complementing the descriptivism of traditional stylistics, in terms of the cognitive processes of textual creation (Chapter 4), and (5) a demonstration of creative stylistics through an examination of my own literary writing, together with a discussion of further pedagogical and cross-cultural issues arising from this (Chapter 5). Through these chapters I make it clear. (a) that the theoretical proliferation, the variety of nomenclature, and the arbitrary subcategorization of stylistics has made this discipline seem more complicated than it really is; (b) that stylistics has so far only followed the course laid down by descriptive linguistics and literary criticism, and has not yet fully explored or exploited the dynamic interaction between language and literature, since it has hardly paid attention to the issue of the creativity of style and language; (c) that, in order to establish stylistics as a truly interdisciplinary field of study between linguistic and literary studies, we need to take up the classical idea of rhetoric with its prescriptive function as well as the new idea of 'creative language awareness' in order to open up the domain of stylistic study for the purpose of textual creation; (d) that, as the descriptive analyses of traditional stylistics should be retrievable, so the processes of creative stylistics should be replicable for any creatively-motivated writer, irrespective of the kind of text he or she is trying to create; (e) that, by being replicable, the theory of creative stylistics would be extraordinarily useful in pedagogical contexts in helping language learners both to improve their skills in writing and to sensitize themselves to language and literature; and (f) that creative stylistics is designed to explore and exploit the possibilities of breaking down the native/non-native opposition in English studies and of bridging native/non-native cultural gaps in aesthetic creation.

This study is a historico-cultural examination of the role of the garden in literature written for children between 1850 and 2000. The garden is considered from two perspectives - as a setting for children's play, and as a cultural symbol that changes over time to reflect social concerns. The central assumption of this thesis is that the garden may be considered as a symbol of childhood itself. My main concern is to investigate the nature of the construct of childhood as evidenced in texts written at different periods, focussing on what it might have meant to be a child at those times. In doing so, I frequently have cause to contrast these definitions of ‘childhood’ with each other, and with contemporary ones. The notion of the garden suggests to me a series of ‘structural oppositions’ (Rose, 1984), such as innocence/experience, civilisation/nature, home/away, enclosure/exposure; all of which are typical concerns of literature in general, and, arguably, particularly significant themes in children's literature and thus pertinent to its study. I suggest that the garden as a common setting for children's literature also acts as a meeting-place, or compromise, for some of these pairings. Since children are generally subject to adults, I consider that some of these oppositions can be regarded in terms of power and control. The thesis emphasises the ‘constructedness’ of such oppositions, in order to demonstrate the mythological - and often adult-serving - nature of much thinking about childhood. I explore texts as diverse as Barrie's Peter Pan (1911) and Pullman's His Dark Materials (1995-2000) in order to illustrate changes in the mythology of childhood, and in the deployment of the icon of the child in the garden. The study concludes with a detailed exploration of Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden (1958), which I believe expresses many symbolic meanings of the garden image in a particularly convincing way, with considerable artistic and emotional integrity.

Epic literature has often been interpreted as a static genre, conforming to conventional structural and thematic characteristics. This study argues that epic is a genre of movement and transition, in terms of its literary style, and its humanist representation of journeys and geography. Taking a thematic approach, this study draws upon images of movement, modes of transport and perceptions of the environment to argue that modern epic is concerned with describing both an animate universe and humankind's position within it. Chronological discussions of individual narratives focus upon John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), William Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805), Lord Byron's Don Juan (1819-24), James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Derek Walcott's Umeros (1990), and Aiden Andrew Dun's Vale Royal (1995). This carries the study across the modern period, from the Seventeenth Century to the present day. Literary and philosophical contexts are engaged with, and culturally-specific interpretations of a perceived human condition are drawn out. The study concludes that epic must be perceived as a genre which evolves alongside cultural developments. The epic journey is one of the prime vehicles for expressing change, and for guiding the hero and reader towards new revelations or ways of understanding material and social environments.