The thesis brings together Íslendingasögur and srpske junačke pesme, two historically and culturally unrelated heroic literatures, literatures that had, nevertheless, converged upon a similar kind of realism. This feature in which they diverge from the earlier European epics - Beowulf, Nibelungenlied, La Chanson de Roland, is the focal point of this study. Rather than examining it solely in terms of verisimilitude and historicism with which it is commonly associated, I am approaching it as an emergent feature (emergent realism) of the non-linear, evolutionary dynamics of their production (i.e. their networked, negotiated authorship), the dynamics I call the distributed author. Although all traditional narratives develop in accordance with this dynamics, their non-linearity is often compromised by Bakhtinian 'centripetal forces' (e.g. centralised state, Church) with an effect of directedness akin to the authorial agency of an individual. The peculiar weakness of such forces in the milieus in which the sagas/Serbian epics grew, encouraged their distributed nature. As a result, they come across as indexes of their own coming into being, preserving, meshing and contrasting the old and the new, the general and the more idiosyncratic perspectives on past events and characters. In so doing they fail to arouse in the recipient the feeling of being addressed and possibly manipulated by an all encompassing organising authority. As a consequence, they also impress as believable. While chapters one and two of this study deal with theoretical and aesthetic implications of the two literatures' distributed authorship and their emergent realism, chapters three and four illustrate the ways in which these are manifested in the rich texture of the past and the complex make-up of the characters. The final chapter summarises major points of the thesis and suggests the poetics of complexity as a term particularly suitable to encapsulate the two literatures' common creative principles.

This dissertation responds to the question, "What would it be like, what would it mean, to approach texts lovingly?" in terms of the work of 20th-century theorists, writers, and thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Brian Massumi, Jean-Luc Marion, E. E. Cummings, Rainer Maria Rilke, Teresa Brennan, and W. J. T. Mitchell. In order to demonstrate the appropriateness and place of love in the philosophical canon, the dissertation combines a consideration of affect with these writers' work. Beginning with an exemplary reading of Cy Twombly's painting The Ceiling, the then dissertation adapts Mitchell's question "What do pictures want" to an approach to texts, as defined with reference to Barthes. An introduction and literature review trace the places love in texts by Plato, Freud, Lacan, Cixous, and a host of writers who fall under the rubric of 'affect theorists'. Because an approach to texts is the dissertation's focus, a chapter is spent discussing the possibilities for deconstruction to be part of such an approach. Derrida's work is constellated with that of Cixous, Irigaray, Marion, and Brennan in order to emphasise the integrity of sensory and affective information to such an approach. The writing of Rilke and Cummings provides examples of an authorial approach to texts that can inform a readerly one, and serves to further expand the canon of texts that suggest the possibility of this approach. The final chapter is a second exemplary reading of the story of Moses and the burning bush. Deliberately aiming to stretch the expectations of scholarly work, I combine the anecdotal, the affective, and the textual as modes of engaging with and ways of knowing about love.

My thesis looks at encounters between East and West in the novels of Ahdaf Soueif and how similar issues and themes can be seen in Monica Ali's 'Brick Lane' , a novel that brings together Bangladesh and the UK. It is divided into five chapters. Chapters 1 to 4 focus on the socio-historical contexts of Egypt and British Colonisation and themes in two major novels by Ahdaf Soueif, 'In the Eye of the Sun' (1992), and 'The Map of Love' (1999). Chapter 5 takes a cross-cultural perspective, focusing on Monica Ali's 'Brick Lane' (2002). My selection of texts has been based on thematic similarities and the ethos that the novels manifest despite their different contexts. In this study, I aim to offer an analysis of the specificities of the novels in question and of their commonalities. Soueif and Ali have been widely published and read, and they have received recognition and accolades from the media and the academy alike. Both Soueif and Ali have stepped across cultural dividing lines to claim a voice of their own, creating a meeting ground based on plurality and openness to various cultures. They can be categorised as diasporic Muslim writers who write in English in Soueif's case in an exilic environment, investigating the misconceptions that exist in the spaces between East and West. My way of seeing and/or narrating is hybrid insofar as it draws on Egyptian and British cultures. My goal is to strengthen a view of Britain and Egypt as contemporary multicultural societies where hybrid cultural identities are questioned throughout. I wish to argue that Britain, Egypt and South Asia easily inhabit shared histories which have shaped and influenced each other. All share rich histories and humanist values, which if better understood, could be seen to complement and sustain each other.

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This thesis, comparative in method, examines a wide range of the poetry of Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis, and some of their prose writings. As Second World War poets, both sought a poetic register that voiced their testimony to changed realities, both internal and external. Degrees of commonality are traced between Douglas’s dominant impulse for ‘impersonality’ and Lewis’s increasing stylistic objectivity, alongside investigation of their shared underlying sense of loss, and of complicity as agents of war, even when their poetic voice is at its most impersonal. Diverse critical viewpoints are addressed, along with several psychoanalytical theories and relevant biographical commentary. Following an Introduction and Review of the Critical Field, each chapter is structured as a bipartite comparison, focusing first on Douglas, then on Lewis. Chapter 1 investigates Douglas’s impersonality as a controlled, ambivalently detached poetic register which, in its undertow and perceptual shifts, reveals the speaker’s submersed engagement and ethical complicity. Lewis’s poetry is seen to reveal a related impulse for increasingly subordinating the subjective voice in evocations of the painfully harsh realities he encountered. Chapter 2 explores the writers’ dialectical struggles to resolve or extinguish self-division, focusing particularly upon Douglas’s ‘bête noire’ and Lewis’s ‘enmity within’, configurations analysed as paradoxically creative/destructive ingredients of the poetic impulse. Chapter 3 then examines the poets’ epistemological and ontological preoccupations with death, ‘darkness’ and ‘being’, and their relevance to what is here termed ‘the extinction of Self’. Chapter 4 extends this enquiry to examine the poets’ representations of wartime separation and geographical dislocation as manifestations of ‘the exilic self’ and a mutual desire to extinguish internal crises. The conclusion drawn is that their shared, dual axis of poetic engagement and detachment reveals a deeply embedded, common impulse to voice and escape their burdens, both inherently personal, and as complicit agents of war.

This thesis presents an in-depth analysis of the major British disaster novels published before World War II. Focussing on Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898), Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901), Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt (1913), Connington’s Nordenholt's Million (1923), Fowler Wright’s Deluge and Dawn (1927 and 1929) and Sherriff’s The Hopkins Manuscript (1939), it makes a significant contribution to the literary and contextual understanding of these narratives. Furthermore, it responds critically to the often imprecise employment of the term ‘disaster’ to describe related but distinct works of catastrophe, apocalyptic, postapocalyptic, entropic or prophetic fiction. It does so by presenting a precise terminology with which to discuss disaster narratives featuring a catastrophic event. Such texts, termed ‘transformative’ disaster narratives, range from ‘transfigurative’ examples, which frame the disaster as an opportunity for positive social change, to ‘deteriorative’ texts, in which the disaster has long-term negative consequences. By analysing pre-World War II British transformative disaster narratives, the thesis avoids the ambiguities of previous studies that have often favoured broad discussions over sustained close analyses. It argues throughout that these transformative disaster novels were unanimously ‘transfigurative’, as all present catastrophe as opportunity. Each narrative satisfies contemporary anxieties by providing a wish fulfilment fantasy concerned with the correction or improvement of its cultural context. Responding to concerns around Victorian complacency, social degeneration, or increasing technologisation, the novels enlist catastrophe as a means of effecting cultural and/or political change. Taken collectively, they are united by their wish fulfilment responses to an increasing disillusionment in the first half of the twentieth century. The Hopkins Manuscript distinguishes itself from its predecessors by presenting a transfigurative cataclysm followed by a deteriorative catastrophe. Accordingly, it initiates the post-World War II movement away from transfigurative disasters towards pessimistic deteriorative scenarios, thereby marking the end of a significant period in British disaster fiction.

This thesis closes an existing gap within the field of Victorian poetry scholarship, as the relationship between Pre-Raphaelite and working-class poets has yet to be explored in depth by critics, in part because they superficially appear to be disparate. I argue that a contiguous tradition exists between the two groups which reveals connections through; shared political agendas, the use of the past to change tastes and ideas in the present, connections between imagery and form, and the use of contemporary events to modify public perceptions of their poetry. This focus is of significance to critics of the Victorian period because it is not necessary to prove that an individual poet or group has an influence over another. As a result, this thesis does not principally concern itself with the power relationships which are of interest to a New Historicist critic; rather it employs elements of Cultural Neo-Formalist criticism and Cultural Materialism. What emerges is an expanded notion of what constitutes Victorian high culture, as well as a more nuanced picture of social stratification.

This thesis examines the changing relationship between key elements of the Aristotelian, Newtonian and holistic scientific paradigms and contemporary detective fiction. The work of scholars including N. Katherine Hayles, Martha A. Turner has applied Thomas S. Kuhn’s notion of scientific paradigms to literary works, especially those of the Victorian period. There seemed to be an absence, however, of research of a similar academic standard exploring the relationship between scientific worldviews and detective fiction. Extending their scholarship, this thesis seeks to open up debate in what was perceived to be an under-represented area of literary study. The thesis begins by identifying the main precepts of the three paradigms. It then offers a chronological overview of the developing relationship between these precepts and detective fiction from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890) to P.D.James’s The Black Tower (1975). The present state of this interaction is assessed through a detailed analysis of representative examples of the detective fiction of Reginald Hill, Barbara Nadel, and Quintin Jardine written between 1980 and 2010. The thesis concludes that by presenting the interrelatedness characteristic of the holistic paradigm in a positive light, the work of Hill, Nadel and Jardine may facilitate a paradigm shift away from the dominant Newtonian paradigm towards a more holistic worldview. Further, contemporary detective fiction may have an important role to play in acclimatising its readership to a more inclusive worldview. This research identifies several areas for future study. It would be interesting to extend this work to take account of detective fiction from other cultures. It would also be fascinating to investigate the relationship between structure (of both the narrative and the plot) and scientific pattern in order to assess just how far scientific concepts and detective fiction are interconnected.

The incidence of plagiarism in higher education has increased over the decades as assessment strategies widened and moved away from pure examinations (Ober, Simon, Scott and Elson, 2013). This has repercussions especially in nursing, where nurses are required to be honest and have professional integrity. This study examines senior nurses’ perception of plagiarism and its impact on professionalism and patient care. Plagiarism is associated in the minds of most nurses with the demands of academia, rather than their professional practice. This study has shown that far from plagiarism being restricted to cutting and pasting text into an assignment from the Internet without referencing, it is in fact intentional and may involve the falsification and copyright of assignments, practice documents and competencies and observation charts in the professional context. The implications of this are serious, leading to unprofessional behaviour that could potentially lead to putting the patient at risk. This two stage qualitative constructivist enquiry was carried out using questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. Sixty eight participants (nurses band 7 and above) completed the questionnaires, the findings of which were used to inform the semi-structured interviews with nine individuals representative of each of the professional groups of nurses who completed the questionnaire. The respondents strongly felt that it was unprofessional to plagiarise and bring the profession into disrepute. However, most nurses could not see past the academic-practice divide, believing that plagiarism was restricted to universities. There was a divided opinion as to whether plagiarism in practice was a matter that should be referred to the Nursing and Midwifery (NMC) Fitness to Practise Panel and whether an individual involved could be deemed an unsafe practitioner. Opinions were influenced by the extent of plagiarism involved and a lack of understanding of the professional and ethical implications. This study has shown that there is a wide academic–practice divide, which needs to be addressed both in pre-registration through study skills and the use of OSCEs (Objective Structured Clinical Examination) in assessment and post registration training. Nurses need to understand that what they learn in the classroom is directly related to what they do in practice and that plagiarism can compromise patient safety. To plagiarise an essay is unethical and unprofessional; to falsify results on an observation chart or copy the notes written by the nurse on the previous shift is potentially dangerous and could cause harm to a patient contravening the principles of beneficence and non-maleficence.

While the concept of the fictional character has been widely discussed at an interdisciplinary level, a foundational theory of character creation in Creative Writing is yet to follow. As a result, Creative Writing students refer to post-construction analysis in Literary Theory, or even the formulaic advice often suggested by popular writing manuals. Aiming to fill this gap, and at the same time reconcile the chasm between Literary Theory and Creative Writing, my thesis shall initiate a paradigm of character creation, by combining creativity with craftsmanship. More specifically, my approach consists of two interrelated stages: Conceptualisation entails the conception of the character by means of authorial perception, imagination and judgement, which precedes her textual birth; and Exposition, which pertains to the conveyance of such a priori knowledge on paper. My research is conducted through both synthesis and critical analysis. I will be presenting, analysing and thus substantiating my own method of work and at the same time I will examine existing theories I wish to encompass or challenge. My sources are interdisciplinary: Literary Theory and Criticism, Cognitive Psychology, Theory of Mind, Theory of Person and Linguistics are some of them. Examples from Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm (1994), J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith (2002) will be used to support my hypotheses. I will not be presuming upon the novelists’ original intentions, but rather testing my own method against their texts.