The investigation proposed in this study is based on the consideration that the nature of "text" is currently undergoing a change whereby verbal components are increasingly being accompanied by visual components, and the two modes of expression co-exist side by side in the same texts. The Internet is symptomatic of this change, with its multi-modal texts, where words, pictures, and sometimes even sounds, interact with one another. One of the main issues that this thesis aims to address is that although the relationship between the verbal and the visual is not an entirely new area of study, what characterises traditional approaches is the fact that the two components have fundamentally been considered as separate entities, while the combination of words and pictures has generally been regarded as having the function of aiding comprehension. This thesis is based on the main hypothesis that the combination of verbal and visual components is a true interaction which creates a type of 'language' that is more than a simple sum of the two codes. This type of verbo-visual interaction characterises media as old as film and comics, both of which came into existence around a century ago. However, while film studies has become an established discipline, comics have never enjoyed much scholarly attention, their expressive potentials having gone largely overlooked, and the publications that deal with them having being essentially socio-historical accounts. This thesis aims to investigate the complex and sophisticated type of interaction between verbal and visual elements that takes place in comics, and suggests that a close scrutiny of this medium enables the researcher to understand better the way in which the verbal/visual interaction works. In doing so, it recognises the necessity for linguistics to expand the notion of 'language' beyond the traditional verbal boundaries and to incorporate other types of codes which exhibit 'language-like' properties. The theoretical discussion is guided by an eclectic approach as it draws from the fields of semiotics, text-linguistics and stylistics. Accordingly, rather than developing one single main analytical model, this study proposes smaller frameworks, one in each of the areas of study drawn from. Finally, the thesis also suggests ways of applying the theoretical finding for pedagogical purposes.

This thesis explores the early development of the British boy detective in ‘penny dreadfuls’ and story papers from 1865-1940 and considers how the construction of this figure addresses contemporary social anxieties surrounding boyhood and performs an ideological function for boy readers. Chapter 1 focuses on how the representation of the boy detective in the ‘penny-dreadful’ The Boy Detective (1865-6) responds to anxieties about juvenile delinquency, particularly the perceived corrupting influence of ‘penny dreadfuls’ upon boy readers. Chapter 2 examines the first appearances of the adult professional detective’s boy assistant in the Harmsworths’ boys’ story papers of the 1890s and early twentieth century. Here, the representation of the detective’s assistant is linked to the emergence of anxieties surrounding adolescence. Chapter 3 explores the centralisation of the professional boy detective, as either assistant or independent investigator, in story-paper narratives in the first decade of the twentieth century. These texts are considered in relation to anxieties about the impending threat of war and boys’ future role in the defence of a declining British Empire. Chapter 4 explores the increasing restrictions placed upon the professional boy detective in the post-1910 story-paper narratives in which he is largely confined to the assistant role. I make connections between this subsidiary position and the supporting defence roles to which real-life boys were confined in preparation for and during the First World War. Chapter 5 focuses upon the fictional boy detective’s relocation from a professional, adult arena to an amateur, child-centric environment in schoolboy detective narratives. This transition is considered in relation to childhood’s increasing distinction from adulthood in the early twentieth century. Overall, the thesis considers the boy detective as a dual figure, acting simultaneously as a threat in need of containment and a boyhood role model and thus utilised as both an expression of and antidote to the contemporary adult anxieties about boyhood.

This thesis explores forms of fragmentation that characterize black male subjectivity in Richard Wright’s fiction and considers their relationship to the demise of the social anchors and referents which are supposed to allow black men to develop as coherent and whole. It argues that the physical and psychic disfigurement and political and social marginality to which these men are consigned are a direct result of a humanist worldview imposed on them by the two main entities that define them as marginal, namely, white society and black community. To address this relationship, the thesis deploys a poststructuralist approach to question the two societies’ humanist grounding of subjectivity in terms of its conformity to the social whole and its attendant stress on homogeneity and sameness. Wary of this humanist and Enlightenment positioning of the subject as a conscious and thinking individual who is at home with the social totality, the thesis illustrates that the experience of splitting and disjuncture undergone by black men is a corollary of societal modes of subjection that disavow difference and heterogeneity. Probing black male identity from this perspective reveals as much about its decentered nature as it does about the two societies’ humanist view of identity as a closure determined by the ostensibly stable categories of race and community. The formation of black male identity as fractured thus helps map out the instability and anxiety at the heart of collective identities, showing that both white and black societies deny black manhood in the name of preserving their own racial fixity and cultural purity. It exposes the mythical and ideological character of the two societies’ humanist pretentions of safeguarding the values of freedom, equality and the right to agency and shows how such high moral values are politically mobilized in order to maintain racially-sanctioned forms of identity and banish black men as different and inferior.

This thesis proposes a new reading of Tennessee Williams which enables his work to be seen as a cohesive dramaturgy which challenges realist and liberal notions of dramatic space, identity, and time. It examines the biographical and historical origins of ‘plastic theatre’, and the aesthetic and philosophical implications of this crucial term. This thesis analyses the development and hardening of Williams’ reputation during the 1940s and 1950s as a realist (or ‘failed’ realist) playwright through an examination of contemporary reviews and the work of literary critics such as Raymond Williams and Christopher Bigsby. The thesis argues that the critical reception of Williams during these decades was inflected by biographical readings which pathologised Williams and his work from the perspective of ‘straight’ realism. It considers more recent critical re-­‐evaluations of Williams’ work: including those of David Savran, Annette Saddik and Linda Dorff. These re-­‐evaluations, and Williams’ work as a whole, are seen in the cultural, political and historical contexts of the 1950s and 1960s, which saw the development of the notion that the ‘personal is political’ and a major shift in the ‘structure of feeling’. The thesis goes on to develop a new theoretical perspective on Williams’ work which draws on the philosophical work of G.W.R. Hegel’s views on contradiction and his analysis of the master/slave relationship, W.E.B. Du Bois’ notion of veiling and Malcolm Bull’s theories of hiddenness. This new perspective is employed in extended close readings of early successful plays (The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire) as well as the more problematic later plays (Camino Real, The-­‐Two Character Play, The Remarkable-­‐Rooming House of Mme Le Monde, I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow and In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel). The final chapter makes use of Gérard Genette’s theories of narratology to explore the plasticity of time in Something Cloudy, Something Clear and Clothes for a Summer Hotel.

The following study is an examination of the contribution of the Germanic place-names of southern Scotland to the onomasticon and lexicon of Britain generally and Scotland specifically. By building a corpus of the Germanic place-names so far identified in the south of Scotland, and interrogating this data in the light of recent onomastic scholarship, a wealth of material has been uncovered, which clearly establishes the importance of Scottish place-name data to the fields of British onomastics and historical lexicography. Over the last hundred years, English place-name scholars have demonstrated that English place-names are a valuable resource for evidence relating to early Germanic lexis in the British Isles. However, comparative material from Scotland has seldom been taken into account, and the present study aims to redress this imbalance by focusing primarily on Scottish data. The thesis is divided into two main sections, the first of which considers the contribution of Scottish place-names to the onomasticon by presenting an analysis of seventy-two elements that are not represented in the corpus of English place-names. The second section investigates place-name elements which are unattested in the literary corpus, and thus assesses the contribution of Scottish place-names to the lexicon. The definitions of many elements have been revised, and in some cases a consideration of the onomastic evidence has resulted in a reinterpretation of lexical usage. This thesis is also the first study to focus attention on qualifying elements rather than generics, and the first to collate the historical evidence for over five hundred Scottish place-name elements. As shown by this study, the Germanic toponymicon of southern Scotland deserves to take its place amongst the national resources for Scottish onomastics and historical lexicography.

The thesis contains a creative text, along with a poetics of the work. The Ghost of Your Father is the story of unusual childhood adventures in the small village of Ramsbottom, Lancashire, with chapters also dedicated to exploring the forests, mountains, rivers and family members of Trebija, Yugoslavia, during the long summer holidays of the 1980s. Remic’s father, Nikolas, was a child of Yugoslavia, enlisted in the army at the age of seventeen and captured by Germans during WWII. He subsequently escaped from a POW camp, was rescued by US troops, and brought to the UK where he joined the RAF and met the author’s mother, Sally, a Liverpudlian working in the NAAFI. The thesis is a childhood memoir of clashing worlds: village life in Lancashire, contrasted with village life in Trebija, Yugoslavia, and is infused with the new dawning age of the 1980s computer revolution, and the author’s conflicting desire to become both an author and computer game programmer. A strange merging of country life and 8-bit technology, of Tolkien fantasy novels and differing cultures and customs, the text reveals these two very different worlds, searching for linking threads, and is the source of what made Remic the genre novelist he became. The text explores life in Ramsbottom and life in Slovenija – and presents childhood adventures in the 1980s, and those same places and faces experienced a quarter of a century later. The text contains a travel section detailing an account of the events that occurred when Remic returned to Slovenija to meet his long, lost, beloved Aunty Mary, taking his children on that same voyage of discovery he experienced as a boy, and which he believes shaped his imagination and fired his creativity to create a genre novelist working in the field today. Part memoir, part travelogue, part exploration and decoding of a child’s-eye view of a world filled with fantasy monsters, pixellated graphics, mountain-top escapades and small-town haunted houses, The Ghost of Your Father is a book of contrasts, of exploring imagination, creativity, ethics, and the very twisted essence of subjective memory. It is a story of a child then, and a child now, based on memories, interviews and new experiences. It is a fictional representation of a factual past, and a factual exploration of a fictional present. It is the truth, perhaps not as it was, but as it might have been. The poetics is an exploration of the writing process of The Ghost of Your Father. It’s an investigation of why, and how, Remic decided to create this text, examining contextualisation, where this work sits in the field of contemporary memoir, reflecting on the process of writing the text, including how Remic was inspired and arrived at conclusions over memory, tone and research for form, and ultimately concluding with how this project has altered Remic’s perspective of research, creative writing, and how it has informed Remic’s genre writing and creative writing as a whole.

This thesis examines the use of the Gothic - genre of literary production deeply implicated with a set of patently middle class anxieties concerning the home - in the ‘middlebrow’ detective fiction of Agatha Christie, particularly within her novels authored in the forty year period between 1930 and 1970. It is argued that there are five different ‘types’ of Gothic at work in Christie’s fiction: the haunted house narrative; the Gothic village; Gay Gothic; Post-WWII Gothic; and Brontë Gothic. This thesis moreover suggests that Christie’s employment and development of these Gothic sub-genres is often achieved via nineteenth-century interlocutors, with Christie’s fiction drawing heavily upon, and in some cases ‘re-imagining’, some of the cornerstones of Victorian Gothic literature. In doing so, this thesis sets out to problematize Alison Light’s famous characterisation of Christie as a ‘modernist […] iconoclast’ whose fiction nonchalantly shatters ‘Victorian images of home, sweet home’. Instead, it is argued that Christie’s use of the Gothic speaks of a relationship with nineteenth-century literary culture which far more complicated: a contradictory interplay of simultaneous desire and distance characteristic of the ‘middlebrow’ fiction produced by women writers of this time. This thesis reads Christie’s use of the Gothic historically, seeking to both firmly situate her work within its contemporary historical contexts - particularly in relation to debates regarding the family, domestic space, and the birth of what Nicola Humble has termed the birth of ‘the new cult of the domestic’ after the First World War - and to elucidate the nineteenth-century contexts which she additionally draws upon. Ultimately, in reading instances of domestic Gothicism as they occur across her oeuvre, this thesis makes a case for the valuable historically-specific cultural critiques made by one who, at least in the popular imagination, is positioned as such an avowedly ‘conservative’ writer.

This thesis explores Kazuo Ishiguro's six novels written in first-person narrative mode: A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, The Unconso/ed, When We Were Orphans, and Never Let Me Go. The focus is on how Ishiguro's narrative techniques allow him to explore the themes of psychological disorder with which his work consistently engages, which will be identified here through use of ideas drawn from Sigmund Freud and from literary studies of trauma fiction. The argument will be divided into six chapters. In each chapter, one of Ishiguro' s novels will be studied thoroughly. Distorted narrative and the technique of transference of Etsuko in A Pale View of Hills are explored in chapter I. In chapter II, the research concerns particularly how Masuji Ono, the narrator of An Artist of the Floating World, who suffers from his demand to be respected and his indecisiveness in defining the sense of respect especially as a great artist. Chapter III deals with narrative of Stevens, an English butler, in The Remains of the Day, whose problem concerning his professional achievement in its relation to the idea of id, ego and superego. Chapter IV argues that The Unconsoled engages with how the dream-like narrative technique is developed in order to reveal Ryder's psychological problem, and how Ryder uses the dream-work mechanisms, especially displacement, to deal with his problem. Chapter V explores how When We Were Orphans works as detective fiction and how this relates to Christopher Banks' psychological problem, and, finally, in chapter VI, I examine the particular psychological problem articulated by the clone narrator of Never Let Me Go.

Holding Baby: A creative exploration to raise awareness about Kinship Care through a play, Holding Baby, a poetry collection, Holding, and a critical commentary placing the work in a cultural, societal and practice-led context. The dramatic work Holding Baby covers a crisis where a grandparent is left taking responsibility for a young baby. In the tradition of social realist and community based drama, it reflects the real life stories of a growing number of connected persons or family members raising children who are not theirs by birth. The poetry collection Holding considers the personal response of the author, as a kinship carer, to that role's challenges and its rewards. In the critical commentary issues around kinship care are considered together with the history of the writing and its context. A detailed account is offered of the stage production process, as well as problems and possibilities around reaching potential audiences for both play and poetry. The relationship between the direct focus of the script and the comparative subjectivity of the poetry is reflected on and discussed.

This thesis is a response to Darnton’s challenge that ‘more work needs to be done on the bookseller as a cultural agent’, and offers as a case study the career of the early nineteenth- century Glasgow bookseller John Smith, Youngest (1784-1849), and the company John Smith and Son (founded 1751). Early nineteenth-century Glasgow was developing into a major centre of commerce, with trade and finance taking full advantage of the new industrial age and burgeoning population. In comparison to Edinburgh, there has been comparatively little research on Glasgow’s role in the contemporary book trade. John Smith, Youngest, was the third of three generations of booksellers of the namesake family firm, merchant baillie, Secretary to the Maitland Club, and member of the contemporary Glasgow cultural and social elite. Smith was a devout Presbyterian, and this religious faith was highly influential on and guided his personal and business lives. I argue that this aspect of his life is the key to understanding John Smith. This is the first thorough study of John Smith. Using publications of Smith’s imprint and his social network, I show the influence Smith had on the book trade of the period through his Presbyterian religious faith, how he maintained his business, and which outside pressures were brought to bear on the family firm; as well as determining what contribution he made to the cultural milieu of the period through his business and philanthropic ventures. This will be the first study on the book trade of Glasgow from a bookseller’s perspective.