This thesis examines the motif of the desert island in anglophone post-war popular culture as it coincides with the destabilisation of modern conceptions of identity. The extent to which desert island narratives either reify or challenge normative societal ideals is charted through the analysis of a range of texts across media: novels, radio, advertising, magazine cartoons, television, films and video games. Each text is placed into the context of a dialectic between discipline, the coercive method of state control theorised by Michel Foucault, and seduction, the technique of market dominance described by Zygmunt Bauman. Semiotic, psychoanalytic and spatial approaches are also used in close readings. The relationship of ‘home’ to ‘the Other’ was transformed by the advent of affordable international travel and communication; the thesis considers desert island texts since 1942, from the period since our planet has been opened up to tourism and global capitalism. This post-war timeframe maps onto the development of a self that is increasingly understood as fragmented, reflexive and alienated. A chronological approach is used in order to chart the ways in which desert island texts reflect this trend during what Bauman calls the liquid modern era. Power structures are examined but, rather than taking an overtly postcolonial stance, the thesis explores relationships between the ‘mainland’ and the castaway. The desert island is a useful site for exploring such concerns precisely because its desertedness, (presumed) Otherness and distance from ‘home’ allow it to function as an analogy of both the subject and the Other, and as an altered reflection of ostensibly normative continental life. Desert islands are often revealed to be inhabited; if the desert island represents a fantasy of agency in self-creation then the appearance of the Other represents the anxiety that that fantasy intends to dispel or seeks to embrace.

This thesis examines the influence that William Shakespeare had on the works of Harold Pinter. This breaks down into three chapters: page, stage and screen. The page section examines Pinter’s early writings about Shakespeare (1950-1956) and the ways in which this influence can be seen in Pinter’s later development as a playwright. The stage chapter considers Pinter’s time at the Royal Shakespeare Company (1962-73) and the role that this played in establishing his reputation as a playwright with particular reference to his collaborations with Peter Hall. The screen section analyses the unproduced screenplay for a film of ‘The Tragedy of King Lear’ that was completed in 2000 and places it in the critical context of ‘King Lear’ on film. Through this, I aim to prove the significant and lasting influence that Shakespeare had on the works of Harold Pinter.

This thesis analyses the manner in which gender and sexuality are explored within the context of Vodou and Santería in a number of Haitian and Cuban novels and plays. Focusing on the body as the nodal point between the physical and spiritual planes, it examines women’s negotiation of religious, social and political life in Haiti and Cuba as participants in these marginalised religious communities. The narratives these works of fiction comprise indicate the complex nature of such experiences and recognise the active participation of women in Caribbean society, challenging the way in which they have often been limited in, or omitted from, official discourse. By drawing on African-derived religious traditions in the Caribbean, these texts are inscribed within a worldview in which the physical and the spiritual, the living and the dead coexist, and one that allows divisions within and between concepts such as gender, sexuality, womanhood, space and nation to be transcended. In so doing, these authors write alternative and arguably more complete accounts of lived experience in Haiti and Cuba that serve as a source of knowledge regarding the complexities of daily life and provide a means through which the voice of the marginalised can be heard.

My research will consist of a literary investigation into changing representations of violence in the contemporary novel in the context of the paradigm shift from humanism to posthumanism, from reality to fiction. The core of my work, developed through the reading of some research in neuroscience, will concern the examination of the brain as metaphor machine. From here, I will argue that the problem of violence in relation to fiction today is due to the struggle in the human body between transcendence and immanence. The individual has a tendency to transcend reality and in so doing lives violence as fiction even when inflicting pain to the other. I will observe how this transcendence is translated in contemporary narrative forms and I will shape a rhetoric of contemporary literary violence. My intention is to conduct comparative research across British, American, French and Italian literary fiction of the past 20 years, with a few exceptions. I will explore whether and how, in a globalizing world, it is both possible and necessary to develop a comparative literary analysis of the forms of contemporary violence. I will observe how the advent of posthumanity or of the fictional man has generated a crisis in the definition of identity and reality in a context in which fiction has taken its place. I will show how the individual re-acts to this condition through violence in order to find authenticity. References will include the works of Deleuze, Badiou, Bauman, Baudrillard, De Man, Agamben, Hayles et alii. In order to explore the different ramifications of the substitution of fiction to reality and its connection to violence, I will focus on what I consider the main three tools for the creation of simulation today: language, desire and information, through the works of Wallace, McCarthy, Miéville, Ballard, Gibson, Palahniuk et alii. Finally, the work will focus on the new emphasis given by contemporary writers to literary responsibility after the irresponsible writing (after the death of the author) of postmodernism through the analysis of the New Italian Epic postulated by Wu Ming but applied to the English Weird Fiction writer China Miéville. I will suggest that an attempt to overcome postmodernism is taking place in contemporary global fiction based on a more ‘serious’ approach (as Wallace would have said), a new ethics of literature, which endeavours to depict the reasons for contemporary violence in fiction and advocates for a balance between the transcendence of fiction and the immanence of reality.

This study investigates how the aesthetic concept of Stimmung [‘mood’ or ‘attunement’] informs the affective and experiential dimension of the reading process through the lens of modern philosophy and literature. It seeks to establish ‘mood’ as a key concept in literary theory and to outline the modes and articulations of this aesthetic phenomenon as an integral part of the modern discourse on existentialism and aesthetics. Modernity, I propose, fundamentally redefined Stimmung as an intersubjective phenomenon, and has sparked a sustained exploration of this concept in pivotal philosophical and literary texts of the modern age. The study first examines the conceptual history of this term and its musical origin to then focus on Martin Heidegger’s redefinition of attunement as a crucial aspect of his ontology. From these considerations, a phenomenological theory of Stimmung in literature is developed, in which the reading process is defined through the attunement between text and reader. I subsequently further refine this notion by analysing the central role of Stimmung in the narrative fiction of three key authors of modern literature: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard. What these readings demonstrate is a significant shift towards an aesthetic of intensity and immediacy, in which the experience of the reading process takes centre stage. Stimmung as an attunement between text and reader uncovers the dynamic relationality of aesthetic reception, and is inextricably connected to dominant modes of conceptualising existence and experience in the modern age. Ultimately, I demonstrate how the specific modern configuration of Stimmung answers to a sense of crisis and vicissitude that aesthetic modernity has transformed into a mood in its own right.

This study argues that contemporary literature archives and articulates its wider visual environment. It develops an interdisciplinary methodology, making a case for visuality as something that can be read. This study rethinks how we approach literary criticism: it asks that a reader bring awareness of a wider visual culture and an understanding of how images work to the text. Close reading reveals how description, far from being ornamental to narrative, drives much of the thematic or theoretical content of a given novel. These texts do not simply replicate their wider image environment; they engage with it on a critical level. A visual approach can illuminate literary concerns and techniques. But, equally, the novel form has a lot to tell us about the structures and issues attendant on the image. The first chapter considers how Teju Cole’s prose emulates certain visual forms, particularly photography. For this author, writing and reading have an inherent affinity with visualization. And his work has much to tell us about the ethical and historical issues that attach to particular techniques and targets of visual representation. The second chapter reads character description in Ali Smith’s fiction from the perspective of visual portraiture. It shows how description stages conversations to do with gender and identity, and with the limitations of narrow categorization in both respects. Smith’s novels then propose certain strategies as correctives to the dangers associated with a highly visual cultural environment. The final chapter focuses on how Helen Oyeyemi’s work exposes race’s uneasy relationship with vision and visual representation. Like Cole and Smith, for Oyeyemi the novel is a valuable and flexible space within which to explore the possibilities and limitations of the visual field as an area for expression, for representation, and for the unfolding of identity.

Drawing on Bakhtin’s theory of the literary artistic chronotope and the interdisciplinary spatiotemporal theories of geocriticism, this study identifies three particular modes of the fantasy spatiotemporality presented in modern children’s fantasy works. They are the epic chronotope, the “fantastic” time-travel chronotope and the heterotopian chronotope. Each fantasy chronotope is examined in the specific but interrelated textual contexts of selected children’s fantasy works in relation to the three main research questions: (i) How is the fantasy chronotope embodied and strategically deployed in the focused children’s fantasy works? (ii) What ideas and values are conveyed by its syntagmatic interplay with other chronotopes that characterise the textual quotidian world? (iii) How do characters, through their spatiotemporal practices, negotiate with the divergent chronotopic values that converge and wrestle in the textual universes? This study builds on existing works in relation to chronotopic considerations and develops the understanding of the fantasy chronotope in these particular ways: a) It moves the study of the fantasy chronotope from generalities to specific instances, so that the inner diversity of the fantasy spatiotemporal arrangements can be perceived and explored. b) It examines the syntagmatic spatiotemporal relations constructed between the fantasy and the “real” in individual children’s fantasy works and their connotations. In so doing, it reveals how each of the identified fantasy chronotopes can be strategically deployed in fantasy cartographies to convey meanings and values. c) This study also delves into the spatiotemporal embedding of human actions that is distinctively shown in fantasy chronotopes. This is done by reading characters’ spatiotemporal practices in and their negotiations with the projected fantasy worlds. d) Taking Bakhtin’s literary artistic chronotope as the link, my reading of the fantasy chronotopes also demonstrates an interpenetrative and reciprocal relation between fantasy spatiotemporal imaginations and the theoretical interpretations of space and time in geocriticism.

This thesis conducts a Critical Stylistic Analysis of Sherko Bekas’ The Small Mirrors, with the help of metaphor analysis. Five textual conceptual functions (Jeffries, 2010): Naming and Describing; Equating and Contrasting; Representing Processes/Events/States of being; Assuming and Implying and Prioritizing are used to analyse the poems. I also analyse the connotations of metaphor. These functions and metaphor analysis show how the texts construct the speaker and the fictional world in Bekas’ The Small Mirrors and the ideologies behind such constructions. The ranges of ideation – ideology in Bekas’ poetry identified by these tools are: 1. Suffering and survival are inexorable 2. Martyrdom is positive 3. Valuing one’s nation and identity is positive 4. The speaker and the people lack control over the situation My thesis aims to create a version of the Critical Stylistic model that helps me to show the depiction of the speaker and the fictional world in The Small Mirrors. I argue that Critical Stylistics is applicable to the Kurdish poetry, but it needs modifications and that the tools might work in hierarchical ranks meaning that some tools are given primary focus over others because of the difference between English and Kurdish. I use Jeffries’ (2010) Critical Stylistics and add any required modification for the textual conceptual functions to get a complete model for the analysis of The Small Mirrors. The model can show how the speaker and the fictional world are constructed which I aim to reveal. The textual conceptual functions construct a coherent perspective of the reality of the fictional world in Bekas’ poetry. The linguistic images of the fictional world of Bekas’ poetry are repetitions that become part of the naturalised ideologies of the writer.

This PhD by Publication comprises two of my novels, 22 Britannia Road and Spilt Milk, accompanied by a reflective and critical exegesis which investigates the process and context of writing my internationally published historical fiction novel Spilt Milk. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s theoretical approaches to memory and narrative as a means to consider the borderlines between lived life and fiction, I consider the ways in which historical fiction can represent versions of real life which contain human truths and emotions. With this in mind, I argue that my novel writing (and reading) practice stem from the shared potential in what I term ‘creative memory.’ This site of potentiality is where worldliness and collaborative knowledge between writer and reader in response to the text exists, illustrating my own belief in the imagination as a place of creative communality. In examining this, I establish my own contribution to the ways in which memory and the imagination impact on the practice of creative writing, and reading fiction. Reflecting on my creative practices offers original and wider ways of understanding how literature represents, or even is, ‘real life,’ and thus has an important role in our lives today.

This thesis interrogates the relationship between the material conditions of Virginia Woolf’s writing practices and her work as a printer and publisher at the Hogarth Press. While the role played by the Press in the intellectual and literary innovations of modernism has been well-documented, less attention has been paid to its influence upon Woolf’s own literary experimentalism. By examining its effect on the material and visual aspects of her compositional processes, from the manuscript drafts to the physical construction of her printed works, this thesis explores how her involvement in the crafting of her publications (including practices of writing, editing, printing and binding) enabled her to situate her fictions alongside the visual and material innovations of modernism. Underpinned by an engagement with Bloomsbury epistemology and aesthetics, it aims to contribute to understandings of Woolf’s textual practices in the context of early twentieth-century visual and material cultures. The thesis examines several of Woolf’s texts printed between 1917, the year the Hogarth Press was established, and 1931, the year in which The Waves, often considered her most experimental work, was published. By drawing on the field of print culture and the materialist turn in Woolf scholarship, it, firstly, considers Woolf’s early short stories and how these enable her to challenge the distinction between visual and verbal forms of representation. Chapter two examines the extent to which her short stories, as well as her embodied experience of printing them, shaped the form of Jacob’s Room. The manuscript version of Mrs Dalloway is the focus of chapter three, and it suggests that the novel can be considered a palimpsest in the way that earlier versions of text reverberate in the published edition. This chapter also offers new ways of thinking about Woolf’s conceptualisation of textuality as fluid rather than fixed. Woolf’s use of colour in her writing is given particular attention in the final two chapters of the thesis. Chapters on To the Lighthouse and The Waves reveal how these visual signifiers enable her to weave a feminist-materialist discourse into the textures of her work. In establishing a connection between Woolf’s literary concerns with materiality and her feminist politics, this thesis argues that her use of objects, colours and forms work to reinsert the forgotten histories of women in the pages of her published texts.