The twentieth century saw capitalist growth accelerating the pace of urban life and transforming cities ever more clearly into sites of uneven and combined development. The result, for novelists, was an intensification of the problem of representing urban form – both as unmappable totality and as subjective experience of fragmentation, distraction and unexpected connection. In line with David Harvey's thesis concerning the 'space-time compression' endemic to modernity, I claim that not only are technological advances in urban transport and communications reflected in the shifting registers of novelistic characters' perception of their environment, but that this change in perception embodies a break with the unilinear logic of sequence and setting to encompass what Ernst Bloch terms 'the synchronicity of the non-synchronous,' or an uneven spatial simultaneity, characteristic of modern fiction. In Part I, by comparing the New York of John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer (1925) with the Istanbul of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar‘s Huzur (1949), I elucidate the differential stakes of modernist representations of the city, the core and the periphery, as the conjoining of contemporary and archaic forms. In both novels, I argue, the motifs of music and transport function in analogous ways – fragments of song intersect with details of urban journeys to point up the sharply variegated and unequal terrain of the twentieth century metropolis. In Part II, I examine Paul Auster‘s and Orhan Pamuk's postmodern city novels of the 1980s, which diverge from the experimental realism Dos Passos and Tanpınar adopted in the 1920s and 1930s. The economic transformation that both cities underwent from the 1950s on increasingly served to undermine the coordinates of historical memory within the new urban environment, widening the subjective gap between past and present. In this context, I argue that the conflict between the apparent freedoms of globalization and the increasing entrapment of the postmodern subject constitutes the main dilemma of postmodern aesthetics. Auster's City of Glass and Pamuk's The Black Book register this postmodern dilemma in their respective forms through recourse to the metaphor of the 'city as illegible text' and to the broken signifying systems of postmodern allegory. Focusing on these two literary techniques, I examine their differential appropriations in the core and the periphery of the world literary system in order to gauge how the experience of urban modernity – as shaped by particular cultural, social and economic developments – contributes in turn to the shaping of literary form.

This thesis is a materialist study of memory in contemporary writings. Situating itself in the emergent field of memory studies, this thesis is an attempt to go beyond the stretched horizon of traumatic recollection that is commonly regarded as part of contemporary postcolonial and diasporic experience. Apparently, in the contemporary world the geographical mapping and remapping and its concomitant sense of displacement and the crisis of identity have become an integral part of an everyday life of not only the post-colonial subjects, but also the post-apartheid ones. This interconnectedness between memory, place, and displacement as an outcome of colonisation, migration and the apartheid lays conceptual background for my study of memory in the literary works of four contemporary writers, namely Jhumpa Lahiri, Monique Truong, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ivan Vladislavić. This study is a scrutiny of some key issues in memory studies: the working of remembrance and forgetting, the materialisation of memory, and the commoditisation of material memory. In order to restore the sense of place and identity to the displaced people, it may be necessary to critically engage in a study of embodied memory which is represented by the material place of memory - the brain and the body - and other objects of remembrance.

My thesis explores London’s and Brighton’s Romantic-period affluent residential suburbs as represented in fiction by Charlotte Smith, Medora Gordon Bryon, Elizabeth Helme, Jane Austen, and Elizabeth Sandham. While scholarship is still small in size and scope, literary critics, historians, geographers, and architects have increasingly recognized the importance of this period for understanding suburban histories and geographies more generally. At this time, the middling ranks began to move en masse to the suburbs, distinctly suburban architecture and developments proliferated, and unprecedented acceleration in the growth of suburban population and infrastructure occurred. My thesis is the first full-length assertion of the suburbs’ significant re-ordering of society and the built environment in this period, a transformation that anticipates today’s ubiquitous Anglo-American suburbs. I ground my study in Romantic-period suburbs by using the work of J.C. Loudon, whose The Suburban Gardener, and Villa Companion (1838) was the first in-depth treatise on explicitly suburban homes and gardens. Furthermore, I spatialize the suburb, extending current criticism on Romantic-period homes, suburbs, and cities, and applying the ideas of postmodern geographers and spatial theorists. I define the suburban by focusing on how characters experience domestic space’s geographical location, material features, and social spaces. These elements of space, along with the connections between time and suburban space, reveal how the suburb is implicated with the urban and the rural and with issues of management and power. Characters experience suburban space differently depending on factors such as socio-economic status, lifestyle, gender, and space of primary identification. Multiple and diverse versions of suburban homes emerge. Invariably, the novels all prize some kind of peaceful retreat—a space of reflection, emotional tranquillity, intimacy, or physical rest. I interrogate how and why fictional narratives condone or condemn particular strategies of suburban space-making in order to elaborate on wider cultural implications.

This thesis, Amateur Cinema: History, Theory, and Genre (1930-1980), draws largely on primary material from the Scottish Screen Archive and related museum sources. The project establishes a critical dialogue between university-based Film Studies and the archive sector, via a series of case studies of influential groups, individuals, and movements. Prefaced by a chapter entitled 'Theorising Amateur Film: Limitations and Possibilities' detailing the domination of amateur cinema studies by discussion of the 'home mode', I suggest that work to date has obscured an understanding of films made by cine-clubs within the highly organised film culture of the British amateur cine movement. The main body of the thesis consists of four chapters exploring the most popular generic practices of 'institutionalised' amateur filmmakers, focusing on: art cinema, the 'film play', community filmmaking, and the amateur heritage picture. I argue that these production strands were formed by discourses circulating within amateur film journals, 'how to do it' manuals and amateur film festivals. Amateur cinema was viewed throughout as a parallel cine movement existing alongside professional practices, enjoying an ambivalent relationship to inherited professional standards. The final chapter, 'Amateur Film Re-Located', proposed a fresh theorisation of 'local' amateur production within a national film culture, marked by distinctly cosmopolitan connections.

The aim of this study is to illustrate the ways in which the practice and logic of sacrifice in dystopian narratives is anti-utopian. There is a dearth of research on the dystopian fiction, very little which investigates ethical issues and none which consider sacrificial ethics. In the first half of the thesis, the concept of dystopia is delineated against definitions of utopia, concrete utopia and utopian literature. In the second theoretical chapter, major and minor theories of sacrifice are examined for their normative bias in order to question their function in practice. Two important literary examples are read in light of a cross section of sacrifice and utopia: the influential story of Isaac's near sacrifice by Abraham in Genesis 22, and Ursule Molinaro's The New Moon with the Old Moon in her Arms, a literary depiction of the ancient Greek sacrificial ritual of the 'pharmakos'. The works chosen are canonical examples of the genre and in each a different aspect of sacrifice is foregrounded. In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the structure of sacrifice and the rigid hierarchy it imposes engenders perpetual violence. In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, women's sacrifice of reproductive freedom renders them commodities which cannot sustain friendships. In Octavia Butler's Kindred, the scapegoating of women slaves prevents vertical relationships as a result of the severing of mothers from their offspring. In the final chapter, Ursule Le Guin's 'The Ones who Walk Away from Ornelas' and Lois Lowry's The Giver foreground the cost of utopia based on a sacrificial ethics and problematises the relationship between self and community. The questions of genre, gender, and ethics intersect at the anti-utopian function sacrifice performs in the totalitarian societies foregrounded in the various manifestations of dystopian fictional worlds.

This PhD consists of a novel, Ramshackle, and a book of lyrical essays, microbursts and topologies. Anne Carson talks about Joan of Arc’s answers at her trials, sentences spoken such as ‘The light comes in the name of the voice’, which Carson describes as ‘a sentence that stops itself. Its components are simple yet it stays foreign, we cannot own it.’ (Carson 2008) This Creative Writing PhD thesis is a journey of four and a half years. The first element, Ramshackle, a novel, is Roe Davis’ narrative of the first days of life after her father’s disappearance, and was written during the first year of the PhD. microbursts & topologies follows as a collection of conjectured, composited and imagined pieces on landscapes, memory, creativity and loss. These pieces might be defined as prose poems, essays, stories and memoir, or simply as lyrical essays. As these essays crossover and move between forms, as they dissolve boundaries, they are one and other, neither and multiple. This thesis places two distinct primary creative texts beside each other like pictures in a gallery. The plain and simple pressed up against the unfathomable. The writing of this thesis raised questions about how we, as makers, apply our research to creative works, and also about how creative works convey ideas, knowledge, and insights. Additionally, the crossover form of the lyrical essays encourages the reading of primary texts without mediation, introduction or explanation, and illuminates different reading practices and ways of acquiring knowledge from creative works. In this thesis process and genealogy are palimpsested, obscured and made into landscapes and by reading you make them your own.

This thesis has two aims. First, it is a study of the idea of allegory and some of its literary manifestations within the context of late modernity. It attempts to disentangle and critically evaluate the multitude of theories and definitions that have been mobilised around this problematic term. Through an analysis of these theories, this study attempts to establish a critical use of allegory that preserves the insight of these varying notions of allegory by advancing the following twofold hypothesis. The first side of this hypothesis posits allegory as a distinct generic trope in which characters are engaged in a quest or a journey that involves the recognition and interpretation of metaphors and metonyms, with an aim to arrive at an "interpretative utopia" in which signifier and signified coincide. This is a definition that Deborah Madsen constructs and that this thesis embraces but revises. The second side of the hypothesis proposes that in the allegories of late modernity the recognition and interpretation thematised are historically variable and must be understood in relation to specific historical contexts. This assumption informs the examination and deployment of, amongst others, Fredric Jameson’s ideas of the national allegory and the postmodern allegory; Walter Benjamin’s theorisation of allegory, melancholia and the dialectical image; Paul de Man’s study of the relation between allegory, irony and subjectivity; and Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy of ethics and its relation to allegory. The second aim of the thesis is to put these critical insights to work in a dialectical relationship with the fiction of Gabriel García Márquez, Angela Carter, and J.M. Coetzee. All the novels chosen thematise the failure of a utopian coincidence of signifier and signified, sign and meaning, a failure which conditions the understanding of capitalist modernity. The consequences of that failure are dramatised differently, in accordance with the specific experience of modernity in each case. In the context of the uneven development of Latin America, the continental allegories of García Márquez deal with the themes of melancholy and power, the accumulation of allegorical fragments and the potentiality for dialectical images. In the postmodernist allegories of Angela Carter, the failure of interpretation reflects a larger cultural dominant of commodification and fetishisation of the signifier. The postcolonial allegories of J.M. Coetzee deal with the cognitive failures of an identity thinking which underlies the Manichean allegory of coloniser and colonised, a failure that results in ethical melancholia. Overall, while positing their common use of generic allegory to deal with these crises of recognition and interpretation, the thesis emphasises the differences rather than the similarities of these writers. This convergence in one area but divergence in others throw a questioning light on the discussion of Franco Moretti’s idea of conducting a study in "world literature" via the use of "distant reading". Through examining Moretti’s method, the thesis shows that allegory is a dynamic problematic rather than a fixed conceptual term.

This thesis situates the writings of Roland Barthes in the immediate postwar period. Whilst Barthes's thought has generally been appreciated for its theoretical innovations, this study identifies the historical and cultural influences behind his theories. His first permanent job in 1960, at the age of forty-five, ended a decade of career and financial uncertainties, during which he had been, above all, a journalist. His most famous book, Mythologies, consists of articles which were originally part of a monthly column appearing in the left-wing journal Les Lettres nouvelles between 1954 and 1956; this column helped to inflect the journal's attitude towards events such as decolonization. At the same time, he was active in the popular theatre movement, writing for Theatre populaire and defending Brechtian theatre. Barthes was also a pioneer of analytical tools in the social sciences. An avid reader of Michelet's attempts to 'resurrect' those who had been excluded by traditional historical narratives, Barthes valued the new history-writing of the Annales. He suggested a historical materialist analysis which, underlining the voluntarist nature of history, tried to resolve two historiographical dilemmas. Firstly, how could historical representation incorporate both continuity and change? Secondly, could a scientific, objective description of reality be reconciled with its partisan, subjective explanation? Undermining his earlier voluntarist view of history, the first dilemma was resolved by semiology: change and continuity were reconciled by showing forms functioning in a system. In the second the committed sociologist and critic could use the 'dialectique d'amour' to denounce and explain the alienation caused by bourgeois myths. However, whilst developing his semiological analysis, Barthes also concluded that a representation of both subjective and objective reality led to the exclusion of the committed critic. Finally, this thesis will suggest how Barthes's experiences and theoretical developments can be linked to his political views in this immediate postwar period.

This study explores the ways in which "social art cinema" has been constructed as a form of national cinema in the context of the 1990s. It discusses how particular institutional issues of the period affected signification revolving around the genre and, consequently, how that affected the concept of national cinema. This research draws upon a range of agendas relating to financial and distribution structures, promotional activities and multi-media consumption that were involved in encouraging the proliferation of social art cinema. This study contends that the success of social art cinema as a generic style was a key factor in constructing an idea of British cinema as a cultural entity. By examining how the institutional elements created this idea, I discuss how social art cinema was positioned as a national cinema in the market place through such elements. The primary objective of this study is therefore to make a contribution towards the growing body of scholarly work that considers the role played by the idea of national cinema in the very commercial environment of the contemporary film business where expressions of national specificity can often seen indistinct. The study also presents evidence for the need to consider contextual aspects when discussing the idea of national cinema. Thus, by examining the commercial aspects of national cinema, I demonstrate that national cinema should not only be defined by accounts of socio-political engagement, but should encompass institutional agendas as well.

This thesis presents the work of Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse as responses to romantic problematic obtained first and foremost from the legacy of Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy, and, secondly, from the first significant American realisation of this inheritance in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The importance of this romantic reading is that it escapes the usual interpretations of Marcuse and Brown in terms of Marxism and Psychoanalysis, instead tracing the significance of their thought to an earlier philosophical foundation in Europe and America. Kant and Emerson remain touchstones throughout; and it is through them that, in Chapter 1, I have determined what I shall be calling romanticism in an American context, reading Emerson’s essay ‘Experience’ (1844) as an exemplary occasion. In Chapter 2, two of the major works of Marcuse and Brown, Eros and Civilization (1956) and Life Against Death (1959) are examined philosophically in terms of their dialectical rethinking of narcissism, showing how they begin to respond to the romantic question set out in Chapter 1. In Chapter 3, I ex-amine the use of myth and aesthetics, paying particular attention to the integrity of the failings of Marcuse’s aesthetic theory, which stem from its romantic origins in Kant and Schiller. Chapter 4 is a reading of Brown’s Love’s Body (1966), presented against Marcuse’s criticisms (1967), in which I establish the importance of symbolism and originality for Brown, tracing them again to themes present in Kant and Emerson. Chapter 5 interprets Brown’s Closing Time (1973) through an extensive reading of that book’s primary source, the proto-romantic Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1744). The Conclusion locates Brown and Marcuse within the myth and symbol tradition of American Studies, showing how they re-vision America as a romantic ideal.