This thesis is concerned with situating the works of Anna Kavan (1901-1968), Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984) and Ann Quin (1936-1973) within a discussion of British mid-twentieth century fiction. The relative neglect of these authors in academic criticism may be due to the fact that much British experimental writing has previously been ignored in surveys of this period. This thesis argues that a study of their work warrants a more nuanced understanding of the mid-twentieth century literary landscape than conventional accounts have allowed for. In that sense, it aims to contribute to research undertaken in more recent years which is concerned with revising dominant accounts of this period. The broader framework for the thesis is provided in Chapter 1 which examines past and present accounts and categorizations of mid-twentieth century British fiction. The remaining three chapters then focus on the 1940s work of Kavan, the fiction written during the 1950s by Trocchi and Quin’s novels of the 1960s. As well as contributing to research concerned with overviews of this period, this thesis furthers individual studies of each of the novelists presented here. By drawing on archival material and reading their works in conversation with their time and place, it attempts to understand the ways in which the experimental fiction of these three authors responded to the social, cultural and historical forces at work in Britain between the forties and the sixties. Whilst all three authors started out from a strategy of subjectivity, rooting their experimentation in a turn inwards, their works, as this thesis suggests, can be construed of as political in their concern with drawing attention to the osmotic effects of exteriority on interiority.

This thesis considers the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, focusing on Cat’s Cradle (1963), Player Piano (1952), and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), through the literary theories of Mikhail Bakhtin. It concentrates on Bakhtin’s carnivalesque inversion from Rabelais and his World (1965), his theoretical perspectives on the text as a site of struggle from The Dialogic Imagination (1975), and the practical application of his theories with the novel as polyphonic from Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1963). The thesis concentrates on three main themes: religion, technology, and war. Chapter One will examine the theme of religion in Cat’s Cradle. It will consider how religion is presented in society and how fundamental opinion can become embedded in our social and cultural structures. It will further consider the cultural shift in belief from religion to science, juxtaposing the two ideals and highlighting the destructive forces of absolute belief and fundamental opinion. Chapter Two will concentrate on Player Piano, and how technology could have a detrimental effect on the progress of human civilisation. It considers how valuable technology is to the human experience, and what happens to civilisation if humans are forced to surrender everything that gives their lives meaning. Chapter Three will analyse Slaughterhouse-Five, looking closely at the representation of war, and its effects on the mental state of those that are forced to encounter it. It will engage with the ‘ideals’ of war presented in society juxtaposed with the experience of actually taking part in war. Vonnegut critiqued the American social, political and religious structures prevalent throughout his life. To Vonnegut, America had the possibility to become a blueprint for the rest of the world, a role model for the liberation and equality of all human beings, but it needed work.

The work of Ian Hamilton Finlay spans a fifty-year career, numerous media (many invented by Finlay himself) and thousands of years of Western history. Yet despite its range, it is the product of a singular artistic vision. The object of this thesis is to provide a philosophical and aesthetic framework through which Finlay’s work can be read comprehensively. Centred on the notion of the ‘non-secular’ – a term coined by Finlay in response to bureaucratic, social and artistic antagonisms – it proposes that Finlay’s entire body of work can be read as a project towards realisation of ‘non-secular’ awareness. This comprises, firstly, a longing for an ‘essential’ language and absolute truths, and a respect and reverence for those aspects of culture which strove to, if not discover, then construct and have faith in those truths. It also comprises, secondly and as a consequence, reconciliation with the fact that these absolutes can never be fully realised in the practice of everyday living. This prompts further reconciliation with the limits of our comprehension of the universe and, in the last analysis, our own mortality. This reconciliation is ‘non-secular’ insofar as it does not dispel, but rather emphasises, the notion of a ‘beyond’ inherent to these limits, without defining that ‘beyond’. Using the metaphor of a navigator’s compass, the thesis defines the borders of the ‘non-secular’ through study of Finlay’s work, his correspondence, and his relationship with his contemporaries and critics. It gathers together, develops and responds to previous criticism on Finlay in order to present a unified reading of the poet’s oeuvre which, though it cannot hope to cover every aspect, suggests how his work might best be approached, navigated and read. To this end, the thesis also draws from a number of philosophers working in the continental, hermeneutic tradition, who present ways of thinking the ‘non-secular’ which complement Finlay’s project and, in some cases, directly influence it. As the title would suggest, though the thesis explores Finlay’s work in all media, its locus is Stonypath/Little Sparta, the poet’s family home and magnum opus. Here, the tensions between life and art which give rise to the ‘non-secular’ are at their most palpable. Despite Finlay’s reputation as a visual and plastic artist, this thesis opens with the premise that his work is best approached as poetry, beginning with an extended Introduction which shows how Stonypath/Little Sparta develops from modernist poetry. Coining and defining the term ‘topographical poetics’ to describe Finlay’s site-specific works, it then constructs a formal and methodological approach for reading these ‘poems’. Preliminary discussion of the ‘non-secular’ follows, leading into a four-chapter structure concerned with sketching out the limits of the ‘non-secular compass’. The compass consists of four poles – the Poetic, the Homely, the Modern and the Classical – corresponding to Chapters One through Four respectively. Each pole serves as an absolute point by which to consider the idea of the ‘non-secular’. The exception is the Homely, a pragmatic anchor from which develops the ‘non-secular’ in its reconciliatory aspect and, ultimately, provides the unique foundation for Finlay’s work. This ‘non-secular compass’ is presented as a critical paradigm for reading Finlay. With the work itself, it may also be used as an interpretative tool which opens up to fresh and vital reflections on our comparatively ‘secularised’ existences.

This thesis comprises a fictional novel, Floating, and a critical essay. The essay explores the borderlines between autobiographical writing (including memoir) and fiction. Using autobiographical narrative, the essay explores the inspiration and influences for writing the novel, Floating. It considers authors’ attitudes to autobiography in fiction, drawing on the work of Jessie Kesson before examining the literary techniques used by three contemporary authors: Jeanette Winterson, Janice Galloway and Jackie Kay. It considers particular challenges of writing autobiographically including: narrative perspective, identity, truth and invention. The novel engages with themes arising in the essay, particularly those relating to the creation and assumption of identity through recounting memory.

This thesis comprises three main components: firstly, close readings and critical analyses of four major poetical works by W.H. Auden—“The Watershed”, The Sea and the Mirror, “New Year Letter”, and “In Time of War”; secondly, ten semi-informal letters addressed to W.H. Auden; and thirdly, a serial poem consisting of short and long poems based on the speeches of the public figure, Barack Obama. The thesis proposes a creative writing discipline founded on the productive and intensive exchange between reading and writing poetry, and reflection through letter writing. The chapters of critical analysis argue the following: firstly, that through his idiosyncratic handling of syntax and voice in poems like “The Watershed”, Auden introduced a new element of the uncanny into English poetry; secondly, that in The Sea and the Mirror, Auden re-evaluated his poetics and altered his poetic voice in response to a new reading public; thirdly, that in the “New Year Letter,” Auden uses tone to expand the range of his poetic voice; and fourthly, that in the sonnet sequence “In Time of War”, Auden uses parable to combine lyric and narrative elements in order to universalise the Sino-Japanese War. Some of the issues raised in the chapters of critical analysis, such as poetic truth, poetic voice, the lyric subject, and parabolic writing, are elaborated on in the letters to W.H. Auden. Finally, the Serial Poem presents 74 short and long poems produced using appropriative writing procedures. The idea that runs through all parts of this thesis is that speech, voice, and parable are crucial elements in the poetic practice of W.H. Auden, and that close attention to these three elements through all stages of this project— critical reading and writing, letter writing, and creative writing—has contributed to the development of a rich and productive poetic writing practice.

This doctoral thesis examines the representations and dynamics of crime and inner punishment in a range of European literary works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: F.M. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Преступлeние и наказaние, 1866), L. Rebreanu’s Ciuleandra (1927) and P. Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985), while tracing the developments of crime fiction and the changes in criminal legal system over the span of one hundred and nineteen years. Utilising the methodology of comparative literature, I argue that the interiorized punishment - which I identify, after Foucault, as a new episteme - is a narrative thread that runs through all three novels, and informs much other writings in the same period. Informed by different socio-cultural, temporal, political, and stylistic backgrounds, each novelist utilizes distinct narrative techniques and strategies to configure their protagonists in such a way that permits the reader to get an insight into their psyches. The present study locates the literary tendency to fuse the character of the protagonist/hero and the perpetrator/anti-hero into one narrative entity and examines the literary representation of the factors that trigger the guilt or need for punishment in this entity. To this end, I focus on the narrative structure, temporal framework, geographical setting as well as the protagonists’ relations with other characters within the texts. The idea of self-punishment, its representations and manifestations, is explored through the lens of psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan and Otto Rank. My psychoanalytical readings of the texts are furthermore complemented by the theoretical frameworks offered by Mikhail Bakhtinʼs theory of polyphony, Linda Hutcheonʼs account of historiographic metafiction and relevant philosophical perspectives such as Søren Kierkegaardʼs and Jean-Paul Sartreʼs existentialisms.

This history of Dostoevsky’s reception in France draws from critical responses, translation analysis, and the comparative analysis of adaptations as well as intertextual dialogues between fictional, critical and philosophical texts. It begins from the earliest translations and critical accounts of the 1880s and 1890s, such as Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé’s seminal moralist reading. It then traces modernist responses and adaptations from the turn of the century to the twenties. Existential readings and re-translations dating from the arrival of émigré critics and religious philosophers in the wake of the Russian Revolution are examined, assessing the contribution of these émigré readings to emerging existential readings and movements in France. Finally, French existentialist fiction is analysed in terms of its intertextual dialogue with Dostoevsky’s work and with speculative and critical writings of French existentialist thinkers on and around the philosophical reflections expressed in Dostoevsky’s fiction. By following specifically the existential and existentialist branches of Dostoevsky’s French reception, an overlooked aspect of the history of French, Russian and European existentialisms comes to the fore, reframed within a pivotal period in the history of European intercultural exchange, and of transmodal literary and philosophical discourse.

This thesis is composed of two parts, encompassed in a third: a poetry collection; a critical dissertation; and an artist’s book. The thesis as a whole is entitled Florilegium. This title, from the Latin flos, or ‘flower’, and legere, ‘to gather’, refers to the medieval system of collecting extracts from various authors to form a larger body of work. It is also applicable to flower-treatises, dedicated to their ornamental nature rather than medicinal or scientific. The critical dissertation comes in the form of a glossary. It intends to show that the flower plays an essential role in linking Modernist poetics with that of its Romantic predecessors and beyond. In isolated and ‘illuminated’ examples from Aristotle to Zukofsky, it examines the lineage of botanical poetry, in the light of its unique linguistic makeup: a vernacularized scientific lexicon established in the Latin of Carl Linnaeus. While the critical component of the thesis is an interrogation of botanical language, the poetry collection is its living representation. To enhance the living nature of the text, I have designed and printed an artist’s book, which also acts as an herbarium for floral specimens collected and pressed over the duration of my degree. The design of the book is in keeping with traditional florilegia, incorporating historic binding techniques, typography, paper, and size.

In a broad sense this thesis concerns the politics (and ethics) of strategic management, organisational psychology, organisational narratives, knowledge management and conditions of innovation. More specifically, this is research into the dimension of politics and the legitimacy of power relations within the synchronization of time and space in social organisations, typically as part of the design and implementation of strategy, in context of organisational definitions of innovation and contestations of 'the new'. With a conceptual archaeology, the thesis contends that strategy research focuses on the nodal concepts of 'inertia', 'adaptation' and 'friction', in context of three past conceptual frameworks: namely, Newtonian mechanics, Hobbesian interpretations of evolution, and Clausewitzian military theory. A genealogical approach is used to reveal the persistent influence of the Newtonian notion of simultaneity (absolute time and absolute space) across these three frameworks in their combinatorial guise in the discourse of strategic management. The genealogy unfreezes the nodal concepts by showing the history of their contingent construction and selection. Finally, a critical analysis scrutinizes the contextual appropriateness of applying the concept of simultaneity to social matters. The thesis rejects simultaneity and its dominant position as an 'articulatory practice' of organisational strategy. By decoupling the notion of simultaneity from frames through which sense is made of motion and events, the grip that structuralism has on organisational strategy is loosened and by substituting simultaneity with political power the implications for strategic management become clear. The approach draws from Political Discourse Theory to reframe the strategy discourse, in its current conception, as hegemonic and an antagonistic system of 'Politics' that, instead of facilitating either stability or innovation, leads, instead, to 'conceptual inertia' and economic stagnation, by repressing emergences of 'the Political'. The thesis proposes a strategy of 'agonism' as an alternative. Rather than replacing one despotic concept with another, the suggestion of agonistic strategy is made because agonism allows for its own reinterpretation, thus does not represent a sedimented centre of a discourse. In this way, agonism is less susceptible to stagnation, and more amenable to innovation. The theoretical framework is then accompanied with a study of the design and implementation of strategy within a research institute engaged with the innovation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) using the CRISPR-cas9 technique. The selection of this case organisation allows for an analysis of the politics and power relations at play in the definitions of innovation, and a means to ground a study of the social construction of reality within an empirical setting regarding the strategic development of genetic constructs.

This thesis examines the relation between philosophy, the poem and the subject in the mature philosophy of Alain Badiou. It investigates Badiou’s decisive contribution to these questions primarily by means of comparison, especially to Martin Heidegger, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Theodor Adorno, as well as by analysing Badiou’s readings of poems and prose by Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett respectively as sites of potential dialogue with his immediate predecessors. The thesis stresses the importance of French philosophy’s German heritage, emphasising not only Badiou’s radical departure from Heidegger and his legacy, but also the former’s wholesale rejection of philosophies that would, in the wake of twentieth-century violence and beyond, proclaim their own end or completion. The thesis argues Badiou’s innovative readings of Celan and Beckett to be crucial to understanding this endeavour: for Badiou, both writers use the poem to affirm novel conceptions of subjectivity capable of transcending the historical conditions of their presentation. The title quotation from Badiou’s The Century, ‘Yes, the century is an ashen sun’, anticipates both the affirmative nature of these subjective figures, and their presience, beyond the bounds of a twentieth-century ‘ashen sun’ pervaded by melancholy, for the ‘new suns’ of the twenty-first. The thesis is in four chapters. The first chapter unfolds the central concepts of Badiou’s departure from Heidegger using Paul Celan’s poems to focus the enquiry. It is guided by two of Badiou’s most condensed declarations about the poem, that, firstly, ‘the modern poem harbours a central silence’, and secondly, that ‘Celan completes Heidegger’. The second chapter exposes the political implications of Heidegger’s writings on Friedrich Hölderlin and the role of the subject therein, offering at its close some thoughts about what Badiou calls, following Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, the poem’s ‘becoming-prose’. It concludes by drawing the poem and politics into relation by way of the philosophical category of the subject. The third chapter reads Badiou’s concept of ‘anabasis’ against Heidegger’s ‘homecoming’ in order to think the possibility of a collective political subject’s formation in the wake of Auschwitz. The final chapter examines the imbrication of the Two of love and the ‘latent poem’ in Badiou’s reading of Samuel Beckett’s late prose, contrasting this ‘affirmative’ reading of Beckett to Theodor Adorno’s earlier emphases on negation. Following its investigations of subjectivity, poem and prose throughout, the thesis concludes by returning to the title quotation in order to unfold the particular relations between subject, affirmation and negation Badiou’s philosophy enacts, and to offer further routes forward for research regarding Badiou’s philosophy and aesthetic figuration.