This thesis makes the claim that there is an important correlation between the poetic and the ethical in the work of Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous and Paul Celan. Taking its cue from Derrida’s 1988 ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’, it proposes that what he calls the ‘poematic’ entails an ethical experience. It seeks to show that the underlying link between the poetic and the ethical as it emerges in Derrida’s text calls for a reconsideration of the relation between the literary and the ethical. Rather than merely describe ethical situations or prescribe ethical behaviour, the poetic involves an ethical experience of the arrival or ‘invention’ (from the Latin invenire: to come upon) of the other. Focusing on Derrida’s notions of responsibility and hospitality in turn, it argues that the interruption at the heart of Derrida’s ethical event is what characterises poetic force. Chapter 1 presents a reading of Derrida’s notion of the poetic as an instance of ethical responsibility. It begins with a discussion of Derrida’s understanding of responsibility that underlines the importance of the interrelation between the secret, the call and the response. It subsequently argues that the poetic dictate, like responsibility, also involves an interruptive call or apostrophe that demands a response. Referring closely to the biblical narrative of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac as well as Derrida’s notions of the ‘double yes’ and the countersignature, it finally considers the ethics of poetic response. Chapter 2 claims that the force of Hélène Cixous’s work is intricately bound to the Derridean ethical imperative of responsibility as explored in Chapter 1. It begins by showing the parallels between Cixous’s ‘coming to writing’ and the Derridean notion of the poetic dictate. It maintains that the complex question of genre in Cixous’s work is related to her writing practice as an instance of submitting to the call of the other. Finally, it argues that the ethical import of her work is to be found in what Derrida has described in terms of a monstrous force. Turning its attention primarily to Derrida’s seminars around the subject of hospitality, Chapter 3 begins by focusing on the inherent violence in hospitality through an analysis of the etymological root of the word ‘hospitality’ and Derrida’s neologism ‘hostipitality’. It then addresses Derrida’s aphoristic claim that an ‘act of hospitality can only be poetic’. Relating this assertion to his understanding of invention as the instance of the coming of the other, it argues that the poetic is ethical at its core because it invents the impossible. Finally, drawing out the implications of Derridean hospitality for a reading of Sophocles’ play ‘Antigone’, it demonstrates that the eponymous character enacts the poetic experience at the centre of the discussion. In an extended analysis of the notion poetic hospitality, Chapter 4 takes the concept of the uncanny in Paul Celan’s ‘Der Meridian’ speech as its foremost concern. It makes the claim that the ethical force in Celan’s oeuvre lies in its power to overcome the uncanny automaticity of art. It then turns to ‘Die Niemandsrose’ to explore the uncanny in relation to what Celan calls the ‘groundlessness’ of the poem. Finally, it suggests that the uncanny in Celan’s oeuvre can be seen as the ethical counterpart to the aesthetic of the Romantic sublime that is arguably no longer possible today.

Queer theorists have argued that we should move beyond sexual labelling in the social sense. For this thesis I have conducted audience research to explore the liberatory potential of the representation of fluid sexuality in the BBC television series Torchwood (2006-) through my own and my participants' interpretations. I evaluate how Torchwood can be seen as potentially liberating in terms of sexual identity and what the implications might be for wider debates around fluid versus stable gendered sexual identities in queer politics. I suggest Torchwood should be seen as liberatory in the sense that it challenges rigid notions of sexual identity in the first two seasons of the series. However through the analysis, I argue that in two important ways we cannot suggest that the series is challenging heteronormativity, as some academics have proposed. Firstly, as part of the process of channel hopping from niche to mainstream television, the liberatory sexual agenda is watered down. Secondly, through readings of the series from the perspective of gender I suggest that the portrayal of masculinity in particular is heteronormative. In terms of my participants, I also note the tension that exists between their aspirations for fluid sexuality, exercised through their readings of Torchwood and the need for stability of identity, also notable when analysing their responses. In this way, I suggest that in terms of the period now often termed the ‘post-gay', perhaps we need a more fluid approach to identity, where we aspire to a fluid notion of gendered sexual identities, but keep in mind the need for stability as part of that process.

In the European narration of the Orient, there is a deliberate stress on those qualities that make the East different from the West. In his Orientalism Edward Said offers perspectives for studying the Western works that depict the Orient and its people. He argues that the orientalist discourse has managed - and till now continues - to exile the Orient into an irretrievable state of "otherness”. This thesis contains an analytical and critical examination of Said's views as presented in his book. It attempts to test Said's formulations against a deliberately assorted collection of English literary works. The First Chapter sketches the general background to the theory of the orientalist discourse and to Said's views of the latter in regard to the Western documentation of the East and the Arabs. This chapter also offers an explanation for the deliberate choice of 'primary texts'. The Second Chapter introduces Lawrence Durrell's work The Alexandria Quartet and examines how far Durrell adheres to the 'rituals' of the orientalists as defined by Said. The chapter's main focus is on Durrell's depiction of Alexandria as an Arab city. Chapter Three is primarily concerned with Durrell's treatment of the 'desert'. This is compared to the introduction of the theme of the desert in the writing (The Seven Pillars of Wisdom) of T. E. Lawrence who is cited as a representative of the traditional English 'desert' writers. Chapter Four contains an appreciation to Durrell's treatment to the theme of the 'quest'. The quest of Mountolive is compared to the treatment of that theme in William Beckford's Vathek. Durrell's portrayal of the Alexandrian woman and 'Egyptian sexuality' is discussed in Chapter Five, with a retrospect to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. The Chapter examines the differences and the similarities between old and modern presentations of the Alexandrian woman. Chapter Six looks at Edna O'Brien's Arabian Days. This Chapter investigates the representation of the Arabs in the post-colonial post-oil modern time. It attempts to see if O'Brien's writing still conveys the old dogmas of the orientalist discourse. Chapter Seven deals with Jonathan Raban's representation of the Arab World in his Arabia Through The Looking Glass. Raban's expedition to Arabia comes a few years after O'Brien's, and it is worth considering how far the two experiences are similar or different. The Chapter also tries to demonstrate the weight of Raban's work when taken in the context of mainstream representation of the Arabs and their world especially in the work of Durrell. The Conclusion emphasizes the need for a fairer stand in relation to the depiction and the portrayal of one culture by another. It also poses the question of how far should portrayals be trusted or, indeed, be judged. It calls for the lifting up of the fog that clouds the visions of both sides in question.

This study deals with the influence of film form in fiction in terms of narrative discourse, focusing on issues of genre, narration, temporality, and the imitation of cinematic techniques. It provides a theoretical analysis of different methodologies (intermediality theory, semiotics, narratology, genre theory) which are useful to assess how a cinematic dimension has found a place in literary writing. This research, in particular, puts forth the idea of a 'para-cinematic narrator', a 'flattening of the narrative relief', and a 'para-cinematic narrative contract' as constitutive items of strongly cinematised fiction. These three theoretical items are subsumed in the concept of 'cinematic mode in fiction', which describes a distillation of characteristics of the film form on the written page. This research therefore represents a theoretical attempt to demonstrate how the cinematic component integrates the stylistic and generic traits of novels and short stories relating to different periods, styles and genres of the twentieth century. The proposed theoretical model is tested on a corpus of American, French, and, especially, Italian case studies. The remediation of film that emerges from these texts points to a complex interconnection between cinema and literature which still requires full acknowledgment in literary history.

This thesis aims to ‘apply’, as it were, some of Jacques Derrida’s conclusions regarding the age-old distinction between ideal and material to an understanding of animality and how it emerges in texts. I propose the paleonym “arche-animality” to understand the workings of animality in texts. In the field of Literary Animal Studies, some challenging questions concerning animals in texts seem to mirror Derrida’s topics in his early works. On the one hand, we can conceptualise animals as radically different from humans due to their embodiment, but, on the other hand, we can take them to be only differently embodied subjectivities, not unlike the human’s as it is thought to be housed in the body. Both positions are fraught with problems and are, in fact, entangled with the relationship between materiality and ideality. These challenging questions – especially concerning animal embodiment – must be approached with an eye towards paleonymy, the procedure by means of which Derrida was able to propose arche-writing as the origin of both vulgar writing and speech. To demonstrate the appropriateness of paleonymy, I uncover the arche-animal in different texts of different genres and varying degrees of ‘animal presence’: a ‘theoretical’ text (Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo), a film (Darren Arofnosky’s Black Swan), a novel (Clarice Lispector’s The Apple in the Dark), and a poem (Ted Hughes’ ‘The Thought-Fox’).

This study draws together a range of critical models in order to explore the ways in which the periodical functions as a particular cultural practice, both shaping and being shaped by the society in which it was produced. Focusing upon single women's magazine, Woman, across its entire publication span from 1890 to 1910, the study seeks to contribute a deeper understanding of the periodical text by situating it within its specific social and historical context. Through this comprehensive diachronic approach the study accounts for the changes occurring within a long-lived periodical which does not have one identity but several. The study also explores the complex web of relations between the text, its producers and its consumers, and the function of each in the creation and negotiation of meanings. The fragmentation of the periodical text into separate areas of writing, as well as its multiple points of production (from proprietors, publishers and editors to the many professional and amateur contributors), renders the magazine's construction of a stable textual identity problematic. A central question in the study, therefore, has been how to develop a critical model with which to address the plurality of a text in which genres and voices collide within an overarching editorial framework. The study also aims to redress the balance of existing critiques of the women's periodical press which have tended to marginalise the role of the reader both in the production of the text itself and in its interpretations. While the study explores the ways in which the genres of feature articles and editorials, competitions, correspondence and fiction in Woman functioned within the editorial framework as well as in response to circulating discourses, the central focus of the study is the interaction between consumers and producers in the construction of the text, and the ways readers absorbed, appropriated or resisted dominant modes of editorial discourse.

The Dissertation is a two-part study of Shakespeare's Patterns and Themes in the Early Comedies. The First Part is concerned with the diversity of intellectual construction revealed by the plays seriatim. Chapter 1 focuses on the Quest Pattern in The Comedy of Errors, and its function in clarifying the play's thematic complications. Chapter 2 takes a close look at the Pattern of Classical Allusions in The Taming Of the Shrew. Chapter 3 examines four integrating structural elements in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which contribute both individually and collectively to the total meaning of the play. Chapter 4 explores the Morality Pattern implanted in Love's Labour's Lost, behind the barrier of artifice which separates Navarre from the outside world. The Second Part centres on the plays' versatile thematic preoccupation. Chapter 5 discusses the Debate about Marriage in The Comedy of Errors, a play written at a time when the controversy over women and their position in marriage particularly, had reached its apogee. Chapter 6 examines The Taming of the Shrew as an academic drama set in Renaissance Italy, in which an experience of Education is provided for the benefit of its characters and audience alike. Chapter 7 analyses the literary theme of Alienation in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and shows how it is ultimately resolved in a state of social communion at the end of the play. Chapter 8 deals with the Religious Dimension in Love's Labour's Lost--the Christian view which emerges from the play and which is based on the teaching and imagery of Holy Scripture. The plays become more interesting when the link between their respective patterns and themes is probed. The associations of home enhanced by the journeys of the Errors bear a strong relationship to the male/female attitudes to domesticity and household stability. Similarly, the Shrew's wonders, achieved against all odds by Petruchio, are doubly stressed by the process of education. The pattern of reconciliations in The Two Gentlemen complements its theme by conquering the alienations. Likewise, the Morality element in Love's Labour's Lost overlaps the play's Christian connotations.

Britain imported a vast number of cashmere shawls from the Indian subcontinent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These were largely male garments in India at the time, which became popular dress accessories for British women. The demand for these shawls was opportune for textile manufacturers at home – particularly in Edinburgh, Norwich, and Paisley, who launched a thriving industry of shawls, ‘made in imitation of the Indian’. There has been considerable scholarship on cashmere shawls and their European copies in textile history. However, it has enjoyed no such prominence in literary studies. This PhD thesis examines Cashmere and ‘Paisley’ shawls in works of literature. Indian shawls are mentioned in a number of literary texts, including plays, poems, novels, opera, and satire. A wide variety of writers such as Richard Sheridan, Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and Wilkie Collins (to name a few) depict these textiles in their works. For these writers, I argue, shawls provide a means to explore Britain’s changing social and imperial identity through the prism of material culture. The sheer incidence of ‘shawls’ in printed discourse furthermore suggests that they went beyond the realm of everyday fashion to constitute one of the important narratives of nineteenth-century Britain. In emphasising the significance of material culture and recovering new historical contexts, this investigation raises important questions relating to the links between industry and trade, and literary production. I rely on literary criticism, scholarship on India, and textile history to examine the phenomenon of cashmere shawls. In the wider context of postcolonialism, the research suggests that instead of the Saidian model which viewed the East as an abject ‘Other,’ colonies actually exerted a reverse and important influence on the imperial centre. A new emphasis on Indian things in literature, this work hopes, will contribute a fresh strand of thought to studies of imperialism.

Desire and pursuit of the whole is the theme which animates all Rose Macaulay s fiction. Her literature-rich childhood nourished both an interest in mysticism and an ambition to write poems. It is in her verse that we first see emerging her careful symbolism of quest, her obsession with pilgrims who seek the elusive goal of insight perfectly achieved. The fascination is evident in her six earliest, image-studded novels in each of which she traces a protagonist s development from innocence to maturity. The multiple symbolisms of mysticism, Platonism, Hermeticism and Christianity are juggled to produce a complex iconographical subtext to the stories of growth towards perception. While Rose Macaulay s novels of the First World War period change sharply in tone, veering towards a new mood of pragmatism, the theme of the pursuit of the whole remains clear. Now, however characters are shown realising that the "whole" is an unrealisable dream which they must, in the interests of good sense, decline to chase. They must limit their quests to the practically achievable. Satire lightens her most well-known fiction of the inter-war years, allowing her to complicate her work with the new elements of ambiguity and irony. Still convinced that the individual s impulse to search for wholeness is essential, she now combines here conviction with a satirical perception that the quest is pointless. Her field widens in these intricate, paradoxical novels and it becomes evident that her interest in the personal "pursuits of the whole" of her characters is paralleled by her anxious interest in the quest of the post-war world itself for civilisation.

The creative dark is a term by Doris Lessing to describe the process of writing. It is used here also to describe writing about subjects that are commonly held to be unknowable: namely, writing fiction about the Holocaust, trauma and autism. Yesterday’s Shadow is a novel, which explores a link between autism and the Holocaust. Bruno Bettelheim, a psychologist, was interred in Dachau and Buchenwald in 1938 – 1939. His observations on human behaviour in the camp led him to hypothesise that autistic children were like the Musselmänner in the camps, they had withdrawn from the world through lack of hope. Bettelheim furthermore claimed that autistic children had no hope because the parents did not love them. This came to be known as the ‘refrigerator mother’ hypothesis. The novel considers the differences between the developmental disorder of autism and autistic-like withdrawal, which may happen as a result of trauma. Several issues arose during the writing of the novel and these are addressed in the commentary. The first of these is memory, in particular how trauma is remembered. Following a brief outline of psychological research in this area, there is a discussion of how memory and trauma are treated in Yesterday’s Shadow and in the discredited memoir by Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments. The second factor concerns women’s experience of the Holocaust and whether there is a case for stating that women’s experiences were different from those of men. This is discussed in relation to Yesterday’s Shadow and Lovely Green Eyes, a novel by Arnošt Lustig. Finally, there is an exploration of how the Holocaust is represented and the ethical issues surrounding this. One significant theme is a need for historical accuracy when writing about the Holocaust. A recent children’s novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, by John Boyne is discussed in this light.