This thesis focuses on the connections between fin de siècle accounts of psychical phenomena and the extraordinary bodily capabilities of the characters in Henry James’s late novels. In reaction to the scholarly commonplace that these characters are simply refined out of corporeal existence, I posit the alternative that their bodies are unconventionally constituted: hyperaesthetic like the Society for Psychical Research’s ‘sensitives’, or materially reconfigured like the ‘etheric bodies’ of the dead envisioned by Sir Oliver Lodge, and thus perfectly adapted for life in the phantasmagorical world of James’s ‘major-phase’ and beyond. Against the backdrop of recent scholarly work on the material world of James’s novels by Thomas Otten, Victoria Coulson and others, and theories of embodiment such as those of Didier Anzieu, I assert the importance of fin de siècle psychical research narratives of the hyperextension of human bodily capabilities and their historical collocates in art, literature, and occult philosophy to fully excavate the cultural work with which Henry James’s late novels are involved.

Through a heterogeneous set of contributions from film studies, psychoanalysis and critical theory, including Leo Bersani and Laura Marks, Jacques Rancière and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, the dissertation confronts spectatorship, film theory, and their relation, on the issue of emancipation and of its discursive regulation. Against the pedagogical forms of film theory and the authoritarian framing of the spectator’s position that can be seen to be integral to the functioning of the cinematographic apparatus, this work suggests that we consider theory as an internal aspect of film experience, rather than as its external explanation. Arguing for the fundamental emancipation of the spectator together with the heteronomy of the subject and the discursivity of film experience, the dissertation addresses what, in film experience, resists being reduced within intellectual mastery, metapsychological structures, and the logic of interpretation, and rather remains radically incommensurable with the principles of its intelligibility. Indeterminacy and a lack in mastery are thus taken to be the constitutional ground of spectatorship as a praxis and of the spectator as a site of tensions and dissensus. More specifically, three basic dimensions and categories of this “wayward” ground of film experience will be examined in their correspondences and connections: contingency, free association, and embodiment.

Nick is a young graduate with no direction in life until a friend introduces him to the concept of dérive and explains how Nick can become a twentieth-century flâneur in London. The result is a unique meditation on life, love, friendship and time, set against the urban landscape. However this is no ordinary story of a graduate, facing feelings of aimlessness and lethargy. When he was twelve, Nick learned he has an illness which means he will be confined to a wheelchair. The story encompasses Nick's reveries on loss, romantic dreams and sharp observations of the contrasts between his life and others'. My writing is classed as fictional autobiography. The narrative of the novel is split between two realities. The first is the present, in which Nick (confined to a wheelchair) is struggling to write his novel and find his place in life. The second is based on Nick's recollections, expressed through written accounts of his dreams. The two realities are described in alternate chapters. Unseen Stars is centred around the idea of the dérive. A dérive is a concept developed by French philosophers in the 1960's. It proposes a journey whereby the individual lets himself be drawn towards places that appeal to him. Nick goes on his derive; a voyage of self-discovery. A dérive is psychogeographical, one's surroundings have a direct effect on one's state of mind. I merge the realities in the novel by making a dérive psycho-memorial too (i.e. where one is in time – memory - affects one's state of mind). The critical introduction addresses the principal themes arising from my novel. The themes examined are psychogeography and urban wandering (especially The Arcades Project). I will focus on dream, psychologies and perception of time, discussing the inspiration of literary works following similar psychogeographical/philosophical guidelines.

This thesis is made up of five parts: a critical dissertation, a video essay, a novel and two short stories. The first part, the dissertation, is on what it terms body texts: literature that makes deliberate, creative use of its form. This is literature that can’t be considered as simply (to use Genette’s definition of a literary work), ‘a more or less long sequence of verbal statements, more or less endowed with significance,’ [Paratexts, p1] but is inseparable from its incorporate existence, whether that existence is physical or digital. Using the work of B.S. Johnson and Alasdair Gray – as authors who have creatively occupied typesetting and production to create fiction that extends beyond the purely verbal – the dissertation considers the antagonistic responses that can often attend to formal devices (such as Johnson’s) and how small departures from convention, for example the formatting of paragraphs (in the work of Gray), can have a meaningful aesthetic impact on the work. It considers the difficulties that can accompany attempts by the author to occupy the paratext of their work; how the rise of digital reading environments both encourage formal experimentation, by introducing new capacities to the work, and discourage it, by creating a marketplace in which a work is expected to be disembodied and transposable; and it argues for the pleasures of the body text. It also positions these concerns in the context of my own creative work, including in some of the fiction included in the thesis. There is then a video essay, B.S. Johnson vs. Death, made using footage from Johnson’s film work. Following this is the novel, Muscle, and the two short stories: ‘Shark’ and ‘The Brain Drawing the Bullet’, a digital short story created to be read in a web browser.

In spite of over three hundred years of commentary on Molière's plays, one area of research has been neglected by scholars, namely the role of language in the creation of comedy. Of those critics who have analysed Moliere's use of language, the majority have limited their focus to a small number of plays and do not consider what makes his discourse comic. Even more surprising is the fact that virtually no Moliériste has attempted to view Molière's language from the perspective of modern literary and linguistic theory. Consequently, the aim of this thesis is to explore the extent to which contemporary theory elucidates, or perhaps even obscures, our understanding of Moliere's language. While critics in the past have tended to apply a single theory to his plays, we will consider whether a multi-theoretical approach can best account for the range of Moliere's linguistic humour. The analysis of the comedies will be informed by post-Saussurean theories of language, many of which have never been applied to Moliere's work before. The first part of the thesis, entitled 'Language and Society' will address a long-standing debate which continues to divide Molièristes as to the nature of his comedy. Whereas W. G. Moore and Rene Bray have portrayed Moliere as an actor and director, whose primary aim was to amuse his audience, this theatricalist position has been challenged in recent years by the socio-critical theories of James Gaines, Paul Benichou, Larry Riggs and Ralph Albanese. We will consider whether it is possible to reconcile these two opposing approaches through an examination of parody. The second part of the thesis moves from the notion of language as representational to the focus on the ludic function of language games, and discusses whether these represent a retreat into a fantasy world or whether they have a subversive role. Finally, we will turn from the conscious humour of language games to the comedy of the unconscious, in which characters accidentally reveal more than they intend in their speech. The thesis concludes with a recognition of the extent to which recent critical theories may help inform our reading of the comic dramatist.

This thesis explores modernist narrative art embodied in modernist style of constructing narrative space. Within Chatman’s conceptual framework, narrative space can be divided into story-space (settings and characters) and discourse-space (focus of spatial attention). In a corpus-stylistic approach, the structuration of the story-space in The Mill on the Floss, The Good Soldier and To the Lighthouse is examined. The findings show that modernist tendency to deemphasise particularity of place shapes a narrative design of spatial detachment. In consequence, the establishment of settings in early modernist fiction is generally sketchy, but sometimes spatially informative. This is a mixed character. By contrast, settings in classic modernist fiction are symbolic of viewers’ psychological states, a clear manifestation of a modernist interest in characters’ interiority. To further trace the style change from early modernism to high modernism, a cross-disciplinary model for character analysis and a cross-axial model for the examination of discourse-space have been constructed. They help detect some similarities and dissimilarities between early and classic modernist styles of spatialisation. As a whole, this thesis has two features. First, it applies corpus stylistic methods to inform cognitive narratological interpretation. Second, it resorts to visualisation as an attempt at a multi-modal study of narrative space.

Ann Yearsley (1752-1806) was a humble rural worker who sold milk for a living, but was best known as a poet. Her success in getting a significant amount of work published dismissed the contemporary notion that to be poor and uneducated precluded a life of letters. This thesis examines the constraints and repressions faced by a woman from the lower orders with a will to write. Ann Yearsley’s journey into print is framed in the context of the poet’s effective negotiation through an eighteenth-century society still rooted in gender and class ideology and restraints. This study is distinctive in offering an updated account of an unlikely literary career. This is not a literary study of Yearsley, but offers a nuanced and critical reading of Yearsley’s poetry and correspondence to throw new light on her personal struggle to become a professional writer. This thesis concludes that Ann Yearsley was an important cultural figure in her time because she overcame the difficulties encountered by a female writer from the lower orders. In doing this she showed that a window existed for other women from the laboring classes to become published writers.

This thesis is a modern-spelling edition of Tarlton's News Out of Purgatory, based on the British Library's copy of the first edition of 1590, with occasional emendations from the second and third editions, and including a full collation of the three early editions. The Introduction offers studies of various aspects of the work, including the bibliographical background of the piece, and descriptions of surviving copies; the life and legend of Richard Tarlton; the background of the genre of 'News from Hell', to which the work belongs, and examination of works in that genre which immediately followed the publication of Tarlton's News Out of Purgatory; and the sources of the pamphlet, and the author's adaptation and development of them. There is a study of the work published in response to Tarlton's News Out of Purgatory in 1590, The Cobler of Caunterburie; an investigation into the question of the identity of the author, including consideration of claims that have been made for various writers, and, finally, a short critical appreciation of the work. There is a full Commentary on the text, including glosses of obscure and archaic words, textual notes, explanations of references in the work, and, as part of the investigation into the authorship, echoes of the works of contemporary writers.

The primary impulse for this dissertation was the striking disparity between the initial critical reaction to Doderer's works in the 1950s and early 1960s, and the long-term evaluation of his literary stature • .In the Introduction, an outline of the theoretical foundations of the study is followed by a brief survey of the academic criticism devoted to Doderer. This survey attempts to establish whether the 'new beginning' in Doderer criticism inspired in the mid-1970s by Anton Reininger and Hans Joachim Schroder has succeeded in clearing the way for a more balanced approach to Doderer's work. The survey reveals, however, that recent Doderer criticism has seen an alarming increase of interest in Doderer the man, as opposed to Doderer the writer. Chapter One is devoted to the reception accorded to Doderer's Ein Mord den jeder begeht. The critical reaction to Doderer's novel can be directly linked to suggestions made by his publishers in their 'Verlags- . prospekt' as to how the novel ought to be read, namely as anything but a detective novel. A detailed examination of Doderer's use of motifs familiar from detective fiction indicates that the author so consistently 'breaks the rules' of classical detective story writing that Ein Mord den jeder begeht might justifiably be regarded as a forerunner of the parodies of the detective novel so common in modern literature. An examination of Doderer's novel in the context of its first publication in 1938 reveals how uncannily closely the detective element in Ein Mord den jeder begeht resembles the official Nazi line on detective fiction, and this throws up the vexed question of whether Doderer's 'anti-detective novel' was an attempt to placate the Nazi censor. However, a comparison with Friedrich DUrrenmatt's anti-detective stories shows that the ideology of the irrational which informs Doderer's novel is not necessarily fascistic in nature, as some of Doderer's critics imply. A brief 'Excursus' on Claus Hubalek's television adaptation of Ein Mord den jeder begeht is intended to illustrate the difficulties involved in transferring Doderer's work to a visual medium. The critics' reactions to Hubalek's play provide a useful up-to-date picture ofoDoderer's current literary standing. In Chapter Two, the focus is turneq on the critical response provoked by Doderer's most controversial work, Die Merowinger. The outrageous plot and 'scurrilous' style of this novel present the reviewer with an unenviable dilemma, for he is confronted with a new work by a major titerary figure which does not conform with the pattern of the author's past successes. The survey of the reception of Die Merowinger is intended to illuminate how the reviewers were so prejudiced by their familiarity with what many regard as a 'Viennese trilogy', Die strudlhofstiege, Die erleuchteten Fenster and Die D~onen, that they were unable to arrive at a reasonably open-minded evaluation of Die Merowinger. The key problem in Doderer reception is the identification of the author with the image of an amiable Viennese raconteur. An examination of the reception of Doderer's works in America reveals that the author's very conscious 'Vienneseness' presents a major obstacle for many non-Austrian readers, and accounts to a large extent for the accusations of parochialism not infrequently levelled at Doderer. Yet, paradOXically, it is undoubtedly to his realistic depictions of Vienna, allied to an apparently apolitical ideology, that Doderer's success in the 19506 must be attributed. In view of the grossly oversimplified identification of Doderer with the image of the chronicler of Vienna, and the increasing politicization of literature in the 1960s, it is perhaps understandable that Doderer has gradually become little more than a peripheral figure in German literature today. The dissertation is supplemented by a Doderer-bibliography of some 1,955 titles. Although it makes no claims to be comprehensive, ·the bibliography is nevertheless a first attempt to collate the diverse material on Doderer which can be found in the archives in Munich and Vienna.

Through an analysis of, and novel comparison between, the thought of Jacqes Lacan and Paulo Freire, this thesis endevours to rethink subjective agency in a way which takes into account the determinate influence of socio-symbolic structures. It argues for a reconceptualisation of subjecthood such that it might once again (subsequent to postmodernism and poststructuralism) become a basis of a system of ethics. The project examines the ways in which Lacan and Freire innovatively chart the dialectic between being and meaning which, they posit, is a universal human phenomenon. Within their conceptions of this dialectic a subject not only has the ability to make fundamental choices but can also ground trans-subjective truth. The thesis addresses what it percieves as a need to re-emphasize subjecthood as a symbolic existence required of all human beings. Such an existence, it maintains, is the object of Lacan and Freire's work. It, furthermore, posits that the impetus behind their interventions concerning subjectivity is primarily an ethical one. Both thinkers cite engagement with and humility before the project of meaning (as shared human activity) as an essential component of an authentic subjective act. Literacy operates in this thesis as a unifying motif between the thought of Freire and Lacan.Understood in light of their work, literacy suggests a pedagogical practice that prompts individuals to realise their capacity and responsibility as subjects. The project aims to outline the central features and tactics of such practice. The thesis also draws on examples from literature, particularly that of J.M. Coetzee, in an attempt to explicate the dynamics with which both Freire and Lacan are preoccupied. Coetzee is particularly suited to this end because his novels are largely concerned with how subjects confront the necessity as well as the difficulty of making ethical interventions in meaning.