This thesis undertakes a literary study of contemporary novels published by metropolitan French writers between 1980 and 2000, and analyses their representation of the changing relationship between France and North Africa. It begins by analysing the specificity of the situation in France, arguing that this is largely due to the functioning of the French Republican tradition, which equates inassimilable difference with inferiority. Consequently, France’s former colonies represent a privileged site of the Republican relationship with difference. This is particularly acute in the case of Algeria, by virtue of its former status as an integral part of the French Republic, and as a result of the large population of Algerian origin resident within France. It therefore offers a useful perspective from which to assess the extent to which French identities and systems of representation have been problematised in the post-colonial era. Part One examines contemporary French attitudes towards the wider Maghreb, including examples from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Drawing on traditions which extend back to Montaigne and Montesquieu, it considers contemporary updating of Orientalist traditions within which French writers have explored other countries as seen from the Hexagon. Part Two concerns the singularity of Algeria’s relationship with France. By focusing on a case-study – representations of the Paris massacre of 17 October 1961 – the thesis draws wider conclusions about the way in which attitudes to the Algerian War are changing, and the key role potentially played by literary and other artistic representation. The final chapter looks at recollections of life in Algeria in the work of two women writers, Marie Cardinal and Hélène Cixous. It concludes that their early experience there of conflict and otherness was fundamental in shaping the development of their writing project, and that their literary memories destabilise notions of a unified ‘Frenchness’.

In recent years, the works of the Oxford Inklings C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, and Charles Williams have increasingly found academic acknowledgment. However, no real attempt has yet been made to evaluate their writings in terms of the literature of the twentieth century. The present thesis aims to remedy this omission by reading the works of the Inklings against those of their modernist contemporaries. Both modernist works and those of the Inklings are heavily influenced by the experience of the World Wars. The present study examines in particular how the topic of war is employed in modernism and the Inklings’ fantasy as a structuring agent, and how their works seek to contain war within the written work in an endeavour that is ultimately doomed to failure in the face of war’s reality. History plays a highly important role for both modernists and Inklings. Their works attempt to construct a coherent and authoritative (nationalist) history, while at the same time paradoxically acknowledging the impossibility of doing so. The works examined employ various forms of intertextuality to create authenticity and authority, and make extensive use of myth – which, according to Barthes, transforms an arbitrary history into self-evident (and thus authoritative) nature (cf. Roland Barthes, Mythologies. London: Vintage, 1992). Finally, it is the question of language that lies at the heart of the modernists’ and the Inklings’ projects. Both show a high degree of self-awareness and self-reflexivity, openly thematising that their respective worlds are constructed of words. They are also concerned with the perceived crisis of language, and with the necessity of discarding outworn traditions coupled with the difficulty of creating new ones.

My research is, as far as I am aware, the first reading of Dubliners as a specific and profound engagement with the ideas of the Celtic Twilight school. The recurrence of dreamlike states, such as ghostly visions and reverie, symbolizes aspects of an urban petit-bourgeois Catholic Irishncss excluded by Revivalist propaganda. Joyce earths popular notions of spirituality so that in their dreamlike states characters arc tantalized by glimpses of an evanescent world. He shapes such experiences in relation to similar moments in Celtic Twilight writing, delineating Dubliners' states of mind as an implicit rebuke to mythic ideal and romantic versions of Irishness, and suggesting a Dublin Otherworld to rival the one popularized by Yeats, A.E., Lady Gregory and Synge. Joyce reacts, too, against George Moore's brand of faux Naturalism which claims to present the 'real' Ireland in The Untilled Field. Joyce's project involves parody of privileged Celtic Twilight genres such as the fairy story, heroic legend, and folk song. The precise reactions in Dubliners expose the distortions of the apparently authentic Celtic Revival, which, for all its patriotism, is, ironically, unlrish since it is influenced by a genteel English sensibility. Such parody is complex in terms of mood since the wit co-exists with delicate psychological investigation and exploration of Dublin tribal consciousness. Against fashionable opinion, Joyce, in Dubliners, reclaims the city of Dublin as fit territory for literature and its citizens as capable of spiritual experience, however complex and potentially compromised this spiritual state might be.

By narrowing the disparate and often contradictory trajectories of Romantic thought into a compressed framework, this thesis seeks to scrutinise the treatment of the Romantic ideal in the fiction of Muriel Spark. A number of recurring themes can be understood to collectively constitute this Romantic ideal. These include Coleridge’s theory of the power of the imagination to coalesce disparities into unity and harmony. The relationship between creativity and psychosis in The Comforters (1957) is considered within a wider discussion on the nature of creativity and the conception of the visionary Romantic artist. This leads to an investigation of the Romantic Movement’s emphasis on interiority and the self, and the influence of John Henry Newman in The Mandelbaum Gate (1965). The resulting discussion treats the concepts of transfiguration and the sublime as they relate to individual subjectivity in The Driver’s Seat (1970). The Romantic fascination with the reinvigoration of myth, legend and oral narrative cultures is examined in relation to The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), and the discussion returns to unity, harmony, vision, and the artist in The Finishing School (2004). The investigation of these elements of the Romantic ideal highlights a number of corollary questions. The emphasis on the self prompts the examination of Spark’s engagement with the themes of solipsism, ego, and performance, while Keats’ ‘Negative Capability’ is considered in the attempt to comprehend the other. The methodology will be comparative textual analysis with reference to relevant extant criticism, alongside consideration of literature from anthropology and folklore studies. By illuminating previously overlooked connections with Romanticism and Romantic literary methodologies, this interdisciplinary approach will assist in ascertaining whether Spark’s sustained engagement with these themes is evidence of a complex, multivalent relationship with the Romantic ideal, or whether recent criticism positing her rejection of Romanticism can be upheld.

The thesis is comprised of a novel and a critical reflection. The novel component, entitled The Mathers’ Land, draws on traditions of magical realism, storytelling, memory and metafiction. The framing narrative of the novel follows Luanne Richardson, a librarian who has moved South with her new boyfriend, Kenneth Miers. As soon as they arrive in Peebles, North Carolina, Kenneth disappears. Luanne only knows that he last visited a particular house that belongs to the Mathers, the richest family in Peebles. Luanne forces an encounter with the head of the family, Walter Mathers. Despite her initially confrontational contact, Walter Mathers offers Luanne a job to construct a history of his family through interviews and records. He hopes the history will provide an answer to why his only son Eric has not produced an heir. Luanne’s research draws her into a claustrophobic society where no one seems to notice the frequent deaths of the wives of the Mathers family or their odd attachment to roses and a dogwood tree, as elements of magical realism occur in the frame story. The interviews Luanne conducts appear on the pages of the novel as fully developed stories, which draw on themes of tradition, loss and family attachment. These themes are explored through perceptions of memory and storytelling. The critical reflection component considers both what methods and writings made it to the thesis as well as what methods and writings did not. It explores the modes of construction, from the use of Oulipian and metafictional techniques to the use of magical realism. The major influences from specific writers are addressed in terms of structure, magical realism and Southerness, specifically Harry Mathews, Joseph McElroy, Mischa Berlinksi, Sharyn McCrumb, Randall Kenan, Steven Sherrill, and particularly Doris Betts. The reflection concludes by addressing what it means to be an expatriate ‘Southern’ writer.

Matthew Lewis's 1796 novel The Monk continues to attract critical attention, but the accusation that it was blasphemous has overshadowed the rest of his writing career. He was also a playwright, M.P. and slave-owner. This thesis considers the need to reassess the presentation of social power, primarily that of a conservative paternalism, in Lewis's dramas and the impact of biographical issues upon this. As Lewis's critical reputation is currently built upon knowledge of him as a writer of „Gothic' works, this thesis considers a range of his „Gothic' plays. The Introduction explores the current academic understanding of Lewis and provides a rationale for the plays chosen. Chapter One explores how The Monk prefigures Lewis's dramas through its theatrical elements and Lewis's reaction to violence on the continent in the 1790s. The remainder of the thesis examines Lewis's deployment of three conventions of Gothic drama in order to explore social power. Chapter Two discusses the presentation of the Gothic villain as one who usurps and abuses power through a focus on The Castle Spectre. Chapter Three considers Lewis's Gothic heroes in Adelmorn, the Outlaw; Rugantino, or, the Bravo of Venice and Venoni; or, the Novice of St. Mark's against his actions in Parliament and the trial by Court-Martial of his uncle General Whitelocke. Lewis uses these plays to advocate the qualities of mercy, benevolence and courage in those with jurisdiction over others. Chapter Four considers Lewis's use of Gothic spectacle in two 1811 plays, One O' Clock! or, the Knight and the Wood Daemon and Timour the Tartar, which return to a focus on usurpation. Factors considered include the use of Renaissance influences and Lewis's rift with his father. Finally, the Coda examines Lewis's attempts to put his theory of paternal power into practice when he inherited two Jamaican estates.

This thesis invites a re-examination of our understanding of the human and its relationship with the external world. To this end, it develops the paradigm of appendicology as a way of going beyond traditional conceptions of the human, nature and technology. Appendicology is a study of appendages and appendixes – bodily organs and parts that seem to be merely attached to the body proper and that appear peripheral, external or non-essential to the human form despite being internal or integral to it. At once internal and external, natural and alien to the body, the appendage and the appendix defy any absolute boundary between the inside and the outside, revealing the integral exteriority and natural foreignness of the human. This thesis engages with the contradictions and ambiguities posed by these organs of corporeal otherness to argue that the relationship between the human, technics and the natural world is one of becoming in which the human and the nonhuman, the natural and the artificial, the singular and the multiple are always necessarily implicated with and within one another. By engaging with a range of material sourced from literary, scientific, and theoretical works, including texts by Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Charles Darwin, André Leroi-Gourhan, Lynn Margulis, Samuel Butler, Italo Calvino and Daniel H. Wilson, this thesis argues that the relationship between the human and technology, and that between the human and the natural world, must be considered alongside the multitudes of other relationships of becoming that constitute life. The central claim of this project is that an appendicology opens up ways of thinking that do not essentialize or privilege the human, or, for that matter, technology, nature or life, but that instead allow us to see each one in the other and to recognise how each is always already constituted through these others.

My PhD is entitled Sub-Versions of Reading. The thesis is concerned with critical refractions such as reading, interpretation, criticism, commentary ... activities which resemble each other in that they do not resemble that from which they derive; thus derived rather than original, secondary rather than primary, their status is also deemed second-rate. My aim has been both to reread their inferior plight and rewrite this plight through the theoretical insights culled from recent literary theory. I therefore compare two theoretical frameworks, one hermeneutic, the other post-structural both of which have contributed, each in different ways, towards a theorization of reading. Following this, I come to argue that the kind of Unitarian, totalizing hermeneutic approach, which seeks to reduce the original text's polysemantic possibilities, unlike a post-structuralist strategy which renders the "original” indeterminable and unleashes the isotropisms of textuality, can make no real critical difference to empower the refractor, be it the reader, critic or translator. Thus my argument finally uses translation, as the very site, that 'impossible place' where the multiple discourses on reading, re-reading, misreading, (un)readabl1ty, reading/as/writing connect, and where the (sub)version of translation can be theorized differently. Here, theories can be seen to multiply, and in multiplying, they not merely transform the "state" of translation (as a re/writing) but also the state of "theory" (as a multiplication of theorems).

This project is comprised of a novel, Being Helle, and an accompanying dissertation. Being Helle explores in fictional form a number of ideas relating to the uneasy relationship between the individual, digital media and late-capitalism that emerge after undertaking a reading of the fiction of Don Delillo and Bret Easton Ellis alongside the critical theory of Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson. Being Helle interrogates Baudrillard's contentious notion that the hegemony of capitalism undermines the autonomy of the individual subject. This is evident on a number of levels, both stylistically and thematically: the novel explores and reflects how late-capitalism's pervasive digital media affects the writer, the individual and the shape, form and scope of fiction writing. Following the life of photographer Helle Dahl, who has recently moved to Copenhagen, Being Helle ultimately challenges the limits of Jean Baudrillard's theoretical position as regards the influence of capitalism on the individual subject. Although the essential self may well be under attack in an era of rabid capitalism, Being Helle considers whether there are ways and means of formulating some kind of resistance to this, especially through artistic endeavour. The accompanying dissertation, Creative Writing at the Nexus of Fiction & Theory, is a case study analysis of the interaction between reading and creative praxis, focusing in detail on the kind of reading and thinking that took place in the production of Being Helle. In this way, the critical component of this project documents how when a writer engages in reading critical theory alongside fiction a "possibility space" is established which allows for a criticalcreative "cross-over" to occur. In the dissertation I posit that a writer who's methodological approach to novel writing embraces the reading of critical theory and fiction in tandem establishes a useful basis from which an informed cultural debate in the form of a novel can occur.

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