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.

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.

Beginning with an analysis of the nature of the Morality play and its near relative, the moral play, this thesis finds both forms to be founded on an adversarial view of the world (Chapter One). The nature of the adversary is variable, and that variation is, in turn, revealing about the plays' philosophical position. The theories of Jacques Lacan suggest a reading of Mundus & Infan s, The Castle of Perseveraunce, and Youth as descriptions of selfhood via language- acquisition (Chapter Two). Psychoanalytic theory also suggests that otherness may involve both the rule-making Other of authority and a transgressive 'other', broadly analogous to repressed desire. The moral plays discuss the latter version of otherness through their construction of an increasingly elaborated 'vice figure'. A reading of Mankind demonstrates the interpretative power of this approach (Chapter Three). In the 1560's and 70's, vice behaviour becomes more complex, and so more ambiguous. Deconstructive theories suggest that this change can usefully be read as equivalent to the tendency of linguistic terms towards meaninglessness. The Tyde Tarrieth No Man is an example. Otherness comes to be located in certain 'abjected' social groups. In addition, vice play radically alters the original structure of the moral play, tending to replace narrative with showmanship. Enough is as Good as a Feast and Like Will to Like demonstrate this point. All For Money, however, uses dramatic structures symbolically, restoring meaning to vice play (Chapter Four). Feminist theory leads me to consider the place of woman as other in the moral plays. In The Play of the Wether, the endightement of mother messe and Lingua the 'female vice' figure is developed (Chapter Five). The social implications of that figure are considered through analyses of The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune and Lingua (Chapter Six). Finally, the figure of the 'good woman' is found to undergo increasing criticism, as the plays come to encode virtue as undesirable, and perhaps impossible (Chapter Seven). A Conclusion summarizes the main arguments of the thesis.

This thesis aims to reinterpret Tom Jones by putting it into some previously untried comparative contexts. As well as using the traditional points of reference such as Lucian, Swift and Sterne, I compare Fielding's satire with Flaubert's; his narrative poetics with Dickens's and Beckett's; his strategy of intrusion with George Eliot's; and his literary politics with Brecht's. I start by assuming the ambivalence of Tom Jones, but rather than seeing this as a conscious ironic duality, I argue that it derives from literary, moral and political uncertainty. The intrusive narrator is seen as an index of vacillation between first- and third-person narration, while conservative satiric influences are shown to complicate rather than strengthen the book's moral decisiveness. Its form, moreover, is shown to be dialogic, and unable to keep at bay either the reader's subjectivity or the flux of historical reality. But Fielding's achievement, I finally suggest, is to have put these factors into the service of his awareness of the always judgmental nature of literature. The thesis therefore takes on several previously uncovered areas: it is very specific about the nature and extent of the narrator's presence in Tom Jones; it draws new analogies between social and literary forms (in the sections on conversation) and political and literary structures (in the section on Fielding's plays). It thereby reveals new areas of Fielding's writings which can be treated as literary theory; finds detailed affinities between Fielding and writers not normally associated with him; and eventually constitutes a reading of Tom Jones as an inconclusive and open-ended text which implies not a denial but a redefinition of its historical importance.

The role of characterization in dramatic structure is assessed by theoretical criteria. Characters who perform actions necessary for the completion of the narrative sequence are said to be "bound" to the narrative; those without such obligations are "free". Characters who maintain a single, constant meaning during the course of a play are said to be "static"; characters who change or develop into new roles are "dynamic". Horatian decorum demanded that comic characters be static, and the characters of Plautine and Terentian tradition were almost always bound to narrative intrigue. However, evaluations of six Tudor comedies show an increasing use of non-classical characterization within the comic form. In the early comedies lohan lohan and Roister Doister all characters are bound and static, yet the impetus to enlarge the role of characterization is evident. The characters of lohan lohan are expanded from their French source, and Roister Doister includes extraneous episodes in which Udall displays his braggart hero. Free characters abound in Misogonus; as well the play brings dynamic characterization into the scope of comedy with the conversion of its prodigal son. Free characters offer new possibilities of non-narrative plotting. In comedies of the 1580s favourite traditional characters appear as diversions outside the action, and thematic arrangements of characters inform the increasingly complex plots. Lyly stresses the symbolic potential of characters in Endimion, whereas Greene uses dynamic characterization to heighten the illusion of independent figures in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Love's Labour's Lost exposes the limitations of comic artifice by pulling the characters between convention and individualization. By the end of the sixteenth century free and dynamic characters had become common, and characterization had established a sizable claim on the design of English comedy. These developments set the English form apart from its neoclassical counterparts.

To analyse the essential themes of Women in Love: i.e. three successive phases in a breakdown of moral health and three aspects of its recovery. To trace their development in Lawrence's other novels. To examine the position of Women in Love in this development and especially its relationship with The Rainbow. To present some illuminating affinities between his treatment of the themes and the treatment of similar themes in the novels he read or that formed a major part of the influences at work on him in his cultural environment.

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.