This thesis investigates the limitations and capacities of genres of the fantastic in their ability to represent the “break” between agency and structure, specifically the transformation of the former into the latter on the scale of radical social and political change. The transformation of utopian impulse to utopian programme is traditionally understood to present a representational impossibility—a “break”—and to require a shift into a less rigorous fantastic or magical representational register. This thesis considers this apparent impossibility to be a product of an ontology of atomised individualism that informs texts from mainstream Hollywood blockbusters to more putatively radical works of literature. It argues that these representations of agency, conceptually limited to individual action, occlude the reality and possibility of communal political agency. This thesis takes contemporary neoliberalism’s transformation of social structures and subjectivities to be driving this specific limiting effect on the ability to imagine alternative patterns of social relations and on the scope and potential of the imagination as such. Beginning with the development of a new political theoretical approach to fantastic literature, this thesis seeks to identify, through a series of close readings, the mechanisms by which this ideological work is performed by sf and fantasy texts, and then seeks to identify alternative representational techniques and strategies that overcome these limitations, allowing the societal imagination to think communal political agency, and move beyond the imaginative confines of the neoliberal horizon. Culminating in the work of China Miéville, this thesis finds that the effort to represent the “break” requires techniques and tropes taken from various genres, in order to capture the becoming—the producing and being-produced—of the world, of social structures, of communities and of subjectivities. The resulting literature has the potential to recruit the reader into occupying a position of radical, critical subjectivity—one which not only understands the malleable, constructed nature of social reality, but understands their own part in its reproduction, and the potential they wield, along with others, to alter it.

Within the last few decades much interest has arisen around the growing field of black British and “multi-ethnic” literature, yet the presence of protagonists of mixed origin in these works has been widely overlooked. The aim of this thesis therefore is to explore these characters across a range of genres, using Mixed Race Studies and other critical approaches in order to discover whether contemporary British writing challenges or perpetuates preconceived notions about mixed race subjectivity. Thematically structured, the thesis uses selected texts by authors such as Jackie Kay, Charlotte Williams and Lucinda Roy to investigate how contemporary literature provides a platform for self-expression in the form of the autobiography; explores gender and sexuality; challenges notions of British national identity and national narratives; and (re)considers the problematic concepts of “race” and “belonging”. Furthermore, in the last chapter, the thesis discusses the presence of the mixed race character within picture books for children and young adult fiction. In this section the thesis suggests that such characters can become a strategic tool for the promotion of a culturally diverse nation, whilst also providing young people with coping strategies against racism and introducing the reader to alternative histories. Wishing to employ a comparative and interdisciplinary framework, the thesis draws upon research from a range of different fields, analysing the discourse of “race” and the construction of “mixed race” with the support of writers such as Robert J.C. Young, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Miri Song, Suki Ali, and Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe.

This thesis explores the relationship between fin-de-siècle anti-emigration propaganda and fiction written by upper middle-class Irish women. Specifically, it examines the ways in which Catholic authors used the medium of fiction to propound an anti-emigration message analogous to that found in Catholic and nationalist press. Often at stake in their work is the degree to which the peasant female emigrant is to blame for the act of emigration, and the degree of agency she possesses in relation to the events or conditions that lead to this event. Class is a dominant determinant of agency in the depiction of the emigrants’ actions and decisions, as peasant and gentry emigrants are treated differently; the authors’ own class is also key in determining the stance they take on these decisions. In all of these treatments, the common themes throughout the study are the construction of Ireland as ‘Holy Ireland’, a haven of moral safety and spiritual regeneration, the ways in which the difference in authors’ political intent affects their treatment of the emigrant female, and the degree of realism with which the protagonist and her context are addressed. The authors under discussion, Mary Butler, Katharine Tynan, Rosa Mulholland, and Geraldine Cummins, though well-known in their time, have been almost completely forgotten, along with their literary and cultural contribution to Ireland’s history. Aside from contemporary criticism and reviews of their work, relatively little information exists about the authors under discussion. Consequently, this study seeks to initiate a conversation about the authors and the way their adaptation of Catholic nationalist discourse participated in emigration debates. This thesis is the first full-length study to examine the works of authors who adapted literary themes in order to create a discourse that actively discouraged young women from leaving Ireland during a period of female-dominated emigration.

Using Jerome J. McGann’s suggestion that the earliest fragments of Manfred might have been written during his Levantine Tour (c 2 July 1809 – 14 July 1811), this thesis aims to offer a new perspective on Byron’s Manfred, taking into account issues inherent in Byron’s patrician upbringing, his experience of Ottoman Greece, his notion of a Classical tradition, and his previous Byronic heroes. The majority of motifs previously perceived as “Gothic” can thus be seen in a new light, namely, as “Greek”. Another inspiration for a “Greek” reading of Manfred has been the fact that Western-European formative education and the literary canon have been based on works written by fifth-century BC Athenian writers, works which evoke a model of intellectual and political sophistication which I call, “the Greek imaginary” on the basis of its essentially fictive quality. However, the Greek imaginary formed part of a nobleman’s education from the days of fifth-century Athens until well after Byron’s age, by the time of which “Greekness” was a form of noblesse oblige amongst privileged North-Western Europeans, while “Greece” denoted a sense of the (imaginary) origin of Western-European culture. In effect, this thesis offers an insight into Byron’s Greek imaginary, shaped by the poet’s Classical education, his loyalty to the British patrician class, and his choice of reading matter from childhood onwards, as well as by what I call, his “inner Greek landscape”, namely an inner mental construct formed during his Levantine Grand Tour, wherein the “Oriental” Greek landscape was tempered by the literary landscapes of his Classical primers. This study provides a detailed account of the ideological and cultural traditions in which Byron’s intellect was formed, showing how the landscapes of Western Greece and Switzerland were conflated with the literary landscapes of Pausanias, Longinus and English pastoral poetry. The Introduction surveys the Greek imaginary, its historical dissemination, its respective appropriations by the Roman Empire and by North-Western Europeans, especially by British Whigs, and its legacy within British poetry, especially regarding the description of mountain landscapes. Aiming to facilitate an insight into Byron’s formative experiences, the chapter offers a survey of eighteenth-century Philhellenism and its socio-political conditions, namely the institution of the Grand Tour, burgeoning Orientalism, Winckelmann's aesthetic reassessment of the plastic arts (followed by the trends of antiquarianism and the picturesque in British painting) and the French Revolution. Here, I draw an ideological and aesthetic distinction between the Greek imaginary and Gothicism and then I outline Byron's Greek imaginary. Chapter One assesses Byron’s intellectual formation from the time he was taught to read until the moment of his Grand Tour (c 1794 – 1809), reviewing it within the cultural and ideological framework of the British Whigs, whose education was based on the study of Ancient Greek and Latin and whose adult culture displayed the dissemination of tropes taken from Classical texts, for example the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, within Whig gentlemen’s clubs, and pastoral and travel writing. In effect, both Byron’s comprehensive knowledge of Ancient Greek history and literature and his Enlightened Orientalism can be read as a product of his patrician upbringing. Chapter Two follows the movements of Byron and John Cam Hobhouse in Western Greece prior to their arrival in Athens (c October – December 1809) with Pausanias and the Arnaout servants of the tyrant Ali Pasha as their guides and protectors. It is argued that Byron’s “inner Greek landscape” (a collection of motifs which appear in all of his works from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and which I see epitomized by Manfred) was formed during the initial three months of his Grand Tour. Here, various elements of that “landscape”, both topographical as well as literary and metaphorical, are established. This chapter also surveys Byron’s antiquarianism, scholarly Orientalism (namely his studies in Romaic philology) and his divided attitude to the abstract legacy of Classical Greece and the contemporary Greeks. The last issue was epitomized by the concepts of the “mark of Cain” and the Byronic hero’s tragic love for his other, (apparently a native of Ottoman Greece), which I see as the two leitmotifs of Byron's poetic fictions featuring the Byronic hero (namely from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage until Manfred). The chapter also charts the Platonic notion of eros and a quest for the Kalon, pivotal to Byron's concept of love as absent presence, and key to the Byronic hero's self-torture and self-sufficiency. Chapter Three considers the events preceding and surrounding the composition of Manfred (April 1816 – May 1817), following Byron on his second Continental Tour, where his Greek imaginary was displaced onto the Belgian plains, German hills, Swiss mountains, the city-state of Venice and the Mekhitarist monastery of St Lazarus. This chapter observes the impact of Thomas Taylor's Neo-Platonist treatise, A Dissertation of the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, matched by the impact of Byron’s new friend, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, on Byron's subsequent composition of Manfred. The influences of Taylor and Shelley are evident in Byron's respective views of suffering in life as a part of the soul’s philosophical journey, and in his approach to the Promethean myth, Classical democracy, and the Gothic trope, the last serving as an excuse for a series of sceptical discussions culminating with the Diodati contest. Lastly, this chapter traces the influence of Shelley and his friend Peacock on Byron's reassessment of the Promethean and Christian myth during the time of his collaboration with the Mekhitarist monks of St Lazarus, when he was simultaneously writing Manfred and translating the apocryphal words of St Paul the Apostle, which can be read as approving of Manfred’s ultimate self-sufficiency. Following insights from the previous chapters, Chapter Four provides a close reading of Manfred, assessing the play as a form of simultaneous dialogue between Aeschylus, Plato, and Byron’s own hero. While the hero’s musings and monologues are seen as a reiteration of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, and while his notion of a (deflected) eros seems inherited from the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Oriental Tales, the plot of the play seems to follow the course of an initiation rite (theoria) evoked in Plato’s (and Taylor’s) notion of the Eleusinian and Bacchic mysteries. During the course of the play, Manfred is seen as an initiate reclaiming his lost eros, which then enables him to behold the highest good, the Kalon, and to come to terms with the fact that he was, and will be, his own destroyer, whereby displacing the Almighty as the (unjust) ruler of the Universe. In the conclusion, I recapitulate the key terms and concept of my thesis, the function and dissemination of Manfred as an ontologically subversive and politically ambitious reading play and as a contemporary myth. Lastly, the conclusion outlines the significance of Manfred within Byron’s subsequent artistic development by ushering in a shift of Byron’s focus onto collective and cosmic forces, and a more and more impersonal hero.

This thesis focuses on the critically neglected short film adaptations of Lawrence’s short stories. Building on recent advances in adaptation studies, it looks beyond ideas of fidelity to emphasise how each film adaptation functions as a creative response to a written text (or texts), foregrounding the significance of the fluid text, transtextuality, genre and the role of the reader. The films analysed in the thesis represent a body of work ranging from the very first Lawrence adaptation to the most recent digital version. The three case-study chapters draw attention to the fluidity of textual and visual sources, the significance of generic conventions and space in adaptation, the generic potentialities latent within Lawrence’s short stories, and the genetic nature of adaptation and genre (which combines replication with variation). By considering Lawrence’s short stories through the lens of these rare short films, the thesis provides a fresh, forward-looking approach to Lawrence studies which engages with current adaptation theory in order to reflect on the evolving critical reception of the author’s work.

The aim of this dissertation is to trace the development of Lawrence’s thought about the interdependence between language, selfhood and otherness in the period between the composition of Women in Love and the closing years of his literary career. Around the time of Women in Love’s inception, Lawrence saw the relationship between self and language in terms of the gap separating the speaker’s experience from his utterance. This gap, Lawrence believed, could be bridged through a type of verbal expression that was qualitatively different from the static language of representation on which Western rationalism was predicated. In “Foreword to Women in Love” this authentic mode of expression is referred to as “the new idea” arising out of the individual’s “struggle for verbal consciousness” (276). However, the complexity of linguistic signification, revealed on the dramatic plane of the novel itself, proves the one-to-one correspondence between expression and experience impossible to achieve. Lawrence’s exploration of the interdependence between selfhood and language continued with his essays on psychology, which followed chronologically Women in Love. In both Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence describes the ego as a rational construct analogous to the static language of representation. This structural homology allows the full verbal representability of the ego whilst rendering un-signifyable all those facets of subjectivity which transcend reason. The argument of Lawrence’s psychology essays can therefore be said to introduce an important twist in his earlier views on the interrelation between self and language. If the “Foreword to Women in Love” envisaged at least the possibility for an absolute coincidence between experience and verbal expression, the psychology essays reveal this at-oneness as virtually unattainable. With the hindsight of the late twentieth century developments in psychoanalytic thought, the argument put forth in Psychoanalysis and Fantasia can be said to foreshadow certain aspects of Jacques Lacan’s and Julia Kristeva’s views on subjectivity. The completion of the psychology essays left Lawrence undeterred in his quest for a new mode of signification able to reveal the entirety of the human self. Since all his attempts to elicit a solution from within Western ontology proved futile, he turned his attention to a variety of non-European civilisations, which the science of the time believed to share a mode of being different from the one engendered by rationalism. This essentially primitivist image of the non-European other had a profound impact on Lawrence who was fascinated to discover that societies so radically different from his own were predicated on the same state of at-oneness between experience and language which he himself hoped to achieve in the present. It was with these thoughts that Lawrence departed to the United States to familiarise himself with the traditional, non-European culture of the Native Americans and find inspiration therein. In other words, Lawrence’s impulse to travel to the New World was rooted in preconceived ideas which tend to transform the other into a projection issuing from the self. These ideas influenced in varying degrees Lawrence’s account of the indigenous people throughout his stay in North America, yet, in time, he began to develop a more authentic sense of their otherness which was reflected in his narrative technique. The Native American essays included in the collection Mornings in Mexico demonstrate how Lawrence began to, literally, write himself out of his own projections by creating what can be referred to as a self-conscious discourse on alterity. The specificity of this discourse lies in its capacity to foreground its very own cultural bias and thus bracket off, as it were, the truth that it ostensibly affirms. In this sense it prefigures the methodological adjustments that Jacques Derrida prescribed to late twentieth-century science of ethnology. The signifying logic of Lawrence’s discourse on alterity is applied further in some of his later works which examine cultural otherness in terms of a particular mode of expression epitomised by the symbol. The symbol, conceived of as a particular type of language, functions in accordance with the same logic of transcendence that we found in the discourse of the Native American essays in Mornings in Mexico, in the sense that it simultaneously affirms and subverts a particular meaning. However, if the essays’ narrative leaves an unbridgeable gap between the European observer and the indigenous people, the symbol creates a signifying space where self and other can genuinely interact. Thus the collection of Places elaborates a social model allowing culturally diverse communities to co-exist without infringing upon each other’s difference. Using Julia Kristeva’s theory of inter-subjective relations across a cultural divide, put forth in her work Strangers to Ourselves, I will try to demonstrate that the social model Lawrence develops in Sketches of Etruscan Places is based on a fundamental re-conceptualisation of the correspondence between selfhood and language, conceived as symbolic discourse. Since the symbol contains its own undoing in the dynamic flux of experience, its meaning is characterised with a semantic surplus, an otherness, that can never be fully explicated. Symbolic discourse can therefore signify the ever changing and ultimately unknowable dimension of the self, which Lawrence calls variously dynamic consciousness or the unconscious, and which the static language of representation is unable to express. In other words, the symbol can accommodate both the self-sameness of the ego and the otherness of the non-cerebral self. By positing in language the decentred human subject, never at one with itself, the symbol renders hollow the idea of a homogenous society based on individual selfsameness. Since the subject is always at variance with itself, social cohesion begins to appear possible only if predicated on difference, a difference that all the members of society share. This sameness in difference creates an open and inclusive social framework able to integrate people irrespective of their cultural background. In this sense, the essays included in Sketches of Etruscan Places create a new balance between the notions of language, selfhood and otherness that is both similar and different from the one we described in Part I of this thesis. The correspondence between self and language, i.e. the speaker and his utterance has been regenerated at the cost of a radical redefinition of the notion of language. This redefinition, in turn, has been made possible by Lawrence’s recourse to cultural otherness and has led to the development of a model of self-other interrelation whereby self and other can coexist in difference.

William Shakespeare has led a rich and varied afterlife in Ireland. That this history documents the development of distinct Shakespeares in circulation during different periods also reveals unique possibilities for understanding the relationship between the literatures of England and Ireland at particular cultural moments. Shakespeares Wake: Appropriation and Cultural Politics in Dublin, 1867-1922, interrogates the ways in which the contentious Anglo-Irish cultural politics that obtained in Dublin between the Fenian and Easter risings shaped the Shakespeares of Matthew Arnold’s lectures On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), Edward Dowden’s Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875), and the early essays of W. B. Yeats first collected in Ideas of Good and Evil (1903) and The Cutting of an Agate (1912). But James Joyce’s own (ab)use of the Shakespearean text in Ulysses (1922) underscores the instability of the binary oppositions with which Arnold, Dowden, and Yeats had each constructed their appropriations, demonstrating the pernicious manner in which the terms of Anglo-Irish cultural politics had come to mediate the relationship between the colonial reading subject and its object in Dublin during the late nineteenth century. Joyce’s Shakespeare in this way marks the point where the discourse of literary history ends and that of the literary as such starts.

John Eliot (1601-1690) was one of the first English missionaries to settle in the New World. Over the past four centuries his life and missionary work with the Algonquian Indians of Massachusetts Bay, New England, have been documented in various forms including biographies, poems, fiction and children's stories. In addition to his active missionary work, Eliot was also a profile writer and translator: he contributed to many promotional pamphlets, authored one of the most controversial commonwealth treatises of the seventeenth century, published fictional dialogues of Algonquian Indians, composed language and logic primers to help in the translation of Massachusett into English and vice versa. His most ambitious and famous publication is his translation of the Bible into the Massachusett dialect of Algonquian. Throughout the twentieth century, Eliot's reputation as a missionary and a translator has received much critical attention, especially from historians of the colonial period. However, given recent moves to expand the canon of colonial literature, it is surprising that there is no book-length literary analysis of his work. In order to redress this balance and consider Eliot's work from a literary rather than a historical perspective, this thesis considers the written records of direct speech, conversations, speeches, dialogues and deathbed confessions of Algonquian Praying Indians, in order to investigate the use and manipulation of written and spoken communicative strategies. By considering Eliot's work in terms of speech, text and performance, this thesis traces the performative nature of cultural identity through the emergence and inter-dependence of English, New English, Indian, and Praying Indian identities.

In 1792, the inventor and illusionist Paul Philidor unveiled the ‘Phantasmagoria’ to the people of Paris. Coined by combining the Greek words ‘phantasma’ (appearance, vision, ghost) and ‘agora’ (assembly), Philidor had intended the name to suggest a vast crowd of the undead, a riotous carnival of phantoms. He promised his audience that, using the projections of a magic lantern and other ingenious mechanical devices, he would show them the illusory shapes of ghosts and monsters, reunite lovers separated by death, and call fiends out of hell. However, this exhibition of illusory spectres was to become something far more than a mere footnote in the history of Romantic popular entertainment. The Phantasmagoria was to assume a metaphorical function in the mindscape of the period; this cavalcade of spectres was to come to serve as an image for not only the fantastic terrors of dreams and hallucinations, but also for the unbounded creative power of the imagination. Besides this, the metaphor of the phantasmagoria was to subsume into itself an idea which had its origin in the ‘Curiosity Culture’ of the previous century: the curious collection. As time wore on, this Curious – or Phantasmagorical – collection became a symbol by which writers of the late Nineteenth Century could signal their resistance to bourgeois conformity and their own paradoxical celebration and rejection of consumer culture. This work examines the evolution of the Phantasmagoria metaphor as well as the development of its associated aesthetic: the aesthetic of the curious collection – the collection of weird and fabulous objects that astonishes the senses and confuses the mind, erasing the boundaries between reality and fantasy.

Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha offers the most comprehensive study to date of an intriguing but understudied body of plays. It undertakes a major reconsideration of the processes that determine the constitution of the Shakespeare canon through study of that canon’s exclusions. This thesis combines historical analysis of the emergence and development of the "Shakespeare Apocrypha" with current theorisations of dramatic collaboration. Several new theoretical and historical approaches to early modern authorship have emerged in the last decade. This thesis breaks new ground by bringing them together to demonstrate the untenability of the dichotomy between Canon and Apocrypha. Both within and without the text, the author is only one of several factors that shape the plays, and canonical boundaries are contingent rather than absolute. Chapter One draws on the New Textualism and studies of material print attributions, viewing the construction of the apocryphal canon alongside the growth of Shakespeare’s cultural prestige over three centuries. Chapter Two applies recent repertory studies to authorship questions, treating five anonymous King’s Men’s plays as part of a shared company practice that transcends authorial divisions. Chapter Three seeks dialogue between post-structuralist theory and "disintegrationist" work, revealing a shared concern with the plurality of agents within disputed plays. Within all three models of authorship, the divisions between "Shakespeare" and "not Shakespeare" are shown to be ambiguous and subjective. The associations of many disputed plays with the Shakespeare canon are factual, not fanciful. The ambiguity of canonical boundaries ultimately demonstrates the insufficiency of the "CompleteWorks" model for study of Shakespeare’s drama. Chapter Four confronts the commercial considerations that impose practical limitations on the organisation of plays. In so doing, this thesis establishes the theoretical principles by which the neglected plays of the Apocrypha can be readmitted into discourse, dispersing the fixed authority of the authorial canon.