This PhD thesis focuses upon the work of the neglected modernist poet Joseph Macleod (1903-1984), exploring in particular the development of his poetic style from the impacted, allusive and opaque high modernist long poem The Ecliptic (1930), through to the five books of poetry written under the pseudonym ‘Adam Drinan’: The Cove (1940), The Men of the Rocks (1942), The Ghosts of the Strath (1943), Women of the Happy Island (1944) and Script From Norway (1953). In these poems, he developed a documentary style of verse containing a strong simplicity and a socialist focus upon locality. An Old Olive Tree (1971), his final poem sequence, is entirely autobiographical, containing poems which meditate upon the friendships and familial ties which moulded his identity, and the ageing process. The causes and the implications, artistic and political, of his transformation are related to the key environments and literary relationships of his life. This exploration entails an investigation into his personal papers. The NLS archive is extensive, and in preparation for this work I undertook a first full listing of the contents of the previously uncatalogued materials. I am selective in my use of material from this vast primary resource, which contains over ten thousand items. I do, however, wish to give an indication of the literary correspondences this writer, theatre director, theatre historian and broadcaster maintained, in particular as a poet in contact with other significant poets and writers of his time. Macleod’s writing style changed over time in response to various factors, including his recognition of the importance of addressing audience and readership, as much in his work as an actor and director of the Cambridge Festival Theatre (1928-35) and in his work for the BBC as a radio announcer during the World War II, as in his poetry and prose writings. The thesis consists of six chapters, each dealing with an area of Macleod’s life and work, in chronological order. For the sake of clarity, Chapter One is an introduction giving biographical details and an overview of Macleod’s life and work, such as his early life at Rugby School, and his important and close friendship with the artist, critic and art theorist Adrian Stokes there. It also considers his time at Balliol College, Oxford, and his key friendship with Graham Greene, his time at the Cambridge Festival Theatre, and begins to examine his middle years announcing at the BBC. Chapter Two considers Macleod’s early poems and in The Rugbeian, the school’s literary journal, and his editorship with Stokes. It investigates his contributions of poems to The Oxford Outlook (edited, at the time, by Greene), as well as Oxford Poetry, 1924 and 1925. Chapter Three examines Beauty and the Beast (1927), Macleod’s book of literary observation, his first publication in book form, which appeared in the United States as well as in Britain. Chapter Four examines his major work, The Ecliptic, and his correspondence with Ezra Pound, and highlights Macleod’s views on both past and contemporary poetry. Chapter Five briefly considers his work at the Festival Theatre, as an actor, producer, director and writer, and the poetry he wrote and published for the Cambridge Festival (New Lease) Programme (1933-35) while he was editor. It also considers his interest in socialist politics. The main chapter focus is The Cove and The Men of the Rocks, the first two books published under the pseudonym ‘Adam Drinan’, considering the reasons for his adoption of a pseudonym. Chapter Six looks at the final three Drinan books, The Ghosts of the Strath (1943), Women of the Happy Island (1944) and Script From Norway (1953), and the essays he wrote at this time for Scottish journals. It examines the influence of the BBC upon his writing during his mature period. The Conclusion engages briefly with his last years in Italy and his final published collection, An Old Olive Tree (1971), and assesses the complete trajectory of his poetic journey. Two Appendices are included, the first of which contains the poet’s key correspondence, and second gives brief details of Macleod’s works, along with the publishers and editors responsible for their production. Dates of publication, and significant responses both at the time and later are included, to clarify the as yet relatively thin critical context of his work after its original reception.

China was subject to increasingly pressing foreign presence and influence from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, but it was never formally colonised. Accordingly, foreign residents of many nationalities occupied an ambiguous position in the country. This was particularly so during the latter decade of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries, a period of internal unrest, revolution and external wars that saw expatriates either dismissed as irrelevant bystanders in China’s radical process of domestic change, or subject to sporadic but sustained campaigns to rid the country of their presence. Focusing on fiction written by Western residents of China during the period during 1890–1914, this thesis investigates, from a primarily historicising perspective, the extent to which their ambivalent ‘insider/outsider’ status, and the turbulent political and social conditions that they experienced or witnessed during this time, informed the work that they produced for domestic expatriate or overseas markets. It addresses the fictional output of several expatriate novelists, principally: Homer Lea; Mrs Archibald Little (A.E.N. Bewicke); Charles Welsh Mason; Paul and Veronica King (‘William A. Rivers’); and Bertram Lenox Simpson (‘Putnam Weale’). All produced factual works as well as fiction, and careful examination of their diverse fictional subtexts uncovers points of view often radically at variance with their opinions of record. Variously involved in social reform work, employed in Chinese government service (in the form of the Chinese Maritime Customs), engaged in criminal enterprise and associated with revolutionaries, these authors were also part of extensive professional, family and friendship networks throughout the country. An examination of their fictional representations of two social concerns – interracial liaisons and footbinding – reveals that in the context of the latter there is a significantly gender-differentiated response; while the Boxer Rebellion and the 1911 republican Revolution prompt both male and female writers to embark on remarkably similar generic explorations of events, as they universally invoke Romantic and Gothic strategies respectively in otherwise diverse works. In their similarities and in their differences, expatriate authors’ literary engagement with revolutions both social and political suggest that the China they sought to portray in fiction was as subtly varied as their own, distinct, personal relationships with the country they called home.

The proposition that ecological crisis can be ameliorated or even resolved if humans were to 'reconnect to the natural world', has been steadily gaining in popularity since the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962). In a collection of my own poems, Habitude, I unpack this idea, asking what 'connection to nature' might mean and exploring ways in which ecological poetry can be said to enact - thematically and formally - the kind of connection it seeks to encourage. I discuss the use of the poetic 'I' and its absence, scrupulous observation (of mindscape as much as landscape) and mythopoetic narrative, as poetic 'strategies of connection'. In this way, the poems invite the reader to (re)negotiate an emotional, intellectual and spiritual relationship between the human and nonhuman. Habitude suggests that 'connection to nature' is not 'shining union' (Tim Lilburn) but interrelationship, an interdependent co-existence of diverse and disparate species. With reference to both ecocritical texts, in particular the work of Timothy Morton, and contemporary ecopoetics (John Burnside, Robin Robertson, Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson, amongst others), I present a deliberately polyphonic thesis in an effort to formally embody the notion of interrelationship. Polyphony is represented not just in the different writing styles (academic/conversational/poetic/personal) and genres (poetry and prose), but also in the presence of three distinct voices: alongside the collection of poetry, I engage in two conversations with fellow ecological poets, Susan Richardson and David Troupes. The conversations focus on ecopoetic practice and 'strategies of connection'. In an essay which offers a personal take on 'ecopoetry' and its role in facilitating interrelationship, I explore the strengths of ecological poetry at this time of accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss. I suggest that its value lies not so much in 'saving the earth' (Jonathan Bate), but in offering a covert politics of potential – a space to renegotiate human-nonhuman interrelationship, whilst resting in uncertainty.

In this study, I set out to examine the multifarious ways in which Romantic-era women writers appropriated the Gothic for genres other than the novel, and to explore the implications of these appropriations. I look at different manifestations of the Gothic written by women in non-novelistic texts –– such as drama, autobiography, poetry, and chapbooks –– and I contend that the relationship of women writers to gothic writing is more complex and ambivalent than has been shown in earlier studies, revealing the special and intricate relationships of Gothic with genre and gender. In the first chapter, I compare two plays that are based on a well-known highland legend, Joanna Baillie’s _The Family Legend_ and Thomas Holcroft’s _The Lady of the Rock_. I elucidate the role played by genre and gender in formulating two adaptations that bear, each in its own way, on themes of liberation, tyranny and domestic violence. One of the main issues addressed by this chapter is how Baillie appropriates gothic tropes and adapts a legend to suit her gender specific literary and political purposes. In the second chapter, I refer to Diane Hoeveler’s concept of “gothic feminism” and use it to read Mary Robinson’s _Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson_ and “Golfre: A Gothic Swiss Tale”, a long narrative poem. I consider these texts as instances of an ideological appropriation of varieties of the Gothic that victimizes women, and thus reveals their vulnerability in order, paradoxically, to make a case for their rights and to expose hegemonic patriarchal constructs. In the third chapter I look at the poetic works of the little known Anne Bannerman whose utilization of the Gothic has centred on the deformed body, in this way obliquely revealing her own definition of and experience with disability. The fourth chapter examines yet another minor women writer, Sarah Wilkinson, who lived in almost total obscurity, yet wrote numerous gothic chapbooks. I study her appropriation of the didactic modes of Gothic that are found in chap-literature, and in this way I highlight a new strand of the Gothic that weaves gothic trappings with elements of both popular literature and middle-class morality. In the fifth and final chapter I return to Joanna Baillie in order to study _Orra_ which I believe to be one of her most unusual plays in that it uses gothic conventions to offer a critique on these very conventions. I use Elizabeth Fay’s definition of the “radical critique gothic” to illuminate my reading.

This thesis examines the representations of the self as a cultural agent, both reacting to and actively shaping codes of social and artistic respectability, as displayed in the diaries of the canonical Victorian writers Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, Henry Crabb Robinson, George Eliot, George Gissing, John Ruskin and Gerard Manley Hopkins. It analyses the impact of wider ideological and social imperatives on the diarists’ subjective experience and reads their tendency to silence the self as a symptom of the cultural pressure to merge their private and public persona. These diaries represented a forum in which the diarists perpetually negotiated their own value within the Victorian ideology of productivity and thus not only reflect their inner world but also the cultural climate of the nineteenth century. Chapter One traces the selected diarists’ reluctance to reveal private information, as well as their tendency to foreground professional productivity, to the social pressure to efface emotions relating to the self and to only cultivate those that nurtured the community. It identifies the similarities between the compulsive self-discipline advocated in the psychological discourse of the period, particularly Alexander Bain’s The Emotions and the Will (1859), and the willingness to both live up to and actively shape the cultural codes of respectability that Elizabeth Eastlake and Henry Crabb Robinson display in their diaries. Chapter Two compares and contrasts the desire for maximal professional productivity as exhibited in George Eliot’s and George Gissing’s diaries. Both worked obstinately in order to increase their own value: whereas Eliot sought to redeem her ‘guilt of the privileged,’ Gissing desperately needed to increase his financial solvency through literary output. Chapter Three discusses the ways in which John Ruskin’s diary helped him block out unrespectable and painful private experiences through transforming his obsessive desire to appropriate and “feel” visual experience into a professional task. Chapter Four shows that Gerard Manley Hopkins—because he was acutely concerned by his cultural otherness caused by his homosexuality—not only sought refuge and validation by joining the Jesuits, but by narrowing his realm of experience to nature, merged the private and the public self into the figure of the professional, asexual, dutiful and disinterested observer.

Over the four hundred years which have elapsed since the publication of The Faerie Queene, the effectiveness of Arthur as the central hero of the poem has been called into question time and time again. Critics have objected to the sporadic nature of Arthur's appearances, and to the fact that this quest is unfinished. In the first chapter of my thesis I provide a survey of Spenser criticism, covering neoclassical and romantic views as well as a selection of twentieth century studies. My own argument centres on the belief that the role of Arthur in The Faerie Queene is not best understood in terms of a narrative with a beginning, middle and end. In contrast to the titular heroes of each book, perfection is the starting point of Arthur's story, not a goal he gradually works towards. The effects of Arthur's interventions do differ from book to book, but this reflects the evolving moral allegory of The Faerie Queene rather than the development of Arthur himself. In order to highlight the pre-eminence of Arthur vis-a-vis the titular knights of The Faerie Queene, chapter two compares the presentation of Arthur in a selection of medieval texts: the Celtic Arthur of the Mabinogion, the courtly king of Chretien de Troyes, Arthur's relation to the Grail in La Queste del Saint Graal, the warrior-king of Layamon's Brut, and the gathering together of different types of Arthurian narrative by Sir Thomas Malory. There has not been extended study of Spenser's Arthur in this context - those critics who touch on the topic tend not to go beyond the generalisation that Spenser exploits the prestige of Arthurian tradition whilst avoiding the constraints of reworking the familiar story.

The main aim of this thesis is to explore Christina Rossetti?s poetic vocation and persona as a nineteenth-century woman poet in the competitive literary marketplace. It begin by mapping out the socio-historical factors that, I argue, shape the construction and reception of women poets. Gender ideology is central to this issue, which the thesis explores by comparison of Christina Rossetti?s work with the paintings and poetry of her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti. An overview of contemporary critical opinion and reception history in Chapter One demonstrates the construction of the Rossettis? professional image and sense of vocation. The following chapters compare reciprocal works by each poet in a range of literary genres: the early semi-autobiographical prose works ?Maude? and ?Hand and Soul?, the narrative poems ?Goblin Market? and ?Jenny?, and the amatory sonnet sequences Monna Innominata and The House of Life. Fundamental to these comparisons is the image of woman, for femininity is seen to be at the heart of the nineteenth-century aesthetic. The concept of woman as image is unravelled, in Chapters Two, Four and Six, in a discussion of Dante Gabriel Rossetti?s wife, Elizabeth Siddal, who was also a painter and poet. Elizabeth Siddal?s value as an image superseded her value as an artist and indeed a woman. The inter-relation between fallen women and women poets is linked to the problems of women poets as both poetic producers and poetic inspiration. The particular problem of the woman poet is a continuous strand of argument throughout the chapters. Christina Rossetti?s poetry is seen to explore the choices available to nineteenth-century women in a dominant patriarchy. Her resistance to and compliance with these choices is shown as central to her work. The final chapter joins the strands of the argument to focus on woman as icon, commodity and image as it is demonstrated by both brother and sister. Elizabeth Siddal is shown to have lost her identity in favour of her image. Dante Gabriel Rossetti is identified by the image of the women represented in his poetry and painting. These women become the sign of his artistic persona. Christina Rossetti?s tenacity in retaining her identity is located in her religious faith, her poetic gift and her ability to both comply with and resist patriarchal dominance.

This study explores the shifting notions of postmodernism developed through Muriel Spark’s fiction, and thereby clarifies this artist’s own postmodernism. I use Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of the notion in his The Postmodern Condition (1979), that there is no grand narrative, as my starting point, and deploy various postmodernist theories, which can illuminate Spark’s art and can in turn be illuminated by her art, in my arguments. Throughout the thesis, I focus on two of Spark’s most important themes as crucial keys to understanding her postmodernism: the theme of individual subjectivity and the theme of the interplay of life and art. The thesis begins with the claims Spark makes for her individuality and her individual art through the voice of “I”. Chapter I considers issues about being a woman and an artist, which Spark raises around the narrator-heroine of a fictional memoir, A Far Cry from Kensington (1988). Here I present this heroine as a definition of the strength of Sparkian women who liberate themselves by practicing art. Chapter II discusses Loitering with Intent (1981), a fictional autobiography of a fictional woman novelist, alongside Spark’s own autobiography and her various biographical works. This section illustrates Spark’s notion of the “author” in relation to the “work” - and an author in control in her sense - by investigating the dynamic interplay of life and art in the form of this novel. Chapter III analyses The Driver’s Seat (1970), the novel which most shockingly elucidates the postmodern condition according to Spark and demonstrates her postmodernist narrative strategies. Her concern with the crisis of the “subject” in the world in its postmodern phase is observed in the figure of the heroine, a woman who has tried and failed to be an author in control. I argue that Spark here theorises the notion of subject, by providing her own version of the psychoanalytical “death drive” and also represents the Lacanian real as the unfigurable with this figure. Chapter IV and Chapter V follow the developments of Spark’s discussion of the crisis of the “subject” in two of her later novels. Chapter IV concentrates on the theme of Otherness in Symposium (1990). Chapter V discusses Reality and Dreams (1996), in which Spark pursues the theme of excess and opens up the contradictions inherent in this notion to bring about a new philosophy of life by art as excess.

This thesis establishes contexts for the interrogation of modern travel narratives about African countries. The nineteenth century saw significant advances in travel in Africa’s interior. For the first time much of Africa was revealed to a Western audience through the reports of explorers and other travellers. My thesis focuses on more recent representations of African countries, discussing changes in travel writing in the twentieth century, from 1930–2000. This thesis studies key twentieth-century representations of four African countries: Ethiopia, Kenya, the Republic of Congo and South Africa. I interrogate Western constructions, with a specific focus on narratives by Evelyn Waugh, Wilfred Thesiger, Dervla Murphy and Redmond O’Hanlon. Narratives of South Africa by Laurens van der Post, Noni Jabavu and Dan Jacobson also provide important insights into African self-construction in travel writing, which is, as yet, an under-developed genre in African literature. I begin by sketching a historical framework of the Western idea of Africa which, most recently, has been characterised by nineteenth-century interpretations of the Dark Continent. The process of decolonisation and the emergence of postcolonial discourses have challenged these constructions. An analysis of travel narratives from 1930–2000 reveals a variety of responses to the growing distaste for older, colonial attitudes. Increasingly, Western travellers seek both to create culturally relevant Africas and to subvert older Western creations. Travel writers seek to re-present destinations, to examine and modify existing discourses. There are fewer texts of exploration, but many writers now travel in order to write, looking for new ways to re-imagine and, thereby, rediscover what is already known. Developments in modern thought influence writers’ self-representations, as well as their presentations of the Other. Twentieth-century women construct themselves according to new social constructions of femininity, no longer juxtaposing hardiness with more traditional feminine traits, but proving that their capability and endurance as travellers equals that of men. The traveller is always central to the narrative and so it is always important to interrogate the writer’s self-presentation. Trends in twentieth-century travel narratives reveal an increasingly personal focus; this can bring a unique quality to the account, but also raises questions of authenticity. Foregrounding the creative process of producing a travel narrative reveals the agendas which inform self-presentation. This thesis points towards the potential for much further study on the continual process of re-presenting Africa but, also, the contextualisation of Western travel narratives continually points up the lack of African self-representation in travel writing. There has been little response from Africans to the long history of Western travellers imagining Africa; future dialogues with African texts of self-exploration and self-representation will, potentially, reveal new complexities, bringing greater depth and diversity to the discourses already in place.

This thesis attempts to account for the unusual problems raised for interpretation by the works of Angela Carter, as well as the particular pleasures which they provide. It demonstrates how Carter's self-conscious novels speculate about the very nature of fiction and, in doing so, challenge conventions which govern the way we interpret not only fiction but also ourselves and our world. The second half of the thesis is concerned with issues of sexual difference, specifically the strategies used by Carter to demystify the false universals which govern gender politics. Chapter 1 engages with both Nights at the Circus and a selection of reviews of Carter's work in order to establish the particular reader/text relationships which her fiction demands. The breakdown of the traditional distinction between centre and margins in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is the focus of Chapter 2: this chapter incorporates Jacques Derrida's model of invagination in its examination of the distinctive intertextual qualities Carter's work displays. Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate an important strategic technique employed by Carter's novels to expose and exploit specific reading conventions which underlie the interpretation of character, identity, and gender. Chapter 3 shows how four novels, The Magic Toyshop, Heroes and Villains, Love, and The Passion of New Eve, promote a 'realist' mode of reading character whilst continually reminding the reader that character is a construction, in order to demonstrate the power of the conventions which create the illusion of knowablc individuals both within and outside fiction. Chapter 4 shows how The Passion of New Eve foregrounds a central feminist question, 'What is a Woman?' This chapter examines the ways in which Carter utilises gender stereotypes, particularly those used to define the female body, in order to debunk them. It also contains an account of the debate about pornography which Carter's work has excited amongst critics. Finally, Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the New Eve figures which recur across Carter's fiction and examine the affirmative feminist politics which sustain it. Chapter 5 asks the question, 'What constitutes a liberated female subject?' while Chapter 6, returning to Nights at the Circus, celebrates Fevvers as just such a figure. Each chapter demonstrates how Carter's work continually anticipates readers' responses and dramatises its own fictional procedures. Each chapter also attempts to illuminate, from a variety of perspectives, the liberating 'reading space', which her fiction opens up.