This thesis is an examination of Liz Lochhead's three published plays: Blood and Ice (1982), Dracula (1989), and Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1989). Each of these three plays deals centrally with a literary or historical pre-text: the life of Mary Shelley and the ideology of English Romanticism in Blood and Ice; Bram Stoker's novel Dracula and late-Victorian British ruling-class culture in Dracula; and sixteenth-century Scottish and English history in Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off. Given these dramatic emphases, the critical emphasis of this thesis is the plays' reassessment of their pre-texts, and particularly of those pre-texts' power to exercise and selectively to confer cultural authority. The thesis argues that the plays critically re-cast their pre-texts, re-interpreting those texts and compelling audiences to do the same. Altering diegetic emphases, the plays emphasize and interrogate the perhaps dubious function of their pre-texts to narrate and legitimate certain cultural groups' dominance and others' subordination. And using narrative forms which contrast in significant ways with those of the pre-texts, the plays demonstrate alternative, less prescriptive narrative forms. The effect of these textual re-interpretations and alternative narrative forms to intervene in hegemonic operations of power is important not least because each of the pre-texts, in different ways, thematically and/or formally, is ostensibly committed to the "fair" distributed of power. Romanticism claims commitment to the liberation of humanity. The protagonists of Stoker's Dracula fight avowedly to protect the superiority of their "good" Western humanity over Dracula's "bad" Eastern monstrosity. And orthodox histories, including those of Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I of England, frequently function to absolve present communities' responsibility for their "closed" histories, but also for their histories' legacies, and, thus, for responsibility for the present.

The predicament of human isolation and alienation is a pervasive theme that has not been sufficiently studied in Thomas Hardy's fiction. This study investigates the theme of alienation focussing on Hardy's major novels. Although the term 'alienation' is one of the most outstanding features of this age, it is not very clear what it precisely means. The writer has to draw extensively on Hegel, Marx, Fromm and other thinkers to understand the complex ramifications of the term. The numerous connections in which the term has been used are restricted to include only a few meanings and applications among which the most important refers to a disparity between one's society and one's spiritual interests or welfare. The theme of alienation, then, is investigated in representative texts from the wide trajectory of Victorian literature. It is clear that the central intellectual characteristic of the Victorian age is, as Arnold diagnosed it, "the sense of want of correspondence between the forms of modern Europe and its spirit". The increasing difficulty of reconciling historical and spiritual perspectives has become a major theme for Hardy and other late Victorians. Next, each of Hardy's major novels is given a chapter in which the theme of alienation is traced. In Far from the Madding Crowd, Boldwood's neurotic and self-destructive nature makes him obsessed with Bathsheba, and as a result, murders Troy and suffers the isolation of life imprisonment; Fanny Robin's tragic and lonely death, only assisted by a dog, is a flagrant indictment of society. In The Return of the Native, Clym is the earliest prototype in Hardy's fiction of alienated modern man. He returns to Egdon Heath only to live in isolation unable to communicate with the very people whom he thought of as a cure for his alienation. Eustacia has consistently been leading a life of alienation in Egdon Heath which leads to her suicide. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Henchard's alienation may be more ascribed to his own character, recalling Boldwood, than to incongruity with society. Yet Hardy emphasises the tendency of society towards modernity which Henchard cannot cope with. In The Woodlanders, not only does wild nature fail to be a regenerative and productive force bet also human nature fails to be communicative and assuring. The people of Little Hintock fail to communicate with iry other. The relationship between Marty and Giles is an "obstructed relationship"; Giles dies a sacrificial death, and Marty ends as a wreck in a rare scene hardly credible in a newly emerging world. Fitzpiers and Mrs Charmond, on the other hand, are isolated in the sterile enclosure of their own fantasies. Grace, anticipating Tess and Sue, is torn in a conflict between two worlds, neither of which can happily accommodate her. In Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Tess, after her childhood experiences at Marlott and later at Trantridge, soon discovers how oppressive society is,particularly when she is rejected by Angel, whom she loves and through whom she aspires to fulfil herself. Angel suffers from self-division in his character, and the conflict between received attitudes and advanced ideas leaves him an embodiment of an alienated man hardly able to reconcile the values of two worlds. Jude the Obscure is Hardy's most complete expression of alienation. Jude's alienation is explicitly social and implicitly cosmic, and his failure to identify himself in society constitutes a major theme of the novel. The novel foreshadows the modern themes of failure, frustration, futility, disharmony, isolation, rootlessness, and absurdity as inescapable conditions of life. In conclusion, the theme of alienation in the major novels of Thomas Hardy is a pervasive one. Nevertheless, not all his characters are alienated; however their happy condition, like that of the rustics in Gray's Elegy, is seen to stem from their intellectual limitations.

This thesis uses the hostile reception of The Satanic Verses, the 'Rushdie Affair', as a paradigm for studying immigrant writing from the Indian Subcontinent today. Looking at a selection of authors who specifically write on topics of migration, travel and migrant communities in the West, it considers the political implications of texts that represent marginalised immigrant communities, and inevitably offer them to the gaze of a mainstream readership, thus entering a peculiar power relationship. The introduction looks at the position of Edward Said as exiled intellectual and cultural critic, and the location of travel and migrant identity within postcolonial criticism. Chapter I discusses the reception of The Satanic Verses, particularly by the Muslim Asian communities in the UK, and the conflicting definitions of Indian and Muslim 'authenticity,' as well as political loyalty and accountability at its basis. Chapter II discusses the definitions of expatriation and immigration that occur in Bharati Mukherjee' writing, placing her within a tradition of criticism that has made use of such categorisation. It also looks at the class basis of her own categorisation, and the way this translates to functions of voice, vision and definition in her writing. Chapter III examines Hanif Kureishi's textual strategies for engaging with issues of representation and reception, by looking at his early plays, and focusing particularly on My Beautiful Launderette and The Buddha of Suburbia. It also emphasis Kureishi's particular position as a second-generation immigrant, and makes references to a number of other writers with comparable voices. Chapter IV discusses the influence of Midnight's Children on Indian literature in English, and its redefinition of postcolonial Indian selfhood with reference to alienation and minority status, and metaphorical and actual migration.

This project aims to explore the fictional image of the feral child through practice-based and critical research. The novel Consider The Lilies, comprising the main body of the thesis, explores the relationship between Vicky, a woman who suffered isolated confinement as a child, and Jack, the main narrator, as he searches for his lost identity. In the critical component, analysis of the image using historical perspectives locates its function within the text as one of radical critique, reviewing existing social practices from a defamiliansed perspective. Exploration of contemporary texts focuses this critique on the role of language in the formation of the individual consciousness. The application of psychoanalytic theories, in particular the work of Julia Kristeva on the semiotic chora, identifies the function of the fictional image of the feral child as a catalyst permitting the expression of the semiotic in the text. An examination of a specific text, Jill Dawson's Wild Boy (2003) tests this proposition and evaluates the poetics involved in the composition. The simultaneous development of practice-based and critical research is discussed in the chapter on the poetics of wildness which traces the writing process and its motivation. The concluding arguments consolidate the position that the fictional image of the feral child acts as a catalyst permitting an address to the unspeakable and the expression of the semiotic in the text which carries a revolutionary potential but recognise that this image is only one means of making such address, situating this research as part of an ongoing poetics which will continue to influence future writing.

The Caribbean islands have been distinguished by mass migratory patterns and diasporic communities that have moved into and out of the region; as a consequence, the genre of the letter has been an important one to the culture and has provided a template for many creative works. This dissertation is the first major study on West Indian epistolary practices: personal letters, emails, verse epistles, epistolary novels, letters to editors, etc. It focuses on a contemporary period – from the 1930s to the present, and on examples that have come out of Jamaica. The dissertation offers both close-readings on a range of epistolary texts and theoretical frameworks in which to consider them and some of the ways in which Caribbean people have been addressing themselves to each other, and to the wider world. My first chapter looks at the non-fictional letters of Sir Alexander Bustamante and Sir Vidia Naipaul. It reflects on the ways in which the public personas of these two men had been created and manipulated through their public and private letters. My second chapter tries to expand a critical project which has been satisfied to simply place contemporary epistolary fiction within an eighteenth century genealogy. I propose another conversation which understands recent examples of West Indian epistolary fiction within their contemporary cultures. My third chapter looks at examples of Jamaican verse epistles and considers how three poets – Lorna Goodison, James Berry and Louise Bennett – have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to create an epistolary voice that is both literary and oral. My fourth chapter looks at the popular Jamaican newspaper advice column, Dear Pastor. It considers the ways in which evangelical Christianity has impacted on the construction of a West Indian epistolary voice and consequently the shape of a West Indian public sphere. My final chapter considers how technology has changed epistolography; specifically how the email, Facebook messages, and tweets have both transformed and preserved the letter. I end with a presentation of a personal corpus of emails titled The Cold Onion Chronicles with some reflections on remediation of epistolary forms.

The thesis takes Mandeville's medical works at Leiden as a starting point. Translations of his first three works - all originally published in Latin - lay the foundation for a consideration of his approach to medicine, medical discourse and the contemporary seventeenth-century debates on Cartesian thought. From this basis, Mandeville's early English works are examined in detail. His fables are seen to develop the first stages of a complex theory of imitation which is closely related to his medical ideas on digestion. Mandeville elaborated this theory in three major works - The Virgin Unmask'd (1709), A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions (1711) and The Fable of the Bees (1714). Each of these works is examined in the context of contemporary texts and ideas. Taken as a trilogy, the works are shown to explore the problems of the individual in a rapidly changing society. The thesis argues that in The Virgin Unmask'd Mandeville considers the nature of seual identity and the various ways in which the new consumer society could operate to determine that identity. In A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions, it is shown that Mandeville continues his exploration of the effects of consumerism on the individual. In this text, however, he is concerned with consumption in both its literal and metaphorical dimensions as he fully develops the medical theories on digestion which he had begun to consider as a student in Leiden. Finally, Mandeville's first edition of The Fable of the Bees is examined in the light of his medical works and his interest in the nature of consumerism. Through the readings of each of these texts it is shown how Mandeville uses both the dialogue form and the `Remarks' of The Fable of the Bees to equip the reader with a set of interpretative tools. By using his chosen literary forms to question the notions of `knowledge' and `ignorance', he offers a perspective from which to `anatomize' the structures of power that were beginning to take shape in early eighteenth-century England.

This thesis considers the use of the allegorical personification of the nation as a woman in the work of the twentieth century Scottish writers Hugh MacDiarmid, Naomi Mitchison and Alasdair Gray. The image of nation as woman, whether as mother, virgin, goddess or victim is widespread in European iconography from the eighteenth century onwards, but is not common in Scotland until the twentieth century. Not only is the objectification of the female figure intrinsic to such imagery objectionable from a feminist point of view, but the female stereotypes which surround the figure of the nation are contradictory, and it ultimately reinforces a sexist ideology which constructs women as victims. These political flaws and contradictions are highlighted when the metaphor is considered in the context of Scotland's peculiar political situation. The three authors considered here exemplify very different uses of the nation-as-woman trope. Comparing their work shows that the image is used differently by male and female writers, and that the changes in both gender politics and nationalist theory during the course of the twentieth century mean that its use in the 1990s is much more self-conscious and parodic than when it is used by Hugh MacDiarmid in the 1920s. Nation as woman is a trope which is much more easily used by male authors, as for example in the work of MacDiarmid and Gray, whereas Naomi Mitchison, in appropriating the voice of mother Scotland, finds problems asserting her own voice as a woman writer in Scotland. The work of all three writers demonstrates an awareness of the problems inherent in the trope. From the 1920s to the 1950s MacDiarmid uses the female figure to represent both Scotland and his creative muse, but acknowledges the lack of such a tradition in Scotland by importing his female figures from other cultures and literatures. The version of Scottishness which MacDiarmid creates privileges the position of a male nationalist in relation to a female nation, and his influence in the Scottish literary scene is such that Naomi Mitchison, as a woman writing in the 1940s, finds it difficult to address the 'matter of Scotland' without resorting to the gendered iconography of woman as nation. Alasdair Gray, writing forty years later, is also influenced by MacDiarmid, but this is shown through his post-modern rewriting of MacDiarmid's key poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, and his problematisation of many of the political and aesthetic contradictions inherent in the nation-as-woman trope.

Doughty's popular fame depends still on one prose-book, but his poetry is still neglected by the majority and ignored by a large section or those who know. To redress the balance and put the whole in perspective, this thesis begins by discussing minutely his roots in East Anglia, his family background and his school and university days. Here for the first time a list of his father's library books and a rare early poem written by the young Doughty in Cambridge are used to prove that contemporary literature was in Doughty's mind, when he reacted against the facile ways of literary expression and the immorality in literary circles. That reaction is shown to have decided his future career. His studies after that in earlier literature are traced minutely, and their certain fruits shown in the turns of his thought and the new ideals in lire in general and in literature in particular. When he left to the Continent in 1870, he is shown to have reached the mature stable basis of everything that one finds in all his prose and poetry. In general his attitude was one of reaction against the Nineteenth Century and an attempt to bring back the vigour of patriotism and the liveliness of the literature of Renaissance and Elizabethan England. With the Nineteenth Century as a basis, and the Renaissance as an ideal, a pattern is laid for a detailed study of different problems based on the various Doughty works. Each book is looked at mainly from one angle, although the other different sides of the work are not neglected. Doughty's attitude towards Islam, Arabia and the Arabs is shown to be a result and a continuation of the orthodox Christian European attitude through the ages. So follows a historical study of that background in European thought and English Literature from the earliest times to the Nineteenth Century. An objective unemotional attempt to defend Islam and the Arabs follow. Then the linguistic side of the problem, the influence of Arabia on the style of 'Arabia Deserta' is studied, and Doughty's knowledge of Arabic is assessed. 'The Darn in Britain' gives us the chance to study Doughty's knowledge of and ideas on the epic form. 'Adam Cast Forth' provides an opportunity for studying all the sources or the beautiful legend, and of Doughty'a usage Of these sources. 'The Cliffs' provides an opportunity for a study of Doughty's ideas on the contemporary scone and his solutions for the problems of today. 'The Clouds' is used to study the discursive rambling all inclusive 'form' of Doughty's works. 'The Titans' is Doughty's nearest poem to his geological studies, so Doughty's scientific ideas and their imaginative expression are dealt with. 'Mansoul' is his last message. Consequently his belief in the doctrine of the 'Inspired Poet', his belief in Man, his hope in the future of humanity, and his philosophy of virtue and love, his Religion and his humanism are studied. 'The Conclusion' follows, with an apology for the great length necessary to deal with the mind, ways and works of this voluminous poet. In an appendix the list of books at Theberton Hall Library in, given and in another that rare poem at his young days "The Lay of the Long One". All through the thesis, Doughty's manuscript Word-Notes, Book-Notes, and letters and all the books written the various scholars and critics on his works are used to get a better understanding of his thought and his books in this panoramic survey, of his life and works.

This dissertation examines in detail the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, a mid-Victorian English author. It establishes that she was significantly influenced in her writing by the Unitarian social milieu to which she belonged during her lifetime, and by a wide range of other dominant influences, such as Romanticism and the rise of Darwinism. It demonstrates that conflicting doctrinal strains within Unitarianism, and emphases in Unitarianism differing from that of other prevailing influences within society, jointly contributed to the particular nature of her literary output. Elizabeth Gaskell's work is characterised by a series of binary oppositions, a feature of her fiction which serves to illustrate her individual response to conflicting values or concepts. Rather than dogmatically resolving the series of antinomies revealed throughout her work, she maintains their co-existence in such a manner that the mutual interdependence of each set of polarities is perpetuated. This suggests that she preferred, despite varying emphases at certain points, an intelligent open-endedness regarding opposing views. In fact, her work infers an acceptance that textual vitality and purpose is fostered by allowing such tensions to exist. The binary oppositions exhibited in her work that are discussed in this dissertation are varied in nature. In Chapters Two and Three, the Priestleyan notion of necessarianism, a form of moral determinism, is set against the equally evident notion of free-will and divine benevolence. In Chapter Four, the radical edge of her Unitarian faith is balanced by an equally strong appreciation of the benefits of social respectability. Elizabeth Gaskell's work reflects a recurrent commitment to the Unitarian espousal of truthfulness, but she also understands the textual benefits of concealment and deception.

Whilst researching his bibliography of Neil M Gunn, the writer found photocopies of papers said to have been in Gunn's desk at the time of his death, amongst which were copies of both sides of a handwritten sheet' torn from a looseleaf notebook. This document, produced in response to perceived criticism by Eric Linklater, offers a unique insight into Gunn's view of his literary achievement at the end of his novel-writing career. In it Gunn sets out the theoretical concept of all his twenty novels being components of a single, composite, 'Novel of the Highlands', an abstract concept referred to in this thesis as a'meta-novel'. The thesis examines the literary viability of this meta-novel; it follows a tripartite form: chapter one, which records inter alia Highland problems, forming the introduction, chapters two to four inclusive forming the central developmental section before culminating in chapter five, the conclusion. The developmental section offers a critique of the problems outlined in the introduction via a series of 'epicyclic journeys' which approach the problems from the perspectives of childhood, history and culture, each contributing to the achievement of a positive conclusion. By considering the interplay between each chapter heading and the content of the individual novels allocated to it, the implied plot structure of the overall work can be established. Gunn habitually re-used and adapted his material over time. The evolution of this material in the individual novels is discussed. The meta-novel represents another, and final, re-use of material and, through the exercise outlined above, it is hence possible to speculate on which elements of the individual novels Gunn deemed to be important in retrospect, as it is these that develop the meta-novel's plot. Thus, crucially, the examination prompted by the existence of this primary document enables a re-evaluation of Gunn's individual novels, which this thesis also undertakes.