This dissertation consists of a collection of short stories titled The Head Knows What Lies Near the Heart and an accompanying critical commentary. These tales look to question the ways women relate to their body through examining and emulating certain aspects of traditional fairy tales. While previous feminist examinations of the topic engaged with fairy tales to subvert and rewrite social expectations of the female body (for example, Angela Carter in 1979 or Suniti Najomshi in 1981), the stories in this collection find a middle ground, neither re-writing fairy tales nor completely eschewing them. In my tales the body is used as a starting point; concentrating on a particular body part (head, hands, feet, etc.) per story to narrate the different ways women relate to and approach embodiment. The critical commentary, presented in three chapters, returns to the themes I touched on in my creative work through an analysis first of the use of the body and the motif of mutilation in “Cinderella”, “The Little Mermaid”, and “The Girl Without Hands”, then through the examination of metamorphosis in contemporary texts of magical realism (Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes and Karen Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves). Each of these chapters is accompanied by a critical reflection on the way the research impacted the creative practise. This self-criticism is expanded in the third chapter, where I engage with Julio Cortázar’s principles of the short story and Hélène Cixous écriture féminine to further analyse my work.

This thesis investigates the relationship between women's writing and domestic architecture in London during the four decades around the turn of the twentieth century. It foregrounds novels written by women in order to investigate the ways in which this literature grapples with new forms of urban housing that emerged in order to accommodate economic, political and cultural changes in the city. This period of study is roughly framed by the Married Women's Property Act of 1882, legislation that allowed women to exist legally outside the family structure, and the end of WWI, which initiated a movement towards suburbanisation that was intended to alleviate the necessity of housing the city's labour forces locally. While scholarship to date has been attentive to the ways that women have been denied participation in the production of urban environments – through professional exclusion and social marginalisation – this thesis argues that their creative engagement with the city should be understood as an important contribution to its growth and development, imaginatively and materially. Central to this thesis is a consideration of the ways in which changing gender ideologies initiated new patterns for domestic architecture, but were also responses to the new social relationships that took shape as a result of their construction. It looks closely at women's literary engagement with domestic architecture in order to gain insight into the ways that the representative spaces of these texts interact with the city's built environment. In Chapter 1, I begin with an examination of the ways in which women's fiction engages with the political and legislative developments that initiated slum clearance and city improvement projects, and which led to the construction of model dwellings and early local authority housing. In Chapter 2, I trace the origins of purpose-built housing for women, or 'ladies' chambers', and consider its treatment in contemporaneous novels and journalism. In Chapter 3, I examine the ways in which the settlement movement challenged conventional notions of home and labour by studying its representation in two novels that construct these concerns within discussions of sexuality. I conclude this thesis with an investigation of the development of Hampstead Garden Suburb, and of the ways its design and representation sought to redress the social and political uncertainties that emerged in late nineteenth-century London and its literature.

This thesis explores Doris Lessing’s writing of evolution and genetics in her space fiction through two contexts: first, through a historical global crisis for capitalism in the 1970s following a temporary breakdown of post-war Euro-US financial hegemony; and second, through a philosophical shift in scientific discourse from an age of reductionism to an age of complexity or emergence. After almost two decades of writing realism, Lessing started writing what she calls ‘space fiction’ in the late 1960s in the final section of The Four-Gated City (1969), and she did not stop for over a decade, with The Sentimental Agents of the Volyen Empire (1983). Focusing on Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and the Canopus in Argos series (1979-83), I argue that space fiction allows Lessing two modes of inquiry, the first based in realism and the second on speculation: first, to explore the human body as a political object, or the biopolitical; second, speculations on resistance to biopolitical governance through living ambivalently (not competitively), for the sake of metabolic survival, or biosociality. If biopolitics is enabled through reductionist constructions of ‘the body’ as a unit of analysis (‘bio’ signifying ‘type’ or collection of genes), then biosociality understands ‘bio’ as metabolic systems that extend between individuals, across species differentiations. The posthumanism of biopolitics leads towards transhumanism, while the posthumanism of biosociality is what Eugene Thacker calls ‘peripheral life’: ‘life that is perpetually going outside itself’. The vehicle of this critique is what I call ‘epigenetic poiesis’. I develop this term throughout the thesis to describe literary and cultural representations of epigenetic changes, using ‘poiesis’ to describe how these changes emerge through responses to chance events which put subjects out of equilibrium, enabling or forcing fast adaptation to changed contexts (a forced displacement to another planet, an arranged marriage, an ice age). Lessing’s sf novels express modes of survival activated outside the restrictions of biopolitical control, chance responses to the end-game of a world-system that exploits, determines and tracks the bio-energy of the living matter under its dominion for the sake of accumulation and expansion. The novels also anticipate biopolitics under neoliberalism as a matter of data control, rather than the discipline of individuals. Throughout, the narratives disturb the construction of a liberal subject under capitalist modernity by staging a broader speculation on the intricacy, interdependency and interpretative activity of ‘life itself’ with regard to all kinds of material relations. The texts are literary engagements with what Nikolas Rose calls ‘vital politics’, both a reflection on the governmental co-option of life processes, and an exploration of the multifaceted dimensions of ‘life itself’ loosened from anthropocentric categorisations.

This thesis attempts to understand, through a study of postcolonial Indian novels, the nature and character of Indian (post)colonial modernity. Modernity is understood as the social condition that (post)colonial modernisation and development have given rise to. This condition underlies a historical crisis which is manifest in various kinds of catastrophic events – famine, peasant insurgency, caste violence, communal riot, state repression, and so on. By analysing three of these historical events – the 1943-44 Bengal famine, the Naxalbari Movement (1967-1972), and the State of Emergency (1975-1977) – this thesis argues that a careful reading of the dialectic between event and crisis can offer crucial insights into the conditions of postcolonial modernity. It claims that novels that register these events are able to capture the event-crisis dialectic through their use of form and mode. Socially committed writers adopt the realist form to represent the historical aspects and traumatising consequences of the events. However, because the nature, form, and orientation of these events are different, their realisms undergo immense stylistic improvisation. These stylistic shifts are shaped primarily by the writers’ adapting of various literary modes to the specific requirements (i.e. the historical context). Modes are chosen to represent and historicise the specific character and appearance of an event. In order to represent the Bengal famine, the thesis argues, Bhabani Bhattacharya and Amalendu Chakraborty use analytical-affective and metafictional modes, while Mahasweta Devi and Nabarun Bhattacharya deploy quest and urban fantastic modes to register the Naxalbari Movement and its aftermath. For the Emergency, writers such as Salman Rushdie, O. V. Vijayan, and Arun Joshi use magical, grotesque and mythical modes, and Nayantara Sahgal and Rohinton Mistry employ critical realist modes, defined sharply by the writers’ class- and caste-based perspectives. These modes shape the realisms in the respective texts and transform realist literary form into a highly experimental and heterogeneous matter. Contrary to the prevailing academic belief that modernity breeds modernism, the thesis posits that, in the postcolonial Indian context, the conditions of modernity have provoked a historically conscious, experimental, and modernistic form of ‘crisis realism’.

This study investigates the politicisation of Arthur John Arberry’s and Desmond O’Grady’s translations of the seven Mu‘allqāt, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory. It presents a sociology of translation that is based on five of the conceptual tools that Bourdieu employs in understanding social reality in studying the influence of the social norms on the two translators’ decisions. The study foregrounds the fact that Arberry’s and O’Grady’s translations were similarly produced in highly politicised societies due to the British and later the American involvement in the Middle East, and it argues that British and American propaganda respectively formed the doxa about Arabs at the times the translations were produced and influenced the representation of Arabs in each translation. The study aims to advance the understanding of the influence of the socio-political context on poetry translation which has rarely been studied. A review of extant English translations of the Mu’allaqāt defines the boundaries of the field; specifies its key players, and the factors that shaped their habitus; highlights the major types of capital over which these players struggle; and thus helps to situate Arberry’s and O’Grady’s translations in the field. The theoretical framework of this study draws on Bourdieu’s sociology in order to establish the link between politics and Anglophone literary fields during the time the translations were produced. It thus tests Bourdieu’s sociology in the study of poetry translation. The theoretical framework employs Skopostheorie to explain the different approaches that the two translators adopt to the translation; it also draws on the domestication/foreignisation model. The study analyses and compares the two translators’ choices of methodologies which ultimately result in characterising their representations of the Arab reality described in the Mu‘allaqāt by essentialism, absence, and otherness that have been the three characteristics of Orientalist representation of the non-West since the eighteenth century. The analysis reveals how the decisions of both translators result in problems such as distorting or altering Arab reality, or in obstructing the message of the original qaṣīdas. The study concludes that the socio-political context had its impact on Arberry’s and O’Grady’s translation choices in spite of the different purposes of their translations. It also concludes that the socio-political context seems to have influenced O’Grady’s choices relating to style. Furthermore, it sheds light on the problems that result from the influence of the socio-political circumstances on the translators’ decisions, and offers suggestions for avoiding such problems.

In order to answer questions about the nature, viability and shape of what would constitute a modernist epic, this thesis explores three very different twentieth century writers, Hart Crane, David Jones and Derek Walcott. Rather than being a narrowly genre based study, however, I argue that in the twentieth century the ‘epic’ mode has become a malleable form with which to explore troubling legacies of history, empire and, to exhibit a dimension of the sacred in modernity. All three poets penned challenging epic poems (The Bridge, The Anathemata and Omeros respectively) in a condition of modernity. Haunted by the ruptures of history, in various ways, Crane, Jones and Walcott attempted to create an aesthetic which seeks cultural reintegration, recovery and reconciliation with the past. I analyse the formal experimental modernist aesthetic of each poet as they are anxiously and sometimes ambivalently influenced by the increasingly dominant institution of a particular form of metropolitan high modernism. This allows for a critique of modernity whilst contextualising a modernist inscription of imperialism. Finally, I show that the spiritual and religious concerns of these writers are essential in the recuperative or compensatory ideals of the epic. I argue that far from being an obsolete and impossible genre, for poets the epic is the very mode which best captures the transitions and conditions of an uneven and unequal modernity. I seek to show how through the trope of place (bridge, city, ruins, sacred sites and island), journey and the sea and other aesthetic devices, Crane, Jones and Walcott attempt to re-enchant emptied and destroyed cultural heritages.

This thesis explores the genre of Ovidian female-voiced complaint poetry and its tradition in early modern English literature. In looking at original poems, translations and receptions of Ovid’s Heroides, I argue that female as well as male writers throughout the early modern period engaged with the tradition of Ovidian female-voiced complaint poetry. By using case studies advancing chronologically throughout the period, I will also show how female-voiced complaint changes and develops in different historical and literary contexts. Nobody as yet has produced a study looking at a large sample of women writing female-voiced complaint. The criticism around complaint is diffuse, with only a small number of book-length studies which focus on complaint in general as a genre or discourse. There are many articles or chapters on individual complaint poems but not many which compare different female-voiced complaints of the same period, especially those written by women. When female poets write in the genre, the rhetorical trope of Ovidian female-voiced complaint (that the sex of the author is discontinuous with that of the speaker) must be renegotiated. This renegotiation by female poets is often the result of close and learned engagement with the traditions of complaint, both the classical precedents and the receptions and re-imaginations of the genre in early modern England. They are choosing a genre which has a productive potential in being female-voiced but which also has a tradition of male manipulation. However, rather than seeing women writers as existing separately from male writers, I argue that they work in parallel, drawing on the same Ovidian complaint traditions.

This thesis explores the lived experience of teaching Shakespeare within English in England’s secondary schools. Using hermeneutic phenomenology as methodology it examines teaching practices in the Shakespeare classroom in terms of influences and variations. Both literature and data suggest three core categories of influence are at play: socio-political, professional and personal contexts. Throughout this research I argue that it is only through analysing all three, and the complex interrelationships between them, that we can begin to understand practice and variations in that practice. Through between one and three semi-structured interviews with nine English teachers, followed by thematic data analysis, I attempted to identify influences that were significant, whether shared or different. Furthermore, I considered both presence and absence of experience, since this emerged within the data as a key consideration. I ultimately concluded that whilst socio-political contexts, through curriculum and assessment, undoubtedly impact on the experience of Shakespeare, they do not of themselves explain the variations in practice reported within the literature and my data. The teaching of Shakespeare is deeply influenced by three further characteristics. Firstly, local cultures appear to have a significant impact on Shakespeare, both in terms of cultural attitudes towards education, and the nature of school cultures and leadership. Secondly, the importance of experiences of high quality training may come as no surprise; however, what is noteworthy is the extent to which absence has such a detrimental effect on experiences of teaching Shakespeare, as illustrated within the data. Finally, and perhaps most noteworthy, highly individualised, frequently random, often (inevitably) subjective personal identities, philosophies and life histories significantly influence how English teachers experience the teaching of Shakespeare. Collectively, the presence or absence of supportive cultures, training and personal experiences and preferences, appear to account for most variations in practice, prompting important considerations for individual teachers, school leaders, training providers and policy makers.

British responses to the French Revolution are characterised by humorous expression in the literature of the 1790s. Yet political humour is often not readily harnessed to an immediate political agenda. ‘Political humour’ as an idea appears to be a contradiction and elicits a contradictory set of epithets, which falls into two distinct categories: ideological commitment and disinterested amusement. This thesis argues that it is this tension that contributes to the redrawing of the ambit of politics. This thesis continues the recent scholarly approach to the British response to the Revolution less as a formal ‘debate’ than as a ‘controversy’, which involves a diversity of cultural practices and experimentation of expression and social organisation. I argue that the employment of humour in the political literature of the 1790s provides extended or alternative means of political engagement. The political humour goes beyond topical political agendas and alludes to the eighteenth-century comic theory, which instructs ethical questions about social relation or ways of life. I demonstrate that the claim to autotelic innocence of humour in the comic discourse of the eighteenth century was predicated on contradictory social tendencies: laughing either reinforces individual boundary or facilitates transmissive and collective conviviality. ‘Common life’, which denotes a social relation in settlement, is the existential horizon that enacts this contradiction. With ‘common life’ in crisis or contestation in the 1790s, and with social organisation under political controversy, humour as political disclaimer is thereby reworked into a particular political language. I read the comic discourses of Burke and the popular radicals, the satire of Peter Pindar, and the comic rhetoric of the anti-Jacobin novels to explore this political language. In doing so, this thesis seeks to suggest ways of reading the literary culture of the 1790s in terms of the circumscription or expansion of the scope of political life, so as to examine how humour contributed and responded to changes in political culture.

James Shirley is a distinctly Caroline playwright: his first play was performed in the year of Charles I’s coronation, 1625, and his last the year of the outbreak of civil war in 1642. Yet his importance extends beyond the era in which he worked as a professional playwright. As one among a handful of dramatists whose work was staged regularly by the new playing companies after the theatres reopened in 1660, he is an important figure in the development of new modes of theatre. Despite having had more of his plays produced on the Restoration stage than Shakespeare did, scholarship on his significance to Restoration drama has been remarkably scant. This thesis investigates the significance of Shirley in the Carolean period, tracing the adaptations of Shirley throughout the reign of Charles II. It uses Shirley as a case study to investigate transitions in theatrical practice before 1642 and after 1660, paying attention also to the continuities. This thesis asks why Shirley’s plays were considered suitable by the managers of the Restoration theatre companies who staged them: the King’s Company under Sir Thomas Killigrew, the Duke’s Company under Sir William Davenant, George Jolly’s ‘Nursery’ group, performing at Hatton Garden, and the Red Bull Players, an illegal, pre-Restoration group. It also explores the ways in which Shirley’s plays were adapted in response to the changed social and political climate after 1660, including textual amendments made and the addition of new prologues. It concludes by asking why Shirley’s reputation declined so sharply in the long eighteenth century while Shakespeare’s came to pre-eminence, by comparing the Restoration treatment of his plays with those of Shakespeare.