This thesis seeks to analyse how the transcendental as experienced in everyday life is presented and represented in my poetry and in the poetry of four selected contemporary Ulster poets. The thesis argues that many emerging Ulster poets take a secular viewpoint. Nonetheless, religious terminology or, at least, the use of spiritual imagery and symbolism, pervades contemporary Ulster poetry. Clay, is an attempt to reconcile the usual secular Western and Christian-based preconceptions of the spiritual and moral with the Vaisnavist viewpoint through the medium of poetry and examine those themes through reflective writerly-critical engagement with my own work and four selected contemporary Ulster poets. Of the contemporaries selected, some also explore faiths other than the traditional Christianity that has pervaded culture and society here and which influenced, in various ways, predecessors such as William Butler Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon. Two linked aspects of contemporary society that feature in contemporary Ulster writing are consumerism and hedonism. These have been challenged in various ways by the chosen contemporary writers. In Clay, the negative impact of these aspects is explored. The thesis uses close reading and an auto-ethnographic approach to explore the impact the spiritual has on my writing and how the transcendental impacts on the poetry that I produce. The philosophies of agrarianism and vegetarianism, linked as they are to Eastern transcendentalism and contemporary environmentalism, feature in my writing, and these are compared and contrasted to how they are treated by my chosen contemporaries. Mention is made of poetic influences and recurring concepts such as defamiliarisation and the notion of poetic vocation.

Recent work by scholars including Jed Esty and Alexandra Harris has emphasised a renewed focus among English interwar modernist writers upon rural landscapes, culture and traditions. This thesis builds upon such work in examining that focus in the prose works of D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), John Cowper Powys (1872-1963), Mary Butts (1890-1937) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). All of these figures have a profound sense of attachment to place, but an equally powerful desire to engage with the upheavals of interwar modernity – in terms of urbanisation, cosmopolitanism, and developments in technology and transportation – and to participate in contemporary literary experimentation. This dialectic between tradition and change, I argue, is analogous to a literal geographical shuttling between rural and metropolitan environments, and in all four writers I identify imagery and literary techniques which reflect those experiences, and are applied across diverse geographical realms. One central claim is that modernity’s tendency to challenge cultural and geographical boundaries, and its oscillations between disintegration and renewal, are manifested in new ways of depicting and understanding our relationships with place and nonhuman animals. I also emphasise the continuity of particular literary techniques (such as paratactic syntax) and forms of imagery (trees, bodies of water) across metropolitan ‘high’ modernism and the texts of the later interwar period, presenting this as evidence for the consistent influence of a tradition/change dialectic in these writers’ work. Another key claim is that all four writers call for an expansion of our conception of modernism, through their challenge to the urban-central/rural-peripheral dichotomy, their emphasis on the past and tradition (particularly the sense of temporal layering within landscapes), and the unorthodox ways in which their work can be considered experimental (for example, through meandering or non-linear structuring). Chapter One emphasises ambivalence in the work of Lawrence, in terms of the persistence of underlying tensions, and argues that these are inextricably bound up with his intimate, empathic understanding of place. Lawrence longs to return to an idyllic, prelapsarian landscape connected to the Nottinghamshire of his childhood, but recognises the impossibility of doing so, given his exposure to the maelstrom of cosmopolitan and metropolitan experience. These experiences generate the need for a renewed relationship with place, although he struggles to articulate any such vision. In Chapter Two I argue that Powys has a similarly ambivalent relationship with modernity, but defuses this through the deliberate playfulness of his work: his ‘Wessex novels’, written from the USA, reimagine the landscape of home through a fantastical, nostalgic lens that can be described as ‘imaginative realist’. This approach, he suggests, is one way in which the contradictory desires and inclinations of the peripatetic modernist author can be reconciled. Through his complex identity and experience of self-imposed exile, Powys develops a strong sense of the English landscape as layered, expressing a kind of temporal cosmopolitanism. In Chapter Three, I again note a vexed relationship with modernity and place in the work of Butts, whose work often expresses a dismayed sense that her childhood landscape in Dorset is being invaded by urbanites and tourists. Like Powys she attempts to resolve this through a re-enchantment of place, emphasising a sense of an ‘unseen world’ in the region, but such fantasises are both less self-conscious and more ethically problematic than Powys’. Nonetheless I do note a distinctively cosmopolitan reimagining of rural England, as a potential haven for marginalised communities, in works such as Armed with Madness (1928). Finally, Chapter Four posits Woolf as a figure in whom the dialectical tensions between belonging and place are less troubling. I relate this ability to manage tensions to Woolf’s equally strong attachments in childhood (and throughout her life) to both urban and rural environments, reflected in the development of an ‘urban pastoral’ form in Mrs Dalloway (1925). In all four writers there is evidence that modernism’s expansion of perspectives can be fruitfully extended to those of place and nonhuman animals, and Woolf’s work is particularly sustained and successful in this respect. The central stress in my thesis conclusion, accordingly, is on the need to incorporate such perspectives into understandings of modernism as a community-oriented movement.

Romantic Disillusionment in the Later Works of Mary Shelley argues that, despite a growing consensus among modern critics that Mary Shelley’s works, and especially the novels written after Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death, are of lesser quality than her earlier novels, especially Frankenstein, the later works deserve more attention than they have hitherto received. The title Romantic Disillusionment, at once establishes my disagreement with those of Shelley’s critics who insist that her work is continuous with her father’s, her mother’s and her husband’s. No doubt, she rehearses various elements that characterise her family’s writings, revisits their favourite themes, but she does so in a way that is distinctively her own. The thesis locates in Shelley’s work a more general sense of disillusionment with Romantic ideas, amongst them a reverence for the sublime, a confident faith in the power of the imagination, and a belief in human perfectibility, ideas current in her father’s writing and discussed in the circles in which he moved, as well as those she joined as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s lover and wife. The influence of her parents and husband and other contemporaries is traced with particular attention to the disillusionment that she at first shared with them and later came to feel in them. Shelley often invokes Romantic ideals, but characteristically she invokes them only to ironise or undermine them. The thesis is organized in six chapters: an introduction is followed by four chapters on the four novels Shelley wrote after her husband’s death, and a conclusion. The introduction gives an overview of Shelley’s early novels, Frankenstein and Valperga, as well as the novella Matilda, trying to establish how far Shelley even in her early writings did not simply, as seems to be the consensus, follow her family’s notions. This is followed by a chapter on The Last Man, which discusses the opposition between the public and the private life, between a life devoted to public activity and a life spent in seclusion. This chapter also explores Mary Shelley’s understanding of creativity and in particular her interest in biography. Indeed, all Mary Shelley’s later novels can be understood as disguised biographies, substitutes for the book that she had been forbidden to write, the biography of her husband. This chapter also discusses the function of the plague as, like death itself, a leveller, the destroyer not simply of humanity but of all human ideals. I understand the novel in conclusion as a parodic challenge to Godwin’s and P.B. Shelley’s belief in human perfectibility and the millenarian cast of mind that the two men shared. The following chapter on The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck examines Shelley’s single later experiment in the historical novel. Clearly she is responding to the achievement of Walter Scott, as well as to his extraordinary commercial success, but once again hers is an active response. Unlike Scott, she does not pretend to offer a disinterested description of historical events but instead undertakes a passionate engagement with history. She effects, I will argue a self-conscious feminization of the genre of the historical novel. The chapter on Lodore focuses on education, especially the question of female education that has preoccupied not only Shelley’s mother, but many of the most significant female intellectuals of her mother’s generation. In the penultimate chapter, I argue that Falkner is an appropriate culmination of Shelley’s career as a novelist. It is a novel in which she incorporates disguised the ‘Lives’ of Godwin and Shelley, as well as a novel in which she attempts a vindication of the reputation of her mother. It is a novel in which she is especially concerned with her relationship with her father, but for her it is a literary as much as a personal relationship. The novel is modelled, I shall argue, on Hamlet, the play in which Shakespeare explores most complexly the fraught relationship between the parent and the child, and it can also be understood as a re-writing of her own father’s most successful novel, Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams.

This thesis develops a reflexive methodology to read four North American long form poetic projects: Lorine Niedecker's North Central; Charles Olson's Maximus Poems; Robin Blaser's The Holy Forest; and Susan Howe's Souls of the Labadie Tract. The methodology, 'ecoseriality,' provides a way of reading serial structures in the 'web of life' (Jason W. More). Ecoseriality emerges through two research threads: ecological thinking (Lorraine Code, Dianne Chisholm), an interdisciplinary approach to ecological methodologies, and seriality, an extension of serial poetic form into an interdisciplinary understanding of serial qualities. The project's ecological thinking comprises a recombinant methodology primarily adapted from Moore's theories and methods for reading capitalism in the web of life, a number of philosophical approaches and concepts from Gilles Deleuze and Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, and Fredric Jameson's cognitive mapping. The project's seriality begins with Joseph M. Conte's typology of serial poetic form, Unending Design: the Forms of Postmodern Poetry, reading serial structures across genres and disciplines to refresh understanding of serial poetry and poetics. Ecoseriality develops along three primary, overlapping lines of inquiry: Moore's oikeios, adapted to read competing subjectivities and values brought to bear on relations in the web of life; Jameson's cognitive mapping, adapted into a post-Cartesian strategy for reading the imbrication between matter and meaning; and an examination of how the parts of a series relate to the whole. The project applies these foci to the four case studies, exposing fresh perspectives on the poetry and poetics of each. By reading Howe's 'cannibal cosmology' (Miriam Nichols) through Moore's theories of world-economy and world-ecology, the thesis arrives at an understanding of ecoseriality as an ethical ecological practice within the complex series of relations in the web of life. Ecoseriality thereby emerges as an oikeios for valuing complex relations in the web of life. The analysis concludes with discussion of the cosmological values of the serial poetic projects examined in relation to ecological thinking.

This thesis examines a range of poets from Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland from the Modernist period to the present day, who take the relationship between humans, poetry and the natural world as a primary point of concern. Through precise, materially attentive engagements with the coastal, littoral, and oceanic dimensions of place, Louis MacNeice, Hugh MacDiarmid, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Kathleen Jamie, John Burnside, Moya Cannon, Mary O’Malley and Jen Hadfield, respectively turn towards the vibrant space of the Atlantic archipelago in order to contemplate new modes of relation that are able to contend with the ecological and political questions engendered by environmental crises. Across their works, the archipelago emerges as a physical and critical site of poetic relation through which poets consider new pluralised, devolved, and ‘entangled’ relationships with place. Derived from the geographic term for ‘[a]ny sea, or sheet of water, in which there are numerous islands’, the concept of the ‘archipelago’ has recently gained critical attention within Scottish and Irish studies due to its ability to re-orientate the critical axis away from purely Anglocentric discourses. Encompassing a range of spatial frames from bioregion to biosphere, islands to oceans, and temporal scales from deep pasts to deep futures, the poets considered here turn to the archipelago as a means of reckoning with the fundamental questions that the Anthropocene poses about the relationships between humans and the environment. Crucially, through a series of comparative readings, the project presents fresh advancements in ecocritical scholarship, with regards to the rise of material ecocriticism, postcolonial ecocriticism, and the ‘Blue Humanities’.

The Imperative Commands is an interdisciplinary creative writing PhD in two parts: (a) a poem-object of 365 pages, which is an original engagement with found everyday instructional language, reimagined in an experimental/visual format; (b) ‘Appropriate Language,’ a critical and theoretical afterword exploring the inspiration, themes and methods of the poem. The premise of The Imperative Commands is to investigate current institutional and corporate language and appropriate it as poetry. It is a collagistic arrangement of found imperatives and assertions, harvested from the language of state institutions and corporate bodies that hail people on a daily basis. To create this long poetic work I set myself the initial constraint of harvesting found language during the course of a calendar year (May 1st 2014 to 30th April 2015). During this time I collected found imperatives, assertions, naturalizations of contestable information as fact, and other forms of overt and tacit instruction. The material was then transcribed, organized and rearranged in a variety of forms, using both chance and editorial interventions to make deviant collocations, stochastic juxtapositions, concrete-visual constellations and lyrical expression. ‘Appropriate Language’ breaks into several forms of afterword. The introduction outlines the general architecture and aims behind The Imperative Commands, as well as key influences on my practice and what inspired the thesis. Its main purpose is to explore ideas around how society is manipulated by language and ideology by, and for, the various institutions that seek to influence us. To do this it focuses on the writing of two thinkers: (1) the so-called ‘father of public relations’ Edward Bernays (1891-1995), who was instrumental in developing PR in the 20th century; and (2) French philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-1990) and his theory of Ideological State Apparatuses—which form and inform the essential structure of society outside the state—and interpellation, whereby individuals become ‘subjects’ through the ways in which they are hailed by ISAs and ideology. The second purpose of ‘Appropriate Language’ is to consider the affinities and differences that The Imperative Commands has with Conceptual Writing, with a particular focus on the work and ideas of poet Kenneth Goldsmith (b. 1961). My research into Conceptual Writing, and its claims of unreadability, helped to remind me of the importance of readability that I feel about my own work. That the organization of the found texts should be a readable, though idiosyncratic, book is crucial to The Imperative Commands. The harvested material when reorganized to make the poem reveals aspects of the life of a subject during a specific period of time, with disparate facets of social control brought into focus through the various language forms that constitute everyday life. The poem-object, that is also a social document, explores ways of uniting the notion of ‘concept’ and experimental writing—particularly within some of the methodologies of Conceptual Writing—with ways of maintaining and supporting a ‘self’ that is both lyrical and political.

Frequently employing the device of close textual analysis, this thesis attempts to chart, and subsequently examine, some of the ordering systems which would appear to inform, in a variety of ways, Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano. The introduction sets out to try and explain why the novel can be regarded, to some extent at least, as an 'open' text, and further suggests that the reader himself is posited by Lowry as an implied organising consciousness. Dividing the analysis into the fields of external, symbolic and motival areas of potential order, the thesis then proceeds to further examine smaller units of Lowry's processes. Although generally acknowledged as a dense or complex text, Under the Volcano has infrequently been subjected to rigorous textual analysis and, as such, the thesis charts some large new areas which have so far only remained peripheral to Lowry studies, always seeking to draw attention to how any given system corresponds to itself, as well as to other related areas of reference. Mythic, literary, cabbalistical, and other relevant material is introduced if it assists in defining any specific aspect of a potential ordering system. The thesis concludes that Under the Volcano seeks to draw attention to its own obsession with pattern and that one of Lowry's purposes is to enable his reader to imaginatively participate in the ordering and re-ordering of the novel's basic materials.

This thesis concerns the conflict between Byron the poet and Byron the man of action in so far as such a study illuminates the poetry. The aim has been to trace this conflict as it developed in Byron's work, in terms of a discourse between what he himself regarded as the spectator role of the poet and the participatory role of the man of action. The study therefore concentrates on those poems and materials that illustrate the tension between the poet and the man, and reflect Byron's movement from poetry to action. The first chapter outlines the argument of the subsequent discussion and provides certain relevant biographical details as a background to it. Hence we move from Byron's early poetic expressions of his desire for fame and action, through his critical observations on poetry and action, his parliamentary schemes and his attitude towards Napoleon, to his engagement in the Italian uprising and, finally, to his active commitment to the Greek War of Independence. Bach succeeding chapter seeks to formulate more cogently the principal issues that arise in this first chapter. Chapter 2 discusses Byron's interest and performance in the House of Lords. His speeches, which have met with little critical scrutiny, are considered both as pieces of oratory and as an effort by Byron to engage seriously and actively with English politics. The third chapter analyses Byron's attitude towards Napoleon as the archetype of the contemporary man of action. In particular, a sustained critique is offered of the ode to Napoleon Buonaparte and the Napoleon poems of 1815, since none of these has received due critical attention. Chapter 4 studies closely three crucial texts The Prisoner of Chi lion. The Lament of Tasso and The Prophecy of Dante. These are considered as a sequence, as an extended meditation on the theme of mental imprisonment, in order to reflect Byron's coming to terms with himself and his emergence from poetry to action. The final chapter continues this profession, resuming a polarity sketched in the first chapter between the world of poetry and the world of action. The aim here has been to re-iterate the tension between the poet and the man, in order to secure more forcefully the argument that the poem 'On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year', of which a new MS reading makes a material difference to its interpretation, is a poem of choice, the poetic endorsement of Byron's commitment to action. Marchand's complete edition of Byron' s Letters and Journals has been used throughout, as have, wherever possible, the first three volumes of McCann's new edition of The Complete Poetical Works.

This study aims at investigating the representations of Persia in a number of canonical and non-canonical texts in English literature. The theoretical framework comes from Edward Said’s analysis of orientalism. It is argued that the case of Persia instances the heterogeneous and striated character of orientalism (‘representations’ rather than ‘representation’ in the title). It is shown that while a number of relatively similar set of motifs and topoi, mainly derived from classical tradition and contemporary travel writing, circulate in the works of the three Renaissance authors included (Spenser, Marlowe, Milton), they are differently inflected and serve different thematic and ideological purposes. It is also suggested that the somewhat nascent orientalism of these authors develops into a more fully-fledged one in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh where a basically Romantic notion of Persia as an exotic land is overridden by its construction as a realm fallen to foreign domination and cultural dispossession so as to displace the poet’s radical political views. Finally, it is shown how the motifs and topoi teased out in the analysis of the matter of Persia in the works of the authors preceding James Morier find their characteristic form and their most effective articulation in his fiction, especially the Hajji Baba novels which arrogate the representation of the ‘real’ Persia. Central to the analysis is the point that though Said’s theorisation of orientalism is immensely useful, and essential, to any consideration of the orientalist canon, issues such as masquerading and displacing as well as the specificities of each text, of its context, and of the object of representation, compound the notion of orientalism as merely a mode of Western domination and hegemony.

Rethinking Urban Space in Contemporary British Writing argues that the prose literature of its featured authors offers a unique forum through which to perceive and account for the multifarious agency of urban space. Chapter one examines the limitations of using the Marxist spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre, widely adopted by literary scholars, to account for the widespread appearance of abandoned, subterranean and transient spaces in contemporary British writing. The thesis then develops new ways of reading which, unlike Lefebvrean theory, allow such spaces to emerge as affective and narrative agents, shaping narrative form and action. Chapter two focuses upon reading abandoned spaces in the work of Iain Sinclair and Cheshire-born author Nicholas Royle; chapter three examines the agency of the subterranean city-space in narratives by Neil Gaiman, Tobias Hill and Conrad Williams; and chapter four interrogates the agency exerted by the hotel space in contemporary hotel novels by Ali Smith and Monica Ali. Throughout, the materialism of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer is combined with affect theory to stress the narrative and affective agencies achieved by such urban spaces, precisely due to their transcendence of the networks of production and exchange which dominate the capitalist-driven cities of their fictional worlds.