This thesis examines the ontology of the cyborg body and the politics inherent to cultural manifestations of that image, and focuses on the links between glass and human-machine integration, while tracing the dangerous political affinities that emerge when such links are exposed. In the first chapter, the cyborg’s persistent construction as a cultural Black Box is uncovered using the theories of Bruno Latour and W. Ross Ashby. It examines why the temptation to explore the cyborg solely through close readings of contemporary incarnations leads only to confusion and misreading. The second chapter builds on the work of the first by placing the cyborg within its proper historical context, and provides a detailed examination of the period in which the cyborg was not only named, but also transformed into a physical possibility with an existent political agenda. It then investigates the phallogocentricity, hyper-masculinity, and inherent racism of the cyborg body, and demonstrates how representations of human-machine integration reinforce the pre-existing racist, hetero-normative, patriarchal hegemony of the Cold War. The discussion then explores the issue of the emergent property in the cyborg body; specifically, the figure’s persistent construction as a ‘body of glass.’ It demonstrates how cyborgs are not only associated with objects like the mirror, but also how that figure is tied to visual motifs such as the double or doppelganger. Accordingly, the theories of Jacques Lacan are employed to elucidate the issues that arise when one of the most pervasive images in Western culture also doubles as a reflector. The final chapter seeks to expand upon the framework provided by Lacan, and examines the cyborg not as a mirror, but as a portal. Subsequently, this section challenges not only the cyborg’s current status as a posthuman figure, but also current theoretical assumptions which frame the cyborg as the point of transition from humanism to posthumanism.

This thesis examines representations of exotic animals in Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction and how they produce the boundary between human and nonhuman animals. Particularly, it scrutinises how violent engagements with animals participate in the construction of masculine identities and how these reflect and contribute to imperialist conceptions of ecology. I contend that the ostensibly fundamental distinction of humans from their animal others emerges in this context as compromised and unstable: a complex interplay of kinship and difference rather than an innate, monolithic and hierarchical opposition. This argument both continues the postcolonial dismantling of empire’s logic of domination and develops the recentering of the nonhuman in environmentally focussed criticism, but, most vitally, signals the relation between these fields: the necessary interdependence of human and nonhuman interests, of environmental activism and global social justice. Chapter One begins by examining recent critical interventions in the colonial adventures of G. A Henty, John Buchan, G. M. Fenn, R. M. Ballantyne, H. Rider Haggard and Paul du Chaillu. While intimately involved with an imperialist agenda that seeks to assimilate foreign environments and their denizens into colonial order, such texts also draw on a long-standing literary tradition that relishes wilderness as the theatre of narrative excitement and heroic testing. Through analysis of Henty’s Rujub the Juggler (1895) and Buchan’s A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906), I illustrate how imperial romance simultaneously narrates the symbolically powerful domestication of animal others through depictions of hunting and warfare and embraces animal otherness through a fetishistic investment in animal bodies re-presented as a panoply of imperial trophies and trinkets. Exploring further the ambiguities of domination, Chapter Two investigates colonial natural history as a material and discursive violence that forcefully integrates animals into Western patterns of signification. Adventure fiction’s role in this, however, emerges in Henty’s By Sheer Pluck (1884) and Fenn’s Nat the Naturalist (1882) as a conflicted celebration of restraint and aggression; the masculinities that such texts aim to construct and marshal suggesting an uncomfortable intimacy of civilisation and savagery that besets imperialist racial and species hierarchies and the unitary relation of the genre to colonial power. The themes of race, species and narrative form are developed in Chapter Three through a close reading of the cultural history of gorillas in the second half of the nineteenth century in the romanticised travel writing of Paul du Chaillu and the fictions of R. M. Ballantyne. The ‘invention’ of these extraordinary animals troubles the generic boundaries between romance and natural history and raises pointed questions about what it means to be human. A rhetoric of hygiene and contamination emerges as adventure heroes consistently find themselves deprived of their upright human dignity and floundering in a series of mucks and mires. The relation of sanitation and species forms a significant element of degenerationist discourse and the starting point for Chapter Four. Metropolitan decay is recurrently implicated in a potential devolution that threatens empire with both practical and philosophical dilemmas. Paradoxically, in Haggard’s Nada the Lily (1892) and Buchan’s Lodge the cure for this malaise is figured as another form of becoming animal as the enervated urbanite recovers in the colonial wilds. Such naturalisation of colonial violence leads into a discussion of the psychological undercurrents of male aggression. While the eroticisation of hunting is crucial, the imperial romance reveals male sexualities that hinge, most notably in Ballantyne’s 1861 The Gorilla Hunters, on imaginings of vulnerability as much as on fantasies of self-empowerment. In conclusion, I posit the human/animal border as one permeable at many points and follow Val Plumwood in delineating a selfhood ultimately in relation to, rather than separated from, the other and radically divergent from dualistic, colonial conceptualisations of human identity.

The Mabinogi Tetralogy by Evangeline Walton consists of four novels: Prince of Annwn (1974), The Children of Llyr (1971), The Song of Rhiannon (1972) and The Island of the Mighty (1970, first published under the title The Virgin and the Swine, 1936). This thesis locates the Tetralogy as a founding text of modern feminist fantasy fiction by analysing its rewriting of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi. The analysis demonstrates how feminist debate, Welsh medieval literature and Celtic history combine to produce an important, if hitherto largely ignored, contribution to both fantasy fiction and women’s writing. Walton re-visions the Mabinogi as a tale of a fictional Celtic Wales’s transition from a mother-worshipping tribal society to the patriarchal, monotheistic power structure that governed the construction of the medieval text. The fantasy genre which Walton helped form enables the author to use magic as a symbol of female agency. The female characters in The Mabinogion Tetralogy with the strongest connection with the fictional deity referred to as the Mother – Rhiannon and Arianrhod – also have the highest degree of magical capabilities. Conversely, those who lose their connection with the Mother – Branwen, Penardim and Blodeuwedd – become subject to the control of their male counterparts. A feminist reading of the Tetralogy, which draws upon the work of Luce Irigaray, reveals Walton’s series as a story about the cultural demise of Mother-worship and the institutionalisation of a patriarchal society that permanently re-defined gender roles. An examination of Walton’s source material elucidates how the author uses historical research to provide a realistic framework for the Tetralogy. By examining how Walton merges history with fantasy, and a medieval text with modern feminist thought, this thesis argues for a re-evaluation of Evangeline Walton as one of the most important developers of feminist fantasy fiction.

This thesis examines representations of monstrosity in Old English literature. The literary studies herein examine the construction of monstrous individuals in Old English poetry, and I demonstrate that literary monstrous types converge and develop a tradition of monstrosity that informs the monsters of the Liber monstrorum and Anglo-Saxon Wonders of the East. I argue that, for Old English writers, a monster was not necessarily a deformed being located in the distant lands of the East; rather, the literary and linguistic evidence suggests that any man or woman had the potential to become a monstrous type within the conventional social order. The Old English works examined are Precepts, Maxims I and II, Vainglory, Judith, The Battle of Maldon and Beowulf because each text reveals that Old English writers utilised binary sex and gender differences to define the social roles and behaviours appropriate for the masculine and feminine. According to critical theory, gender is a performance and both men and women must therefore prove their gender identities by behaving in a certain way and fulfilling the roles deemed appropriate for their gender. In failing to conform to the expectations of their gender, a gender-monstrosity matrix works upon the social transgressors, excluding them from the social order and distorting their gender identities into a monstrously confused yet recognisable construct. In the literary works examined, the monstrous type is not only the antithesis to the idealised masculine and feminine, but is also a malevolent figure whose anti-social words and actions transgress gender expectations. I demonstrate that the danger posed by the monster is not only physical, but also psychological. The monster threatens the communal harmony of the social order because, in Old English literature, monstrosity emerges in the form of an uncontrolled riot that incites unrest and enmity in the hall, or as words and outward actions that are purposely deployed (or withheld) in order to demoralise, destroy, and even consume the masculine symbolic order in the pursuit of self-gratification.

This thesis examines the various operations of notions of republicanism in the Jonsonian canon, in particular within his dramatic compositions. Taking "republicanism" as a term to refer to groups of often contrasting and conflicting ideologies, it examines the direct influence of Renaissance Humanism's interest in republican history and constitutions upon Ben Jonson's work, looking at the role of Ancient Rome (in its incarnation both as Empire and Republic) and early modern Venice and Florence in a number of his plays. It also considers the influence of republicanism as a linguistic programme, deriving often from a number of European conflicts against the dominant authorities, and disseminated through the potentially democratizing print culture that was emerging in the early seventeenth century. Republicanism is seen to shade into notions of community and the communal, and also to disperse and displace comfortable concepts of the same. This is seen to carry a special valency in Jonson's later plays, although it is an issue that also figures in the texts that precede them. In placing a particular focus on Jonson's less-discussed drama, the thesis seeks to reassess his canon, avoiding any simplistic developmental reading of his career and, in subverting a strictly chronological approach, reclaiming individual texts for more precise and contextualized understandings - on a political, sociological, and gendered level. The interest In the local in Jonsonian drama requests a Similarly localized reading of the play-texts. By concentrating upon Jonson's plays, the thesis also uncovers a registration within them of the inherent republicanism of the dramatic genre. Jonson recognizes this in his continued interest in the role of audiences in the production of meanings. He examines both the operations and the breakdowns of contractual agreements in society at large and in the theatrical situation, confirming that the authority of the author or monarch can never be absolute.

This thesis seeks to study women's poetic response to the First World War a hitherto neglected area of the literature inspired by the war. It attempts to retrieve from oblivion the experience of the muted half of society as rendered in verse and document as far as possible the full range of the poetic impact the war made upon female sensibility. It is thematic in structure and concentrates upon the more recurrent of attitudes and beliefs which surface in women's war writings. The thematic structure was adopted to cover as wide a range as possible of the ways the historical experience could be met and interpreted in literature. This study takes into account the work of the established writers of the period as well as the amateur versifiers who made war their subject. The first chapter discusses verse which defines the nature of war as apprehended by the female consciousness. Chapter Two examines the poets' use of religious concept and image to lend meaning and purpose to an event entirely at variance with the ideals employed to explain it. The third chapter considers the exploitation of the perennial poetic subject of nature to interpret war by accommodating it into the language and thought of an apparently alien literary tradition. War as it impinged upon the consciousness of people on the Home Front is discussed in Chapter Four; it is partly concerned with revising the calumnious images of women in war time as set out by the soldier poets. Chapter Five looks into the writing of those women who wrote out of their experience of working in the various organisations which were an integral part of the machinery of warfare. War as an experience of suffering - suffering peculiar to the female - defines Chapter Six. The purpose of this study has been to suggest the variety of literary responses to the First World War by those who, at great cost, produce the primal munition of war - men - with which their destinies are inextricably ,linked. As part of a response to a particular historical event, the literary interpretation of which has conditioned modern war consciousness, women's war poetry is not without relevance for it adds a new dimension to the established canon of war literature and correspondingly a new vista to understanding the truth of war.

This thesis aims to examine the little-known works by three Anglo-Sicilian women, written at the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century, as expatriate writing. In particular, this study explores the various mechanisms and strategies at play in the representation of the Other and the Self in these texts, in the light of the events preceding and following Italian Unification. I intend to verify how these texts respond to being analysed as a distinct group, and what are the specific roles and functions of expatriate women's works. I consider these three works through an interdisciplinary, comparative approach. This thesis consists of an introduction, three case studies - structured in terms of generic subdivisions - and a conclusion. The Introduction draws the historical, social and cultural context shared by the three case studies. It looks at women's expatriate writing as a genre, as well as a few women's travel texts about Sicily. Chapter one explores Letters from Sicily: Containing Some Account of the Political Events in that Island during the Spring of 1849 (London, 1850) by Mary Charlton Pasqualino. Within the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistolary writing, this work is read as a text marking the author's transition from a condition as traveller to that as expatriate. Chapter two is devoted to an analysis of Sicilian Ways and Days, by Louise Hamilton Caico (London, 1910). It looks at strategies used by the author to exert her authority as participant-observer in her ethnographic work. This section also analyses Hamilton Caico's photographs of inland Sicily within a selection of iconographic representations of Southern Italy produced by female travellers. Chapter three examines the relationship between history and memory, personal and public account through a close reading of Sicily and England: Political and Social Reminiscences, 1848-1870 (London, 1907) by Tina Scalia Whitaker. It examines the author's search for an Anglo-Italian identity, as well as the issue of the 'authenticity' of Scalia's historical narrative and self-representation. The conclusions briefly look at today's reception of the translation into Italian of the works by Hamilton Caico and Scalia Whitaker. This section also suggests further research on women's expatriate writing about Italy.

The years between 1815 and 1825 were a period of social and cultural flux. This thesis examines what I take to be the most significant literary genre of that period, the magazine. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the London Magazine and the New Monthly Magazine, along with a host of other, less commercially successful magazines, emerged as a dominant cultural force in these years. I place these magazines in a context of rapid literary and urban expansion, in which distinctions between commercial and aesthetic, literary and non-literary, and high and low cultures became newly anxious. Magazines, I suggest, illuminate a literary culture that was not as clearly divided as either traditional Romantic criticism or New Historicist cultural critiques have suggested. Rather, magazines stand at a midpoint between high and low cultures, neither of which could define itself except in relation to the other. I argue that magazines are significant precisely because their intermediate status offers the best guide to a newly confusing republic of letters. Chapter One discusses the development of the magazine from its eighteenth-century roots, and argues that Leigh Hunt’s Examiner is the most important influence on the new magazines. In Chapter Two I challenge Jon Klancher’s influential model of magazine readerships, and argue for a model of the magazine market dependent not on exclusion, but on connections between magazines and across a culture. In Chapter Three I propose a model of metropolitan culture, defined by its indistinctness, that underlies my conception of the magazine form as a whole. Here I discuss T. G. Wainewright’s art criticism for the London Magazine, arguing that it revels in the cultural indeterminacy that magazines so adeptly theorise. Chapter Four turns from the metropolis to the print market, arguing that magazine writers recognised that it had begun to resemble the London streets. But rather than rejecting the newly expanded “reading public” like many of their contemporaries, magazine writers enjoyed a new sense of freedom, even while they sensed the limits of that freedom. Many writers in the period sought to oppose literature and commerce, and in Chapter Five I again place magazines between these two categories. Thomas De Quincey made himself into a commercial success by claiming a literary identity that was opposed to the marketplace, but Blackwood’s, in a brilliant reversal, made itself into literature by flamboyantly asserting its commercialism.

This study aims to offer a new literary biography of Thomas Dekker (c. 1572-1632) and demonstrates the ways in which he refashions his principal source, Geoffrey Chaucer. The first chapter considers Dekker in both literary and theatre histories, situating him amongst his collaborators: Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle, Michael Drayton, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster. This chapter also aims to re-evaluate Dekker’s achievement in history, starting from Dekker’s presence in Henslowe’s Diary, his ‘part’ in the War of the Theatres, his theatre writing, followed by his observations of London written during the plague years, his imprisonment, and his posthumous historical reception. The second chapter investigates how Dekker uses Chaucer, whose ‘book’, I argue, is a common theatrical source book that offers the playwrights quick access to stories and plots. To provide evidence of Dekker’s readership of Chaucer, I trace the early modern editions of Chaucer available in Dekker’s time and survey Dekker’s reading of Chaucer from his early career to his late years. The final three chapters concentrate on Dekker’s uniquely creative refashioning of Chaucer in theatrical terms. Chapter Three examines how Dekker turns Chaucer’s serious Clerk’s Tale, a ‘text of loss’, into a comic parody, re-titled as The Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissil. Chapter Four investigates Chaucer’s legacy of the festive and the carnival, whose ideas of ‘game’ and ‘play’ in The Canterbury Tales directly influence Dekker’s Westward Ho and Northward Ho, wherein I call the Ho plays Dekker’s ‘game’ plays. Chapter Five demonstrates the ways in which Dekker transforms the tropes of Chaucer’s Loathly Lady in The Wife of Bath’s Tale into performative metaphors in The Roaring Girl, a fantasy satire. This is the first attempt to discuss and study, in full, Dekker’s texts alongside their source. Through Dekker’s Chaucerian re-imaginings, we see the playwright’s three-dimensional transformation of his source and the ways he visualises his performances.

The overall argument of this thesis is that Anthony Burgess’s literary journalism enables us to make a nuanced reading of his own Catholic novels. My definition of ‘journalism’ is necessarily wide: it takes in television and radio work, as well as published book reviews and interviews. Although previous commentators have established useful connections between Burgess’s novels, his journalism has been consistently overlooked and undervalued. As a result of this neglect, there is no published study of Burgess’s journalistic writing. This is also the first thesis to make extensive use of Burgess’s manuscripts, letters, diaries and other archival materials. The Worm and the Ring (1961), Tremor of Intent (1966) and Early Powers (1980) offer useful examples of ‘confluence’ between fiction and journalism. These novels pick up and develop a variety of material - often, but not exclusively ‘Catholic’ - which Burgess engages with elsewhere, in essays and reviews. The act of reviewing is seen to be crucial part of the process of fiction-writing, and Burgess’s journalism (on Greene, on spy fiction, and on the idea of the Catholic novel) appears to flow into these blocks in a fairly straightforward way. The ‘conflict’ of my title refers to A Clockwork Orange and Burgess’s subsequent journalistic statements about it. His post factum prefaces and other journalistic articles on the novel’s composition are shown to be at variance and typescript evidence. The theological implications of the variant endings are examined carefully, with reference to Burgess’s writings about the theological dispute between Saint Augustine and Pelagius.