Most commentators on Robert Graves’ writings agree upon the importance of his ideas on mythology to the development of his unique theories on poets and poetry. Few critics have undertaken to apply the same approach toward an understanding of his fiction. This thesis undertakes to fill that gap by investigating Robert Graves’ historical fiction in order to test whether his theories on mythology and poetry can also be found to play a part in his conception of history and historical legends. To that end, Graves’ historical novels have been analysed from various narratological perspectives in order to uncover the often complex relationship between the author, his narrators, and the reader. Robert Graves’ heroes as autobiographers, and narrators as biographers, are found to suffer psychological neuroses that are usually the result of an overly acute awareness of history. They seem to be aware of the process by which actions and events are ascribed mythic qualities which pollute the story of their real lives. Some of Graves’ heroes fall victim to this process whilst others attempt to gain from it. Invariably, as the thesis demonstrates, they all fail because they lack an awareness of the single true story to which Graves himself subscribed: that of the White Goddess

Dan Billany (1913-1943?) published only four novels, yet in those novels he engages in the debates that preoccupy Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. Billany’s view of the period, however, differs from that of his more famous contemporaries. As a young working class man, he challenges contemporary assumptions about this literary period, arguing that the more bourgeois writers have a false view of the working class. This study aims to recast the political and literary memory of the 1930s and 1940s in order to show how a young working class writer from the North of England defines and shapes Marxist and literary tradition to further his revolutionary ideals. The ultimate goal of this dissertation is to provoke the debate that will give Billany, badly underrated, the attention he deserves. Due recognition of his fiction will help to expand the critical view of the 1930s and 1940s. Billany actively engages not only with the period but with those writers who have traditionally been seen as defining that literary period. His attacks on writers such as John Galsworthy and W.H. Auden show that Billany is trying to develop a truly radical Communist working class literary tradition. As an educated working class man and a committed Communist, Billany offers an alternative view to the traditional and conservative attitudes associated with pre-war and wartime writing

This dissertation examines Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet in its various Egyptian contexts. It contests the idea that the Alexandria of the Quartet is essentially a city of the imagination which bears little or no relation to the real city of history. It argues that various strata of Alexandrian history, from antiquity to the nineteen- fifties, are deeply embedded in Durrell’s Quartet. Of particular interest is the tetralogy’s representation of the history of Egypt’s Wafdist independence movement in the years 1919 - 1952, and Britain’s responses to it. The dissertation argues that the tetralogy can be read as an allegorical treatment of historical events that took place in colonial Egypt. Chapter One of the dissertation provides an over-view of Durrell’s Quartet and of the main critical and scholarly approaches which have been used in the study of the tetralogy, Chapter Two continues the exposition, with particular reference to T.S. Eliot’s concept of “tradition”, and Edward Said’s “Orientalism” as keys for the understanding of the Quartet. This chapter then applies these two concepts to the analysis of the Quartet, and proposes a “tradition of Orientalism” with the tetralogy as the paradigmal text of “late Orientalism”. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is proposed as an important precussor. Chapter Three examines the ways in which the Quartet makes use of the history of Alexandria from the city’s founding by the Ptolomies until early modern times, with particular reference to the British occupation of Egypt 1882 - 1956. The chapter then examines the tetralogy’s treatment of British Imperial selfhood and the Egyptian “Other”. Chapter Four examines the Alexandria Quartet, in particular Mountolive, in parallel to the history of the Egyptian Wafd party and the struggle for Egyptian independence. It argues that Mountolive should be read as an allegorical treatment of events that took place in Egypt between the years 1919 - 56. Chapter five investigates the relationship between the Alexandria Quartet and the three phases of Durrell’s “Egyptian” poetry: that written between 1938 - 40, which utilises themes from ancient Egyptian mythology; that written during Durrell’s Egyptian exile between 1941 - 45; and that written in the immediate post-war period 1945 - 50. In this way the historical context brought up to the early nineteen-fifties. Chapter Six concludes the dissertation by asserting the importance of the Alexandria Quartet as a key literary text from a period that saw the end of Empire and the beginnings of de-colonisation, and argues that the tetralogy should be given an enhanced status in the study of colonial and post-colonial English writing

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With a language, landscape and culture unfamiliar to the majority of British readers, Latin America is a puzzling and anomalous presence in British modernist fiction. Yet, in the work of Conrad, Lawrence and Lowry it is also a setting that constitues a minor tradition in its own right and one that offers a distorted reflection of the concerns an anxieties back home: from uncertainties over the future of the British Empire to the traumatic recogntion of loss that attended the First and Second World Wars. In addition to these political and historical concerns, the representation of Latin America in British modernist fiction is also entangled with a corresponding crisis of culture. Consistently Latin America offers itself to writers in English as a suitable correlative to concerns which range from disturbing visions of the natural worls to the disorientation that attended the engagement with the culturally unfamiliar along with the uncertainties that were related to the emergence of a truly global economy in which Britain modernist fiction is far from static. As this interest in Latin America matures, there is a progressive movement from the initial sense of doubt (Conrad) along with a contrary sense of desperation (Lawrence) towards a final sense of resignation (Lowry). As such, Latin America can be thought of as a fictional space in the British modernist novel - in the end, more of a fantasy than a reality - that reflects the frightening apprehension of a new world in which British fiction had found a suitable place to come to terms with some of its deepest fears and anxieties.

While literary critics have tended to focus on episodes of alleged masculinism or homoeroticism in D.H. Lawrence’s fiction, this thesis examines a greater complexity of masculinities running throughout his novels, manifested in the tension between an insistence on gender difference and a desire to transcend gender altogether. It does this in two principal ways. Firstly, masculinities in the novels are historicized via discussion of the crisis of Victorian masculinities and fin de siècle anxieties about gender. Secondly, Lawrence’s depictions of masculinity are scrutinized in light of theories of otherness, particularly the conflicting critiques of Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray. Over five chapters, which deal chronologically with Lawrence’s major novels, this thesis traces his response to the damaging legacy of a gendered mind-body split, often explored through a developing trope of the Lady of Shalott, which simultaneously circumscribes and challenges the perceived duality of gender. A third theme thus emerges from this dual line of enquiry, as anxieties about masculinity focus around the ambivalent figure of the angel, which represents both a seductive ideal of transcendence (the sexless angel) and the more elusive goal of reuniting mind and body (Irigaray’s carnal angel). Although notions of masculinity are always relational to images of femininity, this is particularly the case in Lawrence’s fiction, in which the relationship between men and women is probably the central concern. Accordingly, this thesis engages with masculinities from within a broader context of gender roles. Indeed, Lawrence’s men experience great difficulties in separating themselves from the women around them, while it is the women who begin to insist on the separateness of men and the idea of love as a “third thing” that allows a union of two subjects rather than a reduction to Platonic one-ness. This nascent ethics of gender difference is then taken forward by Rupert Birkin and his male successors, as Lawrence explores a new vision of divine manhood, culminating in the evocation of Oliver Mellors as a “pure masculine angel”

This thesis examines the dynamic relationship between realism and experimentalism in the 1940s and mid-century fiction of James Hanley and Patrick Hamilton. It is argued that the work of both writers during this period, although it might utilise realist forms and techniques, is not characterised by reversion to a traditional and outmoded model of novel writing that predates modernism, but rather, is engaged in a productive and sometimes tense dialogue with the gestures, manners and experiments of the avant-garde. In so doing, Hanley and Hamilton are read as key exemplars of a varied and adventurous literary moment that has been frequently overlooked within the broad narrative of twentieth century British fiction. It is argued that these works complicate the vocabulary of literary realism by suggesting the novel as a hybrid form: an aesthetic which privileges fidelity to a contemporary ―real‖, especially the conditions of wartime and post-war and the shifting configurations of social and economic relations, even as it simultaneously projects a deep estrangement or satirical detachment from a sense of unified reality. Whilst registering the manifest differences between the two writers, the thesis explores their fiction‘s varying reactions towards and absorption of avant-garde idioms, such as the surrealist and expressionist, and analyses the affective qualities of that ―heightening‖ of language in the construction of their realist narratives. All the novels discussed, in a series of close readings, possess a stylistic or tonal singularity that tangibly frames their narratives, a process of divergence that contests and reconceptualises the concept and aims of literary realism. In historicising this phase of literary change, the thesis draws on the work of various cultural theorists and historians and elaborates the interpretive framework in which the literary 40s and the fiction of Hanley and Hamilton can be recast.

This thesis argues that a preoccupation with space is a characteristic feature of English fiction in the years following the outbreak of the Second World War and, more specifically, that the war's events caused this heightened interest in the spatial. Writing from the 1940s exhibits an anxious perplexity in its spatial descriptions which reveals an underlying philosophical uncertainty; cultural assumptions about spatial categories were destabilised by the war and this transformation left its mark on literature. Writers in London during the war were among civilians shocked by new sensory assaults and dramatic changes to the urban landscape. These material facts exerted pressures on the collective imagination and a major part of the literary response was an urgently-renewed interest in the problematics of space. The primary literary focus here is on Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green, though work by other writers including Graham Greene, Mervyn Peake and William Sansom is also discussed. I draw on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to illustrate the challenge phenomenological thinking posed to prevailing cultural conceptions of space in this period and to suggest how the war directed writers' attention to the role that embodied perception plays in composing spaces. I also examine how technological change, particularly development of the V2 rocket, shook established spatial thinking and I discuss how conceptual categories such as adjacence, linearity and sequence were further disrupted by the political divisions of post-war Europe. Documentary and diary sources are used to support literary evidence. English fiction changed abruptly and significantly in the 1940s because of a fresh spatial understanding emerging from the war which shaped the culture of the Cold War and the space race. This change demands reassessment of a decade often dismissed in literary history as a dull interlude between temporally-dominated high modernism and a postmodern ‘turn to the spatial.'

Focusing on approaches to place in selected novels by J. M. Coetzee and V. S. Naipaul, this thesis explores how postcolonial literature can be read as contributing to the reimagining of decolonised, decentred or multi-centred geographies. I will examine the ways in which selected novels by Naipaul and Coetzee engage with the sense of displacement and marginalization generated by imperial mappings of the colonial space. My chosen texts contribute to the decentralizing tendencies of postcolonialism by deconstructing the tropes of boundaries from the perspective of those who have been marginalized on the basis of their race, gender or geographical origins. The work of Edward Said, bell hooks, Edward Soja, Gillian Rose and Homi Bhabha provide a means for me to explain how the displaced subjects relate to places in the postcolonial context. Accordingly, Coetzee's and Naipaul's visions of place and geography are examined in this study in relation to the situational complexity of their habitats. Naipaul's view of place in terms of the binary oppositions between the colonial and metropolitan places is discussed in relation to the sense of displacement that is generated by his colonial upbringing. On the other hand, Coetzee's view of place as the product of imperialist divisive discourses is also interpreted against the historical contest over land and belonging in South Africa. It is argued that both writers contribute to the decentralizing mission of postcolonialism by locating themselves in the margins and advocating sensitivity towards the tropes of boundaries that subject people to displacement and marginalization. Part I discusses A House for Mr Biswas, The Enigma of Arrival, Half a Life and Magic Seeds. I will explore how Naipaul's sense of marginality results in his view of the world in terms of a binarism between the centre and the margin. However, I will argue that among these novels, the last three acknowledge that the longing for homeliness is an unlikely quest for a displaced subject, and that the imperative of the postcolonial world requires the displaced to see the world as unhomely, changing and hybrid. Part II interprets Coetzee's experience of apartheid in South Africa as a legitimate reason for resisting the ways in which the dominant powers in the social and cultural spheres implement marginality. In Waiting for the Barbarians, and Life and Times of Michael K and Foe, Coetzee deconstructs boundaries and asserts the entitlement of the displaced and the marginalized to the land and its representation. The distinctive approaches taken by these two canonical writers remind us of the increasing necessity, yet the complexity, of moving towards a decentralised and dynamic view of the world.

This thesis examines the poetry and critical work of Veronica Forrest-Thomson, arguing that her poetic project is characterised by her ‘struggle with forms'. Forrest-Thomson developed many formal models of poetry in her critical writing which acted as ideals to be enacted in practice. The broad struggle in Forrest-Thomson's poetic project is, then, between the formal projections of theory and a variety of forms of poetic practice; between, that is, the fixed and totalising frames of theory and the local patterns of form and meaning which exceed the logic of an ideal model. This thesis examines the struggle between theoretical and practical forms through consecutive stages in Forrest-Thomson's career. First, I examine Forrest-Thomson's attempt to combine Romantic, formalist and modernist poetic theories in an early manifesto. Her early, conflicted theoretical perspectives, I argue, transferred to her poetry as tensions between a use of traditional poetic forms and a variety of free, formal modes. Second, I demonstrate how conflicts between traditional and innovative form in the poems were exacerbated by Forrest-Thomson's developing interest in artistic theory and concrete poetry. Third, I assess the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein's linguistic philosophy on Forrest-Thomson's theory and practice, concentrating on her use of his notion of ‘language-games' to inform collage-like poems and the idea that the poem is a ‘context' absorbing and transforming others. At this stage, Forrest-Thomson's theory and poetry also exhibit tensions between modernist and post-modernist perspectives which induce an anxiety of losing control at the level of poetic form for which she compensates with an emphasis on traditional literary figures and forms. Fourth, I examine Forrest-Thomson's Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry as an example of a particular type of formalism where fixed metaphors of poetic form comprise both the polemical strength and conceptual weakness of her poetic theory. Lastly, I outline the struggle between formal and semantic control and excess in Forrest-Thomson's late theory and poetry, arguing that her quest for what she calls ‘writing straight' is impeded by her conflicted assessment of the role and status of complex poetic form.