This thesis analyzes the newness of ideas in Salman Rushdie’s narrative art in the following eight novels: Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Furyy and Shalimar the Clown. These novels are concerned with the experience of formerly colonized, still disadvantaged peoples, uprooted, disoriented by the fragmentary tendency of postmodernism and undergoing metamorphosis in their postcolonial migrant conditions, which Rushdie believes represent a “metaphor for humanity” (IH 394). From Rushdie’s point of view, humanity is exposed to the transformation which “comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs” (IH 394). Humanity rejoices in “mongrelization (hybridization), and fears the absolutism of the Pure” (IH 394). In narrating such a medley of human existence, Rushdie creates a new literary language and a form to convey his perspectives of this uncertain world within which human beings have to exist. The thesis is structured in eight chapters interposed between an introduction and a conclusion. For its pivotal significance in Rushdie’s oeuvre The Satanic Verses occupies the first chapter; the other chapters are arranged in chronological order to represent the sequence of publication of the remaining seven novels. Each novel is concerned with a distinctive mise en scene, characterized by its unique motif depicting Rushdie’s insights into the predicament of human existence in a world of indeterminacy adrift in the historic confluence of postcolonialism, postmodernism and neo-colonialism. Ideologically, the thesis deconstructs Rushdie’s view of the world of migrants who are confounded by the force of entrenched metaphysical myths of unreliable provenance. Such view naturally leads Rushdie to critique all forms of fundamentalism which represses the freedom of expression to challenge conventional beliefs

The above named thesis is an inter-disciplinary study which considers John Berger’s multi-media storytelling project, located in the margins of Europe! the postmetropolis/ the canon, in the ‘global’ context of Euro-American postmodernism. This thesis is concerned with the question of how useful ‘theory’ and/or postmodernism might be in the understanding of Berger’s position, and with how Berger’s position might be used to re-locate ‘theory’, and to tell a radical story of postmodernism. The thesis focuses on Berger’s work from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, because it was only after Berger emigrated, in 1974, that he declared himself to be a storyteller. And secondly, because the date of Berger’s emigration coincides with the period when the transition from a modern to a postmodern condition began to be felt. The thesis also focuses on Berger’s relation to Walter Benjamin and his writings about the dead, messianism, and storytelling. The argument advanced is that Benjamin’s - and Berger’s - writings about the dead should be read as emerging from and speaking to a specific historical conjuncture, or constellation; one in which the dominant, (post)metropolitan story of unilinear time and progress is coming to an end

The thesis focuses on the representations of British political history in the last five decades in the works of Jonathan Coe in comparison with other contemporary British authors who deal with the same historical issues. Specifically I discuss how the transition from the post-war consensus politics and the welfare state to neoliberalism is represented, and how these transformations British society has undergone are the subject of political commentary and criticism in the works of Coe. I discuss the different stylistic approaches deployed by Coe to deal with history, framing my analysis in the context of a discussion around the genre of the historical novel. The comparative approach of my thesis serves the purpose of both providing a wider depiction of the historical period taken in consideration and provides a broader critical evaluation of recent trends in the genre of the historical novel. My thesis is divided in three chapters, each focusing on the representation of a specific historical period, namely: the 1970s and the erosion of the social structure of the welfare state, the 1980s and Thatcherism, and ultimately the 1990s, New Labour's reformulation of neoliberalism, Cool Britannia, and the 2007-2008 financial crisis and the society of the 'precariat'. My argument is theoretically is inscribed in the framework of the discourse around postmodernity. My interpretation of postmodernism relies heavily on Jameson's analysis of post-industrial, late-capitalist society from the 1970s onwards and is intended to contribute to recent arguments about neoliberalism and the novel. The definition of postmodernity is also drawn from Harvey, Lyotard, Eagleton, Baudrillard, Bauman, and Hutcheon. The theoretical discussion around neoliberal consumerist society is framed in the discourse of excess of desire production and constructed lack, and therefore I use the concept of schizophrenia as theorised by Deleuze and Guattari, drawn from the Lacanian tradition. Žižek's analysis of the last developments of the neoliberal society also contributes to the theoretical and interpretative framework of my thesis. My exploration of Coe's novels, The Rotters' Club, What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep, The Closed Circle and The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, in relation to other contemporary works by Amis, Hollinghurst, McEwan, Barnes, etc. reveals the ways in which Coe's historical novels of the late 20th/early 21st century rework the realist novel tradition in light of a postmodern (or schizophrenic) late capitalist society.

This thesis discusses the intersection of subjectivity and the liminal in contemporary literary and filmic texts. In discussion of eight texts, the thesis weighs the dual meaning of “liminal subjectivities” – the liminal space between subjectivities, and the condition of subjectivity as it negotiates the liminal. It aims to explore how liminality manifests in manners both universal and specific to the literary or filmic form, in the embodiments of characters, and the rhythms and poetics of the text. It considers the liminal a privileged trope of destabilised subjectivity, a space of suspension and potentiality, and explores how the liminal functions as an interface between haecceity and otherness; whether it binds together or holds apart; if it is a space between oppositional states or a continuum of specific sites of intensity. The eight texts discussed are The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo (W. G. Sebald), Sputnik Sweetheart, Kafka on the Shore, and After Dark (Haruki Murakami), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry), My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant). The work of Sebald and Gondry is considered in translation from the original German and Japanese. The thesis considers both literary and filmic texts to contrast the salient modalities of subjectivity that each form constructs. Each chapter considers how liminality manifests at the surface of the text, how a liminal agency operates to interrupt, destabilise, and displace subjectivity in the spaces between languages, genre, form, voice, states of consciousness, word and image, facticity and fictionality, and cinematic and literary tropes and modes. The discussion explores how this is reflected and expanded upon within the text, in liminal embodiments, intensities, and motifs, such as the hypnagogic, rites of passage, the uncanny, home, the vespertine, night, metamorphosis, carnival, as well as issues of space – the non-place, the extraterritorial, and nomadic space.

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.