The title of the creative work is ‘Ugly Lovely'. The 20,000 word critical discussion of the creative piece has no title, other than that it offers a critical consideration of the relationship between the literary composition and contemporary or traditional achievements in the genre. The creative work concerns a taxi driver named Don, living in the south Wales port of Swansea. He finds his life and culture unsatisfying, but is unable, because of his own lack of will and energy, to leave. His passengers, some of whose lives have an orbit beyond the small-ish Welsh city, bring his sense of dissatisfaction into focus. The work follows a sequence of episodes during which the driver meets and reflects on the remarks and actions of subsequent passengers, and considers his own family and life. Structurally, the work takes the form of a story-cycle concerning or emanating from Don or from the passengers in his taxi. The passenger narratives sometimes present complete stories or self-contained episodes, sometimes broken or partial narratives. All episodes stand in relief against the other fractured narrative running through the work, the driver's self-reflection and re-evaluation of the family life and up-bringing. Thus: 1) Taxi stories – involve the characters who step in and out of the taxi. These stories centre upon a cast of characters who enter the driver's working world, but also present to reader the a secondary cast of characters introduced by the passengers, through the stories they tell. The role and status of the driver shifts as the work progresses. At the close of the work, though the driver's future, like the futures of his town and nation, remains unassigned, he approaches it with a firmer sense of purpose (if not direction). 2) Connected family narratives - gradually present fragments from the history and lives of the main figures in the driver's family. Through these frequently conflicting and contesting narratives, the work delivers a number of perspectives on the history of the town in which the family lived and through which the taxi stories now move. These separate narratives are arranged out of linear sequence, in an order which has greater correspondence to their emotional importance, and in response to triggers set within the various passenger narratives. The contesting nature of the family stories raises questions in the reader's mind about which narratives are privileged, and which reliable. As the work progresses, the realisation comes that none of the narratives is privileged, that all may be unreliable and all contest for dominance and primacy in the driver's mind. The critical element In providing a ‘critical consideration of the relationship between the literary composition and contemporary or traditional achievements in the genre', this commentary will present I. a general introduction to the creative work, II. discussion of the narrative form and organisation of the work, comprising: a. consideration of the ways that the work is shaped by modernist concerns and structures, particularly those of the modernist ‘city novel', b. consideration of the way that the work is structured to present a collection of linked and inter-related narratives, broadly referred to as a short-story sequence III. discussion of the extent to which the work can be placed within the canon of Welsh writing in English; in particular: a. the ways in which the work constitutes a recognisable piece of Welsh writing in English and the extent to which it treats the concerns of one of the national literatures b. the ways in which the work makes considered and constructive use of its setting in Swansea.

This project is largely creative in nature offering the first half of a now published novel entitled Stranger Than Kindness and a textual and critical analysis of that novel that explores the experience of traumatized or ‘bruised' nurses. The novel, half set in 1989 and half set in 2013, follows the clinical and personal traumatization of two nurses and their tentative steps towards restoration. It reveals a backdrop of a sometimes subtle institutionalized brutality and a culture that lends itself to the individual collection or absorption of difficulty. It uses gentle magical realism to counterpoint the gritty backdrop of the pre-community care asylum of the 1980s and the neoliberal, free market setting of the modern world of healthcare in the second half of the book. It's dénouement is a celebration of whimsy in the face of hard industrialized science. The novel reveals the capacity of the nurse to collect emotional residue, trauma or bruising and be both changed and hurt by the experience of care to the point of being damaged. It essentially resorts to poetics to explore the ‘felt' world of the nurse or carer. In tone and in theme the book is a novel of the emotions. Valuing an emotional literacy over medical rationalism, it seeks to gently reclaim the idea that caring for others is a pursuit or enactment of embodied wisdom rather than just the exercising of scientific knowledge. The critical discussion uses the text of the novel to make three observations in relation to the research question. The first is that the question is political. It is strikingly unaddressed in policy responses to ‘The Francis Report' (2013) and perhaps in terms of mainstream research it is unaskable because it addresses the felt world. In the same way that the novel explores a hierarchy of values in the caring profession, the ensuing critical discussion reveals a hierarchy of knowledge. The second observation is that it is our tacit understanding of what reason is and how we make sense of the world we have constructed that helps make questions about bruised or damaged nurses somehow beyond convention. Iain McGilchrist's The Master And His Emissary (2009) offers a way of making sense of that by exploring the contemporary imbalance between the logical and linear thinking of the left hemisphere and the integrative and imaginative right hemisphere. We have come to prize the measurable over the experiential or contextual and reflective to such an extent that we organize the world accordingly. The third observation, which emerges from the first two and the novel, is the suggestion that nursing is assuming an ill-fitting Cartesian epistemology that cannot do justice to its breadth or holistic need. I suggest that a philosophy that took clearer account of the body, the senses and the felt world would more comfortably accommodate and legislate for the needs of the nurse and the profession of nursing. An embodied realism (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999) that emerges from Damasio (2000, 2012) and Merleau-Ponty (2005) offers the potential to restore a more balanced and less reductionist philosophy that might enable a fuller and more person-centred response to the nursing crises. A further more general observation the thesis makes is that fiction can inform social science and offers a way in which it can do that. Thus it finds itself in a tradition of narrative inquiry (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000). However, it also notices the potential paradox in valuing art as a sociological resource: something that offers us knowledge, meaning and even moral review while turning to cognitive neuroscience to legitimize that methodology.

The thesis comprises a novel – Interpreters and a critical commentary. Interpreters The novel explores the notion of identity, the interpretation of the past, the secrets and lies inherent in families, the parent/child relationship and the collective and personal guilt of a generation who grew up in Nazi Germany. It is a work of fiction that has grown out of memory and imagination, informed by original research, family memoirs, and oral history. Interpreters tells the story of Julia Rosenthal, a successful anthropologist, who returns to the suburban estate of her 1970s childhood. During her journey, both actual and emotional, the unspoken tensions that permeated her seemingly conventional family life come flooding back. Trying to make sense of the secrets and half truths, she is forced to question how she has raised her own daughter – with an openness and honesty that Susanna has just rejected in a very public betrayal of trust. Meanwhile her brother, Max, is happy to forge an alternative path through life, leaving the past undisturbed. In a different place and time, another woman is engaged in a painful dialogue with an unidentified listener, struggling to tell the story of her early years in wartime Germany and gradually revealing the secrets she has carried through the century. Critical commentary Autobiographical fiction as a genre can be laden with moral and ethical issues, and I have made their examination the centrepiece of my critical commentary. I have focused on the contractual understanding of the relationship between the author, reader and those written about, the issue of who “owns” memory, and issues relating to a writer's responsibility – and the limits of that responsibility – to their sources. I have examined the tension between “truth” and “fiction” and whether this is something that is particularly problematic in the writing and reading of autobiographical fiction. I have also considered what happens to the writer and the reader when the rules are broken by fake memoir, particularly fake memoir related to recent history and, most particularly, to the Second World War and its aftermath. My reflections on my own novel and its genesis are complemented throughout by discussions of other, mostly twentieth century, authors' and critics' works.

This thesis consists of two components: a 70,000-word verse novel and a 50,000-word critical component that has arisen out of the research process for that novel. Creative Component: The Marlowe Papers The Marlowe Papers is a full-length verse novel written entirely in iambic pentameter. As with verse novels such as The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth, or The Emperor's Babe by Bernadine Evaristo, its inspiration, derivation, conventions and scope owe more to the prose novel than to the epic poem. Though there is as yet no widely-accepted definition, a verse novel may be distinguished from an epic poem where it consists, as in this case, of numerous discrete poems, each constituting a ‘chapter' of the novel. This conception allows for considerable variations in form and tone that would not be possible in the more cohesive tradition of the epic poem. The Marlowe Papers is a fictional autobiography of Christopher Marlowe based on the idea that he used the pseudonym ‘William Shakespeare' (employing the Stratford merchant as a ‘front'), having faked his own death and fled abroad to escape capital charges for atheism and heresy. The verse novel, written in dramatic scenes, traces his life from his flight on 30 May 1593, through the back-story (starting in 1586) that led to his prosecution, as we similarly track his progress on the Continent and in England until just after James I accedes to the English throne. The poems are a mixture of longer blank verse narratives and smaller, more lyrical poems (including sonnets). Explanatory notes to the poems, and a Dramatis Personae, are included on the advice of my creative supervisor. Critical Component: Writing Marlowe As Writing Shakespeare This part of the thesis explores the relationship between early modern biographies and fiction, questioning certain ‘facts' of Marlovian and Shakespearean biography in the light of the ‘thought experiment' of the verse novel. Marlowe's reputation for violence is reassessed in the light of scholarly doubt about the veracity of the inquest document, and Shakespeare's sonnets are reinterpreted through the lens of the Marlovian theory of Shakespeare authorship. The argument is that orthodox and non-Stratfordian theories might be considered competing paradigms; simply different frameworks through which interpretation of the same data leads to different conclusions. Interdisciplinary influences include Kuhn's philosophy of scientific discovery, post-modern narrativist history, neuroscience, psychology, and quantum physics (in the form of the ‘observer effect'). Data that is either anomalous or inexplicable under the orthodox paradigm is demonstrated to support a Marlovian reading, and the current state of the Shakespeare authorship question is assessed. Certain primary source documents were examined at the Bodleian Library, at the British Library, and at Lambeth Palace Library. Versions of Chapters 2, 3 and 4, written under supervision during this doctorate, have all been published, either as a book chapter or as a journal article, within the last year (Barber, 2009, 2010a, b).