The purpose of this dissertation is to reflect on the author’s published work in the field complementary and alternative medicine, specifically that produced between 1996 and 2005. It examines how the production of this work was influenced by the author’s previous and concurrent experience as a medical journalist and the methodological challenges arising from sourcing complementary and alternative medicine and framing for audiences of broadsheet newspapers and two books – The Which? Guide to Complementary Medicine and Alternative Answers to Asthma & Allergies. It explores how this work relates to scholarship in three key areas: the theory of sourcing, the theory of framing and the study of erroneous beliefs. The author demonstrates that a “perfect storm” – sociologically, culturally and economically – created a narrative that suited the new consumer-­‐driven cult of the empowered individual, which in turn led to most sectors of the print media becoming impervious to any real investigation of the subject.

As posthumanism has developed in the last twenty-five years there has been hesitation in elucidating a robust posthumanist engagement with the body. My thesis redresses this gap in the literature in three intertwined ways. First, it is a critical assessment of posthumanism broadly, focusing on how the body is read in its discourse and how there is a continuation of a humanist telos in terms which revolve around the body. Second, it is a philosophical interrogation, adaptation, and transformation of aspects of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, focusing its reading on Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible, with additional material drawn from his works on language, aesthetics, and ontology. Third, it is a critical analysis of four films drawn from that seemingly most posthumanist of genres, science fiction: Cronenberg's eXistenZ, Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Rusnak's The Thirteenth Floor, and Oshii's Ghost in the Shell. Science fiction is the meeting place of popular and critical posthumanist imaginaries as the vast majority of texts on posthumanism (in whatever form) ground their analyses in a science fiction of some kind. By reading posthumanism through the work of Merleau-Ponty I outline a posthumanist ontology of corporeality which both demonstrates the limitations of how posthumanism has done its analyses of the body and elucidates an opening and levelling not adequately considered in posthumanist analyses of the body. Following Merleau-Ponty I argue that there is a ‘belongingness of the body to being and the corporeal relevance of every being’, yet, the body is not the singular purview of the human. There are alternative embodiments and bodies which have been previously overlooked and that all bodies (be they embodied organically, technologically, virtually or otherwise) are corporeal.

This thesis attempts to develop a new model for a renewed concept of readability. The thesis begins by discussing the rationale for carrying out this research. Next, the extensive literature around the topic of readability is reviewed. The literature suggests that most research into readability has stemmed from a positivist paradigm, and has used quantitative methods to assess text comprehensibility. This approach has been widely criticised and, recently, more qualitative methods stemming from an interpretive paradigm have been employed. It seems that both quantitative and qualitative methods have strengths and limitations. Therefore, the research I have carried out has explored the concept of readability by combining these two research approaches. The data collection methods include readability formulae; text feature analyses; miscue analyses; retellings and interviews. This research has been conducted in the United Kingdom and involved 16 male and 16 female pupils with an age range from 6 to 11 years old. All the participants were fluent readers. Data were analysed using; (1) six online readability formulae - ATOS (1997); Dale-Chall (1948); Flesch-Kincaid (1948); FOG (1952); SMOG (1969); and Spache (1953); (2) Reading Miscue Inventory (Goodman, Watson & Burke, 2005); (3) Judging Richness of Retellings (Irwin & Mitchell, 1983); (4) text feature analysis forms; and (5) a cross-interview analysis approach. Two computer software programmes i.e Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS 17) and Qualitative Data Analysis (Nvivo 7) were used to organise and analyse the quantitative and qualitative data. The findings suggest that the concept of readability is influenced by both reader and text factors. The reader factors involve a complex relationship of nine embedded elements within the reader, namely interest, prior knowledge, attitude, reading ability, motivation, purpose of reading, engagement, age and gender. The text factors include eight elements, these being the physical features of the text, genre, content, author, linguistic difficulties, legibility, illustrations and organization of the text. This research comes to the conclusion that the concept of readability is a complex matching process involving the dynamic interaction between both reader and text factors and bound by certain contexts.

This thesis is the first major investigation into the representations of Vodou within the cultural productions of Britain and America. It also opens up opportunities for further research to be undertaken in the representations of Vodou, Haiti and the culture and religions of other Caribbean countries. This thesis explores the representations of 'Voodoo,' the widely accepted and recognised term for the re-imagined religion, in Britain and America since 1850. The history of the Caribbean and Haiti is examined before considering the influence that the religion of Haitian Vodou has had on cultural production. Through a historical perspective the thesis will consider the evolution of Vodou during the horrors of slavery. The historiographic representations form the basis of the productions and are explored to contextualise Vodou in the British and American imagination. All genres of literature are examined, from the first mention of Vodou in the eighteenth century through to the present day. This is followed by an examination of the cultural reproductions of Vodou in film, animation, theatre and television to explore the diversity of the representations. The wider societal influences are considered throughout this work to contextualise the productions of 'Voodoo'. This thesis argues that the cultural reproductions of Vodou since 1850 have not changed greatly, despite various efforts to redress the misrepresentations, they remain rooted in colonialism. It will argue that many of the cultural productions are reliant on previous representations. They do not in the majority introduce authenticity, instead opting for the more sensational approach. Many of the representations will be shown to be derogatory to the religion, culture and people of Haiti and the diaspora. This is despite Vodou as a religion having survived, gained strength and continuing to thrive in the twenty-first century.

Through an analysis of the work of Virginia Woolf and T.W. Adorno’s theory of the aesthetic, this dissertation seeks to develop a poetics of criticism that takes account of the philosophy of the non-identical in subjective experience. As the subversion of the positivist and subjectivist tendencies of identity thinking, Adorno’s negative dialectic is read here in parallel with Woolf’s work as an example of a discourse that preserves the particularity of experience. Much of Woolf’s writing about music is in the form of diary entries, letters and notes or jottings and is singularly unfinished. Her writing about music pushes her to the extremes of essayistic practice where she is forced to improvise and invent a musical-critical voice. This dissertation argues that subjectivity and aesthetic experience are constructed negatively in Woolf’s diaries, letters and essays and by reading her tendency to resist describing musical experiences as a resistance to the domination of conceptual subsumption, I hope to show that Woolf’s writing could offer a new perspective on criticism. The present work attempts to develop a three-fold thesis, the presentation of which will constitute a poetics of criticism. Firstly, Woolf’s attempts to write a critical selfhood actually serve as a critique of transcendental subjectivity and undermine the ideology of a priori subjectivity. Secondly, Woolf’s essays complement work done by Adorno on genre theory which asserts that contradiction remains essential to the critical essay, contradiction which secures the identity of negative dialectics and a contradiction that can simultaneously be read as fundamental to the architectonics of a modernist subjectivity. Woolf’s essays, therefore, will be read for their potential status as a means of critique. And thirdly, the technique of parataxis as a form of writing that Adorno thought best expressed the inaccessibility of objectivity will be shown to be decisive in analyzing Woolf’s fragments. What I hope to assemble, therefore, is a constellation of ideas that map several points ofconnection between Adorno and Woolf.By effecting a salvaging of Woolf’s musical marginalia this thesis argues that ostensibly ill-informed or naïve testimony can be given legitimacy within contemporary music criticism. In addition, this thesis presents all the references to music found in Woolf’s diaries and letters, and, as such, the appendices found at the back of the dissertation constitute not only the first attempt to bring this material together, but are also presented in such a way so as to reinforce the paratactical nature of Woolf’s writing about music. That is to say, structurally, the appendices appear as they appear in Woolf’s original texts, and this thesis has, self-consciously, tried to resist the conceptual overdetermination of these fragments. This structural consideration implies that this dissertation fulfils a performative, as well an analytical function.

This thesis asks the question: what does it mean to “discern the body” (1 Cor. 11:29)? Answering this begins with the question’s origin in the sacramental context of a particular Christian community’s attempt to observe what became known as the Eucharist. In their physicality, sacraments act as reminders that theological concepts, while they systematise experience and knowledge, can never be simply abstract; theology must never forget the particular, discrete nature of human beings, the separation of creatures, the otherness that allows true plurality and mutuality. My thesis is divided in three parts, to address bodies and their stories in theory, literary art, and sacramental liturgy. The first part of the thesis offers a critical reading of various theologies of body and story, applying to them insights from feminist epistemology concerning situated knowledge. The critique examines the work of Graham Ward, Stanley Hauerwas, Marcella Althaus-Reid, and Paul Ricoeur, looking at the way that even their attempts to take the body into account tend to downplay the concreteness of particular people and their stories. The second part of the thesis explores the way that literature handles the problems of particularity and universality, looking at specific stories in specific novels, and examining the way they treat bodies and the meeting of bodies. I address five novels. In conversation with Anil’s Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje, I discuss the importance of touch in defining meaning. With A Map of Glass, by Jane Urquhart, I look at bodies as tactile maps and geographies of memory. Fugitive Pieces, by Anne Michaels, leads me to a discussion of the place of artistic form in the determination of meaning both for the body and for literature. The Man on a Donkey, by H. F. M. Prescott, leads to reflections upon disjunctions in bodies as various narratives make claims upon them. The discussion of Godric, by Frederick Buechner, centres upon personal identity being constructed physically, artistically and relationally through proximity with others. The third part investigates the nature of sacraments and sacramental theology as a place of attending to both the abstract and the particular, to the person—seeking a geography of love. To do this, I begin with a discussion of the search for a normative liturgical pattern as exemplified by Dom Gregory Dix’s The Shape of the Liturgy, focusing on the consequences for acknowledging the unruliness of the materiality of bodies. I then examine the approach of Gordon W. Lathrop, who uses the image of the map for describing liturgy. But his use of this metaphor construes the liturgical map as a given, turning away from interactive, creative possibilities. As a response, I look to the theologian Charles Winquist, who writes about the particularity of love. Finally, I bring together my reflections from the first two parts of the thesis to make suggestions about the liturgical body: that it is discerned by paying attention to the stories that the body carries, to the relationships in which bodies are implicated and to their locations, and to the vulnerabilities manifested by love and grief, by care.

Though this study had its origins in the consideration of children's writing and their responses to reading it explores in a wider context the nature of imagination and its relation to the discursive. Within imagination there seem to be three modes that are frequently conflated - fantasy, identification and the imagination itself. Each, however, has distinctive epistemological implications and significance for identity. In normal discourse imagination is often conflated with fantasy. Whereas fantasy seeks to exercise power in attempting to transform the world into its own terms and imagination shares this capacity for refiguration, the one is associated with obfuscation and the other with insight. In reading, the distinction is crucial. Generally, children are empowered by the fantasy that texts exploit or stimulate. Yet the absence of significant cognitive control constitutes a kind of blindness. Identification differs from fantasy in that the reader is drawn, say, into the world of the book - this supposes a differentiation, an escape, from the self that is merely placated in fantasy. Yet, here too, is blindness, particularly with regard to the constitutive aspects of the writing. On the other hand to teach texts through exerting cognitive control may shift the text too quickly into the discursive with the danger that students are expected to respond to experiences that they have not had. The distinctions between identification and imagination are manifest in some of the fictions of Chaucer and Kafka where differentiation is achieved through irony. Imagination is what facilitates the sh

This thesis argues that, while the Revelation of John claims to unveil reality, the interpretative structures built on the book are undermined by its own rhetoric. A historical examination of its use shows the fragility of hermeneutics, but also the power of the 'apocalyptic tone' to engender new unveilings. The first chapter presents the Apocalypse as a book constantly inviting but constantly confounding interpretation, refusing to fit conventional generic definitions or reading strategies. The next two chapters show the book's continuing prominence in eighteenth-century England after its pivotal role in the Reformation. First - writers such as Isaac Newton and William Whiston - it serves as rationalistic evidence for God's providence, as well as giving encouragement to moral 'usefulness' and to the reformation of Christianity. Secondly, its imagery reinforces the more individualistic appeal of the Wesley's preaching and hymns. But it is only with the French Revolution (treated in Chapter 4) that the Apocalypse recovers political immediacy, as seen in both radical millenarian writers like Priestley and Bicheno and in conservative ones like Burke and G.S. Faber. The Romantic period also saw a revival of prophetic and visionary writing, and for many poets John of Patmos was a guiding spirit. Coleridge, the subject of Chapter 5, moved from the millenarian declamation of 'Religious Musings' and the fragmented vision of 'Kubla Khan' to an attempt to interpret the Apocalypse as symbolic representation of polar logic and moral order.

This thesis is a study of the autobiographical writings of Naomi Mitchison, a prolific writer of exceptional versatility who was born in the last years of the Victorian period and is now best known as a writer of fiction, and as part of the 'Scottish literary Renaissance' of the first half of the twentieth century. In her late seventies, towards the end of a highly productive literary career, Mitchison published three volumes of autobiography, Small Talk: Memoirs of an Edwardian Childhood (1973), All Change Here: Girlhood and Marriage (1975) and You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940 (1979). Unusually for retrospective memoir, however, these texts cover less than half of her hundred and one years, leading the reader to question the location and mode of her complete autobiographical writings. Working extensively with archival material, much of which has been previously unavailable, this thesis sets out to demonstrate that Mitchison's personal writings are far more extensive than have been previously acknowledged, and are to be found through a wide range of out-of-print and unpublished material which include diaries, travel writing, personal correspondence, and, in few instances, poetry and prose fiction. In the course of this research I have compiled two substantial volumes of source materials which have been lodged in the Department of Scottish Literature Library. A contribution to Mitchison studies in themselves, I here draw attention to their existence and availability. While at first sight many of the texts on which this study focuses are minor writings in relation to the major achievements of Mitchison's literary career, this thesis argues that as a collected body of work, they form an autobiographical corpus which documents and bears witness to an extraordinary twentieth-century life, and constitutes a substantial literary achievement. Autobiographical- and life-writings often escape strict generic boundaries, and this study employs genre theory to interrogate the categorisation of literary genre. Central to this focus on traditionally marginalised non-fictional writings are questions of the changing position of memoir, the diary, epistolary and travel writings to the canon, and recent theoretical approaches are examined.

(This thesis is an attempt to apply literary criticism, specifically a narratological approach, to the reading of the biblical text.) There is an incongruity in the story of Isaac's (near) sacrifice by Abraham insofar as it is too economical with language in what is otherwise a complex set of important issues about obedience and sacrifice. Interpreters throughout the centuries have tried to resolve the textual difficulties created by the incongruity. Yet the variety of their conclusions are evidence of the impossibility of overcoming the ambiguities of the story. But these ambiguities are scarcely given any thorough investigation by the interpreters, whose assumed duties are commonly to clarify the story either for the sake of religious or moral obligation or, in the pursuit of intellectual satisfaction, as is apparent in many historical readings of the text. A closer look at the story reveals that there are many ambiguities that can be grasped from many angles. By using the focalization theory of narratology one can illuminate differing points of view involved in the process of narration. The narrator's voice should not be regarded as the only representation of the events as there are also the characters' ways of looking and the related events. One should be careful so as not to follow slavishly the narrator's voice while neglecting others' standpoints in the narrative which may contradict the narrator's voice. There should be communicative links seen amongst the voices or focalizations in the narrative which may or may not be verbally said. Here, it is proposed that reading is experiencing the multilayered world of the narrative. Reading is not necessarily and ultimately bound with the task of producing meaning, although it may mean a threat towards rational objectivity.