This study is a historico-cultural examination of the role of the garden in literature written for children between 1850 and 2000. The garden is considered from two perspectives - as a setting for children's play, and as a cultural symbol that changes over time to reflect social concerns. The central assumption of this thesis is that the garden may be considered as a symbol of childhood itself. My main concern is to investigate the nature of the construct of childhood as evidenced in texts written at different periods, focussing on what it might have meant to be a child at those times. In doing so, I frequently have cause to contrast these definitions of ‘childhood’ with each other, and with contemporary ones. The notion of the garden suggests to me a series of ‘structural oppositions’ (Rose, 1984), such as innocence/experience, civilisation/nature, home/away, enclosure/exposure; all of which are typical concerns of literature in general, and, arguably, particularly significant themes in children's literature and thus pertinent to its study. I suggest that the garden as a common setting for children's literature also acts as a meeting-place, or compromise, for some of these pairings. Since children are generally subject to adults, I consider that some of these oppositions can be regarded in terms of power and control. The thesis emphasises the ‘constructedness’ of such oppositions, in order to demonstrate the mythological - and often adult-serving - nature of much thinking about childhood. I explore texts as diverse as Barrie's Peter Pan (1911) and Pullman's His Dark Materials (1995-2000) in order to illustrate changes in the mythology of childhood, and in the deployment of the icon of the child in the garden. The study concludes with a detailed exploration of Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden (1958), which I believe expresses many symbolic meanings of the garden image in a particularly convincing way, with considerable artistic and emotional integrity.

Epic literature has often been interpreted as a static genre, conforming to conventional structural and thematic characteristics. This study argues that epic is a genre of movement and transition, in terms of its literary style, and its humanist representation of journeys and geography. Taking a thematic approach, this study draws upon images of movement, modes of transport and perceptions of the environment to argue that modern epic is concerned with describing both an animate universe and humankind's position within it. Chronological discussions of individual narratives focus upon John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), William Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805), Lord Byron's Don Juan (1819-24), James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Derek Walcott's Umeros (1990), and Aiden Andrew Dun's Vale Royal (1995). This carries the study across the modern period, from the Seventeenth Century to the present day. Literary and philosophical contexts are engaged with, and culturally-specific interpretations of a perceived human condition are drawn out. The study concludes that epic must be perceived as a genre which evolves alongside cultural developments. The epic journey is one of the prime vehicles for expressing change, and for guiding the hero and reader towards new revelations or ways of understanding material and social environments.

The thesis brings together Íslendingasögur and srpske junačke pesme, two historically and culturally unrelated heroic literatures, literatures that had, nevertheless, converged upon a similar kind of realism. This feature in which they diverge from the earlier European epics - Beowulf, Nibelungenlied, La Chanson de Roland, is the focal point of this study. Rather than examining it solely in terms of verisimilitude and historicism with which it is commonly associated, I am approaching it as an emergent feature (emergent realism) of the non-linear, evolutionary dynamics of their production (i.e. their networked, negotiated authorship), the dynamics I call the distributed author. Although all traditional narratives develop in accordance with this dynamics, their non-linearity is often compromised by Bakhtinian 'centripetal forces' (e.g. centralised state, Church) with an effect of directedness akin to the authorial agency of an individual. The peculiar weakness of such forces in the milieus in which the sagas/Serbian epics grew, encouraged their distributed nature. As a result, they come across as indexes of their own coming into being, preserving, meshing and contrasting the old and the new, the general and the more idiosyncratic perspectives on past events and characters. In so doing they fail to arouse in the recipient the feeling of being addressed and possibly manipulated by an all encompassing organising authority. As a consequence, they also impress as believable. While chapters one and two of this study deal with theoretical and aesthetic implications of the two literatures' distributed authorship and their emergent realism, chapters three and four illustrate the ways in which these are manifested in the rich texture of the past and the complex make-up of the characters. The final chapter summarises major points of the thesis and suggests the poetics of complexity as a term particularly suitable to encapsulate the two literatures' common creative principles.

The goal of this thesis is to propose a cognitive approach to intertextuality. Intertextuality has attracted the attention of a number of literary scholars interested in discussing the interrelations between literary texts without, however, focusing on how readers create these connections. On the other hand, despite its reader-oriented approach, cognitive poetics has largely neglected the concept. This project employs recent developments in the field of cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology and proposes a multi-layered approach to intertextuality in the light of the principles of cognitive poetics. The main part of the thesis draws on the cognitive notion of frames defined as online processing domains. I propose that readers create intertextual links by combining their background knowledge with textual elements in intertextual frames. Three types of frames are identified: semantic, topical and stylistic. The term 'semantic frame' refers to the more impressionistic links that emerge from the identification of a single lexical item, while the term 'topical frame' refers to more complex constructions built by readers through the identification of multiple textual elements. The term 'stylistic frame' refers to links based on quotation identification or genre similarities. A variety of literary texts will be discussed in order to illustrate how these frames may be created. The final part of the thesis is dedicated to the investigation of the relationship between intertextuality and the emotional engagement of readers with literary texts reflecting recent directions in cognitive poetics. This is accompanied with a mixed methods study designed to present empirical data on how readers construct intertextual links and on the effects these have on the reading experience. The overall aim of this project is to provide the foundations and the theoretical point-of-entry for further related research.

This dissertation responds to the question, "What would it be like, what would it mean, to approach texts lovingly?" in terms of the work of 20th-century theorists, writers, and thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Brian Massumi, Jean-Luc Marion, E. E. Cummings, Rainer Maria Rilke, Teresa Brennan, and W. J. T. Mitchell. In order to demonstrate the appropriateness and place of love in the philosophical canon, the dissertation combines a consideration of affect with these writers' work. Beginning with an exemplary reading of Cy Twombly's painting The Ceiling, the then dissertation adapts Mitchell's question "What do pictures want" to an approach to texts, as defined with reference to Barthes. An introduction and literature review trace the places love in texts by Plato, Freud, Lacan, Cixous, and a host of writers who fall under the rubric of 'affect theorists'. Because an approach to texts is the dissertation's focus, a chapter is spent discussing the possibilities for deconstruction to be part of such an approach. Derrida's work is constellated with that of Cixous, Irigaray, Marion, and Brennan in order to emphasise the integrity of sensory and affective information to such an approach. The writing of Rilke and Cummings provides examples of an authorial approach to texts that can inform a readerly one, and serves to further expand the canon of texts that suggest the possibility of this approach. The final chapter is a second exemplary reading of the story of Moses and the burning bush. Deliberately aiming to stretch the expectations of scholarly work, I combine the anecdotal, the affective, and the textual as modes of engaging with and ways of knowing about love.

The metropolitan hotel is a rich space for exploration in hotel fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries due to its interesting connection with both the city and the home, and its positive and negative effects on the individual. Using spatial theory as a foundation for understanding how the hotel functions, and drawing on theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Edward D. Soja, Fredric Jameson, Yi-fu Tuan and David Harvey, this thesis offers an alternative approach to the culturally specific readings of past hotel studies; by contrast, it will draw on two alternate readings of the space: those which are concerned with the geographical and with the sociological make-up of the hotel. The ambition behind this thesis is to provide a framework for discussing novels from the realist tradition through to post-modern examples of spatial exploration. A selection of works will be studied, including: Elizabeth Bowen, The Hotel, Henry Green, Party Going, Arnold Bennett, Imperial Palace and Grand Babylon Hotel, Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac, Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled and Ali Smith, Hotel World. These writers are linked through the particular use they make of the hotel and the creation of spatial identity in their novels. Spatial identity in turn arises through an awareness of the power of space, and its variable effect on an individual’s identity. This thesis begins by examining past hotel research, which centred on late nineteenth-century novels by Henry James and Edith Wharton. It then introduces the theoretical studies that have informed the current thesis. Before moving onto the two central chapters, which examine the geography and sociology of space, it includes a brief ‘interlude’ on Richard Whiteing’s No. 5 John Street, a work which introduces many of the themes central to this thesis. The central argument considers the agency or power of the hotel space, a concept which has been generally overlooked in criticism. The power of space in hotel fiction is exhibited in its capacity to alter events and emotions and identities in general. In this view landscape, traditionally considered two-dimensional, is no longer flat, but can be rather seen as a multifarious ‘character’ in its own right. This conception of the spatial environment of the hotel encapsulates what it means to function in the modern urban environment.

My thesis looks at encounters between East and West in the novels of Ahdaf Soueif and how similar issues and themes can be seen in Monica Ali's 'Brick Lane' , a novel that brings together Bangladesh and the UK. It is divided into five chapters. Chapters 1 to 4 focus on the socio-historical contexts of Egypt and British Colonisation and themes in two major novels by Ahdaf Soueif, 'In the Eye of the Sun' (1992), and 'The Map of Love' (1999). Chapter 5 takes a cross-cultural perspective, focusing on Monica Ali's 'Brick Lane' (2002). My selection of texts has been based on thematic similarities and the ethos that the novels manifest despite their different contexts. In this study, I aim to offer an analysis of the specificities of the novels in question and of their commonalities. Soueif and Ali have been widely published and read, and they have received recognition and accolades from the media and the academy alike. Both Soueif and Ali have stepped across cultural dividing lines to claim a voice of their own, creating a meeting ground based on plurality and openness to various cultures. They can be categorised as diasporic Muslim writers who write in English in Soueif's case in an exilic environment, investigating the misconceptions that exist in the spaces between East and West. My way of seeing and/or narrating is hybrid insofar as it draws on Egyptian and British cultures. My goal is to strengthen a view of Britain and Egypt as contemporary multicultural societies where hybrid cultural identities are questioned throughout. I wish to argue that Britain, Egypt and South Asia easily inhabit shared histories which have shaped and influenced each other. All share rich histories and humanist values, which if better understood, could be seen to complement and sustain each other.

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This thesis, comparative in method, examines a wide range of the poetry of Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis, and some of their prose writings. As Second World War poets, both sought a poetic register that voiced their testimony to changed realities, both internal and external. Degrees of commonality are traced between Douglas’s dominant impulse for ‘impersonality’ and Lewis’s increasing stylistic objectivity, alongside investigation of their shared underlying sense of loss, and of complicity as agents of war, even when their poetic voice is at its most impersonal. Diverse critical viewpoints are addressed, along with several psychoanalytical theories and relevant biographical commentary. Following an Introduction and Review of the Critical Field, each chapter is structured as a bipartite comparison, focusing first on Douglas, then on Lewis. Chapter 1 investigates Douglas’s impersonality as a controlled, ambivalently detached poetic register which, in its undertow and perceptual shifts, reveals the speaker’s submersed engagement and ethical complicity. Lewis’s poetry is seen to reveal a related impulse for increasingly subordinating the subjective voice in evocations of the painfully harsh realities he encountered. Chapter 2 explores the writers’ dialectical struggles to resolve or extinguish self-division, focusing particularly upon Douglas’s ‘bête noire’ and Lewis’s ‘enmity within’, configurations analysed as paradoxically creative/destructive ingredients of the poetic impulse. Chapter 3 then examines the poets’ epistemological and ontological preoccupations with death, ‘darkness’ and ‘being’, and their relevance to what is here termed ‘the extinction of Self’. Chapter 4 extends this enquiry to examine the poets’ representations of wartime separation and geographical dislocation as manifestations of ‘the exilic self’ and a mutual desire to extinguish internal crises. The conclusion drawn is that their shared, dual axis of poetic engagement and detachment reveals a deeply embedded, common impulse to voice and escape their burdens, both inherently personal, and as complicit agents of war.

This thesis presents an in-depth analysis of the major British disaster novels published before World War II. Focussing on Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898), Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901), Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt (1913), Connington’s Nordenholt's Million (1923), Fowler Wright’s Deluge and Dawn (1927 and 1929) and Sherriff’s The Hopkins Manuscript (1939), it makes a significant contribution to the literary and contextual understanding of these narratives. Furthermore, it responds critically to the often imprecise employment of the term ‘disaster’ to describe related but distinct works of catastrophe, apocalyptic, postapocalyptic, entropic or prophetic fiction. It does so by presenting a precise terminology with which to discuss disaster narratives featuring a catastrophic event. Such texts, termed ‘transformative’ disaster narratives, range from ‘transfigurative’ examples, which frame the disaster as an opportunity for positive social change, to ‘deteriorative’ texts, in which the disaster has long-term negative consequences. By analysing pre-World War II British transformative disaster narratives, the thesis avoids the ambiguities of previous studies that have often favoured broad discussions over sustained close analyses. It argues throughout that these transformative disaster novels were unanimously ‘transfigurative’, as all present catastrophe as opportunity. Each narrative satisfies contemporary anxieties by providing a wish fulfilment fantasy concerned with the correction or improvement of its cultural context. Responding to concerns around Victorian complacency, social degeneration, or increasing technologisation, the novels enlist catastrophe as a means of effecting cultural and/or political change. Taken collectively, they are united by their wish fulfilment responses to an increasing disillusionment in the first half of the twentieth century. The Hopkins Manuscript distinguishes itself from its predecessors by presenting a transfigurative cataclysm followed by a deteriorative catastrophe. Accordingly, it initiates the post-World War II movement away from transfigurative disasters towards pessimistic deteriorative scenarios, thereby marking the end of a significant period in British disaster fiction.