The thesis contains a creative text, along with a poetics of the work. The Ghost of Your Father is the story of unusual childhood adventures in the small village of Ramsbottom, Lancashire, with chapters also dedicated to exploring the forests, mountains, rivers and family members of Trebija, Yugoslavia, during the long summer holidays of the 1980s. Remic’s father, Nikolas, was a child of Yugoslavia, enlisted in the army at the age of seventeen and captured by Germans during WWII. He subsequently escaped from a POW camp, was rescued by US troops, and brought to the UK where he joined the RAF and met the author’s mother, Sally, a Liverpudlian working in the NAAFI. The thesis is a childhood memoir of clashing worlds: village life in Lancashire, contrasted with village life in Trebija, Yugoslavia, and is infused with the new dawning age of the 1980s computer revolution, and the author’s conflicting desire to become both an author and computer game programmer. A strange merging of country life and 8-bit technology, of Tolkien fantasy novels and differing cultures and customs, the text reveals these two very different worlds, searching for linking threads, and is the source of what made Remic the genre novelist he became. The text explores life in Ramsbottom and life in Slovenija – and presents childhood adventures in the 1980s, and those same places and faces experienced a quarter of a century later. The text contains a travel section detailing an account of the events that occurred when Remic returned to Slovenija to meet his long, lost, beloved Aunty Mary, taking his children on that same voyage of discovery he experienced as a boy, and which he believes shaped his imagination and fired his creativity to create a genre novelist working in the field today. Part memoir, part travelogue, part exploration and decoding of a child’s-eye view of a world filled with fantasy monsters, pixellated graphics, mountain-top escapades and small-town haunted houses, The Ghost of Your Father is a book of contrasts, of exploring imagination, creativity, ethics, and the very twisted essence of subjective memory. It is a story of a child then, and a child now, based on memories, interviews and new experiences. It is a fictional representation of a factual past, and a factual exploration of a fictional present. It is the truth, perhaps not as it was, but as it might have been. The poetics is an exploration of the writing process of The Ghost of Your Father. It’s an investigation of why, and how, Remic decided to create this text, examining contextualisation, where this work sits in the field of contemporary memoir, reflecting on the process of writing the text, including how Remic was inspired and arrived at conclusions over memory, tone and research for form, and ultimately concluding with how this project has altered Remic’s perspective of research, creative writing, and how it has informed Remic’s genre writing and creative writing as a whole.

This thesis examines the use of the Gothic - genre of literary production deeply implicated with a set of patently middle class anxieties concerning the home - in the ‘middlebrow’ detective fiction of Agatha Christie, particularly within her novels authored in the forty year period between 1930 and 1970. It is argued that there are five different ‘types’ of Gothic at work in Christie’s fiction: the haunted house narrative; the Gothic village; Gay Gothic; Post-WWII Gothic; and Brontë Gothic. This thesis moreover suggests that Christie’s employment and development of these Gothic sub-genres is often achieved via nineteenth-century interlocutors, with Christie’s fiction drawing heavily upon, and in some cases ‘re-imagining’, some of the cornerstones of Victorian Gothic literature. In doing so, this thesis sets out to problematize Alison Light’s famous characterisation of Christie as a ‘modernist […] iconoclast’ whose fiction nonchalantly shatters ‘Victorian images of home, sweet home’. Instead, it is argued that Christie’s use of the Gothic speaks of a relationship with nineteenth-century literary culture which far more complicated: a contradictory interplay of simultaneous desire and distance characteristic of the ‘middlebrow’ fiction produced by women writers of this time. This thesis reads Christie’s use of the Gothic historically, seeking to both firmly situate her work within its contemporary historical contexts - particularly in relation to debates regarding the family, domestic space, and the birth of what Nicola Humble has termed the birth of ‘the new cult of the domestic’ after the First World War - and to elucidate the nineteenth-century contexts which she additionally draws upon. Ultimately, in reading instances of domestic Gothicism as they occur across her oeuvre, this thesis makes a case for the valuable historically-specific cultural critiques made by one who, at least in the popular imagination, is positioned as such an avowedly ‘conservative’ writer.

This thesis explores Kazuo Ishiguro's six novels written in first-person narrative mode: A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, The Unconso/ed, When We Were Orphans, and Never Let Me Go. The focus is on how Ishiguro's narrative techniques allow him to explore the themes of psychological disorder with which his work consistently engages, which will be identified here through use of ideas drawn from Sigmund Freud and from literary studies of trauma fiction. The argument will be divided into six chapters. In each chapter, one of Ishiguro' s novels will be studied thoroughly. Distorted narrative and the technique of transference of Etsuko in A Pale View of Hills are explored in chapter I. In chapter II, the research concerns particularly how Masuji Ono, the narrator of An Artist of the Floating World, who suffers from his demand to be respected and his indecisiveness in defining the sense of respect especially as a great artist. Chapter III deals with narrative of Stevens, an English butler, in The Remains of the Day, whose problem concerning his professional achievement in its relation to the idea of id, ego and superego. Chapter IV argues that The Unconsoled engages with how the dream-like narrative technique is developed in order to reveal Ryder's psychological problem, and how Ryder uses the dream-work mechanisms, especially displacement, to deal with his problem. Chapter V explores how When We Were Orphans works as detective fiction and how this relates to Christopher Banks' psychological problem, and, finally, in chapter VI, I examine the particular psychological problem articulated by the clone narrator of Never Let Me Go.

Holding Baby: A creative exploration to raise awareness about Kinship Care through a play, Holding Baby, a poetry collection, Holding, and a critical commentary placing the work in a cultural, societal and practice-led context. The dramatic work Holding Baby covers a crisis where a grandparent is left taking responsibility for a young baby. In the tradition of social realist and community based drama, it reflects the real life stories of a growing number of connected persons or family members raising children who are not theirs by birth. The poetry collection Holding considers the personal response of the author, as a kinship carer, to that role's challenges and its rewards. In the critical commentary issues around kinship care are considered together with the history of the writing and its context. A detailed account is offered of the stage production process, as well as problems and possibilities around reaching potential audiences for both play and poetry. The relationship between the direct focus of the script and the comparative subjectivity of the poetry is reflected on and discussed.

This thesis is a response to Darnton’s challenge that ‘more work needs to be done on the bookseller as a cultural agent’, and offers as a case study the career of the early nineteenth- century Glasgow bookseller John Smith, Youngest (1784-1849), and the company John Smith and Son (founded 1751). Early nineteenth-century Glasgow was developing into a major centre of commerce, with trade and finance taking full advantage of the new industrial age and burgeoning population. In comparison to Edinburgh, there has been comparatively little research on Glasgow’s role in the contemporary book trade. John Smith, Youngest, was the third of three generations of booksellers of the namesake family firm, merchant baillie, Secretary to the Maitland Club, and member of the contemporary Glasgow cultural and social elite. Smith was a devout Presbyterian, and this religious faith was highly influential on and guided his personal and business lives. I argue that this aspect of his life is the key to understanding John Smith. This is the first thorough study of John Smith. Using publications of Smith’s imprint and his social network, I show the influence Smith had on the book trade of the period through his Presbyterian religious faith, how he maintained his business, and which outside pressures were brought to bear on the family firm; as well as determining what contribution he made to the cultural milieu of the period through his business and philanthropic ventures. This will be the first study on the book trade of Glasgow from a bookseller’s perspective.

This thesis examines the motif of the desert island in anglophone post-war popular culture as it coincides with the destabilisation of modern conceptions of identity. The extent to which desert island narratives either reify or challenge normative societal ideals is charted through the analysis of a range of texts across media: novels, radio, advertising, magazine cartoons, television, films and video games. Each text is placed into the context of a dialectic between discipline, the coercive method of state control theorised by Michel Foucault, and seduction, the technique of market dominance described by Zygmunt Bauman. Semiotic, psychoanalytic and spatial approaches are also used in close readings. The relationship of ‘home’ to ‘the Other’ was transformed by the advent of affordable international travel and communication; the thesis considers desert island texts since 1942, from the period since our planet has been opened up to tourism and global capitalism. This post-war timeframe maps onto the development of a self that is increasingly understood as fragmented, reflexive and alienated. A chronological approach is used in order to chart the ways in which desert island texts reflect this trend during what Bauman calls the liquid modern era. Power structures are examined but, rather than taking an overtly postcolonial stance, the thesis explores relationships between the ‘mainland’ and the castaway. The desert island is a useful site for exploring such concerns precisely because its desertedness, (presumed) Otherness and distance from ‘home’ allow it to function as an analogy of both the subject and the Other, and as an altered reflection of ostensibly normative continental life. Desert islands are often revealed to be inhabited; if the desert island represents a fantasy of agency in self-creation then the appearance of the Other represents the anxiety that that fantasy intends to dispel or seeks to embrace.

This thesis examines the influence that William Shakespeare had on the works of Harold Pinter. This breaks down into three chapters: page, stage and screen. The page section examines Pinter’s early writings about Shakespeare (1950-1956) and the ways in which this influence can be seen in Pinter’s later development as a playwright. The stage chapter considers Pinter’s time at the Royal Shakespeare Company (1962-73) and the role that this played in establishing his reputation as a playwright with particular reference to his collaborations with Peter Hall. The screen section analyses the unproduced screenplay for a film of ‘The Tragedy of King Lear’ that was completed in 2000 and places it in the critical context of ‘King Lear’ on film. Through this, I aim to prove the significant and lasting influence that Shakespeare had on the works of Harold Pinter.

This thesis analyses the manner in which gender and sexuality are explored within the context of Vodou and Santería in a number of Haitian and Cuban novels and plays. Focusing on the body as the nodal point between the physical and spiritual planes, it examines women’s negotiation of religious, social and political life in Haiti and Cuba as participants in these marginalised religious communities. The narratives these works of fiction comprise indicate the complex nature of such experiences and recognise the active participation of women in Caribbean society, challenging the way in which they have often been limited in, or omitted from, official discourse. By drawing on African-derived religious traditions in the Caribbean, these texts are inscribed within a worldview in which the physical and the spiritual, the living and the dead coexist, and one that allows divisions within and between concepts such as gender, sexuality, womanhood, space and nation to be transcended. In so doing, these authors write alternative and arguably more complete accounts of lived experience in Haiti and Cuba that serve as a source of knowledge regarding the complexities of daily life and provide a means through which the voice of the marginalised can be heard.

My research will consist of a literary investigation into changing representations of violence in the contemporary novel in the context of the paradigm shift from humanism to posthumanism, from reality to fiction. The core of my work, developed through the reading of some research in neuroscience, will concern the examination of the brain as metaphor machine. From here, I will argue that the problem of violence in relation to fiction today is due to the struggle in the human body between transcendence and immanence. The individual has a tendency to transcend reality and in so doing lives violence as fiction even when inflicting pain to the other. I will observe how this transcendence is translated in contemporary narrative forms and I will shape a rhetoric of contemporary literary violence. My intention is to conduct comparative research across British, American, French and Italian literary fiction of the past 20 years, with a few exceptions. I will explore whether and how, in a globalizing world, it is both possible and necessary to develop a comparative literary analysis of the forms of contemporary violence. I will observe how the advent of posthumanity or of the fictional man has generated a crisis in the definition of identity and reality in a context in which fiction has taken its place. I will show how the individual re-acts to this condition through violence in order to find authenticity. References will include the works of Deleuze, Badiou, Bauman, Baudrillard, De Man, Agamben, Hayles et alii. In order to explore the different ramifications of the substitution of fiction to reality and its connection to violence, I will focus on what I consider the main three tools for the creation of simulation today: language, desire and information, through the works of Wallace, McCarthy, Miéville, Ballard, Gibson, Palahniuk et alii. Finally, the work will focus on the new emphasis given by contemporary writers to literary responsibility after the irresponsible writing (after the death of the author) of postmodernism through the analysis of the New Italian Epic postulated by Wu Ming but applied to the English Weird Fiction writer China Miéville. I will suggest that an attempt to overcome postmodernism is taking place in contemporary global fiction based on a more ‘serious’ approach (as Wallace would have said), a new ethics of literature, which endeavours to depict the reasons for contemporary violence in fiction and advocates for a balance between the transcendence of fiction and the immanence of reality.

This study investigates how the aesthetic concept of Stimmung [‘mood’ or ‘attunement’] informs the affective and experiential dimension of the reading process through the lens of modern philosophy and literature. It seeks to establish ‘mood’ as a key concept in literary theory and to outline the modes and articulations of this aesthetic phenomenon as an integral part of the modern discourse on existentialism and aesthetics. Modernity, I propose, fundamentally redefined Stimmung as an intersubjective phenomenon, and has sparked a sustained exploration of this concept in pivotal philosophical and literary texts of the modern age. The study first examines the conceptual history of this term and its musical origin to then focus on Martin Heidegger’s redefinition of attunement as a crucial aspect of his ontology. From these considerations, a phenomenological theory of Stimmung in literature is developed, in which the reading process is defined through the attunement between text and reader. I subsequently further refine this notion by analysing the central role of Stimmung in the narrative fiction of three key authors of modern literature: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard. What these readings demonstrate is a significant shift towards an aesthetic of intensity and immediacy, in which the experience of the reading process takes centre stage. Stimmung as an attunement between text and reader uncovers the dynamic relationality of aesthetic reception, and is inextricably connected to dominant modes of conceptualising existence and experience in the modern age. Ultimately, I demonstrate how the specific modern configuration of Stimmung answers to a sense of crisis and vicissitude that aesthetic modernity has transformed into a mood in its own right.