Collage Grrrls represents the first sustained attempt to define, historicise and analyse the contentious genre of ‘anti-chick lit’. In this thesis, I argue that anti-chick lit – while critically neglected – represents a key development in women’s writing from the 1990s onwards; alighting on the girl and the grrrl as figures of contradiction and transitional possibility, anti-chick fictions generate spaces in which the darker aspects of female experience – from mental illness, self-harming and unwanted pregnancies, to sexual excess and consumerism – can be creatively (re)imagined. In this way, Collage Grrrls makes a timely intervention into debates about feminine identity and feminism in popular culture. At the heart of these debates, however, exists a fraught paradox that Collage Grrrls will interrogate: at the same time as celebrating a female subject that is ‘untamed, ungroomed and unglossed’, does anti-chick lit’s alignment with the mass- market appeal of chick lit mean that the subject is simultaneously re-tamed, re-groomed and re-glossed in order to preserve her appeal – paradoxically – to a mass audience? I identify Emma Forrest, an Anglo-American author and journalist, as a representative for the genre. Along with Forrest’s novels Namedropper (1998), Thin Skin (2002) and Cherries in the Snow (2005), I will also include detailed reference to Stephanie Kuehnert’s I wanna be your Joey Ramone (2008) and Kristin Hersh’s Rat Girl (2010). Collage Grrrl’s scope of literary genres includes Young Adult fiction and memoir, with each key work presenting an unapologetic portrait of female pathology. The discussion will address the impact of third wave and postfeminism, and the cultural shifts in mainstream representations of gender, specifically in light of the fluxional identity politics of the 90s and their effect on young women. The politics and practices of this era paved the way for movements such as riot grrrl, with the grrrl becoming a notable figure for challenging normative meanings of femininity. By examining authors and works on which there is little critical material, Collage Grrrls aims to do the same, seeking out authors and texts that have yet to be recuperated to academic discourse.

This study examines Lawrence's views of nature and their relations to perspectives drawn from Oriental traditions and philosophies. Many of Lawrence's non-Christian perspectives concerning the universe and man's relationship with nature bear strong affinities with Eastern thought systems, particularly his understanding of such fundamental matters as the enigma of nature, nature's duality and oneness, the mutual identity between man and nature, issues of god and evolution, mind and body, life and death, and sexuality, and concerns with intuition, spontaneity and primitivism. Lawrence met with hostility and prejudice from the literary world partly because some of his viewpoints were misread and misunderstood. However, they can be to a large degree explained and justified by traditional Oriental thought. In Lawrence's understanding of man's integrity and "living wholeness", we have his "indecent" proposition of sexuality, his "strange" assertion of blood consciousness and stress upon the solar plexus, his rejection of mind and intellect, and his preference for desire over ideology, and for primitivism over industrial materialism. These are views parallel to those of Taoism, though they also have their traces in the Western scientific readings which Lawrence was familiar with. Lawrence's transcendental attitude towards nature accounts for his extraordinary sensitivity to the natural world, and for his radical criticism of modern civilizations, sciences and the mechanical life, particularly in terms of financial motivation. The study of Lawrence's philosophy of nature suggests that Lawrence is an outstanding example of twentieth-century Romanticism. Furthermore, in Lawrence and in his work, we see a prominent figure in the development of a new environmental consciousness in literature.

This thesis examines the relationship between fictional depictions of rape and legal and social realities between 1700 and 1765, and argues that these contexts are essential to reconstruct contemporary understandings of rape in this period. Rape was presented differently in legislation, legal texts, trials and literature, reflecting the varied ideas of what constituted a rape. The research begins by asking why the statutory definition of rape was inconsistent with legal practice, and how clear the legal conventions of rape were in contemporary society. This leads to a series of case studies investigating why Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett and Samuel Richardson were interested in rape, how their depictions of rape relate to legal realities and were informed by their own legal knowledge, and what form of interpretation the authors invite. The geographical focus on London is occasioned by the selection of trials, largely heard at the Old Bailey, and texts published in London, but acknowledges the wider national readership for the texts and trials, which were often reported in the press and/or published. The historical parameters reflect the decline in standardized legal education and increased reliance on legal texts from 1700, and the lack of a significant contemporary legal treatise to guide interpretations of statutory and common law until the publication of William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769). This study contributes to existing scholarship on rape in the eighteenth century. Criticism in this area has begun to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to this subject. This thesis combines legal and non-legal sources to inform its analysis, suggesting that critical approaches need to use a wider range of sources to reconstruct the context in which contemporary portrayals of rape were situated. Part two of this thesis offers new readings of canonical works, showing how Pope, Defoe, Richardson, Smollett and Fielding engaged with wider contextual legal discourse in their works, and explores their reasons for doing so. These case studies assert the importance of legal and social contexts, offer new ways of interpreting rape in literature, and show that literary authors negotiated and presented ideas of rape in a variety of ways in their texts, influencing public perceptions of the nature and illegality of such acts.

This thesis explores the ways in which seventeenth-century nonconformist writers used the Puritan model of spiritual autobiography to record their individual forms of dissent. Spiritual autobiography is read against the political and religious turmoil that existed in England in the aftermath of the Civil Wars and during the subsequent Restoration. Through a study of four dissenting writers I show how a genre seen usually as a record of spiritual crisis and ultimate reconciliation, was also used as a way of communicating gendered, psychological, domestic, and religious dissent by writers from the extreme margins of society. The argument differs from other studies of spiritual autobiography in that I situate the genre beyond the strict confines of soteriology and adopt an interdisciplinary approach that deploys literary, historical, and theoretical readings. I draw upon the theories of Jean-François Lyotard in order to illustrate a mood analogous to postmodernism apparent in the nonconformist psyche as well as to contextualise the wider dissent shown to exist in the seventeenth century. By applying Lyotard’s concepts of Svelteness, competing Phrase Regimens, and the Differend to spiritual autobiographies by John Bunyan, Agnes Beaumont, Laurence Clarkson, and Richard Norwood this study raises questions with regard to assumptions associated with the genre, the context in which they were written, and so presents new readings of often marginal texts.

This thesis investigates the life and work of six eighteenth-century writers, two male and four female. It explores their experience of depression through their letters and other autobiographical material, and examines the ways in which they represent melancholy in their poetry and prose. The subject of Chapter Two is Thomas Gray, whose real life persona as the lonely intellectual is also identifiable in his poetry. The Scottish poet Robert Fergusson is studied in Chapter Three. Fergusson’s lively and vigorous mind was shattered in the months leading up to his death, during which time some of his writing became darkly nihilistic. Chapter Four looks at Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, a lifelong depressive who often wrote about her feelings of despair in her poetry. Chapter Five explores Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She was a courageous and controversial figure, but despite her resilience, on occasion in her letters she reveals her vulnerability and susceptibility to low spirits, a mood which is sometimes expressed in her creative writing. Sarah Scott, whose life and work have not yet been considered in relation to the subject of melancholy, is examined in Chapter Six. Her novel includes several low-spirited and depressed female characters who are continually seeking asylum from a hostile world. Chapter Seven analyses Charlotte Smith, a mother of twelve children whose unhappy marriage ended in separation. Smith wrote extensively about her depression in her letters, prefaces, poetry and novels. This study shows that the women in particular use their writing on melancholy and depression to express their discontent with the confined way in which they are often expected to live out their lives.