As a writer seeking to construct a detective text as part of a research study, I looked to the work of previous authors to inform and contextualise the making of a fiction which would both respect and test genre boundaries. A remarkably adaptable genre, detective fiction has, from its early beginnings to the present day, offered the opportunity for writers to create texts which, while introducing changes to the genre and expanding its boundaries, nevertheless remain of the genre. My thesis is presented in two parts. The first is the creative element: a historical detective novel entitled Close to Home, set in the small town of Romsey during World War II. Historically and geographically accurate, the characters and events are entirely fictional. The novel demonstrates how my practice of reading as a writer – a reiterative and multi-layered exploration of the work of authors Allingham, Sayers, Tey and Peters from the twentieth century, and Penney, Griffiths and McPherson from the twenty-first century – has enabled me to create my own text. Patterned on the milieu and tropes of the earlier detective fictions and contextualised by the later works, Close to Home presents a fiction in which plot and writing technique express elements of innovation to the classic detective text. The second part is a commentary reflecting on my research process, tracing the development of my practice of reading as a writer. It explores the way in which reading and writing were inextricably linked: so that my reading influenced and inspired the creation of my novel, while the writing focused my reading practice. In offering an account of how a specific creative writing research study has been undertaken, it suggests how this can illuminate individual practice and be disseminated to other creative writing practitioners.

A reflexive analysis of five peer reviewed published papers reveals how socio-cultural and political discourses and individual agency compete to shape the identity of the learner-writer. It is posited that although hegemonic political discourses construct ‘schooling literacy’ (Meek 1988 ) which frame the socio-cultural contexts in which texts, authors, teachers and leaners develop; the socio-cultural standpoint of the individual makes possible conscious construction of counter discourses. Writer identity is integral to the compositional process. However, writer identity is mediated by, on the one hand, dominant discourses of literacy that inform current pedagogies of writing (Paper One) and on the other by socio-cultural narratives that shape identity (Paper Three). A synthesis of Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony and Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory is used to explain the constraining function of dominant discourses in literacy education. These works largely fall within a qualitative paradigm, although a mixed-method approach was adopted for the data collection of Papers Four and Five. The methods these papers had in common were the use of survey and documentary analysis of reflective journals. A semi-structured interview with a focus group was the third method used to collect data for Paper Five. Individual semi-structured interviews were used to collect partial life-histories for Paper Two and textual analysis of pupils’ narrative writing was the main method used for Paper One. Paper Three involved a rhizotextual auto-ethnographic analysis of original poetry. Findings suggest pedagogies which minimise or negate the identity of the writer are counter-productive in facilitating writer efficacy. It is suggested, the teaching of writing should be premised on approaches that encourage the writer to draw upon personal, inherited and secondary narratives. In this conceptualisation of writing, the writer is simultaneously composing and exploring aspects of self. However, the self is not a fixed entity and writing is viewed as a process by which identity emerges through reflexive engagement with the compositional process. The corollary is that pedagogy of writing needs to embrace the identity of the writer, whilst also allowing space for the writer’s ‘becoming’.

The thesis shows how the novel The Apothecary's Tales manipulates narrative frames to create a 'simulachron', an unreliable virtual world, which problematises the reader's conceptions of the past. The novel transgresses the generic rules of 'historical fiction' to create a quality of 'historicity' located in the affect of alterity. This is argued to be a somatic response to peril deferred. The novel seeks to evoke alterity by defamiliarising linguistic norms. It does this principally through the use of 'diachronic polysemia' (lexical 'false friends') and intertexts to syncopate the reader continually between the disparate sensibilities of the 1ih and 21 st centuries. These sensibilities are simulated in the novel by the imbedment of sociolects and 'hypomemes', the tacit thoughtways supposed peculiar to a given milieu. To self-authenticate its fictions, the novel employs the 'parafictive' devices of a testamentary found artifact, an unreliable narrator and editor, plausible sociologuemes (social conventions) and ideologuemes (ideologies that inform behaviour), along with a density of period minutiae putatively grounded in the record. Any truth effects achieved are then ludically subverted by a process of critique in which structural units of the novel systematically parody the other. The novel is patterned in the structure of a nested diptych, of expositions contra posed in a mutual commentary, which extends from the defining templates of plot and episode to the micro levels of morphemes in polysemic wordplay. The tropes of nested framing and repetition of form and syntagm are defined in the thesis, respectively, as encubi/atio and 'emblematic resonance'. It is argued that these tropes, encoded in a fictive discourse that defies closure, provide a simulation of hermetic form that -when mapped upon the aleatory life world -can be productive of aesthetic affect. The agonistic elements of plot and incident in the novel are figured within the tapas of theatre, foregrounded by the duplicitous self-fashioning of the characters, and by the continual metaleptic shifts or 'frame syncopation' of narrative viewpoint, both intra and extra-diegetic. Frame syncopation is used advisedly to dilemmatise significations at both the structural and syntagmatic levels. The thesis contends that such contrived collisions of narrative interpretation may be the dynamic of affectivity in all aesthetic discourse.

Beginning with Montaigne’s essayistic dictum Que sais je? — ‘What do I know?’ — this PhD thesis examines the literary history, formal qualities, and theoretical underpinnings of the personal essay to both investigate and to practice its relevance as an approach to writing about art. The thesis proposes the essay as intrinsically linked to research, critical writing, and art making; it is a literary method that embodies the real experience of attempting to answer a question. The essay is a processual and reflexive mode of enquiry: a form that conveys not just the essayist’s thought, but the sense and texture of its movement as it attempts to understand its object. It is often invoked, across disciplines, in reference to the possibility of a more liberal sense of creative practice — one that conceptually and stylistically privileges collage, fragmentation, hybridity, chance, open-endedness, and the meander. Within this question of the essay as form, the thesis contains two distinct and parallel strands of analysis — subject matter and essay writing as research. At the core of the study lie two close-readings: Ana Mendieta’s Labyrinth of Venus (1982) and Le Couvent de la Tourette (1959) by Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis. In each case, the writing draws, in its tone and texture, on a range of literary influences, weaving together different voices, discussions, and approaches to enquiry. The practice of essay writing is presented alongside, part and party to, research: a method of interrogation that embraces risk and uncertainty, and simultaneously enacts its own findings as a critical-creative mode of study-via-form, and form-via-study. The thesis is presented as a book-length essay, in which the art in question is equal and intimately connected to the writing used to address it. Method and form are designed to respond to the oft-cited challenge of the essay as fundamentally unmethodical, ranging, and diverse. Research, critical study, writerly description, and storytelling are combined to elucidate and expose each other based not on surface continuity, but on a deep interconnection among ideas that, through language, cohere and become related — imbued with an affinity for one another. The consummate product is the argument, as it works across genres, disciplines, descriptive and critical models, to challenge the narrative structure and language used within contemporary writing about art.

In the face of climate change, what can art do? The question is both practical and ethical: a question of art's efficacy, its ways of working, and its uses to audiences. These intertwined questions are articulated in writing and film-making, both of which draw on an empirical method, alongside research into ethics, ecology, film history, the politics of climate change, and critiques of capitalism. I seek to represent the consequences of climate change as they are experienced by the inhabitants of the north of Scotland and Arctic Russia. Through writing and film I document and interpret changing relationships with the sea and the land, thus bringing to light the interplay of climate change with history and memory, and with the social, economic, environmental and political forces that are shaping places and lives. One of the research methods of this PhD is a form of fieldwork, consisting of recorded interviews and informal encounters, filming and note taking, which form the source material for a multi-vocal approach to writing and filmmaking. The written thesis consists of narrations of journeys, both actual and theoretical. I tell stories of journeys to the White Sea in northeastern Russia, and to the north Highlands and islands of Scotland, where the political, economic and environmental upheavals are emblematic of a geopolitical shift north. I examine how ideas of North and of the sea, of nature and landscape, contained in films, oral histories, myths and writings, contribute to contemporary perceptions of place. These ideas are analyzed further through Alexander Dovzhenko’s film Aerograd, and Michael Powell’s The Edge of the World. I shot the two films, Call of North and From Time to Time at Sea, alongside supplementary film works, in Northern Russia and the far north of Scotland, in Caithness, Orkney and during a sailing expedition to the Northern Isles with Cape Farewell. Concomitantly with the first person written narrative, they investigate the camera as a participant-observer, and the implied presence of a future audience. The familiar trope of anthropology whereby the observer influences what is observed is explored here within the context of film. Both the written and film works document disappearance: of individuals and their memories, of species, of ecosystems, of ways of life, of imagined worlds, and of entire societies as well as the vertiginous fear of the future annihilation of human civilization. At the same time a plurality of perspectives and voices are combined to produce polyphonic compositions that resist being reduced to pessimism. The documentation of disappearance is examined and articulated as a distinct response to an ethical and ecological imperative. Meanwhile, the works propose to speak to a future audience –– to speak not to the world as it is but as it could become.

This thesis is an example of creative practice that uses contemporary transmedia storytelling techniques to build a fictional environment that content creators can collaborate in and contribute to with their own fictional works. Within this thesis, I refine my methodology and identify new methods and processes that apply to the context of the creative project example – the fictional world of Chaos Reborn. The most notable of these are 1) making use of invented and real mythology to project depth into the work 2) presenting information to other contributors so they can switch roles as creators and consumers of the franchise content and 3) Identifying the ways in which my creative work interacts with other elements of the transmedia narrative of Chaos Reborn. This thesis also identifies issues around continuance of production for this franchise after an initial raft of publications and suggests a consistent way to approach further development of content. The main creative component of this thesis is a novel set in the world of Chaos Reborn. This is Dreams of Chaos (2016), the first of a planned trilogy entitled The Death of Gods, which tells the story of how the world of Chaos Reborn came about from its alternative history root in Earth’s 14th century. This operates as the background to the game world and anchors the fantasy genre context to a version of our own history. This work is only a part of the writing undertaken to build the world of Chaos Reborn. There is additional material in appendices which contain the other associated writing from this work and from my previous science fiction case study on Elite Dangerous to illustrate the progression and development of my methodology across the genres of science fiction and fantasy.