This thesis consists of two parts: a creative work and a reader’s companion to the novel which reflects on the process of research. The creative work is a novel entitled What Remains. Set during the Spanish civil war, it has a twin narrative structure, and through alternating chapters follows the fortunes of Michael, a Scottish volunteer fighting with the International Brigades, and Ana, a Spanish woman in Nationalist territory whose husband is fighting for the Republicans. At the start of the novel Michael volunteers to fight in the conflict and the narrative follows his progress through a year and eight months of fighting for the Republic and examines how the harsh realities of war affect his political beliefs. Ana discovers her husband has been captured by the Nationalists and makes a Faustian pact with a Nationalist captain to get her husband out of prison and back home. What Remains is an exploration of how war affects the soldier and the civilian, how they are desensitised and ultimately dehumanised by their environment. The reader’s companion is titled Faith and doubt: The failure of idealism in the Spanish civil war and is intended as an illumination of the process of researching and writing a historical novel. It guides the reader through the historical research, the texts utilised by the writer and the broader themes and contradictions of the war as discovered through the reading of nonfiction and creative works.

This thesis investigates the ways in which the encounter of the self with the other enlarges both individual characters and English life in George Eliot's fiction. The role of the foreign in her novels of English life gradually increases in general from novel to novel, and hence the chapters of my thesis are chronologically structured, and each chapter is devoted to one particular novel. The Introduction consists of a brief history of George Eliot's own awakening through her foreign experiences, as her letters and journals reveal. In addition, critical and theoretical background material, particularly Foucault and Habermas, is briefly introduced. Chapter One is devoted to the first indications of the foreign in Scenes of Clerical Life. Chapter Two considers the foreign in terms of sympathy in the rural world of Adam Bede. The next chapter examines the attitudes of the dominant culture towards the foreign in The Mill on the Floss. Chapter Four centres on different forms of the alien inserted into English life in Silas Marner, 'Lifted Veil' and 'Brother Jacob'. Chapter Five focuses on the ambiguous representation of Harold Transome's anglo-oriental identity, and English attitudes towards the Orient in Felix Holt. The last two chapters study Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, in which the encounter with the foreign is experienced beyond the borders of England. Chapter Six introduces the conflict between the conditions obtaining 'here-now in England' and those in the metropolitan city of Rome. In the last chapter, a synthesis of various encounters, which connects England to Europe and the Orient, is examined. My thesis concludes by appreciating the complexity of identity, and the broader horizons achieved by the encounter with the foreign in George Eliot's novels of English life.

'Fuzzy Theory and Women Writers in the Late Eighteenth Century' contends that women writers require more careful critical treatment, and suggests that critics are still bound by the outdated logic of the Law of the Excluded Middle. This law, first formulated by Aristotle, and developed by Gottfried Leibniz in the early eighteenth century, indicates that where there are two contradictory prepositions, one must be true and the other false; a female writer must, therefore, either be feminine or masculine, conservative or radical. The twentieth century concept of Fuzzy logic, however, helped mathematicians and engineers to manage reasoning that was only approximate, rather than exact. Borrowing from this, the thesis will employ the Fuzzy Set Theory, which permits the gradual assessment of elements in a set, rather than relying on elements that are assessed in binaric terms (the principle of bivalence, or, contradiction). Put simply, the Fuzzy Set Theory does away with binaries, the Law of the Excluded Middle, and the Law of Contradiction, allowing subjects to be imprecise, and changeable. Thus, each chapter will construct a Fuzzy Set by which a variety of eighteenth century debates, with which women writers engaged, can be examined. The thesis will show that all such concepts are subjective and unstable— changeable and open to personal interpretation, and will discuss such writers as Mary Wollstonecraft, Catherine Macaulay, Charlotte Smith, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mary Hays, Lucy Aikin, Hannah More and Joanna Southcott.

This thesis interprets the work of John Dryden in the context of the cultural, political and religious controversy that surrounded the concept of "enthusiasm" in later seventeenth-century England. It argues that Dryden is a more "enthusiastic" writer than is commonly thought, both in terms of poetics and of epistemology. It examines the tensions inherent in this enthusiasm when it is placed in the context of contemporary anxieties surrounding religious dissent and the memories of mid-century radicalism. Chapter One explores how "fancy", commonly a cultural signifier for fanaticism, was important in the formulation of an idea of poetic enthusiasm in Dryden's early critical works. In seeking to represent things beyond nature, this model of enthusiasm was underpinned by a concern that marvellous fiction could be mistaken for truth. Chapter Two pursues these ideas into the period of Plot and Exclusion. Dryden responded to a changed political culture with a renewed prioritisation of judgement, but the chapter will show how he sought to retain some aspects of his "enthusiastic" style. Chapter Three discusses Dryden's use of the later seventeenth-century Pindaric ode, a form in which cultural debates about religious enthusiasm and poetic inspiration took place. Chapter Four investigates Dryden's understanding of providence in some of his late work and considers how the mysteries of the divine, that had previously been a source of literary inspiration, began to suggest suffering after the political losses of 1688. As well as positing a revised view of Dryden as an imaginative writer, then, this thesis suggests ways in which the relationship between politics and literature in the later seventeenth century was less oppositional and more a fluid process of contest for, and appropriation of, key ideas. It also outlines Dryden's place in a larger narrative of the development of poetic "enthusiasm" in the eighteenth century.

This thesis focuses on narratives of mobility in the mid-nineteenth century novel, analysing journeys within and between England and Europe in novels of the period 1845-65 by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Mary Braddon. I locate bodies in transit as crucial representational sites asserting that, in an era of capitalist modernity effecting immense transformations to space, mobile embodied subjects provide a locus through which spatial readjustments are mediated. The theoretical context for this analysis is provided by the fields of critical geography, feminist geography, and recent studies into travel and mobility; the intersection of these fields constructs a new theorisation of mobile embodied subjects. I read textual representations of bodies through this critical lens, using literary analysis to develop a more nuanced theorisation of the relationship between the body and space. The first chapter explores the changing production and understanding of space in the mid-nineteenth century, following which subsequent chapters each focus on a different travel context. Walking in the English countryside and the city (with focus on Adam Bede, Jane Eyre, and Villette) centres on issues of gender, mobility, and modernity; journeys across European spaces (Little Dorrit, Villette) explore anxieties about nationality and the stability of British place in a contracting global space; and railway journeys (Dombey and Son, Lady Audley’s Secret) position anxieties over modernity, and its implications for the human subject, at the forefront of concern. Through this analysis, I situate mobility as occupying a central position in midnineteenth century literature: a significant representational principle that is fundamental to the internal structures of novels and their interactions with wider cultural contexts. The thesis demonstrates that reading novels through spaces of mobility provides a perspective through which to significantly reorient our understanding of familiar literary texts.

The thesis engages with Harold Bloom’s theories of poetic influence, beginning with an examination of influence, both literary and fluvial, in Anglophone poetry. The first chapter details the canon of English river-writing, ranging from Spenser’s Prothalamion, Drayton’s Polyolbion, Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ and Pope’s The Dunciad to Wordsworth’s ‘Sonnet XXXVI’ and Eliot’s The Waste Land. I examine Hughes’s reading of these texts as an undergraduate, and introduce the ways in which he engages with them in his poetry. The second chapter demonstrates how Hughes’s work owes a poetic debt to three major writers who lived through the First World War. Hughes’s own father fought in the First World War, and I question whether or not the relationship between Hughes and these ‘father figures’ is Bloomian. Eliot mentored Hughes at Faber & Faber, and the influence of The Waste Land (1922) on Hughes’s river-poetry was seminal. Williamson was a war veteran, and his Tarka the Otter is the source of many tributes by Hughes, from newspaper articles to eulogies. Hughes cites Tarka as having formed his ambition to write for himself. Graves, another war veteran, greatly influenced Hughes via his reading of The White Goddess. In the third chapter, following the methodology of Heather Clark’s 2011 study The Grief of Influence, I trace the ways in which Plath’s work shaped the manuscript drafts of Hughes’s poetry, especially River. I argue that the influence of such writing about water as ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ and ‘Ocean 1212W’ was so seminal as to have to be edited out of Hughes’s work. There follows a very detailed chronological appraisal of Plath’s impact on Hughes’s manuscript drafts from the Emory archive. In the fourth chapter, by examining letters in the British Library, I discuss the ways in which the publication of River was a bold statement for the preservation of British rivers. Although his project was not entirely successful, I examine how Hughes’s bids to secure funding from British Gas for his project were motivated by his environmental activism. I also demonstrate how the publication of this book fits into the bigger picture of his campaigns for water quality. The fifth chapter shows how Hughes and Seamus Heaney influenced each other, how Hughes and his son Nicholas Hughes drew ideas from each other’s work, and how Hughes has influenced Alice Oswald. There are elements of a Bloomian ‘family romance’ here, but I largely reject a Bloomian reading by demonstrating that Heaney and Hughes’s friendship, and Nicholas and Ted’s close bond, do not support Bloom’s theories.

The primary subject of this thesis is the work which Fredric Jameson has published since the year 2000. It argues that this date has functioned as a kind of watershed in thinking about Jameson, and that the work which appeared after it has not yet received close or rigorous enough critical attention, especially in comparison to his very widely read and discussed work of earlier decades; in particular his various writings from the 1980s on the subject of postmodernism. It claims that as a consequence the full significance of this writing has been broadly overlooked. The thesis identifies the existence of a 'modernist turn' within this later work which is focussed around three texts in particular; A Singular Modernity of 2002, Archaeologies of the Future of 2005, and The Modernist Papers of 2007. It claims that the mutation in regard to modernism which takes place in these works, and the emergence of modernism as the central concern of Jameson's thinking, is not just valuable in itself in terms of the wider contemporary movement within the academy towards an interest in global forms of modernity. It also constitutes a highly significant revision on Jameson's part of the foundations of much of the vast body of far more canonical work which preceded it. The aim of the thesis is to explore this revision and to effect a subsequent movement in the view of Jameson's thinking onto a far more firmly modernist footing. In asserting the value of this modernistic rethinking of Jameson's oeuvre the thesis argues for a resituating of Jameson's thought in relation to two wider theoretical traditions. The first of these is the Frankfurt School, and in particular the form of modernism associated with Theodor Adorno. The second is the current of post-structuralism contemporary with Jameson's 1980s work; in particular the alternative, post-structural model of postmodernism laid out by Jean-François Lyotard, and the deconstructive form of reading associated with Paul de Man. This argument takes place in four chapters. The first discusses the construction of modernism which occurs in Jameson's key works of the 1980s. The second outlines the revision which this construction is subjected to by his later modernist works. The final two chapters then develop the significance of this model of modernist revisionism by using it to intervene in two of the most widely-discussed and controversial areas of Jameson's career to date; the question of totality (the subject of the third chapter), and Jameson's engagement with the subject of 'Third-World Literature' (the subject of the fourth).

This thesis takes as its starting point Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s argument that it is the way in which “Third World” women’s narratives are read and understood that is crucial, together with the need to locate them contextually. My original contribution to knowledge is to develop a deconstructive, cultural analysis through the re–reading of a selection of core postcolonial women’s texts written in former colonial societies, at a time prior to the full emergence of postcolonialism as a set of theoretical concepts and before feminism had developed its major contribution to academic scholarship. These theories are examined in the first three chapters of the thesis. This re–reading is of texts which arguably prefigured in many ways some of the main debates later articulated in postcolonial feminist criticism, thus (re–)interpreting them through a contemporary, critical lens. The objective of the textual analysis, among other things, is to underline the function of literary mapping in postcolonial women’s writing and the ways in which this resonates with key issues in postcolonial feminist studies. For example, the texts subvert the figure of the “universal woman” challenged by several critics, undermine images of women’s sameness, and transform marginalising spaces such as prison and home into sites of possible resistance. Overall, the main contribution of this thesis is twofold. Firstly, the interpretation of postcolonial women’s writing as a metachronous discourse of literary mapping in order to reclaim rather than deny the difference and complexity inherent in women’s texts and identities. This lends a wider dimension to the literary representations of women and justifies my attempt to order the texts as following an inverted rite of passage. Secondly, this thesis demonstrates that postcolonial women’s writing constitutes a discourse of literary activism and a cultural archive of prismatic female narratives which demands a responsive reading of the texts. This is to form a collective, critical consciousness from which, it is hoped, present and future communities of women can learn to change their lives.

The Beckettian creature is a product of dehumanisation and endures a variety of irresolvable tensions which culminate in a contingent mode of being that subsists in the nostalgia or hope for an authentic, meaningful life. This thesis examines Samuel Beckett's evocation of the 'creature' as an ontological concept to make the case for the oblique historical and political significance of his artistic forms. My work traces the aesthetic, biopolitical and humanistic resonance of the creature to contribute new ways of analysing Beckett's 'art of failure' in the post-Holocaust context. Through close readings of Beckett's prose and drama, particularly texts from the middle period, including Mol/ay, Ma/one Dies, The Unnamab/e, Waiting/or Godot and Endgame, I explicate four arenas of creaturely life in Beckett. Each chapter attends to a particular theme - testimony, power, humour and survival- to analyse a range of pressures and impositions that precipitate the creaturely state of suspension. I draw on the philosophical and theoretical writings of Theodor Adomo, Giorgio Agamben, Waiter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida to relate Beckett's creatures to a framework of critical theory that addresses the human condition and the status of art in the second half of the twentieth century. The key findings of this thesis are that Beckett's creatures traverse the edge of a bare life devoid of meaning, but live on through the debased idea of the human as they negotiate pressing obligations and melancholic repetition compulsions. Beckett invents author-narrators and narrative modes replete with epistemological and expressive failures, which act as an appropriate aesthetic response and pertinent reflection of the destabilised human after the Holocaust. As such, Beckett conveys the anti-humanist vision that attends the perverse or ineffective performance of humanist assumptions.

The term post traumatic stress is routinely used to describe the psychological experiences of soldiers returning from war. It is used here to describe the effects it has on the families of PTS victims, in particular children. Hunting Captain Henley is a novel which explores the long term effects of a father’s post traumatic stress on a son’s (intellectual) development. It tracks the progress of the narrator from childhood to adulthood as he sets about tracking down the (English) Royal Signals Captain who allegedly bullied his dad into shooting Arab civilians during the Ismaelia police uprising at Suez in 1951. In his 1919 book Scottish Literature: Character and Influence G. Gregory Smith first coined the phrase Caledonian Antisyzygy to spotlight the zigzag of contradictions at the heart of Scottish Literature, especially under the stress of foreign (in particular English) influence. The term has since been used to point at the schizophrenia at the heart of Scottishness. The novel considers the dual influences of the English (language) on Scottish writing and families. As a prologue to the book a commentary is provided. Scotland’s Fascist Voice addresses the unexplored area of the present-day fascist consciousness in Scotland. It does so by firstly acknowledging Scotland’s role in the creation of the British Empire then delineates a developing contemporary identity borne out of that imperial experience. It examines the significance of The Raucle Tongue, hitherto uncollected prose by Hugh MacDiarmid, in particular his Plea for a Scottish Fascism. The remaining chapters of the commentary explain the significance of a form of cultural repression at work in Scottish society and showcase the fascist style mindset and its incumbent voice. It is concluded that as both victims and perpetators of Empire Scots must now acknowledge this duality of experience and carry forth its impact on both our language and identity into the 21st century.