This thesis provides a 'green' reading of selected writings from Wilson Harris and Derek Walcott, demonstrating each writer's profound and sustained engagement with the philosophy, politics and poetics of environmentalism. The environmental ethic evident in the work of Harris and of Walcott has been fashioned in relation not only to personal experiences of lived reality in the Caribbean, but also as a result of prevalent ecological thinking world-wide. In addition, an integral part of the construction of such literary ecology is the formation of dialogues with an earlier eco-literary heritage, especially the inspiration taken from an understanding of 'green' Romanticism in the form of the poetry of William Blake and of John Clare. Part one of the study examines examples from across the corpus of Wilson Harris's work, tracing the representation of ecologically-conscious interconnected vision from his earliest published writings up until his final novels. Harris textually re-maps journeys of incursion, ethnocentric and anthropocentric, into the forests of Guyana to arrive at a position of redemptive possibility for the history of the land. Part two of the study looks at the formation of Derek Walcott's environmental ethic through his construction of an ecopoetic body of work, which comprises various modes, tones and genres of writing. Walcott, too, arrives at a representation of 'interconnected vision' which demands the re-figuring of relations between humanity and the extra-human world. This thesis hopes to offer some insights into the reassessment of the Romantic inheritance to literary ecology in general, and, furthermore, to indicate how the processes of 'green' reading might be compatible with postcolonial analysis. It is the contention that the cross-cultural nature of the eco-narratives and ecopoetics of Harris and of Walcott locate them very much at the forefront of discussions of cultural ecology both in the Caribbean and beyond.

James's fiction, especially in the Middle Phase, centres on the figure of the artist and is characterized by, the two interrelated aspects which previous criticism has largely overlooked: the Bakhtinian 'polyphonic' -creation of 'author-thinkers'; and the conflict between ephebes and precursors, for which Harold-Bloom's concept of 'the-anxiety of influence' is the most illuminating model. Polyphony is the narrative mode, and influence is the intra-artistic, theme. These, as the Introduction to the thesis makes clear, are rehearsed in James's inaugural novel, Roderick Hudson. Rowland Mallet is an author-thinker, and his failure is caused by authorial limitations. His monologism -is impaired by his mistaking empathy for the authorial sympathy. Likewise, Hudson's failure does not arise from a mercurial temperament, but from a polyphonic shortcoming: not possessing the power of fiction to contain the fiction of power in, his mentor. And the relationships among the three artists - Gloriani, Hudson and Singleton - perfectly exemplify the Bloomian-theme. It is these two concepts, polyphony and influence, which are the major preoccupation in the Middle Phase; as, the works chosen demonstrate. These are a novella, a novel, and a number of short stories all of which have been unjustifiably neglected. Chapter One, on The Aspern Papers, argues that Tina Bordereau, far from being, the artless victim seen by many critics, actually challenges and defeats the narrator by the very form of her narrative. Her 'realist' discourse undermines his language of 'romance', and shows up its internal unstability. Chapter Two is an extensive study of the critical reception of The Tragic Muse. The most common areas of critical attention have been its contemporary topicality, its relation to previous novels on similar themes, and the possible genealogy of Gabriel Nash. Those have all missed the core of the work. - Chapter Three demonstrates how polyphony and the anxiety of influence make the novel what it really is. Influence arises from the juxtaposition of, and the wrestling between, artistic ephebes and their precursors (Nick and Nash, Miriam and Madame Carre). The dialogic quality defined by Bakhtin is crucial to the proper, and even-handed, characterization of all, the conflicts in the novel. And since most of James's tales in the eighties and nineties -are about 'masters - and acolytes, the anxiety of influence remains central. Chapter Four is a study of 'The Author of Beltraffiol' and 'The Lesson of the Master'. Again the characters' manipulations are a crucial focus in a way that G6rard Genette's terminology helps to illuminate. The fact that the ephebe is the author-thinker emphasizes the inextricability of the Bakhtinian and the Bloomian in James. Just as polyphony offers a different focus for explicating the poetics of James's fiction; so the ephebal conflict provides the basis for a fresh perception of James's own artistic struggle.

This thesis conducts a close analysis of representations of trauma in six late twentieth century novels. I construct a theoretical framework by examining debates about trauma and narrative which have taken place in the fields of historiography, social studies, psychoanalysis and literary fiction. By drawing on these debates, I argue that the relationship between narrative and trauma is paradoxical: narrative is an essential tool, both for working-through and bearing witness to the trauma, but it can also intentionally or unintentionally be used to create an inauthentic version of events. I illustrate the need felt by many late twentieth century theorists for the development of a narrative form that will be able to produce an effective version of trauma. This narrative needs to facilitate working-through and enable witnessing of trauma. However, it must strive to avoid producing a falsifying version of the trauma. I argue that it can achieve this by acknowledging its own provisionality and therefore highlighting the limitations but also the necessity of narrative representations of trauma. I argue that the six contemporary novels I have chosen are examples of narratives that strive to develop a more effective means of representing trauma. The novels explore their concerns about trauma and narrative on both a thematic and formal level. The story told in each novel follows a similar pattern of events: in each novel the protagonist is depicted as suffering from the effects of trauma; they all try to evade their traumas by creating falsifying versions of their experiences; and they all offered a means of interpreting which will allow them to work-though and, therefore, bear witness to their traumas. Finally, the six authors utilise their narrative strategies to teach their readers this therapeutic and ethical hermeneutics which corresponds with contemporary concerns about trauma and narrative.

The prominence of women in Jacobean drama is immediately evident. Jacobean dramatists excel in their depiction of courtship and marriage, in their evocation of London life and city women, and in their analysis of female character. This concern with women is new to the drama, and is most marked, and most fruitful in the plays written between 1590 and 1625. The major dramatists of the Jacobean period - Shakespeare, Webster, Jonson, Middleton, Marston, Heywood, Dekker, Chapman, and Beaumont and Fletcher - share attitudes to women, but their sensitivity to conflicting ideas, and eagerness to spell out their own assumptions, suggests that the similarity is not merely conventional. Their treatment of women implies confidence in their audience's involvement in the issues on which they focus. The Puritans, preaching to the same audience as the dramatists write for, promote liberal attitudes to women by following through the implications in the Protestant and Humanist ideal of chaste marriage. The dramatists echo them in disapproving of virginity as an end in itself, and in exalting sexual passion in marriage, in opposing inhumane practices such as forced marriage, and in pointing out that a wife's obedience to her husband is conditional on his treatment of her. The dramatists hark back to Humanists such as More, Erasmus and Vives in their distrust of romantic excess, both in adulterous situations, and in courtship. They portray individual women who fulfil Humanist convictions about women's rational and intellectual equality with men. The drama reflects contemporary uneasiness at women's liberty in a society where economic change alters a wife's relation to her husband's work, and where an impoverished gentry seeking middle-class wealth creates a booming marriage market. The dramatists expose both female presumption and male alarmism. They recognize the bid for independence of women who join Puritan sects (ridiculed as disreputable in the drama), or who ape masculine dress; their defence of masculine-feminines is in part a defence of theatrical practice against Puritan extremists. The abundance of stock medieval satire on women in Jacobean drama seems at first misleadingly at variance with liberal attitudes to women. The dramatists give it a coherent dramatic function by attributing it to groups of characters whose way of life, or associations for the audience, neutralise its venom. Convinced that women are as capable of virtue as men, the dramatists concentrate on the causes of adultery and whoredom, whether they lie in witchcraft, or in special pressures - the temptations of money and social status, the corruption of Court life, the condition of womanhood - which operate against women. They attack the double standard by dividing moral responsibility equally between seducer and seduced, and by implicating the husband in the adulteress's guilt. Shakespeare shares his contemporaries' attitudes to women, but integrates them into his realisation of individual character. He shows how preconceptions about women in general damage individuals, and limit the experience of love. The dramatists’ close contact with conflicting ideals and prejudices relating to women outside the theatre contributes to the richness and vitality of Jacobean drama.

One of the central critical problems about Beckett - how can we praise without feeling uneasy the work of an artist for whom "to be an artist is to fail"? - parallels the creative predicament of a writer whose "art of failure" can only exist in an inherently expressive medium. How can an art which is anti-art remain true to itself? Is a truly self-annihilating expression possible? Two perspectives on the problem are opened. The first is theoretical: a consideration of the Duthuit Dialogues confirms that Beckett refuses to countenance an art which survives by making artistic failure itself the occasion of artistic creation. Rather he "dreams" of a genuine "art of failure": without occasion, in-expressive and indefinable. The second perspective (itself suggested by Beckett's critical tendency in the Duthuit Dialogues) is literary-historical: pertinent Romantic, nineteenth-century and Modernist attitudes towards artistic failure are outlined and briefly considered. Such a consideration serves both to define the particular (and unique) nature of Beckett's response to what may be seen as a traditional Romantic and Modernist problem, and to confirm the essentially ontological nature of what Beckett sees as the creative "obligation". (Failure to create as failure to be.) The Beckettian creative predicament is thus considered next in terms of individual identity, by way of the recurring motif of the "imperfect birth", and the paradoxical quality of Beckett's response to his creative problem is most clearly seen in the theatre, where he needs to represent degrees of ontological absence in what has been seen as the medium of "presence". Studies of the individual plays show that Beckett's method is to exploit the essence of theatre, which is playing, so as to suggest that the players are never really present, only playing, because obliged to play, over the void of (their own) identity. In order to render the creative-ontological situation of the imperfectly born subject, Beckett seeks to produce, both in the text and the stage-picture and by a precise counterpointing of the two elements, the effect of parody presence. Examination of the plays in chronological order illustrates a development towards abstraction and an increasing emphasis on shape and pattern. The central character becomes more and more obviously a creator and (by the same token) is revealed more and more clearly by the effect of parody presence as a created being, though imperfectly created. Thus theatrical presence is undermined and the Beckett play enacts its own self-annihilation.

This thesis is structured around exchanges between contemporary critical theory and the fiction, criticism and context of Henry James. In Chapter 1 I discuss readings of James and theories of reading as an active process. Chapters 2 and 3 provide a theoretical context for my work. Chapter 4 gives the background to James's use of "economy" as a critical term, discussed in Chapter 5. Chapters 6 and 7 introduce ideas of literary production and the relations of literary production, the changing nature of criticism and the market. Chapters 8 through to 12 focus on specific areas of James's work: the question of sexuality; journalism, the public and the private; travel, reading, and Daisy Miller; In the Cage, thrift, and utopia; early 20th century America. Certain dominant readings of James are challenged by a historical and theoretical framework that relates James to his economic context through locating him in the material and textual relations of literary production; through concepts central to his work and to Marxist criticism, absence and symptomatic reading; through structures of displacement whereby the economic resurfaces as a part of James's critical vocabulary; through questions of sexual difference and reading. My research demonstrates that James's writing is especially relevant to current critical debates; and through staging their meeting this thesis provides insights into both of these areas.

This thesis seeks to locate Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney within a post-colonial and postmodern era of writing which is concerned with the problematising of an effective identifying relationship between self and place. In the first instance, the study is interested in the response of these two writers, within the literary forms of drama and poetry, to the recurrence of sectarian and neo-colonial conflict in Northern Ireland since the nineteen sixties. Obliged to deal with history as a category, their art emphasises the contest for the naming of people and terrain which has taken place within language, writing and discourse. But place for these writers is not only historical and material, it is sensual, familiar and parochial. The structural and narrative shape of the drama and poetry is that of a lived, intimate, non-literate engagement with the local particulars of place and a learned, artistic life which offers insight into that existence. The thesis is interested in the nature of this modern form of division: the detached, educated mind 'making strange' the ordinary assimilated life. Men of rural origins who pursue pedagogical and artistic vocations do not only offer educations in displacement, but contrarily, realise that language, education and writing generate displacement, uprooting the individual, and creating divisions in experience and consciousness. It is the syncretism of this personal experience of rural place, and of parochial and metropolitan forms of education and culture, with the historical colonial reformation of the Irish landscape through a culture of modernity which constitutes the main focus and major contribution in understanding of this thesis to the contemporary literature and society of Northern Ireland.

Celebratory claims for the epistemic centrality of the diasporic, nomadic and non-territorial subject have been advanced in recent years. Migrancy is said to confer privileged sensibility and ocular omnipotence; it has also been proposed as a universal ontological condition. At the same time there has been immense critical investiture in the counter-hegemonic valencies of diasporic and syncretic or hybrid cultural forms, which are often parsed as inherently oppositional or subversive, all of which helps to buttress theoretical moves that downplay or dismiss paradigms of rootedness, territoriality and/or national identity in contemporary critical discourse. This dissertation challenges the articulations above through a critical elaboration of the writings of Anglo-Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro. It does this by drawing attention to the operation of exilic self-fashioning in Ishiguro's fiction. But, more importantly, it shows that his writing inscribes a trajectory that is metacritical in its ambit, suggesting that critical elucidation of cosmopolitan cultural production needs to attend to the systematicity and effects of international capital if its oppositional impetus is not to be emasculated. This claim derives from the propensity in Ishiguro's fiction to refine the substance of earlier work in response to their popular reception, while simultaneously restating contestatory themes, which means that his authorial trajectory is also able to illuminate some of the commonplace misrecognitions underwriting the reception of cosmopolitan cultural production. Insofar as the increasingly normative insistence on the oppositional makeup of diasporic and syncretic cultural forms and experiences tends to misjudge the appropriate proclivities of global capital the predominance of the former in critical discourse is, therefore, deeply problematised, together with the allied propensity to devalue materialist interpretative categories. The importance of exilic themes in Ishiguro's fiction and also the trajectory proposed here reminds us, however, that migrant encounters can take many forms, and hence that scrupulous attention must be paid to the negotiated specificities of different migrant encounters.

This thesis deals with the relationship between post Darwinian scientific thought and selected literary texts by Hardy, Gissing and H.G. Wells to illuminate the concept of degeneration and its implications for these writers in the period 1880-1910. It involves the examination of primary material in the field of biology, anthropology and medicine, as well as philosophical and social writing of the period and other related literary texts. Chapter One examines the major areas in emerges into biological, medical and cultural reflecting movements within scientific debate social, economic and philosophical concerns. this discussion is extended after 1900 and is light of Wells's own development. which degeneration discussion, itself and broader In chapter Four interpreted in the In the discussion of its biological and pathological emergence, the growth of hereditary determinism is particularly emphasised as crucial to the variety of applications of the concept. Degeneration reflects the prestige of Darwinian evolution, with its unresolved account of inheritance, a growing sense of economic decline, and a tension between the authority of evolutionary science and changing philosophical and ethical concerns. The three literary chapters deal with the impact of degeneration on the writers and illuminate aspects of their major work. While all the texts reflect the impact of degeneration, Gissing is revealed to be more dependent on scientific determinism, as in Demos or The Whirlpool, than is Hardy, who in Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, exposes the myth of that determinism while appearing to collude with it. Wells's journalism reflects the extent of his scientific endorsement of degeneration-producing in The Time Machine the one fiction about, and constructed around, it. The powerful conjunction of scientific ideas and imaginative writing, 1880-1910, can be traced to a perception of social, cultural and ethical crisis of the civilisation for which both novelist and scientist aspire to speak.

While the general idea is to illustrate how William Shakespeare reflected the contemporary conflicts and problems of the Elizabethan society, the particular aim of the thesis is to offer a close critical analysis of Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 1 and Part 2, Henry V and Henry VI Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 plays in an eclectic critical approach derived from the theoretical principles of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. In order to provide a better understanding of the plays studied in the thesis, there is a presentation of the development of drama, both religious and secular, in the Reformation period. In addition to this, main features of Cultural Materialism and New Historicism are given. The English Reformation and its effects on drama have been given in the introductory chapter. In the first chapter, contemporary religious controversies as reflected in Shakespeare's 1 and 2 Henry VI plays are discussed. The second chapter deals with the reflections of contemporary social conflicts in especially the Jack Cade episode of Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI. In the third chapter, reflections of political conflicts in Shakespeare's Henry V, Henry V, and Henry VI plays are analysed in terms of the appropriation of commoners by the ruling class for the preservation of the dominant order. The thesis concludes that the plays are polyvalent in meaning and thus open to further academic discussions for the years to come.