In both fact and fiction, the lower-class intellectual is a significant figure of the years 1880--1911. I concentrate on the three novelists who have made the most sustained artistic enquiry into the subject. In the process I hope to show how in practice Victorianism developed into modernism. Hale White and his obscure provincials experience loss of faith but are unable to reject certain values that were fundamental to that faith. If they cannot return to old certainties they cannot embrace the new ones of secularism find mass opinion; significantly, White sets his novels early, rather than late, in the nineteenth century. Gissing writes of his own times but he and his characters are poor struggling scholars in a society given to vulgarity and materialism. They can, however, still respond to certain worldly preoccupations---notably gentility. They are perpetual lodgers seeking a real home. Unlike White and Gissing, Wells is consciously committed to the future. However, his ambitious young scientist or utopian is an 'Anachronic Man', a term just as applicable to a White or Gissing protagonist. The Wellsian hero, ostensibly confident, can still suffer a crisis of identity and identification. I emphasise the individual nature of every chosen example of this character-type; each of them, however, suffers from a conflict between the need to find his unconventionally individual bearings and his need to relate to his fellow human beings in the community, however crass or mediocre that community may be. He faces undesirable extremes of isolation and integration. He is in limbo, and even 'unclassed'. If he originates between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, he cannot belong to either. His intellectual qualities cut him off from the class or community of his birth but do not necessarily enable him to place himself in another. I show how the ultimate condition for him is one of isolation, but I end on a positive note.

This thesis is a collection of creative work including two screenplays, three short stories, an essay, and a compilation of graphic texts. Although diverging in mediums, the following forms of work seek to investigate and explore the role of both the imaginary and the natural-animal world while discerning one’s many identities: the sexual, the spiritual, the familial, and the societal. These works were written between February, 2014 and April, 2016.

After the Fire is a novel exploring a mother and daughter as they are faced with shifts in socioeconomic status and cultures in 1970s Los Angeles. Haunted by the mysterious death of her sister and her father’s abandonment the daughter tries to fit herself into her changing world by giving up her own aspirations to seek replacements for what she lost. The mother is catapulted into financial survival as she uncovers the secrets of her missing husband’s past and comes to terms with the role she played in a life that was a lie. Use Your Words is a collection of linked creative non-fiction essays that examines how things said, and not said, create belief systems and identities, and explores the roles we take on when we speak up and when we stay silent.

Calling Up the Dead is a collection of seven short stories which all take place over the final hours of December 31, 1999 and the first few hours of January 1, 2000. The themes of time, history, and the reactions toward the new millennium (positive, negative, indifferent) of a variety of cultures are addressed. Each of the six major continents has a story, along with its cultural perspective, delivered by narrators both young and old, three female, three male and one balcony.

This thesis will examine the representation of food in the works of Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad to demonstrate how food is used to chart the progress of modernity from the beginning of the nineteenth century through the continuing emergence of capitalism and consumerism to the first decade of the twentieth century when the stability of the British Empire was being questioned. Food becomes the measure of how modern society responded to new innovations in transport, technology and the way in which British society viewed both itself and the colonies from which much of its food was being imported. As a cultural language, traditions and rituals of food solidified notions of what it meant to be civilized but when this cultural language was fused with the food of the Other, the definitions of ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’ became increasingly difficult to define. This thesis begins with Section One which introduces the scope and approach of my research. The section is broken into three chapters: the first serves as an introduction considering Conrad’s use of a family anecdote to examine how he borrows from real life experiences while blending fact and fiction to suit his purposes as an author. Chapter two is an analysis of realism, focussing on nineteenth-century debates about its use in the novel and investigating how Hardy and Conrad viewed the process of novel writing. This chapter will also briefly examine food in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations as an example of a traditional realist novel and consider how its handling of food differs from that of Hardy and Conrad’s Modern approach. To conclude, I have provided an overview of the critical reception of these two authors. Finally, to signal my broadly historicist approach, chapter three outlines the changing place of food within British society through the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I have chosen to focus my study on the works of Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad because, in their novels, these authors span this crucial historical period and between them reflect the changing face of the national food-producing landscape, in Hardy’s case, and the international world which increasingly became the source of imported food, in Conrad’s case. These authors necessarily respond to the key methodologies that provide the frame of reference for this thesis, namely those of history, anthropology, sociology and politics. By narrowing the focus to just two authors, it is possible to consider in greater depth the production, consumption, psychological impact and metaphorical range of food in literature. Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad not only sit well chronologically – Hardy published his last novel Jude the Obscure in 1895, the same year that Conrad published his first, Almayer’s Folly – but also thematically: where Hardy concentrates on the effects of modernity at a national level, Conrad’s perspective is international. Where Hardy laments the decline in the production of food in England and its impact on gender, the countryside and tradition, Conrad considers the impact of colonial expansion at a time when the morality of the Imperial mission was under scrutiny. Food plays an inherent role in this engagement with the Other, posing questions about morality, the rise of globalization, issues of identity, political ideology and the growing power of capitalism. Both Hardy and Conrad respond to the two great social truths about British life during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: the great shift of population from the countryside to the cities and anxieties about the decline of the British Empire. Hardy’s novels provide a survey of the changing face of nineteenth-century Britain through the politics of food production; while, drawing upon twenty years in the merchant navy, Conrad brings the colonial world, the world of Greater Britain, into the English novel, and with it the food of the outer world. Selecting these two particular authors enables an investigation into the pervasiveness of food in Modern fiction.

A work of fiction in which, much to the dismay of her band director father, a 13 year old girl is fired from her acolyting position.

The House That Jack Built is a contemporary novel, set on the mythical Caribbean island of St. Anne, that explores enduring themes of American literature such as independence, selfdetermination, and the effects of greed on the independent spirit.

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