Leadership has been studied from many angles. But in my study, I study leadership with metaphors, hoping to provide some new insights. With metaphors, I want to seek an answer what can leaders do to integrate themselves to lead better. In this time, leadership is no longer constrained within one domain. With rapid changes and merging among companies and industries, people expect leadership in a broader range of contexts and domains. I also want to find what leaders can do to manage their influence well, to get it across domains. I look into various fields including psychology, culture, leadership and others to gain knowledge. With the help of metaphor, I break the questions into answerable parts and start my research. As for methodology, I adopt systems approach. I conduct eight interviews with leaders from diversified backgrounds regarding age, gender, industry, position and family status. But one thing in common is that they are all highly engaged in multi-cultural or multi-domain interaction. By studying their experience, learning their past and their approach, I come up with eight patterns of influence from the interviews, showing their uniqueness in style and approach to integrate themselves and to convey influence beyond domains. In theoretical study, I further compare the patterns to locate the common parts and reveal the different parts. Then I introduce a concise frame and analyze further. Finally, by combining books, articles and analysis, I provide the advice on what leader can do to expand their influence. Finally, I suggest a few points for leaders to integrate themselves to be better leaders and seek their styles. Then, using their styles or patterns, develop and deliver their influence beyond domains.

Charlotte Brontë’s problematising of first-person narrative foregrounds the fluidity of the concept of identity and insists on its constructed nature. Brontë uses specific narrative techniques in The Professor, Jane Eyre and Villette to achieve this foregrounding, which leads to a complex and sophisticated exploration of the individual’s relationship to society, and how this influences the way individuals construct their identity. Each of these novels presents a different example of such self-construction through the characterisation of the first person narrator. Brontë’s questioning of the stability of the self encourages readers to be aware of such constructs. In my first chapter, I look closely at how narrative authority is parcelled out in Brontë’s nineteenth-century society, and what influence the conferring or withholding of such authority has on the construction of a narrative self. The next three chapters are devoted to discussion of specific examples of narrative self-construction in Brontë’s first-person novels, how her protagonists deal with narrative authority, and the difficulties inherent in speaking or writing with such authority for nineteenth-century women in particular. Individuals construct a sense of their self through telling stories. Brontë’s fiction asks the question, if “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life” is this tantamount to denying women the right to an arena for the construction of a self at all? What role do readers play in the construction of a narrative self for a writer? In the concluding chapter my aim is to open out my analysis of Brontë’s fiction by examining the idea of narrative as a place more generally for imaginative self-construction. I structure the chapter around J. Hillis Miller’s argument in On Literature that the role of reading and writing in this regard has irrevocably changed in the twenty-first century due to the influence and popularity of the on-line world.