RSS 1.0Theses
This collection contains the Doctoral and Masters by Research theses produced within the department.
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Recent Submissions
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Deconstructing the Dominant Pregnancy Script: A Feminist Analysis of Pregnancy and Parenting in Contemporary British and American Fiction, Film, and on Social MediaIn the global North, there is a dominant pregnancy script (DPS) where the expectation is that the pregnant body, and people’s parenting styles, should fit a universal category. What this means is that Black, transgender, non-conforming pregnancies (for example, surrogate pregnancy), and other marginalised bodies are missing from narratives in fiction, film and on social media platforms. To challenge this, my thesis conceptualises a new, feminist pregnancy script (FPS) that advocates for pregnant people, mothers, or parents, to, as motherhood scholar Andrea O’Reilly puts it, have agency, autonomy, authenticity and authority in their choices. Crucially, the FPS is inclusive and supportive of pregnancy, mothering, or parenting that does not adhere to the ‘rules’ of the DPS. The paradoxical and demanding expectations of the DPS mean that many representations of pregnancy and parenting experiences in fiction, film and on social media are not equal, diverse, or inclusive, and neither empower pregnant people and parents, nor encourage choice. The DPS and its multivalent cultural manifestations revere the ‘good’ mother – someone who is white, heterosexual, married and in a nuclear family; this same ‘good mother’ is altruistic, patient, loving, selfless, devoted and cheerful. However, representations of pregnancy and parenting also have the potential to resist and challenge such embedded, dominant norms. It is through digital texts in particular that audiences can interpret, interact with and revoke heteropatriarchal inscriptions of ‘correct’ pregnancy and parenting experiences. By uncovering and subsequently deconstructing the DPS through textual analysis, my thesis proposes a feminist reimagining. The FPS challenges social systems where pregnancy and parenting must be done in a ‘correct’ way to be accepted, and it underlines how attitudes in the global North reflect structures where neoliberalism and global capitalism benefit only a privileged few. It is time for change.
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The Nineteenth-Century Female Sex Worker in Britain and France: The Representation of Stereotypes in Visual and Literary CulturesThis thesis examines the subversion of stereotypes by the nineteenth-century female sex worker in Britain and France in visual and literary cultures. It uncovers the methods working-class women employed to escape the legal, medical, and cultural restrictions which arose from the Régime des Moeurs, Solicitation Laws, Contagious Diseases Acts, and the Criminal Law Amendment Bill. I explore how sex workers could evade detection and criminalisation by evading stereotypes regarding their clothing, body, and behaviour. I argue the women’s carefully considered identity became an unforeseen and overlooked source of contagion for a society that sought to criminalize and ostracize the sex worker as a conduit of vice and venereal disease. Section 1 explores how sex workers manipulated clothing to transgress social boundaries and avoid police detection. I investigate how and why sex workers were able to manipulate clothing to reclaim personal agency. The section evaluates how sex worker stereotypes became morally contagious toward the rest of society. Section 2 focuses on the sex worker’s body to determine how the women were able to avoid corporeal stereotypes surrounding their weight, skin, cosmetics, perfume, and hair. I examine how the body could be manipulated to meet physical ideals of femininity created by the middle and upper class. However, I also identify the limits of stereotype subversion particularly concerning the fate of the fictional sex worker and her untimely demise. Section 3 investigates the stereotypes surrounding sex workers’ behaviour focusing on their manners, habits, and titles. It reveals how sex workers were constantly performing whether they altered their habits, recited middle- and upper-class mannerisms, or improved their etiquette and education. I primarily focus on male representations of the female sex worker in British and French literature; British texts include Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838), William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), George Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn (1880) and The Unclassed (1884), and George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893). French texts include Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877), Nana (1880), and The Ladies’ Paradise (1883), Joris Karl Huysmans’s Marthe (1876), and Alexandre Dumas fils’ La Dame aux Camélias (1848). I also reference several short stories and novels by French and British authors, draw from contextual resources including courtesan memoirs, newspaper reports, medical essays and social commentaries, and artwork to demonstrate the prevalence of sex worker stereotypes. The thesis concludes by determining the extent to which sex workers could reclaim personal agency by subverting stereotypes.
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J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and appropriationAbstract available in hard copy
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Looking into distance: feminine narrative strategies and the male gaze in female narrated prose fiction, 1680-1780Abstract available in hard copy
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Phonemic accuracy in the spelling of dyslexic and normally achieving children: similarities and differencesAbstract available in hard copy
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Phonological and orthographic processing of Chinese characters in China, Hong Kong and TaiwanAbstract available in hard copy
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The fiction and fictionalising of William CarltonAbstract available in hard copy
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The relevance of the ideology of separate spheres in Nineteenth-Century British travel literatureAbstract available in hard copy
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The representation of Ireland and Irish issues in Anthony Trollope's Irish fictionAbstract available in hard copy
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Young Adult Novel: #IsaacAndAidenAreOverParty Critical Commentary: The Development of Queer Adolescent Identities and Communities Online and the Impact of Social Media within Young Adult LiteratureThe novel #IsaacAndAidenAreOverParty centres on two queer teenagers who incidentally go viral amidst their breakup. After discovering the opportunity of winning a competition to crown the country’s biggest viral star, they decide to keep their breakup a secret and fake it to win. The novel challenges perspectives on social media in contemporary society and its impact on adolescent identity, with each character having their own personal relationship with online platforms. As an exploration into online queer identity and communities, the novel incorporates online elements within the narrative. The Critical Commentary explores the development of queer adolescent identities and communities online and the impact of social media within young adult literature. As authors have begun to introduce and explore social media within young adult literature, they have offered various perspectives through their characters’ relationship with online platforms and their online identities. The representation of social media platforms and other forms of online communication on the page has encouraged authors to experiment with the form to connect to readers. Central to the novel and the Critical Commentary is the relationship between young people and social media, exploring the positive and harmful impact online spaces can have on individuals and the development of their identity online. The Critical Commentary addresses how authors from marginalized communities have offered a nuanced perspective on social media platforms and forms of online communication, illustrating how online spaces can be essential in establishing queer adolescent identity for young LGBTQIA+ people. On a personal level, both the novel and the Critical Commentary combine my passion for presenting both the positive and harmful sides of establishing identity in the age of social media and the importance of online spaces for young LGBTQIA+ people.
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PEARL: A Doctorate in Creative WritingThe novel PEARL is inspired by the fourteenth-century poem known by the same name, found in the same manuscript as the better-known Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The poem Pearl has remained until now in the hands of scholars and poets, and although it has been translated in recent years to great critical success, by Jane Draycott and Simon Armitage, it has not previously inspired a prose story based on its emblems or central concerns. A meditation on the imagery and preoccupations of the poem, the novel borrows from its patterns as well as its plot, moving the original work into a new genre. Central to both the poem and the novel is a relationship between a parent and child that continues after the death of one of them, and where the roles of teacher and pupil, child and adult, become in time reversed or complicated. In the second part of the thesis the Critical Commentary draws on my reading and translations of the poem Pearl, as well as research into local myths and village customs, children’s singing games and rhymes about death and burial and folklore, in particular those stories that deal with transmigration of the soul. As the novel is set in the early 21st century the Critical Commentary also draws on readings of contemporary fiction and memoir that deal with sudden death, suicide and grief. Both the novel PEARL and the Critical Commentary are forms of creative autobiography, and share a structure that weaves poetry, song, and memory into a dense collage of prose. This in turn echoes the complex repetitions and patterns of the poem that inspired both pieces of writing. The poem Pearl has been called a lament, or a meditation on death, but it is also a love-song addressed to the lost infant and a kind of wish-fulfilment in that the poem brings the lost child to the riverbank of life and death to console her father. Similarly the novel can be read as a lament for a lost childhood, but also, more positively, as a re-creation of that lost world and an act of devotion to the person who is being mourned. The novel and the commentary are both a form of tribute to the poem that inspired them, re-creating a sensory map of the lost world of the poem. On a personal level they are also both also an act of mourning for my mother, a way of re-visiting the songs and stories she taught me, a re-creation of the mythical and musical map of the village where I lived as a child.
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Novelty Fades: Science Fiction and PosthumanismThis thesis contends that Critical Posthumanism and Science Fiction studies are symbiotic academic disciplines, which both stand to benefit significantly from critical approaches that accurately recognise their dialogic resonances. It contends that the posthuman qualities of SF texts are manifest rhetorically, rather than simply within their narrative schema. The Introduction argues that Posthumanist disciplines often undervalue SF texts, as a result of a common misconception that the genre is insufficiently posthuman. Likewise, SF critics have long disregarded texts’ mundane elements in lieu of an eschatological focus upon their novel technologies. As I proceed to outline, a new posthumanistic conception of the internal mechanics of SF is not only overdue, but also key to conceptualising our Anthropocene epoch. The thesis therefore proceeds to provide demonstrative posthumanistic readings of works by a number of canonical SF authors. Chapter 1 inaugurates this project in practice by undertaking a textual analysis of a series frequently regarded as the keystone of Golden Age SF. The diegetic metaverse established within Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Robot stories, I argue, comprises a future history which overtly gestures towards the profoundly everyday character of our posthuman futures. By taking notice of the banal elements of Asimov’s narratives, we newly discern their futuristic extrapolation of everyday life. Meanwhile, Chapter 2 examines the repetitive qualities of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle. Taking the series as an exemplar of New Wave SF, it explores the pluralistic ways in which Le Guin’s seminal series gestures towards the primacy of daily life to the posthuman. In addition to textual analysis, this chapter undertakes a concordance analysis of the series, further demonstrating the manner in which its data prove just as vital as its nova. Moving towards a consideration of contemporary written SF, Chapter 3 analyses the posthuman qualities of Kim Stanley Robinson’s oeuvre. The palimpsestuous qualities of Robinson’s future histories, in particular, gesture towards his mundanely-embedded figuration of the posthuman future. In the process of delineating the Anthropocenic interventions of Robinson’s novels, the chapter concludes with a comparative analysis of variant forms of his omnibus Green Earth, evidencing the penetration of environmental nova into our everyday lives. Finally, Chapter 4 explores the repetitive schema of two prominent televisual SF texts, claiming that their participatory qualities significantly alter the textual positionality of their audiences. This chapter begins by analysing the Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat eras of the BBC television series Doctor Who, before undertaking an autoethnography of the videogame Outer Wilds. In a science-fictional fashion, the Conclusion of the thesis underlines its ecocritical value for a world whose near future will be increasingly devastated by starkly novel climactic phenomena.
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My Friend, the Queen, an historical novel, with an accompanying Critical Commentary, Historical Fiction in the 21st Century: its Purpose and Practice1509. On the day of the Coronation of the new young King and his Spanish Queen, eight-year-old Kat Champernowne goes to live and work at Hever Castle. There she strikes up a friendship with the family’s middle child, Anne: it is a lifelong bond that will take her to France, to London, to the birth of a Princess, and to the execution of a Queen. My Friend, the Queen is a feminist novel in the historical literary fiction genre, which presents the story of Anne Boleyn from an original perspective. Its protagonist, Kat Champernowne, more familiarly known by her married name of Ashley, is a real person whose early life has not previously been voiced. Throughout the substantive part of my thesis - the novel - she narrates her own story, closely intertwined with that of Anne Boleyn, from their imagined first meeting at Hever to Anne’s beheading in 1536. My Critical Commentary begins by tracing the trajectory and evolution of historical fiction from 1971. Drawing on the experience of undertaking a practice-based PhD, I then examine the relationship between history and fiction, linking my analysis of historical fiction’s current purpose and practice to the research and methodologies I employ in synthesising ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ into a cohesive whole. I incorporate both critical and theoretical issues, as well as drawing on the works and methodology of other novelists, to delineate the role and status of historical fiction in the twenty-first century from the viewpoints of both a practitioner and a theorist.
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Industrial Gentlemanliness: The fin-de-siècle adventure hero in text and image, 1870-1914This thesis identifies and examines representations of English heroic masculinities in imperialist adventure stories at the end of the nineteenth century. It contends that fin-de-siècle adventure stories are products of Victorian industrial, technological, and scientific developments. The chapters trace this context through analysis of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912). A significant aspect of the texts is how their perspectives on the English identities of their heroes are informed by their authors’ ‘outsider’ status, for Stevenson and Conan Doyle were Scottish (the latter of Irish Catholic descent), Burroughs was American, and Verne was French. The Introduction to the thesis argues that central to identifying the relationship between the adventure hero and industrialisation are the original illustrations that were printed with the stories. These create intertextual and paratextual frames, showing how the context of industrial modernity moulds the fin-de-siècle masculine body and mind. The partnership between text and illustrations exposes the complex relationship between industrial modernity and heroic masculinity, particularly, the construction of an idealised gentlemanly identity and gendered performance. Stevenson claimed that penny dreadfuls influenced his development of characters and the action of Treasure Island, and Chapter One traces the impact of nineteenth-century print culture and the growth and dissemination of popular fiction in relation to both Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Burroughs’s Tarzan. Simultaneously, the influence of mid-century discourses regarding ideas of self-help and industriousness are analysed in the portrayals of Stevenson’s characters, especially the pirate Long John Silver. Chapter Two focuses on the topic of mobility and how the industrialised travel space is negotiated by adventurers. Verne’s Around the World demonstrates how international travel became more accessible, and how the speed of travel impacts on the curiosity of the orientalist traveller. Despite Phileas Fogg’s lack of engagement with his journey, a connection is established between the traveller and his immediate industrialised travel space. This is accentuated when Fogg is forced to use ‘exotic’ modes of transport, which ironically serve to delineate his Englishness, especially when placed against the other voices and behaviours of his fellow travel companions. Chapter Three identifies the psychological and physiological impact of science, industrialisation and technology upon Conan Doyle’s adventurers, showing how this is exposed during encounters abroad. The identity of the adventure heroes in these novels is moulded by a Western masculine heteronormative construct that is characterised by a visible gendered performance. This performance includes the body and its clothing and accessories. As the thesis argues, the fin-de-siècle adventure hero has a Janus-faced identity; constructed against a romanticised vision of the past and a nostalgic ideal of gentlemanliness, but also forward-looking in terms of forging a future for Britain through the imperialist dream. The thesis demonstrates that the adventure story is a paradox: an outcome of invention, scientific, technological and industrial progress, yet also a supposed escape from nineteenth-century industrial modernity.
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A “WomEsanist” Theory: Autoethnography of Triads of Familial Generations of Nigerian Esan Women’s Perceptions of Body Size and ImageI consider the under-theorised genre of less powerful cultures, like my Esan culture, as a site for the subversion of dominant discourses. Espousing a novel feminist theoretical framework – “WomEsanism”, in combination with autoethnographic research methodology, I aim to advance the understanding of Nigerian Esan women’s constructions of ideal body size and image while reflecting on my own status as an Esan woman. My research trajectory was constantly characterised by self-interrogation and self-analysis, while relating my personal experience to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings articulated by other Esan women participants of my study. I recruited 16 sets of triads of familial generations of Esan women from all five local government areas of Esanland. A triadic family set comprised of daughter, mother, and grandmother. The total number of individual participants were 48. I used the snowballing sampling technique to locate families that met my inclusion criteria. I collected data from myself through introspection and from my participants via one-to-one in-depth interview using semi-structured questions, and real-life observations. Then, I conducted a thematic analysis on all data types I collected. “Being beyond body in bodies” emerged as my overarching interpretation of my findings. Two complementary but inter-related themes supported the articulation of this interpretation and are: “being beyond body” and “being in bodies”. “Being beyond body” was expressed through three analytical sub-themes namely, “abilities”; “circumstance”; and “essence”. Esan women’s abilities in terms of body responsiveness, connectedness to body, and comfort in body, influence their innate image that transcends corporeal representations. In addition, they expressed their innate beliefs of how life circumstances, like nature events and socio-economic events, rationalise their views of being beyond body. Still, they derived an innate essence from both spirituality, mostly demonstrated through religion; and being human. “Being in bodies” echoed the body as a social phenomenon described as “slim”, “average” and “fat” by my participants. These are socially-fluid categorisations of body size. Furthermore, four analytical sub-themes created contexts for understanding these body sizes and are: “nourishment and youthfulness”; “health and wellbeing”; “attractiveness”; and “respect and personality”. Together, these cultural perceptions of body size and image by my participants are embedded in the intersections of the multiple social spaces which they occupy. I conclude that my study is beneficial to the academic discipline of Public Health for understanding the connections between socio-political locations, resultant cultures, and body image. This research was also an opportunity for me to gain skills relevant for my learning how to learn about the diverse world via discourses of gender constructs; culture and bodies; politics of knowledge; sociology of health; and the autoethnographic research methodology as a critical social research approach.
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The Literary Places of Mary Cholmondeley and Mary Webb: Women Walking and Interacting with the Shropshire CountrysideThis thesis will demonstrate the importance of Mary Cholmondeley’s and Mary Webb’s novels, short stories, poetry and essays by showing their part in the literary heritage of Shropshire. Both writers drew on their experiences of living in Shropshire villages for their inspiration. This thesis will highlight the significance of the work of these now little-known authors and will draw attention to the feminist arguments which were implicit in their work. By highlighting the instances of women walking and interacting with the countryside in their short stories and novels, I will show that both authors indicated the necessity for greater rights for women in society in the early part of the twentieth century. The independent and freethinking heroines who feature in their novels and short stories provide important feminist representations which deserve greater visibility in studies of this period. As such, this thesis will be useful to scholars studying New Woman writers and their depictions of women. By stressing the influence of Shropshire on each author’s work, I hope that they will stand comparison with A.E. Housman, whose poetry is influenced by that region. This thesis will provide a critical study of Cholmondeley and Webb and I have produced a number of G.I.S. maps to emphasise the connection they had with Shropshire. These provide an alternative way to study their work. This online and accessible resource should engage new audiences to their work. The Introduction to the thesis will set out the connections that both writers had with the county. It will also provide an overview of critical texts associated with Space and Place studies that have influenced my research, as well as relating Cholmondeley and Webb to some of the other women writers who were writing at the same time. Chapter One focusses on Cholmondeley’s writing, arguing that her work displays an implicit feminism. She depicts heroines walking and interacting with the countryside in both her novels and short stories as part of her argument that women desired more independence in the early part of the twentieth century. This chapter also assesses the influence of Shropshire on Cholmondeley’s work and argues that, even when living away from the county, it had a great impact on her writing. Chapter Two will show that, whilst Mary Webb’s connection to Shropshire has already been well established, few academic studies have been written about her work. I argue that, by portraying the mobility of women within the rural landscape in her novels, poetry, essays and short stories, she addresses the larger political issue of women’s rights. This chapter also analyses the work of many of the literary pilgrims who visited Shropshire specifically in search of the places that inspired Webb’s writing in order to show the unhelpful ways in which they have mythologised her life and work. Chapter Three will analyse the G.I.S. maps which I have produced in order to argue that mapping can lead to a greater insight into the work of these two authors. It will also point out the growing use of interactive technology in contemporary literature studies. Links to my G.I.S. maps, and more information about them, can be found in the Appendix to my thesis. The Conclusion demonstrates the continuing legacy of Cholmondeley and Webb in order to stress their importance, not only to the literary landscape of Shropshire, but also to the wider literary culture.
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‘The Madman out of The Attic’ Gendered Madness in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Villette, and The Tenant of Wildfell HallThe nineteenth-century ‘madwoman’ is critically established, but not always contentiously questioned or repudiated, within Brontë scholarship. This dissertation will therefore explore the possibility that the quintessentially ‘mad’ female can be replaced by the heavily flawed, and often equally ‘mad’ man, who continuously controls and represses her. Through a diachronic analysis of Bertha Mason and Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette, Catherine Earnshaw in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Helen Graham in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, this project will demonstrate how and why the middleclass, ‘sane’ and respectable man can be met with character divergences and vices of his own. This undermines his credibility as a ‘doctor’ or a dictator in his treatment of women, which in turn vindicates and questions the validity and the ultimate cause of female ‘madness’ in the first instance. Chapters One and Two will trace Bertha and Catherine’s respective downfalls to death through ‘madness’, and their connecting relationships with both Rochester and Edgar. Chapter Three will examine how Lucy does manage to survive her mistreatment; yet, she is left without purpose or a definitive identity of her own as a result. In contrast to the preceding chapters, Chapter Four will inverse and redeem the trends of the nineteenth-century woman, ones which so heavily affected Bertha, Catherine and Lucy, as Helen survives her unfavourable experience. While Bertha, Catherine and Lucy react and succumb to their patriarchal repression in different ways, only Anne Brontë offers a solution to the polemical issues which all three authors raise. As she emancipates her heroine Helen, in contrast to repressing her further, she negotiates how an alternative and a more optimistic fate potentially awaits women who are entrapped within the rigid patriarchal systems of nineteenth-century literature and culture.
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The Social History and Technical Development of Tatting: An Overlooked NeedlecraftThis thesis takes a narrative chronological approach to explore the development of tatting as a craft activity from the eighteenth century to the present day by examining a broad range of primary and secondary literature. Extant tatting and relevant ephemera in archives and other repositories have been examined and analysed in order to identify the origins of this hand-held, knotted lacemaking technique. By the very nature of the subject, the research has been multidisciplinary and the data was accumulated over several years at every opportunity. The narrative, an enquiry as a means of understanding experiences as lived and told through both literature and research, has extended from the first known record of tatting in print through to the present day. A variety of literature is discussed, including periodicals and patterns, along with many illustrations of tatting and shuttles, a variety of designs with their possible use, threads, methods of construction, provenance, extant tatting in museums and archives. The Introduction to the thesis introduces the history and development of this needlecraft as a leisure occupation for women and highlights how tatting has often been neglected in relevant craft literature. The chapter also analyses the world-wide appeal of the craft. Chapter 1 investigates the tools, threads and variations of this portable craft as well as the often confusing terminology associated with it. There have been many practical books and articles published about, or referencing, tatting and Chapter 2 offers an analysis of them from the earliest confirmed mention in 1770 to the latest books to show how instructions for creating this knotted lace have changed, from those Madame Riego de la Branchardiere at the end of the nineteenth century to the colourful diagrammatic instructions seen in the twenty-first century. Tatting has been used by people in all walks of society, and Chapter 3 discusses some of the uses to which tatting has been applied to fashionable clothing, from elaborate collars to handbags and parasols. Many of these tatted items are in museums across the UK, a large number of which were visited to in order to study the surviving items, which are discussed in this thesis. The catalyst for this research was The Art of Tatting by Lady Katharin Hoare which contains photographs of Lady Hoare’s own tatting and that of Queen Elisabeth of Romania. Chapter 4 focuses on the work of these women, both in terms of their writing and their surviving tatted items. Access was given to both the surviving tatting of Queen Elisabeth in Pelés Castle, Romania and Lady Hoare’s tatted items preserved in collections owned by her descendants and those still use in a church in Norfolk. This work, never before discussed in close detail, is analysed in Chapter 4. The Conclusion to the thesis reviews current attitudes towards tatting and needlecrafts in general especially the difficulty in promoting and keeping tatting active and alive. The thesis aims to offer the first academic account of the social history and technical development of the neglected craft of tatting, and original contributions to knowledge include clarification regarding the writings of Mlle Riego and the discovery and recording of Lady Hoare’s tatting, as well as the extant items by Queen Elisabeth in Pelés Castle.
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The Dynamics of Time and Space in Recent French Fiction: Selected Works by Annie Ernaux, Patrick Modiano, Jean Echenoz and Marie DarrieussecqThis thesis investigates the ways in which literary texts negotiate spatio-temporal movements and how, through the nature of narrative, they may offer models for expressing the lived experience of time and place. The theoretical framework traces developments in philosophies of time and space beginning with Henri Bergson’s concepts of duration and simultaneity. The desire to portray both of these informs Gilles Deleuze’s study of cinema to produce his writings on the image-temps and image-mouvement which highlight the constant change undergone in moving through space and time which he defines as différence. The transformative nature of our relationship with the space around us and the agency of the body in that transformation is seen by Deleuze as a positive creative force and one which demands a continual deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation evidenced in the literature studied. Henri Lefebvre further interrogates the importance of the body in the production of space and contributes to the debate around the creation of place and non-place taken up by Michel de Certeau, Edward Casey and Marc Augé, whose work on supermodernity articulates concerns about the absence of place at the end of the twentieth century. These theories provide a backdrop for a close reading of the literary texts published between 1989 and 2017. Each of the four authors selected interrogates spatio-temporal connections in their work and, in order to model our lived experience at the turn of the millennium they experiment with form, genre and language and raise questions about the formation, location and stability of the self. Patterns of repetition and rewriting in the works of Annie Ernaux and Patrick Modiano engage with non-linear approaches to narrative and problematize duration, stasis and the construction and accessibility of memory. The novels of Jean Echenoz explore non-places and liminal spaces in ways that suggest possibilities for the future of fiction and Marie Darrieussecq questions the centrality of the body in defining the self and its agency in creating place. My findings suggest that the desire to comprehend and mirror the lived experience of time and space motivates the literary project of the selected authors and that the nature of narrative, in its openness and fluidity, can replicate and respond to some of the anxieties around time, place and non-place at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries.
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From Fallen Woman to Businesswoman: The Radical Voices of Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret OliphantThis thesis demonstrates the ways in which Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant drew upon their domestic identities as wives and mothers to write in radical, yet subtle, ways which had the potential to educate and inform their young female readership. While in the nineteenth century the domestic space was viewed as the rightful place for women, I show how both Gaskell and Oliphant expanded this idea to demonstrate within their novels and short stories the importance of what I term an 'extended domesticity'. This thesis charts how Gaskell and Oliphant educated their young female readers to imagine their lives beyond conventional domesticity. The extended version of domesticity they presented offered space for women of all backgrounds and experiences, including those whose lives did not fit into the Victorian ideal of marriage and maternity, to forge their own identities, educate themselves, and find personal fulfillment. Through examples of female characters from several of Gaskell's and Oliphant's novels and short stories, I explore the ways in which both writers made clear the importance of the domestic space as a tool for women's personal growth. Without providing prescriptive answers or solutions, both authors encouraged their readers to make decisions about their own lives by showing them what was possible when domesticity was extended into a place for education and development. They also pointed to possibilities for women beyond the domestic sphere. In the 'Introduction' to the thesis I outline my argument for Gaskell's and Oliphant's 'radical voices', discussing the range of recent critical approaches, as well as positioning Gaskell and Oliphant in their historical context as nineteenth-century women writers. I explore how the rise of feminism affected their work and consider how their way of communicating ideas in fiction differed from the approach taken by their contemporary, George Eliot. Chapter One discusses in detail Gaskell's and Oliphant's domestic identities and how both authors drew upon these to create an extended domesticity within their novels and short stories. I explore the publishing careers of both women before exploring how they exemplified the importance of educating their young female writers with their work. This chapter also introduces Gaskell's focus on representing female sexuality and Oliphant's interest in exploring the choices available for women in marriage and a career. Central to the chapter is a discussion of how both authors extended the boundaries of the domestic by representing it as a place for women to find recuperation, education, and personal growth. They did this, I argue, via their development of 'radical voices'. In Chapter Two the focus is on Gaskell's representation of the 'fallen' or sexually experienced unmarried woman. Through the close analysis of four of Gaskell's novels – Mary Barton, Ruth, North and South and Wives and Daughters - and two of her short stories – 'Lizzie Leigh' and Cousin Phillis, I demonstrate the evolution of her female characters, all of whom experience their sexuality in different ways. While her earlier young women have little autonomy over their lives, her later female characters are endowed with the ability to make their own decisions and forge their own identities. Gaskell makes clear that sexuality is a natural part of women's lives and that even so-called 'fallen' women should have a place in an extended domestic community or family where they will find room for recuperation and rehabilitation. Chapter Three moves on to discuss Oliphant's representation of 'enterprising' women. These women make choices regarding marriage and maternity, and even have identities in the public sphere as businesswomen. Again, through the close analysis of four of Oliphant's novels – Miss Marjoribanks, Phoebe Junior, Hester and Kirsteen - and two of her short stories – 'A Girl of the Period' and 'Mademoiselle', I demonstrate how Oliphant represented a range of female characters who were enterprising in different ways; from those who did not have careers of their own, yet used their talents in their communities, to those who managed their own businesses and enjoyed identities in the public sphere. The 'Conclusion' sums up the main arguments of the thesis, concluding that for both Gaskell and Oliphant their professional identities were as important as their domestic identities and that their novels and short stories suggest that all women could achieve an assimilation of private and public roles. I suggest that by using their radical, yet subtle voices, Gaskell and Oliphant showed that women could make choices and decisions over their own lives which moved them beyond the realms of conventional domesticity.
