1509. 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.

I 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.

The 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.

This 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.

This thesis concentrates on the role of artificial light in the society, culture, and literature of the nineteenth century. Technologies of illumination in this period had a great effect on how society operated and how people experienced space and reality. These effects will be studied through reference to contemporary sources, historical analysis, and literary analysis. Each chapter uses a distinct theoretical viewpoint, and maintains a focus on a particular author (where possible). In the first chapter, the role of firelight in the works of Elizabeth Gaskell is examined, using Gaston Bachelard’s ideas on fire and psychology. The second chapter focuses on the role of candlelight in the works of Wilkie Collins, using Jacques Lacan’s theories on the Gaze. Due to the density of metaphoric references to gaslight in his fiction, Émile Zola’s work is the focus of the third chapter, while Jean Baudrillard’s theories on the nature of modern reality inform the theoretical analysis. The fourth and final chapter examines electric light’s rise to prominence and the rapidly changing attitudes towards it. It was impossible to limit this chapter’s study to only one author, so instead attention is paid to how electric light transitions from a fantastical technology to something real; this is done through a close examination of the early Science Fiction of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, before the study moves to examine the realism of E.M. Forster and Edith Wharton. The theoretical background of this chapter is informed by a combination of previously covered theory, with attention also paid to posthumanism. The thesis identifies a number of trends and developments in the relationship between light and literature. It notes how artificial light created a space symbolically independent of light and dark, as well as elaborating on each light source’s individual symbolism. It also documents the relationship between artificial light and the transition of society and culture into modernity; it outlines the development, and cultural acceptance, of the notion of a technologically connected society and consumerism. Perhaps most importantly, this study identifies a psychological connection between literature, light, and the individual, and examines the representation of such a concept in the symbolism and metaphor of artificial light.

This thesis demonstrates that the historic silencing of those labelled ‘mad’ is – paradoxically – inextricable from language. Stigma is a semantic issue. The focus of my first chapter is to establish how and when the language available to discuss ‘madness’ became so problematic. Chapter one establishes a dual language problem: first, the language which surrounds ‘madness’ is limited and limiting; second, this language imposes social ‘otherness’, often permanently. I approach the politics of the language of ‘madness’ using Saussure’s hypothesis of signification, Lacan’s theory of the nom du père, and narrative theory, in order to investigate who is to blame when language and narratives fail. In chapter two, I examine the reality of these semantic and narrative politics. This chapter covers a variety of ‘madness’ narratives salvaged from psychiatric textbooks, for example those of influential psychiatrists Emil Kraepelin, Eugen Bleuler and Sigmund Freud. Such texts have been essential to the development of psychiatry, but how have these discourses about ‘madness’ functioned to establish stigma? I retrieve personal accounts from these hegemonic publications, establishing how the presence of paratexts and psychiatric ‘authority’ manipulate the receipt of such narratives. This will demonstrate how the historic silencing of ‘madness’ began. Chapter three focuses on how a cross section of nineteenth-century fiction portrays ‘madness’, in order to explore the potential for fiction to offer ‘madness’ an accessible narrative platform. Initially, I examine literature as a continuation of psychiatric discourse, including Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’; Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Maud’; Bram Stoker’s Dracula; and Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. As a point of comparison, I examine literary representations which go beyond psychiatric discourse to articulate ‘madness’, exploring Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper; Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether’; and texts which explore other selves and other worlds (Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘William Wilson’; and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass). Chapter four examines the merits of visual art as a platform for ‘madness’ narratives, as it is divorced from many of the issues which are latent in language use. I explore the oeuvres of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century artists Richard Dadd, Vincent Van Gogh, Louis Wain, Adolf Wölfli, August Klett, and Hyacinth Freiherr von Wieser. Despite the theoretical assumption that visual art is universal and accessible, the social reception of art, necessary for this communication to be heard and validated, proves that the practice is far removed from this hypothesis. The stereotype of the ‘mad’ artist is, in itself, an oxymoron: in the realm of social engagement, either the artistic identity of the individual is compromised and eventually disparaged, or ‘madness’ is obscured and censored. Chapter five shows how the nineteenth-century model for (mis)understanding ‘madness’ is the foundation for our twenty-first-century discourse. This chapter examines narratives of ‘madness’ in popular culture, to understand how these discourses echo or challenge psychiatric representations of ‘madness’, and how a mainstream social audience is encouraged to feel about such depictions, including episodes The Simpsons, House and Peep Show, to explore how psychiatric discourse has shaped these narratives. This chapter also scrutinises the language employed by the media and other mainstream agencies in order to establish what these popular discourses reveal about entrenched societal prejudices and fear. This thesis addresses the question: can we truly ever speak of ‘madness’ without simultaneously silencing it?

This thesis examines the important role of female same-sex relationships in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Whilst drawing directly upon Sharon Marcus‟s recent book, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, a revisionary queer reading of inter-dependent same-sex female intimacy and mainstream middle-class heteronormative ideals, my own study extends the parameters of Marcus‟s work by focussing on alternative contexts and previously overlooked same-sex female relationships. This thesis argues that the culturally endorsed model of Victorian female homosociality identified by Marcus was subject to disruption and transformation both within and beyond the institutions of marriage and the family. It concludes that various forms (rather than one definitive model) of homosocial desire shaped nineteenth-century female bonding. In the first chapter I explore the unstable social status of working middle-class women, and identify instances of employer/employee female intimacy organised upon a disturbance or reversal of social hierarchy. In the second chapter I demonstrate how the ideal of female amity was inevitably undermined in the literary marketplace, and that whilst women writers were engaged in constructing and disseminating this ideal in their novels, they were also embroiled in a series of professional jealousies with one another which served to undo the very ideal they were promoting. In the second part of this chapter I highlight the pluralism of mainstream homoerotic femininity by examining Dinah Mulock Craik‟s fictional representation of homoerotic surveillance manifest in a culturally endorsed adolescent female gaze. In the third chapter I challenge Marcus‟s claim that well-known independent nineteenth-century lesbians were fully accommodated into mainstream „respectable‟ society by demonstrating that some of these women informed Eliza Lynn Linton‟s homophobic portrait of radical feminist separatism. I also explore in this chapter Linton‟s fictional representation of sororal eroticism, and argue that (notwithstanding mother/daughter bonds) Linton, like many of her contemporaries, regarded sisterhood as the primary bond between women. I also evidence in this chapter that Linton‟s portrait of „sororophobia‟ is comparable with cultural ideals regarding the important function that female friends had in facilitating one another‟s marriage.

Chimera is set in England and France in the present day and at the turn of the nineteenth century. Henri de Saint-Gilles was executed as a spy in London in 1813 on the evidence of his friend Richard Turnbull. Two hundred years later the novel’s twenty-first-century protagonists, Julia Dalton and Peter Marchmont, are both researching the events surrounding this incident. Marchmont, a delusional café-owner, is convinced that his ancestor Saint-Gilles was wrongly accused and that Turnbull was in fact the spy; since there is no evidence for this version of events, Marchmont has decided to produce it through an elaborate forgery. Dalton, an ambitious postgraduate student who has run out of leads in her research, agrees to pool resources with Marchmont. Her research takes her to Paris, where she meets the eccentric academic Mathias Fournier; together they visit the Château Ruffec, the Saint-Gilles family seat, in the Charente. Here and at the university of Poitiers, they discover documents written by Saint-Gilles’s sisters, Rosine and Manon, concerning a visitor to the château in the summer of 1794. This visitor, who is also the father of Rosine’s illegitimate son, is subsequently discovered to be Richard Turnbull, a fact which has dramatic implications for Marchmont’s understanding of his ancestry. Dalton’s boyfriend Miles Carter, a police detective, has meanwhile become suspicious of her relationship with Marchmont and begins his own investigations, looking into Marchmont’s past and his connection with the career criminal Drue Paulin whom he has employed to steal documents to order. In this novel, past and present are interwoven. The historical narrative proceeds through fictional fragments of varying length, such as diaries, letters and memoirs, many of them written by Turnbull. These alternate with the twenty-first-century narrative and occur in the order of their discovery; thus the historical story is not presented chronologically but jumps around in time. It is also incomplete: there are hiatuses in the narrative, some of which are not explained. Running through the novel, but separate from the main narrative, are the sections of Saint-Gilles’s trial; these provide an official version of events which is complicated, and in places contradicted, by the rest of the narrative. A significant element of the plot concerns Turnbull’s hunt for the French spy in 1812. This is narrated in a journal purloined by Dalton early in the novel, but most of which she is unable to decipher until much later. (Her possession of this journal eventually enables her to detect a factual error in Marchmont’s forgery which would otherwise have gone unnoticed.) The concept of the past is here complicated by the fact that the events of 1812 are linked in Turnbull’s eyes with two significant episodes in his past: the death of his mother in 1788 following her entry into an extreme religious community run by the eccentric preacher Ezekiel Juggins; and an episode of both personal and political significance, only partially explained, which took place in Paris in 1793-94. All the characters involved in these earlier incidents (Juggins, Saint-Gilles and the American John Newman) happen to be in London in the summer of 1812 and are investigated by Turnbull; it is not entirely clear, however, to what extent his official remit masks a personal one. The open-ended nature of research and the relative nature of time are emphasized by the novel’s coda, which takes place in 2028; Dalton receives from Mathias Fournier a copy of two letters written by Richard Turnbull from Paris detailing his meeting in 1825 with the son whom he had believed, on Saint-Gilles’s word, to have died at the age of fourteen. Ambiguity is a major theme in this novel, and to express this the wave-particle complementarity of light has been used, both thematically and as a metaphor. Much of the plot of Chimera rests on Turnbull’s identity: was he a government agent, a French spy or a mere wandering scholar? Dalton considers the idea that Richard Turnbull might best be understood, like light, in terms of a ‘both/and’ paradigm rather than an ‘either/or’ one. The purpose here has been to link forms of duality and ambiguity which have long been recognized in literature (paradox, spying and betrayal, for example) with what appears to be a fundamental ambiguity at the heart of the material universe. One of the intentions underlying this novel was to produce a work which combines plot and suspense with intellectual weight. Through its use of subjective narrative as the means by which the historical plot is advanced, Chimera foregrounds the process of research and the slipperiness of narrative, whether historical or fictional. It is meant to raise questions surrounding the nature of textual evidence: the way in which it influences our view of history; the tension between subjectivity and objectivity; the sometimes tenuous relationship between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’. The accompanying analytical commentary consists of five essays. The first examines various aspects of the writing of the novel; it discusses the origins of Chimera, some of the influences on it and the narrative techniques and decisions which informed it, including the ways in which the quantum theory of light has been incorporated into the narrative. The remaining four chapters discuss the main areas of research which contributed to the writing of the novel. First, two key texts are analyzed: Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, a polyphonic novel which examines the rise of Nazism in Germany, and John Banville’s The Untouchable, a roman à clef based on the life of Anthony Blunt. These untypical examples of the amorphous genre of historical fiction share features, both with each other and with Chimera; in addition, they demonstrate how history may be incorporated into fiction in an intelligent and imaginative way. Chapter IV, ‘Conventicles and Politics’ discusses some of the essential historical research necessary for the writing of Chimera. The themes of dissenting religion and political radicalism are central to this novel (they are brought together in the opposition of Richard Turnbull and Ezekiel Juggins); the complex relationship between them in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a defining feature of this period and provided a focus for the historical research carried out during the writing of the novel. Chapter V of the commentary combines a discussion of both history and science. First, it examines the historical controversy surrounding the nature of light in the early nineteenth century, a controversy touched on by Richard Turnbull in his account of Thomas Young’s lecture on light at the Royal Society in 1803. Young’s double-slit experiment is then compared with that of Richard Feynman in the twentieth century, and the implications of wave-particle complementarity are discussed.

In offering readings of Shakespeare’s tragic women on film, this thesis explores bodies that are caught between signifiers of absence and presence: the woman’s body that is present with absent body parts; the woman’s body that is spoken about or alluded to when absent from view; the woman’s living body that appears as a corpse; the woman’s body that must be exposed and concealed from sight. These are bodies that appear on the borderline of meaning, that open up a marginal or liminal space of investigation. In concentrating on a state of ‘betweenness’, I am seeking to offer new interpretive possibilities for bodies that have become the site of much critical anxiety, and bodies that, due to their own peculiar liminality, have so far been critically ignored. In reading Shakespeare’s tragic women on film, I am interested specifically in screen representations of Gertrude’s sexualised body that is both absent and present in Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Desdemona’s (un)chaste body that is both exposed and concealed in film adaptations of Othello; Juliet’s ‘living corpse’ that represents life and death in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; the woman’s naked body in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971) that is absent from Shakespeare’s play-text; and Lavinia’s violated, dismembered body in Julie Taymor’s (Titus, 1999) and Titus Andronicus, which, in signifying both life and death, wholeness and fragmentation, absence and presence, something and nothing, embodies many of the paradoxes explored within this thesis. Through readings that demonstrate a combined interest in Shakespeare’s plays, Shakespeare films, and Shakespeare criticism, this thesis brings these liminal bodies into focus, revealing how an understanding of their ‘absent presence’ can affect our responses as spectators of Shakespeare’s tragedies on film.

This thesis sets out to investigate, and concludes by defining, a genre of modern women's writing. This genre, which 1 have called 'intimatopia' for its depiction of fictional worlds which centre around intimacy, explores close relationships between men, I use this thesis to elucidate the ideological assumptions which underlie this genre, as well as to consider the textual features which are commonly used to support them. My investigation is facilitated by my choice to focus on the appropriative fictions which form a significant part of the intimatopic genre. The appropriative text is particularly apposite to any project which, like this one, seeks to investigate distinctive ideologies, for in a comparison between the text and its source the ideological perspectives of the writer can be glimpsed. As a result of this approach one of the central features of this thesis is a comparison between hegemonic and intimatopic ideologies, which are found to be markedly different. Central to the intimatopic text, which may be sexually explicit, sexually discreet, or sexually ambiguous, is the assumption that there exists a fluid link between love, friendship and intimacy. This ideological perspective is one which many theoreticians, in fields as diverse as literary criticism, psychology and biology, have connected to feminine, rather than masculine, ways of thinking. Although it is therefore unsurprising to find that this is a feature of a predominantly feminine genre, its application to relationships between men runs counter to ideological assumptions about masculine interaction. From examining a variety of appropriative literature 1 move on to less overtly appropriative texts in which the by now familiar intimatopic features can be identified. Following this, 1 discuss the interpretive communities which produce intimatopic texts, using the example of slash fiction, where the interpretive community is readily accessible, I begin to investigate the ideological assumptions about human interaction which underpin the interpretations typical of intimatopic writing. Finally, I consider the genre's antecedents, and mention other texts which, although they do not take male intimacy as their theme, nonetheless share intimatopic features. Thus this thesis offers an insight into an area of women's writing which has received little critical attention and which I have been able to crystallise into the genre of intimatopia. Whilst it is clearly inaccurate to describe all women's writing as intimatopic, this genre accounts for a significant number of texts by women and should be recognised alongside other feminine genres as part of the varied field of women's literature.