Mrs. G. Blore of London was one of many people asked by Paul Tabori to define exile. She
describes a land, "where the people speak differently, where they live and laugh differently ...".

"I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know ... It echoed
loudly within him because he was hollow at the core ...". Thus Marlow talks of Kurtz in
Conrad's Heart of Darkness. In this essay, I compare T. S. Eliot's The Hollow Men with an
extract from The Passage to India, in the context of Modernism. Using the leit-motif of
"hollowness", I examine ways in which both texts are hollow.

Meredith, speaking of the ridiculous person, says "If you laugh all round him, tumble him,
roll him about, deal him a smack and drop a tear on him, own his likeness to you and yours to
your neighbour, spare him as little as you shun, pity him as much as you expose, it is a spirit
of Humour that is moving you". This is a warm, open hearted merriment, a sympathy which
says "there but for the grace of God go I" and revels in our ridiculousness as we look to one
another, each of us shod in feet of clay. However there is a laughter which goes further than
this,

"The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the
text". Umberto Eco's provocative pronouncement, made whilst he himself was writing
Reflections on 'The Name of the Rose', represents part of the debate about the origin of
meaning with regard to text. In this essay, I shall examine how Possession and The Name of
the Rose both confirm and resist Derrida's claim that "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte". The thrust
of my argument is that A.S. Byatt's work resists the assertion and that conversely, the overall
effect of Umberto Eco's novel is to confirm the remark.

Dissertation

Inclusion and Autonomy: A study in belonging

We are social animals and we need to feel a sense of belonging, and yet independence is
important to us and we would like to believe that we behave as individuals. This is the first
premiss upon which this dissertation is based. The second is that belonging to a group
precipitates a degree of ideological interpellation within the group members. I ask the
question: how far is it possible to belong to a group and yet to retain autonomy of identity,
autonomy of moral self-legislation, and ideological autonomy?

[This dissertation centres around the following texts: Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake, Kevin Sampson's novel Powder, and Jane Austen's Emma.]

I will examine the ways in which both Philip Larkin and T.S. Eliot address a
sense of dislocation from the past in their poems. In their work, both Larkin and
Eliot demonstrate how dislocation from the past can become expressed by a loss
of identity, and how a life deprived of the narrative of chronological memories
can trap a person between an inexpressible past and a futile future.

How Marxist was Engels? Approaching his writing about the slums of London from a critical
Marxist approach, certainly opens our eyes to this question. I have endeavoured to avoid
Leninist Marxism, selecting instead the theoretical aspects of Engelsian and Althusserian
Marxism. My second approach to the text is to deconstruct it along post-structualist
principles,

Standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, Darwin once wrote in his journal,
"it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration and
devotion which fill and elevate the mind". Later, upon looking back, he remarked "I well
remember my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body. But now
the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind".
This transition between one awareness of the world and another epitomises the struggle of the
Victorian consciousness with religion. Both Tennyson and Hopkins were faced with serious
and troubling doubts about their Christian faith.

Stephen Greenblatt's remark implies that "theatricality" and "the constant pressure of power"
are linked. I will examine how power uses theatricality to confine us and ask why we applaud
this.

Satire is the primary technique by which Swift in Gulliver's Travels and Fielding in
Shamela sought to improve the morality of the society into which the works were
published.

A melodrama is a "sensational dramatic piece with crude appeals to emotions" in the terms of
the Concise Oxford Dictionary. Given that the Victorian era has become synonymous with
restraint, it is surprising to note the passionate sentimentality of its literature. In this essay, I
examine the theatricality of Dickens' writing in Hard Times and the schematised passion of
Hardy in The Mayor of Casterbridge;

"Even this imperfect consciousness faded away at last, and he dreamed a long, troubled
dream". In using Zizekian ideas about ideology and fantasy to interpret Stephen Blackpool's
dream in Hard Times, I will be referring to Zizek's conception of fantasy as discussed in The
Sublime Object of Ideology.

Graham Swift's Waterland and Julian Barnes' A History of the World in 10 [and a half]
Chapters are both examples of historiographic metafiction. This essay refers to
both texts in examining how literature can relate to the past.

I often think of those lines of old Goethe:
Schade dass die Natur nur einen Mensch aus dir schuf,
Denn zum wurdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff.
Nature, alas, made only one being out of you,
Although there was material for a good man and a rogue.
Sherlock Holmes applies these words to himself at the end of The Sign of the Four. In this
essay, I first demonstrate how Holmes represents transgression,

Could it really be the case that Milton, who has been accused of a number of
prejudices, and among these misogyny, presents in his interpretation of the Fall
an Eve "whose fault was only too much love"? In one respect, this can be said to
be true. Yet

In this essay, I examine two extracts - from Pope's The Rape of the Lock and from Defoe's
Moll Flanders; attempting in both cases to relate the satirical and narrative techniques of the
passages to the quality of what each text seeks to undermine.