http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/32834 2026-06-24T08:56:21Z http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/33433 Title: The literary inheritance of paradise lost in the nineteenth-century domestic novel Authors: Dümm, Brianna Abstract: This dissertation examines how nineteenth-century women novelists rework Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) within the domestic novel, particularly by reframing the Fall through the courtship plot. The central narrative conditions of the Fall—temptation, error, exile, and reconciliation—are not simply inherited or resisted but transformed within the social worlds of marriages, households, and provincial communities. In doing so, writers such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot reshape the Fall narrative into a lens for exploring ethical choice and relational conflict, making the domestic novel a vital vehicle for Milton’s nineteenth-century afterlife. For many nineteenth-century readers, Milton’s retelling of Genesis—with its psychological depth and rhetorical intensity—shapes the imaginative reception of the biblical Fall. Novelists adapt Miltonic motifs into new narrative forms: Austen refigures error as ironic misjudgement in Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814); Brontë expands temptation into Gothic and communal ordeals in Jane Eyre (1847) and Shirley (1849); Eliot disperses the Fall across provincial causality in Adam Bede (1859) and Middlemarch (1871–2), presenting error and partial reconciliation as conditions of ordinary life. Taken together, these novels domesticate Milton’s epic by resituating its theological drama within the intimate ethical concerns of everyday existence. The project situates its readings within broader currents of feminist literary criticism and debates on influence, engaging especially with scholarship on domestic fiction as a site where gender, power, and narrative authority are continually negotiated. By highlighting the transposition of Milton’s Paradise Lost into the domestic novel, the thesis demonstrates how epic motifs are repurposed to shape new genres and narrative practices. In this process, women writers transform Milton’s narrative arc, redirecting a dominant literary inheritance into the sphere of courtship, marriage, and everyday ethical life. The result is a distinct form of domestic theology, in which the cosmic drama of the Fall is reimagined through the intimate terms of the nineteenth-century novel. Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/33421 Title: From hard science fiction to soft science fiction: The hero’s journey and visions of utopia and dystopia Authors: AlMuzairai, Yousef Ibrahim Abstract: This thesis examines the concepts and ideas found in the speculative genre known as Science Fiction (SF) across two periods, the Golden Age (c.1938s-mid- 1950s) and the New Wave (c.1964s- early- 1970s). The former was characterised by a sense of optimism, and it reflects a level of confidence in scientific innovation and rationality. This period embodies a belief in technological progress that was clearly seen in the pages of magazines such as Astonishing SF. Conversely, the New Wave period was characterised by anxiety and uncertainty brought on by the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. The period witnessed a fusing of psychology, ethics, and cultural speculation about the limits of technological and scientific progress that simultaneously promised boundless human expansion set against the threat of imminent and universal apocalyptic destruction. The increasing militarisation of science and technology led to concerns regarding the future of humanity, and SF provided a lens for readers to help them understand these changing ways. These developments also impacted the way utopias and dystopias were depicted in the genre. The following works are discussed in detail: Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood's End (1953), The City and the Stars (1956), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint (1959) and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959) and Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965). All these texts charted how humanity’s uncertainties, fears and anxieties grew during the 50s and into the 60s. SF imaginaries capture broader cultural fears and anxieties, especially regarding the potential afforded by rapid technological advancements. During this period the genre moves from a spirit of optimism to one of pessimism, and I will show how SF writers used techniques such as Darko Suvin’s concept of cognitive estrangement, along with subverting Joseph Campbell’s classical tropes of the Hero’s Journey (HJ), to capture this change. All the texts under discussion exhibit an increasing ambivalence (if not hostility) to technological innovations. This of course is one of the central ironies present within SF narratives as supposedly utopian worlds contain within them their own dystopian antithesis, which has been discussed by Tom Moylan (2018), Ruth Levitas (1990), and Fredric Jameson (2007). This thesis offers a more nuanced perspective and understanding of how SF attempts to reflect social and cultural changes. Specifically, it will examine how the broad change from utopian to dystopic imaginaries in the periods under discussion parallels changes in cultural views of the role of science and technology in contemporary society. The specific contribution of this thesis to the wider field of SF literary studies rests in its detailed examination of how SF writers utilised narrative techniques such as cognitive estrangement and re-worked tropes associated with the HJ to better capture how the periods under discussion were influenced by the emergence of new technology. Narrative techniques such as cognitive estrangement, along with the reworking of traditional heroic tropes and journeys, successfully capture the changing nature of culture and society in the face of unprecedented technological innovations. Through in-depth analysis, the thesis demonstrates how SF narratives not only capture changing social and political climates, but they also simultaneously offer a critical commentary on humanity’s relationship with technology, including views on its potential. As we shall see, this creates a complex dialectic where supposed utopias always carry within them their dystopian alternatives. Description: This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/33417 Title: Botanically-infused prose: An examination of nature forms in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931), and Between the Acts (1941) Authors: Clarke, Alexandra Beata Abstract: The thesis examines how Virginia Woolf’s nature writing in Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves and Between the Acts illustrates her, and her characters’, engagements with nature. With a focus on Woolf’s creative relationship with nature, the thesis looks at the naturalistic and nature writing context, autobiographical material, forms of nature, naturalistic horticulture, the natural sciences and the natural environment. The thesis considers how Woolf’s own horticultural knowledge, and her observations of garden techniques used by family and friends, had a powerful impact on her establishment of naturalistic scenes. The thesis explores how Woolf’s physical engagement with and her appreciation of the tangibility of nature contribute to an investigation into the significance of being aware of the interconnectedness of ecosystems that support both human and non-human beings. The research therefore draws on the works of Woolfian critics who capture Woolf’s horticultural and environmental lines of thought and enters into dialogue with existing eco-criticism on Woolf and her work. The thesis argues that Woolf, by observing and interacting with the ecological web of life, goes so far as to map out this human and non-human relationship as a foundational pattern of nature forms in the above-mentioned selection of works. The close reading of the choice of four novels is conducted with an emphasis placed on Woolf’s use of the four nature form types: formal design, naturalistic gardens, rurality, and estate grounds. The thesis contributes to existing and current research, in the combined fields, by adopting a scale of planting styles which is drawn from horticultural and landscape design terminology. This range of styles that stretches from the inner domesticity of formal design to the outer extension into the ‘wild’ is then used as a structural method for discussing and evaluating Woolf’s expression of environmentalism and her exploration into how energy is exchanged between the beings and phenomena that exist as part of these habitat ecosystems. Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/33227 Title: Concert electric guitar composition: Techniques, challenges and creative possibilities Authors: La Spesa, Vincenzo Abstract: The growing presence of the electric guitar in contemporary art music highlights the need for a focused investigation into its compositional role. This thesis examines the instrument within what is here defined as the domain of the concert electric guitar, that is, the use of the electric guitar in notated, composer-led art music contexts. The thesis functions both as a musicological study and as a compositional resource. It is structured around a theoretical section, addressed to musicologists and composers, which analyses the development of the electric guitar in art music and the ambiguities between popular and concert practices from which the notion of the concert electric guitar emerges. A practical component, specifically directed at composers, complements this discussion. The latter includes annotated examples, original audio and video demonstrations, and a collection of nine studies and a fugue composed by the author, conceived as compositional case studies. Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z