Disordered bodies and disrupted borders: Representations of resistance in modern British literature

The dissertation examines several twentieth-century British authors\u27 representations of the human body as a political text, specifically as a material/theoretical text of resistance to the dominant ideology of warfare and imperialism. Culture inscribes bodies in certain ways, often depending on the subjects\u27 race, class, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, and so on, using a system of binary opposition to support an ideological framework of dominance and submission. The authors under discussion are often split in some way, their division between dominant and non-dominant group(s) allowing them a vantage point from which to critique the present system and to call for a transformation of the cultural codes which reproduce the cycle of violence. Madness as resistance to warfare is a common theme among many of Wilfred Owen\u27s war poems, Bernard Shaw\u27s Heartbreak House and Virginia Woolf\u27s Mrs. Dalloway. The performance of nationalism according to a masculine ideal is critiqued by J. M. Synge, in The Playboy of the Western World, and by Sean O\u27Casey in The Plough and the Stars and Juno and the Paycock. Olive Schreiner, in The Story of an African Farm, interrogates the notion of gender as a natural fact by showing how power is distributed according to the performance of gender roles. George Orwell\u27s novel of imperialism, Burmese Days, reveals the fictions which sustain the construction of racial superiority. The aforementioned authors, writing in the late-nineteenth or early-twentieth centuries, were all profoundly influenced by warfare, especially the Boer War and World War I, and by British imperialism, specifically in Ireland, Africa and India. The final chapter of the dissertation then examines how these social conditions continue to inform the writings of several contemporary British authors, including Caryl Churchill\u27s Cloud Nine, several poems by the Northern Irish poets Michael Longley, Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon, and Pat Barker\u27s World War I trilogy. While endorsing resistance to domination, all of these authors also describe the serious consequences of resistance, especially the destruction of the body/text by the power which inscribes it