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This thesis aims to urge consideration of George Mackay Brown (1921-96) as a writer of deeper political concern(s) than previously thought. Though Brown’s writing for local Orkney newspapers spans his entire literary career, critical appreciations of his journalism have tended to be shallow in investigation and narrow in terms of focus. After considering the political context in which Brown was raised, this thesis will then seek to enhance our understanding of Brown’s journalism and his political awareness by focusing on early articles that, this study contends, have not received sufficient attention in either biography or criticism. In broadening our understanding of this area, this study will regularly refer to articles that have not been extensively considered since their original publication during the infancy of Brown’s writing career - the articles selected are generally representative of Brown’s writing at the time, giving the reader a wide knowledge of the concerns and style of his early journalism. Once the terrain of Brown’s political leanings has been mapped out, this study will then explore how elements of Brown’s political attitudes translate to his creative work, predominantly through close reading of selected short stories. Having first of all examined Brown’s politics at an early stage of his career through his journalism, and then studied how this can be found within his creative work, this thesis will ultimately propose a new angle of consideration of his work: that Brown, while a writer of wide and varied concern, is a writer who can (and should) be considered within a political context.

This thesis consists of two parts: a creative work and two critical essays on translingual writing. The creative component, Then the Cicadas Sang, is a novel set in 1940s Malta. It is a story about love and aspiration. As a teenage girl, Mari vouches she will do anything to leave the tiny island she lives on. Foreigners – the British who governed the island at the time – and books give her a glimpse of the world beyond her shores. But she craves for more, unaware of what she risks losing by chasing her dreams. The novel deals with how books shape our imagination, how the languages we speak give us access to different systems of conceptualizing the world and how we navigate the spaces in between. It does this through the protagonist, Mari, and the people who help shape who she is, in particular Mrs Applegate, a British evacuee who sought shelter in Gozo in the midst of the Blitz. But as much as it is a story of a girl turning into a woman, the novel is also the story of an island. It sits between Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Elena Ferrante’s The Neapolitan Series. The extract submitted is Book One in a series of two. The critical essays explore the poetics of multilingual writing. They analyse the linguistic, political and cultural stratifications in multilingual writing, with a focus on the perception and reception of Maltese literature written in English. I ask if a multilingual writer’s role can be akin to that of a cultural translator. They investigate whether, unlike the monolingual writer, a writer’s multilingual background gives him or her access to different systems of conceptualizing the surrounding environment and how this informs the creative process. This study informs my own process of writing Then the Cicadas Sang, with a particular regard to self-translation and how one language can carry another on the page. In this case the languages I am working with are English, Maltese and Italian.

This thesis proposes that a body of British writing has emerged since the early 1980s which could be called ‘British New Journalism’. In defining a new category of literature, the creative and critical elements of this thesis offer an original contribution to knowledge. In Part I, this discrete genre is exemplified in a fictional biography, A Funny Thing. Underpinning the novel is a set of emerging ‘rules’ which are influenced by, but distinct from, those of American New Journalism. The narrative is set between the 1960s and the present day and follows the impact of Motor Neurone Disease on Norman and Freddy, a C list double act. It culminates in the mercy killing by Freddy (the narrator) of his partner. It is suggested that the integration of real, historical detail with fiction, unconventional use of footnotes and scripted material and implied critique of post-war British society locate this work within British New Journalism. In Part II, a critical work defines the genre and examines how novels and non-fiction books within it appraise society through the lens of real lives. Gordon Burn is located as the most significant writer in this field. His role is initially traced through a study of the influence of American New Journalism on his storytelling and reference to ‘rules’ articulated by Tom Wolfe and exemplified by Norman Mailer and Truman Capote. Through detailed analysis of Burn’s novels, biographies, and ‘true crime’ works which best illustrate emerging genre conventions, it is shown that British New Journalism differs from the US genre in its extension of real, fictional, famous, and ordinary lives as cyphers for dysfunction in communities and wider society. Finally, the ongoing impact of Burn and his hybrid version of New Journalism on subsequent British writers is exemplified by close reference to the works of David Peace and Andrew O’Hagan. The thesis concludes that, while more extensive study of a wider range of writers will be useful, the research offers sufficient evidence that British New Journalism is a distinctive genre that continuous to develop and adapt to current societal strands.

The Modernist period in Scotland is of immense interest to academics from a range of disciplines; from a literary perspective, it signals the coming together of the most iconic figure in Scottish literary history and a generation of confident, motivated and talented writers, keen on carving out a new path for Scottish literature. The reception of Robert Burns in the early twentieth century has been regarded as hostile and controversial in some quarters, yet beyond the headlines and slogans, there is a much more significant story to be told. As the leader of the modern Scottish Renaissance, Hugh MacDiarmid is central to any discussion concerning this period, and his attitude to Burns has often been judged on soundbites rather than careful analysis. The same can be said of Edwin Muir and Burns: a single line from his entire corpus of work defines (for some) his thoughts on Burns, rather than an appreciation of his complete critical and creative output. This dissertation aims to address this myopic mindset, which pervades when it comes to discussing the relationship between Burns and these integral figures of Scottish literature. Catherine Carswell and James Barke, as characters within the Burns afterlife story, are as, if not more, important than MacDiarmid and Muir, yet often their work is overlooked, or summarised (and ultimately dismissed) through one single word or phrase. This dissertation seeks to amend what is a grievous oversight in Burns scholarship by exploring their roles in the evolution of Burns’s legacy, as well as highlighting their importance as writers within the modern Scottish Renaissance.

This thesis employs multiple methodologies in order to explore Hungarian fiction in contemporary English translation as a distinct body of literature. It comprises three interrelated contributions: a bibliography, three case studies, and a translation. A bibliography of English translations of Hungarian novels published between 2000 and 2016 is presented in Appendix A, and Chapter 1 contains an overview of contemporary Hungarian-to-English fiction translation based on the bibliographic data, including a description of the assembly process. Chapters 2-4 focus more closely on a selection of these texts, tracing publication histories as well as target culture reception and interpreting translation shifts. Chapter 2 considers the language of Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai (2013, tr. Ottilie Mulzet) in relation to the author’s vernacular oeuvre, and offers meta-artistic commentary on the target text. Chapter 3 investigates the concept of corporeal writing in Parallel Stories by Péter Nádas (2011, tr. Imre Goldstein), arguing that the organising principle of the source text is compromised in translation, which produces a fragmented work. Chapter 4 uncovers and categorises translation shifts in Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb (2002, tr. Len Rix) as an example of a recently translated Hungarian classic. Chapter 5 connects the analytical section of the thesis with the creative component that follows it. It departs from traditional academic discourse and uses a more reflective, lyrical mode of writing to explore the subjectivity of the translator and introduce the new text to its English-language readership. Finally, my English translation of the 1967 Hungarian novel Győzelmes Gábriel by György Méhes is presented under the title Gabriel the Victorious.

This thesis is concerned with situating the works of Anna Kavan (1901-1968), Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984) and Ann Quin (1936-1973) within a discussion of British mid-twentieth century fiction. The relative neglect of these authors in academic criticism may be due to the fact that much British experimental writing has previously been ignored in surveys of this period. This thesis argues that a study of their work warrants a more nuanced understanding of the mid-twentieth century literary landscape than conventional accounts have allowed for. In that sense, it aims to contribute to research undertaken in more recent years which is concerned with revising dominant accounts of this period. The broader framework for the thesis is provided in Chapter 1 which examines past and present accounts and categorizations of mid-twentieth century British fiction. The remaining three chapters then focus on the 1940s work of Kavan, the fiction written during the 1950s by Trocchi and Quin’s novels of the 1960s. As well as contributing to research concerned with overviews of this period, this thesis furthers individual studies of each of the novelists presented here. By drawing on archival material and reading their works in conversation with their time and place, it attempts to understand the ways in which the experimental fiction of these three authors responded to the social, cultural and historical forces at work in Britain between the forties and the sixties. Whilst all three authors started out from a strategy of subjectivity, rooting their experimentation in a turn inwards, their works, as this thesis suggests, can be construed of as political in their concern with drawing attention to the osmotic effects of exteriority on interiority.

This thesis considers the persistence of the self in the work of three contemporary Scottish writers. It moves beyond current criticism’s emphasis on political and national concerns and themes of self-pity in Scottish literature from the 1980s onwards. Instead, it analyses how characters’ relationships with themselves and other selves are central to their happiness and worth, as well as forming their sense of belonging within both the domestic home and the wider community, regardless of their nation or politics. The primary texts are: Ron Butlin’s The Sound of My Voice (1987), Janice Galloway’s This Is Not About Me (2008) and James Robertson’s And the Land Lay Still (2010). ‘The Potential of Human Relationships’ investigates the depiction of human relationships in these three texts and the ways in which many of the characters struggle to interact meaningfully with others. This first chapter shows how these texts reveal that a relationship with one’s self is an essential step towards forming bonds with others. ‘Belonging and Unbelonging’ discusses themes of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ in the writing of Butlin, Galloway and Robertson and considers the self in its most immediate social context, both in terms of the domestic and the wider community. By examining ‘home’ and what it means to ‘belong’, this chapter also builds on chapter one in its consideration of the ways in which these characters’ selves shift and alter between their private selves and the selves they choose to portray to the outside world. ‘Coming Home’ considers the evolution of the self in these texts in relation to the themes of self-forgiveness and forgiveness of others, in order to discuss the persistence of the self in the face of fragmentation. This chapter argues that acceptance and forgiveness of former or even present selves is necessary in order to allow for the evolution of the self as key to its survival as well as its meaningfulness to others. This concluding chapter reveals the way in which the protagonists in the above-mentioned texts continue to endure everyday life in order to lead a worthwhile existence. Therefore, this dissertation will contribute new readings of these well-known contemporary Scottish texts by analysing characters’ relationships with themselves and other selves to reveal how they are central to their happiness and worth, as well as forming their sense of belonging.

This thesis comprises a fictional novel, Floating, and a critical essay. The essay explores the borderlines between autobiographical writing (including memoir) and fiction. Using autobiographical narrative, the essay explores the inspiration and influences for writing the novel, Floating. It considers authors’ attitudes to autobiography in fiction, drawing on the work of Jessie Kesson before examining the literary techniques used by three contemporary authors: Jeanette Winterson, Janice Galloway and Jackie Kay. It considers particular challenges of writing autobiographically including: narrative perspective, identity, truth and invention. The novel engages with themes arising in the essay, particularly those relating to the creation and assumption of identity through recounting memory.

Alcoholics Identified includes two separate volumes, a full-length stage play, and a personal essay. Coming Home is a family drama set in a hospital room in Ontario, Canada, detailing the events that take place after the father of the family falls into a coma. The play looks at themes of alcoholism, guilt, grief, and the meaning of family. Coming Home also illuminates the connection of alcoholism within families, particularly between a father who exhibits the traditional view of alcoholism, contrasted with a young female struggling to place herself in an alcoholic category. The A Word is a hybrid nonfiction essay and memoir. It combines my research on alcoholism with personal anecdotes and stories to explore my own complicated relationship to alcohol. The A Word includes a look at memoirs written by female alcoholics, fictional alcoholic characters, and the science behind alcoholism to illuminate the disparity between male and female drinkers. The essay looks at the societal view of drinking to seek an understanding of what it means to be a young female drinker questioning the possibility of alcoholism.

This thesis considers the works of six major literary figures in the context of their engagement with the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. These writers are, in order of analysis, Edwin Morgan, J.K. Rowling, Liz Lochhead, Alasdair Gray, Kathleen Jamie, and John Burnside. Each has produced a significant literary oeuvre which is examined here in relation to each other's work and to the Referendum debate. The multifaceted relationship between literature and politics is investigated through the lens of the Referendum, utilising these six figures as interrelated case studies. Chapter One explores Edwin Morgan and J.K. Rowling in relation to each other and the concept of nationalism as manifested in the Referendum period. Chapter Two focuses on postcolonialism and the work of Alasdair Gray and Liz Lochhead in that same context. The third and final chapter is concerned with Kathleen Jamie's and John Burnside's preoccupation with ecopoetics, and how that concern overlapped with Referendum discourse. This thesis provides new readings of these six writers in the context of the Referendum. It sets out to establish that, while their published literary works are often connected to the spectrum of stances these writers took regarding the Referendum, these works need to be considered with respect to the nuanced attention all six had previously given to key themes of the Referendum debate in the decades leading up to that political moment.

In this thesis I explore the narratological paradigm of conversion and its usefulness in interpreting the Metamorphoses of Apuleius. I believe that this paradigm is not useful in exploring the novel. However, a closely related paradigm - which I call a "narrative of metamorphosis" - can in fact help us interpret the novel and make sense of the final book of the novel known as the Isis book, which has generated much scholarly debate.

Whilst there have been a variety of attempts to understand Thomas Merton’s psyche, there remains relatively little attention to his own research in psychology. By focusing on a number of lesser known writings by Merton, this thesis will address the question of the integration of psychology and religion in his work. I will argue first that the early Merton operates with a hierarchical distinction between ascetical theology and psychology, before examining the psychological ramifications of the developing turn to humanism in his work through his correspondence with and reading of Erich Fromm. First devoting a chapter to those of Fromm’s writings with which Merton was familiar, I will then draw on this material in order to suggest that the avowed humanist harmony between the two writers in fact evaporates when considered in light of theological positions explicit in their correspondence. Subsequently analysing several chapters written in the twilight of Merton’s life, the thesis ultimately challenges the claim that any asceticism-humanism tension is merely or primarily historical. Instead, an elaboration of how Merton’s final putative integration of psychology, religion, and humanism incorporates Christian eschatology and soteriology will help demonstrate that this tension is intratextual, enduring, and perhaps also intrapsychic.

This thesis demonstrates a new methodology for the linguistic analysis of literature drawing on the data within The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (2009). Developing ideas laid out by Carol McGuirk in her book Robert Burns and the Sentimental Era (1985), this study offers a novel approach to the cultural connections present in the sentimental literature of the eighteenth century, with specific reference to Robert Burns. In doing so, it responds to the need to “stop reading Burns through glossaries and start reading him through dictionaries, thesauruses and histories”, as called for by Murray Pittock (2012). Beginning by situating the methodology in linguistic theory, this thesis goes on firstly to illustrate the ways in which such an approach can be deployed to assess existing literary critical ideas. The first chapter does this testing by examining McGuirk’s book, while simultaneously grounding the study in the necessary contextual background. Secondly, this study investigates, in detail, two aspects of Burns’s sentimental persona construction. Beginning with his open letter ‘The Address of the Scotch Distillers’ and its sentimental use of the language of the Enlightenment, and moving on to one of Burns’s personas in his letters to George Thomson, this section illustrates the importance of persona construction in Burns’s sentimental ethos. Finally, a comprehensive, evidence-based, comparison of linguistic trends examines the extent to which similar sentimental language is used by Burns and Henry Mackenzie, Laurence Sterne, William Shenstone and Samuel Richardson. This thesis shows how this new methodology is a valuable new tool for those involved in literary scholarship. For the first time in any comprehensive way the Historical Thesaurus can be harnessed to make new arguments in literary criticism.

This thesis examines the relation between philosophy, the poem and the subject in the mature philosophy of Alain Badiou. It investigates Badiou’s decisive contribution to these questions primarily by means of comparison, especially to Martin Heidegger, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Theodor Adorno, as well as by analysing Badiou’s readings of poems and prose by Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett respectively as sites of potential dialogue with his immediate predecessors. The thesis stresses the importance of French philosophy’s German heritage, emphasising not only Badiou’s radical departure from Heidegger and his legacy, but also the former’s wholesale rejection of philosophies that would, in the wake of twentieth-century violence and beyond, proclaim their own end or completion. The thesis argues Badiou’s innovative readings of Celan and Beckett to be crucial to understanding this endeavour: for Badiou, both writers use the poem to affirm novel conceptions of subjectivity capable of transcending the historical conditions of their presentation. The title quotation from Badiou’s The Century, ‘Yes, the century is an ashen sun’, anticipates both the affirmative nature of these subjective figures, and their presience, beyond the bounds of a twentieth-century ‘ashen sun’ pervaded by melancholy, for the ‘new suns’ of the twenty-first. The thesis is in four chapters. The first chapter unfolds the central concepts of Badiou’s departure from Heidegger using Paul Celan’s poems to focus the enquiry. It is guided by two of Badiou’s most condensed declarations about the poem, that, firstly, ‘the modern poem harbours a central silence’, and secondly, that ‘Celan completes Heidegger’. The second chapter exposes the political implications of Heidegger’s writings on Friedrich Hölderlin and the role of the subject therein, offering at its close some thoughts about what Badiou calls, following Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, the poem’s ‘becoming-prose’. It concludes by drawing the poem and politics into relation by way of the philosophical category of the subject. The third chapter reads Badiou’s concept of ‘anabasis’ against Heidegger’s ‘homecoming’ in order to think the possibility of a collective political subject’s formation in the wake of Auschwitz. The final chapter examines the imbrication of the Two of love and the ‘latent poem’ in Badiou’s reading of Samuel Beckett’s late prose, contrasting this ‘affirmative’ reading of Beckett to Theodor Adorno’s earlier emphases on negation. Following its investigations of subjectivity, poem and prose throughout, the thesis concludes by returning to the title quotation in order to unfold the particular relations between subject, affirmation and negation Badiou’s philosophy enacts, and to offer further routes forward for research regarding Badiou’s philosophy and aesthetic figuration.

This thesis is composed of two parts, encompassed in a third: a poetry collection; a critical dissertation; and an artist’s book. The thesis as a whole is entitled Florilegium. This title, from the Latin flos, or ‘flower’, and legere, ‘to gather’, refers to the medieval system of collecting extracts from various authors to form a larger body of work. It is also applicable to flower-treatises, dedicated to their ornamental nature rather than medicinal or scientific. The critical dissertation comes in the form of a glossary. It intends to show that the flower plays an essential role in linking Modernist poetics with that of its Romantic predecessors and beyond. In isolated and ‘illuminated’ examples from Aristotle to Zukofsky, it examines the lineage of botanical poetry, in the light of its unique linguistic makeup: a vernacularized scientific lexicon established in the Latin of Carl Linnaeus. While the critical component of the thesis is an interrogation of botanical language, the poetry collection is its living representation. To enhance the living nature of the text, I have designed and printed an artist’s book, which also acts as an herbarium for floral specimens collected and pressed over the duration of my degree. The design of the book is in keeping with traditional florilegia, incorporating historic binding techniques, typography, paper, and size.

The primary aim of this thesis is to bring Allan Ramsay (1684-1748) and James Thomson (1700-1748) into close critical contact for the first time and, in so doing, deconstruct the paradigm of opposition which has previously attached to these two contemporaries. The thesis posits that the separation of Ramsay and Thomson has been effected, retrospectively, by the twentieth-century Scottish critical tradition. The narrow, cultural essentialism exhibited by this body of scholarship has been effectively challenged in recent decades by the work of Gerard Carruthers, and revisionary ‘Four Nations’ approaches to late eighteenth-century British literature have done much to reinstate the importance of what were previously viewed as marginal or peripheral literary locations. Ramsay and Thomson, however, have never been fully united in literary and cultural terms. This thesis demonstrates that Ramsay and Thomson shared, not only a chronological context, but also a creative context informed by a reciprocal engagement with the work of the other and posits that the relationship between these two lowland Scottish writers can be conceived of in terms of a sustained mutual gaze. James Thomson remains entrenched within an English literary canon, despite the efforts of Mary Jane Scott to reclaim him for his native country. Conversely, Allan Ramsay remains firmly rooted in his native Scottish soil as the father of the vernacular revival and the epitome of literary and cultural resistance to a supposed English cultural hegemony in the wake of the 1707 Act of Union between Scotland and England. It is true that Ramsay’s and Thomson’s creative trajectories exemplify the literary choices and cultural paths available to a Scottish writer in the years immediately following the Union of Parliaments, but to set them in creative opposition as a result of these choices is a critical commonplace which this thesis challenges. Thomson spent the greater part of his literary career in and around London, whilst Ramsay remained in Edinburgh until his death; clearly the corpora of these two writers were conditioned by the locations of their production. Hence, the thematic structure of this thesis relies on the notion of location, both physical and literary. The first two chapters of this thesis, ‘Edinburgh’ and ‘London’, illustrate the urban contexts of both writers; in so doing they suggest that a mutual gaze was sustained, not only between Ramsay and Thomson, but that a similarly reciprocal relationship and network of influence existed between the literary and cultural centres of Edinburgh and London. The third chapter of this thesis, ‘Nation’, traces the fluid and nuanced literary responses to the concept of nation in a period when national and literary boundaries were in a state of flux. The fourth and final chapter of this thesis, ‘Land’, explores the shifting aesthetic landscape of the period and, with an emphasis on mode and genre, demonstrates Ramsay’s and Thomson’s original contribution to an emerging British poetic, elucidated by an extended analysis of their poetry of place.

By narrowing the disparate and often contradictory trajectories of Romantic thought into a compressed framework, this thesis seeks to scrutinise the treatment of the Romantic ideal in the fiction of Muriel Spark. A number of recurring themes can be understood to collectively constitute this Romantic ideal. These include Coleridge’s theory of the power of the imagination to coalesce disparities into unity and harmony. The relationship between creativity and psychosis in The Comforters (1957) is considered within a wider discussion on the nature of creativity and the conception of the visionary Romantic artist. This leads to an investigation of the Romantic Movement’s emphasis on interiority and the self, and the influence of John Henry Newman in The Mandelbaum Gate (1965). The resulting discussion treats the concepts of transfiguration and the sublime as they relate to individual subjectivity in The Driver’s Seat (1970). The Romantic fascination with the reinvigoration of myth, legend and oral narrative cultures is examined in relation to The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), and the discussion returns to unity, harmony, vision, and the artist in The Finishing School (2004). The investigation of these elements of the Romantic ideal highlights a number of corollary questions. The emphasis on the self prompts the examination of Spark’s engagement with the themes of solipsism, ego, and performance, while Keats’ ‘Negative Capability’ is considered in the attempt to comprehend the other. The methodology will be comparative textual analysis with reference to relevant extant criticism, alongside consideration of literature from anthropology and folklore studies. By illuminating previously overlooked connections with Romanticism and Romantic literary methodologies, this interdisciplinary approach will assist in ascertaining whether Spark’s sustained engagement with these themes is evidence of a complex, multivalent relationship with the Romantic ideal, or whether recent criticism positing her rejection of Romanticism can be upheld.

This thesis examines the socio-political engagements with concepts of masculine working class identity in three British novels written between 1985 and 2009 by James Kelman, Magnus Mills and Monica Ali. It argues that the three primary texts each differently explore a similar conceptualization of masculine identity tied to forms of industrial work. With reference to Jacques Rancière’s writings, this thesis applies the interrelated concepts of ‘politics’, ‘police’ and ‘radical equality’ to the primary texts in an attempt to consider why and in what ways British novels produced during the neoliberal era represent and explore such an anachronistic masculine working-class identity. To aid that discussion, the thesis contemplates Rancière’s critique of the concept of the proletariat and considers the historical development in Britain of the masculine ‘worker’ persona in order to foreground my central argument that the protagonists in each text represent an obscure subject resisting the reach of the proletariat and worker identities, and whose very obscurity enables the different engagements played out within each text. This thesis aims to emphasize the importance for literature studies to reconsider the figure of the proletariat-styled ‘workingman’ in contemporary literature for rethinking politics within an era shaped by advanced neoliberal capitalism.

This thesis is comprised of two components: a creative work of fiction and a critical analysis of the fiction through a discussion of craft and creative influence. The creative section, the novel The Gospel of Something or Other, is a formally experimental work that explores authenticity - of both narrative and voice - authorial identity, the performativity of grief and sincerity, and the aesthetic function of narratalogical failure. The critical section of the thesis, Critical Mass, analyses the work of David Foster Wallace and James Wood in relation to the aforementioned fiction, discussing aspects of craft most relevant to the novel: the function of comedy and the function of manipulation. The critical piece investigates the extent to which influence can be identified in the creative process and the unstable relationship between critical interpretation and authorial intent.

This thesis is made up of five parts: a critical dissertation, a video essay, a novel and two short stories. The first part, the dissertation, is on what it terms body texts: literature that makes deliberate, creative use of its form. This is literature that can’t be considered as simply (to use Genette’s definition of a literary work), ‘a more or less long sequence of verbal statements, more or less endowed with significance,’ [Paratexts, p1] but is inseparable from its incorporate existence, whether that existence is physical or digital. Using the work of B.S. Johnson and Alasdair Gray – as authors who have creatively occupied typesetting and production to create fiction that extends beyond the purely verbal – the dissertation considers the antagonistic responses that can often attend to formal devices (such as Johnson’s) and how small departures from convention, for example the formatting of paragraphs (in the work of Gray), can have a meaningful aesthetic impact on the work. It considers the difficulties that can accompany attempts by the author to occupy the paratext of their work; how the rise of digital reading environments both encourage formal experimentation, by introducing new capacities to the work, and discourage it, by creating a marketplace in which a work is expected to be disembodied and transposable; and it argues for the pleasures of the body text. It also positions these concerns in the context of my own creative work, including in some of the fiction included in the thesis. There is then a video essay, B.S. Johnson vs. Death, made using footage from Johnson’s film work. Following this is the novel, Muscle, and the two short stories: ‘Shark’ and ‘The Brain Drawing the Bullet’, a digital short story created to be read in a web browser.

Goethe had a complex and evolving relationship with the nobility, for reasons which can in part be inferred from his biography. This thesis, however, is primarily concerned with examination of relevant texts, and is largely confined to the years before the journey to Italy in 1786. The first three chapters cover the period before his arrival in Weimar. This is followed by an account of the relevant works from the first Weimar decade (1775-1786), with some biographical detail. The main weight has fallen on Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung, a text which is still sometimes undervalued, and has a rather limited bibliography. It is naturally a more direct reflection of his social attitudes than the three major plays associated with the decade, which however have been given separate, more cursory treatments in the three final chapters. General themes include the emergence of Goethe from immature, or at least inherited, stereotypes of the nobility, first towards an attempted alliance between it and the ‘Genie’ of the Sturm und Drang, and then to a more detailed critique made possible by personal experience. The final phase (final, that is, within the limited time frame) was the formation and development of an internal ideal of nobility with an increasingly tenuous relationship with social and political reality. Goethe’s picture of nobility as performance and presentation of self is considered, and its links, for the non-noble author, with theatre and theatrical role performance. Other recurring themes include court manners and their value, both inherently and as an analogue of the heightening which for Goethe was essential to art, court life as a paradigm of social life in general, and the related subject of flight from society.

This creative writing thesis concerns ecopoetic engagement with river environments, and it uses a number of forms and responses in order to consider the ways in which Ecopoetry might be employed to convey the complex environmental pressures that rivers face in the early twenty-first century. The thesis is an experimental investigation which addresses the interactions between science and poetry, river ecology and verse. The thesis is primarily a creative investigation into river environments, taking the form of lyrical essays which explore particular environmental issues, and a collection of poems which responds to notions of water becoming words, rivers flowing into poems and being transformed, and potentially transformative. As its starting point and provocation, the thesis examines the claims made by editors of leading anthologies of Ecopoetry, namely Neil Astley’s Earth Shattering (2007), John Burnside and Maurice Riordan’s Wild Reckoning (2006) and Alice Oswald’s The Thunder Mutters (2007) concerning the ability of environmental poetry to address environmental concerns and inform readers. Considering carefully poetic responses to environmental problems affecting river environments, the thesis then examines closely selected poems from these anthologies to consider their scientific exactitude and veracity in describing and portraying particular environmental problems associated with rivers. The thesis also contains a series of aligned lyrical essays in which I seek out key ecological threats to water environments: diffuse pollution; potential for catastrophic pollution events, and morphological change. I use these essays as a means of discussing the ubiquity of environmental threat to rivers, and barriers to popular understanding of the issues involved, through personal reflection. These key themes are then picked up again in a selection of poems which portray water environments in a way which is informed by a deep knowledge of river ecology and which seeks to communicate specific issues to the reader. The thesis is an eclectic investigation during which I reflect upon my dual roles of river ecologist and writer. I seek to reconcile through creative engagement the two lenses through which my committed environmental concerns are conveyed. Indeed, the thesis demonstrates that ecopoetry is a practice, as well as an art. Many ecopoets insist that the writer to get out into their environment, rather than experiencing it ‘in virtual glimpses’ (John Burnside). The thesis is constructed as an experiment as well as a series of reflections, then, providing a scientist’s view and critique of Ecopoetry, but also reflecting on my own poetic practices, and considering how key environmental issues can be conveyed using verse.

The work of Ian Hamilton Finlay spans a fifty-year career, numerous media (many invented by Finlay himself) and thousands of years of Western history. Yet despite its range, it is the product of a singular artistic vision. The object of this thesis is to provide a philosophical and aesthetic framework through which Finlay’s work can be read comprehensively. Centred on the notion of the ‘non-secular’ – a term coined by Finlay in response to bureaucratic, social and artistic antagonisms – it proposes that Finlay’s entire body of work can be read as a project towards realisation of ‘non-secular’ awareness. This comprises, firstly, a longing for an ‘essential’ language and absolute truths, and a respect and reverence for those aspects of culture which strove to, if not discover, then construct and have faith in those truths. It also comprises, secondly and as a consequence, reconciliation with the fact that these absolutes can never be fully realised in the practice of everyday living. This prompts further reconciliation with the limits of our comprehension of the universe and, in the last analysis, our own mortality. This reconciliation is ‘non-secular’ insofar as it does not dispel, but rather emphasises, the notion of a ‘beyond’ inherent to these limits, without defining that ‘beyond’. Using the metaphor of a navigator’s compass, the thesis defines the borders of the ‘non-secular’ through study of Finlay’s work, his correspondence, and his relationship with his contemporaries and critics. It gathers together, develops and responds to previous criticism on Finlay in order to present a unified reading of the poet’s oeuvre which, though it cannot hope to cover every aspect, suggests how his work might best be approached, navigated and read. To this end, the thesis also draws from a number of philosophers working in the continental, hermeneutic tradition, who present ways of thinking the ‘non-secular’ which complement Finlay’s project and, in some cases, directly influence it. As the title would suggest, though the thesis explores Finlay’s work in all media, its locus is Stonypath/Little Sparta, the poet’s family home and magnum opus. Here, the tensions between life and art which give rise to the ‘non-secular’ are at their most palpable. Despite Finlay’s reputation as a visual and plastic artist, this thesis opens with the premise that his work is best approached as poetry, beginning with an extended Introduction which shows how Stonypath/Little Sparta develops from modernist poetry. Coining and defining the term ‘topographical poetics’ to describe Finlay’s site-specific works, it then constructs a formal and methodological approach for reading these ‘poems’. Preliminary discussion of the ‘non-secular’ follows, leading into a four-chapter structure concerned with sketching out the limits of the ‘non-secular compass’. The compass consists of four poles – the Poetic, the Homely, the Modern and the Classical – corresponding to Chapters One through Four respectively. Each pole serves as an absolute point by which to consider the idea of the ‘non-secular’. The exception is the Homely, a pragmatic anchor from which develops the ‘non-secular’ in its reconciliatory aspect and, ultimately, provides the unique foundation for Finlay’s work. This ‘non-secular compass’ is presented as a critical paradigm for reading Finlay. With the work itself, it may also be used as an interpretative tool which opens up to fresh and vital reflections on our comparatively ‘secularised’ existences.

This thesis analyses representations of autism in twentieth and twenty-first century Anglo-American literature and film. It posits that, while many cultural portrayals of autism are more concerned with perpetuating the stereotypes surrounding the condition than with representing autistic experiences, there is evidence of a small but significant counter-current that is responding to and challenging more reductive representational modes. Each of my chapters examines prevailing narrative tropes that reinforce existing stereotypes of disability (narratives of overcoming, victimhood, dependency), which can be clearly evidenced in contemporary depictions of autism, from Barry Levinson’s Rain Man (1988) to Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). In each case, a significant proportion of texts use the generic markers of autistic representation to question and subvert these more established literary and cinematic approaches. The twenty-first century authors discussed in this thesis repurpose and interrogate the prevailing stereotypes of autistic representations, and provide provocative considerations for the study of postmodernism, crime fiction, melodrama and autobiography. This critical crossover and the employment of genre tropes cross-examines the subversive potential of genre fiction and the significance of postmodernism as frameworks for examining depictions of autism. This thesis proposes that this crucial minority of texts embodies a writing forwards out of stereotypes of autistic representations, by both autistic and neurotypical authors, into new, twenty-first century representational patterns.

Tha an tràchdas seo a’ coimhead air buidheann de dhàin fhada a nochd aig toiseach an fhicheadaimh linn. Cha deach cus ùidh a shealltainn sna dàin seo bho sgrùdairean Gàidhealachadh sa chiad dol a-mach. Bho chrìoch an fhicheadamh linn, tha ùidh air nochdadh sna dàin seo a-rithist, gu h-àraidh An Cuilithionn, Aeòlus agus Balg agus Mochtàr is Dùghall. Ach ’s e an tràchdas seo a’ chiad sgrùdadh domhain air a’ bhuidheann seo de dhàin nan aonar. Gus an rannsachadh seo a dhèanamh thèid corpas a lorg am measg leabhraichean agus irisean bhon àm, agus na co-chruinneachaidhean a chaidh fhoillseachadh nas anmoiche. Thèid taghadh a dhèanamh a tha a’ riochdachadh prìomh fheartan nan dàn seo. Thèid rannsachadh a dhèanamh air cuid de dh’eisimpleirean bhon 18mh agus 19mh linn ann an Caibideil 2. Air sgàth ’s an uidhir de shurbhaidhean nas fharsainge a tha ri fhaotainn de litreachas na Gàidhlig, seallaidh an sgrùdadh sin air feartan sònraichte. Chìthear mar a chleachd bàrdachd Mhic Mhaighstir Alasdair cruth a’ chiùil mhòir gus gnè-sònraichte ùr de dhàin fhada a chur air bog ann an 1751. Ghabhar sùil mar an ceudna air Uilleam MacDhùn-Lèibhe air tàilibh a bhuaidh air Somhairle MacGill-Eain, agus gu robh amasan nàiseantach agus socio-cànanachais an Ìlich ri fhaicinn anns a’ mhòr-chuid de bhàird a’ chorpais cuideachd. Seallaidh Caibideil 3 air na bàird fhèin, gu h-àraidh na beachdan aca agus na ceanglaichean eatorra. Bha iad seo ri fhaicinn ann an saoghal litreachais agus poilitigs. ’S e prìomh amas na h-anailisean (Caibideilean 4-10) tuigse nas fheàrr fhaighinn an dà chuid air na dàin fhèin agus air ceistean teòiriceil a tha a’ buntainn ris a’ chorpas. ’S e an dàrna amas barrachd dhòighean-obrach teòiriceil a chleachdadh sa Ghàidhlig gus bruidhinn air litreachas na cànaine. Stèidhicheadh na h-anailisean air na feartan a bha ri fhaicinn anns gach dàn, a leithid iar-phlanntachais ann am Mochtàr is Dùghall, air neo air coimeasan a bha gus tuigse nas fheàrr a thoirt seachad air a’ chorpas shlàn. Bidh na h-anailisean seo a’ dearbhadh cuid de na ceanglaichean cudromach a th’ aig litreachas na Gàidhlig ri litreachasan Eòrpach eile, air uairean airson a’ chiad uair. Tha an co-dhùnadh a’ tilleadh do sealladh nas fharsainge air a’ chorpas. Chìthear gu bheil buidheann sònraichte de dhàin ri fhaicinn bhon chiad leth den fhicheadamh linn, dàin nach deach a sgrùdadh còmhla riamh. Tha na dàin seo ceangailte ann am meud, cuspairean, iomraidhean agus amasan nam bàrd. Leasachaidh tuigse nas fheàrr air na dàin seo an t-eòlas a th’ againn air bàrdachd na Gàidhlig, gu h-àraidh sna bliadhnaichean nuair a bha na nua-bhàird a’ nochdadh an toiseach.

Britain imported a vast number of cashmere shawls from the Indian subcontinent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These were largely male garments in India at the time, which became popular dress accessories for British women. The demand for these shawls was opportune for textile manufacturers at home – particularly in Edinburgh, Norwich, and Paisley, who launched a thriving industry of shawls, ‘made in imitation of the Indian’. There has been considerable scholarship on cashmere shawls and their European copies in textile history. However, it has enjoyed no such prominence in literary studies. This PhD thesis examines Cashmere and ‘Paisley’ shawls in works of literature. Indian shawls are mentioned in a number of literary texts, including plays, poems, novels, opera, and satire. A wide variety of writers such as Richard Sheridan, Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and Wilkie Collins (to name a few) depict these textiles in their works. For these writers, I argue, shawls provide a means to explore Britain’s changing social and imperial identity through the prism of material culture. The sheer incidence of ‘shawls’ in printed discourse furthermore suggests that they went beyond the realm of everyday fashion to constitute one of the important narratives of nineteenth-century Britain. In emphasising the significance of material culture and recovering new historical contexts, this investigation raises important questions relating to the links between industry and trade, and literary production. I rely on literary criticism, scholarship on India, and textile history to examine the phenomenon of cashmere shawls. In the wider context of postcolonialism, the research suggests that instead of the Saidian model which viewed the East as an abject ‘Other,’ colonies actually exerted a reverse and important influence on the imperial centre. A new emphasis on Indian things in literature, this work hopes, will contribute a fresh strand of thought to studies of imperialism.

This project explores the nature and extent of the relationship between Blake and Whitman. I examine their works to find affinities in tone, style and themes and seek to understand the origin of these affinities. The resultant discoveries, however, lead to the conclusion that, because of Whitman’s lack of exposure to Blake’s work, these affinities must be accounted for through a coterie of indirect influences on Whitman. Over the course of the introductory chapter, I establish the critical proclivity of connecting William Blake and Walt Whitman, providing examples of such critical interpretation; in addition, I provide an introduction to the key figures, terms, and works with which this thesis engages. The work of the second chapter of this project is to uncover in Whitman’s work, before he could have read Blake, those elements that are read as points of contact between them. Through close readings, I show that those aspects of Whitman’s work which are read as points of contact between Blake and Whitman predate Whitman’s exposure to Blake’s work, and so necessitate an engagement with influences shared by Blake and Whitman. The third chapter articulates the notion that a variety of influences affected Whitman’s composition of Leaves of Grass, and these various influences serve as an explanation for those apparent similarities between Blake and Whitman discussed in chapter two. The final element this chapter engages with is that of nineteenth-century periodical culture; this aspect of the influences articulated in this chapter provides a secondary explanation for the similarities discussed in the second chapter. The fourth and fifth chapters focus on the 1860 and 1867 iterations of Leaves of Grass and the 1867 and 1871–72 versions of Leaves of Grass, respectively, both with special emphasis on the poem that would become “Song of Myself.” The changes seen throughout these iterations will be used to understand Whitman’s evolving prosody as well as his changing public persona. These chapters also engage with the work of Swinburne, in chapter five, and of Gilchrist, in chapter four, as integral elements of this mediated influence of Blake on Whitman. In the final chapter of this work, I summarize my findings, suggest possible avenues for further inquiry, and discuss the implications of this research. There is a trend in Anglo-American literary criticism to see the relationship between America and England as adversarial rather than generative. The concluding chapter of this work will explore the idea of the Anglo-American literary tradition as a continuum—a complex of acceptance, extension, transformation, and refusal—and place the relationship of Whitman to Blake accurately on this continuum.

There is a conceptual resonance between the rhizomatic habit in the world of plants and the perennial errancy in the (meta)physical world of man traversed by Mohammed Dib’s writing. In so far as reflective research and the practice of translation can ‘mirror’ the surface of their object, this project is a rhizomatic endeavour. It is a fragmentary journey into the desert, in search of the mysterious at’lāl, the trace of the sign, drawn and effaced and redrawn again by Mohammed Dib to reveal ephemeral truths about the self and its others. Dib’s focus migrates from early realist ‘socio-ethnographic’ novels in the 1950s to metaphysical explorations described by critics as ‘hermetic’, ‘mystical’ or ‘surreal’. The historical and the mystical, however, are two facets of the same inexorable acts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization in a precarious, often oneiric, universe. The ‘visions’ expressed in his poetics are couched in the elemental vocabularies of light and shadow, fire and water, space and duration and draw their substance from Sufi mystical scholars and poets. I posit that Dib’s nomadic contemporary writing arises from the place that lies between the sensible and the intelligible in Sufi mysticism, in a secular transposition of the Sufi Imagination: Dib neither constructs nor deconstructs. Rather, his singular style serves to hone an acutely experiential expression. Further, there is a sense in which each ouvrage is a heterotrope whereby his poetry and prose collections are inextricably embedded in each other, thus one is always in the middle of his universe. The ubiquitous entry point to this universe lies in the middle of his metaphorical desert, an aesthetic landscape stripped of idiocultural signification. Central to its lines of flight is the sign, both ephemeral and enduring, and what is enveloped in the sign is the non-signifying impact of its expression. I argue that Dib’s perennial re-assembling of ‘ces chaînes aux mailles d’acier qui sont mots’ (those chains with links of steel that are words) doesn’t so much ‘give rise to thought’ as ‘give rise to affect’.

This thesis examines the representations of housing in the fiction and non-fiction texts of Gordon Burn, Andrew O’Hagan and David Peace. This thesis will explore the relationship between housing and class in all three writers’ work and consider the ways in which housing displays and conceals class. These three writers have never been critically examined together, and their similar subject matter provides interesting points of contrast and comparison. ‘Housing. The Greatest Issue of Our Poor Century’ writes Andrew O’Hagan in his novel Our Fathers (1999) and this is a sentiment shared by Burn and Peace throughout their texts. All three writers depict the ways in which housing has changed over the course of the twentieth century, as against the slum clearances of post-World War II Britain, Modernist tower blocks were erected. Against these visual changes there was a sustained campaign, by all major political parties, to increase home ownership. A succession of Acts throughout the latter half of the twentieth century saw council houses being sold to tenants and a subsequent decrease in the construction of council houses. These Acts promoted, and made easily achievable, home ownership and ingrained within society the idea that owning property was a symbol of success and security. By examining changes in housing Burn, Peace and O'Hagan consider the fate of the working-class in the latter half of the twentieth century, and this thesis will explore to what extent, and in what ways, housing displays and conceals class. Chapter One will consider the changes in housing policy over the latter half of the twentieth century and the ways in which government policy affected issues of class. This chapter will look at the ways in which Burn, Peace and O’Hagan consider issues of class and will argue that by examining issues of housing all three are examining the fate of the working-class. Issues of housing are inexorably linked with issues of class and this chapter will form the basis on which the remaining chapters’ arguments are based. Chapter Two will explore issues of housing in the cases of Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West, specifically the ways in which housing both concealed and motivated their crimes and how in turn assumptions about class hide their murders within plain sight. Chapter Three will examine the construction of high-rise tower blocks and the ways in which the creation of housing allowed for social crimes to be committed for both political and economic gain by various individuals. Chapter Four will look at the underground spaces of the houses featured in the previous chapters and will consider to what extent the underground reflects the issues of the over-ground and the significance of the underground in debates about class. The final Chapter, Chapter Five, will look at depictions of the celebrity house and will consider how the house of the celebrity fits into narratives of twentieth century housing and how the inhabitants are as hidden and revealed as their working-class counter parts.

This history of Dostoevsky’s reception in France draws from critical responses, translation analysis, and the comparative analysis of adaptations as well as intertextual dialogues between fictional, critical and philosophical texts. It begins from the earliest translations and critical accounts of the 1880s and 1890s, such as Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé’s seminal moralist reading. It then traces modernist responses and adaptations from the turn of the century to the twenties. Existential readings and re-translations dating from the arrival of émigré critics and religious philosophers in the wake of the Russian Revolution are examined, assessing the contribution of these émigré readings to emerging existential readings and movements in France. Finally, French existentialist fiction is analysed in terms of its intertextual dialogue with Dostoevsky’s work and with speculative and critical writings of French existentialist thinkers on and around the philosophical reflections expressed in Dostoevsky’s fiction. By following specifically the existential and existentialist branches of Dostoevsky’s French reception, an overlooked aspect of the history of French, Russian and European existentialisms comes to the fore, reframed within a pivotal period in the history of European intercultural exchange, and of transmodal literary and philosophical discourse.

Bagpipes and pipers, as cultural identifiers, are embedded within their national culture, charged with symbolisms. British authors have often viewed bagpipes as cultural icons, endowing them with connotations from devilish to virtuous, from rural to military. By analysing literary and artistic references one can perceive how the attitude towards the bagpipe changes with the evolution of Britain’s internal dynamics. Jacobitism contributed in casting a particular light on the bagpipe: it was the ‘voice of the rebellion’. In Scotland this constituted a reason for national pride, while in England the ‘common denominator’ of the Scot-enemy charged the bagpipe with the worst connotations. After Jacobitism stopped being seen as a threat, authors and artists came to view the bagpipe in a different light: the once negative icon was now imbued with ancestral values. The Scot – and the bagpipe by synecdoche – was romanticised: as James Boswell wrote, “The very Highland names, or the sound of a bagpipe, will stir my blood, and fill me with [...] a crowd of sensations with which sober rationality has nothing to do” (1785). The words of many Romantic authors contributed in characterising the instrument, endowing it with implications the influence of which is still relevant today.

This thesis is the first ever survey of Shetland’s literature. The large body of material the thesis covers is not well known, and, apart from Walter Scott’s 1822 novel The Pirate, and Hugh MacDiarmid’s sojourn in the archipelago, Shetland is not a presence in any account of Scottish writing. ‘The Literature of Shetland’ has been written to address this absence. Who are Shetland’s writers? And what have they written? These are the fundamental questions this thesis answers. By paying close attention to Shetland’s writers, ‘The Literature of Shetland’ extends the geographical territory of the Scottish canon. ‘The Literature of Shetland’ covers a chronological period from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Virtually no creative poetry or prose, either written or oral, survives in Shetland from before this time so, after a brief discussion of the fragmentary pre-nineteenth century sources, the thesis discusses the archipelago’s literature in eight chronologically arranged chapters. Chapter One concentrates on a group of three obscure early nineteenth-century Shetland authors – Margaret Chalmers, Dorothea Primrose Campbell, and Thomas Irvine – and also explores Scott’s involvement with the northern isles. Chapters Two and Three discuss an important period at the end of the nineteenth century, in which books and newspapers were published in Shetland for the first time, and in which a number of pioneering and influential local writers emerged. Jessie M.E. Saxby became the first professional writer from Shetland and, in the work of George Stewart, James Stout Angus, Basil Anderson, and especially J.J. Haldane Burgess, the Shetland dialect developed as a serious literary idiom. These writers laid down foundations for much of what came next. Chapter Four discusses the end of this period of growth, with James Inkster posed as the last significant figure of his generation, and the war poet John Peterson as the first local writer to depart from the literary principles which developed in the Victorian era. Chapter Five looks at the work Hugh MacDiarmid did in Shetland from 1933-1942. MacDiarmid is not really part of the narrative of the thesis, but the work he produced in the isles is vast. Because he does not need to be introduced in the way the other writers do, this chapter takes a different approach to the rest of the thesis and looks at MacDiarmid’s Shetland-era work alongside that of Charles Doughty. Doughty was a crucial presence for MacDiarmid during his time in the isles, and considering their work together opens up a better understanding of the work MacDiarmid did in Shetland. Chapters Six and Seven discuss the second major period of growth in Shetland’s literature, focussing on the writers associated with the New Shetlander magazine, an important local journal which emerged in 1947. The final chapter then looks at contemporary Shetland authors and asks how they negotiate the literary tradition the thesis has worked through. This chapter also discusses the Shetland-related work of several non-native authors, Jen Hadfield being the most well known. In moving through these authors, as well as providing necessary introductory material, several general questions are asked. Firstly, because almost all the writing studied emerges from the isles, the question of how each writer engages with those isles is consistently relevant. How do local writers find ways of writing about their native archipelago? Do writers who are not from Shetland write about the islands in different ways than local people? The thesis shows how Scott and MacDiarmid, the two most famous non-native authors dicussed here, draw on earlier literary sources – the sagas and the work of Doughty – to construct their respective creative visions of the isles. And, in discussing the work of local authors, it will be shown that, in the early period covered in Chapter One, landscape is the most prominent idea whereas, from the Victorian era to the present day, the croft provides the central imaginative space for Shetland’s writers. A second question that runs through the thesis is one of language. Almost every local author has written extensively in Shetland dialect, and this study explores how they have developed that language as a literary idiom. The thesis shows how Shetland dialect writing gets underway in the 1870s, and how writers have continued to expand and diversify that literary tradition. The two most innovative figures to emerge are J.J. Haldane Burgess and William J. Tait and, after demonstrating how the corpus of writing in Shetland dialect has grown, the thesis concludes by examining the ways in which contemporary writers engage with the vernacular legacies their predecessors have left. Extensive use of the local language gives Shetland’s writing a regional distinctiveness, and this thesis shows how some writers have been enabled and inspired by that idiom, how some have taken dialect writing in exciting new directions, but also how some have felt limited by it and how, by not using the language, some writers have been unfairly ignored by local editors and critics. The thesis also shows that, in its two main eras of development – at the end of the nineteenth century and in the middle of the twentieth – Shetland’s writers took their cues from the general movements in Scottish writing. In the Victorian period, developments in local letters paralleled the interest in regionality and upsurge in vernacular writing that are marked characteristics of Scottish writing at the time. And, in discussing the emergence of the New Shetlander and the writers associated with it, the thesis demonstrates how the second period of flourishing in Shetland’s literature is part of the wider cultural movement of the Scottish Renaissance. The picture of Shetland’s literature the thesis offers is a self-consciously heterogeneous one. Despite the marked use of the vernacular, the thesis resists moving towards an encompassing definition of the large body of work covered, preferring to celebrate the diversity of the writing that Shetland has inspired during the last two centuries. Questions of engagement with the local environment and the use of the local language are constantly asked, but the primary scholarly contribution offered by ‘The Literature of Shetland’ is a realignment of Scotland’s northern literary border.

Anthropology and literary criticism can interact fruitfully in the investigation of theoretical, general and specific issues concerning literature. Anthropological concepts of magic and ritual are useful to account for those fictions which defy neat labels and sit at the crossroad between the fantastic and the mimetic impulses. Furthermore, the reading process of such fictions can be interpreted as a liminal experience, whereby the reader’s consciousness is ritualized. Adopting a phenomenological stance and a socio-anthropological methodology, the thesis presents the author’s auto-ethnography of reading, also integrating the latest findings of cognitive linguistics and psychology of fiction into the theoretical reflection. Other conceptual tools, such as ideas concerning performative language, the hero quest and epiphany, metaphor and symbolism, are elaborated in order to illustrate the reading of ‘hybrid’ fictions, and how the reader is actively involved in the process. Moreover, three sample novels are analysed in the light of concepts of magic from a thematic and structural point of view, as texts which posit the issue of the de-reification of the real and of the imagination itself as a critique of the discourses of modernity. Overall the thesis supports an ecological view of the (literary) imagination, conceived as a relational process whereby nature and culture are seen as co-extensive and not in opposition to each other.

The modern translation of poetry into the Scots language was of central importance to the movement now known as the Modern Scottish Renaissance, presenting writers with vital opportunities to redefine canons and realise their internationalising intentions. This thesis addresses the Scots-language translation work of the neglected second generation Renaissance poets who came to prominence after World War Two. It aims to situate this corpus of translated poetry in the context of twentieth-century Scottish writing as a whole, considering it in terms of its potential for the redress of tradition and canonicity. Tom Scott (1918-1995), William J. Tait (1918-1992), Robert Garioch (1909-1981), Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915-1975), Douglas Young (1913-1973) and George Campbell Hay (1915-1984) are the primary poet-translators with whom this thesis is concerned. Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978) was clearly of enormous importance as a formative influence on all the writers named above. He will therefore be referred to in terms of his interactions with his younger contemporaries and the impact of this on their Scots-language translation work. The Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean (1911-1996) becomes particularly relevant due to the large number of his poems translated by Garioch, Goodsir Smith and Young. Why was translation into Scots so important to these writers? What opportunities did it present them with and what drives the decision to translate a particular text into a particular dialect or synthetic form of Scots? What impact do these decisions have on their nature as cultural and political artefacts? What, finally, has been the legacy of these poets’ Scots translations and why are they important today? These are the core questions this thesis aims to address in terms of these texts’ wider global and historical context, drawing upon post-colonial criticism and translation theory to achieve its perspective.

This thesis is the first attempt at analysing the Bórama with a detailed analysis of the poetry read alongside the prose, as well as a detailed discussion on the hagiographical material found at the core of the text. Chapter 1 examines the text, with particular attention on issues of composition, chronological order or disorder and other temporal anomalies, as well as the connection with other texts, especially those situated within the Book of Leinster (LL) manuscript. This is to address the issue of what the purpose of the text is, to support the argument that this is a compiled text, possibly by a single author or compiler, drawing on an extensive knowledge of literary works. It examines what the central focus of the text is and also illustrates Moling as the central character of the text, and crucial to the text in whole. In addition it will discuss the issue of classification, something that scholars have contended with for many years. The poetry of the Bórama serves as the focal point of Chapter 2. There I demonstrate the various metres represented in the poetry, and cover a broad discussion on the issues the poems raise in the debate on the Bórama. It illustrates that the poems are an integral part of the text, and that without them the understanding of the text has been severely affected. The following chapter, Chapter 3, is devoted to the numerous saints who occur in the poetry of the Bórama. In the poems, interspersed throughout the text of the Bórama, there is a great number of saints mentioned at various instances with varying purposes. The purpose of their inclusion as well as in which situation they are represented in the text is discussed extensively. Their locality and affiliations will, as far as possible, be explored in terms of their connection to Leinster or Moling. Chapter 4 will be dedicated to the discussion of Moling, the central character of the text. It will explore how he is represented in the text of the Bórama, as compared to other texts where he is also a key figure. It will be shown that the Bórama, in LL, is a central text to his hagiographical corpus. Material concerned with Moling will also be looked at in terms of what they contribute to his legend. It will draw together the traits Moling exhibits in the extant sources and how his literary persona develops. The chapter will then conclude with the suggestion that LL was invaluable to the development of the legend of Moling. In the final final section of the thesis I will draw together the main issues of each chapter in order to provide a conclusion and iron out any remaining issues. I will also highlight the numerous issues this thesis has raised during the course of the research undertaken and which would serve as future projects centred on the text.

This thesis aims to provide a new analysis of Gavin Douglas’ portrayal of the Dido episode in his vernacular Eneados of 1513. Previous readings have readily excused Douglas’ strict adherence to the tradition of the ‘Virgilian’ Dido as symptomatic of nothing more than a loyal and accurate translation of his source text, with others going so far as to attest that Douglas creates an overtly sympathetic figure (such as J. Derrick McClure) or rather one who circumvents a didactic outlook on desire (such as Sarah Couper in her 2001 thesis). I disagree with this assertion of a sympathetic author and wish to argue that the addition of Douglas’ Dido to the trajectory of her character’s development over time is in fact a retrograde step, made by Douglas deliberately in light of his attitudes to humanism and the trajectory of literature in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth-century. I aim to exemplify what Douglas does with Dido’s narrative and suggest why he chooses to do this, using both a theoretical stance and close textual analysis. Utilising the work of critics such as Marilynn Desmond, Priscilla Bawcutt and Helen Cooney, I will trace the development of the Dido narrative up to and including the 1513 Eneados, extending and complementing the work of Desmond’s monograph by locating Douglas in a distinctly Scottish tradition. A comparison of Douglas’ Dido and Robert Henryson’s ‘Testament of Cresseid’ will be executed to establish this tradition, following a section on the relevant work of Geoffrey Chaucer, with whom Douglas sets himself up in direct opposition, in particular through his Legend of Good Women and House of Fame. From these comparisons, I will draw conclusions as to whether a modern, and more instinctive reading of Douglas’ Dido can be sustained in light of the evidence presented. Particular attention will be paid to the notion of Douglas as a humanist and Cooney’s proposed ‘crisis of allegory’ contemporaneous with his work. Finally, consideration will be given to the inclusion of Maphaeus Vegius’ thirteenth book in the Eneados and the representations of Lavinia therein, and the implications thereof for the narrative of Dido.

The thesis discusses the subject of time as dealt with in the writings of Edwin Muir, exploring the ways in which his poetry, novels, and critical writings articulate a range of perspectives regarding the nature of time and its relation to human experience. Following the adaptation of ideas through Muir’s career, a trajectory is traced from his early writings in which time is seen as a destructive power antithetical to life through to the celebration of mortality in his late writings. Integral to this development was his persistent interrogation of the relationship between time and eternity. Identifying the important role of Muir’s autobiographical method, this thesis begins by exploring his desire to obtain an objective view of human life by establishing a critical distance in his writings between the subject being presented and the imagination that presents it. To this end, his creative writings often incorporate myths, biblical allegories, heraldic symbolism, and surreal abstractions to present archetypal or timeless events and situations. In doing so, Muir is seen drawing on an array of literary and philosophical influences, many of which relate to his adolescence and formative adulthood in Glasgow. His rural childhood in Orkney and his early contact with Presbyterian and Evangelical Christianity made a lasting impression on his imagination with the resultant preoccupation with Eden and the Fall being dominant features of his poetry. Often dealt with in an abstract way in his poetry, Eden is frequently associated with his childhood on Wyre in his autobiographical writings, with the Fall, in Muir’s theorizing, forming the moment at which time becomes of relevance to humanity. Critically under-appreciated as ephemera and juvenilia, Muir’s earliest prose and poetry in The New Age magazine between 1913 and 1923 convey a strong sense of his desire to engage with the popular debates of the day regarding contemporary literary and social matters. For this reason, a significant amount of space has been given in this thesis to allow these writings to be re-evaluated; not just as portents of his later work, but also as important contributions to the vibrant journal and magazine culture of the period. Offering substantive detail to sketch the relevant biographical context, the essays, critical monographs and volumes of poetry are discussed chronologically and with reference to each other to allow the development of Muir’s ideas to be seen as an organic evolution rather than as a series of philosophical epiphanies. However, the significance of Muir’s reconciliation to Christianity in 1939 is highlighted as the single most important creative breakthrough of his mature adulthood. The extensive range of Muir’s critiques of Scottish and European culture, and his essays on the relationship between literature and society more generally, underline his position as a modernist writer immersed in the affairs of his time. Through detailing Muir’s creative and philosophical struggles with himself and modernity (which he felt he had fallen into through a time-accident) he is seen repeatedly reaffirming his commitment to exploring the nature of time and its meaning for human society.

This study engages with the contemporary academic revision of Scottish Romanticism. It attempts to aid an understanding of both how this literature functions ideologically, and the nature of the relationship between this work and the wider British Romantic literary sphere. Central to the topical focus is the issue of Scottish national identity, and how over the 'long eighteenth century' – citing the Union of 1707 as one crucial ideological origin for Scottish Romanticism – Scottish literature develops a highly complex aesthetic framework regarding national identity which is engaged in a multifaceted dialogue on the political, social and economic situation in Scotland during the period. This literature interacts on a number of levels with Scottish Enlightenment thought, and in particular the British historiographical revision enacted by theories of stadial development. However, the question remains whether literature of the period primarily helped to rescue a notion of Scottish identity from annihilation within the British state, or aided the transition from Scotland to ‘North-Britain’ in a political disarming of nationhood through romanticization and antiquarianism. This focus is an essential feature of an attempt in this study to identity the factors which distinguish Scottish Romanticism’s approach to social and political dialogue within the wider British Romantic tradition. In order to address this, a critical framework is developed, drawing upon the work of important scholars in this field, including: Murray Pittock, Ian Duncan, Cairns Craig, Susan Manning and Nigel Leask, and serves as an important departure point. This combines with a focus on the relationship between notions of the aesthetic and political or social engagement – what this study terms polemical material – in literature. Through this critical structure, an analysis of some key ideological features of Scottish Romanticism regarding literature’s engagement with political and social debate is presented. Given the central importance of political and social issues – alongside the development of new aesthetic trends in literature – to not only Scottish Romanticism but the wider British and European Romantic literary canon, this focus facilitates an effective exploration of this literature. A selection of works from key Scottish writers – Robert Burns, James Hogg, Walter Scott and John Galt – provides the main literary focus in an attempt to achieve an understanding of how the theoretical elements of the argument operate in a practical setting. In particular, an extended analysis of Hogg's lesser-studied The Three Perils of Women posits the work as a central text in elucidating some of the central ideological conflicts under investigation. The study also takes account of the relationship between Scottish literature and the wider British Romantic sphere, moving to contextualise this material in light of some canonically-pivotal English examples, while the textual relationships between Scottish Romanticism and the writing of the Scottish Enlightenment are also of keen interest. It is hoped that this project provides a fresh and original contribution to the body of Scottish Romantic studies, yet one which consciously builds upon the strong critical work currently appearing in this field.

This is a study of three contemporary, Mexican, lesbian themed novels published between 1989 and 2001. The overall aim of this thesis was to explore the creation of a lesbian community by the authors in these novels by close textual analysis of the methods the authors use in order to explore the creation of Mexican lesbian identity and community. The lesbian community as an imagined concept is explored using Benedict Anderson’s theory of the nation as an imagined community as a model. Whilst the literary and publishing world is traditionally male dominated, the use of female, lesbian authorship and the repeated use of the act of writing within the novel is revealed to be subversive in breaking traditional gendered boundaries within Mexican literature. The lesbian community is seen to be given increased visibility as a result both of the dissemination of printed text and by activist and academic organisation on a national scale. Notions of passing and coming out are seen to be developed within the three novels and the thesis analyses the use of these themes in creating an imagined lesbian community. The use of passing and public secrecy, where an individual’s sexual identity is simultaneously publically known but not acknowledged, is shown to be essential in the creation of a lesbian community within the novels. In addition, the thesis explores the manner in which the authors subvert traditional Mexican feminine roles and figures in order to include lesbian representations within mainstream Mexican cultural identifiers. Through literary, cultural and historical references the authors subvert traditional notions of the duality of sexuality and gendered stereotypes in order to create an imagined lesbian community which is fluid and which provides a queer voice to what is still largely a silenced minority.

This thesis investigates the treatment, form and function of Romanticism and the Romantic imagination in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). Critical engagement with the work of Spark has marginalised Romanticism as an important influence on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and this study seeks to develop new critical perspectives which emphasise the centrality of the hitherto overlooked Romantic imagination in Spark’s novel. Recent recognition of Child Of Light (1951) – Spark’s study of Mary Shelley – as an important piece of Romantic criticism provides the catalyst for enquiry into Spark’s treatment of the Romantic in Jean Brodie. By undertaking a comparative reading of Jean Brodie and Frankenstein, while referencing Spark’s criticism in Child Of Light, this study will contend that although Spark’s novel can be placed within the Scottish literary trajectory identified by G. Gregory Smith as the ‘Caledonian anti-syzygy’ (1919), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie owes an equal debt to Shelley’s Frankenstein specifically, and Romantic literature and art in general. Spark’s treatment of the solipsism that evolves from Romanticism’s emphasis on the self is considered alongside John Henry Newman’s assertion of the beneficial conflict between authority and private judgement, as outlined by Benilde Montgomery (1997). The portrayal of the various Romantic artists who populate The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and their exemption from dominant moral codes, are considered within the context of Romanticism’s aesthetic, secular and sacred modes of transfiguration. Spark’s narrative techniques are scrutinised within the triangulation of postmodernism, religion, and Romanticism, in order to illuminate the engagement with the Romantic imagination in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

A study of twentieth century adaptations of Sophocles' Antigone, Oedipus Rex, and Philoctetes. Two modern plays are addressed in each chapter: Heaney & Gide, Anouilh & Brecht, Cocteau & Cixous. The topics discussed include the use of Greek tragedy as political metaphor and the impact of that on plot and character, the use of metatheatre, and the role of the chorus.

This thesis is a study of the key novels of Iain Banks and James Kelman in the light of Jean Paul Sartre’s theories of existentialism and literature as set out in his 1949 literary manifesto Literature and Existentialism. By comparing and contrasting these two contemporary Scottish writers with reference to Sartre’s ideas, valuable insights into their fiction and their Scottish literary context may be gained. Sartre’s existentialism is primarily concerned with the potential of the apparently alienated subjective individual to influence and affect wider society. His theory of literature focuses specifically on the relationship between the writer, the reader and the social context of both, so the thesis will consider not only the novels of Banks and Kelman but also the social context of their writing and the critical reaction to it. The thesis is structured as an examination of Kelman and Banks in terms of their depictions of class, politics (both economic and social), gender, religion and ideas of morality. The introduction explains the reasons for choosing Sartre’s Literature and Existentialism as the critical basis of the thesis and the context in which his theories were formed. A brief overview of existentialism precedes consideration of the specific argument that Sartre proffers in terms of the relationship between his existentialist thought and literature. As a novelist himself, as well as a politically committed intellectual and existential philosopher, Sartre believed that there was a strong connection between literature and philosophy. His ideas about literature and existentialism therefore have the authority of a novelist’s experience of writing as well as those of a philosopher and critical thinker. I subsequently explain why I have chosen Iain Banks and James Kelman as the literary focus of the thesis. Both are pre-eminently novelists who have expressed political and, in some senses, philosophical, ideas that link them implicitly to Sartre’s writings. Neither makes extensive or overt acknowledgement of Sartre, but approaching them and their work from the Sartrean perspective is illuminating because it highlights what drives their main protagonists as well as their own motivation for writing. Using Sartre’s claims for the importance of literature as my starting point I consider not only their writing but also what has inspired their work in terms of their political, social and ethical beliefs, examining the reaction to their work, both from critics and in their own self-reflective comment. Chapter One examines in greater detail the ideas set out in the introduction, with reference to the idea of the ‘engaged writer’. This is a specific term which derives from Sartre’s claim that the ‘engaged writer knows his words are actions’. The chapter examines Sartre’s definition of the writer and the writer’s role in society. This definition is applied to Iain Banks and James Kelman with reference to their artistic reaction to the world post 9/11 in Banks’ novels Dead Air and The Steep Approach to Garbadale and Kelman’s You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free. The chapter analyses what can be gleaned from their differences and similarities when writing about the same subject and concludes that both writers, for all their apparent contrasts in terms of style and aesthetic, understand that the relationship between reader and writer is one which can promote social and political change, thus fulfilling Sartre’s definition. Chapter Two focuses on Banks’ and Kelman’s reaction to a specific political situation and widens the scope to look at the political climate that both Banks and Kelman deal with in their fiction. Kelman (born 1946) and Banks (born 1954) are of a generation of Scottish artists who have reacted to a particularly volatile time in Scottish politics. By looking at their personal comment upon it I investigate the culture that produced their writing, and how relevant their respective reactions were. For this, particular attention is paid to Banks’ Complicity and Kelman’s How Late it Was, How Late in a discussion of the role of the writer in political debate and in wider society. In these and other novels both writers not only provide reportage on the politics of the time, but, through their fiction, as ‘engaged writers’, directly challenge the mainstream contemporary political ideology. Chapter Three moves on from questions of politics to consider the writer and morality. For Sartre, the question of personal morality is central to the writer’s reason for writing. He believed not only that an individual writer’s moral sense is evident in their fiction, but also that the reader likewise learns about the environment that created that moral sensibility, specifically in their respective community. In this chapter questions are therefore asked about the transmission of ideas and ideals through the act of Banks’ and Kelman’s writing, as well as questioning what the nature of morality is. In their fiction Banks and Kelman deal with the individual, the collective (with reference to religion, art, class and philosophy) and further related questions of social and political morality by placing their characters outside the socially accepted norm, and offering a critique of those norms in their depiction of those characters’ circumstances and actions. In ways that invite comparison with Sartre’s stated ideas about the link between an individual’s writing and personal morality, both writers offer considered moral, social and political ideas and ideals that they believe will change the individual reader, and the wider collective, for the better. Chapter Four examines the question of Scottish masculinity and femininity as expressed in the novels of Banks and Kelman. This examination is related to the ideas discussed in the previous two chapters with reference to how portrayals of men and women in literature reflect the connection between gender and a nation’s political and social systems in a Scottish context. Said depictions interrogate the politics, morals and aesthetics of the writers’ work. Banks and Kelman offer different, but related, critiques of the masculine and feminine stereotypes in Scottish, British, and Anglo-American conventions. Their creation of male and female characters thus exemplifies the politics and aesthetics of their writing and the nature of their ‘engagement’. Chapter Five looks more closely at Sartre’s theories with specific reference to the individual writer’s aesthetic, the individual reader’s aesthetic and the idea of shared aesthetic values between both. This is done with close analysis of how Banks’ and Kelman’s writing has changed over the years, and in doing so this analysis asks to what extent one writer can be said to be ‘artistically superior to’, or more ‘aesthetically pleasing than’, another. The expectations of the reader and the writer are discussed with reference to Sartre’s specific definition of the writer’s aesthetic, and this definition is applied to Banks and Kelman to ascertain what we can learn from their respective aesthetics. Both writer and reader are required to create an ‘objective reality’, a process by which Banks, Kelman and Sartre implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, propose the recognition of ‘human freedom’ as its ultimate aim. Chapter Six posits that comparison with a number of their contemporaries will demonstrate that, while Banks and Kelman are novelists who notably benefit from such critical exposition, Sartre’s ideas are perennially relevant and insightful when considering writers in a political, social and ethical context. Amongst modern Scottish writers Banks and Kelman are pre-eminently ‘engaged’ writers with moral responsibilities, as Sartre believes all writers should be, and their engagement remains morally, politically and aesthetically committed and challenging, yet open to further revision and development. Over and above applying Sartrean literary philosophy to Banks and Kelman this thesis therefore also offers a model of literary criticism that can be applied to a number of other contemporary Scottish authors. In conclusion, this thesis suggests that Sartre’s theories of literature can assist in the attempt to better understand the value of the writer in society, and of Kelman and Banks in particular. The comparison and contrast between Banks and Kelman makes clear the importance of contextualising the individual writer not only with the work of their contemporaries, but with the time, place and position in which they are writing. The intention of the thesis is to discover how Sartre’s ideas of existentialism and literature can be applied to writers and their work in a way that allows ‘the critic’ to analyse both the novelist’s fictional technique and to gauge the value of their role in society – in other words, how Sartre’s theories allow us to better understand the individual writer in a social, political and moral context, both nationally and internationally.

Most critics who mention the particular breed of terror fiction found in the early issues of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in the beginning of the nineteenth century, praise them as being extremely influential on writers as famous as Charles Dickens, the Brontë siblings, Henry James and especially Edgar Allan Poe. Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick in their 1995 collection Tales of Terror from Blackwood’s Magazine describe these tales as the missing link between the Gothic tradition of the late eighteenth century and Poe’s short horror fiction. However, there exists today next to no analyses on the actual tales themselves. This thesis focuses in detail on the problems that arise when comparing the Blackwood’s tales of terror with the eighteenth-century Gothic. By identifying the narrative modes, the themes used, as well as the contemporary political and cultural motivation of the writers, this study endeavours to understand the reasons for why these tales appeared and also flourished, when and where they did. The author explores the idea that the Blackwood’s tales were not so much a continuation of the Gothic tradition as a conscious move away from it; a shift in the genre from a mode of stylised romance and elevated virtue, to a deeply psychological interest in the darker sides of the human mind that foreshadows famous Victorian works like Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. By looking at contemporary ‘street literature’, here in the form of broadsides, the analysis identifies popular themes that were used to great success in the Blackwood’s tales. The thesis shows that the early tales of terror in Blackwood’s Magazine were sensationalist pieces of fiction elaborately constructed to suit the magazine format and tie in with its high-Tory politics.

The ‘Poetas del 27’, from an early stage of their development, shared an awareness of their place in the history of Spanish poetry. Their friendship, enthusiasms and respect for one another’s writing brought them close together and led them to develop a similar critical understanding and appreciation of the tradition and of modernity. In the general introduction I refer to the events that united them: their reappraisal of the poetry of Luis de Góngora, the poetry anthologies and magazines they contributed to and their rejection of the many poetic credos of the time, their association with Madrid’s ‘Residencia de Estudiantes’, and much else. They were steeped in the Spanish literary tradition, both the popular (poesía popular and cante jondo), and the classical (Luis de Góngora, Francisco de Quevedo, Garcilaso de la Vega, San Juan de la Cruz, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and others). They had also read and assimilated the poetry and prose works of their contemporaries, Miguel de Unamuno, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado, whose poetry I also consider in the context of their development. I limit this study to the work of Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén, Emilio Prados, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda and Manuel Altolaguirre. In the individual introductions I consider the work of each author in detail, from the period that preceded the Spanish civil war (1936 – 1939), through their dispersion and contact with languages and cultures different from the peninsular Spanish. Each introduction is followed by a selection of poems from the full trajectory of their work, presented alongside my English translation. I conclude with a detailed bibliography.

This thesis explores the creative synergy between an era of cultural flux and seismic social upheaval, and a life stage conceived of as fraught, transitional and poised between progress and regress. It contends that adolescence functioned as an organising trope and a dominant paradigm of modern subjectivity in diverse British novels of the period 1918-1939. I develop a wide-ranging thematic analysis which draws established luminaries of the inter-war literary canon into dialogue with neglected mavericks and ‘middlebrow’ authors including Rosamond Lehmann, Patrick Hamilton, E.H. Young, Stevie Smith and Walter Greenwood. The theorisation of adolescence by anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists and cultural critics including G.Stanley Hall, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Wyndham Lewis is canvassed in detail in Chapter I and provides a vital and enriching context for the close textual analyses which follow. Chapters III and V draw on original archival material to trace the evolution of distinctive adolescent agencies and visions of maturity in the striking inter-war novels of Elizabeth Bowen and Graham Greene. Julia Kristeva’s reflections on the ‘adolescent novel’ and the mechanics of abjection offer salient points of illumination and debate in each chapter. These case-studies are elaborated and contextualised by close scrutiny of the gender differentials shaping literary constructions of adolescence in this era. Chapter IV takes inspiration from the parallel drawn by social psychologist Kurt Lewin between the adolescent and the socially disempowered or oppressed ‘marginal man’. In the light of theories of masochism, it calibrates the interrogative force of novels which accentuate the failures and sufferings of male adolescent protagonists. Chapter II gauges the radical aspirations towards female self-fulfilment and definition embedded in narratives of generational conflict and alliance between women and positions the post-war ‘modern girl’ as an enabling yet also peculiarly problematic avatar of female emancipation.

In recent years the importance of the Scottish contribution to rhetoric and literary criticism has begun to be fully recognised by historians and literary critics. Men such as Hugh Blair, Adam Smith and George Campbell have now been afforded a just place in the canon of literary critics. However, the period before the 1760s which saw a great flourishing in Scottish intellectual activity has, by in large, remained untouched. The main purpose of this thesis is to rehabilitate those thinkers in Scotland who were active in the period before this, and who began to change the boundaries of rhetoric and literary criticism, which ultimately paved the way for their fellow countrymen to export their own systems to Europe and the wider Atlantic world. In addition to this, the thesis addresses two other major concerns. Firstly, it will argue that Scotland in this period does not deserve to be viewed as merely a cultural province of England, reacting solely to its larger neighbour’s cultural agenda. Instead, the Scots were engaged in a European-wide exchange of ideas which allowed them to develop a system of rhetoric and literary criticism which was richer than a brand that was developed only in response to English cultural pressure. Secondly, the thesis will demonstrate the importance of the classical influence on Scottish thinkers in their attempts to forge a new style of rhetoric for modern consumption. The structure of the thesis has been set in such a way as to provide a balance between the development of rhetoric in regional enlightenment centres, in terms of both university and club activity, and its development and progression in the traditional institutions of Scotland: the parliament, the church and the law. The first three chapters focus on Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and chart the different influences that each city was subjected to, that in turn led to the construction of differing, yet still in many respects, complementary systems. Within the universities themselves, the figures of Thomas Blackwell of Aberdeen, Francis Hutcheson of Glasgow, and John Stevenson of Edinburgh, merit substantial analysis for their role in this process, not only for the influence which they exerted on future generations of literary critics in Scotland and abroad, but also for their own contributions to the discipline, which have been frequently overlooked. The focus on the regional varieties of Enlightenment also permits for a discussion of club activity in Scotland, which was an integral part of the Scottish Enlightenment. This will demonstrate that the growth of rhetoric and literary criticism in the country was not the sole preserve of the educated elites, but was something which could be accessed from all levels of society. The second half of the thesis focuses on the institutions of Scotland. This section seeks to restore to parity, sources such as political pamphlets, sermons and style books which, under the rules of modern day criticism that concerns itself with only a narrow band of literature, have become overlooked as a foundation for rhetorical development. Furthermore, it provides an opportunity to assess the contribution to the advance in critical theory of those individuals such as Lord Kames and Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh who did so away from the universities.

The Early Modern Irish recension of the tale relating Cú Chulainn’s death, Oidheadh Con Culainn, has received comparatively little scholarly attention, especially compared with its Early Irish counterpart, Aided Con Culainn. Consequently, little is known about the textual transmission and manuscript tradition of the Early Modern Irish tale. The present thesis seeks to rectify this and give a more accurate view and preliminary analysis of the extant manuscripts, concentrating on the manuscripts that date to before the 19th century. A core element of this thesis is a draft catalogue of these pre-19th-century manuscripts. Taking advantage of the tale’s prosimetric structure, it will be argued and demonstrated that it is possible to classify the manuscripts of Oidheadh Con Culainn into distinct groups. Within the extant manuscripts preserving the tale we can identify a number of versions of it, differing most notably in the poetry that they contain. The classification of the manuscripts into groups can be established on the basis of the poetry that a version of the tale contains; the emerging groups thus established can be used to comment on the transmission of the tale. In order to corroborate the argument for the manuscript groups, we will explore a number of aspects of the text and the manuscripts, such as textual comparisons on both intra- and inter-group levels, possible relations (e.g. geographical) of the scribes, linguistic and metrical variations, the ‘rhetorics’, and different versions of the tale written by the same scribe. The thesis will further investigate the most famous poem from the text, Laoidh na gCeann (‘The Lay of the Heads’), in order to establish to what extent the evidence from the poem can be used to add to our understanding of the transmission of the overall tale.

Dante’s relationship with his classical models has interested many scholars over the decades, especially because of the numerous references to classical literature in the Commedia, which suggest a profound knowledge of the auctores despite the little evidence for Dante’s actual education. Previous studies have focused on the modality and quality of classical reception in Dante as the work of a man living in a world that interpreted most pagan literature in Christian terms; on how and where Dante alludes and refers to classical literary material in the Commedia; on how Dante developed the genre of comedy from Antiquity; and finally on how Dante perceived classical literature as inadequate and insufficient compared to the thought and writings of Christianity. My research consists primarily in the analysis of the Commedia’s technical poetical vocabulary (i.e. genre, specific verbs and objects) and poetical topoi and images related to writing poetry that have their roots in classical literature (invocations, sailing similes, coronation with laurel, immortalization of the poet as vates, the effects of poetical song on the audience, ineffability). In addition to finding new literary correspondences between Dante and his auctores, I have attentively evaluated Dante’s dialogue with the Classics, pointing out that Dante’s ‘lungo studio’ and ‘grande amore’ are the literary foundation of the Commedia; and that although the relationship between Dante and his classical models is not definitely established from the encounter with Virgil, it develops in love, conflict, imitation, in-/dependence, superseding and redemption throughout his journey, as Dante’s personality evolves between his descent to Hell and his rise to Paradise. At the end of his poem there is no total refutation of his auctores; yet by incorporating them into his poetry to express even the essence of God, Dante gives them the chance to redeem themselves from paganism, to write Christian poetry through his own verses and to participate in the kingdom of God as poets. On this basis I have formulated a new interpretation of the allegorical ‘dark wood’ in If. 1: the dark wood becomes the literary place for Dante’s poetical orientation and definition of his own identity, and the meeting with Virgil represents the starting point of the Commedia as a work of poetry. Dante’s reception of the Classics is an issue of pressing interest not only for dantisti, yet for any scholar in the field of humanities, as it embodies the lively interaction between the Christian-based culture of Western society and its classical roots, which becomes more forcefully relevant today as cultural identities face both internal and external fragmentation. The composition of the Commedia starts with the reading of the auctores. Dante finds no more suitable models for his poem than the Latin poets, setting the literary foundations of the Commedia principally on their literature, even though he anachronistically gives them a Christian interpretation by reading them through the eyes of his culture. Dante evokes the ancient auctores in a dimension without time, or above time, where he can elevate himself and engage in dialogue with them transcending every boundary of faith or background. In the Commedia he sets them in the fortress of Limbo where the ‘bella scola’ is reunited in If. 4.94; Dante as a Christian could have not placed the auctores anywhere else and, even though he reluctantly damns them, he locates them in a place of stillness. Thus Dante sincerely intercedes for them by using their poetry to sing praises to God, leaving to Him the final judgment regarding their destiny, confident that God’s project of salvation spreads beyond human conception, and that man may experience Him in many ways that are not necessarily those of Christian faith, transcending the temporal and spatial limits of Christianity. Dante acts not like a man of the Middle Ages but like a modern Christian, believing that God can also reveal himself to the human being through the spirit and intellect, the ‘senno’, or λόγος, or verbum, with which man is endowed, and which is God’s fundamental nature: in principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum (John 1.1).

This thesis examines imagery of the subconscious throughout the works of Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevskii and how it can be used to analyse the psychology of his characters and the author himself. While studies exist on the role of, for example, dreams in Dostoevskii’s works, this thesis aims to comprehensively examine the author’s experience and use of subconscious phenomena as a whole, and their most important role in his texts: their effect on the characters who experience them. In each chapter, one form of this imagery in Dostoevskii’s works is explained and analysed with respect to individual characters or themes, and then Dostoevskii’s own experiences of the relevant subconscious phenomenon are explored. Chapter 1 looks at imagery arising through characters’ daydreams, while the author’s recurrent theme of childhood memories is also analysed as a type of nostalgic daydream. Chapter 2 examines the ‘greyer’ area of dreamlike reality, which in itself operates at two poles: confusion between dream and reality; and reality so intense as to appear unreal. The role of the ‘unreal’ city of St Petersburg is also analysed, as well as Dostoevskii’s narrative mode of ‘fantastic realism’. Chapter 3 looks at characters’ hallucinations, while Chapter 4 focuses on the character of Goliadkin in Двойник and his decline into split personality. Chapter 5 analyses the imagery of dreams, be they of anxiety and warning, of catharsis and peripeteia, or those featuring Dostoevskii’s recurring motif of the ‘Golden Age’ of mankind. The final chapter differs slightly in form by focusing on the overarching condition of epilepsy. Analysis of the author’s principal epileptic character, Prince Myshkin in Идиот, reveals the ‘deepest’ point of subconscious imagery, the ecstatic aura. Upon examining the condition’s recorded effects on Dostoevskii, epilepsy is ultimately discerned as the origin of many of the author’s experiences of subconscious phenomena and, in turn, the imagery of the subconscious used in his works. Moreover, experiences of subconscious phenomena are found to be a vital source of literary inspiration and motivation for Dostoevskii; so the correlating imagery of the subconscious is thus able to reveal fictional characters’ deepest drives and can be used as a means to glean vital, otherwise unseen, insights into their psychology.

This thesis examines the subject in Popular American Metal music and culture during the period 1994-2004, concentrating on key artists of the period: Korn, Slipknot, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, Tura Satana and My Ruin. Starting from the premise that the subject is consistently portrayed as being at a time of crisis, the thesis draws on textual analysis as an under appreciated approach to popular music, supplemented by theories of stardom in order to examine subjectivity. The study is situated in the context of the growing area of the contemporary gothic, and produces a model of subjectivity specific to this period: the contemporary gothic subject. This model is then used throughout to explore recurrent themes and richly symbolic elements of the music and culture: the body, pain and violence, the grotesque and the monstrous, and the figure of the child, representing a usage of the contemporary gothic that has not previously been attempted. Attention is also paid throughout to the specific late capitalist American cultural context in which the work of these artists is situated, and gives attention to the contradictions inherent in a musical form which is couched in commodity culture but which is highly invested in notions of the ‘Alternative’. In the first chapter I propose the model of the contemporary gothic subject for application to the work of Popular Metal artists of the period, drawing on established theories of the contemporary gothic and Michel Foucault’s theory of confession. The second chapter focuses on instances of violence to the body and the recurrent themes of pain and violence, which are explained through the model of corporeal verification and consensual violence. In the third chapter I explore the contemporary gothic subject in the tradition of the grotesque and the monstrous, drawing on theories of the gothic monster, to suggest that the subject is engaged in a negotiation of the boundaries between self and other. The fourth chapter concentrates on the figure of the child, drawing on theories of horror film and fiction and the tradition of the Evil Innocent and the Gothic child. The final chapter is a case study of Marilyn Manson, exploring his role as a paradigmatic example of contemporary gothic subjectivity.