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This thesis rereads Paul’s use of sacrificial language in Romans. Its central argument is that in 12:1, in which Paul appeals to the ethne to offer their bodies as a living sacrifice, Paul uses the language of sacrifice to construct and to ratify a relationship of brotherhood between the ethne and Christ (8:29) and consequently between the ethne and Israel within the Abrahamic lineage (4:16-18; cf Galatians 3:29). In this way Paul uses sacrifice to promote the fulfilment of God’s promise to Abraham, that he will be the father of many peoples (plural), as reflected in his eschatological vision of 15:10 cf the role of Christ 15:8. All of Paul’s sacrificial language within Romans will be considered. Generally, we argue that Paul is addressing the ethne (in line with his explicit statements within Romans). Our understanding as to the function of sacrifice builds on the work of Nancy Jay and Stanley Stowers, who have demonstrated the role of sacrifice in the construction of the family and kinship relationships. Our analysis flows from Romans 1, in which Paul makes it very clear that the fundamental problem is misguided latreía (idolatry). The sins of Paul’s “vice list” are a secondary issue, consequent on the handing over to the cosmic power of Impurity and the Passions (1:24,26). Romans 3:25 has often been interpreted in sacrificial terms. By employing the methodology of J. Ross Wagner, however, we will demonstrate that the connection often made with Leviticus 16 is not in fact secure i.e. the allusion is not well-evidenced. We will put forward an alternative reading, based on the idea of truce (anoché), part of the general dynamic of cosmic conflict against malign powers, and which is corroborated by the surrounding text. Similar arguments apply to the idea that Jesus was a sin offering (8:3). Subsequently, and building towards our analysis of Romans 12-13, we will demonstrate that familial and ethnic categories, not least those of brotherhood (8:29; 4:17-18) and those pertaining to Israel, play an ongoing and indeed central part in Paul’s message. Ultimately, we will argue that ethnic Israel, while needing to call upon Christ, retains ongoing legitimacy in Paul’s eyes. We will also evidence Paul’s attitude towards the body, and will argue that there is a strong element of asceticism within Paul’s message and practice. The body is eschatologically instrumental for Paul, and we will call this Paul’s “eschatological asceticism”, of which the dynamic of 12:1 is a part. In 12:1 Paul very significantly brings together the language of the family with that of sacrifice. This constructs brotherhood and hence family membership within the family of God and the Abrahamic lineage. It also furnishes the ethne with a new latreía, which will operate in tandem with and alongside that of the Israelites (9:4). This is profoundly transformative, as strongly emphasised in 12:2, these consequences being further articulated and indeed moulded throughout Romans 12-13. New family membership leads to a transformed relationship with God (inheritance of gifts, protection), to new moral capacity, to the arrival of love and the spirit and to becoming the image of Christ (8:29), and to the acquisition of the characteristics of their new fathers (God and Abraham). The transformed moral capacity of the ethne means that their new lives of love fulfil the law (Romans 13:8-10). The standard that Paul has invoked throughout Romans is thereby now fulfilled by the ethne, who are now both worshipping God and fulfilling the law alongside their new brothers the Israelites (cf 15:10). The ethne’s moral transformation constitutes their circumcision of the heart, with Abraham as their father of circumcision (Romans 4:12) and Christ as the servant of circumcision, as it is through him that the promises to the fathers will be fulfilled (15:8), circumcision of the heart being linked to fulfilment of the law in Romans 2:25-29. Our argument complements that of Caroline Johnson Hodge, but we argue that by using sacrifice to construct and to further ratify family membership Paul is doing something new in Romans. Romans 15:16 further articulates Paul’s use of sacrifice to describe and to facilitate the incoming of the ethne (cf Isaiah 66:20-21). This whole dynamic is both familial and profoundly eschatological in nature. In this way, Paul uses sacrifice to promote the fulfilment of both God’s promise to Abraham, and the law (meaning that God’s kingdom is arriving), and thereby to promote the arrival of the end of time.

This thesis explores the psychological trauma of the survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which occurred on April 26, 1986. I argue for the emergence from the disaster of three Chernobyl traumas, each of which will be analysed individually – one per chapter. In reading these three traumas of Chernobyl, the thesis draws upon and situates itself at the interface between two primary theoretical perspectives: Freudian psychoanalysis and the deconstructive approach of Jacques Derrida. The first Chernobyl trauma is engendered by the panicked local response to the consequences of the explosion at Chernobyl Reactor Four by the power plant’s staff, the fire fighters whose job it was to extinguish the initial blaze caused by the blast, the inhabitants of nearby towns and villages, and the soldiers involved in the region’s evacuation and radiation decontamination. Most of these people died from radiation poisoning in the days, weeks, months or years after the disaster’s occurrence. The first chapter explores the usefulness and limits of Freudian psychoanalytic readings of local survivors’ testimonies of the disaster, examining in relation to the Chernobyl event Freud’s practice of locating the authentic primal scene or originary traumatic witnessing experience in his subjects’ pasts, as exemplified by his Wolf Man analysis, detailed in his psychoanalytic study ‘On the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1918). The testimonies read through this Freudian psychoanalytic lens are constituted by Igor Kostin’s personal account of the disaster’s aftermath, detailed in his book Chernobyl: Confessions of a Reporter (2006), and by Svetlana Alexievich’s interviews with Chernobyl disaster survivors in her book Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (2006). The second chapter argues that Freudian psychoanalysis only provides a provisional, ultimately fictional origin of Chernobyl trauma. Situating itself in relation to trauma studies, this thesis, progressing from its first to its second chapter, charts the geographical and temporal shift between these first and second traumas, from trauma-as-sudden-event to trauma-as-gradual-process. In the weeks following the initial Chernobyl explosion, which released into the atmosphere a radioactive cloud that blew in a north-westerly direction across Northern Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Sweden, symptoms of radiation poisoning slowly emerged in the populations of the abovementioned countries. To analyse the psychological impact of confronting this gradual, international unfolding of trauma – the second trauma of Chernobyl – the second chapter of this thesis explores the critique of the global attempt to archivise, elegise and ultimately understand the Chernobyl disaster in Mario Petrucci’s elegies, compiled in his poetry collection Heavy Water: A Poem for Chernobyl (2006), the horror film Chernobyl Diaries (2012, dir. Bradley Parker), and Adam Roberts’ Science Fiction novel, Yellow Blue Tibia (2009). Analysing the deconstructive approach of Jacques Derrida in these texts – his notions of archive fever, impossible mourning and ethical mourning – this chapter argues that the attempt to interiorise, memorialise and mourn the survivors of the Chernobyl disaster is narcissistic, hubristic and violent in the extreme. It then proposes that Derrida’s notion of ethical mourning, outlined most clearly in his lecture ‘Mnemosyne’ (1984), enables us to situate our emotional sympathy for survivors – who, following Derrida’s lecture, are maintained as permanently exterior and inaccessible to us – in our very inability or failure to comprehend or locate the origin of their Chernobyl traumas. The third and final chapter analyses the third trauma of Chernobyl: the psychological and physiological effects of the disaster on second-generation inhabitants living near the Exclusion Zone erected around the evacuated, cordoned-off and still-radioactive Chernobyl region. These second-generation experiences of living near a sealed-away source of intense radiation are reconstructed in literature and videogaming: in Darragh McKeon’s novel All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (2014), Hamid Ismailov’s novel The Dead Lake (2014) and the videogame S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl (2007), developed by the company GSC Game World. The analysis of these texts is informed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s psychoanalytic theory of the intergenerational phantom: the muteness of a generation’s history which returns to haunt the succeeding generations. This chapter will explore the psychological effects upon second-generation Chernobyl survivors, which result from these survivors’ incorporation or unconscious interiorisation of their parents’ psychologically repressed traumatic Chernobyl experiences, by analysing reconstructions of this process in the abovementioned texts. These parental experiences, echoing the Exclusion Zone as a denied physical space, have been interred in inaccessible psychic crypts. By way of conclusion, the thesis then offers an alternative theory of reading survivors’ Chernobyl trauma. Survivors’ restaging of their Chernobyl witnessing experiences as jokes enables them to cathartically, temporarily abreact their trauma through the laughter that these jokes engender.

This thesis describes (1) a simple and effective method for growing large numbers of fern gametophytes under field conditions and (2) the application of this method to investigate the sequence and timing of events in the fern life-cycle following spore dispersal or soil disturbance at different times of the year. Long-term field experiments involving Athyrium filix-femina, Blechnum spicant, Polystichum setiferum and Phyllitis scolopendrium were initiated at 2 sites near Edinburgh in January and October 1988. During these experiments (which continued till January 1990) both sites experienced a series of exceptionally mild Winters. The results for the 4 species were strikingly similar. Spores sown in January germinated in the Spring and gametophytes became sexual in the following year between mid-Spring and mid-Summer. Germination was synchronous although many spores did not produce gametophytes. Gametophytes quickly became 2-dimensional; no protonemata were observed. Sex organs developed and matured rapidly and their production was continuous. Most populations consisted of male, female and bisexual gametophytes. In general, female gametophytes were larger than bisexual gametophytes and all archegoniate gametophytes were larger than male gametophytes. All archegoniate gametophytes were meristic; all male gametophytes were ameristic. Most populations were predominantly male. Female gametophytes were always more abundant than bisexual gametophytes. All bisexual gametophytes were protandrous. Fertilization was often rapid, often occurred at high frequency and was not seasonal. Polyembryony was rare. All gametophytes from the January sowing survived the Winter of 1988/'89 but male and fertilized archegoniate gametophytes began to die in the Spring or Summer of 1989. No sporelings died. All gametophytes and sporelings from the October sowing survived throughout the experiment. A third (short) field experiment involving A.filix-femina, B.spicant, P.setiferum, P.scolopendrium, Dryopteris affinis subsp. borreri, Dryopteris dilatata, Dryopteris filix-mas and Pteridium aquilinum was initiated in August 1989. Spores of all 8 species germinated more or less immediately but only gametophytes of P.aquilinum became sexual before Winter. In one population fertilization occurred before the end of the year.