This thesis considers the hitherto unexplored question of modernism and non-fictional genres. Although modernist studies have long been attentive to the implications of modernism’s “manifestos”, and recent work on modernist magazines has shed new light on forms beyond poetry and fictional prose, little attention has been afforded to other non-fictional writing. Similarly, although a growing school of criticism has emphasised the significance of “the everyday” in modernist texts, few have examined non-fiction concerned with leisure or daily life – a particularly unusual omission given the rich possibilities such texts offer for our understanding of how everyday lives relate to wider society. This thesis examines instructional texts which make radical interventions in the social and political upheavals which follow the First World War. Contra to the well-debunked yet still pervasive narratives which typify the modernist text as a work of disinterested – even isolated – genius, these examples demonstrate a broad-ranging, complex engagement with popular venues. Surveying examples of popular genres such as cookbooks, travel guides and radio programs written by a range of canonical and lesser-known modernist writers, it demonstrates how modernist writers re-appropriated the common features of such mainstream forms in order to stage various (and varied) interventions in local and national affairs. Its reading of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Somerset (1949) and Scottish Scene: The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Albyn (1934), by Hugh MacDiarmid and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, shows how adopting the “textual codes” of travel guides provided authors with a means of writing back against the over-simplistic narratives of region and nation popular in other examples of the genre. Likewise, The Alice B Toklas Cook Book (1954) and F.T. Marinetti’s The Futurist Cookbook (1932) are read as divergent examples of texts which stage radical interventions in food practices as they relate to nationhood and conflict. Comparable interventions are also unearthed in the media. Flann O’Brien’s Cruiskeen Lawn columns (1940-66), published under the name Myles na gCopaleen, are often read in studies of Irish political and cultural consciousness. This thesis argues that they must also be read in terms of genre, demonstrating how a subversive use of headlines, bylines and other page architecture signals O’Brien’s use of the newspaper form itself to pass comment on the cultural and political life of the Republic of Ireland. Finally, this thesis turns to broadcast culture, with a chapter on radio and documentary films. Through readings of Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen's radio broadcasts, and the GPO Film Unit collaboration of Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden, this chapter shows how irony and experiment allowed writers to turn state-sanctioned media to their own ends during the interwar years – suggesting that literary readings are crucial to understanding modernism's engagement with new media. Through these different readings, this thesis highlights the sheer diversity of modernist genres which have either received little critical attention, or whose formal specifics have been under-acknowledged. As a result, it is able to reframe modernism’s approach to several areas of twentieth-century life, approaching anew pressing areas of concern in the field – for instance, space and place, the circulation of texts, the everyday, and the commercial, lowbrow and domestic – demonstrating the critical importance of instructive genres to understanding literary modernism.

Scotland has enjoyed a late and significant flowering of theatre since the late 1960s. This project explores what I believe to have been a Renaissance that has occurred in Scottish theatre since 1969 and tests my thesis that at the core of this revival lie profound connections to the related concepts of Europeanness and Modernism. The work combines a considerable quantity of new material, generated through exclusive interviews conducted with major players in this Renaissance (both theatre directors and dramatists), with my own analyses and interaction with the existing critical and academic literature. The thesis begins with a Preface addressing various facets of European Modernism and their relations to the development of Scottish theatre since the late Sixties. Chapter 1 of the work offers a detailed consideration of the role played in Scottish theatre's revival by Giles Havergal's thirty-four year reign as artistic director at Glasgow's Citizens Theatre, and explores the manner in which Havergal's work was, or was not, taken forward by his successors Jeremy Raison (2003-2010) and Dominic Hill (2010 to the present).Moving on from the establishing of a European Modernist aesthetic at the Citizens in the 1970s, the thesis contends (in Chapter 2) that this aesthetic was disseminated more widely in Scottish theatre in the 1980s, and that the driving force in that dissemination was Communicado theatre company. Chapter 3 addresses the emergence of a generation of Scottish theatremakers in the 1990s whose work, arguably, represents the clearest and strongest reflection of European Modernist aesthetics in new theatre produced in Scotland. This chapter comprises interviews (in question and answer format) with the five artists who I consider to be the leading figures in the "golden generation" of the Nineties, followed by analyses of the interviews. The interviewees are writers David Greig, Zinnie Harris, David Harrower and Anthony Neilson, and the auteur director/designer Stewart Laing. Finally, in Chapter 4 and the Conclusion, the thesis considers the way in which the National Theatre of Scotland (established in 2006) has mapped onto and contributed towards the European Modernist strand in Scottish Theatre. This is followed by an analysis of the possible future for this tradition in live drama in Scotland.

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Life and Death in the Kingdom of Shoes is an exploration into the lives of the people of Zlín, Czechoslovakia from 1923 to 1941. During this period Zlín became the headquarters for one of the most successful commercial concerns in the world, the Bat’a Company. Alongside its explosive economic growth, the company attempted to transform its workforce and town into a highly rationalized operating system, which held strikingly new determinants for inclusion and exclusion within the body politic. From planners, architects, and executives to criminals, housewives, and students, Life and Death in the Kingdom of Shoes encompasses high and low to suggest that the conflicts and compromises of those living in Bat’a’s model industrial towns produced a distinct ideology with its own symbols, heroes, and discourse. The ideology, Bata-ism, was part of a transnational project to design, build, and control cities based on scientific principles of rationalism. The project transcended national, class, and religious boundaries to offer a new way of identification: the Bata-man or woman. Work, play, gender, loyalty to the company, and appearance became much more important in deciding one's place within Bat’a’s twenty four towns, and some 3,600 retail outlets, than nation, class, or religion. This dissertation challenges dominant historical narratives of Czechoslovakia and Bat’a in the interwar period, which have focused almost exclusively on national conflict and on the designs of the executives. By turning attention to the debates and implementation of something that radically changed people’s lives - the rationalization of everyday life – Life and Death in the Kingdom of Shoes adds a crucial chapter to our understanding of interwar Czechoslovakia The primary aim is to peel away the facade of the utopian company project to locate, in the words of the historian Richard Stites, “oceans of misery, disorder, chaos, corruption, and whimsicality that went with it.” With the stories of people like Marie Urbašková, a prostitute who led police on a fool’s errand, Life and Death in the Kingdom of Shoes allows disparate narratives to unravel tidy conceptions of Bat’a’s utopian project. / text

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2007. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 268-280). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Tulsa, 1992. / Bibliography: leaves 181-184.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Tulsa, 1992. / Bibliography: leaves 181-184.