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Although well known for his work in the field of cultural studies, Raymond Williams' parallel career as a novelist has received little critical attention, despite the fact that he himself considered his fiction to be his most significant achievement. The purpose of this thesis is to correct that neglect by subjecting Williams' novels to close critical scrutiny. I focus primarily on Williams' notion of the ideal or 'knowable' community, as it is reflected in his novels. A model of community based upon the male-dominated, socialist, working-class environment in which he spent his childhood. This study is divided into three parts. Part One concentrates on the plight of educationally mobile working-class intellectuals: Williams is concerned to deny any tension in the relations between such characters and their natal communities. However, the novels show that he must impose a series of false solutions in order to mask the conflicts to which this configuration gives rise. Part Two examines the role of women in the novels. It suggests that they are marginalised by the nature of the community envisaged by Williams, and bear the most tangible cost of maintaining the community. This involves a discussion of Williams' approach to women's issues and exposes an ambivalence between his fiction and his political writings. Part Three focuses on Williams' strong sense of the land and his intense attachment to the Welsh border country. Williams' characters increasingly draw upon the history of their rural working-class families in order to sustain their own sense of connection to the community. This is achieved in part by an emphasis upon spiritual empathy with the landscape, which transcends the personal tensions between individual and community.

This dissertation investigates the role played by the image of the body that features prominently in Coelzee's novels. In a series of close readings and utilising the tools of cognitive linguistics, it argues that the image creates meaning because of the employment of two conceptual metaphors, TRUTH IS IN A CONTAINER and BODY IS A CONTAINER, which endow the represented body with the attributes of truth. The meaning is then created through the foregrounding of the body (most commonly in the images of mutilation, disability and disease), through the use of the image as a blended space (a signifying body) and through the situating of the image as the narrative foca1 point, an object of scrutinity and interpretation. Such use of the image aids in interpreting the body as a container for truth, a kernel of human identity, a source of thought and morally purposive action. This often leads to interpreting the image of the body allegorically and partly explains the nature of the critical reception of Coetzee's novel s. The dissertation is divided into four chapters. Chapter) presents the history and theory of thinking about the metaphor from Aristotle to cognitive linguistics with an emphasis on the context-based understanding of metaphor and on its cognitive value. The final section of this chapter presents the author's engagement with the ideas expressed in Derek Attridge's J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Chapter 2 presents the problem of reading and interpreting the body on the example of Waiting for the Barbarians and Life and Times of Michael K. Chapter 3 analyses corporeal metaphors and gender symbolism in history through the reading of Dusklands and The Age of Iron. Chapter 4 presents Foe and Master of Petersburg as examples of the representation of literary thinking, creation and interpretation of bodily experience.

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