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This thesis represents the first extensive examination of the ‘faithful fictions’ of the Orkney writer George Mackay Brown (1921-1996). Until now, critical appreciations of the Catholic imagination informing Brown’s opus have been vague and Brown has been seen as a throwback; his Catholicism only part of a reactionary impulse that denies modernity a place in his oeuvre. Through a thematic critical analysis of four major strands of Brown’s corpus that display his Catholic imagination, it is contended that Brown has been misunderstood by the Scottish literary-critical tradition, and that his creative work on religious subjects is diverse, experimental and devotional. The thesis provides a biography of Brown’s faith. It looks at his conversion accounts, and it discusses the interaction between these and other accounts of (spiritual) autobiography. The thesis looks in a detailed way at three mediators of grace in Brown’s faithful fictions: the Virgin Mary, St Magnus, and Christ, whose nativity Brown frequently depicts. By discussing their different roles, depictions and the various literary forms that tell their stories, this study will discover the ways in which Brown encapsulates his Catholic faith in his creative work. The thesis questions whether Catholicism harms his literary output, as some critics have suggested, and shows the ways in which Brown’s writing interacts with other Catholic literature – old and new, at home and abroad. Manuscripts, including several unpublished poems, plays and stories, will be referenced throughout, as will rare and unseen correspondence. The thesis takes in the entire scope of Brown’s body of work and is not limited to a single mode or genre in his corpus. Ultimately, this study contends that Brown is an excellent case-study of the neglected Catholic writer in twentieth-century Scotland, and that there is much work to be done in appraising the Catholic imaginations of many post-Reformation Scottish Catholic writers.

This thesis argues that the representations of Venice found in the works of John Ruskin and Ezra Pound can only fully be understood in the light of historico-political contexts such as the Austrian occupation of Venice, the rise of revolutionary Nationalism and Fascist uses of Venetian history. In contrast to critical approaches that concentrate on the construction of Venice as aestheticised fantasy, this project draws on a range of archival materials to place these two modern literary visions of Venice within their respective historical ‘moments’. The first chapter examines a range of cultural representations of Venice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using examples from Ernest Hemingway, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Thomas Mann, it argues against the prevailing myth of the ‘Dream’ of Venice and proposes that literary and other representations of the city should be understood in relation to specific historical events and political anxieties. The second chapter focuses on Ruskin and demonstrates how his text The Stones of Venice can be seen as a counter to the nineteenth-century myth of the ‘dark legend’ of Venice as propagated by historians like Pierre Daru. The third chapter then demonstrates how Ruskin’s Venetian works can be situated within a spectrum of European Nationalist concerns, particularly examining how the 1848 Venice revolution and its aftermath creates an atmosphere of political tension in The Stones of Venice. The following two chapters on Ezra Pound place Pound’s Venetian engagement against the backdrop of early twentieth-century Italian Nationalism. Beginning by discussing the cultural uses of Venetian history under the Fascist regime, these chapters show how Pound’s engagement with the idea of a ‘renewed’ Venice proposed by Nationalist writers such as D’Annunzio, along with Pound’s own Fascist commitment, provide contexts for his visions of Venice in the Cantos. Thus the representations of the city in both writers are seen to be crucially connected to the political concerns of Nationalism and the Nationalistic use of Venetian history.

Through her poetry and essays Constance Naden (1858-1889) sought to create an interdisciplinary philosophy predicated upon finding unity in diversity. By providing close-readings of Naden’s poetry, essays, and unpublished notebooks, and thus considering the full breadth of her intellectual pursuits, this thesis demonstrates the extent of her secular world-scheme which attempted to synthesise science, philosophy, and poetry. I begin with an intellectual biography that situates Naden’s scientific education, philosophical ideas, and poetic output in their nineteenth-century contexts. This creates a framework for understanding the trajectory of Naden’s endeavours as scientist, philosopher, and poet. The subsequent chapters demonstrate how these three strands of her life were fundamentally intertwined. Chapter Two focuses upon Naden’s engagement with scientific ideas and the scientific imagination, specifically examining the importance of light as it manifests in the study of botany, astronomy, physics, and physiology. Chapter Three turns to Naden as philosopher, teasing out the details of her childhood faith (newly demonstrated by the notebooks) and analysing the development of her relationship with the freethought movement and wider philosophical discourses. Chapter Four analyses Naden’s equivocal relationship with poetic tradition, focusing on her shifting engagement with Romanticism, and her use of the lyric ‘I’ and the comic mode.

This thesis contributes to the understanding of Ruskin's relationship to nineteenthcentury science through the consideration of his specific engagement with British positivism. This engagement is analysed within the context of attempts to determine the importance of science and art for social progress. The first chapter reads Modern Painters (1843-1860) as a response to John Stuart Mill's System of Logic (1843) and shows that Ruskin's participation in the constitution of Victorian science is greater than previously recognized. The second chapter focuses on Ruskin's critique in Unto this Last (1862) of Mill's positivist view of political economy. The third chapter considers Frederic Harrison's positivist reading of the social significance of Ruskin's life in his biography, John Ruskin (1902). The thesis shows that Ruskin's engagement with positivism is more extensive and more diverse than previously acknowledged.