This thesis analyses the creative theory and practice of J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973). In my Introduction, I situate Tolkien's fantastic legendarium within the historical climate of loss pervading the first half of the twentieth century. Using the theories of Sigmund Freud, I argue that personal experiences of such climate and actual losses are manifested in Tolkien's fiction, both as a compensatory mechanism and as a mythopoelic activity. In Chapter One, 1 determine how the psychological dynamics of mourning and melancholia are represented in the themes of fall, exile and mortality that connect the narratives of the chronotopic ages of Tolkien's mythology. In Chapter Two, I evaluate Tolkien as a philologist, and the influence of Gothic and Old English on linguistic structure in The Silmarillion (1977). I constellate his "secret vice" of language invention with the theories of modernist poet Stephane Mallarme. I furthermore determine how these factors influence the symbolic representation of culture in Middle-earth by linguistic means, exploring how words in Tolkien's invented languages evolve from literal signifiers into reservoirs of melancholia. In Chapter Three, I indicate how lost cathexis is regained in The Lord a/the Rings (1954•5) not only through the mechanism of the paternal bond, but also through the creation of ecologically-aware narratives expressing "vistas of history and legend" comparable to the function of dinnseanchas (place-lore) in Irish mythology. In Chapter Four, 1 contend that Tolkien's creative agency stems from deployment of radical nostalgia, and is utilised in such a way as to facilitate mourning and negotiate the collective trauma of apocalyptic "immanence" in the twentieth century. I conclude that this psychological process facilitates a response of renewal in Tolkien's readership

C. S. Lewis was perhaps the most popular and influential Christian apologist of the 20th Century, and his work is full of philosophical themes and arguments. Despite this, the main body of Lewis' work has received only scant attention from academic philosophers. Although countless books and articles have been written about C.S. Lewis and his writings, we are without a balanced and sustained evaluation of the philosophical themes and arguments to be found in his works. This is unfortunate for, in the words of James Patrick, the philosophical aspects of Lewis' work "constitute the very texture of his apologetic". It is hoped that this dissertation goes some way towards changing the situation. The dissertation contains five mam chapters, addressing four issues in the philosophy of religion through the writings of C.S. Lewis. Those issues are: the Euthyphro dilemma, the philosophical status of miracles, the Freudian critique of religious belief, and an argument from Lewis that has been dubbed 'the argument from desire'. While disagreeing with Lewis in some of the details, the dissertation defends a broadly Lewisian (and therefore broadly Christian) approach to each of these issues. Indeed, these Lewisian positions are defended with refurbished versions of Lewis' own arguments. In addition to a summary of some of the philosophical themes and arguments from C.S. Lewis that are not addressed in this dissertation, the work also includes two appendices. Appendix A is a short biography of C.S. Lewis. Appendix B offers a few thoughts on Lewis' general stance on the relation between faith and reason.

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Of the major literary modernists writing in English in the early years of the twentieth century, arguably the most misunderstood and critically neglected has been Wyndham Lewis. It is the contention of this dissertation that Lewis should be reassessed, not only as a vitally important writer and artist, but also as one the most significant critical theorists of modernity. Accordingly, the central aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate that Lewis, whose oeuvre extended from fiction, drama, poetry and literary criticism to radical experimentation in painting and drawing, to a considerable range of non- fictional, political and philosophical writings which would now be classified as critical and cultural theory, was not only a highly significant theorist of his own period, but also, pre-emptive of many of the concerns that have come to be identified with postmodernism and its aftermath. The essence of this untimeliness, it is argued, lies firstly with his consistent engagement with the nihilism hat he believed to be the engine of modernity, and secondly, with his creative deployment of the ideas of a range of continental philosophers from Kant and Schopenhauer to Nietzsche and Bergson to counter that nihilism and in Nietzsche's terminology to "overcome" it. In the process, and particularly in his exploration of temporality and spatiality as they configure human identity, Lewis provided a philosophical commentary on the modern that in many ways paralleled and prefigured the intellectual trajectory of major twentieth century thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and subsequently, Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard. The genealogy of these parallels and pre-figurations will be traced through the use of the concept of repetition as it is deployed by Lewis in his critical theory and fiction, from his early short stories to his final theological fantasies.