Den här uppsatsen handlar om Charlie (1932) av Margareta Suber, som ofta kallas Sveriges  första lesbiska roman, och Girl Meets Boy (2007) av Ali Smith, en modern roman som utspelar sig i en annan tid och kontext, men har många gemensamma teman med Charlie. Böckerna  behandlar homosexualitet, androgynitet och genus, men det viktigaste för den här uppsatsen  är hur de centrala karaktärerna tar del av en skriven text, och hur sagda text är fundamental  för deras identitetsskapande och böckerna i sig.  Detta hör samman med diskursbegreppet och representation på flera olika sätt; vilka  strukturer styr hur böckerna och texterna i böckerna ser ut? Vilka effekter får de? Hur  representeras verkligheten i texterna? Hur tolkas de av karaktärerna?  De två böckerna ställs sida vid sida för att möjliggöra en jämförelse av diskurser i olika  kontexter. Genom att ställa en äldre bok mot en nyare med samma centrala teman är det  lättare att se hur diskurserna i de olika böckerna ser ut och verkar.  En av uppsatsens slutsatser är att den centrala skrivna texten i Charlie kommer från ett  snävare utbud av texter än den i Girl Meets Boy, och ger huvudpersonen som läser den en  snävare beteckning att identifiera sig med. En annan är att texterna påverkar karaktärerna i  de två böckerna på väldigt olika sätt, och att orden och att göra dem till sina egna är av stor  vikt i en människas (och kanske särskilt i en från normen avvikande människas)  identitetsskapande. Karaktärerna tar ord som de fått av andra och gör dem till sina egna, och  gör med det en tolkning av dem. De betonar vissa aspekter av texterna, utesluter annat, låter vissa saker definiera dem och ta extra plats i textens betydelse, och bedömer andra saker  som oväsentliga. De skriver alltså om andras ord, med andra ord.

I denna jämförande studie analyseras vad det androgyna gör med identiteten och det kreativa skapandet i romanerna Orlando av Virginia Woolf och How to be both av Ali Smith. Analysen görs utifrån Virginia Woolfs tanke om ”the androgynous mind” samt Judith Butlers teori om performativitet. Studien visar att Virginia Woolf `s tanke med ”the androgynous mind” går att finna i Orlando och How to be both utifrån vad det androgyna tillför konsten och identiteten i de båda romanerna. Studien visar också att Butlers teori om performativitet som här använts för att undersöka och jämföra vad som sker när protagonisterna ”spelar” sina nya könsidentiteter går att finna i båda romanerna.

This thesis focuses on the work of two contemporary authors, Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson, and their treatment of the concepts of history and gender in their fiction. I argue that, by openly speculating about the nature of time and history, and by making their readers think about the origin of these notions, Smith and Winterson uncover the seemingly stable but, in actuality, very fragile roots of the 'truths' we take for granted. They explore the potentiality of the past, which, in turn opens up the present and the future. To support my argument, I turned to Hayden White and his theory of historiography and Paul Ricoeur's philosophy of time and history. The latter part of the thesis deals with gender, as well as biological sex and sexual orientation, and the way in which Smith and Winterson's texts put into practice Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, and work towards the subversion of gender norms as well as the destabilisation of heteronormativity. Both parts of the thesis are closely connected; history serves to keep the laws that define gender, sex and sexuality intact, and, in turn, these laws are often adhered to solely by the virtue of their historicity. What is more, myth and language are equally exposed to be supporting these norms. The aim of this thesis is to...

This study uses the Tibetan mandala, a Buddhist meditation aid and sacred artform, as a secular critical model by which to analyse the complete fictions of author David Mitchell. Discussing his novels, short stories and libretti, this study maps the author's fictions as an interconnected world-system whose re-evaluation of secular belief in galvanising compassionate ethical action is revealed by a critical comparison with the mandala's methods of world-building. Using the mandala as an interpretive tool to critique the author's Buddhist influences, this thesis reads the mandala as a metaphysical map, a fitting medium for mapping the author's ethical worldview. The introduction evaluates critical structures already suggested to describe the author's worlds, and introduces the mandala as an alternative which more fully addresses Mitchell's fictional terrain. Chapter I investigates the mandala's cartographic properties, mapping Mitchell's short stories as integral islandic narratives within his fictional world which, combined, re-evaluate the role of secular belief in galvanising positive ethical action. Chapter II discusses the Tibetan sand mandala in diaspora as a form of performance when created for unfamiliar audiences, reading its cross-cultural deployment in parallel with the regenerative approaches to tragedy in the author's libretti Wake and Sunken Garden. Chapter III identifies Mitchell's use of reincarnation as a form of non-linear temporality that advocates future-facing ethical action in the face of humanitarian crises, reading the reincarnated Marinus as a form of secular bodhisattva. Chapter IV deconstructs the mandala to address its theoretical limitations, identifying the panopticon as its sinister counterpart, and analysing its effects in number9dream. Chapter V shifts this study's use of the mandala from interpretive tool to emerging category, identifying the transferrable traits that form the emerging category of mandalic literature within other post-secular contemporary fictions, discussing works by Michael Ondaatje, Ali Smith, Yann Martel, Will Self, and Margaret Atwood.

This thesis addresses critical conceptions of Scottish literary development in the twentieth-century which inscribe realism as both the authenticating tradition and necessary telos of modern Scottish writing. To this end I identify and explore a Scottish ‘counter-tradition’ of modern uncanny fiction. Drawing critical attention to techniques of modal disruption in the works of a number of post-1970s Scottish writers gives cause to reconsider that realist teleology while positing a range of other continuities and tensions across modern Scottish literary history. The thesis initially defines the critical context for the project, considering how realism has come to be regarded as a medium of national literary representation. I go on to explore techniques of modal disruption and uncanny in texts by five Scottish writers, contesting ways in which habitual recourse to the realist tradition has obscured important aspects of their work. Chapter One investigates Ali Smith’s reimagining of ‘the uncanny guest’. While this trope has been employed by earlier Scottish writers, Smith redesigns it as part of a wider interrogation of the hyperreal twenty-first-century. Chapter Two considers two texts by James Robertson, each of which, I argue, invokes uncanny techniques familiar to readers of James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson in a way intended specifically to suggest concepts of national continuity and literary inheritance. Chapter Three argues that James Kelman’s political stance necessitates modal disruption as a means of relating intimate individual experience. Re-envisaging Kelman as a writer of the uncanny makes his central assimilation into the teleology of Scottish realism untenable, complicating the way his work has been positioned in the Scottish canon. Chapter Four analyses A.L. Kennedy’s So I Am Glad, delineating a similarity in the processes of repetition which result in both uncanny effects and the phenomenon of tradition, leading to Kennedy’s identification of an uncanny dimension in the concept of national tradition itself. Chapter Five considers the work of Alan Warner, in which the uncanny appears as an unsettling sense of significance embedded within the banal everyday, reflecting an existentialism which reaches beyond the national. In this way, I argue that habitual recourse to an inscribed realist tradition tends to obscure the range, complexity and instability of the realist techniques employed by the writers at issue, demonstrating how national continuities can be productively accommodated within wider, pluralistic analytical approaches.