This thesis undertakes a study of the contradictions embedded in Golding's fiction. It is difficult, as I attempt to show, to treat Golding under the rubric of revolutionary, conservative, liberal humanist, optimistic or pessimistic writer separately. Golding's fiction shows a mind which is at once creative and enmeshed in the mysteries of the universe. However, I attempt in this study to shed light on the many contradictions which I think are present in his work. For this purpose, I concentrate on eight novels as the objects of my analysis. Lord of the Flies, Golding's first novel, displays a contradiction which is at the heart of Golding's vision. WhiIe Golding tries hard to show the hardness of man’s heart, he risks falling into pointlessness if the project were to end only on this note. Golding is caught up in the dilemma of at once believing in Original Sin and wanting to see an alternative future for humankind. If man is "originally" incapable of harmonious living, how is he ever to achieve this harmony? In Pincher Hartin, Golding delves deeper into a religious dogmatism which believes in individual greed. This greed, however, threatens ultimately to undo the "system" within which it exists. But if Golding tries hard to eliminate this individual greed, how then can he emphasise that man is originally sinful? With the removal of this greed and many other sins with it, man is likely to become "pure", something which Golding does not believe in. In Free Fall, Golding explores the idea of art for art's sake. One of the problems of this idea is that it leaves the political implications of any situation completely intact. The Spire enacts a different kind of contradiction. Jocelin, in one sense a saintly figure who can "see" more intuitively than the others, is driven into despair at his own creation. He ultimately loses faith in his own "powerful" vision. In The Paper Men, Golding embarks on a new way of treating his own themes. In its technique, this novel is closer than any of the others to postmodernist literature in its permutations, displacements, and indecisiveness. As for the trilogy, here Golding reaches a position where he can confidently be described as a liberal humanist. The trilogy paradoxically shows Golding at his best. The contradictions of the protagonist Edmund Talbot "reflect" those of a social class that has within it the features of both the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. At the end, Golding does not "solve" these contradictions and he leaves us with a proposition that could see the end of all literary criticism and analysis. It is in the conclusion to this study that I address this problem.

This thesis is the first to examine chronologically the earliest published versions of all the full-length plays wrilten by Bertolt Brecht in the years 1918-1929. The evidence of these early unrevised versions and of hitherto unpublished material throws new light on this first period of his career as a dramatist which is seen as being principally characterised by the lack of any attempt to resolve the conflicts in which these early plays abound. The analysis of these conflicts involves in the first place an examination of the antagonisms between characters and the tensions within the mind of individual characters. This study of motive and interaction draws attention to the co-existence of existential and social sources of conflict in these early dramasq and outlines the changing relative importance of existential and social factors in each of the plays under consideration. Whereas in Baal (1918), Im Dickicht (1922) and Leben Eiduards des Zweiten (1924) there is great emphasis on the existential dimension of conflict, Trommeln in der Nacht (1919)9 Mann ist Mann (1926) and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1929) pay more regard to its social significance. From the dates of these plays alone it is clear that to make such a distinction is to point to differences oI stress in individual plays rather than to a clear and straightforward development within the period under consideration. Howeverg allowing that existential and social factors continue to be of equal importance throughout the Twenties, a trend towards paying more attention to the social determinants of behaviour becomes apparent in works written from 1926 onwards. Brecht's presentation of conflict in these early plays is invariably ambivalent a fine balance being constantly maintained between the respective merits and negative aspects of different facets of conflict: vital enjoyment of struggle is offset by horror at the suffering caused, the claims of the transient individual clash with the demands of morality, the attractions of self-destruction vie with those of survival, the claims of passion with those of prudence. Formally, this ambivalence is reflected in the frequent mixture of comedy with tragedy, in sudden shifts from one stylistic level to another, and in the use of techniques of presentation, some of which encourage empathy with the characters, while others promote a more distanced attitude to events. The concluding chapter examines briefly the re-emergence of unresolved conflicts in plays written after Brecht's turn to Marxism.

From the introduction: So vast is the body of published work on Burns that one must justify yet another study of the poet. From 1786 to the present, his life and poetry have always had popular appeal. In his lifetime, he was an object of attention to all classes of society, from Ayrshire peasants to the habitue of Edinburgh drawing-roans, and detractors, idolaters, and disinterested parties have continued to scrutinize his achievements and failings. Popular attention has never wavered. In the nineteenth century especially, many and varied editions of Burns's poetry were published to satisfy this curiosity. Some were lavish, some cheap; some accurate, others, wildly imaginative. Nor has this demand noticeably slackened in the present century. Not a year passes without some book or pamphlet, albeit ephemeral, being published on Burns. To the scholarly mind, "popular", when applied to Burns studies, usually implies superficiality and this assumption all too often proves correct. It can hardly be said that the best minds of each age since Burns's death have considered him worthy of their critical attention in the way that Shakespeare, or Dante, or Milton have engaged scholars, editors, and publishers in succeeding generations. Byron, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Emerson, Carlyle, and Mac=armid have commented on Burns, and in the nineteenth century important and durable editorial work was undertaken. Nevertheless, it remains true that it was not until the twentieth century, and then only in bursts, that there developed a scholarly, academic interest to match the popular enthusiasm for Robert Burns.

For most twentieth-century readers, the name of James Hogg, if it means anything at all, is inextricably linked with The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which has been hailed as one of the most important of all Scottish novels. However, this was not always the case: in fact, his considerable reputation ln his own day was won not by The Confessions, which was read by few of his contemporaries, but by his poems, such as The Queen's Wake or The Pilgrims of the Sun, and by songs such as "When the kye comes hame" and "The Skylark" which were the mainstay of many an Edinburgh social gathering, and maintained their popularity throughout the century. However, towards its end, prominent literary critics such as George Saintsbury and Andrew Lang were already giving The Confessions of a Justified Sinner the notice which was to raise it to the position of overwhelming dominance over the rest of Hogg's work which it enjoyed until the past few years. However, the recent publication after many years of absence from print of The Three Perils of Man and The Brownie of Bodsbeck, together with a volume of selected poems and one which reprints some of Hogg's best short stories, and the steady growth in the number of specialised articles on Hogg's work, notably ones by Douglas Gifford, Douglas Mack, and Alexander Scott, suggest that there is need to consider the rest of Hogg's output and the position The Confessions holds in his development. It must seem to many present-day readers that Hogg s wrltlng of The Confessions of a Justified Sinner was little short of miraculous, for to a reader who lacks any idea of the works that led up to it, The Confessions seems a surprlslng work to be produced by a fifty-five year old Border sheep farmer, who was confessedly illiterate until the eighteenth year of his life. Earlier surveys of his career by Edith C Batho and Louis Simpson, while containing much interesting biographical detail and stimulating critical comment, have for the most part failed to discern any pattern in the author's career which can account for his achievement in this novel. The intention behind this thesis is to explain, by describing Hogg's literary development from the days of his illiteracy to the time when he could be treated an an equal by the foremost literary figures of his day, how far Hogg's success in The Confessions was the consequence of his experience in his earlier writing. This study will discuss to what extent the course of Hogg's career was affected by the unusual circumstances of his education, as he tackled in an acute form the problems faced by all writers in finding their own voice when under the influence of powerful literary examples. The study is not meant to be a biography of Hogg, though certainly biographical details are included, and the discussion follows for the most part a chronological path: at all periods of Hogg's life the natural development of his talent came into conflict with the need to earn a living, while his confidence in his powers was frequently drained by the personal insecurity which arose from his unusual background. However, no new facts are presented, the details being taken in the main from Douglas S Mack's careful edition of Hogg's Memoir of the Author's Life, supplemented by some of the information contained in the Hogg letters to be found in the National Library of Scotland. Equally, this discussion is not meant to be an 'exhaustive survey of the sources of Hogg's works: no attempt has been made to identify every influence to which the author was exposed. It is the contention of this thesis that there is a self-evident model, about which the author was seldom secretive, behind each of his more important writings, and that of much greater interest than any list of all. Hogg's sources is the consideration of how he coped with the knowledge that he was following in the footsteps of a predecessor, and how far he succeeded in producing individual work while under those pressures. To that end, I have concentrated on the extent to which each of his most important poems and each of his longer stories is a consistent and coherent whole. This has involved me 1n a discussion of the form and content of each of these works in an attempt to establish whether the author has realised his intentions in it without being deflected by external pressures. A final chapter discusses the pieces he wrote for the less formal context of the literary magazines of his day and seeks to determine the value of these miscellaneous works, to which he devoted most of his attention in the last years of his life. Several other more peripheral discussions have been rendered necessary only because of the incomplete nature of Scottish Literature studies at the present time, when so much groundwork must be done before one can begin to concentrate on more specific subjects.

In recent years the writings of James Hogg have attracted much critical interest. Illuminating work has been done, but so far scholarship has not successfully come to terms with Hogg's great debt to tradition, despite the fact that this debt has long been recognised. Sir George Douglas wrote in 1899 that in his better prose tales Hogg "has incorporated the whole body of the floating popular mythology of Scotland - a fact which, should the day ever come when the stories fail to charm as stories, will still command for them the regard of students of history and folk-lore. An understanding of the role and use of folk tradition in literature has been difficult to achieve because of the lack of proper critical tools to permit objective assessment. By literary standards folk tradition has been devalued to the status of "fairy tales" something pleasant for children - and its workings often seem to smack of the irrational or highly coincidental. The fact that Hogg, or any other writer, uses folk tradition in his literary work should not be taken as some sort of aberration from literary convention but rather as a positive contribution. However, merely recognising its presence is not enough. The present work will therefore concern itself with the kinds of tradition Hogg uses, the status and meaning of these traditions and the way in which Hogg adapts and develops them to meet the needs of a new audience that is literary rather than traditional. Any discussion of Hogg's relationship with folklore must first examine Hogg's upbringing and education and the nature of the Border community in which he grew up to try and discover something about the kind of traditional sources Hogg would have known, the kind of material available and the status it would have enjoyed. All these things governed Hogg's own attitude to different types of folk tradition and therefore helped to determine the ways in which he presented his material and ideas. It is helpful to begin a study of Hogg's work by way of his songs. Songwriting provides a natural and acceptable transition from folk tradition to literature as it has a well-developed tradition of its own. This stage of Hogg's work is very important in helping to establish an idea of the unity and homogeneity of his work. Hogg was able to compose songs with apparent ease and throughout his career he turned this to good account but his greatest achievements are to be measured in his narrative verse and prose. The narrative verse shows Hogg beginning to develop his own ideas more creatively, hammering out the themes that were eventually to dominate his work. From there it is then possible to make a deeper study of the key themes, principally superstition, the supernatural and religion, history and community. The discussion will concentrate here on the wealth of short prose which forms the bulk of Hogg's work. This is partly to emphasise where the main force of Hogg's creativity lay for this concern seems always to have been with narrative or story. However, the dominance of the novel in literary tradition has led to critical emphasis on the Confessions at the expense of the other shorter works. The nature of the contemporary literary community with its proliferation of magazines, journals and annuals did foster Hogg's preoccupation with the short anecdotal form. Despite this, the preponderance of folk tradition in Hogg's works and the emphasis on a traditional tale telling context and on the sort of community environment in which this tradition survived is illuminating. It suggests that Hogg was not trying to write novels but to recreate in some way the traditional story telling experience through his tales. This can be seen on a larger scale in the Queen's Wake or the story-telling competition in the Three Perils of Man. It is in the form and structure of Hogg's work that the most subtle links are to be found with folk tradition. In particular, by studying form and structure, it is possible to understand more clearly Hogg's exploitation of the narrator's role. Taken over all, this thesis hopes to show the clear links in theme, idea, form and structure between the shortest of Hogg's pieces and longer, more sustained efforts such as the Brownie or the Confessions. An understanding of Hogg's use of folk tradition can therefore do much more than explain certain motifs or odd references. It shows that tradition is not an excuse for sloppy structure or improbable events but a real tool by which Hogg enlarged his creative capability. Thus tradition provides the reader with an important key to Hogg's work. The concern with folk literature in the discussion which follows has necessitated the use of a number of terms drawn from the critical analysis of folklore. The meaning of these terms should be clear from the context but the following brief guide may be helpful. The name Marchen is employed when discussing the magic tale, the fullest and most elaborate form of folk narrative. Examples form types 300-749 in the Aarne-Thomson classification system and the name is taken from Kinder-und Hausmarchen, the collection compiled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. This term is used to avoid the idea of "fairy tales" which has rather dismissive overtones of the nursery. In a traditional community the folktale has a serious role in addition to its entertainment value and these distinctions are important to an understanding of Hogg's use of folklore. The term "informant", used in the discussion of Hogg's family, refers to a source or transmitter of items of folklore from whom material is recorded, learned or otherwise preserved.

Jane Austen's novels abound with readers "reading" not only texts but also speech, gestures, looks, scenery, events, each other, themselves. Readers in the novels illuminate her assumptions about readers of the novels; unlike eighteenth-century novelists who judged fiction by readers' responses and who tried to manipulate those responses, she accepted that not all readers read alike. / Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice explore different styles of reading and suggest some ways are more successful than others. A good reader observes accurately, reflects carefully, and judges candidly, disciplining subjective feelings with "objective" truths of religion and morality; above all, good readers trust their own educated judgments rather than rely upon external monitors. / Readers of the novels share the reading experiences of heroines. In Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, readers are invited to judge without monitor or narrator to direct them. Readers, like heroines, discover and reveal themselves in the act of reading.

The subject of this dissertation is John Arden's dramaturgy. It covers the stage plays written by Arden (alone or with Margaretta D'Arcy) during their career in the "professional" theatre--that is, from The Waters of Babylon to and including The Island of the Mighty. It approaches them as one dramaturgically coherent opus and identifies and examines the basic artistic and cognitive emphases immanent to it. / The study explores two fundamental and related constitutive features of Arden's dramaturgy: diachronically, its adherence to the forms, conventions, and techniques of popular or traditional theatres, and synchronically, its radical political emphasis as expressed in a categorically plebeian and collectivistic bias. It begins by situating Arden in his time and his tradition, and then discusses how other significant choices of his--the emphasis on story-telling (Part 2), the supra-individual approach to dramaturgic agents (Part 3), and his ludic theatricality (Part 4)--flow out of and contribute to the consistency of his dramaturgy. Part 5 focuses on a detailed analysis of The Island of the Mighty. / Arden's rejection of the established bourgeois theatre with its illusionist character and individualist ideology and his orientation towards a dialectical show distinguishes his work from that of his English contemporaries. It can be linked to that radical alternative tradition in modern dramaturgy which culminates in Bertolt Brecht.

Langdon Gilkey's theological method distinguishes three stages of the theological enterprise, namely, prolegomenon, constructive theology and theology of culture. In this dissertation we employ this threefold division as an organizing principle for the exposition and evaluation of Gilkey's thought. We propose further, however, that the whole project is best understood if seen primarily in terms of the third stage. Consequently the dissertation focuses on Gilkey's theology of culture and interprets his prolegomenon and constructive theology in terms of their foundational relevance to his theology of modernity in decline. Interpreted in this way the project as a whole displays a coherent interrelatedness. That coherence also means, however, that ambiguity and weak arguments in both the prolegomenon and constructive theology are reflected in the theology of culture. These deficiencies notwithstanding, Gilkey's theology of culture provides us with an analysis and diagnosis of modernity that plumbs to the religious depths of that culture. Such analysis is necessary for all cultures but especially for cultures in decline.

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