This thesis is a critical study of Scottish literary culture since 1989. It examines and interrogates critical work in Scottish literary studies through a ‘critical nationalist’ approach. This approach aims to provide a refinement of cultural nationalist literary criticism by prioritising the oppositional politics of recent Scottish writing, its criticism of institutional and state processes, and its refusal to exempt Scotland from this critique. In the introduction I identify two fundamental tropes in recent Scottish literary criticism: opposition to a cultural nationalist critical narrative which is overly concerned with ‘Scottishness’ and critical centralising of marginalised identity in the establishment of a national canon. Chapter one interrogates a tendency in Scottish literary studies which reads Scottish literature in terms of parliamentary devolution, and demonstrates how a critical nationalist approach avoids the pitfalls of this reading. Chapter two is a study of two novels by the critically neglected and politically Unionist author Andrew O’Hagan, arguing that these novels criticise an insular and regressive Scotland in order to reveal an ambivalent, ‘Janus-faced’ nationalism. Chapter three examines representations of Scottish traditional and folk music in texts by A. L. Kennedy and Alan Bissett, engaging with the Scottish folk tradition since the 1950s revival in order to demonstrate literature and music’s ambivalent responses to aspects of literary and cultural nationalism. Chapter four examines texts by Janice Galloway, Alasdair Gray and James Kelman, analysing the relationships they construct between gender, nation and class. Chapter five examines three contemporary Scottish texts and elucidates an ethical turn in Scottish literary studies, which reads contemporary writing in terms of appropriation and exploitation.

From the earliest days of English-language Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television (CBC-TV), the military has been regularly featured on the news, public affairs, documentary, and drama programs. Little has been done to study these programs, despite calls for more research and many decades of work on the methods for the historical analysis of television. In addressing this gap, this thesis explores: how media representations of the military on CBC-TV (commemorative, history, public affairs and news programs) changed over time; what accounted for those changes; what they revealed about CBC-TV; and what they suggested about the way the military and its relationship with CBC-TV evolved. Through a material culture analysis of 245 programs/series about the Canadian military, veterans and defence issues that aired on CBC-TV over a 40-year period, beginning with its establishment in 1952, this thesis argues that the conditions surrounding each production were affected by a variety of factors, namely: (1) technology; (2) foreign broadcasters; (3) foreign sources of news; (4) the influence of the military and its veterans; (5) audience response; (6) the role played by personalities involved in the production of CBC-TV programs; (7) policies/objectives/regulations set by the CBC, the Board of Broadcast Governors and the Canadian Radio-Television Commission (later, Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission); (8) ambitions for program development and the changing objectives of departments within the CBC; (9) economic constraints at the CBC; (10) CBC-TV’s relations with the other producers of Canadian television programming, like the NFB; and, (11) broader changes to the Canadian social, economic, political and cultural scenes, along with shifts in historiography. At different times, certain of these conditions were more important than others, the unique combination of which had unpredictable results for programming. The thesis traces these changes chronologically, explaining CBC-TV’s evolution from transmitting largely uncritical and often positive programming in the early 1950s, to obsession with the horrors of war and questioning of the military’s preparedness by decade’s end, to new debate about the future of the forces and the memory of war in the 1960s, to a complex mixture of activism, criticism and praise in the 1970s and 1980s, and, finally, to controversy and iconoclasm by the 1990s.

Paul L. Rosenfeld ( 1890-1946) almost single-handedly established the music of living American composers on a solid critical foundation in the period between the two world wars. Although he built a reputation chiefly as a critic of music, he was a man ofletters who ranged across all the arts with unrivaled competence and ease. Rosenfeld's contemporaries acknowledged him as a champion of that strain of modernism which celebrated the interrelatedness of the arts. His importance for the wider culture of early twentieth-century American modernism also lay in his seriousness about the arts. Rosenfeld earned forward the American democratic and romantic belief, epitomized by Walt Whitman and Alfred Stieglitz, in the capacity of art to articulate basic values that enrich and even ennoble the human person. Such an idealistic conception of the value of art was increasingly losing favor among the American literati during the 1920s, the period when Rosenfeld enjoyed his greatest influence and prestige. During this decade of"terrible honesty," American intellectuals tended to dismiss the "ideals of men" in favor of a single-minded interest in a more bitter realism. Inasmuch as they denigrated the notion that art held any kind of privileged status as a conveyor of values, they were in effect nascent postmodemists. This study ofPaul Rosenfeld's life and work examines the achievements ofPaul Rosenfeld as a critic of the arts in their relation to the wider American culture of the interwar years, and as a purveyor of modernism against the background of the first strains of postmodemism. It will also treat at length Rosenfeld's efforts as a writer, editor, and minor philanthropist on behalf of establishing a distinctively American music, literature, and painting. This cultural nationalism, I argue, is best understood as part ofRosenfeld's modernist project. To a lesser degree this thesis also deals with the changing position of the man of letters in American life. / History / D. Litt et Phil. (History)

Paul L. Rosenfeld ( 1890-1946) almost single-handedly established the music of living American composers on a solid critical foundation in the period between the two world wars. Although he built a reputation chiefly as a critic of music, he was a man ofletters who ranged across all the arts with unrivaled competence and ease. Rosenfeld's contemporaries acknowledged him as a champion of that strain of modernism which celebrated the interrelatedness of the arts. His importance for the wider culture of early twentieth-century American modernism also lay in his seriousness about the arts. Rosenfeld earned forward the American democratic and romantic belief, epitomized by Walt Whitman and Alfred Stieglitz, in the capacity of art to articulate basic values that enrich and even ennoble the human person. Such an idealistic conception of the value of art was increasingly losing favor among the American literati during the 1920s, the period when Rosenfeld enjoyed his greatest influence and prestige. During this decade of"terrible honesty," American intellectuals tended to dismiss the "ideals of men" in favor of a single-minded interest in a more bitter realism. Inasmuch as they denigrated the notion that art held any kind of privileged status as a conveyor of values, they were in effect nascent postmodemists. This study ofPaul Rosenfeld's life and work examines the achievements ofPaul Rosenfeld as a critic of the arts in their relation to the wider American culture of the interwar years, and as a purveyor of modernism against the background of the first strains of postmodemism. It will also treat at length Rosenfeld's efforts as a writer, editor, and minor philanthropist on behalf of establishing a distinctively American music, literature, and painting. This cultural nationalism, I argue, is best understood as part ofRosenfeld's modernist project. To a lesser degree this thesis also deals with the changing position of the man of letters in American life. / History / D. Litt et Phil. (History)