This dissertation rethinks textual images of the other’s beauty, depicted in works by D. H. Lawrence, Muriel Spark, and Virginia Woolf, whose fascination with the other, called by this dissertation the beloved, urged them to inscribe the beloved’s original beauty in texts. Their works make perceptible the singularity of the beloved, while revealing the writers’ predicament in translating the beloved’s ineffability in texts. Taking the untranslatability of the beloved into consideration, this dissertation traces the ways in which these writers’ texts capture the beloved’s original beauty at moments of revelation, related to epiphanies entering the terrain of literary modernism. My study thereby scrutinizes the dynamics of images of beauty and their impacts on art and politics in the context of modernism. In doing so, I argue that the texts I consider express the beloved’s singularity in challenge of the beautified images that many other artists invented for self-directed purposes in the early and mid-twentieth century. First, I explore Lawrence’s creation of aesthetic spaces in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) in keeping with his desire for making palpable visual spectacles through the text. Analyzing how this ambition helped to create the novel’s aesthetic scenes, I would like to define Lawrence as an aesthete whose aspiration lay in expressing the beauty of things. Then, I discuss Spark’s affection for her characters and her desire to visualize the figure’s originality in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and The Girls of Slender Means (1963). Considering Spark in relation to both modernists and Fascists, I propose that her making of the image of her character breaks away from Fascism’s aestheticization of human figures. Finally, I investigate Woolf’s love for words by focusing on “The Duchess and the Jeweller” (1938), a short story written for expressing various modes of beauty in words. Drawing to the represented link between words and smell, considered the most “wasteful” sense, I examine how the sensory medium makes perceptible intrinsic qualities of words, and argues that her depiction of words, linked to smell, reveals the anti-utilitarian nature of words, unconstrained by a craftsman’s manipulation of words.

This thesis explores the figure of the trickster in the works of Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark. By looking at these writers’ treatment of elusive, illusive and allusive characters, the thesis argues that they each incorporated what can be read as “trickster” figures in their fiction as a means of addressing anxieties about art, society and the self. The trickster is a character-type found in narratives from a multitude of cultures and eras, and is typically characterised by his subversive presence, his boundary-crossing and his role as a healer of predicament. While the trickster is often perceived as a universal phenomenon arising from a collective unconscious, this thesis instead focusses on writers’ intentional inclusion of trickster characters in literature as a way of thinking through specific problems. Bowen, it will be shown, interpolated tricksy characters drawn from myth and fairy-tale into her fiction in order to expose a perceived rift between art and academia; Taylor used the trickster to think about the construction of identity in post-war Britain; Murdoch took models from Shakespeare to create tricksters that helped her explore the ethics of writing fiction; and Spark’s tricksters allowed her to conceptualise truth and lies, and good and evil. Concentrating on four mid-century writers whose works have been seen to vary in genre and style, this thesis demonstrates that a trickster paradigm emerged in mid-twentieth-century British fiction – a period not previously associated with the trickster. Influenced by converging strands of trickery and allusion in art through the early decades of the twentieth century, notable mid-century British writers used outsider characters to probe social and artistic shifts in a landscape fractured by war and to reach for a sense of healing. By identifying such characters as trickster figures, this thesis sheds new light on patterns of subversion, healing and character in mid-century fiction. It explores the particular affinity the trickster had with women’s writing, and illustrates how the trickster was important to twentieth-century concerns surrounding metafiction and the role of the reader.

The thesis consists of two parts. The first, practical part presents a translation of short stories The Portobello Road (1956), The Curtain Blown by the Breeze (1961) and The Young Man Who Discovered the Secret of Life (2000) by the Scottish writer Muriel Spark. The texts represent various periods of Spark's writing career and offer a complex insight into her style and its various shades. The translation is succeeded by a study focusing on the life and work of Muriel Spark and mainly on an analysis of the key translation issues encountered in the process of translation. The key problems include the translation of Spark's specific literary language, the rendering of natural speech and the idiolects of the characters, the translation of names and other culture-specific facts. The theoretical part devoted to the translation analysis stresses the link between various translation theories and the work of a translator.

This thesis is an investigation into the nature of the 'postmodern' narrative strategies and fictional methods in the work of two British Catholic writers. The work of David Lodge and Muriel Spark is here taken as an example ofthe 'Catholic novel'. In order to determine ifthe overlap ofpostmodern. and Christian-influenced narrative strategies constitutes more than a convergence or coincidence of formal concerns, narrative form in these novels is analyzed in the light of neo-Tho mist and Tho mist aesthetics, a traditional Catholic Christian theory of the arts. The 'postmodern' in these 'Christian' texts becomes largely a coincidence of terminology. Narrative forms which can be classified as 'postmodern' can also be categorized using the terminology of Thomas Aquinas. The apparent similarities betray radically divergent metaphysical presuppositions, however. The nature of the Catholic 'difference' lies in the way postmodern forms are used to challenge the metaphysical bases of those forms. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

This thesis is an investigation into the nature of the 'postmodern' narrative strategies and fictional methods in the work of two British Catholic writers. The work of David Lodge and Muriel Spark is here taken as an example ofthe 'Catholic novel'. In order to determine ifthe overlap ofpostmodern. and Christian-influenced narrative strategies constitutes more than a convergence or coincidence of formal concerns, narrative form in these novels is analyzed in the light of neo-Tho mist and Tho mist aesthetics, a traditional Catholic Christian theory of the arts. The 'postmodern' in these 'Christian' texts becomes largely a coincidence of terminology. Narrative forms which can be classified as 'postmodern' can also be categorized using the terminology of Thomas Aquinas. The apparent similarities betray radically divergent metaphysical presuppositions, however. The nature of the Catholic 'difference' lies in the way postmodern forms are used to challenge the metaphysical bases of those forms. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

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.