The 'enigmas' dealt with in Part 1 (Chapters 1-4) are illusory, arising largely from the apparent inability of many of his critics to understand much of Borges' work. However, the discussion of his widely appreciated wit in Chapter 1 shows that this is sometimes the fault of Borges himself. He once proclaimed his intention to conceal the true nature of some of his fictions so that only 'a very few' of his readers should understand them. Fortunately, his attempts at concealment were not always successful; but some of his critics seem to have been misled by them. Chapters 2-4 deal with characteristics that appear to be less widely appreciated. Chapter 2 discusses the importance of Borges' obsession with death; chapter 3 deals with what he called 'the most precious gift, doubt'; and chapter 4 illustrates Borges' humility and his aversion to arrogance; but all three chapters demonstrate that Borges' critics have often failed to acknowledge these characteristics. Chapters 2 and 3 show that many of his poems make clear the importance of some of these factors. Borges regarded himself primarily as a poet, and published many more books of poetry than prose; however, comparatively little attention has been paid to this aspect of his work. Part 2 of the thesis (chapters 5 and 6) deals with the enigma which Borges himself presents. This is no illusion. It stems mainly from some of his seminars, lectures and non-fictional pieces, which are shown to be rife with inaccuracies, contradictions, and poor preparation. They raise many questions about the depth of Borges' learning, and about his academic rigour. Part 1 suggests answers, while Part 2 despairs of answers. A number of the quoted texts were published originally in English; I have no Spanish, and the remaining texts are quoted in translation.

Scholars recognise the importance of the Vulgate quotations in Langland's Piers Plowman, but few have investigated the relevance of the context of these biblical references: discussion of the Vulgate contexts has been very limited. Research for this thesis, examining every Bible quotation, context and associated materials, revealed a series of themes: Truth& was a major instance, but Baptism& and Ordination were also of considerable importance. Part one covers structure: chapter one surveys the history of Piers' criticism on the Bible; chapter two, Langland's use of Bible. Chapter three covers how Langland considers “Truth” contextually through sequential quotations in the first quarter of Piers. Part two deals with interpretation, and examines how Langland employs Bible frames of reference to explore two Sacraments: Baptism (chapter four), waymarks for Baptism (chapter five) and Ordination (chapter six).

Based on the observation that “interdisciplinarity” is the essential nature of C. S. Lewis’s religious narratives created by twofold enterprise—imaginative writing and Christian apologetics, this thesis aims to undertake a comprehensive reception of Lewis’s works by considering carefully the inter-mixture of literary art and Christian apologetics within the texts and the relevance of the reader’s role to the textual experience. In other words, the whole study is oriented to combine literary analysis, apologetic reading and “hermeneutical” reflection upon the encounter between reader and text. The purpose in general is to demonstrate that Lewis’s literary world remains artistically engaging, religiously meaningful and existentially significant to the readers beyond his time. The main part of the thesis presents a practice of close reading and multi-faceted discussion of five texts of Lewis, including: The Pilgrim’s Regress (an allegorical account of a modern man’s conversion), The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce (theological fantasies concerning interaction between subjective being and objective reality), Till We Have Faces (a mythic novel about the correlation between self-knowledge and religious experience), and A Grief Observed (a first-person narrative of an inward journey of coming to terms with grief and faith). Varied in literary modes of expression, these texts are read in terms of one common theme about the inter-related problem of faith and self. More specifically, they are treated as works of “literary apologetics”—written to manifest and tackle in an “existentialist” manner the alienated or disrupted relationship between the human self and religious / Christian faith. In the concluding section, the discussion is moved from interpreting the texts to revisiting C. S. Lewis’s mind and rethinking the proper mindset for Lewis’s readers. This part of the discussion is intended firstly to re-estimate the enterprise of C. S. Lewis as a Christian thinker and literary writer through connecting and comparing his ways of thinking and reading with contemporary theologians and hermeneutical thinkers, particularly Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Ricoeur, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Such association between Lewis and the contemporary trends of hermeneutics leads to the conclusion that C. S. Lewis is indeed an intellectually defensible thinker as well as literary figure in and even beyond his time. Moreover, it helps to fulfill the second objective of this final discussion, which is also the chief goal of the whole thesis, namely, to shed light on an appropriate way of reading C. S. Lewis. Methodologically, this research is done on a cross-disciplinary basis in terms of a multiplicity of theoretical ideas concerning such topics as literary tropes, figures of speech, the psychology of religion, literary theory and (Kierkegaard’s) existentialist philosophy of irony, and hermeneutics. Illuminated by these miscellaneous tools of interpretation, the whole research looks to attest to the claim that the genuine experience of Lewis’s texts is not gained through simply appreciating the art of expression or digging out the underlying ideas of Christian apologetics, nor does it rest upon the response of the reader alone, but must rely on the co-working and interplay of all these three aspects of experience.

This thesis will argue that the authority and power of a ‘sermonic text’ is found in its fictive qualities. The term ‘sermonic text’ is chosen in preference to ‘sermon’ to indicate the distinction between the singular occasion of a preached sermon, and the consignment of this singularity to the permanent condition of a written text, that may be read on many occasions by readers separated by time and space. A sermonic text functions in the manner of a work of fiction and creates an event and space that forces a decision upon the reader. Within the text the reader is in a place where the Kingdom of God is about to happen and is happening. Consequently, the reader is forced to make a decision. Will he or she, “Go and do likewise,” or reject the Kingdom of God? This is possible because the sermonic text has what I describe as ‘fictive qualities.’ These qualities include setting the context in which the sermon is proclaimed which in turn creates a space and event for various ‘worlds’ to meet. Necessarily, a sermon, whether historical or in fiction, must be ‘preached’ in a particular place and at a particular time – e.g. Capernaum, the Rolls Chapel in London or the Whaleman’s Chapel in Moby-Dick. At the same time, the ‘sermonic text’ opens up a ‘space of literature’, which is universal, and of no specific time or place, but entertains the various worlds of the reader, the biblical narrative (e.g. the Jonah narrative in Father Mapple’s sermon) as well as the historical setting. Other fictive qualities include a dialogical relationship between the reader and the text and the capacity of time and place to be both specific and universal, temporal and eternal. Finally, the voice of the sermonic text has authority and authenticity because it is at once familiar in the human experience and, at the same time, set apart and distinct through a particular relationship with the divine.

Discussions of British travel to Greece in the nineteenth century have been dominated by the work of Lord Byron. Byron’s contemporary Greeks were Orientalised, while antique Greece was personified as a captive Greek woman on the brink of compromise by the Ottomans, or a cadaver. Throughout the nineteenth century this antique vista was employed by the tourist industry. This thesis offers a consideration of the visions and vistas of Greece encountered by British women who travelled to Greece in the subsequent years, especially in the light of how commercial tourism limited or constructed their access to Greece. Commercial tourist structures were in place in Athens and other major sites of antiquity, but the majority of the women considered here travelled through a terrain that went beyond a narrow and museum staged experience of Greece. Three paradigms have been established for women travelling in Greece: the professional archaeologist, the ethnographer, and the tourist. The women archaeologist combated the patriarchal domination of the classics, not only to posit a female intellectual who could master Greece, but also reveal how antique Greece was used to underwrite patriarchal British ideologies. The ethnographers in Greece are a mixed collection of semi-professional and professional ethnographers, considered alongside more conventional travel narratives, all of which offer discussions of the modern Greek psyche trapped at a series of liminal fissures (East/West, antique/modern). Concentrating on women and geography, they subtly conflate the two to read nation in gender. However, without the sexualised aspect of their male counterparts, they read Greek women through a series of diverse practices that they identify through a close contact that could only be established between women. The modern tourist in Greece offers the most enduring and lasting type of traveller in Greece. Travelling with and against guidebooks, the discussion considers the visual technologies that helped to codify the way Greece is still seen as a tourist destination. In conjunction with this, the popular discourses denigrating women’s travel are also discussed, which offers a key reason for the dismissal of their literary output.

Fordun’s Chronica Gentis Scotorum, Gesta Annalia I and II, Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon and Liber Pluscardensis, present the narrative of the Scottish nation from its early origins up to (in the later works) the minority of James II. The extant MSS of Fordun, Bower and their derivatives, dateable ca 1440 to ca 1500, are therefore invaluable sources for studies of late-medieval Scotland. The popularity of these histories is reflected in the number of subsequent abbreviations of their text in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (for example, Extracta e variis Cronicis Scocie and Brevis Chronica) and by no further independent narrative being produced in Latin until John Mair’s Historia in 1521. The principal objective of this thesis is to analyse the nature and extent of reader interest, ca 1450 to ca 1550, in these narratives. In particular, the aim is to demonstrate what specific subjects of the narrative of the Scottish nation interested late-medieval readers the most. To achieve this, the extant MSS of Fordun, Bower and their derivatives, numbering over thirty, have been thoroughly researched. Within each MS the additions by late-medieval readers (non-textural reader scribal activity) have been identified, recorded and subjected to thematic analysis. To further demonstrate the process under consideration, an edition of particular reader interest is presented as an appendix. The result of this research is that these narratives evidently continued to be consulted throughout the period ca 1450x1550 (and into the early-modern era) and that one can detect both the individual concerns of the readers’ in the texts and that distinct patterns of interest are apparent in their additions to the MSS. Moreover, the research indicates some surprising results, with topics previously considered as pivotal in the narrative of the Scottish nation not registering as much interest among the late-medieval readers as expected.

I argue that the Southern folk tradition is William Faulkner’s strongest influence. Faulkner experienced both a black and white folk culture in childhood through his Aunt Alabama and his nurse, Caroline Barr. I cover many of Faulkner’s ‘Modernist’ novels but examine their folk and vernacular elements, such as Jason Compson’s vernacular consciousness, the storytelling in Absalom, Absalom! or the trickster figure in the Snopes novels. I will be using Ed Piacentino’s The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor for secondary research and Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination and Rabelais and his World to provide a theoretical framework regarding the text as an interaction of competing discourses, and the ‘grotesque.’ I examine several writers to provide a folk ‘context.’ Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s ‘The Horse-Swap’ uses vernacular traders, but a refined observer passes judgment on their actions. George Washington Harris brings vernacular culture to the forefront. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an entire novel written in folk speech which invests the folk narrator with a conscience. I argue Faulkner also bestows his writing with folk morality, such as V.K. Ratliff’s stand against the rapacity of Flem Snopes. I also examine the conjure tales of Charles Chesnutt. Uncle Julius exemplifies black folk wisdom being used to outsmart the white northerners, demonstrating how many use folk culture to further their own ends. The third chapter examines the grotesque, through an examination of Harris, Chesnutt and Erskine Caldwell, along with Faulkner, and Bakhtin and Rabelais’ discussion of the ‘physical’ and ‘psychological’ grotesque, the damage caused by mental illness or obsession with the past. I examine how the psychological state manifests in the physical in Faulkner’s writing, and how he humanises those society deems ‘grotesque’ through psychological insight, emphasising the cruelty in simply regarding such beings as ‘spectacle.

This thesis examines the role of Scots language verse translation in the second-generation or post-war Scottish Renaissance. The translation of European poetry into Scots was of central importance to the first-generation Scottish Renaissance of the nineteen twenties and thirties. As Margery Palmer McCulloch has shown, the wider cultural climate of Anglo-American modernism was key to MacDiarmid’s conception of the interwar Scottish Renaissance. What was the effect on second-generation poet-translators as the modernist moment passed? Are the many translations undertaken by the younger poets who emerged in the course of the nineteen forties and fifties a faithful reflection of this cultural inheritance? To what extent are they indicative of a new set of priorities and international influences? The five principal translators discussed in this thesis are Douglas Young (1913-1973), Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915-1975), Robert Garioch (1909-1981), Tom Scott (1918-1995) and William J. Tait (1918-1992). Each is the subject of a chapter, in many cases providing the first or most extensive treatment of particular translations. While the pioneering work of John Corbett, Bill Findlay and J. Derrick McClure, among other scholars, has drawn attention to the long history of literary translation into Scots, this thesis is the first extended critical work to take the verse translations of the post-MacDiarmid makars as its subject. The nature and extent of MacDiarmid’s influence is considered throughout, as are the wider discourses around language and translation in twentieth-century Scottish poetry. Critical engagement with a number of key insights from theoretical translation studies helps to situate these writers’ work in its global context. This thesis also explores the ways in which the specific context of Scots translation allows scholars to complicate or expand upon theories of translation developed in other cultural situations (notably Lawrence Venuti’s writing on domestication and foreignisation). The five writers upon whom this thesis concentrates were all highly individual, occasionally idiosyncratic personalities. Young’s polyglot ingenuity finds a foil in Garioch’s sharp, humane wit. Goodsir Smith’s romantic ironising meets its match in Scott’s radical certainty of cause. Tait’s use of the Shetlandic tongue sets him apart. Nonetheless, despite the great variety of style, form and tone shown by each of these translators, this thesis demonstrates that there are meaningful links to be made between them and that they form a unified, coherent group in the wider landscape of twentieth-century Scottish poetry. On the linguistic level, each engaged to some extent in the composition of a ‘synthetic’ or ‘plastic’ language deriving partly from literary sources, partly from the spoken language around them. On a more fundamental level, each was committed to enriching this language through translation, within which a number of key areas of interest emerge. One of the most important of these key areas is Gaelic – especially the poetry of Sorley MacLean, which Young, Garioch and Goodsir Smith all translated into Scots. This is to some extent an act of solidarity on the part of these Scots poets, acknowledging a shared history of marginalisation as well as expressing shared hopes for the future. The same is true of Goodsir Smith’s translations from a number of Eastern European poets (and Edwin Morgan’s own versions, slightly later in the century). The translation of verse drama by poets is another key theme sustained throughout the thesis, with Garioch and Young attempting to fill what they perceived as a gap in the Scots tradition through translation from other languages (another aspect of these writers’ legacy continued by Morgan). Beyond this, all of the writers discussed in this thesis translated extensively from European poetries from Ancient Greece to twentieth-century France. Their reasons for doing so were various, but a certain cosmopolitan idealism figures highly among them. So too does a desire to see Scotland interact with other European nations, thus escaping the potentially narrowing influence of post-war British culture. This thesis addresses the legacy of these writers’ translations, which, it argues, continue to exercise a perceptible influence on the course of poetry in Scotland. This work constitutes a significant contribution to a much-needed wider critical re-assessment of this pivotal period in modern Scottish writing, offering a fresh perspective on the formal and linguistic merits of these poets’ verse translations. Drawing upon frequently obscure book, pamphlet and periodical sources, as well as unpublished manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland and the Shetland Archives, this thesis breaks new ground in its investigation of the role of Scots verse translation in the second-generation Scottish Renaissance.

This thesis inhabits the space between the art of poetry and the conditions of faith. Its concern is threefold: women, Church, poetics. It undertakes a journey from institutional Church into more radical and textual spaces, beginning with an examination of the state of the Roman Catholic Church today as revealed in Tina Beattie’s critique of Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose disturbing theology has contributed to a misogyny she argues has poisoned the body of the Church. Beattie’s critique is a point of departure into a potentially transformative poetics that she hints at but never fully pursues. I attempt to articulate such a poetics through multiple, spiraling approaches that are interdisciplinary, invitatory, performative and creative. In my reading and writing practices, I seek to trace the contours of this poetics through the delineation of a series of alternative poetic ‘ecclesiological’ spaces. These spaces will be shaped mainly by engaging the work of five poet/thinkers, a seemingly disparate group of authors, who, whether strictly poets or not, exhibit qualities of ‘poetic being’: Ignatius of Loyola, Gaston Bachelard, Yves Bonnefoy, Dennis Potter, and Hélène Cixous. The latter will further assist me in defining this poetic geography through her philosophical and fictive investigations of the interrelationships of gender, writing and spirituality. The readings I undertake are relational, conversations in which reading is a careful listening to texts and writing becomes an organic outcome of that listening. I ask essentially what happens when we, man/woman, stand in the clearing with Heidegger to share his wonder at being? With the help of my poet-companions, I respond that we are transformed after a full engagement of poetic thinking itself. I conclude that we are brought by this engagement to a sacred space of poetic dwelling.

This thesis explores a number of topics centred around the theme of memory in relation to medieval Irish literature roughly covering the period 600—1200 AD but considering, where necessary, material later than this date. Firstly, based on the current scholarship in memory studies focused on the Middle Ages, the relationship between medieval thought on memory in Ireland is compared with its broader European context. From this it becomes clear that Ireland, whilst sharing many parallels with European thought during the early Middle Ages based on a shared literary inheritance from the Christian and late-classical worlds, does not experience the same renaissance in memory theory that occurred in European universities from the thirteenth century onwards. Next, a detailed semantic study of memory terms in Old and Middle Irish is provided with the aim of clarifying, supplementing and revising the definitions found in the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of the Irish Language. Whilst the two principal memory nouns, cuimne and mebair, appear largely synonymous, the verb mebraigid appears to lean towards favouring the sense of ‘committing to memory,’ whereas cuimnigid(ir) encompasses this sense in addition to that of ‘recalling from memory.’ The third part of this thesis re-evaluates the dichotomous tension between notions of orality and literacy which some scholars have found in medieval Irish literature, arguing that this aspect has perhaps been exaggerated and that memory was a fluid concept in medieval Ireland embracing and merging both oral and textual forms. Following this, an assessment is made as to the importance and function of memory within the learned culture of the filid emphasising its necessary significance in a culture still partly based in an oral world. A wide range of sources including legal texts, grammatical tracts and tale literature is explored to show that the filid’s idealisation of memory was, largely, as a broad, comprehensive source supplying the knowledge necessary to acquire prestige through its performance and expression in a social context. The last part of this thesis investigates the notion that memory of the past could be used for the purposes of propaganda in medieval Ireland through the case study of the Ulster Cycle tales. Summarising and criticising some of the key prior scholarship in this area, this final section advocates for a much more cautious approach when claiming Ulster Cycle tales demonstrate political leanings, and that these must include or reconcile other more literary based interpretations of the themes and characters in these texts in order to remain successful as critical readings.