This thesis is about the inter-relationship between migrancy and narrative. It is based on research carried out among expatriate Nigerians, studying the stories that they told of their time abroad and of their relationship with Nigeria. It is also based on research examining the cross-cultural reception of two contrasting novels in various parts of Scotland, and in Plateau State, Nigeria. The thesis argues that western cultural history from the 1980s forwards had tended to celebrate migrancy in general, and the migrant intellectual specifically, in a way that privileges homelessness over residence, and in a fashion which allocates an undue voluntaristic power of achievement to acts of imagination, ignoring the delimiting effects of class position and economics on individual subjects. This aggrandisement of the migrant, it is argued, is part of a long-standing western romantic tradition in which the outsider is seem to hold a unique, vatic perspective on social life. While there is some sociological truth in such a proposition, the research presented here demonstrates how such a dominant intellectual attitude exerts a pressure against the production of fiction written locally in Africa, for African readers. It also demonstrates how the privileging of the distanciated perspective can give the cue for migrancy to become, in itself, a form of symbolic capital held over and against the sedentary local. In both of these cases what appear to be purely cultural effects - changes in perspectives and attitude - are at the same time disguised expressions of an economic privilege. The contribution of this dissertation then, is to examine these cultural questions from a materialist position and to suggest how it has come about that even in its discussion of migrancy, the deterritorialization of identity, and the death of the nation, western cultural theory has managed to re-enforce its own hegemonic and institutional grip.

This thesis is the first critical study to examine Miller across the full range of his intellectual contribution. Existing studies of Hugh Miller have been preoccupied with Miller’s biography and with the scandal of his suicide in 1856, with many commentators viewing Miller as the quintessential ‘divided man’. This thesis, however, seeks to demonstrate that, far from producing a work of irreconcilable tensions, Miller’s work, taken as a whole, demonstrates a remarkably coherent response to the many contemporary intellectual and social issues he engages with. Part One examines the politicised literary climate of nineteenth-century Scottish letters, and in particular the cultural phenomena of the ‘peasant poet’ made fashionable after Burns. I examine Miller’s entrance into literary circles as the self-fashioned persona of ‘the Cromarty stonemason’. Pat Two traces Miller’s search for an authoritative vehicle of self-expression across the genres of poetry, short fiction and folklore before attaining recognition as a man of science and an influential social and religious commentator as editor of The Witness newspaper (1840 – 1856). In Part Three two significant features of Miller’s socio-literary approach are considered. Chapter ten examines Miller’s broader socio-literary agenda, which insisted upon autobiography’s capacity to reclaim a marginalised working-class voice, and his tentative moves towards the exposition of a working-class canon. The final chapter attempts to place Miller in his proper relation to the intellectual thinking of the time and to suggest that his adherence lay toward intellectual moderation and liberality rather than the religious partisanship with which he has become associated.

This thesis erects and defends the proposition that Jacques Derrida's readings of 'metaphysics in deconstruction' and his raising to theoretical consciousness of the 'differential matrix', have the capacity to inaugurate a 'brave new world' in this postmodern 'age of the aporia'. Beginning with an examination of Derrida's readings of Husserl and Saussure, it is argued that the radical historicity uncovered here qua an originary synthesis of language, time and the other, opens the possibility for greatly more democratising and emancipating self-creations and human solidarities to be thought. In terms of 'self-creations', and borrowing from the work of Elizabeth Deeds Errnarth, Chapter Two follows Derrida as modernity's sovereign subject and its 'History' are dis-placed by an absolutely affirmative postmodern subjectivity whose axiom might be 'I inherit, therefore, I am ... yes, yes ... ' Construed through his deconstructive reading of Kant, Derrida shows the way in which this postmodern subjectivity without alibi, makes of us all (like it or not, know it or not) resistance fighters, so many singularities existing in constant tension with all normalising/totalising tendencies (social, economic, techno-scientific, political, legal etc ... ) which profess to know the secret. Turning to co-extensive 'human solidarities', Chapter Three subsequently demonstrates the way in which Derrida's call for a 'New International', orientated through a 'new figure of Europe', enables us to imagine new polysemic communities (local, national, international) founded on the 'aporia of the demos', a 'foundation' that construes its hyper-relativity as a positive (ethico-political) condition of decision in terms of a radical responsibility (on an individual and communal level) for the moral/aesthetic decisions we make. It is thus that I will argue that Derrida's vision for a 'new world order' is born out of an aporetic condition which is both a risk and a chance of both the best - and the worst - happening; as someone who shares Derrida's desire for a fairer, freer, more peaceful world, one respectful of difference and otherness, I believe this to be a 'poker like gamble' well worth taking. Chapter Four offers a comparative analysis between the work of Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, two theorists counter-signing differently many of the 'same' discourses/ traditions/cultures/languages, etc ... to which they are both heirs. The chapter examines their respective 'quasi-philosophies of the limit', together with their differing conceptions of the issues surrounding globalisation and universalisation, as well as Baudrillard' s elevation of America (as opposed to Europe) as the exemplary site of resistance against the dangers of totalisation in 'postmodem' societies. The central argument here, in line with my previous remarks, is that Derrida's thought arguably remains 'the best' way to navigate the postmodem condition and the challenges it produces. The originality of this thesis lies in two main areas, the first having to do with my presentation and conception of Derrida's oeuvre and the second having to do with the comparisons made in this study between Derrida and Ermarth and Derrida and Baudrillard. In terms of the former, I offer what I consider to be a unique, sustained, in-depth analysis of the 'development' (on a theoretical and practical level) of the thematics of 'radical historicity' and of 'post-historical man' - effectively the development of Derrida's quasi-philosophy of history- from his earliest works so that they can be seen to inform his later intervention(s) in what are conventionally understood as ethical and political matters; transforming this understanding in the process and, after the end of history's ends (upper case, lower case and the totalising 'history of meaning' per se), quite literally and radically changing the way we see what we call 'the world'. For while in the conventional literature Derrida's politics come late, I argue here that his indeed later political work is but an emphasis of constant political thematics acting as a leitmotif from beginning to end. Turning to the latter, in terms of the comparisons I make - first between Derrida and Ermarth in Chapter Two and more especially between Derrida and Baudrillard in Chapter Four - the claim to originality lies in the fact that there is no comparison of any note or depth in the literature between these thinkers; nothing that compares Derrida's 'affirmative postmodem subjectivity' and its 'inheritance' with Ermarth's 'rhythmic time' and 'muIti-level consciousness', and nothing comparing Derrida's corpus - specifically his optimistic emancipating and democratizing hopes for the future - with Baudrillard's more pessimistic conceptualization of 'simulation society' and the loss of our European universal values under the hegemonic, globalising movement of the 'American model'. The aim of these two comparisons is to support my claim that Derrida's historico-political position is the 'best' way of essaying the quasi-ground of an in(different) politics in such a way that it keeps the future open to what he calls a 'better world' to come, a world without ends.

This thesis is a study of the twentieth-century debate between F.R. Leavis and F.W. Bateson. In it I explore the critical positions held by Leavis and Bateson in relation to the function of criticism and the role of the critic. The epistemological inquiry central to my analysis asks: is literary criticism and the study of literature antithetical to the construct of a discipline, which by definition presupposes objective standards and criteria. My research concludes that the views contested throughout the Leavis-Bateson debate stem from pre-conceived and implicit notions regarding what Leavis and Bateson deem literary art ought to be. As such, their methodological principles and critical ideologies can be seen as practical extensions of subjective values. In the later sections of the thesis I examine the key issues of the debate in relation to wider critical discourse in which the principles of literary evaluation are subject to applied autotelic and meta-critical analysis. I conclude my work with the assertion that due to the inherency of subjectivism in processes of critical performance, the systematic application of determinable validity to critical methods or judgments within fields and disciplines of knowledge, occurs not through deference to verifiable domains of aesthetic or nomothetic truth, but rather through functions of power, position, and bad faith.

Using an approach that distinguishes between the epistemologies of critical theory and creative practice, this study investigates notions of originality and influence in literary theory and considers their applicability to the teaching of creative writing and creative writing practice. It argues that current paradigms offer limited and contradictory explanations of these phenomena and makes the case that, through the assimilation of recent philosophical and scientific perspectives into a framework of socially-situated theory, a fresh approach can be developed that acknowledges the embodied experience of the writing process. The study consists of two main research areas: qualitative and literary/theoretical. The literary/theoretical research falls into two strands of enquiry that are closely linked and run parallel to each other throughout the thesis. One strand is concerned with the need to find an ontological structure for creative writing that accommodates practical and theoretical approaches and provides a conceptual framework that allows issues of originality and influence to be seen from both inside the writing process and from an external theoretical perspective. The second strand, evolving within the former, analyses notions of originality and influence historically and more specifically within romanticism and the socially situated theory of Mikhail Bakhtin. The qualitative research was designed to offer a practical and experiential set of findings that could be used to guide the theoretical research. In this research project, using a phenomenological methodology, a group of part-time adult creative writing students (14 participants) were asked to reflect on their perception and experience of originality and influence in the writing process. Their responses were returned in the form of questionnaires and the findings were collated into fourteen key themes. The theoretical research contextualizes the study within debates with student writers in writing workshop sessions about issues of influence and originality in critical peer review. After a discussion of the pedagogic and theoretical issues that these debates generated, including an analysis of the impact of romanticism on contemporary notions of creativity and a survey of developments in pedagogic theory in creative writing, the literary/theoretical research goes on to explore notions of originality and influence in the work of Bakhtin and romanticism in greater detail. It develops a critique of Bakhtin's socially-situated theory of creativity and argues that this is due to a weakness in the ontological premises of Bakhtin's conceptual framework. Moving to a study of romanticism it proposes that Bakhtin's socially-situated theory fails to fully understand or assimilate embodied emotionality into its ontology and that the embodied emotionality in romanticism, when seen through a more contemporary paradigm of embodied realism reveals the shortcomings in socially-situated theory. The final section on embodied realism and the impact of neuroscience on studies of the body and emotionality argues for a fresh ontological perspective, which would resolve the paradoxical nature of the relationship between an epistemic, socially constructed view of reality and a more biologically determined notion of human nature. In the discussion of key findings and in the conclusion to the research the thesis shows how, by adopting the ontological perspective of embodied realism and incorporating it into socially-situated theory, new perspectives on originality, influence and creativity can be developed that fully integrate epistemologies of theory and practice, and offer a grounded theoretical position from which to construct a viable pedagogy for creative writing. Finally, the thesis offers ideas for further research and discusses ways in which this combined approach can be applied to teaching practice, offering examples of exercises developed during the course of the study and covered by the main topics of research.

This thesis analyses the notion of "author" as a "critical category" in literary interpretation, i.e. the extent to which author-related knowledge is used to make claims about a literary work which exceed what could have been said of the text alone. Chapter 1 gives an account of the principal theorisations made about the critical category of the author in literary theory and analytical aesthetics. It is argued that ontology is a central dimension of these theories, and in particular that the notion of the “author” as a relevant element for interpretation is logically dependent on a "thick" ontology of the literary work, i.e. on considering the work as irreducible to its textual manifestation. It is argued that the "author" in literary interpretation is typically constructed out of notions that come from two different sources, namely the text and the writer. The historical situatedness of this "thick" ontology in a modern conception of copyright law is also briefly analysed. Chapter 2 tackles the use of the category in the British and French culture of the second half of the nineteenth century. It is argued that the dominant critical paradigm in the age was “authorialist”, i.e. it considered the author as always relevant for an understanding of the work. A case is made for this tendency being a part of a larger tendency within that culture to consider phenomena in terms of their genesis. The practical consequences of this in the literary interpretation of the time are then considered. Chapters 3 and 4 propose a series of close readings of literary works of the same area and period, mainly associated with the Decadence (Swinburne, Pater, Mirbeau, Wilde). The focus is on the issue of whether and how their textual features comply with or resist the "authorialist" readings to which they were subjected.

This thesis examines the visions of Scotland that come across in the inter-war writings of Hugh MacDiarmid, Neil Gunn, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Edwin Muir in relation to the ideas of the Scottish Literary Renaissance as a whole. The initial part, "Into the Renaissance", consists of a historical account of Scottish political and cultural nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, followed by an examination of the ways in which the authors associated with the Scottish Renaissance participated in the construction of Scotland as an imagined community. Geography, history, religion, language and literature are identified as the five predominant themes in the inter-war tradition, on the basis of which the intellectuals created an image of the nation that could express their twin philosophies of nationalism and modernism. The second part, "Four visions of Scotland", is composed of close readings to the work of High MacDiarmid, Neil Gunn, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Edwin Muir in that order of appearance. The MacDiarmid chapter begins with a discussion of the poet's call for a Scottish Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s. It is argued that MacDiarmid set out with a strong belief in his own ability to awaken the nation, but that he became increasingly disappointed with the Scot's lack of response to his programme towards the end of the 1920s. This disillusionment resulted in a change of strategy in the 1930s when, on the one hand, he exchanged the politics of the National Party for his personal ideology of Scottish Republicanism, while, on the other, he abandoned previous attempts to reform the Scottish nation favour of an idealised vision that was more compatible with his poetic aims.

This work is a study of the various concepts and theories of myth and ritual as they are found in some non-literary disciplines, especially anthropology, in literary theory, and in the criticism of Shakespeare. It is divided into two parts. Part I discusses various theories of myth and ritual and the relation of these theories to literature in general. It consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 discusses the allegorical theory of myth, and tries to show that the idea of myth as allegory persists in literary criticism, even though it has generally been discarded in theory. It suggests that the majority of criticism in terms of myth and ritual can, in fact, be seen as the extension to literary material of the kind of allegorical and typological exegesis that has been widely practised in scriptural hermeneutic from very early times. This suggestion is tested with reference to Shakespeare-criticism in Chapter 6 in Part II. Chapter 2 discusses the idea of ritual and the specifically anthropological theories concerning the connexions between myth, ritual, and drama. It is suggested here that the idea of ritual as such, and a psychological-cum-sociological extension of the concept of the scapegoat may be critically more valuable than the mere tracing of the origins of works of art in primitive rituals. Chapter 3 discusses ideas concerning a special mythical mode of thought, emphasis being placed here on the theory of Ernst Cassirer. Chapter 4 is concerned with the theories of Northrop Frye and Levi-Strauss, who are both, in their very different ways, interested in the 'structural' approach to myth. Chapter 5 surveys theories concerning the social role of myth and ritual and also discusses the relation between myth and ideology. It is proposed here that application of anthropological theories of myth and ritual in literary criticism should logically lead to a sociological approach to the work of art. Part II is also divided into five chapters, each surveying the existing 'myth' criticism of Shakespeare in the light of the theories outlined in the corresponding chapter in Part I. It emerges from this survey that contrary to the common impression, the influence of anthropological theory, especially of the theories that come after Frazer and the 'Cambridge' anthropologists, has been relatively slight where actual criticism is concerned. In fact, we find that the overwhelming majority of the criticism of Shakespeare in terms of myth is really an extension of allegorical mythography to secular, literary works. In such criticism there is usually an assumption that the work under consideration is of mythical or scriptural status and hides some profound and universal truth. Sometimes, however, such criticism may also be seen as an attempt to raise the work of art to the status of myth.

Since the mid 1980's it has been unthinkable for white feminist literary critics to neglect race in their theoretical work. Strong challenges from black feminists have been effective in placing race high on the critical agenda. No longer is the kind of exclusivity that marked early (white) feminist literary theory possible. However, despite the evident commitment to addressing the race question in their work, the black feminist challenge has been greeted with a considerable degree of anxiety by white feminist critics. I suggest that the main source of anxiety is a failure to square the pressing need to 'include' race on the feminist agenda with doubts about straying into what is perceived to be black feminist territory. In other words, white feminist critics have yet to resolve their relation to the black feminist project. This anxiety has meant that a concern over the notion of exclusion has given way to that of appropriation. This has tended to place the white feminist reader in the paralysing position where there seems little available ground between the twin poles of exclusion and appropriation. Typical questions that have arisen out of this dichotomy are: should white feminists teach black women's writing? Should white feminist critics produce critical readings of texts authored by black women? Can white women readers read black women's writings without imposing onto them their own critical agendas? Is a non-appropriative reading relation possible? How should white feminists deal with the fact of their own race privilege and what bearing does this privilege have upon the readings they, potentially, might produce? This project examines some of the ways in which white feminists have attempted to address their relation to the race question in feminist literary criticism. Over the space of six chapters I focus on a number of specific reading strategies offered as positive critical interventions. My main contention is the impossibility of a guaranteed anti-imperialist theory or reading position. I also argue for the necessity of asking the question: whether the imperialist can read, as a complement to that of whether 'the subaltern can speak'. Chapter 1 questions the white feminist ambition of arriving at the truth of the black text as a means of decolonising the text. Through an examination of the Rodney King events some of the perils of appeals to pure seeing are highlighted. Chapter 2 explores the implications of white feminist abstention from the race debates. Chapter 3 looks at the issue of identification as a basis for reading. Chapter 4 questions the identifications that inhere in applying theory to a text. Chapter 5 challenges the use of contextualisation as a source of textual limits. Chapter 6 examines the limits of self-reflexivity as an anti-imperialist method.

Isaac Rosenberg was more than just a war poet, and a general failure to take this into consideration has contributed to the belated recognition of the distinctions of his work. He started writing long before the Great War and, as a working-class London Jew, he schooled himself to respond to issues of class, culture, art and poetry. It was this combination of dependency and self-sufficiency which sustains his mature work; and which gave him a sense of himself as an Anglo-Jewish poet. In order to illuminate Rosenberg, Chapter One considers the conditions ofthe Jewish community in the East End of London at the turn of the century, and examines the writer's attitudes to the Zionism in vogue at the time. Chapter Two investigates the striking echoes of Freudian psychology which feature in Rosenberg's work, and which are related to the Jewish heritage of both writers. Chapter Three investigates Rosenberg's feminine principle, suggesting that, as part of an Orphic vision of art, it fused an allegorical 'female god', with seductive females familiar from Jewish narratives, effectively combining English and Hebrew cultures. Chapter Four traces Rosenberg's working-class literary heritage, and suggests that his treatment of class differs from his Gentile contemporaries in that it parallels Freudian and Marxist perceptions, while manifesting a modem Jewish insight. Chapter Five details the role class and race played in the critical marginalising of Rosenberg; special attention is given to the 'Georgian' literary ideals of the period, against which Rosenberg reacted and which influenced his reputation and the reception of his poetry. Chapter Six focuses on Rosenberg's debts of origin, and his 'anxiety of influence', uncovering his revision of his precursors, in light of a modem urban, and Jewish perspective. The thesis concludes by examining Rosenberg's idea of language as a vehicle for mental essence, suggesting that the roots for this perception lie in the painter's mind, along with class and race associations.