This thesis is a study of the Glasgow novel from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century till the present day. After a brief look at the issues raised by Scottish industrial fiction in general we go on to approach the Glasgow genre in the light of the themes and groupings it has thrown up, and in doing so a chronological history emerges indirectly. We find no all embracing theory, but a number of significant points are raised. Foremost stands a continuing split between a vision of the city as an industrial centre and, conversely, as a centre of culture. Chapter One shows the novelist's view of materialism and ambition in the Victorian city and how this changes as we enter the twentieth century. The next Chapter examines the Glasgow examples of kailyard fiction. Chapter Three then traces the increasing awareness of lower life in the novel and the technical approaches it involves, and the next Chapter looks in detail at an offshoot of this - the gang novel. Chapter Five, on politics, gives the lie to the myth of Red Clyde si d e, and confirms the split approach to the city. Chapter Six views the Glasgow novel through its. apprehension of religion and its replacement as the genre ages by an interest in the individual, Chapter Seven looks at the many different manifestations of pride associated with the city, while Eight and Nine deal with the peculiar contributions of respectively women and children, Chapter Ten shows how the city's past has evoked various responses - some superficial others strongly felt - and Chapters Eleven and Twelve give a detailed look at the two most important writers to have worked on the city. Finally the Glasgow genre is set in context - against the wider background of both Scottish and English regional fiction.

This dissertation first sets out to place Du Bartas' Les Semaines in its religious and epic setting, and argues that the poem's mission is to exist as poetry and as religious instruction at the same time. From this and its philosophical backdrop emerges a poetry that emphasises equation, or fusion, over comparison. Antique-type similes are therefore summarily examined and connected with the "primary" sensibilities of Homer. The proper fusive style and language of Sylvester's translation are then considered. Its style is found to be conscious to a degree, relying especially on repetitional devices of catechistic value, such as anaphora and symploce; on devices of oxymoronic and paradoxical metamorphosis, such as agnominatio; and on devices of epigrammatic summary, such as chiasmus. The language of Sylvester's Du Bartas is then examined closely in two domains, those of its scientific and natural description. The two are not wholly separable. It is found that Sylvester's language, as Du Bartas, must be interpreted at more than its literal level; that three levels of interpretation along the lines of three levels of allegory are implicit. This is so in respect the italicised language so prominent in Divine Weeks, discussed in Chapter 5, and in respect of the adjectival and verbal language discussed in Chapter 7. One way of designating the organising principle lying behind these language hieroglyphs is as emblem book turned purely into words. This is insensitive to the poetic third level of Operation, which seeks to do more than teach, which seeks to inspire. This dissertation relates Sylvester's language to two traditions of English poetry, as different one from the other as noun is from adjective: the metaphysical school and the Augustan period. It argues that metaphysical poetry is enthralled with Du Bartas' conceits in Sylvester's translation, is influenced by them, and takes them up. These conceits are nonetheless often one-word, substantive, and hieroglyphic. Augustan poetry on the other hand takes up a Sylvestrian diction, often unaware of its implications, because it deems this language the true language of poetry. The rather dramatic place given to Divine Weeks in the development of English poetic diction is dealt with at a statistical level in an excursus on Sylvester's word and language formulations.

Tracing Masculinities in Twentieth-Century Scottish Men's Fiction takes account of the representation of masculinities in a selected group of novels by twentieth-century Scottish male authors. Rather than attempt a chronological survey of fictions during this period, the argument proceeds by analysing groups of texts which are axiomatic in specific ways: the Glasgow realist novels of the 1930s and post-1970s, from the works of James Barke and George Blake to those of William McIlvanney and James Kelman, which offer particular perspectives on relationships between men of different class identifications; fictions reliant upon existentialism, which intersect with the masculinist values of the Glasgow tradition in the figure of Kelman, but are also produced by Alexander Trocchi and Irvine Welsh; and novels which employ the technique of 'cross-writing', or literary transvestism, from the Renaissance fictions of Lewis Grassic Gibbon to the postmodern works of Alan Warner and Christopher Whyte. In a critical field which has always been concerned with a tradition of largely male-produced texts privileging the actions of male characters, but has neglected fully to consider the production and reception of those texts in terms of their specific articulations of gender positions, this thesis employs theories of masculinities developed in the study of American and English literatures since the 1980s in order to provide new perspectives on Scottish novels. It also draws upon the materialist theory of Louis Althusser for a model of ideological identification, as well as utilising several psychoanalytic and deconstructive approaches to gender formation in Western culture, epitomised by the work of Judith Butler and Kaja Silverman. The various perspectives on masculine gender and sexual identities thus assembled are primarily directed towards considering the novels under discussion as 'men's texts' - texts not only by or about men, but often directed towards men as readers too.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore a set of key issues and themes in the fiction of Stephen King, and then to present, in the form of a creative extract, a demonstration of an imaginative engagement with those same literary preoccupations mapped out in that opening critical section. This thesis is thus divided into two parts. The first part, 'Critical Encounters', explores through an interconnected series of close readings a selection of novels and novellas that circle around questions of suffering and survival. Chapter One, 'Monsters by Design', looks closely at Carrie (1974), The Shining (1977), and Misery (1987), among other texts, in order to define King's human monsters and investigate the episodes of domestic violence that are among his most terrifying scenes. Chapter Two, 'Retrospection of Abuse', uses 'The Body', a novella in Different Seasons (1982), as a core text to examine King's use of abuse and abusive characters as a means of defining character and assigning motivation for further violent tendencies. Chapter Three, 'Remorse and Resurrection', examines the influence of science and religious faith in terms of mourning the loss of loved ones. Chapter Four, 'The Selfish Apparition', a detailed engagement with Bag of Bones (1998), delves into the meanings behind the appearance of ghostly apparitions and suggests they may be less para-psychological and more psychoanalytical in nature. The second part, 'Creative Engagement', demonstrates the influence King's writing has had on my own work by providing an extract from a new novel, Without Warning, a sequel to my first book, Summer of the Cicada (Jonathan Cape, 2005). Without Warning is a unique experiment for me, as it has been written not only in the wake of the literary works of King - which have long exerted an influence on me as a writer and as one of his 'constant readers' - but in the light of a sustained period of research and reflection on King as a writer. Being in the midst of a critical and creative immersion in King, including his own accounts of his craft as well as interviews and essays by other scholars, has shaped my writing and made me mediate on my craft in a way I had not done before. This thesis then is both a study of aspects of the fiction of one of America's foremost storytellers, and an example of an emerging writer grappling with the fiction and criticism of a major influence.

The investigation of Fitzgerald's equivocal success, of the decisive change in Britain's recent cultural perspective, involves raising questions around canon-formation, the consolidation of a national identity, strategies of writing, and the politics of reading. I have found it necessary to examine aspects of theme, form, genre and context in Fitzgerald's writing, focusing successively on convention and subversion in her work. This 'doubleness' has generated the two-part structure of the present thesis, the first book-length study of Fitzgerald's work. Part One examines the canonical literariness of Fitzgerald's novels through studying literary conventions and thematic preoccupations. It aims to elucidate Fitzgerald's fiction through the tradition of liberal humanism. The canon of English literature is more than a settled corpus, it involves a set of prescribed criteria which, I argue, is the cornerstone of Fitzgerald's literary success as a novelist, biographer, and literary critic. Contemporary British fiction has undergone a focal sea-change seen in its preoccupation with linguistic experimentation, typographical innovation, and topical engagement with current issues. Fitzgerald's fiction is out of step with current critical paradigms, and thus tends to get caught between the canonical and the contemporary. Part Two explores the impact of postmodern approaches on Fitzgerald's fiction, and examines the ways in which age, race, gender, identity and the nation have impinged on her writing. The scope of this study, therefore, comprises gender, writing, and the culture industry. In view of the scarcity of criticism on Fitzgerald's work, and apart from the more obvious critical concerns regarding authorship and periodisation, this thesis draws on a variety of critical perspectives in order to achieve a historical and contextual understanding of Fitzgerald's fiction and literary career in relation to contemporary British fiction.

In the light of Bakhtinian theories, this research focuses on Ulysses as a postcolonial modernist text, in which Joyce appropriates modernist aesthetic strategies to serve the purpose of narrating the nation. Bakhtin is helpful here, not only because his theories serve especially well to explain the meeting and intersection of social, political, and cultural forces in periods of transition, but also because his attempt to establish a “historical poetics” helps both to explore discourse as social/individual ideology constituting the text and to interpret the dialogue interaction between sociohistorical forces and textual representation. As Bakhtin seeks to think through the issue of alterity and accentuates the all-importance of dialogue construction, his thought is useful for interpretation of Joyce-s endeavour to turn the hostility of binary opposition into polyphonic orchestration of heteroglossia. Mediating between such binary oppositions as Self and Other, private and public, inside and outside, the Joycean text demonstrates the importance of engagement with the past to transform its nightmarish impact into creative power for the composition of a postcolonial history; the significance of incorporating and negotiating dichotomies in a triangular structure and recognizing their coexistence for the constitution of a postcolonial subjectivity; and the consequence of integrating nationalist projects and cosmopolitan dimensions for the construction of a postcolonial nation. While Bakhtin sheds light on Joyce, Joyce complements what Bakhtin leaves unsaid, enlarging the scope and implication of Bakhtinian theories. The dialogue between the Irish author and the Russian thinker results in mutual enlightenment. The introductory chapter surveys the relationship between Joyce, Bakhtin, and postcolonial modernism, concentrating on the applicability of Bakhtinian concepts to the Joycean text. From the notion of the chronotope, the first chapter examines Stephen’s ambivalent attitude toward history, and focuses on his transformation of the past in the present time-space for the construction of a divergent and ongoing postcolonial future. The next chapter explores Bloom’s relation to colonial Irish society and inquiries into his shaping of an architectonic self, which results from the reaccentuation of public discourse and the mediation between individualism and collectivism. In the light of dialogism and grotesque realism, the third chapter deals with Molly’s dialogue answers to Bloom’s proposal of liberation, and investigates how her androgynously grotesque body transmits the external body, through her sexual body, into the textual body which is “Penelope.” The concluding chapter focuses on the interillumination of Joyce and Bakhtin: while Bakhtin helps refigure a postcolonial modernist Joyce, Joyce triangulates the binary structure of dialogue, underscoring the significance of trialogue as potential technique for postcolonial construction.

The thesis discusses the subject of time as dealt with in the writings of Edwin Muir, exploring the ways in which his poetry, novels, and critical writings articulate a range of perspectives regarding the nature of time and its relation to human experience. Following the adaptation of ideas through Muir’s career, a trajectory is traced from his early writings in which time is seen as a destructive power antithetical to life through to the celebration of mortality in his late writings. Integral to this development was his persistent interrogation of the relationship between time and eternity. Identifying the important role of Muir’s autobiographical method, this thesis begins by exploring his desire to obtain an objective view of human life by establishing a critical distance in his writings between the subject being presented and the imagination that presents it. To this end, his creative writings often incorporate myths, biblical allegories, heraldic symbolism, and surreal abstractions to present archetypal or timeless events and situations. In doing so, Muir is seen drawing on an array of literary and philosophical influences, many of which relate to his adolescence and formative adulthood in Glasgow. His rural childhood in Orkney and his early contact with Presbyterian and Evangelical Christianity made a lasting impression on his imagination with the resultant preoccupation with Eden and the Fall being dominant features of his poetry. Often dealt with in an abstract way in his poetry, Eden is frequently associated with his childhood on Wyre in his autobiographical writings, with the Fall, in Muir’s theorizing, forming the moment at which time becomes of relevance to humanity. Critically under-appreciated as ephemera and juvenilia, Muir’s earliest prose and poetry in The New Age magazine between 1913 and 1923 convey a strong sense of his desire to engage with the popular debates of the day regarding contemporary literary and social matters. For this reason, a significant amount of space has been given in this thesis to allow these writings to be re-evaluated; not just as portents of his later work, but also as important contributions to the vibrant journal and magazine culture of the period. Offering substantive detail to sketch the relevant biographical context, the essays, critical monographs and volumes of poetry are discussed chronologically and with reference to each other to allow the development of Muir’s ideas to be seen as an organic evolution rather than as a series of philosophical epiphanies. However, the significance of Muir’s reconciliation to Christianity in 1939 is highlighted as the single most important creative breakthrough of his mature adulthood. The extensive range of Muir’s critiques of Scottish and European culture, and his essays on the relationship between literature and society more generally, underline his position as a modernist writer immersed in the affairs of his time. Through detailing Muir’s creative and philosophical struggles with himself and modernity (which he felt he had fallen into through a time-accident) he is seen repeatedly reaffirming his commitment to exploring the nature of time and its meaning for human society.

This thesis is the first attempt at analysing the Bórama with a detailed analysis of the poetry read alongside the prose, as well as a detailed discussion on the hagiographical material found at the core of the text. Chapter 1 examines the text, with particular attention on issues of composition, chronological order or disorder and other temporal anomalies, as well as the connection with other texts, especially those situated within the Book of Leinster (LL) manuscript. This is to address the issue of what the purpose of the text is, to support the argument that this is a compiled text, possibly by a single author or compiler, drawing on an extensive knowledge of literary works. It examines what the central focus of the text is and also illustrates Moling as the central character of the text, and crucial to the text in whole. In addition it will discuss the issue of classification, something that scholars have contended with for many years. The poetry of the Bórama serves as the focal point of Chapter 2. There I demonstrate the various metres represented in the poetry, and cover a broad discussion on the issues the poems raise in the debate on the Bórama. It illustrates that the poems are an integral part of the text, and that without them the understanding of the text has been severely affected. The following chapter, Chapter 3, is devoted to the numerous saints who occur in the poetry of the Bórama. In the poems, interspersed throughout the text of the Bórama, there is a great number of saints mentioned at various instances with varying purposes. The purpose of their inclusion as well as in which situation they are represented in the text is discussed extensively. Their locality and affiliations will, as far as possible, be explored in terms of their connection to Leinster or Moling. Chapter 4 will be dedicated to the discussion of Moling, the central character of the text. It will explore how he is represented in the text of the Bórama, as compared to other texts where he is also a key figure. It will be shown that the Bórama, in LL, is a central text to his hagiographical corpus. Material concerned with Moling will also be looked at in terms of what they contribute to his legend. It will draw together the traits Moling exhibits in the extant sources and how his literary persona develops. The chapter will then conclude with the suggestion that LL was invaluable to the development of the legend of Moling. In the final final section of the thesis I will draw together the main issues of each chapter in order to provide a conclusion and iron out any remaining issues. I will also highlight the numerous issues this thesis has raised during the course of the research undertaken and which would serve as future projects centred on the text.

This thesis is divided into three parts – Word, Body and Transubstantiation. Collectively these are the central motifs of Catholicism’s Eucharist. According to Scripture, Christ is the word made flesh. The Eucharist recalls his words and actions at the Last Supper when he shares bread and wine with his disciples and tells them that they are his body and blood. In the Catholic faith partaking of wine and bread during the communion of mass is believed to be a partaking of the real presence of Christ. By consuming the body (bread) and blood (wine) of Christ, the participating community symbolise their collective belonging in and to Christ. The Catholic Eucharist consequently explodes difference in a utopic leap of faith whereby transubstantiation conflates and reconciles language and physical being, sub specie eternitatis. Whilst it is a religious formation, a relationship between word and body and their overlap also maps into preoccupations in recent philosophical and cultural theory which bear on Seamus Heaney’s poetry. Rather than converging word and body through a utopic leap of faith (transubstantiation), poststructuralism (following Saussure) posits an irreconcilable interstice between signifier and signified and (in the language of Derrida) infinitely defers meaning. Psychoanalysis (following Lacan) suggests desire is a consequence of the space between signifier and signified. Anthropological and sociological body theories (following Foucault) propose a disparity between corporeality and discursive constructions of bodies. Questions of a persistent gap in secular philosophy are therefore opposed to a sacred structure (converging word and body in a utopic leap of faith) that is most clearly marked and symbolised in the Catholic Eucharist. By appropriating this religious structure and these cultural theories, an ongoing secularisation of belonging in Heaney’s poetry emerges.

The thesis aims to propose a framework for poetry translation and its criticism. It is demonstrated how criticism on poetry translation can discuss the source text and target text in a way that they may well be two pieces of prose and miss a very important point: their aesthetic value as poetry. The thesis goes on to investigate an important issue of poetry translation: what makes �·poetry poetry. For if poetry is to be translated into poetry and criticized as poetry, this will be a highly relevant issue. An investigation into both Chinese and Western traditions shows that the common ground shared is that poetry in a poem is something holistic and coming from those aesthetically effective contextual relations from the poem. Gestalt Theory is introduced as the backbone of the framework to embody how those contextual relations function and a new term for the poetry one reads in a poem is coined, poestalt-combining poem and gestalt. The framework then is applied to investigate three issues and its significance to the criticism of poetry translation: Firstly, how poestalt may emerge mid the condition for this to happen, i.e. aesthetic coherence. Secondly, the significance of the creative involvement of the reader/translators, which is an important element of poetry reading/translation. Thirdly, the nature of the contextual relation and poestalt, which is highly related to the former two.issues. With this framework, the thesis shows that the poestalt emerging from the source text is the relevant object of poetry translation and its comparison with the poestalt emerging from the target text is the object for the criticism of poetry translation.