This thesis is the first ever survey of Shetland’s literature. The large body of material the thesis covers is not well known, and, apart from Walter Scott’s 1822 novel The Pirate, and Hugh MacDiarmid’s sojourn in the archipelago, Shetland is not a presence in any account of Scottish writing. ‘The Literature of Shetland’ has been written to address this absence. Who are Shetland’s writers? And what have they written? These are the fundamental questions this thesis answers. By paying close attention to Shetland’s writers, ‘The Literature of Shetland’ extends the geographical territory of the Scottish canon. ‘The Literature of Shetland’ covers a chronological period from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Virtually no creative poetry or prose, either written or oral, survives in Shetland from before this time so, after a brief discussion of the fragmentary pre-nineteenth century sources, the thesis discusses the archipelago’s literature in eight chronologically arranged chapters. Chapter One concentrates on a group of three obscure early nineteenth-century Shetland authors – Margaret Chalmers, Dorothea Primrose Campbell, and Thomas Irvine – and also explores Scott’s involvement with the northern isles. Chapters Two and Three discuss an important period at the end of the nineteenth century, in which books and newspapers were published in Shetland for the first time, and in which a number of pioneering and influential local writers emerged. Jessie M.E. Saxby became the first professional writer from Shetland and, in the work of George Stewart, James Stout Angus, Basil Anderson, and especially J.J. Haldane Burgess, the Shetland dialect developed as a serious literary idiom. These writers laid down foundations for much of what came next. Chapter Four discusses the end of this period of growth, with James Inkster posed as the last significant figure of his generation, and the war poet John Peterson as the first local writer to depart from the literary principles which developed in the Victorian era. Chapter Five looks at the work Hugh MacDiarmid did in Shetland from 1933-1942. MacDiarmid is not really part of the narrative of the thesis, but the work he produced in the isles is vast. Because he does not need to be introduced in the way the other writers do, this chapter takes a different approach to the rest of the thesis and looks at MacDiarmid’s Shetland-era work alongside that of Charles Doughty. Doughty was a crucial presence for MacDiarmid during his time in the isles, and considering their work together opens up a better understanding of the work MacDiarmid did in Shetland. Chapters Six and Seven discuss the second major period of growth in Shetland’s literature, focussing on the writers associated with the New Shetlander magazine, an important local journal which emerged in 1947. The final chapter then looks at contemporary Shetland authors and asks how they negotiate the literary tradition the thesis has worked through. This chapter also discusses the Shetland-related work of several non-native authors, Jen Hadfield being the most well known. In moving through these authors, as well as providing necessary introductory material, several general questions are asked. Firstly, because almost all the writing studied emerges from the isles, the question of how each writer engages with those isles is consistently relevant. How do local writers find ways of writing about their native archipelago? Do writers who are not from Shetland write about the islands in different ways than local people? The thesis shows how Scott and MacDiarmid, the two most famous non-native authors dicussed here, draw on earlier literary sources – the sagas and the work of Doughty – to construct their respective creative visions of the isles. And, in discussing the work of local authors, it will be shown that, in the early period covered in Chapter One, landscape is the most prominent idea whereas, from the Victorian era to the present day, the croft provides the central imaginative space for Shetland’s writers. A second question that runs through the thesis is one of language. Almost every local author has written extensively in Shetland dialect, and this study explores how they have developed that language as a literary idiom. The thesis shows how Shetland dialect writing gets underway in the 1870s, and how writers have continued to expand and diversify that literary tradition. The two most innovative figures to emerge are J.J. Haldane Burgess and William J. Tait and, after demonstrating how the corpus of writing in Shetland dialect has grown, the thesis concludes by examining the ways in which contemporary writers engage with the vernacular legacies their predecessors have left. Extensive use of the local language gives Shetland’s writing a regional distinctiveness, and this thesis shows how some writers have been enabled and inspired by that idiom, how some have taken dialect writing in exciting new directions, but also how some have felt limited by it and how, by not using the language, some writers have been unfairly ignored by local editors and critics. The thesis also shows that, in its two main eras of development – at the end of the nineteenth century and in the middle of the twentieth – Shetland’s writers took their cues from the general movements in Scottish writing. In the Victorian period, developments in local letters paralleled the interest in regionality and upsurge in vernacular writing that are marked characteristics of Scottish writing at the time. And, in discussing the emergence of the New Shetlander and the writers associated with it, the thesis demonstrates how the second period of flourishing in Shetland’s literature is part of the wider cultural movement of the Scottish Renaissance. The picture of Shetland’s literature the thesis offers is a self-consciously heterogeneous one. Despite the marked use of the vernacular, the thesis resists moving towards an encompassing definition of the large body of work covered, preferring to celebrate the diversity of the writing that Shetland has inspired during the last two centuries. Questions of engagement with the local environment and the use of the local language are constantly asked, but the primary scholarly contribution offered by ‘The Literature of Shetland’ is a realignment of Scotland’s northern literary border.

Beginning with an analysis of the nature of the Morality play and its near relative, the moral play, this thesis finds both forms to be founded on an adversarial view of the world (Chapter One). The nature of the adversary is variable, and that variation is, in turn, revealing about the plays' philosophical position. The theories of Jacques Lacan suggest a reading of Mundus & Infan s, The Castle of Perseveraunce, and Youth as descriptions of selfhood via language- acquisition (Chapter Two). Psychoanalytic theory also suggests that otherness may involve both the rule-making Other of authority and a transgressive 'other', broadly analogous to repressed desire. The moral plays discuss the latter version of otherness through their construction of an increasingly elaborated 'vice figure'. A reading of Mankind demonstrates the interpretative power of this approach (Chapter Three). In the 1560's and 70's, vice behaviour becomes more complex, and so more ambiguous. Deconstructive theories suggest that this change can usefully be read as equivalent to the tendency of linguistic terms towards meaninglessness. The Tyde Tarrieth No Man is an example. Otherness comes to be located in certain 'abjected' social groups. In addition, vice play radically alters the original structure of the moral play, tending to replace narrative with showmanship. Enough is as Good as a Feast and Like Will to Like demonstrate this point. All For Money, however, uses dramatic structures symbolically, restoring meaning to vice play (Chapter Four). Feminist theory leads me to consider the place of woman as other in the moral plays. In The Play of the Wether, the endightement of mother messe and Lingua the 'female vice' figure is developed (Chapter Five). The social implications of that figure are considered through analyses of The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune and Lingua (Chapter Six). Finally, the figure of the 'good woman' is found to undergo increasing criticism, as the plays come to encode virtue as undesirable, and perhaps impossible (Chapter Seven). A Conclusion summarizes the main arguments of the thesis.

This thesis explores childhood as theme and perspective in the Argentine cuentista and poet Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993) and traces this thematic and vital link to the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizamik (1936-1972). The study looks at childhood not only in relation to their literary texts but also in the writers' construction of self-identity within their socio-literary context, and at the role played by visual art in their aesthetic. Chapter 1 contrasts Silvina with her elder sister Victoria Ocampo through their differing literary appropriation of a shared childhood. It distinguishes Ocampo from Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges in terms of her fictional logic and her treatment of games, drawing comparisons instead with Julio Cortdzar. Chapter 2 undertakes close reading of various Ocampo texts, including some for children, in order to explore her vision of childhood through nostalgia, adult-child power relationships, aging and rejuvenation, and moments of initiation or imitation. Chapter 3 turns to Pizarnik and the myth of the child-poet. It analyses her child personae through Andre Breton's Surrealism, Jean Cocteau and Octavio Paz, through her borrowings from Alice in Wonderland and Nadja, and through her obsession with madness, death, orphanhood, violation and transgression. Chapter 4 is comparative. It outlines the context in which Ocampo and Pizamik's passionate friendship developed, and considers Pizamik's essay on Elpecado mortal. It then explores their broad mutual literary and thematic affinities. My conclusion is that Ocampo's works achieve equilibrium between childhood and age, whereas Pizarnik's much-discussed poetic crisis of exile from language itself parallels her deep sense of anxiety at being exiled from the world of childhood. This thesis contributes to the study of Argentine literature by drawing revealing comparisons between two key writers through their shared obsession with childhood, arguing that an understanding of their attitudes to childhood is fundamental to appreciating fully their work. I refer to unpublished letters of Ocampo, material from private interviews, photographs and relevant paintings by Leonor Fini, Alicia Carletti and others.

This thesis aims to reinterpret Tom Jones by putting it into some previously untried comparative contexts. As well as using the traditional points of reference such as Lucian, Swift and Sterne, I compare Fielding's satire with Flaubert's; his narrative poetics with Dickens's and Beckett's; his strategy of intrusion with George Eliot's; and his literary politics with Brecht's. I start by assuming the ambivalence of Tom Jones, but rather than seeing this as a conscious ironic duality, I argue that it derives from literary, moral and political uncertainty. The intrusive narrator is seen as an index of vacillation between first- and third-person narration, while conservative satiric influences are shown to complicate rather than strengthen the book's moral decisiveness. Its form, moreover, is shown to be dialogic, and unable to keep at bay either the reader's subjectivity or the flux of historical reality. But Fielding's achievement, I finally suggest, is to have put these factors into the service of his awareness of the always judgmental nature of literature. The thesis therefore takes on several previously uncovered areas: it is very specific about the nature and extent of the narrator's presence in Tom Jones; it draws new analogies between social and literary forms (in the sections on conversation) and political and literary structures (in the section on Fielding's plays). It thereby reveals new areas of Fielding's writings which can be treated as literary theory; finds detailed affinities between Fielding and writers not normally associated with him; and eventually constitutes a reading of Tom Jones as an inconclusive and open-ended text which implies not a denial but a redefinition of its historical importance.

The thesis aims to explore the issue of representation and its limits in the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvin. It focuses on the authors' treatments of the relationships between representational practices and the constraining limits of the human condition in perceiving reality. The introduction aims to discuss the methodology of the thesis and the theoretical positions of contemporary theorists regarding these relationships in order to contextualise and place the thesis in perspective. The conflictual tension between representation and the human condition will then be organised around five major themes, i. e. language, cognition, hermeneutics, spatial forms, and games, each of which will be a focal point of a chapter. While the first two chapters set out to describe how language and cognition prevent humans from attaining the real in its absolute state, the next three chapters will mainly discuss the implications and consequences of the unattainable real and human inadequacies. Each of these five chapters, in its different yet interconnected direction, features an extensive discussion of the issue of representational limits and a comparative analysis of what the authors manage to do in face of the issue. A final conclusion will summarise the similarities and differences in the ways both authors deal with the critical interactions between representation and the limits of the human condition.

The role of characterization in dramatic structure is assessed by theoretical criteria. Characters who perform actions necessary for the completion of the narrative sequence are said to be "bound" to the narrative; those without such obligations are "free". Characters who maintain a single, constant meaning during the course of a play are said to be "static"; characters who change or develop into new roles are "dynamic". Horatian decorum demanded that comic characters be static, and the characters of Plautine and Terentian tradition were almost always bound to narrative intrigue. However, evaluations of six Tudor comedies show an increasing use of non-classical characterization within the comic form. In the early comedies lohan lohan and Roister Doister all characters are bound and static, yet the impetus to enlarge the role of characterization is evident. The characters of lohan lohan are expanded from their French source, and Roister Doister includes extraneous episodes in which Udall displays his braggart hero. Free characters abound in Misogonus; as well the play brings dynamic characterization into the scope of comedy with the conversion of its prodigal son. Free characters offer new possibilities of non-narrative plotting. In comedies of the 1580s favourite traditional characters appear as diversions outside the action, and thematic arrangements of characters inform the increasingly complex plots. Lyly stresses the symbolic potential of characters in Endimion, whereas Greene uses dynamic characterization to heighten the illusion of independent figures in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Love's Labour's Lost exposes the limitations of comic artifice by pulling the characters between convention and individualization. By the end of the sixteenth century free and dynamic characters had become common, and characterization had established a sizable claim on the design of English comedy. These developments set the English form apart from its neoclassical counterparts.

This thesis offers a Bakhtinian perspective on the operation of discourse in critical practice. Bakhtin's account of the individual's relation to language provides the basis for an examination of the ways in which discourse operates as a constraint upon and motive for acts of interpretation. In this my thesis breaks with the dominant use of Bakhtinian theory in which it is deployed as a means of analysing the operation of discourse in literary texts. In what follows I begin with an account of Bakhtin's sociolinguistics. Having established the theoretical framework for my analysis I move on to characterise the discourses of the heteroglossia in Britain in the period 1900 to 1930. For ease of analysis my account is divided into two sections. In the first of these the discourses operating at the societal level are discussed whilst the second section is concerned with the discourses which operated in literary critical circles at this time. In the third section of this work I offer an intermediate synthesis via an analysis of the operation of the discourses identified in preceding section in the practice of leading literary critics from this era. This section also enables me to offer a fuller account of the various discourses informing critical practice at this time. In the fourth section I examine the criticism generated by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in the period 1899 to 1930 and offer a detailed account of the ways in which the discourses identified in previous sections operate as constraints upon the act of criticism. More general works on Conrad from this period are also analysed. In my Conclusion I step back from the minutiae of critical practice and offer an account of some of the problems associated with adopting a Bakhtinian perspective on the processes of criticism. I end with a brief statement of the value of Bakhtinian theory as a basis for critical practice.

To analyse the essential themes of Women in Love: i.e. three successive phases in a breakdown of moral health and three aspects of its recovery. To trace their development in Lawrence's other novels. To examine the position of Women in Love in this development and especially its relationship with The Rainbow. To present some illuminating affinities between his treatment of the themes and the treatment of similar themes in the novels he read or that formed a major part of the influences at work on him in his cultural environment.

No description available.

This study is a cultural materialist analysis of the spectacular commodity economy of the fin-de-siecle as mediated and represented in the iconography of the artist that Oscar Wilde and Henry James employ. The figure of the artist within the dominant social organisation of the fin-de-siecie is studied in relation to residual, dominant and emergent social formations. Focussing on four distinct figures, I examine the ways in which the discursive subject positions of the actress, the critic, the revolutionary and the child are oppositional because they represent positions that frustrate and evade the forceful processes that seek to incorporate individuals to the hegemony. This evasion is achieved because these positions exploit ambiguities within the discursive formations. Each of these positions is characterised by the same qualities of marginality, vulnerability and mutability, qualities traditionally identified as weaknesses, which I identify here as paradoxical strengths. The figure of the actress captures the force with which the processes of hegemony reify women, but she also represents an alternative to those schemes of identity formation. The vulnerability of the actress before the hegemonic discourses, a vulnerability that the artist shares, is paradoxically the quality that offers the greatest opportunity for constructing alternative positions. In a corruptly theatrical world the actress's art allows her to confound the possessive male gaze, and to evade the roles scripted for her by hegemony. The figure of the actress represents the first example of the theatrically multiple subjectivity that James and Wilde identify and explore. The critic is inextricably bound by systems of exchange and the logic of the marketplace and this represents the vulnerability of the critic. This vulnerability though depends upon the critic's intermediate position and this intermediate position is a site, I argue, which James and Wilde exploit as they re-conceptualise the action of culture and the work that art achieves. At the fin-de-siecle this work was recognised as necessary and urgent by many intellectuals. The developing mass culture presented an emergent form of social organisation, one that offered substantial opportunities for change. Cultural critics sought to find ways to understand and influence these social forms. Both Henry James and Oscar Wilde critique the dominant narratives of art and culture through their readings and rewritings of Matthew Arnold's works. Their rewritings reveal the complicity of Arnold's formulations of hegemony at the same time as they identify oppositional positions and strategies. These oppositional positions and strategies depend upon redefining the existing relations of production and consumption that govern aesthetic encounters. The work that art does becomes the transformation of the individual's consciousness, a change from the fixed bourgeois self to a theatrically multiple subjectivity. The critic mimes this change in order to make the process available to all. The revolutionary represents the vulnerability of the individual to political discourses of reaction and revolution. This vulnerability is realised by James and Wilde in their works through the figure of the scapegoat, an individual whose relation to the group is explicitly dangerous and revelatory. I argue that James and Wilde both identify a theatrically multiple subjectivity and I trace the genealogy of this subjectivity in Hegelian thought. I illustrate how Henry James's investigation of city-spaces demonstrates his understanding of the creation and regulation of subjects in modernity. The figure of the child is a familiar role for the romantic artist but the romantic child is also the latent being intently examined by late nineteenth century psychology, ethnology, and physiology. I argue that the potential of the child, as its promise and its threat, reveal the means through which subject positions are established, fixed and regulated, and holds out the promise of evading those regulatory schemes. I read Oscar Wilde's fairy-tales in the context of late nineteenth century folklore research, in particular the writings of Andrew Lang, and I relate James's literary children in 'The Turn of the Screw' and What Maisie Knew to his developing modernist literary form. I conclude that a significant contribution of these writers to the establishment of a distinctively Modernist literary practice was their detailed exploration and examination of the relationship of the artist to the dominant and emergent social formations, and their commitment to an active role for the artist in contesting the limits of modern subjectivity, doing battle with the forces of capital.