Through the imaginative literary genius of the Scottish author George MacDonald (1824-1905) an exploration of the Mystery of Man and his/her relationship with and to God is explored along the lines of Theological Anthropology. Myth and the literary genre of fantasy (which, like religion is moral in character and relies on relationships with supernatural forces) are explored as vehicles for transmitting and articulating deep truths about what it means to be human. Moral and spiritual growth are explored from psychological sources (Existential and Humanistic Schools of Psychology), and religious sources (Cambridge Platonists and Thomistic Theology) with the goal seen as the perfection of love --deification; And this understood as an irrevocable destiny for all rational creatures.

This thesis interweaves the lives and works of three Latin American women writers – Victoria Ocampo, Alfonsina Storni and Gabriela Mistral – into a travel narrative undertaken as part of a research project. The journey begins in Glasgow, Scotland and takes the reader as far as Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Santiago, exploring the legacies left by Ocampo, Storni and Mistral. Through a variety of interviews, encounters and experiences, against the backdrop of political unrest of 2002/3, a colourful tapestry unravels to reveal why and how these three women made such a profound impact on their people and countries. The researcher/traveller was able to explore culture, custom and history through the generous hospitality of local artists China Zorrilla, Monica Ottino and Eduardo Paz Leston. The narrative recalls relationships shared between Victoria Ocampo and Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges and Graham Greene. Questions of class, society and the after effects of Argentina’s Dirty War are considered, and Chile’s past is investigated through the open testimonies of present day Chileans. The researcher/traveller learns 9sometimes the hard way) valuable lessons about how to survive as a twenty-something woman travelling on her own and reflects on the changes time has imposed, not only on south America but also on herself. The focus on the ‘inner journey’ is vital to the overall theme of women and the sense of self. By staying in youth hostels an element of the backpacker’s subculture is incorporated into the overall story, which in turn surfaces as a parallel theme. The narrative is broken up into forty-one chapters which are divided into two separate sections; one relating to Argentina and Uruguay, the other to Chile. The section on Argentina and Uruguay makes up the majority of the text, while the section on Chile can be interpreted as an extended epilogue. Both sections are completely unique in terms of circumstance and material but complement each other in their preoccupations with the troubled terrain of gender, writing and travel.

Knox has seldom been taken seriously as a literary figure; in fact it is often assumed that he was hostile to `art' of any kind. Most British literary critics who have examined his work have done so superficially and have concluded that his prose was plain or unadorned and that its most important feature was a drift towards anglicisation. In the introductory section, `The Myths, the Writer and the Canon', it is argued that, on the contrary, the latter assessment cannot be made definitively for textual reasons and is, in any case, irrelevant to literary criticism. Moreover, the study suggests that Knox was one of the most highly rhetorical of all the sixteenth-century prose writers, although his rhetoric was never decorative. Chapter one traces the beginnings of Scottish literary prose from 1490 onwards, examining such texts as John Ireland's The Meroure of Wyssdome, John Gau's The Richt Vay to the Kingdom of Hevin, The Complaynt of Scotland and so forth, and establishes that works before Knox reflect religious belief even at the levels of lexis and syntactic structure, but generally speaking, do not consistently and convincingly reveal the personalities of their authors (with the possible exception of the Complayner). Chapter two illustrates that Knox's prose is always double-edged; its rhetorical aims are both offensive and defensive, it is often psychologically self-expressive and simultaneously revealing of his fundamental religious beliefs. The remaining chapters attempt to identify the range of rhetorical devices through which Knox manifests his own character and his religion, to assess how they may have affected his audience, to establish his sources, and whenever possible, to set them within pre-existing literary traditions, Scottish or otherwise. Chapters one and five are concentrated especially on the historiographical milieu in mid-sixteenth century Scotland and beyond, in order to set The Historie of the Reformatioun, the first great work of Scots prose, in its proper context. Chapter five itself consists of a number of generic divisions which are isolated to facilitate detailed analysis of disparate literary strands in Knox's magnum opus. Thus, according to the author, as far as prose is concerned, Knox's rhetoric and literary works represent the culmination of homiletic and historiographical traditions, the maturation of incipient religious forces in the sixteenth century, and the earliest establishment in Scotland of a fully-rounded literary personality.

This thesis is concerned with the Revolutionary press in the provinces and Paris as it relates to the local female community. It aims to show that the Revolutionary press was a vehicle for community information both aimed at and originating from literate women who had access to printed material. That is to say, literate women used their local papers to advertise themselves and their wares, express their views on a subject, to seek answers to questions and also to refute false information which was circulating about them. In addition, local information which was relevant to women could be publicised in the pages of a newspaper and it would be read. Finally, when describing women in news reports these periodicals employed a stock of phrases and literary or linguistic devices to present a specific picture of the females in question. The way in which women were depicted was intended either to unite the Revolutionary community against a female foe or to exalt a particular woman as a beacon of Revolutionary virtues. The approach to the sources will be one of considering newspapers and journalistic rhetoric as being engaged in the process of creating their own view of the world from the raw material of actual events, views which promoted the political loyalties or the ethos of a particular journal. Since it aims to examine continuity and rupture between the pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary press, the time-scale for this thesis is 1780-1800. This allows for comparisons and contrasts to be made and the thesis will show that although the provincial press contained many of the elements found in their pre-Revolutionary predecessors, the cultural changes engendered by the Revolution meant that new elements of journalistic language and new subjects for discussion developed or emerged. This work is located in the existing body of literature on the French regional and Parisian press in the eighteenth century, particularly the work of Jeremy Popkin, Hugh Gough, Jean Sgard, Gilles Feyel and Pierre Rétat. It is also linked to works on the wider world of contemporary print, for example by Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier and to the literature by Olwen Hufton, Sarah Maza and Joan Landes on the experience and roles of eighteenth-century French women. Its place in the midst of all this literature is that of drawing together the strands of Popkin's, Gough's, Sgard's and Feyel's work to argue that the Revolutionary newspaper was an instrument not simply of general information for a particular community or section of the population but also of communication on subjects which were of importance to, or which were deemed by editors or government officials to be of importance to women.

This thesis examines the relationship between multilingualism and defamiliarisation in Joyce, Beckett, Nabokov and Rushdie. Focusing on Joyce’s Ulysses, Beckett’s Trilogy, Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, Pale Fire and Ada, and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the study considers the reasons for these authors’ uses a foreign languages and examines their specialised compositional processes. It evaluates the textual effects produced by these processes, and compares overtly multilingual effects (such as multilingual puns and the hybridisation of language) to more general characteristics of the authors’ prose-styles, including monolingual forms of defamiliarisation. The prose of all four authors is characterised by extreme forms of defamiliarisation, and the thesis develops the concept of ‘linguistic estrangement’ to elucidate a perceived relationship between each author’s perspective of ideological or literal estrangement from language and his subsequent estrangement of that language. In particular, these writers tend to turn the distinctive features of the foreigner’s perspective on language - semantic ambiguity and linguistic materiality - to positive effect: semantic ambiguity is used to produce puns, plays on words and linguistic overdetermination, while in focus on the material characteristics of language is fundamental to the construction of phonetic and rhythmic linguistic patterns. As a result, the work under scrutiny is often characterised by high levels of musicality, iconicity and textual performativity. Apparently ‘negative’ aspects of language - interlingual confusion, distortion, mistranslation, misunderstanding and misuse - thus form the basis of some of the most productive stylistic aspects, and indeed the radically innovative nature, of each author’s work. The thesis explores a wide array of evident intentions associated with such processes including, among others, mimetic, aesthetic, literary historical and socio-political concerns. Translational processes, interlingual contact and linguistic estrangement are thus demonstrated to be fundamental to the particular thematic and stylistic features of the work of each individual author. This study can also, more generally, be seen to address a central dynamic within modernist (and subsequent late-modernist and postmodernist) literary production.

This thesis examines some perceptions of collective behaviour and psychology in some nineteenth and twentieth century literature. Focusing on selected works by three novelists, Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge (1841) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Emile Zola's Germinal (1885) and Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fe (1935), it is an attempt to analyse the cultural representations of the nature, psychology and behaviour of crowds from 1841-1960. We attempt to contextualize the models of the crowd present in each novel and the interpenetration of the development of crowd theory and political experience. We also evaluate the novelists' attitudes towards the crowd and the implications of their approaches for public policy. We argue that Dickens, failing to distinguish between individual and collective psychology, has a pre-modern perception of the crowd. Zola, placing collective behaviour in a positivist framework presents a modern view of the crowd psychology that prefigures in essentials the classical crowd theory of Le Bon. Canetti, questioning the approach of received crowd theory, and the traditional presumption that the crowd is necessarily unconscious, instinctual and anti-social, presents a post-modern interpretation of the crowd which corresponds to the highly original insights of his crowd monograph, Crowds and Power.

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.