In this paper, I first examine the Middle Scots poem, "Christis Kirk of the Green" (referred to as "Christ's Kirk"), and then study the poems in the Scottish vernacular which have been influenced by it. "Christ's Kirk", which may have been composed in the fifteenth century, has popular merry-making for its theme, and its creator has used a distinctive stanzaic form in his depiction of the sights of a rural fair. In my investigation, I have considered first the structural and thematic antecedents of "Christ's Kirk". My next step has been to examine its bibliographical and literary history. Thereafter, I have studied other poems of the same genre composed before the year 1560: "Peblis to the Play", "Sym and his brudir", and "The Justing and Debait at the Drum". The employment of the "Christ's Kirk" stanza — or a modified form thereof — for satirical accounts of social gatherings in eighteenth-century Scotland is the theme of Chapter 5, and its use by a modern poet describing the Edinburgh International Festival is examined in the final chapter of this thesis. By a study of these poems, drawn from five centuries of Scottish vernacular literature, I have demonstrated that the tradition established by "Christ's Kirk" has continued to be useful up to the twentieth century as one literary method of chronicling, in a satiric fashion, the actions of people at popular gatherings. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Scottish authors throughout the ages have linked their art to their nationality. When the contemporary writer A. L. Kennedy observes, 'I believe that fiction with a thread of Scottishness in its truth has helped me to know how to be myself as a Scot,' she pinpoints the value of literature for both her predecessors and peers. However, the idea of Scottish literature as an autonomous and coherent national literature is controversial. Questions concerning self-sufficiency, unity, and value continue to haunt the idea of a Scottish literary tradition. Many studies have attempted to address the stereotype of Scottish literature's fragmentation and its place as a sub-category within English literature; however, few critical works have considered specific literary forms as constituting a basis for the Scottish literary consciousness. 'A Thread of Scottishness' argues that Scottish literature uniquely sustains an allegorical framework traceable from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the present. Chapter one discusses allegory's history, definition and relationship with the reader. Chapters two, three, and four focus upon the specific theoretical strands of the Scottish allegorical form: nature, nationalism, and morality, respectively. Each of these three chapters begins with a discussion of works from the medieval period and follows the progression of the Scots' use of allegory through time. More modern works, including S. Ferrier's Marriage, R. L. Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae, N. Shepherd's The Weatherhouse, are shown to reflect the narrative traditions of medieval and Renaissance texts, such as R. Henryson's Morall Fabillis and The Testament of Cresseid, King James I's The Kingis Quair, and Sir D. Lindsay's Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. Thus, through a consideration of the use of allegory within specific Scottish texts, I posit continuity for Scottish literature as a whole.

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This PhD thesis proposes an Irish-Scottish comparative framework for examining a range of shared ethical, socio-political and theoretical concerns, pertaining to aspects of class and gender, in contemporary Irish, Northern Irish and Scottish literature. My approach galvanises Lévinasian ethics with the socio-cultural category of the ‘subaltern’ in relation to postcolonial, Marxist and feminist theories in order to trace what I term a ‘subaltern aesthethics’ between selected works of Scottish, Northern Irish and Irish writing that show a specific sensibility to the social inequalities and inequities that are part of the current restructuring of the global capitalist system. My work explores how these texts engage with both the processes of political and economic transformation in the Atlantic archipelago, and critical-theoretical approaches which, I argue, show the tendency to subsume the specificity and intensity of subaltern concerns. The first chapter delineates key debates in Irish and Scottish studies, offering a critique of conventional applications of postcolonial and postmodern theory. I demonstrate that dominant versions of postcolonialism are analytically entrapped in the nation as a paradigm. Additionally, I show that for all its apparent celebration of difference, postmodernism reduces otherness to the terms of the self. Chapter 2 outlines the model of a subaltern counter-history as a theoretical framework for reading ethical issues of historicity on the basis of texts by James Kelman, Patrick McCabe and Robert McLiam Wilson. This engagement with history is continued in chapter 3, which investigates the desire to archive Northern Ireland’s recent past in the context of its peace process in Glenn Patterson’s and Eoin McNamee’s recent novels. The emphasis of the three subsequent chapters turns the attention of my counter-historical method to issues of gender. The fourth chapter evaluates the material consequences that the gendering of the imagined nation has on female bodies in particular. Whereas the focus lies here specifically on the Irish context, the following chapter 5 engages in a comparative reading of traumatic herstories in three Irish and Scottish novels by Roddy Doyle, Janice Galloway and Jennifer Johnston. The purpose of both of these chapters is to examine women’s experience of disempowerment and their struggle to reclaim agency. My last chapter then investigates the relationship between men, gender and nation in the allegorical imagiNation of Alasdair Gray and McCabe with specific regard to the turn to the feminine that has taken place in contemporary criticism.

This essay is a psychoanalytical reading of the Scottish author Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The protagonist is a charismatic teacher, who is popular among her pupils, but who appears to use her power and position merely in order to manipulate her pupils. It appears that Miss Brodie’s main interest is not her pupils’ academic achievements, but she has a different agenda on her mind. This essay examines the unconscious motives behind the protagonist’s peculiar treatment of her pupils by learning more about what takes place in the human mind, when the individual starts to listen to the sound of defensive mechanisms instead of to the sound of logic.

This thesis examines the phenomenon of Sir Walter Scott's extraordinary Victorian popularity. Focussing on criticism of his Waverley Novels between 1832 - the year of his death - and the end of the century, the thesis plots the development and terms of Scott's eminence. An introductory chapter sets out principal areas of study, being followed by a section leading up to 1832. Then follow analyses of critical work on Scott by, respectively, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Carlyle, Walter Bagehot, John Ruskin, Leslie Stephen, Richard Hutton and Julia Wedgwood. The thesis concludes with an epilogic section covering critics of the late nineteenth century, including Frederic Harrison and Andrew Lang. In each instance the context of each critic's wider work figures prominently. The thesis contends that large elements of Scott's achievement received relatively little attention in Victorian criticism. These are Scotti,s Enlightenment interests in speculative history and detailed, almost sociological, methods of composition, as well as the 'experimental' character of his work. By contrast, much was made in criticism of what may be summarised as his 'health' and 'beneficial effects'. It is claimed that the construction of such consensual critical notions about the merits of Scott's very popular work had a great deal to do with the buttressing and underpinning of some Victorian attitudes. While these varied with critics' own preoccupations - and Scott's 'malleability' is remarkable - Scott's role was so significant in Victorian culture that his employment, within what was still a relatively eclectic and formally undisciplined critical practice, constituted significant ideological manoeuvring. Specifically, Scott's remit in Victorian criticism was most usually to represent and validate some kind of opposition to the present. This both excluded much of his achievement, and also narrowed the terms of his appraisal so as to permit a revealing coalescence of literary with social, political and even racial arguments. This thesis traces the increasing definition of such a pattern within Victorian criticism of the Waverley Novels.

Neil Gunn was one of the principal writers of the Scottish Literary Renaissance movement, the earlytwentieth century flowering of modernist literature in Scotland. Although some commentators have noticed the frequent mentions of psychoanalysis in his work, until now no wider study has been undertaken. In this thesis, I look at Gunn's interest in psychoanalysis in a number of different ways. This is down with the two-fold aim of first, providing a modern assessment of Gunn's work, and second, examining more broadly the history of modernism in Scottish literature. In the introduction, I propose an understanding of modernism based on the literary exploration of new theories of, in this case the mind. I argue that a complex understanding of the interplay of these new theories and literature serves better than a more simple concern with either intellectual developments or changes in literary form alone. In the first section, I look at Sun Circle and The Serpent in the light of psychoanalytic theories of 'primitive' psychology and the history of religion. In the second, I look at Highland River and The Silver Darlings in the light of Freudian and Jungian theories of personal development, regression, and childhood. In the third, I look at the way in which Gunn explores Freud's theories of the warring life- and deathinstincts in both The Shadow and The Lost Chart. I conclude by looking briefly at how Gunn's literary explorations of psychoanalysis link with the work of later writers such as Muriel Spark, Robin Jenkins, Alexander Trocchi, Alasdair Gray, Kenneth White and Alan Spence.

This is a scholarly edition of Susan Ferriers (1782-1854) second novel, <i>The Inheritance</i> (1824). I want to reclaim its value as a novel that reveals much about nineteenth-century Scottish notions of class, gender, and nation. Ferrier was among many writers influenced by the development of the Scottish Renaissance. Anand Chitnis claims that this Scottish flowering began in earnest by 1750 and ended by 1830, during which time Scotland emerged from centuries of war and oppression to establish itself as a major force in Europes intellectual and scientific community (4). Improvements in transportation opened up opportunities for migration and travel, connecting Scotland with the rest of Britain. This changing climate influenced significantly Ferrier and her Scottish contemporaries, who adopted recurrent themes, symbols, and settings in their works to establish a sense of coherence within their own society. Ferriers works feature elements that are fundamental to Scottish womens writing as a whole. These elements, such as a powerful sense of locality,distinctive characters, and use of the Scottish vernacular, are especially evident in <i>The Inheritance</i>. In utilizing the 1853 edition as copytext, I adhere to Jerome McGanns notion that each text enters the world under determinate socio-historical conditions, which can be variously defined and imagined (9). The production of a text, therefore, can be influenced by changes in perspective of the author, as well as the opinions of publishers,reviewers, family, and friends. In 1850, in response to a letter from Bentley inviting Ferrier to make changes to the stereotypes of the 1841 edition in his possession, Ferrier asked that Bentley remove the existing illustrations and vignettes and make some substantive and accidental changes to the text. These appear to have been attended to, although Bentley did keep one of the illustrations as frontispiece. At this time, Ferrier also allowed her name to be released as author of the text. This present edition is collated against the 1824 edition held at the National Library of Scotland. As one of my aims is to illustrate the nature of literary production during this period, idiosyncrasies of spelling and punctuation are left unchanged. A few misprints are corrected as indicated in the footnotes. I have included separately accidental and substantive changes between the 1841 and 1853 texts. Aside from a comprehensive introduction, I also include a brief chronology of Ferriers life and works,an appendix that includes a selection of illustrations from various editions, and a list of editions of <i>The Inheritance</i>.

This is a scholarly edition of Susan Ferriers (1782-1854) second novel, <i>The Inheritance</i> (1824). I want to reclaim its value as a novel that reveals much about nineteenth-century Scottish notions of class, gender, and nation. Ferrier was among many writers influenced by the development of the Scottish Renaissance. Anand Chitnis claims that this Scottish flowering began in earnest by 1750 and ended by 1830, during which time Scotland emerged from centuries of war and oppression to establish itself as a major force in Europes intellectual and scientific community (4). Improvements in transportation opened up opportunities for migration and travel, connecting Scotland with the rest of Britain. This changing climate influenced significantly Ferrier and her Scottish contemporaries, who adopted recurrent themes, symbols, and settings in their works to establish a sense of coherence within their own society. Ferriers works feature elements that are fundamental to Scottish womens writing as a whole. These elements, such as a powerful sense of locality,distinctive characters, and use of the Scottish vernacular, are especially evident in <i>The Inheritance</i>. In utilizing the 1853 edition as copytext, I adhere to Jerome McGanns notion that each text enters the world under determinate socio-historical conditions, which can be variously defined and imagined (9). The production of a text, therefore, can be influenced by changes in perspective of the author, as well as the opinions of publishers,reviewers, family, and friends. In 1850, in response to a letter from Bentley inviting Ferrier to make changes to the stereotypes of the 1841 edition in his possession, Ferrier asked that Bentley remove the existing illustrations and vignettes and make some substantive and accidental changes to the text. These appear to have been attended to, although Bentley did keep one of the illustrations as frontispiece. At this time, Ferrier also allowed her name to be released as author of the text. This present edition is collated against the 1824 edition held at the National Library of Scotland. As one of my aims is to illustrate the nature of literary production during this period, idiosyncrasies of spelling and punctuation are left unchanged. A few misprints are corrected as indicated in the footnotes. I have included separately accidental and substantive changes between the 1841 and 1853 texts. Aside from a comprehensive introduction, I also include a brief chronology of Ferriers life and works,an appendix that includes a selection of illustrations from various editions, and a list of editions of <i>The Inheritance</i>.

The fictions of James Kelman are most intriguing when read in terms of the frictions they reveal. This thesis defines these frictions and uses theories of exile, postcoloniality, nationalism, space and the “ordinary” in order to elucidate them. Kelman’s career has been fraught with tensions born of a troubled relationship with the British literary establishment. Kelman puts this down to the censorship and elitism he believes define that establishment, and his self-confessed refusal to conform to its expectations. This thesis considers the perception of exile that has become the vantage point from which he has written about the lives of marginalised characters and through which he deconstructs Scottish identity and the plight of the Glaswegian working classes. This thesis focuses on three of Kelman’s finest works of fiction: How Late It Was, How Late (1994), A Disaffection (1989) and The Busconductor Hines (1984), each of which was written in the period between Margaret Thatcher’s taking office in 1979 and Scotland’s successful devolution in 1997. This period has proved to be a defining one for Scotland and its latter years have been marked by the development of a newly confident sense of Scottish identity which rejects English hegemony as well traditionally parochial notions of Scottishness. This has informed, and been informed by, a new movement within Scottish literature that seeks to relaunch Scottish culture through a rejection of both past frustrations and “couthie” representations of Scotland in favour of more productive explorations of wider human concerns. This thesis makes a case for the key role Kelman has played in this shift, and challenges the widely held perception that his work does little more that mourn a past way of life and expose a relentlessly bleak present.