Approaching the idea of the library as a polyvocal, self-contradictory and even paradoxical dream, this thesis examines five select texts to examine how this dream emerges across vastly different representations in fiction. Discussed texts include Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel” and “The Book of Sand,” Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, and Thomas Wharton’s Salamander. Special attention is given to the archetypal opposition between daytime’s clarity and night’s disorder, as well as to Alberto Manguel’s two hypothesized library foundational myths, the Tower of Babel and the Library of Alexandria. Although it attempts to remain conscious of social realities surrounding and producing historical libraries, this thesis is primarily concerned with the textual irruption of libraries in fictional narratives, and while its argument articulates the problematic dimension of libraries, it also endeavours to show how libraries are healthy, necessary, and even inevitable human creations. / A survey of library representations in select literary texts.

The name of Tomas Wharton Phillips, (1835-1912), occurs quite frequently in the history of the Disciples of Christ. Probably his family name is best known by its association with Phillips University, Enid, Oklahoma. There has also been a renewed interest in him through the recent completion of the "T.W. Phillips Memorial Library" in Nashville, Tennessee, now the headquarters of the Disciples of Christ Historical Society. This general interst generated into a special interst, when, during the lectures on the history of the Disciples of Christ, a remark was made to the effect that "there was a need for a more adequte understanding of the place of T.W. Phillips in the Brotherhood of Disciples of Christ." This promoted the undertaking of a study of this layman.