Scotland has enjoyed a late and significant flowering of theatre since the late 1960s. This project explores what I believe to have been a Renaissance that has occurred in Scottish theatre since 1969 and tests my thesis that at the core of this revival lie profound connections to the related concepts of Europeanness and Modernism. The work combines a considerable quantity of new material, generated through exclusive interviews conducted with major players in this Renaissance (both theatre directors and dramatists), with my own analyses and interaction with the existing critical and academic literature. The thesis begins with a Preface addressing various facets of European Modernism and their relations to the development of Scottish theatre since the late Sixties. Chapter 1 of the work offers a detailed consideration of the role played in Scottish theatre's revival by Giles Havergal's thirty-four year reign as artistic director at Glasgow's Citizens Theatre, and explores the manner in which Havergal's work was, or was not, taken forward by his successors Jeremy Raison (2003-2010) and Dominic Hill (2010 to the present).Moving on from the establishing of a European Modernist aesthetic at the Citizens in the 1970s, the thesis contends (in Chapter 2) that this aesthetic was disseminated more widely in Scottish theatre in the 1980s, and that the driving force in that dissemination was Communicado theatre company. Chapter 3 addresses the emergence of a generation of Scottish theatremakers in the 1990s whose work, arguably, represents the clearest and strongest reflection of European Modernist aesthetics in new theatre produced in Scotland. This chapter comprises interviews (in question and answer format) with the five artists who I consider to be the leading figures in the "golden generation" of the Nineties, followed by analyses of the interviews. The interviewees are writers David Greig, Zinnie Harris, David Harrower and Anthony Neilson, and the auteur director/designer Stewart Laing. Finally, in Chapter 4 and the Conclusion, the thesis considers the way in which the National Theatre of Scotland (established in 2006) has mapped onto and contributed towards the European Modernist strand in Scottish Theatre. This is followed by an analysis of the possible future for this tradition in live drama in Scotland.

This thesis reads the twentieth-century novel in light of its engagement with multilingualism. It treats the multilingual as a recurring formal preoccupation for writers working predominantly in English, but also as an emergent historical problematic through which they confront the linguistic and political inheritances of empire. The project thus understands European modernism as emerging from empire, and reads its formal innovations as engagements with the histories and quotidian realities of language use in the empire and in the metropolis. In addition to arguing for a rooting of modernism in the language histories of empire, I also argue for the multilingual as a potential linkage between European modernist writing and the writing of decolonisation, treating the Caribbean as a particularly productive region for this kind of enquiry. Ultimately, I argue that these periodical groupings - the modernist and the postcolonial - can be understood as part of a longer chronology of the linguistic legacy of empire. The thesis thus takes its case studies from across the twentieth century, moving between Europe and the Caribbean. The first chapter considers Joseph Conrad as the paradigmatic multilingual writer of late colonialism and early modernism, and the second treats Jean Rhys as a problematic late modernist of Caribbean extraction. The second half of the thesis reads texts more explicitly preoccupied with the Caribbean: the third chapter thus considers linguistic histories of Guyana and the Americas in the works of the experimental novelist Wilson Harris, and the fourth is concerned with the inventive and polemical contemporary Dominican-American novelist, Junot Díaz.