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The Culture is a utopian civilization that features in the science-fiction novels of Iain M. Banks that has some claim to be as comprehensively satisfactory and universal in its appeal as possible. After sketching out a space of mechanisms by which fictional utopias can maintain their civilization and prevent themselves from collapsing, I situate the Culture in this space. By close reading of five novels, I then clarify two items: the purpose (or lack thereof) the Culture and its citizens can find within the society; and the extent to which the Culture derives its reason for existence from the external wretchedness of less enlightened societies. Using an analogue of Kant’s categorical imperative, I attempt to expose the Culture to its own justificatory logic, and determine if it withstands the onslaught. Specifically, I consider the limiting case where the Culture insistently and consistently works towards the realization of its implicit purposes, and whether this leads to contradiction. Alongside this literary analysis, I highlight and develop thought-experiments and scenarios taken from or inspired by these novels that present interesting parallels to the contemporary world, for the purpose of incorporating these into lesson plans for upper secondary education. Finally, I outline three educational plans based on this material, one more intense than the others, to suit the different demands of the syllabus for upper and lower-level courses of English.

The purpose of this thesis was to explore the boundary between human and other created by virtual worlds in contemporary science fiction novels. After a close reading of the three novels: Surface Detail, Existence, and Lady of Mazes, and the application of contemporary literary theories, the boundary presented itself and led to the discovery of where the human becomes other. The human becomes other when it becomes lost to the virtual world and no longer exists or interacts with material reality. Each of the primary texts exhibits both virtual reality and humanity in different ways, and each is explored to find where humanity falls apart. Overall, when these theories are applied to real life there is no real way to avoid the potential for fully immersive virtual worlds, but there are ways to avoid their alienating effects.

This thesis discusses contemporary Scottish crime fiction in light of its transatlantic contexts. It argues that, despite participating in a globalized popular genre, examples of Scottish crime fiction nevertheless meaningfully intervene in notions of Scottishness. The first chapter examines Scottish appropriations of the hard-boiled mode in the work of William McIlvanney, Ian Rankin, and Irvine Welsh, using their representation of traditional masculinity as an index for wider concerns about community, class, and violence. The second chapter examines examples of Scottish crime fiction that exploit the baroque aesthetics of gothic and noir fiction as a means of dealing with the same socio-political contexts. It argues that the work of Iain Banks and Louise Welsh draws upon a tradition of distinctively Scottish gothic in order to articulate concerns about the re-incursion of barbarism within contemporary civilized societies. The third chapter examines the parodic, carnivalesque aspects of contemporary Scottish crime fiction in the work of Christopher Brookmyre and Allan Guthrie. It argues that the structure of parody replicates the structure of genre, meaning that the parodic examples dramatize the textual processes at work in more central examples of Scottish crime fiction. The fourth chapter focuses on examples of Scottish crime fiction that participate in the culturally English golden-age and soft-boiled traditions. Unpacking the darker, more ambivalent aspects of these apparently cosy and genteel traditions, this final chapter argues that the novels of M. C. Beaton and Kate Atkinson obliquely refract the particularly Scottish concerns about modernity that the more central examples more openly express.