This thesis traces the 'metaplot' of Ian McEwan's progress, through his professional writing. Completely unknown in 1971, his work has attracted increasing recognition, culminating in the Booker prize in 1998. Early in his career, he gained access to elements of his unconscious through free-association, active imagination, meditation and the use of recreational drugs. These elements, which surfaced gradually and piecemeal, include strong feelings associated with the Oedipus complex, difficulties with masculine self-identification, feelings of rejection, unresolved grief, wishes to regress to the latency period of childhood, and sexuality contaminated with anal-sadistic power issues. McEwan dealt with these themes by creating characters who expressed them through sexual deviations and violence or acted them through to their logical conclusion. Thus he was able to confront previously repressed aspects of his inner life and resolve some of his emotional problems in safety, while availing himself of rich material for his fiction. His writing is not autobiographical, but it will be demonstrated that events in his life and his changing beliefs and values are reflected in his work. He achieves an illusion of authenticity by including real people and events, familiar to readers from recent history and the news, in vividly described settings. He shares with the reader his interest in advances in science and his concerns about the dangers facing mankind and the evils of authoritarian and patriarchal structures in the microcosm and macrocosm of human institutions. He synthesises these components under a strong narrative shelter of complex plots, dramatic suspense, unexpected thrills and shocks. The psychodynamic interpretations offered in this thesis depend on a detailed study of McEwan's published work. Their aim is to isolate the separate threads in the fabric of his fiction and demonstrate the maturation and increasing sophistication of his work.

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According to Pierre Nora, “[m]emory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition”. Drawing on theories of memory and psychoanalysis, my thesis examines the role of memory as a narrative of the past in late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century Scottish literature. I challenge Nora’s supposition that memory and history are fundamentally opposed and I argue that modern Scottish literature uses a variety of forms of memory to interrogate traditional forms of history. In my Introduction, I set the paradigms for my investigation of memory. I examine the perceived paradox in Scottish literature between memory and history as appropriate ways to depict the past. Tracing the origins of this debate to the work of Walter Scott, I argue that he sets the precedent for writers of modernity, where the concerns are amplified in late twentieth and twenty-first century literature and criticism. While literary criticism, such as the work of Cairns Craig and Eleanor Bell, studies the trope of history, Scottish fiction, such as the writing of Alasdair Gray, James Robertson, and John Burnside, asserts the position of memory as a useful way of studying the past. Chapter One examines the transmission of memory. Using George Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe, I consider the implications of three methods of transferring memory. Mrs McKee’s refusal to disclose her experience indicates a refusal to mourn loss and to transmit memory. Skarf’s revision of historical narratives indicates a desire to share experience. The Mystery of the Ancient Horsemen demonstrates the use of ritual in the preservation and the communication of the past for future generations. Chapter Two studies the Gothic fiction of Emma Tennant and Elspeth Barker. I examine sensory experience as indicative of the interior and non-linear structure of memory. I argue that the refusal to accept personal and familial loss reveals problematic forms of memory. Chapter Three traces unacknowledged memory in Alice Thompson’s Pharos. I use Nicolas Abraham’s theory of the transgenerational phantom to consider the effects of this undisclosed memory. I argue that the past and its deliberate suppression haunt future generations. Chapter Four considers the use of nostalgia as a form of memory. I investigate the perceptions and definitions of nostalgia, particularly its use as a representation of the Scottish national past. Using Neil Gunn’s Highland River, I identify nostalgia’s diverse functions. I examine nostalgia as a way in which, through the Scottish diaspora, memory is transferred and exhibited beyond national boundaries. Chapter Five builds on the previous chapter and extends the analysis of the ways nostalgia functions. I study nostalgia’s manifestations in the diasporic Scottish-Canadian literature of Sara Jeanette Duncan, John Buchan, Eric McCormack, and Alastair MacLeod.

This thesis re-engages the work of the distinguished literary critic, Geoffrey H. Hartman as a means of interpreting postmodern literature. Contemporary literary criticism has acknowledged the value of Hartman’s work in thinking about contemporary culture but, until now, there have not been any attempts to apply his interpretative methods to the reading of postmodern fiction. By identifying some of Hartman’s main concerns and drawing on his revisions of his theory, this thesis offers a case study of a selection of postmodern texts, which are characteristic of the challenges that postmodern literature presents. The postmodern literary text becomes challenging for literary interpretation through its extreme experimentation and by textually transgressing traditional forms of narration. The postmodern text’s incorporation of images, its attention and use of assonance, and its itinerate, indiscriminate assemblage of diverse creative expressions complicates the interpretive task. I aim to show how Hartman’s critical contribution can inform the reading of the postmodern text but also, how the consideration of the postmodern highlights the significance of Hartman’s theoretical work. I begin by developing the complexities that the consideration of postmodern literature and Hartman’s critique present and relate the authors and texts that become the focus of this investigation in the chapters that follow. Chapter 2 considers the relationship of the postmodern text to its use of illustrations and images and explores what this relationship manifests for the nature of the postmodern. Chapter 3 draws on Hartman’s understanding of literary interpretation as the listening for different meanings of the word, with particular attention to the typographical manifestations of the dissemination of meaning in the creation of the postmodern novel. Chapter 4 examines the implications of the postmodern rejection of iii modernist concerns, in literary interpretation and postmodern theory and the effects of the postmodern condition on the development of identity and historical consciousness. Chapter 5 focuses more closely on the problems of narrative orientation and direction that develop through typographical experimentation and relates these concerns to the challenge of following Hartman’s intellectual progressions in his critical contributions. The final chapter of this thesis explores the nature and role of the contemporary critical essay in the postmodern condition and the future of literature.

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Esta dissertação, composta de três volumes (I. Biografia; II. Seleção de textos; e III. Catálogo bibliográfico), tem como objetivo resgatar a figura do escritor mineiro Jurandir Ferreira (1905-1997), contextualizando-o no cenário cultural de Poços de Caldas, cidade em que nasceu e residiu a maior parte da vida. Baseia-se para tanto em uma pesquisa de campo desenvolvida entre 1998 e 2005 (durante a Iniciação Científica e parte do Mestrado), composta basicamente de três etapas: 1. Consulta ao acervo do escritor; 2. Reunião e organização de textos de e sobre ele dispersos em periódicos; e 3. Entrevistas com escritores, amigos e familiares do autor. A literatura na estância balneária de Poços tardou a ultrapassar as ralas manifestações de jornal, devido, em grande parte, a uma cultura de entretenimento que os cassinos instalaram por lá. O primeiro romance só apareceu em 1948, com a edição de O céu entre montanhas, de Jurandir Ferreira. O autor incluído entre Os 18 melhores contos do Brasil, editado pela Bloch em 1968 publicou ainda coletâneas de contos, crônicas e poesias, além de um segundo romance e da novela Um ladrão de guarda-chuvas, que lhe valeu o Prêmio Guimarães Rosa de 1994. Do conjunto de sua obra onze títulos publicados em geral por editoras paulistas, como Martins, Saraiva e Duas Cidades destacam-se as crônicas, traçadas com estilo leve e seguro, que compõem o painel de uma vila interiorana, com sua gente, seus costumes e suas transformações. Ao refazer o percurso da vida intelectual de Jurandir Ferreira, nota-se que, paralelamente à carreira de escritor, ele se empenhou em construir um sistema literário orgânico em Poços, podendo ser considerado, pelo seu enorme esforço, o principal divulgador da literatura moderna naquelas regiões montanhosas. / This dissertation, composed of three volumes (I. Biography; II. Selection of texts; and III. Bibliographical catalog), aims to rescue the writer\'s personality of Jurandir Ferreira (1905-1997), bring him in to the cultural scenery context of Poços of Caldas, city he was born and lived most part of his life. This work was based in the field research developed between 1998 and 2005 (during the Scientific Initiation and part of the period of the Master\'s degree), an it was composed basically of three stages: 1.Studies of the writer\'s collection; 2. Organization of texts of and about him dispersed in periodical publication; and 3. Interviews with writers, friends and the authors family. The literature in the Watering Place of Poços delayed to cross the insipient manifestations of newspaper, due, mostly, the culture of entertainment that the casinos installed in the city. His first novel only appeared in 1948, with the edition of O céu entre montanhas, of Jurandir Ferreira. The author included among the eighteen better short story of Brazil, edited by Bloch in 1968 published so far collections of stories, chronicles and poetries, besides a second novel and of the fiction Um ladrão de guarda-chuvas, in which he was awarded the Guimarães Rosa prize in 1994. From the collection of his work eleven titles published in general by publishers from São Paulo, as Martins, Saraiva and Duas Cidades the most important are the chronicles, written with soft and safe style, that composes a picture of a countryside village, their people, their habits and their transformations. When we reestablish the trajectory of Jurandir Ferreira\'s intellectual life, we realized that, parallel to writer\'s career, he fought to build an organic literary system in Poços de Caldas, and we could consider him, by his enormous effort, the main divulger of the modern literature in those mountainous regions.

Esta dissertação, composta de três volumes (I. Biografia; II. Seleção de textos; e III. Catálogo bibliográfico), tem como objetivo resgatar a figura do escritor mineiro Jurandir Ferreira (1905-1997), contextualizando-o no cenário cultural de Poços de Caldas, cidade em que nasceu e residiu a maior parte da vida. Baseia-se para tanto em uma pesquisa de campo desenvolvida entre 1998 e 2005 (durante a Iniciação Científica e parte do Mestrado), composta basicamente de três etapas: 1. Consulta ao acervo do escritor; 2. Reunião e organização de textos de e sobre ele dispersos em periódicos; e 3. Entrevistas com escritores, amigos e familiares do autor. A literatura na estância balneária de Poços tardou a ultrapassar as ralas manifestações de jornal, devido, em grande parte, a uma cultura de entretenimento que os cassinos instalaram por lá. O primeiro romance só apareceu em 1948, com a edição de O céu entre montanhas, de Jurandir Ferreira. O autor incluído entre Os 18 melhores contos do Brasil, editado pela Bloch em 1968 publicou ainda coletâneas de contos, crônicas e poesias, além de um segundo romance e da novela Um ladrão de guarda-chuvas, que lhe valeu o Prêmio Guimarães Rosa de 1994. Do conjunto de sua obra onze títulos publicados em geral por editoras paulistas, como Martins, Saraiva e Duas Cidades destacam-se as crônicas, traçadas com estilo leve e seguro, que compõem o painel de uma vila interiorana, com sua gente, seus costumes e suas transformações. Ao refazer o percurso da vida intelectual de Jurandir Ferreira, nota-se que, paralelamente à carreira de escritor, ele se empenhou em construir um sistema literário orgânico em Poços, podendo ser considerado, pelo seu enorme esforço, o principal divulgador da literatura moderna naquelas regiões montanhosas. / This dissertation, composed of three volumes (I. Biography; II. Selection of texts; and III. Bibliographical catalog), aims to rescue the writer\'s personality of Jurandir Ferreira (1905-1997), bring him in to the cultural scenery context of Poços of Caldas, city he was born and lived most part of his life. This work was based in the field research developed between 1998 and 2005 (during the Scientific Initiation and part of the period of the Master\'s degree), an it was composed basically of three stages: 1.Studies of the writer\'s collection; 2. Organization of texts of and about him dispersed in periodical publication; and 3. Interviews with writers, friends and the authors family. The literature in the Watering Place of Poços delayed to cross the insipient manifestations of newspaper, due, mostly, the culture of entertainment that the casinos installed in the city. His first novel only appeared in 1948, with the edition of O céu entre montanhas, of Jurandir Ferreira. The author included among the eighteen better short story of Brazil, edited by Bloch in 1968 published so far collections of stories, chronicles and poetries, besides a second novel and of the fiction Um ladrão de guarda-chuvas, in which he was awarded the Guimarães Rosa prize in 1994. From the collection of his work eleven titles published in general by publishers from São Paulo, as Martins, Saraiva and Duas Cidades the most important are the chronicles, written with soft and safe style, that composes a picture of a countryside village, their people, their habits and their transformations. When we reestablish the trajectory of Jurandir Ferreira\'s intellectual life, we realized that, parallel to writer\'s career, he fought to build an organic literary system in Poços de Caldas, and we could consider him, by his enormous effort, the main divulger of the modern literature in those mountainous regions.

This thesis examines the ways in which the Celtic aesthetic emerges in case studies of four writers from the last century: Brian O'Nolan (under the pseudonyms Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen), David Jones, George Mackay Brown, and John McGahern. It considers a wide selection of their writing across literary genres, including the novel, the short story, the essay, and poetry, but privileges prose and fiction. This study undertakes a formal analysis of these texts using a conceptual, thematic, and critically biographical approach. The archival methodology informing such an approach brings new scholarship into focus that either aligns these authors for the first time or reevaluates their relationships. O'Nolan, Jones, Brown, and McGahern are united here because they put forward their own theories of the Celtic aesthetic and modernized these differing representational strategies when they applied them in their fictional practices. My analysis of each writer begins with a definition of the "Celtic Aesthetic" then draws out how the Celtic is represented in his literary work, showing what we gain from reading the work within a modernist Celtic aesthetic. O'Nolan proposes a Celtic realism within a modernist understanding of the unity between form and content. He writes within a collaborative framework, retrieving modes of thought and literary effects from medieval Irish sources and scholarly texts. He and his peers were concerned with making an Irish-Celtic contribution to modern literature. David Jones develops a visual aesthetic in an Anglo-Welsh context, arguing that the Celtic enhances the potential for metamorphosis through a combination of contraries. Jones establishes a connection between the First World War and ancient Welsh tradition to symbolically pattern the experience of fighting in the trenches. George Mackay Brown shares this idea about Celtic metamorphosis and war. He claims the Celtic is a decorative aesthetic, one that is bound up with Roman Catholic theology and his understanding of Eucharistic anamnesis. Writing almost exclusively about the Orkney islands, Brown portrays the Celtic as an aspect of the Orkney's archipelagic modernism, informed by his own Scottish Gaelic linguistic heritage but also connected by sea to Wales and Ireland. John McGahern implies his theory about Celtic style in his discussions of Gaelic linguistic inheritance and the effect this produces on his English writing. McGahern also shares Brown's mysticism and O'Nolan's practice of depicting eternity in the West of Ireland. There are thus three converging lines of inquiry that will frame this project: first, how does this minor strain in modernist literature animate this set of literary works? Second, how do those characteristics inform our understanding of what the term "Celtic" means in a twentieth-century context and for contemporary readers? And third, what does this contribute to the current field of modernist studies? The Celtic for these writers is transnational, hybrid, decorative, and the means through which their questions about violence and despoliation could find expression in twentieth-century literature.