Title: Competency profile of PR professional in sport Objective: The objective is to identify competencies required to a position of PR professional in sport. The aim of a survey is to verify the level of competencies which follows compiling competency profile and comparison with existing profile of PR specialist. Methods: The objective is achieved using survey, interview and analysis of competency models database. Results: The result of this paper is competency profile of PR professional in sport, which contains competencies divided into several sectors and their required level. Key words: Public relations, PR professional, sport PR, competence

This thesis represents the first extensive examination of the ‘faithful fictions’ of the Orkney writer George Mackay Brown (1921-1996). Until now, critical appreciations of the Catholic imagination informing Brown’s opus have been vague and Brown has been seen as a throwback; his Catholicism only part of a reactionary impulse that denies modernity a place in his oeuvre. Through a thematic critical analysis of four major strands of Brown’s corpus that display his Catholic imagination, it is contended that Brown has been misunderstood by the Scottish literary-critical tradition, and that his creative work on religious subjects is diverse, experimental and devotional. The thesis provides a biography of Brown’s faith. It looks at his conversion accounts, and it discusses the interaction between these and other accounts of (spiritual) autobiography. The thesis looks in a detailed way at three mediators of grace in Brown’s faithful fictions: the Virgin Mary, St Magnus, and Christ, whose nativity Brown frequently depicts. By discussing their different roles, depictions and the various literary forms that tell their stories, this study will discover the ways in which Brown encapsulates his Catholic faith in his creative work. The thesis questions whether Catholicism harms his literary output, as some critics have suggested, and shows the ways in which Brown’s writing interacts with other Catholic literature – old and new, at home and abroad. Manuscripts, including several unpublished poems, plays and stories, will be referenced throughout, as will rare and unseen correspondence. The thesis takes in the entire scope of Brown’s body of work and is not limited to a single mode or genre in his corpus. Ultimately, this study contends that Brown is an excellent case-study of the neglected Catholic writer in twentieth-century Scotland, and that there is much work to be done in appraising the Catholic imaginations of many post-Reformation Scottish Catholic writers.

This Creative Writing thesis comprises two parts. Part one consists of two essays on questions that arose, and which I wished to explore, in relation to my poetry writing, and it concludes with a selection of my poems entitled Pillow Lava. The first essay considers reflections on the use of conventional form in critical writings and poetry of Thom Gunn and Michael Donaghy; the second explores the relationship between perception and the use of metaphor in poems by Craig Raine and Elizabeth Bishop. Part two consists of two essays relating to my translation of poetry by the German writer Sarah Kirsch, and concludes with my translations of poems by her entitled Ice Roses: Selected Poems by Sarah Kirsch. In the first essay, I introduce the life and work of the poet; in the second, I discuss my literary translations of some of her early poems through comparison with non-literary translations by others interested in Kirsch’s writing for political rather than aesthetic reasons.

In Ordinary Time consists of two parts, a critical introduction and novel. Focused by my sister Heather Benning’s site-specific sculptural installations, the introductory essays perform a fine topography of place, specifically of the wilderness and watersheds of my natal home in central Saskatchewan, a landscape exhausted by the current reign of corporate agriculture. While each essay can be considered discretely, they are better read as a whole as themes, stories, and various thinkers are returned to in the manner of leitmotifs. With each return, understanding deepens and alters – this movement suggestive of the ongoing nature of my meditation on place, how it shapes who we are. To further trace my continued engagement with these themes, the introduction is interleaved with poems from my collection of new and selected, The Season’s Vagrant Light (Carcanet Press 2015). Similarly, In Ordinary Time constitutes an archive of the subtleties that generate a sense of place. Set mainly between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s, the novel centres on eight-year-old Luke Abend and his mother, Magda, descendents of German-speaking, Catholic Russians, who immigrated to rural Saskatchewan to escape religious persecution. Their intertwined narratives, which give voice to the harsh exigencies of life on a subsistence farm, reveal that not only ancestral history and inherited faith determine identity, but also that intimacy with place shapes who we are. Refashioned from the remnants of the family farm, both In Ordinary Time and the introductory essays will stand in stark contrast with Saskatchewan’s corporatized prairie. These works will invite the reader in, even as she is expelled by the current un-livability of the milieux. By coupling the sensation of intimate dwelling with the contemporary reality of rural abandonment, these projects will make manifest the complex costs attendant to the dramatic shift in Saskatchewan’s farming terrain.

This thesis examines a selection of Lady Gregory’s original dramatic works. Between the opening of the Abbey Theatre in 1904 and the playwright’s death in 1932, Gregory’s plays accounted for the highest number of stage productions in comparison to her co-directors William Butler Yeats and John Millington Synge. As such, this thesis analyses examples ranging from her most well-known and successful pieces, including The Rising of the Moon and The Gaol Gate, to lesser known plays such as The Wrens, The White Cockade, Shanwalla and Dave. With a focus on the historical, bibliographical, and political contexts, the plays are analysed not only with regard to the printed texts, but also in the context of theatrical performances. In order to re-evaluate Gregory’s contribution to the Abbey, this thesis is divided into three chapters dealing with dominant themes throughout her career as a playwright: Empire, class, and religion.

Although Barker began in the early 1970s as a Marxist satirical playwright, by 2005 his approach had shifted in focus to such an extent that he felt able to define his theatre as having ‘many of the characteristics of a religion.’ This study investigates the relationship between Barker’s theatre and religious and spiritual ideas, focusing on two key influences: the medieval Christian mystical theologian Meister Eckhart and religious and mythic elements of ancient Greek tragedy. Barker’s dramatic engagement with Abrahamic monotheism reveals his interest in early biblical portrayals of God and his appropriation of dominant Christian tropes, notably apocalypse and rebirth. The specific influence of Eckhart’s apophatic theology, his Neoplatonic conception of the One and his doctrine of ‘detachment’ are shown to inform aspects of Barker’s work, including his theoretical text Death, The One and the Art of Theatre. Greek tragedy is examined as a religious and ritual event, establishing parallels with Barker’s view of tragedy as a sacred art that challenges rational and moral ideals by generating ecstatic emotions through an imagined proximity to death. Greek narratives that centre on an encounter with the dead, nekyia and katabasis, are explored in connection with Barker’s drama, along with ritual initiation in Greek mystery cult. Finally there is an investigation into the immoral, ecstatic, erotic, and thanatic aspects of the female protagonist in Greek tragedy and how these aspects of the tragic female continue and are appropriated in Barker’s contemporary tragedy. Eckhartian mystical theology and elements of classical tragic spirituality help to give Barker’s theatre a unique and mysterious dimension. The recurring antagonistic female archetype of ‘the one’ in Barker’s drama expresses core aspects of this spirituality: sexual ecstasy, proximity to death, and detachment from morality and ideology.

In China, Jane Austen is today widely acknowledged as one of the greatest English writers. Yet her literary reputation has altered greatly since her works were first introduced to Chinese readers in the early decades of the twentieth century. This thesis will examine and explain the major changes in the Chinese reception of Austen in light of the political, social, and cultural upheavals experienced by the country over the last century. The introduction will provide a historical overview of Chinese translation and criticism of Austen’s novels. During the first half of the twentieth century, Austen was generally disapproved of by Chinese critics for restricting her writing to a limited social sphere and her fame therefore grew slowly. I will discuss the influence of Chinese political history on critical assessments regarding Austen’s conservatism and realism. Following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Marxism came to dominate the literary and cultural scenes. As a consequence, some Chinese translators attempted to incorporate Austen’s works into a Marxist canon, but failed. I will investigate the profound impact of the Communist Party’s political campaigns on the translation and reception of Western literature in China from the 1950s to the 1970s. However, since the 1980s Austen has enjoyed a rapid rise in critical reputation and popularity in China, with her six major novels all appearing in Chinese. However, there are presently significant differences in the reception of each of these novels. The six main chapters of this thesis will examine the reasons behind the popularity of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma and the relative obscurity of Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. In doing so, I will explore Chinese critics’ views of Austen’s connection to feminism, conservatism, and romanticism as well as areas of literary debate in her time. I will demonstrate the radical changes in Chinese approaches to Austen’s works in recent decades. This thesis also aims to compare the reception of Austen in China to that in Britain, and contains questionnaire and interview surveys that were conducted among undergraduate students at the University of Nottingham’s China and UK campuses.

This thesis investigates a spectrum of literary, theological, and mythological allusions to the Fall of Humanity in a representative selection of novels by Anthony Burgess. Burgess's use of allusion is fundamentally affected by his natal Roman Catholicism, his view of himself as an exile, and his Augustinian vision of the human condition. The study seeks to identify how Burgess applies theological concepts of the Fall and Original Sin as a lens through which to read other myths, and how these allusions to myth are then absorbed and manipulated within his fiction. The central argument is that Burgess employs irony to ridicule valorised, idyllic, or supernatural elements from mythology, epic poetry, and romance in a degraded, yet comic, postlapsarian environment. This thesis will begin by outlining Burgess's preoccupation with Original Sin and the Fall, and argue that the presentation of the postlapsarian state is a core theme throughout his writing. The critic Northrop Frye's discussion of the archetypes and central features of myth, romance and irony – and his focus upon the Bible as the bedrock of western literature – provides an ideal framework to analyse the mythical allusions used throughout Burgess's fiction. Though Frye is the basis of the critical approach in this thesis, Mikhail Bakhtin's essay 'Epic and Novel', from The Dialogic Imagination, is also drawn upon. Each chapter involves close textual reading, paying specific attention to mythological, biblical, and literary allusions to the Fall, underpinned by the theories of Frye and Bakhtin. The first chapter examines allusions to the wilderness in The Malayan Trilogy (1956-9) and The Doctor is Sick (1960). These novels parody the katabasis, or hero's descent into the underworld, in order to dramatise the destruction of the modern individual in the face of greater forces of disorder. The second chapter considers A Vision of Battlements (1965) and Any Old Iron (1989), investigating the connection between the descent into a temporal world and the onset of warfare and violence in human society. The third chapter turns to Tremor of Intent (1966) and MF (1971), and argues that these novels present a battle between individuals who acknowledge their Original Sin, opposing sterile, solipsistic, and tyrannical forces. The fourth chapter explores the conflict in Earthly Powers (1980) between the heretical notion that evil stems solely from the devil, and the opposing Augustinian vision of evil at the core of human civilisation. Finally, an analysis of A Clockwork Orange (1962) and The Wanting Seed (1962) proposes that the novel form best expresses the capacity of fallen humans to choose and change in a mutable world. The present study aims to demonstrate that Burgess uses allusion to clarify the nature of the Fall to the modern reader. I conclude that Burgess does not yearn for a lost Eden or Golden Age in his fiction, but instead celebrates the postlapsarian state as an authentic human vision. I eschew a socio-political or biographical approach to Burgess's writing, offering an alternate way of interpreting his novels through close textual analysis of mythological, biblical, and literary references.

Prophecy — that is, the action of foretelling or predicting the future, particularly a future thought to represent the will of God — is an ever-present aspect of Shakespeare’s historical dramaturgy. The purpose of this thesis is to offer a reading of the dramas of Shakespeare’s English history cycles — from 1 Henry VI to Henry V — that focuses exclusively upon the role played by prophecy in representing and reconstructing the past. It seeks to show how, through close attention to the moments when prophecy emerges in these historical dramas, we might arrive at a different understanding of them, both as dramatic narratives and as meditations on the nature of history itself. As this thesis seeks to demonstrate, moreover, Shakespeare’s treatment of prophecy in any one play can be viewed, in effect, as a key that can take us to the heart of that drama’s wider concerns. The comparatively recent conception of a body of historical plays that are individually distinct and no longer chained to the Tillyardian notion of a ‘Tudor myth’ (or any other ‘grand narrative’) has freed prophecy from effectively fulfilling the rather one-dimensional role of chorus. However, it has also raised as-yet-unanswered questions about the function of prophecy in Shakespeare’s English history cycles, which this thesis aims to consider. One of the key arguments presented here is that Shakespeare utilises prophecy not to emphasise the pervasiveness of divine truth and providential design, but to express the political, narratorial, and interpretative disorder of history itself. It is also argued that any conception of the English history plays that rejects homogeneity and even consistency must also acknowledge that prophecy, as a form of historical narrative in essence, cannot be expected to manifest itself in the same ways in each drama throughout Shakespeare’s career. In this sense, the purpose of this thesis is to show that Shakespeare not only uses ‘prophecy’ to construct ‘history’: as a dramatist, he also thinks through ‘prophecy’, in various ways and from multiple perspectives, in order to intensify and complicate our sense of the complexity and drama of history itself. This thesis treats the English chronicle plays in order of composition and performance. While the Introduction contextualizes concepts of prophecy in the early modern period, and its relationship to history in particular, chapters 1–3 address the Henry VI plays and Richard III, with chapters 4 and 5 examining Richard II and the two parts of Henry IV. Henry V is addressed in the Conclusion. The inclusion of the second cycle of histories, rarely interrogated by critics in relation to prophecy, is crucial to the approach taken by this thesis. Unlike previous studies, this thesis privileges prophecy in both the earlier and the later histories, not least because its perceived absence from the plays of the second cycle is capable of informing our understanding of Shakespeare’s historical dramaturgy more generally. What is at stake in this reading of prophecy in Shakespeare’s English histories, both locally in the plays themselves and more generally across the cycles, are questions of causality, identity (both personal and national), monarchy, and the art of theatre itself.

This thesis is concerned with exploring different forms of Jacobean drama and performances that span across different sites, from the commercial stages of London, to the civic pageants that took place on the Thames and in the City, and the court entertainments held at Whitehall Palace. My research necessarily casts a wide net over its subject matter in order to illustrate how these different modes of performance engage with representations of the marine through the technologies available to them, whether poetic, material, or both. While the sea had long been a receptacle for literary and poetic attention and can repeatedly be found as the stronghold of adventure, wonder, danger, and exile in the English narrative tradition, it is specifically at the beginning of the seventeenth century that the sea takes a hold of the literary imagination with particular force. The cultural, political, and economic predominance of the marine in early modern England found numerous means of expression in drama, where the different facets of marine identity and occupation create on-stage marine spaces. The thesis elucidates how these modes of performance often invoke and exploit the dramatic potential of the marine and its commercial, political, and iconographical meanings. Commercial drama, written for a pre-proscenial stage, realises the marine through language and metaphor, appealing to a collective imaginary in bodying forth the limitless watery expanses on which the action takes place. This imaginative embodiment finds a very different—and indeed a more material—means of expression in civic drama and the court masque, where the extensive and elaborate pageant devices and stage machinery were largely indebted to and shaped by continental theatrical design. The material means of expressing the marine that are found in the civic performances and the court masques discussed in this study necessitates a consideration of European trends in theatre design and the decorative arts. In looking to visual and material culture this thesis explicates the interdependence between different modes of creating on-stage marine spaces and the ways in which the material presence inflects both language and action in Jacobean drama.