This thesis explores the importance of tolerating and facilitating uncertainty as it is recognised by British Independent and Kfeinian psychoanalysis and contemporary British magic realist fiction. In Part I, I offer some theoretical investigations, arguing that postmodem and some psychoanalytic discourses, namely Lacanian psychostructuralism, remarkably fail to address the challenges facing subjects in late- twentieth, early twenty-first century consumer culture. In their inability to tolerate paradoxes and uncertainty, these discourses objectify the subject, through processes of depersonalisation, derealisation and desubjectification. To redress these problems, I offer the work of British psychoanalysts, specifically, that of D. W. Winnicott and Melanie Klein and her followers. These perspectives, I argue, better serve the contemporary subject by recognising the importance of paradox and helping develop facilitating environments for the realisation of creative experience. In Part II, I examine how the play of paradox is fostered in contemporary British magic realist fiction. Specifically, I look at how these narrative strategies attempt to move away from the vicissitudes of internal and external, certainty and uncertainty, reason and unreason, to negotiate a Winnicottian third, potential space. The conceptualisation of such a space, I believe, offers a place from which we can begin to dialogue, to draw ourselves out of the oppositional dialectics that have plagued the bourgeois subject. I believe that in the novels of writers such as Jeanette Winterson, Joanne Harris, John Fowles, John Murray and, most especially, Angela Carter, we can find alternatives to bourgeois conceptions of reason and rationality, alternatives that are not based on the paranoid-schizoid, primitive processes and depersonalisation necessitated by the Enlightenment and capitalism but instead upon, in Kleinian terms, depressive ambivalence and the recognition of whole-objects.

The five stories in this collection are an exploration of realist fiction through a variety of narrative points of view and a diversity of characters. The stories explore issues of class, age, work and family, but in each piece, the characters struggle in their own way to discover a sense of belonging in their own lives. Central to each of these stories is a sense of place. All are set in the American west, most in rural California and the land and activities of place provide not only a specific landscape, but often a limitation, a narrative element against which the characters both resist and find their truest home.

Tandis qu’elle accède à son indépendance, l’Irlande voit émerger une nouvelle génération d’écrivains soucieux de promouvoir une littérature dite « réaliste ». Ce réalisme, qui peut d’abord s’appréhender comme une forme d’anti-idéalisme, est inspiré par des motivations certes littéraires, mais également politiques et identitaires. Par là, sa démarche rejoint celle d’un mouvement, plus tard qualifié de révisionniste, qui se dessine en histoire au même moment avec l’ambition de rééquilibrer les représentations d’une historiographie nationaliste. Ainsi, parallèlement à leurs ouvrages de fictions, nombre de ces écrivains réalistes, parmi lesquels Sean O’Faolain, choisissent-ils d’aborder l’histoire par le biais de la biographie historique. Située à la frontière de l’histoire et de la littérature, celle-ci répond tant à des enjeux littéraires, permettant à des auteurs frustrés par une censure institutionnelle de laisser libre cours à leur sensibilité artistique, qu’à des considérations historiographiques. S’infiltrant dans les biographies, imposant son propre tempo, la fiction participe de la révision de l’histoire. En retour, les biographies, par-delà leur fonction de refuge, constituent de véritables laboratoires dans lesquels le biographe élabore des antidotes aux maux qui rongent la fiction en même temps qu’il y forge les pièces maîtresses de son réalisme. Ainsi, alors que le personnage biographique constitue le vecteur privilégié de toutes les tensions politiques et littéraires dont l’auteur tâche de se défaire, l’esthétique réaliste mûrit au fil de paysages biographiques densifiés par l’histoire. Après avoir dû cohabiter avec la fiction et avec le témoignage, la biographie reprend ses droits et conditionne la fiction réaliste de façon décisive, jusqu’à en redéfinir les thèmes, le fonctionnement et la forme. / The period after independence in Ireland saw the emergence of a new generation of writers eager to promote a literature described as ‘realist’. This realism, which can be understood as a form of anti-idealism, was inspired by literary motivations, but also by motives that were both political and identity driven. In this, it was in tune with the approach of a historiographical movement of the same period, later qualified as revisionism, which aimed at nuancing the dominant nationalist narrative of history. In parallel to their works of fiction, a number of realist writers, including Sean O’Faolain, chose to approach history from the angle of historical biography. Situated at the frontier between history and literature, these biographies were at once historiographical and literary in their intentions, thus giving authors, who were hampered by the censorship regime in place, an avenue of expression in which they could give free rein to their literary sensibilities. On the other hand, fiction, by infiltrating the biographies, and by imposing its tempo, contributed to some extent to the revising of history. Beyond their function as refuge, the biographies can be seen as a laboratory in which the biographer elaborates antidotes to the ills that afflict fictional writing of the period while at the same time perfecting key set pieces of his realist fiction. The biographical character concentrates within him the political and literary tensions of which the author is seeking to divest himself. His realist aesthetic matures as the realist landscapes become ever more steeped in history and bring more realist representations to his fiction. Biography having accommodated fiction and memory in turn permeates the realist fiction in a decisive way, to the point of redefining its themes, its functioning and its form.

"Instead of studying, for example, how the psychology of personality limits and prevents real social and political change, we should be studying how political and ideological changes create new personalities and individual needs and motives." The above quotation is from social psychologist Professor John Turner, who is one of the two theorists, the other being Henri Tajfel, most responsible for the Social Identity Perspective, the principle subject of this thesis. The Social Identity Perspective is an approach to Social Psychology that incorporates two sub-theories: Tajfel's Social Identity Theory and Turner's Self-Categorization Theory. This thesis is based upon using the perspective for the purposes of creating more realistic and believable fictional characters in realist fiction. For the purposes of this thesis Pam Morris' definition of realism will be used, that being, 'any writing that is based upon an implicit or explicit assumption that it is possible to communicate about a reality beyond the writing.' According to both theories, individuals can develop two principal identities: the personal self, which is to say a collection of idiosyncratic qualities that define them as a unique individual, and a collective self (or social identity) that encapsulates the status and characteristics of the social groups they belong to in opposition to other social groupings. Turner theorised that the personality of a human being is heavily influenced by their social context at an unconscious level. This influence can be made manifest by their parents, by their school friends and work colleagues, by their romantic partners, and especially by the collective cultural expectations native to the area they choose to reside in. Turner put forward the concept that our personality and actions are therefore influenced by society at the level of how the individual defines himself or herself. This occurs without agency on the part of the individual. These social belief systems therefore mould what the individual thinks, their actions, and their motivations. This thesis will demonstrate a method of usage for elements of Social Psychology, specifically the Social Identity Perspective that underpins the actions, interactions and motivations of the fictional characters contained within the thesis's creative element. It is the contention of this thesis that The Social Identity Perspective will assist an author in marrying together ever more realistic characterisation to other areas of writer research already extensively drawn upon by the author such as those projects focused upon creating a more realistic setting in a historical novel for instance. As previously stated it is the intention of this thesis to apply aspects of social psychology to the creation of realist texts only, the findings however may also be of use to authors who write in other genres, after all even the writer of fantastic fiction still requires characters whose actions are fundamentally recognisable and justifiable to the reader in order for them to be able to make sense of the fiction and as Henry James said, 'one can speak best from one's own taste, and I may therefore venture to say the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel'. It is the aim of this thesis that its findings may highlight the potential of using The Social Identity Perspective and other adjuncts of Social Psychology as tools for both plot construction and character development that is completely realistic. This may then lead to other areas of research, some of which are suggested in the concluding chapter of this thesis.

The paper explores the human-environment relationship in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. It argues that every impact on humans by the environment or by human-made objects is initially triggered by human actions. The paper questions humans' and objects' agency. Furthermore, the essay argues that the environment either helps or impedes the novel's characters, which according to the book, can be solved by collaboration.

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