Dissertations / Theses: 'Scottish Americans in fiction'

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Manning, S. L. "The nature of provicialism : Some nineteenth-century Scottish and American fiction." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.372632.

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Hughes, Keith John. "Constructions of identity in nineteenth-century Scottish and American fiction : ideology and discourse." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/22328.

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This thesis examines the ways in which various nineteenth-century literary texts articulate the ideological and linguistic production of identity. I argue that the representation of individual and/or collective identity is problematized, and the determinant role of language accorded due weight, in these texts. A contested relationship with imperialist ideology and English 'centrality' in the nineteenth-century is a common factor for both Scottish and American culture: this thesis interrogates the paradigms of 'core-periphery' and 'provincialism' as applied to Scottish and American literature. Chapter One considers a number of travel narratives for production of subjectivity and authority - including Washington Irving's Tour in Scotland, Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands, and Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans. Some of Nathaniel Hawthorne's stories and essays are then read for their ironic constructions of American identity. Chapter Two considers Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Billy Budd, locating a critique of imperialist-capitalist practices as they impact on the production of identity. Chapter Three recontextualizes the Scottish 'Kailyard' as other than melodramatic. Precursors of Kailyard are considered - Adam Blair and Mansie Wauch - alongside William Alexander's Doric narrative Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk and a classic Kailyard text, J.M. Barrie's Auld Licht Idylls. Through its formulation of a 'British' Scottish identity, Kailyard embodies as text specific social and ideological contradictions; Barrie's Farewell Miss Julie Logan is seen to self-reflexively deconstruct the genre. Chapter Four considers Edgar Allan Poe's critique of America's literary 'provincialism', and his call for a specifically American literature as a marker of national identity. Using de Tocqueville's Democracy in America as historiographic counterpoint, Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast are seen to describe and inscribe a growing American hegemony; however, unlike most critics, I read Pym as destabilizing racist ideologies, not buttressing them. Frederick Douglass's 'The Heroic Slave,' furthers the connections between racism, language and power.

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Wall, Brian Robert. "Inheritance and insanity : transatlantic depictions of property and criminal law in nineteenth century Scottish and American fiction." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/21707.

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Participants in the critical enterprise of “Law and Literature” tend to center their arguments on the question of literature’s utility to the study and practice of law. I focus instead on the reciprocal corollary: how can an understanding of law influence a critical reading of literature? Taking cues from discussions in Renaissance studies of law and literature and drawing on my own legal training, I assert that transatlantic literary studies provides both a conceptual framework for positing a reciprocal relationship between law and literature and, in nineteenth century Scottish and American depictions of property and criminal law, a crucial test case for this exploration by uncovering new “legal fictions” within these texts. I begin my first chapter by situating my work within recent critical work in Law and Literature. While most scholarship in the “law in literature” subcategory since James Boyd White’s influential 1973 text The Legal Imagination has focused on how (and if) literary studies can help current and future legal practitioners through what Maria Aristodemou calls “instrumental” and “humanistic” mechanisms, recent work, particularly by a dedicated group of interdisciplinary scholars in Renaissance studies, has focused on the law’s benefit to literary studies in this field. I explore the critical mechanisms employed by these scholars as well as by scholars in nineteenth century literary studies such as Ian Ward. I then turn to transatlantic literary studies, arguing that the approaches outlined by Susan Manning, Joselyn Almeida, and others provide a framework that can give nineteenth-century literary studies a similar framework to that proposed by Aristodemou: an “instrumental” method of giving greater precision to discussions of how historical institutions and hierarchies are depicted in nineteenth century literature, and a “humanistic” method of extending beyond historicist approaches to see beyond the often artificial demarcations of literary period and genre by finding commonalities that transcend disciplinary and historical borders. I conclude this introduction by identifying the legal and literary parameters of my project in the legal-political tensions of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Scotland and America. My second chapter focuses on property law and the question of inheritance, reading Walter Scott’s Rob Roy and The Bride of Lammermoor alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables to demonstrate how the narratives play with two dueling theories of inheritance law – meritocratic and feudal – and how those dueling legal theories impact the events of the tales themselves. After outlining tensions between older but still prevalent ideas of feudal succession and newer but admittedly flawed in execution notions of meritocratic land transfer, I explore how Scott’s and Hawthorne’s narratives demonstrate the inability of their characters to reconcile these notions. Both Rob Roy and The House of the Seven Gables seem to demonstrate the triumph of deserving but legally alienated protagonists over their titled foes; both novels, however, end with the reconciliation of all parties through ostensibly love-based weddings that perform the legal function of uniting competing land claims, thus providing a suspiciously easy resolution to the legal conflict at the heart of both stories. While reconciliation makes the legal controversies at the heart of these stories ultimately irrelevant, the legal nihilism of The Bride of Lammermoor takes the opposite tactic, demonstrating both the individual shortcomings of the Ashton and Ravenswood families and the systemic failure of Scottish property law’s feudalism to achieve equitable outcomes. I next turn to the question of insanity in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and James Hogg’s “Strange Letter of a Lunatic,” arguing that both narratives complicate the legal definition of insanity by showing gaps between the legislative formulation and actual application to their fictional defendants. After developing the different viewpoints towards criminal culpability articulated by the American (but based on English law) and Scottish versions of the insanity defense, I turn first to Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poe’s narrator, I argue, deliberately develops a narrative that takes him outside the protections of the insanity defense, insisting on his own culpability despite – or perhaps because of – the implications for his own punishment. Meanwhile, Hogg’s narrative, both in its original draft form for Blackwood’s and its published version in Fraser’s, paints a different picture of a narrator who avoids criminal punishment but finds himself confined in asylum custody. These two areas of inheritance and insanity collide in my exploration of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Frank Norris’s McTeague, where I illustrate the relationship between the urban demographics and zoning laws of both the real and fictional versions of London and San Francisco and the title characters’ mentally ill but probably not legally insane murderers. After demonstrating Stevenson’s and Norris’s link between psychology and the complex amalgamations of their fictional cityscapes, I demonstrate how these cityscapes also allow them to sidestep rather than embrace mental illness as an excuse for their murderous protagonists’ crimes, indicting the institutions at the center of their texts as equally divided and flawed.

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McGuire, Matthew. "Dialect in contemporary Scottish and Irish fiction." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/29263.

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There has to date been no attempt at a detailed comparative study of contemporary Irish and Scottish literature: this thesis constitutes an attempt to do so. Specifically, it looks at the significance of the dialect novel in writing after 1979. My claim is that the dialect novel must be read in terms of the crisis facing working-class communities at the end of the twentieth century. Despite certain attempts to declare class a redundant critical category, I argue that it is fundamental to our understanding of contemporary Irish and Scottish culture. Chapter one traces the emergence of Irish-Scottish studies as an interdisciplinary field within the humanities. It also outlines the political and theoretical challenges confronting Marxism at the end of the twentieth century. Here I will introduce the work of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Chapter two looks at Scotland and the work of James Kelman. It examines attempts by nationalist critics to locate Kelman’s work within the so-called 'Renaissance’ of contemporary Scottish literature. Against this, I argue that Kelman’s use of dialect belongs to a class based politics that makes problematic the politics of nationalism. Chapter three looks at the Republic of Ireland and the work of Roddy Doyle. Focusing in The Commitments (1987), it examines the novel’s contentious claim that the working-class are the niggers of Ireland. The conflation of class and race will be examined in detail, particularly in light of Kelman’s own insistence that his work belongs to literature of de-colonisation. Chapter four examines the wholly neglected issue of class within the post ’69 conflict in Northern Ireland. It focuses on the role of dialect in Frances Molloy’s No Mate for the Magpie (1985) and John Boyd’s Out of my Class (1985). Chapter five considers all three regions in a more concentrated form of analysis. It concentrates on Richard Kearney’s concept of postnationalism and the postmodern theory upon which it is predicated. Although popular among both Scottish and Irish critics, I contend that this is an essentially misguided critical enterprise.

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Farrell, Maureen Anne. "Culture and identity in Scottish children's fiction." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2009. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/902/.

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British Children’s Literature has a long and distinguished history. In fact it could be argued that in the late seventeenth and increasingly in the eighteenth century, Britain took the lead in developing a new kind of literature especially designed for children. The Puritans were the first to recognise the potential for material specifically targeted at children as a means of reforming the personal piety of all individuals, including children. As a result, educational, instructional and religious books for children began to appear followed later by books retelling myths, legends and oral tales and later again books intended to entertain and engage children at all stages of their development. Included as part of British Children’s Literature was the work of Scottish authors. Indeed writers such as Sir Walter Scott, George MacDonald and J.M Barrie produced works that have since become Children’s Literature classics and they themselves had significant influence on diverse children’s authors including writers such as Lewis Carroll and C.S.Lewis. Though the work of Scottish authors was included in British Children’s Literature, it was not recognised specifically for its distinctively Scottish elements. In fact, increasingly from the nineteenth century, it began to be labelled as ‘English’ Children’s Literature even though it meant ‘British’. Scotland had been a separate nation until the Act of Union in 1707. After that, even as a ‘stateless nation’, Scotland retained its own education system, its own legal system and its own national church. Scottish Literature continued to flourish during this period making use of English and Scots language, as well as Gaelic, to produce an illustrious and influential literature of world renown. As Roderick Watson has observed, “the main ‘state’ left to a ‘stateless nation’ may well be its state of mind, and in that territory it is literature that maps the land.” (Watson, 1995: xxxi) Since devolution in 1997, Scotland’s literature sector has undergone an unprecedented period of rapid, sustained and dramatic expansion, a process paralleled by the growing profile of Scottish writers internationally. During the same period Scottish Children’s Literature and Scottish children’s writers have not received the same attention, though their progress has been just as significant. In the year 2000 the Modern Language Association of America recognised Scottish Literature as a national literature, and presumably Scottish Children’s Literature is included as part of that, but it was not specifically highlighted. Even up until 2006, Scottish Children’s Literature was not generally included or even mentioned in Scottish Literature anthologies or histories of Scottish Literature. When in January 2006 the Scottish Executive unveiled Scotland’s Culture, its new cultural policy, it gave Scottish Literature a prominent place. At the same time this document also acknowledged the importance of education in giving access to and highlighting Scotland’s literary heritage. It became all the more important then to recognise the existence of a corpus of work that is recognisable as Scottish Children’s Literature existing separately from but complementary to English Children’s literature and which could be used in schools by teachers and read by children in order to explore and interrogate their own cultural history and identity. This thesis seeks to investigate whether a distinctive Scottish Children’s Literature exists and, if so, to identify those aspects that make it distinctive. Further, if Scottish Children’s Literature exists, how does it become a repository for the formation of culture, identity and nationhood and how does this impact on young Scottish readers? In order to carry out this investigation the study adopts an integrated, humanistic and multi-dimensional approach towards Scottish Children’s fiction. It draws selectively and discursively on theories of reading, reader response and close reading skills for heuristic purposes; that is, on methods that further the overall hermeneutical task of enlarging understanding of the phenomenon, though no particular theoretical approach to analysis has been privileged over another. It draws on a range of overarching theoretical perspectives that work effectively in illuminating the characteristics of particular texts with and for readers. As such, the study does not pretend to provide a specific theoretical basis for the reading of Scottish Children’s Fiction. The approach adopted requires an immersion in the narratives, making unfamiliar texts familiar in order to do the work of projecting a distinctive Scottish perspective. Given that this study is among the first of its kind, it provides a base-line for others to apply specific theoretical filters to Scottish Children’s Literature for further study. Using what cultural typology and the semiotics of culture would recognise as a retrospective approach, this study intends to identify children’s texts that are recognisably Scottish and which may be considered to form a corpus of work which can be celebrated as a central part of Scottish Children’s Literature. WATSON, R. (1995) The Poetry of Scotland, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.

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McMillan, Neil Livingstone. "Tracing masculinities in twentieth-century Scottish men's fiction." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2000. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5190/.

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Tracing Masculinities in Twentieth-Century Scottish Men's Fiction takes account of the representation of masculinities in a selected group of novels by twentieth-century Scottish male authors. Rather than attempt a chronological survey of fictions during this period, the argument proceeds by analysing groups of texts which are axiomatic in specific ways: the Glasgow realist novels of the 1930s and post-1970s, from the works of James Barke and George Blake to those of William McIlvanney and James Kelman, which offer particular perspectives on relationships between men of different class identifications; fictions reliant upon existentialism, which intersect with the masculinist values of the Glasgow tradition in the figure of Kelman, but are also produced by Alexander Trocchi and Irvine Welsh; and novels which employ the technique of 'cross-writing', or literary transvestism, from the Renaissance fictions of Lewis Grassic Gibbon to the postmodern works of Alan Warner and Christopher Whyte. In a critical field which has always been concerned with a tradition of largely male-produced texts privileging the actions of male characters, but has neglected fully to consider the production and reception of those texts in terms of their specific articulations of gender positions, this thesis employs theories of masculinities developed in the study of American and English literatures since the 1980s in order to provide new perspectives on Scottish novels. It also draws upon the materialist theory of Louis Althusser for a model of ideological identification, as well as utilising several psychoanalytic and deconstructive approaches to gender formation in Western culture, epitomised by the work of Judith Butler and Kaja Silverman. The various perspectives on masculine gender and sexual identities thus assembled are primarily directed towards considering the novels under discussion as 'men's texts' - texts not only by or about men, but often directed towards men as readers too.

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Hammer, Julia Maria. "Crossing limits : liminality and transgression in contemporary Scottish fiction." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/25923.

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In my thesis, I aim to show that a focus on liminality in contemporary Scottish fictional texts illustrates underlying developments of relevant social phenomena with regard to class issues, gender and sexual identity. The anthropological concept of liminality looks at a situation of “being between”. The liminar faces a situation of having to renegotiate their values and perceptions in order to proceed. Liminality always involves the existence of limits which have to be transgressed and against which the individual negotiates a personal situation. I further hypothesise that the transgression of limits can be seen as an instrument to create order. I take an anthropological approach to my thesis. Arnold van Gennep’s early studies on rites of passage and Victor Turner’s study of liminality originate in the observation of tribe-internal, social structures of personal development. Van Gennep assumes a tripartite structure among which liminality is the middle stage, the phase in which the initiand has to perform tasks to re-enter and become part of the community. Turner isolates the middle stage and transfers this concept to western societies. This theory is taken up and developed further by several literary critics and anthropologists. While the transgression of limits is often regarded as a violation of those norms which regulate societies, the transgression of limits in a rite of passage and connected with liminality is a vital aspect and socially necessary. Several concepts are related to this theory, which will play a major role in my thesis: Turner’s permanent liminality, Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque as well as Foucault’s transgression. In the first chapter, I contrast two of Alasdair Gray’s novels, stating that the most powerful message of social and capitalist criticism is not just visible on the surface of the hyperbolic texts, but particularly prominent in liminal passages. The theories of Bakhtin and Turner plays the most important role in this chapter. In the second chapter, A. L. Kennedy’s novels are contrasted. In So I am Glad a difficult psycho-social issue is solved by a liminal trigger-figure, Paradise is an example of the destructive and restrictive effects of permanent liminality. In chapter three, I deal with the issue of passing and an individual redefinition of gender identity. The performativity of masculinity reveals ambiguous definitions of gender and morale. The Wasp Factory portrays a form of masculinity which has destructive effects on the individual and its environment. It is the tension in the liminal situation of a gender myth, a brutally performed masculinity and the character’s biological sex which expresses a harsh criticism of society’s definition of masculinity. In Trumpet, the binary model of gender is questioned. The text suggests a different definition of identity as fluid, passing between the two ‘extremes’, formulating the possibility of a state of being ‘something in-between’. It is the confrontation with this ‘otherness’ which provokes a wave of rejection and protest in the environment of the individual passing as a member of the ‘other sex’. In this case, it is not the obvious liminal individual, but his son who undergoes a process of change and thus a process of renegotiating his strict value system. The final chapter deals with liminal spaces and how these reflect and support the internal development which the protagonists undergo. The choice of Orkney as a mystical place and the fictional setting in a war game show that liminal spaces – both real and fictitious – trigger a personal development and reconnect present day life in Scotland with historical events which have had a shaping role for Scottish and European life.

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Böhnke, Dietmar. "Brave New Scotland?: National Identity and Contemporary Scottish Fiction." Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2007. https://ul.qucosa.de/id/qucosa%3A31942.

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Stark, Lynne. "Beyond skin : the exposed body and modern Scottish fiction." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/23204.

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This thesis examines the use of graphic corporeal imagery by an number of modern Scottish writers - Janice Galloway, A. L. Kennedy, Candia McWilliam, Alan Warner and Irvine Welsh - and reclaims such potentially offensive material as socially and thematically significant. Using Phillip A. Mellor and Chris Shilling’s notion of the Baroque modern body, I show in the first two chapters how scenes of pain, violence and sexual violation relate to, challenge and comment upon the cultural tensions surrounding the body in postmodern society. These tensions stem from two contradictory social impulses, the first towards intense cognitive control and denial of the body, the second towards physical release and greater sensual expression. The damaged or violated body is positioned at the precise point where these opposing tendencies meet. Violence towards the body may reflect a desire to disassociate oneself from the flesh, if not obliterate it altogether. Yet cutting, wounding or perforating the body renders it literally more substantial by exposing the bloodied mesh of tissue and tendon that lies beyond the skin. Paradoxically, many ‘harmful’ body practices force us to re-engage with the body. I trace this oscillation between disembodiment and re-embodiment across several novels in order to show how fictional representations of anorexia, sado-masochism and violence function as something more than simple metaphors of social dysfunction. The main argument of this study is that extreme physical episodes are often the catalysts for characters’ reintegration into existing social formations or even herald the creation of new forms of sociality based on sensual solidarities. Contemporary ‘transgressive’ body practices such as body piercing and tattooing highlight the transformative capacity of pain and violence. I discuss these in the final chapter.

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MacDonald, Kirsty A. "Spectral ambiguities : the tradition of psychosomatic supernaturalism in Scottish fiction." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2005. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1926/.

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This thesis aims to prove that there exists in Scottish literature a previously undervalued, or indeed, overlooked tradition of ‘psychosomatic supernaturalism’, which like other literary traditions, refers to an evolving constellation of texts with similar themes, motifs and techniques. It is widely accepted that the continued presence of supernatural elements is a common feature in Scottish literature. However, the modifier ‘psychosomatic’, a term borrowed from the field of psychiatry, designates those specific supernatural events or beings around which accumulate sustained doubt as to whether their origins are in the actual or the psychological. This supernatural/psychological tension – discussed but rarely analysed closely by critics – occurs primarily in fiction throughout the national literary history from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present day. The evocation of this tension is a subversive strategy, challenging realism and its associated modes of representation. Perhaps the most renowned example of the tension occurs in James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). However, Hogg wrote a number of equally significant psychosomatic supernatural tales, including the novel The Three Perils of Woman (1823), and the short story ‘The Brownie of the Black Haggs’ (1828). The start of the nineteenth century marks the establishment of psychiatry, and the underlining of the distinction between madness and supernatural forces, a demarcation that was previously hazy. This was something Hogg was fully aware of, and as a writer with a documented interest in the supernatural and folk tradition, and in evolving views on mental illness, his work forms the starting point for the thesis. The development of this tradition throughout the nineteenth century is subsequently traced. During this time ‘social realism’ is a prominent mode in fiction. There are, however, critical and subversive exceptions to this in the work of writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Margaret Oliphant and J.M. Barrie. The thesis considers their work, and then examines how this tradition is manifested during the period now referred to by critics as the Scottish Renaissance. Late twentieth-century manifestations of the tradition are then analysed, against a background of the increasing dominance of realism and its associated metanarratives in Scottish fiction, and mass media contexts such as film and television.

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Syme, Neil. "Uncanny modalities in post-1970s Scottish fiction : realism, disruption, tradition." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/21768.

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This thesis addresses critical conceptions of Scottish literary development in the twentieth-century which inscribe realism as both the authenticating tradition and necessary telos of modern Scottish writing. To this end I identify and explore a Scottish ‘counter-tradition’ of modern uncanny fiction. Drawing critical attention to techniques of modal disruption in the works of a number of post-1970s Scottish writers gives cause to reconsider that realist teleology while positing a range of other continuities and tensions across modern Scottish literary history. The thesis initially defines the critical context for the project, considering how realism has come to be regarded as a medium of national literary representation. I go on to explore techniques of modal disruption and uncanny in texts by five Scottish writers, contesting ways in which habitual recourse to the realist tradition has obscured important aspects of their work. Chapter One investigates Ali Smith’s reimagining of ‘the uncanny guest’. While this trope has been employed by earlier Scottish writers, Smith redesigns it as part of a wider interrogation of the hyperreal twenty-first-century. Chapter Two considers two texts by James Robertson, each of which, I argue, invokes uncanny techniques familiar to readers of James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson in a way intended specifically to suggest concepts of national continuity and literary inheritance. Chapter Three argues that James Kelman’s political stance necessitates modal disruption as a means of relating intimate individual experience. Re-envisaging Kelman as a writer of the uncanny makes his central assimilation into the teleology of Scottish realism untenable, complicating the way his work has been positioned in the Scottish canon. Chapter Four analyses A.L. Kennedy’s So I Am Glad, delineating a similarity in the processes of repetition which result in both uncanny effects and the phenomenon of tradition, leading to Kennedy’s identification of an uncanny dimension in the concept of national tradition itself. Chapter Five considers the work of Alan Warner, in which the uncanny appears as an unsettling sense of significance embedded within the banal everyday, reflecting an existentialism which reaches beyond the national. In this way, I argue that habitual recourse to an inscribed realist tradition tends to obscure the range, complexity and instability of the realist techniques employed by the writers at issue, demonstrating how national continuities can be productively accommodated within wider, pluralistic analytical approaches.

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Satayaban, Natsuda. "The gendering of aesthetics and politics in contemporary Scottish fiction." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/25860.

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This thesis studies contemporary Scottish fiction by four writers Agnes Owens, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, and Alan Warner, focusing on the problematic position of women characters and feminocentric texts within the dominant class and national(ist) discourses. It argues that the intimate interconstitution between Scottish masculine subjects and class/national politics alienates women from an active political subjectivisation, that the gender matrix of femininity/masculinity underlies the normative selection of which gendered subjects, and accordingly whose symbolic 'voice', can be perceived as 'historical' and 'political'. Scottish working-class men and the texts in which they are the central characters have been considered paradoxically as both a literary reflection of 'political defeatism', but also a form of 'subaltern' counter-politics to British neoliberalism and imperialism. This thesis points out that the common parameters of the debate on the possible (dis)continuation of both class and national(ist) discourses are masculinist, and as such women tend to be perceived as 'non-political' in this (re)politicisation of aesthetics. More fundamentally, these discourses are problematic for women's politicisation because they follow the rule of modern politics which assigns politicality on a fraternal basis, that political struggles are between men of different classes, nationalities and so on. The research interrogates this masculine-centrism in the dominant representational praxis which provides the discursive link between literature, politics, and history which (dis)places feminine subjects into a 'dehistoricised', 'depoliticised' space. It seeks to renegotiate the fraternal terms of this practice and to read feminine subjects and women-centred narratives as capable of conceptually illustrating emancipatory politics.

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Stedman, Jane Elizabeth. "A time of interregnum : navigating nation in devolutionary Scottish fiction." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2017. https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/a-time-of-interregnum-navigating-nation-in-devolutionary-scottish-fiction(0581a50b-a213-43f3-9cac-96a8cfc8a8f5).html.

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This thesis analyses four texts produced during the so-called ‘devolutionary period’ in Scotland, between the referendum of 1979 and the opening of the Parliament at Holyrood in 1999. Due to the particular political exigencies of the time, texts from this period have often been read through the prism of cultural nationalism. One particularly influential such characterisation argues that ‘in the absence of elected political authority the task of representing the nation has been repeatedly devolved to its writers.’ Such a critical paradigm can impose a limiting and distorting framework on these texts, reducing the scope and complexity of their political interventions by insisting too exclusively upon reading them through the lens of nation. Therefore, in this thesis, I undertake an analysis of these novels not as documents of cultural nationalism, but through Gramsci’s description of times of interregnum. Gramsci suggested that the crisis precipitated at moments of regime change as one that ‘consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; and in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ This delineation of the fraught character of interregnum seems an apt and helpful way to elucidate the tensions and fault lines within devolutionary Scottish fiction, and help to evade the pitfalls of readings that would recruit these writers into a narrative of resurgent national confidence directly connected to the political process of devolution. In order to explore the dynamics of interregnum at work in devolutionary fiction, I will analyse four key canonical texts from 1979–1999; James Kelman’s How Late it was, How Late (1994), Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989), Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995) and Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998). I will be attentive to the ways that these novels literalise the figurative suggestions of Gramsci’s aphorism; probing instances of death, woundings/illnesses and interrupted reproduction. Within my discussion, I will be attentive to the fault lines within Scottishness explored by these texts, in particular paying attention to the way that the nation has been gendered in damaging or occluding ways. I will also contend that the interregnum liminality of these texts is also enacted in their spatial negotiations, as the novels repeatedly press against spatial boundaries. I hope to offer a perspective on this period in Scottish literature that complicates and refines the predominant cultural nationalism that has coloured their critical reception.

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Walker-Churchman, Georgia. "This demented land : representations of madness in contemporary Scottish fiction." Thesis, Loughborough University, 2016. https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/23141.

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This thesis analyses representations of madness and mental illness in Scottish fiction from 1979. I begin by exploring the development of the relationship between Scottish identity on one hand, and madness and unreason on the other, arguing that in criticism of Scottish fiction, representations of schizoid experience are often understood as contributing to discourses centring on Scottish identity and the construction of a Scottish literary tradition. The contention of this thesis is that reading madness in this way often simplifies the complex relationship between representations of psychosis and other forms of unreason on the one hand, and political, philosophical and theoretical structures on the other. Its purpose is to proffer a corrective to this simplification and to develop a thematic mode of approaching Scottish writing. This thesis analyses representations of madness in the work of Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway, Alan Warner, Elspeth Barker, Bella Bathurst, and Alice Thompson. In Chapter One, I discuss the relationship between madness, creativity and autonomy in Gray's Lanark, 1982, Janine and Poor Things; Chapter Two deals with the significance of traumatic experience to Janice Galloway's The Trick Is to Keep Breathing and Foreign Parts, and the environmental concerns of Alan Warner's Morvern novels form the basis of Chapter Three. The second section of the thesis deals with representations of madness in the work of three women authors. In my fourth chapter, I attempt to formulate an approach to Gothic stylistics by comparing the function of madness and other Gothic traits in Barker's O Caledonia and Bathurst's Special. The final chapter approaches Alice Thompson's enigmatic work by theorising how she aestheticises her concern with the limits of rational knowledge in The Existential Detective, The Falconer, and Pandora's Box. The purpose of this thesis is to place the writing of madness in Scotland within the context of broad literary and philosophical traditions. This contributes to the field of Scottish literary studies by widening its scope to think through questions raised by the representation of madness. In particular, it allows for the analysis of the ways these writers distinguish between madness and sanity, the nature of the distinction between reason and unreason, and the implications these questions have for wider epistemological inquiries into the nature of knowledge and narration. In doing so, it allows for engagement with current debates in literary theory, particularly feminist and ecologically-orientated criticism, affect theory and trauma, as well as asking how a concern with literary style and genre can contribute to readings of unreason.

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Slack, Justin. "After Jameson : Scottish fiction and the ambiguities of postmodern identity." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/26256.

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Anderson, Carol Elizabeth. "The representation of women in Scottish fiction : character and symbol." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1985. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/19671.

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Nash, Andrew. "Kailyard, Scottish literary criticism, and the fiction of J.M. Barrie." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15199.

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This thesis argues that the term Kailyard is not a body of literature or cultural discourse, but a critical concept which has helped to construct controlling parameters for the discussion of literature and culture in Scotland. By offering an in-depth reading of the fiction of J.M. Barrie - the writer who is most usually and misleadingly associated with the term - and by tracing the writing career of Ian Maclaren, I argue for the need to reject the term and the critical assumptions it breeds. The introduction maps the various ways Kailyard has been employed in literary and cultural debates and shows how it promotes a critical approach to Scottish culture which focuses on the way individual writers, texts and images represent Scotland. Chapter 1 considers why this critical concern arose by showing how images of national identity and national literary distinctiveness were validated as the meaning of Scotland throughout the nineteenth century. Chapters 2-5 seek to overturn various assumptions bred by the term Kailyard. Chapter 2 discusses the early fiction of J.M. Barrie in the context of late nineteenth-century regionalism, showing how his work does not aim to depict social reality but is deliberately artificial in design. Chapter 3 discusses late Victorian debates over realism in fiction and shows how Barrie and Maclaren appealed to the reading public because of their treatment of established Victorian ideas of sympathy and the sentimental. Chapter 4 discusses Barrie's four longer novels - the works most constrained by the Kailyard term - and chapter 5 reconsiders the relationship between Maclaren's work and debates over popular culture. Chapter 6 analyses the use of the term Kailyard in twentieth-century Scottish cultural criticism. Discussing the criticism of Hugh MacDiarmid, the writing of literary histories and studies of Scottish film, history and politics, I argue for the need to reject the Kailyard term as a critical concept in the discussion of Scottish culture.

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Kerr, Christine. "Lewis Crassic Gibbon/James Leslie Mitchell : gender, sex and sexualities." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.249103.

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This thesis examines Lewis Grassic Gibbon/James Leslie Mitchell's promotion of the transformative power of the feminine and its offshoot of freer sexuality as a basis for new relationships among individuals, their societies and the world. As a result of Gibbon's revaluation of gender values, the feminine becomes identified as innate human "good," largely subsumed under, and set in opposition to, the evil perpetrated by the masculine historical process. Distinct from actual women, the feminine can be reclaimed by men too, affecting Gibbon's representations of both sexes. The feminine emerges as revolutionary - and not a conservative form of symbolism limiting women's subjectivity - in that it prepares the ground for a return to society and fuels both men and women with the power to challenge society's (masculine) values and institutions. A world-view structured around a gender dichotomy is nothing new. An overview of Gibbon's literary contemporaries, however, reveals that his prioritising of gender and sexual issues is unusual for a Scots male writer of the 1920sl1930s, although it does align him with female, feminist writers of his period (ch. I). Gibbon's early writing reconsiders stereotypes and archetypes of women/femininity but does not advance a practical programme for change (eh. 2). The influence ofDiffusionism, pronounced after 1930, manifests itself by portrayals of the male's re-connection to his "pre-civilisation" self through the feminine, allowing men and women together to renounce evils such as religion and masculine versions of history (eh. 3). Chapter 4 analyses various models that interact with factors such as race and sexual orientation to transcend gender disunity, although Gibbon's vision is occasionally marred by scepticism and blind-spots. His later work reveals a developing conviction that the individual- male or female - may have to lead the battle against evil, aiding transmission of the idea of "good." This, however, may lead to an overwriting of essential feminine values as is seen by the ending of A Scots Quair (chs. 5 & 6). In an analysis giving equal weight to most of his fiction, the thesis concludes that Gibbon's first step to solving civilization's malaise is a movement beyond polarities that make genders and sexes antagonistic, a ''third way," creating a rebirth of the individual and society when people re-awaken to the divinity in self and other and reconnect to the feminine. This movement, however, runs the risk of staying conjectural since actual measures for social change prove harder for Gibbon to delineate.

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Christie, Thomas A. "Notional identities : ideology, genre and national identity in popular Scottish fiction, 1975-2006." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/7149.

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One of the most striking features of contemporary Scottish fiction has been its shift from the predominantly realist novels of the 1960s and 1970s to an engagement with very different modes of writing, from the mixture of realism and visionary future satire in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) to the Rabelaisian absurdity and excess of Irvine Welsh’s Filth (1998). This development has received considerable critical attention, energising debates concerning how such writing relates to or challenges familiar tropes of identity and national culture. At the same time, however, there has been a very striking and commercially successful rise in the production of popular genre literature in Scotland, in categories which have included speculative fiction and crime fiction. Although Scottish literary fiction of recent decades has been studied in great depth, Scottish popular genre literature has received considerably less critical scrutiny in comparison. Therefore, the aim of my research is to examine popular Scottish writing of the stated period in order to reflect upon whether a significant relationship can be discerned between genre fiction and the mainstream of Scottish literary fiction, and to consider the characteristics of such a connection between these different modes of writing. To achieve this objective, the dissertation will investigate whether the features of any such shared literary concerns are inclined to vary between the mainstream of literary fiction in Scotland and two different, distinct forms of popular genre writing. My research will take up the challenge of engaging with the popular genres of speculative fiction and crime fiction during the years 1975 to 2006. I intend to discuss the extent to which the national political and cultural climate of the period under discussion informed the narrative form and social commentary of such works, and to investigate the manner in which, and the extent to which, a specific and identifiably Scottish response to these ideological matters can be identified in popular prose fiction during this period. This will be done by discussing and comparing eight novels in total; four for each chosen popular genre. From the field of speculative fiction, I will examine texts by the authors Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, Margaret Elphinstone and Matthew Fitt. The discussion will then turn to crime fiction, with an analysis of novels by Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre, Denise Mina and Louise Welsh. As well as evaluating the work of each author and its relevance to other texts in the field, consideration will be given to the significance of each novel under discussion to wider considerations of ideology, genre and national identity which were ongoing both at the time of their publication and in subsequent years. The dissertation’s conclusion will then consider the nature of the relationship between the popular genres which have been examined and the mainstream of Scottish literary fiction within the period indicated above.

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Kydd, Christopher. "A mongrel tradition : contemporary Scottish crime fiction and its transatlantic contexts." Thesis, University of Dundee, 2013. https://discovery.dundee.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/965af68c-99ba-4b38-a20b-a23e052646cf.

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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.

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Crane, Tara Christopher. "Adoption, construction, and maintenance of ethnic identity : a Scottish-American example /." free to MU campus, to others for purchase, 1999. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/mo/fullcit?p9946251.

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Tym, Linda Dawn. "Forms of memory in late twentieth and twenty-first century Scottish fiction." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/5551.

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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.

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Brooks, Darren. "'Rankin's Scotland' : contemporary Scottish crime fiction and a narration of modern Scotland." Thesis, University of Sunderland, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.654719.

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Ian Rankin is one of the world's best-selling authors of crime fiction. His series of Inspector Rebus novels, set in contemporary Edinburgh, have been translated into thirty-six languages and have achieved wide critical and commercial success. Yet for all its global reach, the Rebus series collectively asserts a more nuanced story: that of modern Scotland. The first novel, Knots & Crosses, was published in 1987, in the years after the failed devolution referendum of 1979 and in a decade of industrial tumult. In 2007, as 01 John Rebus was compelled to retire from Lothian and Borders Police in Exit Music, Scotland was an altogether different nation: now devolved from Westminster, with a definitively Scottish Parliament situated in Edinburgh, and the Scottish National Party elected to government for the first time. During the twenty years in between, Rankin's sustained crime fiction initiated the nation's first true crime writing tradition. This study explores the ways in which this series of crime novels collectively asserts a distinctive narration of modern Scotland. To do so, the series is 'de-integrated' for close, chronological study: the thesis is organised into four key chapters, and is bookended by introductory and concluding sections. Chapter 1 studies Rankin's first four Rebus novels, alongside influential themes of Scottish crime and literary history. Chapter 2 explores, via his next three novels, Rankin's representation of Edinburgh, and the sub-genre of crime fiction his work initiated. This chapter also includes specific analysis of his breakthrough novel, Black & Blue. Chapter 3 looks at how a pivotal two-book sequence 'disrupted' Rankin's narrative project, in light of his series' commercial success and its changing imperatives. Scotland's renewed selfdetermination is also explored briefly in relation to its symbiotic relationship to the growth of Scottish crime fiction. Chapter 4 explores the series' 'valedictory' novels, as we follow Rebus through to his statutory retirement. Crucially, the introduction presents selected ideas on narrative of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, which I apply to the collected Rebus series. Through these ideas, Rankin's 'epic' story of modern Scotland can be discerned. The (in)conclusion considers briefly the possible future - or not - for crime fiction in Scotland as the nation prepares for its 2014 referendum on full independence from the United Kingdom. It is anticipated that this study will contribute to the growing corpus of literature seeking to understand the development of crime fiction in Scotland, and lan Rankin's work in particular. It is hoped - by its end - that it will assist in Rankin's selfconfessed interpretation of his Inspector Rebus series as a serious means of understanding contemporary Scotland.

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Neely, Sarah. "Adapting to change in contemporary Irish and Scottish culture : fiction to film." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2003. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7486/.

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This thesis examines the relationship of Irish and Scottish literature and film comparatively. The field of adaptation has traditionally centred around classical literary adaptations and the heritage film. Considering the increasing frequency with which contemporary novelists are adapted to film, it comes as a surprise that very little analysis has extended beyond the pages of the general media. Recent Irish and Scottish films in particular have relied upon the popularity of their literary exports in order to boost their indigenous filmmaking ventures. While generally considering the dialogic relationship between the publishing, film and television industries, this thesis specifically focuses on the adaptations of novels and short stories by Irish and Scottish writers from the 1980s to the present day. Part one, focusing on the work of Irish authors, looks at Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal (Pat O’Connor, 1984) and Lamb (Colin Gregg, 1985); Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (Neil Jordan, 1997); Roddy Doyle’s The Barrytown Trilogy, comprising The Commitments (Alan Parker, 1991), The Snapper (Stephen Frears, 1993) and The Van (Stephen Frears, 1996); and Christy Brown’s My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan, 1989). Part two examines the adaptations of Scottish writers, including Christopher Rush’s Venus Peter (Ian Seller, 1990); William McIlvanney’s The Big Man (David Leland, 1990) and Dreaming (Mike Alexander, 1990); Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996); and Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002). Rather than carefully consider the fidelity of the translation from page to screen, this study examines the cultural circulation of the texts in alternative media in relation to their adaptive strategies. The novel’s role in representing ‘Irishness’ and ‘Scottishness’ versus and adapted film’s mode of representation is also considered alongside the influence of the director in contrast to the author, in order to reveal all of the contributing components to the development of a national cinema out of a national literature, both key components of a national culture.

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Neely, Sarah. "Adapting to change in contemporary Irish and Scottish culture fiction to film /." Connect to e-thesis, 2009. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/757/.

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Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Glasgow, 2003.
Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Department of English Literature and Department of Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow, 2003. Includes bibliographical references. Print version also available.

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Wallace, Gavin. "English voice, Scottish heart : a critical study of the fiction of Compton Mackenzie." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1986. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/19388.

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Böhnke, Dietmar. "Science Fiction and/or Scottish Fiction?: The Ambiguous ‘SF’ of Alasdair Gray in the Context of the ‘Two Cultures’ Debate." Peter Lang, 2000. https://ul.qucosa.de/id/qucosa%3A32036.

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Hilderbrandt, Scott Andrew. "The Highland soldier in Georgia and Florida a case study of Scottish Highlanders in British military service, 1739-1748 /." Orlando, Fla. : University of Central Florida, 2010. http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0003019.

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Davies, Ben. "Exceptional intercourse : sex, time and space in contemporary novels by male British and American writers." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2582.

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This thesis provides a theory of exceptional sex through close readings of contemporary novels by male British and American writers. I take as my overriding methodological approach Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, which is a juridico-political state in which the law has been suspended and the difference between rule and transgression is indistinguishable. Within this state, the spatiotemporal markers inside and outside also become indeterminable, making it impossible to tell whether one is inside or outside time and space. Using this framework, I work through narratives of sexual interaction – On Chesil Beach, Gertrude and Claudius, Sabbath’s Theater, and The Act of Love – to conceptualise categories of sexual exceptionality. My study is not a survey, and the texts have been chosen as they focus on different sexual behaviours, thereby opening up a variety of sexual exceptionalities. I concentrate on male writers and narratives of heterosexual sex as most work on sex, time and space is comprised of feminist readings of literature by women and queer work on gay, lesbian or trans writers and narratives. However, in the Coda I expand my argument by turning to Emma Donoghue’s Room, which, as the protagonist has been trapped for the first five years of his life, provides a tabula rasa’s perspective of exceptionality. Through my analysis of exceptionality, I provide spatiotemporal readings of the hymen, incest, adultery, sexual listening and the arranged affair. I also conceptualise textual exceptionalities – the incestuous prequel, auricular reading and the positionality of the narrator, the reader and literary characters. Exceptional sex challenges the assumption in recent queer theory that to be out of time is ‘queer’ and to be in time is ‘straight’. Furthermore, exceptionality complicates the concepts of perversion and transgression as the norm and its transgression become indistinct in the state of exception. In contrast, exceptionality offers a new, more determinate way to analyse narratives of sex.

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Chapi, Aicha. "Towards a reading of Toni Morrison's fiction : African-American history, the arts and contemporary theory /." Thesis, Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1995. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B19671441.

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Lin, Hsin-Ying (Alice). "Relishing the abject : gendered identity and intertextuality in selected twentieth-century Scottish women's fiction." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/24843.

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This thesis examines gender identity as explored by twentieth-century Scottish women writers: A. L. Kennedy, Emma Tennant, Elspeth Barker, Jessie Kesson, Alice Thompson and Muriel Spark. The objective of the thesis addresses the thematic and cultural significance of the ‘dangerous woman’ as she appears in twentieth-century Scottish women’s fiction. I provide fictional examples of sentimentally and sensationally based communities in my readings of selected texts and I examine how ‘pleasure’, depicted as empirically justified by conventionally ‘dangerous women’ such as sexual warrior Judith from Bible literature, is traditionally associated with the values of female masculinity as evidenced through abused gender role’s justification. I further contend that twentieth-century Scottish women writers redefine the significance of the ‘dangerous woman’ by subverting the norms of ‘pleasure’ and by depicting this pleasure, through either Gothic or fantastic manifestation, as morally dangerous and psychologically destructive. Through a Kristevian analysis of intertextuality in these selected novels I demonstrate each writer’s desire, either to soften female resistance to the symbolic (paternal) order, or to examine male desire in a consolidation of the symbolic (paternal) order. Within the domain of psychoanalysis, which addresses the external subjugated Other (gendered role of femininity) as well as the internal rejected Other (abjected maternal side of self), I explore reflexive narrative language and related philosophical implications as evidenced in female Gothic or fantastic literary forms. I propose that the characteristic features of the ‘dangerous woman’ as they appear in twentieth-century Scottish women’s fiction may be re-defined. The characteristic features of the ‘dangerous woman’ may shift from more corporeal challenges to the ‘essence’, the ‘presence’ and therefore the ‘centre’ of gender, that is, to the emotional abjection of the inherent maternal side of herself. The central argument of this thesis is that just as post-structuralism attempts to explain the subjective construction of reality, so the six authors examined here emphasise the significance of individual’s invention of reality.

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Watts, Billie Stephanie Powell. "Talk to me while I'm listening : a novella /." free to MU campus, to others for purchase, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/mo/fullcit?p3115597.

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Cutler, John Alba. "Pochos, vatos, and other types of assimilation masculinities in Chicano literature, 1940-2004 /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1680034831&sid=34&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.

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Merz, Caroline. "Why not a Scots Hollywood? : fiction film production in Scotland, 1911-1928." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/22054.

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This thesis addresses a neglected area of British national cinema history, presenting the first comprehensive study of Scotland’s incursions into narrative film production before the coming of sound. It explores both the specificity of Scottish production and its place within the broader cultural, political and economic contexts of the British film industry at key periods in the ‘silent’ era before and after the Great War. Early film production in Scotland has been characterised as a story of isolated and short-lived enterprises whose failure was inevitable. The work problematises this view, focusing instead on the potential for success of the various production strategies employed by Scottish film-makers. It demonstrates that producers were both ambitious and resourceful in the manner in which they sought to bring their films to local, national and international screens. Previously unknown markets for these films are also identified. In 1911 the first British three-reel film, Rob Roy, made in Scotland by a Glasgow production company, reached audiences as far away as Australia and New Zealand. Scottish efforts in film production, including the development of synchronised sound systems, were not haphazard but mirrored trends in the British and worldwide film industries until the late 1920s. With the coming of sound, the costs of commercial film production represented too great a challenge for the limited resources of Scottish producers. The study encompasses a detailed exploration of efforts in feature film production; how far these productions travelled and for whom they were made; the presentation and treatment of Scottish-made films by the trade press and local newspapers and their critical reception both at home and overseas. The majority of these films are lost, but close scrutiny of contemporary publicity and archival documents including business records has enabled a detailed picture to emerge of their content, nature and production background. Scottish stories and the Scottish landscape were important to the British film industry from its earliest days, and feature films shot on Scottish locations by outside producers are also discussed. Were these the films Scots would have made, if they could?

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McAlpine, Kay. "The gallows and the stake : a consideration of fact and fiction in the Scottish ballads." Thesis, University of Stirling, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/3511.

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As the title of this study suggests, the following pages are concerned with ballads which refer to death by hanging or burning. This subject brings an aesthetic world into the realms of the real and presents an artistic conceptualisation of both the 'real' - historic facts - and the 'abstract' - human emotions. In terms of the 'real', ballads which refer to actual events can be compared to historic documentation in order to ascertain the extent of interaction between the ballad world and historic fact. In terms of the 'abstract', execution and death are emotive subjects, so how emotional potential is controlled within the tradition is important, for even those reports which claim to be impersonal accounts of executions can be disturbing, even though centuries may separate a reader from the event. Formalising the language is one method of control and this study will discuss formulas and structures related to execution scenes. The formulas also provide points of connection between ballads which otherwise would seem to be unrelated, such as Mary Hamilton and Hobie Noble. The ballads discussed come from different repertoires, regions and centuries. Thus, those scenes which have been retained are more than a personal or regional variant of that scene; it has become a cultural interpretation and it may prove rewarding to consider what precedents exist for such interpretations and whether these are historic, national - specifically Scottish - or part of a wider aesthetic interpretation of death and justice. The printed ballad trade which existed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scotland has also been referred to, in order to provide alternative interpretations of the spectacle of execution and the popular presentation of the condemned. It may be that one tradition relies more closely on reality than the other, or it may be that two conflicting fictions exist.

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Homberg-Schramm, Jessica [Verfasser], Heinz [Gutachter] Antor, and Beate [Gutachter] Neumeier. "“Colonised by Wankers”. Postcolonialism and Contemporary Scottish Fiction / Jessica Homberg-Schramm ; Gutachter: Heinz Antor, Beate Neumeier." Köln : Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek Köln, 2016. http://d-nb.info/1156461650/34.

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37

Kohlbek, Beata. "The fiction and journalism of Neil Munro : bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of Scottish writing." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.439220.

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Hamilton, Jennifer L. "Held together by words : the bull calves and the Scottish fiction of Naomi Mitchison (1930s-1960s)." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2004. http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=229125.

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Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999) was an accomplished Scottish author noted for her historical fiction. Her literary career was prolific and lengthy, moving through several phases. From the early 1930s through the 1960s, Mitchison wrote primarily Scottish works. Whether in setting, characterisation, or concern, her literature during these years was for the Scottish people. In this reader’s estimation, Mitchison’s greatest contribution to the Scottish literary world was her ability to write engaging story while constructively recreating strong national mythos and setting forth models of healthy, loyal communities. Mitchison first is artist; therefore, any social agenda she embraces finds expression in art (whether these concerns be socialism, feminism, education, the arts, agricultural practices, or fishing, to name a few). This thesis will trace the themes in her earlier and later periods of the Scottish phase of her literary art, with The Bull Calves as focal point not only of this study, but also of the Scottish period of her writing. Exploration of the early works (1930s-40s) and the later works (1950s-60s and the later Early in Orcadia) will highlight themes that recur throughout her literary career. While not new to her particularly Scottish works, recurring themes take on new significance in light of Mitchison’s political involvement with the Labour Party and her local Community of Carradale. Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of narratology acknowledges the inherent political nature of language, and how the lexical range of characters within a text signifies particular class, occupation, religious and/or political propensity. When examining The Bull Calves, Bakhtinian method will be applied to the text, illustrating Mitchison’s utilisation of the facets of language to refract meaning within the text.

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Ditze, Stephan-Alexander. "America and the Americans in postwar British fiction an imagological study of selected novels." Heidelberg Winter, 2004. http://deposit.d-nb.de/cgi-bin/dokserv?id=2849617&prov=M&dok_var=1&dok_ext=htm.

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Burgess, Moira. ""Between the words of a song" supernatural and mythical elements in the Scottish fiction of Naomi Mitchison /." Thesis, Connect to e-thesis, 2006. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1046/.

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Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Glasgow, 2006.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 270-288). Print version also available. Mode of access : World Wide Web. System requirements : Adobe Acrobat reader required to view PDF document.

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Fernández, Sandy M. (Sandy Michele). "Notes from a Latina in Canada : criticism and stories." Thesis, McGill University, 1993. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=68087.

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While writing in English by Hispanas has been in publication for decades, it is only in the last few years that the writing and its attendant criticism have attracted mainstream attention in the United States. The purpose of this work is to provide an introduction to different facets of Hispana writing. The first section of the work, an essay titled, "Emerging Criticism and Themes in Hispana Literature," provides an up-dated overview of issues within Hispana literary criticism and major themes within the writing itself. The latter part of that essay uses as its framework Tey Diana Rebolledo's 1985 essay, "The Maturing of Chicana Poetry: the Quiet Revolution of the 1980's." The second section of the work consists of four original short stories which reflect some of the general characteristics of Hispana writing. Together, the two parts are intended to provide Canadian scholars with a succinct introduction to this growing field, and thus aid and encourage them to further explore it on their own.

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Rieley, Honor Jean. "'Wha sae base as be a slave?': linguistic spaces in Scottish historical fiction, and where slavery doesn't fit." Thesis, McGill University, 2011. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=103775.

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This thesis examines the literary incompatibility of two different currents in eighteenth-century Scottish history, exemplified by the figurative use of 'slavery' to refer to the oppression of Scots and the simultaneous effacement of Scotland's involvement in the practice of plantation slavery in the colonies. The focus of the competing histories is Scotland's entry into the sphere of social and economic progress opened up by the Union of 1707. In the traditional version, this happens at the expense of the Jacobites, who are left out of the modern British polity because of their unassimilable backwardness and cultural otherness. In more recent re-evaluations, it also happens at the expense of the slaves whose labour underpins British commercial development. This thesis studies four novels about the 1745 Jacobite uprising: Walter Scott's Waverley, whose hero personifies the rejection of Jacobitism in favour of unified Britishness; James Robertson's Joseph Knight, which sets slavery and Jacobitism side by side; and Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped and Catriona, which fall somewhere in between. It argues that these novels negotiate history in linguistic and spatial terms. Jacobites are closely associated with a particular place, the Highlands, but this space is also conceived as a linguistic gap or 'vacuity'; confronting Scotland with Jamaica brings the semantic flexibility of 'slavery' into question; and the narrative function of Scots dialect is to resist the fixity of histories that either ignore slavery or incorporate it too completely.
Ce mémoire examine l'incompatibilité, en littérature, de deux tendances simultanées dans l'histoire de l'Écosse au dix-huitième siècle, représentées, d'un côté, par l'usage figuratif de « l'esclavage » pour indiquer l'oppression des Écossais et, de l'autre, par le silence de l'Écosse au sujet de sa participation à l'esclavage colonial dans les plantations. Ces tendances contradictoires se concentrent sur l'entrée de l'Écosse dans la sphère du progrès social et économique suite à l'Union de 1707. Dans la version traditionnelle, cette entrée se fait au détriment des jacobites, qui sont tenus à l'écart du régime politique de la Grande-Bretagne moderne, puisque considérés comme inassimilables du fait de leur altérité et de leur retard culturels. Dans des relectures plus récentes, elle se fait aussi au détriment des esclaves dont le travail est le fondement du développement commercial britannique. Ce mémoire explore le soulèvement jacobite de 1745 à travers l'étude de quatre romans : Waverley de Walter Scott, dont le héros incarne la rejection du jacobitisme en faveur d'une identité britannique unie, Joseph Knight de James Robertson, qui met en parallèle esclavage et jacobitisme, ainsi que Kidnapped et Catriona de Robert Louis Stevenson, qui mêlent les deux tendances. Ce mémoire soutient que ces romans négocient l'histoire à la fois linguistiquement et spatialement. Tout d'abord, les jacobites sont intimement liés à un lieu spécifique, les Highlands, mais cet espace est également conçu comme un fossé ou « vide » linguistique. De plus, mettre en tension l'Écosse et la Jamaïque pose la question de la flexibilité sémantique de « l'esclavage ». Enfin, la fonction narrative du dialecte écossais est de résister la fixité des histoires qui ignorent l'esclavage ou, à l'inverse, l'incluent sans l'interroger.

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Lunan, Lyndsay. "The fiction of identity : Hugh Miller and the working man's search for voice in nineteenth-century Scottish literature." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2005. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5345/.

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This thesis is the first critical study to examine Miller across the full range of his intellectual contribution. Existing studies of Hugh Miller have been preoccupied with Miller’s biography and with the scandal of his suicide in 1856, with many commentators viewing Miller as the quintessential ‘divided man’. This thesis, however, seeks to demonstrate that, far from producing a work of irreconcilable tensions, Miller’s work, taken as a whole, demonstrates a remarkably coherent response to the many contemporary intellectual and social issues he engages with. Part One examines the politicised literary climate of nineteenth-century Scottish letters, and in particular the cultural phenomena of the ‘peasant poet’ made fashionable after Burns. I examine Miller’s entrance into literary circles as the self-fashioned persona of ‘the Cromarty stonemason’. Pat Two traces Miller’s search for an authoritative vehicle of self-expression across the genres of poetry, short fiction and folklore before attaining recognition as a man of science and an influential social and religious commentator as editor of The Witness newspaper (1840 – 1856). In Part Three two significant features of Miller’s socio-literary approach are considered. Chapter ten examines Miller’s broader socio-literary agenda, which insisted upon autobiography’s capacity to reclaim a marginalised working-class voice, and his tentative moves towards the exposition of a working-class canon. The final chapter attempts to place Miller in his proper relation to the intellectual thinking of the time and to suggest that his adherence lay toward intellectual moderation and liberality rather than the religious partisanship with which he has become associated.

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Hill, Lorna. "Bloody women : a critical-creative examination of how female protagonists have transformed contemporary Scottish and Nordic crime fiction." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/27352.

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This study will explore the role of female authors and their female protagonists in contemporary Scottish and Nordic crime fiction. Authors including Val McDermid, Denise Mina, Lin Anderson and Liza Marklund are just a few of the women who have challenged the expectation of gender in the crime fiction genre. By setting their novels in contemporary society, they reflect a range of social and political issues through the lens of a female protagonist. By closely examining the female characters, all journalists, in Val McDermid’s Lindsay Gordon series; Denise Mina’s Paddy Meehan series; Anna Smith’s books about Rosie Gilmour; and Liza Marklund’s books about Annika Bengzton, I explore the issue of gender through these writers’ perspectives and also draw parallels between their societies. I document the influence of these writers on my own practice-based research, a novel, The Invisible Chains, set in post-Referendum Scotland. The thesis will examine and define the role of the female protagonist, offer a feminist reading of contemporary crime fiction, and investigate how the rise of human trafficking, the problem of domestic abuse in Scotland and society’s changing attitudes and values are reflected in contemporary crime novels, before discussing the narrative structures and techniques employed in the writing of The Invisible Chains. This novel allows us to consider the role of women in a contemporary and progressive society where women hold many senior positions in public life and examine whether they manage successfully to challenge traditional patriarchal hierarchies. The narrative is split between journalist Megan Ross, The Girl, a victim of human trafficking, and Trudy, who is being domestically abused, thus pulling together the themes of the critical genesis in the creative work. By focusing on the protagonist, the victims and raising awareness of human trafficking and domestic abuse, The Invisible Chains, an original creative work, reflects a contemporary society’s changing attitudes, problems and values.

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Andrade, Emily Y. "Illegal immigration : 6 stories from an American family." Virtual Press, 2007. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1365172.

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Illegal Immigration: Six Stories from an American Family is a collection of stories derived from and inspired by the author's personal life experiences, dreams, and family history, as a Mexican American woman. The stories also hold distinct archetypal patterns, images, storylines and symbolism due to the author's connection to the collective unconscious through meditation. The stories tell character driven stories of adversity, and the search for home, and identity by linking main characters to their family members in each story. The collection as a whole reveals generational patterns, histories and connections not only present in the matriarchal bloodline of the collection, but from one human to another. The stories beckon the reader into an alternate reality created by these archetypal patterns inherent in all humans, in an attempt to transcend genres and find a place within the psyche where anything is possible.
Illegal immigration -- Marco and Margarita -- La muerte de mi padre -- Together again -- Vivi and Ricardo -- The healer.
Department of English

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Reilly, Elizabeth Lauren. "The "scab" of slavery interracial female solidarity in literature about the antebellum South /." Click for download, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1588773401&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=3260&RQT=309&VName=PQD.

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Marron, Rosalyn Mary. "Rewriting the nation : a comparative study of Welsh and Scottish women's fiction from the wilderness years to post-devolution." Thesis, University of South Wales, 2012. https://pure.southwales.ac.uk/en/studentthesis/rewriting-the-nation(acc79b10-cd63-48ee-b045-dabb5af2f77c).html.

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Since devolution there has been a wealth of stimulating and exciting literary works by Welsh and Scottish women writers, produced as the boundaries of nationality were being dismantled and ideas of nationhood transformed. This comparative study brings together, for the first time, Scottish and Welsh women writers’ literary responses to these historic political and cultural developments. Chapter one situates the thesis in a historical context and discusses some of the connections between Wales and Scotland in terms of their relationship with ‘Britain’ and England. Chapter two focuses on the theoretical context and argues that postcolonial and feminist theories are the most appropriate frameworks in which to understand both Welsh and Scottish women’s writing in English, and their preoccupations with gendered inequalities and language during the pre- and post-devolutionary period. The third chapter examines Welsh and Scottish women’s writing from the first failed referendum (1979) to the second successful one (1997) to provide a sense of progression towards devolution. Since the process of devolution began there has been an important repositioning of Scottish and Welsh people’s perception of their culture and their place within it; the subsequent chapters – four, five, six and seven – analyse a diverse body of work from the symbolic transference of powers in 1999 to 2008. The writers discussed range from established authors such as Stevie Davies to first-time novelists such as Leela Soma. Through close comparative readings focusing on a range of issues such as marginalised identities and the politics of home and belonging, these chapters uncover and assess Welsh and Scottish women writers’ shared literary assertions, strategies and concerns as well as local and national differences. The conclusions drawn from this thesis suggest that, as a consequence of a history of sustained internal and external marginalization, post-devolution Welsh and Scottish women’s writing share important similarities regarding the politics of representation. The authors discussed in this study are resisting writers who textually illustrate the necessity of constantly rewriting national narratives and in so doing enable their audience to read the two nations and their peoples in fresh, innovative and divergent ways.

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Acri, Nila <1987&gt. "Scottish English in Contemporary Fiction: Dialogues in Irvine Wlsh Trainspotting and James Kelman How Late It Was, How Late." Master's Degree Thesis, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10579/6424.

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Bryce, Sylvia. "Tracing the shadow of 'No Mean City' : aspects of class and gender in selected modern Scottish urban working-class fiction." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14803.

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This Ph.D. dissertation examines the influence of Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long's novel No Mean City (1935) on the representation of working-class subjectivity in modem Scottish urban fiction. The novel helped to focus literary attention on a predominantly male, working-class, urban and realistic vision of modern Scotland. McArthur and Long explore - in their representations of destructive slum-dwelling characters - the damaging effects of class and gender on working-class identity. The controversy surrounding the book has always been intense, and most critics either deplore or downplay the full significance of No Mean City's literary impact. My dissertation re-examines one of the most disliked and misrepresented working-class novels in modern Scottish literary history. McArthur and Long's literary legacy, notwithstanding its many detractors, has become something to write against. Through examination of works by James Barke, John McNeillie, Edward Gaitens, Robin Jenkins, Bill McGhee, George Friel, William McIlvanney, Alan Spence, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Janice Galloway, Agnes Owens, Meg Henderson and A.L. Kennedy, the thesis outlines how the challenge represented by No Mean City has survived the decades following its publication. It argues that contrary to prevailing critical opinion, the novel's influence has been instrumental, not detrimental, to the evolution of modern Scottish literature. Ultimately I hope to pave the way toward a fuller, more nuanced understanding of No Mean City's remarkable impact, and to demonstrate how pervasive its legacy has been to Scottish writers from the 1930s to the 1990s.

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Bebout, Lee. "Reflections of Other/Reflections of Self." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2002. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc3189/.

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This Thesis collection contains a critical preface and five stories. The preface, “Reflejos y Reflexiones” (translated: Images and Thoughts), addresses the issues of writing the cultural or gendered Other; these issues include methodology, literary colonialism, a dialogue between works, and creating distance through defamiliarizing the self. “Perennials” is the story of Noemi Tellez, an immigrant to the U.S. who must choose between working and taking care of her family. In “Load Bearing” Luis, the eldest child, faces his family and friends on one of his last days before moving away to college. “La Monarca” deals with Lily's, the youngest daughter, struggle to mediate a place between her friends and her family. In “Reflections in the River,” Arabela, the second youngest, faces the ghost of an unwanted pregnancy and La Llorona. “La Cocina de Su Madre” is the story of Magda, the oldest daughter, and her own teenage girl, Natalia, as they attempt to find themselves in a new town after moving a thousand miles from home.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Scottish Americans in fiction'

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