The gradual establishment of George Mackay Brown as Orkney's literary spokesman over the last four decades has instigated a revival of the Orcadian tradition in literature. In light of Paul Ricoeur's concept of narrative identity this study explores the correlations between Brown's work and the construction and maintenance of a distinct Orkney identity. It posits that communal identity derives from dynamic narrative processes merging fact and fiction into a story that is generally accepted as authentic in spite of its essentially mythic nature.

This lively new study is the very first book to offer an absorbing history of the uncharted territory that is Scottish Catholic fiction. For Scottish Catholic writers of the twentieth century, faith was the key influence on both their artistic process and creative vision. By focusing on one of the best known of Scotland's literary converts, George Mackay Brown, this book explores both the Scottish Catholic modernist movement of the twentieth century and the particularities of Brown's writing which have been routinely overlooked by previous studies. The book provides sustained and illuminating close readings of key texts in Brown's corpus and includes detailed comparisons between Brown's writing and an established canon of Catholic writers, including Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and Flannery O'Connor.This timely book reveals that Brown's Catholic imagination extended far beyond the 'small green world' of Orkney and ultimately embraced a universal human experience.

In this book Timothy C. Baker situates George Mackay Brown's work within a broad literary and philosophical context to articulate how his novels engage with the question of community.

What is postmodern literary subjectivity? How to talk about it without falling in the trap of negative hyper-essentialism or being seduced by exuberant lit speak? One way out of this dilemma, as this book suggests, is via a redefinition of the concept in the context of Emmanuel Levinas and his radical ethics. By defining subjectivity as an ethically charged act of language, Levinas provides a fresh perspective on the often trivialized aspects of postmodern poetics such as referentiality and affect construction strategies. The foregrounding of the ethical dimension of those poetic elements has far-reaching consequences for how we read postmodern texts and understand postmodernism in general. Thus, to prove the benefits of the Levinasian approach, the author applies it to the work of the canonical American postmodernist, Donald Barthelme, and explains the distinctly ethical character of his apparently surfictional experiments.

A Companion to the British and Irish Short Story provides a comprehensive treatment of short fiction writing and chronicles its development in Britain and Ireland from 1880 to the present. Provides a comprehensive treatment of the short story in Britain and Ireland as it developed over the period 1880 to the present Includes essays on topics and genres, as well as on individual texts and authors Comprises chapters on women’s writing, Irish fiction, gay and lesbian writing, and short fiction by immigrants to Britain

This volume shows how British literature recorded contemporaneous historical change. It traces the emergence and evolution of literary trends from 1980-2000.

The central argument of the thesis, the representation and reception of otherness, is followed throughout White's novels with the support of a complex critical instrumentarium made up of postcolonial theory, reader response theory, cultural-critical frameworks, alterity theory, and narratology. Otherness in its manifold representations is a main component of Patrick White's fiction. It functions on several levels and this requires a deeper entanglement on the part of the reader. The different levels previously referred to are embodied in the various Others who people White's novels: ethnic Others as members of the Australian multicultural society and the Aborigines as colonial Others, as well as gender Others, who also play an important role in White's fictional world. Reading Patrick White is an exercise in tolerance, endurance and acceptance of alternatives. But the efforts of the reader do not remain unrewarded. In his endeavour to change what it meant to imagine Australia, the writer broke down the barriers of what it meant to imagine otherness.