Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/737 on 20.03.2017 by CS (TIS)This study developed after considerable time spent collating and cataloguing data
contained in Ronald Duncan's archive. Familiarisation with the material led to my
identifying a need to explore the elusive nature of the personality that biographical
material should hope to uncover. Duncan was prone to mainly confessional writing,
a kind of writing that demands a causal inference between life and work. Furthermore,
the archive supplies multiple data sources that serve to aid chronology, trace
reliability, provide external corroboration and investigate truth-value.
My study follows a loosely chronological structure after discerning shifts in
his thematic concerns. The years up until the mid-' 60s are detailed because, from his
youth until that time, Duncan is consistently idealistic but expresses preoccupations
particularly manifest in society in each period. Chapters 1 and 2 study Duncan's
concern with utopian politics (1930s); Chapter 3, his relationship to religion (1940s);
Chapter 4, his part in West End Theatre in the 1950s; and Chapters 5 and 6, his
tackling of issues of gender and sexuality (1950s and '60s). Each chapter draws upon
the autobiography and-related documents of those years. The thesis refers particularly
to Duncan's dramatic writing, avoiding serious analysis of the poetry because it
has been recently researched. Because theatre movements are imbued with popular
cultural codes, these and his memoirs are chosen to convey how his texts centralise
the idea of authenticity but also manipulate the idea using subjects and characters
caught between idealism and despair, the textual and the historical.
Consequently, my approach to Duncan's work emphasises subject-hood rather
than a pre-textual authorial presence which prompts the reader to seek an explanation
for the work in its producer. Theoretical implications emerge from the association of
Duncan's autobiographical personalities with the notion of writerly authority and its
creations. With Duncan the 'question' of self-hood is ultimately conceived as a process
whereby the text is attributed to the author through a complex and disparate set
of operations, not referential simply to a real individual, but to several simultaneous
selves and subject positions. Displacing a perception of the author as the origin of
meaning, webs of intertextual voices are discerned within the texture of discourse.THE RONALD DUNCAN FOUNDATIO