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Abstract
The present dissertation aims at giving an account of the significance of the rogue in contemporary British literature, focusing on this character's survival and metamorphosis particularly from the second half of the 20th century onwards.
The thesis is divided into five sections, comprising three main chapters. The opening section is a general introduction showing the main steps in my approach to the subject under discussion and the attending methodology. In the first chapter I deal with the origins of the literature of roguery and the development of the rogue. Starting with the analysis of six previously selected novels, the second chapter studies the revival of the rogue mainly in the 1950s, adopting a comparative perspective. For this purpose I analyse and contextualise the following works: Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth (1944) and Iris Murdoch's Under the Net (1954); John Wain's Hurry on Down (1953), Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954), John Braine's Room at the Top (1957) and Allan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958). This section closes with an analysis of the transformations undergone by Bill Naughton's radio play, Alfie Elkins and His Little Life (1962), making manifest the multiple possibilities inherent in a character such as the rogue.
My third chapter deals with fiction produced in Britain in the last decades of the second millennium and the beginning of a new one, focusing on Martin Amis' and Irvine Welsh's literary works. In their novels, especially Amis's Money: A Suicide Note (1984), London Fields (1989) and Yellow Dog (2003), and Welsh's trilogy Trainspotting (1993), Glue (2001) and Porno (2002), the rogue is an effective vehicle for both the depiction and the questioning of the society we live in.
The conclusion brings together the main ideas developed in the thesis, concentrating on the characteristics of the rogue and the literature of roguery in the present. The dissertation closes with a section containing attachments and bibliography.
