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Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales is part of a literary tradition whose most important feature is its subversiveness. This subversion involves supernatural or fantastic elements in the creation of a temporary alternative world. The ensuing struggle between the real and the fantastic worlds is often embodied by a bourgeois heroine and an aristocratic male villain, respectively. The role of the heroine is pivotal to the plot for it is her survival that signals the defeat of a subversive alternative world. But what happens when the villain is a woman? Can her subversion be feminist in nature? The popularity and financial success of women writers of the Gothic means they could not have contradicted dominant views of gender. Yet, Dinesen's fiction demonstrates that subversion is indeed possible. A look at her life and her nonfiction works will facilitate an investigation into the subversive nature of her Gothic tales.

This thesis re-evaluates Inhumanism, the philosophy of twentieth-century American poet Robinson Jeffers, in light of the Christian eremitic tradition. Inhumanism continues to create controversy around Jeffers' life and work; charges of misanthropy and anti-Americanism have pushed him to the margins of American literature. My first chapter looks at how critics have tried to understand Inhumanism's influences and motives by contextualizing Jeffers' philosophy in many cultural, psychological, literary, and spiritual traditions. Chapter Two explores the main tenets of the eremitic ideal, as expressed in the lives and writings of hermits from the fourth to the twentieth centuries. Chapters Three, Four, and Five then situate Inhumamsm's themes, imagery, and purpose---as set down in Jeffers' poetry from 1903 to 1962---in this eremitic tradition. Looking at Jeffers' early work shows that Inhumanism is not politically-motivated, as many critics claim, but rather is a deep-rooted spiritual orientation, carried in his heart from boyhood. Recontextualizing Jeffers' work in the eremitic tradition shows Inhumanism to be, not an exceptional or dangerous philosophy, but part of the core of western spirituality.

Most critical acclaim of William Faulkner has focused on his innovations of narrative technique, and while critics have frequently noted the correlation between form and meaning in his novels, the central focus of these novels--race--has largely been ignored in the criticism. The purpose of this paper is to examine Faulkner's narrative methodology and arrangement of material in order to demonstrate that the structures of his novels, particularly Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!, consistently enhance and dramatize the major subject and themes of the novels. Under careful scrutiny, these structures reveal an effective and dramatic parallel between Faulkner's rhetorical methodology and the complexity of his subject matter--the South, and the issue of race.

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This thesis is concerned with Freud, Lacan and Faulkner's explorations of psychology and language, regarded as differential versions of common concerns. In the first part, using aspects of the Freudian concept of the unconscious, and reading Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness narrative in The Sound and the Fury, we find that Faulkner seeks to convey the flow of the unconscious. In the second part, we see that Lacan reads Freud through Saussure's linguistics, and renews Freudian psychoanalysis with the Lacanian concept of an unconscious structured like a language. Beyond Freud, with reference to these Lacanian notions, we find that Faulkner produces a narrative structured like a language. In the third part, through the application of Lacanian theories of narration to literary theories, and through a Barthes-inspired comparison of Faulkner's novel with Lu Xun's short story "A Madman's Diary", we see that while Lu Xun gives his readers a world of meaning, Faulkner shows them the world of the word without any meaning by creating a new narrative strategy.