Within the field of comparative literature, this dissertation investigates how the paired symbols of snow and window illuminate certain imaginative processes such as the threshold experience of creative and receptive acts. This work is an intertextual analysis and synthesis of self-allusive poems by Boris Pasternak, Ted Hughes, Gyula Illyes, and Gennady Aygi. Poems by other authors are also discussed briefly, or linked to the main texts through epigraphs. Contemplation of snow through a window is the central theme of the focused texts. Snowflakes falling on the window pane allegorically represent words on the page, and the observation of this process is a metaphor for the ongoing creative and receptive acts. Meditative contemplation of nature and of the processes of writing and reading are portrayed as means for an introspective self-discovery of imagination. The threshold experience of observing the creative mind as it is externalised in nature and embodied in the poetic text involves a deconstructive reversal and overlapping of the external and the internal worlds, and other opposites. The complex mental process of watching the internal in what is external is comparable to the fusion of the optical effects of transparency and reflection on a window. The works analysed reveal that poems can function both as 'windows' displaying external phenomena, and as symbolic 'mirrors' in which one can catch a glimpse of the working of imagination at the very act of simultaneously outward and inward contemplation. The methodological scope of this work is primarily concerned with the intertextual connective function of recurring poetic images (symbols). The metaphorical symbol is a central embodiment of imagination. By focusing on recurring symbols, one can establish links between literary texts and between various imaginative systems (such as literature, mythology, music and visual arts) on a primarily aesthetic basis, without recourse to extraliterary criteria. Northrop Frye's Theory of Symbols, Jungian archetypal criticism, Iurii Lotman's models of communication, and more recent theoretical works by Harold Bloom, Michael Riffaterre, Owen Miller, Roland Barthes, Jonathan Culler, Jacques Derrida, and other scholars serve as the conceptual framework for this approach. Five main intertextual relations are explored. The recurring metaphorical image is shown to be (1) a semantic link between works of the same author, (2) a manifestation of transpersonal features of imagination, (3) a trace of one author's text in the work of another, (4) a means for establishing hypothetical dialogues between texts which are not related by their authors, and (5) a potential connective between literature and other imaginative systems, such as mythology and visual art. These comparative analyses reveal that intertextual approaches are not only tools for uncovering and enriching the meanings of literary texts; they are also means for constructing order in one's otherwise chaotic corpus of reading, and they enable one to gain knowledge about the nature of imagination. The thematic and methodological aspects of the dissertation thus complement and support each other.

The significance of the relationship between Scottish artist Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) and English novelist J.G. Ballard (1930-2009) has previously been overlooked in art historical and literary scholarship. This thesis fills this research gap through the analysis of how the pair’s works overlapped thematically to represent a particular strain of British modernity. By looking at shared cultural circumstances after World War II, parallels will be drawn between the work of Paolozzi and Ballard in the late years of British modernism. Drawing upon the topics of science fiction, Surrealism, the neo-avant-garde and militaristic and crash aesthetics, this thesis explores the various themes which Paolozzi and Ballard encountered during the period of their friendship. Overall, this comparative analysis reveals that despite dissimilar upbringings, Paolozzi and Ballard’s harrowing experiences of the Second World War culminated in a dual reaction against the stagnant flow of British modernism during the late postwar era. My thesis demonstrates this through their involvement with literary magazines as well as their mutually shared interests as expressed in their works of art and writings. By creating works which appropriated early twentieth century traditions, Paolozzi and Ballard rejected their immediate modernist inheritance and turned to the modernist past with renewed avant-garde intent. As exemplified in their works, the pair together represented the late postwar transition of British modernity during the dawn of what would come to be called ‘postmodernism’.

This thesis investigates how diasporic Caribbean women writers use the vehicle of the novel to effect a ‘writing back’ to the Caribbean home through what I propose to consider as a specific sub-genre of Caribbean literature: ‘narratives of return’. I argue that novels which constitute ‘narratives of return’ reveal how diasporic identity continues to be informed by a particularised connection to the Caribbean homeland. Firstly, I propose the region’s literary representation within these narratives as the home of cultural memories which fully inform the hybridised nature of diasporic subjectivity. Secondly, I investigate the narrative of return’s depiction of the Caribbean as the site of historical, collective, and personal trauma which continues to influence notions of identification and belonging to the region for Caribbean people. Whilst ‘return’ refers to the act of ‘writing back’ to the Caribbean by diasporic authors, I suggest that the ‘return’ represented within the narratives can also be literary, symbolic, metaphorical and physical. I investigate how the ‘return’ is negotiated within the text, exploring what ‘narratives of return’ reveal about Caribbean diasporic subjectivity and the relationship of protagonist and author with Caribbean history and the ancestral home. Theories of culture and identity acquisition will be crucial in addressing these questions, while my analysis explores how Caribbean diasporic identity is informed by an inherently traumatic and violent history of colonialism. I argue towards the healing, therapeutic function of the discourse of the ‘narrative of return’ in selected novels by diasporic authors from the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone Caribbean. My approach seeks to unveil links between islands, recognising similarities in diasporic and Caribbean experience across racial, cultural and linguistic differences. I propose the Caribbean as a space which is representative of traumatic experience for Caribbean people across racial and cultural boundaries, investigating the palliative nature of the ‘narrative of return’ in effecting a process of confronting and working through past traumas.

This thesis explores aesthetic representation in Australian and Canadian nature writing from the turn of the twenty-first century to the present day. I analyse nine representative texts to explore the relationship between aesthetic representation of the so-called natural environment and the texts’ central themes, which I identify as (i) belonging (in place) (ii) digging (uncovering colonial history), (iii) walking (pilgrimage), and (iv) working (ecological rehabilitation). In connection with each theme, I examine how the environment is perceived, how notions of aesthetic value are constructed around it, and how aesthetic language¬¬ contributes to the narrative and argument of the text. In so doing, I seek insight from contemporary environmental aesthetics as developed by philosophers including Allan Carlson, Yuriko Saito, and Arnold Berleant. I argue that recent nature writing from both Australia and Canada shows an increasingly self-conscious engagement with the politics of representation that is often characterised by anxiety on the part of the narrator about representation and the possibility of the ‘truthful framing’ of place. This leads recent writers to enquire (albeit with different levels of success) into the discourses that drive beliefs about the natural environment. Some writers put pressure on popular modes of perception such as the picturesque by disrupting conventional representational styles, while others use those popular modes as the basis for a normative model of aesthetics and a spur to action. I suggest that one of the distinctive features of recent Australian and Canadian nature writing is its critical engagement with ways of seeing and describing nature that were developed during the colonial period, in particular in debates surrounding picturesque aesthetics, which in turn influenced travel and nature writing. In this way, much of contemporary Australian and Canadian nature writing can be seen as engaging, either explicitly or implicitly, in a critical project of reframing the picturesque.

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A study of Octavia Butler has long been overdue. My aim is to rectify the paucity of critical commentary on her work, and to take into consideration the specificity of the African American woman. Examining how Butler's fiction interrogates the dual narratives of oppression that are an integral feature of black women's lives, I focus on six areas of Butler's fiction. Butler uses the conventions of science fiction to interrogate religious and secular mythologies that aim to limit and circumscribe the black woman; I explore how she amalgamates science fiction with other narrative modes such as fantasy, the historical novel, and the slave narrative. Linked to a consideration of Butler's use of science fiction is an exploration of the spaces she creates. I examine the categorisation of her work as either utopian or dystopian suggesting that Butler complicates this enterprise by questioning and extending its format. Her work rejects the hope and consolation offered by utopias; instead her fiction opens onto heterotopia, revelling in contradiction, difference, and change. Butler's fiction is preoccupied with the treatment of the black woman's bodily, material existence. She uses strategies of transformation to elude white patriarchal control, presenting us with grotesque figures and cyborg monsters that provide a parodic reversal of the images that have been apportioned to black men and women. Relations of self to its others are a fundamental aspect of Butler's work. However, rather than simply dramatising hierarchical, binary thinking and its subsequent deconstruction, her work offers alternative formations of self and other in which each term is able to recognise its other in their full subjectivity. Butler makes use of a linguistic heritage that is 'double-voiced'. The polyphonic construction of her texts, her use of Signifying, and the repetition and displacement that she enacts is indicative of much African American literature. Butler's reliance on religion in her work suggests a fundamental interrogation of Christianity. Her novels explore the complicated relationship that African Americans maintain toward the Judeo-Christian tradition; devices such as the introduction of African belief systems and the creation of an entirely new religion work to disrupt this. Articulating the view from the margins, Butler's fiction talks back to narratives of originary identity that posit the black woman as other, as inferior, and therefore, as subjugated to a white, male ideal.

The anthology consists of fifty-one poems. They have been selected from a much larger number and were chosen, partly because I feel they are among the most successful, but also because they represent themes and concerns which have emerged over time. They are divided into eight groups with the titles: Private Rooms; Exchanges; Chiaroscuro; lines from France and Flanders; Myths and Modernity; Epitaphs and Last Words; Public Events; The Nature of Nature. I trace a general movement from private to more public and impersonal poems. A roughly chronological pattern exists within each section. The dissertation is 29,364 words long. not counting bibliography. index and appendices. The opening section comments on the individual poems and their origins. It is followed by an autobiographical chapter which expands on the personal background of the anthology and refers to some excluded poems. This subdivides into: Childhood and Danger; Childhood and Unknowing; Memory; The Stages of Life; Childhood Pre- War; World War II; Books and People; Cambridge and Sport; The Navy and France; Paris,' Finland and Cambridge Again; Finland and Acting; Literary Scandinavia; England Again. There follows a more general section on well-known poems by Lowell, Stevens, Hughes, Plath, Larkin and others which relate to a sense of boundary lines I find in my own writing. This I call The Edges of Things and it subdivides into various kinds of boundary: including the natural (The Elements), temporal (The Languages of War) and what I call 'modal' (The Social and the Existential). A section commenting on 'myth' and 'reality' in poetry is then followed by some observations on personal voice, technique, literary models and influences, taking Eliot's phrase 'objective correlative' as a useful base. The dissertation ends with a general theoretical model of the relation between poetry and its roots, which is developed from Paul Klee, together with references to Koestler's theory of 'bisociation' and creativity.

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