Novelists have struggled to find forms of expression that would allow them to register the post-9/11 landscape. This thesis examines their tentative and sometimes faltering attempts to establish a critical distance from and create a convincing narrative and metaphorical lexicon for the historical, political and psychological realities of the terrorist attacks. I suggest that they have, at times, been distracted by the populist rhetoric of journalistic expression, by a retreat to American exceptional ism and by the demand for an immediate response. The Bush administration's statement that the state and politicians 'create our own reality' served to reinforce the difficulties that novelists faced in creating their own. Against the background of public commentary post-9/11 , and the politics of the subsequent 'War on Terror', the thesis considers the work of Richard Ford, Paul Auster, Kamila Shamsie, Nadeem Aslam, Don DeLillo, Mohsin Hamid and Amy Waldman. USing my own extended interviews with Ford, Waldman and Shamsie, the artist Eric Fischl, the journalist Kevin Marsh, and with the former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams (who is also a 9/11 survivor), I consider the aims and praxis of novelists working wilhin a variety of traditions, from Ford's realism and Auster's metafiction to the postcolonial perspectives of Hamid and Aslam, and, finally, the end-of-decade reflections of Waldman. My conclusion is that novelists are, finally, edging closer to methodologies adequate to the challenges of the post-9/11 world. Ford's admission that writers do not 'have an exact human vocabulary for the loss of a city' has given way to a new surety that the narrative and visual arts can define the unimaginable in important and expressive ways.

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This thesis addresses, from a comparative perspective, an important lacuna in the research devoted to German and English revolutionary literature in the period from 1819 up to the European revolutions of 1848/49. It illustrates that a major shift from a concept of political revolution to one of social revolution took place within these years which is reflected in radical literature between the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ (1819) and the failure of the bourgeois political revolution of 1848/49. Theoretically based on selected writings of the early Marx and Engels on ideology, consciousness and political and social revolution as well as on more recent Marxist theories of cultural studies, this study shows how the contemporary philosophical, socio-political, socio-economic and literary discourse on revolution must be regarded as closely interlinked. This interconnection is not limited to an ideological, but also extends to a rhetorical and even metaphorical level. However, although it foregrounds these shared textual elements, the purpose of this thesis is not to add yet another philological analysis of literary works, but rather to flesh out the shared ideological involvement of the fictional and non-fictional revolutionary discourse. Texts and authors include in the British context of 1819 Percy Bysshe Shelley and British radical journalists such as Richard Carlile. In order to analyse the shift in revolutionary discourse in the years between the French bourgeois July Revolution of 1830 and the early 1840s, texts by the literary revolutionary writers Ludwig Börne, Heinrich Heine, Thomas Lovell Beddoes and Georg Büchner are contextualised with the pamphlets and writings by the most radically socio-revolutionary among the French early socialists, Louis Auguste Blanqui, by rebellious weavers, by the Parisian German early proletarian movement as well as Marx’s earliest socio-philosophical justification of a proletarian social revolution, the “Einleitung Zur Kritik der Hegel’schen Rechts-Philosophie” (1844).

Bibliography: leaves 29-340 / 340 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, 1988

This dissertation undertakes a comparative study of certain works of literature concerning Vietnamese and American troops during the United States’ involvement in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. My assumption was that during war it is possible to conclude that enemy forces behave in the same manner in order to reach the identical goal, that of victory over the ‘other’ side. I sought to ascertain how under the selfsame conditions they could be considered as enemies. Divided only by the 17th Parallel: A Study of Similarities Between American and Vietnamese Soldiers in Selected Works By close reading of six texts, three from Vietnamese and three from American perspectives, I have attempted to extract their similar views from each in order to create a context in which the likeness of each side is demonstrated. This was achieved by exploring four themes: those of landscape, time, conflict and ghosts. It was discovered that the protagonists’ behaviour was the same and that rather than being the others’ adversary their true enemies were found within their own ranks. The results indicate that a wider perspective should be adopted on war than one which regards it as a simplistic binary consisting of two opposing sides. Contrary to any supposition that enemies must remain separated, there is more than enough evidence for one to conclude that they actually occupied mutual psychological territory. Key Terms: Landscape, time, ghosts, psychological damage, Reader Response, CSR, PTSD, New Historicism, dehumanisation, conditions of war, 1954 Geneva Agreement, ideology, war literature. / English Literature / M.A. (English Literature)

This dissertation undertakes a comparative study of certain works of literature concerning Vietnamese and American troops during the United States’ involvement in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. My assumption was that during war it is possible to conclude that enemy forces behave in the same manner in order to reach the identical goal, that of victory over the ‘other’ side. I sought to ascertain how under the selfsame conditions they could be considered as enemies. Divided only by the 17th Parallel: A Study of Similarities Between American and Vietnamese Soldiers in Selected Works By close reading of six texts, three from Vietnamese and three from American perspectives, I have attempted to extract their similar views from each in order to create a context in which the likeness of each side is demonstrated. This was achieved by exploring four themes: those of landscape, time, conflict and ghosts. It was discovered that the protagonists’ behaviour was the same and that rather than being the others’ adversary their true enemies were found within their own ranks. The results indicate that a wider perspective should be adopted on war than one which regards it as a simplistic binary consisting of two opposing sides. Contrary to any supposition that enemies must remain separated, there is more than enough evidence for one to conclude that they actually occupied mutual psychological territory. Key Terms: Landscape, time, ghosts, psychological damage, Reader Response, CSR, PTSD, New Historicism, dehumanisation, conditions of war, 1954 Geneva Agreement, ideology, war literature. / English Literature / M.A. (English Literature)