This thesis attempts to answer the following questions: What determines a modern 'Southern' short story as opposed to any other. What are its literary characteristics. What pattern of short fiction is outlined by its foremost practitioners. In eight chapters, first, the short story is examined to indicate why, as a genre, it best exhibits the qualities of modern Southern writing, and the background is reviewed which gave rise to the Southern 'renaissance', the New Tradition, and the New Criticism. Chapters Two through Seven examine successively six approaches to the writing of modern short stories in the South: the way that William Faulkner controlled the language through a personalised idiom drawn from an environment which included such influences as the King James Version of the Bible, Mark Twain, and Sir Walter Scott; the influence of the Fugitives upon Southern letters, in particular their advancement of the themes and ideas of their classical training and the controlled artifice of their writing form, as shown in stories by Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, and Robert Penn Warren; the firmly distanced control of Katherine Anne Porter which made her the natural exponent of the short story; Flannery O'Connor's use of imagery in explaining her often disturbing themes, and the building up of sometimes dark and frightening symbols; the technical improvisations, structure, tone, poetic effect, and characteristic humour of Eudora Welty; and, the direct and indirect relation to Southern short fiction of black writers Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Diane Oliver, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin. The final chapter includes an examination of universality and regionality, the impact of the six approaches upon Southern short fiction, the changing face of the South, and possible directions of future Southern short prose fiction.

This thesis constitutes an examination of those attitudes toward warfare and the military establishment which can be detected in a representative number of the war novels written by American authors in the period from 1880 to 1963. It is not intended to be primarily a work of literary criticism, although some observations upon the literary merits of various works have been made in passing. The principal object of the thesis has been to discuss the American war novels in relationship to the historical, economic and political events which accompanied or preceded their appearance, in order to be able to observe those attitudes which seem to be peculiar to the citizens of the United States, and to describe the changes which those attitudes have undergone in the last eighty years. The time span has been sub-divided into four main segmental c1880-1917; 1917-1939; 1939-1952 and 1953.1963, corresponding to what are felt to be major epochs in the American experience of warfare. Each sub-section begins with a review of the more important events contributing to the American outlook upon war or the military establishment in that period, and then goes on to discuss the war literature produced during the period.

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The thesis draws on twentieth-century continental philosophy and literary theory· to frame a counter-tradition in post-World War I American writing that confronts hegemonic cultural values such as individual autonomy and teleological progress. Deleuze's concept of minor literature plays a structuring role: the unending disruption of power structures consolidated by and mirrored in the enforced regularity of language-use. Aspects of Derrida's writings on the rogue further define the theoretical perspective together with Wittgenstein's thought on the drive for (metaphysical) certainty. America's fraught relationship with its self-mythologizing suggests strenuous efforts to regulate signification as well as the necessity of denying material that does not fit into such schemata. The network of writers brought together responds to this tension by disengaging from the struggle between propaganda and protest, while remaining in conversation with both. One aim is to demonstrate the breadth and diversity of literature that can usefully be read using such an approach. The thesis interweaves philosophy, fiction, and memoir through chronologically ordered chapters on specific authors. Emerson's and Thoreau's (re-)placement of the non-rational at the heart of philosophical thinking, for example, discussed in the first chapter as a stagesetting moment, anticipates John Dewey's redescription of logic as a completely historicized and thus contingent technique. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man probes the outer limits of liberal individualism with its narrator's uncanny credulity,-· wliile race, respectability, and gay gender pose potentially insurmountable problems for James Baldwin's cultural critique in Giovanni's Room. Stanley Cavell's inheritance of Freud's work on melancholia grounds his understanding of philosophical skepticism as both expression and obfuscation of ordinary anxieties. Chuck Palahniuk's insistently superficial looks at beauty, violence, and (social) waste emphasize the body's formative influence on self. Alison Bechdel's memoir of her and her father's quests for a livable II erotic truth" synthesizes fact and fiction using the deceptively transparent comic idiom.

This thesis explores issues of literary criticism, aesthetics and nationalism, arguing that Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville were among the first major American fiction writers to challenge the myth of American Exceptionalism, not in terms of their overt criticism of American values or myths, but as the result of an aesthetic operation that places competing and contradictory expressions against each other. The resulting clash of perceptions and the subsequent revelation of a new, unique mode of understanding constitutes a direct challenge to static, context-free mythologizing, i. e. a direct challenge to national exceptionalism. Section I of the thesis places this argument within the context of contemporary literary criticism, including an argument for the relative importance of aesthetic analysis, though cognizant of the pitfalls of such an approach. I propose a mode of considering aesthetics that grows out of an understanding of the "embodied" nature of language, the fundamental importance of metaphor in shaping perception, and the manner in which literary artists, such as Hawthorne and Melville, place perceptions against each other in such a way as to evoke new metaphors or ways of knowing. Sections 2 and 3 utilize these arguments in the process of analyzing all of the major novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, respectively, though of particular concern are Hawthorne's novel The Blithedale Romance and Melville's Moby-Dick. Section 4 forms an extended conclusion and extrapolates from these analyses to suggest an alternative mode of evaluating aesthetic "value, " specifically here in the sense of challenging the authority of any single, unambiguous narrative.

The Left Behind series of apocalyptic novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins is a popular publishing phenomenon. Some 65 million copies have been sold, and more than one in ten Americans has read at least one of the novels. Despite their cultural salience, however, academic attention to the novels and the worldview represented therein has thus far been desultory. This thesis seeks to fill the lacuna in the existing literature, arguing that religion as a social formation requires renewed attention in the discipline of American Studies. "Paradoxes of Power: Apocalyptic Agency in the Left Behind Series" is particularly concerned with the way in which notions of human agency, free will, and possessive individualism are formulated in the series. The following analysis will note that, in Left Behind, the representation of agency is divided against itself. The novels advance a strong form of human agency rooted in possessive individualism and the possibility of personal volition unfettered from external structures, but also assert the necessity of relinquishing one's self and one's will to God, and insist that human history is predetermined and invulnerable to human intervention. I will argue that the authors are the products of multiple, contradictory traditions, some of which valorize agency, others of which enervate or deny it. The paradoxes that arise at the confluence of these traditions constantly disrupt the clarity of the novels' vision and message in this regard. This study will examine the various language games, rhetorical manoeuvres, and discursive strategies employed in the texts in an attempt to make these contradictory conceptualizations of agency cohere. It will note the "tacking" or vacillating movement of the narrative between passive and active representations; describe the texts' positing of distinct forms of agency that are "sacred" and "mundane"; show how the novels blur the boundaries between "normal time" and "apocalyptic time" in order to mitigate the ostensible passivity of its protagonists; and examine the possibility that Left Behind does not dispense with human agency but instead rearticulates it, locating agency not in action but in knowledge. The textual analysis undertaken in this thesis is one which is alert to the theological positions that underpin Left Behind's narrative, as well as the history of "rapture fiction" as a genre. Therefore its methodology might be described as theologically-situated literary criticism. Such an approach permits texts to be taken on their own terms and opens a space for innovative and dissident readings, but also cultivates an awareness of the intellectual, ideological, theological, and historical contexts within which such texts are both produced and received.

The poems in this collection draw, firstly, on my interest in a tradition of American confessionalism, which, particularly in the poems of John Berryman, seems to re-articulate the 'fragmented self of Anglo-American Modernism. A second major interest is in the more radical dislocations oflyric voice in John Ashbery's poetry. In the following poems, these two influences combine in the exploration of linguistic constructions of SUbjectivity, especially that of a knowing and knowable author figure. Specific practical concerns which stem from this central interest include translation and focalization strategies, polyphony, and oblique responses to philosophical, cultural, and literary contexts. These poems also explore questions of lyrical SUbjectivity in relation to constructions of gender and sexuality, with a particular focus on masculinity. I work from the premise that the authorial voice and its claims to truth, power, and sexual and gendered identity are . continually undermined by inner incoherencies and contradictions, a process of selfsubversion which these poems work to emphasize. Inmany places, this emphasis relates to a tension between a 'disembodied' authorial/lyrical voice and the 'embodied' form of the poem, which exposes that voice to textual inconclusiveness. This tension is also examined through the problematics of lyrical address and gendered relations between the'!' and 'you'. The Linguistic Subject of William Carlos Williams' Spring and All This thesis explores the discourse of authorial subjectivity at work in the declarative prose of William Carlos Williams' 1923 book, Spring and All, now regarded as a seminal text of American Modernism. In order to re-examine what has proven for critics to be a variously interpretable relationship between subject and object in Williams' early thinking, I read Spring and All here through an interconnected chain of conceptual frameworks. More. specifically, in hopes of remapping Spring and All's fragmented notion of authorial SUbjectivity against a more diverse history of ideas, these four chapters bring the longestablished influences of visual arts and Romanticism on Williams into juxtaposition with the less biographically or historically derived contexts of structuralist linguistics and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. By drawing on correspondences among these contexts.this thesis finally argues for a notion of radically 'linguistic' SUbjectivity underlying Williams' early poetics, which may be productively compared to earlier philosophies of a mutually constitutive dialectic between external objects and a persistent centrality of the self, as well as later 20th-century revisions which emphasize the formalistic and linguistic nature of this relationship.

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