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This thesis identifies science as Ezra Pound’s first extended extra-poetic interest. This reference to science in Pound’s poetic theory and poetry is portrayed as rhetoric, with its emphasis on the linguistic signifier or word rather than the actual concepts and data of science. The material covers over two decades between 1901, when Pound entered university, and 1922, after he left London. Beginning with Pound’s exposure to philology, the thesis establishes a correlation between his educational background and his use of scientific rhetoric in his prose. As he attempted to establish a professional status for the poet, he used metaphors linking literature to the natural sciences and comparisons between the poet and the scientist. Additionally, Pound attempted to organize poetic movements that resembled the professional scientific organizations that were beginning to form in America. In his writings promoting these movements, Pound developed a hygienic theory of poetry— itself an extensive rhetorical project—which produced a clean, bare poem and further linked Pound’s poetic output with the sciences. Beyond his rhetorical use of science, Pound attempted to study the sciences and even adopted a doctor persona for his friends with illnesses—both diagnosing and prescribing cures. When Pound was planning to leave London, he also considered entering medical school—a biographical fact to which Pound scholarship has paid little attention. His decision not to formally study the sciences reinforced his identity as a poet and his representations of scientific knowledge as mere rhetoric. This interest in the sciences, and medicine in particular, influenced Pound’s poetry and prose because of their frequent references and their alignment with literature. Additionally, this early use of rhetoric and an exploration into extra-poetic materials prepares Pound for his later, better-known and often infamous explorations of economics and social theory.

This thesis examines five poems by four twentieth-century poets who have explored the epic tradition. Some of the poems display an explicit concern with ideas of American nationhood, while others emulate the formal ambitions and encyclopaedic scope of the epic poem. The study undertakes extensive close readings of Hart Crane's The Bridge (1930), Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (1956) and The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-71 (1972), James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), and John Ashbery's Flow Chart (1991). Although it is not primarily an account of a Whitmanian lineage, the thesis considers Whitman's renegotiation of the dialectic between the public and the private as a context for the project of the homosexual epic, arguing for the existence of a genealogy of epic poems that rethink the relationship between these two spheres. The difficulties presented by the epic poem's foundations in commonality constitute the starting-point for this discussion of four homosexual poets who have risen to the ideological challenge that the epic tradition presents for a minority voice. The thesis examines how these poets have rethought and modified the epic poem, and explores the different kinds of dialogue each develops with their precursors, both European and American. It also pays close attention to the ways in which each poem figures its presumed audience.

This PhD thesis is a close textual analysis of Don DeLillo's fiction grounded in critical theory. The thesis re-evaluates and moves beyond descriptions of DeLillo's work as postmodern. The thesis addresses some comparatively overlooked but key texts from the poststructuralist tradition, taking us some way to a more adequate account of DeLillo's fascination with language, visual media and spatiality in all its forms. Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault's work on architecture and the spatial frames the theoretical approach. Related writings by Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre and Mark Wigley are also considered. The theory permits an approach that ties together postmodernity, visual culture, language, space, architecture and the 'everyday' to claim that DeLillo's fiction has developed ways of representing resistance to the economic, political and cultural determinism implied by most theories of the postmodern. DeLillo thus emerges not as a reflector of postmodernity, but as its analyst.

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