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This thesis intervenes and expands on the critical reception of Cormac McCarthy. Additionally, the thesis both complements and supplements the expanding field of masculinity studies. The study examines McCarthy's Southwestern fiction from Blood Meridian (1985) through the novels of the Border Trilogy (1992-1998) to No Countryfor Old Men (2005). In addition to the published novels the study addresses the unpublished , screenplay of Cities ofthe Plain (1984) held in the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University in'San Marcos, Texas. The thesis proposes that McCarthy's Southwestern fiction, with its preoccupation with men and masculinity, presents a valuable opportunity to investigate the recent developments in gender theory. Equally, gender theory offers new ways of reading McCarthy's work that attend to the political dimension absent in much of the existing criticism. I propose a syncretic·theoretical perspective which places Judith Butler's . ,. work on performativity at the centre of a framework intended to accommodate sociological sex role theory and psychological approaches to gender studies. The thesis argues that McCarthy's Southwestern novels simultaneously appropriate and disavow the potentially transformational politics of gender theory in general and masculinity studies in particular. Similarly, the study argues that the Southwestern novels repeat this process of acknowledgement and denial in relation to the Patricia Nelson Limerick led New Western History and concerns reflected in writing on the New West.

This thesis is a study of the work of American novelist and short story writer Richard Yates. Taking as its starting point the consensus view of Richard Yates as a realist operating during a period of strong anti-realist currents in American literature, the thesis seeks to complicate this notion, arguing instead for a reading of Richard Yates' work as a mode of realism that could only have emerged after modernism, a realism that focussed on a number of concerns and problems regarding representation and interpretation shared with literary postmodernism, and which anticipates recent and current trends within American literary fiction. Its main areas of investigation are Yates' take on everyday language as a site of entropy; his use of intertextuality, in particular in relation to the short story; tensions between realism's claim to cognitive/visual authority and epistemological uncertainty; concerns and anxieties around masculinity within American realism; his use of autobiographical material in relation to the psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott; the impact of media saturation on subjectivity, with particular focus on cliché.

My thesis is engaged in conceptualising the genre of the Canadian female Kuenstlerroman, and in charting how this genre has been deployed by L.M Montgomery, Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence. This project addresses the implications of Canada's literary identity, as constructed by female authors, and offers a unique perspective on their feminising of the Kuenstlerroman, and the degrees of meta-narrative and autobiography which the use of creative female protagonists entails. This thesis identifies the genre of Canadian female Kuenstlerroman, and explores both its significance in sustaining existing readings, and its potential for generating new interpretations. It is structured into four chapters, as well as a detailed critical introduction. The introduction outlines my understanding of the Kuenstlerroman narrative in conjuncture with Canadian literary identity, as well as offering a brief overview of the three writers considered in this study. Chapter One focuses on the treatment of Canadian landscapes and locations within the texts, considering how the space is gendered, and reinforcing the significance of the texts as explicitly Canadian. Chapter Two examines the presentation of the protagonists' childhoods, and negotiates the nature/nurture debate whilst also identifying the importance of mentor figures in the Kuenstlerroman. Chapter Three charts the protagonists' progression into adult life, and acknowledges the increasingly complex demands made upon them as they attempt to reconcile personal and professional commitments. Chapter Four explores the strong Gothic element that is present in all the texts, and considers how gender and genre combine to destabilise the narrative and regenerate the latent menace of Gothic tropes and traditions. Finally, a brief conclusion evaluates my reading of these texts as Kuenstlerroman narratives and identifies their defining characteristics. Throughout, my thesis maps both the dual construction of the writers' fictional characters and literary careers - driven by both the desire for self-expression and artistic subjectivity - and the meta-fictive and self-referential writing into existence of three national writers. This process is constantly driven by questions of Canadian literary identity and female creativity, and how they combine to produce the persistent and intriguing genre of the Canadian female Kuenstlerroman.

The intention of this thesis is to examine the production and function of twentieth century Manhattan's various marginal communities and underworlds as mediated through the New York walking narrative. The literary flaneurs specialist reading of the cityplace offers an important ground level entry point into these communities, revealing significant tension within the multicultural, multi-racial city. The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first provides a historical and theoretical foundation by examining the origins of the literary flaneur. Before turning to the contemporary material, this chapter offers a photo-fit of the Parisian flaneur and demonstrates that although the New York flaneur is an almost unrecognisable distortion of his or her nineteenth century European counterpart, the two share key characteristics. The chapter then charts the transposition of the flaneur from Europe to America and examines how important literary precursors to the twentieth century New York walking narrative, such as works by Baudelaire, Benjamin, Poe and Whitman, influence and inform the texts studied in the subsequent chapters. Chapter two is a study of the work of Jack Kerouac and James Baldwin. This chapter reveals the racial tension between Manhattan' s white bohemia and black ghetto by examining the flaneur's crossing of racial boundaries within the cityplace. Chapter three focuses on the work of Allen Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara and examines the tension between 'straight' and "queer' space by charting the gay flaneur's path through the city. Chapter four examines the blurring of flanerie and vagrancy in the work of llerbert Huneke and David Wojnarowicz by considering the perspective of two homeless writers hustling on the streets of New York. Chapter five is a study of gentrification in Sarah Schulman's Girls. Visions and Everything and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. These two texts allow for gentrification to be viewed from opposing perspectives, through the eyes of two radically different urban wanderers. The thesis as a whole examines the precarious position of Manhattan' s 'outsiders' and exposes the manner in which all forms of transgressive activity. including flanerie, are at risk of being stifled or eradicated by surveillance, policing and gentrification. The flaneurs own position within the cityplace is critically reassessed with regards to his or her potential to either perpetuate or destroy marginal communities via his or her advertising of 'otherness'.

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In this thesis my aim has been to establish a link between the western American writers, Wallace Stegner and Cormac McCarthy. My point of connection has been the treatment of landscape and nature in the works of both authors, and I have argued that their works exemplify perspectives which are related to their authors' historical positions before and after the cultural watershed of the Vietnam era. Although their works are dissimilar in many ways, both writers have similar concerns with regard to the western American landscape, and the social, political, and human ramifications of , the myth of the frontier, and crucially, its effect on the natural world. I argue that Stegner and McCarthy provide a link between the thinking of their respective eras· which reveals changes related to the loss of faith in the culturally accepted archetypes upon which much American thought was based prior to the upheavals ofthe era ofthe Vietnam War, the 1960s and early 1970s. I believe that despite what might appear to be contradictory narratives about the'West and the western landscape, the subtext in both authors is a deep questioning of widely accepted western mythic imagery and its continuing effect on American life and ideology. While western mythology has been examined before, it has IJpt been discussed in relation to these two authors seen as a pairing exemplifying a movement from the more traditional realist narratives written prior to the Vietnam era, and the darker, more pessimistic narratives of the post-Vietnam era, in which a loss of faith in many previously accepted cultural givens became common. It might therefore seem appropriate to describe Stegner and McCarthy as modernist and postmodern, but I believe those terms simplify, obscure, and in a very real sense misname the complex sets of issues and· traditions with which both authors deal from their vantage points on either side ofthe divide which had as its defining moment the Vietnam War. I also discuss the issue of the feminine in western landscape in the works of both authors. Again, Stegner and McCarthy reveal a change in American thinking, not necessarily entirely positive, which has as its fulcrum the 1960s and '70s, and included such culturally momentous events as the civil rights movement, the women's movement, a new, politicized environmentalism, and various other progressive movements. The western American landscape has always had great significance in American thinking, requiring an unlikely uniori between frontier mythology and the reality of a fragile western environment. Both Stegner and McCarthy focus on this landscape and environment; its spiritual, narrative, symbolic, imaginative, and ideological force is central to their work. My goal has been to show how their various treatments ofthese issues relate to the social climates in which they were written, and how despite historical discontinuities, both Stegner and McCarthy reveal a similar unease about the effects of the myth ofthe frontier on American thought and life.