Desire over Protest: Sexual Politics in the Work of Tennessee Williams examines growing claims that Tennessee Williams is fundamentally, or in large part, a political writer. Drawing on newly published texts from both ends of Williams's career, his prose fiction, essays and unpublished manuscript material, this study uniquely charts the writer's development from an apprenticeship influenced by the radical social drama of the nineteen thirties, through the commercial successes of the nineteen forties and fifties, to his most experimental late work. Unlike the books and articles that have tackled separate aspects of Williams's writing within the broad area of politics, this study is structured in chapters that combine mainstream ideology, homosexuality, race and gender. Many of the texts analysed contain both overt and indirect references to social conditions, discrimination, regimes and the ethics of America's foreign policy, but these are ultimately of secondary concern. Though Williams presented himself as a revolutionary instinctively allied to a leftist politics, his writing privileges private relationships, the power struggles that are, or emerge from, sexual encounters. The resulting vision is one of fractured communities, of individuals selfishly pursuing lines of desire that are self-destructive or, increasingly and conversely, just a mode of survival. As Robert F. Gross reminds us, Williams's work assumes a liberal individualist stance. Effectively, it deconstructs the tyranny and alienation of modern life only to admit the impossibility of refashioning something more structurally egalitarian and spiritually humane. Protest is diagnostic, not corrective; desire has sovereignty

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The aim of the thesis is, through the analysis of four influential American plays of the twentieth-century, to explore the relationship between capitalism and identity. The discussed plays are similar in that they focus on what might be called a 'crisis of masculinity,' with different reactions from the feminine to that crisis. They trade on the oppositions implicit in that binary: the tension between public and private, bosses and workers, breadwinners and dependents, husbands and wives, parents and children. However, these plays are not interchangeable. Indeed, part of the purpose of this thesis is to situate them within their respective historical contexts through an examination of their form: social expressionism of Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine (1923), domestic realism of Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing! (1935), personal expressionism of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949), and new realism of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen- Ross (1983). The selected plays integrate with each other in order to depict the individual's vulnerability, insecurity and alienation in American corporate business. I investigate how Rice's play responds to the emerging culture of consumption in America during the 1920s. I show the way in which the play, according to Antonio Gramsci's concept of Americanism, seeks to reveal the human cost, both at work and at home, of maximum industrial efficiency under Taylorism and Fordism. The discussion of Odets's play demonstrates how mass unemployment caused by the Great Depression of the 1930s challenges the traditional structure of the nuclear family: it radically defies the conventional American ideology of self-sufficiency and rugged individualism. The practically emasculating matriarch, the eroded authority of the Marxian and idealist patriarch, who ceases to be a provider, and the disturbed masculinity of the son are tracked. Further, I explore how Miller's play reflects the concepts of other-directness and conformity after World War II. I illustrate how the notion of work dominates and affects the life of the organization man in the home that, in tum, contributes to his anxiety and delusion as well as determines the validity of his values. Finally, the consequences and the requirements of social Darwinism, which takes the form of cutthroat competitiveness to achieve the American Dream in the 1980s, are pinpointed through examining Mamet's play. I argue that the businessman's need to establish and maintain a masculine identity parallels his obsession with success: for him, having means being.

This thesis argues for a unique relationship between African American literature and liminal space, predicated on the historical facts of North American slavery. While recent critics of African American literature have argued for the importance of historical and civic space in shaping racialised discourse, the· role of liminal space has not been well examined. This thesis examines texts by three African American writers - Harriet Jacobs, Ralph Ellison and John Edgar Wideman - and one Canadian Caribbean author, Nalo Hopkinson, to argue that their literary representations of liminality perform two functions: firstly, symbolising the experience of slavery and its attendant experiences of incarceration; and secondly, problematising mainstream categories of race and identity. By investigating the narrative construction of these liminal spaces, this thesis will extend the categories of 'African American' and the 'novel' in two important directions: towards the future and into the 'black Atlantic'. The following five chapters will address how the symbolic use of narrative liminality enables black writers to resist or appropriate the cultural and ideological structures imposed by white Europeans in the New World and also those structures later developed within a rapidly urbanising society. Firstly, Harriet Jacobs's slave narrative addresses the restrictive architecture of slavery and domesticity and, through Linda Brent's attic hideaway, Jacobs expresses a ·concern with endurance and female authority. The Ralph Ellison chapter examines the shifting nature of liminality and subjectivity in the post-slavery migration environment; Invisible Man's cellar engages with racialised tropes of deterrito'rialisation and desire. John Edgar Wideman addresses ideas of race and artistic responsibility in his treatment of a contemporary suburban bombsite, assessing the difficulty of achieving spaces of possibility in the face of racialised urban decay. Jhe concluding chapter uses Nalo Hopkinson's speculative fiction to challenge the essentialist construction of an African American liminal aesthetic by enacting its subversive qualities across the geographical boundaries of the black Atlantic. Hopkinson's projection of a racialised underground onto the new spaces of technology also disturbs traditional models of genre and discourse.

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This thesis is a study of several texts written by Margaret Atwood, and is motivated by a desire to demonstrate the polysemous irreducibility of literary meaning and to suggest ways in which critical theory and textual practice may meaningfully interact and correspond. The first chapter examines poems in <i>The Circle Game</i> in order to observe how Atwood's persistent scrutiny of the constitution of images creates a world almost entirely detached from a consciousness of time and history, and considers how this generates a radical split between textual self-sufficiency and the psychic wilderness through which the poems move. Here we can see Atwood deploying language in a pared-down, restrictive manner that circulates through the book with particular tension. The second chapter studies her first novel <i>The Edible Woman</i>, and attempts to trace through analysis of its linguistic patterns, how Margaret Atwood controls her subject matter and deploys her chosen narrative form in a way that expreses the conflict between consumption and production which is embodied in the novel's architectonic symbol. Moving through a specific historical period, her characters struggle to achieve self-definition and linguistic mastery of their environment. The third chapter is concerned with her critical study of Canadian literature, <i>Survival</i>, and the relational framework it suggests between Canada's uneasy post-colonial status, the writer's expressive predicament, and the universal experience of victimization. Consideration is given to aspects of Atwood's political and social philosophy, and comparison made between her conclusions and those of other contemporary Canadian writers.

Perhaps the greatest irony of postmodern American fiction has been the ascendency within its broad aegis of the very mode that the early postmoderns of the 1960s so dismissively repudiated, namely realism. This thesis aims to provide both a theoretical reading of this ascendency in relation to the earlier metafictional irrealism and also readings of selected key texts of the 'new realism' on their own post-Modern terms. This initial contextualization of the new American realism is therefore defined very much in relation to the more or less militant epistemic 'ultimism' ('ultimate' in the sense suggested by John Barth in his seminal 'Literature of Exhaustion') which both precedes and to some extent overlaps its own reflexive radicalism. Theoretical interest is focused to begin with, therefore, on such texts as 'The Literature of Exhaustion', Barth's early fiction, Jerome Klinkowitz's critical engagements with both metafiction and, as he terms it, 'experimental realism', and the 'European' new realism of Walter Abish and Peter Handke. But in attempting to find a critical vocabulary with which to analyze this new realism there arises the need for a more than simply comparative contextualisation. The thesis therefore narrows in scope in order to address more comprehensively the nature and origins of its evidently postmodern 'mimesis'. The fictions of Raymond Carver and Richard Ford are selected as broadly representative for the purposes of this exploration, not simply because they have been two of the most influential of the 'new realists' but also because they offer the clearest methodological route to a reading of the problematic but fundamentally important relationshp between this postmodern vernacular radicalism and the Modernist vernacular revolution pioneered by Stein, Anderson, Faulkner and, most significantly of all as regards this particular post-Modern turn, Hemingway.

The aim of this thesis is to break with the habit of much criticism of Wyndham Lewis, which has been to rely on the various classes of Lewis' non-fictional discourse in the interpretation of his fiction and satire. To this end, Chapter 1 undertakes a short survey of the bulk of major Lewis criticism, and indicates the several limitations attendant thereupon, in the form of too restricted models of interpretation. This chapter ends with a brief account of the method that I myself will adopt. In essence, this will be to go 'outside' the confinement of Lewisian discourse, as it were, in order to bring external bodies of knowledge to the examination of his work. In Chapter 2 (which occupies nine sections) I attempt to show how the anti-Christian heresies embraced by the term 'Gnosticism', and the conceptual structure of Persian dualism, informed Lewis' work both theoretically and imaginatively, and adduce evidence of his interest in these systems. Lewis' attitude to nature, his conception of good and evil, his aestheticized theology and the theory of satire (or satiric philosophy) expressed in <i>Men Without Art</i> can, in my view, be called Gnostic. That term might also be applied to the attitude of certain of his protagonists, to the allusive and imaginative syncretism of parts of <i>The Apes of God</i>, to an eschatological structure discernible in that novel, to a creation myth expounded in <i>Malign Fiesta</i>, and to other elements of that novel (though in a less positive sense than in Lewis' previous work). In Chapter 3 (in six sections) I introduce a new way of looking at Lewis' satire. In his capacity as a satirist, I relate Lewis to the earliest manifestations of that genre (in Ancient Greece), when it was believed that the satirist had the potency to <i>kill</i> through the word. Such a belief has persisted to the present, undergoing a transformation from a literal to a symbolic significance. Its presence, and the urges and intentions associated with it, I trace in Lewis' theory, polemics, verse and satiric fiction. In addition, I examine his affiliation with the figures of the railer and the Cynic, who, on account of the virulence of their utterance, have in some ways been associated with the proto-satirists. In a discussion of <i>The Apes of God</i>, I present Lewis as a 'revenge-satirist', motivated by an impulse to satirize to death the objects of his hate. Finally, I return to <i>Malign Fiesta</i> as the point at which, a Christian theology beginning to emerge in Lewis, attended by <i>guilt</i> over the character of his career as a satirist, a twin departure is signalled in his work, from the traditions expounded in Chapters 2 and 3.

The thesis's two starting points are Bellow's 1967 short story "The Old System" and his 1959 essay "Deep Readers of the World, Beware!". A close reading of the former finds that the antipathy expressed in the latter - an antipathy towards critical preference for "meaning" over "feeling", towards the "practice of avoidance" in which literature is interpreted as being primarily a system of motifs and symbols - is implicitly present in the fiction itself. The readings of the novels from <I>Dangling Man </I>to <I>Mr Sammler's Planet </I>attend to the workings within them of the "deeply readable", of the proliferation of "meanings" which provokes a kind of hermeneutic double-take; the texts are replete with motifs and symbols, structured so that they <I>invite </I>attempts at "deep reading". The novels also display an awareness of this, are conscious of their own "preferences", and are concerned for the consequences of their "practices". In <I>Dangling Man, </I>the "deeply readable" is given a free hand, occupies the entirety of the text, but thereafter Bellow's novels react against it, against their own emergent "meanings". The anxiety which drives this reaction derives from Bellow's approach to the notion of "character"; his fiction's structures knowingly configure "character" as an <I>unsuitable form, </I>co-opt it as a means to the narrative's own ends. The novel's conclusions exhibit the disengagement of these narrative agencies from that which they have educed into the form of a "central character", rendering it ultimately <I>opaque, </I>preserving it at the last from the threatened dissolution into the text's patternings.

The career of the American Critic and poet John Crowe Ransom seems marked by discontinuity. An acclaimed poet, he disowned his first collection of verse and virtually abandoned poetry at the end of the 1920s. A political activist during the 1930s who was devoted to a vision of complete and complex human life he went on to dedicate himself to the apparently formalist and exclusive New Criticism. Though critical attempts have been made to explore the connections between the various phases of his career, the overall shape and importance of Ransom's critical project has to date been unclear. This thesis draws upon unpublished correspondence, and the manuscript for Ransom's Agrarian book <I>Land</I>! which was assumed destroyed by Ransom himself in 1932. It indicates that Ransom was involved with a systematic attempt to shape his own career by the revisions of his poems, destruction of his correspondence and recantation of the critical positions he had previously held to. It contextualises many of the central decisions of Ransom's career, and discusses his often alienated position within the movements with which he is associated, the Fugitive group of poets, the Agrarians and the New Critics. It problematises many of the conclusions about Ransom which have been accepted since his death in 1974 and provides a revisionist view of Ransom's poetry and critical writings.