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This thesis argues that, as an American poet living variously in England, Scotland, and Wales, Anne Stevenson has had a major role in bringing together diverse literary traditions and forging a distinctive transatlantic poetic. Questions of inheritance and influence are, of course, important for any poet, but especially so for a poet of dual nationality. As the title of her 2003 collection, A Report from the Border, suggests, Stevenson has found her true home in the no man’s land between different cultures and traditions. Though the poet’s claim that she ‘lost any sense of belonging either to the United States or to Britain long ago’, suggests rootlessness and disenfranchisement, it is clear that she is rooted, though by no means restrictively, in both American and British poetic traditions, and is heir to the cultural and artistic inheritances of both the Old and the New worlds. It will be shown that her work ranges widely and eclectically across British and American cultural models and poetic styles, and each chapter considers a particular facet of her bi-national and bi-cultural inheritance. The first chapter explores Stevenson’s complex and ambivalent relationship with both the texts and the figures of the Romantic poets, and her development of a pragmatic romanticism that speaks to both our late philosophical scepticism and our persisting desire for affirmation. The second chapter looks at how Stevenson, a contemporary and biographer of Sylvia Plath, eschews a ‘Confessional’ poetic in favour of oblique modes of self-expression and self-examination, most notably in her book-length epistolary poem, Correspondences (1974). The third chapter looks at the ways in which Stevenson’s elegiac poetry, in both its echoic adherences to, and innovative departures from, the conventions of the genre, succeeds in extending and expanding that legacy bequeathed by her predecessors, carrying the elegy forward into the twenty-first century. The final chapter suggests that Stevenson’s work enthusiastically reprises persistent questions and concerns about the adequacy and inadequacy of language that we recognise from the work of earlier poets from Shakespeare and the Romantics to Wallace Stevens and Robert Graves. This thesis attempts, in its study of little-known archival material held on both sides of the Atlantic, the most comprehensive examination of her work, both creative and critical, to date.

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This thesis argues that the technical and aesthetic appropriation of light in American Romantic literature draws on a network of relations between time, space and subjectivity that is specifically linked to the invention of photography. It argues that, after the Enlightenment, after its advances in the scientific comprehension of light and colour, there followed a comprehensive philosophical and artistic re-evaluation of light and its properties. The appropriation and mediation of light by art in this period is informed by new understandings of its reflective and colouring properties, and directed by new constructions of the relation of light to darkness. Most significantly, the thesis describes a relocation of the creative power of light from God to the artist and the individual, and an incumbent transformation of its association with omniscience towards new notions of individualism, subjectivity and perspectivism. It argues for the historical and the technical specificity of photographic processes, and so for photographies over photography. Part of the exploration of this specificity entails an enquiry into the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth picturesque mode, and the specific dynamics that it initiated between the observer and the observed across several arts. Similarly, the thesis argues that Daguerreotypy, when properly understood as a medium of art, has a critical role in the reconfiguration of relations between the arts specifically related to a new, intermediary idea of light. It concludes that the American picturesque mode is fundamental to the appropriation of `photographic' techniques in the visual writing of the period and, more specifically, shows that Daguerreotypy actuates the American Romantic way of seeing and describing

If, as Jacqueline Rose (1991) claims, Sylvia Plath is a ghost that haunts our culture, a ghost created from myths, stories and fantasies, then what happens to these myths and fantasies when they seep into the world at large? This piece of research aims to explore the notion of haunting. How does Sylvia Plath return and in what way does she inform the lives of her readers? This research collects, combines and critiques the 'creative autobiographies' of Plath 'reader-fans' and engages in the ongoing debates about the problematic nature of ethnography (Skeggs, 1995, Lawler, 2000) thus contributing to the methodological scholarship regarding the ethics of representation. By remaining reflexive about the use of primary data and by offering one possible reading of many, the method employed here attempts to further highlight the impossibility of a 'perfect' ethnography. Working with the 'creative autobiographies' of my respondents, the thesis explores how Plath's reader-fans negotiate their relationship with Plath via time, place, space, images and objects. Though influenced (methodologically) by feminists scholars such as Annette Kuhn (1995) and Caroline Steedman (1986) it draws primarily on Freudian theories ofidentification, loss and narcissism and Otto Rank's work on 'the double' in its attempt to explain the nature of the reader-fans' intense relationship to their icon. The thesis thus contributes to existing debates in fandom scholarship by theorising the role death appears to play in most forms of identificatory relationships between Plath and her readers. Equally, the thesis engages with the sociology of haunting (see Avery Gordon, 1997 and Kevin Hetherington, 2001) via place and mourning as well as work on cultural memory and visual/material culture. Using the notion of haunting as an instrument of social negotiation, I further question existing theorisation about the boundaries between the living and the dead. The role of place, the photograph, and objects, subject to both temporal and physical instability, are presented as powerful tools for mutual communication between the living and the dead. To explore exactly what or who may haunt a reader, this research also enters into debates concerning the 'author-function' and the active role of the reader in textproduction. Whereas Foucault (1984) and Barthes (1977b) argue that the text disperses the author at the centre of it, I, to a certain extent, reinstate the central role of the author and attempt to position the reader as a ghostly presence within the text. As such, this research is not about Sylvia Plath per se, but is what is left of her and how these remains are used.

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This thesis analyses mythology as expressed in selected American narratives of the Vietnam War. Myth not only manifests itself in literature, but also impinges on interpretations of history, and on political rhetorics. I distinguish, therefore, between primary, national (historical), and political myths as three interlocking levels within the mythological system. The narrative structure of the primary myth combines Campbell's pattern of the universal hero-myth and the symbology of Jung's archetypes. This constitutes the virtually universal foundation of all myths, including national myths, and their contemporary offspring - political myths. The appeal of political and national mythologies depends on the universal message of the primary narrative. The archetypal hero-tale with its quest-journey and initiation sequence remains valid as a paradigm for war literature. This is also the structural frame of Vietnam narratives which reiterate the hero-myth pattern in concrete historical circumstances. Literature rewrites and mythologises the war. Vietnam authors tend to go away from the tenets of political and national myth, and turn towards the universal themes of the initiation of a warrior, or of atonement and redemption. The writing of Mailer, Herr, and O'Brien involves a quest for the hidden meaning of conflict (chapters 1, 3). Other authors also seek to determine whether the combat experience is an ultimate test for potentially glorious warriors, or a spiritual descent of fallen heroes (chapters 4, 5).

Cormac McCarthy’s western novels have made him one of the most prominent authors in contemporary American fiction, and they have received a great deal of critical attention. Yet the western novels were preceded by four novels set in East Tennessee that set the mythic, historic and thematic template for McCarthy’s later work. Like East Tennessee itself, McCarthy’s early works have suffered from a lack of detailed critical and historical analysis. I contend in this study that McCarthy’s Southern work can only truly be understood when read within the context of East Tennessee exceptionalism, and I shall explore how the mythic and historic character of the region is played out in McCarthy’s Southern aesthetic. I will also show how this region and McCarthy’s work is unique within Southern letters, the most marginal, dispossessed area within the large South itself. This is captured with East Tennessee’s struggle to resist modernity following the birth of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and this struggle forms the central component of McCarthy’s Southern aesthetic. Two strands of comparative analysis help us in establishing the centrality of East Tennessee exceptionalism to McCarthy’s work. Each chapter will compare his work to that of other Southern authors in order to show that McCarthy is an author who maintains a mythic and very Southern interest in myth, albeit in terms very different to the Southern renaissance. Each chapter will also include a comparative analysis of his later work in order to highlight how the imaginative and mythic culture of East Tennessee informs <i>Blood Meridian </i>and the Border Trilogy.