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Vladimir Nabokov’s ubiquitous humour has prevented many critics from granting his work the seriousness it deserves. In this study, I argue that his humour does not preclude the underlying seriousness of his art - that, on the contrary, he is often at his most profound when at his most humorous. What he has written of parody is true of his humour as a whole: it functions ‘as a kind of springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion’ (<i>The Real Life of Sebastian Knight</i>). Much recent criticism of Nabokov has concerned itself with these higher regions. In <i>Nabokov’s Otherworld </i>(1991), Vladimir E. Alexandrov argues that ‘an aesthetic rooted in [Nabokov’s] intuition of a transcendent realm is the basis of his art’, and claims that his ‘conception of the otherworld underlies the comedy’ in his work. This claim gains legitimacy in light of Nabokov’s comment ‘that the difference between the comic side of things, and their cosmic side, depends on one sibilant’ (<i>Nikolai Gogol</i>), which implies that his humour has a pronounced metaphysical dimension, and that his comic vision is, at its most profound regions, a cosmic one. This statement has far-reaching implications with respect to Nabokov’s humour, and points to a set of commonly-held assumptions which need to be revised. Many critics continue to regard him as a black humourist, an author whose fiction reflects an underlying belief in a meaningless universe. Nabokov’s faith in an otherworld gives an entirely new perspective to this argument. By aligning the comic with the cosmic, he is not suggesting that we should look upon life as a joke; on the contrary he posits the notion that it is meticulously patterned. The association he draws between the comic and the cosmic invites us to view his humour as an extension of his faith in an afterlife, the existence of which offsets the pain and losses encountered on the earthy plane of being, and relegates them to a position of relative unimportance.

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American urban writing of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is characterized by a range of discursive, thematic and ideological conflicts. These generate a literature of the city which is often paradoxical, ambiguous or aporetic. Across a wide range of texts, written in different periods and in different generic forms, the American city is thus seen to resist the philosophical or narratological ordering principles employed to loan coherence and cogency to the urban spectacle. Such a resistance functions, this thesis contests, as an articulation and interrogation of the crises of individual, national and artistic identity engendered by the urbanization of America. In this thesis, such textual practices are addressed through a peristrophic engagement with American literary criticism, with theoretical debates on the relation of textual forms to the world of the text's production and with discourses of modernity drawn from social and political theory. By locating each text historically, generically and philosophically, this thesis divides into three contiguous areas of inquiry. Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman are discussed within the context of romantic idealism. The pronouncedly spiritual representations of the city which each writer produced, is here aligned to the philosophy of nature and the policies of radical individualism which pervades the texts in question. William Dean Howells and Theodore Dreiser are discussed as realists whose urban novels emerged from a self-conscious synthesis of ante-bellum idealism and machine age materialism. This synthesis, it is argued, enabled these writers to explore the effects of capitalist industrialism upon the nation, its citizens and their arts. Edith Wharton and John Dos Passos are discussed as modernists, whose verisimilitudinous representations of the city facilitated a critique both of the mythical lexicon of the ante-bellum period and of the integrated subjectivity and textual unity posited by the realist text.

My dissertation discusses the early career of the American poet Ezra Pound in relation to visual art at the beginning of the twentieth century. Pound was a leading propagandist of modern art, advertising his friends Wyndham Lewis, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Constantin Brancusi, among others, in his extensive art criticism, and explaining his poetic theories by reference to art movements and practices. The majority of Pound's critics have followed his lead and describe his poetry by using the aesthetic values and terminology Pound conveniently supplied in his prose. I argue that this is an erroneous move, which hides a series of problems in the development of Pound's poetics. Pound's poetry shows surprisingly little evidence of his interest in art; however, unpublished manuscripts show that this evidence existed, but was deliberately excised. My dissertation aims to uncover the sequence of decisions which led to vital changes in Pound's poetic style, by focusing on the periods during which he aligned himself with particular artists or movements. In my first chapter, I look at unpublished essays and poetry written between 1906 and 1908, to explore Pound's interest in the work of James McNeill Whistler, and explain an apparent change in poetic style in 1908. My second chapter deals with Pound's association with the vorticists, which I argue was less a meeting of minds than a method of placing his imagist verse, with its nineteenth-century predilections, in an emphatically modern context. In the third chapter I analyse the earliest drafts of <I>The Cantos</I> in detail, showing how Pound's conception of the poem in 1915 as egalitarian in structure and argument was compatible with the type of visual description he had rejected in 1908. The dada movement, which I discuss in my fourth chapter, contributes to Pound's redefinition of artistic talent. His emphasis on the value of the artist's personality above the artist's works necessitates a reconsideration of the structure of <I>The Cantos</I> in 1922. The fifth chapter examines the role of sculpture in Pound's poetry and prose, in order to determine how it becomes an analogy for Pound's poetic technique.

John Berryman continues to be critically perceived as an academic, establishment poet whose career represented a development from New Critical traditionalism towards a solipsistic, self-absorbed confessionalism. In this thesis, I seek to challenge such a limiting view through an exploration of his two long poems, <i>Homage to Mistress Bradstreet</i> and <i>The Dream Songs,</i> as works that extensively engage with contemporary American Cold War culture to a degree not admitted by such restrictive paradigms. Centrally, I examine the way in which Barryman’s engagement with religion occurs not simply as a personal questing, but as a form of cultural critique that is reflective of the politicised nature of Cold War American religious life. In chapter one, I interrogate the persistent critical tendency to codify American poetry since World War II in terms of an opposition between a ‘mainstream’ establishment centre and a countercultural ‘avant-garde’. I then seek in my second chapter to highlight the inadequacy of this canonical model, through an exposition of spiritual politics as a shared concern of the two poets most famously associated with the ‘establishment’ and ‘countercultural’ subdivisions of Cold War American poetry: Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg. In chapter three, I discuss the spiritual politics of Berryman’s <i>Homage to Mistress Bradstreet</i>. In chapter four, I challenge Christopher Rick’s suggestion that <i>The Dream Songs</i> is a ‘theodicy’, and show how recognition of the political nature of Berryman’s religious engagements actually exposes the poem as a form of ‘antitheodicy’, whereby its protagonist Henry is continually unable to reconcile the contemporary world in terms of any overarching scheme of divine justice. Finally, in my fifth chapter, I examine four key thematic concerns of <i>The Dream Songs</i> – World War II, the Cold War, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the minstrelsy and blackface traditions – in order to elucidate the heterogeneous contexts in which Berryman’s religiopolitical concerns operate.

Confronting the needs of his personal economics. Washington Irving explored the relationship between credit and dis-credit within his writing. With an emphasis on textual analysis, I investigate the effect upon his work of this attempt to create a 'creditable narrative' - both credible as story and capable of functioning satisfactorily in the market. In the search for a satisfactory form he appropriated various narrative voices and styles. I argue that the literary currency introduced into circulation by Irving in the first half of the nineteenth century should be recognised as an important medium of exchange, one against which many later American writers measured their productions. In the first chapter I examine Irving's search for the authority with which to describe the changes consequent upon New York's growing importance as a centre for commerce and consumerism, discussing the first edition of <I>A History of New York </I>(1809) and <I>Salmagundi </I>(1806-07), examining the conflicts exposed by Irving's desire to create an associative poetic history for America, and showing that Irving was dissatisfied with the models he employed. My second and third chapters read Irving's European writings in the light of the author's experience of financial bankruptcy. This experience is deeply implicated within his writing and he uses it as a means to explore the debt owed by the American writer to Europe. Through the mediating voice of Geoffrey Crayon, Irving utilised the trope of the Picturesque to explore the ways in which a writer can appropriate landscape to assert cultural authority. I discuss <I>The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. </I>(1819-20).

The thesis explores the textually-mediated relationships between Henry James and three of his most important female friends: novelists Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton, and Henry's sister Alice, author of a significant Diary. These seemingly disparate writers draw together in their affinity for a certain form of realist representation. I argue that what I call 'Jamesian realism' is a mode of representation characterised by the productive ambivalence of its distinctive semiotic structures; it is especially hospitable to the expression and negotiation of ambivalence towards authority. In particular, this is the ambivalence towards gendered and sexualised authority experienced by the women writers whose otherwise inarticulable resistance to the social and psychological imperatives of femininity engaged with James's own gender discomforts and imaginative affiliation with women. With the exception of Alice's interest in Irish politics, Woolson, Wharton, and Alice James were social conservatives who never identified themselves with any form of avowed feminist thought; they were the last generation of intellectually ambitious women for whom a socially acceptable engagement with gender politics was unthinkable. For each, there was a disjunction between her conscious commitment to conservative values, and her lived experience of the social and psychological disentitlements that nevertheless ensued. Alice, Edith, and Constance found in Jamesian realism a mode of representation through which they could express the restiveness and self-division that each has experienced within herself, as well as in relation to her female critics and rivals. Jamesian realism is a representational form through which each woman negotiates her ambivalent sense of exclusion and reprieve, her conflicting impulses towards complying with, and resisting, authority.

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