This thesis documents the significant involvement of London's fiction with contemporary culture. In doing so it calls particular attention to his intellectual restlessness and to his methodology of adoption and adaptation. I argue that London combined his role as a successful popular writer with a steadfast commitment to experimentation and innovation, producing works that were and are complex and challenging. In the first chapter I analyse the circumstances that contributed to London's successful emergence into the literary marketplace at the turn of the century. I examine the genesis of London's Klondike stories, and argue that they presented readers with prose that was meticulously tailored to reflect the characteristics and dilemmas inherent in the northland environment. The following three chapters focus individually on three novels that provide the reader with especially pronounced stylistic and structural challenges: <I>Before Adam </I>(1907), <I>The Iron Heel </I>(1908) and <I>Adventure </I>(1911). Each chapter outlines the immediate context of the works and then proceeds to a close critical reading, highlighting the unique perspectives they offer on popular tastes and attitudes. I demonstrate that London's innovations clearly distinguish him from his contemporaries and that they resist efforts to abbreviate the remarkable variety of his work. In the final chapter I turn to the subject of authorship itself, arguing that <I>Martin Eden </I>(1909) provides us with a gritty portrayal of authorship's estrangement within America's fierce economic environment. The result is a novel that powerfully illustrates both London's intense involvement with contemporary culture and his capacity for responding to it with insight and originality. By revealing the multiple sources that influenced the genesis of individual works, I hope to shed new light upon the connection between London's reading and his writing; and thereby make possible new assessments of his relation to turn-of the-century literature.

This dissertation describes the degree to which thinking about the theatre was involved in James's writing processes. As its central example it takes his numerous efforts to adapt his works to and from the stage. James expended much energy in the effort to adapt his fiction to theatrical conditions. I conclude that James studied the contemporary stage and made huge efforts to conform to its strictures because he saw it as the best means available to him to dramatise the action of personality. The work's aim is to describe Henry James's involvement with the contemporary stage as his means towards developing to dramatic writing style. It looks at both James's plays and his prose works and considers them in the light of the well-made play and the development of fourth-wall theatre. After some initial experiments and disappointments (1880-1893) James found much that he could adapt into his own writing from contemporary plays that dramatised peoples' interactions with places. I look at his critical and personal pronouncements and show how they chime in with the works and the arguments of such figures as W.B. Yeats, André Antoine, Emile Zola, and George Bernard Shaw. The writings covered in the thesis are, therefore: representative samples of the plays, novels and stories that were adaptations of each other; critical remarks in journalism and private notebooks and letters; contemporary work in and about the theatre by writers other than James. The dissertation privileges James's voice but emphasises that his was but one (and by no means the loudest) amongst a particular group clamouring for roughly the same change, a movement towards a serious theatre. James took what he could find from contemporary drama both as succour and material for his own efforts towards dramatising personality. I argue that he examined the European avant-garde, as it was expressed in Paris and London, for any means to further a personal project. The thesis is, therefore, about how Henry James adapted his style of writing so as to accommodate developments he was gathering from writing for the stage. It emphasises that he thought about the theatre continuously and takes issue with the received account of James's early, middle and late styles. James did not break with the stage after 1895's Guy Domville incident, as is widely believed. By providing an account of how he manipulated and developed the representation of space across his career I show that, in fact, he continued directly on with his project, writing with the same theatrical concerns in mind for much of the rest of his life.

This dissertation concentrates on three women writers, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino and Rosmarie Waldrop taken to be at varying degrees of proximity to the experimental writing movement known as Language poetry. It argues that the same (male) poets to secure a controversial reputation for this movement, by publishing large amounts of critical and expository tracts aimed at highlighting the group’s originality and political significance, inadvertently damaged the movement’s potential. The dissertation takes its cue from Ann Vickery’s <i>Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing</i>. However, while Vickery looks in depth at the social formations of the Language grouping, this study concentrates on the work, particularly the poetics, of the writers involved. The first two chapters examine the varied intellectual background to the work of the women which comprises a plurality of phenomenologies, post-structuralist theories, feminisms and ideology critiques, as well as European Modernist (and contemporary) poetry and Eastern philosophy. The suggestion is that the self-reflexive forms of these poets’ thinking and writing are what render their work less easily categorisable, and thus more contiguous with the realities of their complex, cultural positioning. Through a close examination of the transnationalism of Waldrop, her negotiations ‘between world(s)’ (Marjorie Perloff) and gender positions; the phenomenological appearances in Hejinian’s writing, à la Gertrude Stein; and the continual deformations and ‘under-cutting’ (Scalapino) of cultural constructions and hierarchies in Scalapino’s texts; the next three chapters investigate how the work of these women can be seen to continue to contribute to important cultural questions of epistemology and thus, concomitantly, questions of ethics also. I conclude that these writers’ work explores many of the issues raised more recently by contemporary feminist criticism of the ‘third wave’.

The aim of this thesis is to reread the work of three US writers, whose novels have long been central to the postmodern canon - John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Ishmael Reed - in relation to philosophical pragmatism. The scepticism expressed in their parodic reworkings of everything from mythology, to history, to philosophy and literature will be resituated alongside an antifoundational philosophy that Cornel West has described as ‘an attempt to explain America to itself at a particular historical moment’. In each chapter I will be elucidating connections that exist between these writers and pragmatist philosophers, in particular William James. From this platform I will be exploring how philosophical pragmatism has informed the attempts made by these writers to ‘explain America to itself’, attempts which in each case have been critical of the US, while also perpetuating some of its exceptionalist claims. Ultimately, I will be suggesting that while these postmodern novelists are relentlessly anxious about the failure of representation and the intractability of epistemological problems, this does not lead them into silence. Rather, they energetically perform the evasion of epistemology that West attributes to pragmatism, an evasion in which metaphysics and epistemology are partially replaced by a national history that recognizes itself as fictional. The chapter on Barth will focus on his attempts to quarantine fiction from the world, while recognizing, and to an extent celebrating, the mutual infection of story and history. The chapter on Pynchon will examine the sense of inevitability in his novels about inhabiting structures such as science, religion, or nation, with a corresponding hope that there will be room enough for humans to make themselves at home within such structures. The chapter on Reed will look at his efforts at syncretism, refashioning US history using African religion and mythology.

This dissertation critiques the temporal poetics of Jorie Graham. Examining the experience of time immanent to Graham’s manner, I argue that the temporality evident in Graham’s practice challenges her theoretical privileging of the poetically revealed present moment. Despite Graham’s temporal-poetic aims her poetry portrays time in two conflicting modes; a dominant and Successional drive towards ending is insistently countered by suspension and hesitant retraction. In opposition to Graham’s poetic theory I hence claim that the temporal dynamics governing her practice are those of teleological drive, hesitation and suspension. Chapter one examines Graham’s teleological drive and argues that this temporal experience is realised through the interplay between Graham’s sentence and her line. Chapter Two looks at the way in which Graham’s propulsive drive is enhanced by her use of enjambment. In chapter three I examine Graham’s mode of hesitation and claim that this temporal experience is closely linked to Graham’s use of brackets and parentheses. Chapter four considers the experience of suspension in Graham’s work and argues that this experience is most pronounced in Graham’s use of the terminal dash. In conclusion I address the phenomenon of silent reading that facilitates and structures our experience of Graham’s work. Concentrating on those attributes where temporal experience is heightened the dissertation thus foregrounds miniscule elements of language that may often remain overlooked. It is in this sense that I examine the temporal poetics of Jorie Graham – concentrating on those features that function as the constituent elements and governing temporal principles of her work. In particular, I consider how such minute features of manner impact upon, and engender, Graham’s peculiar mode of temporal movement.

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My dissertation examines the early writings of Herman Melville in the context of American representation of the Pacific produced during the first half of the nineteenth century. Starting from the premise that critical accounts of Melville's literary development have tended to overlook the Pacific contexts of his first three books - <i>Typee, Omoo</i> and <i>Mardi</i> - I attempt to situate them in terms of various traditions of western voyage, travel and historical writing on the region. The writing of nineteenth century American travellers on the Pacific has customarily been viewed within the purview of American continental expression and western history while Melville's Pacific writing has been interpreted predominantly within the critical parameters of American studies and literary history. Both these tendencies have neglected the often complex position of American travellers in the Pacific during this era. Looking at the voyage accounts of Benjamin Morrell, Amaso Delano and Charles Wilkes I trace their negotiations with the traditions of scientific voyaging established by earlier European explorers, highlighting their attempts to fashion authorial identities and generic conventions against the backdrop of those traditions. I then read <i>Typee</i> as the product of similar negotiations and offer the figure of the beachcomber as means of interpreting Melville's text and the model of authorship that underpins it. Towards the mid-nineteenth century, as exploration in the Pacific began to give way to more sustained processes of western colonisation, new representational forms emerged to describe those processes. Melville's <i>Omoo </i>is a response to just these developments and my analysis of it is based on an examination of the historical accounts of Hawai'i written by the American missionary Hiram Bingham and James Jackson Jarves. How Melville views the advent of colonisation and acculturation in Tahiti is thus filtered through the frameworks of American romantic historiography and providential history.

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