This thesis provides a critical account of women writers of the Beat generation. Writers such as Diane di Prima, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, Joyce Johnson, Bonnie Bremser, and Janine Pommy Vega were part of the 1950s Beat literary culture and had social relationships with the more famous male Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. To differing degrees the women writers have also been influenced by the aesthetics of the male writers, and since the 1950s their work has been contextualised alongside the men's in literary magazines, anthologies and more recent academic studies. But in such responses the women writers appear overshadowed by the male Beats, as 'minor characters', to quote the title of Joyce Johnson's memoir of the 1950s. The issue of women's 'minority' forms the premise of this thesis, and I introduce the minority debate through reference to the Beat canon and the issue of revisionism in relation to the wider literary canon. I cite theoretical models such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's 'rhizome' and 'nomadology' to support my argument. In their spatial form and terminology, these models express movement, which is pertinent since physical movement characterises the lifestyles, texts and myths of the Beat writers. Deleuze and Guattari' s theory can also express the destabilising which the notion of the woman writer brings to these images and myths. I argue that instead of proposing women writers as Beat writers we look to their difference. By reading the women's texts in relation to various themes -literary influence, the literary bohemian world of the city, the parental generation, and body, sexuality, and the road - I suggest difference is expressed in their writing. But rather than positing a distinct 'gynocritical' tradition in the terms set out by Elaine Showalter (1979), I highlight the differences between the women writers. By nature of its focus on little known texts and authors, and the critically undeveloped area of Beat literature and culture, this thesis is part literary history, part cultural history, part biography, as well as offering close readings of the texts. The texts discussed in this thesis have not only received little critical attention, they have not been read and contextualised against each other. In this thesis I do so, taking the broad historical and literary overview that women of the Beat generation have not received, as either writers or subjects.

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This thesis is a study of the travel writing inspired by automobile journeys in Britain in the period 1896 to 1930 and the new modes of subjectivity afforded by the motor car. In permitting greater access to the countryside away from railway stations, motorists were able to gain fresh perspectives on the landscape. Their journeys in the countryside invited them to ‘rediscover’ England and shape new versions of national identity based on a revival of pre-industrial pastoral idylls. This model of Englishness was directly influenced by car travel, particularly ideas of getting ‘off the beaten track’. A comparative study of the travelogues of American writers visiting Britain looks at their search for a shared heritage and the contrasting vision of England that they convey. The different experience of automotive travel and freedom to use the car as described by female writers in the period is also explored in two case studies. Many of the texts analysed in this work have never been discussed in scholarly studies and so this thesis aims to apply new material to the catalogue of home tour narratives, and to shed new light on the early years of automobile travel. This thesis also explores the car’s relationship to modernity in the narratives and concerns about the impact of motorised tourism on the landscape. By weaving together different theoretical concepts from travel writing, such as notions of the tourist and traveller, with historical studies of the car’s cultural impact in Britain, this work aims to establish the travelogues featured as a distinct sub-genre of travel writing studies.

African American literature is infused with travel. Experiences of physical journeying have been pivotal to the story of men and women of African descent in the United States for hundreds of years, since the original traumatic forced displacement of the Middle Passage that generated a diasporic subjectivity intertwined with corporeal motion. The subsequent emancipatory journey to freedom, as recited in slave narratives, decentred the coercive migrations of the slave trade by coupling the subversive act of self-directed movement through geographical space with a collective understanding of liberty. Wanderings in the period after the Civil War, followed by the momentous collective Great Migratory journeys of the twentieth century, as well as the countless and ongoing voyages to the ancestral continent of Africa spanning four centuries, has only deepened the criticality of travel to African American history and cultural production. However, African American travel writing has received only a small amount of scholarly attention. Moreover, of that scant consideration, the focus has tended to be on narratives of involuntary or economically necessitated movement. Thorough academic study of the contemporary literature of African American travel beyond these domains is rare, despite the potential rewards of such an endeavour for researchers interested in the contemporary (re)construction of African American subjectivity and in the continuing artistic evolution of the changeable and indeterminate travel book form. This thesis argues that the travel text is a highly appropriate vehicle for mobile African Americans journeying in defiance of the imposed classifications of identity and of the constraints of taxonomic and hierarchical genre systems. Chapter One considers contemporary African American travel writing as a performance of genre, in relation to memoir, ethnography and imaginative fiction, fruitfully testing the already elastic boundaries of a form of writing wrongly dismissed as sub-literary. Chapter Two addresses recent narratives of journeys to Africa, considering in particular the contrasting responses of Keith B. Richburg and Saidiya Hartman. Chapter Three attends to the neglected area of domestic or intranational travel literature by examining the work of African Americans journeying within and across the United States. Chapter Four centres upon Natasha Tarpley’s lyrical memoir Girl in the Mirror: Three Generations of Black Women in Motion to assess the changing generational experiences of mobile African American women in the United States. The thesis concludes by reflecting on these texts in relation to postcolonial and Black Atlantic theoretical frameworks.

Following Edward Said, my argument is that spatial exile, despite its distress and deprivations, generates a different way of looking at the world. Since intellectuals should look at the world differently, Said insists on their transcending the existential sufferings of losing home and urges them to cultivate what George Lamming famously calls ‘the pleasures of exile’. Thus, Said turns exile into a metaphorical concept and a model of intellectual practice in order to question the familiar and the known. In effect, Saidian intellectuals do not necessarily have to be dispossessed of their homeland. Rather, they have to be figuratively exiled from it by placing themselves at a certain distance from the familiar cultural system(s), and viewing them through the lens of the ‘other’ in order to broaden their perspective on them. To establish this, I first demonstrated that exilic conditions could be intellectually empowering, and outlined the properties of Saidian intellectual practice by showing how Mahfouz, Darwish, Saadawi, Ahmed, and Chahine also uphold its principles. I analysed how the convergences and divergences of their thoughts create diverse resistances, and discussed if writing is the abode where their pluralistic minds reside. I then ascertained the discursive intersections among Said’s ‘exile’ and postcolonialism and postmodernism by exhibiting the ‘exilic’ transcendence of some of the limitations existing there. Thus, my writing formed an in-depth analysis of Said’s ‘exile’ in order to project this as a significant intellectual vocation. At the same time, I presented some of the most prominent Middle Eastern and Arab-American intellectual(s) in a new light by highlighting the humanistic strength of their writings and creations. Thus, I formulate an enhanced understanding of freedom and identity contained in the ‘exile’ through cultural, political and theoretical arguments.

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This thesis aims to interrogate the role and representation of the United States presidency, presidential figures and avatars, and the question of executive power more generally, in the works of Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy. Observing a gap in current criticism of these authors, and American literature generally, I propose that the presidency/executive provides a new and important way of mapping these authors’ work. In this I seek to build on Sean McCann’s work on this area in A Pinnacle of Feeling. My project situates itself in a historical framework, investigating the extensive network of historical evidence that each author uses in their conception of and dialogue with the presidency and executive power. My argument takes Pynchon’s portrayal of George Washington, the United States’ semi-mythical first president, in Mason & Dixon as its starting point, then proceeds to consider a range of texts before finally discussing the presence of Ronald Reagan and the rise of corporate power in McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. I posit that in each of these authors’ work, the executive power is present simultaneously as an embodied and a “phantom” force, shaping the narrative and subjective individual experiences even when characters are not expressly engaged in political activity. A complex relay between embodied and phantom forces is apparent, with the identity and even physicality of individual presidential figures and avatars substantially affecting the operation of this power, amid a nuanced dialogue with the nation’s historical narrative. This dynamic occurs across these authors’ work, although they have divergent political and literary approaches. This thesis aims finally to establish this framework of executive power as a fundamental aspect of these authors’ writing that is vital to understanding their thinking about the United States, its history, and socio-political context, which could ultimately be extended to many other cultural and literary texts and their producers.

This thesis offers a cross-section of the workings of collage – a key twentieth-century creative mode – across the disciplines, and on both sides of the Atlantic, navigating a path through plastic art, prose, and poetry, and assessing the medium’s viability as both a physical practice and a theoretical principle. It argues that artistic systems of order, upon whose assumed absence the collage aesthetic is founded, are replaced by intuition. The act of decoding required from the viewer or reader constitutes an intellectual and emotional challenge whose rules of engagement necessitate not necessarily the discovery of any particular message but the gradual discernment of the unique regulating system behind each poem, novel, or work of art. Following the expatriation to America of many European avant-garde artists in the early twentieth century, collage took root particularly amongst New York-based artists and writers seeking broader fields of representation. For Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, and Frank O’Hara, the medium functioned as an important creative catalyst. Producing collage works largely in response to varying representational crises, they employed it aggressively, experimentally, and cathartically, often as a key part of the process by which their non-collage works were produced. Following my introduction, in which I trace the medium’s development, and propose redefining it more elastically, Chapter One explores the complexities of Cornell’s uses of collage to express himself as an artist. Chapter Two proposes a re-reading of the first two decades of Burroughs’ writing, re-framing the nauseated critical response to his work against a collage backdrop. My third chapter posits O’Hara’s early collage experiments as important developmental acts of aggression against the poetic tradition, and suggests that his later use of the medium was as a primarily conceptual means of ensuring that his readers experience, rather than interpret, his poetry. This thesis is the first interdisciplinary consideration of the collage practice during this period.

This thesis stems from interlocking sites of local and global inequalities that span from the public to cultural realms. Considering the US-Iranian relations, and America’s geopolitical presence in the Persian Gulf since the Cold War, my literary study concerns a world order of core-periphery divides that chart the global circulation of travelling texts. Within this process of establishing “national” and “world texts,” silenced are subordinate characters whose untold stories read against the grain of institutional World Literature. Towards an egalitarian cross-cultural exchange, therefore, I examine works of fiction and cinema across a century and two oceans: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Esmail Fassih’s The Story of Javid, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s Missing Soluch, and Amir Naderi’s film The Runner. In contention with the widespread Eurocentric treatments of world literatures, and in recognition of radical efforts to reimagine the worldliness of American and Persian literatures respectively, I maintain that aesthetic properties are embedded in their local histories and formative geographies. Bridging two literary worlds, then, I introduce the Parsee Fedallah as a figure whose significant role has been subdued in Melville scholarship. To retrieve his unheard voice, or “proleptic narrative,” is to de-territorialize an American master-text, and to bring the character to his Persian literary and cinematic counterparts in a subversive practice of Comparative Literature. In effect, lived experiences of Fassih’s Javid (a Zoroastrian national trope) and Dowlatabadi’s Mergan (a marginalized rural woman) are “proleptic” articulations of Fedallah’s voice in Iranian fiction. In-between Melville’s outward “sea” and Fassih and Dowlatabadi’s inward “land” is an alternative space in which the border-crossing of fictional characters enable counter-hegemonic cartographies. In conclusion, by virtue of his creative conflict with Melville, Naderi’s Amiru points at the silver screen as a visual realm of new possibilities beyond the monopoly of an expansive World Literature.

The study explored the information behaviour of authors of children's and young adult literature in both the United States and the United Kingdom. In addition, it sought to determine whether personality and cognitive styles had any influence on this behaviour. The contribution of this study to the research base is due to the focus on a group of creative professionals that has received little attention in the information seeking field and has so far been under-researched. The study followed a concurrent embedded qualitative dominant mixed methods research design. Instruments included in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 38 authors that took place in the natural work setting of these individuals, the BFI personality questionnaire, and the ASSIST learning styles questionnaire, modified to apply to the working lives of authors. Analysis of the qualitative interviews followed an inductive grounded theory approach with constant comparison and emerging codes while the quantitative results were analysed in SPSS with descriptive statistics and correlation analysis. Results from the quantitative elements demonstrated clear links between personality and cognitive styles and a significantly high openness to experience for this group of creative professionals. The qualitative data portrayed a group of authors with diverse and idiosyncratic needs. The combination of the two data sets showed relationships between all three elements, leading to the development of five information styles for authors and a model of information seeking for the group as a whole. Key recommendations to information providers include enhancing resource access for authors, developing programmes to assist them in learning more about library resources as well as subject matter related to their novels, and providing creative workspaces that would double as an ?office? environment. Recommendations for publishing professionals involves setting up a network of experts for authors to utilise for information, as well as obtaining key information from the target audience. These recommendations could assist authors in the development of their works and provide them with easier access to the sources they deem valuable. Future research could examine a larger sample of authors, including those who write for adults. Doing so could highlight any differences in author groups and further enhance the findings of this study.