Giving backchat is a popular term in the Anglophone Caribbean and is locally considered a form of gendered speech. This form of discourse is like the African American concept of talking back with the exception of intent; giving backchat is not intended to convey disrespect whereas backtalk is impertinent. Typically applied to girls and young women, giving backchat is a way of challenging, interrogating, and upsetting social, cultural, and familial gender-biased norms in closed and sometimes unyielding groups that seek to impose forced silences on female group members. This project examines the appearances giving backchat makes throughout the texts of Anglophone Caribbean female writers-particularly those who are migrant, immigrant, and resident in Britain beginning in the 19th century and extending to the 21st century. Female authors with Caribbean roots residing in the UK such as Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, Jean Rhys, Una Marson, Beryl Gilroy, Joyce Gladwell, Andrea Levy, Jean Binta Breeze, and Eintou Pearl Springer utilise giving backchat in their texts, which include slave narratives, travelogues, novels, and poetry, to question the often stagnant roles women occupy in societies; to challenge false immigrant narratives or immigrant narratives exclusive of girls and women of colour; and to create dialogues more inclusive of the colonised or formerly colonised, female Other living in the Imperial, host society. This project examines several examples of immigrant narratives by these authors, fiction and nonfiction, to determine how giving backchat functions in these texts to promote a discourse focused on issues relevant to Anglophone Caribbean immigrant women living in the UK.

This thesis offers a comprehensive reassessment of the fiction and criticism of Carol Shields. It aims to present her work as less "domestic" and "celebratory" and more expansive and equivocal than has sometimes been recognised, and to re-address elements which have been under-explored in previous scholarship. Close attention is paid to formal and thematic liminality, stylistic experimentation, intertextuality, subversions of historiography, and Canadian contexts, as well as to texts which have previously received very little analysis, such as Shields's poetry collections. The study is also the first to draw extensively on manuscript materials which give a valuable insight into her working methods and extend debate about her experiments with narrative perspective and genre-mixing. An introductory chapter places the study in the context of work previously undertaken on Shields~s fiction. Emphasising the complexity of her portrayals of family dynamics, her early texts are then assessed through Lacanian concepts of alterity in order to explore the central tension between alienation and connectedness developed in this apprentice work. A study of Various Miracles (1985) and Swann (1987) examines these texts~ combination of post modem narrative "play" with a realist commitment to character construction and moral issues. A study of the interplay of different language registers follows, and reveals that the deployment of dialogue in Shields's work challenges the alleged limitation of its social scope. Extant analyses of Shields's "use and abuse" of autolbiographical convention are extended by tracing her development of The Stone Diaries (1993) and Larry's Party (1997) through their multiple manuscript revisions and transformations of personal biography. Finally, a study of Shields's last three texts demonstrates that these generically disparate final works are linked thematically by an inquiry into the Canadian trope of survival.

This thesis comprises a collection of poetry, All These Rivers, and a critical dissertation Beyond the Temple, Beyond the Pond: Deep Ecology and Contemporary Literature of the American West, which collectively explore the relationship between the literature of the American West and Deep Ecology. All These Rivers engages with the themes and tenets of Deep Ecology in its methods and principles of construction. It considers my relationship to the landscape of home, the Pacific Northwest, and how it is maintained and intensified by the process of writing my experiences into existence during a period of geographic isolation. The collection’s title responds to the many rivers in this region, but also alludes to the collection’s themes of origins, direction and cycles. The content and structure of this body of work demonstrate how nature and natural processes not only shape the landscape, but imprint upon the self. Voicing my complex relationship with this geography through the process of writing, re-mapping and recounting experiences, this collection seeks to collapse the distance between vast and intimate geographies, reconcile the wild and the civilized, and to reunify myself with home terrain. The critical component provides a context for reading this collection of poems and further explores of the relationship between Deep Ecology and contemporary Western American literature through critical readings of Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm and Ellen Meloy’s The Last Cheater’s Waltz. Concluding this body of work, I embark on a brief critical reading of All These Rivers, suggesting that the process of writing the collection, and the poems themselves, engage in a practice of Deep Ecology.

No description available.

This thesis brings together literary texts that portray Hasidic Judaism in Jewish-American literature, predominantly of the 20th and 21st centuries. Although other scholars may have studied Rabbi Nachman, I.B. Singer, Chaim Potok and Pearl Abraham individually, no one has combined their works and examined the depiction of Hasidism through the codes and conventions of different literary genres. Additionally, my research on Judy Brown and Frieda Vizel raises urgent questions about the gendered foundations of Hasidism that are largely elided in the earlier texts. The thesis demonstrates how each text has engaged with Hasidic identity, thought, customs, laws, values and communities in its own particular way, creating tensions between the different literary interpretations. Furthermore, the thesis is structured chronologically and contributes to a cultural historical understanding of a people that has been threatened by modernity, nearly annihilated by the Nazis and uprooted from their motherlands in order to survive, and in fact thrive, in the United States. This historical development is described in the various texts used in this thesis, which belong to different genres from the short story, to the novel, to online Life writing. My research has been truly interdisciplinary, which is reflected in the use of different methodologies belonging to different academic fields such as history, sociology, anthropology, theology, Western esotericism and literary studies.

This dissertation is about the prevalence of religious themes in American literary naturalism, which emerged in the late nineteenth century. The centrality of themes such as the indifference of nature and the struggle for survival are common to naturalism, owing to its close association with post-Enlightenment and post-Darwinian advances in science and philosophy. From a contemporary perspective, where science and religion often appear as oppositional explanations for life and its development, it becomes all too easy to assume that those authors associated with naturalism represented religion in limited ways, or with a spirit of antagonism. However, I demonstrate that religion occupies a central position in naturalism. I argue that the religious themes of Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Sinclair Lewis are reflections of nineteenth and early twentieth-century theological and cultural histories that saw American Protestantism adjusting to a post-Darwinian and post-Enlightenment context through a process of liberalisation. Whilst I do not set out to form an overarching theory of religion in naturalism, I do argue that the naturalists consistently explore the veracity of the Bible, the humanity of Christ, the eschatological promise of life after death, the socio-economic and socio-political implications of Christ’s teaching, and the concept of original sin. In conclusion, I note that both the Great Depression and post-9/11 America saw a return to naturalism as a mode of representation. I therefore also explore how twentieth- and twenty-first century naturalists continued to incorporate into their works the religious themes explored in the works of the earlier generation of naturalists. The naturalists were, and perhaps continue to be, scientists, philosophers, and non-conventional theologians. Religion and naturalism coexist in a complex relationship that ebbs and flows between orthodoxy and liberalism, but never do they deny the right for the other to exist.

In this project the fields of modernist studies and science converge on the topic of lighting. My research illuminates a previously neglected area of modernism: the impact of artificial lighting on American modernist literature written in Paris between 1900 and 1939. Throughout that period, Paris maintained its position as an artistic centre and emerged as a stage for innovative public lighting. For many, the streets of Paris provided the first demonstration of electricity’s potential. Indeed, my research has shown that Paris was both the location of international expositions promoting electric light, as well as a city whose world-class experiments in lighting and public lighting displays were widely admired. Therefore, I have selected texts with a deep connection to Paris. While significant scholarship exists in relation to Parisian artificial lighting in fine art, a thorough assessment of the impact of lighting on the modern movement is absent from recent critical analysis. As such, this thesis seeks to account for literary modernism in relation to developments in public and private lighting. My research analyses a comprehensive range of evocations of gas and electric light to better understand the relationship between artificial light and modernist literary aesthetics. This work is illuminating for what it reveals about the place of light in the modern imagination, its unique symbolic and metaphorical richness, as well as the modern subject’s adaptability to technological change more broadly. This account of modernism considers artificial lighting in fiction and poetry and culminates in a final chapter on electrically illuminated literary epiphanies. The implications of technologized lighting for form and content are fused in that particular device. This thesis confirms that the dissemination of artificial modes of lighting coincided with, shaped and contributed to literary experiments that span a number of modernist characteristics: fragmentation, stream of consciousness, spatial representation, literary epiphany, formal self-awareness and imagism. Tracing the history of lighting technology and its aesthetic dimensions unearths parallels between lighting and writing which justify my claim that modern lighting was a symbol for and constituent part of the direction and execution, content and form of American modernist literary innovation.

This dissertation reads ‘character’ as a formative concept in U.S. literature and culture. The word speaks to the creation of myth, to the impact of dominant cultural narratives upon individual identity, and to the construction of untruths for the purpose of communicating truth. In the nineteenth-century United States, I argue, character was perceived as a defining aspect of personhood, and gave shape to culturally specific understandings of citizenship and national identity. My primary focus is on how competing genealogies of character intersected in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century U.S. literature, where the term held multiple meanings: a political expectation of citizenship and of the nation state; a marker of social, economic and moral eligibility; and an outward display of spiritual salvation inherited from Calvinist theology. In each chapter, I locate my central ideas within a complex nexus of literary admiration, imitation and suggestion, through which character comes into view as a vital and effective form of cultural interchange. Yet, equally, I suggest that certain writers articulated anxieties about judging individuals on a narrow understanding of what it meant to be socially legible. My aim is to chart the influence of character through the forms of resistance that emerged against it. I demonstrate how, for Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harold Frederic, Henry James and Sinclair Lewis, representing Americans in fiction meant acknowledging that character was not so much an immutable fact of selfhood as a culturally produced identity constituted by public approval.

This thesis explores the Haitian Revolution and its multiple assaults upon the American imaginary. These assaults are understood to form part of a traumatic cultural inheritance. It envisages the Haitian Revolution not as one, singular event, but as a complex, multivalent, and polymorphous phenomenon, with a circular, repeating energy. This ‘circular’ revolution is shown to resonate with different ‘American’ anxieties—anxieties regarding race, class, gender, sexuality, creolization, nationhood, and diaspora. Drawing upon Abraham and Torok’s theory of cryptonymy and the ‘transgenerational phantom’, this thesis traces the roots of these revolutionary traumas (or ‘phantoms’) and uncovers the ‘encrypted’ secrets that underlie the multiple layers of myth, obfuscation, and silence that characterize American representations of Haiti—secrets which reflect both the limits of Haiti’s continual revolutionary power, and the transgenerational force of American cultural anxiety. Using the American gothic tradition as a discursive springboard, this thesis sees fiction, and the creative arts more broadly, as an archive of creative possibilities. Examining a range of gothic ‘texts’ from the 1790s to the 1930s, including Herman Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes, and the Halperin brothers’ film White Zombie, it demonstrates the endurance of particular social, political, and cultural anxieties that are often occluded by the conventional American archive. In this sense, it responds to the concerns of Haiti scholars such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who have highlighted the limitations of the western archive, and confronts the need to read ‘beyond’ the text, using an assemblage of other sources that may offer clues into ‘encrypted’ histories. In so doing, it does not propose to offer a solution to Haiti’s historical erasure, but demonstrates the unimagined revolutionary possibilities of creative interdisciplinarity.

This thesis offers a sustained and nuanced examination of representations of expatriation and exile in modern American expatriate narratives and post-1948 exilic Palestinian writing. In so doing, this thesis addresses and develops an under elaborated conversation in comparative, postcolonial and diaspora studies. It accounts for the distinction between the departures and returns of the involuntary exile and the expatriate or self-imposed exile. In Chapter One, I analyse memoirs by Fawaz Turki (1941–) and Malcolm Cowley (1898– 1989) in order to illustrate that the departure of exiled Palestinian writers from their homeland is imposed by a colonial situation, while the departure of Modernist American expatriate authors to Europe is elective. In Chapter Two, I juxtapose works by Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1919–1994) to show that American expatriate characters are engaged in centrifugal movement that increases their sense of freedom, while exiled Palestinian characters are involved in a centripetal mobility that expresses their desire to return home. In Chapter Three, I examine memoirs by Edward Said (1935–2003) and Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) to show that Said uses his ‘voyage in’ to the Palestinian context to enter into the Palestinian national narrative, while Stein performs ‘a displaced and dialectical encounter’ with the US to cultivate a distinctive personal identity and narrative. In Chapter Four, I explore a range of exilic Palestinian and modern American expatriate works to suggest that the differences between the representations of ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ by the authors at stake echo the various forms of departures and returns they represent. The overarching aim of this thesis is to foreground the different modes of placelessness represented by exiled and expatriate characters and their authors. It contends that the possibility of American expatriate protagonists of reconnecting with their roots enables them to choose the routes they desire to follow afterwards, which reflects an elective exile. By contrast, the representation by their Palestinian counterparts of their inability to access their roots and choose their routes reflects an involuntary exile. This thesis therefore urges comparative, postcolonial and diaspora studies to stress the differences between expatriation and exile, and it opens up new possibilities for further comparative examinations of literatures of exile and expatriation. This thesis also paves the way for further research on potential connections between Palestinian and American writing.