My PhD thesis identifies a "will to reduction" in twentieth-century American literature as a significant trend that I trace from the Modernist era to the contemporary period. I locate the origins of contemporary literary Minimalism in Modernist experimentation. In an early chapter I identify reductive tendencies and the values informing them in Imagism, Objectivism, and the writings of Ernest Hemingway and William Carlos Williams. These form the foundation for a tradition of American Minimalism, which I then document in contemporary literature. Robert Creeley is an inheritor of the Objectivists' Minimalist leanings, which recur, by emulation or partial disagreement, in the poetry of Aram Saroyan and Robert Grenier. Raymond Carver renews the Hemingway tradition in his short stories, and one chapter of my thesis considers Carver along with Mary Robison, who has also written a Minimalist novel. Radical, sustained experiments in Minimalism by Robert Lax, Lydia Davis, and David Markson are the subject of subsequent chapters. Their work represents recent versions of Minimalism in poetry, the short story, and the novel. Recurring themes in my thesis are the ways in which some of these authors have been influenced by visual art, and philosophical issues raised by literary experiments in Minimalism.

This thesis explores the representation of motherhood as ideology, identity, and experience in contemporary women’s writings, offering comparative studies of Persian texts alongside English-language narratives from marginalized backgrounds such as African American, Caribbean, Chinese American, and queer mothering. It investigates theoretical approaches to motherhood and identity such as those of Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker, questions the exclusion of women from other literary theories such as that of Michel Foucault, and engages with contemporary critical views on motherhood and the materials published recently in mothering studies.

This thesis critiques the prevailing assumption that passing is passé in contemporary African American women’s literature. By re-examining the work of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Dorothy West, Alice Walker, and Barbara Neely, I argue that these writers signify on canonical passing narratives – Brown’s Clotel (1853) and Clotelle (1867), Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), Larsen’s Passing (1929), and Hurst’s Imitation of Life (1933) – in order to confront and redress both the historical roots and contemporary contexts of colourism. As well bridging this historiographic gap, I make a case for reading passing as a multivalent trope that facilitates this very process of cultural interrogation. Rather than focussing on literal episodes of passing, I consider moments of symbolic, textual, and narrative passing, as well as the genealogical and intertextual processes at play in each text which account for the spectral hauntings of the passing-for-white figure in post-civil rights literature. In Chapter 1, I examine the relationship between passing and embodiments of beauty in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Bambara’s “Christmas Eve at Johnson’s Drugs N Goods” (1974) and Neely’s Blanche Among the Talented Tenth (1994). In Chapter 2, I discuss passing, class, and capital in Naylor’s Linden Hills (1985) and Dorothy West’s The Wedding (1995). In Chapter 3, I suggest that Walker and Morrison revisit Larsen’s Passing in their short stories “Source” (1982) and “Recitatif” (1983). Finally, I conclude this project with a discussion of Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child (2015) in order to demonstrate the continued centrality of the passing trope for authors interested in colourism, genealogy, and black women’s experiences.

This thesis examines a number of literary texts from and about the nineteenth-century American South through a transatlantic lens, in order to consider mutations and alterations in the pastoral tradition importantly fostered in the region by Thomas Jefferson. Due to the turbulent political and, eventually, military situation in the United States during the period under discussion, detailed attention is given here to the many ways in which literary pastoral was adapted in response to shifting regional needs. The thesis begins by considering the pastoral influences on the political philosophy of Jefferson, specifically his notion of America as a pastoral New Jerusalem . It establishes the emergence of American pastoralism through the colonization process, and examines how an English yeoman ideal came to exist in the colonies. Part Two maps and evaluates alterations to the Jefferson ideology in several Southern novels of the antebellum period (especially John Pendleton Kennedy s Swallow Barn and Nathaniel Beverley Tucker s The Partisan Leader), such as a focus less on the small farmer than on the land more generally, that emerged in the face of the political threat from Northern abolitionism. This section of the thesis also considers plantation literature s idyllic tropes in a new light by utilizing the American travel writing of British authors particularly Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope so as to establish a parallax interpretive position. In Part Three, the thesis provides detailed examination of Southern texts of the postbellum period, with especial focus upon writings by Mark Twain and the lesser-known Virginian writer Mary Tucker Magill s novel, The Holcombes. This section investigates the reimagining of and by the South following defeat in the Civil War. Focused on returns to, and further divergences from, the original Jeffersonian ideal of the pastoral, it also emulates Part Two in turning to selected English writing here, Thomas Hardy s own fictional negotiations of significant rural change so as better to identify and assess the politics of the Southern literary imagination.

My thesis sets out to explore the literary representations of Caribbean modernity in selected fiction by Erna Brodber, V.S. Reid, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Joseph Zobel. Reading their texts in relation to modern Caribbean subjectivity, I employ a historiographical approach to pan-Caribbean theoretical movements and link these with the works. I suggest that in the selected fiction we can begin to map a Caribbean modernist literary tradition that seeks to locate the Caribbean subject through terms that reflect the over-determined history and creolised nature of the region. I read their literary representations of Caribbean modernity through the matrix of the plantation, the ship and the creolised city in an attempt to complicate hegemonic discourses that privileges and imposes Western modernity on the development of Caribbean literary modernity. In an attempt to re-locate the Caribbean subject, I suggest that these writers inscribe a series of narrative techniques that complicates traditional Caribbean and Western literary canons. Through the use of the creolised language and folk practices that have long been considered ‘low culture’, they develop a literary discourse that is discomforting and difficult to access. A central aim of my thesis concerns locating the gendered modern subject, who, I argue, has stood on the margins of Caribbean intellectual thought and literary criticism. Underpinning my argument and the basis of my theoretical framework are two observations concerning the Caribbean made by CLR James and Stuart Hall respectively. For James, the Caribbean is a product of a peculiar history, while Hall concludes that for the population of the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora, a process of translation that significantly differs from hybridity occurred at the point of the region’s present day formation. This notion of a peculiar origin and the process of translation I assert are central to understanding literary representations of Caribbean modernity.

This thesis examines literary texts as place-making conduits in the case of the North American region commonly referred to as the Great Plains or the prairies. From a discursive and historicist perspective, it demonstrates how Willa Cather's novel 0 Pioneersl, Robert Kroetsch's poems 'Stone Hammer Poem' and 'Seed Catalogue', and William Least Heat-Moon's PrairyErth constitute key twentieth-century literary geographies that demarcate a shift in the way the land on the ground has been overlaid with spatial tropes and narrative structures. The direction of the shift, it is argued here, is from a narrow regionalism that conceives of place as enclosed, rooted, and essentialist towards a 'middle ground' in which cultural and natural forces come into contact, conflict, as well as collaboration in a complex dialogic negotiation of power, presence, survival, and belonging (Richard White). In setting out a critical framework, the first chapter identifies a culturally dominant meta-narrative of fall and recovery as a powerful ideological influence on how the Plains has been represented and understood. It is shown how, in mapping the region along linear wilderness-garden and desert-landscape trajectories, artists and critics alike have tended to represent the place in binary and essentialist terms as landscape (not wilderness), rooted (not routed), and authentic (not hybrid). Countering this discourse is an archaeological mode of inquiry that decentres linear narratives of progressive recovery/fall by unearthing local particulars. What emerges instead are palimpsest and rhizomatic deep maps that trace intercultural, transnational, and global movements operating beneath, across, and above the levels of region and nation and hence challenge narrow definitions of either. Thus, in addition to a formal dispersion of textual and geographical space, the deep maps also count the cost of empire and nation building and address socio-political issues of ethnicity, ecology, inhabitation, and economics. Through close readings of Cather, Kroetsch, and Heat-Moon's literary geographies, I proceed to situate them in relation to this matrix of prairie place-making and elaborate on how they variously contribute to, dispute, and seek to displace it.

In an effort to address and to rectify the overabundance of stereotype in regional literature of the American South, this dissertation seeks to recontextualize the traditional markers and the use of sense of place to determine setting. Instead, the thesis emphasizes and explores how relationships of identity through attitudes of dysfunction and obsession can give place or land agency within a narrative, thus reinvigorating the value and authenticity of the regional narrative beyond common and expected patterns. This is exemplified and analyzed in close readings of contemporary Southern writers who defy the traditional narrative, e.g. Jesmyn Ward, Benh Zeitlin, and Karen Russell, as well as canonical authors whose success can be seen in the appearance of these attitudes and development of identity for place, e.g. William Faulkner and Margaret Mitchell. The accompanying novel excerpts serve to highlight even further the execution and power of this literary form for a post-millennium Southern Literature, which can evade its growing presence as a genre literature and regains its position as a figurehead for the significance of regional writing.

The central argument of my work is that authors Leslie Marmon Silko, Louis Owens, and Gerald Vizenor, working in the latter half of the twentieth century, use violence as a literary device (literary violence) for exposing and critiquing modes of systemic violence inherent in the formative originary myths of dominant US culture, specifically the mythic frontier and West. I argue that they engage with questions arising out of the systemic and normative violence required to sustain exceptionalist and supremacist Euramerican myth, which in turn sanitise the unspeakable violence of settler colonialism. This sanitising effect produces a form of transcendent violence, so called because the violence it describes is deemed to be justified in accordance with dominant ideology. In addressing this, Silko rewrites the mythic legacies of frontier and the West, rearticulating the unspeakable violence of conquest and domination, resulting in an anti-Western, pre-apocalyptic vision that turns away from European modernity and late twentieth century capitalism, looking instead to an Indigenous worldview. Owens similarly proposes an alternative reading of frontier where binaries of racial and cultural difference become malleable and diffuse, producing unexpected breaks with established ideology and narratives of dominance. The unseen systemic violence of the provincial town, in many ways the American societal idyll in microcosm, emerges during key confrontations between Native and non-Native characters in the liminal spaces and boundaries of the provincial town. Bringing these different threads together, Vizenor critiques systemic and institutionalised violence in his fiction and non-fiction work. His breakthrough novel Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart shares key characteristics with the work of Silko and Owens in this regard. Transgressing borders of taste, binaries of simulated Indianness, and notions of Euramerican cultural dominance, Vizenor’s mocking laugh destabilises the notion of completed conquest and closed frontiers as the final word on Euramerican supremacy.

‘Part One: 9/11 and the Death of the Capitalist Utopia’ focuses on how 9/11 has been memorialised, mythologised, and mobilised by contemporary culture. It examines a range of cultural materials from literature, film, and architecture, to 9/11 in the media. The section discusses, through a fusion of cultural and political thought, how the War on Terror became the inevitable continuation of the binary rhetoric of good and evil perpetuated since 9/11. Chapter One, entitled ‘Falling Man’, examines the complex relationship between art and 9/11, and the impact of images of those seen falling from the towers, primarily using Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close to discuss the role of censorship after 9/11. The chapter progresses to look at Hollywood’s overt response to 9/11 with World Trade Center and United 93. Chapter Two: ‘Reflecting Absence’ contains a reading of the 9/11 memorial used as a case study of the preferred narrative of 9/11. The chapter establishes a regressive rhetoric produced after 9/11 and used to fuel support for a more aggressive stance towards foreign policy. In ‘Part Two: The Earth Burns Again: the Culture of Apocalypse in Contemporary Cinema’, I examine the specific case of apocalyptic narratives post 9/11. This is achieved through comparison pieces between late 90s apocalyptic films and those released after 9/11. It develops much of the theory put forward in the first chapter, showing how this can be applied not just to texts linked directly to 9/11, but also to texts about the future. Chapter Three: ‘The Abuse of Apocalypse’ begins with an examination of genre and the place of the apocalyptic narrative. I establish two distinct ‘waves’ and then move on to discuss a fascination with the ‘post’- apocalyptic after 9/11. This is framed by a comparison between 90s apocalyptic film and film post 9/11. Here I address the lone survivor narrative and further discuss the aesthetic differences between the two waves. Chapter Four: ‘You’ve Gotta Have Faith: Issues of Religion and Faith in Post 9/11 Apocalyptic Cinema’, continues by examining the developing theme of religion within these post 9/11 apocalypse movies. This second part of the thesis is more focused on textual analysis, using the theory already discussed to inform a deeper and more specific discussion of the ways in which this movie genre/sub-genre is indicative of the wider issues at stake. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the economic apocalypse which is evident in both the text and filmic versions of Cosmopolis. It places these ideas of an apocalyptic cultural mentality within the contemporary framework of the global financial meltdown, as well as summarises and returns to the main themes of the work, namely ideas about our ability to imagine the future, and the end of ideas of progress in traditional cultural forms. Over the last decade 9/11 has been a popular source for writers of both fiction and non-fiction. The unique contribution this thesis makes to the body of work on 9/11 lies in its examination of primary texts alongside political and cultural theory. Most importantly, the way in which I combine narrative and aesthetic theory with textual analysis to build a narrative of post 9/11 apocalyptic thinking gives an overall framework to an otherwise fractious discourse on the popular imagination post 9/11.

This PhD thesis asks the following question: how does Adam Smith's moral sense philosophy, particularly his notion of sympathy, as articulated through his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (delivered 1762-63), rationally and relationally inform an understanding of socio-political character in Early America? Prioritising the American Revolutionary period, broadly marked by the years 1716 and 1826 (introduced by the opening of the first theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia), my analysis employs Smith's theory as a rhetorical device for understanding discursive fields of human interconnection, wherein "sensible" selves are being rationally constructed and theatrically conceived. I read the culture of sensibility and the language of sentiment as underpinning legal and logical intellectual development within this context (drawing upon scholarship by Andrew Burstein, Gary Wills, Sarah Knott and Nicole Eustace in this regard), where sympathy is foregrounded as one particular aspect of sensible self-construction. I understand the sensible self within this environment as a conceit that is always already theatrically informed and performed: this character is ever responsive to surrounding audiences and 'interpretive communities' (a la Stanley Fish, and Rhys Isaac in his dramaturgic and ethnographic approach to The Transformation of Virginia), and is bound up in underlying rhetorics of costume, composition and comportment (engaging with Jay Fliegelman's study concerning the performative underpinnings of American Independence: Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, & the Culture of Performance). I develop this thesis through the course of four illustrative case studies wherein sensible American characters (in principle) and American characters (in fact) are standing trial. With respect to these, I enact a series of rhetorical executions, engaging with Adam Smith's notion of sympathy - which is itself theatrically informed - alternately as follows: as a dialogue of conviction; as a grammar of economy; as a translative rhetoric passage; and as a rhetorical conceit of logic and law. Each study depicts a different historical narrative relative to specific modes of sensible self-construction and "transformative" character development, and I treat each scenario with the same tool in order to effectively delineate and examine the original point. This approach is timely insofar as it qualifies Jonathan Lamb's investigation into The Evolution of Sympathy during the Long Eighteenth Century (2009): it usefully extends Lamb's work on the sympathy more generally by prioritising Adam Smith's theory in particular, and by reading Smith's paradigmatic conceit (distinguished via the impartial spectator) into legal and logical fields of "lived interactions". This thesis argues that Smith's sympathetic system offers a uniquely incisive mechanism for engaging with the socio-political processes whereby American characters are being transformed into "sensible" American citizens.