My thesis explores the role of religion and spirituality in the work of the Beat Generation, a mid-twentieth century American literary movement. I focus on four major Beat authors: William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso. Through a close reading of their work, I identify the major religious and spiritual attitudes that shape their texts. All four authors’ religious and spiritual beliefs form a challenge to the Modern Western worldview of rationality, embracing systems of belief which allow for experiences that cannot be empirically explained. They also assert the primacy of the individual—a major American value—in a society which the authors believed to encroach upon individual agency. Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Corso are also strongly influenced by established religious traditions: an aspect of their work that is currently overlooked in Beat criticism. Burroughs’ belief in a magical universe shapes his work. Ginsberg is heavily influenced by the Jewish exegetical tradition. Kerouac and Corso’s work contains Catholic themes. My study rectifies some tendencies in current criticism which I find problematic: a dismissal of the Beats as a countercultural phenomenon rather than a literary movement, a tendency to frame Beat religion and spirituality in vague language, and a tendency to focus solely on Buddhism within the movement. My study illustrates that the Beat authors’ work contains serious religious and spiritual content, that they take part in American religious and literary traditions, and that the authors engage with major social issues of the post-war period.

This thesis investigates models of subjectivity and agency in early twenty-first-century pop-feminist fiction and non-fiction. Non-fiction accounts of subjectivity (Haaf, Klingner and Streidl, 2008; Valenti, 2007; Moran, 2011 et al.) draw on poststructuralist notions of incoherent, performative identity, yet retain the assumption that there remains a sovereign subject capable of claiming full autonomy. The pop-feminist non-fictions reflect a neoliberal model of entrepreneurial individualism where self-optimisation replaces an ethics of intersubjective relations. In exploring the theoretical blind-spots of pop-feminist claims to female autonomy and agency, this thesis sets out to demonstrate that pop-feminist non-fiction lacks an actual feminist politics. My methodology is comparative and primarily involves the close reading of a corpus of pop-feminist texts from the Anglo-American and German contexts. I utilize my corpus of current essayistic pop-feminist texts as a fixed point of reference, deeming them to be representative of a pervasive kind of contemporary postfeminist thinking. Through the employment of the first-person narrative voice the literary authors explore how subjects are constituted by discourse but also how the subject may shape her choices/actions. Subjectivity becomes a generative capacity characterised by expansive and self-reflexive negotiations between self and other. The fictional portrayal of this process prompts an imaginative and extrapolative process of identification and dis-identification in the reader which opens up a site for the exercise of critique. Through my close readings of the novels (Riley, 2002; Walsh, 2004; Thomas, 2004; Grether, 2006; Roche, 2008; Bronsky, 2008; Baum, 2011; Hegemann, 2010) I develop a model of intersubjective dependency, drawing on Judith Butler’s later work (1994, 1999, and 2005), and identify versions of this model in the 1980s-1990s work of American postmodern feminist writers Kathy Acker and Mary Gaitskill. My thesis reveals hitherto un-discussed lines of literary and critical influence on the contemporary British and German novelists emanating from Acker and Gaitskill, suggesting that their texts may be viewed as representative of a critical pop-literary interest, spanning approximately three decades and shifting across cultural contexts, in the encounter between female subjectivity and agency in the face of late-capitalist manifestations of social constraint.

In this thesis I investigate connections between modern Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean fiction between the 1950s and the present. My study brings into focus literary representations of inter-related histories and cultures and problematises the fragmentation of Caribbean studies into separate academic disciplines. The disciplinary compartmentalisation of Caribbean studies into English studies on the one hand and French and Francophone studies on the other has contributed to a reading of Caribbean literature within separate linguistic spheres. This division is strikingly reflected in the scarcity of any sustained literary criticism that acknowledges cultural and literary interpenetration within the archipelago. My comparative study of selected Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean fiction allows me to account for the ethnic, cultural, linguistic and historical diversity of Caribbean societies while, at the same time, foregrounding their inter-relatedness. Through a series of specific case studies the thesis illuminates ways in which theoretical concepts and literary tropes have travelled within the archipelago. Through a close reading of selected narrative fiction I will contextualise and analyse significant underlying linguistic, ethnic and cultural links between the various Caribbean societies which are largely based on the shared history of slavery, colonialism and decolonisation processes. The themes of migration, transformation and creolisation will be at the centre of my investigation. Chapter One establishes the historical and literary-critical framework for this thesis by engaging with key developments in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writing from the 1920s until the present. My comparison of the most influential trends in both Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature and criticism from the discourse of négritude to postcolonial studies seeks to highlight connections between these two linguistically divided fields of study. The analysis of Caribbean fiction in Chapters Two to Four pursues such theoretical, stylistic and thematic links further. Chapter Two challenges the conception of postwar Antillean and West Indian writing produced in the metropolis as distinct literary canons by drawing attention to thematic connections between the two traditions. Through the comparison of The Lonely Londoners by Samuel Selvon and La Fête à Paris by Joseph Zobel it argues that these continuities represent a wider trend in ‘black European’ writing. Chapter Three examines concepts of cultural identity which have been central to Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature and criticism during the last two decades. Specifically it focuses on the notions of hybridity, créolité/creoleness and créolisation/creolisation which it discusses in relation to Robert Antoni’s novel Divina Trace and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco. The final chapter focuses on Shani Mootoo’s and Gisèle Pineau’s representations of specific female experiences of trauma which are related to reiterated colonial violence. Their fictional portrayal of suppressed memories can be read in light of recent critical debates about a collective remembrance of the history of slavery and colonialism.

This thesis examines Antiguan narratives’ peculiar engagements with the national question. It draws largely upon the works of four writers—Jamaica Kincaid, Joanne C. Hillhouse, Marie-Elena John and Frieda Cassin—and selected calypsonians including Antigua’s leading female and male calypsonians, Queen Ivena and King Short Shirt. It reads anxiety as the chief organising principle of the singular deconstructions of gender, ‘racial’, ethnic, and class identities undertaken by these texts. I offer a retooled account of anxiety that elaborates the local/regional concept of bad-mindedness informing the core of the narratives’ deconstructive and recuperative projects. Chapter one probes the bad-minded delimiting of Antiguan literary production. It interrogates the singular cohesive Caribbean canon typically suggested by critical readings, which obscure the narratives/ literary traditions of smaller territories such as Antigua. It also highlights locally produced canons’ intervention into the dominant canons/maps of Caribbean literary traditions. Its discussion is underpinned by the concept of bad-mindedness which I use to frame the evils that locate the smaller territory and its inhabitants at the cultural periphery. Chapter two examines the texts’ enunciations of the bad-mindedness inherent in the construction of the composite gendered identities of 19^th century Creole women, 20^th century working-class Afro-Antiguan women and men, and 20^th century proletarian Carib women. It refashions Erna Brodber’s kumbla trope, Kenneth Ramchand’s notion of terrified consciousness, and Jamaica Kincaid’s line trope to elaborate these enunciations. Chapter three examines Antiguan calypsos’ record of the peculiar responses of small-islanders to their subordinate position within the ‘global village’ and continuing entanglement in British colonialism and neo-colonial relationships and processes. It draws upon Charles Mill’s theory of smadditization/ smadditizin’ or the Afro-Caribbean struggle for recognition of personhood and Paget Henry’s account of the dependency theory to analyse the calypsos’ anxious insistence upon Afro-Antiguan personhood. The primary conclusion of my thesis is that an engagement with the neglected literary traditions of the smaller territories and national literatures on the whole, is likely to excavate a cornucopia of currently sidelined experiences, issues, and transnational relationships which can only serve to enrich our postcolonial conversations.

Definitions of celebrity authorship and material textuality at the turn of the twenty-first century have predominantly emphasised the implicitly negative aspects of contemporary developments in the literary marketplace. Particularly prominent are arguments that the practice of authorship has become subject to homogenisation by the matrix of celebrity in which successful writers are now expected to function; and, further, that the changing nature of texts themselves and the ways in which they are marketed is eroding the implicitly superior position traditionally held by literature in the cultural marketplace. This thesis views such readings as pessimistic, and offers an alternative, seeking to formulate a new critical approach to literary value in the contemporary sphere which would appreciate notions of celebrity, populism, and digital mediation as integral and productive aspects of how literary value is formed today. Through in-depth focus on the cases of a number of unconventional contemporary American authors whose work demonstrates differing, innovative approaches to the process of authorship, this thesis exposes the ways in which contemporary, atypically ‘literary’ instances of writing can and do work within and develop beyond traditional conceptualisations of authorship and literary value. Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, largely critically considered prototypical ‘celebrity’ authors, are in the first chapter reconsidered as writers whose understanding of their position within the literary marketplace affords them a self-conscious, critical perspective on the notion of celebrity in their work and public personae. The productively self-conscious author-figure is reconsidered in the second chapter, which reads the individual and joint works of author Paul Auster and visual artist Sophie Calle as foregrounding the process of creative collaboration as uniquely illuminating and transformative within the contemporary literary sphere. The notion of dual authorship is revisited and reconceptualised in the third chapter, which considers JT LeRoy and the practice of hoax authorship, outlining how this process forces the reformulation of literary value, particularly in a contemporary setting in which authors are accountable for their work in newer, more visible ways. The final chapter expands these previously-introduced themes to consider bloggers-turned-authors, particularly Tucker Max and Julie Powell, and the impact of the merging of old and new textualities on both the orientation of the figure of the writer and the way in which value is attached to his texts by readers. Ultimately, the unconventional nature of these examples is shown to belie the universality of the representations of value they enact, contributing to a full and salient account of how literary value is determined at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Despite the characteristic cross-disciplinarity of animal studies, interactions between literary and scientific researchers have been negligible. In response, this project develops a framework of practical zoocriticism, an interdisciplinary lens which synthesizes methodologies from science, animal advocacy, and literature. A primary focus of this model is the complex relationship between literary representations of animals, scientific studies of animal cognition, and practical and theoretical work advocating animal protection. This thesis proposes that the Canadian wild animal stories of Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G.D. Roberts operate at an intersection of these three factors. Their potential for facilitating reciprocal communication has not been recognized, however, due to their damaged representation within Canadian literature as a consequence of the Nature Fakers controversy. By re-contextualizing and re-evaluating these texts this project illuminates the unique contributions made by these authors. It also offers new evidence of the intersecting discourses and ideologies that stimulated the controversy. Re-defining the genre has enabled this project to uncover a selection of twentieth-century Canadian texts that perpetuate its core aims and characteristics. This project suggests that after the Nature Fakers controversy, the wild animal story diverged into two new forms: ‘realistic’ and ‘speculative.’ By placing the wild animal story in relation to a broader canon of Canadian literature, this thesis identifies three distinct modes of animal representation. These methods of relating to literary animals in the Canadian context are the fantasy of knowing the animal, the failure of knowing the animal, and the acceptance of not-knowing the animal. This novel characterization of Canadian literature is a product of the diverse, interdisciplinary approaches offered by the practical zoocriticism framework.