This thesis in Creative and Critical Writing comprises two parts. The novel, Mrs Hemingway, is an exploration of the lives of the Hemingway wives: Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh. Set in the last weeks of each marriage, from bohemian Antibes to pre-war Key West, Liberation Paris to Cold War Idaho, each quarter is told from the point of view of the next Mrs Hemingway. The novel aims to bring to the fore the female voices that have been lost, or at least sidelined, by the hyper-masculinised narrative of the writer’s life. It also seeks to disrupt the homogenous reading of Hemingway’s first marriage as the only one of lasting importance: a view begun in the author’s memoir A Moveable Feast (1964) and continued in many biographies since. One of the aims of Mrs Hemingway is to draw attention to the other three wives who defied canonisation, and to suggest Hemingway’s feelings for the ‘other Hemingway women’ were very much more moveable than has been previously suggested. The second part is a critical thesis on the subject of loss in Hemingway’s texts. During my creative work, loss became the major governing theme of my novel: the author lost wives, lost words in lost manuscripts, and finally lost his way with words in the 1950s. This thesis investigates the same theme in a critical idiom: how Hemingway’s characters endure loss, and how it is the major – and rather undercritiqued – subject of Hemingway’s texts. The essay also argues that while the author’s fascination with loss spans his whole career, the style and strategy of loss changes in the mid-1930s.

This thesis is presented in two sections: firstly, a novel, Randall, or The Painted Grape; and secondly, an essay, ‘Beyond Ekphrasis: The Role and Function of Artworks in the Novels of Don DeLillo’. Randall, or The Painted Grape is a novel about the Young British Artists. It takes the form of a fictitious biographical memoir of an artist, Randall, written by his friend Vincent, after Randall’s death. This memoir is interpolated with sections treating Vincent and Justine, Randall’s widow, following their discovery of a series of previously unknown paintings by Randall. ‘Beyond Ekphrasis: The Role and Function of Artworks in the Novels of Don DeLillo’ discusses critical approaches to the treatment of artworks in fiction. It considers existing theories of ekphrasis (the literary description of a work of art) and explores how far these theories, which most often treat poems addressing paintings and sculptures, can be applied to prose fiction, and to post-representational and conceptual art forms. Taking examples from three recent novels by Don DeLillo: Falling Man, Point Omega and The Body Artist, the essay looks at ways in which novelistic ekphrasis can engage with non-literary art forms that differ and go beyond those put forward by canonical theories of ekphrasis. These include: the treatment of the art encounter in an extended narrative; the ethics and etiquette of representation; the use of structural rather than descriptive mimesis; and the possibility of a non-paragonal, or non-confrontational, relationship between the treating and treated art forms. Finally, with reference to The Body Artist, the essay suggests the possibility of a ‘reverse ekphrasis’, by which the novel as a whole can be read as a representation of an artwork that is nowhere fully described in the text.

The study explores reconstructions of whiteness in the literature of the American South, offering a deconstructive approach to whiteness. Navigating its way through contemporary scholarship on whiteness, it questions the conflation of whiteness with white identity, which locks its interpretations within the white versus black dichotomy. Adopting a place specific approach, the thesis situates its discussion in the Post-Reconstruction South, proposing that whiteness is not a homogeneous category, but rather its constructions are unique to particular locales. The thesis engages with the works of such nineteenth century southern writers as Thomas Nelson Page, Ellen Glasgow, Charles Waddell Chesnutt and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Although immersed in the tradition of the region, these writers are positioned on the opposite sides of the colour line, and an examination of their unique narrative positions allows for an objective delineation of southern whiteness. Combining ‘white’ and ‘black’ perspectives, the discussion explores what constitutes the southern variety of whiteness and the ways in which these writers reconstruct it. Following Richard Dyer’s identification of perfect whiteness with the figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary, the study argues that whiteness consists in replicating these biblical paradigms in the ordinary. In the South, these models of whiteness are conflated with notions of antebellum gentility and apotheosised in the figures of the gentleman planter and southern belle, who are involved in the process of mimetic reconstructions of the divine and genteel ideals. Casting whiteness as a composite of distinct totalities that resist unification into an organic whole, the thesis argues that the desire to replicate the biblical and genteel models is perpetuated by a conviction of intrinsic ‘blackness’ that needs to be exorcised. Such awareness blights reconstructions of whiteness, transmuting them into sites of rupture and transgression. Haunted by the preconceived perfection of the divine and antebellum paradigms, the southern gentleman and lady are transformed into inadequate approximations, while whiteness proper remains elusive.

This thesis charts the postmodern fin de siècle in North American fiction, through close scrutiny of David Foster Wallace’s writing, and his engagement with twentieth-century literary development. Through examination of the ‘blank generation’ fictions of Douglas Coupland, Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, and establishing the lineage of Wallace’s own influences, such as John Barth and Don DeLillo, this thesis demonstrates that Wallace’s writing is distinct from that of his contemporaries and explores his ambition to move American literature beyond its reliance on established tropes of postmodern expression. In his fiction, Wallace depicts a world where postmodernism has become the default, mainstream mode of expression. Focusing on Wallace’s novels, The Broom of the System (1987) and Infinite Jest (1996), this thesis interrogates his depictions of passivity and addiction through his creative rendering of contemporary consumer culture, going on to evaluate his attempts to develop a new moralism through pragmatic application of philosophical systems of thought. There is particular focus on how his ideas of morality parallel many of Iris Murdoch’s writings on the ethics of attention. This is one of the first theses to make use of the Wallace collection at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, and through archival research and close readings it builds on existing critical material in order to position Wallace’s work in the wider American canon, considering its conceptual links to past literary works. Through a critical engagement with Wallace’s work, this thesis reassesses the progression of late-twentieth century American literature and also identifies a Foster: 03943028 ii systematic attempt to initiate a new direction in novel-writing which defies traditional categorisations and more aptly describes the American millennial experience.

This thesis aims to discuss Bellow's works mainly in a psychological context. The basic premise is that, despite a person's individual situation and the more universal problems facing him, there is the possibility of an approach to life which can transcend such problems, which rests on man's natural optimism. Each novel is discussed in turn, showing how the protagonists have, for various reasons, become unable to cope with everyday life. This is partly due to their idealism, which, carried too far, causes dissatisfaction with their world and prevents them from compromising that idealism. Their inquiring nature drives them to seek 'answers' to problems through explanation and theory, thus cutting themselves off from experience. A change in their attitude, and a reconciliation with the world, comes about through a cessation of effort subsequent to a realisation of its futility --- possibly precipitated by a particular event. They are once more able to communicate with people, breaking the barrier of their alienation, and find satisfaction in this contact. Their redemption is in the realisation that man shares the common fate of existence and death, and that this connection, asserted between individuals, can provide a worthwhile basis for living and for affirming the value of existence. Another factor which may indicate a more positive existence is the instinctive optimism of the soul, which refuses to succumb to merely temporal pressures or to see life only in nihilistic terms. Bellow believes that this optimism can emerge in anyone's life if only one allows it to, and that this, rather than the struggle for rationality, will bring peace. The short stories and plays are also considered in this context. The conclusion of the argument is followed by an appendix which discusses Bellow's latest novel, Humboldt's Gift.

This thesis considers the relationship between literary modernism and visual culture in the work of Caribbean modernist Jean Rhys. Through analysis of a range of visual modes—theatre, fashion, visual art, cinema and exhibition culture—it examines the racialised sexual politics of Rhys’s modernist aesthetics, as represented in her texts of the 1920s—30s. I read Rhys’s four interwar novels—Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939)—in the context of contemporary visual practices and the politics of empire. Rhys’s descriptions of artistic practices, acts of viewing and interpreting art, and the identification of her protagonists as both objects and consumers of art are a crucial aspect of her anti-colonial feminism. The politics of vision and of empire are always intertwined for Rhys. Chapter One studies theatrical spectacle and everyday performances of the self. Chapter Two moves to the fashioning of female identities and sartorial constructions of Englishness. Chapter Three turns to Rhys’s use of ekphrasis to question representational structures as they exist in the modernist, primitivist art context. Chapter Four reads Rhys and cinema, focusing on divided or fractured subjectivities as relayed through allusions to distorted mirrors. This conveys Rhys’s powerful evocation of themes of alienation and dislocation. I conclude by analysing what ‘exhibition’ means for those occupying both subject and object visual positions within the imperial metropolis. Analysis is supported by readings of unpublished short stories, letters and poems, works that are relatively absent from current Rhys scholarship. The conjunction of revolutions in the visual arts and the destabilization of the empire in the modernist period provides clear space for investigation into the creation of new ways of seeing that provided a degree of visual agency for those deemed incapable of aesthetic production. Crucial to this is Rhys’s own Creolité. Situated within and outside of European visual subjectivity, Rhys’s work becomes vital to any study of social acts of seeing, in terms of individual subjectivity and within the wider systems of vision produced through the arts.

This thesis is presented in two sections; the first (primary) section is the short story collection, Unspeakable Acts, and the second, ‘Means of Discomfort: Narrative and its Dysfunctions in the Short Fiction of David Means,’ consists of an essay identifying and addressing the role of narrative dysfunctionalities in the work of David Means. The stories in Unspeakable Acts share certain thematic preoccupations. In the first instance, while broadly realist in instinct, most of the stories examine, in one way or another, the way in which life – lived as much in the imagination as on the streets – has at times a shimmering quality that nudges it towards the mythic. The second preoccupation is with the act of storytelling itself, the way in which characters and narrators attempt – and often fail – to narrate their presence in the world in a way that allows them to make sense of their existence. ‘Means of Discomfort: Narrative and its Dysfunctions in the Short Fiction of David Means,’ represents the first critical work on the American short story writer, David Means. Close readings of his stories are made with the intention of identifying forms of narrative dysfunctionality that exist within them. The term ‘dysfunctional narrative’ is drawn from the poet C. K. Williams, who uses it to define an inability to tell satisfactory stories about the self. In the thesis, the term is used as a guide to thinking about the ways in which Means’s stories work to impede a reader’s sense-making instincts and so lead to a form of readerly discomfort. The effect of these dysfunctionalities – which occur at the levels of content and form, story and discourse – is to project the stories beyond their textual confines into a postnarrational void, an afterlife, which implicates the reader in the act of making meaning.

When the term “voice” is used in the discussion of contemporary fiction – as it frequently is – its meaning is taken to be understood intuitively, and more often than not no further elaboration is either required or offered. In these essays – augmented by my novel, Ballistics, which has more than once been described as having a “very distinct voice” – I examine what, exactly, we mean (or think we mean) by the term “voice” when we use it in our discourse about fiction: it turns out that what we know intuitively does not so elegantly hold up under scrutiny. I examine the standardized methods for both talking about “voice” and improving it in one’s own fiction, as put forward by luminary novelists and teachers like John Gardner and Jack Hodgins, and I suggest that part of the reason why discussion of “voice” is limited to what we feel, intuitively, is because voice is not embedded in the text, but, instead, constitutes the experience – the what it’s like – of engaging with a work of literature.

This thesis investigates some possible difficulties that historical novelists may face when writing about near-mythic personas such as the royals, or in this specific case, the American 'royal' Jackie Kennedy. While not offering prescriptive advice, nor purporting to offer solutions to problems that writers may encounter, this paper examines a set of project-specific discoveries that I have made in regards to my novel, 'The pink suit'. It is my intent to offer this very particular circumstance as a case history, using my own personal experiences with the publishing process and the specifics of my creative practice, which is influenced by others who write about iconic figures including Colm Toibin, Colum McCann and Hilary Mantel. I have also included in this work a critical analysis of a selection of contemporary novels. The rationale for choosing these, partly, arises from the dual circumstances of their being identified as 'literary' and their featuring of Mrs. Kennedy as a character.

The critically acclaimed African American novelist Toni Morrison depicts female communities and bonds in almost all of her works. This thesis will explore how this marks a deep interest in female homosociality, its dynamics within familial and non-familial relationships, its politics in the face of patriarchy, and its shaping by different contexts. The seven novels studied in this thesis, selected for their diverse engagement with homosociality and as representative of different stages of Morrison’s writing career, are: Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1997), Love (2003), and A Mercy (2008). Examining Morrison’s portrayal of women’s interactions through a broad feminist lens, and looking at the part such portrayals play in her wider narrative schemes, this thesis will map a rich and complicated set of interrelations and connections that extends our understanding of her work. Morrison neither idealizes nor dismisses female homosociality; she reveals problematic ties and patterns but also suggests female togetherness can be a means for women to gain an independent identity, achieve self-recognition and solidarity, and sometimes even enjoy better and more equal relationships with men.