This thesis analyzes Kingsolver's consistent critique of mainstream United States culture by focusing on her use of characters of various races and other cultures within her seven novels. Each chapter examines the manner in which her texts critique an aspect of United States culture: individualism in The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams, and Pigs in Heaven; imperialism in the United States and abroad in The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna; and anthropocentrism in Prodigal Summer and Flight Behavior. By consistently foregrounding protagonists who learn to listen to others and consequently craft creative solutions to cultural, political, and scientific problems, Kingsolver's novels present themselves as transnational American literature. This thesis considers transnationalism as a critical paradigm—a recurring pattern of creative thinking linked to internationalism but not contingent on it. Reading Kingsolver's novels as transnational literature not only acknowledges the various critical perspectives within Kingsolver scholarship, suggesting a way to move past the representational hurdles critics decry, but also, more importantly, provides a unified reading of her oeuvre to date.

This thesis explores forms of fragmentation that characterize black male subjectivity in Richard Wright’s fiction and considers their relationship to the demise of the social anchors and referents which are supposed to allow black men to develop as coherent and whole. It argues that the physical and psychic disfigurement and political and social marginality to which these men are consigned are a direct result of a humanist worldview imposed on them by the two main entities that define them as marginal, namely, white society and black community. To address this relationship, the thesis deploys a poststructuralist approach to question the two societies’ humanist grounding of subjectivity in terms of its conformity to the social whole and its attendant stress on homogeneity and sameness. Wary of this humanist and Enlightenment positioning of the subject as a conscious and thinking individual who is at home with the social totality, the thesis illustrates that the experience of splitting and disjuncture undergone by black men is a corollary of societal modes of subjection that disavow difference and heterogeneity. Probing black male identity from this perspective reveals as much about its decentered nature as it does about the two societies’ humanist view of identity as a closure determined by the ostensibly stable categories of race and community. The formation of black male identity as fractured thus helps map out the instability and anxiety at the heart of collective identities, showing that both white and black societies deny black manhood in the name of preserving their own racial fixity and cultural purity. It exposes the mythical and ideological character of the two societies’ humanist pretentions of safeguarding the values of freedom, equality and the right to agency and shows how such high moral values are politically mobilized in order to maintain racially-sanctioned forms of identity and banish black men as different and inferior.

This essay presents an analysis of the religious and philosophical ideas present in the early fiction of the contemporary American writer, Cormac McCarthy. It is intended as an intervention into the controversial debate within McCarthy scholarship concerning how the perceptibly ‘religious’ nature of the author’s fictions may be described according to recognised and coherent confessions or perspectives. I argue that McCarthy’s fictions cannot be shown to conform to any particular theological or metaphysical system without significant remainder on account of their being essentially heterogeneous in their construction; and that their religious ‘significance’ lies not in their communication of a positive message, but in the presentation of what is at stake in the contrary interpretations that they uphold. I argue that the essential heterogeneity of McCarthy’s fiction is a development of the author’s reception of the complex aesthetic of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and the posture of serious and searching scepticism which that touchstone of American literature presents. The peculiar aesthetic of Moby-Dick alloys the Hellenic and Hebraic imagination, creating a synthesis of the concrete images of mythical and biblical literature, and of the narrative patterns that are native to tragedy and to romance. The effect of this complex is a literary mode that performs a suspension or opposition between a shapeless, circular, mythical world, and the created and teleological worldview declared by the biblical religions. I demonstrate how McCarthy takes up and imaginatively revises this complex of ideas in three novels (Outer Dark, Child of God, and Blood Meridian) in terms of their relation to the motifs and tropes of tragedy and romance, with a particular concern for their relation to the literature of katabasis, or spiritual and metaphysical ‘descent’. The three novels I have selected demonstrate a consistent and developing approach to McCarthy’s examination of various accounts of the material and physical nature of the world. My analysis sets out how the author’s aesthetic and narrative strategy describes an opposition between a view that is attributable to a broadly defined atheistic naturalism on the one hand, and notions of a teleologically orientated creation that is concordant with the transcendent God of the biblical religions on the other. In providing this description, I interpret how McCarthy uses this Melvillean pattern to test the viability of such oppositions, and in doing so, argue that the author’s distinctive vision should be understood as an apophatic mode that is appropriate to a faith ‘beyond the forms of faith’.

This thesis considers how Auster, Roth and DeLillo write in order to see themselves in the world. If Kafka's burrowing into himself and Nabokov's inscription of a chalk-white “I” on the inner blackboard of his shut eyelids exemplified Modernist strategies for projecting the isolated self into the world, my subject authors have confronted a theoretical situation in which the world as a permanent and common object doesn't exist. Negotiating an increasingly unreal American popular culture that stands in for this object and that has disassembled the monadic self, they reimagine the sight of darkness and premonitions of death inherited from their precursors' self-seeing as a means of reifying our world. The thesis proceeds in three author-specific chapters. The first traces Auster's chimeric appearances in the glass of fictive representation using popular cultural symbols. These symbols repeatedly erase the self, figuring its disappearance into the continuing present and giving the lie to a permanent visible world in which the self can be located. The second chapter explores Roth's writing characters as “darkening[s]” of the fictive glass. His fiction interrogates the obscure “inside of me” to locate an unseen point where the self is remade through transformative connections with the world. This connection, which he names “reality”, remains invisible, communicated in distorted images of grief and mourning that also reflect the unreal character of popular culture. In the final chapter, a new connection between the self and the world becomes visible in DeLillo's work. He reifies our dissembling culture by rendering it as a smeary, visible reflection of the unfixed, continuing present into which Auster's selves disappear. The sight of this unfixed, different world is co-eval with a new form of self-seeing in which the world is not permanent nor transparent but formed in characters' relationships to it, reciprocating today's wavering possibility of there being the world at all. In tracing the pursuit of self-seeing in the world in these three exemplary writers, the thesis develops a new relationship between the aesthetics of character and the world-rendering potential of novel-writing. In a period of theoretical transition after postmodernism, such new paradigms are vital for grasping how we envision selves now as reciprocations of the world's precarity, responding to the pressure of the real.

This thesis proceeds in two modes, utilizing both a critical and a creative lens to think about the use of simple language in formal writing. It examines the production of a register that categorizes insider/outsider status (the mechanics) as well as interrogating the (un)conscious attempts of authors seeking to prise into or remain removed from established cultural identity (the intention). It investigates the use of the vernacular and the informal in American writing in general and how it is ultimately reflected and reworked through an autobiographical channel: an examination of voice, register, and code-switching in my own writing. The first section, ‘Listening to Writing,' is a forensic analysis of Vonnegut and Saunders, two exemplars of literary informality in American writing. It seeks—employing the work of Sarangi, Milroy, Hunston & Thompson and others to pinpoint, at a microanalytical level, what makes the conversational conversational, and the sociolinguistic work of Austin (performativity), Giles, Coupland, and Gumperz (accommodation and identity), and Auer (code switching)—to investigate the authors' specific manipulation of pitch and register to create effect. It also appraises the historical and cultural imperative of the American abhorrence of intellectualism and hence the disdain for high-flown language and how that is reflected in not only the literature but also the very social self-positioning of the authors. The second section, ‘My Ice Age,' is an autobiographical foray into outsider/insider, normal/abnormal categories and boundaries, extending the investigation of voice and register as examined above to explore the complex nature of belonging and alienation, of community and identity, from being a white boy in an Inuit settlement to being from an Inuit settlement in Los Angeles to the complexities of belonging and alienation that arise from being gay. The juxtaposition of two different tones in ‘My Ice Age' is used to reflect the juxtapositions of geographic and temporal otherness, the distance (formality) and increased vernacular in the Los Angeles sections reflecting a need to fit in, to forge a place for myself both geographically and socially through the use of voice and register. Both the critical and the creative lenses elucidate use of simple language and variations of registers to create sociological bonds/alienation. Simple language—and humour—forges communion with reader. The adoption of the vernacular, therefore, has a purpose beyond mere stylistics, in that it also is used in a social and community building (or razing) way. In other words, the use of informality becomes a performative speech act.

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Willa Cather (1873-1947) has been seen by many critics as a regional novelist of marginal importance. Attention has largely been confined to her portrayal of the American Midwest during the pioneer age and it has been assumed that she was primarily an elegist for the passing of the frontier. This study attempts to view her work in the larger context of European culture and to demonstrate that she is not, as has so often been suggested, an old-fashioned local colourist but a major writer of international significance. The thesis makes extensive reference to Cather's unpublished letters which are housed in over sixty separate collections. Due to the stipulations in Cather's will, several libraries do not permit her letters to be reproduced in any form but I was able to read them in person. This unpublished material confirms that Cather's main themes are the interaction of the Old World with the New and the power of art to sanction life. The thesis begins with a short biography, showing particularly the influence of Cather's immigrant neighbours on her early life, and an account of how her preoccupation with the European heritage informed her perspective of America. It also outlines briefly the contrast between Cather and most of her contemporaries and the special difficulties faced by American women writers. This study analyses Cather's novels, in loose chronological order, in the light of her absorbtion in Wagnerian music drama, Virgilian epic and nineteenthcentury French and Russian literature, in order to reveal how her particular cultural awareness influenced her experiments with narrative form and the development of her distinctive style. I hope to show how, through this means, Cather's work acts not only as a corrective to the aggressively masculine tendencies in the literature of the American West, but how she endowed local concerns with universal significance and appeal.

This thesis examines how southern novelists at mid-century used the fictional small town to critique racial segregation. Depictions of segregated towns across a selection of representative fictions share a typology of people and institutions – what I term offices – that combine to make these towns seem integral and functioning. In the segregated southern town, the community is contaminated by segregation and the paradoxes it engenders are revealed through the typology I uncover and explore in this thesis. The racial landscape of Maxwell, Georgia in Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit (1944) exposes how points of intersection in the town’s supposedly rigid racial geography highlight the weakness of segregated structural integrity. In The Hawk and the Sun (1955) Byron Herbert Reece examines the relationships of a farmer and a teacher with other offices, representatives of the bank and the church, in the Appalachian town of Tilden, Georgia. Carson McCullers set each of her novels in the town of Milan, Georgia but this consistency only becomes clear in Clock Without Hands (1961), in which she focuses on the roles a judge and a pharmacist play in defining the town’s collective identity. The courthouse square in William Faulkner’s Jefferson, Mississippi represents the identity of the town and, in The Reivers (1962), a narrator attempts to rewrite the history of the town by insinuating himself into Faulkner’s existing typology. In A Different Drummer (1962) William Melvin Kelley positions his imagined town of Sutton, in an unnamed southern state, at a moment of historic change and explores this change from the vantage point of the archetypal porch of a general store. This thesis contributes to a developing literary history of racial segregation by conducting detailed close textual analysis to argue that the ostensibly benign setting of the small town exposed the fallacies upon which the segregated South operated.

This thesis examines three novels written by the Jewish-American author Philip Roth, collectively known as the Kepesh novels: The Breast (1972), The Professor of Desire (1977) and The Dying Animal (2001). Based on a desire to re-evaluate the critical position of these works within Roth’s oeuvre, this thesis offers an analysis of each novel based upon a critical methodology supplied by an examination of the role of fetishism in psychoanalytic theory. Fetishism, an ambiguous theory within psychoanalysis, has been adapted and deployed by a range of post-Freudian theorists for a number of purposes. Utilising fetishism as both a theme found in these novels and a methodology for their interpretation, this thesis attempts to form a new means of analysing these novels that pays heed to the different ways that they combine themes within the trilogy. With this diversity in mind, this thesis explores the reception of the Kepesh novels in periodicals and academic research, as well as using a range of theoretical strategies and comparative readings with other literary works. This supports and influences close readings of each text in turn. This thesis argues that these novels are dependent upon Roth’s subversive attitude towards the protagonists that narrate them. This is enabled by the variety of themes used by Roth in each text, but is most telling in his approach to describing debate and communication within each novel. This thesis incorporates and advocates for the playfulness that these novels demonstrate; they can thus be re-examined as works whose perspectives on sexuality are more nuanced than has previously been acknowledged.

This thesis explores the relationship between the representation of contagion and those it affects offered by contemporary American speculative fiction and the ways in which this representative model has and continues to inform our understanding of real and actual pandemics. Over the past decade, the success of texts centred on such figures as the vampire, the werewolf and the zombie has triggered a return of contagion to the forefront of the American popular fictional imagination. Though this renewed fascination coincides with the emergence of new global biological threats, it also draws part of its power from a broader cultural anxiety regarding the structures of subjectivity, the relation between subject and State as well as the subject’s role within the collective deployed by our contemporary discourse of health. While critical studies on contagion have been predominantly concerned with real diseases and their narrativisation, this thesis focuses on five fictional representations—Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and its adaptations, the American series Being Human, Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark and Charles Burns’s Black Hole—in order to explore the ways in which these texts engage with the modern medical discourse and the wider conceptualisation of subjectivity promoted by Western philosophy. By emptying the referential dimension of the diseases they mobilise, these texts provide a unique opportunity to analyse the underlying mechanisms of contagion as a cultural construction and to expose the set of assumptions (moral, political, social, etc.) upon which its production itself relies. Exposing the ways in which our cultural perception of contagion has been shaped by the limitations inherent to the traditional epistemic model dominating Western society, this thesis not only reveal the violence inherent in the structures of subjectivity surrounding the individual, it also highlights, by deconstructing the dominant model, new possible lines of flight for the contagious subject outside the normative structures of our current public health, medical, social and political discourses.