Thomas Mann’s illness symbolism is one of the most important fictional explorations of medical narrative in twentieth-century literature. Drawing on scholarship in the medical humanities, this study interprets Mann’s illness narratives in the light of what I shall term various mythologies of illness in his work. Next to establishing a new reading of Mann’s literary appropriation of medicine, I examine a major postmodern reading of these mythologies by the American author Philip Roth and his relationship to German thought on illness. The central focus of this thesis is on the dialogue between illness as a figure in fiction and the medical narrative tradition such as the clinical and curious discourse within case history writing neglected by scholarly research on Thomas Mann and Philip Roth so far. I start by providing a contextual consideration of the development of the medical case history as narrative, which through common roots with the novel lends itself as medical countertext to Thomas Mann’s fiction. I demonstrate how Mann imagines the defective body as the concrete site of the struggle for art and eventually vindicates the sentimentalisch consciousness. Because bodily defects are the marks of artistic sensitivity in Mann’s oeuvre, mythologies of illness are among the most important structuring principles of his work. Despite his canonical status, Mann has not been thought of as exerting a very direct influence on writers in the English-speaking world. I will demonstrate that the postmodern variations of the illness theme by Philip Roth are grounded in Mann’s fictional explorations of the body in decline. There are two things at stake here. I offer a new perspective on Thomas Mann drawing on medical narrative traditions in his mythologies of illness. By linking the postmodern author Philip Roth to Thomas Mann this thesis sheds light on the tradition of writing the defective body and the sick self from Fin de Siècle German to contemporary American literature.

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Ursula Le Guin's 2008 novel Lavinia presents a unique case study with which to examine the ways in which feminist readership and the classical canon can be theorised, and this thesis will be the first full-length examination to concentrate on her text. To do this, I will be establishing the character of Lavinia in Lavinia as an ideal feminist reader of Virgil' s Aeneid, and exploring how her interactions with specific sites or moments of inteltext, including her conversations with the ghost of the dying Virgil, show Lavinia (and Le Guin) to be a privileged and insightful reader of Virgil's canonical text. By looking at specifically Le Guinian metaphors for feminist writing and reading, alongside their interplay with second wave feminist metaphors for the same, I will begin to construct a theory of feminist readership in Lavinia that is co-poietic and creative, informed by an engagement with Bracha Ettinger's theory of the matrixial borderspace. This theory will then be utilised in a study of Lavinia's most ovelt sites of feminist engagement with Virgil's Aeneid. Featured in this research will also be a communication with Rachel Blau DuPlessis' work in For the Etruscans as a notable founding work of feminist reader response theory that utilises a silenced and marginalised female character from the Aeneid. An examination of Lavinia 's paratexts will also help to explore the ways in which the external reader of Lavinia is encouraged to engage co-poietically with this work of feminist classical reception. By looking at the elements of Lavinia 's paratexts that communicate with particular competencies of female and feminist reader, we will see how the reader, even with little or no previous experience of the Aeneid, is able to immediately immerse herself in the world of Virgil's Latium through the medium of Le Guin's Lavinia. This focus on Lavinia 's paratexts as effective sites of feminist reader response is a new approach that seeks to expand the field, and to instigate fulther exploration of paratext in feminist classical reception.

This thesis will examine images and ideas of decay and ruin in the writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne within a transatlantic context. In doing so, it will address the ways in which the time Hawthorne spent in Europe in the 1850s altered how decay and ruin figure within his writing. In nineteenth century American culture and politics, the idea of ruin is significant for the way in which it relates to particular myths of American nationhood. In my first three chapters, looking at "The Custom-House," The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851), I will demonstrate how Hawthorne's American romances challenge myths of American exceptionalism in which a decaying Old World stands in contrast to an innocent and ruin-free New World. I will argue that ruin is an essential quality of Hawthorne's specific brand of romance and that decay and ruin within these texts, far from situating America in opposition to Europe, in fact suggests a complex system of transatlantic influence and awareness. The fourth and fifth chapter of this thesis will examine Hawthorne's European writing - first The English Notebooks (1870), followed by a final chapter on both The French and Italian Notebooks (1883) and The Marble Faun (1860). I will argue that Hawthorne's personal encounters with and responses to the ancient material decay of Europe altered the way in which he viewed and wrote about ruin. I will then build upon my analysis of his responses to European ruins described in his notebooks as I examine his final romance The Marble Faun. I will argue in this chapter that while the relationship between ruin and romance remains fundamental to The Marble Faun, Hawthorne's encounters with European decay, along with the impending American Civil War, profoundly altered his attitude towards American ruin.

This thesis examines the relationship between literature and science in contemporary culture. Section one explores the histories of literature, science and literary theory, from the Enlightenment to the present day, charting the ways in which parallel developments take place in each field. This version of history is justified by an analysis of the canon of texts and ideas to which 'postmodern' discourses make reference in explaining their current status. This history also involves the replacement of a traditional model of the culture, in which literature and science stand in direct opposition to one another as 'two cultures,' by a new understanding. This new model sees the culture as an amalgam of various discourses, and makes possible an analysis of the complex interactions between literature and science. Section two is comprised of three case studies, focusing on issues of knowledge, identity and time, which are used to explore this interaction of literature and science in contemporary culture, drawing out the ways in which it upsets binary distinctions that were key to Enlightenment thinking. The first of these is a comparison between notions of order and disorder in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and popular presentations of chaos theory; the second explores the transgression of the human/machine and natural/artificial boundaries in William Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy and Richard Dawkins' books about evolution; and the third explores a tum away from the concept of progress in Kurt Vonnegut's novels and Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life.

This study consists of a systematic study of the romantic themes used by F. Scott Fitzgerald throughout his works. Although reference is occasionally made to other romantic influences, the central emphasis is that of the influence of the major English Romantic poets-Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. This influence ranges from direct quotation to direct and indirect allusion, as well as to implicit and at times unconscious inference. The major themes examined are as follows: The youthful dream of an imaginative paradise The inability of reality to live up to the imaginative conception of it The beautiful lady without mercy The pormanence of art set against the mutability of actual existence The painful consequences of an overextension of the imagination The thirst for sensation rather than thought those themes are examined in relation to the author's major works so as to show the thematic unity and progressive development throughout. The emphasis here is upon the novels, although individual stories are discussed when they shed additional light on the theme or themes being discussed at any given point. Similarly, the autobiographical writings and aspects of the author's life are discussed only when they have a particular significance with relation to the themes being examined. Section by section, the thesis is broken down as follows: I. 'A High Romance': (The historical interpretation of what is meant by 'romantic' in literature, as well as a discussion of Fitzgerald's own attitude to the term in an aesthetic context.) II. Of Clocks and Calendars: (Fitzgerald's romantic sense of time throughout the works.) III. The Romantic Egotist In Search of Paradise: (The inability to actualize the youthful dream of paradise in real life.) IV. The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy: (The belle dame or femme fatale qualities of women in the early novels and stories.) V. 'Beyond the Shadow of a Dream': (A detailed study of the multiplicity of romantic themes in The Great Gatsby, and the interrelation of these with the other works.) VI. The queen Moon" (A study of the psychological and emotional consequences of an overextension of the imagination.).

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This research focuses on the relationship between death and language, as it is presented in the literature of Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville. I argue that Poe and Melville share a conception of the limits of language, and represent encounters with these limits as ones that, in a variety of ways, involve the subject or language itself with death. My conception of what constitutes language is drawn, in a large part, from the theoretical work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. The limits of language are various, but often involve the distortion or corruption of a signifier or the recognition of the arbitrary correspondence between a signified and its signifier. It is in the gap between signifier and signified that death frequently emerges. This work engages with previous critical work on the representation of the shortcomings of signifying systems in Poe and Melville, by foregrounding how encounters with language can consistently be read as encounters with death and by drawing these two authors together in an extended way. In order to illuminate the similarities between their representations of death and the limits of language, this study is structured in such a way that keeps the presentation of Poe's concerns side-by-side with those same concerns in Melville's work. The structure is broadly tripartite. First, I look at the limits of writing in Poe and Melville; second, I look at the limits of speech; and, finally, how silence impinges on both writing and speech in their work. Preceding these chapters, is an introductory chapter, in which is established the theoretical groundwork for the study, and a chapter outlining the theories of language as presented by Poe and Melville themselves.

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One central question unites the critical and creative halves of this project: how should fiction respond to a sudden crisis? Through this thesis, I was able to explore the potential pitfalls authors need to avoid in tackling historic subject matter. This critical half of this thesis examines the treatment of race in fiction depicting the September 11 attacks. The writers mentioned in this thesis—including Jonathan Safran-Foer, John Updike, Jay McInerney, Don DeLillo—are considered to be left-of-centre thinkers. However, their 9/11-related work aims to restore a classical notion of American hegemony. Chapter I: An American Breed discusses the protagonists of these novels, and how they represent ideas of upper class American whiteness. Chapter II: Fighting the Need to be Normal is about the portrayal of terrorists and terrorist bodies. Chapter III: You Want to Dance, I Want to Watch is about the treatment of African American characters. The final chapter, Chapter IV: White Crayons is about lower class and ethnically marked white characters. The creative half of the thesis is Translatie, a novella. It is written from the perspectives of two different characters, Jacob and Mia. Jacob is a 17-year-old Surinamese rent boy who is being sexually abused by his upstairs neighbour. Mia is a sex-show worker in her early 30s. The novel traces their lives in the week leading up to the 1992 Bijlmer Air Disaster. After the disaster, they go missing, and their friends and relatives are left to track them down.