Margaret Atwood’s Survival: a thematic guide to Canadian literature was originally published by House of Anansi Press in Toronto in 1972. In spite of the mixed reception, Survival became a key text in the study of Canadian Literature. Although it is now taught as a historical curiosity, it is possible to trace the ideas in it, and their reconfigured functions, through contemporary Canadian short fiction. It is my contention that the ideas and themes which Atwood describes have rooted themselves in the Canadian imaginary, and that they have taken on a truth value which was originally disputed. Thus it is relatively easy to trace the continuing life of, for example, ‘Settlers and Explorers’ (Survival, Chapter 5) in contemporary Canadian short fiction. This is a synchronic study, not merely tracing the appearances of Atwood’s themes, but looking at how they are refigured in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, using stories published since 1972 to illustrate the argument. The potential impact of the research will be the re-evaluation of Atwood’s forty-year old text, which with Frye’s The Bush Garden were the ‘parents of CanLit’ (Fee, 2013, pers.comm.), and the exposure of the continuing arguments in literature in Canada about national identity, in the light of an increasingly multicultural population, and the growing neo-colonial awareness of the ‘behemoth to the South’ (Chilton, 2003). It will also bring a neglected body of work to international attention, and most particularly to the UK. Although Atwood, Alice Munro, and to a lesser extent, Alistair MacLeod are known both inside Canada and abroad, Mark Anthony Jarman, Thomas Wharton, Hiromi Goto, Lisa Moore, Joseph Boyden, Lynn Coady, Patricia Young, Lauren B. Davis, Diane Schoemperlen, Matt Cohen, D. W. Wilson and Leon Rooke are known only to dedicated readers of the short form, and these are the writers I have chosen to focus on here.

This thesis explores the politics of the everyday in Don DeLillo’s novels from 1982 to present. It contends that DeLillo’s canonization as an exemplar of postmodern depthlessness and ahistoricity has occluded his interest in mapping the connections between the particularity of daily life and the capitalist world- system. I position the theoretical framework of the everyday as a corrective to these readings, and seek to recover and foreground its Marxist orientation, whilst envisioning the everyday as a way of negotiating between deterministic applications of Marxist theory and the uncritical celebration of individualized resistance endorsed by the cultural turn. Drawing on the French sociologists Michel De Certeau and Henri Lefebvre’s theories of the everyday, the thesis extends De Certeau’s conception of the everyday as resisting the ‘grid of discipline’ and Lefebvre’s characterization of it as eluding the ‘grip of forms’ to attend to the intersection of politics and form. I conceptualise the everyday as operating at the nexus of plot and detail, digression and generic suspense, world-systemic totality and quotidian singularity. To examine the everyday is to turn to the overlooked and undervalued; DeLillo’s surpluses of quotidian detail pose a challenge to the value-logic of capital, its uneven manifestations, its invisiblized surplus populations and labour, as well as literary-critical systems of value. This thesis advances this theory of the everyday through explorations of DeLillo’s representations of waste, crowds, and terrorism, and traces lines of continuity rather than rupture between DeLillo’s work and supposedly ‘post-postmodern’ texts by David Foster Wallace and Jennifer Egan. My coda examines DeLillo’s move from digression to contraction in his ‘late style,’ arguing that this stylistic shift registers financialized exhaustion. Ultimately, this thesis pursues the claim that DeLillo’s everyday opens up utopian possibilities by challenging the value relations underlying everyday life, thereby allowing us to imagine its transformation.

Brotherhood: A Novel – Doug and Jerry are fraternal twins, orphaned as infants and raised by their grandparents. Dying of cancer, Jerry moves back home to live with Doug after a nearly fifteen year estrangement. Set against the backdrop of the 2001 NHL playoffs, Jerry searches through his memories in the hope of understanding the complex relationship he has with his brother, and to figure out the roles they are meant to play in each other's lives. Shepherds on Skates: Canadian Hockey Fiction as a Version of Pastoral – the last quarter century in Canadian fiction has seen an increasing number of ‘hockey novels' – serious literary works in which hockey plays a significant thematic or dramatic role. This portion of the thesis examines these narratives in order to ground them in the tradition of pastoral poetry. Using as context the pastoral journey of retreat and return, as well as the pastoral elegy, Canadian hockey fiction is seen to function in similar ways to traditional pastoralists, and, more importantly, for similar reasons.

This thesis investigates the ongoing significance of the state of California in the novels of Thomas Pynchon. It does so by focusing on the (counter) cultural, spiritual and geopolitical histories that are present in and/or intertwined with Pynchon’s work. Building on recent scholarship that has reinforced the notion of a California trilogy, this project seeks to open up new ways of engaging with both the fictional and historical resonances of Pynchon’s Californian spaces. Using a kind of narrative/investigative methodology that places a special emphasis on Pynchon’s well-established dedication to marginalized or ‘preterite’ communities, one of the key strands in this thesis is the role of American Indian history and culture in a lived Californian context. The project traces unexplored aspects of Pynchon’s engagement with American Indian experience and it does so with a view to reimagining the scope of his Californian landscapes. This immersive approach to the lost stories of land and spirit that lie within and beyond Pynchon’s fiction also functions more expansively in questioning some of the standardised categories of the postwar U.S. novel (such as experimental postmodernism vis-vis ‘rooted’ forms of ethnic testimony and protest). The project is divided into three large chapters, sequentially moving through each of the novels of the California trilogy — The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Vineland (1990), and Inherent Vice (2009) — while at the same time establishing cross-textual connections that complicate and enrich a linear chronological approach. The first chapter establishes a crucial base for the reinterpretation of these novels by placing The Crying of Lot 49 in the context of Cold War anxiety and the subsequent flourishing of interest in alternative spiritualities, ultimately offering a new way of navigating the novel’s spaces and the quest of its central protagonist. Chapter two takes on the distinct ecology of Northern California by zeroing in on Pynchon’s depiction of the redwood forests in Vineland, showing how the stories contained within the trees point towards a fresh understanding of the broad and varied Californian histories that flow through each of the novels. The third chapter on Inherent Vice concentrates on marginalised and displaced communities in the context of histories of land (re)development. The attention to specificity and detail that this approach affords reflects the complex, layered landscape that Pynchon presents. Furthermore, this method clarifies the place of California in Pynchon’s work, and suggests California as a representative space for Pynchon’s national and global concerns.

This thesis examines the foregrounding of a particular type of liminal human protagonist in contemporary American television Science Fiction. These protagonists, which I have termed the ‘unliving,’ exist in-between the realms of life and death, simultaneously both alive and dead whilst occupying an indistinct middleground. I examine how the liminal nature of these protagonists has been used as a means of exploring various aspects of personal identity during the early years of the twenty-first century. Developing anthropologist Victor Witter Turner’s work, in which he argued for the universal occurrence of liminality in cultural, political, economic and social contexts, I argue that the use of liminal protagonists in American television Science Fiction constitutes a demonstrable trend. Although they are to be found in ever-increasing numbers in (and outside) the genre, their growing presence and significance have yet to be properly discerned, studied and appreciated. I analyse the use of these unliving protagonists in four key texts: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (The Halcyon Company/Warner Bros. Television, 2008-2009), Battlestar Galactica (Universal/Sci-Fi TV, 2004-2009), Caprica (Universal/Sci-Fi TV, 2010-2011) and Dollhouse (Boston Diva Productions/20th Century Fox, 2009-2010). Textual analyses of serial television are often dismissed as outmoded and irrelevant to the study of television. Part of the aim of this thesis is to repudiate this widespread assumption. Therefore, my methodology involves the use of close narrative analysis to interrogate my chosen texts, situating my findings within broader sociocultural contexts. Utilising this methodological approach reveals how these texts engage with contemporary concerns and anxieties regarding illness, religion, trauma, and gender. Ultimately, this thesis presents an intervention within ongoing discourses regarding the relationship between these subjects and personal identity in 21st century America.

Before the 1960s, there was very little literary criticism on the presence of race and culture in Herman Melville’s texts. However, racial events, such as the Civil Rights Movement, have been influential in causing intellectuals, such as Samuel Otter, Eric J. Sundquist, and Carolyn Karcher, to revisit Melville’s texts through the lens of race. This thesis is aligned with such critics, and it takes their ideas a step further - by contending that the racial performance found in Melville’s work develops increasingly during the 1850s, becoming more complex by Melville’s last published work prior to the Civil War. Moreover, I argue that these textual representations of racial performance are often ambiguous echoing the national and ethical dilemmas of the decade prior to the Civil War. Chapter One establishes the beginning of my argument by contending that whiteness is implicitly performed in the staged theatrical production that Melville includes in White-Jacket. Chapter Two moves my argument forward as I examine the ways that race is performed in Moby-Dick. I suggest that the book is a development from Melville’s White-Jacket because the racial performance that takes place is more explicitly about race and is also extempore. Whereas Chapter One and Two focus on staged and extempore performances of race, Chapter Three moves my analysis of racial performance to social enactments of race. Specifically, I analyse the ways that the Senegalese slaves and Spanish crew perform race on board the San Dominick. I contend that Benito Cereno develops the racial performance found in Melville’s 1850s texts by offering a critique of slavery while the earlier writing did not. The last Chapter of the thesis concentrates on the racial performance in Melville’s last publication of the 1850s, The Confidence-Man. I propose that this text marks the height of racial performance found in Melville’s work as a result of the Black guinea’s ambiguity. Collectively, the chapters in this dissertation will provide a new reading of Melville through the lens of racial performance, by demonstrating how that racial performance develops in Melville’s work throughout the 1850s.

This thesis examines representations of Obeah, the name given to a range of African-inspired, syncretic Caribbean religious practices, in novels and short stories written by authors born in the former British West Indies. Ranging from the late 1920s to the late1980s, these texts’ plots all systematically engage with these practices in their narrations of West Indian nation and national identity. My study focuses on how each of these texts narrates Obeah vis-à-vis the wider concerns of modernity, cultural identity, nationhood and colonial alienation, and realigns the discussion of Obeah aesthetics with debates around what has been designated ‘the folk’ in Caribbean literary criticism. Through detailed, comparative readings of the works of several authors, this study not only recovers the neglected trope of Obeah in West Indian fiction, but also argues Obeah’s integrity to the elaboration of a uniquely regional literary and cultural aesthetic. Chapter One examines the use of Obeah in barrack-yard fiction, and its implications for the myth of a unified, homogenous nation. Chapter Two explores the representation of Obeah in short stories of the late 1930s into the 1950s, and their concerns with Obeah’s place in the new nations they imagine. Chapter Three reads Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom (1934) as critiques of the primitive/modern aesthetic and cultural binary; I argue that Obeah is narrated, in these novels, from the threshold of these extremes. Chapter Four examines three novels written around Independence, featuring single male protagonists whose negotiations of Obeah are analogous for national negotiations of selfhood. Chapter Five focuses on Erna Brodber’s Myal (1988), which manipulates ‘African’ spirituality in its ‘quarrel with history.’ These novels all, in addressing Obeah, reimagine these practices as integral to, while also challenging, the idea of West Indian nationhood and identity.

This thesis responds to Ocean Studies’ dissatisfaction with how literary geography is read metaphorically. Positioned in relation to geocritical, geopoetic and ecocritical endeavours, the present study brings this concern back to land, and builds a method of reading literary geographies that treads a patient and geophysically informed path to comprehending their metaphorical value. To achieve this, the thesis proposes reading literary geographies as forms of heterotopia: fictional and inaccessible, yet tethered to real-world geography and its geophysical dynamics. To realise the potential of this proposal, the core of the thesis is a comparative reading of Tim Winton and Cormac McCarthy, two writers praised for their attention to place. Prompted by geophysical, environmental, anthropological, historical and philosophical ways of understanding geography, the thesis traverses the rivers, paths, deserts, and cities that emerge in Winton and McCarthy’s fiction. Reading these spaces geophysically reveals connections between the two writers that have not yet been enabled by transpacific or transnational frames, appreciating the host of materialities beyond the Pacific that connect them and their thinking. Studying the presence of the fluvial cycle, lines, dust, and concrete in these locations prompts a diversity of metaphorical, symbolic, and literal ways of reading that develop ideas of national identity, gender, community, and crisis within their fiction. Comparing both writers geographically enables a communication that expands our understanding of their individual literary works, oeuvres, and networks. It also shows the potential of geophysical reading to develop understanding about the concerns of literary inheritance, influence and epochs, helping to place both writers in a broader literary context: as inheritors of a nineteenth-century tradition, as key figures in late-twentieth and twenty-first century fiction, and as writers contesting ‘modernity.’

This thesis and related work of fiction explores the representation of rape in contemporary British and American writing, with a particular focus on the use of rape myths in narratives about sexual violence. It evaluates how this crime is portrayed in popular literature through the analysis of three works of fiction by two bestselling authors: Joyce Carol Oates and Jodi Picoult. It also examines newspaper reporting through the analysis of three news events – one in the U.K. and two in the U.S. – that received a significant amount of coverage from an assortment of newspapers. Literature and newspaper reporting contribute to public views of rape as well as cultural attitudes towards women. People may reference rape narratives as they form opinions about sexual violence, therefore making it crucial that these acts are portrayed accurately. This thesis will examine the vehicles that frame the discussion of sexual assault. It will focus on the way each author depicts the victim(s) and perpetrator(s) and assess how the type of rape – whether date, gang, or stranger rape – affects its representation. It will also reveal if contemporary British and American writing has tried to disprove misperceptions and accurately depict sexual violence or if it continues to propagate myths.

This thesis comprises a critical component, The Continuous Flight From Wonder: An Ecocritical Analysis of Tensions Between Natural History and Modern Science in Andrea Barrett's Fiction, and a creative component, How Muskrat Made the World and Other Stories. These two pieces are connected by their common theme of characters defining their place in the world through their relationship with nature. More specifically, both seek to explore how knowledge of and interactions with the nonhuman natural world play a role in the characters' view of self. The critical component looks at the way in which the tension between natural history and modern science in Barrett's work affects the characters' troubled relationship with nature as they conceive it. The body of this piece is divided into four chapters, each corresponding to a recurring character archetype: The Naturalist, The Explorer, The Immigrant, and The Female Scientist. By analyzing the ways in which the restriction of these archetypes affect the characters' relationship with the natural world, I will show that Barrett's work provides a wealth of material for ecocritical analysis and should be considered alongside other works of ecocritical fiction. The creative component consists of seven short stories linked by the presence of human/animal interactions in each one and loosely by place. The characters in these eight stories try to make sense of the world through their relationship with animals. Sometimes this knowledge of animals comes through myth, science, and, most frequently, through domestic familiarity. The mirror that animal interactions holds up to the human characters often illuminates flaws and strengths, but inevitably defines what it is that makes them human by highlighting their affinity or aversion to the nonhuman natural world.