This thesis interrogates the part played by the figure of ‘the Indian’ in the formation of the U.S. national consciousness as reflected in the nineteenth-century fictional works of James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Montgomery Bird, Lydia Maria Child, Helen Hunt Jackson and Herman Melville. I propose that new understandings can be reached concerning Indian representations and national identity in the selected texts via an approach that combines postcolonial and psychoanalytic theories, in particular as detailed by Ranjana Khanna in Dark Continents (2003). I explore how the national ideals articulated by Cooper, Bird, Child and Jackson are predicated on repression identifiable in historical revisionism, disavowal, ideological rhetoric, generic conventions and so forth, which reflects a melancholic nationalism more generally concerning the colonial subjugation of Native Americans. I demonstrate that where the national origins mythology of The Last of the Mohicans is ‘haunted’ by inassimilable historical memories associated with frontier conquest and displacement, the Indian-hating premise of Bird’s Nick of the Woods is yet more melancholic in being overwhelmed by the genocide it seeks to justify. In contrast, Ramona and Hobomok effectuate their own forms of epistemic violence in assimilating the Indian into the national body. However these novels also allow for the principle of an autonomous Indian perspective, which jeopardises the idea of state legitimacy that is crucial for their national ideals. In Melville’s The Confidence-Man a historically recuperative national vision is absent and this allows indirect recognition of the Indian ‘phantoms’ of the nation’s past. These works encompass psychological, ideological and cultural patterns of negotiation with a Native American presence that reflect different facets of the nineteenth-century American psyche and its evolution. My readings of these patterns provide a new perspective on how the nineteenth-century American national consciousness is unable to reconcile its history of imperialist, frontier expansion to its ‘ego-ideal’ as a democratic institution distinguished from its European predecessors.

This thesis joins the critical conversation on the wound and the scar in Hemingway’s life and works. Previous analyses have generally reproduced Hemingway’s narrative of nihilism (Hemingway himself used the term ‘nada’ to describe his characters’ feelings of loneliness, angst and despair), reading this ‘nothingness’ as evidence of Hemingway’s understanding of the single, separate self in opposition to a harsh world. The brutality that permeates his work, along with his emphasis on the sensate, wounded body, is read as reinforcing this narrative of the discrete self, set in defiant opposition to the other, to the world, and to death. My thesis offers a new approach, arguing that this nihilism is a space that opens up, through the metaphor of the wound, the selfs keen awareness of the multiple other as the cause of such wounding, and from which a new dimension of the self emerges. It establishes a fresh perspective on Hemingway’s understanding of the self as dynamic and multiple, rather than static and solitary, and advances the notion of the other beyond gender and sexuality. It shows how the wound exists not simply at the level of content, but that Hemingway’s style—with its disruption of syntax and binary signification, its galvanizing of banal words, its silences and ellipses—is the saving wound of his artistic process. The inextricable link between the wound, the scar and the other is demonstrated through analyses of selected Hemingway short stories and novels - In Our Time, ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ Across the River and into the Trees and The Old Man and the Sea. Helene Cixous’ philosophy of the self and the other, unpublished archival material, and the implementation of a thematic structure focussed on ‘initiation,’ ‘medicalisation,’ and ‘de-personalisation’ together provide an original contribution to Hemingway studies.

James Ellroy is an eccentric and divisive popular novelist. Since the publication of his first novel Brown’s Requiem in 1981, Ellroy’s outré ‘Demon Dog’ persona and his highly stylised, often pornographically voyeuristic and violent crime novels have continued to polarise both public and academic opinion. This study considers Ellroy’s status as an historical novelist, critically evaluating the significance and function of voyeurism in his two collections of epic noir fiction The L.A. Quartet and The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy. Using a combination of psychoanalysis, postmodern and cultural theory, it argues that Ellroy’s fiction traces the development of the voyeur from a deviant and perverse ‘peeping tom’ into a recognisable, contemporary ‘social type’, a paranoid and obsessive viewer who is a product of the decentred and hallucinatory, ‘cinematic’ world that he inhabits. In particular, it identifies a recurring pattern of ‘ocularcentric crisis’ in Ellroy’s texts, as characters become continually unable to understand or interpret through vision. Alongside a thematic analysis of obsessive watching, this project also suggests that Ellroy’s works - particularly his later novels - are themselves voyeuristic, implicating the reader in these broader narrative patterns of both visual and epistemophilic obsession. While principally a study on Ellroy’s work, this thesis also attempts to situate his texts within the broader contexts of both the contemporary historical novel and our pervasive ‘culture of voyeurism’. This thesis will therefore be of interest not only to Ellroy critics and readers, but also to scholars of both contemporary fiction and contemporary cultural studies.

With the disappearance of terra incognita from nineteenth century maps, new lands of imagination emerged in literature, supplanting the blank spaces on the globe with blank spaces inside the globe, the terra cava. Beginning with Symmes’s Theory of Concentric Spheres from 1818, dozens of American authors wrote fictions set in a hollow or semi-hollow earth. This setting provided a space for authors to experiment with contemporary issues of imperialism, science, faith, and socio-political reforms. The purpose of this thesis is one of literary archaeology, examining the American hollow earth narrative, which peaked in publication numbers between 1880 and 1920, most of which was forgotten as exploration of the Poles disproved Symmes’s theory of Polar openings into a hollow, habitable world. Though there have been some general studies of hollow earth and subterranean literature, there has never been a focused study of nineteenth century American hollow earth literature and its relationship to contemporary culture. The first chapter explores the history of John Cleves Symmes, Jr and his theory in the early nineteenth century, and the influence is had on American politics, literature, and scientific thought. In the subsequent three chapters, the terra cava narratives published between 1880 and 1920 are explored in three categories: the imperial, the spiritual, and the utopian. All of these elements reflect distinct American concerns during the fin de siècle about the country’s expansion, the closing of the frontier, variations in Christian theology, the development of Spiritualism, the women’s rights movement, and socio-economic reforms meant to improve American life. The primary texts are supported by contemporary reviews and analyses where any exist. As part of the conclusion, an extensive examination of the post-1920 terra cava narrative and the legacy of Symmes is provided, establishing the modern context for examining these historical literary works.

Between 1950 and 1960, Alfred Bester produced numerous works which utilised his contemporary Cold War atmosphere in order to examine and extrapolate the current cultural state. The purpose of this thesis is to offer a reading of Bester’s works which focuses exclusively on the portrayal of psychology and the exploration of identity crises in relation to the split self. Designed to demonstrate Bester’s unique approach to the self as inherently split between the social and the personal, this thesis understands the Cold War as a collective neurosis, and uses this model as a framework for its examination of psychology. As such, this thesis aims to demonstrate that Bester’s use of psychology expresses the universal nature of compulsions and literature’s importance in depicting genuine human characters. The impact of nuclear weapons and the Cold War state of anxiety, paranoia, and suspicion on the human psyche is widely recognised and examined through the lens of identity. However, Bester’s particular approach utilises this understanding of identity to depict the reciprocal nature of individual and political psychology. One of the key arguments presented here is that Bester’s portrayal of universal psychology is designed to mirror the Cold War state of tension and anxiety against individual psychological pressures. Conformity or isolation are extrapolated to exacerbate a loss of self that can only be regained through reconciliation between the public and private spheres. Thus, Bester’s approach is designed to argue that such reconciliation is required in order to break down barriers of the ‘other’ and dissuade collective delusions of normality. This thesis argues that Bester’s approach to psychology develops and foreshadows the growing awareness that individuals may not be in control of their own mind, and the importance of human understanding in extrapolating and predicting the future of society. By depicting the Cold War as collective neurosis, Bester’s works mirror social identity crises against individual crises in order to depict the impact of social influence and the place of the individual within society. Tracing the development of this approach, this thesis examines Bester’s works chronologically from 1950 through 1960. With the intention of establishing Bester’s commitment to his approach, this thesis has expanded beyond his fiction to include his non-fiction, such as letters, editorials, interviews, and essays, as well as crossing genre lines between his sf and mainstream writing. Not only is Bester’s understanding of psychology thereby revealed and charted, but an exploration of the ability of various modes of writing to examine psychology is undertaken, as is an overview of the general literary atmosphere in which Bester was working.

This thesis argues that marginalia, understood broadly as those writings to be found on the margins of the literary work or text, can help us to rethink a number of practical and theoretical issues that have been, and remain, central to the discipline of English Studies: from the formalist strictures on intrinsic/extrinsic evidence, to poststructuralist notions of textuality, to the more recent turn to ‘affect’, and the re-emergence of archival forms of research as a possible alternative to ‘Theory’ altogether. By bringing together three forms of literary annotation – reading notes, manuscript marginalia, and fictional footnotes – my thesis argues for the usefulness of a dynamic model of ‘centre’ and ‘margin’ for theorizing interpretation as a problem of ideological investment: in other words, I take any margin (‘material’ or otherwise) to be constituted in opposition to a ‘centre’ that is a matter of socio-historical perspective, rather than simply ‘given’. I begin by contending that the value and meaning of authorly annotations have tended to proceed from Romantic notions of authority: the marginal note assumes a synecdochic relation to the author as a ‘whole’. However, I argue that this framework has historically tended to allow the marginal note to act as a kind of ‘transparent’ supplement to interpretation, while at the same time masking a number of potentially problematic assumptions. For example, whereas the annotations of William Blake and James Joyce have usually stood as evidence of aesthetic mastery, those of Sylvia Plath and Djuna Barnes have only tended to buttress their authors’ cultural positioning as stereotypically ‘dangerous’ or ‘embittered’ female artists. In this sense, while the thesis does not posit any straightforward equivalence between textual and ‘other’ kinds of marginality (e.g. political), nor does it dismiss their connection entirely; indeed, it goes on to argue that such divergent forms of ‘marginality’ have often been brought into conjunction by the appearance of pseudo-scholarly marginalia in the literary text, from Alexander Pope to T. S. Eliot to Susan Daitch. The main ‘case study’ of the thesis builds on these claims to contend that the work of David Foster Wallace, as well as its reception, occupies a central position in a wider cultural reaction to the ‘radical de-centrings’ of Marxist and psychoanalytical post-structuralism. Chapter One argues that Wallace’s extensively annotated personal library – several items from which were controversially redacted by the Ransom Centre in 2011 – can be seen to participate in a critical return to the category of the (white, male, middle-class) ‘genius’ that is nonetheless critiqued in advance by his work; engaging with Fredric Jameson, I thus contend that Wallace’s marginalia perform both the ‘end of the bourgeois ego’ and its rejuvenation. Chapter Two argues that this tension is exacerbated by a reading of Wallace’s ‘unfinished’ posthumous novel, The Pale King, alongside its archival materials. Rather than allowing us to ‘disentangle’ the author’s intentions from his editor’s interference, the movement between oeuvre and archive instead draws the ‘original/mediated’ opposition into the problems of aesthetic ‘plagiarism’ and late capitalist abstraction that run throughout Wallace’s writing. And finally, although Wallace’s oeuvre seems persistently to attempt to supersede such tensions through its extensive use of pseudo-scholarly footnotes, yet Chapter Three argues that these same marginalia tend to reinscribe a set of anxieties around autonomous selfhood, ‘affect’, and cultural value that is inseparable from the modern institutionalization of U.S. literary production and ‘critical theory’.

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The root of Malfunction of the Deity is Dick's own conception of and justification for God or for a 'Creator entity'. The thesis shows that Dick's primarily dualistic cosmological ideas, as expressed in his science-fiction and personal writings, possess as their nucleus the belief that the human world is flawed through the machinations of a malignant being or agency. This agency begins in many of his stories as a loosely ideated construct, but one which in most cases will metastasise and recreate the human world as an illusory manufactory over which evil holds sway, and against which the smaller forces of good are forced to struggle. The thesis presents Dick as a liberal philosopher and theologian whose pseudo-didactic approach draws from a variety of extant historical, sociological and especially theological sources that inform both his science-fictional and his non-fictional work. Analysis of Dick's writing and mystical thought, identifies Dick as an intellectual presence within the genre of science-fiction and the field of American literature, and the thesis also contemporises Dick with other American science fiction authors. Major works---including A Scanner Darkly (1977), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), The Man in the High Castle (1962), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Ubik (1969) and Valis (1981)---are analysed in detail.;The crux of the thesis resides in Chapter Two, a representative study of the period February to March 1974. Dick's own shorthand of '2-3-74' is used to refer to this period, during which he suffered a mental breakdown and/or underwent a series of mystical experiences that he often interpreted as divine revelation. Critics have suggested 2-3-74 shaped and informed the themes in his post-1974 work, but part of the purpose of this thesis is in exposing the fact that those themes are explicit in Dick's earliest fiction, dating back to the 1950s.

The submission, Ross Sinclair: 20 Years of Real Life consists of seven publications discussed in a critical overview, with three supporting Appendices. Together they document and analyse the diverse outputs of my practice-led research project, Real Life, initiated in 1994. The critical overview argues for the innovative nature of the Real Life Project through its engagement with audiences and demonstrates its contribution to the field of contemporary art practice, across the disciplines of sculpture, painting, performance, installation, critical writing and music. Since the inception of my Real Life project I have explored the agency and impact of the artwork and exhibition in relation to audience exploring new methodologies and in June 2016 was awarded the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Published Work at GSA/GU titled, “20 Years of Real Life”. Here I set the project in critical overview around the philosophical paradigms of Barthes, Baudrillard and de Certeau viewed through a contemporary critical framework of Bourriaud, Bishop and Kester. I argue my project represents a unique and idiosyncratic contribution in its own right to these debates when viewed as a single longitudinal project, unique in recent art context. The impact, influence and contribution of this project is viewed in this submission through the prism of the 5 institutional monographic publications on my work as well as 2 contributions to refereed journals and 3 Appendices describing the project output and published writing, two of these appendices alone exceed 400 pages in length. I will continue to explore this project in the wake of the PhD undertaking further research. I have already had informal discussions with several staff with a view to mentoring/assistance/development of PhD's and am giving a Fine Art Research Seminar on the process of the PhD by Published work and I hope this will lead to more confidence and capability in the School of Fine Art.

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has garnered increasing interest and research attention and become particularly significant in many studies of translation. The present study is located within the framework of descriptive and applied Translation Studies. The thesis reports a study investigating the applicability of SFL to translating English prose fiction into Arabic. What makes this study so important is that it addresses several interrelated issues serving two vital purposes in Translation Studies: assessing translations and training translators. The two purposes are kept in balance in a well-constructed, three-phase research model, establishing the joint effect of testing the viability of SFL in English-to-Arabic translation of fiction. In the area of assessment, two SFL-based models are applied and developed. Firstly, Kim's metafunction shift analysis is applied to a 48-clause sample from seven Arabic translations of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. The results of this rigorous metafunctional match analysis show that Process and Circumstance top the 10-catgory list of optional shifts. The seven translations are ordered based on this matching analysis. Using the same sample, another in-depth study is carried out on three translations (those having the highest, the lowest and medial number of metafunction shifts) to examine the validity of a newly created multi-level schema of optional explicitation located beyond the scope of metafunction shift analysis model. The results demonstrate that the order of the three translations is maintained. This schema suffices to adequately describe the lexicogrammatical nature of the explicitatives (at the micro-level) and to show how this can facilitate identifying their effect on the texture of the target text (at the macro-level). Secondly, in implementing House's well-established model for translation quality assessment, three interdependent developmental processes are introduced to facilitate its application, develop its tools and gauge its efficiency. A source text Profile Template, a Match Tracer and a statistical comparative table (which can together be potentially exploited in other genres or adapted for other language pairs) are applied to the same three translations using a longer excerpt. The results show that the order of the three translations remains the same. In summary, the results of the three studies lend further support to the general premise that the SFL framework can be applied reliably in assessing Arabic translations of English fiction. The applicability of SFL is also tested empirically in the area of training. A three-month training experiment involving a sample of two groups (control and experimental) of final-year Arab university students majoring in English (40 participants each) is designed and carried out to compare the progress of performance between the two groups with and without the presence of an SFL-based translator training course. The data are gathered through initial and final exams involving assessing short Arabic translated extracts of English fiction and translating a longer extract into Arabic. The results indicate that the four sub-competences constituting the scoring rubric of the control group show an increase/decrease of 10%, -0.75%, 0.0% and 9.5% respectively, whereas in the experimental group they show a massive increase of 47.5%, 21.25%, 34.5% and 49.5% respectively. Likewise, the total rate of performance of the control group in the final exam increases slightly by 7.1%, while in the experimental group it increases greatly by 43.1%. Further, the overall percentage change between the total rate of performance of the initial and final exams for the control group is +76.3%, while for the experimental group it is + 218.8%. The pool of data is also used to explore the nature of the relationship between the two skills of assessing short Arabic translated extracts of English fiction and translating English fiction. The results demonstrate that the correlation coefficients of the two elements of relationships regarding the relevant sub-competences of the experimental group increase significantly between the initial and final exams (0.721 and 0.636), while they increase insignificantly in the control group (0.164 and 0.016). These results confirm a strong positive relationship between the two skills if the SFL-based translator training factor is strongly present. The results of this large-scale study yield the conclusion that SFL is highly effective in assessing professional English-to-Arabic translations of fiction and in training prospective translators in an academic institution.