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As the self-proclaimed ‘Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction’, James Ellroy, renowned author and literary celebrity, has expanded his style and ability to create narratives through his persona. The public image of Ellroy has been shaped by the author through his mastery of different mediums, such as the interview, book reading and auto-biography. Yet his persona is neither easily definable nor constant. A contrarian at times, Ellroy has benefited from his love of nostalgia paired with his unconventional approach and his willingness to shock his audience. These narrative techniques have informed his writing, and his style has evolved alongside, and sometimes interchangeably with, his public persona This thesis is an examination of the narrative styles James Ellroy has experimented with and developed over the course of his writing career. I argue that Ellroy embraced new and often radical writing styles as he transitioned from one phase of his career to the next. In his debut novel, Ellroy accepted many of the conventions of the crime fiction genre, but by the time he had moved to the LA Quartet novels, Ellroy claimed the genre was all but dead, and that his work had been the apex and finale of crime fiction. In each chapter I make references to Ellroy’s literary persona as a form of narrative in his work. As his stature grew as a crime writer, the Demon Dog persona became increasingly apparent. This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter, ‘Experimentation and Method in the Avon Novels’ examines Ellroy’s early novels with the publisher Avon. Ellroy drew on aspects of his own life to develop the plots and characters: in Brown’s Requiem, protagonist and antagonist are modelled on Ellroy; in Clandestine, Ellroy’s family, and specifically his mother’s murder, provides the plot for the novel; and Martin Plunkett’s backstory in Killer on the Road embeds scenes from Ellroy’s childhood that he did not reveal until late in life. The second chapter, ‘Ellroy’s Displaced Romantic: The Lloyd Hopkins Novels’, examines Ellroy’s depiction of Hopkins as a man in conflict with the age, and by the final chapter of the novel he has moved from his place of centrality, to a minor character. Ellroy was forced to rein in some of his stylistic changes with the apocalyptic manuscript ‘L.A. Death Trip’, deferring the experimentation until he was a more skilled writer. The third chapter, ‘James Ellroy, Jean Ellroy and Elizabeth Short: The Demon Dog and Transmogrification’, examines Ellroy’s lifelong obsession with the Black Dahlia murder case. From a young age, Ellroy linked his mother with the murder victim Elizabeth Short and himself, and this trinity forms the basis of other changing trinities, intense relationships between three people, in the novel. With the success of The Black Dahlia, Ellroy was briefly the definitive voice on the case, until the popularity of true crime authors threatened his control over the narrative. The fourth chapter, ‘The New Noir Style of the Los Angeles Quartet’, considers how Ellroy drew on film noir, consciously making his writing visual, and in the case of L.A. Confidential, almost mirroring the style of a screenplay. Ellroy’s desire to experiment with the noir depictions of 1940s and 1950s LA, led him to develop a noir prose style he dubbed ‘Ellrovian’. The fifth and final chapter, ‘The Private Nightmare of Public Policy’: The Narrative of Secret Histories in the Underworld USA Trilogy’, explores how Ellroy expanded his vision beyond crime fiction to a revisionist historical fiction. With each of Ellroy’s experiments, he offers a countermovement; the sparse prose style of The Cold Six Thousand provoked a critical backlash, causing him to radically revise his writing plans for the last novel of the Underworld trilogy and Ellroy’s final novel to date, Blood’s a Rover.

This thesis explores how McCarthy uses figures of trauma to interrogate the creation of myth in three categories: mythic narrative, mythic masculinity, and mythic national identity. Focusing on McCarthy’s five most recent novels, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain, No Country for Old Men and The Road, I argue that this interdependency of myth and trauma helps explain the repetitive cycles of loss, failure and defeat that pervade his work. Most critics of McCarthy have failed to explain adequately the relationship between these cycles of failure and the various mythologies of the West in these novels, sometimes even praising his supposed rejuvenation of the ‘exhausted’ myths of cowboys and the Western frontier. But recent developments in trauma theory help explain how McCarthy uses figures of loss and trauma to re-imagine the very structure of myth in twenty-first century America, particularly in relation to mythic models of the heroic quest, heroic masculinity, and American Exceptionalism. Furthermore, this reading of McCarthy also extends trauma theory by enabling a reconsideration of both myth and trauma in terms of futurity. McCarthy’s fusing of trauma with myth exposes how myths are typically a cyclically violent and destructive cultural phenomenon, as well as revealing how myths always depend upon the projection of a future event that ultimately collapses into failure. By explaining these connections between trauma, failure, myth, and futurity, I thus revitalize the criticism devoted to McCarthy’s writing and open up new ways to think about the larger concerns of narrative, genre, gender, and nation. I investigate how and why McCarthy takes the mythologies of the Old West, and rather than revising or subverting these myths, strives for a further model of myth in the form of heroic narratives that always end in failure and unresolved traumatic experience. And yet, McCarthy does not simply offer the failure or collapse of myth itself. Rather, his engagement with trauma in these Western novels reinstates the mythic as a cyclical pattern in which the present experience of trauma invokes some kind of loss in the past, sometimes even an unspecified loss, and projects some kind of further loss into the future, so as to keep the very notion of myth in constant play or motion. The model of myth that McCarthy offers is thus an eternal cycle that can never resolve itself as redemption. In the process I will examine how McCarthy’s traumatic model of myth helps us understand how a failing and defeated cowboy culture, with its heritage based on mythic visions of mastery and loss may, in striving for a sustained mythic experience, remain trapped in unresolved traumatic cycles and patterns of violence, crisis and suffering which nevertheless produce a further cycle of traumatic myth. I engage McCarthy’s negotiations of the mythic quest in my analysis of The Crossing in Chapter One, in which I show how the traumatic failure of the quest infuses that quest with mythic symbolism, and spurs the inevitable repetition of the quest in order to preserve that mythic cycle. In Chapter Two I examine the relationship between myth, trauma, and masculinity in All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain where I argue heroic masculinity relies upon the attempt to master the defeat and failure associated with trauma. In Chapter Three I examine how, in No Country for Old Men and The Road, the myth of American nation is associated with perpetual affirmations of chosenness and survival and how McCarthy’s novels open up new ways to understand how American culture builds a mythic past out of a sense of traumatic loss and projects that mythic vision onto an illusory and destructive future.

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This thesis offers a new way of reading narratives of cyberpunk fiction. It undertakes to re-evaluate cyberpunk fiction according to a feminist criticism that takes direction from Donna Haraway's cyborg politics and Eve Sedgwick's "deconstructive" reading. Both cyberpunk fiction and its criticism are read "deconstructively" in order to contest the notion that cyberpunk fiction cannot productively be read for feminism. The representation of embodiment and technology in cyberpunk narratives is customarily read in terms of a Cartesian opposition of body and mind, in which the materiality of female bodies is contrasted with the virtuality of male minds. The feminist analysis in this thesis focuses upon the way in which cyberpunk narratives can be seen to problematise both materiality and virtuality, embodiment and technology. Four novels are examined in detail: William Gibson's Neuromancer, Pat Cadigan's Synners, Marge Piercy's Body of Glass, and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. In each narrative, conventions of cyberpunk fiction are seen to be subverted and contested. Gibson's novel, which has become accepted as the template of "classic", masculinist cyberpunk fiction, is revealed through this feminist analysis as a narrative which is profoundly ambivalent in its depictions of technologised male and female bodies. This ambivalence continues in the versions of cyberpunk offered by Cadigan, Piercy, and Stephenson. These readings illuminate the way cyberpunk narratives work to deconstruct binary oppositions through their explorations of gendered bodies, technology, virtuality, and disembodiment. The deconstruction, disruption and dismantling of binarisms are conceptualised in the image of the unnaturally embodied cyborg, which unites gendered embodiment and technological augmentation in an imaginary body.

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This thesis examines the progression of Toni Morrison's literary aesthetic within a historical, political and cultural framework, and considers how Morrison's linguistic strategies have evolved as a result of her engagement with intellectual, philosophical and literary developments in African-American and American writing and politics. I first analyse Harlem Renaissance literature to explore the historical context and traditions from which Morrison's aesthetic arises, and to show how Morrison's work is informed by tensions within the Harlem movement. In subsequent chapters, I examine The Bluest Eye (1970) in relation to the Black Aesthetic of the late 1960s, and discuss Sula (1973) and Song of Solomon (1977) in terms of their importance as historical novels as well as the ways in which they reflect contemporary debates surrounding feminism and masculinity. I approach Tar Baby (1981) as a text which problematises female identification with black cultural heritage and my final chapter is concerned with Morrison's genealogical recovery and exploration of African-American history in her trilogy Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998). I trace the evolution of Morrison's aesthetic from the contestatory language of The Bluest Eye through an emphasis on the cultural forms of the black community in Sula and Song of Solomon, and finally to her latest attempt to extend the limits of her own aesthetic through the construction of de-raced language in Paradise. I establish a theoretical framework for the examination of Toni Morrison's novels, which includes Mikhail Bakhtin's theories on language and ideology, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of a 'minor literature' and their study of political theory, psychoanalysis and linguistics. The thesis incorporates an analysis of African-American philosophy, theory and literature, including the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison. The development of a variety of perspectives from which to examine Morrison's novels illuminates the importance of her project as radical critique of the dominant culture and aesthetic and makes possible an examination of the ways in which her linguistic strategies are not only informed by African-American experiences in white American culture, but also contribute to the deconstruction and reconstruction of those experiences.