This thesis argues that the contemporary fantasy fiction of Gregory Maguire is indicative of a particular form of myth making that occurs in narrative form in contemporary culture. In choosing to re-imagine existing narratives that already have recognisable cultural significance, Maguire's particular engagement with this process illuminates the power of narrative to affect individuals on an emotional level as well as the values of society. In examining the interactions between theories of myth, intertextuality, and fantasy this thesis proposes to interrogate both the status of these narratives as cultural myths, and the phenomena of re-making myth in contemporary fiction. The aim is to examine this pattern of perpetuation and transformation of myth, specifically in the area of contemporary fantasy literature. The particular changes that Maguire makes in the transformation of the myths in question are indicative of broader cultural and social trends and, in some cases, go beyond merely documenting these shifts in the values of society to actually playing a part in enforcing these changes. That this pattern has found its continuation in modern fantasy literature is shown through the analysis and through comparisons between Maguire's myth-making that of other contemporary fantasy writers. This addresses questions of the importance of fantasy literature in the perpetuation of myth in modernity, something that some areas of myth criticism have struggled to account for and occasionally to recognise. It does so by close examination of the parent myths that Maguire chooses to re-imagine, and the ways in which his approach to intertextuality offers those particular mythic narratives new life in contemporary culture.

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This thesis focuses on the portrayal of men and masculinities in Carol Shields’s novels. There is a conspicuous gap in the scholarly research on Shields's oeuvre which significantly sidelines her male characters. The focus of academic interest often falls on the author's engagement with feminism, almost solely concentrating on her female protagonists. Along with new developments in masculinity studies I give prominent attention to men in Shields's novels to illustrate how the feminist standpoint is filtered through masculine perspectives. The aim of this thesis is to show how the presentation of male characters in Carol Shields’s novels refracts wider societal changes and evolving theoretical paradigms of masculinity, and to trace how these portrayals evolve as a consequence of social developments. The thesis also stresses how Shields's novels become increasingly experimental, partially embracing postmodern ideas and techniques and combining them with questions about the position and situation of women and men in society. Only by reading male and female characters together, the thesis argues, are we able to build a holistic picture of Shields's literary achievement. Even though, on the surface, Shields's narratives feature most average male characters – white, middle-class, heterosexual North Americans – the protagonists and their constructions vary considerably from one narrative to another. Shields published her first novel in 1976 and her last in 2002. Thirty years of her writing career coincide with a turbulent period in the social life of the Western hemisphere. The emphasis of this thesis is on how Shields’s novels engage with the changing intellectual environment of second- and third-wave feminism, masculinity studies and postmodernism. Construction of gender in the novels changes: it becomes much more complex, less defined and more open to (re)interpretation. In novels such as Swann, The Republic of Love or The Stone Diaries we witness the emergence of postmodern masculinity which is fragmented, self-questioning and unstable. Men’s stories become increasingly complex as filtered through numerous layers of narrators’ and focalisers’ lenses. Also male characters gain more potential as protagonists achieve the capacity to reinvent themselves and their stories. However, as depicted in the novels, a postmodern man still occupies a dominant social position over women and still blames his mother for his failures in adult life, in spite of socio-political changes. As such Shields’s works express great sadness and disillusionment with feminism’s failure to allow women to assume equal status with men; however, the texts never blame men openly for social imbalance. Rather, Shields’s protagonists are united in their inability to control their stories and it is the social system that oppresses and limits women and men. Finally, the thesis shows the author's great skill and deep engagement in revealing the workings of the twentieth-century North American culture which reshapes definitions of what a man and what a woman is at a given time in history. Shields’s novels uncover and expose the mechanisms behind such artificial and arbitrary constructions which are often blindly accepted as the only true norm.

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The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the representation of authorship, readership and intertextuality in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and the southern anti-Tom tradition from 1852 to 1902. The principal claim of the thesis is that Stowe's novel provides nineteenth-century southern readers with a series of aesthetic paradigms that enable these readers to construct and reconstruct the role of artist in the South as this intersects with the construction of gender identity in nineteenth-century America. In Chapter 1, Uncle Tom's Cabin is interpreted through Julia Kristeva's theory of intertextuality, whereby 'the one who writes is the same as the one who reads', to argue that Stowe's text promotes acts of active rather than passive readership. The reading of Caroline Lee Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride in Chapter 2 interrogates the ways in which the female writer locates herself within a female literary tradition by subverting the Bloomian model of literary paternity to create the gothic mother author. Chapter 3 demonstrates how William Gilmore Simms appropriates Stowe's aesthetics of sympathy in the 'sensible man'. Barthes's recapitulation of the writer and reader as 'producer' and 'consumer' is mapped onto Simms's aesthetic terminology of 'utility' and 'extravagance' to reconcile Stowe's antithesis of marketplace and sentiment within the southern home. In Chapter 4, James Lane Allen's paired stories 'Mrs Stowe's "Uncle Tom" at Home in Kentucky' and 'Two Gentlemen of Kentucky' are read in the context of the literary debates between realism and romance in the late nineteenth-century. In doing so, Allen attempts to reconfigure these gendered aesthetic paradigms and so legitimise southern cultural elegy as a southern form but effectively begins the process of dismantling Stowe's aesthetics of sympathy. Chapter 5 discusses the ways in which Thomas Dixon's The Leopard's Spots dramatises the failure of Stowe's aesthetics of sympathy in the context of the southern rape complex.

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Chapter One: (pp. 1 -87) Landscape, Society and the Individual in Cormac McCarthy's Novels This chapter considers the incursion of a form of Emersonian transcendentalism in the earlier Southern novels. The second part focuses on the Western novels and includes discussion of the relationship between man and nature and the influence of the ideologies which underpin both nationalism and Manifest Destiny. The gradual conflation of landscape and text in the western novels, the increasing internalisation of landscape and the tendency towards erasure that threatens to subsume/ absorb the traveller/ narrator, are also addressed. Chapter Two: (pp. 88 - 147) A Consideration of Corpses: Literary and Cinematic Autopsy in Cormac McCarthy's Prose The second chapter examines the various narratorial strategies employed by McCarthy, focusing on the image of the corpse in his first three novels. The influence of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Joyce on McCarthy's narrative strategy and the role of the 'author' in his work are considered in the introduction. In The Orchard Keeper, the position of the reader as 'spectator' is examined and finds that the anamorphosis of the narrative style mimics cinematographic changes in perspective and point of view. The voice of a sadistic and misogynist narrator is addressed with reference to Child of God, which also draws on feminist theories of voyeurism and scopophilia. The relationship between the author and the 'spectator/ reader' is related to classic films (Hitchcock's Psycho and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, for example) and issue of identification practices and specular relations are discussed with reference to film theory. The depiction of 'death hilarious' in Outer Dark compares McCarthy's conflation of horror and humour with both the earlier prose of Flannery O'Connor and contemporary cinema.