In "A Poetics of Chaos: Schizoanalysis and Postmodern American Fiction," I use theories from physics and psychoanalysis together to explore narrative structures in recent American fiction. Chaos theory, which emerged in mathematical and biological discourses in the 1960s, postulates the intrinsic instability and unpredictability of many natural and physical phenomena. Theorists like Bertalanffy, Mandelbrot and Lorenz produced a vocabulary to account for these pervasive systems. In assessing historical, economic and, indeed, literary systems, we may draw terms from chaotic inquiry: bifurcation, fractal, moebial, reiteration, complexity, butterfly effect, strange attractors, and sensitive dependence upon initial conditions. '"Chaotic narratives*" may explicitly deploy (Barth, Pynchon, Gibson) or inadvertently express (Coover, Ondaatje, Powers) the structural features of chaotic systems. Such writing is characterized by a diffusion of linear chronology, as well as ontological and narrative fracture, repetition and variation. Literary theorists N. Katherine Hayles, Joseph Conte, Hanjo Berressem and others have discussed how chaotic scientific and psycho-social systems are not only invoked in contemporary literature, but are themselves the structural and philosophical underpinnings of postmodern culture. My thesis builds upon chaotic-literary criticism by investigating the psychological implications of "chaotic narratives." Drawing from the anti-deterministic "schizoanalysis" of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I explain how writings by Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, David Foster Wallace and Mark Z. Danielewski perform and reflect the "orderly disorder" of psychic development. I advance the term "psychochaotics*' to describe a theoretical approach that uses principles from chaos theory to reveal the psychodynamic systems in postmodern fiction.

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This thesis examines the character of the white mistress in retrospective fiction- post hoc works that revisit the slave-narrative tradition to revise the story told about antebellum slavery in the Southern states of America. The figure of the white mistress has been at worst ignored and at best marginalised in much fictional and critical output. I redress the balance by focusing on three novels which foreground the role of the white mistress. Through an exploration of the white mistress in Willa Cather‘s Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), Sherely Anne Williams‘s Dessa Rose (1987) and Valerie Martin‘s Property (2003), I consider ways in which white female guilt in relation to slavery is represented. By responding to the work of Minrose Gwin, Toni Morrison and Ashraf Rushdy, among others, I extend the critical consideration given to the character of the plantation mistress. In Chapter One I explore how the female slave acts as a counterpoint for the white mistress, beginning by considering three stereotypes commonly associated with nineteenth-century southern women: the belle, the jezebel and the mammy. I argue that these stereotypes not only influence the relationship between the mistress and her slaves, but that the stereotypes themselves are troubled in retrospective fiction. In Chapter Two I explore familial responsibilities for the white mistress in relation to her husband and father and to her children. I argue that these novels expose how family ties are damaged not only for the slave but for the mistress in these novels, complicating any easy interpretation about the mistress‘s guilt. In Chapter Three I address the importance of the plantation setting in fiction about slavery. Specifically, I posit the plantation as a Gothic space for both the white mistress and her female slave, characterised by das unheimliche, claustrophobia and voyeurism. Although the white mistress is the principal focus of only a minority of retrospective novels about slavery, my thesis is driven by the increasing compulsion to confront this character‘s complicity in the South‘s peculiar institution.

This study examines the decorative interior in Henry James’s fiction: its representation, its function, its existence as a nascent cultural and economic phenomenon. It also explores Edith Wharton’s deployment of interiors within her writing, as a friend and contemporary of James with a professional interest in architecture and interior design. Other writers on aesthetics, design, or decorative art are also considered: William Morris and John Ruskin (Chapter One), Oscar Wilde (Chapter Two). A study of the decorative interior in James is inseparable from other wide-ranging cultural and philosophical questions. I discuss the growth of department stores and shopping, along with changing gender roles at the end of the nineteenth century with reference to The Bostonians and Summer in Chapter Three. I consider the representation of domesticity, and the house as a psychological and epistemological space in What Maisie Knew (Chapter Four). In Chapter Five I explore surfaces, both textual and decorative, in The House of Mirth and The Ambassadors, while in the final chapter I consider modernism and James’s absent interiors in “The Beast in the Jungle”, “The Great Good Place” and The American Scene. In this study I scrutinise both the decorative objects (sofas, carpets) and interior architectural structures (doors, staircases) which comprise James’s and Wharton’s fictional interiors. Bringing the work of spatial theorists (Bachelard, Lefebvre), anthropologists (Daniel Miller), and phenomenological thinkers (Merleau-Ponty), to bear on James’s and Wharton’s imagined spaces will I hope contribute to the ongoing critical consideration of materialism and materiality within James’s writing. Exploring the powerful connectivity between “things” and text exposes Jamesian objects as increasingly fragile, invisible and de-categorised. His fictional imperative towards interiority intensified over time, producing imagined spaces in which objects become ciphers for the incomplete, the marginal, and the deferred.

This thesis explores how contemporary women writers write about heterosexual love, considering not only the ways it has been implicated in patriarchal models and traditional romance plots, but also its portrayal in light of developments in feminism and fiction in the 1990s and 2000s. The thesis examines Carol Shields’s The Republic of Love (1992), Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992), Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1993), Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup (2001), Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto (2001), Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (2000) and Doris Lessing’s Love, Again (1995). In this study it emerges that as well as illustrating continuities, the scope of the treatment of love is opened up further in recent fiction as aspects like age or social, economic and historical factors are centralised and considered in interesting ways. The thesis also identifies some positive approaches to heterosexual love, as in, for example, the emphasis on men’s capacity for emotions. However, this is not always the case, as a writer like Lessing further develops a vision of love without providing an affirmative view. Thus, the contemporary women writers’ work can be said to contribute to understandings of heterosexual love on many different levels, even as feminist criticisms of repressive, patriarchal forms of romantic relationship continue to remain relevant.

Although there have been many postcolonial studies of the portrayals of Native American characters in children’s and young adult literature, the majority of these have focused on historical novels, rather than analysing fantasy literature. Additionally, I have found no direct comparisons between texts by Native and non-Native authors, and the impact of authorship on the representations of American Indian characters. I believe that a study of this area of literature is important, as it will serve to examine how the portrayal of Native characters in texts varies depending on the insider or outsider experience of the author. In my thesis, using critical theory around Gothic, gender and queer studies, I analyse three examples of young adult fantasy literature; the Twilight saga by Stephenie Meyer, the Tantalize series by Cynthia Leitich Smith, and the novel Wolf Mark by Joseph Bruchac. In the first chapter, I study the texts’ portrayals of Native American spiritual beliefs, comparing Meyer’s use of Quileute legends to bolster her series’ mythology with Bruchac’s reinterpretation of Abenaki beliefs in Wolf Mark. In the next chapter, I focus on the role of Christianity in the novels, considering historical contexts of missionary movements and colonisation. Chapter Three analyses the novels from a gender studies perspective, considering the racialised representations of masculinity and femininity in the texts, while Chapter Four studies the theme of sexuality in the novels. Finally, in the fifth chapter, I look at postcolonial Gothic space in the novels, and its connections to frontiers and borders, both physical and psychic. ii As a result of my research, I discovered that the Quileute characters in Meyer’s novels correspond with images of Native peoples as ‘savage’ and animalistic, with Native men portrayed as violent and sexually threatening, and Native women as pitiable and subordinate. Her focus on the ‘treaty line’ established by the vampires, and the ‘civilising process’ the main Quileute character Jacob undergoes during his time with the Cullen family, perpetuate colonialist narratives. By contrast, Leitich Smith and Bruchac write against these stereotypes. Bruchac focuses directly on Abenaki characters, writing from an insider perspective that allows him to create a nuanced, non-stereotypical portrayal of a Native protagonist. Although Leitich Smith does not write directly about Native characters or cultures, her representations of gender, sexuality and race correspond with a counter-colonialist perspective. My direct comparison of texts by Native and non-Native authors shows that an author writing from an outsider perspective is far more likely to use stereotypical portrayals of American Indian characters and cultures than an author with an insider perspective of a Native culture. It also indicates that young adult fantasy literature, with its emphasis on the boundaries between childhood and adulthood, can be used as a site for both conservative and radical narratives on colonialism and postcolonialism.

This thesis examines and explores twentieth century literary representations of American masculinity at war. It aims to demonstrate the manner in which American novels responding to the First and Second World Wars and the Vietnam conflict reflect symbolic, mythic and material anxieties regarding America‟s masculine identities. The thesis examines in particular the pervasive myth of the American Adam and its influence on behaviours, ideologies and narrative. Each text and each conflict operates under the influence of Adamic myth. I argue that prose fiction offers a space in which to scrutinise, engage and ultimately resist such mythic singularity. The incorporation of gender theory into such a study provides an original critical perspective with which to read crucial artistic responses to major events of the American twentieth century. Its central arguments engage with anxieties existing between ideological representations of hegemonic American masculinity and the graphic truth of experience for the corporeal and psychological subject. As well as thematic aspects of the literature, the thesis analyses shifts in narrative technique and the manner in which they reflect the growth and pluralising of wider narratives within the fields of modernism, American naturalism and postmodernism. The contemporary era is marked by commemoration and reflection regarding twentieth century conflict and by anxiety regarding the unstable post 9/11 world. In addition to this, there is resurgence in scholarly, political and popular interest in gender and its representation. These factors mean that this is a timely and vital study that reflects on literary history and current literary debates. The authors and their work in this thesis are considered in chronological order and cover a significant part of the American twentieth century. Chapter one examines John Dos Passos‟ Three Soldiers and Ernest Hemingway‟s A Farewell to Arms. Chapter two engages with two Pacific war novels; Norman Mailer‟s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones‟ The Thin Red Line. Chapter three explores post-war existential angst and early postmodernism in Joseph Heller‟s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut‟s Slaughterhouse-Five. The final chapter offers analysis of Larry Heinemann‟s Close Quarters and Paco’s Story and Tim O‟Brien‟s Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried.

This is the first full-length scholarly work dedicated to the fiction of Kentucky-raised feminist activist and trained biologist Barbara Kingsolver. Interrogating the political efficacy of the work of an author who proclaims that art “should be political” and that “literature should inform as well as enlighten”, this thesis explores the ways in which Kingsolver positions herself variously as an environmentalist, liberal, communitarian, feminist and agrarian. It unpacks the author’s issues-based approach to writing fiction and its effect on her commercial popularity and through close readings of her fiction provides an assessment of this popular and critically acclaimed contemporary American writer. This study maps the oeuvre of a writer who has achieved critical success in the form of Pulitzer nominations, American Booksellers Book of the Year awards, a National Medal for Arts, and commercial success in the form of bestselling novels and even non-fiction works – not to mention the populist accolade of being selected as an Oprah’s Book Club author. It analyses tropes, techniques and tensions in Kingsolver’s novels and short stories published between 1988 and 2001, namely The Bean Trees (1988), Homeland and Other Stories (1989), Animal Dreams (1990), Pigs in Heaven (1993), The Poisonwood Bible (1998), and Prodigal Summer (2001). Rather than act as an introductory survey, this assessment posits that there exists a difficult but fruitful tension between writing fiction for readers and writing to a political agenda. Kingsolver promotes both of these through her narrative strategies and preoccupations. In the end, I argue that Kingsolver’s pursuit of popular appeal, far from compromising her politics, is a political strategy in itself.

This thesis examines the motif of terraforming from Wells’ War of the Worlds (1898) to James Cameron’s film Avatar (2009) in order to assess the dialogical development of ecological themes and its imbrication with politics in science fictional narratives of terraforming. It tracks the growth of the theme in four distinct phases that are contextualised by a short history of terraforming in the introductory first chapter. Chapter two examines the appearance of proto-terraforming and proto-Gaian themes in British scientific romance and American pulp sf prior to Jack Williamson’s coining of the term “terraform” in 1942. Environmental philosophical concepts of nature’s otherness, Lee’s Asymmetry, Autonomy and No-Teleology Theses and notions of identification with nature are examined in this connection to illustrate the character of these texts’ engagement with environmental philosophy and ecopolitics. Chapter three examines the development of the terraforming theme in primarily American 1950s terraforming stories and explores how the use of elements of the American Pastoral are deployed within the discourse of sf to consider the various ways in which the political import of terraforming is imagined. Chapter four explores the impact of the environmental movement of the 1960s in terraforming stories of the 1960s-1970s. Beginning with a consideration of the use of Gaian images in characterisations of alien ecologies, this chapter then progresses to consider a parallel strand of terraforming stories that transform the themes of the 1950s texts in the light of the impact of the 1960s environmental movement. Chapter five concludes this analysis by considering two major trilogies of terraforming written in the 1980s-1990s, Pamela Sargent’s Venus and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogies. These works inherit the discourse of terraforming established by earlier works and re-configure them in ways that address contemporary environmental and geopolitical concerns.