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This thesis sets out to explore the ambiguous concept of American heroism in Ernest Hemingway's short story collection e~titled In Our Time (1925), We shall investigate the author's interpretation of Americanness in its social context during the Roaring Twenties, Because visions of manliness have always been crucial in defining what it means to be an American (Kimmel, 2006, p. ix), the study also gives prominence to Hemingway's representation of masculinity. The surface of his text conforms to contemporary Midwestern defmition of manhood. Accordingly, as existing scholarship asserts, Hemingway's American hero is traumatised in physical and emotional terms, but he conceals his weakness and he comes to terms with his loss, which essentially signifies his American optimism. With the help of men's studies, psychoanalysis and narrative theory, our analysis of In Our Time reveals a different type of man existent in Hemingway's literature. The central protagonist, Nick Adams, displays the characteristics of the inherently melancholic American man. Examining him as a travelling correspondent, we can see how his journey enables him to investigate the meaning of identity and alterity. He comes to acknowledge the shortcomings of his native society. He identifies gaps and hiatuses in the American patriarchal tradition. Nevertheless, Hemingway's innovative narrative style disguises overt criticism about the United States. He manipulates the text and therefore confuses the reader. He applies redundancy - a form of repetition of details --and silencing - a conscious concealment of knowledge - in his narration in order to guide the reader to uncover the truth about preconceived ideals of American heroism and manliness. The American hero emerges as a representative of everything that he is not supposed to be: vulnerable, effeminate, homosexual and open-minded. Nick's "reports" thus deliver an austere critique of the American condition in the 1920s.

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This dissertation provides specific feminist and deconstructive approaches to Gertrude Stein's 'Melanctha', the second and longest story of Three Lives. These approaches outline the contradictions of a text caught between nineteenth-century conventions about sex and race and twentieth-century preoccupations with aesthetics. The individual readings of the text in four chapters are not mutually exclusive; indeed, they are united by a discussion of gender, identity and female sexuality. Each chapter is concerned with demonstrating how Stein's attempts to write her radical views about identity and sexuality are undermined by he difficulty of finding an appropriate space for these views in this early text. Moreover, the final chapter demonstrates that Stein's use of race, which is politically naive and racist, has profound implications for critics who want to claim this story as Stein's first modern text. Chapter One provides a reading of Stein's challenge to dominant discourses of gendered identity and mimesis through the trope of the marginal and the "metaphoric lesbian". Chapter Two extends Chapter One into the realms of deconstruction and Jacques Derrida, showing how Stein's concepts of gender and identity prefigure those ofDerrida. Chapter Three moves on to a cultural materialist discussion of'Melanctha' through the trope ofthejlaneuse, and discusses Melanctha's positional challenge to discourses of public and private spaces for men and women at the tum-of-the-century. Finally, Chapter Four continues the cultural materialist reading through an analysis of'Melanctha' against two African-American texts in order to bring to the reader's attention the problems of a text which Stein claims was her 'negro' story. These readings are diverse, but brought together, as I have said, through a discussion of gender and identity. More importantly, the final reading of this story, in Chapter Four, draws together the assumptions made in Chapters One, Two and Three in order to demonstrate that this text cannot be read innocently. Stein's bigoted views about race must be addressed if we are to come to a more definitive conclusion about where we place this text ethically, and if we can really accord it the place it has so far occupied in the Canon.

Zora Neale Hurston is a complicated figure whose work has always aroused contradictory responses. During her lifetime she was often more readily appreciated by white readers who enjoyed her boisterous accounts of apparently unthreatening 'Negroes', than by other African American writers who felt that she pandered to white stereotypes, simplifying the black experience and the black psyche. Neglected for several decades, Hurston was again brought to the attention of literary and cultural critics in the late seventies by Robert Hemenway and Alice Walker, who published seminal reconsiderations of her work. Since then Hurston has become a central figure, not only in the African American canon, but also in the mainstream, becoming, to paraphrase the critic Hazel Carby, a veritable industry in her own right. Yet she remains a writer who evokes mixed responses. For some she is an exemplary Womanist and an uncomplicated role model. For others, though, she is a reactionary individualist who offers her readers little more than escapism and unexamined nostalgia. Particularly contested is the sort of African American space Hurston describes in her work. Centred on the all-black town of Eatonville, it has seemed to some an ideal space worth recovering for the potential it possesses for sustaining a model of authentic African American life. For others though, it has seemed an irrelevant and reactionary retreat from the complexities and realities of twentieth century life and an ideal, which has little relevance for an increasingly urban black population. In this thesis I intend to examine more closely the space and place that Hurston creates in order to argue that the Eatonville of her texts is more complex and ambiguous than either of these accounts allow.