This thesis constitutes an original contribution to knowledge in its examination of the range of Jewish subjectivities that emerge in the fiction of Philip Roth. Initially, it will engage with the contradiction between the writer's own perception of himself in his early work as a mischief-maker among the Jews, and the way in which he has come to be regarded by both critics, and the reading public, as betraying Jewish ethnicity and culture. This thesis then also examines the later criticism levelled at Roth as a writer who has trivialised Jewish ethnicity, isolating the racial anxieties and tensions that emanate from the interlinking of particular readings of cultural history and Jewish subjectivity. These readings in effect, produce readings which locate a specific history of trauma and Diasporic dilution as predominant in his fictional evocations of post-Second World War American society. This thesis will challenge such readings, demonstrating the need to re-evaluate Roth as a writer aware of, and responding to, the racial anxieties and the cultural tensions that have emerged in the post-Holocaust era. This project also investigates the significance of the authorial voice in Roth's fiction as a presence that reading audiences and critics alike have chosen to understand as autobiographical. However, this thesis contends that over the course of his writing career, Roth has deliberately incorporated a form of authorial presence in order to challenge the apparent authenticity of the writer's potential to claim a position of authority within a text. This project also examines the narrative device(s) that evolve into impersonation, doubles and 'counterlives' in the later fictions. These serve to explore tension between what Roth considers authentic and inauthentic Jewish positions in post-Holocaust, American social order. Finally, this thesis introduces Roth's seminal reproduction of a version of Jewish SUbjectivityin which history has no place and typified as a phenomenon happening elsewhere in America. The thesis will conclude that in Philip Roth's fiction, America emerges as the site of a modem Jewish Diaspora and thus as an authentic location for the interrogation of Jewishness.

This thesis will extend the critical supposition common in studies of Thomas pynchon that the author's novels bear a direct structural correlation to their respective titles. Taking as a starting point Samuel Cohen's analysis of the importance of the ampersand in Mason & Dixon (1997), Joseph W. Slade and Tony Tanner's parabolic models for Gravity's Rainbow (1973). and Harold Bloom's observations on the V·shape in V. (1963), I intend to apply an analogous logic to The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Vineland (1990), Againstthe Day (2006) and Inherent Vice (2009), proceeding chronologically across Pynchon's entire novelistic oeuvre. With the exception of Co hen, who makes Mason & Dixon's titular ampersand the crux of his reading of the novel, critics have simply gestured towards a connection between Pynchon's titles and possible visuowgeometrical narrative structures, without delving into the broader implications of this approach or basing their readings of the novels on this titulo-structural correspondence. Recuperating this notion, this study will extract it from the realm of the passing remark and the interesting observation, both analyzing it and proposing it as a form of analysis in itself. By attending to the formal relationship between titles and topoi in Pynchon's novels, not only will this thesis offer new interpretations of this canonical author's body of work, but it will also heed to the thematic specificity of each individual text, encompassing the multiplicity of Pynchon's expansive fictions. This study will be the first to attempt a systematic, coherent analysiS of the interrelation between the structuring devices of Pynchon's novels and their titles. In this way, this thesis constitutes a unique contribution to pynchon scholarship and, more broadly, the field of American Studies.

This thesis examines Atwood's transformation of the crime genre, more particularly the whodunit and the spy thriller, in some of her longer fiction. Her protagonists are considered as detective figures needing to decipher experiences made mysterious to them by acceptance of hegemonic scripts. Discussion explores their discoveries that they are not only victims of the crime fabulae they unravel, but accessories, their complicity arising from an acculturation to ideologies of power, particularly those of patriarchy, class and colonialism. A gendered inflection of the crime narrative is also evident in one of the texts under discussion, Alias Grace, which depicts an unsuccessful male investigator. Using the concept of abduction - the interpretation of signs according to inherited mental frameworks - this thesis demonstrates that the protagonists' understanding of their conditions requires profound changes in their mental mapping of their worlds. While the body and the environment are shown to provide pressing evidence of crime, analysis demonstrates that mysteries are only unlocked by adjustments in the protagonists' mindsets. Careful tracking of those adjustments also makes clear that Atwood treats the romance narrative as a barrier to understanding. This thesis considers detection as an activity required by Atwood's readers as well as her characters. The penultimate chapter, on the metafictive detective story, therefore examines those authorial techniques that engage readers as investigators needing to deconstruct false stories generated by blinkered focalizers. Underpinning the entire thesis, but especially addressed in its closing chapters, is the belief that Atwood' s metafictive strategies are not symptoms of a postmodem depthlessness. Instead, pursuing Atwood's assertion that popular forms of literature embody mythologies which she terms the 'dreams of society', transformation of the crime genre is discussed as part of the author's wider project: interrogation of ways of seeing in order to encourage a sounder apprehension of ourselves and our worlds.

This thesis examines Toni Morrison's exploration of African-America's past, specifically the manner in which she employs the African-American body as a tool in the construction of alternative versions of American experience. Morrison attempts to release her novels from the burdens of symbols, connotations and language that have so long obfuscated the African- American subject and their history, this thesis considering the methods which she employs in this endeavour. Specifically this book explores Morrison's interrogation of typical representations of African- American physicality, language and behaviour, and the way in which she reconfigures those identity functions in order to create narratives that are able to symbolically negotiate and articulate African-American experience. The book is divided into four chapters, the first of which considers African-America's reinvention as a fabricated presence within white narratives of control, focusing predominantly on Morrison's consideration of this process within Playing in the Dark. Subsequent to this first chapter this book focuses on Morrison's examination of the body, language and behaviour, considering in particular her novels The Bluest Eye, Jazz, Beloved and Paradise.

This thesis seeks to examine the major themes in Frank Herbert's Dune Series, in order to question why this work is considered as the pinnacle of science fiction literature. I will examine the themes as part of a response to a historical and cultural malaise within SF literature, and attempt to understand why these works are subversive to the genre whilst simultaneously representing its greatest achievement. As a work of science fiction lying between two distinct historical periods of literature, namely the Golden Age of SF and the subsequent New Wave, this thesis will examine Dune's role as a Janus-facing work that is polemic to the existing tropes of an established genre distancing itself from any literary aspirations. By the major themes of the Dune Series, it is the purpose of this thesis to examine the intention, application and execution of a number of ideas that would shape this series' deliberate and subversive nature, whilst simultaneously helping to mould its literary character. In its study of evolution and genetics, this thesis will show how Frank Herbert took his inspiration from science fiction of the late Victorian era, and extrapolated many of the questions it raised about the nature and origins of life. In turning his back on the pulp literature that SF was increasingly becoming, the study of evolution was able to inform a number of aspects to the Dune Series, and lend it a detailed and believable verisimilitude, which would in turn shape the nature of its most subversive attack against the typical SF protagonists from the Golden Age. This thesis will also examine Herbert's approach to ecology, and try to show why Dune, remains the greatest example of ecological science fiction, and how it has inspired a shaped a new genre all of its own.

This thesis examines and theorizes the unique ways in which the fiction of Thomas Pvnchon facilitates our retrospective comprehension of some of the historically- contingent and historically-significant human experiences associated with the Cold War era. Through a renewed focus on the emotional and psychological investments shaping Cold War American culture, and on the dynamic and affect-led reading practices informing contemporaneous and twenty-first century responses to Pynchon's prose, the study aims to historicize both literary-artistic and interpretative practices within the socio-historical context of the Cold War. The thesis also advances a historicizing critique of certain specific aspects of Cold War American culture - including paranoia, nuclear anxiety, televisual mediation and religious conviction - that are brought into focus by Pynchon's writings. Drawing on the work of theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Eve Sedgwick, and Jacques Derrida, the thesis also delineates some of the specific ways in which twenty- first century readers of Pynchon's fiction can engage with, yet move beyond, the paranoid and cynical tendencies represented within, and deconstructed by, his fictional narratives. In view of the presently unacknowledged value of the particular forms of 'creative understanding' that Pynchon's fiction facilitates, the thesis exhibits and endorses an open, reparative approach to Pynchon's texts, incorporating elements of biographical, New Historicist and deconstructive approaches. Whilst maintaining a critical focus on the literary texts themselves, the thesis also traces key aspects of Cold War experience within, between and beyond the texts, and can therefore be situated within the emerging field of Cold War historiography.

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This thesis undertakes an examination of the manner in which a novelist interacts with a contemporary theoretical discourse. I argue that the novelist and the theoretical discourse enter into a symbiotic relationship in which each influences and is influenced by the other. This process, I suggest, is simultaneous and complex. The thesis demonstrates how the prevailing theoretical discourse is absorbed by the contemporary author, is developed and redefined in conjunction with alternative concerns, and comes to permeate the narrative in an altered state. The novelist's new perspectives, frequently problematising theoretical claims, are then disseminated by the novel, promoting further discussion and development of the theoretical discourse. The thesis focuses on the novels of Margaret Atwood, considering them in relation to the history and development of second wave feminism. "Second wave feminism" is understood as an umbrella term that incorporates a wide variety of related but diverse and occasionally contradictory discourses, centring on the subjects of gender, femininity, and sexuality. The focus of the discussion is dual and presented simultaneously. Atwood's novels are analysed chronologically, and within the parameter of this analysis I demonstrate how her work has been influenced by earlier feminist theories, how it comments upon a variety of contemporary feminist ideas, and how it can be seen to anticipate further discussions within feminist discourse. Finally, I identify moments in Atwood's writing when alternative discourses compete with feminism to create new directions for feminist criticism. Examples of these discourses include Canadian nationalism, liberalism, communitarianism and environmentalism. The specificity of the novelist's interests and politics create a unique site of interaction for feminism which, I argue, benefits feminist theory by challenging, broadening and diversifying its focus. The thesis concludes that the symbiotic relationship of the theorist and the novelist is self-perpetuating and is also necessary and beneficial to both parties.