This thesis comprises a Vietnam War novel written by a former anti-war activist (Please Set Me Free So I Can Destroy The Earth), an examination of the creative process as it pertains to that novel, and a critical look at narratives informing the novel, most notably Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War, Michael Herr's Dispatches, and Nathaniel Tripp's Father, Soldier, Son (all memoirs); Wallace Terry's Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans; and the fiction of Tim O'Brien and Larry Heinemann. Common to the narratives of Vietnam, including this novel, is the sense that the narrator has lost control of a story he nevertheless feels compelled to tell, thus finding himself engaged in a lonely struggle to order the incoherent. The story is not the story the narrator expected to tell; it is not the story of heroism and sacrifice told by his father. The war offers neither clear boundaries nor comfortable myths. It abounds with abominations, terrors, ambiguities, uncertainties, bitter ironies, strange beauty, squalor, guilt, and trauma. The narrator has no understanding of the war's higher strategy or political necessity and questions the very existence of such. He may be disillusioned, disgusted, shell-shocked, confused. Because the war cannot be easily apprehended, the narrator must fight for purchase. Many of the best Vietnam narratives wrestle with questions of how to apprehend truth, of the relation between art and experience, of the difference between fact and interpretation. They struggle to decipher a war that cannot even be illustrated on a map. Many strive for expiation, and thus help the American psyche come to terms with defeat and often dishonor. They illustrate perfectly the need for narrative, in both our personal lives and the life of a nation, to provide structure, coherence, and even necessary myth.

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The connection between imaginative writing and the political has always been contentious, and whilst many critics see literature as the creation of contemporary mythologies by which we negotiate our lived experience there are others who refute such a politicisation in favour of the singular aesthetic experience. This thesis will argue that the literary and the political are immutably bound in an undeniable relationship: a relationship which encompasses the construction of sexual, cultural and racial identities, questions of censorship and the concept of freedom and the mutual dependence of the individual subject and society. Like most epochs, the 1980s both invites and repels a tendency to organise its events into a single, understandable and easily internalised diachronic order, an order that will mask or efface the complex contradictions and multiplicity of possibilities that emerge. Through a series of close readings of arbitrarily selected literary and popular fictions, the thesis conducts an examination of the tensions, issues, conflicts and theoretical perspectives of this divisive decade. This project, however, is not just an attempt to chronicle a vast and fertile period of literature. It seeks to define the political imagination, to counteract the Bloomian claims that literature is a private space of imaginative production and passive aesthetic reflection, insisting that the political imagination is an inexorable part of social and cultural life which can neither be denied nor appropriated by a singular agenda or master code.

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This dissertation examines relationships between Northern Irish Troubles fiction and its secondary critical literature. Producers of genre are viewed as consumers of the genre to which they contribute and the consumption of genre is seen as a pre-requisite of production. The research method is designed to examine genre systematically through the analysis of a large data set representative of the genre spectrum. It employs analytical concepts drawn from semiotics, specifically, paradigms and syntagms. Results are interpreted using Raymond Williams' "structures of feeling" and a modified version of Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model. The review of the secondary literature of Troubles fiction reveals two interpretative models. The first sees Troubles fiction as a static site of cultural production in which a narrow range of negative or false stereotypes is endlessly reproduced. The second sees Troubles fiction as a site of cultural production that has experienced a form of cultural rupture as a younger generation of writer critiques and re-interprets conventional representations. Analysis reveals that neither interpretative model emerging from the secondary critical literature fully describes Troubles fiction. Conventional critical approaches to Troubles fiction based on intuitive and impressionistic ways of seeking knowledge miss minute shifts in the genre's history. In particular, critical studies miss the return to relatively conservative thriller codes and conventions in novels published in the early 1990s during the peace talks. Critics have most regard for novels written by Irish literary authors and novels containing literary and technical modifications. The modality-orientated content modifications of 1980s thrillers do not attract literary interest. This study sees genre as historically contingent, taking the view that the relationship between the macro-level perspective of generic system and the micro-level perspective of individual novel is best explored through specific description and comparison of novels both diachronically and at the level of the synchronic moment.

The thesis examines British fiction of the 1990s, focusing on the `novel of history'. It contributes to the analysis of recent and contemporary British fiction, joining work by John Brannigan, Steven Connor, Peter Childs, Dominic Head, Rod Mengham, Nick Rennison and Alan Sinfield. Whilst these critics have written about the centrality of the historical novel, the significance of the Holocaust and its use in fictional narrative remains relatively under-theorised. Issues surrounding memory and representation and their relation to history are central to an understanding of how British 1990s Holocaust novels dramatise the events of the `real'. In this regard, the thesis contributes to the theory that the 1990s British novel often `looked backwards' over the waning century. Fiction attempting to represent the Holocaust has made a significant contribution to this `taking stock'. A number of issues arise surrounding the complex relationship between historical `event' and `imaginary' text. Given the extremity of the Holocaust and the persistence of it as a 'secular-sacred' discourse, such issues are further problematised. The central theme is how British writers in the 1990s, given their temporal, spatial and familial distance from the event, have negotiated the `limits of representation' inherent in the aesthetic apprehension of the Holocaust. The fiction under discussion is by Martin Amis, Justin Cartwright, Robert Harris, John King, Caryl Phillips, Michele Roberts, W. G. Sebald, Rachel Seiffert, Zadie Smith and D. M. Thomas. The `apocalyptic turn' that many have characterised as emblematic of the 1990s is interpreted as a turning back to an `apocalypse' that has already taken place. Tropes of fragmented temporality, absence and presence, the sublime, articulation and silence, trauma, atrocity and the inherent problems of retelling the past are interpreted in relation to each individual text. Recent writing on the representation of the Holocaust also informs the central arguments of the thesis. Work by Saul Friedlander, Geoffrey H. Hartman, Berel Lang, Dominick LeCapra, Daniel R. Schwarz and Sue Vice discuss both the enduring legacy of the Holocaust and the areas of contention surrounding the `speaking' of the event. Holocaust representation will thus provide a `bridge' between analysis of the historical novel since 1989 and theoretical work on imagining the `Final Solution'. The thesis title is taken from Sebald's Austerlitz and alludes to the theme of contemporary writers making imaginary and ethical `journeys' back to the `dark heart' of the century. It also suggests something of the impulse to remember and `serve witness' to a generation of survivors. In conclusion, the thesis argues that despite the hegemony of postmodern concepts of the `textuality' of history and the instability of narrative, the Holocaust embodies a fundamental challenge to cultural and political relativism. The novels embrace and argue back against postmodern literary strategies, and in doing so reveal how ethical and aesthetic issues of representation are profoundly `tested' in context of the Holocaust.

The changing social consciousness in South Africa during the twentieth century falls within a political-historical framework of events: amongst others, World Wars I and II; the institution of the Apartheid Laws in 1948; the declaration of a South African Republic in 1960; Nelson Mandela's release in 1992. The literary social consciousness of Abrahams, Paton, Mphahlele and Gordimer spans the time before and after 1948. Their novels reflect the changing reality of a country whose racial and social problems both pre-date and will outlive the apartheid ideology. These and other novelists' changing social consciousness is an indication of the development of attitudes and reactions to issues which have their roots in the human and in the economic spheres, as well as in the political, cultural and religious. Their work interprets the history and the change in the South African social consciousness, and also gives some indication of a possible future vision. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

The changing social consciousness in South Africa during the twentieth century falls within a political-historical framework of events: amongst others, World Wars I and II; the institution of the Apartheid Laws in 1948; the declaration of a South African Republic in 1960; Nelson Mandela's release in 1992. The literary social consciousness of Abrahams, Paton, Mphahlele and Gordimer spans the time before and after 1948. Their novels reflect the changing reality of a country whose racial and social problems both pre-date and will outlive the apartheid ideology. These and other novelists' changing social consciousness is an indication of the development of attitudes and reactions to issues which have their roots in the human and in the economic spheres, as well as in the political, cultural and religious. Their work interprets the history and the change in the South African social consciousness, and also gives some indication of a possible future vision. / English Studies / M.A. (English)