A sequence of poems, mostly in a phonetically rendered Eastern New England accent, follows the exploits and thoughts of a young man from central Massachusetts, as well as a cast of secondary characters. This is followed by an essay that examines the sequence's salient aspects of language, voice, place, and mythology, and attempts to situate each in a context of forbears and influences.

This thesis considers Ralph Waldo Emerson’s compositional process of ‘double writing’ as a distinctly theorised and intellectually coherent practice that generated discrete bodies of text: his private journals and notebooks; and the public essays, lectures, and poems. Throughout Emerson scholarship, critics tend to quote the two bodies without differentiation, often either neglecting the issue of their coexistence or asserting the priority of one form over the other. I contend instead that principles of self-reading, accretive reinscription, and a perpetuated relation to his own text condition Emerson’s ideas of poetic agency and the role of literature in broader socio-cultural contexts, to the extent that they become the preeminent factor in shaping his philosophical and literary aspirations. Focusing on the period 1836-50, from the beginning of the coexistence of public and private corpuses to the point at which he finalises his theory of textual relation, I trace the way in which Emerson’s ongoing textual investment first echoes—and later disrupts—aspirations to realise a philosophy of the subject steeped in the romantic tradition. The first part of the thesis examines the two textual bodies insofar as they reflect upon each other and on theories of composition, finding that Emerson gradually loses faith in the function of his public works up to 1842. In the second section of the thesis, I illustrate the continual revision his relation to text undergoes in the major works of the 1840s, as his compositional theory adapts to first conceptualise and then fulfil certain ethical obligations of the scholar and poet. I end by examining the poetic apotheosis figured by Poems (1847) and Representative Men (1850), which has little in common with his youthful aspirations, but which explains the ‘sage’-like mantle he accepted in American life and letters from the 1850s until his death in 1882. As well as revising conceptions of Emerson’s literary agency and the structure of his canon, this thesis offers an original reading of the theory of an author’s socio-cultural role in the mid nineteenth-century through the example of one of the era’s major figures.

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.

By the time the Fugitive movement was launched between 1922 and 1925, Ransom's poetic technique had changed in a remarkable fashion which is the main topic of the thesis. Gone was a direct, almost brutally sarcastic manner to be replaced with a polished irony that places a considerable distance between him, his subject and his reader. He is no longer involved in the narrative action of the poems as in Poems about God, and there is more concentration on the action of the poems than description. In The Fugitive (1922-1925) Ransom published his most successful poems such as: "Ego", "Bells for John Whiteside Daughter", "Philomela", "First Travels of Max", "Captain Carpenter", "Prometheus in Straits" "Ada Ruel", "Old Mansion", "Blue Girls", "Adventure This Side of Pluralism", an "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son". These poems and a number of others were also published in separate collections, Chills and Fever (1924), Grace after Meat (1924). Some of these poems underwent few changes while others were revised drastically. The Fugitive group disbanded in 1926 and their magazine ceased publication. In 1927, Ransom published Two Gentlemen in Bonds. In this last book of verse Ransom introduced sonnets for the first time in his publications, though he had experimental once before in "Sunset". After 1927 some members of the Fugitive group began to reestablish contact and they soon became Agrarians in the economic, political, agricultural, and perhaps literal sense of the word. During the Agrarian years (1927-1938), Ransom was busy in three spheres: professor of English at Vanderbilt University, contributing to the editorship of the Agrarian publications, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, (1930), and Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence (1936), and finally publishing his first works of literary criticism; God without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defence of Orthodoxy (1930) and The World's Body (1938).

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.

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.

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 takes a historical-geographical materialist approach to the capitalist production and literary representation of "place" in the American South between the 1960s and 1990s. Part 1 provides literary-historical and theoretical context. Chapter 1 considers how the Agrarians and their literary critical acolytes defined the "sense of place" of "Southern literature." However, the chapter also recovers an aspect of Agrarianism suppressed by later Southern literary critics: the critique of modern (finance) capitalist abstraction expressed through the Agrarians' "proprietary ideal." Drawing also on postmodern theory, Chapter 2 theorises a postsouthern literary theory of place. Part 2 analyses the "postsouthern turn" in novels by Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy and Richard Ford. Chapter 3 argues that, in A Place to Come to (1977), Warren interrogates his earlier Agrarian aesthetics of place. In Percy's The Moviegoer (1961), land speculator Binx Bolling constructs a rhetorical contrast between "the South" and "the North" to repress his fear that capitalist development is destroying New Orleans and its environs. Chapters 4 to 6 argue that, in A Piece of My Heart (1976), The Sportswriter (1986) and Independence Day (1995), Ford has offered the most sustained and sophisticated critique of the Southern literary critical "sense of place." Part 3 focuses uses upon recent literary representations of Atlanta. Chapter 7 provides a contextual assessment of Atlanta's "non-place" in "Southern literature" and its development as a postsouthern "international city." Chapter 8 considers the representational politics of "creative destruction" in Anne Rivers Siddons' Peachtree Road (1988). Chapter 9 considers the role of land speculation, global capital flows and finance capitalist abstraction in Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full (1998). The final chapter demonstrates how Toni Cade Bambara's novel about the Atlanta Child Murders, Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999), indicts capitalist abstraction through a grotesque body politics of place.

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This thesis investigates the "talk-story" narrative patterns, which stem from the Chinese oral tradition, in selected works of two contemporary Chinese American women writers, Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. In The Woman Warrior, Kingston has experimented with a new kind of "talk-story" writing in blending family stories, cultural myths, fantasy, autobiographical details, and history, as she attempts to model her work on the familial talk-story culture she was nurtured in. Borrowing the term "talk story" from a pidgin Hawai'ian expression, Kingston develops a special kind of generic "talk-story" as an artistic creation in her fictions. Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club is often compared to The Woman Warrior and a number of critics have observed the use of "talk-story" in Tan's novels, but the talk-story components in the two writers' works have been largely discussed in relation to the mother-daughter dyads and few critics have distinguished the different usages and functions of "talk-stories" in their works. Through a literary analysis of their works, my thesis attempts to enrich the concept of "talk-story" originated from Kingston, and discusses its relation to the works of Kingston and Tan, with an aim to teasing out the two writers' differences within their sameness. While Kingston exhibits a talk-story narrative structure in her works, Tan mainly confines the talk-story elements at a textual level as a healing narrative therapy between generations. I will argue that while both writers exemplify talk-story as a form of self-expression and empowerment, their talk-stories function differently as they interact with the mainstream discourse: while Kingston remodels the Chinese talk-story pattern by making it a form of literary art, Tan refashions talk-story as a kind of "talking-cure, " as in western psychotherapy, in her fictions and writes in the popular arena.