The thesis examines the current split in American Indian literary studies between cross-cultural and tribal-centred schools of criticism through analyses of Arnold Krupat's, Louis Owens's and Gerald Vizenor's scholarship, on one side, and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's and Craig Womack's critical work, on the other. The conflicting critical positions, despite their growing importance, have not received a consistent analysis in the critical discourse. The implications of this controversy for the future of American Indian studies and for the ways in which American Indian literature may be studied and taught have not been examined in depth. Particularly, there is little recognition of the validity of tribal-centred contributions to the field. The research seeks to address such gaps in the current scholarship: it develops a synoptic discussion of the opposing critical positions, assesses their strengths and drawbacks, and proposes a possible resolution of the controversy. The thesis argues that crosscultural scholarship (in conjunction with postcolonial and postmodern theory) has contributed importantly to the understanding of discursive hybridity as a vital aspect of American Indian existence, writing and anticolonial resistance. Yet, cross-cultural criticism has sidelined questions regarding tribal sovereignty discourse and tribal centred identity politics. Tribal-centred scholarship is making an important, and still ignored and misunderstood contribution to American Indian studies because it assists the understanding of these two important categories in American Indian experience and decolonisation. Assessing contributions and omissions of either critical position, the research posits that the current critical split could and should be negotiated to enable a more accurate and comprehensive reading of the political discourses that shape American Indian experience, anticolonial struggles and writing. The research illustrates the controversy and its potential mediation through a re-interpretation of two "representative" American Indian novels: Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Louise Erdrich's Tracks. Part One of the research - chapters one, two and three - analyses the debate, while Part Two - chapters four and five - re-reads Ceremony and Tracks.

This thesis analyses the responses of Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair to American society in the early modern era through their treatment of the immigrant, the city, the business tycoon, women, and the labour problem. The role of Dreiser and Sinclair as critics of American society has often been dealt with and highly praised. Although the thesis also discusses this particular aspect, its main purpose lies with the comparison of Dreiser's and Sinclair's ideological and literary responses to these socio-economic issues. The study starts with an account of the literary climate of the time. It shows that American literature at the close of the nineteenth century and in the early beginning of the twentieth century stems from the socio-economic and political unrest of the Gilded Age. American writers demonstrated an increasing concern with the evil consequences of the new technological development and felt it was their duty to record the prevailing conditions and express their reactions. They used the realist technique to describe things as they were and adopted naturalism to give a scientific study of their society. As a mirror of American society at the outset of the twentieth century, American fiction reflected the unrest and contradictions of this period and gave a clearer insight into the inner responses of American writers to the new order. It revealed that in spite of a general feeling of anxiety and disillusionment among American writers, individual reactions against the current events were diverse. They varied from an attitude of resignation and pessimistic speculations about America's future to an active desire to break rising capitalism and to reform American society. This analysis of Dreiser's and Sinclair's responses to some of the problems of America has been placed to a large extent in this divided socio-economic and literary climate. Thus while the comparison shows the two writers' strong indictment of American society, it also shows two distinct ideological and literary responses to its upheavals. Then the main body of the study divides into six chapters. Chapter one compares the socio-political and literary views of Dreiser and Sinclair and gives, thus, an idea about the spirit with which they treated their subject matter and the course of their literary works. This chapter also deals with the relationship between Dreiser and Sinclair in an attempt to find traces of a debate between the two writers on the socio-economic and literary situations in America. The following chapters focus on Dreiser's and Sinclair's treatment of the immigrant, the city, the business tycoon, women, and the labour problem. Each of these chapters starts with a brief historical account of the subject of study as a background to the fiction. Then it shows Dreiser's and Sinclair's respective concern with, and experience of, the problem, and moves onto the analysis of their literary treatment of it. The aim of this thesis has been to show that no matter what their artistic, ideological, and philosophical beliefs, American writers in the years of unrest which followed the large-scale industrialisation in their country, were called to assume their social responsibilities and contribute to the cause of social improvement.

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.

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This thesis explores the use and significance of technologies of representation in the work of Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) and William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), particularly in relation to the development of ideas of free and improvisatory expression in the 1950s. More specifically it focuses on the role played by the technologies of the typewriter and tape recorder in the textual production of key works of each writer and how these technologies are also thematically important in their exploration of the topics of individual creativity and freedom in relation to social and technological control. It also examines the centrality of epistolary practice in the creative process. The focus on these technologies will allow the thesis to develop from this base into a wider exploration of many of the key themes of Kerouac’s and Burroughs’ work, placing them within a context of wider debates and concerns over the power of mass media and technology among contemporary social commentators as well as writers of the Beat generation. The thesis is broadly divided into two sections, with the first half concentrating on Kerouac and the second half on Burroughs. Chapter one explores Kerouac’s writing practices in an analysis of the scroll draft of On The Road. Chapter two examines Kerouac’s representation of a variety of media including the printed word and radio in Doctor Sax. In chapter three, I look at Kerouac’s spontaneous prose method in an analysis of The Subterraneans. Chapter four concentrates specifically on Kerouac’s experimentation with the tape recorder in Visions of Cody. Chapter five focuses on framing Burroughs’ Junky and Queer in terms of cybernetics. In chapter six I present an analysis of Naked Lunch, looking at the techniques that Burroughs uses to disrupt the traditional narrative form, and in chapter seven I look at Burroughs’ cut-up method by examining his Nova trilogy: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express.

The American writer Paul Bowles lived in Morocco from 1947 until his death in 1999, apart from visits to North Africa, Europe, Ceylon, India and the United States during this period. Bowles’ expatriation and subsequent itineraries are quite well known, but this thesis explores his interest in – indeed, preoccupation with – mediations and a state of being ‘in-between’ in a selection of his texts: the translations, his autobiography and his fiction. Only a few commentators on Bowles’ work have noted a meta-fictional dimension in his texts, possibly because the facts of his life are so intriguing and even startling. Though not explicitly meta-fictional, in the manner of somewhat later writers, Bowles does not tell us directly how he understands the various in-betweens that may be identified in his work, and their relationship to the individual and social crises about which he writes. His work unravels the effects of crises as not directly redeemable but as mediated and over-determined in complex and subtle forms. There are no explicit postmodern textual strategies; rather, Bowles draws on the basic resources of fiction to locate, temporally and spatially, the in-between: plot, character, description and background are intertwined in order, at once, to give a work its unity and to reveal, sometimes quite incidentally, a supplementary quality that threatens to undermine that unity. Bowles’ experimentation with different genres and forms may be understood as part of this problematic, even as a form of textual travelling that leaves no single genre or form as a summation of his achievement. Using close, even – at times – deconstructive readings of a selection of texts across different genres, the thesis supplements the dominant approach to Paul Bowles’ relationship with Morocco, namely a life-and-work approach. It develops what might be called a postcolonial approach to Bowles, but, again, through close reading and an in situ use of theory that is appropriate to the texts in question, rather than through a heavy-handed theoretical approach. For instance, liminality as an encounter with the ambivalent process of hybridity is useful across Bowles’ work. Further, narrative ambivalence is helpful in the chapter on the translations, while Derrida’s exploration of a general versus a restricted economy informs my discussion of Let it Come Down. Bowles is, of course, vulnerable to a postcolonial critique that focuses on the exotic, and I share some of these concerns, as will be apparent in the following chapters. Chapter 2, for instance, deals with translation and argues that Bowles’ role moves between simple translator and facilitator to initiator and creator of the text in complex and often creative ways, especially in relation to Larbi Layachi and Mohamed Mrabet’s stories. In Chapter 3, the fictional treatment of the transitional stages in Bowles’ journey are analysed to show how Bowles enacts liminality as a non-unitary mode of understanding. The thesis concludes by arguing that there is always a pattern in Morocco. It suggests that Bowles is more subtle and more ambivalent than some of the simple oppositions might suggest. This subtlety is conveyed in the first part of my title, ‘Inhabiting the exotic’.

My PhD engages with a number of recent works of fiction in order to understand how American literature has commented on the emergence of a postsuburban environment – that is to say a cosmopolitan landscape in which the previous city/suburb binary is no longer evident. Whilst the term 'postsuburban' is resistant to easy categorisation, I use it as a mode of enquiry both to reassess what fiction has to tell literary criticism about the foundational concept of suburbia, as well as to assess contemporary writing free from the assumptions of an inherited suburban imaginary. It is my thesis that these postsuburban environments are seen by the writers who set their fictions there as places that are far more than white middle-class dystopias, and that it is a fallacy to attribute to them, as certain literary critics do, the negative cultural clichés associated with postwar suburban fictions. After offering revisionist readings of Sloan Wilson's The Man in the The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) and Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road (1961), I consider Richard Ford's trilogy The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995), and The Lay of the Land (2006) as a representation of a classic postwar suburb that has been overtaken by development and sprawl. I focus next on T. C. Boyle's The The Tortilla Curtain Curtain (1995), and Junot Diaz's Drown (1996), which both suggest the postsuburban landscape as a place of cross-cultural exchange and re-invention. An analysis of Douglas Coupland's Microserfs (1995) follows and proposes that the physical postsuburban spaces of innovation that exist in Silicon Valley, the novel's setting, are paralleled by the changing virtual spaces of the Internet. Lastly, I explore The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007) by Dinaw Mengestu, and Richard Price's Lush Life (2008), two novels that deal with one of the corollaries of the breakdown of the city/suburb binary and the emergence of a postsuburban environment: inner-city gentrification. An earlier version of chapter 4 was published as, Tim Foster, “‘A kingdom of a thousand princes but no kings’: The Postsuburban Network in Douglas Coupland's Microserfs,” Western American Literature 46:3 (2011).

This thesis deploys works of literature, political theory and intellectual history to reach an understanding of both the specific form and the content taken by the American political novel. This understanding is informed by an over-arching analysis of liberalism as the dominant ideology within the US political tradition and the pressure, moral and political, exerted on this ideology by successive counter-ideologies at various historical junctures. The alleged 'anti-political' basis of many post World War II theories of American literature is initially explored along with the relative absence of American literature in studies of the political novel. Works by the 'New Americanist' literary critics as well as an important recent study of American political fiction by John Whalen-Bridge are also subjected to critical scrutiny. In the central chapters, novels by Gore Vidal, Russell Banks, Lionel Trilling and Philip Roth foreground the critique of liberalism put forward by republicanism, Transcendentalism, Marxism and neo-conservatism at their respective historical moments of ascent. The aim here, primarily, is to treat novelists seriously as political thinkers; much of the analysis is, accordingly, inter-disciplinary in approach drawing from artists, philosophers and theorists such as Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Hannah Arendt, John Dewey and numerous contemporary commentators and historians as well as the novelists listed above. Melville's Moby Dick is ultimately invoked as a formal template for the American political novel with a theory of 'republican' fiction then being presented that is compared and contrasted with the 'democratic' mode Mikhail Bakhtin associated with Dostoevsky. The American political novel, finally, it is argued, is always informed by the complexities of the American political tradition itself: a form of immanent liberal critique pre-occupied with the health of the polity and guided by a 'republican' persuasion.

This thesis explores the reaction against realism in the work of three contemporary American novelists, John Barth, John Hawkes and Thomas Pynchon, with a view both to elucidating their individual literary styles and concerns, and to suggesting why these writers no longer consider realism a valid fictional mode. Chapter One defines realism as a product of a nineteenth century philosophical and scientific world-view; it traces the changes which have developed in twentieth century thinking from the work of Einstein and Freud, and suggests the different effects these have had on novelists. The chapter continues with a brief analysis of one work by each of four writers in fields other than literature, Herbert Marcuse, Norman 0. Brown, Theodore Roszak, and Alan Watts; the work of these writers can be seen to parallel the attempts of the three novelists to express in their fiction the possibility of alternative realities. Chapter Two examines the fiction of John Hawkes; it traces a development in his fiction from the overtly experimental early novels, to the apparently more straightforward later ones, exposing this apparent return to convention as an illusion, and suggesting that "reality" to John Hawkes has never been less important than in his most recent work, Travesty. The chapter locates Hawkes' central concerns as a novelist in his exploration of the unconscious and of the power of the human imagination. Chapter Three explores both the multi-referential and the playfully satiric nature of John Barth's fiction; it examines the development from The Sot-Weed Factor, which exposes the inadequacy of the realistic world-view when it is placed in a twentieth century context, to chimera, which celebrates the vitality and significance of fictions within life. Chapter Four is a discussion of the work of Thomas Pynchon, and provides the central focus of the thesis. It suggests that Pynchon's real achievement lies in his uncompromising rejection of the concept of a single, definable reality, of linear approaches to experience, of the inevitability of cause and effect, in other words, the underlying structures of realism, because he has created in their place a more complete alternative that recognizes the validity of multiple versions of reality. The conclusion puts forward the view that these writers share a loathing for the prescriptiveness of reality, and that their fiction becomes an act of rebellion against all the limitations imposed upon the human imagination and its freedom.

In this thesis I investigate the relationship between contemporary author Cormac McCarthy and his editors: Albert Erskine at Random House and Gary Fisketjon and Dan Frank at Alfred A Knopf. In investigating these relationships I attempt to give insight into the working practices of McCarthy, and by doing so examine the changing world of publishing at Random House. I also explore the implications for established critical understandings of McCarthy's work of the significant changes which were made during the re-writing and editing of McCarthy's novels. In mapping relationships between author, editor and agent I conduct a study of the changing modes and models of author-editor and author-editor-agent relationships within Random House and its subsidiary Alfred A Knopf. Taking each of McCarthy's novels in turn as a case study I construct an examination of the relationships between this tightly knit core group and the various specialist collaborators who appear at scattered but significant moments during McCarthy's literary career. It is in this web of collaboration and interdependence in concert with established understandings of the author-role and author-function that this thesis builds its understanding of McCarthy's authorship practices. In this thesis I draw intensively upon archival material held at both the University of Texas at San Marcos, where McCarthy's own papers are held following their sale to the Witliff South Western Writers Collection, and the papers of Albert Erskine, currently held at the University of Virginia as part of their Small Special Collections Archive. Between the two archives, this body of material contains personal and professional correspondence between McCarthy and his various collaborators, as well as McCarthy's handwritten notebooks in which he made copious notes from his various source books and, most significantly, the various typewritten drafts and redrafts of all of McCarthy's novels. These drafts include handwritten notes from both McCarthy himself as he altered the typescripts during the redrafting process and those of his editors, who annotated the various drafts McCarthy sent them in order to suggest changes or ask questions about various aspects of the drafts. Through an engagement with these valuable sources of unpublished primary material I attempt in this thesis to resituate the input of McCarthy's editor and other collaborators into an understanding of McCarthy's work.