This thesis is an examination and reassessment of an early work on postmodernism written by the once prominent American critic, Bernard Iddings Bell, in 1926. Bell's work, Postmodernism, and other essays, provides us with one of the earliest documented uses of the term "postmodernism" in the English language. It also anticipates many of the pronouncements of later critics regarding the development of postmodernism in politics, philosophy, and literary criticism. Despite these facts however, or perhaps because of them, contemporary critics have continued to ignore Bell's work, charging that his thesis is "anti-modern" rather than "postmodern", and otherwise irrelevant to current debates on postmodernism. This thesis will challenge that interpretation. Here it will be argued that the decision to exclude Bell's work from current debates on postmodernism is based upon Bell's religious predilections. In addition to constituting a radical break with the knowledge systems of the past, Bell argues that postmodernism will also be accompanied by a large scale religious revival. This argument runs counter to the dominant critical consensus regarding the relationship between postmodernism and religion adopted by critics from Arnold J. Toynbee in the 1950s, to Fredric Jameson in the 1990s. The first part of the thesis is dedicated to analysis of the philosophical influences and historical background to Bell's essay with the aim of comparing and contrasting Bell's ideas with those found in more recent works on postmodernism. The second part examines the possible impact of Bell's thesis on the interpretation of contemporary American literature and literary theory. Rather than focusing on a "poetics of parody", or the theoretical implications of "irony and humour", as previous critics have done, we will focus here on how contemporary writers like John Updike, Don DeLillo, and Toni Morrison, have chosen to incorporate the themes of postmodern criticism with a critique of that criticism, especially where this touches on the subject of religion. We conclude that Bell's insistence that postmodernism will be defined by a renewed interest in religion and mystical theology still has merit in the realm of contemporary cultural debates. Postmodern criticism that attempts to exclude religion from this arena does so on the basis of a modern interpretation of religious evolution and secularization, and therefore runs the risk of reiterating an older modernist critique.

This thesis looks at Edward Dorn s work from his early poems in the late 1950 s to Gunslinger, his mock epic of the American West written between 1968 and 1974. The overall background premise to the present study is that, in this period, Dorn s work develops from a form of lyric, in his early work, to the construction of a multiple and epic consciousness within the four books of Gunslinger. Some critics of Dorn see quite radical shifts within this development, which often leads to a periodizing of Dorn s work. But this thesis argues for a strong continuity that runs alongside these shifts, driven by a consistent anti-capitalism that informs Dorn s writing. Chapter 1 assesses several of Dorn s early poems and finds within the construction of his poetic subject, a tendency to undo and undermine the traditional lyric voice of interiority. Comparisons are made with Frost and Thoreau, and Olson is introduced as Dorn s first and foremost major influence. The poet s dealing with otherness is considered, as are the influence of Whitman and Blake among others, with the aim of placing Dorn in a literary sense, and showing how his poetry continues and subverts various traditions and conventions of poetry, In Chapter 2, examples of Dorn s prose works - short stories, sketches and his autobiographical novel By the Sound (1971) - are explored both in their own terms and as experiential backdrop to the poetry. This section is particularly concerned with Dorn s configuration of poverty in his work and how it is consstructed as a form of American otherness. Chapter 3 s primary concern is with Dorn s treatment of the American West in his 1964 volume Hands Up! Particularly important here is Dorn s undemining of myth, its process of privileging certain stories to the detriment of history, and the West s reliance on capitalism. The second half of this chapter continues these ideas through an assessment of 'The Land Below'. Chapter 4 critiquse Geography (1965) through the influence of Charles Olson and the cultural geographer Carl Otwin Sauer. The first half is concerned with Dorn s push for expansiveness in his poetry and his attempts to achieve, what he calls, a 'condition of the simultaneous.' The second half of the chapter however, locates in this collection, a poetics of melancholy and isolation that is more in keeping with his early work and in tension with his development toward epic. Chapter 5 assesses The North Atlantic Turbine (1967), focusing primarily on the two long poems of the volume, 'The North Atlantic Turbine' and 'Oxford.' This section looks at the further expansion in Dorn s poetics with the collection s global reach, and also considers the introduction of the experimentation with made-up voices. The final chapter on Gunslinger looks first at Dorn s treatment of the first-person pronoun as a continuation of his consistent testing of poetic subjectivity. Also explored, are 'The Cycle' and Dorn s creation of Robart as a monstrous manifestation of capiralism and finally, how the poem utilises the genre of eopc. The goal of the thesis is to explore beneath the presumptions about Dorn s development as a poet and understand how the complexities of such a development are played out within the texts themselves. Also, the aim here is to show how the movement from lyric to epic takes place in Dorn s work by very gentle degrees and is inextricably connected to his anti-capitalist politics.

Concerned with developments in contemporary innovative fiction Experimental Forms in Contemporary Fiction locates 'post- Modernist' writing largely within a North American context. William Burroughs, Ronald Sukenick, Donald Barthelme, Ishmael Reed, Robert Coover and Steve Katz are identified as the exemplary post-Modernist figures; their favoured techniques --a combination of cancellation and erasure, fragmentation and discontinuity, game and play--express an indeterminancy of meaning which places post-Modernist writing at some distance from the writing of contemporary figures like Vladimir Nabokov, John Hawkes and John Barth, who, as identifiably 'neo- Modernists', are essentially concerned with extending Modernism's restorative and paralleling features into the contemporary literary discourse. At the same time, post- Modernist fiction bears only a passing resemblence to the work of innovative contemporary British writers like B. S. Johnson, Gabriel Josipovici and J. G. Ballard, who are inclined to impose a series of disruptive forms upon mimetic substance. Uniquely post-Modernist fiction celebrates an eternity of displacement by insisting that unity, coherence and system are totalitarian concepts inimicable to the necessary free- lay of the imagination. Therefore, even as Burroughs et al express long-standing American literary concerns, post- Modernist fiction is demonstrably part of the deconstructive shift away from holistic and humanistic ideas and procedures. Post-Modernist writing, therefore, initiates a crisis within literary criticism, one which needs to be examined against the background of contemporary philosophical, cultural, and social developments.

The thesis uses Hawthorne's interest in a scene of filial ambiguity, namely Samuel Johnson's penance to argue that Hawthorne's (re-) writing is characterised by a subversion of origins (both metaphysical and cultural). Complementing this argument, the thesis also attempts to show, with reference to texts by J. Hillis Miller, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Paul de Man and Maurice Blanchot, how deconstruction can offer new and important insights into Hawthorne's writing. Having outlined other important critical approaches (New Critical and New Historical) the thesis claims that, with its heightened sensitivity to the use of tropes, deconstruction is a particularly useful critical tool when it comes to reading Hawthorne. The thesis pays particularly close attention to two theoretical texts: Miller's Hawthorne and History: Defacing It and Lyotard's `Rewriting Modernity' and attempts to extend Miller's analysis (the only deconstructive text which refers directly to Hawthorne). This involves two movements. Firstly the thesis extends Miller's analysis by showing how it is echoed in the writings of de Man, Blanchot, and Lyotard. Secondly, the thesis refers to a wider selection of writings from Hawthorne's corpus (including writings from Twice-told Tales, Mosses From An Old Manse, The Snow-Image, `Alice Doane's Appeal', The Scarlet Letter, The Marble Faun, Our Old Home, the final `unfinished' manuscripts and diary and notebook entries). Using insights from these texts the thesis argues that Hawthorne rejects the idea that history involves the storing up of facts for future retrieval (a project which is aligned with memorialising). Hawthorne, it is argued, subverts this sense of memorialising by repeatedly drawing attention to an instability that contaminates each and every historical happening.

The study directly explores the three aspects of deviance that contemporary American crime fiction manipulates: linguistic, social, and generic. I conduct case studies into crime series by James Patterson, Michael Connelly and Patricia Cornwell and investigate the way in which the novelists correspondingly challenge linguistic norms, the boundaries of acceptable social behaviour, and the relevant generic conventions. The study particularly explores the nature of the figurative language employed to portray the criminal mind in Patterson, and additionally examines the moral justification of crimes from all three series using the notion of mind style. I also challenge the nature of abnormality as featured in the Connelly series, and argue that crime fiction can be seen as carnival. I name THE MONSTER, THE VAMPIRE, and THE SPOILT CHILD as contemporary criminal archetypes that feature in the genre, and additionally deal with the implications that such a classification bears for the reading of it. In an attempt to re- define the genre, I draw on family resemblance theory, the prototype approach to sense, and defamiliarisation. I argue that novelists such as Paul Auster and Philip Kerr dismember the conventions of crime fiction and defamiliarise the genre. Finally, I hold that the extent to which sub-genres such as Cornwell's forensic series evolve into new genres is a matter of reception. Deviance proves to be a term that means different things for different disciplines, and is difficult to define in the context of anyone. The language used to portray the criminal mind is seen as deviant due to the labelling of criminals as 'socially deviant'. The detectives' social abnormalities are tolerated due to these characters' labelling as ‘socially normal’. Finally, generic deviance goes hand in hand with both other forms of deviance, since character behaviour and mind styles form part of generic conventions. Key words: crime/detective fiction, carnival, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, deviance/deviation, stylistics, genre, defamiliarisation, James Patterson, Patricia Cornwell, Michael Connelly

This thesis examines the trope of 'dislocation' within the later novels of Toni Morrison, identifying it as central to her representation ot African American history and experience. Organising my project around the theme and figure of dislocation allows me to bring together diverse considerations such as those of the geographical, communal, familial, cultural, corporeal and narrative displacements that preoccupy Morrison's fiction. Developing a line of enquiry neglected within the field of scholarship addressing Morrison's work, most importantly my thesis finds this term useful for negotiating the author's engagement with the diaspora engendered by racial slavery. In particular, it explores her evocation of the black diaspora as a configuration encompassing sites of remembering, affirmation and potentiality as well as processes of displacement, disruption, deracination and loss. My research is informed by a broad range of critical resources but especially Edouard Glissant's and Paul Gilroy's theories of diasporic interaction. Tracing symbolic spatial trajectories and enabling and disabling relationships to the past, I investigate Morrison's imaginary in terms of a black Atlantic of roots and routes, patterns of traversal, connection and exchange. Rejecting a narrowly defined notion of African American Studies, this thesis seeks to extend the ways in which Morrison's novels are approached, locating in them a truly diasporic vision.

The American poet Sarah Piatt (1836-1919) addresses crucial dilemmas of modem identity, in particular the traumatic effects of war, the complexities of racial relationships and the unsettling dynamics of urban life. Although a respected poet in her day, Piatt's work disappeared after her death from the canon of American literature, and it is only in the last five years that scholars have begun to realise the importance of her poetry and to assess its depth and scope. This thesis contributes to the process of assessing the significance of Piatt's work, and contextualises her in relation to a number of other nineteenth-century American writers, including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Chestnut and Frederick Douglass. I focus on the rift between Piatt's Southern plantation childhood and her married life in the industrial North, and upon how the Civil War created irreconcilable conflicts and divided loyalties in her life, which are played out in her writing. I emphasise the Civil War as a moment of personal and cultural trauma, which inaugurates what I term Piatfs 'politics of mourning'. I explore her politics of mourning in relation to psychoanalytic theory. While Freud sought to rid mourning of its ambivalence and interminability, and to displace these onto melancholia, Piatt's writing blurs the boundary between them. Instead of dispensing with mourning too quickly, too easily, Piatt recognises that one cannot avoid being haunted by the past and by the dead. She engages in a dialogue with the past and explores how the desire of the dead continues to be played out by the living. In contrast to Northern writers like Phelps, Stowe and Whitman, who seek to heal the nation by appealing to the idea of sacrifice, and the pastoral, in order to console the bereaved and envisage a redeemed body politic, Piatt turns away from consolation. Instead, she takes mourning in a direction that leads towards an exploration of the uncanny, the ghost-like and the hallucinatory. She explores the stifling effects of mourning in the South, and the way in which the North buried the unpleasant realities of the war, in the process of memorialising it. Piatt remained deeply emotionally invested in the South, yet she was also very critical of the Confederate Cause, and in her work she repeatedly interrogates her own investment in an idealised version of the antebellum South. I examine the ways in which Piatt scrutinises Southern discourses of race and slavery. I focus in particular on how she seeks to articulate a language of mourning for the South while also repeatedly exposing, and destabilising Southern fictions of mastery.

Two philosophical positions seem evident in post-war American fiction: one realist, one anti-realist. Using the terms 'revelation' and 'apocalypse' to reflect the former, and 'entropy' the latter, this thesis proposes that distinctions between the two can be made by analysis of a text's treatment of the nexus between laughter and madness. After an Overview that identifies and defines key terms, the Introduction considers various theoretical treatments of laughter from which its function can be ascertained as being both to reinforce stability within social groups and to explore new alternatives to existing modes of thought. Madness being defined as an inability to balance the opposing forces of system and anti-system, laughter is therefore vital to maintain sanity. The Fool emerges as a crucial figure in this process. Chapter One explores, with reference to Heller's Catch-22, Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Kerouac's On The Road, the Laughter of Revelation: a laughing relationship between a Protagonist who is trapped within the system of an Institution and a Fool who communicates to the Protagonist (through laughter) a means of escape. Chapter Two then discusses, with reference to Blatty's The Exorcist, King's It, Morrison's Sula, and Nabokov's Lolita, the Laughter of Apocalypse: a laughing relationship in which the Fool's laughter (as mockery) is potentially destructive of both the Protagonist's sanity and the stability of the Institution. Chapter Three explores, with reference to Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-5, Ellis's American Psycho, and Heller's Closing Time, the Laughter of Entropy: the failure of the laughing relationship that obtains when the dialectic between Institution (as system) and Fool (as anti-system) collapses. The concluding remarks reflect the metafictional implications of the foregoing analyses. It is suggested that, with the collapse of this dialectic (expressed by the Laughter of Entropy), the traditional relationship between Author and Reader becomes problematic.

This thesis examines a significant but little-studied feature of Toni Morrison's work: her ambivalent engagement with classical tradition. Analysing all eight novels. it argues that her allusiveness to the cultural practices of Ancient Greece and Rome is fundamental to her political project. Illuminating hegemonic America's consistent recourse to the classical world in the construction of its identity, I expand on prior scholarship by reading Morrison's own revisionary classicism as a subversion of dominant US culture. My three-part study examines the way her deployment of Graeco-Roman tradition destabilizes mythologies of the American Dream, prevailing narratives of America's history, and national ideologies of purity. Part I shows that Morrison enlists tragic conventions to problematize the Dream's central tenets of upward mobility, progress and freedom. It argues that while her engagement with Greek choric models effects her refutation of individualism, it is her later novels' rejection of a wholly catastrophic vision that enables her to avoid reinscribing the Dream. Part II demonstrates that it is through her classical allusiveness that Morrison rewrites American history. Her multiply-resonant echoes of the epic, pastoral and tragic traditions that have consistently informed the dominant culture's justifications for and representations of its actions enable her reconfiguration of colonization, of the foundation of the new nation, of slavery and its aftermath and of the Civil Rights Movement. Part III illuminates how the author uses the discourse of pollution or miasma to challenge Enlightenment-derived valorizations of racial purity and to expose the practices of scapegoating and revenge as flawed means to moral purity. Her interest in the hegemonic fabrication of classical tradition as itself a pure and purifying force is matched by her insistence on that tradition's African elements, and thus on its potent impurity. Her own radical classicism, therefore, is central to the transformation of America that her novels envision.

The international success of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, and the release of the film Interview with the Vampire (based on her novel of the same name) has fueled an explosion of interest in the vampire genre, resulting in further incarnations of the vampire story in fiction and film. This study attempts to analyse Rice's development of the vampire narrative in relation to a body of novels and short stories which comprise a recognizable genre. The first chapter has three sections: an Introduction comprising a comparison between the Chronicles and Bram Stoker's Dracula,- a study of the Chronicles as a metaphor for homoeroticism and AIDS; and a study of the psychoanalytic aspects of vampirism linked with the concept of Rice's vampire as a Sadean hero. The second chapter has two sections: an analysis of Rice's representations of femininiiy; and a study of the myths of womanhood employed in the novels, together with the origins of these myths. The third chapter has two sections: a focus on the complex self-conscious and moral life of Rice's vampires in relation to contemporary consciousness and subjectivity; and a comparison of Rice's treatment of genre, historical romance and erotica with the vampire narratives of her contemporaries. The fourth and concluding chapter is a summary of Rice's treatment of genre, gender and religion in relation to evolving feminist, cultural and psychoanalytic debates, including reference to material from her other novels. In her self-conscious appropriation of the vampire tradition, Rice introduces a wider scope to the formulaic elements of the gothic genre, interweaving different genres with the gothic horror story. Her innovative approach to the vampire novel, with its complexity of intermingling issues, leaves many unanswered questions. It is the unresolved nature of the contradictions and paradoxes intrinsic to Rice's work that disturb and generate further debate.