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This thesis examines the representation of sexuality and identity in six novels written by Edmund White. Issues specifically related to gay male sexuality and homosexual/gay identity politics are discussed in Chapter One. These issues are developed in Chapter Two's exploration of sexuality, coming out, outing, and narrative. However, the first two chapters also facilitate the introduction and critical expansion of key contextual and theoretical concerns. On the one hand, White's output is shaped and informed by the cultural, historical and political circumstances which have conditioned how gay male sexuality has been discursively figured and represented over the last forty years. On the other hand, his work has been inflected by theorisations of sexuality which have called into question the very specificity of a homosexual and/or gay identity. Drawing principally on theorisations of sexuality and identity in the work of ludith Butler, Lee Edelman, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the first two chapters propose that the relations between sexuality and identity are unstable and discontinuous. Chapter Three's examination of narrative strategies contends that White's Forgetting /;;lena (1973), and Nocturnes for the King (if Naples (1978), excite readings of same-sex desire which are unable to specify an essential or natural difference between heterosexual and homosexual identities. Alert, nevertheless, to the political contexts which compel all sexual identity claims, Chapter Four observes how White's deployment of fantasy enables his novel Caracole (1985) to consider why identities and communities are labelled gay or straight in the first instance. Critical essays on White's work rightly note his novels' apparent preoccupation with gay male self-representation. However, discussing A Boy's Own Story (1982), and The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988), Chapter Five aims to expose the limitations of homosexual and gender definition. Indeed, if the relations between sex, gender and identity are neither clear nor continuous, then perhaps White's novels bring out such gender trouble. The examination of gay sex, sexuality and AIDS in Ihe Farewell Symphony (1997) observes why acts of gay self-nomination are politically necessary in homophobic cultures. However, this final chapter discusses why White's work appears reluctant to determine the meaning of sexuality and identity in any resolute way. Such queer irresolution, this thesis contends, enables the fiction to critique the past. Nevertheless, simply to say farewell to this past is to ignore the conditions of a future.

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This thesis takes as its focus several works in the late period of Philip Roth’s writing and examines the way in which these particular texts address issues of American national experience since the Depression. In particular, this study looks at Roth’s assessment of a distinctly modern liberal vision that came to prominence during the 1930s and was to dominate American political and cultural life until the late 1960s. In thus covering the wider historical sweep of these novels, the research will draw attention to the way in which such broader matters of American cultural and political life intersect with more local issues of Jewish-American subjectivity and literary style that have been explored recurrently throughout Roth’s greater body of fiction. This study thus aims to show how the more recent ‘historical turn’ in Roth’s novelistic focus is in fact consistent with certain pivotal themes that have helped to define his overall development as a writer.

Many American novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries discuss prostitution. Some works like Reginald Wright Kauffman's The House of Bondage, (1910) exaggerate the threat of "white slavery," but others like David Graham Phillips's Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917) more honestly depict the harsh conditions which caused many women to prostitute themselves for survival. Contemporary critical interpretations of novels addressed in this dissertation began before major shifts in women's roles in the workplace, before trends towards family planning, before women could respectably live on their own, and especially before women won the right to vote. Yet, a century of progress later, this vestigal criticism still influences our study of these texts.Relying on primary source materials such as prostitute autobiographies and vice commission reports, I compare fictional representations of prostitution to historical data, focusing on the prostitute's voice and her position in society. I examine actual prostitutes' life stories to dispel the misconception that prostitution was always a lower-class business. My chapters are ordered in regards to the prominence of the prostitute characters' voices: in Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) the heroine seldom speaks for herself; in two Socialist novels--Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) and Estelle Baker's The Rose Door (1911)--prostitutes debate low wages, political corruption, and organized vice; and in Phillips's Susan Lenox, the title character is almost always allowed to speak for herself, and readers can see what she is thinking as well as doing. As my chapters progress, I demonstrate how the fictions become more like the prostitutes' own autobiographies, with self-reliant women telling their stories without shame or remorse. My conclusion, "Revamping `Fallen Women' Pedagogy for Teaching American Literature," suggests how social history and textual scholarship of specific "fallen women" novels should affect our teaching of these texts. / Department of English

While writing in English by Hispanas has been in publication for decades, it is only in the last few years that the writing and its attendant criticism have attracted mainstream attention in the United States. The purpose of this work is to provide an introduction to different facets of Hispana writing. The first section of the work, an essay titled, "Emerging Criticism and Themes in Hispana Literature," provides an up-dated overview of issues within Hispana literary criticism and major themes within the writing itself. The latter part of that essay uses as its framework Tey Diana Rebolledo's 1985 essay, "The Maturing of Chicana Poetry: the Quiet Revolution of the 1980's." The second section of the work consists of four original short stories which reflect some of the general characteristics of Hispana writing. Together, the two parts are intended to provide Canadian scholars with a succinct introduction to this growing field, and thus aid and encourage them to further explore it on their own.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1996. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 344-345). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1996. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 344-345). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisor: Salgado, César. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (P.H.D.)--University of Virginia, 1921. / Bibliography: leaves 136-152.