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.

This thesis will consider the incest theme in twentieth century American literature. Antecedents will be considered, especially the rich traditions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the main focus will be on three writers central to the American canon: F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Vladimir Nabokov. All three of these writers have produced texts in which their claim to literary fame and their appropriation of the incest theme are inextricable: namely, Fitzgerald's Tender is the Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, and Nabokov's Lolita. I will conclude with a chapter which examines how this debt to literary tradition, this canonical pride of place of the incest theme, has been transformed in its trajectory through the latter half of the twentieth century. In the thesis, I will examine the utilisation of these 'variations on a theme' as a form of rhetoric manifesting itself in a wide variety of uses and readings. Pertinent aspects would include: symbolic appropriations with pretensions to universality; transgressive modulations manipulating reader affectivity; referential modes attempting the delineation of a particular - or their collective combination. All of these uses of the incest theme will be seen to participate in the propagation of various codes of normative behaviour, ethics, critiques, or political polemics. The incest theme will be tracked both as a form of didacticism and as a form of literary pleasure. The representation of incest will be observed in its combination with other important literary themes: courtly love, childhood, and their inversions. It will be linked to an aesthetics of transgression and to the representation of child sexual abuse. Its combination with the latter will also provide the grounds for a comparison of child sexual abuse, 'actually existing incest', and the many other uses of the incest theme. The contexts of these uses will also be considered. If I were to attempt to reduce this thesis to a simple proposition, I would suggest that the importance of the incest theme has been due to its rhetorical versatility, its role as a signifier of the limit (of the family, of society, of civilisation, of the representable), and of its ready utilisation for literary shock, the vicarious enjoyment of the second-hand, or, in what amounts to the same thing, literary pleasure. These factors delineate the importance of the incest theme to literature in general, and to American literature in particular. The literary utilisation of the incest theme suggests that the most efficient way to say anything effective is still to make use of that which hides behind the barrier of the unsayable. After giving a summary of the chapters of the thesis, the rest of the introduction will introduce the issues that form the background to an informed evaluation of the place of the incest theme in modern American literature. This background features three inter-related areas; the controversies around the incest taboo, the emergence of child sexual abuse, and the concept and representation of childhood. I will suggest that the issue of child sexual abuse is key to any referential,analogical, or comparative approach to the reading of the incest theme in literature (most especially in those examples which include an adult/child or adult/infant age differential). I shall begin with some definitions of incest, and its relation (and non-relation) with child sexual abuse. 'Incest’ can, of course, mean very different things in literature, in philosophical speculation, in the social sciences, or in the discourses of welfare or feminism. This difference of discourse, a difference of 'register' or genre', suggests that 'translations' between discourses need to be observed carefully. A comment on the American context will be relevant to the discussion of recent American literature. These issues are inextricable from the representations and conceptualisation of childhood that our period has inherited from the past, particularly the traditions and writing of the previous two centuries. I will attempt a brief summary of the concept of childhood, including its transformations up to the seventeenth century, its rationalisation in the legal and medical discourses of the eighteenth century, and its recent evolution. A comment will then follow on the influence of this inheritance upon the emergence of a recognisable child theme in nineteenth century literature (the origin and role of social and literary clichés). As recent theories of incest, sexuality, power, and representation play an inseparable part in any understanding of these issues, I shall complete the introduction with a 'rough' model of the workings of incest and its relationship with representation based upon these recent developments.

More has been written about the life of Hunter S Thompson than about the writing which brought him fame, although the peculiar nature of his first-person literary journalism makes his life and his work impossible to separate. Although the legend of the outlaw journalist is an indispensible feature, the focus of this textually-oriented study is Thompson’s method, conventionally called ‘Gonzo journalism’, and how it operates. Drawing on theories of subjectivity and authorship informed by the work of Derrida, Foucault, Barthes and John Mowitt, I attempt to analyse the Gonzo Text, examining the place of various elements of ‘Gonzo’ style and content. Looking at key themes in Thompson’s oeuvre - principally the problematics around representing drug experiences and the subjective experience of edgework, the nature of myths of objective and professional journalism in the context of political reportage, the interrogation of the place of sports in American culture and ideology, and, ultimately, Thompson’s engagement with ‘the death of the American Dream’ – I examine the ways in which the Gonzo Text is constructed. The Text of Gonzo is placed in social, political and historical contexts in terms of both wider American history of the period, and the traditions of American journalism. Gonzo works can be read in terms of Thompson’s renegotiation of the boundaries of reportable experience, of journalism, and even of personal safety and legal liability, with the unusual place of the voice of the author within Gonzo facilitating a unique type of hybrid Text. Blending fact and fiction into undecidability allows the Text to operate in some senses as what Derrida termed a ‘pharmakon’ – a site and agent of the instabilities of categories which cannot hold it. Gonzo journalism destabilises conventional ideas of literary journalism, and of journalism itself, in its peculiarly unclassifiable nature.

This thesis analyzes Kingsolver's consistent critique of mainstream United States culture by focusing on her use of characters of various races and other cultures within her seven novels. Each chapter examines the manner in which her texts critique an aspect of United States culture: individualism in The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams, and Pigs in Heaven; imperialism in the United States and abroad in The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna; and anthropocentrism in Prodigal Summer and Flight Behavior. By consistently foregrounding protagonists who learn to listen to others and consequently craft creative solutions to cultural, political, and scientific problems, Kingsolver's novels present themselves as transnational American literature. This thesis considers transnationalism as a critical paradigm—a recurring pattern of creative thinking linked to internationalism but not contingent on it. Reading Kingsolver's novels as transnational literature not only acknowledges the various critical perspectives within Kingsolver scholarship, suggesting a way to move past the representational hurdles critics decry, but also, more importantly, provides a unified reading of her oeuvre to date.

<p> In 1901, Alice Hegan Rice, a wealthy socialite reformer, published the novel <i>Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch</i> which dealt her experiences working with the poor. By the end of 1902 her novel had become a national phenomenon and finished the decade as one of its five bestselling books. Though the novel was fictional in nature, the book&rsquo;s heroine, Mrs. Wiggs, was based on the life of a real woman, who inhabited the one of the poorest neighborhoods in Louisville, Kentucky at the turn of the twentieth-century, a slum known as the Cabbage Patch. Shortly after the book&rsquo;s publication it became well-advertised that Mary Bass, a widowed mother of five children living in poverty in the Cabbage Patch, was the prototype for the beloved character of Mrs. Wiggs and subsequently and quite undesirably became fetishized by an overenthusiastic public. Mary Bass would end up suing Alice Hegan Rice for libel. The Bass/Rice story supplies an uncommon historical opportunity to analyze the portrayal of poverty in popular fiction in the Progressive Era United States and the classist values behind those representations.</p>

<p> Jane Austen&rsquo;s Pride and Prejudice, Christina Rossetti&rsquo;s &ldquo;Goblin Market,&rdquo; and Louisa May Alcott&rsquo;s Little Women are three works which focus on communities of women. Since women had such limited opportunities available to them in the nineteenth century, marriage was the most viable option for survival. An interesting connection found, though, among the literature written by women at the time is the way in which women thrive together in communities with each other&mdash;up until the men enter the scene. Once the men, or more commonly, one man who is also the future husband, disrupt these women-centered communities, the close bond among women is severed. These three authors envisioned a better option than marriage&mdash;a supportive sisterhood&mdash;safe, loving, and uninterrupted. How and why did women thrive together in these three fictional nineteenth-century communities? How did they communicate? In what spaces did these communities exist? In what ways did men disrupt these communities, and was it possible for women to regain a similar level of closeness with each other after the disruption of men (i.e. marriage)? This thesis looks at the various viewpoints and treatments each author brought to women&rsquo;s communities, their importance, formation, and men&rsquo;s intrusions upon them.</p>

<p> USonian identity has been defined controversially since its inception. Its representatives have largely been independent, white, wealthy, male, and heterosexual. However, the actual population of the US is more diverse and possesses much more complex identities. Some of the identifying factors of USonians derive from the US tradition of self-making. Traditional US self-made narratives, as with larger definitions of US identity, lack a full inclusivity and nationally representative characters, as scholars such as Mary Carden explain. However, rather than simply disappearing, traits of the US self-made man, as part of a larger national identity, continue to exist but in ways more suitable to the US nationality that has developed. For example, some of the newer versions of US self-makers include women, ethnic minorities, and homosexuals. </p><p> The more important elements of the changing definitions of US identity and self-making, community building and belonging, arises when more diverse representatives appear in texts ranging from Susan Sontag&rsquo;s <i> In America</i> to works like Lin-Manuel Miranda&rsquo;s <i> Hamilton.</i> This dissertation studies more communal self-making models as well as US representatives who are recognized within texts and by readers in works by authors such as Philip Roth. The modeling of these characters results in the opportunity for readers to identify with them and/or some of their contexts. Such a relationship sets the foundation for what I have termed &ldquo;fabulous ordinariness.&rdquo; This means that despite possessing some fabulous or extraordinary storylines or characteristics, there are daily events, interactions, or traits that readers can empathize with, connect with, or feel represents them. Such experiences with the characters and texts provide the space for a representative relationship to be established and articulated as such. </p><p> The redefinitions of self-making and US identity, along with the enactment of fabulous ordinariness, ask readers to consider how culture, identities, and nationalities are preserved, challenged, and protected. Scholarship addressing traditional US role-models, along with works that support and challenge those representatives and roles, examines contemporary US identities and their connection to the past. This dissertation asks questions concerning the boundaries between fiction and history, culture and its artifacts, as well as readers and their texts.</p>