Having read much of Nietzsche's published work, particularly The Birth of Tragedy, The Joyful Wisdom and Thus Spake Zarathustra, Eugene O'Neill absorbed many of his ideas and attempted to transfer the philosophical concepts into dramatic form. He copied out many passages from Nietzsche's work (see Appendix) and used them directly or adapted than in order to relate Nietzsche's ideas to the newly developing theories of theatre and dramatic presentation in the United States of America and to the emerging character of twentieth century America as O'Neill observed it. O'Neill explored such controversial concepts as F temal Recurrence (Chapter II), Socialism (Chapter III), the evolution of the Superman (Chapter IV), the Dionysian influence (Chapter V), Nietzsche's pronouncements on the death of God and the re-valuation of Christianity (Chapters VI and VII) and Nietzschean pronouncements on life and death (Chapters VIII and IX). He created plays which are a dramatic analysis and interpretation of the nature of man and the world he inhabits, and throughout O'Neill's playwriting career the influence of Nietzsche is evident. From the early one-act sea-plays and the elaborate and innovative plays of the '20s and '30s where Nietzsche's influence is most clearly observed, to the more dramatically realistic final plays, O'Neill adapts and integrates Nietzsche's philosophy. In many of his most original and complex dramatic works he produced plays which are both a reflection of Nietzsche and a vehicle for his own philosophical and theatrical theories.

This thesis examines how southern novelists at mid-century used the fictional small town to critique racial segregation. Depictions of segregated towns across a selection of representative fictions share a typology of people and institutions – what I term offices – that combine to make these towns seem integral and functioning. In the segregated southern town, the community is contaminated by segregation and the paradoxes it engenders are revealed through the typology I uncover and explore in this thesis. The racial landscape of Maxwell, Georgia in Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit (1944) exposes how points of intersection in the town’s supposedly rigid racial geography highlight the weakness of segregated structural integrity. In The Hawk and the Sun (1955) Byron Herbert Reece examines the relationships of a farmer and a teacher with other offices, representatives of the bank and the church, in the Appalachian town of Tilden, Georgia. Carson McCullers set each of her novels in the town of Milan, Georgia but this consistency only becomes clear in Clock Without Hands (1961), in which she focuses on the roles a judge and a pharmacist play in defining the town’s collective identity. The courthouse square in William Faulkner’s Jefferson, Mississippi represents the identity of the town and, in The Reivers (1962), a narrator attempts to rewrite the history of the town by insinuating himself into Faulkner’s existing typology. In A Different Drummer (1962) William Melvin Kelley positions his imagined town of Sutton, in an unnamed southern state, at a moment of historic change and explores this change from the vantage point of the archetypal porch of a general store. This thesis contributes to a developing literary history of racial segregation by conducting detailed close textual analysis to argue that the ostensibly benign setting of the small town exposed the fallacies upon which the segregated South operated.

This thesis explores the relationship between the representation of contagion and those it affects offered by contemporary American speculative fiction and the ways in which this representative model has and continues to inform our understanding of real and actual pandemics. Over the past decade, the success of texts centred on such figures as the vampire, the werewolf and the zombie has triggered a return of contagion to the forefront of the American popular fictional imagination. Though this renewed fascination coincides with the emergence of new global biological threats, it also draws part of its power from a broader cultural anxiety regarding the structures of subjectivity, the relation between subject and State as well as the subject’s role within the collective deployed by our contemporary discourse of health. While critical studies on contagion have been predominantly concerned with real diseases and their narrativisation, this thesis focuses on five fictional representations—Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and its adaptations, the American series Being Human, Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark and Charles Burns’s Black Hole—in order to explore the ways in which these texts engage with the modern medical discourse and the wider conceptualisation of subjectivity promoted by Western philosophy. By emptying the referential dimension of the diseases they mobilise, these texts provide a unique opportunity to analyse the underlying mechanisms of contagion as a cultural construction and to expose the set of assumptions (moral, political, social, etc.) upon which its production itself relies. Exposing the ways in which our cultural perception of contagion has been shaped by the limitations inherent to the traditional epistemic model dominating Western society, this thesis not only reveal the violence inherent in the structures of subjectivity surrounding the individual, it also highlights, by deconstructing the dominant model, new possible lines of flight for the contagious subject outside the normative structures of our current public health, medical, social and political discourses.

Halfway Houses examines popular American Gothic fiction through a critical focus on what I call the ‘haunted house motif’. This motif, I argue, creates a distinctive narrative space, characterised by the key quality of liminality, in which historical events and processes impact upon the present. Haunted house stories provide imaginative opportunities to keep the past alive while highlighting the complexities of the culture in which they are written. My chosen authors, H. P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson and Stephen King, use the haunted house motif to engage with political and ideological perspectives important to an understanding of American history and culture. Analysing their fiction, I argue that in “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1933) Lovecraft uses haunting to address concerns about industrialisation, urbanisation and modernisation in the early part of the twentieth century, endorsing both progressive and conservative ideologies. Similarly, Matheson’s haunting highlights issues of 1950s suburbanisation in A Stir of Echoes (1958) and changing social mores about the American family during the 1970s and 1980s in Earthbound (1982; 1989), critiquing conformist culture whilst stopping short of overturning it. Lastly, as a product of the counterculture, King explores new kinds of haunted spaces relevant to the American experience from the 1970s onwards. In The Shining (1977) he draws on haunting to problematise inequalities of masculinity, class and capitalism, and in Christine (1983), at a time of re- emerging conservative politics, he critiques Reaganite nostalgia for the supposed ‘golden age’ of the 1950s. At the close of the twentieth century, haunting in Bag of Bones (1998) reappraises American guilt about race and the legacy of slavery. Overall, my thesis shows that the haunted house motif adapts to the ever-changing conditions of American modernity and that the liminality of haunting addresses the concomitant social unease that such changes bring.

This thesis examines the repeated appearance of liminal white voices in antebellum American fiction. It identifies a number of white characters who inhabit the boundary between life and death and produce inexplicable voices: talking corpses, ghosts, ventriloquists, spiritualist mediums and non-human bodies. It argues that Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Robert Montgomery Bird, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville continually associate dead, dying and supernatural white figures with African Americans and Native Americans to amplify these white characters own marginal positions within their communities. While existing criticism classifies the non-white and female body as a site of otherness, this thesis identifies marginality within the white male citizen himself. The six chapters examine how authors articulate liminal whiteness in different vocal contexts: ventriloquism in Brown, storytelling in Irving, blackface minstrelsy in Bird, medical discourse in Poe, enchanting speech in Hawthorne, and wordlessness in Melville. Across these texts, the liminal figure’s voice disturbs essentialist racial ideologies and challenges prescriptions of citizenship in the antebellum period. Inexplicable voices act as powerful articulations of liminal whiteness that question, contest or negate antebellum ideals of the autonomous, rational, industrious, social and respectable white citizen. This thesis demonstrates that antebellum authors employ liminal white voices across the border of life and death to both explore and attempt to contain threats and anxieties of fragile or negated white citizenship. In doing so, this thesis contributes to a growing body of scholarship concerned with the cultural construction of whiteness and citizenship in the antebellum period.

This thesis explores the emotional experience of reading horror fiction from a cognitive-poetic perspective. The approach adopted in this thesis combines thorough consideration of Text World Theory, attention and resonance, emotion studies, and online reader responses to provide a detailed analysis of the texture of the horror-reading experience. Three classic contemporary horror novels are the analytical focus of this investigation: Ira Levin’s (1967) Rosemary’s Baby, Stephen King’s (1986) IT, and William Peter Blatty’s (1971) The Exorcist. These popular novels were chosen for their ability to evoke anxiety, fear, and disgust in readers, respectively. The primary intention of this thesis is to be an original contribution to the fields of stylistics, cognitive poetics, and the literary critical understanding of horror fiction. This thesis argues for a multifaceted approach to understanding the emotional experience of horror fiction, which is considered in terms of movement. As the conceptual metaphor EMOTION IS MOVEMENT recurs as an experiential effect of the horror-reading process throughout the reader-response data in this thesis, the frameworks applied aim to give insight to the readerly experience of conceptual movement. This thesis proposes that negation and other negatively oriented lexis establish the macabre ambience of the text-world space and that manipulation of movement through world-switching contributes to negative emotions evoked through the experience of these horror text-worlds.

The representation of mental health disorders and syndromes has increased in contemporary literature, film and television. Characters with disorders and syndromes such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, autism and Asperger’s syndrome, Tourette’s syndrome, and dissociative identity disorder are common, leading to an increased critical engagement with these fictional texts. This thesis examines the representation of dissociative identity disorder (DID) in contemporary American fiction since 1994, concentrating on a small selection of texts: the novels Set This House in Order (2003) and Fight Club (1996), and the television shows Dollhouse (2009-2010) and United States of Tara (2009-2011). By engaging in turn with trauma theory, illness narratives and genre theory, and queer theory, this thesis argues that the texts metaphorically employ dissociative identity disorder as a means of resisting normativity, whether this is the systems of social normativity characters find themselves facing within the texts, or generic or narrative norms. In so doing, the texts position DID as a utopian condition: one that enables its sufferers to resist systems of normativity they encounter and champion non-normative identities. There is a tension evident here between metaphorical uses of disease within fiction and the real-world experiences of those who suffer from these disorders. By examining all the ways in which the texts resist norms and their utopian impulses, this thesis examines the extent to which these texts suggest DID can or should be universalised as a disorder of non-normativity.

abstract: This dissertation investigates the life and career of singer Celia Cruz and the cultural legacy she has left the Hispanic culture in the United States and the world. It explores the musical journey of the Queen of Salsa and analyzes the different genres and themes that she developed in her performances during the years of her dedication to the public professional career. Among the various topics, this work discusses the African influence on the music of Celia Cruz because she made her first step to fame with the music and lyrics from African religious traditions. Additionally, this project investigates the theme of nostalgia and how Celia Cruz, with her music, helped to perpetuate the nostalgic feelings of Cuban exiles. It surveys the repertoire of songs with nostalgic themes that helps to perpetuate in the memory of the Cuban diaspora, a Cuba that no longer exists and is reflected only in their imagination. This work also examines feminist and queer issues in the life of Celia Cruz, in the lyrics of her songs and in many of her performances. Finally, it explores various stages in Celia Cruz's career that stand out: first, her beginnings in Cuba and Latin America where she soon became known as the Guarachera of Cuba; then, the contribution of Celia Cruz to the salsa music since its appearance in New York, its development in the United States, and its rapid international spread. Similarly, this project shows that Celia Cruz, with her performances worldwide, gained popularity and became the Queen of Salsa. She excelled on indoor and outdoor stages, on the small and big screen, and took her musical talent around the world. Because of her great artistic work, she was recognized for her achievements multiple times and won awards in the United States, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia, finally winning the title of Global Salsa Icon. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Spanish 2014

abstract: Addressing the pending problem of understanding and interpreting the baroque discourse and multiple symbols in the third part, Realización, of the trilogy Crisol (1984) by Justo S. Alarcón, this study compares the vision of mestizaje, or miscegenation, in the said trilogy part and La Raza Cósmica (1925) by José Vasconcelos. To do this, we examine existing research on the two authors and we particularized the conception of mestizo, taking into account its expression in Mexico and the United States (U.S.). To analyze the text by Alarcón, our critical framework is based on fables and their didactic function as represented by the parables in the Bible and their moral functions as personified in the fables by Aesop and other writers. Although both authors predict the birth of a new race, we found that Vasconcelos, in a Utopian way, claims it would rise in Mexico. This new race, according to Vasconcelos, will be the product of hybridization between four races: white, yellow, red or Native American, and black. Justo S. Alarcón, on the other hand, suggests in Realización that such hybridization will take place in the United States, specifically the Southwest. Using analogies, allegories, and parables, the narrator presents several Aesopian characters that engage in massive and repeated migrations that ultimately produce a new crisol or melting pot. Such new hybridization takes place in the U.S. This study draws attention to the origin of the Chicano and the issue of identity. Future work could focus on both issues / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Spanish 2012

abstract: ABSTRACT This thesis aims to demonstrate the validity of political violence in contemporary Chicano and Peruvian American narratives as a reflection of the sociopolitical situation of immigrants and their descendants in the United States (U.S.). The thesis explores the various ways in which contemporary Chicano and Peruvian American narratives present the political violence in the U.S. towards Mexican and Peruvian immigrants and Chicanos and Peruvian Americans examining the intersections that exist between the resistance and violence discourses and its sociopolitical consequences. Although the topic of political violence has been previously studied in U.S. and Latin American narratives throughout its history, its analysis has been insufficiently explored as far as contemporary narratives of the XXI century are concerned. With this in mind, two texts will be used to study this discourse of violence in Chicano and Peruvian American literature: Alejandro Morales' "Pequeña nación" (2005) and Daniel Alarcón's "Guerra en la penumbra" (2005). The thesis examines the immigrant as a center of discourse exploring the conflict between them and the institutions or groups in power that instigate this political violence. The first chapter covers the socio historical background regarding Mexican and Peruvian migration flows to the United States in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The second chapter introduces "The Triangle of Violence" proposed by Norwegian mathematician and sociologist Johan Galtung as the basis for the theoretical framework and approach of this analysis. Chapter three analyzes the Chicano short story "Pequeña nación" by Alejandro Morales. The analysis of the Peruvian American short story "Guerra en la penumbra" by Daniel Alarcón follows in chapter four. The conclusion emphasizes the problem of political violence experienced by immigrants in the U.S. in contemporary Chicano and Peruvian American narratives and possible solutions contained therein, protesting a problem that can hinder immigration policy reforms and the defense of human rights. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Spanish 2013