This study explores the relationship between female identity formation within patriarchal society and women's literary discourse. The 'Introduction' serves to highlight Lou Andreas-Salomé's and Anaïs Nin's acute awareness of the tradional conflict between the role of artist and the role of woman. With both writers, their efforts to come to terms with their own creative powers involve tentative questions about the function of writing itself, which they both experience as a vital need. Part One of the study, therefore, addresses itself to reflecting the role of language as a basic means of socialization, which produces genderized subjects. This is related to the power of language to enable the construction of identity. Patriarchal culture produces woman as man's complementary Other. Questions of female identity and desire thus gain particular importance for the writer who strives to constitute her identity as autonomous subject. The first two chapters of Part Two focus on the problems that confront the women who, within the process of writing assume creative powers that are traditionally conceived as male prerogatives. The internalized image of woman as mother operates as a powerful impediment to creative self-assertion. An equally fundamental obstacle in the writer's quest for literary authority are the problematic links each writer establishes between a masculinized creator God, paternal authority and cultural discourse. Transcending their culturally induced duality between woman and creator Lou Andreas-Salomé and Anaïs Nin develop opposed literary strategies. Yet both resort to non-threatening female stereotypes that are able to accommodate their anxiety of authorship. Chapters III and IV revolve around the experience of writing itself in terms of a re-construction of inherited meanings and the woman's problem of creating her own meanings. Chapter V concentrates on the gaps that structure either writer's discourse and contribute to making it impossible to establish the woman as subject of desire. Chapter VI explores the ways in which internalized concepts of femininity work to limit the freedom of the imagination, reduce the field of vision and result in projecting transgressive female desires in disguised or displaced form. The 'Conclusion' stresses the inadequacy of existing controversial attitudes to both writers and highlights significant differences between the fiction of Lou Andreas-Salomé and Anaïs Nin.

This study considers the approach in recent African-American and Black British fiction toward the cultural memory of Africa. Following a brief consideration of the relationship between contemporary conceptions of African-American and Black British cultural identities, I examine the ways in which the imaginative journeys and geographies, evoked by the ideals of Africa and 'Africanness', are employed in the negotiation of historical memory, and in the endeavour to situate black identity in the context of contemporary American and British society. My discussion addresses these questions, initially, in four novels by African-American writers: Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1983), and John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire (1990). I argue that African-American writers situate a memory of an African past within an African-American present, through a form of historical memory which is sensitive not only to tradition, but also to the practice of 'possession'. This fluid form of memory, characteristic of a voodoo tradition, and also, these writers suggest, of a diversity of African-American artforms, allows knowledge of African tradition to be situated within the American present, but is broadly denied by an American trend of forgetfulness toward the past, and devalued by institutionalised racism. African-American texts present uses of language in which the linguistic and the pre-linguistic realms are felt to be continuous with one another, in response to an American language which is centrally occupied by the fraught relationship between black and white Americans. The second half of this study examines the memory of Africa in three Black British works, including Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River (1991), S.1. Martin's Incomparable World (1996), and Bernardine Evaristo's Lara (1997). I suggest here that Black British authors employ the cultural memory of Africa not as an inheritance which is connected to a known 'tradition', but as one of a diverse number of inheritances which are negotiated as part of the process of situating identity as flexible, individual, and unfinished. The memory of Africa is figured as frozen in the past, along with a range of other cultural inheritances, which are taken up and redramatised in the present as part of an attempt to recover the inherent diversity at the heart of an oppressive British fiction of linearity, and of uniform 'whiteness'. Where Britain, historically, has been silent on Britain's black presence, Black British writers simply speak into that silence. Emerging from this fruitful comparison between the two literatures is a sense of the contrasting approaches which are made by black writers toward notions of tradition and the performance of identity, in the context of two very different national histories, and as part of fundamental strategies of survival employed in contemporary social settings. These dramatisations are interrogated against continuous issues of race and racism, but also as diverse solutions for identity where national contexts bear a contrasting significance in an age which is increasingly globalised, and in which imperial power has shifted, and continues to shift, between Britain and America.

<p> Literary scholars have been examining and recreating the experiences of &ldquo;bonded&rdquo; female characters within Toni Morrison&rsquo;s novels for decades. However, the distinct experiences of these enslaved women, that are also mothers have not been astutely examined by scholars and deserves more attention. My thesis fleshes out the characterization of several of Morrison&rsquo;s bonded-mothers and identifies them as a part of a developing controlling image and theory, called the bondmother. Situating these characters within this category allows readers to trace their journeys towards freedom and personal redemption. This character tracing will occur by examining the following Toni Morrison novels: <i>Beloved</i> (1987) and <i> Paradise</i> (1997). In order to fully examine the experiences of these characters it will be necessary for me to expand the definition of bondage and mother.</p>

This thesis argues that H.D.'s creativity originates in a flight from reality. Hilda Doolittle's adoption of her initials is interpreted as a sign of the writer's rejection of any identity located in the shared reality of the historical and the quotidian. From childhood her personality presented itself to her as a duality; detaching herself from the merely visible and material world, H. D. created an intense inner life which asserted itself in the dimension of artistic realization. It is argued that paradoxically the unevenness and discontinuity that characterize H.D.'s work derive from the same roots as her artistic originality and power: in her "split dual personality" which posited reality in the disembodied self. H.D. discovered in ancient Greece a metaphor and a direction for her own inner world. However her Imagist poems are not imitative but genuinely original: H.D. invented a new reality which she projected as a world devoid of all traces of human presence. H.D.'s subsequent shift of interest towards autobiographical prose is interpreted as a response to the threatened disintegration of her identity after World War I. The formlessness and repetition of much of H.D.'s prose is thus attributed to the exacerbation of the writer’s dichotomy of being. However, in some of her prose works H.D. succeeded in transfiguring the autobiographical material through the reinvention of reality in the image of her own subjectivity. Seeking new forms for her projection of the self, H.D. turned increasingly towards the occult which she understood as the science of the invisible dimension. She conflated with the occult her discoveries of the cinema as self-projection, and psychoanalysis as an instrument of knowledge of the inner being. It is argued that these interests exacerbated the solipsism inherent in H.D.'s rejection of external reality. With the exception of the war <b>Trilogy</b>, H.D.'s work becomes locked in private meanings which render it increasingly inaccessible to the reader. It is argued that after her mental breakdown in 1946, H.D. never recovered her vitality and originality as an artist. The space that this thesis devotes to the life of H.D. does not intend to justify her work by her life, but to signify that the literary message cannot be isolated from the circumstances in which the process of creation takes place. Thus H.D.'s flight from reality is not judged from an existential point of view as a diminution of being, since it is out of her "split dual personality" that H.D. emerges as a genuinely creative and original artist.

<p> This project examines Beat poet Elise Cowen&rsquo;s creative implementation and development of the cockroach image from culturally maligned pest to its symbolic representation of the marginalized Beat woman and artist. Set primarily against the backdrop of the cyclical gendered kitchen, the cockroach subject serves as the conduit from which Cowen underscores the Beats' relegation of women into the stifling roles of the caretaker, lover, and muse; roles that critically disable them of the time, freedom, and spontaneity of experience found outside of the home that informs the traditional Beat aesthetic. As a stand-in for her own oppressed subjectivity as a Beat artist, Cowen&rsquo;s solitary cockroach affords her the ability to reflect on and articulate her silenced frustrations and critique against her androcentric Beat community, un-fixing her marginal existence as a Beat &ldquo;other&rdquo; in the process. </p>

This thesis re-evaluates the work of the poet Anne Sexton (1928-1974), concentrating, in particular, on the indeterminacies, contradictions and aporia which it finds to be characteristic of her ostensibly frank and self-revelatory writing. The study is based on a close textual analysis of Sexton's writing, is informed by oststructuralist theories, and is sustained by an examination and discussion of archive collections of her previously unpublished papers. In seeking an understanding of Sexton's poetics, the thesis identifies and interrogates the strategies of denial and obfuscation apparent in her own explication of her work - principally, by scrutiny of the unpublished, and previously unresearched, drafts of a series of lectures which she delivered in 1972. Chapters One and Two consider the origins of 'confessional' or - Sexton's preferred term - 'personal' poetry and reassess her place within contemporary poetry. They suggest that Sexton's writing is engaged in a process of negotiation and contestation, both with the boundaries and expectations of confessionalism, and with the strictures of T. S. Eliot's theory of 'impersonality'. In support of these arguments, Chapter Two offer a reading of Sexton's little-known poem, 'Hurry Up Please It's Time', alongside its intertext, Eliot's The Waste Land. Chapter Three reassesses received views of the supposedly beneficial interrelationship between confessional speaker and reader. It examines Sexton's appropriation of dramatic masks and personae and her use of metaphors of striptease and prostitution, and suggests that these are employed simultaneously to appease and to repel an intrusive audience. Similarly, Chapters Four and Five trace Sexton's problematisation of two previously-accepted tenets of confessional poetry: its status as autobiography and its truthfulness, drawing attention to the techniques employed in order to give the impression of both. Chapter Six considers Sexton's problematic engagement with a language which is not malleable, transparent, and referential but, rather, is experienced as uncooperative and occlusive. Finally, the thesis recuperates Sexton from the common charge of narcissism, arguing that it is the writing, rather than the poet, which is self-reflexive and self-conscious. In this respect, it concludes that her work - perhaps unexpectedly - anticipates many of the tendencies of postmodernist writing.

I argue that the Southern folk tradition is William Faulkner’s strongest influence. Faulkner experienced both a black and white folk culture in childhood through his Aunt Alabama and his nurse, Caroline Barr. I cover many of Faulkner’s ‘Modernist’ novels but examine their folk and vernacular elements, such as Jason Compson’s vernacular consciousness, the storytelling in Absalom, Absalom! or the trickster figure in the Snopes novels. I will be using Ed Piacentino’s The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor for secondary research and Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination and Rabelais and his World to provide a theoretical framework regarding the text as an interaction of competing discourses, and the ‘grotesque.’ I examine several writers to provide a folk ‘context.’ Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s ‘The Horse-Swap’ uses vernacular traders, but a refined observer passes judgment on their actions. George Washington Harris brings vernacular culture to the forefront. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an entire novel written in folk speech which invests the folk narrator with a conscience. I argue Faulkner also bestows his writing with folk morality, such as V.K. Ratliff’s stand against the rapacity of Flem Snopes. I also examine the conjure tales of Charles Chesnutt. Uncle Julius exemplifies black folk wisdom being used to outsmart the white northerners, demonstrating how many use folk culture to further their own ends. The third chapter examines the grotesque, through an examination of Harris, Chesnutt and Erskine Caldwell, along with Faulkner, and Bakhtin and Rabelais’ discussion of the ‘physical’ and ‘psychological’ grotesque, the damage caused by mental illness or obsession with the past. I examine how the psychological state manifests in the physical in Faulkner’s writing, and how he humanises those society deems ‘grotesque’ through psychological insight, emphasising the cruelty in simply regarding such beings as ‘spectacle.

This thesis is a study of the poetics and politics of place in the short stories of James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner. In an introduction, three chapters, each examining the short fiction of a writer, and a conclusion this thesis explores various aspects of understanding and representing place. Focusing on these writers’ short story cycles and drawing on short story theories, I argue that the main characteristic of the modernist short story cycle is the creation of interiorly diversified chronotopes. My main argument is that these writers create uncertain fictional places that could be described as dialogic. This representation of place as heterogeneous, conflicting, and uncertain reflects the changed conception of and attitude towards place in modernism. The introduction contextualizes the discussion and presents some relevant theoretical frameworks. The first chapter concentrates on the representation of place in Joyce’s Dubliners (including the interior, the exterior, the public place of the street and the space of home and country); it is argued that Joyce’s short story cycle generates a polyphonic world. In the second chapter, focusing on Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, I examine Anderson’s place, a small Midwestern town in the region of Ohio, USA, and show how an image of heterotopic place is created out of the counterbalance between grand narratives of the pastoral Midwest and the fragmentary form of the short story cycle. The third chapter deals with William Faulkner’s fictional place, his imaginary county of Yoknapatawpha and argues that Faulkner’s place is heteroglossic. The conclusion summarizes the findings in a comparative fashion, arguing that the meaning of place is not fixed and stable but rather personal and momentary reflected in the writerly texts and that the narratives these writers develop allocate an important role to the reader: to co-construct the text and thus also its image of place.

This literary study presents an analysis of literary constructs of African American childhood in the 1930s in American children’s literature. The purpose for such a study is to determine, identify, and analyse the constructions of African American childhood offered in such books. The critical approach employed involves theories based in post structuralism and post colonialism. The literary constructions of African American childhood are influenced by the society in which they were produced; hence this thesis includes a contextualisation of the historical time period in relationship to the works discussed. Furthermore, this thesis considers constructions offered through illustration in equal terms with textual constructions. Representations of African American childhood are also presented through the use of dialect. The position adopted considers dialect as African American patois since such written dialect is pre-proscriptive African American Vernacular English rules. Analysis has been carried out of the ways in which language written in African American patois constructed African American childhood rather than focusing on the linguistic aspects of the written dialect. Finally, four key texts, all written after 1965 and set in the 1930s have been evaluated: Sounder (1970) by William Armstrong, Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry (1976) by Mildred Taylor, Tar Beach (1991) by Faith Ringgold, and Leon’s Story (1997) by Susan Roth. These contemporary writers offered a different view of the 1930s since they are ‘writing back’ into the previously assumed stereotypes. In conclusion, this thesis demonstrates that in the 1930s, positive progression was achieved, bridging ideologies concerning the African American community fostered in the Harlem Renaissance and the search for African American identity for children and adults. While negative stereotypes established before the 1930s were included in some publications, defiance of mainstream views, resistance to overt racism, and a complication of representation of African American childhood is present in American children’s literature in the 1930s.

The principal concern of this thesis is the extent to which male and female characters in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878), Henry James’s The Europeans (1878) and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920) succeed in contributing to, or halting, the processes of change in their respective societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In combination, these three novels provide a particularly apt opportunity to look at issues of gender and social change at specific points in time, and within a transatlantic context, through the representation of attitudes and actions by individuals within the narratives. The study is divided into three chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. Each chapter addresses one novel through three main areas of enquiry that aim to build a detailed understanding of the role of gender in the relevant social settings. The first area of study concerns the serialisation of the novels, with attention to the visual imagery that accompanied the texts in the case of Hardy and Wharton. The illustrations which accompanied the first, serialised versions of The Return of the Native and The Age of Innocence disclose concealed themes. They also provide added insight into the expectations of the period. The second area of enquiry explores the setting of each novel: Egdon Heath in Hardy's English west-country Wessex, Boston for James and New York in the case of Wharton. Those settings are discussed in relation to historical indicators within the works, including public gathering places which are portrayed as points of social pressure. A study of characterisation in the novels concludes each of the three chapters. The focus is on individuals, representing certain social categories, that are either struggling to attain a degree of autonomy over their lives or trying to maintain a status quo that would enable them to keep their social position. The conclusion brings into the thesis a conversation about technical devices and further contextual considerations that the three authors deployed in order effectively to portray how men and women of their respective societies reacted to changes at different levels of their everyday lives. A main contribution to knowledge in this study lies in the examination of serialisation and the use of illustrations in light of the role of gender in social change. Despite cultural differences between the American and the British societies portrayed , Hardy, James and Wharton as major authors of their time share a number of concerns about male and female interactions within vastly changing societies. Furthermore, this investigation aims to establish an example that might prompt future comparisons of more global writers from different periods and parts of the world; in particular, asking how they differently reflect change in diverse social contexts.