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Three seminal 19 th-century North American literary works feature bodies of water which serve both as key elements in their narrative structure and as symbolic entities within their meaning systems. The protagonists in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Edgar Allan Poe’s A Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick literally define themselves in terms of their relation to these bodies of water. The best way to determine the function of water in the texts is to analyze the initial relationship between water and the central character, the way that water serves as a reflection of the Self, and the way that its Otherness suggests the ultimate possibility of transformation.

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Erik Butler’s predicates for vampirism apply in some degree to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s male protagonists who skulk in the margins of “The Birthmark,” The Scarlet Letter, and “The Minister’s Black Veil.” As metaphoric vampires who seek weak prey in order to manipulate power structures, these monomaniacal parasites assume paternalistic positions in order to control and manipulate their victims, and they disguise their exploitive and egotistic sides with idealistic and altruistic passions for science and religion. This thesis explores how Hawthorne’s protagonists’ corrupt and consuming spirits echo traditional vampiristic characteristics.

Paul Bowles (1910-1999) was an American writer who restlessly travelled throughout the world until he finally chose Morocco as a country of permanent residence. He settled in Tangier from 1947 until his death in November 1999. Paul Bowles’s work as a whole includes writings set in the different countries he travelled to but the bulk of his literary production is essentially Moroccan in themes, characters and settings. This dissertation attempts to investigate Paul Bowles’s mystic quest in Morocco as a sheltering home and the reasons why this country retained him for a lifelong expatriation. It also demonstrates the impact Morocco exerted on the fulfilment of the writer’s quest in Morocco. In short, this study analyses the reasons why Morocco became the writer’s adopted and sheltering home and the extent to which it fulfilled his mystic quest. My study is a text based analysis involving Paul Bowles’s fiction, autobiographies, travel essays and interviews. This research has been conducted in the light of different methods, namely the comparative method of investigation, the psychoanalytical approaches of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva and others when appropriate and of J.Olney’s and G.Gusdorf theories of autobiography. The comparative method of investigation analyses the different contextual influences that shape the expatriate’s image of Morocco and show the extent to which the writer was receptive to the different world cultural and movements, in addition to the author’s familial, American and Moroccan influential contexts. Bowles’s literary production as a whole includes writings set in the different countries where he resided for different periods of time. A significant element of my study is then the analysis of the autobiographical cohesion and centrality that subtend the writer’s work as a whole. This part is mostly conducted in the light of J.Olney’s and G. Gusdorf theories of Autobiography. The cohesion and centrality linking Paul Bowles’s life and work reveal the Moroccan specificities as well as the cultural and spiritual ethos that retained him for a definite expatriation and contributed to the fulfilment of his mystic quest. In the contexts of J. Lacan’s and J. Kristeva’s psychoanalytical theories, the image of Morocco is also revealed as the projection of Paul Bowles’s psyche, as the metaphor of his self-recovery and definition and finally of his aspirations at transcendence. Paul Bowles’s adoption of Morocco was to a significant extent due to his uncompromising and sheer fascination by Moroccan Nature, scenery and cosmic elements. This appeal induced and, to a great extent, contributed to the fulfilment of the writer’s mystic quest in the context of Pantheism. I have therefore analysed Paul Bowles’s quest in the light of Ibn-al-Arabi’s Pantheism and of other mystical philosophies as appropriate. Thus, the final chapter of this investigation has been devoted to Paul Bowles’s mystic Morocco as the sheltering realm of his mystic quest.

This thesis examines the American novelist Norman Mailer’s relationship to the 20th century avant-garde. Mailer is often remembered as a pioneer in the new documentary modes of subjective non-fiction of the sixties. Looking beyond the decade’s themes of fact and fiction, this thesis opens up Mailer’s aesthetics in general to other areas of historical and theoretical enquiry, primarily art history and psychoanalysis. In doing so, it argues that Mailer’s work represents a thoroughgoing aesthetic and political response to modernism in the arts, a response that in turn fuels a critical opposition to postmodern aesthetics. Two key ideas are explored here. The first is narcissism. In the sixties, Mailer was an avatar of what Christopher Lasch called the “culture of narcissism”. The self-advertising non-fiction was related to an emerging postmodern self-consciousness in the novel. Yet the myth of Narcissus has a longer history in the story of modernist aesthetics. Starting with the concept’s early articulation by Freudian psychoanalysis, this thesis argues that narcissism was for Mailer central to human subjectivity in the 20th century. It was also a defining trait of technological modernity in the wake of the atom bomb and the Holocaust. Mailer, then, wasn’t just concerned with the aesthetics of narcissism: he was also deeply concerned with its ethics. Its logic is key to almost every major theme of his work: technology, war, fascist charisma, sexuality, masculinity, criminality, politics, art, media and fame. This thesis will also examine how narcissism was related for Mailer to themes of trauma, violence, facing and recognition. The second idea that informs this thesis is the theoretical question of “the real”. A later generation of postmodernists thought that Mailer’s initially radical work was excessively grounded in documentary and traditional literary realism. Yet while the question of realism was central for Mailer, he approached this question from a modernist standpoint. He identified with the modernist perspectivism of Picasso and his eclectic “attacks on reality”, and brought this modernist humanism to a critical analysis of postmodernism. The postwar (and ongoing) debates about postmodern and realism in the novel connect in Mailer, I argue, to what Hal Foster calls the “return of the real” in the 20th century avant-garde. This thesis also links Mailer to psychoanalytical views on trauma and violence; anti-idealist philosophy in Bataille and Adorno; and later postmodern art historical engagements with realism and simulation. Mailer’s view was that a hunger for the real was an effect of a desensitising (post)modernity. While the key decade is the sixties, the study begins in 1948 with Mailer’s first novel The Naked and the Dead, and ends at the height of the postmodern eighties. Drawing on a range of postmodern theory, this thesis argues that Mailer’s fiction sought to confront postmodern reality without ceding to the absurdity of the postmodern novel. The thesis also traces Mailer’s relationship to a range of contemporary art and visual culture, including Pop Art (and Warhol in particular), and avant-garde and postmodern cinema. This study also draws on a broad range of psychoanalytical, feminist and cultural theory to explore Mailer’s often troubled relationship to narcissism, masculinity and sexuality. The thesis engages a complex history of feminist perspectives on Mailer, and argues that while feminist critique remains necessary for a reading of his work, it is not sufficient to account for his restless exploration of masculinity as a subject. In chapter 7, the thesis also discusses Mailer’s much-criticised romantic fascination with black culture in the context of postcolonial politics.

“A Place ‘Rendered Interesting’: Antebellum Print Culture and the Rise of Middle-Class Tourism” analyzes the frequently overlooked ideological dimensions of antebellum print culture related to tourism. Traveling through the American leisure landscape became a primary means by which writers, poets, artists, and everyday sightseers explored and defined their worlds. Through tourism, authors expressed some of their deepest anxieties about the society they inhabited. Tourism texts are therefore deceptively powerful cultural artifacts; in fact, sometimes their codified and even repetitive nature was a means of emphasizing an author or authors’ deepest fears. In my dissertation, I analyze guidebooks, travelogues, periodicals, gift books, children’s literature, novels, and visual culture to reveal how authors and artists used potentially escapist discourses of leisure travel to engage with the most pressing problems of the antebellum moment. My examination of touristic print culture shows that this archive, long dismissed as superficial, was in fact central to the consolidation of white middle class identity, to the emergence of manifest destiny, and to ongoing debates over of the rise of commercialism and abolition. Chapter one explores how antebellum guidebooks address ideologies of progress and empire. I examine Catskill guidebook authors’ uses of literary sources, particularly short stories by Washington Irving. These authors quoted and cited Irving’s stories to create a white mythology for the Catskills that marginalized non-white people and encouraged their removal. Chapter two situates tourism within the broader context of antebellum class identity. I argue that authors like Catherine Maria Sedgwick and Nathaniel Parker Willis employ tourism discourse to articulate concerns about the threat of upwardly mobile lower classes and their potential impact on supposed middle-class morality. Chapter three frames the tension between Romanticism and capitalism inherent in touristic culture. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sketches and stories of the White Mountains, I argue, can help us understand the emergent antebellum problem of the commodified landscape. In Chapter four, I argue that tourism became a space for heated political debate on slavery. Abolitionists like Lydia Maria Child encouraged readers to consider the possibility of reorganized society – specifically, a society without slaves – through the imaginative possibilities of the cave aesthetic. / 2020-11-27T00:00:00Z

<p> This study interrogates the resonances of queer utopianism in Octavia Butler&rsquo;s presentation of time in Kindred in order to address the lack of existing scholarship on the novel&rsquo;s relationship with queer temporality. To conduct this interrogation, I utilize the work of queer optimists like Mu&ntilde;oz, Berlant, and Ahmed to deconstruct the text phenomenologically in conjunction with queer pessimists like Halberstam and Edelman to nuance this analysis. To prevent this analysis from being overtaken by a white gaze, I also make use of Black scholars like Morrison, Sharpe, Cooper, Gates, and Collins. In my analysis, I divide Butler&rsquo;s presentation of time into present, past, and future- whereas the present refers to the American Bicentennial and the cultural disconnect the protagonist Dana experiences in her relationship with her white husband, the past signals the pull of Antebellum era white supremacist patriarchy and Dana&rsquo;s need to engage in archival work to reconstitute the history that has been denied to her, and the future implies a nebulousness that blurs both eras together and instills the novel&rsquo;s ending with an ambiguity that lends itself to both pessimistic and optimistic readings. I emphasize how Butler positions Black temporality as a queer temporality in the novel that challenge readers&rsquo; own relationship with the dominant white patriarchal culture.</p><p>

Literary Urbanism and the Symbolist Aesthetic argues that the modern city influences urban writers to develop particular literary-visual practices that translate urban experience into poetry and prose. Chapter one considers how urban planning in Paris during the Second Empire inspired Charles Baudelaire‘s theories of modernity and aesthetic history. Chapter two discusses how A.C. Swinburne translates Baudelairean modernity into an English literary perspective through Sapphic poetry, and the importance Swinburne‘s association with painters has in this process. Swinburne‘s friendship with James McNeill Whistler, for example, results in the ekphrastic poem "Hermaphroditus", which uses sculpture to comment upon the modern city‘s potential to heighten perceptual consciousness. Chapter three studies the application of ekphrasis in urban writing, especially the way in which Arthur Symons‘ poetry uses symbols to render an immediate awareness of the city. Symons‘ reception of French Symbolist poetics opens chapter four, and introduces T.E. Hulme and Henri Bergson as theorists who develop a means of thinking the city through internal consciousness, not geographic space. This initiates chapter five‘s interest in how Pound and Eliot use metaphors of illumination to articulate how perceptions of the city arrive through transposition and refraction.

Initially developed and perfected by male poets, the history of the sonnet has been characterised by androcentrism. Yet from its inception the sonnet has also been adopted by women. In recent years feminist critics have begun to redress the form’s gender imbalance, but most studies of the female-authored sonnet have excluded the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and thus one of the most important periods in women’s history – the rise of feminism – leading to a flawed narrative of the genre. Repositioning Edna St. Vincent Millay as the starting point in a twentieth-century tradition, this study begins where most others end and examines how the emergence and development of feminism, specifically in an American context, underscores a significant female narrative of the sonnet that emerges outside of the male tradition. By reading the works of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Hacker, Marilyn Nelson and Moira Egan within their specific feminist contexts and within the broader trajectory of feminism, it is possible to see how women in the era took ownership of the form. Ultimately, the thesis suggests that feminism has shaped an important narrative in the history of the genre that means today the sonnet is no longer exclusively male.