<p> Current scholarship in food studies generally, and literary food studies in particular, has overlooked important assumptions about the act of eating and its implications for subjectivity, embodiment, and agency. The field has taken up the idea of &ldquo;eating&rdquo; as a natural and universal physical process, immune to discourse. I argue that in so doing, the field has missed important opportunities to examine how our beliefs about what eating is and why are discursively informed. And, further, I argue that the discourses of eating play a role in regulating subjectivity, the material body, and its access to agency. Chapter 1 explores two well-known texts within literary food studies, <i>The Edible Woman</i> and <i>Like Water for Chocolate,</i> and is critical of aspects of each text that have been thus far neglected in the food studies critical conversation. By examining these overlooked pieces, I discuss how the eating discourses in both texts inform the characters&rsquo; subjectivities, their embodiment, and their agency within the novels. Chapter 2 examines two texts infrequently discussed in literary food studies, <i>My Year of Meats</i> and <i>Xenogenesis, </i> in order to illustrate the limits of the field&rsquo;s scholarship so far and to explore how a discursive analysis of eating can provide new insight into how the subject, the body, and its agency can be conceptualized. Chapter 3 looks to contemporary cookery texts for clues about how we talk about eating outside a strictly academic purview and ways that a discursive analysis of the genre can demonstrate how eating shapes our everyday perceptions of subjectivity, embodiment, and agency.</p>

By the time the Fugitive movement was launched between 1922 and 1925, Ransom's poetic technique had changed in a remarkable fashion which is the main topic of the thesis. Gone was a direct, almost brutally sarcastic manner to be replaced with a polished irony that places a considerable distance between him, his subject and his reader. He is no longer involved in the narrative action of the poems as in Poems about God, and there is more concentration on the action of the poems than description. In The Fugitive (1922-1925) Ransom published his most successful poems such as: "Ego", "Bells for John Whiteside Daughter", "Philomela", "First Travels of Max", "Captain Carpenter", "Prometheus in Straits" "Ada Ruel", "Old Mansion", "Blue Girls", "Adventure This Side of Pluralism", an "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son". These poems and a number of others were also published in separate collections, Chills and Fever (1924), Grace after Meat (1924). Some of these poems underwent few changes while others were revised drastically. The Fugitive group disbanded in 1926 and their magazine ceased publication. In 1927, Ransom published Two Gentlemen in Bonds. In this last book of verse Ransom introduced sonnets for the first time in his publications, though he had experimental once before in "Sunset". After 1927 some members of the Fugitive group began to reestablish contact and they soon became Agrarians in the economic, political, agricultural, and perhaps literal sense of the word. During the Agrarian years (1927-1938), Ransom was busy in three spheres: professor of English at Vanderbilt University, contributing to the editorship of the Agrarian publications, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, (1930), and Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence (1936), and finally publishing his first works of literary criticism; God without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defence of Orthodoxy (1930) and The World's Body (1938).

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the representation of authorship, readership and intertextuality in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and the southern anti-Tom tradition from 1852 to 1902. The principal claim of the thesis is that Stowe's novel provides nineteenth-century southern readers with a series of aesthetic paradigms that enable these readers to construct and reconstruct the role of artist in the South as this intersects with the construction of gender identity in nineteenth-century America. In Chapter 1, Uncle Tom's Cabin is interpreted through Julia Kristeva's theory of intertextuality, whereby 'the one who writes is the same as the one who reads', to argue that Stowe's text promotes acts of active rather than passive readership. The reading of Caroline Lee Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride in Chapter 2 interrogates the ways in which the female writer locates herself within a female literary tradition by subverting the Bloomian model of literary paternity to create the gothic mother author. Chapter 3 demonstrates how William Gilmore Simms appropriates Stowe's aesthetics of sympathy in the 'sensible man'. Barthes's recapitulation of the writer and reader as 'producer' and 'consumer' is mapped onto Simms's aesthetic terminology of 'utility' and 'extravagance' to reconcile Stowe's antithesis of marketplace and sentiment within the southern home. In Chapter 4, James Lane Allen's paired stories 'Mrs Stowe's "Uncle Tom" at Home in Kentucky' and 'Two Gentlemen of Kentucky' are read in the context of the literary debates between realism and romance in the late nineteenth-century. In doing so, Allen attempts to reconfigure these gendered aesthetic paradigms and so legitimise southern cultural elegy as a southern form but effectively begins the process of dismantling Stowe's aesthetics of sympathy. Chapter 5 discusses the ways in which Thomas Dixon's The Leopard's Spots dramatises the failure of Stowe's aesthetics of sympathy in the context of the southern rape complex.

This dissertation provides specific feminist and deconstructive approaches to Gertrude Stein's 'Melanctha', the second and longest story of Three Lives. These approaches outline the contradictions of a text caught between nineteenth-century conventions about sex and race and twentieth-century preoccupations with aesthetics. The individual readings of the text in four chapters are not mutually exclusive; indeed, they are united by a discussion of gender, identity and female sexuality. Each chapter is concerned with demonstrating how Stein's attempts to write her radical views about identity and sexuality are undermined by he difficulty of finding an appropriate space for these views in this early text. Moreover, the final chapter demonstrates that Stein's use of race, which is politically naive and racist, has profound implications for critics who want to claim this story as Stein's first modern text. Chapter One provides a reading of Stein's challenge to dominant discourses of gendered identity and mimesis through the trope of the marginal and the "metaphoric lesbian". Chapter Two extends Chapter One into the realms of deconstruction and Jacques Derrida, showing how Stein's concepts of gender and identity prefigure those ofDerrida. Chapter Three moves on to a cultural materialist discussion of'Melanctha' through the trope ofthejlaneuse, and discusses Melanctha's positional challenge to discourses of public and private spaces for men and women at the tum-of-the-century. Finally, Chapter Four continues the cultural materialist reading through an analysis of'Melanctha' against two African-American texts in order to bring to the reader's attention the problems of a text which Stein claims was her 'negro' story. These readings are diverse, but brought together, as I have said, through a discussion of gender and identity. More importantly, the final reading of this story, in Chapter Four, draws together the assumptions made in Chapters One, Two and Three in order to demonstrate that this text cannot be read innocently. Stein's bigoted views about race must be addressed if we are to come to a more definitive conclusion about where we place this text ethically, and if we can really accord it the place it has so far occupied in the Canon.

This is the first full-length scholarly work dedicated to the fiction of Kentucky-raised feminist activist and trained biologist Barbara Kingsolver. Interrogating the political efficacy of the work of an author who proclaims that art “should be political” and that “literature should inform as well as enlighten”, this thesis explores the ways in which Kingsolver positions herself variously as an environmentalist, liberal, communitarian, feminist and agrarian. It unpacks the author’s issues-based approach to writing fiction and its effect on her commercial popularity and through close readings of her fiction provides an assessment of this popular and critically acclaimed contemporary American writer. This study maps the oeuvre of a writer who has achieved critical success in the form of Pulitzer nominations, American Booksellers Book of the Year awards, a National Medal for Arts, and commercial success in the form of bestselling novels and even non-fiction works – not to mention the populist accolade of being selected as an Oprah’s Book Club author. It analyses tropes, techniques and tensions in Kingsolver’s novels and short stories published between 1988 and 2001, namely The Bean Trees (1988), Homeland and Other Stories (1989), Animal Dreams (1990), Pigs in Heaven (1993), The Poisonwood Bible (1998), and Prodigal Summer (2001). Rather than act as an introductory survey, this assessment posits that there exists a difficult but fruitful tension between writing fiction for readers and writing to a political agenda. Kingsolver promotes both of these through her narrative strategies and preoccupations. In the end, I argue that Kingsolver’s pursuit of popular appeal, far from compromising her politics, is a political strategy in itself.

This thesis takes a historical-geographical materialist approach to the capitalist production and literary representation of "place" in the American South between the 1960s and 1990s. Part 1 provides literary-historical and theoretical context. Chapter 1 considers how the Agrarians and their literary critical acolytes defined the "sense of place" of "Southern literature." However, the chapter also recovers an aspect of Agrarianism suppressed by later Southern literary critics: the critique of modern (finance) capitalist abstraction expressed through the Agrarians' "proprietary ideal." Drawing also on postmodern theory, Chapter 2 theorises a postsouthern literary theory of place. Part 2 analyses the "postsouthern turn" in novels by Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy and Richard Ford. Chapter 3 argues that, in A Place to Come to (1977), Warren interrogates his earlier Agrarian aesthetics of place. In Percy's The Moviegoer (1961), land speculator Binx Bolling constructs a rhetorical contrast between "the South" and "the North" to repress his fear that capitalist development is destroying New Orleans and its environs. Chapters 4 to 6 argue that, in A Piece of My Heart (1976), The Sportswriter (1986) and Independence Day (1995), Ford has offered the most sustained and sophisticated critique of the Southern literary critical "sense of place." Part 3 focuses uses upon recent literary representations of Atlanta. Chapter 7 provides a contextual assessment of Atlanta's "non-place" in "Southern literature" and its development as a postsouthern "international city." Chapter 8 considers the representational politics of "creative destruction" in Anne Rivers Siddons' Peachtree Road (1988). Chapter 9 considers the role of land speculation, global capital flows and finance capitalist abstraction in Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full (1998). The final chapter demonstrates how Toni Cade Bambara's novel about the Atlanta Child Murders, Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999), indicts capitalist abstraction through a grotesque body politics of place.

The American Romance is characterized by its use of memorial images which contribute in developing the form and content of its individual literary works. Readings of works by four authors who fall within the American Romance tradition--Hawthorne, James, Faulkner, and Toni Morrison--reveal a poetics of memory that operates in terms of tensions between word and image, with memory achieving apparent embodiment through the image, while the simple presence thus generated is revealed to be both contaminated and opposed by cultural codes. Through portraits, photographs, and other less concrete representations of the human countenance, characters seek to take personal possession of both themselves and others and thereby gain a form of self-possession which places them in a certain relationship to the culture. In creating verbal constructions of images, the authors also pursue a goal mirroring that of their characters. Individual chapters specifically address the way in which the written work of art's identity is reflected in the characteristics of the visual art forms it represents; the power of the memorialized image of woman; and the imaginary strategies by which the cultural authority of one written text can be defused by the written Romance that appropriates it. Works discussed are: The House of the Seven Gables, The Wings of the Dove, The Sound and the Fury, and Song of Solomon and Beloved.

Discourse of Resistance explores the representation of the mad woman in Nineteenth Century literary texts by such authors as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and in modern Freudian psychoanalysis. Generally, in those representations, the figure of the mad woman appears as the outsider to a representational system which fails in representing her: her madness reveals the limits of the logical systems that govern representation; her language shows the failure of the censor; and her body mocks the codes of medicine and hygiene. In Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit, and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hysteria appears as a textual space which marks both the representational system's attempt at containing the female subject and her resistance to it. The Anorexia essay extends the scope of the study by analyzing the limits of the psychoanalytic representation of the women who suffer from this disease. In effect, each specific case studied reveals the representational systems' attempt to repression and containment, an attempt which only succeeds to a certain extent.

This dissertation presents a study of the narrative of the Mexican writer Jose Revueltas (1914-1976), with special attention given to three of his novels: Los muros de agua (1941), Los días terrenales (1949) and El apando (1969). Our analysis explores two fundamental aspects found in the aforementioned novels. First, we posit the presence of a situation of idialogy, a conceptual notion of our own creation that reflects discursive expressions which tend toward ideological marginality of characterization and introspection as a narrative vehicle. Idialogy is the synthetic result of M. Bakhtin's concepts of ideology and the dialogic. Idialogy is reflected in novelistic texts through discursive practices that include dialogized interior monologues and internal dialogues in order to create discourses of resistance that are opposed to a dominant discursive situation. In our view, the character structure of Revueltas' novels responds to this idialogical situation as they are eminently marginal. The second aspect analyzed is the relation of time and space in the novels in question. In order to approach this aspect, we will refer to the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope and to Joseph Frank's idea of spatiality in the form. Revueltas' novels display a tendency to condense narrative times and spaces. Through this condensation one observes at once another tendency which is to reduce or retract spaces and detain time. Therefore, time becomes an evocation of the past and space takes precise geometrical forms. In particular, we study the formation and development of a chronotope of the prison. From the prison space of the Islas Mari as in Los muros de agua to a background of political and ideological clandestineness in Los días terrenales, ending with the presence of a reductionist carceral geometry in El apando, the chronotope of the prison serves as a framework for the inscription of counterdiscourses of the marginal elements in Revueltas' novels.

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