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This thesis investigates depictions of male dismemberment at Anglo and Native American contact sites in the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. It argues for Poe’s subscription to a traditional theology that posits Neoplatonic concepts of the soul as mandatory for the constitution of rational humanity, and contends that he looks critically from this perspective at the contingency of national citizenship on property ownership in Jacksonian America. This investigation therefore involves an analysis of the link between property and national subjectivity, with emphasis on the recurrent trope in contemporary literature of the male body dismembered by ‘Indian warfare’, and how this body represents early America’s uncertain claim to its national territory and, by extension, the constituting condition of property. This thesis also assesses epistemological and religious formations in Poe’s fiction. Poe’s tales often express a theological anxiety, with tensions created as the knowledge systems that define Poe’s subjectivities subordinate spirituality to empirical mensuration and representation. Dramatizing this shift from teleology to epistemology and its disarticulating effect on the self are Poe’s ‘married women’ stories. Keeping in mind links between soteriological paradigms and identity construction, methodologies are partially organized around Poe’s presentation of women in his essays and tales, with particular emphasis on ‘The Poetic Principle’ and ‘Berenice’. The interpretive apparatus gained by historical contextualization and the assessment of Poe’s epistemological and religious formations is then mobilized towards reading the disarticulate male body as a nexus of Poe’s concerns about property ownership, epistemology and theology, and analyzing his tales pertaining to colonial contact, particularly: ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, ‘Morning on the Wissahiccon’, ‘The Man That Was Used Up’, ‘The Journal of Julius Rodman’, and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

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.

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 endeavors to engage in contemporary Thoreauvian scholarship by providing an original reading of Thoreau’s works using a critical framework based on Wai Chee Dimock’s concept of “deep time.” As such, it argues that Thoreau’s infamous embrace of political and rhetorical dissent takes shape in his writings most strongly in his construction of time-frames that break with or stand against his contemporaries’ own use, sense, and measuring of time in antebellum New England. Focusing on two aspects of Henry David Thoreau’s work, the thesis argues firstly that Walden’s resistance to familiar, sequential understandings of time manifests in myth, wherein time and history are shaped holistically rather than sequentially. Secondly, it posits that Thoreau’s excursion narratives resist the dominant recordings of history of his time by forming alternative historiographies within their structures, accommodating otherwise silent or ignored historical elements, at the expense of otherwise smooth, uninterrupted narratives. Having thus established Thoreau’s temporal structures, the thesis goes on to look at Annie Dillard and Susan Howe in order to trace out Thoreau’s previously unacknowledged formation of temporal structures in his texts as a genealogy that emerges in late twentieth-century American literature. Consequently, the thesis provides an alternative reading of Thoreau that moves toward a rethinking of his location in nineteenth-century America and its twentieth-century literature.

This thesis assesses the role of the interview form within literature from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The project contends that the interview, although styling itself as a revealing, authentic, private confession, is a genre of life writing that deeply troubles the model of singular Romantic authorship that it simultaneously promotes. The thesis argues that the interview has been a key site for negotiating conceptions of authorship since its inauguration. Exploring issues of publicity, life writing and gossip, through nineteenth-century newspaper depictions of scandals (chapter one), I argue that the act of interview publication is a staging of the speaking self in the public sphere. In chapter two I triangulate discussions of journalism, celebrity and material modernism to argue that the characteristic modernist authorial persona, far from being revolutionary, avant-garde or iconoclastic, was in fact deeply retrograde. Chapter three examines how the interview operated as a negotiation of the study, the marketplace and the middlebrow in the 1930s, with reference to the popular Everyman magazine series “How Writers Work.” The development of an interrogative interview model in the postwar era forms the subject of chapter four, as I demonstrate how the backdrop of the Cold War transformed the ways in which writers as diverse as Ezra Pound and the Beat poets responded to the interview in their work. The penultimate chapter argues that the Paris Review interview offers a hitherto unrecognised link between New Criticism and New Journalism and can revitalise discussions around the historical institutionalisation of literary studies. Chapter six considers the interview’s prominent contemporary position within world literature as a purveyor of literary value and archive of global cultural memory. Overall, the project illustrates how central the interview has been in the cultural construction of authorship in the last 150 years.

This study examines the presence of poetic form in First and Second Generation New York School Poetry. Because New York School writing—where its existence is conceded—seems formless, it has yet to be viewed under a formal lens. Therefore, this study is the first of its kind. In what follows, works by Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley and Ron Padgett are contextualized and closely read for form, with an attention to the shaping propensity of inhabited spaces. While it is agreed that the external environment has the potential to influence shapes and forms of writing, domestic spaces also offer parameters which are traceable onto the page. New York School poets lived in and wrote from alternative domestic spaces—untidy, disordered, congested apartments in downtown New York City. The forms of their poems are accordingly untraditional. New York School stanzas often take on the contours of these spaces, becoming linguistic rooms riddled with the tensions of indoor urban life. After outlining New York School poetry and addressing contemporaneous urban theories, this study asks: what role does the space of writing have on the shape of writing? More specifically, are New York City apartments reflected in the forms of New York School poems? Through close-reading and formal analysis, it becomes possible to affirm that New York School Poetry is formal, and that its form is distinctive in that in its variances, it makes it possible for the tensions and dynamics of living within the constraints of inner urban spaces to be fully pronounced and inflected. This is a study of the formal representations of those inflections.

American Literature and Global Time, 1812-59 explores the effects of the early stages of globalization on time consciousness in antebellum American literature and non-fiction. It argues that oceanic trade, extracontinental imperialism, immigration, and Pacific exploration all affected how antebellum Americans configured their national pasts, presents, and futures. The ensuing pluralisation of time that followed disallowed cogent conceptions of national identity. It analyses transnational geographies to examine how they transmit heterogeneous times. The project’s interest is in U.S. national sites that counterintuitively acted as fulcrums for the importations of foreign times and non-U.S. sites that interacted with and modified the homogenous progressive time of nationalism. As such, my project seeks to combine the transnational and temporal turns. It argues that the ethnic, racial, and geographic contestation emphasized by transnational critics found parallels in how antebellum Americans conceived of time. Conversely, it suggests that there were profound links between globalization and the sorts of instabilities in time identified by the critics of the temporal turn. Over its course my project identifies a series of “global times” that came into being in the years between the War of 1812 and the discovery of petroleum in 1859. These fall under three broad headings. First, what I term, entangled times that came about as a result of the movement of ships across borders and different social contexts; secondly, foreign local times that re-set the clock of imperialism and national progress; and, thirdly, a huge mass of reconfigurations in the origins and futures of the still-young United States.

This thesis reassesses American AIDS literature of the 1980s and 1990s by focusing on four major writers: the poets Thom Gunn (1929-2004), James Merrill (1926-1995) and Mark Doty (1953-), and the novelist Michael Cunningham (1952-). It questions the dominant critical discourse on literature of the epidemic, contending that while competing versions of the postmodern provided useful models for reading AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, it is now necessary to adjust the critical position in line with the intellectual turn away from the cultural theories of that time. The introduction provides an overview of the most prevalent constructions of AIDS’ postmodernity through the period, arguing that critics were anxious to fit the epidemic to the theoretical models of the day, and going on to suggest that the writers under scrutiny actively question or even resist these models. Chapter One reads the later collections of Thom Gunn against his earlier work, arguing that he writes a "poetry of prophylaxis" which draws on his literary past in order to construct a defence against the uncertainties of the epidemic age. Chapter Two develops this question of self-reconstruction, examining the last two collections of James Merrill and his 1993 memoir in light of his own diagnosis with HIV. It proposes that in the renegotiation of his body, he might help the reader both remember and "re-member" him. Chapter Three turns to the work of Mark Doty, in particular the memoir Heaven’s Coast and the two collections, My Alexandria (1995) and Atlantis (1996), suggesting that Doty reclaims metaphor for palliative good at a time when AIDS theorists such as Paula Treichler registered scepticism during the "epidemic of signification". Chapter Four discusses the 1990s novels of Michael Cunningham, arguing that in order to “know” AIDS, outside of contemporaneous postmodern readings, it is necessary to "re-know" or "recognise" older literary models. The thesis ends with a brief account of post-1990s AIDS literature and theory, before concluding that each writer argues for models of literary continuity as a means of neutralising the possible creative rupture wrought by immunodeficiency.

Gegenstand der Dissertation ist die Untersuchung interlingualer lexikalischer Prozesse von Worterkennung und-zugriff bei ungarndeutschen Bilingualen, die Englisch als Fremdsprache erlernen, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Rolle von Kognaten. Ziel der Studie ist es, die Prozesse lexikalischer Aktivierung in einem polyglotten System zu beschreiben und sowohl die mentalen Lexika, als auch die Verknüpfung und gegenseitige Aktivierung (z. B. durch 'direct word association' oder durch 'concept mediation') zu modellieren. Drei abhängige Variablen werden in einer quantitativen und qualitativen Analyse empirischer Daten untersucht: Genauigkeit, Antwortzeitlatenzen und phonologische Interferenz. Die Resultate der Experimente werden im Rahmen eines multilingualen Netzwerkmodells interpretiert. / The dissertation examines aspects of the interlingual lexical processes of word recognition and word retrieval in Hungarian-German bilinguals learning English as a foreign language, with particular respect to the role of cognates. The purpose of the study is to describe the process of lexical activaton in a polyglot system and to model the mental lexicons and the ways entries in the lexicons are connected and activated (e.g. activation through direct word association or through concept mediation). Three dependent variables are studied in quantitative and qualitative analysis of empirical data taken from experiments: rate of accurate responses, response latencies and phonological interference. The results of the experiments are interpreted in the framework of a multiple language network model.