This thesis investigates how two distinctive and conflicting literary modernisms generate, and subsequently attempt to deal with the proliferation of difficult historical meaning. Part one scrutinizes three novels from William Faulkner's middle period, The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Sanctuary (1931). Its arguments issue from three linked assumptions: first, that semantic meaning, in Faulkner, resides within the smallest of textual locations; second, that this meaning is insistently historical; and third, that the attempt to hide its release as historical meaning generates a formal opacity that, in turn, occasions acutely visual problems at the level of the text. Specific attention is drawn to what I consider to be the “compacted doctrines” (Empson) of Faulkner's prose: the pronoun. It is argued that, in these three novels, historically sedimented meaning congeals in three single words: “them”, “I” and finally, “it”. If Faulkner's texts come into meaning at the level of the word, John Dos Passos' come into meaning at the level of the concept. What was “small”, begrudging, and intractable in Faulkner becomes “big”, abundant, and eminently retrievable in Dos Passos. The semantic “concept” to which I attend is The Camera Eye, a place of visual efficiency. Two parallel concerns drive these chapters. First, I claim that The Camera Eye is the preeminent site of the dialectic in U.S.A.; second, that these episodes provide the formal indices for Dos Passos' shift in political intensities. Sustaining an antagonistic tension between aesthetic modernity and historical memory, however, these mechanical integers problematize their own semantic productions. With reference to the generation of surplus and to Marx's concept of “hoarding” I route the (over)production of the textual product, and its subsequent channelling into distinct textual locations, into conversations regarding commodification, reification and the division of labour.

My research arises from a critique of the tendency within terrorism debates to equate the terrorist act with the production of spectacular images. Chapter 1 uses the work of Luce Irigaray to critique this trend in terrorism discourses, arguing that such a characterisation relies on a repression of the very materiality that terrorist action exploits. Moreover, placing the concept of terror in an Irigarayan framework reveals that the concept of terrorism is bound up with concepts of masculinity. In developing this critical approach, I build on the thinking of both Irigaray and Gayatri Spivak in turning to literary representations of terrorism to find a means of articulating a new understanding of the concept of terrorism and its place within our culture. Chapter 2 brings together the figure of the woman terrorist in terrorism studies, Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter(1979), and Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist (1985) in order to critique the portrayal of the feminine in terrorism discourses. Chapter 3 then moves on to ask how the global reach of terrorism discourses after September 11th, 2001, has impacted on our understanding of masculinity and femininity, looking at the relationship between the body and subjectivity in Ian McEwan's Saturday (2006). Finally, Chapter 4 examines how Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007) figures the body as a site of resistance to such global narratives of terror, as he explores the possibility of an embodied ethics opening up a suspension of photographic and filmic modes of perception. By setting up a dialogue between terrorism studies and literary fiction, I reintroduce the body to our conceptualisation of terrorism. In doing so, I show how literature can open up new ethical horizons in an otherwise closed rhetoric.

In this thesis I explore how people conceptualised, explained and managed their experiences of everyday stress before the concept became ubiquitous. In doing so, I reveal some of the factors which contributed to that ultimate ubiquity. The existing historiography of stress comes mostly from a medical perspective and deals largely with post-traumatic stress. I address these limitations by specifically focusing on the everyday stress more commonly experienced by the wider population and by doing so from a more popular perspective. I focus on changes to everyday life at work and at home, which had a significant impact on the popularisation of stress, in the period from the First World War to the 1980s. Drawing on a range of sources including self-help books, diaries, oral history interviews and popular culture, I foreground continuities in the approach to treating stress and changes in ideas about causation. My analysis reveals a vocabulary of nerves and nervous disorders as precursors to stress, but also illustrates the mutability of the nerves/stress concept and how its very imprecision gave it utility. An examination of contemporary medical, sociological and governmental research demonstrates how the increasing problematisation of everyday life contributed to a growing discourse of stress. This was reflected in popular culture which revealed both the workplace and home to be potential locations of stress. I argue that this arose due to changes to these domains resulting from increased affluence, evolving gender roles and changes to people's expectations of life in the second half of the century. At its heart my thesis argues that despite material improvements in both work and home life during the period, societal changes and a growing popular discourse of stress made it far more likely that by the late twentieth century people would interpret their everyday woes as stress.

This thesis examines how and why we remember the 1950s in Britain in particular ways. The 1950s have become a popular and visible decade in the culture of 'retro' since the late-1960s; there is a stylistic fascination with iconic symbols that have become shorthand for the post-war era. Popular memory is the everyday sense of a past which circulates in a particular culture through the interaction of past and present, public and private, which is expressed and experienced through memory, media and commodities. I interrogate how popular memory is expressed nostalgically through 'Fifties' retro and heritage in Britain, revealing the tensions between past and present in the politics of remembering. In the main, studies of popular representations of the past through nostalgia and retro have largely remained within the boundaries of academic disciplines such as subcultural studies, design/art history and collective memory theory. I use this scholarship in combination to analyse our popular historical culture because a popular sense of the past is created and experienced by an interaction of many different cultural expressions, experiences and representations. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this project blends interviews with fans of Fifties revival culture with other sources such as memories from the Mass Observation Archive, period dramas on film and television, retro in popular music, as well as press reception on retro and nostalgia. This innovative methodology foregrounds the tensions and politics of representing the past, challenging the notion of popular memory of the 1950s as merely 'retro' consumerism and manipulated history. Recent academic thought has emphasised the 'presentness' of nostalgia; that this emotional, rose-tinted view of the past is actually a response to the present. This project suggests nostalgia can be used with agency - individuals and communities use nostalgic images for a wide range of personal and political meanings; nostalgia can also be dynamic and pleasurable. We remember the past through family albums and personal memory, but these interact with mediated pasts in retro popular culture, favourite films and period dramas. My research calls for a more democratic approach to historical study which considers not just 'what happened' in the past but the politics of how we imagine and re-imagine the past.

This thesis will undertake a revision of art historians' critical appraisal of the paintings of Mark Gertler, in particular the issues of ethnicity and class which historians have claimed to have largely determined the development of Gertler's art. In doing this I will present a number of methodologies that reflect a social psychological perspective, in particular the critiques of Sander Gilman and his use of the notion of 'the other' within a Jewish historical perspective. Reflective of the psychological insight is the issue of class which although the thesis recognises it as a formal hierarchy, I will look at its subjective interpretation by using the writings of Henri Tajfel and his perspective on social groups and Angela Lambert's work in the realm of social linguistics as well as briefly discussing Basil Bernstein's perspective on social linguistics. The application of these methodologies will I feel render a greater understanding of the artist's difficulty in adapting to the social processes of the dynamics of the class system. The thesis will highlight what I argue is a valuable insight that these methodologies present to understanding in particular prior to 1916 of Gertler's 'Jewish' themes. The methodologies will be underpinned by referencing them to the primary source of the artist's letters and Gilbert Cannan's novel Mendel, based on Gertler's life.

Dismemberment in the Fiction of Toni Morrison investigates the motif of dismemberment in Morrison's fiction from multiple perspectives—historical, psychological and cultural. My first chapter on A Mercy focusses on the aspect of historical dismemberment in the context of colonialism and slavery. I look at the forced separation of African Americans from their families and motherland in terms of originary experiences of racism and dismemberment. This entailed fragmentation for African Americans who struggled to develop strategies of survival in the New World. My second chapter on Jazz focuses on the impact of transgenerationally transmitted trauma. I argue that experiences of dismemberment – such as feelings of amputation and phantom limbs – arise not from physical amputation but from traumatic experiences and the unconscious of preceding generations as the result of trasgenerational hauntings. I borrow from the psychoanalytic insights of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok in my explanation of phantom limbs in Jazz. The third section of my project looks at how social order is brought about in the fictive community of Sula through the scapegoating mechanism. I define the scapegoating principle in Sula in terms of cultural dismemberment because of the ways the community members symbolically cut a pariah figure, like Sula, off by performing symbolic acts of violence. The characterization of Sula emphasizes the psychological need for a scapegoat figure who can give an outlet to the defensive tendencies of the community following discrimination. My final chapter focusses on Morrison's most recent novel Home, which is about homecoming. In this novel, Morrison continues with her project of imagining a space of domestic and social comfort which is physically and psychically safe in the broad sense of a homeland for African Americans. Home offers a place of salvation from social, historical and psychic fragmentation or the traumas of racism which result in experiences of disruption, amputation and dismemberment.

This thesis focuses on Charles Henri Ford (1908‐2002). Spanning much of the 20th century, Ford's multiform and multimedia aesthetic sensibility incorporated poetry, visual art, filmmaking, photography, and magazine editing. Despite the breadth and depth of his numerous interests and achievements, scant critical attention has been paid to Ford. The little criticism that deals with Ford focuses on his experimental novel The Young and Evil (1933) and his magazine: View (1940‐47). This thesis addresses this imbalance. It seeks to recover a marginalized poet whose work unsettles contemporary and critical assumptions concerning modernist literary and aesthetic production. In order to do so, focus is shifted from View to Ford's first modernist little magazine: Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms (1929‐30). Blues made an indelible mark on Ford and informed many of his subsequent poetic and aesthetic projects. This thesis considers the significance of Blues and a selected assortment of Ford's subsequent projects and literary career moves. Divided into six chapters, and utilizing a reverse chronology, I trace Ford's various literary endeavors back through the decades. The first chapter focuses on Ford's poetic and editorial ventures in the 1980s. This chapter re‐positions Ford's late work in relation to a flexible and sociable version of modernism. The second chapter focuses on Ford's sociable poetics in particular as it culminated in the 1970s. The third chapter draws on the implications of the second and considers the ways in which the modernist Ford is an aesthetic precursor to the postmodern Warhol. The thesis then moves into the 1940s and 1950s to give an account of Ford's perpetual aesthetic awkwardness. Ford's conspicuous absence in the annals of literary history is attributable to his poetic and aesthetic unorthodoxy, which precluded easy incorporation into generally accepted critical narratives of modernism and avant‐gardism. Ford's marginalization has meant that his attempt to renovate modernism has gone unnoticed. Conducted in Blues, Ford's (belated) renovation of modernism is the focus of the final chapters of this thesis. The fifth chapter contextualizes Blues. The sixth and final chapter offers a series of readings focused on Ford's original literary apprenticeship: Blues.

Appearances are one of the main concerns in eighteenth-century novels, but most studies relegate them to a subordinate role, in relation to other issues. Following Slavoj Žižek's understanding of ideology, Alain Badiou's concept of logics of appearances and Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, this thesis offers a sustained analysis of a series of issues of appearances in the eighteenth-century novel, through an exploration of sixteen defining traits, based on Samuel Johnson's definitions of ‘appearance', ‘appear' and ‘apparition'. The concept of appearances allows for an interrogation of ideas, beliefs and positions about most things, including appearances themselves, as they remain open, in their structure and logic, destabilising and deconstructing the ways of thinking that try to contain them. This thesis argues that eighteenth-century novels reproduce, resist and deconstruct the eighteenth-century ideology based on a desire to neutralise the effects of appearances. Through a wide range of eighteenth-century novels, from Robinson Crusoe to Evelina, it argues that novels destabilise the relationship between appearance and being, proposing the multiple appearances of beings and becomings. William Godwin's Caleb Williams is taken as a paradigm, shown to contain most of the issues of appearances in the eighteenth-century novel, revealing that whatever there is, it must be supplemented by appearances in order to appear as reality. This thesis argues that novels came to grasp such a truth of appearances from the beginning of eighteenth-century, by locating appearances subjectively, making more evident the multiplicity and extent of fictions, allowing readers an increased degree of awareness of the fictionality of reality. Thus, this thesis makes a significant contribution to the study of issues of appearance and ideology within literature studies by establishing the genre of the novel as the event of appearances in the eighteenth century.

Part One of my thesis reads Nancy Cunard (1896-1965) as a modernist collector, situating her material and literary collections in relation to the vogue nègre of the 1920s and 30s, when European fascination with black expressive culture reached unprecedented heights. It also looks at how Cunard's collecting practices translate into an ‘aesthetic of assemblage' in her work as an anthologist, and shows how the African sculpture section of her Negro anthology (1934) reflects the collecting cultures of early twentieth-century Europe. Part Two of my thesis reads Cunard in relation to cosmopolitan identity formations in the early twentieth century through an analysis of her poetry and private correspondence, and the fictional representations of Cunard that appeared in the novels of the period. It also examines her efforts to foster transnational networks between writers and artists across America, Europe and Africa, and the role her Communist politics played in forging these connections.

This thesis considers how Auster, Roth and DeLillo write in order to see themselves in the world. If Kafka's burrowing into himself and Nabokov's inscription of a chalk-white “I” on the inner blackboard of his shut eyelids exemplified Modernist strategies for projecting the isolated self into the world, my subject authors have confronted a theoretical situation in which the world as a permanent and common object doesn't exist. Negotiating an increasingly unreal American popular culture that stands in for this object and that has disassembled the monadic self, they reimagine the sight of darkness and premonitions of death inherited from their precursors' self-seeing as a means of reifying our world. The thesis proceeds in three author-specific chapters. The first traces Auster's chimeric appearances in the glass of fictive representation using popular cultural symbols. These symbols repeatedly erase the self, figuring its disappearance into the continuing present and giving the lie to a permanent visible world in which the self can be located. The second chapter explores Roth's writing characters as “darkening[s]” of the fictive glass. His fiction interrogates the obscure “inside of me” to locate an unseen point where the self is remade through transformative connections with the world. This connection, which he names “reality”, remains invisible, communicated in distorted images of grief and mourning that also reflect the unreal character of popular culture. In the final chapter, a new connection between the self and the world becomes visible in DeLillo's work. He reifies our dissembling culture by rendering it as a smeary, visible reflection of the unfixed, continuing present into which Auster's selves disappear. The sight of this unfixed, different world is co-eval with a new form of self-seeing in which the world is not permanent nor transparent but formed in characters' relationships to it, reciprocating today's wavering possibility of there being the world at all. In tracing the pursuit of self-seeing in the world in these three exemplary writers, the thesis develops a new relationship between the aesthetics of character and the world-rendering potential of novel-writing. In a period of theoretical transition after postmodernism, such new paradigms are vital for grasping how we envision selves now as reciprocations of the world's precarity, responding to the pressure of the real.