Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 228-236). Also available online in Scholars' Bank; and in ProQuest, free to University of Oregon users.

This dissertation explores John Ashbery's interactions with several generations of English poets, during a period which ranges from the late 1940s to the present day. It seeks to support two principle propositions: that Ashbery's engagements with contemporaneous English poets had a decisive influence on his poetic development; and that Ashbery's own poetic and critical work can be employed to revise our understanding of mid-to-late 20th century English poetry. The dissertation demonstrates that Ashbery's relationships with four English poets - W.H. Auden, F.T. Prince, Lee Harwood and Mark Ford - occurred at significant junctures in, and altered the course of, his poetic development. Ashbery's critical and poetic engagements with these poets, when read together, are shown to constitute an idiosyncratic but coherent re-reading of the English poetry of the past and present. The dissertation addresses the ways in which each poet theorises the difficulties posed, and opportunities afforded, by perceived changes in Anglo-American poetic relations at different points during the 20th century. Chapter one re-evaluates Ashbery's relationship with Auden. It traces the legacy of Auden's coterie poetics in The Orators for Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, offers a revisionary reading of The Vermont Notebook as a strident response to Auden's late-career conservativism, and reads in depth Ashbery's unpublished, highly ambivalent elegy for him, "If I had My Way, Dear". Chapter Two attends to the extensive correspondence between Ashbery and Prince, argues that Prince's work provided a model for Ashbery's "encrypted" early lyrics addressing his homosexuality, and reads "Clepsydra" as an early elaboration of Ashbery's conception of a reciprocal influential model. Chapter Three examines Lee Harwood's "imitations" of Ashbery, and considers the latter's first critical formation of an English "other tradition" through his association of Harwood with the work of John Clare. Chapter Four portrays Ashbery's relationship with Mark Ford as a successful enactment of reciprocal influence, a form of engagement which allows Ashbery a means to "shake off his own influence" and to retain his status as a "major minor writer".

This dissertation is a recovery project, and as such it introduces Adrián del Valle, a prolific Spanish-born literary modernista and anarchist activist who dedicated his life to social reform in in turn-of-the-century Cuba and beyond. In addition to a critical introduction, this project includes my translation of his 1907 collection of integrated short stories Por el camino [Along the Way], which, as all of his works, is long out of print. Por el camino complicates critical models grounded in nationality and therefore invites us to construct and apply an alternative model better suited to handling a transnational epistemology of space, which allows for the constant flow of people, ideas, and texts, as well as commercial and political influences, across borders. In developing this epistemological framework, I blend two theoretical concepts—“multitude” and “imagined communities”—to situate del Valle in his dynamic historical moment. Del Valle wrote Por el camino in the throes of the Second Industrial Revolution, the Age of Synergy, which I argue can be understood as an early age of globalization. Por el camino also stands at the crossroads of Latin American modernista short fiction and the international anarchist movement, thus challenging critical positions that treat modernismo as an apolitical and socially apathetic literary movement obsessed with elitist aesthetics and escapism and anarchism as a mutually exclusive movement wholly concerned with achieving practical social and political reforms. Through my reading of del Valle’s work, I demonstrate that modernismo and anarchism are two manifold and simultaneous responses to the complex socio-political, economic, cultural, and spiritual crises that grew out of Latin America’s transition into modernity. / Globalization -- Anarchism -- Modernismo -- On the translation -- Along the way. / Department of English

This thesis is concerned with transnational literature and writers of the Middle Eastern and South Asian diasporas. It argues that the diasporic position of the authors enables their roles as comprador subjects. The thesis maintains that the figure of the comprador is always acted upon by its ontological predisposition, so that diasporic positionality often involves a single subject which straddles and speaks from two or more different subject positions. Comprador authors can be said to be co-opted by Western metropolitan publishing companies who stand to benefit by marketing the apparent marginality of the homelands about which these authors write. The thesis therefore proceeds from the notion that such a diasporic position is the paradoxical condition of the transnational subject or writer. I submit that there is, to some degree, a questionable element in the common political and cultural suggestions that emerge upon closer evaluation of diasporic literature. Indeed, a charge of complicity has been levelled against authors who write, apparently, to service two distinct entities – the wish to speak on behalf of a minority collective, as well as the imperial ‘centre’ which is the intended interlocutor of the comprador author. However, it is this difference, the implied otherness or marginality of the outsider within, which I argue is sometimes used by diasporic writers as a way of articulating with ‘authenticity’ the cultures and politics of their erstwhile localities. This thesis is concerned, therefore, with the representation of ‘the East’ in four novels by diasporic, specifically comprador writers, namely Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. I suggest that the ‘third-world’ and transnational literature can also be a selling point for the transnational subject, whose representations may at times pander to preconceived ideas about ‘the Orient’ and its people. As an illustration of this double-bind, I offer a close reading of all the novels to suggest that on the one hand, the comprador author writes within the paradigm of the ‘writing back’ movement, as a counter-discourse to the Orientalist representations of the homeland. However, the corollary is that such an attempt to ‘write back’, in a sense, re-inscribes the very discourse it wishes to subvert, especially because the literature is aimed at a ‘Western’ audience. Moreover, the template of the comprador could be used to explain how a transnational post-9/11 text from an Afghan-American, for instance, may be put to the service of the imperial machine, and read, therefore, as a supporting document to the U.S. policy on Afghanistan.