My project examines the phenomenon of the hazy spaces on the periphery of the antebellum imagination that, while existing geographically at the very fringes of daily American life, are nonetheless active in the conceptualization, production, and representation of an idiosyncratic American sense of space: an anxiety of spatial fragmentation, formlessness, and modulation. In particular I am interested in Poe's “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” and Melville's “Benito Cereno,” both of which deal with American transoceanic travel to the proximity of Antarctica and its surrounding seas. These gothicized nautical fictions demonstrate an important dialectic playing out in these extreme spaces: the oscillating experience of external and closed space. What becomes detectable in antebellum literature in which spaces of enclosure interrupt expansiveness are far-reaching, deeply-rooted anxieties of an ever-transforming American space at risk of fragmenting and necessitating reorientation via the sort of imaginary travel texts being examined.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s literary style transforms from his first novel, "Player’s Piano" (1952), to his final book, "Timequake" (1997). Most of his novels adhere to a similar style – the narrators face a puzzling societal fault that is exaggerated in their dystopian societies, which hides Vonnegut’s humanistic leanings. This thesis, however, focuses on Vonnegut’s authorial identity, his use of the alter ego, and eventual entrance into the novel. His authorial role challenges the literary theory expressed in “The Death of the Author”(1967) by Roland Barthes and further discussed in “What is an Author”(1969) by Michel Foucault. Barthes explains an author metaphorically dies after his book is published and Foucault questions the author’s role and importance to his novel. Vonnegut juxtaposes fictional and nonfictional material whereby his character is paramount to his work. Therefore, Vonnegut challenges Barthes and Foucault’s notion that an author restricts his work; rather, Vonnegut’s identity empowers his novels.

Hybridity is typically formulated in post-colonial theory as a means of resistance, subversion, or liberatory strategy in the hands of the present-day post-colonial subject or theorist. This project, however, demonstrates hybridity as a means of securing dominance and maintaining control when wielded by the imperialist in Cooper's Last of the Mohicans (1826), Kipling's Kim (1901), and Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes (1914). The strategic deployment of hybridity in these texts also serves as an opportunity to negotiate the ambivalence and desire for the native that slips out of that hybrid space-- not necessarily sexual desire that flows between two polarized bodies, but rather, triangulated through other mediating terms such as class, nationality or manliness. Across these novels, the location of the native shifts, until it settles within the white body itself in Tarzan. Desire for the native, then, is returned to the white body in a narcissistic circle of self-glorification.

Zora Neale Hurston’s literature involves dance and performance. What makes this a viable topic of inquiry is her texts often exhibit the performative, whether portraying culture or using dance and associated folk rituals to create complex meaning. Hurston’s use of black vernacular and storytelling evokes lyrical expression in "Their Eyes Were Watching God." African and Caribbean Diasporas in Hurston’s literature reflects primitive dance performances and folklore. This novel requires lyrical analysis. The storytelling feature of performance arts and reclamations of the body are present in Hurston’s text. In recent academic settings, the body has come to occupy a crucial place in literary and cultural texts and criticism. Hurston’s versatile material and anthropology techniques are instrumental in reshaping dance history. A new archetype for theorizing the body has surfaced, where the body of text is performance and lyrical expression.

This thesis is devoted primarily to examining existential factors present in Three Soldiers and The Naked and the Dead, but it is evident that naturalism and Marxism make their presence known in both novels. Three Soldiers and The Naked and the Dead suggest through their existential overtones that indeed existentialism is a vital force which is clearly exerting itself in twentieth-century literature. This study supports the viewpoint of a growing number of modern authors’ works which have concentrated on the individual’s struggle to find meaning and fulfillment in a complex world – a world of nuclear devices, campus unrest, global strife, military conquest, and racial turmoil from the existential point of view. Man’s only salvation is to reject society’s institutions and create an atmosphere which enables individual rights and freedom. Dos Passos, Mailer, and Sartre have been pleading the case of self-actualization and self-realization for years, plans that seem more relevant in the 1960’s than in the decades when they were written. This investigation of existential attitudes in John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead is by no means exhaustive. Certainly more investigation may be carried out on existential elements and attitudes in twentieth-century American literature.

The misfit and the dream of escape are popular motifs in American literature, particularly in the literature of the South. Critical studies of works employing these themes have largely ignored the connection between the two. The Southern misfit – the Southerner who fails to or refuses to conform to his society’s strict standards – often dreams of escaping the restrictions of the South for some Northern “promised land.” In the works of two Georgia writers, Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor, the related themes receive different treatments. Carson McCullers’s misfits in the novels The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding are adolescent girls who fail to meet their society’s expectations to be ladylike and free of personal ambitions, and McCullers seems sympathetic to her misfits’ longing to escape. In Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, her misfits are often intellectuals who feel unappreciated and alienated in their “culturally stagnant” hometowns, but O’Connor usually demonstrates that the real problem of these intellectuals is not the restrictions of the South but the characters’ own lack of self-awareness.

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