This thesis looks at the engagement of English-language poets with the writing of Roland Barthes, and considers how a reading of Barthes may help understanding of a range of challenging experimental work. The introduction to the thesis lays a groundwork of how Barthes has been read in English since the first widely available translations of his work appeared in the 1960s, and thus establishes the intellectual context in which poets have written since. Beginning in the first chapter with Veronica Forrest-Thomson, the first of these poets to have looked at Barthes in detail, it looks both at poetry and of poets’ writings in the fields of criticism and poetics. From Forrest-Thomson the thesis moves in the second chapter to North America and considers the place of Barthes, particularly his Writing Degree Zero, in the intellectual context out of which emerged what has come to be known as ‘language writing’, combining a survey of this writing with close readings of the work of Ron Silliman, Ray DiPalma, Lyn Hejinian, Bernadette Mayer, and others. In the third chapter, the investigation of this diffuse tendency in poetry is followed through various strands, focussing in particular on periodicals and archival material. Finally, the fourth chapter looks at Anne Carson, Deborah Levy, and Kristjana Gunnars, and considers Barthes’ relevance to their texts’ thinking about writing. The intersection of theory and the emotional life is explored using the theoretical lens of Chris Kraus’ experimental fiction, particularly her notion of a ‘lonely girl phenomenology’. Barthes has had a diverse range of effects on poets’ thinking about writing and their writing practices, and our understanding of Barthes as a writer, what we mean by the ‘Barthesian’, and individual notions of his such as the ‘death of the author’ and his work on the possibilities of the fragment, have changed over time. The thesis considers the potential of Barthes’ writing to help us think about literature and its future utility for poetry studies.

The critical reflection at the start of this thesis outlines the ideas that have informed the production of my novel Any Belgian. The novel explores how cities offer creative possibilities for a writer, particularly in suggesting locations and for influencing the development of character and plot. The critical reflection also surveys the work of writers and critics who have commented on the nature of cities as palimpsests, and as places that serve as an emotional refuge. It also reflects on the creative processes involved in constructing my novel, detailing the decisions made about its form. The use of images in the novel is also discussed and a justification is made for their use as a device to deliberately involve the reader in the construction of meaning. References to cinema and other visual arts are prominent in the novel, and there is a reflection on how they are used as an effective way to express the thoughts of the narrator in his attempts to make sense of a set of multi-layered past experiences. It was also important to undertake fieldwork for research in the writing of the novel. This process is described and related to the writings of critics such as Walter Benjamin and other writers who have recorded their walks in urban locations. The narrative for Any Belgian works on several levels and the complexity of its layers are addressed in the conclusion to the thesis. What has been produced is a novel that attempts to raise questions about the possibility of accurately recording urban experiences, especially when a narrator is confronted with the challenge of describing the permanently shifting relationship between recollections and the city locations which give rise to those recollections.

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This thesis constitutes the first extensive study of tragedy during the Napoleonic era. The new tragic productions of this period have been sidelined by French theatre history, allegedly because they were tired copies of seventeenth-century classical models, conduits for propaganda, and suffocated by censorship. I challenge this judgement by excavating this period’s theatre and by applying renewed critical approaches, notably André Lefevere’s notion of rewriting which posits that all productions are subject to poetics and ideology. This thesis is comprised of two principal axes. The first focuses on poetics to contend that new productions were not simply copies of classical plays. Although tragedy was based on the imitation of seventeenth-century models, which scholars refer to as classiques, these examples were rewritten during the eighteenth century, an activity which continued under Napoleon. Therefore, there was no stable example to imitate, rather there was a particular contemporary understanding, which I label the ‘classique’ model to underline its specificity. Using contemporary treatises to form a generic framework, I examine how new tragedies performed at the Comédie-Française depart from this inheritance, reconsidering the passage from theatrical Classicism to Romanticism. The second axis engages with Napoleonic cultural politics by rethinking the terms ‘propaganda’ and ‘censorship’. Although tragedy was used for its propagandistic properties, this policy was not always successful. Moreover, the works’ reception reveals that playwrights and the public appropriated tragedy’s rewriting of historical narratives as a means of mediating the Revolution. Finally, I examine censorship, investigating how the State’s bureaucratic and the Comédie-Française’s lateral systems combined to control and tailor tragedies in performance and print for contemporary audiences. Consequently, this thesis sheds light both on the transition from Classicism to Romanticism in the theatre, and the public and the regime’s use of tragedy as a means of reconstructing the French nation after the Revolution.

Over the past two decades, scholars have shown that the modernist ‘Great Divide’ between high and low culture is culturally-constructed, reductive and oversimplified. Yet, despite these critical disavowals, the field of modernist studies is still informed by the Divide’s binary systems of evaluation and classification. ‘High’ and ‘low’ texts are studied in isolation and modernism is privileged over popular culture. This thesis argues that we must address the Great Divide’s structure if we are to move beyond it. The Divide is underpinned by three structural myths: that of essence (texts are inherently high or low), mutual exclusivity (texts are either high or low) and precedence (high texts come before low ones). Over the course of four chapters, this study seeks to define, challenge and reconfigure the Great Divide, exploring new approaches which allow us to study texts from across the cultural spectrum together. After an initial chapter which maps out the Great Divide in early-twentieth-century Britain, the following three chapters interrogate the structural myths in turn. Chapter 2 disputes the myth of essence, arguing that both ‘little’ and ‘popular’ magazines are shaped by external factors; Chapter 3 considers travel posters, showing that they exhibit apparently mutually-exclusive aesthetic and publicity functions at once; and Chapter 4 examines the extent to which innovations in mass-market fashion predated their modernist counterparts. Informed by theory but rooted in print culture, this thesis combines cultural history and deconstruction to displace the Great Divide as a system of classification and reinstate it as an object of study. Only by viewing high, low and middlebrow texts together can we trace the effects that socio-economic conditions, prevailing aesthetic norms and audience demands had on a text’s production, circulation and reception.

This thesis recommends that the ‘ecocritical’ turn in American Literary Scholarship be brought into contact with ‘symptomnal’ forms of ideology critique, namely after the post-Althusserian thinking of Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek and Deleuze-Guattari. This recommendation is made on the basis that the ecocritical turn has neglected to apprise itself of a thoroughgoing prehistory; by bringing together the lessons of Marx and Lacan, post-Althusserian thinking enables us to address the disavowal of formal and theoretical concerns constitutive of first-wave ecocriticism, and to acknowledge this as symptomatic of North American cultural and political pluralism more broadly. Where such disavowal promoted a widespread rejection of poststructural theories of immanence in the Americanist milieu of the 1980s, I consider how it effectively blocked psychoanalytic and Marxist approaches to literary form and human subjectivity. Following an initial examination of ecocriticism after Althusser and Balibar’s thesis on ‘symptomnal reading’, my study goes on to reassert issues of subjectivity for ecocriticism. Žižek’s subjectivist approach to ideology critique enables a diagnosis of the legacy of modern epistemology and thereafter analysis of ecocritical motivations of sublime aesthetics. By pursuing broader, ‘valetudinary’ issues in relation to literary form, the latter half of the thesis exceeds the former’s emphasis on ideology critique, moving instead to engage the post-subjectivist, ‘schizoanalytic’ project of Deleuze and Guattari. Predicated upon an a-subjective philosophy of differential relations, schizoanalysis enables us to reappraise eco-literary and eco-philosophical concerns, chiefly after post-symptomatological analyses of the relationship between high modern literature, pre-personal affect and the ‘eco-social’ coding of desire. It is in this way that I assert the ‘body without organs’ as the privileged clinical figure with which to address eco-social organisation, and thus, exceed the subjectivist logic of the symptom.

This thesis examines the work of a group of African women writers who have emerged over the last forty years. While figures such as Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri and Wole Soyinka are likely to be the chief focus of discussions of African writing, female authors have been at the forefront of fictional interrogations of identity formation and history. In the work of authors such as Mariama Bâ (Senegal), Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), and Leila Aboulela (Sudan), there is a clear attempt to subvert the tradition of male writing where the female characters are often relegated to the margins of the culture, and confined to the domestic, private sphere. This body of work has already generated a significant number of critical responses, including readings that draw on gender politics and colonialism; but it is still very much a minor literature, and most mainstream western feminism has not sufficiently processed it. The purpose of this thesis is threefold. First, it draws together some of the most important and influential African women writers of the post-war period and looks at their work, separately and together, in terms of a series of themes and issues, including marriage, family, polygamy, religion, childhood, and education. Second, it demonstrates how African literature produced by women writers is explicitly and polemically engaged with urgent political issues that have both local and global resonance: the veil, Islamophobia and a distinctively African brand of feminist critique. Third, it revisits Fredric Jameson’s claim that all third-world texts are ‘national allegories’ and considers these novels by African women in relation to Jameson’s claim, arguing that their work has complicated Jameson’s assumptions.

This thesis provides the first extended and in-depth study of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu?s work on literature. Chapter 1 surveys the problematic from which Bourdieu?s work on literature emerged, and its reception in the Anglophone field of literary criticism. Chapter 2 introduces Bourdieu?s original method of literature analysis, which has yet to have been used widely in literary studies, but which provides analytic purchase at all levels of literary study, from the micro-textual to the macrosocial. Chapter 3 centres on Bourdieu?s notion of autonomy, and explores its relations to his key concepts of habitus, capital, and field. Chapters 4 to 6 then examine the intersections between Bourdieu? work on literature and his other sociological and political projects. Chapter 4 shows how Bourdieu?s theory of sociological knowledge enabled him to set up a distinction between a ?scientific? and a ?literary? representation of the social world, and explores the possibilities for complementarities and exchange between sociology and literature. Chapter 5 shows how Bourdieu hoped to harness the specific skills and symbolic capital of writers in the service of progressive causes, focusing on his plans for an International Parliament of Writers and Liber, his European book review. Chapter 6 explores the cultural policy implication of Bourdieu?s work on literature, both for educational reform and State support for the Arts. Overall, this thesis will show that Bourdieu brings novel solutions to some of the most persistent ? and urgent ? problems facing literary studies today, and not only in France; but also that sociology can learn from literature and from studying literary writers.

This thesis argues for, and conducts close reading on, lesbian pulp fiction published in the United States between 1950 and 1965. Though a thorough investigation of a lesbian textual community centred on the lesbian periodical, The Ladder (1956-1952), this thesis forms a lens through which to closely read lesbian pulp fiction novels. This thesis maintains that members of this textual community were invested in literary discussions, as evinced through the publication of book reviews. Moreover, the lesbian textual community of The Ladder actively participated in literary discussions through the ‘Readers Respond’ column. Spring Fire (1952) by Vin Packer and The Beebo Brinker Chronicles (1957 to 1962) by Ann Bannon are investigated for implicit and explicit criticisms of 1950s sexual politics and the politics surrounding lesbian representation in popular media. For the members of The Ladder’s lesbian textual community, pulp novels belonging to the ‘Golden Age of Paperbacks’ were more than cheaply produced reading materials.

The thesis demonstrates the extent to which the sixteenth-century allegorical epic poem, The Faerie Queene, engages with early modern theories of salvation. Much has been written about Spenser’s consideration of theological ideas in Book I and this has prompted scholars to speculate about the poet’s own doctrinal inclinations. However, little has been written about the ways in which the remaining books in the poem also explore Christian ideas of atonement, grace and damnation. This study advances Spenserian scholarship by stressing the soteriological dimension of books II, III, IV and VI. It considers how the poem’s doctrinal ambiguity would have meant that Spenser’s readers would have been able to interpret the poem in terms of the different schools of thought on the conditionality, or otherwise, of election and reprobation. As the thesis suggests, these particular books were alive to the doctrinal disagreements of the period, and explore the complex theological positions and divisions that existed at the time. By shedding light on the religious tenor of these remaining books, the study has implications for our sense of how the poem would have prompted sixteenth century readers to reflect on the means of their own salvation.