This thesis approaches the issue of form in the Caribbean novel from the perspective of the key role played by the body as an alternative repository of memory in the region. Whether in terms of the production of the wage-labourer under capitalism or the regulation and exploitation of the slave, the body was the locus of a series of power relations upon which colonialist/capitalist expansion hinged. Yet for the colonised, its connection to cultural practices such as vodun ritual meant that it served too as the amanuensis of an historical legacy denied 'legitimate' expression. Tracing the impact of the various material and ideological constraints imposed upon not only the body but also land and language from the time of slavery, the thesis explores how three writers in particular - Patrick Chamoiseau, Wilson Harris, and Earl Lovelace - have sought to integrate this embodied tradition in order to transform a body politic scarred by racial polarisation, underdevelopment, and victimhood. The thesis examines how the need for an original epic form able to express the complexity of the Caribbean's history requires are-visionary approach to memory. It suggests that the latter in tum requires the formulation of an original philosophy, one that, reflecting the admixture of cultures in the Caribbean, makes use of a diversity of intellectual traditions, including traditional African religion, to forge ontological and epistemological modes capable of conveying cross-cultural community. The incorporation of the insights provided by rituals based on ego-displacement, for example, contributes to a form that seeks to undo the consolidation of character and narrative, consuming or reritualising the past to release a new vision of the future. Moreover, the worldview behind this form offers a means to envisage the renewal of the national project and the transformation of the capitalist world system.

Although the relationship between literature and science has been a major focus of research in the last few decades, the influence of complex systems science on recent American fiction has not yet been comprehensively documented. I argue that a significant body of that fiction is systems-aware and thus represents the world as a network of complex systems. In the first section of the thesis, I claim that the origin of systems fiction can be found in the nineteenth-century social novel, which displayed significant knowledge of system function. Despite the narrative challenges posed by the complex, nonlinear structure of systems, contemporary authors somewhat surprisingly turn to a broadly traditional form of realism rather than experimental literary techniques. Motivated by the desire for social engagement, systems realism conceptualises systems as fundamentally ordered and thus narratable, though it acknowledges that this order is frequently inaccessible. In the second section, I engage in a close reading of systems-aware fiction and explore the extent to which novels incorporate the principles and discourse of systems science. I suggest that these novels seek to understand social concerns through analogy and the creation of fictional models which foreground structural homologies between systems. In the third and final section, I argue that systems-awareness is vital to an understanding of recent ‘post-postmodern’ paradigms, and I demonstrate this through an exploration of emerging trends in fiction which are shaped by systems thinking. In particular, I focus upon the emergence of environmental concerns in recent American writing. To explore the extent to which authors have perceived reality as systemic and have engaged with the representational challenges presented by complex systems provides us with new ways of thinking about the novel as a form. For these reasons I suggest that systems realism is central to the contemporary history of the novel.

The central argument of my work is that authors Leslie Marmon Silko, Louis Owens, and Gerald Vizenor, working in the latter half of the twentieth century, use violence as a literary device (literary violence) for exposing and critiquing modes of systemic violence inherent in the formative originary myths of dominant US culture, specifically the mythic frontier and West. I argue that they engage with questions arising out of the systemic and normative violence required to sustain exceptionalist and supremacist Euramerican myth, which in turn sanitise the unspeakable violence of settler colonialism. This sanitising effect produces a form of transcendent violence, so called because the violence it describes is deemed to be justified in accordance with dominant ideology. In addressing this, Silko rewrites the mythic legacies of frontier and the West, rearticulating the unspeakable violence of conquest and domination, resulting in an anti-Western, pre-apocalyptic vision that turns away from European modernity and late twentieth century capitalism, looking instead to an Indigenous worldview. Owens similarly proposes an alternative reading of frontier where binaries of racial and cultural difference become malleable and diffuse, producing unexpected breaks with established ideology and narratives of dominance. The unseen systemic violence of the provincial town, in many ways the American societal idyll in microcosm, emerges during key confrontations between Native and non-Native characters in the liminal spaces and boundaries of the provincial town. Bringing these different threads together, Vizenor critiques systemic and institutionalised violence in his fiction and non-fiction work. His breakthrough novel Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart shares key characteristics with the work of Silko and Owens in this regard. Transgressing borders of taste, binaries of simulated Indianness, and notions of Euramerican cultural dominance, Vizenor’s mocking laugh destabilises the notion of completed conquest and closed frontiers as the final word on Euramerican supremacy.

This thesis examines how southern novelists at mid-century used the fictional small town to critique racial segregation. Depictions of segregated towns across a selection of representative fictions share a typology of people and institutions – what I term offices – that combine to make these towns seem integral and functioning. In the segregated southern town, the community is contaminated by segregation and the paradoxes it engenders are revealed through the typology I uncover and explore in this thesis. The racial landscape of Maxwell, Georgia in Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit (1944) exposes how points of intersection in the town’s supposedly rigid racial geography highlight the weakness of segregated structural integrity. In The Hawk and the Sun (1955) Byron Herbert Reece examines the relationships of a farmer and a teacher with other offices, representatives of the bank and the church, in the Appalachian town of Tilden, Georgia. Carson McCullers set each of her novels in the town of Milan, Georgia but this consistency only becomes clear in Clock Without Hands (1961), in which she focuses on the roles a judge and a pharmacist play in defining the town’s collective identity. The courthouse square in William Faulkner’s Jefferson, Mississippi represents the identity of the town and, in The Reivers (1962), a narrator attempts to rewrite the history of the town by insinuating himself into Faulkner’s existing typology. In A Different Drummer (1962) William Melvin Kelley positions his imagined town of Sutton, in an unnamed southern state, at a moment of historic change and explores this change from the vantage point of the archetypal porch of a general store. This thesis contributes to a developing literary history of racial segregation by conducting detailed close textual analysis to argue that the ostensibly benign setting of the small town exposed the fallacies upon which the segregated South operated.

This thesis explores the relationship between the representation of contagion and those it affects offered by contemporary American speculative fiction and the ways in which this representative model has and continues to inform our understanding of real and actual pandemics. Over the past decade, the success of texts centred on such figures as the vampire, the werewolf and the zombie has triggered a return of contagion to the forefront of the American popular fictional imagination. Though this renewed fascination coincides with the emergence of new global biological threats, it also draws part of its power from a broader cultural anxiety regarding the structures of subjectivity, the relation between subject and State as well as the subject’s role within the collective deployed by our contemporary discourse of health. While critical studies on contagion have been predominantly concerned with real diseases and their narrativisation, this thesis focuses on five fictional representations—Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and its adaptations, the American series Being Human, Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark and Charles Burns’s Black Hole—in order to explore the ways in which these texts engage with the modern medical discourse and the wider conceptualisation of subjectivity promoted by Western philosophy. By emptying the referential dimension of the diseases they mobilise, these texts provide a unique opportunity to analyse the underlying mechanisms of contagion as a cultural construction and to expose the set of assumptions (moral, political, social, etc.) upon which its production itself relies. Exposing the ways in which our cultural perception of contagion has been shaped by the limitations inherent to the traditional epistemic model dominating Western society, this thesis not only reveal the violence inherent in the structures of subjectivity surrounding the individual, it also highlights, by deconstructing the dominant model, new possible lines of flight for the contagious subject outside the normative structures of our current public health, medical, social and political discourses.

Halfway Houses examines popular American Gothic fiction through a critical focus on what I call the ‘haunted house motif’. This motif, I argue, creates a distinctive narrative space, characterised by the key quality of liminality, in which historical events and processes impact upon the present. Haunted house stories provide imaginative opportunities to keep the past alive while highlighting the complexities of the culture in which they are written. My chosen authors, H. P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson and Stephen King, use the haunted house motif to engage with political and ideological perspectives important to an understanding of American history and culture. Analysing their fiction, I argue that in “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1933) Lovecraft uses haunting to address concerns about industrialisation, urbanisation and modernisation in the early part of the twentieth century, endorsing both progressive and conservative ideologies. Similarly, Matheson’s haunting highlights issues of 1950s suburbanisation in A Stir of Echoes (1958) and changing social mores about the American family during the 1970s and 1980s in Earthbound (1982; 1989), critiquing conformist culture whilst stopping short of overturning it. Lastly, as a product of the counterculture, King explores new kinds of haunted spaces relevant to the American experience from the 1970s onwards. In The Shining (1977) he draws on haunting to problematise inequalities of masculinity, class and capitalism, and in Christine (1983), at a time of re- emerging conservative politics, he critiques Reaganite nostalgia for the supposed ‘golden age’ of the 1950s. At the close of the twentieth century, haunting in Bag of Bones (1998) reappraises American guilt about race and the legacy of slavery. Overall, my thesis shows that the haunted house motif adapts to the ever-changing conditions of American modernity and that the liminality of haunting addresses the concomitant social unease that such changes bring.

This thesis examines the repeated appearance of liminal white voices in antebellum American fiction. It identifies a number of white characters who inhabit the boundary between life and death and produce inexplicable voices: talking corpses, ghosts, ventriloquists, spiritualist mediums and non-human bodies. It argues that Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Robert Montgomery Bird, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville continually associate dead, dying and supernatural white figures with African Americans and Native Americans to amplify these white characters own marginal positions within their communities. While existing criticism classifies the non-white and female body as a site of otherness, this thesis identifies marginality within the white male citizen himself. The six chapters examine how authors articulate liminal whiteness in different vocal contexts: ventriloquism in Brown, storytelling in Irving, blackface minstrelsy in Bird, medical discourse in Poe, enchanting speech in Hawthorne, and wordlessness in Melville. Across these texts, the liminal figure’s voice disturbs essentialist racial ideologies and challenges prescriptions of citizenship in the antebellum period. Inexplicable voices act as powerful articulations of liminal whiteness that question, contest or negate antebellum ideals of the autonomous, rational, industrious, social and respectable white citizen. This thesis demonstrates that antebellum authors employ liminal white voices across the border of life and death to both explore and attempt to contain threats and anxieties of fragile or negated white citizenship. In doing so, this thesis contributes to a growing body of scholarship concerned with the cultural construction of whiteness and citizenship in the antebellum period.

This thesis explores the emotional experience of reading horror fiction from a cognitive-poetic perspective. The approach adopted in this thesis combines thorough consideration of Text World Theory, attention and resonance, emotion studies, and online reader responses to provide a detailed analysis of the texture of the horror-reading experience. Three classic contemporary horror novels are the analytical focus of this investigation: Ira Levin’s (1967) Rosemary’s Baby, Stephen King’s (1986) IT, and William Peter Blatty’s (1971) The Exorcist. These popular novels were chosen for their ability to evoke anxiety, fear, and disgust in readers, respectively. The primary intention of this thesis is to be an original contribution to the fields of stylistics, cognitive poetics, and the literary critical understanding of horror fiction. This thesis argues for a multifaceted approach to understanding the emotional experience of horror fiction, which is considered in terms of movement. As the conceptual metaphor EMOTION IS MOVEMENT recurs as an experiential effect of the horror-reading process throughout the reader-response data in this thesis, the frameworks applied aim to give insight to the readerly experience of conceptual movement. This thesis proposes that negation and other negatively oriented lexis establish the macabre ambience of the text-world space and that manipulation of movement through world-switching contributes to negative emotions evoked through the experience of these horror text-worlds.

The representation of mental health disorders and syndromes has increased in contemporary literature, film and television. Characters with disorders and syndromes such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, autism and Asperger’s syndrome, Tourette’s syndrome, and dissociative identity disorder are common, leading to an increased critical engagement with these fictional texts. This thesis examines the representation of dissociative identity disorder (DID) in contemporary American fiction since 1994, concentrating on a small selection of texts: the novels Set This House in Order (2003) and Fight Club (1996), and the television shows Dollhouse (2009-2010) and United States of Tara (2009-2011). By engaging in turn with trauma theory, illness narratives and genre theory, and queer theory, this thesis argues that the texts metaphorically employ dissociative identity disorder as a means of resisting normativity, whether this is the systems of social normativity characters find themselves facing within the texts, or generic or narrative norms. In so doing, the texts position DID as a utopian condition: one that enables its sufferers to resist systems of normativity they encounter and champion non-normative identities. There is a tension evident here between metaphorical uses of disease within fiction and the real-world experiences of those who suffer from these disorders. By examining all the ways in which the texts resist norms and their utopian impulses, this thesis examines the extent to which these texts suggest DID can or should be universalised as a disorder of non-normativity.

Emily Dickinson's work can be understood in terms of dynamic and variable interactions with uncertainty. Sometimes uncertainty is horrifyingly meaningless, whilst on other occasions it is liberating and meaningful; Dickinson's grotesque is predicated upon the interplay of both these perspectives. Dickinson's grotesque dialectic between enabling and disabling interactions with uncertainty resists monolithic critical appropriation. Theories of the grotesque enable us to unify the critical discord between conservative and radical depictions of Dickinson's work. Using the psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion, I explain the dialectic between the different interactions with uncertainty and demonstrate how they are shaped contextually. Gothic context engenders fearful responses to uncertainty; female creativity engenders ambivalence; embodying contexts produce liberating uncertainty. Dickinson's gothic elucidates a need for meaning, and a corresponding fear of representational insufficiency. This desire for certainty is extrapolated from a Calvinist sensibility, whereby uncertainty denotes unregenerate being. The apophatic poems move towards meaning by perpetually surpassing their own conceptual limitations. However, this process becomes self-defeating as the act of negation itself turns into the kind of uncertainty it was supposed to overcome. Female creativity is achieved through internalizing overwhelming, masculine power as the basis of poetic autonomy. Dickinson's poetic self partially overcomes the oppressive, binary distinction between male and female positions. I compare Dickinson with Harriet Prescott Spofford, illustrating how both writers narrate their assimilation of alterity as a terrifying encounter with an omnipotent male muse.