John Cheever published over two hundred short stories in an array of small-, mid-, and large-circulation magazines between 1930 and 1981. One hundred and twenty of these stories appeared in The New Yorker. During Cheever’s career and since his death in 1982, many critics have typically analysed his short stories in isolation from the conditions of their production, lest Cheever’s subversive modernist tendencies be confused with the conservative middlebrow ethos of The New Yorker, or the populist aspect of other large-circulation magazines. Critics, including Cheever’s daughter and his most recent biographer Blake Bailey, also claim that Cheever was a financial and, ultimately, artistic victim of the magazine marketplace. Drawing on largely unpublished editorial and administrative correspondence in the New Yorker Records and editorially annotated short story typescripts in the John Cheever Literary Manuscripts collection, and using a historicised close-reading practice, this thesis examines the influence of the magazine marketplace on the short fiction that Cheever produced between 1930 and 1964. It challenges the critical consensus by arguing that Cheever did not dissociate his authorship from commerciality at any point during his career, and consistently exploited the magazine marketplace to his financial and creative advantage, whether this meant temporarily producing stories for little magazines in the early 1930s and romance stories for mainstream titles in the 1940s, or selling his New Yorker rejections to its rivals, which he did throughout his career. Cheever also developed strong working relationships with his editors at The New Yorker during the 1940s and 1950s. This thesis re-evaluates these relationships by analysing comparatively the drafts, archival materials that have hitherto been neglected by critics, and published versions of some of Cheever’s best known New Yorker stories. In so doing, this thesis demonstrates the crucial role that editorial collaboration played in Cheever’s writing process.

This thesis critically explores the “difference” of contemporary South Asian American women’s fiction and their fictional narratives of women’s lives, away from the ethnic postcolonial depictions of diasporic women. The selected novels of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Amulya Malladi, Bharti Kirchner, V.V. Ganeshananthan, Nayomi Munaweera, Nausheen Pasha-Zaidi and Shaila Abdullah studied here interrogate the depiction of South Asian women characters both within diasporic American locations and in South Asian settings. These writers establish individual identities that defy homogeneity assigned to regional identities and establish heterogeneous characters that are influenced through transnational travel. This dissertation’s engagement with exotic identities, foodways, ethno-social identities and diasporic and native socio-cultural pressures for women, offers a “different” reading of contemporary South Asian women’s fiction. The identities that are being reinvented by the selected Indian, Sri Lankan and Pakistani American women writers destabilise established boundaries for women’s identity in South Asian American women’s fiction by using old and new tropes such as folkloric myths, nostalgia, food and ethnic relationships. The transnational cosmopolitan locations that enable the re-negotiation of identities enable the women characters to fashion their own uniqueness. I argue that a “difference” in South Asian American women’s contemporary writing has emerged in recent times, that looks beyond ethno-social diasporic identities. These changes not only advance the already established tropes in women’s literature, but also address important issues of individuality, personal choices and societal pressure affecting self-reinvention and reception of these women within their societies. The analysis of under-researched yet powerful contemporary women writers makes this an important addition to the existing literary debates on varied women’s identities in fiction. I identify existing trends and evolving trends which help to map the emerging changes, making it a significant contribution to the understanding of the development of contemporary South Asian American women’s literature as a distinct body of work.

This thesis brings together two distinct areas of scholarship – trauma studies and comics. I focus on representations of trauma, specifically trauma arising from conflict and war, in post-Vietnam American comics. Trauma studies is an established area within literary research, both in terms of conflict trauma and also personal trauma. For the most part, comics have been ignored. It is my contention that, by the nature of its form, comics is able to mimic the symptoms and presentation of a traumatic rupture in order to represent a traumatic event as accurately and viscerally as possible. My primary texts are taken from across the full spectrum of the comics form. I consider mainstream superhero comics alongside alternative and art comics; all primary texts were published after 1975 by American creators. The theoretical basis is drawn from Freudian, post-Freudian and contemporary clinical thought. The application of trauma theory to the comics form is a largely untraced path so in using this solid theoretical base I hope to reinvigorate these theories in light of a ‘new’ form. I also draw on the small corpus of critical texts in the field of comics studies. This thesis is structured around 6 key issues in conflict and traumatic representation. I conduct close analyses of my primary sources to consider the effectiveness of comics, both formally and thematically, in the areas of mourning, dreams and personal identity. I further consider how the formal concern of temporality and problematizing issue of postmodernism affect, and are affected by, the dual focus of comics and trauma.

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This thesis examines Herman Melville's representations of the material text and the literary marketplace in the novels he published between 1846 and 1857. Thus far, scholarship has emphasized Melville's hostility towards literary production in mid-nineteenth century America, and positioned the book object as a constraint on his imagination. However, this thesis argues that the industrially produced and commercially circulated book was also a powerful source of inspiration for Melville, and that the printed book is both the subject of and a tool for literary representation in his novels. Combining book history and literary criticism, the thesis considers Melville's aesthetic engagements with the material text in order to provide new perspectives on central concerns in Melville's writing: authenticity, ambiguity, irony, and originality. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the technological, economic and social conditions of literary production in antebellum America, contemporary responses to those conditions, and previous studies of Melville's representations of and relations with the literary marketplace. Chapter 2 examines Melville's ludic uses of print in Typee and Omoo, and Chapter 3 considers the relationship between book covers, the market, and selfhood in Redburn and White-Jacket. Chapter 4 explore's the circulation of the book object in markets and metaphors in Moby-Dick. Chapters 5 and 6 return to the materiality of the text, examining the ambiguities of paper and papermaking in Pierre, and The Confidence-Man's construction of original writing through technologically reproducibility. The Conclusion then suggests that the material text and literary marketplace can be best understood as embodying potential for Melville, functioning as partial and contingent spaces in his works, in which a union of aesthetic and economic value is never fully realized, but is always possible.

This thesis consists of a critical study, ‘“A Noisy Situation”: The Feminine and Feminist New Absurd in Twenty-first Century British and American Poetry’, followed by a poetry collection, 'Send Shells'. The critical study is a guidebook to the New Absurd, and thereby informs the reading of 'Send Shells'. Chapter One introduces the New Absurd as a descendant of male-dominated Absurdism; feminine and feminist humour is explored through Sam Riviere, Heather Phillipson, Selima Hill and Luke Kennard. Chapters Two, Three and Four focus on individual poets: Jennifer L. Knox’s 'A Gingo Like Me', Emily Berry’s 'Dear Boy' and Caroline Bird’s 'The Hat-Stand' 'Union' and 'In These Days of Prohibition'. The following themes are investigated: culture, class, and elitism; reality and imagination; feminine humour and sadness. Chapter Five explores apocalypse and technology through Maxine Chernoff, Jane Yeh, and Anne Carson. Chapter Six analyses failures to communicate through Rebecca Perry, Crispin Best, Rachael Allen, and Sara Woods. In conclusion Kayo Chingonyi, Rishi Dastidar, Mona Arshi and Anne Boyer are read to explore poets utilising the New Absurd, a prominent and influential movement in modern poetry, which does not have a specific membership, and might be seen as an aesthetic rather than a school.

<p>The discussion about 4P’s marketing mix covers two aspects. On the one hand, marketing mix activities are used to apply product into market and attract customers. Its activities are matched with every single market in different way. Managers are focused on country specification, customers’ demands and potential competitors. They analyse all factors, which can influence on future product’s adaptation. Enterprise’s success is measured by amount of selling as well as customer satisfaction and behaviour. On the other hand, it is not obviously that companies need to change their marketing strategies every time, when they want to expand their market to being more international. From this point of view differentiation among marketing mix activities are useful for at first gain new target group and meet their requirements. Subsequently, product can be customized. This thesis concludes theories about marketing mix components and its practical application.</p>

The discussion about 4P’s marketing mix covers two aspects. On the one hand, marketing mix activities are used to apply product into market and attract customers. Its activities are matched with every single market in different way. Managers are focused on country specification, customers’ demands and potential competitors. They analyse all factors, which can influence on future product’s adaptation. Enterprise’s success is measured by amount of selling as well as customer satisfaction and behaviour. On the other hand, it is not obviously that companies need to change their marketing strategies every time, when they want to expand their market to being more international. From this point of view differentiation among marketing mix activities are useful for at first gain new target group and meet their requirements. Subsequently, product can be customized. This thesis concludes theories about marketing mix components and its practical application.

This study uses the combination of block copolymer and metal nanoparticles to array ordered structure and specific physical properties such as optics, electricity and magnetism. In this first part, 2-phenylethanethiol was used as the monolayer-protected gold nanoparticles (nps) and dispersed in block copolymer PS-b-PB-E thin film. Two different methods are compared, the first method was PS-b-PB-E thin film by partial crosslinked treatment then the 2-phenylethanethiol of monolayer-protected gold nanoparticles soaked into PS-b-PB-E thin film. The second method was blended gold nps within PS-b-PB-E directly. We found that the first method was better than second method which had arrangement dispersedly. The analyses of UV-VIS, TEM, and SAXS measurement are able to provide the positive evidence to characterize the dispersion of gold nps in diblock copolymer thin film. In the second part, we design to manufacture the multi-nanoholes golden electrode, which has many application in catalysis, selective transit function and fuel cell electrode. We use the PS-b-PB-E copolymer as the spherical micelle, which is the templates and then micelle surface reaction in mercaptane (S-H) function. Gold nps will use the exchange stabilizing ligands method in the micelle surface layer, and the porous gold electrode material by way of the heat treatment step.

This thesis explores the nature and function of language as it is used in twentieth-century fantastic fiction, as represented by the work of C. S. Lewis and Ursula K. Le Guin. In it I argue that the anti-mimetic impulse behind the language of fantasy makes it a polemical, contentious mode, which situates itself against discourses (religious and scientific) that assume the existence of a reality to which language may be said to correspond in certain clearly understood, conventional ways. Both Lewis and Le Guin suggest, by contrast, that experiential reality is an arbitrary and shifting construct, although each writer has a very different attitude towards the category of the ‘real’ and the question of how it may best be articulated. Despite the fact that Lewis uses the language of authority and Le Guin the language of liberation, they both interrogate fundamental ethical, social, political and theological evaluative assumptions embedded in language, disrupting the rigidity that conventional usage confers upon words and the concomitant human tendency to submit unquestioningly to cultural conventions. Lewis challenges the modern, secular, materialist understanding of reality, contending that metaphor has the power to undermine post-secular fixed notions and reveal new semantic fields pertaining to what he understands as the ‘spiritual’. Le Guin celebrates human and non-human embodied existence, with its possibilities and limitations, refuting any transcendent reality. The thesis is divided into two parts. Part One deals with the ‘reactionary’ school of fantasy represented by Lewis. My contention is that Lewis’s Narnian Chronicles dramatise Owen Barfield’s theory of the concomitant evolution of human consciousness and language in relation to the phenomenal world. The three chapters in this part demonstrate that in the Narnia books Lewis represents initial forms of mythical, ‘participatory’ consciousness (as Barfield calls it) – that is, a world in which no linguistic or imaginative distinction is made between the human, animal, material and spiritual dimensions; followed by the loss of participation and the consequent alienation of human beings both from immaterial things and the environment; and concluding with the renewal of participation through a new use of language. Part Two is concerned with Le Guin’s sequence of fantasy novels about the imaginary world of Earthsea. Following Darko Suvin, I divide the sequence into two trilogies, which embody two contrasting responses to the conservative fantasy represented by the Narnia books. For me, the difference between these responses can best be understood through a close examination of Le Guin’s changing attitude to language in the First and Second Trilogies, which I undertake in four chapters. The first chapter explores Le Guin’s initial collusion with Lewis’s patriarchal politics, a collusion signalled by the rigid linguistic conventions and unchanging cultural practices of her imaginary world. The three final chapters deal with the Second Earthsea Trilogy, with particular emphasis on the last two books, since these have so far received little critical attention. In these books she deconstructs the earlier premises of her created world by finding new ways in which to represent the voices that had been excluded or marginalised in her previous trilogy, as well as in the work of her predecessors in fantasy. The thesis as a whole represents an effort to reassess the political implications of linguistic choices, and of attitudes to language, in twentieth-century fantastic fiction.