This dissertation examines narratives of passing of the nineteenth- and twentieth century fins de siècle. My central thesis is that passing narratives of the 1990s and beyond evidence symmetry between the tropes of passing that occur at plot level and passing strategies surrounding the production of the texts themselves. I argue that the connections between passing and authorship that emerge in contemporary stories invite us to reconsider extant interpretations of earlier passing stories, specifically those published at the turn of the twentieth century. The Introduction challenges the historiography of the passing narrative traced in existing studies of passing. It also suggests the ways in which authorship and passing are inextricably linked via the arbitrary standard of "authenticity," both authorial and racial. In Chapter One, I examine the relationship between the African American body-as-text and the African American author who produces a text in The Bondwoman's Narrative (date unknown), Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000) and Percival Everett's Erasure (2001). Chapter Two takes the self-reflexive detective genre and traces the changing roles of the passing character within the conventions of the form, from femme fatale to hard-boiled detective. Here, I focus specifically on Pauline Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter (1901-1902), Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) and Robert Skinner's Wesley Farrell series (1997-2002). In Chapter Three, I examine texts whose protagonists' gender and/or racial ambiguity serve to destabilise analogously the religious categories under interrogation in those texts, namely Hopkins's Winona (1902) and Louise Erdrich's Tracks (1988) and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001). Chapter Four examines tropes of passing in relation to three contemporary novels of adolescence, Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle (1996), Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998) and Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex (2002). Finally, the Conclusion discusses recent controversies of authorship and authenticity in the U.S., particularly as these pertain to the ambiguous literary category of "memoir."

This thesis investigates depictions of male dismemberment at Anglo and Native American contact sites in the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. It argues for Poe’s subscription to a traditional theology that posits Neoplatonic concepts of the soul as mandatory for the constitution of rational humanity, and contends that he looks critically from this perspective at the contingency of national citizenship on property ownership in Jacksonian America. This investigation therefore involves an analysis of the link between property and national subjectivity, with emphasis on the recurrent trope in contemporary literature of the male body dismembered by ‘Indian warfare’, and how this body represents early America’s uncertain claim to its national territory and, by extension, the constituting condition of property. This thesis also assesses epistemological and religious formations in Poe’s fiction. Poe’s tales often express a theological anxiety, with tensions created as the knowledge systems that define Poe’s subjectivities subordinate spirituality to empirical mensuration and representation. Dramatizing this shift from teleology to epistemology and its disarticulating effect on the self are Poe’s ‘married women’ stories. Keeping in mind links between soteriological paradigms and identity construction, methodologies are partially organized around Poe’s presentation of women in his essays and tales, with particular emphasis on ‘The Poetic Principle’ and ‘Berenice’. The interpretive apparatus gained by historical contextualization and the assessment of Poe’s epistemological and religious formations is then mobilized towards reading the disarticulate male body as a nexus of Poe’s concerns about property ownership, epistemology and theology, and analyzing his tales pertaining to colonial contact, particularly: ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, ‘Morning on the Wissahiccon’, ‘The Man That Was Used Up’, ‘The Journal of Julius Rodman’, and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore a set of key issues and themes in the fiction of Stephen King, and then to present, in the form of a creative extract, a demonstration of an imaginative engagement with those same literary preoccupations mapped out in that opening critical section. This thesis is thus divided into two parts. The first part, 'Critical Encounters', explores through an interconnected series of close readings a selection of novels and novellas that circle around questions of suffering and survival. Chapter One, 'Monsters by Design', looks closely at Carrie (1974), The Shining (1977), and Misery (1987), among other texts, in order to define King's human monsters and investigate the episodes of domestic violence that are among his most terrifying scenes. Chapter Two, 'Retrospection of Abuse', uses 'The Body', a novella in Different Seasons (1982), as a core text to examine King's use of abuse and abusive characters as a means of defining character and assigning motivation for further violent tendencies. Chapter Three, 'Remorse and Resurrection', examines the influence of science and religious faith in terms of mourning the loss of loved ones. Chapter Four, 'The Selfish Apparition', a detailed engagement with Bag of Bones (1998), delves into the meanings behind the appearance of ghostly apparitions and suggests they may be less para-psychological and more psychoanalytical in nature. The second part, 'Creative Engagement', demonstrates the influence King's writing has had on my own work by providing an extract from a new novel, Without Warning, a sequel to my first book, Summer of the Cicada (Jonathan Cape, 2005). Without Warning is a unique experiment for me, as it has been written not only in the wake of the literary works of King - which have long exerted an influence on me as a writer and as one of his 'constant readers' - but in the light of a sustained period of research and reflection on King as a writer. Being in the midst of a critical and creative immersion in King, including his own accounts of his craft as well as interviews and essays by other scholars, has shaped my writing and made me mediate on my craft in a way I had not done before. This thesis then is both a study of aspects of the fiction of one of America's foremost storytellers, and an example of an emerging writer grappling with the fiction and criticism of a major influence.

This study explores the relationship between female identity formation within patriarchal society and women's literary discourse. The 'Introduction' serves to highlight Lou Andreas-Salomé's and Anaïs Nin's acute awareness of the tradional conflict between the role of artist and the role of woman. With both writers, their efforts to come to terms with their own creative powers involve tentative questions about the function of writing itself, which they both experience as a vital need. Part One of the study, therefore, addresses itself to reflecting the role of language as a basic means of socialization, which produces genderized subjects. This is related to the power of language to enable the construction of identity. Patriarchal culture produces woman as man's complementary Other. Questions of female identity and desire thus gain particular importance for the writer who strives to constitute her identity as autonomous subject. The first two chapters of Part Two focus on the problems that confront the women who, within the process of writing assume creative powers that are traditionally conceived as male prerogatives. The internalized image of woman as mother operates as a powerful impediment to creative self-assertion. An equally fundamental obstacle in the writer's quest for literary authority are the problematic links each writer establishes between a masculinized creator God, paternal authority and cultural discourse. Transcending their culturally induced duality between woman and creator Lou Andreas-Salomé and Anaïs Nin develop opposed literary strategies. Yet both resort to non-threatening female stereotypes that are able to accommodate their anxiety of authorship. Chapters III and IV revolve around the experience of writing itself in terms of a re-construction of inherited meanings and the woman's problem of creating her own meanings. Chapter V concentrates on the gaps that structure either writer's discourse and contribute to making it impossible to establish the woman as subject of desire. Chapter VI explores the ways in which internalized concepts of femininity work to limit the freedom of the imagination, reduce the field of vision and result in projecting transgressive female desires in disguised or displaced form. The 'Conclusion' stresses the inadequacy of existing controversial attitudes to both writers and highlights significant differences between the fiction of Lou Andreas-Salomé and Anaïs Nin.

This study considers the approach in recent African-American and Black British fiction toward the cultural memory of Africa. Following a brief consideration of the relationship between contemporary conceptions of African-American and Black British cultural identities, I examine the ways in which the imaginative journeys and geographies, evoked by the ideals of Africa and 'Africanness', are employed in the negotiation of historical memory, and in the endeavour to situate black identity in the context of contemporary American and British society. My discussion addresses these questions, initially, in four novels by African-American writers: Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1983), and John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire (1990). I argue that African-American writers situate a memory of an African past within an African-American present, through a form of historical memory which is sensitive not only to tradition, but also to the practice of 'possession'. This fluid form of memory, characteristic of a voodoo tradition, and also, these writers suggest, of a diversity of African-American artforms, allows knowledge of African tradition to be situated within the American present, but is broadly denied by an American trend of forgetfulness toward the past, and devalued by institutionalised racism. African-American texts present uses of language in which the linguistic and the pre-linguistic realms are felt to be continuous with one another, in response to an American language which is centrally occupied by the fraught relationship between black and white Americans. The second half of this study examines the memory of Africa in three Black British works, including Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River (1991), S.1. Martin's Incomparable World (1996), and Bernardine Evaristo's Lara (1997). I suggest here that Black British authors employ the cultural memory of Africa not as an inheritance which is connected to a known 'tradition', but as one of a diverse number of inheritances which are negotiated as part of the process of situating identity as flexible, individual, and unfinished. The memory of Africa is figured as frozen in the past, along with a range of other cultural inheritances, which are taken up and redramatised in the present as part of an attempt to recover the inherent diversity at the heart of an oppressive British fiction of linearity, and of uniform 'whiteness'. Where Britain, historically, has been silent on Britain's black presence, Black British writers simply speak into that silence. Emerging from this fruitful comparison between the two literatures is a sense of the contrasting approaches which are made by black writers toward notions of tradition and the performance of identity, in the context of two very different national histories, and as part of fundamental strategies of survival employed in contemporary social settings. These dramatisations are interrogated against continuous issues of race and racism, but also as diverse solutions for identity where national contexts bear a contrasting significance in an age which is increasingly globalised, and in which imperial power has shifted, and continues to shift, between Britain and America.

This thesis seeks to explain the organisational, programmatic and ideological renewal of the French Parti Socialiste (PS), employed as a test case to examine the veracity of the 'crisis of social democracy' literature. Chapter I reviews the crisis of social democracy literature, introducing a framework for the analysis of social democracy in general, and the PS in particular. Chapter 2 establishes the historical and institutional context of PS development. Chapter 3 demonstrates how organisational changes have altered the opportunity structures of the key actors, crucially affecting how the party articulates its electoral and policy strategy. Chapter 4 explores PS electoral strategists' attempts to resolve problems posed by the fragmentation of homogenous electoral blocs of support, increasing electoral volatility, and the competitive challenge of new parties. Chapter 5 analyses PS ideological evolution in the 1990s in the context of the collapse of 'actual existing socialism', the exhaustion of traditional social democratic means, the enforced peaceful co-existence with the new market orthodoxy, and the increasing relevance of supra-national co-ordination for social democracy. In Chapter 6 we will explore the implications of globalisation for social democracy. The thesis rejects the 'hyperglobal' interpretation of the relationship between social democracy and globalisation, which asserts that national economies are now subsumed into a 'borderless world', within which social democracy is an historically exhausted project. Analysis of the development and implementation of the PS's macro-economic policy, job creation policy, labour market policies, and 'structural adjustment' policies, such as the shift towards a 35 hour week, demonstrate enduring social democratic policy activism. Chapter 7 presents a comparative political economic analysis of the economic strategies of the PS and the British Labour Party which further illustrates the potential for social democratic policy activism. Finally, the conclusion summarises and draws together the arguments.

This thesis re-evaluates the work of the poet Anne Sexton (1928-1974), concentrating, in particular, on the indeterminacies, contradictions and aporia which it finds to be characteristic of her ostensibly frank and self-revelatory writing. The study is based on a close textual analysis of Sexton's writing, is informed by oststructuralist theories, and is sustained by an examination and discussion of archive collections of her previously unpublished papers. In seeking an understanding of Sexton's poetics, the thesis identifies and interrogates the strategies of denial and obfuscation apparent in her own explication of her work - principally, by scrutiny of the unpublished, and previously unresearched, drafts of a series of lectures which she delivered in 1972. Chapters One and Two consider the origins of 'confessional' or - Sexton's preferred term - 'personal' poetry and reassess her place within contemporary poetry. They suggest that Sexton's writing is engaged in a process of negotiation and contestation, both with the boundaries and expectations of confessionalism, and with the strictures of T. S. Eliot's theory of 'impersonality'. In support of these arguments, Chapter Two offer a reading of Sexton's little-known poem, 'Hurry Up Please It's Time', alongside its intertext, Eliot's The Waste Land. Chapter Three reassesses received views of the supposedly beneficial interrelationship between confessional speaker and reader. It examines Sexton's appropriation of dramatic masks and personae and her use of metaphors of striptease and prostitution, and suggests that these are employed simultaneously to appease and to repel an intrusive audience. Similarly, Chapters Four and Five trace Sexton's problematisation of two previously-accepted tenets of confessional poetry: its status as autobiography and its truthfulness, drawing attention to the techniques employed in order to give the impression of both. Chapter Six considers Sexton's problematic engagement with a language which is not malleable, transparent, and referential but, rather, is experienced as uncooperative and occlusive. Finally, the thesis recuperates Sexton from the common charge of narcissism, arguing that it is the writing, rather than the poet, which is self-reflexive and self-conscious. In this respect, it concludes that her work - perhaps unexpectedly - anticipates many of the tendencies of postmodernist writing.

I argue that the Southern folk tradition is William Faulkner’s strongest influence. Faulkner experienced both a black and white folk culture in childhood through his Aunt Alabama and his nurse, Caroline Barr. I cover many of Faulkner’s ‘Modernist’ novels but examine their folk and vernacular elements, such as Jason Compson’s vernacular consciousness, the storytelling in Absalom, Absalom! or the trickster figure in the Snopes novels. I will be using Ed Piacentino’s The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor for secondary research and Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination and Rabelais and his World to provide a theoretical framework regarding the text as an interaction of competing discourses, and the ‘grotesque.’ I examine several writers to provide a folk ‘context.’ Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s ‘The Horse-Swap’ uses vernacular traders, but a refined observer passes judgment on their actions. George Washington Harris brings vernacular culture to the forefront. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an entire novel written in folk speech which invests the folk narrator with a conscience. I argue Faulkner also bestows his writing with folk morality, such as V.K. Ratliff’s stand against the rapacity of Flem Snopes. I also examine the conjure tales of Charles Chesnutt. Uncle Julius exemplifies black folk wisdom being used to outsmart the white northerners, demonstrating how many use folk culture to further their own ends. The third chapter examines the grotesque, through an examination of Harris, Chesnutt and Erskine Caldwell, along with Faulkner, and Bakhtin and Rabelais’ discussion of the ‘physical’ and ‘psychological’ grotesque, the damage caused by mental illness or obsession with the past. I examine how the psychological state manifests in the physical in Faulkner’s writing, and how he humanises those society deems ‘grotesque’ through psychological insight, emphasising the cruelty in simply regarding such beings as ‘spectacle.

This thesis is a study of the poetics and politics of place in the short stories of James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner. In an introduction, three chapters, each examining the short fiction of a writer, and a conclusion this thesis explores various aspects of understanding and representing place. Focusing on these writers’ short story cycles and drawing on short story theories, I argue that the main characteristic of the modernist short story cycle is the creation of interiorly diversified chronotopes. My main argument is that these writers create uncertain fictional places that could be described as dialogic. This representation of place as heterogeneous, conflicting, and uncertain reflects the changed conception of and attitude towards place in modernism. The introduction contextualizes the discussion and presents some relevant theoretical frameworks. The first chapter concentrates on the representation of place in Joyce’s Dubliners (including the interior, the exterior, the public place of the street and the space of home and country); it is argued that Joyce’s short story cycle generates a polyphonic world. In the second chapter, focusing on Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, I examine Anderson’s place, a small Midwestern town in the region of Ohio, USA, and show how an image of heterotopic place is created out of the counterbalance between grand narratives of the pastoral Midwest and the fragmentary form of the short story cycle. The third chapter deals with William Faulkner’s fictional place, his imaginary county of Yoknapatawpha and argues that Faulkner’s place is heteroglossic. The conclusion summarizes the findings in a comparative fashion, arguing that the meaning of place is not fixed and stable but rather personal and momentary reflected in the writerly texts and that the narratives these writers develop allocate an important role to the reader: to co-construct the text and thus also its image of place.

This literary study presents an analysis of literary constructs of African American childhood in the 1930s in American children’s literature. The purpose for such a study is to determine, identify, and analyse the constructions of African American childhood offered in such books. The critical approach employed involves theories based in post structuralism and post colonialism. The literary constructions of African American childhood are influenced by the society in which they were produced; hence this thesis includes a contextualisation of the historical time period in relationship to the works discussed. Furthermore, this thesis considers constructions offered through illustration in equal terms with textual constructions. Representations of African American childhood are also presented through the use of dialect. The position adopted considers dialect as African American patois since such written dialect is pre-proscriptive African American Vernacular English rules. Analysis has been carried out of the ways in which language written in African American patois constructed African American childhood rather than focusing on the linguistic aspects of the written dialect. Finally, four key texts, all written after 1965 and set in the 1930s have been evaluated: Sounder (1970) by William Armstrong, Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry (1976) by Mildred Taylor, Tar Beach (1991) by Faith Ringgold, and Leon’s Story (1997) by Susan Roth. These contemporary writers offered a different view of the 1930s since they are ‘writing back’ into the previously assumed stereotypes. In conclusion, this thesis demonstrates that in the 1930s, positive progression was achieved, bridging ideologies concerning the African American community fostered in the Harlem Renaissance and the search for African American identity for children and adults. While negative stereotypes established before the 1930s were included in some publications, defiance of mainstream views, resistance to overt racism, and a complication of representation of African American childhood is present in American children’s literature in the 1930s.