Three related elements of Nabokov's art are introduced at the beginning of the study: Nabokov's monist philosophy and the self-contained structures of his art, the necessity of the co-operation of the reader to bring the 'objective existence' of the novel into being and lastly the development of the consciousness as the measure of his characters in relation to the master consciousness Nabokov. All three of these elements are shown to depend on a law of unfulfilment operating in his work, which always seeks to match one mode with its provisional opposite. The abstract basis of this idea is then explained in terms of Nabokov's use of mirror images which (it is shown) educates the reader by teaching him what not to do before he can fully experience Nabokov's deeper structures. The three-fold mirror basis of his work (the artist - the work - the reader) is next related to the tripartite Hegelian method of philosophy. Hegel's ideas are shown to be explainable in mirror terms and the accordance between both writers is demonstrated. The unfulfilling theme is identified with the antithetic phase of the syllogism. These Hegelian and mirror insights are then applied to two novels: The Gift and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. The conclusion seeks to define the experience of the reader's apprehension of Nabokov's art using the Hegelian vocabulary that has been developed. This study demonstrates that Nabokov evolved an informal yet developed metaphysic which must be understood as an avenue to the meaning of his art. The three-fold Hegelian formula, arrived at through the discovery of the role of unfulfilment in his work, provides the Nabokov reader with an indispensable key to the solution of Nabokov' s "riddles with elegant solutions".

This thesis explores the work of two contemporary women poets, one American, the other Canadian, looking particularly at questions of subjectivity and embodiment in relation to place and to history. Their work is considered in the contexts of American modernist poetry, for instance that of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson, and in the light of critical theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous. Modernist concerns with the materiality of the text, both as product of a capitalist economy and as visual object, are considered alongside postmodern aspects of language as processional and reflexive. The early work of each writer is discussed separately in Chapters One and Two, with selected later work in more direct comparison in Chapters Three and Four.

This thesis analyses the cultural work performed by confessional discourses. It contributes to feminist cultural theory by refining and extending the Foucauldian theory of confession through a comparison of the cultural instrumentality of the mainstream, male-authored confession and women's versions of the mode. The thesis begins by arguing that though the mainstream, male-authored confession constructs and addresses a mutable subject suited to the requirements of modern power techniques, the polyvalence of confessional discourse also registers a resistance to subjection to contemporary forms of power/knowledge. The second section of the thesis extends and refines this argument by contending that the gynocentric deployment of confession by the woman's confessional novel produces a double-voiced discourse, which mutedly resists patriarchal forms of femininity. The application of psycho-analytic literary theory to a close reading of Marilyn French's The Women's Room leads to the conclusion that this novel's deployment of confessional discourse allows for a muted venting of repressed active female desire. The third section of the thesis extends the preceding examination of the cultural work performed by gynocentric confessional discourse through an analysis of the madefor- TV-movie version of French's The Women's Room. This section argues that that though the application of a film studies and a TV studies approach to the movie appears to produce two contradictory readings of it s cultural instrumentality, this divergence results from the different emphases of film and TV theory: while film theory emphasises text at the expense of context, TV theory tends to reverse this trend. In conclusion, the thesis argues that discourse theory points the way towards a perspective which can address the relationship between textual and social subjects. This thesis examines the textual negotiation of confessional discourse by gynocentric forms; it also points towards the need for a perspective which can more adequately address the question of reception as negotiation.

The purpose of this thesis is to problematize the relationship between suicide and the author. On the basis of a deconstructive approach, it will study the effect of the self-inflicted death of the writer, namely the emergence of a dual figure, the "suicide-author". To deconstruct the suicide-author, this thesis will combine theoretical issues with examples taken from authors who killed themselves, including texts written by the suicides and by their survivors. Such texts will be referred to as "memorial texts" and will constitute a key element in the deconstruction of the figure of the author, namely his/her "posthumous persona". The thesis is divided into two parts. Part I, comprising the first three chapters, will propose an anti-teleological theorizing of suicide, followed by a study of the role of memorial texts in the deconstruction of the figure of the suicide author and a problematizing of Roland Barthes's concept of the "death of the author" in the context of the multiplicity of deaths of the suicide-author. In Chapter Two, the study of memorial texts will be developed in conjunction with analysis of selected examples, such as Yukio Mishima, Mario de Sa-Carneiro, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Esenin, Raymond Roussel, Walter Benjamin, Anne Sexton, and Virginia Woolf. Also divided into three chapters, Part II is dedicated to an extended analysis of the thesis' case study, namely Sylvia Plath. Rather than focusing on Plath's suicide as an individual unique case, the second part aims at extending and complementing the discussion of the issues previously proposed. Of particular interest is the magnifying of such issues offered by the mythical aura of the Plath case. Chapter Four deals with the "voice of the other", the deconstruction of Plath's image by the living, including both those who had known her in person and the so called "anonymous witnesses" to her suicide, namely critics, journalists, et al. Chapter Five focuses on the "voice of the deceased", as emanating from Plath's writings. Finally, Chapter Six analyses the Plath-Hughes dialogue, with attention to Hughes's particular role in the deconstruction of her posthumous persona.

This thesis is comprised of three parts: a critical dissertation, a creative work of fiction and a bridge piece that connects the two. The critical work is an examination of the Devil as a satirist in Faustian bargains. Through the usage of the Devil as a literary figure, his character has become a more secular being: a trickster rather than evil incarnate—a facilitator of sin rather than its originator. In the tragicomedy of pacts with the Devil, he acts as a mirror, reflecting mankind’s foibles and vanity, while elevating the reader in the process. The thesis considers the language, tone, purpose and conceits of several versions of the story. While the focus is primarily on American Literature, the influence of English, Scottish, French and German folklore and fiction are recognized as an essential component of the theme’s evolution. In the bridge piece, the pact with the Devil is literalized in a modern context; a corporate business of reaping souls is theorized in which techniques of persuasion are streamlined into an effective formula. Whether immersive or expository in approach, the portrayal of the supernatural depends on the literary principles of science fiction and fantasy in order to manipulate the reader and allow irrational concepts to obey rational laws. Such theories are cited to support how the Devil functions as a believable character. The novel, Could Be Much Worse, relates the story of an egocentric boss and his dependable employee, a scout who disguises himself as a taxi driver and seeks candidates who may succumb to temptation. Passengers’ monologues of desperation and pathos are interspersed throughout the protagonist’s day-to-day narrative. At times, the work is experimental, utilizing irregular storytelling techniques, alternative forms and conceits. Light-hearted, but nonetheless poignant, the story serves as a cautionary tale, illustrating the tedium of a bureaucratic job in a transmundane existence.

A theory formulated by Alice Walker, womanism focuses on the unification of men and women with Nature and Earth. This thesis explores womanism with regards to its specific concerns with African American women’s rights, identities, and self-actualisation, and points towards its more overarching concerns with human relations and sexual freedom, as expressed in each of Walker’s seven novels. The seven novels discussed in the thesis are The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian (1976), The Color Purple (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998), and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004). Although Walker introduces the term “womanism” in 1983, this thesis traces the development of the concept across her canon of fictional works. By analysing the novels written in the 1970s, I establish how the term came to be coined, and, by seeing through themes and issues addressed early on and how they can be mapped through analysis of her later works, I demonstrate how womanism went on to be further developed and complexly wrought. This thesis thus examines how Alice Walker’s own theory of womanism is reflected through the oeuvre of her fictional works, and considers where tensions arise in her application of what is intended to be a universalist, humanist, project. For, in many of her novels, it is women’s sexuality and sexual power that are the focus, often at the cost of developing the potential of male characters’ equivalent attributes. However, as will be argued, it is in Walker’s later, less appreciated, works that womanism is more fully developed in its universal claims. The integration of spiritual themes and concepts into her narratives reduce or remove the tensions that arise in the reconciliation between woman and man, as well as between humanity and nature.

This thesis examines conceptions of time and history in five American novels published between 1995 and 2012 which take as their subject matter events associated with the counterculture and New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. The thesis is organized around close readings of five novels. The first chapter focuses on Jennifer Egan’s The Invisible Circus (1995) and argues that it incorporates a number of problematic temporal experiences which have the effect of establishing a key tension of all the novels considered here: the concern with contextualizing and historicizing particular events and cultural atmospheres while remaining faithful to utopian ideas of radical change. Chapter two argues that Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document (2006) is oriented both structurally and thematically towards a future in which the relationship between the 1960s and 1990s will more clearly understandable. The third chapter examines the way Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance (2005) explores the multiplicitous nature of historical narratives, and how he distinguishes between those narratives and a conception of the bare events beneath them. The focus of chapter four is Lauren Groff’s Arcadia (2012) and examines how conceptions of the relationship between humans and nature influence theories of time, mythic histories and post-apocalyptic narratives. The final chapter on David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011) argues that the tension between continuation and change found in the conversion narrative is partly reconciled by a conception of time that allows the moment of radical utopian change (the moment of conversion) to be one of re-entrance into history. At stake throughout is the way these novels’ interpretation of particular events and larger cultural tendencies reveals and makes manifest various processes of historicization. I maintain a dual focus on the way these novels present historicization as something undertaken by individuals and societies and the ways in which these novels themselves not only engage in historicizations of the period but are in various ways self-conscious about doing so. If contemporary scholarship on the emergence of what has been called post-postmodern literature (Stephen J. Burn, Andrew Hoberek, Adam Kelly, Caren Irr) identifies a return to temporal concerns in recent fiction, the readings that comprise my thesis also make use of conceptions of time and history by Mark Currie, Jacques Derrida, Reinhold Niebuhr, Norman Mailer, Christopher Lasch, and Robert N. Bellah (among others) in order to ask: what are the particular material contours of the experiences of time and history manifested in these recent examples of the ‘sixties novel’?

This study focuses on the issue of internalised racism depicted in contemporary African American children’s and young adult literature, utilising Critical Race Theory (CRT) as its key theoretical framework. The study addresses three main thesis questions: (i) What effects does internalised racism have on the marginalised characters, and what are its manifestations? (ii) What narrative strategies have been utilised by the authors to help the characters regain and reclaim their sense of self? (iii) What is the contribution of CRT to children’s and young adult literature? Through critical analyses of the following texts-Tanita S Davis’s (2009) Mare’s War, Jacqueline Woodson’s (2007) Feathers and her 1994’s I Hadn’t Meanto Tell You This, Sharon G Flake’s (2005) Who Am I Without Him and her 1998’s The Skin I’m In, and Sapphire’s (1996) Push—the study examines the effects of internalised racism and offers the young characters the way forward. From a CRT standpoint, it is argued that the study shifts the boundary of literary landscape and enriches both race and literary scholarships by offering new messages, viewpoints and positions, and, crucially, developing a new critical discourse regarding the issue of internalised racism, particularly in critical literary research representing children’s and young adult literature. It defamiliarises the very issue that otherwise has become normalised in American racial discourse, and reaffirms the relevance of ‘race, racism, and racialisation’ in the American landscape. It also argues that literary texts included in this study are a consequential chapter of African American history, or “a new collective history”, which can be used to heal both the individual and the collective, balance the stories, and alter the dominant discourse. The study also analyses the concept of paradigmatic optimism typically found in children’s and young adult literature, and argues that this generic feature is not a flaw but is rather a different trait.

This thesis focuses on the genre of libretto, the sung words for music theatre. The “little book” which accompanies every operatic performance is not just an extended program note to the spectacle, but in fact a substantial literary form in its own right. However, despite the immense influence of Wagner, the output from librettists in an operatic collaboration, has been serious ignored; indeed in opera the aesthetic function of language is frequently diminished and foreshortened, because it is often re-directed by and within the music. The result is that librettists are often seen as offering words to be “decomposed” by composers in the process of operatic collaboration. Opera, in the English language, finally achieved its rightful status, alongside its European counterparts, during the second half of the twentieth century. The thesis is intended to encompass something of the vast diversity of this genre and discusses a number of individual works as constituting legitimate literary artefacts in their own right. There will be five chapters featured in the thesis and each chapter is devoting to a specific theme.

Wallace Stevens was profoundly affected by Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God and his poetry reflects an ongoing struggle to understand what it means to be a poet in an age of disbelief. Although Steven’s early poetry suggests that this loss of belief created a sense of crisis in the poet, his later work indicates a full acceptance, even an embracing, of this loss, recognising it as the inspiration for poesis. The thesis considers Stevens alongside of such thinkers as Nietzsche and (the later) Heidegger and shows how the poet came to regard the shaking of the metaphysical foundations as a gift offering the possibility for poetry.