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.

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.

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.