The aim of this thesis to is explore the relationship between Henry Miller, Zen Buddhism and how this may offer new ways of reading Miller. By exploring the life-long interest of Miller in Eastern Philosophy I hope to show that far from being the misogynistic, sexual miscreant of legend, he was in fact a deeply spiritual man who wished his work to inspire and motivate readers rather than be a form of titillation. My attempt here is not to rehabilitate Miller’s reputation in regards to race, religion or gender, but rather to examine his work through a more spiritual lens. In the process I will attempt to use a more complete selection of Miller’s works than is commonly utilized by critics, although particular attention will be given to Tropic of Cancer, I will show how later, more spiritual works illuminate Miller’s Zen Buddhist beliefs. By using novels, essays, letters and pamphlets I hope to provide a wide-ranging examination of Miller’s oeuvre both chronologically and spiritually. Two key words that will be found to re-occur throughout the thesis are ‘journey’ and ‘progression’. Journey in the sense that Miller saw his own life in Zen Buddhist terms; he existed to evolve and gain awareness though his life experiences through the writing and re-writing them until he could move beyond them. Progression in the sense that movement is crucial to the development of spirituality, the mind and heart must be open to new knowledge and understanding. I will show that Miller came to conceptualise both his life and work through the Zen Buddhist teaching of The Four Noble Truths and Miller’s daily implementation of The Eight Fold Path. I will start by arguing that it is impossible to understand Miller’s journey without first examining the process by which he came to shape his own life narrative. The Zen peace of Miller’s later years was hard fought and gained at considerable price to both him and those close to him. Miller first had to develop a conceptualisation of creativity before he could be open to meaningful spiritual change. This thesis will examine the lasting influence of both Otto Rank and Henri Bergson on Miller’s idea of what it meant to be a writer, how reality in relation to his life experiences was malleable and how this provided Miller with the foundation on which to explore his spirituality. I will show how Miller’s close relationship to Surrealism caused him to re-think some of his positions in relation to language, style and freedom, yet ultimately why he felt impelled to continue on his journey to Zen Buddhism enlightenment.

This thesis seeks to examine how a particularly American ideological formation called the frontier myth has been re-enacted, challenged, and redefined in the literary works written by several American authors. Existing researches about the pervasiveness of the frontier mythology in American culture written by scholars such as Richard Slotkin, Richard Drinnon, and others demonstrate that, as the myth of the frontier–––the popular discourse that romanticizes early white settlers’ violent confrontation with American Indians in the New World wilderness–––has been deeply inscribed in America’s collective consciousness, when they faced with the war in a remote Southeast Asian country, many Americans have adopted its conventional narrative patterns, images, and vocabulary to narrate their experiences therein. The word, Indian Country–––a military jargon that US military officers commonly used to designate hostile terrains outside the control of the South Vietnamese government–––would aptly corroborate their argument. Drawing upon Edward Said’s exegesis of a structure of power that privileged Europeans assumed when they gazed at and wrote about the place and people categorized as “Oriental,” I contend that the images of the frontier frequently appearing in US Vietnam War accounts are America’s “imaginative geography” of Vietnam. By closely looking at the Vietnamese landscapes that American authors describe, I intend to investigate the extent to which the authors’ view of Vietnam are informed, or limited, by the cultural imperatives of the myth. At the same time, I will also look for instances in which the authors attempt to challenge the very discourse that they have internalized. I will read several novels and stories of American Vietnam War literature in a loosely chronological manner––from earlyier American Vietnam novels such as William Lederer’s and Eugene Burdick’s The Ugly American (1958), through three notable Vietnam–vet writers’ works published between the late ’70s and ’90s that include Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (1978) and The Things They Carried (1990), to Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke (2007), a recent novel produced after 9/11. Hereby, I aim to explain the larger cultural/political significances that underlie the images of the frontier appearing in American Vietnam War narratives, and their vicissitude through time. While the authors of early US Vietnam War narratives reproduced stereotypical representations of the land and people of Vietnam that largely reflected the colonial/racist ideologies embedded in the myth, the succeeding generations of authors, with varying degrees of success, have undermined what has conventionally been regarded as America’s master narrative, by, for instance, deliberately subverting the conventional narrative patterns of the frontier myth, or by incorporating into their narratives the Vietnamese points of view that have often been omitted in earlier US Vietnam War accounts.

This thesis traces the ways in which David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, and Colson Whitehead react against the historical, institutional, and formal limits imposed upon contemporary fiction and culture. It argues that in order to counteract such constraints, they embrace and co-opt older forms and values as enabling for their fiction. To map these processes and relationships, I read these five writers as engaging with and reflective of the concept of cultural reproduction. Building largely from Raymond Williams’s definitions, the lens of cultural reproduction acknowledges what Williams terms the ‘limits and pressures’ of the contemporary – such as the inheritance of postmodernism, creative writing programs, technological changes, and commercial demands – but also how these writers display agency in reaction to such limits. Chapter One uses pragmatist philosopher John Dewey’s theories of habit to suggest Wallace’s work explores the way culture is reproduced habitually. Chapter Two contends that Franzen’s attention to these processes is distinctly melodramatic, and his writing embodies melodrama, rather than his stated realism. Chapter Three examines Chabon, Egan, and Whitehead as representative of the ‘genrefication’ of contemporary American fiction, and how each embrace genre forms to respond to different elements and processes of cultural reproduction.

I argue that each of the five American authors in my study of the antebellum era in American literature had dissident responses to Shakespeare’s perverse sexual energies. These reader responses took the following forms, with significant consequences for American history: 1.Conversion As Perversion. This strategy, demonstrated by Emerson and Whitman, employs the structure of perversion by affirming, in Emerson, the healthy imagination, in Whitman, healthy sexuality. In doing so, it commits itself to a confident rhetoric of health that evades and so magnifies anxiety about perverse sexual disease. It attempts to “convert” the reader to its view of the healthy imagination as a way to ward off the perversion it sees everywhere. 2.Perversion As Conversion. This strategy, employed by Hawthorne and Melville, initiates a descent into the terrors of the perverse imagination as a means of exorcising it and reconciling the individual to the consolations of the hearth and home of middle-class American society. 3.Perversion As Subversion. This is the strategy employed by Dickinson in her tense, dramatic lyrics. It employs Augustinian non-being in order to subvert progressive American projections of meaning into the future through a form that I call “perverse reading.” It eschews all identities, and remains menacing, dangerous, and, in my view, profoundly ethical.

This thesis begins by showing how a strong and subtle challenge to poetry and theories of poetry has been recently argued by writers like Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller—critics whose ironic linguistic "disfigurations" of lyrical voice have thrown poem and poet into an anti-mimetic free fall, an abyss of bewilderment or undecidability. To its credit, de Manian deconstruction strongly misreads various mimetic approaches to William Butler Yeats, as its corrosive irony empties out theories of imitation. Chapter two explains how New Criticism, biographical, psychoanalytic, and philosophical criticism, all treat Yeats's poetry as a reflection or imitation of some prior being, text, or doctrine; and chapter three how, most recently and energetically, various new historicisms treat his poems as ideological artifacts determined by the world or history, but as artifacts that must seek to change the world in order to have value. Harold Bloom's theory meets such challenges. It enacts deconstruction's misreading of poem and poet without reducing them to a linguistic abyss; and it re-envisions mimetic approaches by reading poems in terms of genealogical influence, without moralizing. Chapter four investigates Bloom's vision of strong poetry as a "supermimesis" or in terms of gnostic figures of "negative transcendence." Bloom's work, however, also needs Yeatsian creative correction. As the fifth and sixth chapters show, it needs, like Yeats's poetry, to hold itself more open to the chaos of history. Invoking instruction from the very poetry that has so influenced Bloom's theory of influence, yet from which Bloom has turned away, this thesis re-interprets Yeats's poems and Yeats criticism generally. Using Yeats's openness to history to revise Bloom and his pragmatic theory of misreading to re-interpret Yeats, the thesis attempts to advance dialectically both Yeats criticism and Bloomian theory.

This thesis is an analysis of the ways in which images of bodily disgust function in social conflicts. It considers the necessary embodiment of political struggle: that is, the ways in which inequalities are sustained and contested through the material forms taken by human bodies and the meanings attached to bodily states. In chapter one I map out the theoretical grounding for an inquiry into embodiment, by showing how the physical forms taken by bodies are produced by social practices. I argue that ‘the body’ should be seen as a biological product, a ‘body project’, regulated and transformed by its environment. This in turn leads me to a consideration of how such body-shapings sustain regimes of power through constructing for subjects physical forms which are designed to maintain existing systems of inequality. Through a reading of Michel Foucault’s work, I show how such bodies are also able to resist power by making use of the material and discursive structures which seek, but fail, to render them wholly submissive. In chapter two I look at the ways in which the body acts as a map of the psyche, producing a subject which understands itself in terms of its experience of its body parts. I also consider how the body acts as a social symbol, encoding anxieties about the society that it inhabits. By considering both psychoanalytic accounts, and the work of Mary Douglas, I interrogate how concepts of order, form, and integrity become central to embodied subjectivity. In chapter three I consider how, in the Naked Lunch Quartet, William Burroughs represents the body as under threat from repulsive external substances, and how his depiction of such substances in fact relies on a notion of body matter itself as repulsive. I will show how this results from his conceptualization of bodily materiality as antithetical to freedom, and I argue that by demonstrating the impossibility of escaping from acts of invasion and possession, Burroughs's texts in fact undermine the libertarian position that he adopts. In chapter four I develop this argument through a comparison with Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection. I suggest that his representation of abject bodies enables Burroughs to critique the invasive mechanisms of authority, but requires that he collude with the stigmatizing discourses of authority in order to adopt such a position. In particular I consider how this affects his representation of gender. In chapter five I show how David Cronenberg's Shivers may be read as a film that both sustains and critiques the notion of innate bodily disorder. I argue that this is derived from his reliance upon notions of a hierarchy of bodies derived from inequalities of race and class. In chapter six I develop this critique with a reading of Cronenberg's The Fly. I suggest that this film is much more explicit about the fact that bodily chaos is in fact a state experienced by the socially excluded. It offers a critique of the processes by which we are made to feel disgust at our bodies, suggesting that disgust inaugurates a logic of paranoid purification, which in fact impedes the possibilities of the acceptance of those bodies which fall outside certain social limits. Finally, in my conclusion, I look at how Cronenberg's Rabid might be seen as a compendium of the issues of embodied politics, and use this to suggest possible directions in which the work of this thesis might be extended.

The thesis investigates the sociological, cultural and ideological factors that affect the production and marketing of two major translations published in Fascist Italy and targeting both adult and young readers. The dissertation focuses upon a selected corpus of translations of the American novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Little Women (1868), which were repeatedly translated between the 1920s and 1940s. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, which encompasses fields such as the history of publishing, the sociology of translation, children’s literature, studies on the role and functions of the Paratext and scholarship on Fascism and its cultural policy, this study aims to offer a detailed examination of the Italian publishing market during the Ventennio. It probes the contexts informing the publishing history of these translations, their readerships, and interrelations with the growing importance of cinema, as well as questions related to the various retranslations produced. Furthermore, given the central role of publishing in the shaping of political consent and the contradictory attitude of the regime towards translations, this thesis explores ideological influences affecting selected translations of these novels that centre on issues of particular resonance for the regime, namely, race and gender. The dissertation is divided in two parallel sections, each one divided into three chapters. The opening chapters in each part examine the publishing history of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Little Women respectively, with attention to the USA, the UK, and France and a primary focus upon Italy, above all Fascist Italy. The following chapters in each section investigate the role that the visual representations of these two books played in conveying racial and gender aspects and in contributing to the construction of their meaning by the readers. Finally, the closing chapters of each section are devoted to a translation analysis of selected passages in order to survey translational behaviours used to depict feminine and racial features, given that these were known to be especially problematic during the Ventennio. This survey aims to pinpoint norms informing translations targeting both young people and adults.

This thesis examines the European influences on the works of Paul Bowles and William S. Burroughs, focusing on the themes, styles, techniques and preoccupations derived from Existentialism, Surrealism and Primitivism. Their texts, informed by their interest in the transatlantic intellectual currents of the time and non-American influences, represent a dissenting voice against the commonly and officially held values of the post-World War II United States and Western ideological power structures, and offer an insight into the development of a twentieth century American cultural identity. Examining Bowles and Burroughs in parallel gives a unique insight into their differences and striking similarities with regard to their experiences of expatriation and European sensibilities. Analysis of the historical context and material history of the publication, underlying influences, themes, techniques and preoccupations of their works reveals a deeper political engagement than has been previously shown. Bowles and Burroughs participated in a broad transatlantic dialogue of ideas, as reflected in the geopolitical and chronopolitical similarities of their works. The thesis focuses on their use of similar themes such as alienation, derived from Sartrean Existentialism, and their shared existential negativity toward life in the United States. It is argued that their style and method of indirect ideological expression, derived from Existentialism, enables a form of expression that can effectively and covertly interrogate American identity. Their use of experimental techniques drawn directly from the politically charged European based art movements of Dada and Surrealism, such as automatism, is shown to create a politically useful distance between the work and the author, while Surrealist preoccupations with shock, intoxication and violence evoke a closer relationship between the work and the reader. The notion of 'primitivism' and a persistent interest in 'primitive cultures' that intersects with representations of sexuality and a rejection of modernity in their works is examined as a reflection of their negative attitudes toward the modernism represented by the United States. Examining the parallels between their works and the development of film noir also reveals an engagement with a broad transatlantic exchange of ideas, styles and techniques across media. Their experimentation with the constructed nature of authorship, which developed through literary practice in their later works is shown to interrogate the concurrent poststructuralist theories of authorship. The historical contexts, influences of European intellectual cross-currents and range of connections between Bowles and Burroughs combine to make a compelling case that their works are politically charged, transatlantic in style and technique, and stridently significant in the history of English language literature and our understanding of contemporary American and European cultures.

Despite the vast amount of critical writing on the Language movement, little attention has been paid to the specific linguistic and cognitive processes involved both in the creation and comprehension of this innovative work. Motivated by the assumption that an experience with literature is an experience with language, this study investigates the poetry and poetics of three writers closely associated with Language writing and their works in the 1980s: Susan Howe and The Europe of Trusts and Articulations of Sound Forms in Time; Lyn Hejinian and My Life; and Rosmarie Waldrop and The Reproduction of Profiles. The approach taken in this dissertation is to investigate innovative writing with reference to linguistic and cognitive features through the perspective known as cognitive poetics which emphasizes the primacy of the reader in the experience of literary reading. The thesis offers insights into both the psychological and linguistic aspects of literary reading, shifting the focus from interpretation--whether that of the author or that of the critic--to the basis of these aspects in textuality. Textuality concerns both the material text as object, but also the connections the reader makes between stylistic features and felt experience. This dissertation thus addresses literary writing as discourse--as a social act of communication, incorporating other voices, viewpoints, times and cultures. It is suggested here that the complex interplay between word and grammar, world and ideology evident in these texts is connected to Language writing and contemporary verse culture more generally, and that cognitive poetics offers an explicit way to account for the effects of the syntactic experimentation and ideologies of this writing. Especially relevant to this study has been the tendency to site language in landscape to create what I call a poetics of languescape. The collection of poetry, Continental Drift, that completes this study emerges from these correspondences.

The present study proposes that there is an intrinsic relationship between the contemporary American short story cycle and the myth and ideology of the United States. I argue that the contemporary form of the story cycle has become the genre of choice for certain authors whose work explicitly challenges the dominant ideological discourses of Euroamerica and its underpinning mythologies. The five authors and the texts I discuss are Tim O’Brien and The Things They Carried, Julia Alvarez and How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Gerald Vizenor and Landfill Meditation, Sherman Alexie and Ten Little Indians, and Thomas King and Green Grass, Running Water. In the thesis I address the interrelationship between ideology and mythology and this is the foundation for my examination of the way that these five disparate writers each uses the story cycle in his or her own distinctive way to challenge a dominant ideology and the mythology that underpins it.