This thesis examines literary and historical accounts of the Creole slave ship revolt (1841) by Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Lydia Maria Child and Pauline E. Hopkins. The introduction debates the generic status of government testimony and press reportage and identifies the fundamental theoretical issues of the dissertation which include those of intentionality, intertextuality and "signifyin(g)." Chapter I traces the traditions of black and white abolitionism which influenced Douglass's adaptations of the mutiny and researches his representations of the heroic slave figure, Madison Washington, in speeches which he gave in Britain and America during the 1840s. Chapter II analyses the major critical questions surrounding Douglass's. The Heroic Slave (1853) while exploring its previously neglected theatrical conventions. This chapter also compares this work with Douglass's recently discovered second version, The Heroic Slave: A Thrilling Narrative of the Adventures of Madison Washington in Pursuit of Liberty (1853/63? ). Chapter III contextualises Brown's (re)modelling of the black historical figure by examining the varying types of forum - including both periodical and historical volumes - within which he published "Madison Washington" (1861,1863) and "Slave Revolt at Sea" (1867). This chapter discusses Brown's experimentation with an antislavery panorama and interweaving of literary, biographical and historical techniques to revise existing formal conventions. The final chapter interprets Child's biography of "Madison Washington" published in The Freedmen's Book (1866), and Hopkins's short story, "A Dash for Liberty" (1901), in terms of their interventions into gendered representations of slave heroism. Child's text is considered alongside her earlier journalism on the Creole revolt and her short story on insurrection, "The Black Saxons" (1846), and contextualised by an analysis of its publication in an educational tract. This chapter also discusses Hopkins's "Famous Men and Women of the Negro Race" (1901-2), and her textual borrowings from Brown's "Slave Revolt at Sea" (1866) to demonstrate the political imperatives guiding her dramatisations of black history. Finally, the conclusion explores the mid-twentieth century version of this revolt, Madison (1956), a musical composed by the black playwright, Theodore Ward, to indicate the importance of this approach for re-evaluating intertextual relationships across black and white abolitionist authors, throughout the nineteenth century and after.

The connection between Sigmund Freud and modernism is firmly established and there is an increasing (though still limited) body of scholarship that adopts methods of literary analysis in approaching Freud's texts. This thesis adds depth and specificity to a broad claim to literariness by arguing that Freud can be considered a practitioner of modern literary impressionism. The claim is substantiated through close textual analysis of key texts from James Strachey' s Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, alongside theory and fiction by significant impressionist authors Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson. The authors' respective approaches to various aspects of literary impressionism are considered, such as the methods of textual development, the instability of genre, and the stylised techniques utilised to convey the impression. This research illustrates that whilst each of the chosen novelists engages with literary impressionism differently, Freud's texts share common practice with each, facilitating the reassessment of the analyst as a specifically 'impressionist' author.

From 1492, when the first European invaders set foot on the island known today as Hispaniola, until 1965, the year of the April Revolution, the multi-faceted repercussions of invasion have been a prevalent theme within the Dominican Republic’s literature. This thesis examines how the country has amalgamated a roller-coaster past to reflect this in its writing. It starts by evaluating the Spanish invaders’ extermination of the Tainos, its generational influence and the continued impact of Trujillo’s legacy, highlighting the issue of gender within the Resistance movement. It presents a rigorous analysis of writers’ opinions, as transmitters of peoples’ views – from the pirate attack by Francis Drake, to the use of theatre by Independence fighters as a weapon of propaganda against the Haitian invasion; the resilience of peasant-culture represented in the guerrilla movement against the first U.S. invasion of the 20th century; to the exposition of novels to depict a dictator as an ‘invader from within’ and the use of poetry to face the bullets of the U.S. invasion of 1965. By analysing the literary images, expressions, statements and social commitment of the writers throughout their work, this study shows how the various invasions which occurred in the Dominican Republic have been rooted in Dominican discourse. It emphasises that these very struggles against invasion are at the core of its vibrant literature, providing its silent themes and serving to illuminate both the nation as a whole and the individuals within it.

'The Saturday Night Ghost Club', a work involving selective memory loss resulting from a traumatic event, depicts the mechanics of this loss, conveying the manner in which a primary character’s condition — one distinguished by his inability to remember a key trauma — combines with active strategies to avoid recall of said trauma. In preparing to write this thesis, and in toggling between the critical and creative elements, I found myself drawn back to a theme of long obsession: the idea of memory loss and memory retrieval, and the bedrock scientific and psychological principles that inform the subject. I was interested in the plausibility of the condition affecting Calvin Sharpe, and curious about the science and psychology of memory repression following trauma; this led to an interest in the manner in which it has been represented in fiction — specifically, the fiction of my home country. As the creative thesis took shape, I began to (a) re-read works in which memory plays a role, paying attention to books featuring depictions of medical conditions which effect memory — for example, “buried” or “repressed” memories — play a role, and (b) investigate scientific sources and general readership books focused on behavioural sciences, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience.

This thesis investigates male sexuality and neoliberalism in the work of David Foster Wallace. I argue that his texts conceive of male sexuality through neoliberal logics regarding responsibility, risk, contract, property, and austerity. Informing such conceptions are spermatic metaphors of investment, waste, blockage, and release. These dynamics allow Wallace’s texts to ground masculinity in an apparently incontestable sexual hideousness, characterised in particular by negativity and violence. By figuring male sexuality as a neutral economic issue, and one that lends itself to spermatic metaphors, his fiction and nonfiction present such hideousness as a fact to be accommodated for rather than changed. My analysis is broadly revisionist. I depart from readings that stress his texts’ opposition to neoliberalism by showing how they are embedded in, and complicit in reproducing, its key logics. I also nuance considerations of Wallace’s gender politics by arguing that their sexual traditionalism is indicative of an attachment to male hideousness, not their author’s intentions or failings. In these ways my thesis evaluates the complex pessimism animating Wallace’s treatment of male sexuality. I trace the interaction between neoliberal logics and spermatic metaphors throughout his oeuvre to consider how and why Wallace presents male sexuality as being so immutably rotten.

This project sets out to develop a model for a study of difficulty in poetry as systematic and nuanced as possible. In doing so, it endeavours to make a significant theoretical and practical contribution to the fields of stylistics, poetics and literary theory. Throughout the twentieth century, the notion of difficulty in poetry has never ceased to interest linguists, literary theorists, psychologists and researchers in education. The popularity of the notion among non-specialist is equally significant, as it is not uncommon for readers to justify their lack of interest in poetry on the grounds of its supposed difficulty. Notwithstanding this, the dynamics of text-reader interaction – the defining trait of difficulty, as argued in Chapter 1 – remains notably underexplored. This thesis addresses this gap in the literature by (a) providing a psychologically plausible and linguistically sound account of difficulty; and by (b) unifying under a coherent framework the insights offered by a large body of materials – from critical readings of literary works to anecdotal evidence, from psychological models of comprehension to controlled psycholinguistic experiments. In terms of methodology, a linguistic, text-based approach is intertwined with an empirical, reader-based one. This combined effort leads to an in-depth analysis of a set of poems from both perspectives (Chapter 3 to 5). Such a qualitative approach allows for the identification of textual and readerly components typical of difficulty. On the textual side, I identify twenty-four features, called linguistic indicators of difficulty and affecting all the linguistic levels – graphology, syntax, lexis, semantics and text structure. Based on scholarly remarks and experimental evidence, these indicators are likely to hamper readers’ comprehension and thus increase the processing effort they require. These two main readerly dimensions of difficulty I qualify as online (i.e. affecting the processing effort in actual reading) and offline (i.e. affecting the post-reading understanding of a poem). In turn, online and offline difficulty are cued by observable readerly behaviours (e.g. interpretive uncertainty, slowed-down reading, statements of rejection) that are explored in Chapters 4 and 5. Overall, difficulty is viewed as a response phenomenon that has a strong linguistic motivation. For reasons of focus and critical consistency, the model is applied to twentieth and twentieth-first century Anglo-American poems only. This temporal restriction acknowledges the critically established connection between difficulty and modernism (e.g. Adams 1991, Adamson 1999, Diepeveen 2003). The case studies from Chapter 3 to 5 focus on Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Susan Howe and Jeremy H. Prynne as representing different aspects of difficulty. Chapter 6 extends this purview to a larger corpus, featuring Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Hart Crane, Charles Olson, Dylan Thomas, John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein. All these poets have been deemed ‘difficult’ by other critics, so the corpus rests on an intersubjective agreement that was missing in previous accounts. The hope is that the model proposed will be fruitfully extended and applied to non-Anglo-American literary traditions as well as to poetry written in earlier centuries.

A study of the development of the critical thought Paul Elmer More (1864 – 1937), the American journalist, essayist and Christian apologist.

This thesis examines the subject in Popular American Metal music and culture during the period 1994-2004, concentrating on key artists of the period: Korn, Slipknot, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, Tura Satana and My Ruin. Starting from the premise that the subject is consistently portrayed as being at a time of crisis, the thesis draws on textual analysis as an under appreciated approach to popular music, supplemented by theories of stardom in order to examine subjectivity. The study is situated in the context of the growing area of the contemporary gothic, and produces a model of subjectivity specific to this period: the contemporary gothic subject. This model is then used throughout to explore recurrent themes and richly symbolic elements of the music and culture: the body, pain and violence, the grotesque and the monstrous, and the figure of the child, representing a usage of the contemporary gothic that has not previously been attempted. Attention is also paid throughout to the specific late capitalist American cultural context in which the work of these artists is situated, and gives attention to the contradictions inherent in a musical form which is couched in commodity culture but which is highly invested in notions of the ‘Alternative’. In the first chapter I propose the model of the contemporary gothic subject for application to the work of Popular Metal artists of the period, drawing on established theories of the contemporary gothic and Michel Foucault’s theory of confession. The second chapter focuses on instances of violence to the body and the recurrent themes of pain and violence, which are explained through the model of corporeal verification and consensual violence. In the third chapter I explore the contemporary gothic subject in the tradition of the grotesque and the monstrous, drawing on theories of the gothic monster, to suggest that the subject is engaged in a negotiation of the boundaries between self and other. The fourth chapter concentrates on the figure of the child, drawing on theories of horror film and fiction and the tradition of the Evil Innocent and the Gothic child. The final chapter is a case study of Marilyn Manson, exploring his role as a paradigmatic example of contemporary gothic subjectivity.

This thesis examines William Blake's American legacy by identifying a precise American interest in Blake that can be dated from Ralph Waldo Emerson's early reading of Songs of Innocence and Experience in 1842. Chapter one will show that the New England Transcendentalists - primarily Emerson, but also Elizabeth Peabody and readers of the transcendentalis publication The Harbinger - were reading Blake's Poetical Sketchse in the 1840's. This American interest in Blake's poetry will be presented against a background of British neglect of the English poet until after 1863 and the publication of Alexander Gilchrist's Life of William Blake. Chapter one provides details of Emerson's reading of Blake. According to Walter Harding, Emerson owned a copy of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. This was given to him by Elizabeth Peabody in 1842, is inscribed 'R.W. Emerson from his friend E.P.P.', and has notes throughout in Emerson's hand. Indeed, a diary entry of Henry Crabb Robinson (1848) refers to discussions between himself, Emerson and James John Garth Wilkinson about Blake. Drawing on the Transcendentalists' reading of Blake's poetry, chapter two will read Emerson's essay in light of his interest in the English poet. Some critical attention has been given elsewhere to Blakean passages in Emerson's essays, but it has been fleeting. Richard Gravil is the critic who makes the most effort to record Emerson's interest in Blake, but does so sporadically and mainly as a footnote to a larger point about transatlantic Romanticism more generally. Richard O'Keefe's 1995 study, Mythic Archetypes in Ralph Waldo Emerson claims that Emerson was not reading Blake until after 1863; this thesis will challenge that assumption. Chapter two also examines Emerson's later essays and offers a new reading of Society and Solitude (1870) and Letters and Social Aims (1875) by placing these collections alongside a consideration of Blake's prophetic poems, Poetical sketches (1783) and Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794). Chapter three will then show that, in 1868, a transatlantic discussion about the affinities between Whitman's and Blake's poetry emerged simultaneously. Algernon Charles Swinburne opened the discussion in Britain with the publication of his study William Blake, which ended with a long proclamation on the merits of the American poet, Walt Whitman, whose Blakean affinities Swinburne identified as being worthy of critical attention. That same year, in the United States, John Swinton, editor of the New York Times, was reading Blake's poetry aloud at social gatherings and passing off Blake's poems as Whitman's work to audiences familiar with Leaves of Grass. These discussion concerning the similarities between Blake's and Whitman's poetry dwindled into a critical silence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but are reopened here in the form of a transatlantic discussion of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. This thesis queries why a readership of Blake's poetry should have featured so ealry in New England when the British appetite for it was not whetted until after the Gilchrist revival in 1863. My argument suggests that by reading Blake, Emerson and Whitman together, new readings of each of them can profitably be made. By exploring the Blakean affinities in Emerson and Whitman, their visionary qualities - like those found in Blake's prophetic works - become freshly apparent. It will also be argued that something distinctly American can be discerned in Blake's poetry. This original approach to Emerson and Whitman challenges their critically ingrained reputation as writers of America individualism by reinstating them as the heirs to Blake's American legacy.

Nabokov once said that "reality" is "one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes." He has often expressed his scepticism as to whether it is ever possible to know a thing: all one can do is to collect as many facts and data about a thing as possible, accumulate information about it and thus try to get nearer its reality. But even though one may know a lot about an object, one can never know everything about it: "It's hopeless", Nabokov says and concludes, "... we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects." What applies to things applies in an even higher degree to persons. More often than not the complexities of their souls and characters escape us and we see not real persons, but "phantoms": images of people that are the products of our own minds and that are shaped by our own interests and expectations. Nabokov's questioning enters the provinces of metaphysics when he inquires into the nature of space and time, when he asks whether life may not be an illusion, a dream; whether life is just a succession of meaningless coincidences, or whether it has some sensible and meaningful pattern. Finally he inquires into the nature of death and poses the question whether death is indeed the end of everything. According to Nabokov, it is only the artist who, through his art, can penetrate to the true reality of things and who can answer these philosophical questions, since it is he who approaches the world free from all preconceived ideas which are imposed upon ordinary minds by custom or science or even philosophy. By using comic devices, most notably parody, Nabokov frees the reader's mind from all conventional ideas and stock responses, making it possible for him to follow his depicted artists in their exploration of true reality.