Julie Otsuka's novel When the Emperor Was Divine (2002) retells the trauma of the Japanese American imprisonment through the lens of fictional characters taken from their "white house on the wide street in Berkeley not far from the sea" to "the scorched white earth of the desert" (74, 23). The Topaz Internment Camp in Utah's Sevier Desert, where these characters were forcibly relocated, sits on the site of an ancient inland sea, Lake Bonneville, which submerged that barren desert ground some ten thousand years ago. The paleolake serves as a displaced but active character in Otsuka's novel that shapes the characters' understanding of their traumatic experience and their ability to work through it. Rather than serving as an actor in disorientation, the ancient sea actually enables reorientation, affording the characters a new understanding of self and place. In developing this sea-oriented analysis of the internment, I call upon theory from trauma scholars Judith Herman and Dominick LaCapra and archipelagic thinkers like Epeli Hau'ofa and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, who have reoriented our understandings of islands, continents, and the concept of home. With these thinkers as interlocutors, my archipelagic reading of When the Emperor Was Divine advances a model for understanding the ocean as a mediator and a symbol through which traumatic experiences are acted out, worked through, refracted, and reoriented. This essay relies on the interaction of"”or the potential for mutual illumination between"”two emergent arenas of study: critical desert studies and critical ocean and island studies. It thus becomes a frame through which archipelagic thought can become a collaborator for the contingent working through of trauma and, ultimately, a reimagination of notions of home and reorientation.

H.D.’s novel Palimpsest has often been analyzed using psychoanalytic theories due to her relationship with Sigmund Freud and his work. However, her own approach to the science of psychoanalysis reveals that she often complemented her scientific understanding with her syncretic religious beliefs, a perspective she referred to as “spiritual realism,” which suggests that analysis with a spiritual nuance may provide a deeper understanding of the novel’s intended purpose. Postsecular theory makes for a useful lens by which to analyze Palimpsest’s treatment of reintegrating spiritual knowledge into Freud’s secular understanding of the modern world by providing the benefits of such a paradigm shift. Because H.D. adopted the ocean as her metaphor for spirituality, eternity, and transcendence, integrating oceanic and archipelagic theories also help to analyze H.D.’s intentions for spiritual realism by providing the characteristics with which illustrate her ritualistic writing process and its transformative experiences.My reading of the novel using postsecular and oceanic/archipelagic theories reveals that Palimpsest has more significance beyond a psychoanalytic treatment of H.D.’s own traumatic past. Instead, H.D.’s reasons for breaking down secular constructs of reality—such as time, space, memory, and individuality—emerge, showing that as an artistic modernist, she was attempting to outline the spiritual solution to modernity’s weaknesses and secularity’s limitations. By providing examples of characters’ poetic communions with eternity, Palimpsest explores the spiritual potential within humanity’s palimpsestic multi-layered consciousness, expressing how that which can transcend time, space, limits of communication, and personal failures can be discovered inward through outward spiritual connection to the eternal. This reading also provides justifications for H.D.’s decisions to write poetic prose novels, an answer to the alienating secular approaches to psychoanalytic knowledge that denied her identity as a poet-oracle, revealing her intent to share spiritual realism’s transformative power despite its secular critics.

This thesis explores a contemporary literary movement that has been called ‘the new nature writing’, framing it in its wider historical and cultural context of the last forty years. Drawing on recent developments in cultural geography, it explores the way such terms as ‘landscape’ and ‘place’ have been engaged with and reinterpreted in a diverse project of literary re-mapping in the British and Irish archipelago. It argues that the rise of environmentalism since the late 1960s has changed and destabilised the way the British and Irish relate to the world around them. It is, however, concerned with challenging the term ‘nature writing’ and argues that the literature of landscape and place of the last forty years is not solely concerned with ‘nature’, a term that has come under some degree of scrutiny recently. It sets out an argument for reframing this movement as an ‘archipelagic literature’ in order to incorporate the question of community. In understanding the present uncertainties that pervade the questions around landscape and place today it also considers the effects of such political changes as the partial devolution of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on the British and Irish relationship to the land. The literature that it takes as its subject often explores the way personal and communal senses of identity have found a renewed focus in a critical localism in opposition to more footloose forms of globalisation. Through a careful negotiation of Marxist and phenomenological readings of landscape, it offers an overview of what is a considerable body of literature now and what is developing into one of the most consistent and defined literary movements of the twenty-first century.