Despite the recent increase in scholarship on the subject of the female experience in exile, there is still much to be done. Exile scholars now have at their disposal an abundance of broad, general overviews of the circumstances and fates of displaced women writers, but a dearth of scholarship that considers specific literary works in an individualised fashion still exists. This is especially true of those female writers who have only recently been 'rediscovered', such as the three under discussion in this thesis. This thesis explores in detail the exile writings of Veza Canetti, Anna Gmeyner, and Lili Korber, about which little scholarship exists, and uses them as case studies to illuminate the situation of exiled women writers in general The exile works of these three authors repay study both for their own literary merits and for what they can tell us about the individual experience of exile. In their broad similarities, these writers also provide us with case studies of the larger experience of authorial exile - particularly, but by no means exclusively, the gendered experience - that allow us to derive more general lessons about the influence of forced flight on literary art. By giving due consideration to work produced in exile, this thesis calls into question some of the generalisations commonly found in recent scholarship and demonstrates that, despite hardsrnps and setbacks and contrary to common scholarly contention, all three women continued to write well into their exile years and that in those years they took their writing in new, skilful, and creative directions.

"The purpose of this paper is to present the life of Hodding Carter, a bibliography of his published books, and an analysis of his contribution as a writer today, as interpreted by reviewers whose criticisms were identified through the Book Review Digest"--Introduction. / Carbon copy of typescript. / "August, 1958." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Sara K. Srygley, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references.

Mess to the Press is a narrative of the life of Alexander Murray Palmer Haley (Alex Haley), the author and twenty-year United States Coast Guard veteran who wrote his way into annals of the nation’s literary, journalistic, and military histories. While the Pulitzer Prize-winning Haley is best known for authoring The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and the genealogical epic Roots (1976), this study archives and considers over two decades of writerly practices that precede publication of these seminal texts. More specifically, the narrative history presented here—charted from a complex network of archival materials and oral histories that span oceans and continents—critically examines Haley’s origins as a master storyteller, a griot of sorts, whose literary and journalistic contributions subverted the forms, functions, and outlets of traditional narrative accounts for his mid-twentieth-century audiences. Drawing on stories told within and across government documents, special collections, oral histories, periodicals, physical artifacts, and retired Coast Guard members’ personal letters and photographs, the researcher employed historiographical methods to examine the following questions: (1) How does Haley become a writer? (2) How does Haley come to recognize, develop, hone, and share his writing as an active duty Coast Guard member (1939-1959) at a time when African American service members endured the realities of a segregated service while fighting for Democracy and Civil Rights on both home and warfronts? and (3) To what extent do literacy practices, skills, and experiences from Haley’s Coast Guard service emerge in his early post-Coast Guard retirement research, writing, and journalism? As this study traces Haley’s journey from scrubbing pots in a shipboard galley to composing galley proofs for some of the country’s best-selling periodicals, the reader is asked to consider how this revisionist account is less of a traditional critical literary biography and more of an autobiographical assemblage. Textual and material analysis of periodicals, special collections holdings, and oral histories navigated by its female, active-duty Coast Guard author works to navigate and expose the roots of Haley’s early writing life and journalistic journey.

My thesis re-situates the diarist and fiction writer Anaïs Nin within the fields of life-writing criticism, modernist studies, and intimacy studies by reading her diaries as performing, producing and inviting various intimate affects. This thesis focuses mainly on Nin‟s edited and unexpurgated published diaries and also draws on material gathered from the Anaïs Nin Special Collection at the Charles E. Young Library, based at the University of California, Los Angeles. Chapter 1 argues that Nin figures the diary as a space for fantasies of intimacy. Using the Communion as an integral part of these fantasies, Nin imagines scenes of interembodiment and intersubjectivity with her father that rely as much on his absence as on his presence. Performing an intimate relationship with her father, Nin also uses the diary to write her subjectivity as „in-relation.‟ Chapter 2 considers Nin‟s intimate relationships with other writers and artists in the 1930s, namely D.H. Lawrence. I argue that, by writing herself into an intimate relationship with Lawrence, Nin fashions and performs an artistic identity, working within and also resisting a modernist poetics of impersonality and objectivity. As such, this chapter calls for a revaluation of Nin as a modernist writer which attends to recent critical accounts of the importance of life-writing within modernism. Chapter 3 reads Nin‟s „Father Story,‟ an account in the diary of a brief affair Nin had with her father in her early thirties. I use the figure of seduction to argue that Nin‟s story resists a close reading and to critique various critical readings of this story in the 1990s which are underpinned by critical anxiety about the „right‟ way to read incest. For many critics, Nin‟s „Father Story‟ is too literary, rendering both it, and her, as inauthentic. Chapter 4 explores the intersections between Nin‟s diary and psychoanalysis. This chapter argues that Nin confuses the languages of sexual and psychoanalytic intimacy in ways that lead us to question the distance between sex and analysis. Nin uses psychoanalysis as another tool for dramatizing her life through art and another stage on which to perform intimacy. Chapter 5 considers the publication of the edited diary in the late 1960s-1970s, which coincided with a growing interest in women‟s life-writing as a representation of authentic, collective experience. This chapter argues that Nin performed intimacy in public with her readers, whilst all the time holding her private self at a distance.

My thesis is a feminist comparative project on Japanese and English women's writing, historicised within the social discourses of the 1980s, reading the literary texts of Foumiko Kometani, Doris Lessing, Banana Yoshimoto and Jeanette Winterson. Treating these texts as contemporary, this thesis questions the rhetoric of optimism, with ideas such as “liberty” and “happiness” in the beginning decade of neoliberalism, interrogating how this rhetoric empowers and influences women's life choices in the 1980s. Simultaneously, I consider how these women writing in the 1980s respond, criticise, and explore this optimism in relation to maternity and maternal relationships: I examine the rhetoric of maternal/familial happiness in relation to the neo-liberal narrative of normativity. In this sense, happiness works as a force for normativity. I argue that neoliberalism offers women new possibilities for various kinds of labour: it opened up more labour opportunities in the public sphere both in the UK and Japan, whilst nonetheless continuing to encourage women to engage in physical labour, child birth through marriage and heteronormative relationships. These two contradictory agendas, the new opportunity for women to work in the public sphere and the requirement to stay at home to reproduce, nurture and look after family members, caused a huge tension in neoliberal lives, and the fictions that represent them at the time. Building from the works of Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant, I argue that happiness is the affective glue that holds together and smoothes over this tension between women's self-fulfillment in the public sphere and in the domestic sphere. To be happy, after all, women were told (and are still told) they needed to be proximate to the conventional family unit. This study thus seeks to contribute to comparative literature across the East and the West, affect studies, contemporary women's writing and feminist literary criticism.

This dissertation analyzes the influence of cultural philanthropy on 20th and 21st-century American literature. Modern cultural philanthropy emerged in the late 19th century out of the fortunes of wealthy industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie, and grew to be one of the three pillars of the 20th-century literary economy alongside the publishing market and the university system. I trace the origins and evolution of literary philanthropic institutions through authorial case studies to show how funding from the Guggenheim Foundation, the PEN American Center, the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Program, and the MacArthur Foundation have opened avenues for collective political action and individual aesthetic innovation alike, while at the same time extending the power and influence of institutions over the cultural sphere. Through readings of Walter Francis White, Langston Hughes, Philip Roth, Leslie Marmon Silko, Maxine Hong Kingston, and David Foster Wallace, I show how philanthropic institutions have sought to make modernity hospitable for writers—part of what John Dewey in the 1930s called modernity’s “lost individuals”—by incorporating them and their work into the American democratic project. The effect, I argue, has been the democratization of American literature and an unprecedented efflorescence of writing by the varied people and social groups that at once constitute America and its most profound aspirations. Literary philanthropy seeks to transform the literary imagination from a luxury for individual aesthetic ends into an integral component of the common good.

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"April 2003" / Bibliography: leaves 233-258. / vii, 258 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, Discipline of English, 2004

American Indians have not vanished, As of the 1970's, they are 800,000 strong and increasing. Their voices, long muffled, are finally penetrating the consciousness of mainstream Americans, and people have begun to realize that America's treatment of the Indians constitutes a national disgrace.One aspect of the shameful treatment of Indians is the racism perpetuated by literature about Indians and by the neglect of literature by Indians. From its earliest to its latest depictions of Indians, literature has frequently drawn stereotyped images and presented distorted information. There are four major stereotypes: the noble red man, the ignoble savage, the comic buffoon, and the helpless victim. Once such unrealistic portraits have been engraved on the imagination and have educed prejudiced attitudes, the stereotypes are difficult, if not impossible, to eradicate. Research has evidenced that young minds are note impressionable than those of adults and more malleable. Therefore, the books they read are of crucial importance. But heretofore in-depth studies of the quality of young people's literature by and about American Indians have been lacking.Careful evaluation of purportedly factual information books for children and adolescents reveals that many contain misinformation and distortion but that those published in the first half of the 1970's are generally better than earlier ones in several respects: they treat more diverse and lesser known culture groups, consider both sides of conflicts, tackle controversial subjects, evaluate critically government policies, and present an Indian point of view.Analysis of children's fiction, adolescents' novels, biographies, and autobiographies reveals that books employing all of the major stereotypes are still being published, but that careful selection enables youngsters to find memorable, high-quality books which draw a wide variety of realistic, humane images. Recently some books have been published especially for Indian school children, whose self-images have been deleteriously affected by the images whites have of them.A comparison of children's collections of folktales with the sources from which they were adapted reveals the kinds of changes that have been made and determines that some are justifiable in the interests of making the Indian oral heritage comprehensible to non-Indian youngsters and that some are not because they violate the integrity of the tales. But although there are problems in translating and adapting the tales, they are worth the trouble, for they are entertaining and instructive; they offer a different view of reality, which may be more accurate than heretofore supposed. Numerous worthwhile adaptations are available.The functions and forms of traditional Indian poetry are different from those of other American poetry and may be puzzling to non-Indian students. Nevertheless, translators are obligated to preserve the original form and spirit insofar as possible. Successful compromises have been effected, and such poetry offers much enjoyment, especially to youngsters capable of an affective response of the senses. The nature metaphors and symbols that bespeak an attitude of wonder and awe have great appeal, as do the emphasis on the oneness of nature and the affirmation of life.Contemporary poetry is the genre in which more Indian writers are working than any other. A remnant of that faith in the efficacy of the poetic word which ancient singers had still inheres in modern poets and gives their work a "yea-saying" tone which attracts young poetry enthusiasts. The vivid images and the emphasis on continuity with the past and Mother Earth are especially appealing. Like mainstream poetry in some respects, Indian poetry has aspects that make it unique. The voices of modern poets join others of the present and past in asking that Indians be allowed to take their rightful places in a truly pluralistic America.