The central project of this thesis is to diagnose, define, and articulate the concept of resonance. Resonance is a deeply textual, but not intertextual, relationship that exists between fictional and theoretical texts, allowing the former to position itself as a co-discursive partner to the latter. This is achieved via the subtle importation of theoretical models into fictional settings. In this instance, a resonant relationship is traced between Sarah Waters’s three neo-Victorian novels – Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith – and three publications which are representative of queer theory published in the early 1990s: Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (both published in 1990), and Terry Castle’s The Apparitional Lesbian (1993). As the introduction to this thesis clarifies, Waters’s novels are particularly useful to the resonant critic. All three novels are popularly and critically established as part of the neo-Victorian genre, yet their participation in many of that genre’s defining processes – overt intertextuality, metafictionality, parody – is limited. Limited, too, is their relationship with the Victorian texts that so infuse the genre. It is not, however, that Waters’s novels completely fail to reach for textual models; rather, as this thesis establishes, they reach for models found in contemporary queer theory, rather than canonical Victorian novels. This thesis contends that Waters’s fictions are examples of a distinctive assimilation and reworking of the postmodern principles that have helped to make the contemporary historical novel so very popular. The novels’ determination to articulate previously silenced voices, meanwhile, gives rise to this thesis’s second project, also stated in the introduction: an examination of the homonormative lesbians found in Waters’s novels. Women love, desire, and cherish one another – but are also viciously cruel, devastatingly unfaithful, and coldly deceiving to one another. The thesis as a whole identifies the range of relationships and individuals strewn across Waters’s neo-Victorian output as a co-discursive reverberation with queer theory’s politicised calls for queer representation. Each chapter surveys the extant scholarship on each of Waters’s novels, before pairing each fictional text with the theoretical text with which it resonates, in order to systematically examine the resonant relationship. As such, the fictional and theoretical texts examined in this thesis are given equal weight; theory is not positioned as a lens through which fiction is to be read. Chapter 1 traces models of performativity, Gender Trouble’s dismantling of the originating status of the body, and the failure of feminism to represent the lesbian through the bold picaresque narrative of Tipping the Velvet. Chapter 2 identifies Affinity’s claustrophobic corridors and panoptic middle-class houses as a receptive environment for an importation and repositioning of Epistemology of the Closet’s homosexual panic and the spectacle of the closet. Finally, chapter 3 finds the rather less deconstructive approach to lesbian bodies in The Apparitional Lesbian suggestive of Waters’s project as a whole; with regards to Fingersmith in particular, triangulated relationships, blocking gestures, and the de-apparitionalising of the lesbian are established as evidence of the resonant relationship.

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There has long been a connection between the concept of utopia as a perfect society and the desire for perfect humans to live in this society. A form of selective breeding takes place in many fictional utopias from Plato’s Republic onwards, but it is only with the naming and promotion of eugenics by Francis Galton in the late nineteenth century that eugenics becomes a consistent and important component of utopian fiction. In my introduction I argue that behind the desire for eugenic fitness within utopias resides a sense that human nature needs improving. Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) prompted fears of degeneration, and eugenics was seen as a means of restoring purpose and control. Chapter Two examines the impact of Darwin’s ideas on the late nineteenth-century utopia through contrasting the evolutionary fears of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) with Edward Bellamy’s more positive view of the potential of evolution in Looking Backward (1888). Chapter Three uses examples from three late-nineteenth-century feminist utopias to highlight the aspirations within these societies to use science to transform women’s social position and transcend the biological determinism of their reproductive role. Chapter Four focuses on the social theory and utopian fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman to illustrate how eugenics becomes part of her vision of progress for women and the human race as a whole. Chapter Five turns to dystopian fiction from H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Charlotte Haldane and Katherine Burdekin to examine how eugenic ideas retained an element of idealism even in the context of the dystopias of the first half of the twentieth century. Chapter Six looks at the fate of eugenics in utopian fiction after the Second World War and argues that the resurgence of utopianism in the form of the ecological utopia continue to rely on eugenics, population control and manipulation of human behaviour to succeed. My conclusion argues that eugenics is a utopian idea with enduring appeal despite the disastrous effects of its practical implementation, and that utopian and dystopian fiction offer an important lens through which to understand the hopes and fears represented by the different versions of eugenics and the current debates over genetic enhancements and transhumanism.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University. Missing page 52

This thesis traces the 'metaplot' of Ian McEwan's progress, through his professional writing. Completely unknown in 1971, his work has attracted increasing recognition, culminating in the Booker prize in 1998. Early in his career, he gained access to elements of his unconscious through free-association, active imagination, meditation and the use of recreational drugs. These elements, which surfaced gradually and piecemeal, include strong feelings associated with the Oedipus complex, difficulties with masculine self-identification, feelings of rejection, unresolved grief, wishes to regress to the latency period of childhood, and sexuality contaminated with anal-sadistic power issues. McEwan dealt with these themes by creating characters who expressed them through sexual deviations and violence or acted them through to their logical conclusion. Thus he was able to confront previously repressed aspects of his inner life and resolve some of his emotional problems in safety, while availing himself of rich material for his fiction. His writing is not autobiographical, but it will be demonstrated that events in his life and his changing beliefs and values are reflected in his work. He achieves an illusion of authenticity by including real people and events, familiar to readers from recent history and the news, in vividly described settings. He shares with the reader his interest in advances in science and his concerns about the dangers facing mankind and the evils of authoritarian and patriarchal structures in the microcosm and macrocosm of human institutions. He synthesises these components under a strong narrative shelter of complex plots, dramatic suspense, unexpected thrills and shocks. The psychodynamic interpretations offered in this thesis depend on a detailed study of McEwan's published work. Their aim is to isolate the separate threads in the fabric of his fiction and demonstrate the maturation and increasing sophistication of his work.

Time and the Inclination is a collection of short stories--fiction--written, work-shopped, and revised, between the autumn of 2007 and the spring of 2010.

AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF Richard Kelly Pechous, for the Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing, presented on May 19, 2011, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: Spine of a Dog and Other Stories MAJOR PROFESSOR: Professor Pinckney Benedict The characters in this collection display a sense of longing for stability--some sort of attainment of what it means to be an insider--whether it be with romance, happiness, or control. More importantly, the material here examines the way we perceive ourselves in greater society; what drives our desperate need to conform.

A daughter is pressured to marry and must figure out how to reconcile her ideas of independence with her mother's expectations; a young girl, thrust into public school for the first time, discovers that the difference between right and wrong is not always defined by adults; a girl struggling with insecurity meets her perfect college roommate--each of the author's stories focuses on the experience of deciding where to fit in the world and how fitting in is defined by family, society and, ultimately, the self.

Pain is a physical experience that is often imbued with metaphorical significance. Understanding better how pain operates as a cultural signifier can reveal assumptions about the status of different bodies and subjects. Even though pain is a nearly universal phenomenon, there is currently a dearth of sustained inquiry into pain as a literary, physical, and social phenomenon. What critical analysis there is about pain often metaphorizes the experience and forgets the lived, material realities of pain. At the same time, pain is a factor in virtually all cultural and social interactions, influencing everything from medical care to community acceptance. Thus, uncovering the functions of pain is a necessity. This dissertation reads for the ways pain forges intercorporeal relationships between bodies through the process of co-suffering, offering a new way of looking at the grotesque body. Using examples from a broad range of science fiction texts, from popular non-fiction science writing to superhero comics to novels to television, this dissertation explores the various ways that normative and non-normative pain response is witnessed and perceived. Putting forth a theory of co-suffering as a form of attention to and embodied translation of pain language, this dissertation examines the various ways in which listening to the voice of pain creates intercorporeal kinship between bodies. Through this kinship, bodies become subjects and gain access to community. Ultimately, this dissertation shows that, while pain can foster such kinship, predictable and standard pain responses are necessary for creating co-suffering. Thus co-suffering can be emancipatory, as it helps marginalized bodies gain subjectivity, but it can also be a way for cultures to enforce rigid behaviors on subjects, as it requires that bodies conform to those standard pain responses.

This thesis presents an analysis of Japanese modernist texts from the 1930s, with an emphasis on the writings of Takami Jun (1907-1965), Ishikawa Jun (1899-1987) and Dazai Osamu (1909-1948). Rather than discuss these experiments within the problematic of influence and see them as secondary gestures imitating the techniques of Gide or Joyce, I attempt to show that Japanese modernist fiction is deeply implicated in its cultural, political and technological moment. 1 begin with a mapping of the historical and discursive forces behind the so-called cultural revival (bungei fukko) and the revolt against the epistemic regime of Westernized modernity: its soulless positivism, its logic of instrumentality which objectified nature and the historical teleologies which inevitably relegated Japan to a secondary place. I examine the works of Takami, Ishikawa and Dazai in this context, against close-ups of specific material and discursive developments. The transgressions and dislocations of linear narrative in Takami Jun's novel Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot (Kokyu wasureu beki, 1936) are read as radical deconstructions of the deeply ideological discourse of tenko (the official term for the political conversion of leftists) as a regeneration of the self, as the return to a natural organic Japaneseness. The narrative of Ishikawa Jun's Fugen (Fugen, 1936) is structured by dualistic tropes which can be seen as configurations of mediation and unity; I explore the meaning of these narrative strategies against the collapse of political mediation in the mid-1930s and the swell of fascist longings for oneness with the emperor. The marked reflexivity of the stories in Dazai Osamu's first published collection The Final Years (Bannen, 1936) is discussed in the context of the profound anxieties generated by the accelerated logic of cultural reproduction and the technologically altered texture of experience. I argue that in their shared emphasis on discursive mediation and the materiality of language, the texts of Takami, Ishikawa and Dazai become figures of resistance to a nativism which strove for immediate authenticity and abandoned representation for the metaphysics of timeless Japaneseness.