This study situates the literary works of Amy Lowell, Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Gertrude Stein in a genealogy of American modernist war writing by women that disrupts and revises patriarchal war narrative. These authors take ownership of war and war-related trauma as subjects for women writers. Combining the theories of Dominick LaCapra, Judith Butler, Elaine Scarry, and Elizabeth Grosz with close readings of primary texts, I offer feminist analyses that account for trauma and real-world materiality in literary representations of female embodiment in wartime. This framework enables an interdisciplinary discussion that focuses on representations of war and trauma in conjunction with identity politics.I examine Lowell's poetry collection Men, Women and Ghosts (1916), Barnes's novel Nightwood (1936), H.D.'s poem Trilogy (1944-1946), and Stein's novel Mrs. Reynolds (1952). The chapters highlight the progressively feminist and personal ownership of war and trauma embedded in the texts. Lowell and Barnes begin the work of deconstructing gendered binary constructions and inserting women into war narrative, and H.D. and Stein continue this trajectory through cultivation of more pronounced depictions of women and their bodies in war narrative.The strategies are distinct and specific to each author, but there are common characteristics in their literary responses to World War I and World War II. Each author protests war: war is destructive for Lowell, perverse for Barnes, traumatic for H.D., and disruptive for Stein. Additionally, each author renders female bodies as sites of contested identity and as markers of presence in war narrative. The female bodies portrayed are often traumatized and marked by the ravages of war: bodily injury and psychological and emotional distress. H.D. and Stein envision strategies for resolving (if only partially) trauma, but Lowell and Barnes do not.This project recovers alternative war narratives by important American modernist women writers, expands the definition and canon of war literature, contributes new scholarship on works by the selected authors, and constructs an original critical framework. The ramifications of this study are an increased awareness of who was writing about war and the shape that responses to it took in avant-garde literature of the early twentieth century. / Department of English

Work "Short exotic stories in work of Julius Zeyer" deals with five selected Zeyer's works that are set in the exotic land of India and Far East. One prose is associated with India, the other four with China and Japan. The works are a result of careful collecting, translating and creative work of Julius Zeyer. The present diploma thesis outlined in brief the life of Julius Zeyer and its role in the contemporary literature. It characterized Zeyer's interest in the exotic motives and way he followed them. The diploma thesis also considered form of the Zeyer's prose. The present work examined characteristics of plot and main characters and as well as the representation of the exotic places. It showed that the narrative places take part in creating the atmosphere that corresponds to the current experience of the characters. The nature of the characters is revealed against the background of the plot. Zeyer elaborated mutual connection between the characters and areas. Part of the interpretation was in each case devoted to the overall Zeyer's evocation of India, China and Japan and its artistic depth.