This thesis will consider the incest theme in twentieth century American literature. Antecedents will be considered, especially the rich traditions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the main focus will be on three writers central to the American canon: F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Vladimir Nabokov. All three of these writers have produced texts in which their claim to literary fame and their appropriation of the incest theme are inextricable: namely, Fitzgerald's Tender is the Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, and Nabokov's Lolita. I will conclude with a chapter which examines how this debt to literary tradition, this canonical pride of place of the incest theme, has been transformed in its trajectory through the latter half of the twentieth century. In the thesis, I will examine the utilisation of these 'variations on a theme' as a form of rhetoric manifesting itself in a wide variety of uses and readings. Pertinent aspects would include: symbolic appropriations with pretensions to universality; transgressive modulations manipulating reader affectivity; referential modes attempting the delineation of a particular - or their collective combination. All of these uses of the incest theme will be seen to participate in the propagation of various codes of normative behaviour, ethics, critiques, or political polemics. The incest theme will be tracked both as a form of didacticism and as a form of literary pleasure. The representation of incest will be observed in its combination with other important literary themes: courtly love, childhood, and their inversions. It will be linked to an aesthetics of transgression and to the representation of child sexual abuse. Its combination with the latter will also provide the grounds for a comparison of child sexual abuse, 'actually existing incest', and the many other uses of the incest theme. The contexts of these uses will also be considered. If I were to attempt to reduce this thesis to a simple proposition, I would suggest that the importance of the incest theme has been due to its rhetorical versatility, its role as a signifier of the limit (of the family, of society, of civilisation, of the representable), and of its ready utilisation for literary shock, the vicarious enjoyment of the second-hand, or, in what amounts to the same thing, literary pleasure. These factors delineate the importance of the incest theme to literature in general, and to American literature in particular. The literary utilisation of the incest theme suggests that the most efficient way to say anything effective is still to make use of that which hides behind the barrier of the unsayable. After giving a summary of the chapters of the thesis, the rest of the introduction will introduce the issues that form the background to an informed evaluation of the place of the incest theme in modern American literature. This background features three inter-related areas; the controversies around the incest taboo, the emergence of child sexual abuse, and the concept and representation of childhood. I will suggest that the issue of child sexual abuse is key to any referential,analogical, or comparative approach to the reading of the incest theme in literature (most especially in those examples which include an adult/child or adult/infant age differential). I shall begin with some definitions of incest, and its relation (and non-relation) with child sexual abuse. 'Incest’ can, of course, mean very different things in literature, in philosophical speculation, in the social sciences, or in the discourses of welfare or feminism. This difference of discourse, a difference of 'register' or genre', suggests that 'translations' between discourses need to be observed carefully. A comment on the American context will be relevant to the discussion of recent American literature. These issues are inextricable from the representations and conceptualisation of childhood that our period has inherited from the past, particularly the traditions and writing of the previous two centuries. I will attempt a brief summary of the concept of childhood, including its transformations up to the seventeenth century, its rationalisation in the legal and medical discourses of the eighteenth century, and its recent evolution. A comment will then follow on the influence of this inheritance upon the emergence of a recognisable child theme in nineteenth century literature (the origin and role of social and literary clichés). As recent theories of incest, sexuality, power, and representation play an inseparable part in any understanding of these issues, I shall complete the introduction with a 'rough' model of the workings of incest and its relationship with representation based upon these recent developments.

More has been written about the life of Hunter S Thompson than about the writing which brought him fame, although the peculiar nature of his first-person literary journalism makes his life and his work impossible to separate. Although the legend of the outlaw journalist is an indispensible feature, the focus of this textually-oriented study is Thompson’s method, conventionally called ‘Gonzo journalism’, and how it operates. Drawing on theories of subjectivity and authorship informed by the work of Derrida, Foucault, Barthes and John Mowitt, I attempt to analyse the Gonzo Text, examining the place of various elements of ‘Gonzo’ style and content. Looking at key themes in Thompson’s oeuvre - principally the problematics around representing drug experiences and the subjective experience of edgework, the nature of myths of objective and professional journalism in the context of political reportage, the interrogation of the place of sports in American culture and ideology, and, ultimately, Thompson’s engagement with ‘the death of the American Dream’ – I examine the ways in which the Gonzo Text is constructed. The Text of Gonzo is placed in social, political and historical contexts in terms of both wider American history of the period, and the traditions of American journalism. Gonzo works can be read in terms of Thompson’s renegotiation of the boundaries of reportable experience, of journalism, and even of personal safety and legal liability, with the unusual place of the voice of the author within Gonzo facilitating a unique type of hybrid Text. Blending fact and fiction into undecidability allows the Text to operate in some senses as what Derrida termed a ‘pharmakon’ – a site and agent of the instabilities of categories which cannot hold it. Gonzo journalism destabilises conventional ideas of literary journalism, and of journalism itself, in its peculiarly unclassifiable nature.

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Heretical Necessity explores the various ways in which an idea of value was established and debated through the literature of mid 19th century America. Above all, it concerns moral value, the language of personal virtue and social ethics; this includes notions of sympathy and self-sacrifice promoted in sentimental fiction, which I read alongside Melville's responses in his later work: the perversion of altruism in Pierre, his critique of benevolence in the short stories, and his ironization of trust in The Confidence Man. Charity is a key issue because it refers both to a notion of fellowship integral to the sentimental vision of society and to a principle of unreciprocated (hence antagonistic) action: giving one's all becomes incompatible with the more measured principles of justice on which a democracy has to be based. I argue that moral value is related to the production of value in the economic sphere, since charity is at once a religious and a financial practice, thus linking the Christian notions of fellowship and giving to ideas of utility and luxury in capitalist society. In this respect my work is informed by the idea of symbolic exchange, via the theories of figures like Mauss, Bataille, Baudrillard and Derrida; prompted by these thinkers, I attempt to identify different types of contract in the literature (commercial, social, masochistic, and literary) and incorporate them in the same general analysis, as a way of exploring the structural complexities of the moral narrative and the discourse of American community.

Building on recent studies of twentieth-century elegy, this thesis examines the re-working of elegiac tropes in the poetry of Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman and Robert Lowell - four writers among the Middle Generation of American poets who share a persistent preoccupation with loss. As personal and national disappointments and bereavements are reflected in their distinctly elegiac poetics, their work overtly questions not only the possibility of finding consolation, but also the worth of their subject and the ability of language to express, with any conviction or accuracy, what has been lost. Highly conscious of the elegiac tradition, their work collectively distorts this genre, moulding it into a flexible mode which is more readily able to reflect the historical and cultural developments of the mid-twentieth century. Countering the still-prevalent view of these poets as “confessional” writers, this thesis’ focus on elegy challenges critics who have dismissed these four as solipsistic or narcissistic. Instead, they emerge as a group who were deeply invested in understanding their contemporary scene and whose most significant relationships were textual, rather than biographical. Their writing reveals an ongoing and serious engagement with one another’s work, as they built on each other’s poetic experiments. The thesis complicates the canonical divide which has entrenched these poets as the mainstream establishment, pitted against a more radical “postmodern” avant-garde, which includes the Beats, Black Mountain and the New York School. Through close textual analysis and an exploration of their links with Elizabeth Bishop, Schwartz, Jarrell, Berryman and Lowell are posited as poets whose engagement with the elegy has significantly altered the post-World War II poetic landscape.

This essay presents an analysis of the religious and philosophical ideas present in the early fiction of the contemporary American writer, Cormac McCarthy. It is intended as an intervention into the controversial debate within McCarthy scholarship concerning how the perceptibly ‘religious’ nature of the author’s fictions may be described according to recognised and coherent confessions or perspectives. I argue that McCarthy’s fictions cannot be shown to conform to any particular theological or metaphysical system without significant remainder on account of their being essentially heterogeneous in their construction; and that their religious ‘significance’ lies not in their communication of a positive message, but in the presentation of what is at stake in the contrary interpretations that they uphold. I argue that the essential heterogeneity of McCarthy’s fiction is a development of the author’s reception of the complex aesthetic of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and the posture of serious and searching scepticism which that touchstone of American literature presents. The peculiar aesthetic of Moby-Dick alloys the Hellenic and Hebraic imagination, creating a synthesis of the concrete images of mythical and biblical literature, and of the narrative patterns that are native to tragedy and to romance. The effect of this complex is a literary mode that performs a suspension or opposition between a shapeless, circular, mythical world, and the created and teleological worldview declared by the biblical religions. I demonstrate how McCarthy takes up and imaginatively revises this complex of ideas in three novels (Outer Dark, Child of God, and Blood Meridian) in terms of their relation to the motifs and tropes of tragedy and romance, with a particular concern for their relation to the literature of katabasis, or spiritual and metaphysical ‘descent’. The three novels I have selected demonstrate a consistent and developing approach to McCarthy’s examination of various accounts of the material and physical nature of the world. My analysis sets out how the author’s aesthetic and narrative strategy describes an opposition between a view that is attributable to a broadly defined atheistic naturalism on the one hand, and notions of a teleologically orientated creation that is concordant with the transcendent God of the biblical religions on the other. In providing this description, I interpret how McCarthy uses this Melvillean pattern to test the viability of such oppositions, and in doing so, argue that the author’s distinctive vision should be understood as an apophatic mode that is appropriate to a faith ‘beyond the forms of faith’.

This study investigates the contribution of Romanian and German academic and literary communities to the formation of readerships for Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fiction and examines various conceptualisations of the Canadian writer as a literary celebrity in Romania and Germany by taking into account the response to and institutionalisation of the writer’s literary dystopias in the two countries both before and after the fall of communism in 1989. It aims to demonstrate that publishing, translation and cultural policies complicate the cultural reception of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fiction in Eastern European countries and re-evaluates critical representations of Eastern European readerships and publishing contexts as invisible within the global literary field. By investigating the strategies which publishers, editors and translators employed in the dissemination and institutionalisation of Atwood’s work in Romania and Germany, this thesis examines paradigm shifts both in translation, publishing and marketing strategies and conceptualisations of literary celebrity as shaped by cultural state policies. To this end, the first chapter highlights representations of literary markets and readerships in the Atwood archive, and analyses how the Atwood literary archive values celebrity and translation. The second chapter charts the first translation projects which were carried out in both East Germany and communist Romania and points out how forms of censorship have impacted upon the production, dissemination and circulation of her work in translation. The third chapter draws upon interviews with Romanian academics and examines teaching and reading practices employed within a post-communist context. Finally, the study suggests how further examinations of the response to both Canadian and dystopian fiction within Eastern European contexts might proceed.

This project alters the field of American Studies and Modern American Poetry. For after Cold War critics of America's Myth and Symbol School had employed D.H. Lawrence for an American exceptionalism, and after Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1970) had disapproved of Lawrence, the British author has been marginalised by scholars of American Studies and American Poetry. As a result, Lawrence's foundational role within America's countercultural poetry has been overlooked. Robert Duncan, who led the Berkeley & San Francisco Renaissance, has repeatedly testified that Lawrence remains the 'hidden integer' within the poetics of Donald Allen's groundbreaking anthology, The New American Poetry: 1945-1960. This research project asks: how does the transatlantic reception of Lawrence change the tradition of post-1945 American poetry? Within the so-called 'New American Poetry,' queer, black, feminist, and non-academic voices emerged, yet their poetry defined itself by resisting the structures of 'closed-verse' as well. The break into 'open form' had renounced much of the American poetry tradition, especially the intellectualism of high-modernists. In this generational gap, Lawrence's banned writing on the sexual, sensual and political body becomes privileged by countercultural poets, and integrated into open-forms of poetry. Therefore this project also asks: how does the physical body, as found in Lawrence, surface within the disparate literary forms of leading poets and their coteries? Each chapter introduces an undocumented reception of Lawrence within a social network of post-WWII poets and follows a poet's reading of Lawrence's bodily form throughout their formative years. Featured poets include Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Sylvia Plath. The poets are chosen for their reliance upon Lawrence, but each poet also represents a wider social scene. As a new transatlantic and American literary history is charted, new readings emerge in new American poets and in Lawrence alike. In reinterpreting well-known and unknown poems though this lens, a new hermeneutic is explored wherein a bodily form surfaces within the spatial formations working upon the page.

In my introduction I begin by sketching Ezra Pound's engagement with utopian and paradisal themes, charting his moves from aestheticism in the pre-war years to utopian-political concerns in the 1930s and on to a synthetic-paradisal phase after the Second World War. In my first chapter I chart the period of Pound and Louis Zukofsky's closest collaboration, analysing the presence of Zukofsky's political thought in his poetics through this crucial phase and the proximity of his thought to his mentors Pound and William Carlos Williams. In my second chapter I discuss Pound and Zukofsky's interest and use of music in their poetries, suggesting that this theme provides an analogue to their paradisal thought from the late 1930s until the mid-1950s. Music is of great importance to both writers and the points at which their approaches coincide and differ are revelatory of their conceptions of paradise. Finally I turn to the late, paradisal segment of Zukofsky's career in the 1960s and 1970s, describing the manner in which Zukofsky's synthetic paradisal method relates both to Pound's in The Cantos and takes stock of the work and interests of the younger poets writing of the period. In my conclusion I briefly describe the termination of Pound and Zukofsky's relationship and make some closing comments on their paradises, relating their final synthetic paradises to differing conceptions of time that relate to their entire oeuvres, even back to the poets' early aesthetic phases.

The present thesis reads Don DeLillo's fiction as expressive of the process of financialization which emerged in response to the 1970s capitalist crisis in the United States and gave rise to a specific social materiality and peculiar “structure of feeling” grounded in finance capital. I will argue that DeLillo's works offer a powerful representation and critique of the workings of finance capital and of American hegemony pursued via the emergence, consolidation and expansion of finance. As DeLillo's novels depict a specifically finance-driven US hegemony, they also register the attempts to resist such hegemony. Simultaneously, I shall focus on DeLillo's analysis of a culture immersed in what Keynes called “the fetish of liquidity”, and on DeLillo's investigation of how the seemingly dematerialising power of speculative capital modifies the construction of a new social materiality and human experience. By articulating a comparison between specific mechanisms within finance capital and the workings of mourning and melancholia, I shall explore the anxiety and dread pervading DeLillo's characters as originating within the erasure of the commodity form from the dominant financial mode. Within such purview, I will first explore those texts, written in the 1970s, which best depict the crisis in US capitalism and the response to such crisis via the emergence of a chiefly financial economic and cultural mode. Subsequently, I will investigate DeLillo's latest production in order to highlight how such works expose the contradictions and limitations of a finance-dominated economy and its attendant “structure of feeling”, and express an ever-growing need to return to less virtual, less evanescent forms of economic production.