A search for self through historical reconstruction constitutes a crucial concern of the American postmodern historical novels of Pynchon, Barth, Mailer, Coover, and Doctorow. This concern consists of a self-conscious dramatization, paralleled by contemporary theorists' arguments, of the constructedness of history and individual subject. A historian-character's process of historical inquiry and narrative-making foregrounded in these novels represents the efforts by the postmodern self to (re)construct identity (or identities) in a constructing context of discourse and ideology.

Analyzing Chesnutt's fiction from the angle of the West African trickster tradition explains the varying interpretations of his texts and his authorial intentions. The discussion also illustrates the influence that audience and editorial concerns may have had on African-American authors at the turn of the century.

The poetry of T. S. Eliot represents intense yet discriminate expressions of desire. His poetry is a poetry of desire that extenuates the long tradition of love poetry in Occidental culture. The unique and paradoxical element of love in Occidental culture is that it is based on an ideal of the unconsummated love relationship between man and woman. The struggle to express desire, yet remain true to ideals that have deep sacred and secular significance is the key animating factor of Eliot's poetry. To conceal and reveal desire, Eliot made use of four core elements of modernism: the apocalyptic vision, Pound's Imagism, the conflict between organic and mechanic sources of sublimity, and precisionism. Together, all four elements form a critical and philosophical matrix that allows for the discreet expression of desire in what Foucault calls the silences of Victorianism, yet Eliot still manages to reveal it in his major poetry. In Prufrock, Eliot uses precisionism to conceal and reveal desire with conflicting patterns of sound, syntax, and image. In The Waste Land, desire is expressed as negation, primarily as shame, sadness, and violence. The negation of desire occurred only after Pound had excised explicit references to desire, indicating Eliot's struggle …

Elizabeth Stoddard (1823-1902) has been overlooked by most modern literary critics and scholars. She needs to be incorporated into the canon of the American novel in order to establish a deserved critical visibility and to retain it for many years to come. Her groundbreaking fiction, unconventional by any nineteenth-century standard, especially as evidenced by The Morsesons and by some of her short stories, is characterized by penetrating psychology, individuality, and enduring literary qualities.

This dissertation explores Fanny Fern's literary position and her role as a social critic of American lives and attitudes in the nineteenth-century. A reexamination of Fern's literary and non-literary works sheds light on her firm stand for the betterment of all mankind. The diversity and multiplicity of Fern's social criticism and her social reform attitudes, evident in Ruth Hall. Rose Clark, and in voluminous newspaper articles, not only prove her concern for society's well-being, but also reflect her development of and commitment to her writing career.

Anatomy of Loss contains a foreword, which discusses the place of autobiography in fiction, and five original short stories.

Many Old English poems reflect the Anglo-Saxon writers's interest in who could exercise power and how language could be used to signal a position of power or powerlessness. In previous Old English studies, the prevailing critical attitude has been to associate the exercise of power with sex—the distinction between males and females based upon biological and physiological differences—or with sex-oriented social roles or sphere of operation. Scholarship of the last twenty years has just begun to explore the connection between power and gender-coded traits, attributes which initially were tied to the heroic code and were primarily male-oriented. By the eighth and ninth centuries, the period in which most of the extant Old English poetry was probably composed, these qualities had become disassociated from biological sex but retained their gender affiliations. A re-examination of "The Dream of the Rood," "The Wanderer," "The Husband's Message," "The Wife's Lament," "Wulf and Eadwacer" and Beowulf confirms that the poets used gender-coded language to indicate which poetic characters, female as well as male, held positions of power and powerlessness. A status of power or powerlessness was signalled by the exercise of particular gendered traits that were open for assumption by men and women. Powerful individuals …