TENDENCIA THATCHERITIS OR ENGLISHNESS REMADE: The Fictions of Julian Barnes, Hanif Kureishi and Pat Barker

Julian Barnes, Pat Barker, and Hanif Kureishi are all canonical authors whose fictions are widely believed to reflect the cultural and political state of a nation that is post-war, post-imperial and post-modern. While much has been written on how Barker’s and Kureishi’s early works in particular respond to and intervene in the presiding political narrative of the 1980s – Thatcherism – treatment of how revenants of Thatcherism have shaped these writers’ works from 1990 on has remained cursory. Thatcherism is more than an obvious historical reference point for Barker, Barnes, and Kureishi; their works demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of how Thatcher’s reworkings of the repertoires of Englishness – a representational as well as political and cultural endeavour – persist beyond her time in office. Barnes, Barker, and Kureishi seem to have reached the same conclusion as political and cultural critics: Thatcher and Thatcherism have remade not only the contemporary political and cultural landscapes but also the electorate and consequently the English themselves. Tony Blair’s conception of the New Britain proved less than satisfactory because contemporary repertoires of Englishness repeat and rework historical and not incidentally imperial formulations of England and Englishness rather than envision civic and populist formulations of renewal. Barnes’s England, England and Arthur & George confront the discourse of inevitability that has come to be attached to contemporary formulations of both political and cultural Englishness – both in terms of its predictable demise and its belated celebration. Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and “The Body” speak to an alteration that has taken place in which historical Englishness and Thatcherism have become complementary rather than contrasting discourses. What Barker’s Border Crossing and Double Vision offer against this backdrop is a subtle interrogation of how renewal itself comes to be a presiding mode of cultural reflection that absorbs revolutionary possibility.

Fleshing Out and Losing Flesh: The Decomposing Corpse as Narrative Object in American Hardboiled Detective Fiction

This dissertation examines the corpse as an object in and of American hardboiled detective fiction written between 1920 and 1950. I deploy several theoretical frames, including narratology, body-as-text theory, object relations theory, and genre theory, in order to demonstrate the significance of objects, symbols, and things primarily in the clever and crafty work of Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) and Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), but also touching on the writings of their lesser known accomplices. I construct a literary genealogy of American hardboiled detective fiction originating in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, compare the contributions of classic or Golden Age detective fiction in England, and describe the socio-economic contexts, particularly the predominance of the “pulps,” that gave birth to the realism of the Hardboiled School. Taking seriously Chandler’s obsession with the art of murder, I engage with how authors pre-empt their readers’ knowledge of the tricks of the trade and manipulate their expectations, as well as discuss the characteristics and effect of the inimitable hardboiled style, its sharpshooting language and deadpan humour. Critical scholarship has rarely addressed the body and figure of the corpse, preferring to focus instead on the machinations of the femme fatale, the performance of masculinity, or the prevalence of violence. I cast new light on the world of hardboiled detective fiction by dissecting the corpse as the object that both motivates and de-composes (or rots away from) the narrative that makes it signify. I treat the corpse as an inanimate object, indifferent to representation, that destabilizes the integrity and self-possession, as well as the ratiocination, of the detective who authors the narrative of how the corpse came to be. The corpse is all deceptive and dangerous surface rather than the container of hidden depths of life and meaning that the detective hopes to uncover and reconstruct. I conclude with a chapter that is both critical denouement and creative writing experiment to reveal the self-reflexive (and at times metafictional) dimensions of hardboiled fiction. My dissertation, too, in the manner of hardboiled fiction, hopes to incriminate my readers as much as enlighten them.

Disruptive Threads and Renegade Yarns: Domestic Textile Making in Selected Women's Writing 1811-1925

Images of domestic textiles (items made at home for consumption within the household) and textile making form an important subtext to women’s writing, both during and after industrialization. Through a close reading of five novels from the period 1811-1925, this thesis will assert that a detailed understanding of textile work and its place in women’s daily lives is critical to a deeper understanding of social, sexual and political issues from a woman’s perspective. The first chapter will explore the history of the relationship between women and domestic textile making, and the changes wrought to the latter by the Industrial Revolution. The second chapter will examine the role of embroidery in the construction of “appropriate” feminine gentility in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814). The third chapter, on Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853), will explore how the older female body became a repository for anxieties about class mobility and female power at the beginning of the Victorian era. The fourth chapter will compare Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Social Departure (1890) and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) to consider how later Victorian women both internalized and refuted public narratives of domestic textile making in a quest for “self-ownership.” The last chapter, on Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese (1925), examines the corrosive, yet ultimately redemptive, relationships of a family of women trapped by abuse and degradation. For all five authors, images of textiles and textile making allow them to speak to issues that were usually only discussed within a community of women: sexuality, desire, aging, marriage, and motherhood. In all five works, textile making “talks back” to the power structures that marginalize women, and lends insight into the material and emotional circumstances of women’s lives.