Crossing borders and breaking boundaries: American and British fiction in the 20th century and beyond

This thesis explores questions of national identity in American and British fiction in the 20th- and early 21st-century. To allow for a project focused on reading a vast array of texts, I implemented a non-traditional thesis format that focused on taking exams. My final product contains an introduction that details the parameters for the project and offers conclusions on my findings and corrections of my essays, the exam essays themselves including a revision, a detailed annotated bibliography of each primary and secondary work studied, as well as an appendix with the reading lists and the original request to try a non-traditional thesis.;My readings in the American Literature list point to an opening up of our definition of "American Literature" to include historically silenced voices and contemporary minority voices. At the intersections of culture that happen all over the country, literature dealing with identity and journeys into acceptance abound. My British Literature list leads to a similar yet historically more complicated solution. Writers have expressed the increasingly divided British society (in the United Kingdom and all over the globe) by employing new aesthetic modes that both respond to the past and point to the future.;By engaging both American and British perspectives, this project also serves as an example of transatlantic scholarship, not simply looking at one through the eyes of the other, but recognizing the interrelatedness historically and culturally of the two identities. The boundaries between the two identities, as well as shifting aesthetic and literary traditions, provide the context for this project.