Objectives and Methodology: This thesis will break new ground in the study of Israeli/Palestinian literature as it circulates internationally. I will demonstrate how violence has been, and remains, legible in Israeli/Palestinian literature as a mode of representation crucial to robust national identity, and yet one that is predicated on a destructive division of peoples. Understanding violence as a multifaceted phenomenon will enable me to identify forms of structural and symbolic violence that subtend more explicit, manifest, or what Slavoj Zizek (2008) calls 'subjective' forms of violence. Moreover, by reconceiving subjective violence as a 'speech act' (Ball, 2012), I will elucidate what is being said, what sort of response is solicited, and who the interlocutor is in contextually specific acts of violence. By creatively synthesising theories of national narration and affect, with a particular emphasis on gender, I will develop a distinctive approach to violence that attends to its effects on the skin of fiction that mediates the Israeli/Palestinian conflict internationally. Four overarching questions will govern my research: 1. How is fiction (non-)complicit in nationalist narratives in terms of its approach to violence? 2. In what ways are literary representations of violence gendered, and how does that reflect and inform national identity? 3. How might literature's potential for inducing affect augment, or challenge, existing postcolonial approaches to Israeli/Palestinian literature? 4. How might a critical approach towards representational violence contribute to non-violent "solutions" to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict? Rationale: My doctoral thesis will shed fresh light on the controversial topic of violence as this has been represented, in explicit and more subtle ways, in the post-1948 literatures of Israel and Palestine. It will represent a distinctive response to recent appeals to furnish the 'nowhere', or near invisibility, of Israel/Palestine in postcolonial studies (Williams & Ball, 2014). The work will specifically advance the argument that Palestinian and Israeli texts 'share the effort to represent the nation [which] offers a way to conceive of a relational literary history of Israel/Palestine' (Bernard, 2013). My relational approach emphatically departs from the limiting idea of two parallel but separate narratives, instead drawing upon an inclusive paradigm of decolonising 'settler-native relations' that favours bipartisan solidarity (Piterberg, 2008). Yet ongoing discord still needs to be confronted. When assessing claims to belonging in Israel/Palestine we face the 'problem of determining what the appropriate timeframe is for analysing significant historical events' (Peterson, 2016). Nations, like narratives, are created through processes of inclusion and exclusion; thus, narrative 'closure' risks replicating 'the totalisation of national culture' (Bhabha, 1990). At least when literature is interpreted allegorically (Jameson, 1981), it becomes implicated in propaganda designed to endorse a nation's 'soul' (Renan, 1895). My relational comparative approach aims both to sustain attention to the region's ongoing tensions and to heed the constructive call for an 'analytic pluralism' (Said, 1983). A comparative methodology is crucial to my research because where particular histories are privileged, divisions are demarcated, and violence thrives. Since 1948 (when the State of Israel was declared), division and violence have proliferated within what is recognisably a colonial context. Encirclement, military incursion, resource diversion, toponymicide, memoricide, and linguicide are ongoing existential threats to Palestinians (Masalha, 2012). Conversely, the annexation of trauma studies, historical censorship, and the perpetual Othering of Arabs threaten Israel's psyche and legitimation (Pappe, 2006).