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On The Move: Games And Gaming Figures In Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature, Douglas Anthony Guerra
On The Move: Games And Gaming Figures In Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature, Douglas Anthony Guerra
Dissertations (1 year embargo)
In this dissertation, I analyze the way that gameplay, considered broadly, both facilitated and informed representations of agency in the nineteenth century. In effect, games were archives of possibility made procedurally discrete, rendering modes of action and agency legible in ways that are suggested, although differently engaged, in their somewhat less ephemeral cousins: books. Understanding that both games and books emerged from within similar fields of cultural production and often marketed themselves to the same audiences, I argue that taking a technical and materially historical approach to games helps us to explore major literary works of the period to startlingly …
The Queer Work Of Fantasy: The Romance In Antebellum America, Zachary Neil Lamm
The Queer Work Of Fantasy: The Romance In Antebellum America, Zachary Neil Lamm
Dissertations
This project examines the ways in which antebellum writers of romances theorized the relationship between fantasy and queer desire. These writers produced vision of alternative forms of sociality that serve to criticize the heteronormativity of antebellum sexual culture and to promote fantasy as both a mode of critique and a strategy for cultural subversion. Antebellum romances thus represent both a deep dissatisfaction with their author's contemporary culture and a means of envisioning subversive socialities and intimacies that promote freedom of the expression of desire and allow for the queerness that might characterize such expressions if subjects were able to speak …