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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Preposterous America: The Language Of Inversion In Thoreau, Melville, And Hawthorne, Rasmus R. Simonsen Aug 2013

Preposterous America: The Language Of Inversion In Thoreau, Melville, And Hawthorne, Rasmus R. Simonsen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation stages a series of readings that activate the inherent pull towards a queer aesthetic of “preposterousness” in the American Renaissance. In the introduction, I claim that American Studies and Queer Studies have been mutually implicated ever since F.O. Matthiessen’s seminal work American Renaissance. In this way, I bring to light the nascent strands of homoeroticsm and “deviant” practices that disrupt the teleology of normative masculinity in the nineteenth century. My intervention develops a queer heuristic through an exploration of the classical figure of hysteron proteron—the rhetorical inversion of the order of things. As a master-trope for my …


Strata, Soma, Psyche: Narrative And The Imagination In The Nineteenth-Century Science Of Lyell, Darwin, And Freud, Pascale M. Manning Aug 2013

Strata, Soma, Psyche: Narrative And The Imagination In The Nineteenth-Century Science Of Lyell, Darwin, And Freud, Pascale M. Manning

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation, “Strata, Soma, Psyche: Narrative and the Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Science of Lyell, Darwin, and Freud,” contributes new research to the diverse field mapping the intersections of science and literature in the nineteenth century. Although scholars such as Gillian Beer and George Levine have established ties between developments in the natural sciences and the scope of the nineteenth-century novel, there has not been a sustained effort to attend to the narrative structures of the primary texts that most influenced coterminous literary movements of the period. My work thus attends closely to the narrative and imaginative form of scientific …