English Language and Literature Commons^™

"O Carefull Verse": Neoteric Poetics In The Shorter Poems Of Edmund Spenser, Melissa Joy Rack

Doctoral Dissertations

This study aims to illuminate a new aesthetic in the shorter poems of Edmund Spenser. I introduce the concept of Elizabethan neoteric poetry as a method of describing the set of poetic values that inform these poems. Spenser’s shorter poems are puzzling to critics because of their peculiar style, and because they deviate from the traditional rota Virgilii, or laureate career trajectory in which the poet progresses from pastoral eclogue, to didactic georgic, and finally to epic. This model is complicated considerably by the peculiar pastoral innovation of the Shepheardes Calender (1579), as well as Spenser’s return, late in …

Race Patriots: Black Poets, Transnational Identity, And Diasporic Versification In The United States Before The New Negro, Jason T. Hendrickson

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the contributions of black poets in the United States before the New Negro / Harlem Renaissance Movement. Specifically, it focuses on their role in creating and maintaining a tradition of regional transnationalism in their verses that celebrates their African ancestry. I contend that these poets are best understood as “race patriots”; that is, they at once sought inclusion within the nation-state in the form of full citizenship, yet recognized allegiances beyond the nation-state on account of race through a recognition of shared African ancestry across borders. Their verses point to a shared kinship – be it through …

Sweat The Technique: Visible-Izing Praxis Through Mimicry In Phillis Wheatley's "On Being Brought From Africa To America", Karla V. Zelaya

Doctoral Dissertations

“On Being Brought from Africa to America” was written in 1768, seven years after a seven or eight-year-old Phillis Wheatley arrived to British North America. Phillis Wheatley was about fifteen-years-old when she wrote the most reviled poem in Black literature. Charged with thinking white and writing white, “On Being Brought from Africa to America” would condemn Phillis Wheatley as an imitator of the white gaze. Although accused of straightening her tongue, Phillis Wheatley did not imitate the white gaze in “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” She mimicked it. To imitate means to do something the same way. To …

A National Style: A Critical Historiography Of The Irish Short Story, Andrew Fox

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the artistic, historical and theoretical concerns that, for the past century, have shaped the Irish short story, the Irish nation and the body of criticism that mediates between the two. In Ireland, I argue, the prevailing critical narrative of the short story’s emergence and ongoing literary purpose has been bound up with the political narrative of the nation state’s decolonization. This process I view as symptomatic of a broader critical tendency to view Irish cultural narratives as inextricable from national ones, whereby literary interventions either are viewed as mere reflections of, or are assimilated to systems of …

Affecting Manhood: Masculinity, Effeminacy, And The Fop Figure In Early Modern English Drama, Jessica Landis

Doctoral Dissertations

This project identifies and analyzes the fop figure in early modern English drama and treats the figure as a vehicle that reveals the instability of conceptions of masculinity in the period. This project establishes a theatrical history of the character type. Although the fop did not emerge on the English stage as a stock character until late in the seventeenth century, antecedents and proto-fops appear across dramatic genres beginning in the late 1580s. Identifying these characters and deciphering their functions in plot and character development reveals, in part, how cultural anxieties about masculine codes of conduct were manifested. The project …

"The Imagination And Construction Of The Black Criminal In American Literature, 1741-1910", Emahunn Campbell

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation examines the origins of the perception of black people as criminally predisposed by arguing that during eighteenth and nineteenth-century America, crime committed by black people was used as a major trope in legal, literary, and scientific discourses, deeming them inherently criminal. Furthermore, I contend that enslaved and free black people often used criminal acts, including murder, theft, and literacy, as avenues toward freedom. However, their resistance was used as a justification for slavery in the South and discrimination in the North. By examining a diverse set of materials such as confessional literature, plantation management literature, (social) scientific studies, …

Who Do You Think You Are?: Recovering The Self In The Working Class Escape Narrative, Christine M. Maksimowicz

Doctoral Dissertations

This project considers how socioeconomic impoverishment and society's failure to recognize working class women as valued subjects impinge upon a mother's ability to afford recognition to her daughter's selfhood. Situated within the larger North American literary tradition of fiction animated by flight in search of freedom, the texts here explored constitutes a subgenre that I term the “working class escape narrative.” Combining close readings of fiction by Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, and Sigrid Nunez with sociological research and psychoanalytic theory, I explore a relationship between mother and daughter characterized not by mirroring and bonding but rather the absence of intimacy …

The (Dis)Ability Of Color; Or, That Middle World: Toward A New Understanding Of 19th And 20th Century Passing Narratives, Julia S. Charles

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation mines the intersection of racial performance and the history of the so-called “tragic mulatto” figure in American fiction. I propose that while many white writers depicted the “mulatto” character as inherently flawed because of some tainted “black blood,” many black writers’ depictions of mixed-race characters imagine solutions to the race problem. Many black writers critiqued some of America’s most egregious sins by demonstrating linkages between major shifts in American history and the mixed-race figure. Landmark legislation such as, Fugitive Slave Act 1850 and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) are often plotlines in African American passing literature, thus demonstrating the …

Rhetorics Of Self In Eighteenth-Century Biography, Nathaniel Don Norman

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the rhetorical methods that eighteenth-century biographers use to produce selfhood and to educate readers in behaviors that promote sociability. The interventions of the New Science’s inductive epistemology in rhetoric and conceptualizations of selfhood, as well as the rise of print culture, offer a foundation for exploring the emergence of the modern biographical form in the eighteenth century. In its development, eighteenth-century biography utilizes various rhetorical techniques to create a rhetoric of self, which arranges documented, lived experience into a print selfhood that readers can observe empirically and sympathetically, an engagement with the print person through which they …

Southern Gothic Fiction And New Naturalism: Toward A Reading Of New Naturalism, Jeremy Kevin Locke

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the intersections of American naturalism and the Southern Gothic by seeking to demonstrate how William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West revise key elements of fin-de-siècle naturalist fiction in a manner that enables them to create a new naturalism that they use to shed light upon the tendency of the sociocultural narratives that give meaning to the traditional conception of the Southern community to entrap characters within predetermined identities. Of particular interest are these texts’ revisions of the figures of the naturalist …

Military Virtue In Roman Rhetorical Education, Anthony Edward Zupancic

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the connection between rhetoric and military culture in the early Roman Empire. Despite obvious references to the military and martial virtues, little scholarly attention has been directed to exploring the possibilities located within this connection. This dissertation is an alternative cultural history of rhetorical theory and pedagogy that draws on close reading and philology, as well as performance and metaphor theory. In building on the cultural history of Rome, I introduce a concept of “military virtue” that expands on understandings of the Roman notion of virtus (virtue) found in recent scholarship. Since virtue in the ancient world …

Home/Economics: Enterprise, Property, And Money In Women’S Domestic Fiction, 1860-1930, Julia Poindexter Mcleod

Doctoral Dissertations

“Home/Economics: Enterprise, Property, and Money in Women’s Domestic Fiction, 1860-1930” connects American women’s literature to the ideological tensions that affected women’s participation in the development of industrial capitalism in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Working against separate spheres ideologies that largely restricted women’s activities to domestic duties as wives and mothers and discouraged them from working in the public marketplace, American women authors engaged with the contemporary economic theories of John Stuart Mill and Thorstein Veblen and promoted New Woman principles to forge new avenues of fulfilling and productive work for women.

In chapters focusing on entrepreneurial work that …

Samuel Beckett: Age, Impairment, And The Drama Of Confinement, Victoria Helen Swanson

Doctoral Dissertations

The aging body is a universal feature of corporeal existence and, in every sense, aging alters physical and mental performance. Approaches to age and performance studies often focus upon the aging actor or the challenges faced by actors when they are cast in roles which require them to act the part of a much older character. Samuel Beckett’s use of aged or aging characters has gone relatively unnoticed by scholars, especially in his dramatic works. This dissertation positions aging as vital to engaging with Beckett’s drama. Aged figures appear across Beckett’s career ranging from his earliest works to his latest. …

Crafting Memory And My Collector, Katherine Ann Davis

Doctoral Dissertations

This creative dissertation is a partial novel entitled My Collector as well as a critical introduction that explores both the usefulness of a craft essay, and how memory is rendered in fiction through the intersection of time management and point of view. In the critical introduction, I conduct close readings of two of John Banville’s novels—The Sea and The Untouchable—and apply ideas about time and memory from essays by Maud Casey, Joan Silber, and Adam Braver. My explorations demonstrate that the role of memory in fiction is more than setting up a cause-and-effect or a simple explanation for …

Homosexuality Is A Poem: How Gay Poets Remodeled The Lyric, Community And The Ideology Of Sex To Theorize A Gay Poetic, Christopher M. Hennessy

Doctoral Dissertations

SourceURL:file://localhost/Users/christopherhennessy/Desktop/DISS/Dissertation_Hennessy._Final.doc This dissertation approaches the work of three canonical post-war gay poets in an effort to construct a discourse on sexuality and the minoritized writer that argues the lyric functions as a historically contingent, politically invested, value-laden genre in which some subjectivities might be prohibited from or find their expression made to signify in ways that re-inscribe oppression. The first chapter theorizes the possiblitites of a gay poetic and analyzes the gay poet’s subjectivity as one obsessed with the ways in which he is marginalized due to expression. In the chapter on Frank O’Hara, the poet is shown to disfigure …