Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky

Theses and Dissertations

This paper theorizes that authors, in an act I have termed “literary exorcism,” project and expunge parts of their identities that are in conflict with the overriding political agenda of their texts, into the figure of the villain. Drawing upon theories of power put forth by Judith Butler, I argue that this sort of projection arises in reaction to dominant ideas and institutions, but that authors find ways to manipulate this process over time. By examining a broad cross-section of English-language literature over several centuries, this phenomenon and its evolution can be observed, as well as the means by which …

Taverns, Theaters, Publics: The Intertheatrical Politics Of Caroline Drama, Allison Deutermann

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Shame, Darwin, And Other Victorian Writers, Aaron Khai Han Ho

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation explores shame and how shame shapes identities in the nineteenth century. While many scholars examine Darwin in terms of narrativity, how he attempts to counter the theological language in Victorian evolutionary discourses, and the influences he has on his contemporary writers, I argue that his writing on shame, which is part of his long argument on evolution, secularizes the concept of shame, opposing the notions of many Victorians that shame is God-given. Both God-given shame and secular shame are rooted in sexuality, as this dissertation will show, and thus shame, sexuality, and identity are interconnected. Using Darwin as …

Bodies Of Resistance: On (Not) Naming Gender In The Medieval West, Alexander V. Baldassano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers the genres of historiography, romance, hagiography, Chaucerian poetry, and court transcripts. While there are no extant manuscripts depicting transgender-like people’s accounts of themselves, literature of the Middle Ages is replete with fictionalized depictions of ambiguously or transgressively gendered individuals who are meant to symbolize or represent something other than themselves. By investigating how a variety of genres depicts sensationalized and transgressively gendered embodiments, I examine the presentation of transgender-like subjectivity as a manipulation of rhetoric. Viviane Namaste critiques theory such as Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests, claiming that it reduces the transvestite figure to a rhetorical trope …

Involute Analysis: Virtual Discourse, Memory Systems And Archive In The Involutes Of Thomas De Quincey, Kimberley A. Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Thomas De Quincey’s involutes inform metaphysical thought on memory and language, particularly concerning multiplicity and the virtual, repetition and difference. When co-opting the mathematic and mechanic involute in Suspiria de Profundis, De Quincey generates an interdisciplinary matrix for the semiotics underpinning his philosophy of language and theory of memory and experience. Involutes entangle and reproduce. De Quincey’s involute exposes the concrete and actual through which all experience accesses the abstract or virtual. The materiality of their informatics and technics provides a literary model and theoretical precursor to a combination of archive and systems theory. The textuality of involute system(s)—both …

Writing For Strangers: Structural Transformations Of The Public Letter, 1640-1790, Shang-Yu Sheng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines public letters in England during the period spanning the English Civil War to the French Revolution, showing how authors employed the printed epistolary form to imagine different relations with the “stranger readers” who constituted the nascent reading public. I employ a formalist approach to analyze the various rhetorics made possible through the public letter’s framed structure, focusing on the assemblages of the narrative positions of letter writer, addressee, and reader. Each chapter describes a mode of the public letter in socio-spatial terms: spectacle, network, community, and public. Building on studies in book history and print culture, this …

From Humiliation To Epiphany: The Role Of Onstage Spaces In T. S. Eliot’S Middle Plays, Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

This essay looks at T. S. Eliot's major dramatic productions from the 1930s-40s: Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party as a series of investigations into spatial expressions of faith. By using onstage space in unique ways, Eliot encourages audiences to consider the connections between performance and belief, the knowable and unknowable.

The Art Of Cognition: British Empiricism And Victorian Aesthetics, Rachel Kravetz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The British are credited—or charged—with establishing empiricism, the view that all knowledge is embedded in sense experience. My project argues for and describes an undercurrent of idealism within British empiricism: the writers of my study investigated modes of thinking that transform sensory experience. To see their idealism at work, it is necessary to look closely at how they conceived of ideas in the mind as pictures. Given that the term “picture” was used to refer to both inner ideas and actual paintings, it is not surprising (though rarely noticed) that when empiricists wanted to consider how the mind shapes ideas, …

Knowing Others, Or Not: Performing, Caring, Foreboding, And Acknowledging In Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, Meechal Hoffman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Knowing Others, Or Not makes two overarching claims about the nineteenth-century novel’s depictions of relations. First, they are overwhelmingly concerned with epistemological questions about knowing others, and second, more often than not, the problem of other minds is portrayed as productive of both pleasure and valuable negative affects. While much scholarship on the relational nineteenth century focuses on either sympathy or social responsibility within the framework of liberal individualism, I show instead that the authors in this study—Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot—repeatedly register doubt about the usefulness or possibility of authenticity, and posit the pleasure that …

Lyrical Mysticism: The Writing And Reception Of Catherine Of Siena, Lisa Tagliaferri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lyrical Mysticism: The Writing and Reception of Catherine of Siena (https://caterina.io) affirms the 14th-century mystic Catherine of Siena as a writer through contextualizing her texts among the corpus of contemporary Italian literature, and studying her reception in the Renaissance period of Italy and England. Joining an increasing body of recent meaningful scholarship that has been making significant progress to recover many overlooked and peripheral female voices of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, this work serves to fully assert Catherine as a writer of work that is literarily significant and worthy of textual analysis alongside contemporary male Italian …

"The Engine Of Free Expression": The Political Economy Of Copyright In The Colonial British Atlantic And Early National United States, Nora Slonimsky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1985, the Supreme Court of the United States concluded that copyright was included in the Constitution in order to serve as the “engine of free expression.” By providing economic incentive to drive artistic and scientific innovation, the nation received essential information and other tools of learning necessary to make sound political decisions. However, transnational copyright disputes, then and now, frequently resulted in complex and often contradictory understandings of free expression. The formation of copyright in America was thus a far more complex story, and it is that story that forms the basis of this project.

Amidst the many moving …

Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Literary Theories of Circumcision” investigates a school of thought in which the prepuce, as a conceptual metaphor, organizes literary experience. In every period of English literature, major authors have employed the penis’s hood as a figure for thinking about reading and writing. These authors belong to a tradition that defines textuality as a foreskin and interpretation as circumcision. In “Literary Theories of Circumcision,” I investigate the origins of this literary-theoretical formulation in the writings of Saint Paul, and then I trace this formulation’s formal applications among medieval, early modern, and modernist writers. My study lays the groundwork for an ambitious …

The Second Pen, Nicholas D. Brennan

Theses and Dissertations

"The Second Pen" evaluates the historical relevancy of prevalent monikers for William Shakespeare-- namely, "The Bard," "Swan of Avon," and "Upstart Crow." While Brennan finds the general concept of the moniker to encapsulate Shakespeare's current historical legacy, he equally finds the aforementioned monikers to misrepresent this. Brennan offers "The Second Pen" as a moniker for Shakespeare that redresses the distortions of the others. He concentrates his defense of its relevancy around a defense of William Shakespeare as the "second pen" which Ben Jonson's 1605 Sejanus quarto names as a collaborator in the writing of a preceding stage version of the …

William Hazlitt: On The Silencing Effect Of Public Opinion In Nineteenth-Century England, J M Tessa Freeman

Theses and Dissertations

“William Hazlitt: On the Silencing Effect of Public Opinion in Nineteenth-Century England” investigates the social interactions that fostered the circulation of misinformation. Hazlitt depicts how silencing portions of the population benefited those in power and how many within society were unknowingly compliant and in fact facilitating this manipulation of information.

Dogs, Cats, And A Lambkin: Speechlessness And The Animal In Ulysses, Pierce R. Watson

Theses and Dissertations

This essay explores the status of the animal and the consequences of animal speechlessness in Ulysses, mainly focusing on encounters with dogs and cats. Through these animal encounters, Joyce provides a foundation for understanding the complications faced by the Bloom family in grieving their deceased infant son.

Intelligent Bodies And Embodied Minds: Reading Religious Performance In Middle English Writing From Syon Abbey, Nicholas Love, William Langland, And John Gower, Paul Holchak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues for a new reading of the relationship that texts have to performance, bodies have to agency, and that social construction has to literary criticism as these matters relate to the study of religious practice in late medieval England. The project first asks what it meant to participate in religious practice in two, early fifteenth-century Middle English prose texts, The Myroure of Oure Ladye and The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. The former work is a gloss of the Divine Service performed by the Brigittine sisters at Syon Abbey, and the latter consists of …

Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect And Animals In Nineteenth-Century Literature And Culture, Keridiana Chez

Publications and Research

Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture by Keridiana W. Chez is the first monograph located at the intersection of animal and affect studies to examine how gender is produced via the regulation of interspecies relationships. Looking specifically at the development of the human-dog relationship, Chez argues that the bourgeoisie fostered connections with canine companions in order to mediate and regulate gender dynamics in the family. As Chez shows, the aim of these new practices was not to use animals as surrogates to fill emotional vacancies but rather to incorporate them as “emotional prostheses.”

Chez …

Gathering Sense From Song: Robert Browning And The Romantic Epistemology Of Music, Laura Clarke

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars Of Wisdom And The Erotics Of Literary History: Straddling Epic., Václav Paris

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Queen Alice And The Monstrous Child: Alice Through The Looking Glass, Veronica Schanoes

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Roots And Repercussions Of Romantic Feeling: Sensation And Affect In The Poetry Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge And William Wordsworth, Mary K. Cotter

Theses and Dissertations

Enlightenment emphasis on rationalism in philosophy and the arts prefigures Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and William Wordsworth’s Romantic recovery of a subject’s empirical relationship to nature and the phenomenal world. Coleridge and Wordsworth respond to philosophical precedents that emphasize rationalism and the autonomy of a subject while introducing empiricism and sensation as primary components of the speaker’s experience. The poets delineate a fluid shift from the Enlightenment to Romanticism through an interchangeable reliance on Kantian and Burkean philosophical methods. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant follows the Cartesian cogito toward a similar end of reducing human experience to circumstance bereft of empirical …

The Poet And The Polemist: Demystifying The Natural Law Theory Of John Milton, John J. Mazola

Theses and Dissertations

A summation of the influences behind Milton's Natural Law theory as found in the works of Aristotle, Grotius, Hobbes, and Thomas Aquinas. The essay's intent is to uncover this important thread that runs through both Milton's Poetic Verse as well as his Polemic tracts.

The Uprising Of The Anecdotes: Women’S Letters And Mass-Produced News In Jacob’S Room And Three Guineas, Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

This short article explores the similarities between Walter Benjamin's theory about the disruptive potential of an anecdote vis-a-vis the conventional narrative and Virginia Woolf's use of anecdotes in her novel, Jacob's Room and her anti-war treatise, Three Guineas.

"What's The Use Of Trying To Read Shakespeare?": Modes Of Memory In Virginia Woolf's Fiction And Essays, Sara Remedios Bloom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation maps the relationship between Virginia Woolf’s fiction and essays, and William Shakespeare’s person and plays. I argue that Woolf’s writing is intended as an interactive practice of cultural memory, challenging her readers to become responders and to engage critically with the canon. I further argue that Woolf offers herself as inheritor of a literary practice that actively seeks to shape the values and social ideology of the time. The introduction defines three modes of memory operating in Woolf’s work: memory as opiate; memory as political instrument; and memory as dialectic. The first chapter shows the cultural memory of …

Radical Interiorities, Aesthetic Selves: Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Miciah Hussey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In her essay “On Being Ill” (1926), Virginia Woolf writes “We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others…There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown.” My dissertation explores how the novel’s attempts to represent this inherently intimate and estranging “virgin forest” also test its formal limitations. From free indirect discourse to stream of consciousness, the development of the novel is marked by different modes of reproducing inner life that push beyond the boundaries of historical, social, and physiognomic indices. I argue that these narrative and …

Between Life And Literature: The Influence Of Don Quixote And Madame Bovary On Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction, Victoria Tomasulo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project demonstrates the influence of two foundational novels in the Western canon, Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, on twentieth-century British, Italian, and Anglo-American women’s fiction. Both novels illustrate the dangers and pleasures of literary influence. Stylistically innovative, they anticipated concerns that were of import to feminist literary critics in the seventies and beyond: the transformative power of the reading encounter, its normative and subversive effects on gendered identities, and the need of individual writers to liberate themselves from the shackles of literary convention. Drawing upon textual and paratextual evidence such as interviews, journal entries, and essays, I argue …

Counterfeit Letters And Fictional Trials: Thomas More’S Utopia As Cultural Brand, Andie Silva

Publications and Research

Utilizing marketing theory on iconic brands, this article provides a focused study of surviving English editions of Thomas More's Utopia (1551) and the different ways in which the publication was adapted by its print agents, who eventually turned it into an iconic, English brand-name. By drawing a connection between the popularity and versatility of More’s text and the rapidly developing genre of utopian fiction, this article sheds light on the speed with which the press both reacted to and played a role in creating popular taste.

Playing With Matches: Matchmaking As Authorship In The Nineteenth-Century Marriage Plot, Colleen Cusick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the narrative treatment of matchmakers in British marriage plots across the nineteenth century. In an era of increasing state control over marriage and the rising ideology of romantic marriage, the matchmaker represents the communal courtship practices of the past. As such, she offers both a threat to the emerging status quo and a reminder of the persistence of superseded cultural forms in the modern marriage system. Simultaneously, she constitutes an image of female creativity and authority that speaks to concerns about the professionalization of novel-writing and the place of women writers within that profession. Through this focus …

Heavy Expectations: Reading Pregnancy In The Victorian Novel, Livia Arndal Woods

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation articulates the tendency of Victorian novels to make legible only the pregnant bodies of immodest characters who transgress gendered ideologies while the pregnant bodies of modest characters tend to go undescribed. Tracing the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth over the course of the long nineteenth century, my chapters demonstrate the function of moralizing narrative conventions in the representation of pregnancy in mid-Victorian novels, of a self-conscious use of free indirect diagnosis in high-Victorian fiction, and a shift at the fin-de-siècle from pregnancy as a signifier of morality to a symptom of unstable minds. The novels I read closely …

Mediated Technologies: Locating Non-Authorial Agency In Printed And Digital Texts, Andie Silva

Publications and Research

Early modern printers, publishers and booksellers not only influenced readers to purchase particular books but continue to shape our reception of printed books today. Through title-page advertisements, prefaces and indexes, these ‘print agents’ forged unique relationships with new and returning readers. Paying attention to paratextual structures can uncover strategies for marketing new books, corralling readers and outlining new genres. A consideration of framing devices can also further our understanding of digital resources: much as print agents mediated printed books, digital humanists help reinforce the value of new technologies for the study of early modern texts, guiding users to apply new …