Bachelor of Arts, Wittenberg University, 2020, English

Jonathan Swift's travel narrative, Gulliver's Travels, addresses a middle-class Englishman sailing around the world and encountering new populations with unique features. Published in 1726, when British colonization was rampant, Swift's story confronts the effects of colonization on previously untouched civilizations. This paper touches on two of Gulliver's journeys, to Brobdingnag and to the land of the Houyhnhnms. Citing the works of Aime Cesaire and Homi Baba, two prominent scholars in the field of post-colonial theory, this paper examines how colonization harms the parties involved, both those who are colonizing and those who have been colonized. Countering the contemporary view that colonization would benefit any civilization that receives contact, the paper notes how it rather leaves destruction in its course.

Committee: Cynthia Richards (Advisor); Rick Incorvati (Committee Member); Timothy Wilkerson (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2015, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

In the modern critical environment, there has been a renewed interest in the role that proto-feminist and feminist satires have played in the development of cultural commentary and the modern novel. Lesser-studied works have seen several new approaches applied by critics such as Rachel Carnell, Rebecca Bullard, and Ruth Herman, who have focused on the role of the genre of “secret history” in the popular growth of the novel as a form for political dissent. Secret history, which can offer revelatory glimpses into the contemporary scandals and governance of the female authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a field that, properly contextualized, can provide a new focus for previously under-appreciated works, themes, and literary strategies. In this study, these critics' contributions are applied to an interpretation of the works of Delarivier Manley (c. 1663 – 1724), and specifically to the proto-novel Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality, of Both Sexes. From the New Atalantis, vols. 1 and 2 (1709) as a turning point in the development of modern tropes and the utilization of utopian and dystopian spaces, especially those based upon or resembling the mythical lost nation of Atlantis. Extending Manley's semi-biographical secret history from the elements of cultural and political satire present in Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516) and Sir Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1624), the study aims to demonstrate that Manley's text has dramatically influenced the modern interpretation of Atlantis specifically, and dystopias generally, in diverse cultural media including film, literature, comic books, and mythology. Examining the cataclysmic motifs of Atlantean utopias, anti-utopias, and dystopias, the study attempts to note the ways in which Manley's The New Atalantis has permanently revised the accepted causes and motivations for the destruction of the Atlantean continent and the rhetorical commentary that these cataclysmic representa (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Rachel Carnell PhD (Committee Chair); Adam Sonstegard PhD (Committee Member); James Marino PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature