Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1965, Theatre

Committee: Robert R. Findlay (Advisor) Subjects: Theater

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, English

Although the first balloon flights in 1783 created a sensation throughout Europe, human flight had long captured the imaginations of scientific and literary authors alike. Prior histories of flight begin with balloons, but earlier centuries boasted a strange and colorful aviary that shaped thinking about flight long before the first balloon ever left the ground. Taking a cultural materialist approach informed by a broad familiarity with the development of early flight machines and a deep familiarity with the literary conventions of the period, I analyze historical materials ranging from aeronautical treatises to stage pantomimes, from newspaper advertisements to philosophical poems, from mechanical diagrams to satirical cartoons. This earlier culture possessed high hopes and anxieties about human flight. I argue that early flight was lively and varied before the invention of a successful flying machine, and that these early flights were important because they established an aerial tradition astonishingly resistant to change. Rather than revolutionizing the culture, ballooning was quickly incorporated into it. Although ballooning came to be regarded as a failure by many onlookers, the aerial tradition had long become accustomed to failure and continued unabated. Human flight has always promised tremendous and yet debatable utility, a paradox that continues into the present age.

Committee: Roxann Wheeler (Advisor); David Brewer (Committee Member); Sandra Macpherson (Committee Member); Jacob Risinger (Committee Member) Subjects: Aeronomy; Aerospace Engineering; American Literature; Astronomy; British and Irish Literature; Comparative Literature; Engineering; European History; European Studies; Experiments; Folklore; Foreign Language; Germanic Literature; History; Language; Literature; Mechanical Engineering; Museums; Philosophy of Science; Physics; Science History; Technology; Theater; Theater History; World History

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2019, English

This dissertation explores how significant works of English literature from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries interacted with the idea of sovereignty, and especially the perceived necessity that a single person possessing sovereign power must act as the foundation for the existence of functional political communities. I argue that depictions of sovereignty in early modern literature are inseparable from both political theology and varying notions of temporality. Furthermore, I argue that the ideal version of the monarch is never depicted as a present, existent force in the literature of the period. Instead, the ideal monarch is temporally displaced through various means, with a general movement from depicting the ideal monarch as potential and immanent in the late sixteenth century, to depicting him as bygone or inaccessible in the late seventeenth. In the first two chapters, I analyze Shakespeare's Richard II and Henry V, plays which explore the ways in which monarchs with absolutist aspirations can effectively assert their authority without self-contradiction or self-negation. This assertion comes to found itself on the hope of a future ideal monarch which the current monarch might usher in; in the process, these plays transform the perpetually recurring hope of kingly succession into a kind of secularized eschatology. In the last two chapters, I move forward in time to Milton's Paradise Lost and Behn's Oroonoko, two works which are concerned with the perceived disappearance of a connection to legitimate sovereign authority. Milton, in retelling the origin myth of all human political community, seeks a way to contextualize the political disasters of his career and return sovereign authority to its proper divine place. Behn, on the other hand, explores a fundamental breakdown of sovereign power structures in the face of both colonialism and chattel slavery, moving manifestations of ideal sovereign power irretrievably into (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Maggie Vinter PhD (Committee Chair); Chris Flint PhD (Committee Member); Erika Olbricht PhD (Committee Member); Hengehold Laura PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2017, English

When applying the relationship between the mind and the body to the literature of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester and Aphra Behn, a relationship forms between a master and a machine. In this case, the master is the mind, and the machine is the body. I argue that using this application with Rochester's “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” and Behn's “The Disappointment” and Oroonoko, relationships between the self and others become more difficult and complex. When connecting the theory of the mind/body split to Rochester, the outer relationship between the mind and body is displayed. However, when moving on to Behn's writings, she corrects the Imperfect Enjoyment genre by turning the relationship inward. In this paper, I also argue that a new reading of the novel Oroonoko should be one which places it within the Imperfect Enjoyment genre. In this novel, Oronooko displays scenes of Imperfect Enjoyment within himself in not being able to kill himself and in his response to his slave master torturing him.

Committee: Elizabeth Mackay Dr. (Advisor); Rebecca Potter Dr. (Committee Member); Cynthia Richards Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature