Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1971, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1932, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1960, English

Committee: Lowell P. Leland (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1960, English

Committee: Lowell P. Leland (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature

MA, Kent State University, 2018, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

Extreme temperatures, radical weather events, and species' extinctions have all taken place or been foreshadowed during the Earth's current ecological crisis. Since this crisis was named the “Anthropocene” (new, human) epoch, scholars from a range of disciplines have sought to find both a reason for and start to this geological era. Usually, the Anthropocene is thought to have begun during the Industrial Revolution of the early nineteenth century, following the carbon dioxide that was released into the Earth's atmosphere from that period onward. However, this thesis argues that the roots of the Anthropocene, and the climate change that goes with it, can be traced back to the century before the Industrial Revolution. I argue that the roots of the Anthropocene are first apparent in Lydia Maria Child's 1824 novel, Hobomok. Set in early seventeenth-century New England, I seek to show that the Puritan settlers within the novel are carriers of what ecological philosopher Timothy Morton calls “agrilogistical” norms and subscribers to the reductive material philosophy of “Easy-Think Substances.” Moreover, I posit that the American Indians to which the Puritan settlers believe themselves superior to can be viewed as bearing material philosophies more akin to Diana Coole and Samantha Frost's new materialism and Jane Bennett's vital materialism, which offer a more ecologically sustainable viewpoint regarding nonhuman materiality. The competing viewpoints regarding nonhuman nature and materiality further serve to divide the Puritans and Amerindian characters, and this separation is seen further in ethnocentric colonialism apparent in Hobomok and furthered in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. Set a century after Hobomok, Cooper's novel serves to show the advancement of agrilogistical policies that began in Hobomok, and would continue through “civilization,” farming practices, war, and colonialization. In tracing these agrilogistical norms through the (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ryan Hediger (Advisor); Wesley Raabe (Committee Member); Sara Newman (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Climate Change; Ecology; Environmental Studies; Literature; Native American Studies; Native Americans; Native Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, English

“'I Would Prevent You from Further Violence': Women, Pirates, and the Problem of Violence in the Antebellum American Imagination" analyzes how antebellum American pirate stories used the figure of the pirate to explore the problem of violence and the role women play in opposing violent men. This project joins ongoing conversations about women in the nineteenth century in which scholars, such as Nina Baym, Mary Kelley, and Mary Ryan, have made key contributions by recovering a domestic model of nineteenth-century womanhood. As my work demonstrates, antebellum Americans were similarly invested in a more adventurous, and sometimes violent, model of womanhood that was built upon the figure of the gentleman pirate and placed in opposition to violent men. I argue that it is important to think about the pirate story and the figure of the pirate, not only in the context in which it has come to be known—escapist fantasies written for boys and young men—but as a place where authors reinforced, modified, and established different models of gender roles. Frequently within the mid-nineteenth-century American pirate story, authors answered the question of who is allowed to be violent by demonstrating that women had the capacity for violence and constructing scenarios illustrating that women were often the only ones in a position to forcibly oppose violent men. The pirate story uniquely blends different narrative conventions: adventure stories that are often believed to appeal to male audiences and domestic scenarios that are usually understood to resonate with female readers. Although historical and fictional pirates of other eras and geographical locations have been examined, little scholarship has focused on piracy in the antebellum American imagination, even though the figure of the pirate continued to proliferate, especially in popular fiction, throughout the nineteenth century. My project addresses this gap not only by demonstrating the importance of pirates in nineteenth (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sara Crosby (Advisor); Andrea Williams (Committee Member); Susan Williams (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; American Literature; American Studies; British and Irish Literature; Gender; Literature; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2011, English (Arts and Sciences)

This project explores the central importance of captivity and revenge to four novels in the genre of frontier romance: Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly (1799), James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans (1826), Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827), and Robert Montgomery Bird's Nick of the Woods (1837). Although a fundamental plot aspect of nearly every work in the genre, the threat of captivity and the necessity of revenge are rarely approached as topics of inquiry, despite their deep connection to the structure and action of the texts. Perhaps most importantly, as critics Jeremy Engels and Greg Goodale note, these twin tropes serve as a way of unifying disparate social groups and creating order; in essence, such depictions function as a form of what Michel Foucault terms “governmentality,” logics of control that originate from non-governmental sources but promote systems of governance. For works in the genre of frontier romance, the cyclical recurrences of captivity and revenge violence – what I term the “captivity-revenge cycle” – become the rhetorical embodiment of the contemporary sociopolitical discourses on proper citizenship, government, and morality. With these ideas in mind, I examine the role of the captivity-revenge cycle as depicted in the texts studied here. In each novel, the centrality of forms of captivity – male domestic or economic disempowerment and isolation, female abduction and physical captivity – combine with their accompanying acts of vengeance to create a vision of frontier society that is structured around this cyclical violence; the societies depicted represent a form of participation in the era's sociopolitical discourses on topics like expansion, citizenship, proper republican morality, and justice. By reinvestigating a genre often dismissed as overly conventional and lowbrow, this project displays the way that frontier romances serve as vehicles for the rhetoric of sociopolitical organization, revealing important cultu (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Paul Jones PhD (Committee Chair); Nicole Reynolds PhD (Committee Member); Thomas Scanlan PhD (Committee Member); Jessica Roney PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature