This dissertation argues that literature in Old English and early Middle English characterizes legacy-giving as a serious obligation of fatherhood and key paternal role. I contend that the father's legacy in this cultural context can be understood to include property, heirlooms, wisdom, and kin ties. This project contributes to the emerging study of fatherhood, which has begun to examine fatherhood as a previously under-explored phenomenon that is both a cultural institution and a part of many men's lived experiences. I examine Anglo-Saxon law-codes, Old English wisdom poetry, Beowulf, and the Middle English texts The Proverbs of Alfred and Layamon's Brut in order to argue for the cultural importance of this fatherly role. I argue that many of the same cultural markers of Anglo-Saxon paternal legacy continue to be relevant after the Norman Conquest, but that the Norman practice of strict patrilineal primogeniture alters certain aspects of fatherhood. While Old English literature prizes a relationship between father and son that includes an ongoing giving of self on the part of the father, early Middle English literature prefers an ideal father who serves as a prototype for the son, dying just as the son reaches adulthood.

My dissertation investigates the cultural significance of vernacular debate poems from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. Debate poems were hugely popular in late medieval England; dozens survive, often in multiple copies, and authors such as Chaucer, Lydgate, and Dunbar contributed to the genre. The disputants in these poems—birds, corpses, worms, and occasionally humans—argue about seemingly frivolous topics to no clear end, for the debates are never resolved. Debate poems are not empty rhetorical games, however, but fascinating literary and historical documents: they address, and often voice strong opinions on, issues of vital interest not only to medieval audiences but also to modern critics. After an introductory chapter that briefly traces the evolution and criticism of the debate genre, my dissertation focuses on three recurring themes in debate poetry: law, gender and eschatology. Chapter two focuses on the legal ramifications of three debate poems, The Owl and the Nightingale, Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, and The Assembly of Ladies, contending that the irresolution of these debate poems mimics the slow pace of the law courts, and that the poems comment on the delays endemic in the English legal system. Chapter three shows that debates between the body and soul, far from being the straightforward vehicles for conveying moral lessons they are generally assumed to be, are, in fact, explorations of human identity that grapple with fears and uncertainties about the afterlife. My fourth chapter argues that characters engaged in debates purporting to be about the vices and virtues of women generally agree on the nature of women but disagree about how their sexual behavior affects men's reputations. I contend that these debates represent ideas about masculinity and social control. Ultimately, my dissertation both reassesses the debate genre and shows the diversity of opinions that could circulate around these three issues, enriching our understanding of (open full item for complete abstract)

My dissertation investigates how Syriac-speakers conceptualized their communal subjectivities within a Roman imperial context. I argue that Syriac literature from the Roman empire, and especially Syriac historiography and Syriac liturgical texts, provided Syriac-speakers with the discursive tools with which they could interpret recent history and formulate conceptions of the self within a Roman context. I argue that Syriac identity prior to the formation of the Syriac Orthodox Church was articulated through a dialectic with contemporary Roman imaginaries of ethnicity and citizenship. In doing so, I problematize scholarship that supposes `Syriacness' and `Romanness' were antithetical in the late Roman period. Instead, I contend that Syriac-speaking communities adopted, manipulated, and redefined discourses of Romanness in order to create their own Syriac-speaking Roman subjectivities.

The police have a literary history. By the Book canvasses a broad range American novels that depicted many of the organizational developments and institutional operations of municipal law enforcement in United States cities from the late-nineteenth through the early-twentieth century. I examine the rise of the police procedural as a literary genre in the true-crime fiction of Julian Hawthorne and the detective novels of Anna Katharine Green that promote the investigative processes of the New York Police Department and its specialized crime units. I examine the futurist fiction of J. W. Roberts and Frederick Upham Adams, which pushed back against debates about law enforcement's own future in their explorations of interpersonal crime, criminal enterprise, and riot control in metropolises such as Boston, Chicago, and New York. Finally, I examine social problem novels by Sutton E. Griggs that tackle the Jim Crow police state created in Southern cities like Richmond and Nashville through police abuse and neglect toward black Americans. Ultimately, the story that emerges in By the Book is about competing civic narratives -- of the police as collective protagonist and collective antagonist in American society.

In “The Bodies Belong to No One,” I contend that the legal concept corpus nullius in bonis, which restricts the property and personhood rights of the dead, has broader implications in the intersections between twentieth and twenty-first century Native American literatures and federal Indian policy. Specifically, I argue that the literal and legislative acts of violence against Indigenous men in the U.S. from 1934 to 2010 intersect with broader geopolitical acts of Indigenous displacement and dispossession. These interconnected processes rely on what I call “settler hermeneutics,” or the literary and policymaking strategies that seek to affirm settler rights to occupation by setting term limits on “authentic” Indigenous manhood and the scripting of Native masculinities into destinies of cultural death and political dispossession. Set between the Osage Oil murders in the 1920s, which became the FBI's first major crimes case, and the Tribal Law and Order Act (2010), my work explores how Native American authors re-construct the literary, political, and legal histories of violence in pursuit of Indigenous forms of justice. Developing “subsurface” methodologies, I argue that Native writers offer strategies for reconnecting the juridical surfaces in contemporary Indian Country to much deeper histories of violence in novels that unsettle the settler narratives of progress and belonging. Specifically, I argue that these Native writers reconstruct a much deeper history of missing and murdered Indigenous men, which intersects with the historical and ongoing violence against Indigenous women and Two Spirit peoples across gendered, geopolitical, and generational lines.

First made available in the United States in 1962, William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch and those who ventured to sell the illicit book were brought before obscenity courts on three separate occasions within the book's first four years in print. Despite breaking a different law on each separate occasion, Naked Lunch was judged to be equally obscene in all three cases. However, as Allen Ginsberg's testimony during the 1966 Massachusetts State Supreme Court trial that eventually exonerated Naked Lunch from its prior obscenity convictions demonstrates, there exist multiple interpretations and functions of the term "obscene". The discrepancy of usage between Burroughs, Ginsberg and the Court demonstrates a fundamental characteristic of obscenity, its ambiguity. The difficulty in definitively articulating the obscene is best characterized by United States Supreme Court Justice, Potter Stewart, in his famous quote, "I shall not today attempt to further define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [pornographic]… But I know it when I see it." Despite the transparency and moral certitude Justice Potter assumes in his widely quoted remark, the inability of the Supreme Court to standardize or elucidate a description of the obscene beyond the subjective acts of 'knowing' and 'seeing' represents a serious lapse in an otherwise exacting mode of discourse. To understand the significance of this lapse and to begin to gauge its influence on the critical reception of Naked Lunch, it is first necessary to approach the legal origins of obscenity.

This doctoral thesis talks about voice in the testimonial pieces entitled Loyal Soldiers in the Cocaine Kingdom: tales of drugs, mules and gunmen and La Sierra. In the context of this work of reflection, I consider voice in a broad sense, to include body gestures in their performance and prosody. These contemporary literary practices are about historical processes that have to do with the dynamics of the illegal drug trade and the armed conflict. In that sense, what is presented in the next pages is an interaction between the voice with its gestural dimension and the social contexts. In order to cope with this relation in a group of testimonials in written and in audio-visual form, I make use of the Sanskrit theory of dhvani, that allows me to listen through the eyes, the suggestive clothing that dresses the voices. In doing so, in this thesis I explore the stories told by The Mule Driver, Scuzzball, Hanged Man, Sharon, The Nun, The Puppet, Edison, Cielo and Jesus, proposing that through the epithelium of suggestion with which the voices are covered, is possible to hear and see, the emergence of a contemporary archetype of a warrior. All these reflections are bound together to establish a historical trial in which the character's ventriloquist voices constitute precocious testimonies, in other words, they shoot ahead through the gestural dimension, some of the effects that the hegemonic orders are having over societies. In this historical trial, that takes place in the courtroom proper to the studied literary practices, the evidences, consequently, represent a challenge to the legal language. As an ultimate goal, the explorations of these thesis intent to get closer to the force and intensity of the manifested experiences expressed by the voices in the testimonies, that by means of psychoanalytic reasoning, highlight the impossibility of being symbolized, therefore, the image of the warrior is just a metaphorical vehicle that tries to sight the real.

This dissertation examines novels for spatial and temporal practices, what I call “tactics of trespassing,” used by twentieth- and twenty-first-century women writers Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Penelope Fitzgerald, Margaret Drabble, Hilary Mantel, and Jeanette Winterson to re-imagine established constructions of national and gender identity and its relation to property. I focus on property's ability to enable or to prevent particular identity formations and chart the responses of modern British women writers to the ways that legal, political, and economic treatises have historically rendered property ownership in terms of the masculine. As a result, these discourses have defined feminine propriety through property's inaccessibility for women. In novels by these writers, I discern a preoccupation with “looking back,” a process through which authors revisit narratives of national and gender identity – narratives that did not account for or represent particular sections of the British public – for the goal of redefining what, as a result of this absence, was defined as properly “British” for a woman. The specific sites through which these works look back are incarnations of property. By enacting new narratives of identity that challenge the propriety of traditional accounts, contemporary women writers aim to stake a claim for a place within the current British body politic. Through their tactics of trespassing upon grounds of property and propriety defined by masculine society, in other words, these writers show how traditional constructions of national and gender identity are essential but insufficient for marginalized groups to understand their relationship to and position within Britain. By showing how these writers establish a degree of plurality and creativity in their intellectual heritage, this dissertation disputes the claims of British property discourses that assert to represent the whole of British society. My approach investigates contemporary novels that cu (open full item for complete abstract)