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

Drawing examples from over 100 English- and Spanish-language popular dailies and weeklies between January 1855 and December 1866, my dissertation, “Poems in the U.S. Popular Press, 1855-1866,” argues that mid-nineteenth-century newspaper poems constitute a vital but still understudied form of public discourse. I define public discourse as political conversations, debates, and representations for reasoning that take place in the public sphere. I make this case in archival detail in four chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on celebrity poets as part of the media culture created by editor Robert Bonner in his blockbuster story paper the New York Ledger. Chapter 2 shifts from the East to the West coast, recovering the hemispheric Spanish-language poems in the first Spanish-language newspaper in California after the Mexican-American War, El Clamor Publico (the Public Outcry). Chapters 3 and 4 excavate the robust but largely unknown archives of newspaper poems circulating across the U.S. concerning the Panic of 1857 and the New York City cholera epidemic of 1866. This project is significant to the field of U.S. literary history, including the growing scholarship on the Latinx nineteenth century, for two primary reasons. First, the archive of periodical poems has not been completely recovered, categorized, or situated with respect to the larger currents of nineteenth-century public and print cultures. Second, scholars of the Latinx nineteenth century, including Rodrigo Lazo, Jesse Aleman, and Kirsten Silva Gruesz, have begun piecing together histories of the cultural productions of Latinx people using valuable but still incomplete archives. My dissertation contributes to the necessary work of reading Spanish- and English-language newspaper poems as related acts of public discourse reflecting a diverse U.S. media culture.

Committee: Elizabeth Renker (Advisor); Elizabeth Hewitt (Committee Member); Jared Gardner (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; American Studies; Hispanic American Studies; Latin American Literature; Latin American Studies; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, English

Reading as Forgetting interprets representations of immersive readers within Victorian novels and cultural criticism in four major moments in nineteenth-century literary history: in the novels of industrial contact in the 1840s and 50s, the popular sensation fiction of the 1860s, the late-century representations of the 1857 Indian Rebellion, and the incipient modernist writing of Joseph Conrad. In new readings of novels, letters, advertisements, and journalism, I contend that the authorial tendency to show readers in a state of self-forgetful absorption offered a means to define the value of the novel in its relation to developments such as the rise of the railroad, the explosion of magazines and newspapers, and the growth of English colonial communities abroad. Revealing the often contradictory uses of readerly immersion as a sympathetic ideal, a vulnerable experience, an important part of imperial solidarity, or a symptom of imperial disintegration, Reading as Forgetting investigates how the Victorians vigorously debated local reading practices in the context of global developments in industry and Empire. The relationship between emotional and physical “transport” emerges as a crucial component of these debates. Throughout Reading as Forgetting, I show how the supposed ability of the novel to transport the reader into an immersive, self-forgetful state interacted with spatial dislocations caused by the physical movements of industry and Empire. Though the Victorian period is often conceived as an era of unabashed publicity and popular appeal, I discuss how warring representations of readerly immersion acted as strategies of authentication. Immersion is revealed to be a critical concept associated with readers, but one that helped authors and critics create cultural distinctions across the literary landscape that are traditionally associated with twentieth-century writing.

Committee: Jill Galvan PhD (Advisor); Robyn Warhol PhD (Committee Member); Thomas Davis PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; History; Literature