Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2024, English

Modernist artist novels by and about women complicate traditional understandings of the kunstlerroman genre by challenging the definition and status of the “artist” and presenting a broader range of options for women interested in the arts. Beginning with Wyndham Lewis's Tarr and with specific attention to the character of Bertha Lunken, an art student, and continuing with readings of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Mina Loy's Insel, and Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun, the dissertation analyzes representations of the female artist. Through their artist protagonists, these authors explore their ambivalence regarding the importance of talent, vision, and marketability. Their portrayals of amateur artists, students, and models focus on the social and material conditions that women in the period had to navigate in order to come to their own understanding of artistic success. Such portrayals also speak to the ways women participated in various modernist movements, both as visual artists and as writers. Ultimately, a reexamination of the female artist figure in these novels allows for an expanded definition of modernism by finding continuities between the Modernist period and the late Victorian period, interrogating regionalist specificity and transatlantic communication, and considering ways that high modernist experimental fiction relates to a commonly feminized and dismissed mass-market literature.

Committee: Keith Tuma (Committee Chair); Erin Edwards (Committee Member); Elisabeth Hodges (Committee Member); Madelyn Detloff (Committee Member); Mary Jean Corbett (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2013, English

This dissertation challenges traditional author-based chronologies of British and American literatures by examining the international readerships for nineteenth-century bestsellers. The project spans the decades between 1851, when a series of legal cases undermined the copyrights of American books in Britain, and 1891, when the Chace Act in the United States provided full international copyright protection. In this period, international copyright laws (or lack thereof), publishing practices, and circulation patterns allowed bestsellers to circulate even more widely outside their countries of national origin, a pattern I call an inverted audience. Situated at the intersection of current work in book history and transatlantic studies, this dissertation constructs a phenomenology of the bestseller that accounts for these trends in publishing and reading within an international context. I argue that tracing and analyzing the international circulation of bestsellers not only re-nationalizes particular books by focusing on readers, but also creates a newly global map of the book trade that emphasizes reciprocal influences among nations. Constructed as a series of case studies, the dissertation brings together nineteenth-century publishers' records, book trade periodicals, reviews, and international reprint editions to form a comprehensive view of how international audiences responded to particular books' content, context, and circumstances of publication. In Chapter 1, I examine how widespread British reprints of Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1851) and Queechy (1852) variously reshaped these sentimental novels and connected them with a religious readership in England. Chapter 2 compares the international circulation and reception of “The American Tennyson” and “The British Longfellow”; and shows how the popular reprint market on both sides of the Atlantic enabled readers at all levels to imagine close relationships between themselves and their favorite poets. The t (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Clare Simmons Ph.D. (Advisor); Susan Williams Ph.D. (Committee Co-Chair); Steven Fink Ph.D. (Committee Member); Amanpal Garcha Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Australian Literature; British and Irish Literature; Literature

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2017, Arts and Sciences: Romance Languages and Literatures

The aim of this research is to explore the existence of a Latin American literature on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, more specifically in Spain. A tradition that has its origins in the figure of the Inca Garcilaso; which was consolidated at the beginning of the last century and whose evolution has increased in the present. This migratory literature together with other internal triggers has brought about an alteration of the traditional Latin American canon throughout the 20th century and its overcoming in 21st by a literature “en espanol”. This panorama leads me to glimpse a large number of young Latin-American writers with a presence in Spain during the last ten years, stimulated by the publishing world and by a long tradition endorsed by the vanguardias (avant-garde) first, later by the boom, and finally by the "Bolano phenomenon", and already consecrated within a concept of literature in Spanish, aspects that I cover in the first two chapters of this dissertation. Using the terminology of Dagmar Vandebosch, I have organized the literary production of these authors, through three narrative movements: cosmopolita (cosmopolitan), migrante (migrant) and radicante (radicalizing); which I have developed over three subsequent chapters and illustrated with the literary analysis of six novels : Monasterio of Eduardo Halfon, La pena maxima of Santiago Roncagliolo, Una tarde con campanas of Juan Carlos Mendez Guedez, Paseador de perros of Sergio Galarza, Un jamon calibre 45 of Carlos Salem, and Hablar solos of Andres Neuman. Finally, I consider relevant the contribution of all these aspects to the academic field with the clear objective of helping a better understanding of certain areas of study such as: migrant narrative, transatlantic studies, transnational narratives, the relevance of the publishing world, the Spanish-language narrative of the 21st century, the Hispano-American narrative of the 21st century and the narrative written in Spain in the 21st centu (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Patricia Valladares-Ruiz (Committee Chair); Andres Perez-Simon (Committee Member); Nicasio Urbina (Committee Member) Subjects: Latin American Literature