PHD, Kent State University, 2023, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

The religious content of nineteenth-century American sentimental texts is often overlooked as a subject of study itself and is instead analyzed as a means to another end, such as its contributions to the abolition of slavery or to women's rights. Both are powerful uses of religion in writing; by contrast, this dissertation analyzes the use of religion in nineteenth-century American sentimental texts as an active and evolving blueprint by which to live everyday life. Utilizing the sociological/historical theory of ‘lived religion' and emphasizing the literary mode of ‘surface reading,' I explore how women writers of sentimental texts—Jarena Lee, Julia Foote, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Susan Warner, Louisa May Alcott, and Frances E. W. Harper—implemented religious themes and lessons in their sermons, essays, speeches, novels, and poetry in serving the purpose of faith itself. The analysis of lived religion focuses on how these women and their personal theology and religious practices interacted and evolved, which they then taught to society through their writing and speaking.

Committee: Wesley Raabe (Advisor); Babacar M'Baye (Committee Member); David Kaplan (Committee Member); Elaine Frantz (Parsons) (Committee Member); Jennifer MacLure (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; American Literature; Bible; History; Literature; Religion; Religious History; Sociology; Theology; Womens Studies

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2022, History

My graduate thesis project is a museum exhibit on display through the end of May 2022 at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati, Ohio which explores the ways in which the newspaper industry in Cincinnati fostered a toxic environment for racial relations in the antebellum era. Editors not only stoked racial tensions to encourage the riots that occurred in 1829, 1836, and 1841, they also shaped the narratives of the riots in their columns to blame the victims and exonerate the perpetrators. What follows is a brief history of the riots, the historiographical research pertaining to the exhibit, and an exploration of the methodological questions I faced when constructing the exhibit.

Committee: Lindsay Schakenbach Regele (Advisor); Helen Sheumaker (Committee Member); Erik Jensen (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; American History; American Studies; Black History; Black Studies; Modern History; Museum Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2019, English

Sentimental Sailors recovers a largely neglected genealogy of sentimental fiction that promotes non-national forms of personal and collective identity in the early U.S. The “sentimental sailor”— a term that I take from Thomas Mercer's 1772 poem of the same name — is an antebellum ocean character who works to preserve Christian morals by saving those in physical peril, including individuals who are often considered marginalized or foreign. Appearing in texts across a broad range of genres, this figure develops a humanist, religious identity shaped by ocean adventures. Through acts of rescue, the sentimental sailor encourages citizens on the landed frontier to avoid fixed identities, and to instead develop a mobile fluid mind that could see beyond nationalism and the cultural prejudices of their own communities. While the sentimental sailor is unique to the antebellum era, this figure has gone virtually unnoticed by literary scholars. This oversight, I argue, results from the continued focus of much nineteenth-century American literary scholarship on the relation between literature and conceptions of U.S. national or imperial identity. In particular, scholars have shown that sentimental fiction promotes the idea that a productive and healthy home life will lead to a strong community and nation. For example, Amy Kaplan argues that domestic ideologies unite men and women under a central idea of nationalism, allowing them to stand against outsiders that they considered a threat to the country. Relatedly, Margaret Cohen notes that sea narratives emphasize the ideal of imperialism by showing how labor at sea contributes to the nation's pursuit of a global saltwater empire. However, the figure of the sentimental sailor does not fit into the imperialist agendas and cultural modes of most domestic and ocean fiction, but rather uses the experience-based education of the sea to advocate a form of cultural internationalism that requires scholars to reconsider the history of n (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Andrew Hebard (Committee Chair); Michele Navakas (Committee Member); Katharine Gillespie Moses (Committee Member); Anita Mannur (Committee Member); Kimberly Hamlin (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature

BA, Oberlin College, 1984, English

Harriet Beecher Stowe has engendered a good deal of critical contradiction, both in her own time and since. Most of more extreme controversy centers on her popular and influential anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Although the New England novels are generally considered to have some merit as examples of "local color" fiction, Stowe earned her place in the canon of American literature primarily on the basis her authorship of UTC. But the place is an uneasy one. UTC's popularity and impact make it too big an event in American literary history for it, or its author, to be disregarded, but disputes about its intellectual, moral, and artistic legitimacy are rife. It has been variously described by critics as disastrous and miraculous, awkward and artful, dishonest and sincere, keenly intelligent and irrationally emotionalistic, racist and anti-racist, feminist and all-too-oppressively feminine. But whatever else may be said about UTe, few would dispute that Stowe wrote it openly, self-consciously, and unapologetical in a woman's voice, which, for a novel addressing social and political issues of national importance, was at the time something unusual (and controversial) in itself. It is perhaps seems less unusual today, but I would suggest that in some respects the controvery has remained constistent, and that much of the critical argument about UTe may be attributed to the problems of interpreting a woman's voice fairly in a man's world.

Committee: Sandra Zagarell (Advisor) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; Literature