Bachelor of Arts, Wittenberg University, 2020, English

Jonathan Swift's travel narrative, Gulliver's Travels, addresses a middle-class Englishman sailing around the world and encountering new populations with unique features. Published in 1726, when British colonization was rampant, Swift's story confronts the effects of colonization on previously untouched civilizations. This paper touches on two of Gulliver's journeys, to Brobdingnag and to the land of the Houyhnhnms. Citing the works of Aime Cesaire and Homi Baba, two prominent scholars in the field of post-colonial theory, this paper examines how colonization harms the parties involved, both those who are colonizing and those who have been colonized. Countering the contemporary view that colonization would benefit any civilization that receives contact, the paper notes how it rather leaves destruction in its course.

Committee: Cynthia Richards (Advisor); Rick Incorvati (Committee Member); Timothy Wilkerson (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, English

Early children's literature took the forms of complex, distinct genres that, much more than the novels being published contemporaneously with them, were employed in the didactic effect of literary structures. These works, published roughly from 1750-1850, do not assume a simple, one-to-one relationship between fictional worlds and the real world. They are aware of the complexities of representation, and, written and read predominantly by women and girls, they are especially aware of representation's effects on gender. Early children's fiction, I argue, treats literary and social forms alike as structure-at-work in the world, and this treatment had a substantive impact on fiction that shares its interest in the subtleties of gender formation and the disparate treatment of gendered beings in fiction and in fact: the nineteenth-century realist novel. From one perspective, this project is a straightforward, genre-study of early children's fiction and its influence on the Victorian realist novel. I focus on four major genres, selected for their numerousness and their continued though adapted use in fiction, and I think carefully about the bids they made on readers. Rather than teach simple morals, I argue that these works teach people to analyze in culturally-prescribed ways: to see a situation in the world, understand what it means, and react to it accordingly. By emphasizing analysis as a response to structure, this fiction signals the construction of social categories. By adopting and adapting these forms, novelists like Dickens and the Brontes engage children's fictions' educational goals and emphasize the degree to which reality is defined by social, material, embodied, and familial forms. Ultimately, I demonstrate that that the didacticism which we have for so long assumed was simple and straightforward is, in fact, a kind of formalism, one that codifies structures of response and embodiment that belie its reputation as pure content.

Committee: Robyn Warhol (Advisor); Jill Galvin (Committee Member); Sandra Macpherson (Committee Member); Simmons Clare (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Early Childhood Education; Gender; Gender Studies; Literature; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2012, English

My dissertation identifies a significant aporia in Enlightenment thought concerning human and animal life. Eighteenth-century moral philosophy, I argue, predicates social relations on face-to-face identification. However, sympathetic identification limits itself to human form. Sympathy, like species form, promotes twin impulses: the formation of group identities and the exclusion of dissimilar others. Consequently, sympathy recognizes animals as other and excludes them from the social sphere. Eighteenth-century novels, for instance, struggle with the limitations of sympathy, brimming with human sensibility although equivocal about whether it can be directed toward animals. These concerns about the nature of sensibility and affect animate not only eighteenth-century sentimental novels but also surface as one of the central problems of Romanticism. Conventionally, the Romantic period has long been understood as a fulfillment of the Enlightenment promise that autonomous human subjects will govern the social and political imaginary. But this conventional narrative obscures how Romantic thought critiques this institutionalization of what are, in fact, biopolitical narratives that shape human-animal relationships. Romanticism demonstrates how the universalizing gestures of egalitarianism guarantee humans freedom only at the expense of the non-human. Moreover, such universalizing gestures legitimate competing exclusionary narratives that authorize prejudice, suppression, and subjugation of the other however that other is construed (in other words, humans conceived as non-human). As I argue, species form is the twilight of sympathy between not only humans and animals but between humans as well. Following prosopopoeia—the trope that links face and voice with personhood—I show how this trope undermines sympathy's specular insistence on the human form and refutes species determinism as integral to maintaining sociopolitical systems. Prosopopoeia both limns and attenuates f (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Laura Mandell Phd (Committee Chair); Tobias Menely Phd (Committee Member); Mary Jean Corbett Phd (Committee Member); Jonathan Strauss Phd (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2023, English (Arts and Sciences)

This study documents patterns of description of Roman Catholic characters, beliefs, cultural attitudes, dispositions, doctrines, worship and ceremonial rites, and visual and material culture in eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century British prose fiction. From Daniel Defoe's Religious Courtship (1722) to Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), British prose fiction wrestles with the problem of religious difference between Anglo-Protestants and a defamiliarized Catholic other. Delineating Roman Catholicism the spatial-geographical as well as timebound “constitutive outside” of Protestant Great Britain, numerous British novels portray Catholics and Catholic religion as shadows of a dark age past from which Britain itself has emerged, enlightened and whole. And yet certain features of these fictions belie a clean, easy separation and indeed problematize Anglo-Protestant identity itself. Describing in fetishistic detail Catholicism's visual and material culture, to emphasize its strangeness and outlandishness to British observers, British writers draw attention to Protestant Britain's own lack of internal religious unity and coherence, which is often symbolized by the novel's inability to render a rival Protestant religious imaginary on the page. I argue that the stark contrast between the visible and embodied evidence of Roman Catholic religion and an Anglo-Protestant religious imaginary that both contains and resists Catholic art and artifice, is a constant source of unspoken disquiet and tension in the British novel. British writers of the eighteenth-century wrestle with the question or what Britons have lost or gained in shedding the visual and material culture of Catholicism for comparatively immaterial and rational constructions of faith. In consequence, however, a Catholic religious imaginary and sacramental universe—part of England's religious heritage from the Catholic Middle Ages—is preserved in the realm of the symbolic, and becomes a challenge to b (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Linda Zionkowski (Committee Chair); Michele Clouse (Committee Member); Nicole Reynolds (Committee Member); Joseph McLaughlin (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; History; Literature; Religion; Religious Education; Religious History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, English

This dissertation will present a novel corpus of eighteenth-century medical satires to perform a reparation on the secular epistemological terrain of the eighteenth-century Medical Enlightenment. It employs an allegorical method of interpretation informed by syncretic-feminist theology to a collection of eighteenth-century Enlightenment literature to demonstrate how the satirical mode was used to push back against the bodily technologies of the medical profession. This project helps us to identify the characteristic features of these topical satires, which voice a deep epistemological discomfort with the principles, methods, and practices of the emergent secular medical field. Medical satires feature narrators and targets that elide the figures of the physician and the satirist as humoral healers, scientific methodologies applied to absurd and bawdy topics, and a considerable amount of human and animal suffering resulting from poorly-applied medical treatments. This dissertation then reads Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy as a virtuosic representative of the medical satire subgenre whose narrator thoroughly foils both his own and a reader's attempt to rationalize and unify his creation and circumstance. This project hopes to offer literary and medical scholars an allegorical perspective into medicine's literary origins and entanglements to support the gradual recovery and revitalization of pre-Medical Enlightenment medical wisdom.

Committee: Sandra Macpherson (Advisor); Jennifer Higginbotham (Committee Member); David Brewer (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2020, English (Arts and Sciences)

Distel's dissertation examines novels by Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen, focusing on the ways in which female characters in each text experience, negotiate, or reject allocations of shame. The project posits that discussions of shame took narrative form in the long eighteenth century, making this era particularly important to examine because of the drastic improvements in print technology and a rapidly expanding female readership. In analyzing the era's fiction, Distel argues that if female characters do not actually suffer shame, they frequently demonstrate an awareness of its potentially destructive power, and of the fact that patriarchal social structures often demanded women's obedience and shamefacedness. Ultimately, the dissertation posits that the genre of the novel exposes in detail the process by which patriarchal power structures assign shame and impose gender and social norms onto women, while also revealing alternatives to those norms. Additionally, the project offers a bridge between modern (often sexualized) shame and shame experienced during the long eighteenth century, which is, Distel argues, the era in which detailed representations of female shame take narrative form and become a crucial feature of fiction. The dissertation thus serves as a prehistory to contemporary theories of shame, positioning analyses and allocations of shame in their respective historical moments.

Committee: Linda Zionkowski (Advisor) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Gender Studies; Literature; Womens Studies

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

Although the first balloon flights in 1783 created a sensation throughout Europe, human flight had long captured the imaginations of scientific and literary authors alike. Prior histories of flight begin with balloons, but earlier centuries boasted a strange and colorful aviary that shaped thinking about flight long before the first balloon ever left the ground. Taking a cultural materialist approach informed by a broad familiarity with the development of early flight machines and a deep familiarity with the literary conventions of the period, I analyze historical materials ranging from aeronautical treatises to stage pantomimes, from newspaper advertisements to philosophical poems, from mechanical diagrams to satirical cartoons. This earlier culture possessed high hopes and anxieties about human flight. I argue that early flight was lively and varied before the invention of a successful flying machine, and that these early flights were important because they established an aerial tradition astonishingly resistant to change. Rather than revolutionizing the culture, ballooning was quickly incorporated into it. Although ballooning came to be regarded as a failure by many onlookers, the aerial tradition had long become accustomed to failure and continued unabated. Human flight has always promised tremendous and yet debatable utility, a paradox that continues into the present age.

Committee: Roxann Wheeler (Advisor); David Brewer (Committee Member); Sandra Macpherson (Committee Member); Jacob Risinger (Committee Member) Subjects: Aeronomy; Aerospace Engineering; American Literature; Astronomy; British and Irish Literature; Comparative Literature; Engineering; European History; European Studies; Experiments; Folklore; Foreign Language; Germanic Literature; History; Language; Literature; Mechanical Engineering; Museums; Philosophy of Science; Physics; Science History; Technology; Theater; Theater History; World History

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2019, English

Ekphrasis influences descriptions of female characters in early modern drama and prose fiction. These vivid descriptions are conveyed with such clarity that they highlight the constructed nature of ideal feminine behavior within a patriarchal system, thereby exposing abuses of patriarchal power. Classical ekphrasis is a technique capable of transcending genre, aiding in the exposure of abuses of power and eliciting emotional responses from audiences. Ekphrasis is an effective way to appeal to an audience's emotions—when descriptions develop vivid images, they can bypass mental and emotional barriers constructed to protect one's emotions or self-image. Authors elicit emotions from readers in order to teach them how to name their emotions and feelings; being able to name and understand feelings is a crucial part of developing understanding, especially in a society that increasingly relied upon empirical evidence to determine the truth.

Committee: Chris Flint (Committee Chair) Subjects: Literature; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, Spanish and Portuguese

This dissertation analyzes emerging colonial subjectivities in eighteenth-century Spanish America. It focuses on Tucuman (center and northwest of Argentina), a border region of the Viceroyalty of Peru that became an intercolonial mercantile hub in eighteenth century. It analyzes texts on commerce and economy that circulated there during the last century of Spanish domination, alongside literary accounts produced from and about this region. Chapter 1 surveys seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mercantilist treatises dealing with the morality of commerce and its agents within the Spanish imperial project. This literature praised commerce beyond its economic role as a source of communication between Europe and the New World, and as a carrier of civilized values across society. It also created a discourse of virtue and utility around the figure of the merchant that informed accounts of eighteenth-century Tucuman society. Merchants active in this peripheral but pivotal area of the colonial economy reflected in writing on their position within the Spanish monarchy, resulting in a rich textual production. Chapter 2 examines the travel narrative, "El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes" (Lima, 1775) by Carrio de la Vandera, which dedicates several pages to Tucuman, where most of his informants were itinerant merchants of the inner colonial markets. Carrio outlines the contours of a mercantile subject with a utilitarian mindset that makes him a desired agent for an enlightened reform of the viceroyalty. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with "Fracasos de la fortuna" by Miguel de Learte (1770-1788), an autobiography meant to restore the author's reputation after falling in disgrace with the Spanish administration. Learte codifies his experience through his insertion in colonial markets. He suggests he is an honorable individual by defining himself as an agent of the colonial trade. These texts convey imaginaries and discourses of the world of commerce through which Tucuman's traders inscrib (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lisa Voigt (Advisor); Fernando Unzueta (Advisor); Alcira Dueñas (Committee Member) Subjects: Latin American History; Latin American Literature; Latin American Studies; Literature; Romance Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2018, English

As consumer culture expanded in eighteenth-century Britain, British literature likewise took a turn toward “realism,” a more lifelike portrayal of characters and settings that regularly included object references or “literary objects.” This dissertation examines the usage of literary objects from the early 1700s to the early 1800s, tracing the ways authors adapted to the growing presence of object ownership in British culture and society through their inclusion of literary objects in their works. Through a combination of close reading and historical context, this thesis argues that authors used the presence of literary objects to convey multivalent information about both fictional and real-world society and culture, enabling authors to indirectly question overarching power structures in ways that would have been difficult to do directly. The first three chapters address how authors primarily used objects as indicators of boundaries (“walls”) and points of access (“doors”), with a third category of literary object that represented social and cultural authority. Building on these arguments, the last chapter investigates how booksellers used paratext involving literary objects, specifically through illustrations, to co-opt a degree of authorial status in reprinting formerly popular novels. The resulting body of evidence suggests a larger pattern of authorial use of literary objects to reflect an increasingly complex relationship between people and goods, as shown across a selection of eighteenth-century British fiction.

Committee: Christopher Flint Ph.D (Advisor); Athena Vrettos Ph.D (Committee Member); William Siebenschuh Ph.D (Committee Member); William Deal Ph.D (Committee Member); Christopher Flint Ph.D (Committee Chair) Subjects: British and Irish Literature

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2017, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Studies of eighteenth-century British novels are typically centered on the alleged “rise” of the novel; that is, the formation of the novel as a genre distinguished from the epics, dramas, romances, and satires of past centuries. These new novels betray the critical trajectory of masculinity throughout the politically turbulent long British eighteenth century (1688-1815). While critics have studied individual constructions of masculinity within particular novels, or masculinity presented by a single author's corpus, this paper tracks the various constructions of masculinity and demonstrates the relationship between masculinity and political change. The novel's century-long “rise” presents the reflection of the English male society's struggle to redefine itself in the face of the economic change, social empowerment, and political turbulence that resulted from the Glorious Revolution (1688-89). The novels of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen reflect the direct relationship between the English political environment and turbulent trajectory and changing notions of masculinity. Defoe's Whig masculinity favors economic gain and imperial expansion and becomes apparent in Robinson Crusoe (1719). In responding to Richardson's portrayal of the gentry's abusive masculinity in Pamela (1740), Fielding presents what I term “heroic” masculinity in Joseph Andrews (1742). Sterne's 1759 critique of gentry men shows the complete lack of any traditional masculinity in what has become a totally effeminized, and thus ineffectual, asymmetric society. Finally, the anti-Jacobin, Tory Jane Austen brings a restoration of masculinity that results from a renewed interdependency of the sexes. In the neat conclusions of Austen's novels, women submit to male leadership but excel in supportive and managerial positions; men need to marry women and protect the lower ranks. This mutually rewarding synthesis reinstates the acceptable portions of tradition (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Rachel Carnell Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Adam Sonstegard Ph.D. (Committee Member); Gary Dyer Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender Studies; Literature

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2017, History

Through textual analysis and mapping of 1790s published travel accounts, this project examines how lower class individuals utilized the growing British Empire to expand their societal status and travel opportunities. Modeled on early novels of the mid-eighteenth century such as Robinson Crusoe and Pamela, these supposedly “true” travel accounts showed their protagonists using personal connections, patronage, and employment to overcome adversity and rise socially. Individuals demonstrated mobility through their public image, dress, and speech. Passing for middle class was difficult, although often achievable through education, conduct, and finances. A publicly available interactive map in ArcGIS Online was created. It shows the routes of travel, characteristics of the travelers' social status, and quotations from the primary sources, allowing them to be compared. The interactive map was built from the travel accounts descriptions of their travels, social status, financial status, and employment through manual data entry. The map is designed to be accessible and appealing to a broad public, enlarging the audience beyond specialists in digital humanities.

Committee: Renee Baernstein Dr. (Advisor); Lindsay Schakenbach Regele Dr, (Committee Member); Robbyn Abbitt Mrs. (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; European History; Geographic Information Science; Geography; History; Literature

Bachelor of Arts, Ashland University, 2017, English

In eighteenth-century England, women were regarded as intellectually inferior to men by nature and therefore best suited for private life in the domestic sphere. This caused formal education for women to be considered inappropriate and unnecessary, and if a woman did gain access to learning, she was stereotyped as obnoxious and unfeminine. Consequently, “learned ladies” were often portrayed negatively in eighteenth-century English literature, but certain female authors rejected this convention, instead using their educated female characters to provide social commentary on the status of women. This thesis traces the development of the “learned lady” in three of these works authored by women: The Basset Table by Susanna Centlivre, Evelina by Frances Burney, and Memoirs of Emma Courtney by Mary Hays. Through an examination of the educated female character in each text, one can observe a progression in ideology: while The Basset Table, written in 1704, attempts to reconcile marriage and education, Hays uses her 1796 novel to insist that women must have options beyond marriage in order to both sustain themselves and fully exercise their intellectual potential. Working with historical texts and literary criticism to provide context for my analysis, I argue that the evolution of “the learned lady” in eighteenth-century English literature shows the significant connection and conflict between education and marriage during this time period as women began “to dissolve the barbarous spell” that caused their exclusion from the public sphere, advocating for a society in which they could become truly autonomous.

Committee: Hilary Donatini Ph.D. (Advisor); Russell Weaver Ph.D. (Committee Member); David Foster Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, English

England has historically conceived of chastity in two ways: 1) virginity prior to marriage followed by continence – i.e., self-restraint from sexual intercourse – within marriage and 2) simplicity of clothing and ornamentation. This dissertation, Fashioning Chastity: British Marriage Plots and the Tailing of Desire, 1789 and 1928, focuses on a time when these two definitions coexisted. British marriage plots typically concentrate on two female characters: one who overvalues fashion and engages in pre-marital sexual activity (only to make a poor marriage or become a fallen woman) and another who favors conservative dress and guards her chaste reputation (for which she is rewarded with an affectionate marriage). While the fallen women's scandalous sexuality attracts critical attention, the marriage plot's heroines – perhaps because they appear to reify orthodoxy – tend to generate less analytical attention. This dissertation examines the latter group: the overlooked, chaste protagonists. By unpacking sartorial motifs in Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859), Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895), and Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928), I illustrate how these authors use clothing's symbolic relation to contemporary issues to complicate the appearance feminine, chaste sexuality. Ultimately, this dissertation draws upon and contributes to feminist and sexuality studies by helping us to better understand the complexity of female chastity throughout the long nineteenth century. While Enlightenment thinking led contemporary religious, marital, and sartorial discourses to back away from defining husbands as the undisputed rulers of their households, the Marriage Act of 1753 solidified the importance of female virginity, as verbal spousehoods were no longer legally binding. Concurrently, republican and capitalist belief systems deified the pursuit of happiness in marriage and promoted the interests of the rising middle-class, emphasizing women as the (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Marlene Longenecker PhD (Advisor); David Riede PhD (Committee Member); Amanpal Garcha PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: English literature; Literature

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2012, French, Italian, and Classical Studies

This thesis reports on the themes of madness, unreason, and wonderment in Jacques Cazotte's Le diable amoureux, a late-eighteenth-century recit fantastique, and the third book of Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit, an early-nineteenth-century prose poetry collection also considered a fantastic piece of literature. By analyzing 1750s-1850s literary sources belonging to the fantastic genre in which the experience of dreaming is central and whose authors or main characters suffer from a certain type of madness that could be defined as delusion through the informed regard of Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis, literary theories, and Continental Philosophy, this thesis explores the problem of ego construction and self-fashioning, asking what it might mean to become a thinking subjectivity and trying to describe that very process. The two literary sources analyzed in this paper are excellent examples of what one could call Bildungstraumes, that is, dreams that implement the main mechanisms of the mind and show in allegories the symbolic mental representations presiding over our psychic agencies.

Committee: Jonathan Strauss PhD (Advisor); Elisabeth Hodges PhD (Committee Member); Randolph Runyon PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Comparative Literature; European Studies; Language Arts; Literature; Philosophy