Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2023, English

This thesis analyzes the relationship of female novelists to women's literary history through a study of the use of the woman writer character across five novels published in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Women writer characters and the metafictional texts they produce inside these novels reflect common threads across women's literary history, providing a way to categorize these novels not only by the gender of their authors but also by their engagement with this character—and by extension with this specific vein of women's literary history. The novel, which has undergone several transformations across genres, has been accused of feminization, while also being used to categorize the work of female novelists as outside of the Anglo-American canon. Each of the five novels included in this project reflect these literary biases through metafictional texts that are similarly restricted by socially constructed boundaries of oppressive systems, including gender, race, and class.

Committee: Nicole Reynolds (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature; British and Irish Literature; Literature; Modern Literature; Womens Studies

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2022, English

Gregor Samsa is changing. Expelled from the Army, disoriented by the stresses undergone during treatment at a sanatorium, and pressured into a job he loathes, Gregor clings to writing as a source of identity. In his diaries and notebooks, Gregor struggles to make sense of the world, his body, his relationships with others, and the workings of his own mind. As he contends with his inner dualism—the urge to create and the impulse to self-destruct—the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur. In this reimagining of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Gregor's human past is revealed through written forms such as diary entries, letters, interviews, and telegrams. As readers encounter a variety of narrative structures, gaps in recorded history, and a chorus of unreliable narrators, they are invited to take part in puzzling together the story of a life on the verge of an extraordinary transformation.

Committee: Brian Roley (Advisor); Daisy Hernandez (Committee Member); Joseph Bates (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, English

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.

Committee: Elizabeth Hewitt (Advisor); Molly Farrell (Committee Member); Andrea N. Williams (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; American Studies; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, EDU Teaching and Learning

This dissertation is a text-based analysis of young adult novels that have won LGBTQ-focused awards, specifically the Stonewall Book Award and Lambda Literary Award. The project engages with queer theory (Puar; Duggan; Ferguson; Halberstam) and the frameworks of cultural capital and prizing canon formation (English; Kidd and Thomas; Kidd). Looking at the 61 YA novels that have been recognized by either Stonewall or Lambda between 2010 and 2017, I provide statistics about the identities, themes, and ideologies of and about LGBTQ people that are prominent within the awards' canons. Pairing these statistics close readings of representative texts provides a rich analysis of the way these awards both subvert and uphold understandings of those minoritized for their gender or sexuality. Stonewall and Lambda aim to promote novels that provide diverse and inclusive LGBTQ representations. However, these representations construct understandings of LGBTQ identity that support hetero-, homo- and cisnormative constructions that are palatable to adult and heteronormative culture. Throughout, I refer to this often paradoxical balance as the pairing of progression and regression. I explore not only what is considered excellence but also how these texts construct a vision of LGBTQ lives that still fit within oppressive models of society. Throughout my analysis, I additionally examine the difference between white LGBTQ characters and LGBTQ characters of color to discuss the intersecting marginalizations of these populations, as well as promoting more inclusive and just scholarship. In this way, my dissertation shows how Stonewall and Lambda's simultaneously rebellious and oppressive nature blur the lines between heteronormativity, homonormativity, homonationalism, multiculturalism, and progressivism.

Committee: Mollie Blackburn (Advisor); Michelle Abate (Committee Member); Linda Parsons (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Education; Gender Studies; Glbt Studies; Literature

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2018, Creative Writing/Fiction

It's 2016 and the nameless narrator breaks into his ex-wife's house to retrieve a taxidermied badger, a way to regain a small measure of control in his life. Feeling confident after retrieving the badger, he decides to revisit his old haunt, The Lucky Clover, where rawboned and rough characters await him, principally Nanny, a six-foot redheaded amateur madam with a penchant for meth binges. One night the narrator discovers and takes a sizable amount of cocaine, is marked for death by Ray Kennedy, a man haunted by his own racial background. The narrator then turns to crime to repay the debt, only to find he's been a pawn in game where violence is the only possible conclusion.

Committee: Wendell Mayo (Advisor); Lawrence Coates (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Fine Arts; Literature; Modern Literature

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Cleveland State University, 2016, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

This thesis consists of ten short stories that are structured, formatted and thematically aligned with the yamas and niyamas, the ten moral tenants of yoga philosophy. The yamas and niyamas are the first two limbs of Patinjali's eightfold path, or the path to enlightenment through yogic practices. The yamas account for five principles that guide ethical living and instruct followers on how to interact with others and the world. The yamas consist of: ahimsa (non-violence), satya (truthfulness), asteya (non-stealing), brahmacharya (non-excess), and aparigraha (non-possessiveness). The niyamas are guidelines for personal practices that relate to, develop, and enhance one's relationship with self. The niyamas are: saucha (purity), santosha (contentment), tapas (self-discipline), svadhyaya (self-study), and ishvara prandihana (surrender). Each story in this collection loosely correlates with and comments on its assigned yama or niyama. As a collection, the stories function as glimpses of being—fractal pieces of life from inside differing existential or personal crises. The characters face moral, personal and spiritual dilemmas, often grappling with ghosts from the past, striving to make sense of what is through varying tools and coping mechanisms. The highest goal for this thesis is to act as commentary on the modern condition by using the spiritual and existential lens to diagnose and categorize modern afflictions. Some characters reach towards being—towards harmony or enlightenment—as dressing for their wounds. Others merely grapple with their conditions of dis-ease. Still others contribute to, and worsen, the disharmony. Guided by ten moral principles, these stories stand alone and work together to lead readers into the depths of varying states of being, while shedding light on modernity's inherent conflict with ancient spiritual practices.

Committee: Imad Rahman MFA (Committee Chair); Caryl Pagel MFA (Committee Member); Christopher Barzak MFA (Committee Member); David Lardner PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts; Language Arts; Literature; Modern Literature; Religion; Spirituality; Theology

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2016, English

Marjane Nafisi is a thirty-four-year-old Iranian-American. During her last year of graduate school, she leaves campus to help her mother care for her father, who suffers from Parkinson's disease and Lewy body dementia. As she cares for her family, she is distracted by her unfinished dissertation and her relationship with Joseph Battaglia, a man nine years her junior. Over the next several months, she must decide where to put her energies: on that relationship, on forgiving her father, on finishing her dissertation, or somehow on some combination in between.

Committee: Brian Roley (Committee Chair); Joseph Bates (Committee Member); Timothy Lockridge (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2005, English

This thesis is an anthology of short-stories and a single one-act play that come together to comprise a strange, metaphorical journey from damnation to a very human kind of apotheosis. All occupy a borderland between “conventional” contemporary literary fiction and science-fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy and magical realism, using the absurd, the apocalyptic and the spectacular to examine the smallest, most mundane, yet most important of human concerns. Most of the tales feature a crafted holism in terms of story structure, with quantum mechanics and other fields of the higher sciences forming a metaphor for the chaotic grace of human relationships, modern existence and their fuzzy, self-conscious mediations between humor and sadness. A collection of modern myths.

Committee: Brian Roley (Advisor) Subjects:

Bachelor of Arts, Marietta College, 2008, English

This paper explores how fans construct works of fanfiction based on William Shakespeare's plays. Fans situate themselves within the modes of discourse common to online fanfiction communities, and within those modes of discourse, their works serve four primary functions. Writing fanfiction helps to familiarize writers with the content and style of their source texts; it also allows writers to expand upon the events and characters available in these texts; it serves as a medium for subtle critical analysis of texts, which in many ways parallels mainstream literary criticism; and it allows writers to interact with a shared-knowledge community of fanfiction writers and readers.

Committee: Joseph Sullivan PhD (Advisor); Jeffery Cordell MFA (Committee Member); Beverly Hogue PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: English literature; Language Arts; Literacy; Literature; Theater

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

A collection of short stories in which a cast of various women characters believe to see themselves reflected in objects, in artworks, in other people—both those closest to them and total strangers. Within these mirrors and doubles as perceived by the characters is an escape from the confines of traditional domestic life into a territory far murkier, a realm that is at once both quotidian and surreal, intimate and strange, blurring the divisions between memory, imagination, and reality. This collection is a call to question what it means to embody a place, a state of being—what it means to embody a body.

Committee: Nick White (Committee Member); Lee Martin (Advisor) Subjects: Aesthetics; American Literature

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2024, English (Arts and Sciences)

In 1972, a distracted nurse accidentally switches two newborn baby girls on Long Island. The sharp financial, class, and ethnic disparities of these families offer both protection and disadvantages to each daughter. When the truth is discovered over twenty years later, the young women and their birth families must reckon with all that connects and divides them—and what choices and commitments to make (and not make) in the aftermath.

Committee: Patrick O'Keeffe (Advisor) Subjects: Glbt Studies; Literature; Modern Literature; Womens Studies

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

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2023, English

Letters to Faye is a novel about queer sibling relationships and building a chosen family in the face of estrangement and grief. It follows CJ, a young artist and parent, as they grieve the untimely death of their sister Faye. After finding among Faye's effects a series of letters that make them question the life the siblings built together, CJ decides to make the journey back to the hometown they were estranged from fifteen years earlier, in search of answers. The novel is deeply concerned with the ways we tell stories—fictionalizing ourselves, our pasts, and the people around us—and how this impulse can often get in the way of us knowing each other more fully. The novel posits, in its fictional backroads way, that the real work of intimate relationship is to both acknowledge the limits of how deeply we can ever know another person, and still, to commit to learning more of each other every day regardless.

Committee: Nick White (Committee Member); Angus Fletcher (Advisor) Subjects: Gender; Glbt Studies; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, English

Feeling Real: Emotion in the Novels of William Dean Howells and Henry James argues that emotion is an important aspect of American literary realism, revising received wisdom in American literary studies that locates emotion in sentimentalism. As canonical examples of American literary realism, William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes and Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors offer compelling evidence of how realist authors deployed emotion in their narrative progressions. This project demonstrates—through rhetorical narrative readings of these novels—that the emotional dimension of their narratives has remained under-examined and under-theorized. The long-established scholarly view that American literary realism emerged in large part as a reaction to sentimentalism has nevertheless obscured realism's own significant investment in the representation and evocation of emotion. This dissertation adds to recent work on emotion in American literary realism, complicating the conventional narrative that realism is anti-emotional or unconcerned with emotion, by suggesting that emotion in these novels is portrayed as complex, uncertain, and difficult and by arguing that character emotion affects the authorial audience in ways that can lead to ambivalence and frustration but also pleasure. This project contributes to the growing scholarly interest in the emotions represented and provoked by American realist novels by demonstrating the importance of emotion as a crucial component of the rhetorical narrative experience. The novels of Howells and James offer particularly rich examples of the complications of portraying and evoking emotion as a part of their respective projects to create narrative realism. Close narrative readings demonstrate that James's and Howells's well-known disdain for sentimentalism offers a paradoxical clue to their own commitment to examining and evoking emotion in the novel, albeit in a variety of un (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: James Phelan (Advisor); Steven Fink (Committee Member); Robyn Warhol (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; American Literature; Gender Studies; Literature; Rhetoric

PHD, Kent State University, 2017, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

This project comprises a digital edition of a selection of letters by American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), including all known letters written by the poet between 1889 and 1895, and hosted online by Colby College Libraries' Digital Collections. The edition is based on work started last century by Professor Wallace L. Anderson of Bridgewater State University, and left unfinished by him at his death in 1984. Professor Anderson collected a vast quantity of Robinson's letters from various repositories and private parties around the country. He transcribed them and provided annotations and textual notes for about three-quarters of them. For my project, I have edited, updated and corrected a substantial portion of Anderson's transcriptions, as well as completed fresh transcriptions of my own, checking them for accuracy against Robinson's holographs held at Harvard and the University of Virginia. I have formatted the new edition so as to more accurately represent the holographs, and have added my own textual notes and annotations to those of Anderson, along with an introductory critical essay detailing my methods and principles. It is of primary importance to me that these letters be accessible to both the scholarly community and the general public, with a view to maximizing their usefulness for literary and historical research. I have settled on digital publication as the best means to achieve this end because it will render the letters accessible to anyone with a computer and internet connection, free of charge. The project of publishing the remainder of Robinson's letters in this format is expected to continue beyond the dissertation.

Committee: Paul Gaston (Advisor) Subjects: American History; American Literature; American Studies; Comparative Literature; Literature

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2006, English

A collection of short stories centered thematically around the idea of “the hole, ” or that thing which is missing from each characters' life. “The hole” is the gap, or void, that each character must struggle to identify, to fill, or to sink into.

Committee: Margaret Luongo (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

PHD, Kent State University, 2012, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

This dissertation situates the emergence of the science fiction literary genre in the biology of the human brain and its evolved cognitive abilities and it specifically investigates the fiction of three renowned, twentieth-century writers—Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and William Gibson—published between 1940 and 1988. While grounded in literary history, this dissertation is an interdisciplinary project that also draws on neuroscientific topics and science and technology studies. Beginning with what I call a cognitive approach to science fiction, I argue that a combination of effects—the brain's adaptation for narrative and imagination, humanity's co-evolution with technology, and technology's rapid and largely unanticipated change—led to the emergence of science fiction in the early part of the twentieth century. While this approach to the origins of the science fiction genre is new, I demonstrate that its functional aspects are rooted in the ideas of the genre's arguably most influential editors: Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell, Jr. Unlike the majority of scholarly discussions and critiques on Asimov's, Dick's, and Gibson's fictions, I examine their work from a perspective that emphasizes the brain's physicality over the psychology of mind by deploying my cognitive approach. In the chapter on Asimov's fiction, I argue that while many of his works give prominence to robots, these fictions are primarily about their human counterparts and the human brain. I argue in the chapter on Dick that while he emphasizes the centrality of the human brain to our recreation and experience of reality within our consciousness, he vacillates between the good and ill of technology's influence on our realization of the self and our empathy for others. In the chapter on Gibson's writing, I argue that while he focuses on the fetishistic technologies of computer hacking, he carefully constructs cyberspace as a representation projected and perceived interactively within the human brai (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Donald Hassler M (Committee Chair); Tammy Clewell (Committee Member); Kevin Floyd (Committee Member); Eric Mintz M (Committee Member); Arvind Bansal (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Science; Evolution and Development; Literature; Technology