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

BA, Oberlin College, 2021, History

My thesis examines the fluid boundaries between French historical and literary writing in the 19th century, and the shifts in “historical consciousness” that occurred in both fields as the century progressed. I examine three exemplary French writers—Jules Michelet, a historian, and Honore de Balzac and Emile Zola, both novelists—considering each primarily as a historical thinker, regardless of whether they considered themselves to be one. I argue that as the 19th century progressed, the broad shift in French institutions towards positivist epistemological and explanatory frameworks was reflected in literature, as well as in history. Both disciplines, one increasingly academic and one primarily cultural, were affected in strikingly similar ways by the influence of positivism and scientism, providing a distinct aesthetic and rhetorical lens through which the impact of post-1848 positivism can be understood. As positivism infiltrated the practice of history, pushing the discipline farther into the realm of science, so too did it affect the historical thinking of prominent novelists. Additionally, I argue that the shift in historical consciousness reflects broader social fragmentation as France vacillated between various forms of government and their attendant social ideologies across the century. As political regimes and ideologies came and went, novelists, like historians, turned to rationalist frameworks, rather than idealistic or metaphysical ones, to explain their rapidly evolving political, social, and cultural moments. In addition to analyzing the impact these shifts had on historical consciousness in France, my thesis attempts to understand how historical thinking changes in response to shifts in institutional authority and ideology.

Committee: Annemarie Sammartino (Advisor); Leonard V. Smith (Advisor) Subjects: European History; European Studies; History; Literature; Philosophy

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2018, English (Arts and Sciences)

Patient narrative is often an undervalued or dismissed genre of writing in the field of literary criticism, largely because the hermeneutics of suspicion leads critics to see these texts as “misery memoirs,” as Ann Jurecic suggests. In this thesis, I argue for a new approach to reading and to criticism that moves away from the hermeneutics of suspicion and instead seeks to find conversations between patient narratives, case narratives, and popular or dominant medical and scientific texts. This shift would have readers focusing not on the ways in which an author might manipulate a story but instead on what the reader might learn from intently examining the resulting conversations. In doing so, I do not argue for a switch in the hierarchy—from doctor-patient to patient-doctor—but instead argue that both patient and case narratives have value; without both texts, we cannot have a full picture of what it is like to live with illness. Making my argument through historical examination, I prove that by examining Charlotte Perkins Gilman's patient narratives—those found in her letters, her diaries, and her autobiography as well as in “The Yellow Wallpaper”—alongside medical and scientific texts from her time, we can not only deepen and nuance current interpretations of these texts but we can also uncover motivations that may not be immediately apparent. While “The Yellow Wallpaper,” for example, has been considered as a critique of patriarchal medicine, a horror story, and a liberation text—among others—it has never been explicitly examined as a patient narrative. This focus allows us to delve deeper into the conversation created between “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Gilman's nonfiction narratives; I focus particularly on how we can see the eugenic arguments within “The Yellow Wallpaper” and how these arguments are connected to Gilman's anxieties about marriage, motherhood, and her usefulness in society. While ignoring patient narratives makes literary critics and histor (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Thomas Scanlan (Committee Chair); Mary Kate Hurley (Committee Member); Myrna Perez Sheldon (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; American Literature; American Studies; Families and Family Life; Gender; Gender Studies; Health; Health Care; Health Sciences; History; Literature; Medical Ethics; Medicine; Mental Health; Philosophy of Science; Psychology; Rhetoric; Science History; Womens Studies

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

My dissertation establishes a new framework with which to interpret the textual landscapes and ecological details that permeate late-medieval British romances from the period of c.1300 – c. 1500, focusing on the ways in which such landscapes reflect the diverse experiences of medieval readers and writers. In particular, I identify and explain fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English and Scottish conceptions of the relationships between literary worlds and “real-world” locations. In my first section, I analyze the role of topography and the management of natural resources in constructing a sense of community in Sir Isumbras, William of Palerne, and Havelok the Dane, and explain how abandoned or ravaged agricultural landscapes in Sir Degrevant and the Tale of Gamelyn betray anxieties about the lack of human control over the English landscape in the wake of population decline caused by civil war, the Black Death, and the Little Ice Age. My next section examines seashores and waterscapes in Sir Amadace, Emare, Sir Eglamour of Artois, the Awntyrs off Arthure, and the Constance romances of Chaucer and Gower. Specifically, I explain how a number of romances present the seaside as a simultaneously inviting and threatening space whose multifaceted nature as a geographical, political, and social boundary embodies the complex range of meanings embedded in the Middle English concept of “play” – a word that these texts often link with the seashore. Beaches, too, serve as stages upon which the romances act out their anxieties over the consequences of human economic endeavor, with scenes where shipwrecks are configured as opportunities for financial gain for scavengers and as mortal peril for sailors. In my third section, I move beyond the boundary space of the sea to consider the landscape descriptions of foreign lands in medieval British romance, focusing in particular on representations of Divine will manifested through landscape features and dramatic weather in the Holy Land (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lisa J. Kiser (Advisor); Ethan Knapp (Committee Co-Chair); Richard Firth Green (Committee Member); Karen Winstead (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Environmental Studies; Literature; Medieval Literature; Middle Ages

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, English

American Cinematic Novels and their Media Environments, 1925-2000 shows that a famous group of twentieth-century American novels asserted their cultural relevance through their responses to transitional moments in Hollywood film history. I select five well-known novels that engage with different transitional moments, including Hollywood's transition to sound cinema and its response to New Hollywood: The Great Gatsby, The Day of the Locust, Lolita, Gravity's Rainbow, and Underworld. By using narrative theory to analyze the content and form of such cinematic novels and by attending to the evolution of Hollywood cinema itself, I reveal the synergistic relations between film history, media history, and narrative techniques. Because I also grant considerable attention to how the larger “media environment” (including such forms as radio, television, video recorders, and the internet) afforded routes of exchange between cinema and the novel, my dissertation takes a new approach to the task of combining American media history with literary criticism and film history. Based on this evidence, I also intervene in recent debates about the fate of the American novel in new media environments. I argue that even if aggregate sales of print novels continue to fall in the future, influential American novelists will win both readers and cultural prestige by shaping our understanding of new media environments and the novel's evolving positions in them.

Committee: James Phelan PhD (Committee Chair); Brian McHale PhD (Committee Member); Jared Gardner PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature

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

My dissertation demonstrates how literary responses to the United States' first widespread financial crises—the Panics of 1819, 1837, and 1857—gave form to the abstract but increasingly violent forces governing the brave new economic world. Previous economic critics, working under the rubric of the New Historicism, tend to emphasize how literature rehearses arguments about the U.S. economy at the level of theme or plot. Such scholarship, however, obscures how literary form itself conveys economic policy. Over the course of this project's five chapters, I argue that Washington Irving's picturesque sketches (1819-20), James Fenimore Cooper's discursive romances (1821-23), Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalist addresses (1837), Catharine Maria Sedgwick's didactic allegories (1836-37), and Herman Melville's anti-novel (1857) are fundamentally concerned with the economic problems of panics, including excess, abundance, and scarcity. Literary engagement with panic reveals itself, for example, in the sprawling style of Cooper's The Spy advocates the expansion of free trade to spur the economy in the early 1820s. Performing opposite work, the carefully controlled allegory of Sedgwick's “Who, and What, Has Not Failed” attempts to contain the rapid growth of the money supply in 1837. Most radically, Melville's The Confidence-Man, in resisting narrative closure, belies the blind optimism in market outcomes driving investment in 1857. Through readings of an array of panic-era literature, then, this project concludes that the coincidence of crises and important moments in U.S. literary history, typically mentioned in standard histories as incidental, is no accident: financial distress demanded artistry, and literature thrived as the market crashed.

Committee: Elizabeth Hewitt (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature; Economic History

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2024, History (Arts and Sciences)

This thesis essays to study and interpret a small body of poems from Southern Gaul which respond to the breach of the Rhine frontier and subsequent crises from 406-418 AD. After demonstrating contemporary literary conventions in both secular and Christian discourses, the paper will survey how the poems in question came to terms with recent catastrophe and thereby rearticulated differing ideas of empire and meta-history which drew upon the Latin Epic tradition but deployed them in a context that was increasingly Christian and destabilized. While this will shed limited light on the political events, it will primarily serve to situate the beginnings of the Fall of the Western Empire in their intellectual context and indicate how they served as agents of the transformation of the Classical World and the draining of the secular.

Committee: Jaclyn Maxwell (Committee Chair); Kevin Uhalde (Committee Member); Neil Bernstein (Committee Member) Subjects: Classical Studies; Education History; European History; History; Medieval History; Medieval Literature; Middle Ages; Religion; Religious History

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

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

For much of the past seventy years, discussion of authorial intention has often been seen as taboo in historical literary analysis. Monumental scholars such Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault wrote crucial essays that helped steer critical focus away from questions of intention, encouraging interpretation of the text itself as the ideal. While these contributions to the field were both valuable and necessary, paving the way for the reader-response approach that is now predominant in literary analysis, they had the unfortunate consequence of taking the role of intention out of the realm of interpretation entirely. The difficulty this consequence has presented is that to many literary analysts, “intention” is still viewed as a bad word, or at least one tainted by the idea that considering intentions precludes other readerly or critical interpretations. The field of book history has largely steered clear of the negative imputations of intention, as understanding what an author (or other agents involved in publication) intended by choices made in a primary text is essential for how that publication can be parsed from a material standpoint. The divide between book history and literary analysis has gradually been narrowing, but the reluctance to fully embrace intention as one of many tools to explore the interpretational possibilities of historical literary texts is a problem that I seek to address. This dissertation focuses on four editions of poetry from the mid-seventeenth century to demonstrate how the intentions of authors and other agents in the production of literary works have a direct impact on how those works can be interpreted. My methodology is rooted in book history, but my key objective throughout is to apply that approach to literary analysis by using what we can both definitively know and reasonably establish about intentions to guide close-readings of the works themselves. Doing so reveals that, far from precluding interpretation, considering the orig (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Hannibal Hamlin (Committee Chair); Erin McCarthy (Committee Member); Luke Wilson (Committee Member); Karen Winstead (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2021, English

The Kirkbride plan for American mental hospitals first took hold in the late 1840s and remained the most popular floor plan for insane asylums for the next forty years. Kirkbride asylums were considered vital, scientifically advanced centers of mental health treatment throughout the nineteenth century, but quickly became outdated, overcrowded, understaffed, and dilapidated. Today only about one-third of the original Kirkbride buildings constructed from the 1840s to the 1890s remain standing, but their impact on the national imagination is both enormous and permanent. This thesis for the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at The Ohio State University is a combination of memoir and literary journalism documenting the origins, lifespan, decline, and historic preservation of Kirkbride asylums around the continental United States, as well as the author's own experiences with bipolar disorder and psychiatric care.

Committee: Lee Martin (Advisor); Michelle Herman (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; American Studies; Architecture; Fine Arts; History; Journalism; Landscape Architecture; Mental Health; Psychology; Public Health

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, 2019, English

Refracted Realism and the Ethical Dominant in Contemporary American Fiction offers three linked pursuits, at once literary-historical and theoretical: (1) a study of the rhetorical dynamics of literary realism, (2) a study of the literary period after postmodernism and the identification of the aesthetic dominant at work in contemporary literature, and (3) a systemic analysis of a distinct mode of realist representation in contemporary American fiction, which I describe as “refracted realism.” At the intersection between literary realism's longevity and flexibility, I explore three questions: What interests and engagements drive the interactions between authors and audiences in literary realism? What are the “dominant” features and interactions at work in the literary period after postmodernism? How has literary realism changed under the influence of the new aesthetic dominant? My project combines Roman Jakobson's and Brian McHale's concept of the “dominant” with Peter J. Rabinowitz's and James Phelan's rhetorical narrative theory to develop a rhetorically-inflected approach to literary history. In this analytical framework, I identify characteristic and uncharacteristic rhetorical properties, purposes, interests, resources, processes, and engagements in particular works of literature, literary movements, and aesthetic dominants or literary periods and track change and/or continuity accordingly. When theorizing literary realism, I emphasize how representative authors foreground their audiences' interests and engagements with narrative's mimetic and thematic components. When conceptualizing the new aesthetic dominant, I point to an ethical one, oriented towards and engaged in various questions and inquiries about value and power. Then when characterizing “refracted realism,” I define its minimal conditions in terms of the foregrounding of the mimetic and thematic components and the ethical aesthetic dominant, even as “refraction”—representative authors' redeployment (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: James Phelan PhD (Advisor); Brian McHale PhD (Committee Member); Frederick Aldama PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Ethics; Literature; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Akron, 2018, History

The following dissertation examines the ways in which Union and Confederate ex-prisoners of war discussed their experiences of captivity between 1862 and 1930. By examining former prisoners' captivity narratives, this dissertation demonstrates that to the end of their lives, ex-prisoners worked to construct a public image—one of suffering—that differed from the typical gallant volunteer who fought and died on the battlefield. Ex-prisoners shared their stories of captivity as a way of affirming their identities as a distinct type of veteran and to affirm their place as American men, regardless of their time as a prisoner of war. Viewed singly, any of these narratives might be dismissed as a fascinating story of personal suffering and survival, but when they are considered as a body of literature, one can trace the development of a master narrative, both separate from and intertwined with the American public's postwar memory. This dissertation challenges conventional understandings of postwar reconciliation and adds to recent scholarship on veterans' reintegration into civilian life. Both Union and Confederate ex-prisoners of war often contradicted this preferred heroic narrative of the war. Some men, as they got older, accepted reconciliation and censored their bitterness and hatred. Others promised to never forget their sufferings and, as a result, remained obstacles to reconciliation. By examining ex-prisoners' narratives, this dissertation reveals how ex-prisoners did not accept or fit into the ideal trajectory of reconciliation.

Committee: Walter Hixson (Committee Chair); Lesley Gordon (Committee Co-Chair); Stephen Harp (Committee Member); Kevin Adams (Committee Member); Patrick Chura (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; American Literature; History; Military History

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

Drawing on New Historicism, Marxist criticism, and rhetorical theory, Books Are Weapons argues for the significance of didacticism throughout the American literary tradition. Marxist critics have long discussed the possibilities that art offers for enacting social change, and rhetoricians have long studied the ways in which texts communicate persuasively. Books Are Weapons brings together these two parallel, but rarely intersecting, forms of inquiry. Books Are Weapons examines an archive of American literary production from the early twentieth century, primarily focusing on novels, but extending to include political pamphlets, autobiographies, poems, and sermons. This diverse set of cultural products allows this project to consider the multitude of ways that artists use their work for instructional purposes. These purposes are similarly diverse, including political persuasion, ethical instruction, and religious conversion. While these functions of literature are infrequently connected, it is my purpose in this project to demonstrate how they share a common didactic impulse, a quality found throughout American literary history. Examining the novels of Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright's non-fiction work, Jessie Redmon Fauset's novels, the poetry of James Weldon Johnson, and the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, this project examines the multitude of ways that literary texts can teach, inform, and persuade their readers. In this project, works that seek to persuade their readers are not understood as manipulative, as is often the critique of didactic literature or protest literature. The focus of this project remains on the techniques and strategies of persuasion deployed by each author. When this project describes a work as didactic, it does so without the implication of simplicity or condescension that some have come to associate with the term. Instead, the goal of this work is to begin an excavation of the American literary tradition that will uncover artifacts of inst (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jared Gardner (Advisor); Elizabeth Hewitt (Committee Member); Thomas Davis (Committee Member); Jesse Schotter (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; American Studies; Literature

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

MA, Kent State University, 2016, College of the Arts / School of Music, Hugh A. Glauser

This study reviews the history and present state of ethnic minority popular music in Mainland China. A primary focus is on the influence of government policy with regards to authenticity in association with ethnic minorities and mainstream popular music artists. The indie popular group, Shanren, which has strong ties to minority music and culture in China, is used as a case study to examine how authenticity is achieved through visual, aural, and linguistic connections to the social reality of the rural ethnic minority community, as well as migrant workers who are drawn to major urban centers in China, such as Beijing. Perceptions of authenticity are important considerations for their major audience, the Wenyi qingnian (“literary youth”), which refers to urban youth born primarily in the 1980s and 1990s. This demographic generally appreciates indie rock music and is a fundamental audience for indie minority bands, categorizing popular musicians as either Tu (raw, folk, native and authentic) or Chao (fashion, artificial and modernized). This study offers a model for examining how authenticity with regards to these categories is determined and its implications for future public perception.

Committee: Andrew Shahriari Ph.D (Advisor); Jennifer Johnstone Ph.D (Committee Member); Priwan Nanongkham Ph.D (Committee Member) Subjects: Asian Studies; Music

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2013, English-Literature

This essay will propose a kind of interpretive framework based on the ideas of Russell Weaver found in his book Questioning Keats: An Introduction to Applied Hermeneutics. His contribution to Dostoevskian criticism provides a way to assess values in Crime and Punishment and expands on the idea of polyphony and doubling. While the contribution of Bakhtin is important to our understanding of Crime and Punishment, he falls short of addressing the central concern of this novel: the problem of values. To understand the way values seem to operate in Crime and Punishment, the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche will give us a kind of framework to understand the temporal nature of values. This temporality of values is also an important key to understanding a Weaverian idea called the view of the text because Crime and Punishment provides a reader with multiple perspectives on each character in the novel. So, the view of the text is an important feature of Crime and Punishment because perspectives, by their nature, often contradict each other, requiring a reader to continually re-think and re-assess what he knows about the moral world of Crime and Punishment.

Committee: Robert Pope Mr. (Advisor); Patrick Chura Dr. (Committee Member); Hillary Nunn Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature; Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, English

This dissertation proposes that the 1890s were critical to the formation of American literature because of their focus on identifying, collecting, and preserving an American literary tradition. Since 1930, when Fred Lewis Pattee claimed that the twentieth century began in the 1890s, a continuing strain in literary criticism has investigated the decade as the birthplace of modernism. In recent years, however, scholars have begun troubling these historical assessments of the era in order to recover a more nuanced understanding of the decade. Building on their work, I study how competing narratives of American literature existed in the 1890s alongside the fin de siecle movement toward literary nationalism. I recover a group of long-lost literary historians who envisioned a more inclusive American literary canon than was eventually adopted in the early years of the twentieth century. I use the term “scenes of negotiation” to refer to discussions of American literature in late nineteenth-century social discourse about the development of a national American literary tradition. More specifically, I argue that these scenes of negotiation can be read as literary history because no fixed narrative of American literature yet existed. These scenes of negotiation make discernible how accounts of literary history emerged at multiple sites, in multiple genres, through multiple agents. The Introduction identifies some of these scenes of negotiation and explains why they should be read as American literary history, which records the history of literature in America through an examination of texts and/or authors. Organized around specific case studies, the chapters explore how literary historians working singly or in conjunction with others documented the 1890s as a period of literary retrospection and consolidation. Chapter 1 investigates how Edmund Stedman and Ellen Hutchinson's co-editorship of A Library of American Literature resulted in one of the late nineteenth century's most (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Elizabeth Renker PhD (Advisor); Steven Fink PhD (Committee Member); Andrea Williams PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature

BA, Oberlin College, 2011, English

This project examines the boundaries and definitions of 19th-century American realism in relation to the critical and literary writings of Walt Whitman and Henry James.

Committee: Sandra Zagarell (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature; Literature

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

James Joyce wrote Ulysses during a period when time and history carried political importance, especially in Ireland. This study examines the imposition of Greenwich Mean Time on Dublin, Ireland, and the forces that have controlled Ireland's history, namely England and the Catholic Church. By studying Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, one witnesses the temporal and historical struggles taking place within individual characters in Joyce's 1904 Dublin. While time and history create obstacles for Joyce's characters, Stephen and Bloom use their active memories as creative forces to help regain their autonomy and identity.

Committee: Claire Culleton PhD (Advisor); Kevin Floyd PhD (Committee Member); Valerie McGowan-Doyle PhD (Committee Member); Elizabeth Howard PhD (Committee Member); Victoria Bocchicchio (Other) Subjects: European History; History; Literature; Modern Literature