Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2024, English

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

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

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2019, English

My dissertation reads key works of Victorian and modernist literature by Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Gaskell, H. Rider Haggard, David Jones, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf alongside contemporaneous scientific texts to illustrate how mass anthropogenic extinction became increasingly recognizable. By bridging periods, my dissertation examines the multiple and sometimes conflicting registers of meaning that extinction accrued throughout Britain's industrial and imperial history as the notion of anthropogenic mass extinction gained traction within the cultural imaginary. Literary critics who discuss the Anthropocene within the context of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tend to focus squarely on the question of climate, using the geohistorical moment of Britain's industrialization to trace the ideological, material, and scientific developments that gave rise to the notion of anthropogenic climate change within the public imagination, especially through representations of pollution and compromised atmospheres. My project attempts to reframe this conversation by considering the extent to which the Anthropocene became increasingly knowable to both Victorians and modernists through biological registers: as in the observable impacts of imperialist processes and technological modernity on biodiversity and global animal populations. These impacts were recognized in, for example, African species and subspecies that became critically endangered or extinct due to British hunting culture as well as avian species that sharply declined due to British consumer practices. I argue that mid-nineteenth-century authors from Tennyson to Gaskell were beginning to explore the degree to which geological frameworks called into question long-standing beliefs regarding humankind's placement within the natural world as well as the precarity of species within the context of deep time. I consider how such lines of inquiry continued throughout the century in adventure fiction investe (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mary Jean Corbett (Committee Co-Chair); Madelyn Detloff (Committee Co-Chair); Erin Edwards (Committee Member); Andrew Hebard (Committee Member); Marguerite Shaffer (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, English

Reading as Forgetting interprets representations of immersive readers within Victorian novels and cultural criticism in four major moments in nineteenth-century literary history: in the novels of industrial contact in the 1840s and 50s, the popular sensation fiction of the 1860s, the late-century representations of the 1857 Indian Rebellion, and the incipient modernist writing of Joseph Conrad. In new readings of novels, letters, advertisements, and journalism, I contend that the authorial tendency to show readers in a state of self-forgetful absorption offered a means to define the value of the novel in its relation to developments such as the rise of the railroad, the explosion of magazines and newspapers, and the growth of English colonial communities abroad. Revealing the often contradictory uses of readerly immersion as a sympathetic ideal, a vulnerable experience, an important part of imperial solidarity, or a symptom of imperial disintegration, Reading as Forgetting investigates how the Victorians vigorously debated local reading practices in the context of global developments in industry and Empire. The relationship between emotional and physical “transport” emerges as a crucial component of these debates. Throughout Reading as Forgetting, I show how the supposed ability of the novel to transport the reader into an immersive, self-forgetful state interacted with spatial dislocations caused by the physical movements of industry and Empire. Though the Victorian period is often conceived as an era of unabashed publicity and popular appeal, I discuss how warring representations of readerly immersion acted as strategies of authentication. Immersion is revealed to be a critical concept associated with readers, but one that helped authors and critics create cultural distinctions across the literary landscape that are traditionally associated with twentieth-century writing.

Committee: Jill Galvan PhD (Advisor); Robyn Warhol PhD (Committee Member); Thomas Davis PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; History; Literature

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

Novel Ecology: The New Life Sciences in Modern Fiction analyzes literary explorations of ecological ideas during the first four decades of the twentieth century, when ecology was a new, exciting, and rapidly growing discipline. The dissertation follows the expanding scope of the field from its initial focus on individual plants to its eventual embrace of the entire planet, looking at the relationship between changing conceptions of nature in science and in literature by examining the ways in which modern novels engage, explore, and parallel developments in the life sciences. I argue that ecological ideas are essential to a full understanding of British and American modernist literature. By recognizing the development of ecology as a major innovation and a part of modernism, and the value of ecocritical approaches to modernist studies, we can gain new perspective on both modern literature and ecological thought.

Committee: Thomas Davis (Advisor); Robyn Warhol (Committee Member); Howard Ulman (Committee Member) Subjects: Modern Literature

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

My dissertation considers cross-cultural encounter represented in the nineteenth-century novel by focusing on the relationships between England's imperial nationalism and the novel. Whereas many postcolonial critics have situated the nineteenth-century novelistic process in the national context of English colonialism and have argued that the novel mainly sustained the hegemonic mode of conceptualization of England's cultural others, I argue that the story of cross-cultural encounters conceives an alternative vision that counters such a hegemonic conceptualization of English subjectivity and its subordinate otherness. The notion of cross-cultural encounter in my project is differentiated from that of the space of colonial encounter through which the colonizer from the metropolis seeks to assert his superiority and secure his innocence while he is involved with colonial practices. On the contrary, English characters in the texts that I consider experience the sense of guilt, ennui, or uncertainty that is frequently attributed to colonized subjects. Through actual encounter with their cultural others, English characters distance themselves from the dominant cultural order and the imperialist assumptions as to their superiority and engage with other cultures and people. I show how novels suggest the disruption of the claimed cultural hierarchy by addressing the positive alterity of other cultures and hybridity that the dynamics of cross-cultural encounter invoke. The individual chapters of my dissertation show that while the English nation confronted various other cultures in the nineteenth century, at the same time the novel was also engaged with such issues as the Irish Question, the Jewish Question, and the Indian Question to conceive a different world order in which the meaning and values of the metropolitan center and its peripheries are reconsidered. In five case studies of different subgenres of the novel such as the Irish national tale, the realist novel, the s (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Clare Simmons (Advisor); David Riede (Committee Member); Aman Garcha (Committee Member) Subjects: English literature

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2010, English

My dissertation explores the intersections of femininities and sexualities and how these intersections are made to appear natural and normal. My historical charting of queering femininities begins with different key historical and discursive moments in twentieth-century British Culture that shape how we now think about femininity. Femininity becomes a key area of contestation in early twentieth-century Britain, as Britain attempts to redefine femininity with the emergence of categories of lesbian sexuality. Because of this cultural shift in how femininity and sexuality are conceptualized, I analyze how different modernists and contemporary British literatures represent a historical trajectory of femme femininities and how this literature offers us a space to queer femininity. My dissertation project theorizes the resistant and transformative possibilities of the pleasures of femme femininities. My goals for this project are to question damaging and destructive assumptions about femininity, and then to show pleasurable resistant possibilities of queer makings of femininities to force people to confront, question, be aware, and change their preconceptions. As my dissertation traces the intersections of femininity, lesbian sexuality, and heteronormativity, it also reclaims femininities as queer, positive, optimistic, and resistant. To reclaim femininity, I show how various queer narratives challenge dominant definitions of femininity by offering us scripts and performances of pleasurable, critical, and political femme femininities. In other words, not only do I explore what femininity might do for the individual who reclaims it, but I also explore how this reclamation can enhance all of our lives. I also reassert femmes as agents of pleasure, political, and princesses who rescue themselves. Femmes' performances show how dangerous and damaging a dominant understanding of femininity can be; and at the same time, they show us that we are not stuck with such scripts. Stor (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Madelyn M. Detloff PhD (Advisor); Kathleen N. Johnson PhD (Committee Member); Stefanie K. Dunning PhD (Committee Member); Ronald P. Becker PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: English literature