Master of Arts, Miami University, 2022, English

What can readability studies tell us about the novel genre? By tracing both the history of readability studies, a partially abandoned field located at the intersection of education and literacy studies, and the history of the English language novel, this project makes a case for the validity of conversations around readability within literary circles. One of the primary outcomes of readability studies is a number of formulas that measure various elements of a text, such as vocabulary and sentence structure. However, few formulas were created with fiction, or more specifically, the novel genre, in mind. To determine the possible applications of classic readability formulas for the novel genre, this project uses a digital readability formula to measure the readability of a corpus of 127 English language novels from 1800 to 1922. However, the resulting data highlights the difficulty of measuring such a wide-ranging, unique literary genre. Finally, this project proposes a framework for using a statistical analysis of novels to identify potential lines of inquiry favorable to close reading. By approaching novels through a quantitative lens, this project highlights how considering the bigger picture can help us determine which specific elements may lead to a richer understanding of the text.

Committee: Collin Jennings (Committee Chair); Tim Lockridge (Committee Member); Mary Jean Corbett (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; British and Irish Literature; Literacy; 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

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Cleveland State University, 2020, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

With her grandmother's recent passing, Sunny and her family await the arrival of her “living copy,” a holographic figure that the Wyoming Valley Associated Fuel Extraction Company has compiled from all her grandmother's pictures, letters, and ephemera as a thank you for the family's loyal service, over the years, to the company. Sunny's grandmother (and the living copy) have always told her ghost stories -- stories of women walking through the night in an old coal mining village called Concrete City, in the ghost town of Centralia -- but while exploring these sites, Sunny begins to see ghosts herself. It is up to her and her friend Tate, and her uncle Mickey to find out the truth of these tales, and the dark history of Sunny's family. While Sunny races to see whether the stories are true or she's losing her mind, she and her companions travel through abandoned towns, haunted ruins, and old mental hospitals. And through it all, Sunny's grandmother's ominous warning echoes -- “Fear the living, not the dead.”

Committee: Imad Rahman (Advisor); David Giffles (Committee Member); Mary Biddinger (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; American 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

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2013, English

This is a novel that sets out to tell the story of one family affected my mental illness, the Morgan's. At its baseline, this novel tells the story of a family who has been rocked by their mother's bipolar disorder and her subsequent actions. However, this piece also endeavors to entice and empower the reader to discover the Morgan's in a modular, non-linear, multi-generic style. The structure and genres are meant to heighten the mystery surrounding the mother's disappearance and highlight the experiences of the individuals in the family. For example, parts of the novel are told through the teenage daughter's diary entries where the reader may experience Aiya more intimately and hear her voice clearly in the midst of confusion. Ultimately, "Journee" presents the mosaic of this family's life.

Committee: Margaret Luongo MFA (Advisor); Timothy Melley PhD (Committee Member); Joseph Bates PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Fine Arts; Language; Language Arts; 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