Master of Arts in English, Youngstown State University, 2000, Department of Languages

Interpreting Chaucer's motivation in composing the Tale of Thopas, a parody of the Middle English romance, presents readers with many difficulties. A major difficulty is for readers to surpass the Host's estimation of the tale as “drasty rymyng“ and to see the tale as an intentional parody of the Middle English romance, specifically the subcategory of adventure romance.

Committee: Rebecca Barnhouse (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

Master of Arts in English, Youngstown State University, 1999, Department of Languages

The eighteenth century was a time of change. Among the changes were the emergence of the novel and the establishment of the professional woman writer. This thesis examines the life and work of Eliza Fowler Haywood, who, until recently has remained obscure.

Committee: Mary Jo Reiff (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

Bachelor of Arts, Wittenberg University, 2006, English

The best-selling novel of the nineteenth century, Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne, is not commonly read today; neither is Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. These books, published only twelve years apart, share strikingly similar sensational elements and common themes. However, they were received very differently; while the early critics disapproved of the subject matter of the both books, they praised East Lynne highly yet criticized The Tenant, setting the stage of each book's fate through the first part of the twentieth century. As I show in this section of my honors thesis, it is first and foremost the form of these books – point of view, style, and structure – that determines their early treatment. Since the Victorian era refused to give voice to the experience of vicious living, The Tenant threatens the Victorian disguise of respectability by allowing the reader to witness – through a first-person narrator and a structure composed of a letter and a diary – scenes of debauchery and immoral behavior. East Lynne, on the other hand, distances the reader from the immorality in the book by using a third-person, storyteller perspective, thus presenting the story as exactly that – a story, rather than a truthful account.

Committee: Inboden Robin (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2001, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

Loosely structured as a bildungsroman, this collection of four short stories was originally written over a period of about two years, from 1997 to 1999. Each story has, at its heart, a highly-fictionalized recounting of an event in my lifetime, beginning from the time I was a teenager, to a time some twelve years or so later. As the manuscript progresses, the main character at first finds some redemption in family, then because of various flaws in his character, he begins to move along fault lines that are determined by the choices he's made; choices which eventually lead him down a path of remembrance, regret, and adultery. Still, he learns things – the hard way – and in the future, beyond the time frame of the fourth story, those lessons will serve to guide him in positive directions.

Committee: Josip Novakovich (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2001, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

Applying the critical methodologies of psychoanalytic object-relations theory and cultural studies, this dissertation focuses on recurring representations of women intellectual characters and their relationship to (and reactions against) both matrilineal and patriarchal traditions in fiction writing and academia. I argue that twentieth-century British women writers work through their anxieties regarding gender and scholarship through their use (or misuse) of convention, phrasing, and vexed characters. Writers such as Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Sayers, Margaret Drabble, Anita Brookner, and Jeanette Winterson all write of women academics who seek to escape from personal relationships through a retreat into scholarship. Woolf's Three Guineas, A Room of One's Own, and Night and Day and Sayers' Gaudy Night analyze women's relationship to scholarship as a cultural construct and institution by questioning their own ability to capture such experience through traditional genres such as the bildungsroman and the detective novel. Although Margaret Drabble claims she successfully reconciles motherhood and scholarship in The Millstone (1965), her heroine, Rosamund Stacey, actually ends up sacrificing all personal relationships in favor of the dominant, narcissistic relationship with her child. In the obverse scenario, Dr. Ruth Weiss in Anita Brookner's The Debut (1981) struggles to establish her own life independent from her egotistic parents by escaping into literature until it becomes impossible to tell the difference between her own life story and her thesis on Balzac's fiction. Ultimately, Jeanette Winterson's Gut Symmetries (1997) is the only text in the study that satisfactorily resolves the conflict between women's gendered and intellectual identities. A critique of the grand unified theories (GUT) of the Enlightenment, the novel suggests that the only way to liberate women is to disrupt the social conventions of gender and, simultaneously, the novel's narrative conventions. (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dr. Beth Ash (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2000, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

Empire and the Rise of the British Novel Applying Edward Said's ideas regarding the profound influence of imperialism on Western culture and its artifacts to eighteenth-century Britain, this dissertation critically reassesses the work of Ian Watt and Michael McKeon by examining the extent to which an expanding empire affected the rise and development of the eighteenth-century English novel. Specifically, the novel, largely because of its realism and contemporaneity, played a unique role in Britain's imperial venture, investing the colonial terrain with historical and political significance and becoming a medium through which British colonial authority could be asserted. Aphra Behn's Oroonoko in particular is expressly concerned with asserting English colonial authority in South America, a fact that wields a major influence on the formal structures of that novel. Behn's efforts to authenticate an account of events on an actual plantation colony penetrate the dramatic action of a story that, conventionally, is typical of heroic drama. I further contend that notions of a subjective self as well as a national identity emerged, in large part, out of Britain's colonial experience and particularly through its contact with colonized peoples. As their world enlarged through colonial acquisitions, so did the British people's sense of themselves, and they became an increasingly self-referential society, a process both facilitated by and reflected in the novel's preoccupation with individual character. The narrative scope of Robinson Crusoe, for example, is characterized by a double movement: as Crusoe's world literally enlarges through his travels, the focus of the novel narrows to the daily activities of a single (British) subject. I contend that the novel's capacity to engage the particulars of day-to-day life and its attention to individual character are thus tied to the effects of imperial expansion on British subjectivity. Not insignificantly, the colonized world brings C (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Martin Wechselblatt (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2007, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

Virginia Woolf's diaries have traditionally been used by scholars to augment discussion of her “real” and “major” works—the fiction and non-fiction whose publication she supervised in her lifetime—with details of their genesis, composition, and production. But as Quentin Bell, Woolf's nephew and biographer, suggests, the diary itself is a major work, able to stand alongside her fictional masterpieces To the Lighthouse and The Waves (D1 xiii). The diary has been available nearly in its entirety for over fifteen years, and yet it is almost never considered as a text on its own. Of all of Woolf's work, the diary is at once her most traditional (in its reliance on the “plot” of her own life and its day-to-day form) and her most modern and experimental (in the ways in which she often shatters the traditional diary form, uses it to her own ends, and distances it from the published, grand, monolithic male diaries of the past). The six published volumes suggest broad questions about audience, authorial intention, issues of the body and embodiment, and the development of Woolf's modernism, while allowing for an extended look at her development as a writer, reader, wife, sister, and thinker. This project provides a comprehensive reading of the diary, and examines certain issues and themes through a series of individual “lenses” which correspond to biographical and thematic elements. Woolf once likened her diary to a “deep old desk,” and this metaphor of the desk—that solid fixture with many drawers, cubbyholes, nooks and crannies—informs my work. Much as the desk is made of compartments, my project will look at discrete themes and topics from Woolf's diary in separate chapters, while addressing in each several overarching concerns that inform the diary as a whole.

Committee: Tamar Heller (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2007, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

My dissertation examines the close connection between classroom interaction and the colonial encounter. My field work re-affirms my belief in persisting with a pedagogy that self-consciously engages with issues of difference. My experience underscores the need to continue to engage with issues of diversity, but such an effort must persistently engage questions such as, who has the power to define whom, and when, and how? My students' responses provided numerous learning opportunities for me and highlighted the need to continually question the validity of some of the pedagogic decisions that we make as practitioners of critical pedagogy. As a post-colonialist and a compositionist, I view the quest for subjectivity as one of the central predicaments for a teacher of color. My personal classroom encounters echo Jacqueline Jones Royster's claim that, “‘subject' position really is everything” (29). At the same time I recognize that even though identity politics is an inevitable character of a contemporary politics of difference, it can also become a form of cultural narcissism which distracts from the real struggles over class and power. My pedagogical experience recorded in my dissertation demonstrates the uneasy position of the minority pedagogue in Western academia. It highlights the slippages between subverting the traditional colonizing role of a teacher and ensuring the goals of critical pedagogy which aims to create collaborative learning environments. The minority teacher of literature has to balance the additional burden of resisting the mantle of the native informant, especially if the literature being taught identifies with her ethnicity. There is a vital need to construct a critical, self-reflexive, multicultural pedagogy that makes space for emotional/personal aspects of living as a minority, and at the same time does not regard personal experience as the exclusive site of knowledge.

Committee: Dr. Wayne Hall (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

M.M., University of Cincinnati, 2005, College-Conservatory of Music : Music History

Although Libby Larsen's opera Mrs. Dalloway (1992) is not Larsen's most frequently performed opera, its subject matter and musical content offer a wealth of cross-disciplinary avenues for investigation. Mrs. Dalloway challenges the traditional linear pattern of operatic plot, blurs boundaries of gender and madness, and emphasizes characterization above all else, thereby presenting numerous possibilities for gendered interpretations. In order to explore musical and literary interpretations of gender, madness, and identity in Mrs. Dalloway, this thesis will analyze these issues with respect to the interaction of literary and operatic criticism. Larsen corroborates Woolf's literary ideals musically. Her compositional tools, for example, confirm Woolf's notion that there is not a clear division between sanity and insanity, and that gender is ambiguous. Larsen also parallels Woolf's literary style in a musical manner, by such techniques as recurring musical gestures.

Committee: Dr. Karin Pendle (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English; Music

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2003, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

This dissertation contains three papers that address the definition of "confessional" poetry, most especially that which has been written by American women. The primary section of the dissertation is a manuscript of original poetry: thirty poems in all. These poems attempt to negotiate the boundaries between fact and fiction, truth and deception, often employing rhetorical strategies similar to those of the confessional poets of the 1960's.

Committee: Dr. Don Bogen (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2003, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

During the late Imperial Period, 1880–1940, the ways in which the identity category “British” was created allowed for fluidity in both personal and collective identity construction. Because the period saw both great expansion of the Empire and the federation of many discrete colonies into national entities, the issue of national versus British affiliation became an important one. Given these particular historical circumstances, budding national identities could be elided into Britishness and Britishness into the budding national identities. And this potential for fluidity influenced the ways people could and did use their British, English, or other colonial identities when negotiation the enormous social, political, economic, and cultural changes of the era. Using Julia Kristeva's notion of the “subject-in-process” and her theory of female individuation, the study examines the writing of four British women writers of the period and its relationship to modern Britishness: “Lucas Malet” from England, “Somerville and Ross” from Ireland, and Rosa Praed from Australia. Though they were all white, middle-class, British women writers, and though they all addressed the complexities and possibilities created by the inter-connected, trans-nationalist slippages of the imperial system, their responses are inflected by the particular relationship of their home place to the culture of the “center.” Lucas Malet understood that, in order to unseat what she considered the “dullness” of the English middle class, she needed to question the legitimacy of the narratives being used to knit women into the English social fabric. For Somerville and Ross, the difficulties women faced in their quests for individuality were compounded by competing narratives of Irish national identity, narratives which often seemed to overpower the thoughtful, intelligent voice of the Anglo-Irish woman. The trauma Rosa Praed experienced in her youth on the Australian frontier is reflected throughout her work i (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dr. Wayne Hall (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2003, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

In Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio asks the distraught Leonato, “Are our eyes our own?” (4.1.71). Claudio's question, a demand for confirmation of truth as Claudio, under the influence of Don John has come to view truth, serves as a touchstone for this study of four Shakespearean comedies – A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and The Tempest – and Othello. My project is rooted in an analysis of two umbrella-like structures found in the plays, one of which I call comic imposition and the other, tragic imposition. In the context of comic imposition, I explore Shakespeare's representation of misdirected love, moments of grace and forgiveness, and the inadvertent intertwining of eyes and perception which occurs as characters choose to love freely. In the context of tragic imposition, I consider the dramatist's representation of the fragility of human perception – its easily corrupted nature – and the degeneration of will which seemingly accompanies corrupted perception. In addition, I consider various modes through which individual acts of imposition take shape, as well as instances of resistance, a dynamic privileged especially in the comedies. Concerns central to my project include the comic conventions of disguise and magic, the vice of slander, the elusive forces of grace and love, and finally, the elemental magic of an island cosmos that “cares” (The Tempest 1.1.16). In the only tragedy to be included here, Iago's command to Othello, “Wear your eyes thus” (Othello 3.3.201), sets the stage for Shakespeare's representation of corrupted vision and the limitation of resistance. In contrast, the comedies privilege another dynamic: Egeus' courtly imposition in A Midsummer Night's Dream is countered by Theseus' forest resistance, while the potentially-tragic modes emblematic of Twelfth Night are balanced by “A natural perspective, that is, and is not” (Twelfth Night 5.1.215). Vincentio's admonition to Mariana, “Against all sense you do importu (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jonathan Kamholtz (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2003, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

This dissertation consists of a collection of original poetry by Cynthia Nitz Ris and a critical essay regarding William Gaddis's novel A Frolic of His Own. Both sections are united by reflecting the difficulties of utilizing past experiences to produce a fixed understanding of lives or provide predictability for the future; all lives and events are in flux and in need of continual reimagining or recharting to provide meaning. The poetry includes a variety of forms, including free verse, sonnets, blank verse, sapphics, rhymed couplets, stanzaic forms including mad-song stanzas and rhymed tercets, variations on regular forms, and nonce forms. Poems are predominantly lyrical expressions, though many employ narrative strategies to a greater or lesser degree. The first of four units begins with a long-poem sequence which serves as prologue by examining general issues of loss through a Freudian lens. The second section looks more specifically at a localized event—the breakup of a marriage—and ends with another long poem that seeks to recast the events through the use of navigational themes. The third section expands that view to more general losses and the attempts by the subjects and the poet to navigate those events. The final section, including three dramatic monologues, uses four personae to revisit some of the issues raised in the collection through more specific acts of remembering prior events. The critical essay looks closely at William Gaddis's use of varieties of spheres— including the institutional and private—and the use of various forms of exposition, to argue that society's attempts to order life are ultimately futile. The acceptance of that futility and the willingness to embrace the unpredictability of life are suggested as the only possible sources of hope for a satisfying existence.

Committee: Dr. Don Bogen (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2003, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

This dissertation, Human Rooms, a collection of original poetry by Charles Rybak, includes four sections consisting largely of narrative poems. A range of formal styles is incorporated, including sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, prose poetry, and a variety of free verse arrangements. The poems engage many themes, the most central being mythology in both its classical and contemporary manifestations. As the dominant theme, myth is juxtaposed with related themes, such as technology, information, popular culture, family history, and cultural history. In addition, these poems explore mythologizing and demythologizing as meaning-making processes that often fictionalize what is commonly accepted as factual. While these themes are social in nature, many of the poems detail the mythology of the self, focusing on isolated and exiled personas that struggle with the ability to make meaning; these figures often find themselves on the threshold of personal growth and change, yet are unable to achieve metamorphosis. The dissertation also includes a critical paper, "Absalom, Absalom! and the Performance of Literary Modernity." This paper examines two works: Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner and "Literary History and Literary Modernity" by Paul de Man, for the purpose of discussing Faulkner's novel as the formal performance of literary modernity. The paper's main objective is to isolate and discuss literary modernity as it exists stylistically, rather than as a movement merely defined by time period and canonical association.

Committee: Dr. Don Bogen (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, English

My dissertation explores nineteenth-century British authors' views of the moral and educational function of literature, focusing specifically on how William Wordsworth, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy addressed in literary forms the issues of sympathy and reading raised in the eighteenth century. In addition to making a similar claim about sympathy and reading—a central function of literature is to extend the readers' capacities for sympathy through reading experience—all these authors attach major importance to rural life as subject matter in their sympathetic education of readers. By considering these authors' representations of sympathetic relations in rural settings in relation to eighteenth-century thoughts on sympathy and reading, this dissertation aims to reach a more balanced and productive understanding of their “didactic” attempts to teach strategies of sympathy to readers. With the advent of liberalism and the emergence of the concept of a modern individual, the eighteenth century witnessed an enormous preoccupation with the issues of self-representation and sympathetic imagination, bringing up the idea that sympathy is not an immediate identification but only an imagined representation. The complicated epistemological and ethical questions about a sympathetic experience raised by eighteenth-century thinkers shed light on the approaches that Wordsworth, Eliot, and Hardy take to their sympathetic education of readers: by preventing their readers from indulging in superficial and painless feelings of sympathy, these authors seek to make readers conscious of the problems of the improper use of sympathetic imagination. In order to illustrate the specific methods that Wordsworth, Eliot, and Hardy employ to expand readers' sympathetic minds, I focus on how they problematize the commonly accepted notions of sympathy through their representations of rural life or rural people. As the individual chapters of my dissertation show, each author wrote in different histo (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Clare Simmons (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, English

This dissertation fills the critical void on the history of Spenser and his editions. Applying the critical methods of the History of the Book, I situate each of Spenser's editions published from 1569 through 1679 within the context of its contemporary print culture. I study each edition's physical makeup, typography, format, and production history. Additionally, I investigate the lives of the various printers, publishers, booksellers, and editors who had a hand in producing the books. From the evidence I collect, I construct arguments concerning Spenser's relationship with the printing trade, his readership, and his literary reputation. The first chapter examines Spenser's interactions with books and the book trade during his youth and how these interactions helped shape his literary career. The second chapter demonstrates how The Shepheardes Calender (1579) deviated from its Italian bibliographic model by substituting italic type with black-letter or “English” type. The choice of “English” type supported the book's promotion of the English language and literature. The third chapter argues that Spenser and his printer helped position The Faerie Queene (1590) within the epic tradition by imitating the appearance of contemporary editions of classical and Italian epics. The fourth chapter examines Spenser's first folio (1611-c.1625), demonstrating that it was not a monument to the author, as were contemporary folios, but rather a cheaply produced book sold in sections. The fifth chapter reexamines the manuscript and printing history of A View of the Present State of Ireland. The final chapter argues that for many seventeenth-century readers, Spenser's deliberately archaic language had grown too obscure, resulting in efforts to regularize his works. Spenser's literary reputation was momentarily rehabilitated in 1679, when, during a time in which reprints made up a large percentage of English books, Spenser's works returned to folio and set the stage for a minor eightee (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: John King (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, English

This dissertation redefines lyric narrative—forms of narration that fuse the associative resonance of lyric with the linear progression of narrative—as both an aesthetic mode and a strategy for responding ethically to the political challenges of the period of late modernism. Underscoring the vital role of lyric narrative as a late-modernist technique, I focus on its use during the period 1925-1945 by British writer Virginia Woolf, American expatriate poet H.D., French filmmaker Germaine Dulac, and German critic Walter Benjamin. Locating themselves as outsiders free to move across generic and national boundaries, each insisted on the importance of a dialectical vision: that is, holding in a productive tension the timeless vision of the lyric mode and the dynamic energy of narrative progression. Further, I argue that a transdisciplinary, feminist impulse informed this experimentation, leading these authors to incorporate innovations in fiction, music, cinema, and psychoanalysis. Consequently, I combine a narratological and historicist approach to reveal parallel evolutions of lyric narrative across disciplines—fiction, criticism, and film. Through an interpretive lens that uses rhetorical theory to attend to the ethical dimensions of their aesthetics, I show how Woolf's, H.D.'s, Dulac's, and Benjamin's lyric narratives create unique relationships with their audiences. Unlike previous lyric narratives, these works invite audiences to inhabit multiple standpoints, critically examine their world, and collaborate in producing the work of art. Hence, contrary to readings of high modernist experimentation as disengaged l'art pour l'art, I show that avant-garde lyric narrative in the late 1920s—particularly the technique of fugue writing—served these authors as a means of disrupting conventional, heterosexual, patriarchal, and militarist social and political narratives. During the crises of the 1930s and the Second World War, Woolf, H.D., Dulac, and Benjamin turn to the lyr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sebastian Knowles (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2005, English

Drawing on literary texts by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and George Gissing and non-literary texts appearing in periodicals, comic newspapers, and music-hall songs this dissertation show how the lower middle class consisting of those members of British society working variously as Civil Service, commercial, and retail clerks, school teachers, and living in the suburbs of London and other large cities is represented as dangerous, laughable, and pitiable. Through readings of self-improvement books by Samuel Smiles, conduct and instruction manuals, and didactic literature I show how middle-class anxieties about its own position vis-a-vis the aristocracy and the working class drive middle-class elites to represent the lower middle class as dangerous, in need of containment, and surveillance. One of the constant fears of the middle class is that the lower middle class will develop a cultural and economic identity of its own. I then show how the lower middle class poses a threat to the heteronormative order that both underwrites and is underwritten by the bourgeois order. The lower middle class enjoyment of female to male cross-dressing performers like Vesta Tilley highlights how the music hall develops into a place where lower-middle-class men and women can re-imagine their class, gender, and sexual identities. As such, it becomes the locus of an emergent lower-middle-class cultural identity independent of middle class influence. The dissertation also shows how Dickens in David Copperfield offers up a solution to the socio-literary problem of the lower middle class by deploying the Bildungsroman to allow for the social mobility of some members of the lower middle class. Specifically, David Copperfield enters into the Victorian debate over the nature of the gentleman and proposes that the best way for young lower-middle-class men to rise to the rank of middle-class gentlemen is through authorship. The dissertation then turns to a discussion of how Born in Exile and (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: David Riede (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2005, English

While Old English literature rarely represents sexualized bodies, and just as rarely represents monsters, Middle English literature teems with bodies that are both sexualized and monstrous. In Old English, sexualized bodies appear in overlooked genres like bestiaries or travel narratives—the homes of monsters. Thus, monsters possess some of the only explicitly sexualized forms present in Old English texts. But it is not only the difference between paucity and abundance that marks the change from Old to Middle English monsters; it is also the shift from permanence to mutability. The bodies of Old English monsters are permanent and unchanging; many Middle English monsters, however, are capable of transformation. In order to study the shift from Old English monsters to those in Middle English, I offer four case studies, two Old English and two Middle English. I begin with a discussion of the desire by Old English writers and readers to erase the sexualized bodies of monsters in Wonders of the East. The author and characters in Beowulf, too, attempt to erase the monstrous and reproductive body of Grendel's mother from the narrative, a tactic that only results in revealing the failure of human communities. In Middle English, monstrous bodies are trickier; they cannot be so easily erased. Because of their ability to transform, the monstrous bodies in Mandeville's Travels either sexually under- or over-circulate in ways that disrupt proper community and class standards. However, the Middle English romance, Sir Gowther, presents a solution to the problem of the monstrous body; through penance, the child of a demon and a noble woman transforms physically and spiritually into a child of God. Most of these texts attempt to dispel the threat of the monster through erasure, be it the literal removal of the monstrous image, the killing of the monster, or the rehabilitation of the monster through religious means. Mandeville's Travels, however, reminds us that monsters have infiltr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Nicholas Howe (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2004, English

The Victorian and Edwardian sages were authors who worked, following the decline of organized religion among the educated classes in Britain, to restore a sense of unitary meaning to the world. As George Landow observes, the sage's system is, by its very nature as a philosophy that attempts to explain the entire world, unprovable, and the sage's authority is thus derived from his ability to interpret the world vividly, plausibly, and as a whole. Since the sage's authority cannot be established by conventional means, it ultimately derives, as Susan Morgan notes, from the sage's “lived experience.” This dissertation analyzes the implications of sage rhetoric for the genre of autobiography. The sage autobiographer must show that every aspect of his life serves as proof of his theories and, being a public figure, he invariably has experienced incidents—primarily lost literary controversies and poor textual reception—that seem to refute his theories. The premise of this dissertation is that these literary disasters constitute “intertextual traumas” that disrupt the sage's literary authority and textual identity, that serve as signs that the sage seemingly cannot interpret. Sage autobiographies, I argue, are elaborately intertextual attempts to narrate, and thus to interpret and to control, such incidents of intertextual trauma. Unlike most autobiographers, the sage references and interprets preexisting biographies of himself and other rival accounts of his life because to do otherwise would be to permanently cede his authority to interpret the world.

Committee: David Riede (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English