Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2024, English

My dissertation scrutinizes literary representations of the Romany, referred to as “the Gypsy trope,” in Victorian and Modernist works by Walter Scott, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, emphasizing the need for a critical analysis of the complexities of this trope. Existing criticism of the trope focuses heavily on its discriminatory aspects, arguing that it embodies non-Romany writers' cultural fantasies of otherness, reflecting their imperialist mindset. Given that gypsy characters are often associated with Eastern culture and portrayed as victims of discrimination, oppression, and harassment, this post-colonially inflected perspective provides a framework that could aptly encompass many possible interpretations of the trope. However, interpreting the trope solely through its discriminatory measures overlooks a key geopolitical aspect that sets the Romany people apart from their Eastern associates: the Romany have been present in or around English regions since the early sixteenth century, making their lifestyle and culture less “exotic” than internal to the British Isles. In contrast to colonial subjects whose physical distance from the metropolitan center functions to define a boundary line of otherness, the Romany's nearness and visibility were key elements in their representations as literary or symbolic characters, especially as domestic and internal others; this closeness endowed the gypsy characters with an exoticism that was simultaneously familiar. Therefore, to consider this complex interplay of domestic and exotic, this dissertation examines how the interactions of gypsy characters with other characters and communities variously operate within the trope. The authors under my scrutiny represent Romany people not merely as racial and cultural others, but also as drivers of transformation in the non-Romany protagonists' racial, class and gender identities. The familiarity of the gypsy characters allows for seamless engagements with the pr (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

As a topic of study, utopia is often broken into three aspects: utopian social theory, intentional communities, and literature. Thus, a study of utopia best suits an interdisciplinary approach. While utopian scholars have often accepted the invitation for diverse approaches, there is one unifying aspect of the three aspects of utopia yet considered. In this dissertation, I posit a theory of utopian and dystopian rhetoric which explains the affective, persuasive dimension of each of utopia's aspects. Although I propose a wider application of utopian and dystopian rhetoric, I narrow my focus in this dissertation to investigate the connections between utopianism and eugenics. I analyze how nineteenth-century eugenicists leverage utopian and dystopian rhetoric to promote eugenic practices and beliefs. I argue that the hierarchy of eugenics and utopia – the privileging of certain populations and rejection of others as being suited for the future – are assured and enforced through ideological and repressive state apparatuses.

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2024, English

Within the Gothic genre, most books incorporate visible specters or embodied monsters. Authors who produced monsters most often came from marginalized groups within their cultural contexts: Bram Stoker was Irish and Mary Shelley was a woman. Marginalized authors were best equipped to produce monster stories since the body of the monster embodies and enacts the author's personal and the wider culture's anxieties. Monsters remain relevant due to their adaptability to expressing and embodying new anxieties in new eras, independent of the author's original anxieties written into the monster. Monster Theory posits that the body of the monster represents and exhibits the larger culture's fears, desires, and values, and describes permissible and transgressive behaviors in order to teach and control the community. This paper, using Monster Theory to analyze the monster's body, examines the two most famous Gothic monsters, Dracula and Frankenstein's Creature, to see where anxieties are enacted and destroyed. Bram Stoker encodes anxieties of female sexuality, queerness, recolonization, and political tensions over Irish Home Rule within Dracula's, the vampire bella's and Lucy's bodies. The violent death of the vampires are attempts to reinforce English middle-class hegemony against the sexual and invading force of Dracula. Mary Shelley explores her anxieties about child- and parenthood, creation and death, knowledge in isolation, and failure of genius within the creation, growth, and death of the Creature. The Creature's offer to live in harmony with mankind and his extratextual death demonstrates Shelley's desire to accept her anxiety in order to de-threaten it. This research has implications for further study in other monster stories as well as asks pertinent questions about the nature and function of monsters within the cultural psyche.

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 0, English

In this dissertation, I consider a range of texts from the nineteenth century including novels, personal essays, and diaries in which authors attempt to narrate experiences of illness in light of the shifting cultural perceptions of how the physical body and the concept of “self” relate to each other. The Diary of Alice James, Robert Louis Stevenson's “Ordered South,” Harriet Martineau's Life in the Sick-Room, and Henry James's The Wings of the Dove are the main texts analyzed. In each of these examples, I examine the ways that authors compose texts to understand the self alongside the “nerves and fibres” of bodily lived experience. Of primary interest to this dissertation is considering how the texts I examine can be fruitfully analyzed when concepts gleaned from the realm of medical humanities are applied to illness stories. This is a necessary intervention because much of the recent work in the broader field of medical humanities seeks to present illness narratives as artifacts of patient experiences that can be approached as acts of testimony or as evidence of therapeutic exercises. The primary concept that I rely on throughout my dissertation is the “corporeal gap” taken from the work of one of the founders of the practice of Narrative Medicine, Dr. Rita Charon. I use this concept as my way of accounting for some of the ways the texts I examine invent approaches to the difficult work of talking about how sickness disrupts the relationship between bodies and selves. The “corporeal gap,” functions as both feature and analytical tool throughout my dissertation. Primarily, I use the corporeal gap as an interpretive tool that allows me to attend to the various ways the texts I examine deal with the interruptive and disruptive experience of illness.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, History

This dissertation uncovers how, why, and where the modern pet dog originated. The average dog's transition from a working animal to a nonworking companion in the nineteenth-century United Kingdom constituted the dog's most radical alteration of purpose since their initial domestication prior to the establishment of agricultural civilization. This dissertation contends that the modern family dog originated during the long-nineteenth century (1780-1920) primarily in Victorian Britain—the initial nation altered by the interlocking forces of industrialization and urbanization. These processes provided the necessary cultural and material preconditions to reconceptualize this traditional working animal as a nonworking companion. These phenomena also provided the necessary infrastructure to manufacture commodities—from biscuits to soap—that became necessary to maintain dogs. Family dogs altered domestic and urban environments, individual and collective habits, local and global economic markets, and traditional human and canine behaviors. British pet culture surged beyond national boundaries to become the global norm governing appropriate human-dog interaction. Fundamental English practices—such as leash laws—remain normal today alongside British breeds that garner worldwide favor. Despite their integral presence in modern Western culture, however, there remains no holistic—nor interdisciplinary—narrative explaining how the typical dog transformed from a working animal to a nonworking companion. In this sense, this project rectifies this pronounced historiographical absence and knowledge gap for the broader dog-owning public. Answering this question necessitates adopting an interdisciplinary perspective entangling humans and nonhumans since Britons were not solely responsible for creating pet dogs. Rather, dogs actively shaped this process. Understanding dogs in their own right—their cognitive, sensory, and physical capabilities—hinges on including insights from animal s (open full item for complete abstract)

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)

MA, Kent State University, 2023, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of History

Between 1473 and 1666, the printing industry in London was heavily regulated by the Stationers' Company, but after the 1660s, the Company became unable to effectively regulate printed texts. This thesis compares the depictions of masculinity which appeared in early modern English books between periods of heavy regulation and periods of loose regulation. Changes to the printing industry, including changes to the laws surrounding censorship and economic changes in both the market and England as a whole, contributed to changes in how social ideologies are represented in the books that the market produced. During the early period of heavy regulation, narratives of masculinity across texts were relatively consistent and cooperated with one another to create a cohesive, hegemonic version of masculinity. However, as the market grew and opened, there was no longer a reasonable expectation of regulation, and more, often differing versions of masculinity were able to compete with the traditional hegemonic narrative.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2023, English (Arts and Sciences)

This project aims to interrogate modernist symbolism of the dog as representations of human alterity by focusing on the importance of the dog as a robust modernist trope used to articulate the problems of being human in an increasingly industrialized, modernized society. This dissertation explores how the dog functions as a symbol with attention to class, hierarchies, kinship arrangements, sex and sexuality, but also considers the dog as a literal dog, outside of human constructs. While Darwinian theory undermines the supremacy of the human by showing how species interrelate, the dog is of particular importance because of its coevolutionary partnership with humans, having the capacity to expose the precarity of human ascendency and dissolve the human/animal boundary. The dog's capacity for destabilizing the category of human can convey humanity's degradation, but the dog is also an analogue for human constructions, articulating questions of class, gender, and sexuality. Intimacy between humans and dogs also issues new ways of thinking of kinship. Lastly, this dissertation examines modernist texts for their subtle advocacy for the better treatment of animals by imagining animal subjectivity, by humanizing the animal, or by carefully studying animal behavior.

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.

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2023, English (Arts and Sciences)

This thesis explores how two of Wilkie Collins's sensation novels, The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868), grapple with the drastic increase in textual production, circulation, and consumption that characterized Victorian-era England. Through the novels' multi-narrator, text-based structures, Collins forwards multiple modes of textual engagement in order to defy literary hierarchies that privilege certain readers, texts, and forms of textual engagement over others. This emphasis on multiplicity allows Collins to educate his readers about sensational reading practices that contradict the idealized realist practices of the day without setting up sensational reading practices as a new ideal in a new hierarchy. Hence, the novels suggest that the Victorian literary market has space for diverse readers and texts.

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1966, English

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1966, English

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1966, English

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1965, English

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1964, English

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1964, English

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1966, English

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1964, English

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1964, English

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1964, English