This is a thesis about English and American imaginative identification with Italy in the period 1848–1865, facilitated by and expressed through periodicals and newspapers. At the centre of the thesis sits New England magazine The Atlantic Monthly, which during the Civil War emerged as a vehicle for abolitionist literature, but which also published extensively on Italy. The Risorgimento, the movement that sought Italian unification, triumphed in 1861—the same year that the battle of Fort Sumter signalled the start of the American Civil War that would last until 1865. This thesis investigates the transatlantic relationship between the Risorgimento and the Civil War as it emerged in The Atlantic Monthly, The Springfield Daily Republican and other nineteenth–century publications, and it does so through contextualised readings of Arthur Hugh Clough, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Emily Dickinson. These three seemingly very disparate authors are connected by The Atlantic Monthly: Clough’s epistolary poem on the fall of the 1849 Roman Republic, Amours de Voyage, was first published there in 1858; Harriet Beecher Stowe serialised her historical Italian romance Agnes of Sorrento in The Atlantic Monthly between 1861 and 1862; and Dickinson was inspired to write a series of poems on Italy and volcanoes after reading both The Atlantic Monthly and local morning newspaper The Springfield Daily Republican. They are also connected by their fascination with Italy. This thesis argues that nineteenth–century periodicals need to be studied in a transatlantic context: they cannot be read, in the traditional style of Benedict Anderson, as simple affirmations of nationalism and national culture. Another way of putting it is to say that this thesis is about a series of exchanges of influence and thought that get attached to national projects but are in themselves international.

The poetry, prose, and personality of Walt Whitman have attained a truly global circulation, and scholarship continues to reveal his complex and lasting impact on literature, art, and politics around the world. This dissertation reveals Walt Whitman's extensive appropriation by the Latin American avant-garde, an artistic current that encompassed dozens of regional, national and transnational vanguardia movements across the Americas from roughly 1918 through the late 1930s. My work tells the story of how these pugnacious literary and artistic communities used Whitman as the raw material for a self-consciously "modern" art, as they circulated, adapted, and repurposed the US poet and his texts. The dissertation moves from south to north, beginning in Chile, proceeding to Nicaragua and Mexico, and ending with Latino writers in the United States. "Out of Place: Walt Whitman and the Latin American Avant-Gardes" argues that the literary and political appropriation of Whitman becomes a part of these movements' active participation in the hemispheric and global conversation of their day. What these aggressive avant-garde groups find useful, provocative, or generative in Whitman, then, offers us a unique perspective that cannot be left out of American literary studies. For as they wrestle with Whitman and the concept of "America," as they adapt Whitman into their notions of art, of nation and of language, and as they read him against the backdrop of globalization and modernity, a new Walt Whitman emerges, a vanguardista Whitman who sheds new light on the enduring relevance of his own radical project of making a poetry for the Americas.

[pt] A dissertação consiste em uma tradução comentada de Mean Free Path (2010), último livro de poesia de Ben Lerner, poeta e romancista estadunidense contemporâneo. Lerner desenvolve uma poética marcada por colisões e fragmentações, com choques de sentido de um verso para outro, versos fora de ordem, recombinados etc. Tais características dispararam reflexões sobre as escolhas tradutórias, comentadas em notas (relativas aos versos), às quais são entrelaçados conceitos teóricos caros aos estudos de tradução poética, que atribuem ao tradutor um papel ativo. A linguagem do autor se articula com a forma como se dá a comunicação nos dias de hoje. / [en] The thesis consists of an annotated translation of Mean Free Path (2010), the latest poetry book written by the contemporary American poet and novelist Ben Lerner. He creates a poetic language marked by collisions and fragmentations, with disruptions to the meanings from one line to another, lines out of order or recombined etc. These features triggered reflections on the translation choices, which are discussed in notes on specific lines. Theoretical concepts relevant to the study of poetry translation, which give translators an active role, are intertwined with the notes. The author s poetic language is attuned to the way people communicate nowadays.