This thesis investigates Emily Dickinson's spatial imagination. It examines how her poetic landscape responds to the conditions of modernity in an age of modernization, expansionism, colonialism and science. In particular, I look at how the social and cultural representations of nature and heaven are revised and appropriated in her poems to challenge the hierarchical structure of visual dominance embedded in the public discourses of her time. Although she seldom travelled, her writing oscillates between experiential empiricism, sensationalistic reportage, and ecological imagination to account for the social and geographical transition of a rapidly industrialized and commercialized society. The notion of transcendence, progress and ascension in Enlightenment and Transcendentalist writings, based upon technological advancement and geographical expansion, characterized the social and cultural imagination of her time. Alternatively, an increasingly cosmopolitan New England registers a poetic contact zones as well as a Bakhtinian carnivalesque space, in which colonial relations can be subverted, western constructions of orientalism challenged, and capitalist modernity inflected. Dickinson voiced in her poems her critical reception of such a phantasmagoric site of a modern world. I explore how her cartographic projection registers the conflicting nature of modernity, while resists the process of empowerment pursued by her contemporary writers, presenting a more dynamic poetic vision of the world. In the first chapter, I explore her use of empirical mapping as a poetic approach to challenge the Enlightenment notion of progress and modernity. I look at her poems of social transitions, especially her poems of the Bible, the train, the pastoral, and the graveyard, to show how she addresses the issue of modernization. Her visit to Mount Auburn and the rural landscape movement are explored to show her complex poetic response toward modernity. In the second chapter, I focus on her poems of emigration and exploration to see how she appropriates frontier metaphors and exploratory narratives that dominated the discourses of national and cultural projects of her time. The colonial expeditions and national expansionism of her time are examined to show her revision and deconstruction of quest narratives. In the third chapter, I examine her commercial metaphors in relation to cosmopolitanism. I discuss her metaphors of tourism to see how her poems are based upon the notion of consumption as a poetic mode that is closely related to the violence of global displacement and imperial contestation. Her tourist experiences and reading of travel writings will be examined to show her critical response towards the dominant visual representations of her time. In the last chapter, I explore her poems of visitation and reception to show her elastic spatial imagination through her notion of neighbouring and compound vision. In particular, I discuss her poetic reception and appropriation of the theories of Edward Hitchcock and Thomas De Quincey. I conclude suggesting that her spatial imagination reveals her poetic attempt to account for the conditions of modernity.

In this thesis I endeavor to discover and show the Unitarian and Patristic theological influences on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's long narrative poem Evangeline, with special focus on the poem's theological teachings concerning deification and descriptions of the spiritual experience of shining with divine light. In chapter one, I explore the theological climate of early nineteenth-century New England, focusing on the Unitarian and Transcendental movements and Longfellow's familiarity with both. In chapter two, I present an overview of the critical literature concerning the religious elements of Evangeline, beginning with reviews by Longfellow's contemporaries and ending with recent scholarship that calls for a new investigation of Unitarian influences on Evangeline. In chapters three and four, I look back to those Church Fathers who articulated the doctrines of deification and divine light in the second through fourth centuries. Through looking at the presence of the Church Fathers in Longfellow's writings, especially in the unexplored “Christian Fathers” manuscript lectures from the early 1830s, I show how the Patristic writers proved interesting and inspiring to Longfellow in the years leading up to the publication of Evangeline. Finally, in chapters five and six, I investigate in depth the religious elements of Evangeline, giving special attention to the keynote passages of 2.1 and 2.5, which include, respectively, theological teaching concerning deification and a description of the spiritual experience of shining with divine light. I conclude that though in 2.1 Longfellow articulates theological teachings that possess strong affinities with Unitarian doctrine, in 2.5 Longfellow concludes the poem with a characteristically Patristic vision of the deified heroine shining with divine light.

This study examines two &lsquo / socialist&rsquo / utopias of the late 19th century: W. Morris&rsquo / s News from Nowhere and E. Bellamy&rsquo / s Looking Backward. The major concern is to question the validity of title &lsquo / socialist&rsquo / for these two texts. The reference points for such an analysis are: modernity, Marxism of the late 19th century and the practice of discipline. In this context, the intention is to find out ruptures and continuities with respect to the central ideas of socialism and basic premises of modernity. The study explorates that there are serious points of rupture in these two texts with respect to the major premises of modernity, because in Morris&rsquo / s utopia there is a romantic search for restoring communism of the 14th century, in Bellamy&rsquo / s text there are typical reactionary modernist suggestions concerning the nature of typical socialist societies. In that sense, due to the disassociation between socialism and modernity in these two texts, it is very problematic to classify these utopias as socialist. The study also questions whether the sources of such disassociation are embedded in Marxism itself. In response to such question, the study argues that this is the case to a great extent.

ABSTRACT POST-DIVORCE EXPERIENCE OF HIGHLY EDUCATED AND PROFESSIONAL WOMEN Kavas, Serap Ph.D., Department of Sociology Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Ayse Gunduz Hosgor July 2010, 327 pages Based on life-story interviews with women this dissertation analyzes post divorce experience of highly-educated and professional women. Economic, social, psychological well-being of divorced women / specifically, how they manage to adapt to their new lives after legal dissolution were examined. As is shown in our research while divorce caused various difficulties including financial, social and parenting problems, it, on ther other hand provided relief, for the participants. The participants developed wide range of survival strategies in the face of difficulties and challenges they experience which attested to their agency during and after the divorce process. To the study, while an urbanite, educated and professional woman&rsquo / s termination of a failing relationship itself can be considered as liberation on her part, it will be an overstatement to say that women are enjoying their independence and start anew, just as men do. In this connection, this study searched for insights into the question: How does act of divorce affect these women with respect to their empowerment? Feminist theory is used over the duration of this study. The study scrutinized on the emergent themes such as societal attitudes, single parenting, remarriage, intergenerational and intra-family transmission of divorce, financial consequence, and women&rsquo / s varying coping strategies as well as many other common themes emerged. Studying post-divorce experience of women, which is an unexplored area in Turkish context, employing qualitative method and dwelling on grounded theory approach as an inductive way of data analysis, this study intends to be a considerable contribution to the literature.

This dissertation is concerned with Sylvia Plath's late works. Engaging with critical discussion of what constitutes the corpus of Ariel, I show that an appreciation of the editorial history reveals the beginning of a third book (the last poems), and opens up those difficult texts to fresh enquiry. Recent work in Plath studies has focused on visual art. Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley's Eye Rhymes examines Plath’s own artwork in ‘an attempt to answer the question, How did Plath arrive at Ariel? (1) I contribute to that discussion, but also ask the questions, How did Plath leave Ariel behind and arrive at the even more remarkable last poems, and how did visual art enable those journeys? I argue that Ariel’s characteristically lucid style is informed by the dismantling of depth perspective in Post-Impressionist painting, and by the colour theory and pedagogy of the Bauhaus teachers. My work is underpinned by an appreciation of Plath’s unique cultural moment in mid-century East Coast America. I show how Plath’s knowledge of the theories, practice and iconic images of visual art, from the old masters to the Post-Impressionists, offered new possibilities for stylistic development. Working with archival materials including annotated works from Plath’s personal library and drafts of her poems, as well as published material, I examine the synthesis of visual and literary influences. Demonstrating specific textual relations between Plath and the work of Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats, as well as other poets, I show that Plath’s visual poetics combine influences from the modern poets with her New Critical training and with painting and sculpture. I offer new readings of rarely discussed poems, such as ‘Totem’, ‘The Munich Mannequins’ and ‘Child’, as well as fresh insights into the well known works, ‘Tulips’, ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’, ‘Fever 103º’, and ‘Edge’.

This dissertation explores John Ashbery's interactions with several generations of English poets, during a period which ranges from the late 1940s to the present day. It seeks to support two principle propositions: that Ashbery's engagements with contemporaneous English poets had a decisive influence on his poetic development; and that Ashbery's own poetic and critical work can be employed to revise our understanding of mid-to-late 20th century English poetry. The dissertation demonstrates that Ashbery's relationships with four English poets - W.H. Auden, F.T. Prince, Lee Harwood and Mark Ford - occurred at significant junctures in, and altered the course of, his poetic development. Ashbery's critical and poetic engagements with these poets, when read together, are shown to constitute an idiosyncratic but coherent re-reading of the English poetry of the past and present. The dissertation addresses the ways in which each poet theorises the difficulties posed, and opportunities afforded, by perceived changes in Anglo-American poetic relations at different points during the 20th century. Chapter one re-evaluates Ashbery's relationship with Auden. It traces the legacy of Auden's coterie poetics in The Orators for Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, offers a revisionary reading of The Vermont Notebook as a strident response to Auden's late-career conservativism, and reads in depth Ashbery's unpublished, highly ambivalent elegy for him, "If I had My Way, Dear". Chapter Two attends to the extensive correspondence between Ashbery and Prince, argues that Prince's work provided a model for Ashbery's "encrypted" early lyrics addressing his homosexuality, and reads "Clepsydra" as an early elaboration of Ashbery's conception of a reciprocal influential model. Chapter Three examines Lee Harwood's "imitations" of Ashbery, and considers the latter's first critical formation of an English "other tradition" through his association of Harwood with the work of John Clare. Chapter Four portrays Ashbery's relationship with Mark Ford as a successful enactment of reciprocal influence, a form of engagement which allows Ashbery a means to "shake off his own influence" and to retain his status as a "major minor writer".

Poems to the Sea: Rather than narrating or describing a work of visual art, the poems that form this collection show an accumulation, juxtaposition and realignment of material ranging from art historical detail and critique to a more personal, location specific response to works viewed in galleries and museums. Many of the poems engage with non-representational artworks and question how best to reflect, translate or expand upon their transformative effects. The first section, ‘Museum Notes’, explores Charles Olson’s open field poetics by giving artists and writers a conversational voice. ‘Sound Fields’, the second section, responds to individual works of art and reflects a systems-based approach. The authorial voice within ‘Poems to the Sea’, the third section, is that of an artist involved in making a series of palimpsest drawings to capture a sense of place as drawing and writing overlaps and intertwines. Painterly Poetics: Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Cole Swensen: This thesis explores three American poets from successive generations to examine three related types of engagement with visual art. As literary models that have informed my own poetic practice, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Cole Swensen have theorized their own writing process to consider ways of using language to enhance the transmission and transcription of their visual stimuli and ideas. All three are interested in visual art as a model for the writing process: as a means of seeing, thinking and perceiving. After an introduction that surveys relations between verbal and visual art, a chapter is devoted to each of the three poets. In the opening and longest chapter, examples of Olson’s writing are compared to the approach of several Abstract Expressionist painters who contributed to the culture of experimentation and spontaneity that emerged under Olson’s leadership at Black Mountain College in the early 1950s. Following a discussion of Olson as a uniquely influential figure, the chapter on Creeley considers the role of visual art in his poetics. Swensen’s writing is subsequently explored for its extension of the Black Mountain legacy: how she builds upon established critical methods to achieve what she calls ‘a side-by-side, walking-along-with’ relationship between the poem and the artwork.

This project explores the nature and extent of the relationship between Blake and Whitman. I examine their works to find affinities in tone, style and themes and seek to understand the origin of these affinities. The resultant discoveries, however, lead to the conclusion that, because of Whitman’s lack of exposure to Blake’s work, these affinities must be accounted for through a coterie of indirect influences on Whitman. Over the course of the introductory chapter, I establish the critical proclivity of connecting William Blake and Walt Whitman, providing examples of such critical interpretation; in addition, I provide an introduction to the key figures, terms, and works with which this thesis engages. The work of the second chapter of this project is to uncover in Whitman’s work, before he could have read Blake, those elements that are read as points of contact between them. Through close readings, I show that those aspects of Whitman’s work which are read as points of contact between Blake and Whitman predate Whitman’s exposure to Blake’s work, and so necessitate an engagement with influences shared by Blake and Whitman. The third chapter articulates the notion that a variety of influences affected Whitman’s composition of Leaves of Grass, and these various influences serve as an explanation for those apparent similarities between Blake and Whitman discussed in chapter two. The final element this chapter engages with is that of nineteenth-century periodical culture; this aspect of the influences articulated in this chapter provides a secondary explanation for the similarities discussed in the second chapter. The fourth and fifth chapters focus on the 1860 and 1867 iterations of Leaves of Grass and the 1867 and 1871–72 versions of Leaves of Grass, respectively, both with special emphasis on the poem that would become “Song of Myself.” The changes seen throughout these iterations will be used to understand Whitman’s evolving prosody as well as his changing public persona. These chapters also engage with the work of Swinburne, in chapter five, and of Gilchrist, in chapter four, as integral elements of this mediated influence of Blake on Whitman. In the final chapter of this work, I summarize my findings, suggest possible avenues for further inquiry, and discuss the implications of this research. There is a trend in Anglo-American literary criticism to see the relationship between America and England as adversarial rather than generative. The concluding chapter of this work will explore the idea of the Anglo-American literary tradition as a continuum—a complex of acceptance, extension, transformation, and refusal—and place the relationship of Whitman to Blake accurately on this continuum.

The aim of this project is to account for the widespread reception of the epics of Homer and Virgil by American poets of the twentieth century. Since 1914, an unprecedented number of new poems interpreting the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid have appeared in the United States. The vast majority of these modern versions are short, combining epic and lyric impulses in a dialectical form of genre that is shaped, I propose, by two cultural movements of the twentieth century: Modernism, and American humanism. Modernist poetics created a focus on the fragmentary and imagistic aspects of Homer and Virgil; and humanist philosophy sparked a unique trend of undergraduate literature survey courses in American colleges and universities, in which for the first time, in the mid-twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of students were exposed to the epics in translation, and with minimal historical contextualisation, prompting a clear opportunity for personal appropriation on a broad scale. These main matrices for the reception of epic in the United States in the twentieth century are set out in the introduction and first chapter of this thesis. In the five remaining chapters, I have identified secondary threads of historical influence, scrutinised alongside poems that developed in that context, including the rise of Freudian and related psychologies; the experience of modern warfare; American national politics; first- and second-wave feminism; and anxiety surrounding poetic belatedness. Although modern American versions of epic have been recognised in recent scholarship on the reception of Classics in twentieth-century poetry in English, no comprehensive account of the extent of the phenomenon has yet been attempted. The foundation of my arguments is a catalogue of almost 400 poems referring to Homer and Virgil, written by over 175 different American poets from 1914 to the present. Using a comparative methodology (after T. Ziolkowski, Virgil and the Moderns, 1993), and models of reception from German and English reception theory (including C. Martindale, Redeeming the Text, 1993), the thesis contributes to the areas of classical reception studies and American literary history, and provides a starting point for considering future steps in the evolution of the epic genre.

Les États-Unis n’ont eu de cesse d’attendre depuis Emerson le grand chef d’œuvre national qui célèbrerait le destin d’exception de la jeune démocratie et affranchirait la littérature et la langue américaines de la tutelle du vieux continent. Cette tâche ne pouvait incomber à l’épopée dont on a pu juger qu’elle était inapte à décrire le monde contemporain et qu’elle contredisait une modernité poétique de l’intensité lyrique. La renaissance spectaculaire du « long poème » américain au cours des XIXe et XXe siècle ne peut donc s’inscrire dans la filiation de « formes » jugées obsolètes. Elle paraît d’ailleurs d’autant plus problématique qu’après avoir été rapportée au lyrisme démocratique de Walt Whitman, le « long poème » fut approprié par T.S. Eliot et Ezra Pound et assimilée aux excès d’un « high modernism » autoritaire, élitiste et systématique. C’est ainsi que la critique n’est parvenue à rendre compte paradoxalement de cette « forme » qu’en la niant, confirmant ainsi son illisibilité : le long poème ne pouvait être qu’un recueil de poèmes courts, un chef d’œuvre ruiné ou une parodie de la pensée systématique et de l’exceptionnalisme américain. En étudiant « A » de Louis Zukofsky, Paterson de William Carlos William et les Maximus Poems de Charles Olson, je vise à démontrer qu’il est au contraire possible de lire cette forme en tant que telle sans avoir recours à des typologies génériques ou à la dichotomie modernisme/postmodernisme. Je tenterai aussi de suggérer que, dans ces trois œuvres, la poésie se conçoit comme une activité en devenir qui tente modestement d’articuler le poème au monde, au temps et à la lecture. / Ever since Emerson the United-States have been expecting the great national masterpiece that would not only celebrate the unique destiny of this young democracy but would also free American language and literature from the European model. However, it did not seem that it was for the epic poem to accomplish this task given that it appeared not only ill-suited to describe the modern world but also incompatible with the demands of a poetic modernity predicated on lyrical intensity. Hence, the planned obsolescence of this “form” has made it all the more difficult to explain the spectacular rebirth of the “American long poem” in the 19th and 20th centuries. It has appeared all the more problematic since, after having been associated to Walt Whitman’s democratic lyricism, the “long poem” was appropriated by T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound making it the symbol of the authoritarian, elitist and systematic tendencies of “high modernism”. It will thus come as no surprise that the critical community has tended to view the “long poem” negatively confirming in a way its illegibility: the “long poem” could only be viewed as a short lyric sequence, an impossible masterpiece or a parody of systematic thought and American exceptionalism. In undertaking this study of Louis Zukofsky’s “A”, William Carlos William’s Paterson and Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems I wish to demonstrate that it is possible to read the “long poem” as such without having to resort to generic categories and to the modern/postmodern dichotomy. I also hope to show that, in these three works, poetry is understood as a kind of ongoing activity which modestly attempts to articulate the poem to the world, time and reading.