Traitor, Traitor is a collection of poetry combining Celtic selkie myths with the Caribbean Nanny figure to construct a narrative about a widower living in the foothills of the Appalachians during the mid-20th Century. Grounded in the Romantic tradition, the poems explore the boundaries of personal power and the limits of the human will. However, unlike the traditional Romantics, this collection also seeks to explore issues of gender and socio-economic class to become a mystical poetry of witness. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2015. / December 5, 2014. / marriage, Nanny, poetry, selkie, transformation / Includes bibliographical references. / David Kirby, Professor Directing Dissertation; Nicholas Mazza, University Representative; Barry Faulk, Committee Member; Barbara Hamby, Committee Member.

The poems in Dear Bright explore the possibly of love in a deeply anxious world. They are often epistolary, addressing the eponymous Bright through a series of imagined universes in which the speaker and Bright can create and recreate not only their relationship, but their own subjectivities. The poems not directly addressed to Bright explore the world we are currently entrenched in, the physical, natural world as it is interpreted by the speaker's alternating awe and terror. These poems attempt to navigate the world as it is projected, too, from the imagination, imprinting on the natural a sense of joyous, associative nonsense. Sense, in this collection, comes after the sensuous. Narrative is rejected in favor of lyric. However, the speaker's voice imposes on each of these poems a unifying consciousness that seeks both understanding and the relief of accepting what we cannot (or should not) understand. Dear Bright explores, in addition to the physical as subject matter, how form shapes content. Many of the poems assume a more traditional shape, appearing as long single stanzas or couplets or quatrains, but the collection also plays with form in a more experimental way. The universe poems, staggered throughout the collection, all take a uniform, boxed shape punctuated by white space rather than formal punctuation or capitalization. This form allows for not only traditional line breaks, but a kind of break within the line, controlling the reading of the poems as well as the revelation of the universes they are depicting. This white space gives the reader a way into the world of the poem--through silence, the reader is able to fill in the unspoken, the unformed details, to make complete the incomplete. All of the poems in Dear Bright fear the unknown but also embrace it, both formally and through subject, and ultimately attempt to find some way to reconcile the imagined and the real, the beautiful and the frightening, the self and its place in the universe. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Spring Semester, 2015. / March 4, 2015. / literature, original writing, poetry / Includes bibliographical references. / Erin Belieu, Professor Directing Thesis; James Kimbrell, Committee Member; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member.

The poems of Willing draw on my personal experience and family history to explore the metaphors, mythologies, and lived experiences of Mormonism. As a whole, the book is framed by Joseph Smith's declaration that one must "search into and contemplate the lowest considerations of the darkest abyss" to know the things of God and to lead others to salvation ("Letter to the Church and Edward Partridge, 20 March 1839"). The poems of Willing respond to the empathetic yearning implicit in Smith's statement along three lines: 1) in poems that seek understanding of suffering as an inescapable reality of lived experience; 2) in poems that interrogate the family history narratives of my Mormon forebears, including an examination of Mormonism's troubling racial history, and 3) in poems that imaginatively reckon with first-time fatherhood through the lens of the Mormon doctrine that all individuals, including a coming child, lived with God before birth. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / March 21, 2018. / Empathy, Fatherhood, Mormonism, Poetry, Race, Whiteness / Includes bibliographical references. / Erin Belieu, Professor Directing Dissertation; Amanda Porterfield, University Representative; James Kimbrell, Committee Member; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Spanish language and literary tradition were still a form of intellectual colonization for the inhabitants of the newly formed Hispanic American republics. This dissertation proposes a theoretical approach to examine the modernista movement. By examining discursive formations, a reflection about the emergence of a postcolonial subjectivity in premodernista and modernista texts becomes available. This dissertation develops a poststructural view of modernismo as a postcolonial movement. It argues that the construction of subjectivity in the textual world of the modernistas repositioned Spanish Americans with respect to Spanish cultural domination. Analysis shows the ways in which modernista texts appropriated and transformed Western hegemonic literary discourses through translation or rewriting, thus affecting language and discourse. The resulting texts created an original literary form of Spanish different from peninsular that critics recognize as crucial in the formation of a Spanish American literary voice. In this work I examine extensively one literary journal ("revista literaria"), Revista Gris (1892-96) from Bogotá, Colombia. I identify the emergence of aesthetic discourses and practices that appropriated European models and ideas in different ways for nationalist or cosmopolitan postcolonial agendas. Although many of these discourses and practices were still mostly romantic, an epistemological shift was taking place. The analysis of Gris is focused on three types of texts: theoretical and critical essays, original poetry, and translations. Briefly, I also look at the way in which some of the aesthetic discourses and translation strategies from Gris reappear in Revista Azul from Mexico City, Mexico (1894-96). This short overview of Azul examines only discursive formations in critical and theoretical texts and translations. Contrasting Azul and Gris situates Gris within a wider Spanish American context and provides insight into later consolidation of emerging discourses and practices observed in Gris. The analysis of revista material demonstrates that, within a postcolonial dynamic to decolonize cultural production, Spanish American literature at the end of the nineteenth century was in a constant tension between acceptance and resistance, and imitation and subversion of paradigms which resulted in a very peculiar form of cosmopolitan expression. Cosmopolitism was to become one of the idiosyncratic elements of Latin American identity.

The purpose of the study was to combine literary criticism and biography in order to show the connecting links between the poetry of Robert Frost and the woman who shared his life for almost fifty years. This dissertation is a biography of Elinor Frost, which aims not only to relate her difficult life and reveal her complex personality but also to provide insights into her husband's poetry. The time period covers a span, which begins in 1892 with the high school graduation of Elinor White and Robert Frost and ends shortly after her death. Mrs. Frost was a highly intelligent, sensitive woman whose nature complemented that of her husband, and interspersed throughout the narrative are critical analyses of poems that reflect her influence. Sources of information about Elinor include unpublished letters and interviews.

Although much information is known about how Emily Dickinson's paternal family affected her life and poetry, very little is understood concerning the influences of her matrilineal relatives--the Norcrosses. In fact, most of what we do know about the Norcrossses has been blurred by scholarly misinterpretation, maligned by sexist derision, and obscured by a paucity of biographical detail. Yet, by her own profession, Dickinson's Aunt Lavinia Norcross and Cousins Louisa and Frances were among the most significant figures in her life. Along with her Norcross grandparents, Cousin Emily, and Uncle Joel, these formidable individuals helped create a familial environment in which Dickinson felt encouraged to seek self-expression, to act independently, and--above all--to think. This biographical study examines the lives of these central individuals in Dickinson's life in order to consider the ways in which the Norcross family legacy nurtured the poet. By so doing, the research provides a broader cultural context for identifying the social forces which helped shape the world in which Dickinson lived. Chapter I focuses on the influence of the poet's grandparents, Joel and Betsey Fay Norcross, and their important role in the founding of Monson Academy and support of women's education. Chapter II examines the life of Cousin Emily Lavinia Norcross, specifically her year with Dickinson at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary and the model she later provided as an independent woman devoted to a profession. Chapter III considers the effect of gregarious Joel Warren Norcross. Dickinson's pivotal 1850 letter to him, in many ways, marks the beginning of her adult writing career. Chapter IV studies the lives of Aunt Lavinia and Uncle Loring Norcross, with close attention to the prototypic model of sisterhood Aunt Lavinia and the poet's mother represented. Chapter V investigates the early influence of Loo and Fanny Norcross, especially their significant months with Dickinson in Cambridgeport where she was treated for a mysterious eye ailment. Lastly, Chapter VI discusses the Norcross cousins' involvement in the heady literary life of Concord, Massachusetts and offers a new theory as to the possible fate of Dickinson's long correspondence to them.

American expatriate Elizabeth Robins was a major figure of her times. She was more instrumental than any single performer in the staging of Ibsen plays in England in the 1890s. Her writing on behalf of women's suffrage and other women's issues in the first quarter of the twentieth century represents an important contribution to feminist politics. This study of her life and literary output begins with her arrival in England in 1888, and concludes with her feminist treatise against militarism published in 1924, because during these years especially, her life was rich with competing ambitions and a double career. Simultaneous with her London acting career, she published several novels under the pseudonym C. E. Raimond. She carefully documented her trip to Alaska in 1900 in a journal. The journal served as a source for two novels, the memoir of her brother Raymond Robins, and many stories and articles. After 1906, she participated in the organized effort to win the vote for women in England and formulated a more feminist aesthetic in her fiction. Her political activity extended to many women's issues, including white slave traffic and the plight of working women in postwar England. Her fiction bears comparisons to Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather. She responded to the satiric spirit of the early 1890s with parodies of Hubert Crackanthorpe and aggressive lady authoresses, honored Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot in her essays and fiction, and won acclaim for her feminist novels and plays. Robins formed close associations with Florence Bell, William Archer, William Heinemann, Henry James, Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst, Dr. Octavia Wilberforce, and Viscountess Rhondda (Margaret Haig). She wrote about her part in a changing theatre world with a sense of female difference, and what she wrote and did not publish based on her stage experience is equally engaging. She transformed her long personal history of ill-health and poor medical treatment into feminist concerns. Her life was not without contradiction, failure to achieve, missed or denied opportunities. These very aspects of her life defined her feminism and led to her woman-identified existence.

The major novels of Walker Percy are examined for evidence of cinematic stylistic techniques to gain insight into the ways in which Percy achieves his narrative objectives. In particular, his use of "framing" techniques which distance the reader from the characters as well as of cinematic images indicate the kinship between Percy's writing and cinema-verite. Like the cinema-veritist, Percy seeks to alter perception of the boundaries between reader, writer, and character, the seer and the seen. Percy's preoccupation with cinema is shown to reflect his philosophical concerns as a Catholic novelist. The metaphors of film, projection, and acting represent modern man's inability to achieve an authentic existence, which can be achieved only through faith. The pervasiveness of cinematic language and image has finally for its object the debunking of cinematic myths.

This dissertation explores the ways in which Bishop's profound sense of loss permeates much of her work. Specifically, I focus on how Bishop's early loss of her mother and of her family are at the core of her early unpublished and published work and the manner by which this early and intensely personal sense of bereavement becomes a central theme in her work. I begin by examining Bishop's unpublished autobiographical work and her published prose, looking closely at drafts and notebooks from the Vassar College Library and at voluminous correspondences she kept with friends and acquaintances. The opening chapter reveals the extent to which even Bishop's most puzzlingly surrealistic pieces spring from her early autobiographical writing. I then examine each of Bishop's five books of poetry in light of these early writings, and in light of letters and drafts, paying particular attention to the way in which Bishop's vision develops from being mysterious and intensely personal, to being much more inclusive and openly autobiographical. I closely examine individual poems in light of Bishop's early autobiographical concerns, illustrating how the poems spring from the early writings and how they develop the concerns of the particular book in which she published them. While I begin and end by discussing the unavoidable, intensely interesting and ultimately unanswerable questions about the extent to which Bishop's early loss of her mother influenced both her poetic and her sexual identity, the bulk of my dissertation is a close analysis of individual poems and books of poetry. The mystery of Bishop's poetic genius does not reside in her gender or in her losses, but in what she was able to make of what she lost. Ultimately, then, I attempt simply to look closely at Bishop's work--as she herself instructed her readers to do.

Few scholars have attempted to conduct a close examination of Whitman's relationship to his publishers in the context of Leaves of Grass. In their "Typographic Yawp: Leaves of Grass , 1855--1992," Megan and Paul Benton present a minimal, but interesting examination of the typographic story of Leaves, but they ignore three of the editions and deal with author-publisher relations only superficially. Other articles examine individual editions of Leaves of Grass, but none really explore what Whitman's complicated relationships with the publishers of his time tell us about the conditions for his work and for authorship in mid-nineteenth-century America. Most studies tend to focus on Whitman's poetry, rather than on issues associated with his publication history. In his Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass, for example, Michael Moon carefully examines various editions, but chooses to concentrate on Whitman's poetic revisions and program, rather than discussing aspects related to the publication story behind Leaves of Grass. This study will try to address this gap in Whitman scholarship and, in so doing, try to answer the following questions: Were Whitman's ambitions for his Leaves of Grass fulfilled? Did he ever reach his intended audience?