This dissertation focuses on the scene of the crime as a living place. The crime scene forces a retrospective look—a detailed inquiry into the past to uncover physical, political, and historical elements particular to that location. At the scene of the crime, lost or hidden clues are uncovered to solve a mystery: in the texts examined in this study, crime scenes of murder, forced cultural migration, and nuclear bomb testing disclose vital ecological data about changes in the land—in the wilderness, on the family farm, in the southwest desert, and in the urban future. Crimes in these works serve as metaphors for crimes against the land, the possible collapse of the ecosystem, or apocalypse. The rhetoric of crime is well documented in environmental writing—from descriptions of earth slashed by wagon wheels to apocalyptic projections of slaughtered forests, poisoned seas, and the “critical condition” of the earth and its atmosphere—all warnings that envision the world as a vast scene of cultural crime. The works considered in this study command attention in a new way—as ecologically-based tales of crime. The first chapter traces the legacy of crime rhetoric in contemporary environmental writing beginning with Rachel Carson's exposé, Silent Spring. In chapter 2, I investigate Peter Matthiessen's Watson trilogy, a multi-voiced saga of the 1910 murder of E. J. Watson, that recounts the ecological destruction of the Everglades at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapter 3 examines Annie Proulx's Postcards and Wendell Berry's A World Lost. In both novels, a brutal murder directs attention to the survival of small-scale living on the land and the fate of the family farm. Chapter 4 investigates the cultural crime of nuclear testing and the links between radiation and cancer in Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. The final chapter examines the apocalyptic landscapes of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, science-fiction novels set in futuristic urban California. These texts look to the stars for a better place in space and anticipate the possibility of partnership ethics as a means of preserving the living earth and its creatures.

My dissertation consists of a critical, annotated and translated edition, in English, of the fin-de-siècle novel, De sobremesa (1896), a key work of Modernista prose in Spanish America by Colombian writer José Asunción Silva. The edition features the translation, endnotes, an interdisciplinary introductory study and bibliography. After an introduction of the writer, I consider the work's form as a hybrid travelogue, memoir and manifesto, or ars poetica in prose, and its relationship to Decadence in form and content. I invoke examples of the confessional genre and memoirs from the day, and support suggestions that the novel anticipates later novels of dislocation and fragmentation. I contextualize the work as a product of the epoch's nascent ideas of psychotherapy, psychopathology and illness, and thus duly examine the presence and function of “pseudo-science” and the cult of scientific authority in the work. Accordingly, the remnant Catholic apparatus the hero adheres to is considered against his amorality. I explain this value system as partially a product of Paris, a space that is invented/discovered in the Latin American imaginary. I then treat the body in the novel, in dialogue with critics who note the novel's “medical gaze.” In this connection I study the characterization of science, normalcy, power, and subversive erotics. Appropriately I characterize the professionalization of medicine at the time and the so-called “therapeutic ethos” counterpoised to the neurotic aesthetics then in vogue. Consequently I explore the tropes of illness in the novel, specifically tuberculosis, nerves and madness. Subsequently I examine consumer psychology, and insert the hero's neo-feudal values in that era's material culture. Finally I discuss the translation process in theory and praxis, and in my translation proper provide notes to allusions and intertexts.

The epic poem has served as a literary, cultural, and historical guide for literature students since at least the time of Homer. The richness and density of reference to sources outside the poem is one of hallmarks of the epic form, in which the poet serves as a guide, who leads the student to a more profound state of reflection on the nature of the human condition. This guide, however, is no mere tour guide, but extracts a rather demanding price of the traveler who wishes to cross the terrain of the epic. Each verse may appear to the uninitiated traveler as an insoluble riddle. Diego de Hojeda's La Cristiada, while among the best epic poems written in Spanish, suffers from relative obscurity because of the limited number of editions, and the demanding density of the verse. The present dissertation fulfills a double purpose: it serves as a guide to the student, to explore the richness of La Cristiada, by providing a student edition of the poem, and in the same spirit, it endeavors to make a contribution to the revival of the epic poem in general. The present edition has several parts. We start with an introductory study to provide a solid foundation to understand in context Hojeda's life, times and mission. This is followed by the complete original transcription of the poem from the archaic 16th century spelling into readable modern Spanish. Also, in the tradition of Chapman's Homer, context side notes are provided throughout as a further guide to the student. Each of the twelve books of the poem ends with a series of notes, to document every name and place reference in the poem, as well as all historical, mythological and literary references. Finally, in the interest of completeness we have included several documents related to the first edition of La Cristiada, and the laudatory works that accompanied the poem when it was originally published in 1611.

In the context of American imperialism, what role does the interracial/interethnic literary romance play? Do these romances offer the possibility of integrating politically disparate elements, or do these literary unions reveal the conflicts of nation-building at a time of territorial expansion? Drawing upon Doris Sommer's work on heterosexual romances and Robert McKee Irwin's work on homosocial bonds and both authors studies on nation-formation in Latin America, I explore interethnic/interracial unions in works by American and Latino writers and analyze the role these fictional romances and unions serve in representing the inclusion of new peoples and the formation of American national identity at the time of territorial expansion. The texts examined include Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don, Elizabeth Van Deusen's collection short story readers, Stories of Porto Rico and Tropical Tales (Porto Rico) and Manuel Zeno Gandía's Redentores. Through their use of the interracial/interethnic romance and unions, I argue that these writers reveal the complications of the larger geopolitical unions being constructed by the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century. These texts show the potentially subversive power that love, the romance trope, and related themes and homosocial bonds may have in a genre that traditionally emphasizes unions; in addition these works demonstrate that in unions—whether romantic or political—tensions will always persist. Lastly, these texts also demonstrate the frailty of using the nation-as-lovers as the emblematic trope of a nation that will hold within it multiple unions. Issues discussed include how romance is constructed, including the allusions, metaphors, plot devices, and motifs incorporated to tell the story of that romance; representation of these unions in light of United States' anti-miscegenation laws; the construction of consent; education and the lessons of domesticity.

The first attempts to subvert the erotic representation in Puerto Rican literature can be found in literary works produced in the middle of the twentieth century. These representations were at first timid, and then gradually they became more explicit in the seventies, but it was not until the eighties and nineties that erotic visions became more common. The purpose of this research is to analyze the erotic representation in the works of Mayra Santos Febres, especially in El cuerpo correcto . The intention is to bring forward a topic that ironically has had both a persistent presence and a relegated position in Puerto Rican literary tradition. By taking into account Puerto Rican Erotic Literature from the end of the nineteen century to the present, predominantly women's short stories, I attempt to trace the erotic patterns that are subveredt in Santos Febres' short stories. I also study the correlation between Santo Febres' fictional and nonfictional works to establish if it is possible to talk of an erotic poetics in her works. My final objective is to show how the writing of this contemporary author shifts the erotic tradition in Puerto Rican literature. Santos Febres achieves this objective when, in El cuerpo correcto , she includes some sexual practices that are considered as paraphilias or perversions and places emphasis on their human part. This approach to perversions makes this book unique in Puerto Rican Literature.

"Pledging Transnational Allegiances: Nationhood, Selfhood, and Belonging in Asian American and Jewish American Narratives," represents a comparative study of immigrant fiction that traces its development over the course of the twentieth century. The use of Jewish American and Asian American writers occurs because of past and contemporary scholarly connections made between the two groups, which include their respective status as model minority subjects within the larger U.S. body politic. Moreover, with regard to immigration legislation and dominant-held ideas about the immigrant body, the two groups share histories of exclusion and inclusion. The narratives examined in "Pledging Transnational Allegiances" are inflected with global sensibilities that traverse both countries of origin and countries of settlement. Thematically speaking, what links authors as diverse as Abraham Cahan, Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton), Israel Zangwill, C.Y. Lee, Mary Antin, Gish Jen, Nechama Tee and Luong Ung to one another is that each writer examines the ways in which citizenship is not necessarily the product of assimilation but rather the unstable outcome that occurs through the constant re-imagining of transnational affiliations vis-à-vis dominant-held notions of nationhood and selfhood. Concomitantly, these authors negotiate the complicated matrix of sociopolitical belonging through a particular trope of naturalization (the public process by which an immigrant obtains citizenship in the country of settlement). "Pledging Transnational Allegiances" moves the scholarly consideration of immigrant narratives from static and unilateral classifications (e.g. as stories of exodus and deliverance, narratives of rebirth, tales of melting-pot assimilation, and dramas of generational conflict) to a more politicized and multisided discussion of diaspora and ideological border crossings.

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Beginning in 1915, F. Scott Fitzgerald was exposed to the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche under the guidance of mentors and from his personal reading lists. While reading Nietzsche, Fitzgerald's concern with the rise of cultural pessimism in 1920s America appeared in his fiction. Interestingly, both the philosopher and author explore the decline of Western culture in the twentieth century––a period of identity crises that affected America and Europe. This thesis investigates Fitzgerald's misreading of Nietzschean ideas that appears in his fiction to highlight the author's interest in explaining the cause of America's decline. In particular, this thesis appropriates a Nietzschean framework from Nietzsche's three metamorphoses of the spirit in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Each thesis chapter compares one metamorphosis to one quest in Fitzgerald's first three novels. I argue that Amory Blaine's quest in This Side of Paradise (1920) represents the camel's metamorphosis, Anthony Patch's journey in The Beautiful and Damned (1922) aligns with the lion's metamorphosis, and Jay Gatsby's quest in The Great Gatsby (1925) mimics the child's metamorphosis. After establishing a connection between Fitzgerald's concerns and Nietzsche's ideas, this thesis asserts that Fitzgerald's limited understanding of Nietzschean philosophy derives from the adulteration of ideas in the twentieth century.

With the 1881 publication of William Dean Howells's A Modern Instance and Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, American realism began a critical interrogation of the mass-produced sensational daily newspapers. Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser followed this critical posture toward the press, and together the four authors offer a wide-ranging criticism of the popular press. The novels examined are: Howells's A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and A Hazard of New Fortunes; James's The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, and The Reverberator; Wharton's The Custom of the Country; Dreiser's Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. Though it is seldom the central focus in any of the novels, the press serves the authors as a representative of the dominant ideology of consumer capitalism which the realists saw as inimical to the individual subject. The rise of the mass-produced, inexpensive, sensational urban daily provides a reasonably clear view of the ways in which the medium became the locus of the emergent ideology of consumer capitalism. From its beginnings, the new press tended to objectify the individual subject, to treat the individual as both a consumer and as an item for consumption. Along with this objectifying tendency, the popular press also tended to reinforce the social hierarchy, to misrepresent reality, to obscure explanation, and to fragment society into discrete parts with differing representations for each group. The counter-discourse of the realists seeks to reinscribe the individual subject by examining the shortcomings of the press and by offering the explanations that lie behind the news. Each of the authors establishes the press as a metonym for what had by the 1880s become the dominant discourse of consumer capitalism. Howells and James use reporters as metonyms for the press, allowing their actions and concerns to demonstrate how the press objectifies its subjects. Wharton and Dreiser portray the press largely without recourse to reporters and present the press as integrated into the culture as a self-effacing voice of the dominant discourse of consumer capitalism.

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