Special Relationships examines depictions of love affairs, courtships and marriages between British and American characters in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American short stories and novels. I argue that these transatlantic love stories respond to shifting Anglo-American cultural, political, and economic exchanges during the period. In some cases, texts under consideration actually helped shape those interactions. I also suggest that many authors found such transnational encounters a useful way to define ideal versions of American national identity, and to endorse or challenge prevalent attitudes regarding class, race, and gender. Special Relationships begins with Cooper’s The Spy (1821), which I discuss in the Introduction. Part One examines works published by Cooper, Irving, Frances Trollope, Lippard, Warner, and Melville during the 1820s, 30s and 40s, and traces the emergence of the “fairytale” of the American woman who marries into English aristocracy. Part Two places works by Henry James, Burnett, and several other writers in the context of a real-life phenomenon: the plethora of American women who between 1870 and 1914 married into European nobility. I conclude by discussing the Anglo-American political rapprochement of the 1890s and the use by Jack London and Edgar Rice Burroughs of Anglo-American love stories to promote racial ‘Anglo-Saxonism.’

This thesis focuses on the connections between fin de siècle accounts of psychical phenomena and the extraordinary bodily capabilities of the characters in Henry James’s late novels. In reaction to the scholarly commonplace that these characters are simply refined out of corporeal existence, I posit the alternative that their bodies are unconventionally constituted: hyperaesthetic like the Society for Psychical Research’s ‘sensitives’, or materially reconfigured like the ‘etheric bodies’ of the dead envisioned by Sir Oliver Lodge, and thus perfectly adapted for life in the phantasmagorical world of James’s ‘major-phase’ and beyond. Against the backdrop of recent scholarly work on the material world of James’s novels by Thomas Otten, Victoria Coulson and others, and theories of embodiment such as those of Didier Anzieu, I assert the importance of fin de siècle psychical research narratives of the hyperextension of human bodily capabilities and their historical collocates in art, literature, and occult philosophy to fully excavate the cultural work with which Henry James’s late novels are involved.

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<p> This thesis takes a look at three major texts: Mark Z. Danielewski&rsquo;s <i> House of Leaves</i> (2000), Charlotte Bront&euml;&rsquo;s <i>Jane Eyre</i> (1847), and Edgar Allan Poe&rsquo;s &ldquo;The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). These texts are certainly linked by the gothic motif, past trauma (and thus memory), and also desire. However, I see these texts as a set for several reasons. These texts are representations of how the gothic motif can be used to supply the narrative, not supplement it. This means, for me, that the narratives of these texts are not just staples of &ldquo;the gothic,&rdquo; but their very <i>architecture</i> is founded upon the gothic tradition. Each text takes place within a house, in a sort of labyrinthine creation, haunting in nature with supernatural manifestations, and, on top of that, a theme of misery within the family. Although these three texts are connected by their treatment and reliance on the gothic motif, I&rsquo;m drawn to them as a set because of 1) the characters&rsquo; transmutability of the spaces they inhabit and 2) the physicality of the publication themselves. I am concerned with the transformations that occur within and without these texts. By that, I mean I am a concerned with transformations within the minds of the characters (development) and the spaces they occupy, as well how these texts call readers to action. Above all, I am concerned with agency, that of the characters within these texts and of the texts themselves. I argue that these spaces within these texts as well as the texts themselves are posthuman. Though, where does regarding these texts as posthuman leave us as scholars? </p><p>

<p> This dissertation reads twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. multicultural literatures, women&rsquo;s literature, and science-fiction film and literature to identify a tradition of literary representation of long-standing patterns of economic entrapment in American cities.&rdquo; I argue that the capitalist ideologies of opportunity and spatial, economic, and social mobility associated with American cities have been largely false promises, and that literature provides an avenue to investigate the ideological matrices and cultural narratives that American capitalism uses to situate bodies where it needs them, primarily in urban centers. I claim that this entrapment remains more or less a constant in American cities despite the fact that both capitalism and the space of the city have radically changed since the late 1930s. I further claim that the persistence of this entrapment across different instantiations of both the American city and American capitalism speak to its normalization, acceptance, and the fact of its continuing legacy. As the ideological narratives are culturally projected as ones of the promise and freedom of mobility in cities, and as the historical conditions of entrapment have proven so resilient, literature and film have constituted important tools for exposing just how these capitalist ideologies generate consent for hegemonic capitalism. The dissertation seeks to understand how a large percentage of urban populations are interpellated by the very capitalist machinery which fixes them in space and class while simultaneously denying them the benefits of American capitalism.</p><p>

The aim of this thesis to is explore the relationship between Henry Miller, Zen Buddhism and how this may offer new ways of reading Miller. By exploring the life-long interest of Miller in Eastern Philosophy I hope to show that far from being the misogynistic, sexual miscreant of legend, he was in fact a deeply spiritual man who wished his work to inspire and motivate readers rather than be a form of titillation. My attempt here is not to rehabilitate Miller’s reputation in regards to race, religion or gender, but rather to examine his work through a more spiritual lens. In the process I will attempt to use a more complete selection of Miller’s works than is commonly utilized by critics, although particular attention will be given to Tropic of Cancer, I will show how later, more spiritual works illuminate Miller’s Zen Buddhist beliefs. By using novels, essays, letters and pamphlets I hope to provide a wide-ranging examination of Miller’s oeuvre both chronologically and spiritually. Two key words that will be found to re-occur throughout the thesis are ‘journey’ and ‘progression’. Journey in the sense that Miller saw his own life in Zen Buddhist terms; he existed to evolve and gain awareness though his life experiences through the writing and re-writing them until he could move beyond them. Progression in the sense that movement is crucial to the development of spirituality, the mind and heart must be open to new knowledge and understanding. I will show that Miller came to conceptualise both his life and work through the Zen Buddhist teaching of The Four Noble Truths and Miller’s daily implementation of The Eight Fold Path. I will start by arguing that it is impossible to understand Miller’s journey without first examining the process by which he came to shape his own life narrative. The Zen peace of Miller’s later years was hard fought and gained at considerable price to both him and those close to him. Miller first had to develop a conceptualisation of creativity before he could be open to meaningful spiritual change. This thesis will examine the lasting influence of both Otto Rank and Henri Bergson on Miller’s idea of what it meant to be a writer, how reality in relation to his life experiences was malleable and how this provided Miller with the foundation on which to explore his spirituality. I will show how Miller’s close relationship to Surrealism caused him to re-think some of his positions in relation to language, style and freedom, yet ultimately why he felt impelled to continue on his journey to Zen Buddhism enlightenment.

This dissertation examines the instrumental role played by race in the scientific conceptions of society at the turn of the Twentieth Century in Brazil and Cuba. The examination of scientific rhetoric in the work of Euclides da Cunha and Fernando Ortiz, as well as a large number of photographs, from this period of institutional modernization, identifies the racial variable as the conceptual locus of coexistence and struggle amongst multiple representational regimens produced by anthropology, sociology, literature and medicine. These diverse interdisciplinary matrices of meaning (set forth in texts and images) constructed the foundations of the concept of race through the equivalent notion of exoticism and anomaly as expressions of the axiom of difference. This ideological conceit was offered in countries marked by racial miscegenation as the means for cultural originality as well as the main threat to their political consolidation. This constituent relation of the racial difference, evident in Euclides da Cunha's masterpiece Os sertàµes (1902) or in Fernando Ortiz's early criminological work Los negros brujos (1906), prompted an alternative approach to the critical apparatus that has privileged the analysis of their aesthetic qualities. In addition, the design of ethnographic and medical portraits of the time evidenced a correlation between aesthetic value and biological description in disciplines such as criminal anthropology, tropical medicine or ethnology. This project sheds some light on the particular concern for governability and cultural legitimacy raised at the time by nationalistic ideology which influenced the racial hypothesis offered by Euclides da Cunha and Fernando Ortiz. Nonetheless this crucial aspect has been considered incidental to their intellectual careers. The work of these intellectuals has been canonized into Latin American contemporary history as models for cultural emancipation. Yet, the hypothesis of racial difference they helped to foster have explicitly or implicitly guided the implementation of state policies in culture, public health and police control in Brazil and Cuba. The analysis of the social and scientific uses of photography in the construction of the exotic and the anomalous as racial categories offers an alternative methodological approach indispensable for the reconsideration of photographic production in Latin America during the period of modernization.

This dissertation examines the work of four poets writing in a projective or "open field" tradition in post-war America: Charles Olson, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, Susan Howe, and Myung Mi Kim. It considers the way these poets engage, via innovations in poetic form, with conceptions of the citizen and meanings of citizenship at different historical moments in the United States. Drawing on recent developments in citizenship theory which have focussed on what Engin Isin calls "acts of citizenship," "Projective Citizenship--The Reimagining of the Citizen in Post-War American Poetry" suggests that poetry might offer a means for imagining alternative notions of the citizen, conceiving of citizens as active agents rather than passive subjects.

Scholarship on Herman Melville has a tendency to treat the sea as a destination in itself, but in one of Redburn's autobiographical moments the narrator confesses that initially his "thoughts of the sea were connected with the land; but with fine old lands, full of mossy cathedrals and churches, and long, narrow, crooked streets without side-walks, and lined with strange houses". When in literary trouble, Melville rebounded by employing the earliest furnishings of his imagination, using England as his setting and his theme. In his examination of the political, economic, and above all cultural ties between Britain and the United States, Melville anticipated the analytical models used by transatlanticist scholars today: At times he treated England and America as uncanny doubles and trips abroad as akin to time-travel, with each country seeing the other as both a point of origin and a vision of the future. Elsewhere, Melville tracked the circulation of people and objects throughout a unified--and dehumanized--Anglo-American world. Critics are often tempted to treat Melville's English writings, like his trips to England, as a vacation from his real work, but a deep engagement with British culture, and his attempt to write his way into it, was Melville's life's work. He is never writing only about England; produced at moments of professional crisis, Melville's transatlantic fictions include interrogations of the global marketplace and the possibilities for art. Through readings of Redburn, the diptych stories, and Israel Potter, this dissertation aims to explicate what Melville's English works have to say about England, America, commerce, art, and the author's own place in the British literary heritage he valued so highly.

Recent scholarship on black transnationalism and diaspora in the early twentieth century has largely focused on migration to the urban centers of the US North and Western Europe. “Mapping the Global Black South: Aesthetics, Labor, and Diaspora” revises this discourse by exploring the movement of people, cultural practices, and ideas between the US South and the Caribbean as an alternative network of African diasporic affiliation. According to Caribbean theorist Édouard Glissant, “the Plantation system” created a “rhythm of economic production” and a “style of life” that links the US South to the Caribbean and parts of Latin America. Building on Glissant’s geographic frame, this dissertation establishes the plantation—a fundamentally modern form of labor organization—as the figural and literal organizing principle of “the global black south”: a matrix of diasporic articulation, subject formation, and knowledge and cultural production. Through close readings of works by Booker T. Washington, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Price-Mars, this study examines how African American and Caribbean writers and intellectuals mobilized aesthetics—literature, music, photographs, and performance—to imagine alternative futures within and against the legacy of the plantation. By drawing on theories of the plantation in Caribbean and New Southern Studies, “Mapping the Global Black South” makes critical interventions in the field of African American Studies, where the plantation is almost exclusively regarded as a metonym for slavery and anti-modernity. In Caribbean Studies, by contrast, scholars have proposed a more nuanced rendering of the plantation as the genesis of black modern life and culture, and in New Southern Studies, it has been reconceived as the link that tethers the US South to the global south (based on similar patterns of underdevelopment). Through an interdisciplinary and multimedia methodology, then, this study interrogates the paradox of the plantation as at once local and global, fecund and barren, static and fungible—as a site of agricultural production that animates the flow of global capital, on the one hand, and a modern technology of power that exploits the land and the bodies forced to work it, on the other. In so doing, it establishes the plantation as a matrix of global black south cultures that revises traditional understandings of black modernity and creates new systems of connectivity and legibility for contemporary scholarship. Moreover, in reconsidering the plantation as a crucible of black modernity, “Mapping the Global Black South” reconstructs the historical significance of the Tuskegee Institute—a former plantation turned industrial school—as a nodal point of black diasporic affiliation and a model for resolving one of the fundamental predicaments of New World blackness: the problem of free labor. Given that slavery was a system of coerced and exploitative labor, the greatest challenge of emancipation throughout the global black south was transforming a mass of formerly enslaved persons into autonomous workers. Thus, by the turn of the twentieth century, black artists and intellectuals from across the region began to embrace (and adapt) Booker T. Washington’s vision of an agrarian and industrial future (by way of Tuskegee) as a strategy for racial uplift and self-determination. Whereas Washington’s reformism is commonly reduced to a foil for W.E.B. Du Bois’ radicalism, this dissertation resituates Washington within a hemispheric framework to reconsider how his theories contribute to a more capacious epistemology of the “plantation” in African American Studies. “Mapping the Global Black South” is thus organized around two interrelated concerns: the plantation as an alternative framework of black transnationalism and a site of cultural production that evinces the persistence of black life within structures of social death; and Tuskegee’s significance as a symbol of modernity and a nodal point of diasporic articulation at the turn of the twentieth century. In so doing, it illuminates how the plantation shaped the new futures that emerged in the US South and the Caribbean in the aftermath of slavery.