Jane Austen's American fans have a vibrant history. This dissertation traces how fans have sustained devotion to Austen, her works, and her world since the early nineteenth century through a set of practices still current among fans today: collecting objects and knowledge; writing imitative works; and carrying out literary pilgrimage.;I argue that these three modes of engagement are performative. Through practices such as creating and collecting material objects, and writing and reading fan fiction, fans engage in acts of what Joseph Roach has called surrogation. This is a performative means through which fans seek a substitute for a past affective experience that can never be repeated in the same way, such as reading a beloved novel for the first time. These acts take place within the everyday lives of fans who seek pleasure from Austen's world. Through pilgrimage fans enter into a liminal space, apart from the quotidian, where they may perform subjectivity as fans. These performances are enacted during pilgrimage to Austen-related sites, as well as to special events like those sponsored by the Jane Austen Society of North America.;Throughout this dissertation I offer evidence of fan practices overlooked or underrepresented by past studies. This evidence reveals nearly two hundred years of continuity within the American Austen fandom. These fans enjoy a nostalgic, personal connection to Austen, her characters, and her era. their practices offer means of entering Austen's world, seeking pleasure, fulfillment, and community; they also offer means of re-engaging with the original texts, always in search of something new within the familiar.;This case study of Jane Austen fandom contributes to the larger understanding of fans and fan practices. The Austen fandom boasts unique qualities and has a history predating the term "fan," yet it resembles recent popular culture media fandoms. Through a history of three modes of fan practices, I describe and theorize how performativity and surrogation work within fandom, proposing new, more specific ways of understanding the subjectivity, history, and practices of fans---representing prevalent and creative ways American culture consumes literature and narrative media.

<p>Lost-and-found purity is central to William Blake’s illuminated book <em>Visions of the Daughters of Albion</em> (1793). In <em>Visions</em>, Blake’s central character Oothoon embraces the otherness of her sexual desires, flies off to be with her lover Theotormon, but not before being brutally raped and impregnated by Bromion. The assault leads to Theotormon’s refusal to be with Oothoon because of her putatively compromised state. Today, in the shadow of queer conceptualizations of gender, sexuality, and virginity, how do we understand Blake’s narrative of loss and rejection, of injurious force and sexual violence? This thesis lays the critical groundwork for a queer reading of the text that is more than critical – i.e. that is a re-visioning of the text’s details, and is re-writing of its narrative premise.</p> <p>Through unconventional scholarly approaches, this thesis tackles issues of identity in Blake’s <em>Visions</em> from three separate vanguards that each further break open the heuristic and speculative possibilities in Blake’s work. Approaching Blake’s <em>Visions</em> from a Numerological perspective via deconstructing the central characters’ names and explicating the poem through their respective algorithms, the first section examines eighteenth century conceptions of the soul and its place within literature through locating and recognizing the souls of Blake’s poetry of lost souls. Considering sexual essentiality and the potential recovering of virginity, the second section reads <em>Visions</em> from the vantage of Schizosexuality (a fourth component to the hetero-/homo-/bisexual paradigm) to liberate Oothoon from both literal and metaphorical chains. From these critical approaches of Numerology and Schizosexuality, the thesis concludes with a visual book. Through inverting the gender axes of the love triangle central to Blake’s <em>Visions</em>, the visual book queerly re-visions <em>Visions</em> by following a male-Oothoon (Oathe13) flying off to be with his male lover (a homo-oriented Theotormon – Zucchicarro34) but not before being accosted by a female-Bromion (Aquabolt21). The critical chapters together with the visual book complete this thesis’ queer re-vision of Blake’s <em>Visions of the Daughters of Albion. </em></p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>This dissertation explores the connections between sympathy, gender, and characterization in four novels by George Eliot. It contributes to studies of George Eliot’s work by offering readings of minor characters in <em>Adam Bede</em>, <em>The Mill on the Floss</em>, <em>Middlemarch</em>, and <em>Daniel Deronda</em>. Focusing on these characters, who have tended to be ignored in critical studies of the novels, this dissertation argues for a re-evaluation of the relationship between gender and sympathy as understood by George Eliot. Taking into consideration a number of characters who exhibit a range of gendered behaviours and identities, this study explores how both normative and non-normative expressions of masculinity and femininity inform individuals’ sympathy. It uses the concepts of sympathetic economies and sympathetic ethics to demarcate the tension between realism and idealism in George Eliot’s representations of sympathy. The goal of this dissertation is to begin to map out some of the ways in which careful attention to peripheral characters can enhance readings of sympathetic ethics and economies in George Eliot by showing the subtle and challenging ways in which sympathy inflects, and is in turn inflected by, discourses about femininity and masculinity.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>This thesis examines how Seamus Heaney’s <em>North </em>attempts to bear witness to the prolonged political conflict in Ireland known as the Troubles. Drawing upon the intersecting discourses of trauma and testimony as theorized by Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, it argues that <em>North </em>operates as an experimental enterprise evaluating diverging methods of poetically representing and working through the experience of trauma. Though these methodologies seek to convey the Irish Troubles, neither is wholly effective and both are ultimately eschewed by the poet.</p> <p>My first chapter examines Part I and the invocation of representative models—which are at times historical, imaginative and mythical—in order to render legible the experience of trauma. I suggest that the poem’s invocation of human remains exhumed from Jutland bogs as one such model may not be ethical and then read this representation within a broader sense historiographical writing supplied by Michel de Certeau’s <em>The Writing of History</em>. My second chapter looks at Part II and the poet’s assertion of an autobiographical “I” in order to engage directly with the Troubles. I read this part of the collection primarily as a meditation on the limitations of community and poetry, which undercuts the poet’s attempt to deliver testimony. In my conclusion, I suggest Heaney’s testimonial enterprise may not fulfill its whole potential because of its publication in the midst of the Troubles, which forecloses the possibility of futurity, a criticism which may not hold true for the poet’s later collections.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>“Trade in Feelings: Shame in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” traces a genealogy of shame, a difficult feeling which is transformed and reworked in eighteenth-century narratives and which provides a ground for the self-reflective interiority required of commercial subjects. The stakes of this project are twofold. First, while cultural critics (e.g., Ahmed, Probyn, and Sedgwick) have recently theorized shame and suggested its potential for political activism, histories of this feeling have yet to be written. Reading narratives of shame in George Lillo’s <em>London Merchant ( 1731) </em>, Eliza Haywood’s <em>The British Recluse (1722)</em>, multiple editions of Defoe’s <em>Roxana (1724, 1730, 1745[49])</em>, Samuel Richardson’s <em>Clarissa (1747-48)</em>, and Frances Burney’s <em>Evelina (1778)</em>, this chronologically organized study supplies one part of such a history. As such, the analysis builds on and reframes Foucault’s historical narrative of the emergence of the modern disciplined and divided self-consciousness by focusing on the affects that produce and re-produce it, particularly the affect of shame. Second, while Michael McKeon has identified the formative force of questions of virtue and truth on the novel, this thesis suggests that these questions are critically condensed in narratives of shame. The dissertation argues that private shame and the psychological interiority of the eighteenth-century novel are mutually productive. Once a passion which could lead to vice and even murder, by the late eighteenth century shame becomes a feeling which is internalized, and which divides the self. Connected both to the question of truth and the question of virtue, as well as to the status of passion itself, shame informs our sense of emotions as interior, yet remains inextricable from questions of reputation, credit, and civility.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>While eighteenth-century Gothic fiction typically constructs masculinity as tyrannical in a rigid patriarchal structure, Gothic writers such as Horace Walpole were challenging this structure as they were instituting it. Walpole uses Gothic conventions to establish and criticize the cruel, oppressive patriarchal structure in <em>The Castle of Otranto</em>. However, he offers no alternative structure, since even the male characters are powerless to act outside of it. Charlotte Smith introduces Gothic conventions into her sentimental novels in order to undermine patriarchy and to offer an alternative structure of power in which she creates a new social order, challenges gender roles, and demands a more refined masculinity. In <em>Emmeline: The Orphan of the Castle</em>, Smith challenges traditional understandings of masculinity. By incorporating sensibility, she redefines masculinity by affirming its dependence on social status. Thus, Smith effectively establishes social authority as a more powerful force than patriarchy. In <em>Ethelinde or the Recluse of the Lake</em>, Smith further refines masculinity as she uses the power of society to advocate for an equalization of genders, not to degrade masculinity, but to indicate that both men and women are subject to social expectation, and thus to each other. Through her incorporation of sensibility and Gothic elements, Smith promotes a purified masculinity as her male characters must, under the more authoritative force of society, act with selflessness and charity. Smith’s new social structure constructs society as a disciplinary force to which men and women are equally subjected, and which replaces the tyrannical authority and gendered hierarchy evident in the traditional patriarchal structure. Ultimately, Smith promotes a new understanding of society as a gender-neutral space, which demands respectability determined not by wealth or status, but by morality and compassion for others.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

This dissertation examines Shakespeare’s role as the most significant precursor to the Gothic author in Britain, suggesting that Shakespeare used the same literary conventions that Gothic writers embraced as they struggled to create a new subgenre of the novel. By borrowing from Shakespeare’s canon, these novelists aimed to persuade readers and critics that rather than undermining the novel’s emergent, still unassured status as an acceptable literary genre, the nontraditional aspects of their works paid homage to Shakespeare’s imaginative vision. Gothic novelists thereby legitimized their attempts at literary expression. Despite these efforts, Gothic writers did not instantly achieve the type of acceptance or admiration that they sought. The Gothic novel has consistently been viewed as a monstrous, immature literary form—either a poor experiment in the history of the novel or a guilty pleasure for those who might choose to read or to write works that fit within this mode. Writers of Gothic fictions often claim that their works emulate Shakespeare’s dramatic pathos, but they do not acknowledge that the playwright also had to navigate similar opposition to his own creative expression. While early Gothic novelists had to contend with skeptical readers and reviewers, Shakespeare had to negotiate the religious, political, and ideological limitations that members of the court, the church, and the patronage system imposed upon his craft. Interestingly, Shakespeare often succeeded in circumventing these limitations by employing the literary techniques and topoi that we recognize today as trademarks of Gothic fiction—spectacle, sublime, sepulcher, and the supernatural. Each of these concepts expresses subversive intentions toward authoritative power. For Shakespeare and the Gothic novelists, the dramatic potential of these elements corresponds directly to their ability to target the sociocultural fears and anxieties of their audience; the results are works that frighten as well as amuse. As my dissertation will show, these authors use similar imagery to surreptitiously challenge the authority figures and institutions that sought to prescribe what makes a work of fiction socially acceptable or worthy of critical acclaim.

On the heels of an older generation of Romantic poets concerned with the individual’s role in creating reality, Percy Shelley defines perception as a mandatory building block for countering an external physical world that is hostile to the individual. Consequently, the question of perception, both how it is defined and how it can be influenced, plays an important role in Shelley’s works that focus on political and social change. The question of perception, as it relates to the individual and as it relates to social change, is brought to the forefront in Prometheus Unbound and his drama, The Cenci.

Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of collision montage can be applied to The Canterbury Tales because Chaucer’s writing is highly visual and often unconventional. This study analyzes several portraits and tales to demonstrate Chaucer’s literary collision montage technique. The opening lines of the General Prologue present the juxtaposition of the tripartite plant and humans to suggest commoners’ social immobility. The interruption of the Miller’s Tale clashes with the Knight’s to suggest the possibility of social mobility and to challenge traditional patriarchy. The latter half of the narrator’s description in the Wife of Bath’s portrait indicates a sexualized subtext through the juxtaposition of neutral images that undercuts her wealthy appearance. Chaucer’s literary collision montage technique is used to suggest the possibility of social mobility, and to reflect the disruption of the social hierarchy in late fourteenth-century England.

Daniel Westover traces Thomas's poetic development over six decades, demonstrating how the complex interior of the poet manifests itself in the continually shifting style of his poems. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1100/thumbnail.jpg