The fictions of James Kelman are most intriguing when read in terms of the frictions they reveal. This thesis defines these frictions and uses theories of exile, postcoloniality, nationalism, space and the “ordinary” in order to elucidate them. Kelman’s career has been fraught with tensions born of a troubled relationship with the British literary establishment. Kelman puts this down to the censorship and elitism he believes define that establishment, and his self-confessed refusal to conform to its expectations. This thesis considers the perception of exile that has become the vantage point from which he has written about the lives of marginalised characters and through which he deconstructs Scottish identity and the plight of the Glaswegian working classes. This thesis focuses on three of Kelman’s finest works of fiction: How Late It Was, How Late (1994), A Disaffection (1989) and The Busconductor Hines (1984), each of which was written in the period between Margaret Thatcher’s taking office in 1979 and Scotland’s successful devolution in 1997. This period has proved to be a defining one for Scotland and its latter years have been marked by the development of a newly confident sense of Scottish identity which rejects English hegemony as well traditionally parochial notions of Scottishness. This has informed, and been informed by, a new movement within Scottish literature that seeks to relaunch Scottish culture through a rejection of both past frustrations and “couthie” representations of Scotland in favour of more productive explorations of wider human concerns. This thesis makes a case for the key role Kelman has played in this shift, and challenges the widely held perception that his work does little more that mourn a past way of life and expose a relentlessly bleak present.

This project analyzes discourses of social legibility in eighteenth-century self-writing to argue that status-based conceptions of identity continued to influence perceptions of the self in society. Studies of the eighteenth century have been dominated by a "rise of the middle class" narrative that tends to underestimate the resilience and continued relevance of conceptions of rank as an essentialized or innate quality. However, social legibility--the idea that status was encoded on the body through clothing, manners, beauty, grace, and countenance--continue to function, particularly in the self-writing of this period. By examining these epistolary novels, fictional memoirs, diaries, autobiographies, and letters, this project clarifies how people imagined social hierarchy operating at the level of the body. The ways people recognize, enact, theorize, and represent status help us better understand how identity was reconceived between the Restoration in 1600 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.

Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes / Networking Modernist Institutions: Technologies of Literature in Yeats, Joyce, Gissing, and Woolf explores how authors, readers, and books were linked through complex institutions that produced, distributed, organized, and manipulated literary works. More specifically, I argue that often-overlooked literary systems, such as the private press industry, postal service, and libraries, governed the interaction between books and people. In doing so, I look first to W. B. Yeats and the bookmaking traditions that shaped his notion of a sacred book of literature. By leveraging private press networks, I suggest, Yeats attempted to reimagine the book as a sacred object capable of challenging a commercialized and commodified literary world and enacting a poetic and national tradition distinct from the dominant patterns of literary production in the early twentieth century. I then trace the physical movement of texts through a study of the postal service, arguing that James Joyce reveals the various relays, diversions, destructions, and interventions associated with the movement of mail in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), and more importantly, that Joyce’s formal experiment emanates from these everyday experiences of the mail, as books, printed and delivered, settling on the shelves of private and public institutions. The fiction of George Gissing gives insight into the uses of such spaces on the eve of modernism. I argue that Gissing’s chronicle of libraries and their uses in the late nineteenth century provides insight into how modernist authors’ ambivalence about the library and its social consequences. Finally, I turn to the fiction of Virginia Woolf, revealing some of the ways books existed as objects in the early twentieth century. As a printer, publisher, binder, reader, and writer, Woolf recognized books as everyday objects that demanded her care and attention. In her fiction, she imagines the ways in which books simultaneously build tangible barriers and create modes of intimacy. Consequently, she inscribes a modernist sense of the book that simultaneously unites its readers ideologically while keeping them physically at a distance. By extending recent studies of modernism’s response to the shifting media ecology of its day and the importance of historical readings of the bibliographical context of modernist works, I shed light on literary representations of these institutional spaces and their influence on modernist forms. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Since 1928 The First Part of the Contention and Richard Duke of York (texts printed separately in the 1590s) have been regarded as memorial reconstructions of two texts printed in 1623 in the folio edition of Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, where they are instead identified as Henry the Sixth, Part Two and Henry the Sixth, Part Three. Although recent scholarship has called into question the validity of the memorial reconstruction hypothesis in general and has demonstrated aesthetic differences between the “bad quartos” and the 1623 Folio as a sign of distinctive authorial engagements, most reference works and critical editions of the Henry VI plays maintain the 1928 view. This dissertation challenges the validity of textual evidence presented in support of the memorial reconstruction hypothesis and argues that Contention and Duke of York are based on authentic manuscripts and Folio Henry VI plays are based on revised, collaborative texts. The alleged signs of memorial corruption are also found in contemporary authorial manuscripts of other plays, and an examination of textual disruptions in the Henry VI texts shows signs of authorial engagements. A number of passages unique to the earlier printings contain independent references to chronicle sources, which disputes the memorial reconstruction hypothesis that piratical actors improvised the passages that are absent in the Folio when their memory failed. Because the memorial reconstruction hypothesis was, from its origins, committed to the idea that Shakespeare was the sole author of all the Henry VI plays, the dissertation also critically reviews external and internal evidence in regard to the authorship and date of the Henry VI plays, ranging from contemporary documentary evidence to most recent computational analyses. It also examines the implication of collaborative intersection between Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare in the plays written before the 1594 formation of the Chamberlain’s Men texts; in particular, it compares the two texts printed in the 1590s with the 1623 Folio texts by showing that Queen Margret in the Folio is a Shakespearean adaptation of an earlier Marlovian portrayal. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2018. / June 18, 2018. / Authorship, Christopher Marlowe, Collaboration, Henry VI, Revision, William Shakespeare / Includes bibliographical references. / Gary Taylor, Professor Directing Dissertation; Theresa Mategrano, University Representative; Bruce Boehrer, Committee Member; Barry Faulk, Committee Member.

This collection of personal essays and short fiction investigates a post-9/11 America locked in forever war. Centered upon the American veteran and the veteran family experience, Anchor & Knife showcases wide-ranging narratives that challenge conventional models of war literature by combining fiction and creative nonfiction genres into a single work as well as expanding the aperture of battle-scene focus to a much larger, holistic investigation of individuals searching for peace while wrestling with their culpability in violence. As important, this collection explores the close proximity of trauma, not only through the lens of war, but also in family, religion, sex, and popular American culture. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2016. / March 21, 2016. / Includes bibliographical references. / Robert Olen Butler, Professor Directing Dissertation; G. Kurt Piehler, University Representative; Bob Shacochis, Committee Member; Diane Roberts, Committee Member; Mark Winegardner, Committee Member.

The dissertation manuscript Count Four is a collection of poems that attempts to address the often-conflicting identities of their speakers. Thematically, these poems cover a broad array of personal topics such as family, suicide, fame, fear, violence, and intimate relationships. All of these often-disparate subjects connect with each other, often in the same poem, in order to create an origin story for a speaker whose life is in constant contradiction with itself. The speaker in these poems has spent his life maneuvering the space on the fringes of society, and the consequences of this lifestyle have left the speaker to deal with the emotional trauma. Stylistically, these poems are in direct conversation with the free-verse tradition of American contemporary and confessional poetry. However, the formal and stylistic choices in this manuscript have the genealogy of a literary mongrel because they draw not only from a wide range of poetic styles, but also from a large pool of cultural and musical influences that allow the poems to translate personal experience through the lens of cultural identity. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2016. / February 5, 2016. / Poetry / Includes bibliographical references. / Erin Belieu, Professor Directing Dissertation; Lori Walters, University Representative; Barbara Hamby, Committee Member; James Kimbrell, Committee Member; Daniel Vitkus, Committee Member.

Some saints have poverty. Others, the ill or indigent. Evelyn Ellenberger has herself. This novel deals with themes of asceticism and sainthood as the main character, Evelyn, experiences mystic visions of St. Catherine of Siena and tries to prove to her family and to herself that she, too, is destined for sainthood. As a young girl, Evelyn Ellenberger experiences a freak accident with a neighbor's bull. Though she miraculously survives the encounter, the incident leaves her permanently scarred and inspired. Throughout her adolescence Evelyn is isolated and ostracized for a mysterious illness, which her psychiatrist father diagnoses as a case of Anorexia Mirabilis, a miraculous lack of appetite most commonly seen among medieval saints. Initially, her father is her only supporter until he tries to exploit his daughter's extreme asceticism for personal gain. Years later, Evelyn Ellenberger suspects that she is pregnant and risks her relationship with her husband to pursue her own veneration as the saint she believes she is destined to become. A semi-recovered and pregnant Evelyn returns to her childhood home just as Hurricane Sandy is about to hit. Convinced that her pregnancy is the second miracle needed for sainthood, Evelyn scours her father's home and office determined to prove her case for canonization. Over the course of the novel, the characters discover that no one is as pure and holy as they claim to be. At the height of the storm, Evelyn realizes that saints aren't extraordinary people but ordinary people who do extraordinary things and that all of us could be saints if you catch us in the right moment. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2016. / February 2, 2016. / Includes bibliographical references. / Robert Olen Butler, Professor Directing Dissertation; Robert Contreras, University Representative; David Kirby, Committee Member; Barbara Hamby, Committee Member.

This dissertation examines the unique social relationships formed between white Creole characters and their Anglo-English counterparts in Romantic-era women’s fiction. Guided by Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, my dissertation terms these social relationships "negative bonds," which are defined as affective exchanges of both sympathy and negative feeling. Guilt, disgust, and shame—all negative affects—occur in tandem with sympathy during moments when white Creole characters attempt to assimilate to British culture. Through their eventual failure, white Creole characters engender sympathy and experience negative affects from the Anglo-English characters, creating negative bonds that reinforce racial binaries and national boundaries. In using Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings to further conceptualize negative bonds, I extend the discussion to include contemporary theories of affective exchanges. While Ngai’s text explores figures who are oppressed by negative affects, my dissertation looks to the oppressors themselves, illuminating the role that affect plays within racialized discourse. Thus, analysis of negative bonds puts pressure upon texts that participate in maintaining social systems that continually exclude women from social equality and political rights. Negative bonds are most explicitly rendered through interactions with white Creole characters because they exist in geographical (Caribbean/Britain), national (Anglo-English/British-Caribbean), and racial (white/black) liminal spaces. Initially accepted into the ranks of elite social circles, white Creole characters threaten the "purity" of British society and test the limits of inclusionary and abolitionist discourse. While Romantic-era women’s fiction should position white Creole characters to dismantle social, racial, and economic systems of oppression, negative bonds confirm the Anglo-English characters’ superiority through affective exchanges with the "other." Ultimately, negative bonds solidify the white Creole’s "otherness" and maintain social order by ensuring the reproduction of British social hierarchies. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester 2016. / October 19, 2016. / Includes bibliographical references. / Eric Walker, Professor Directing Dissertation; Lisa Wakamiya, University Representative; Meegan Kennedy Hanson, Committee Member; Candace Ward, Committee Member.

In “Some Thoughts about Feelings,” Susan McLeod encourages teachers to develop a “theory of affect” that could account for the various emotional processes that students encounter while writing (433). One contribution to such a theory concerns self-efficacy, a mechanism by which students interpret this emotional, sensory input. Self-efficacy plays a crucial role in understanding how students write as both a cognitive and affective activity. As students engage with various texts, they enter into a process wherein they must mediate and interpret the skills they possess. These interpretations, and the beliefs on which they are based, can significantly enable or hinder writers as they engage in the composing process. Therefore, students' self-efficacy beliefs are vital to their success as writers, both inside and outside of the classroom. Although a significant amount of research explores self-efficacy as related to motivation and performance outcomes, little has been done to map the potential fluctuations of students’ self-efficacy beliefs throughout the composing process. As students progress through a writing assignment, they encounter challenges to their self-efficacy, such as reading the assignment sheet, drafting, receiving feedback, revising, and assessment. These challenges suggest that self-efficacy is not a stable phenomenon; rather, self-efficacy very probably fluctuates as students engage with the challenges presented by a specific task. Understanding the nature of potential fluctuations is important, then, both in a theory of self-efficacy and in teaching writing. Accordingly, this study seeks to determine if, how, when, and from what causes students’ self-efficacy fluctuates over the course of a single writing assignment involving multiple drafts. To examine potential fluctuations in students’ self-efficacy, I conducted a case study with two students enrolled in a single section of ENC 1101. I interviewed each of the participants face to face twice—once before they reviewed the assignment and again after they submitted the assignment to be graded—in order to create a narrative arc of their sense of self-efficacy throughout the assignment. These interviews were supplemented by self-assessment questionnaires that were completed by students at four designated moments chosen by the researcher and one spontaneous moment chosen by the subjects. The questionnaires consist of two parts: a quantitative self-assessment and a qualitative reflection. The quantitative self-assessment operates as a self-efficacy scale in order to determine how students perceive their abilities at specific moments in the writing process. Following each of the five quantitative assessment occasions, students were then asked to respond to a prompt designed to engage them in a qualitative reflection. These qualitative reflections were coded to determine self-efficacy fluctuations, sources of self-efficacy beliefs, and strategies that students evolved to cope with potential fluctuations. I triangulated these data to generate a rich description of the potential ebbs and flows of self-efficacy across the composing process. My data reveals that self-efficacy does fluctuate as students engage with a single assignment involving multiple drafts. However, the fluctuations manifested in different ways and to different degrees. Fluctuations occurred both from moment to moment during the composing process as well as within each discrete moment of the writing process. Additionally, the students reported that performance accomplishments, social persuasion, and physiological reactions played a role in determining their efficacy perceptions and, thus, in triggering fluctuations. The students drew from these sources to varying degrees, and interpreted the sources differently. These data suggest that the sources students draw from to determine their efficacy beliefs vary from study to student and that the more influential sources are most likely to trigger fluctuations. Finally, this study explores the strategies students evolved to address fluctuations. The results of this study illustrate the need for compositionists to attend to what points in the writing process fluctuations are likely to occur, what factors in the writing process might trigger those fluctuations, and what strategies students evolve to address fluctuations. To that end, these findings invite compositionists to reconsider the role of self-efficacy in the writing classroom, and subsequently alter our pedagogy to account for fluctuations in self-efficacy beliefs as our students compose. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Summer Semester 2016. / June 20, 2016. / affect, composition, fluctuation, process, self-efficacy, writing / Includes bibliographical references. / Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Professor Directing Thesis; Michael R. Neal, Committee Member; Kathleen Blake Yancey, Committee Member.

Most early modern playwrights exploit the tonal and representational advantages of prose on stage, and this is especially true of Shakespeare: with the exception of King John and Richard II, all of Shakespeare’s unassisted plays incorporate dramatic prose speeches as a complement to and deviation from dramatic verse. Yet despite the incontrovertible ubiquity of dramatic prose in Shakespeare’s works and on the early modern stage more generally, we currently lack the analytical and methodological terminology necessary to describe how Shakespeare’s prose is different from anyone else’s. This descriptive lapse becomes especially important when we realize that with the exception of 1 and 3 Henry VI, every play with a contested attribution to Shakespeare incorporates dramatic prose speeches. My dissertation examines three separate but interrelated problems in early modern studies: what constitutes dramatic prose? What specific forms does it assume in Shakespeare’s canon? And can we differentiate Shakespeare’s dramatic prose from dramatic prose written by his contemporaries? Drawing on a sustained engagement with the dramatic prose of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, my project illuminates the critical and literary grounds for determining the unique characteristics of Shakespeare’s dramatic prose. The structure and scope of my analysis position this aspect of Shakespeare’s style on interconnected critical and computational trajectories with marked theoretical and empirical outcomes. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2016. / April 21, 2016. / attribution, dramatic prose, Marlowe, Shakespeare / Includes bibliographical references. / Gary Taylor, Professor Directing Dissertation; Mary Karen Dahl, University Representative; Anne Coldiron, Committee Member; David Gants, Committee Member; Elizabeth Spiller, Committee Member.