Reading the Cosmos and Reading the Poem in Early Modern English Poetry, 1579-1674 explores the relationship between early modern cosmology and poetry in England, arguing that the way the heavens are treated in poetry relates to the way the process of reading is understood in that poetry. By considering a range of poetic works across a period of about a century, the dissertation demonstrates an early modern poetic connection between ideas about astronomy and about reading. The multiple viewpoints in astronomy and cosmology in this period form a part of a larger history of uncertainty about the heavens that offers the means for poetic exploration of ideas about perception, self-definition, and world-creation. The first chapter considers the related concerns with the human microcosm and linguistic indeterminacy in works by Spenser and Donne. The second chapter deals with the astronomical imagery for reading the gendered other in the lyric sequences of the Sidney family. The third chapter addresses Milton’s attitude toward cosmology as an analogue for his process of interpreting the Bible, the natural world, and the poem. The fourth chapter considers Cavendish’s presentation of the plurality of worlds in the context of her natural philosophy and her poetics. Taken together, these works reveal strong ties between cosmology and the concepts of writing and reading poetry, the self, and the world in early modern English poetry. This dissertation, then, adds to the body of knowledge about early modern reading and perception by connecting the early modern experiences of perceiving the written word and the physical world. / 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 22, 2016. / astronomy, cosmology, early modern, English, Milton, poetry / Includes bibliographical references. / A. E. B. Coldiron, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Bruce Boehrer, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Svetla Slaveva-Griffin, University Representative; Elizabeth Spiller, Committee Member; Gary Taylor, Committee Member.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the rise of an intense interest in Anglo-Saxon history and artifacts that accompanied the transcription, translation, and dissemintation of the contents of England's monastic libraries following the Reformation begun in the 1530s. The tide of religious reform turned to more secular, legal concerns under the two early Stuart kings, and the pre-Norman past was used to simultaneously legitimize and criticize early-seventeenth-century monarchy and its ancient privileges by free monarchists and constitutionalists, respectively. Much of the modern criticism surrounding the constitutional crises of the reigns of James VI and I and Charles I as it relates to the Anglo-Saxon past focuses on Bede and the Benedictine Reformers of the tenth century. The present study, however, considers an often-cited text typically relegated to the periphery: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Chronicle makes its debut in print under the direction of Abraham Wheelock and the Cambridge University Press in 1643. The annalistic history appears alongside Bede's Historia Ecclesisatica, and, in the 1644 reprint and augmentation, the laws from Ine to Alfred and the later Anglo-Norman kings. Wheelock's editio princeps of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle appears at the height of the First English Civil War in 1643, and it is often treated by modern critics as an appendix to the Old English Historia to which it is attached. This dissertation argues that the Chronicle is not peripheral, and that it participates in a larger royalist campaign to establish the West Saxons as the institutional forbears of the first two Stuart kings. The opening chapters establish Wheelock and his literary circle as participants in the ongoing constitutional debate that culminated in the Personal Rule of Charles in 1629 and the opening years of the Civil Wars a decade later. After the political alleigances of those who surround the production of the 1643 Chronicle have been thoroughly considered, the focus of this study then turns to the text of the Chronicle itself. Wheelock inserts himself into the Chronicle's narrative by means of excision, substitution, and inconsistent translation so that the Chronicle may more easily conform to early modern perceptions of kingship. Specifically, his intervention into and manipulation of the genealogical West Saxon Regnal Table and his interpretation of the advisory body of the Anglo-Saxons known as the witan provide a lens through which to read the medieval Chronicle as a polticial document suitable for seventeenth-century purposes. Lastly, this dissertation traces the influences of the 1643 edition upon the only other Chronicle printed in that century—the 1692 version compiled and edited by Bishop Edmund Gibson. This final chapter argues that Gibson, like Wheelock, uses the Chronicle for political, and in the latter antiquary's case, nationalistic ends. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2017. / March 7, 2017. / Abraham Wheelock, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Antiquarianism, English Civil Wars, Seventeenth Century / Includes bibliographical references. / David F. Johnson, Professor Directing Dissertation; Charles E. Brewer, University Representative; A.E.B. Coldiron, Committee Member; Bruce Boehrer, Committee Member.

The preparation of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) for the college composition classroom has been a conversation in writing program administration scholarship for the last century. In that time, national position statements have been written articulating best practices for the design of these preparation programs in addition to the countless number of articles, chapters, and books taking up this topic. However, a large-scale study of these preparation programs has not been conducted for twenty years. In seeking to update the field’s knowledge of large-scale GTA writing pedagogy education (WPE) preparation, this dissertation describes how doctoral programs across the nation prepare their GTA instructors to enter the undergraduate composition classroom. The study employs a mixed-methods approach to describe GTA education and professionalization across institutions granting doctoral degrees in Rhetoric and Composition and includes a national survey along with three local case studies. The findings for this dissertation include the following: 1) WPE must often balance multiple purposes including the development of local, pedagogical, and theoretical knowledges, 2) WPAs employ a variety of strategies to manage those purposes such as blending, loading, and embedding, 3) The greatest constraint in designing and delivering WPE, as identified by this study’s respondents, is time, 4) The design of WPE is highly local in that it is deeply impacted by programmatic and administrative histories, local constraints, and the population who deliver and receive WPE. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2019. / April 15, 2019. / composition, GTA education, GTA preparation, writing pedagogy education, writing program administration / Includes bibliographical references. / Kathleen Blake Yancey, Professor Directing Dissertation; Vanessa Paz Dennen, University Representative; Michael Neal, Committee Member; Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Committee Member; Deborah Coxwell-Teague, Committee Member.

This dissertation brings together an archive of texts that both reflect and challenge the construction of a contemporary crisis of social mobility and working-class decline as a racial problem. British news media, political rhetoric, and creative work such as literature and film have increasingly represented the expansion of multicultural Britain, particularly after postwar decolonization, as responsible for the loss of the good life for the white working classes. In response to this causatively intertwined narrative of migrant mobilities and class stagnation, this doctoral project has developed an alternate dialogue between the present day and the postwar by examining social mobility as an affective genre in representations of race and class. By exploring literary and cinematic representations of urban mobilities, the home, and the school, my thesis demonstrates the ways in which social mobility materializes as an affective structure that shapes the connections between white working-class and migrant communities in more nuanced ways than has been portrayed by British media and politicians. My analysis of literature and film reveals that the affective genre of social mobility since the postwar era has tended to shore up the continuation and preservation of white nationalism through the marginalization and continued exploitation of racialized subjects. And yet, although the contemporary rhetorical construct of social mobility and its apparently racially-caused endangerment utilizes the white working class as its litmus test and ultimate victim, what the narrative of the good (white) life obfuscates is its inaccessibility for not just the racialized other, but for the white working classes as well. Thus, while my project teases out the colonial structuring of relationships between white working class and migrant and minority ethnic subjects within narratives of class desire, it also ultimately understands classed and racialized communities as jointly — if unevenly — impacted by capitalism. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This project critically examines the common portrayal of the decline of white working-class social mobility as caused by immigration and multiculturalism in British media, politics, and culture. In particular, this narrative of racially-caused social “immobility” cultivates a comparison between the postwar era, which was supposedly a time of working-class affluence, and the twenty-first century present, which is characterized through economic austerity and lack of opportunity for lower income communities. My dissertation counters this popular and politically motivated narrative by bringing together an archive of cultural material — literature, film, political speeches, and news media coverage — that provides a more nuanced description of interactions between the white working class and migrant communities in Britain from the postwar and contemporary eras. This thesis ultimately examines social mobility as a desire that mediates relationships between classed and racialized people under capitalism, rather than a pre-existing economic and social privilege that has been “taken away” by immigrants and the expansion of multiculturalism in Britain.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Michigan State University, Dept. of English, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on March 31, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 206-216). Also issued in print.

In my thesis, I focus on delineating 'The Cynic Sensibility' in British Popular Literature and Culture (1950-1987). Focusing primarily on literature and music (and, to a lesser extent, cinema/television), this works seeks to write a cultural history through analysing cultural texts. The sensibility has three key characteristics: I) it is a Bohemian sensibility; ii) it is apolitical, in that it does not endorse any political alternative to the status quo at any given time, and iii) it is popular, and exists across traditional high/low cultural lines. Connected to this last point is a tendency to oppose stylistic Modernism and its attendant obscurities. Underpinning my thesis are the work of the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk on cynicism as a philosophical phenomenon, and the cultural theory of Raymond Williams. Using this approach, I seek to not only connect spheres of culture which hitherto have been kept separate, but to provide a different insight into 20th century British cultural history.

Thesis advisor: Alan Richardson / Burgeoning exotic consumerism in the eighteenth century supplied British consumers with an increasingly material “Orient,” which never seemed so accessible as when it could be physically consumed, in the form of exotic groceries or ingestible substances like opium. My dissertation investigates how the linguistic representation of foreign, ingestible substances – which I call “exotic ingestants” – problematizes such attempts to access or master the Orient by underscoring the gap between literary trope and material thing. In the writings of Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Moore, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and others, exotic ingestion provides a flexible figure through which British authors do not just imagine the Orient, but also critically diagnose the ways in which that Orient functions as a cipher for domestic fears and fantasies. Their texts self-consciously highlight how both consumer practices and discursive representations fetishize, appropriate, or otherwise distort the Oriental “other” in question. A self-reflexive discursive mode, however, does not imply a consistently anti-imperial agenda. The authors in this study interrogate cultural binaries for a range of purposes, but what does remain consistent is that they do so in order to construct, renovate, or re-imagine their own sense of self. Going beyond the models of contamination or domestication that critics usually deploy when considering cultural representations of opium and tea, I investigate scenes of exotic ingestion as dynamic sites of identity formation, where British authors negotiate their national and transnational subjectivities by consciously engaging with constructions of cultural otherness. Each chapter compares two authors to spotlight one distinctive mode of cross-cultural imagination, and the way it plays out through figurations of exotic ingestion. Together, the four chapters trace a historical trajectory. The evolving scene of exotic ingestion offers an exemplary window into Britain’s construction of its own imperial identity, which develops in response to historical events such as the eighteenth-century consumer revolution, the 1851 Great Exhibition, and the Opium Wars with China. The prominently consumerist mode of British imaginations of China explains that rival empire’s particular, though not exclusive, significance to this project. Treating China as a case study but contextualizing it within both Sino-British relations and the Orientalist discursive tradition that emerged out of Britain’s reception of the Arabian Nights, this dissertation contributes to ongoing efforts at relocating British consciousness at the intersection of national, imperial, and global discourses and practices.

This dissertation takes as its starting point Leo Tolstoy's famous contention that the works of the Russian literary canon represent "deviation[s] from European forms." It is envisioned as a response to (or an elaboration upon) critical works that address the unique rise, formation, and poetics of the Russian novel, many of which are themselves responses (or Russian corollaries) to Ian Watt's study of the rise of the novel in England; and it functions similarly under the assumption that the singularity of the Russian novel is a product of various idiosyncrasies in the Russian cultural milieu. The project is structured as a comparative examination of two pairs of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels from Russia and England, and as such it approaches the question of the Russian novel's distinctiveness in the form of a literary experiment. By engaging in close readings of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) alongside Mikhail Chulkov's The Comely Cook (Prigozhaia povarikha, 1770), and Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853) alongside Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (1880), concentrating particularly on matters of formal design, corporeal integrity and vulnerability, and communal harmony and discord--and by understanding the English texts as a "control group" for an examination of the Russian deviation--it attempts to identify some of the distinctive features of the Russian realist novel. The largest portion of the dissertation is dedicated to The Brothers Karamazov, which I take as an emblematic work in a literary canon that is distinguished by intimations that healing and recovery--as well as the coexistence of both personal freedom and communal rapport--are possible in the real world and in realist narrative.

This dissertation argues that the early modern discourse of conduct, which produced social difference within English households and communities, took on greater importance in a newly global world. In the conduct-obsessed culture of early modern England, two competing and contradictory beliefs about the nature of social difference emerged. The first of these was an ideology of cultivation, a widespread belief that social identity was malleable, that socio-economic status could be determined by measuring an individual's adherence to accepted codes of conduct. The second belief depended upon the idea that social difference was fixed and naturally determined, and thus that somatic differences such as sex and race were deeply significant. For those bearing stigmatized somatic marks, particularly women and non-Europeans, access to cultivating strategies was systematically circumscribed, and this process of socio-economic differentiation was understood as the natural consequence of bodily difference. This dissertation examines the discourse of conduct at work in both domestic and global contexts through early modern English conduct literature, guides to self-improvement through specific cultivating activities or strategies; through plays that stage cultivation as beneficial to self, community, and nation; and through travel writing, where authors attempt to make sense of unfamiliar customs and behaviors. In these works the social and material benefits of cultivation achieved through practices such as good husbandry, educational travel, and hunting for sport are affirmed, even as the limited access of some groups to these same cultivating strategies is reiterated.

How do Victorian novels, those detailed imaginative records of psychic interiority and social life, put into language the aspect of our interior lives that seems most stubbornly nonlinguistic: that is, the insistent claims and impulses of erotic desire? If Victorian culture valued reason and accountability over sheer erotic fulfillment, and at the same time represented love and desire as important social experiences, then how did the Victorian novel represent the process of reasoning about desire without diluting its intensity or making it mechanical? In "Bad Logic," I argue that a surprising array of novelists, including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Henry James, registered the troublesome opacity of erotic life by experimenting with forms of "bad logic," from hasty conclusions to contradictions to tautologies, and finally to the ethical and erotic possibilities of vagueness. These forms bring into view the limitations of logic as a rubric for moral accountability, while at the same time they work as ironic and tacit ways of speaking and thinking about erotic desire. In other words, in the Victorian novel, the singular, embodied feelings of erotic life are imagined not as ineffable, nonsocial, or fully beyond the explanatory powers of logic and the rational mind. Rather, erotic desires represent a profound depth of psychic and affective life that, even in its resistance to sound propositional language, wants to be understood. The resurgence of interest in theories of logic in nineteenth-century England was in fact intimately related to the philosophical problem of the deep, idiosyncratic self that seems to exceed scientific knowledge about thought and its structures, but which nonetheless guides so much of psychic, ethical, and erotic life. Philosophers and social critics as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, George Boole, and George Eliot took up the stubborn problem of logic and its complex relationship to character. But it was the realist novel, I argue, that allowed for the fullest development of this problem through its own strategies for developing fictional character and representing the fullness of psychic and affective life and its often difficult social expression. That the Victorians talked and wrote endlessly about sex and sexuality, in a variety of medical, scientific, sociological, and psychological vocabularies, has been taken for granted since Foucault provided us with our most enduring account of the Victorian "logic of sex." With "Bad Logic," I enter into an ongoing reappraisal of Foucault's influence on the study of sexuality by suggesting that the Victorian impulse toward talking about and representing sexuality and desire may have had a more complex rationale than a utilitarian desire to manage and regulate sexual behaviors. Foucault's late work turned to sexual practice or ethos as a potentially utopian alternative to the "discourse" of sexuality, and yet I argue that novelistic representations of eroticism in language can extend well beyond issues of social power and regulation. Rather, they insist upon the ethical significance of erotic life and upon the importance of balancing the imperatives of rationality against the imperatives of idiosyncrasy. They take seriously, in other words, the difficulties of registering the impulses of the body in language. In addition, "Bad Logic" takes a new approach to a very old question in the study of the novel: how does this genre balance idiosyncrasy with social compromise, or assimilate the individual consciousness to the historically specific social pressures that necessarily shape it? Many critics have answered this question either by detailing the ways in which the novel form itself habituates the individual to ideology (Bersani, Armstrong, D. A. Miller), or on the other hand by showing that some normative models of social intelligibility, such as the liberal ideal of detachment or the ethical ideal of perfectionism, are not incompatible with a powerful model of individual agency (Anderson, Hadley, A. Miller). In "Bad Logic," I propose that in the Victorian novel, even the opacity of erotic life finds its way into models of sociability. Moreover, I show that novelists struggle to make their theories of ethical responsibility capacious enough to accommodate the insistent pressure of erotic desire as it tries to make itself heard.