In these novels, Woolf demonstrates the ways in which wartime trauma affects post-war life, from the societal trauma of losing an entire generation in Jacob’s Room, to the continuation of wartime beyond the end of the war for traumatized soldiers and anyone whose lives they touch in Mrs. Dalloway, to recovery through the creation of art and family ties in To the Lighthouse, to the question of futurity inherent in wartime trauma in The Years.

Book Illustration and Intersemiotic Translation in Early Modern England establishes new terms for assessing the effects of woodcut image reproduction on literary meaning in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printed books. Specifically, this project considers the recycling of illustrations in England and across continental Europe that afforded vernacular readers a transnational advantage of shared visual language. As early modern printers and illustrators traced, copied, and reprinted images, translators shifted verbal signifiers for new audiences. Each chapter examines the ways in which illustration can inflect form and genre in emblem, lyric, and epic poetry, respectively. Drawing on critical methods of literary and translation studies, book history, and illustration, this project contributes to an interdisciplinary understanding of illustrated poetry and the ways in which the production of pictures significantly affects textual reception. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / March 19, 2018. / Includes bibliographical references. / A. E. B. Coldiron, Professor Directing Dissertation; Stephanie Leitch, University Representative; Gary Taylor, Committee Member; Bruce Boehrer, Committee Member.

How do we understand our encounter with ambivalent or visceral aesthetic feelings—textual environments, moods, and atmospheres—if they do not solely belong to the representation of individual or collective emotions? This dissertation proposes a concept of “the feeling of form” to approach these aesthetic feelings as formal dynamics, such as restless orientations and rhythmic intensities. How can literary forms have feelings, and where—or is it necessary—to locate the textual body and the subject of these feelings? The goal of my dissertation is not to show what specific neurological procedures are involved in the emotive-cognitive entanglement between the text and the reader, but to understand “form” as a verb—forming, shaping, mediating, transmitting—whose dynamics and actions manifest the narrative form’s visceral aesthetic feelings, and to examine how such feelings bear significant cultural and political currency. Reading formal dynamics as aesthetic feelings also invites us to adjust our usual gaze at “form” away from categories coined by various formalisms, such as “genre,” “structure,” “focalization,” or “style.” In doing so, we are able to reimagine these categories as part of the dynamics of formal reorientations, rhythms, and syntactic intensities, and to open ourselves up to the impersonal agency and criticality of literary forms. Based on these convictions, my dissertation argues that reading for the feeling of form allows us to experience how literary forms transmit and regenerate volatile experiences of history in ways that complicate, supplement, or subvert the explicit representation of historical events and temporality in a literary text. In this dissertation, I focus on the relationship between the feeling of form and the experience of various histories in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924–1928), Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair (1932–1934), Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet (1957–60), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s single-volume novel The Unconsoled (1995). Chapter One traces how nauseous form in Parade’s End allows us to experience wartime and postwar anxiety through Christopher Tietjens’s self-revolting and incoherent consciousness. Chapter Two examines how the deterioration of rhythm in A Scot’s Quair transmits a historical experience of gradual suffocation intricately linked with Scotland’s political and ecological disasters. In a brief Coda, I conclude my project by looking at how The Alexandria Quartet and The Unconsoled manifest weakened and depleted feelings of form, and how these feelings prompt us to rethink the relationship of the feeling of form to European heteronormative ideology and the ethics of community formation. The Unconsoled (1995), in particular, serves as a twofold limit case of the feeling of form: first, as a limit case of the futile feeling of form, and second, as a limit case of the distinction between the novel form and the novel series form. This twofold limit case speaks to its own historical experience of futility at the end of history, and responds to the aesthetic and ideological legacies of early twentieth-century experimental novel series. / Graduate / 2021-05-12

Influenced by post-Lacanian psychoanalytic feminist theory and Judith Butler’s theories of gender performativity, this project examines three fictional brooding male writers from three separate periods of twentieth-century Ireland and Britain and their performances of authenticity, authority, and exceptionalism as artist figures. By tracing a sociohistorical arc and conducting close literary analyses, this project argues that the myth of white male artistic genius is derived from the power and privilege of a cult of individuality that can be used to excuse and justify harmful behaviour and that comes at the exclusion and expense of those outside this highly specific version of hegemonic masculinity. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, and Sarah Kane’s Blasted undermine the myth of male artistic genius by exposing the artificial and theatrical nature of the notion of “authenticity” and the posture of being countercultural when one is part of a dominating elite.

This study reconsiders power dynamics and authorial style through a study of the structure of interruptions. By considering this everyday occurrence as an aesthetic phenomenon, literary critics can more fully understand the relationships inherent in drama, itself a relational art form. This dissertation illuminates how the everyday becomes aesthetic and how the aesthetic helps us to comprehend the everyday. Interruptions are ubiquitous both in everyday life as well as within literature. While sociologists and linguists have studied them in their quotidian occurrences, literary and performance scholars have almost completely ignored their aesthetic iterations. Some recent studies into this structure evaluate poetry and prose, but rarely consider drama, and even in the studies of prose and poetry, interruptions are deployed as a structure inherently understood. This dissertation offers a fuller consideration and evaluation by studying interruptions through their comprising elements and their distinctive types. This study examines early modern drama as an exemplary, influential moment of dramatic output, focusing on the works of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Fletcher. Through an informed neo-formalism, this dissertation reveals two significant aspects of interruptive structures. First, interruptions demonstrate dynamic power relationships not only among characters within a play, but also between an audience and a performer or a reader and a text. Second, interruption usages indicate aspects of authorial style, emphasizing a playwright’s use and control of a text and its implications/expectations. The chapters of the dissertation explore four types of internal interruptions, or those which an author writes into the text. Chapter Two examines dialogic microinterruptions, which are specific moments within dialogue where a conversant speaks out of turn. Through exemplary scenes within Volpone, The Tempest, and The Humorous Lieutenant, the chapter develops an understanding of both the shifting power relationships among the characters and how the playwrights approach those shifts in building character and community. Chapter Three examines another type of internal microinterruption, the self-interruption. By considering the methodology and rhetoric of stopping oneself on stage, the chapter reveals the emotional, manipulative, and comedic usages of the structure, while developing a reading of each author’s approach to interiority and character. The final two chapters focus on macrointerruptions, or those that disrupt larger governing structures within a text. Chapter Four explores dramaturgical macrointerruptions through audience expectations of structure. Through Jonson’s Grex in Every Man Out, Shakespeare’s surprise reveal of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, and Fletcher’s exposition in The Chances, each playwright explores the possibilities of rupturing dramatic structures and the effects that such ruptures create for audiences. The final chapter examines interruption of theatrical conventions, specifically through the convention of male to female crossdressing. As this type of crossdressing was not as prevalent as female to male in the period, it presents an already interrupted convention, that the authors, in plays such as Epicene and The Loyal Subject, further complicate through the relationship between the convention and the expectation. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / April 10, 2018. / Dialogue, Dramaturgy, Fletcher, Interruption, Jonson, Shakespeare / Includes bibliographical references. / Gary Taylor, Professor Directing Dissertation; Kris Salata, University Representative; S. E. Gontarski, Committee Member; Terri Bourus, Committee Member.

This dissertation argues that certain late-medieval British travelers intended more than simply to journey from place to place. Their travel writing reveals that they had other goals to accomplish, beyond the expected ones of seeing a new place or visiting a particular holy site. I am using three traveler-authors and their works: William Wey’s The Itineraries of William Wey (1458-62), Gerald of Wales’s The Description of Wales and The Journey Through Wales (c. 1191), and Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe (c.1436). This study begins with two chapters devoted to the nature of travel and travel writing in the Middle Ages, and an introduction of the three travelers. Why and how did people travel, and why did they leave written accounts? I will address two important discussions in the field—the idea of curiosity as a motivator for medieval travelers, and the debate best described as “communitas vs. the individual.” Chapters 3-5 will then address the individual authors. While all three certainly traveled for religious reasons such as pilgrimage or Crusade recruitment, each had multiple objectives for having their travels committed to paper. William Wey wanted to give helpful advice to others, and provide a substitute pilgrimage experience for those back in England who were unable to make the journey themselves. Gerald of Wales was traveling with high-ranking churchmen to encourage the Welsh to go on Crusade, but his ultimate goal was that of self-promotion, both for his literary travails and his future employment opportunities. Margery Kempe didn’t begin her travels with a specific goal in mind, other than to visit popular pilgrimage sites. However, once abroad, she develops a female fellowship—something she often lacked at home, and something she did not find amongst her travel companions. The conclusion will summarize my assessment of each author’s account, proving that each formed his/her identity through travel and travel writing. I will also address what they ultimately gained or lost by writing their accounts. Wey successfully guides future pilgrims, actual and virtual. Gerald hopes to highlight his own worth, but never gains the position he desires. Kempe is the most successful, finally finding a welcoming, feminine sphere. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2016. / May 10, 2016. / Gerald of Wales, Margery Kempe, Travel, William Wey / Includes bibliographical references. / David F. Johnson, Professor Directing Dissertation; Charles Brewer, University Representative; Anne Coldiron, Committee Member; David Gants, Committee Member; Nancy Bradley Warren, Committee Member.

Taking up recent arguments associated with New Lyric Studies, contemporary genre theory, and historical poetics, this dissertation examines the trajectory of the dramatic element in twentieth-century poetry and its specific practice in the verse drama. Particularly, it argues that the persistent interest among twentieth-century poets in composing verse drama arises out of a resistance to what has been called the lyricization of poetry. By investigating the dramas of poets as diverse as Sadakichi Hartmann, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Robert Lowell, and Derek Walcott, among others, this study reconsiders poets’ engagements with the theater as endeavors vital to poetic, and not merely theatrical history. Through an examination of the poetic dramas of Hartmann and Eliot, I argue that the ways modernist poets deploy ritual are not merely anthropological, disinterested acts, but part of a larger interest in creating liturgical, actionable works of poetry, reforming our ideas of modernist interest in religious practices and communal experiences of poetry. Further, I argue that the verse dramas of Stein and Barnes help us to re-frame narratives of poetic subjectivity and repudiate the purported “death of tragedy” in a lyric age, developing a more full picture of poetry’s ability to engage with and present traumatic experience. In the final chapter, I demonstrate by looking to the verse dramas of Lowell and Walcott the ways that the verse drama challenges the lyric’s perceived a-historical status, finding in the theater a place for historical and political engagement. Thus, this dissertation addresses a current scholarly gap in the study of twentieth-century poetry by examining an oft-overlooked, yet vital form created during an era associated with the dominance of the lyric, and argues that by including verse dramas in contemporary accounts of poetry, we find a more fully-formed perspective of twentieth-century poetics and, particularly, the possibilities of poetic practice beyond the boundaries of the lyric. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2016. / June 30, 2016. / History, Lyric, Poetry, Resistance, Tragedy, Verse Drama / Includes bibliographical references. / Andrew Epstein, Professor Directing Dissertation; Lisa Wakamiya, University Representative; S. E. Gontarski, Committee Member; Robert Stilling, Committee Member.

One of the key issues that arises when discussing the long eighteenth century is that of identity: self/individual, and group/national. Whereas recent critical work in both literary studies and historiography has concerned itself with the circumstances surrounding the long eighteenth century's fundamental shifts in conceptions of identity, much of this work overlooks the potential for identity to be relational, rather than either exterior or interior to an individual/group. This dissertation explores the relational nature of identity formation in the long eighteenth century by examining a literary genre and a character that depend upon relational interactions in order to sustain themselves: stage comedies and lawyers. Representative dramatic comedies by writers such as George Farquhar, Richard Cumberland, Thomas Lewis O'Beirne, William Wycherly, Christopher Bullock, Henry Fielding, John O'Keeffe, Colley Cibber, George Colman and David Garrick, and Samuel Foote, offer opportunities to study staged representations of lawyers whose clients' issues essentially become those of identity formation. This dissertation argues that, for many characters struggling to establish an identity that can participate in a national British identity, the key to such participation lies in access to real property; when access to real property is denied them, they must turn to someone who is himself struggling to establish an identity. At this point, lawyers in eighteenth-century British comedies become much more than stock characters or mere comic relief. Instead, the lawyer—often ostracized and derided himself—becomes a mediator not just of individual identity, but of "Britishness." Careful attention to lawyers' success representing different types of clients struggling to establish identities through access to real property highlights both the power of relational identity formation and the key roles that arguably minor characters have in arbitrating issues of national significance. / 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 27, 2017. / British drama, British literature, Eighteenth century, Identity, Law and literature / Includes bibliographical references. / Helen M. Burke, Professor Directing Dissertation; Charles Upchurch, University Representative; Celia R. Caputi, Committee Member; Candace Ward, Committee Member.

This project establishes a critical framework for the examination of a recently emerged trend in speculative fictions texts, which I have dubbed "fantasy remix." Through close examination of two exemplary texts that exhibit the characteristics of fantasy remix, Once Upon a Time and Grimm, I establish a method by which fantasy remix can be identified and examined for its strength as a tool of resistance, subversion, and conformity. There are three major characteristics of the technique that can be used to identify most fantasy remix texts: 1) the incorporation and adaptation of multiple pre-existing fantastic characters, plots, and motifs, such as from fairy tales, folklore, or mythology; 2) the juxtaposition of these fantasy elements with contemporary culture and/or settings; and 3) an emphasis on narrative and/or structural temporal complexity. Fantasy remix texts displaying these characteristics make liberal use of speculative fiction's tendency to subvert reality and to enable its consumers to resist the sometimes-overwhelming bombardment of cultural ideology that suffuses the real world. The fantasy remix's simultaneous tendency to conform, at least superficially, to the status quo increases its chances of effective subversion and resistance, creating a semi-paradoxical situation in which that which does not fit becomes a source of cultural reflection. This dissertation examines the way the fantasy remix technique helps to dismantle and critique ideological conceptions of morality, law, and justice; immanent causality, especially race and racism; and the temporal order inherent to causality, and thus to our ability to make meaning from the world. Meant as a means to expand speculative fiction scholarship with regard to a specific niche technique, the questions posed by this analysis serve as an example for new ways of approaching the dialectic possibilities of a contemporary culture that creatively cannibalizes its own past. / 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 29, 2017. / fantasy, justice, racism, remix, television, temporality / Includes bibliographical references. / Barry Faulk, Professor Directing Dissertation; Donna Marie Nudd, University Representative; Trinyan Mariano, Committee Member; Christina Parker-Flynn, Committee Member.

This project seeks to examine the way in which modernist novelists John Dos Passos, Claude McKay, Louis Aragon, and Virginia Woolf depict urban spaces in the early-twentieth century metropolises of New York, Paris, and London. These writers depict spaces that have been influenced by capitalist and imperialist powers, yet they also depict places within the urban environment that serve as locations of resistance where they depict power's damaging effects on the spaces of the city. Drawing on significant conversations in the field of postmodern geography, my project situates these modernist writers as critics of the power's ability to produce its own spaces that it, in turn, uses to control and produce docile urban subjectivities. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2015. / April 3, 2015. / Literature, London, Modernism, New York, Paris, Urbanism / Includes bibliographical references. / Barry J. Faulk, Professor Directing Dissertation; Reineir Leushuis, University Representative; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member; S.E. Gontarski, Committee Member; Robin Goodman, Committee Member.