This paper argues that Eliza Haywoodâs Fantomina inverts the sensory thought experiment known as the Molyneux problem. Haywood establishes a clear distinction between different types of sensory perception in Fantomina and insists upon the inefficacy of the individual senses to reliably transmit knowledge about the protagonistâs identity. Additionally, Haywoodâs text maintains a level of skepticism regarding the reliability of the combination of the senses to afford Beauplaisir understanding of the ladyâs identity. Haywood presents Beauplaisir as an unreliable spectator whose investment in sensory excitement renders him unable to discern the suspicious similarities among his loverâs many disguises. Beauplaisir accepts his superficial perceptions uncritically, and in doing so, he emphasizes the correlation between passion and immediate perception. The unnamed protagonist, however, preserves a distance from her own passion by seizing control of her romantic entanglements with Beauplaisir, in which she dictates the terms of their rendezvous in a usurpation of gender roles. By manipulating Beauplaisirâs sensory perception of her identity, the protagonist of Fantomina reframes the philosophical and aesthetic trends mentioned above in order to imagine a greater degree of agency for eighteenth-century women.

One of the main goals of Jim Crow segregation lawsâapart from demarcating a clear societal boundary between the racesâwas to exclude African Americans from the benefits, promises and ideals of American nationhood and citizenship. Although various forms of media were complicit in this act of exclusion, comics in particular played a unique role because of their combined visual, textual, ideological and cultural currency. As a visual and textual medium, comics employed racist stereotypes that depicted African Americans as clownish, lazy and semiliterate figures content with their subjection. The effectiveness of these racist images and narratives thus helped to secure ideological notions of white superiority, which then diffused throughout society and formed an integral part of American culture. The ingraining of stereotypes in the national psyche reinforced the notion that citizenship and nationhood were out of reach for blacks. However, black cartoonists who were aware of comicsâ power to preserve hegemonic structures knew that the same medium could help to tear down those barriers. This thesis seeks to advance the critical study of black comics by focusing on the role that black cartoonists, comic books and comic strips played not only in advancing civil rights, but also in the advancement of what I call âpolitical personhood.â Through their visuality and narrative, African American comic books and comic strips were instrumental in constructing and mobilizing a community, both physical and conceptual, that connected black people to one another and to a wider concept of American nationhood and citizenship.

Disease, Bread, Efficiency: Rhetorics of Victorian Education Reform arose from my observation that, historically speaking, Anglo-American schools have always been in crisis. I argue that the crisis of the failing school is a rhetorical problem rather than an economic problem as most scholarship suggests. Much like the cultural myth of the One True Love, education reform debates tend to position the school as an institution that can rescue the nation from all perceived social ills. Not only is this unrealistic, the patterns of language are inconsistent as ideas about the purpose of school are translated into policy. This causes further disjuncture between ideal notions of the public school and its reality. I treat a range of archival materials through a variety of theoretical frames including metaphor criticism and Kenneth Burkes notion of the terministic screen, which illustrates that school failure is not an objective occurrence but a rhetorical construction designed to achieve predetermined social ends. This research uncovers three insoluble conditions of public schools in capitalistic societies: a tension between the need for collective education while privileging individualism, a gap between the expansive purposes envisioned by the general public and the narrow measures policy can enact, and a lack of attention to the circulation of institutional energy. I conclude that conversations about education reform can become more productive by respecting the insoluble conditions and searching for non-binary ways to think about schooling.

No description available.

[From the introduction]: In the twenty-first century, poetry, speculative fiction, science fiction, and young-adult fiction introduce new representations of youth in relation to contemporary social changes that arise from the application of technology to everyday life. The figure of youth in twenty-first-century dystopian, post­apocalyptic, and science-fictional settings is used to emphasise the future challenges facing the younger generation. This thesis breaks new ground in examining contemporary literature that engages with youth and the repercussions of certain scientific developments while addressing the interstitial value of young-adult fiction, science fiction, and poetry. The originality of my argument lies mainly in the comparative analysis of poetry and fiction in the twenty-first century focusing on youth and the impact of scientific development on contemporary society and culture. This thesis also demonstrates how the boundaries between the different genres are gradually diminishing when engaging with the topics of technology and youth which is becoming more important to authors and readers than the literary categorisation of texts. This thesis explores the contemporary literary representations of modified bodies in twenty-first-century fiction and poetry. These representations include organically modified bodies (Chapter One) as well as artificially devised ones (Chapter Two). Another primary objective is to investigate the literary representations of social attitudes towards the generation of youth through adult characters such as parents and guardians (Chapter Three). The following three chapters aim to identify the literary standpoints regarding the cultural dominance of new technologies in contemporary societies, especially since advanced technology made its way into people's lives through social media and the internet. I will examine poetry and narrative poetry as well as post­apocalyptic and dystopian fiction and young-adult fiction in the twenty-first century representing the role of advanced technology in creating the posthuman.

This thesis investigates five fourteenth-century Middle English romances—Sir Isumbras, The King of Tars, The Earl of Toulouse, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—for their resonances with fourteenth-century reformist ideology. The fourteenth century witnessed the emergence of Middle English complaint writing and also culminated in two reformist movements in the 1380s: the Peasants’ Revolt and Lollardy. Each romance considered in the thesis share resonances with reformist ideology and complaint poems—like William Langland’s Piers Plowman—as well as texts relating to the Peasants’ Revolt and Lollardy. Such evidence suggests that romance and complaint shared ideologies and both types of texts may have contributed to reformist activities—writing, acting, or both—throughout the century. Sir Isumbras is explored in relation to the Agrarian Crisis, related complaint texts such as The Simonie and The Song of the Husbandman, and the penitential philosophy it shares with Piers Plowman. Isumbras shows landowners causing peasant suffering, and problematises orthodox penitential prescriptions. The King of Tars is read in relationship to complaint texts like The Sayings of the Four Philosophers and with later Lollard writing. Tars reforms nations by highlighting the consequences of immoral kingship—both Christian and Saracen—and replacing it with an ethically superior woman. The Earl of Toulouse, examined alongside texts relevant to the Peasants’ Revolt, represents armed revolt as a means of stopping obstinate tyranny and envisions that heroic men—even to the point of breaking the law—will insist upon truth and justice. The Wife of Bath’s Tale shares resonances with an array of Middle English Lollard writings, from its stance on execution, nobility, poverty, the power of sermons, and female autonomy and power. Finally, I analyse Sir Gawain and the Green Knight alongside Ricardian complaint texts, illuminating tyrannical character traits in Arthur and his negative influence on Gawain.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.