Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2008. / "August 2008." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 204-219). Online version available on the World Wide Web.

Wuthering Heights is a composite of opposites. Its two houses, its two families, its two generations, its two planes of existence are held in place by Emily Bronte's careful manipulation of repetitive, yet differentiated, symbols associated with each of these pairs. Using symbols to develop her polarities and to unify them along the imaginatively rendered horizontal axis connecting Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, the vertical axis connecting the novel's several "heavens" and "hells," and the third dimensional axis connecting the spiritual and corporeal worlds, Emily Bronte gives the divided world of Wuthering Heights an almost perfect symmetry. This study divides the more than seven hundred symbols into physical and nonphysical. The physical symbols are subdivided into setting, animal life, plant life, people, celestial objects, and miscellaneous objects. The fewer nonphysical symbols are grouped under movement, light, time, emotions, concepts, and miscellaneous terms. Verticality and thresholds, the two most important symbolic motifs, are drawn from both physical and nonphysical symbols.

Wuthering Heights was significantly shaped by the pre-Darwinian scientific debate in ways that look ahead to Darwin's evolutionary theory more than a decade later. Wuthering Heights represents a cultural response to new and disturbing ideas. Darwin's enterprise was scientific; Emily Brontë's poetic. Both, however, were seeking to find ways to express their vision of the nature of human beings. The language and metaphors of Wuthering Heights suggest that Emily Brontë's vision was, in many ways, similar to Darwin's.

The purpose of this thesis is to show upon what aspects of nature Emily Dickinson's poems touch, to what extent and in what manner she uses nature terms in expressing her philosophy of life, what ideas she expresses through these terms, and finally what her own philosophy of nature is.

Reconstructions is a nine-movement composition for solo soprano, chorus, and wind ensemble using texts from several of Emily Dickinson's poems. The soloist represents the main character in this dramatic work, and the narrative structure portrays abstract moments in this character's life. While the narrative structure of the reconstructed fragments is important to the form of the composition, other elements are also significant. Pitch structures generated from set theoretical systems, in addition to cyclic and palindromic structures are utilized throughout. Timbre also delineates the form, as various combinations of instruments and chorus create an evolving environment in which the soloist resides.

Gosse’s reputation, both during his lifetime and thereafter, was compromised by his propensity for error, a trait that Henry James famously described as ‘a genius for inaccuracy’. Though much of his biographical and critical writing justifies this criticism, my study of Gosse’s use of the device of allusion, mainly in his fictional writing, reveals a strategy of misprision that is creative and innovative. Since the concepts of Modernism and Postmodernism have changed the way in which texts are read, it is now time to re-read Gosse, and to explore the potential meaning of passages that would hitherto have been dismissed as error or exaggeration. Using Ziva Ben-Porat’s characterisation of allusion ‘as a device for the simultaneous activation of two texts’ as my methodology, I explore the complex and often subversive resonances of Gosse’s allusive practice. Allusion requires four participants: author, reader, the source text by the precursor, and the alluding text. Because a phrase does not ‘become’ an allusion until all four parties have been ‘activated’, many of Gosse’s allusions have for a long time lain dormant in the palimpsest of his writings. I argue that Gosse’s evangelical, tract-writing mother, rather than his father, exerted primary influence on him. I foreground the impact of her prohibition of fiction as the genesis for Gosse’s idiosyncratic vision, showing that its legacy was more bewildering, and ironically more creative, than has hitherto been recognised. Using the revisionary ratios of Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, I establish a trajectory of charged interactions between the texts of Gosse as ephebe and those of his mother as precursor. Many hitherto puzzling and unresolved aspects of Gosse’s writing now make sense in the context of his ‘answering back’ the spectral Bowes. Although Gosse never fully extricates himself from his maternal precursor, he metaphorically orphans himself, and transfers his ephebe allegiance to a host of literary fosterfathers, constantly invoking them in his texts. He thus secures his ‘mental space’ through the covert mode of allusion, and the zenith of this practice is manifested in Father and Son. My thesis demonstrates the potential of allusion as a methodological tool in literary analysis. By his acts of re-reading, Gosse achieves the paradoxical act of simultaneously arresting and promoting a sense of cultural continuity. On the one hand, Gosse arrests tradition by fragmenting texts: by importing a phrase or a passage from a past work into his present text, he engenders textual instability in both. On the other hand, Gosse promotes cultural continuity by importing into his work fragments that serve as allusive bridges forging connections through space and time. I hope that this exploration of his practice will initiate a reassessment of Gosse’s role in relation to the allusive mode as employed by the early Modernists.

A poetry thesis exploring subjects of gender identity, sexuality, socialization, writing, and craft, and including a preface that credits Emily Dickinson and Adrienne Rich as primary influences. One-third of the manuscript features epistolary prose poems in conversation with Dickinson, while the remaining portion contains poetry written in either free verse, traditional poetic form, or field composition.

Centered upon the complicated relationship between Emily Dickinson and China, this thesis analyzes Chinese cultural imagination of Dickinson in relation to Dickinson's Oriental vision, searches for a Chinese critical framework in Dickinson studies, and illustrates the significance of cross-cultural reading and rereading. In particular, the thesis advocates the use of the Chinese cultural resources in foreign literary study, heeds creative understanding embedded within cultural imagination and highlights the epistemic advantage of cross-cultural critics' exotopic vision. / Chapter One examines several important critical issues that have occurred since Dickinson was first introduced into China in the early 1920s, plumbing the changes of Chinese cultural and social environments. The next two chapters focus upon two of Dickinson's distinctively Chinese cultural images---a "Boudoir Lament" and "Daoist Vision," and illustrate their formation processes, salient configurations, sociological function and cognitive values. Chapter Four employs the journal by Zhong Wenyin, a Taiwanese writer as a case study to scrutinize how a Chinese writer grafts Dickinson and Daoism together to settle the mind. Chapter Five explores Dickinson's preoccupation with the poetic imaginary of "Re (homing)," and highlights its resemblance to Daoist meditation that most Western Dickinson scholars fail to recognize. In Chapter Six, I examine two of Dickinson's hummingbird poems, illustrating how the acts of translation and the cultural backgrounds of cross-cultural critics facilitate the discovery of some meanings that have been missed by native scholars, and in addition, explicating how Dickson's Daoist-like vision, as expressed in "Oriental Circuit" and "Linguistic Non-action," may have influenced her poetic imagination. Chapter Seven investigates Dickinson's engagement with the Orient, arguing that her "Circumference," which resembles Daoism constitutes an enriching part of American Orientalism represented by Transcendentalism. / Kang, Yanbin. / Adviser: Benzi Zhang. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: 2034. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 290-331). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

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Traditional feminist readings have valued women's writing that voices silenced experiences. In contrast, other twentieth-century theoretical formulations regard absences, refusals, and silences as constitutive of aesthetic practice rather than as imposed upon it. This dissertation attends carefully to how U.S. women writers approach the nonlinguistic, accounting for how they have been silenced as well as for the kinds of silencing that women poets themselves perform. It argues that U.S. women's experimental poetry is driven by contradictory relationships to language and silence: in one strain, gendered cultural repression spurs American women poets to push language into new territory, often figured as speaking out. But in another mode, female identification with the nonrational or nonlinguistic, whether externally enforced or strategically inhabited, impels women to develop poetic silences in order to resist the impositions of language on a feminized other. Meeting these simultaneous and opposed goals--creating poetic forms capable of greater expressive range while signaling the inadequacy of linguistic expression--necessitates formal experimentation. My primary claim that an unresolved ambivalence toward the nonlinguistic drives innovation dictates an emphasis on formal technique, including syntax, rhyme and meter, sentence and stanza structure, and figuration. This attention to poetic particulars grounds my contextualization of the work of each poet I consider--Emily Dickinson, Lorine Niedecker, and Gwendolyn Brooks--in relation to her own life, to broader literary and cultural histories, and to poststructuralist theories of language. The first chapter of my dissertation explores the role that early American, particularly Puritan and Transcendental, attitudes toward wilderness shape poetic motivations both to extend and limit the reach of language throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In subsequent chapters, I evaluate how those motivations change in the context of Dickinson's nineteenth-century spirituality, Niedecker's modernist and postmodernist anxieties about the role of the poet, and Brooks's engagement with the politics and aesthetics of black nationalism. Reading U.S. women's poetic innovation as simultaneously breaking and cultivating silences opens a dialogue among historically feminist understandings of silence as oppressive, theories that put silence at the heart of poetic impulse, and avant-garde theoretical conceptions of linguistic experimentation as a feminist project.