In this thesis, I show that Lord Byron's notes to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage are an integral part of the poem itself, not to be read as added material, but to be read as material that comments upon and deconstructs the poem. I examine the first two cantos of the poem, reading the notes as Byron's own answers and questions to the stylistic and political ramifications of the romance verse. By scrutinizing Byron's use of the romantic hero, the romance verse, the romantic quest and the text of romance for his reading public, I show Byron's own subversion and questioning of his poem. I draw upon the works of Bakhtin and Patricia Meyers Spacks to follow Byron's poetry as well as his prose in this work. Both critics emphasize the author's reliance upon a willing reading public to interpret the poem as a work both dependent and independent of the author. Byron's notes encourage the reader to complete certain aspects of the poem he left particularly "unfinished." For example, the hero, though influenced by the stock characters of eighteenth century prose and poetry, does not have a concrete past. Readers supplied this history according to their own experience of literature and the basic tropes of what a Regency or Romantic hero should be, relying upon the presentation of such heroes by the poets and writers of the time. The notes further complicate this completion by readers because of the insistence of Byron as a character within the poem itself. Byron's fame and charismatic personality encouraged readers to conflate him with his poetic characters; his notes emphasized his voice in the creation of his poem and in the questioning of his own creation.

Indigenous American sexual minorities and alternatively gendered voices went underground due to Eurowestern sexual colonization from the time of the conquistador invasions of the early 16th century to the political campaigns of cultural homogenization of the mid-20th century. A cultural distortion still exists in the postcolonial era. In the past many North American indigenous nations had culturally specific sexualities and genders that reflected the cultural heterogeneity of the Americas. Today cultural assimilation negatively affects queer Native Americans, and culturally imported attitudes of homophobia are reflected in Native American literature. An interdisciplinary approach must be used to study the cultural distortion that affects all levels of Native American societies including sexuality and gender, by combining anthropology, social studies, forms of oral and textual literature, and history, a discourse between competing Native American voices is revealed. The results indicate that some Native American authors exhibit traditional and/or neo-traditional views versus assimilated views about Native American queer and two-spirit people, traditional means the specific cultural constructs of the nation that produced them, and assimilated means cultural absorption by another and does not mean acculturation. Assimilated views of homosexuality such as James Welchs The Heartsong of Charging Elk and Leslie Marmon Silkos Almanac of the Dead, readily canonized by the literary establishment, are still influenced by the patriarchy. Queer voices that attempt to rediscover Native Americans past acceptance of multiple genders and sexual diversity, neo-traditionalists like Michael Red Earth and Anne Waters, have remained largely unknown by mainstream America, reflecting the invisibility of Native American sexual minorities and two-spirit voices in contemporary American life. The principal conclusion is that a culture clash exists between assimilated and traditional and/or neo-traditional views about the re-acceptance of alternative genders, and the acceptance of culturally imported queer identities. Even so, Native American sexual minorities and two-spirit people are telling their stories as an act of decolonization and reasserting their cultural power.

This collection of poetry explores themes of home, searching, sacredness, song, humanity, loss, and the natural world. It is driven by a strong concern for the places we inhabit, a love of sensory experience, imagery, and description, and an ear for the music of language, often experimenting with words to heighten the psychosomatic experience of their sonic qualities.

At the root of this project is the struggle of my bicultural identitythe practice of composing in a non-native language and the act of speaking ones native language that possesses no written form (though captured in the synthetic Romanized Popular Alphabet, initially for religious conversion, and now, for study, for something). As a second-generation Hmong-American, I am constantly haunted by the Hmong narrative, a story that is inherently my own as it is unbelonging to me, elements of my core being stemming from that of the Secret War in Vietnam, diaspora, and cultural brokenness. The poems presented here exhaustively meditate on such chaos, both internal and external, (the humility of) the Hmong life, a life of exile. More intimately, these poems examine speech locked inside the body, violence inflicted upon the self (and onto others), the weight of worthlessness despite Hmong meaning one who is freeone who is free of worthlessness. The use of language (particularly writtenness) is an integral part of my inquiry into said identity, making the writing experience an ultimate, ritualistic paradox of praying, seeing, and meditating. Like many tribal groups, the Hmongs orally based culture emphasizes the function of the earthe ability to listen, a super sense to be exercised for awarenessand the mouth for the ability to converse and tell stories. A hybrid of listening and telling stories can be found in the art of "hais kwv txhiaj," or sung poetry, an important practice for every Hmong man or woman. These songs or poems are essentially spoken, improvisational ballads that touch on life experiences or themes of said experiencesbeing a young adult, an orphan, and or a widow to name a feweach song revealing complex landscapes of both body and mind, and their relationship to the world. While I never successfully learned how to sing my own life stories, I chose the foreign art of writing as a form of channeling my own songs, letting the page face my pain, my hunger for belonging and truth, internalizing the inscapes of my fears, those songs that continue to haunt.

This thesis explores the executions of noble men and women in Tudor and early Jacobean England and the theatrical representations of executions that mirrored real life spectacles of deadly punishment. Historical scaffold confessions followed a formulaic pattern and condemned traitors performed their final moments before a crowd of witnesses with the power to judge the quality of the actors deportment, costuming and words. As a public stage, the scaffold allowed the traitor a chance to assert and define his or her own individuality in the face of death and formulaic requirements, which I outline in the first chapter. Dramatic representations of executions both reflected and subverted the depictions of real life performances at the block. Playwrights employed the scaffold confession in a variety of ways. Execution spectacles within plays coulddepending on the intention of the authoruphold the power of a just monarch, defy conventions and reveal societal ills, or show the agency of the individual characters facing execution.

Atwoods concern for the environment has spanned nearly the entirety of her career, informing her fears about the future and providing the grounding for her speculative fiction. In Atwoods understanding, ecological ruin stems from human estrangement from the natural environment, an estrangement fortified by capitalism and consumerism in contemporary societies. Instead, she strives to situate the creative, imaginative human species within a larger natural order that inspires ethical treatment of the more-than-human world. Atwood attempts to provide us with a model of interconnection and respect for nature that we must imagine if we desire to avoid the apocalyptic future she describes in her novels. This paper will investigate three of Atwoods novels that address issues concerning our interactions with nature and the effects of technology. In Oryx and Crake, humanist and posthumanist understandings of the world cannot provide individuals with meaning in their radically altered environment. In The Year of the Flood, the second of Atwoods trilogy, we are introduced to the Gods Gardeners, who demonstrate how new ethical systems can be enacted within specific subcultural spaces. From their space on the Edencliff Rooftop Garden, the Gardeners have a critical vantage point by which to view society and resist the controlling aspects of corporation run state. Atwood gives us a model by which to imagine enacting change in our own society, and the ethical system that must be implemented if we wish to avoid ecological ruin. Finally, I turn to Atwoods second novel, Surfacing, to end my discussion. Surfacing demonstrates that Atwood does not believe that returning to nature is the answer to ecological problems and the ills of society. The dissatisfaction at the end of the novel hints at the necessity of humans to exist within communities, as well as the affirmation of traits specific to the human creativity and the imagination. The image of personal survival depicted by Surfacing does not allow for large-scale political or social change. The answer to our dissatisfaction is not to return to nature, but to, like the Gods Gardeners, find a way to be both social and natural the human animal.

'To a Certain Degree' uses an understudied archive of formal education materials from New England and Mid-Atlantic states as a lens to disclose how the early U.S. novel dealt with social, political and economic anxieties accompanying the shift from settler colony to settler nation. Analyzing works by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecur, Charles Brockden Brown, Hannah Foster, Sukey Vickery, James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, and María Ruiz de Burton, I show how seven of the countrys first novelists borrowed from and revised popular English and American school missions, practices, and childrens stories. I argue that their engagement with a range of teaching methods reveals how they prepared readers for changing familial and civic responsibilities during this complex, post-revolutionary transition.

Like other poets who came to prominence in the nineteenth century but continued to publish well into the twentieth, Alice Meynells work has come gradually to be occluded by the work of her younger contemporaries, among them T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The available scholarship records this process of occlusion in the form of an almost complete absence of serious discourse on Meynells work following her death in 1922 until the beginnings of a modest revival of interest in her writing beginning in the 1980s. This study aims to address that gap by giving a more complete account of Meynells stylistic development and technical procedures in the field of poetry than has heretofore been available. Examining select specimens of Meynells verse in the light of prosodic theories current at the time both she and her Modernist contemporaries were writing further allows us to see, in place of the familiar narrative of Modernisms revolutionary break with its immediate literary past, continuities between nineteenth- and twentieth-century understandings of what meter is and how it works. Rather than attempting to catalogue the work of writers producing metrical poetry in the early twentieth century, this project looks to the work of one poet and relies on intensive analysis of only a few of her poems to trace out a literary genealogy between figures who all but never meet in critical discourse. This approach demonstrates how Meynells poetry, especially in its engagement with prosodic convention, provides a bridge which can link the work, on the one hand, of Victorians like Coventry Patmore and Mary Elizabeth Coleridge to, on the other hand, major architects of Modernism like Pound and Eliot, generating, ultimately, a new and alternative perspective for interpreting poetry as a cultural practice in one of its most contested historical phases.

Thomas Carlyles Sartor Resartus (1831) and Herman Melvilles Moby Dick or, the Whale (1851) combine the novel and the anatomy, creating a plot as well as a reflection on the human condition. The result of this combination produces a narrator whose single-minded focus on an object both propels events forward while at the same time stalling the progress of a traditional plot. The aspects of the text that connect to the novel, such as character and plot, offer a reflection of the effect truth and society have on character. Aspects that connect to the anatomy, such as the exhaustive knowledge of a particular subject, allow for an introspection of that reflected truth. Published twenty years after Carlyle wrote Sartor Resartus, Melville's Moby Dick, through his characters Ahab and Ishmael, picks up the threads of identity and the quest for truth and meaning that Carlyle examined with the characters of Teufelsdröckh and the Editor. Looking to combat feelings of hopelessness stemming from society and the self, each narratorthe Editor and Ishmaelbegins a figurative journey in which he attempts to understand the inner-workings of man through the intense study of someone else. In this thesis I argue that the combination of the novel and anatomy as both plot and knowledge based allows the narrator to lose himself in his subjects identity while still remaining central. Through the lives of Teufelsdröckh and Ahab respectively, each narrator examines the shaping of identity and self. Resulting from his role as the informant and observer as well as the singular nature of his inquiry, the narrator exposes his quest for his own identity, and in the process, he unintentionally takes on the self of his subject. Not simply narrators who tell someone else's story, the Editor and Ishmael, become the very men who stand "fixed in ocean reveries"(Melville 4) in search of a "new Truth"(Carlyle 8) that will shape and inform their identity.

Under The Bodhi Tree is a collection of essays about faith, identity, looking, and listening.