First published as a novella by Aphra Behn in 1688, Oroonoko is known for its invocation of the Noble Savage, for its potentially proto-feminist politics, and for its ambiguous entanglement with arguments about slavery. It is also known for its has a long history of adaptation, providing the source material for a series of theatrical productions from Thomas Southernes in 1695 to `Biyi Bandeles in 1999. The legacy of this story is one deeply imbricated in the politics of racial transmutation and representation and the historiographical genealogy of racial performance and cultural appropriation. My investigation of the myriad creative interventions in a tale rendered as myth reveals that while all have a stake in foregrounding an impression of authorial validity for themselves, there is no single authentic version of a text possessed of a long history of mutable form and content.

Madame Merle is perhaps best known as The Portrait of a Ladys secret mother, the principal source of mystery for both Isabel Archer and Henry Jamess readers. I perceive her character through the lens of another womans mysterythrough Jamess career-long critical story of the riddle of the greatest of all women of letters: George Sand. Madame Sands annexation of masculinity inspired in James a series of reflections on gender and the mastery of fiction-writing. My two-part analytical portrait examines the intersection of these concerns in Madame Merle. In the essays first part, I chart the connective tissue between Jamess critical writings about Sand and his characterization of the novels great artist (432). Focusing on questions of performativity, gender, and marriage, I address the analogously paradoxical positions into which James traps each woman. In the second part, I rely on Carolyn Devers Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (1998) to interpret Madame Merles diversely metaphorical role as the texts secret mother. Madame Merles reproductive power and narrative death as chief artificer of Mrs. Isabel Osmond narrate Jamess profound ambivalence about the gender of artistry. I argue that James figures his self-reflexive philosophy for achieving literary mastery, and the doubly gendered mandate of that achievement, in the battle between Osmond and Madame Merle over the authority to craft Isabels and Pansys characters.

In this project, I examine a selection of literary and filmic texts produced between 1946 and 1995, a period I refer to as late modernism. I show how, in offering instances of bodily transformativity that we might call queer, these texts expose, rework, and offer alternatives to the epistemological frames which govern our understandings of bodies at large. Specifically, these texts make formal and theoretical critiques of dominant narrative form, and of normative vision indicating that mainstream post/modern Western culture largely grasps the body not through biological data, but through the systems that govern textual comprehension. Taken together, these works represent a movement in late modernist textual production, one that takes bodily transformativity as a site for exploring the dominant standards that shape what we simplistically term the body. While these works are distinguished by how they indicate that classical narrative form and normative vision affect understandings of bodies, they bring an unprecedented focus to this relationship. First and foremost, they show how these paradigms inform and are further perpetuated by developmentalism the turn-of-the-century discourse of human growth that posits as universal, transhistorical, and inevitable processes including puberty, adolescence, and reproductivity. The works I treat here pointedly take developmentalism as a plot that effects either the validation or pathologization of bodies that conform to or run afoul of it. I thus trace both developmentalisms late modernist life, and how literature and film have been formulated in response to, and formulated queer responses to, this paradigm. Queer bodily transformativity is a concept I explore in order to show the contingency of bodily phenomena, their lack of intrinsic value: when they confirm the established limits for the human body, and the narrative means through which we know that body, they go unnoticed. Only when they begin pushing against those limits and means do they gain traction. Intervening at this juncture, I argue, allows us to see the cultural work that late modernist literary and filmic representations of bodily changeability can do and for what ends.

By examining naturalist novels and silent films from 1895 to 1915, my dissertation projects backwards out of these representational solutions to identify a formal and philosophical problem: time as force. I argue that the early cinema approached the problem of time as an opportunity to demonstrate its representational capabilities as a new medium. In contrast, I suggest that naturalist novels and early narrative films registered a pervasive belief in temporal determinism on the level of narration and, as a result, frequently envisioned the passage of time as a limit to authorial freedom. Using two forms that obsessively posed and answered questions about temporal representation as a lens, I argue that conceptions of time as a force pervaded technological, aesthetic, and cultural discourses in the United States at the turn of the century.

John Denniss Liberty Asserted is an early English effort to dramatize conquest and assimilation in divided North America. The play centers on an Iroquois abducted Huron mother and son whose affiliations with the French and the English represent the tenuous and inveterate alliances shaping King Williams War and the War of Spanish Succession. Richard Braverman argues that Dennis uses a Lockean state of nature to turn his Whig politics into national myth. Reading Liberty Asserted as a Roman drama, Julie Ellison locates a stock narrative in which a conflict between reproductive and homo-social relations parallels a generic, contested terrain. This paper draws new attention to the importance of Denniss North American setting. I argue that the wildly popular publication of Baron de Lahontans New Voyages to North America and the French missionary accounts which precede it had a significant impact on Liberty Asserted. While the informed ethnographer speaking from New France and the distant multiplicity of voices performing these regions may appear irreconcilable, a cross reading of Lahontans and Denniss texts suggests that both genres were often explicitly political and both had a vested interest in the projection of verisimilitude. Their inter-textual relationship demonstrates a complicity between empiricism and allegory in colonial imaginings, where Native American representations serve to clarify contested forms of conquest and assimilation in North America.

This dissertation is a study of the relationship between product branding and American literature and culture around the turn of the twentieth century. By the late nineteenth century, branding had emerged in the United States not only as a common business practice, but also as a shaping cultural influence. Essentially narratives about the relationships between product, manufacturer, and consumer, brands had a strong impact on both literature and the profession of authorship. I trace this impact in the development of three major narrative forms (realism, naturalism, and modernism) evident in the period. In the writing of William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, Edna Ferber, and others, as well as in early American cinema, I find a record of changing attitudes toward and responses to branding. Realism, naturalism, and modernism, I argue, were formally constituted to a significant degree both as professional reactions to brandings impact on the literary marketplace and as broader efforts to think through the cultural implications of this business practices growth and development.

This dissertation calls on the filmmaking and film criticism discourse of auteurism as a means for understanding a certain historical peak of postwar American culture, that period known as the sixties. Some critics have dismissed auteurism, a body of thought that insists on viewing the group-work of filmmaking as the expression of the singular personality of the director. Other critics have since demonstrated its effective truth through its historical uses, industrial and otherwise. This dissertation argues that auteurism, whether mistaken or not, fossilizes a moment in the recuperation of an ideology of individualism, in which the stress shifts from a kind of frontier individual to a new corporate individual. In this respect, where auteurism might distort film history, it helps clarify a larger history of modernity. Considering auteurism as a story told about the relationship of the individual and the institution, at a watershed moment in the larger history of a developing world-system, the dissertation shows how this story was told in various iterations by Hollywood films of the period. Auteurism, that is, was not only a story the film industry told itself, or that critics told themselves about film history, but rather it was a story the films told their viewing public. I select clusters of films whether full-fledged genres or cycles on a theme that tell this story from different standpoints. I take these films clusters, when reckoned together, to constitute the auteurist moment in Hollywood film, a period I give the symbolic bookends of The Graduate (1967) and Jaws (1975). The purview of the dissertation, in fact, if marked by films under discussion, stretches from 1939 to 1982 (Stagecoach to First Blood). But the dissertations concentrated attention rests on the auteurist moment, 1967-1975, because this is the ideologically transformative moment, as the movements attest. While The Graduate proposes defection from society, resonating with the specific concerns of Berkeleys Free Speech Movement and with the general concerns of the post-Civil Rights youth movements, Jaws, in a response of sorts, imagines new grounds for reincorporating defectors into societys industrial complex.

This dissertation examines the significance of noise for modernist culture. Noise functions as both a literal and figurative presence in the aural culture of the early twentieth century: as the sounds produced by modern life and as the social, institutional, and affective manifestations of modernity. The dissertation argues that modernist uses of dissonance and rhythm represent historically specific, embodied critical responses to an intensifying experience of sound. The phenomena indexed by noisewarfare, urbanization, industry, media, publicity, and rumorare mediated and critiqued through modes of dissonance, whose (irregular) movement through historical time is marked by rhythm. Musical uses of noise reveal art as an ideologically laden mediation of social experience: as composers and writers incorporate everyday noises into the artwork, they question art's autonomy and implicate the material conditions of modernity enabling artistic production. Building an interdisciplinary model for interpreting modernism's aesthetics and ideologies, the project draws on literary cultural studies; cultural histories of sound; political and semiotic accounts of musical interpretation; and the researches of the "new musicology." After outlining the project's theoretical bearings in Chapter One, the project studies T.S. Eliot's <i>Waste Land</i> alongside the work of Theodor Adorno, analyzing the figures' treatments of dissonance and rhythm as responses to allegorical treatments of the human body. Chapter Three argues that the interactions between George Antheil and Ezra Pound reveal the drives for publicity and sensation at the heart of Pound's neoclassical aesthetics. Chapter Four addresses James Joyce's treatments of music and noise, arguing that even his less "noisy" early works ground music in their material noises. Chapter Five argues that Edith Sitwell's and William Walton's <i>Façade</i> appropriates the aesthetics of the Ballets Russes to reveal social interactions and "publicity" as stylized aesthetic constructions. The final chapter focuses on music-noise relations in Benjamin Britten and E.M. Forster, examining each individually before turning to their collaboration on <i>Billy Budd</i>. Britten's uses of consonance destabilize the values traditionally accorded consonant harmony: stability, solidarity, transparency. <i>Billy Budd</i> thus calls attention to the acts of scapegoating and rumor at the heart of cultural consolidation.

The American Way of Life as a suburban experience not only appears to be on its downward slope in the energy-starved early twenty-first century, it appears to be unsustainable. This dissertation identifies the everyday spatial practices in the non-home, non-work time and space of transit as the key site for the discursive construction of the suburbs rather than consumption and the built environment. The definitive experience of the suburban occurs not in houses or in office, but rather in the experience of transit most notably time spent on the road and the way in which film and literary representations of transit both reveal the imaginable models of sustainable suburban development as desirable but less and less possible. Post World War II suburban fictions retain an unconscious awareness of the shortcomings of the suburban form and the ideological barriers it imposes -- racial and class division, barriers between private and public experience as well as between genderings of experience and it is through attention to representations of spatial practices that alternatives to these restrictive ideologies of suburban sprawl emerge.

The continuing debate over the potentially collaborative status of Titus Andronicus is symptomatic of Shakespeares exploration of collaboration within the play through the character of Lavinia. He creates a Rome in which multiple narratives about purity, rape and sacrifice circulate. It is not the pure ideal society that Titus imagines, but a hybrid. Lavinias rape results from conflict between the many tales striving to inscribe her, prominently those of Philomela and Lucrece, and her violation enables her to recognize them. Becoming aware of her own composite nature and the hybridity of the state, Lavinia rejects the strategy of reading employed around and used on her. Rather than inserting herself into one tale and attempting to repeat it, reiterating Roman glory or sacrificing herself in order to restore it, Lavinias awareness of the many circulating stories enables her to manipulate them. Lavinia becomes the plays figure for collaboration and the co-author of her own story, asserting her place as an impure hybrid in Rome. Her collaborative skills uniquely fit Lavinia to help her contemporaries survive in the state they are coming to realize is not, and never was, an unadulterated haven from confusion. In claiming a place for herself in society, Lavinia risks being drawn back into the dominant narratives of purity and sacrifice, a danger that comes to fruition in her murder. Unsuccessful for herself, Lavinia leaves her story in circulation, an assertion of the hybridity that neither her surviving family nor the society as a whole can ignore.