This dissertation examines the history of Britains security industry, specifically the rise and development of patent lockmaking in England, throughout the long nineteenth century as a way of contextualizing the Victorians preoccupation with securing property and privacy. Under Lock and Key traces this history through discourses that include technical and trade literature, advertising, records of Britains main engineering institutions, press accounts of a lock controversy at the Great Exhibition, as well as writing on loss prevention, crime, political economy, and domestic management. While recent critics have concentrated on nineteenth-century privacy, particularly with reference to architecture and dwelling practices, none have given attention to securitys social origins, material conditions, and sociocultural significancedespite the fact that lock and key appear more often in Victorian fiction than nearly any other consumer artifacts of the era. Through readings of literary texts by Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Anthony Trollope, Richard Henry Horne, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, this study argues that security carried a complex range of social, cultural, and political meanings which were subject to considerable slippage throughout the nineteenth century. On one hand, the invention of patent locks, and other modern security technologies like burglarproof strongboxes and safes, corresponded with the emergence of Britains reform culture and the claims of liberal individualism and thus played a crucial role in middle-class efforts to stabilize the physical and conceptual boundaries between the separate spheres and in shaping an array of social codes and cultural imperatives. On the other hand, the proliferation of security encoded anxieties about middle-class life in industrial-capitalist society, and lock and key served as troubled markers of agency, subjectivity, and competing claims of individuality and social responsibility.

This dissertation is a study of the interplay of regionalism and globalization in the work of William Faulkner (1897-1962) and Derek Walcott (1930-). Through a survey of contemporary criticism delineating a common postplantation region that encompasses both the U.S. South and the Caribbean and an interrogation of the discourse on relationality and chaotic literary production by such theorists as Édouard Glissant and Antonio Benítez-Rojo, I conclude that the indicated authors, in their capacity as writers incontrovertibly attached to specific regions (Faulkners Yoknapatawpha County and Walcotts St. Lucia) yet simultaneously belonging to global networks of literary interchange, evince a unique redeployment of regional styles within postmodern currents of locational indeterminacy. My major claims are as follows: firstly, the literary region, rather than being locked in an oppositional relationship with forces of globalization and internationalism, is dialogically linked with those forces; secondly, regionalism, far from forbidding inclusion within a global reading community, is in fact generative of interregional comparability; and thirdly, attempts to destabilize or decentralize the notion of the region in literature are another way of reifying regional distinction. I support these claims through surveys of existing and emerging criticism of these authors works and careers, interpretations of seldom-studied early translations of Faulkners work into German, and close readings of a selection of novels and poems, most prominently Faulkners Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Go Down, Moses (1942), and A Fable (1954), and Walcotts The Gulf (1969), Omeros (1990), and The Prodigal (2004). In all of these sources, I show, conceptions of these authors home regions attempt to bring those regions into dialogue with other locales, yet even as these stable regional vantage points proliferate outwards into global space, they simultaneously pull inward, toward a reincarnation of regional particularities. Ultimately, I suggest that the region as manifested in these two authors writings is less destroyed or defeated by the decentralizing pressures of the globe than implicated in a mutually constitutive relationship with those pressures.

I argue that, during the Jacobean and Caroline periods, the three dramatic forms of closet drama, masque, and commercial theatre participated in recreating and critiquing conduct manual vocabularies of speech and silenceparticularly those aimed at women. Using narratology, gender theory, and cultural materialism to examine drama, my dissertation traces representations of womens speech and silence through the three dramatic forms to reveal a shared concern about why, how, and when women used or withheld their voices. This concern links the literary and performance histories of commercial plays like _The Tamer Tamed_, masques like _Tethys Festival_, and closet dramas like _The Tragedie of Mariam_, all of which embody female speech and silence. These works not only use women as subject matter and engage female viewers; they also invite women to actively collaborate in the dramatic process, providing instruction and space for constructing feminine subjectivity, authorship, and performativity. The dramatic forms and womens silent performances exist within a reflexive relationship. Just as the connections among dramatic forms allow women to perform across them, so too do womens performances reveal the intense interrelations of the forms. Rather than functioning as distinct genres, the dramatic forms converge as a single body that creates a narrative about womens voices and how women transgressed conduct recommendations to actively shape representations of their own cultural positions. Ultimately, the narrative emerges from a synthesis of the three forms and reveals that separation is anachronistic and hinders our ability to understand Stuart dramas cultural commentary.

In this dissertation I examine the relationships between textual adaptation and social anxieties. By looking at work by artists as varied as Jane Austen and Michael Powell, Patricia Highsmith and Ellen Wood, Anthony Trollope and William Godwin, and Robert Z. Leonard and Karl Riez, I suggest that there is a type of adaptation best understood as the defensive adaptation. These defensive adaptations manage social problems that have no legal or otherwise formal means of redress. They cluster around social problems that cannot be identified and corrected problems that come with the very messy business of being human: the meaning of selfhood, the terms of social responsibility, the tragedy of unexpectedly interrupted lives, and the always obsessive nature of love. By looking at a broad range of texts, I demonstrate how these problems become lodged in the gaps that form when a narrative moves among media. Defensive adaptations mediate these social anxieties, in both form and content, by discouraging attempts to see the anxieties for what they are. I get around this problem by looking at scenes of adaptation. A scene of adaptation is, at its basic level, a scene or scenes in a single text where a narrative is adapted. These scenes of adaptation remove one layer of defensive adaptations mediation, and thus provide viable models for the way defensive adaptations manage existential social anxieties in culture at large.

This dissertation explores the role of the paid female companion in the Victorian novel. As the paid friends of other women, companions were hired to enact the private virtues supposed to be organic to relationships between women; in particular, they were expected to serve as a receptacle for their mistresses most intimate confidences, to provide company and sympathy. However, as a number of Victorian writers show, this purchased sympathy-on-demand could be distorted and corrupted. I argue that authors such as William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, Wilkie Collins, and Thomas Hardy used their companion characters to interrogate and deconstruct sympathy. The novels I discuss experiment with portrayals of sympathy not as a selfless, empathetic understanding of others suffering but as a manipulative mode of relating. In these texts, sympathy is represented as a self-centered strategy for gaining transgressive power, social mobility, romantic attachments, and narrative centrality. <p> The ambiguity in the mistress-companion relationship enabled Victorian writers to experiment with the diverse narrative versatility of the companion character as well. The companion figure has a special relationship to narrativity because she provides an unstable, mobile locus authors could use to perform ancillary narrative functions. As such, this dissertation also examines the ways companion characters reveal and promulgate supplementary knowledge to other characters and to the reader and address the relationship among author, text, and reader. The companions status as an intersection of class, economic, and affective investments troubles the very meaning of womens work and womens relationships in the Victorian period; however, the companion is lost to historical and literary studies, hidden in the crux of scholarship on the governess and domestic servantlingering only in the Victorian novels we read today. This project introduces the figure into the critical dialogue on nineteenth-century womens work and relationships, highlighting both the pervasiveness of the figure in Victorian literature as well as illuminating the ways in which authors used the companion to address troubled contemporary issues as diverse as gender roles, employment dynamics, power, eroticism, sympathy, and narrative structure in their work.

The advent of the popular culture phenomenon allowed the definition and therefore the confinement and treatment of madmen, in the literary sense, to change, evolving into a complicated interaction within the cultural structures introduced by Foucault in Madness and Civilization. In his work, Foucault promotes the triptych of society at large, a mediator, and the madman, wherein society creates the mediator, usually the doctor or asylum, in order to come to terms with madness. At the end of the 20th century, however, postmodernisms interaction with popular culture blurred this triptych. This suggests that in the latter half of the twentieth century the recognition of the culture industry as an important cultural phenomenon also changed the way in which society reacts to, defines, and deals with madness and the madman. In the postmodern age, the madman retains many of the stigmas he received during the Enlightenment. Yet, he is also a product of the culture industry, an entity who defines his world by mass-market strictures and standards. Like the rest of the postmodern world, the postmodern madman lives and dies by his relationship to popular culture illusions. I therefore argue that postmodern madness is the confusion created when the euphoria of living in a mass-produced fantasy world clashes with the need to retain ones individual nature within such a realm. In this environment, the postmodern madman becomes the source of any mediators that may be placed between society and madness. The mediator, in this case, is a result of the individuals need to conform, not to societys rules, but to societys illusions. The novels analyzed in this dissertation, Carlos Fuentess Zona sagrada [Holy Place], Walker Percys The Moviegoer, Manuel Puigs El beso de la mujer araña [Kiss of the Spider Woman], Kurt Vonneguts Breakfast of Champions, Caio Fernando Abreus Onde andará Dulce Veiga? [Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga?], and Bret Easton Elliss American Psycho present nuanced readings of the postmodern condition and its propensity toward madness, suggesting an evolutionary progression of Foucaults structures which continuously alters the form of the mediator.

This article explores the rise of the legal and medical professions in some of the earlier novels of Anthony Trollope, focusing on the ways in which the roles of doctor and lawyer can blur, particularly during this time of professional revolution. These realms are united in opposition to the clerical profession most notably in their control over a de-mystified and therefore culturally problematic conception of death. The medical profession is particularly transgressive in this respect, while the realm of inheritance law remains slightly less disturbing, as its focus on the aftereffects of death partially elides the moment itself. In The Warden, the erstwhile surgeon John Bold unites with the local legal community against the formerly dominant clergy, though in this instance the nascent control of the upstart professions proves undirected and fleeting. Bolds transgressive potential, partially stripped during his involvement with the central legal machinations surrounding a will, is soon fully curtailed by his marriage and consequent entry into the domestic sphere. The character of Dr. Thorne in Dr. Thorne undergoes a similar, albeit initially more empowered, narrative trajectory, as his role as a doctor first becomes relegated to the periphery, narratively speaking, as he takes on the role of will executor and then as he too enters into marriage in Framley Parsonage. In the end, any potential for transgressive narrative mastery gets redirected into the traditionally stable sphere of domesticity.

English <p>THANK CANADA: LOCATING THE CANADIAN PRESENCE IN U.S. YOUTH TELEVISION <p>Nafissa Thompson-Spires <p>Dissertation under the direction of Professor Paul D. Young <p>Because the United States is and has been a powerful force in Canadian televisionthrough cultural inundation, economic pressures, and exportsmuch of the traditional scholarship about Canadian television emphasizes Canadas vulnerability to U.S. domination, recounts Canadas difficulties in producing homegrown fare that reflects a Canadian sense of nation, and focuses on the flow of television into Canada from the United States. This dissertation considers Canada-U.S. televisual relations from a different angle, examining the flow of television from Canada into the United States, the increase in Canadian television exports since the 1980s, and how these two-way transactions complicate arguments about Canadian weakness, U.S. dominance, and the cultural proximity of the two nations. <p>Despite difficulties in grappling with U.S. media authority and internal issues, the Canadian television industry has produced some of the most successful youth-television programs to ever air in the United States and has become the second-largest exporter of television globally. Using Canadian youth series produced between 1979 and 2009, this project argues that Canadian exports and influences have not only been central to U.S. youth-television broadcasters like Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, and PBS, but also central to U.S. television more generally. Canadian television works as an arbiter of U.S. culture, a mediator between U.S. and other television industries, and a necessary Other in the U.S. processes of self-definition that play out through televisual texts and their handling. In addition to a strong Canadian television industry, what emerges in this analysis is a U.S. television industry that is just as concerned with cultural nationalism, identity, and vulnerability as is the Canadian one. The U.S. anxieties manifest in censorship, assimilative practices that try to make Canadian series pass for American, and conventions that limit U.S. series to specific genres. In this revisionist narrative, U.S. domination remains a legitimate concern for Canadian television, but we also see a symbiotic relationship in which both television cultures are deeply intertwined, yet ultimately very different, globally important and perhaps equally strong.

As apostates from the English Church, Catholic converts in early modern England embodied opposition. Within the seventeenth-century context, I concentrate here on three particular writers who powerfully exemplified this phenomenon: Sir Toby Matthew (1577- 1655), Richard Crashaw (1612-1649), and Serenus Cressy (1605-1674). These specific converts shared a pronounced interest in mystical writings, especially those authored by the female mystics St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) and Julian of Norwich (1342-1416). The purpose of the present study is, first, to explicate the discursive correlation between the Catholics exile (i.e. his bodily dislocation) and his interest in mystical literature, and, second, to underscore the thematic importance of the body within this discursive relationship. My overarching contention is that the cultivation of mystical literature among these convert- writers supplied unique resources for resistance to Protestant negations of bodily religious practice. Mystics like Teresa and Julian claimed in their writings to have experienced divine revelations through affective sensual states of ecstasy and rapture. Matthew, Crashaw, and Cressy all oriented themselves around the mystics texts, and their tales of ecstatic devotion, in suggestive ways. Of the many characteristics of mystical literature, I argue that what appealed to these writers most was the prospect of envisioning the body as a locus of divine disclosure.

This study focuses on seven canonical filmmakers of the 1960s: Fernando Birri, Stan Brakhage, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Glauber Rocha, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, and Andy Warhol. By reading their manifestos and interviews in conversation with their films, we can see how their public statements about filmmaking serve as a place of epistemological reflection. Their films enact these questions while also presenting perspectives that challenge established ideas. Central to their investigations is a focus on subjectivity. In contrast to political modernism, which emphasizes how film practice can determine subjectivity, I examine how filmmaker concepts of subjectivity shape their formal experiments. I also read their manifestos, interviews, and films in conversation with one another and, by doing so, I have discovered a variety of common interests and shared influences that connect them. How systemic pressures shape subjectivity is one of those concerns, as is Hollywood â the economic and aesthetic monolith they think themselves through and against. These filmmakers also draw inspiration, at least initially, from the new cinema practices of European auteurs. These shared concerns and influences unite them, as does a discourse network. Their films, manifestos, and interviews circulate throughout the hemisphere and eventually make their way to Europe. Given these connections, we should begin to think about new cinema in the Americas as just that, new American cinema in the hemispheric sense. These seven filmmakers share orientations, anxieties, influences, and distribution networks that are unique to them. We can also see their success in creating a uniquely âAmericanâ cinema as European filmmakers and critics in the late 1960s âdiscoverâ them and their work. This event not only affirms the North-South flow of ideas, it also prompts us to capture the ways the new American cinema serves as a site where existing epistemological frames are put into question and redrawn.