In this study, I read Elizabethan ghost complaint poetry as a locus for understanding the eras obsessive desire to speak with, for, and as the dead. In charting the rise to popularity of this now neglected poetic form, I employ and advance theories of haunting temporality as articulated in modern as well as early modern philosophy, historiography, and gender theory. My study of ghost complaint poems revises our understanding of how early modern poets and dramatists appropriate historiographic discourses and deploy gendered voices.

That theater and theatrical modes of presentation held enormous cultural, political, and social significance for eighteenth-century English, Irish, and American publics has been convincingly demonstrated. Peter Reed and others have described the existence of "common cultures of Atlantic theatricality" and of "widely shared modes of performance" in these and other locales (Reed 2). Bearing this insight in mind, a great deal of work needs yet to be done in situating eighteenth-century plays in the Atlantic sphere. This thesis aims to begin to correct this oversight, by tracing the reception history of Charles Macklin's The True-born Irishman in these three national contexts. As we'll see, Macklin, a spectacularly successful actor on English and Irish stages, manipulated conventional theatrical modes, tropes, and characters in order to design a virulently pro-Irish "and still more virulently anti-English" comedy. His hero, Murrough O'Dogherty, simultaneously hearkens back "to a purer, manlier Irish aristocracy" and looks forward towards recuperating a unifying Irishness in the face of religious and political discord and an ever-present corrupting English influence. The True-born Irishman was an enormous success with audiences in Philadelphia and New York in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution; this paper explicates compelling congruities between Irish and emergent American cultural forms. As the scholarship demonstrates, the 1780s represented a liminal moment in the history of the American stage, between rampant anti-theatrical prejudice and later efforts to marshal the theater's political potential. Ultimately, we'll ask what TTBI meant for American audiences in the 1780s, towards complicating our understanding of early American theatrical and national culture.

This dissertation argues that the literature of a fading, Atlantic-imperial system of mines and plantations had a decisive and under-examined impact upon twentieth-century globalization. Adopting a world-systems perspective, this project investigates how the literature of declining Anglo settler classes in particular, the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-South Africans constructed a series of stylized emotional dispositions so as to position these classes as mediators between rising national movements and an emerging global economy. Turning to novels, plays, and non-fiction prose by a British-based group of colonial writers who mixed dissident and privileged politics in equal parts Olive Schreiner, George Bernard Shaw, William Plomer, Sarah Gertrude Millin, Elizabeth Bowen, J. M. Keynes, and J. M. Coetzee Affective Transnationalism shows how the Anglo-Irish Big House novel, the South African plaasroman/farm novel, and the South African mine novel provided familiar images of an older Atlantic semiperiphery through which to make sense of an emergent, despatialized semiperiphery governed by professionalized labor and emotional ambivalence. Where the Atlantic mines and plantations featured in Anglo-Irish and Anglo-South African fiction had translated between local, highly-racialized labor systems and metropolitan commodity markets, twentieth-century globalization and the concomitant growth of finance capitalism caused both local, national-political institutions and global economic institutions to exist in the same space. This dissertation thus examines how Anglo settlers developed a formalist epistemology of emotion in which ambivalent emotions like sympathy, envy, hysteria, stoicism, and ecstasy enabled them to orient themselves simultaneously toward national-political and global-economic institutions, thereby using their own increasingly-negligent semiperiphery as a model for the new semiperiphery they now occupied as budding professionals. Most important, by using the Atlantic semiperiphery as a generic model for their experiments with affect, Schreiner, Shaw, Plomer, Millin, Bowen, and Coetzee reveal how literary and economic structural forms repeat across time in a discontinuous historical trajectory. Thus, in contrast to the evolving technologies, political forms, and economic logics we normally associate with globalization, the affective mediations we find in Anglo-Irish and Anglo-South African literature illustrate the formal continuity behind the various material and affective technologies tasked with organizing discrepant economies into a global world-system.

In this dissertation, I argue that we are in the midst of an emergent cultural phenomenon. In the present moment, various social institutions facilitate both formal and informal performance-based Shakespeare rehabilitation programs intended to aid ethnically, racially, economically, and sexually marginalized communities in obtaining a more socially successful future. From prisons to immigrant acculturation projects, these programs present rehabilitation as the point at which Shakespeares intrinsic value meets its use value. However, in examining the audio-visual documentations of these programs-or what I refer to as rehabilitative Shakespeares-Shakespeare operates as an alibi for mechanisms of disciplinary power. While I describe the cinematic conventions and institutional investments of rehabilitative Shakespeares at length, I am primarily concerned with the discursive means by which the rehabilitative subject in process comes to signify both normative and non-normative identity positions in palimpsestic ways. The rehabilitative subject represents a site of identificatory multiplicity that disrupts the teleological intents of these programs. In attending to these moments of disruption during which categories of the normative and non-normative cease to signify as the only possible modes of being, we witness the emergence of queer subjectivity, or what I characterize as a strategically performative sense of self that signifies across a multivalent range of identity possibilities.

Christopher Marlowes early modern hero, Tamburlaine, The Great is a totalitarian who appears to control every thing and every person on the world-stage with speech-acts. This paper argues that Tamburlaine, The Great Parts 1 and 2 in fact disprove the foundational tenets of the protagonists totalitarian fantasy by exposing the embodied reality behind the myth of performative speech. Tamburlaines tyrannical regime is haunted by the fact that every supposed speech-act does not just become reality through the magic of illocution. The plays use Tamburlaines overidentification as the scourge and wrath of God to reveal that each speech-act actually depends on a constellation of material bodies. Tamburlaine needs dead, objectified bodies to prove that his performative power is legitimate and he needs live bodies to consent to his commands. Marlowes plays show that the limits of the body are the true terms of a sovereigns rule.

The writing and commentary of Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean women writers such as Maryse Conde, Jamaica Kincaid, and Merle Hodge, will be discussed in this thesis as critiques of colonialism and within the context of post-postcolonial canonicity. Black feminism, particularly when discussed within a global context, is not a narrative of victimization; it is instead a narrative of complex power dynamics which are determined not only by race, gender, sexuality, and class, but also by a global consciousness (positionality and subjectivity) that is informed by an access to privileged or lack thereof. One is never solely oppressed or oppressor; resulting, instead, in a much more nuanced and fluid sense of ones relationship to an imagined black community as well as the culprit(s) and crime(s) of the past/present under investigation. Such considerations should result in historical trajectories of black womens writing which not only acknowledge their voices/active participation in black internationalism at various time periods; but one which also considers the ways in which Caribbean women, for instance, have only recently experienced a proliferation of their work.

The science of climate change is largely a narrative endeavor, and it is the shape of this narrative that is contested in debates about the politics of global warming. The most significant variables in models of possible future climates involve humans and how we choose to respond to our situation. Scenario-thinking, of increasing complexity and realism, is the goal for ecological management, policy making, and corporate planning with regard to climate change and other risk-filled possibilities, and science fiction acts as a source and supplement to these scenarios. I argue that climate change scenarios, in fiction, science, and policy, tend to be articulated within apocalyptic or utopian frames and that environmentalists have largely neglected utopian thinking in favor of eschatological catastrophe. I argue for the enduring value of utopia as a methodology, above any particular literary text or political platform.

A collection of poems which handle an intricate sense of place makes up this thesis. I have explored both exterior and interior aspects of what one may consider to be home. Though the writing draws from personal or familiar experiences, these poems inherently resist a narrative or realistic center. They explore something nearer to the unfamiliar and often unrecognized places found in the natural world which I can attribute to a haven or home. There are moments of nostalgia, alongside self-discovery and a range of subjective interests, but even more so, there is an acute treatment of the effects of poetry in providing a working space for the imagination, a place one can easily slip into and live through. That effect, that intention is something closer to what I am after. This poetry demonstrates my attempt to solidify a poetic voice carried not only through the musicality in an expression, but also an inherent life and constitution of this musicality to expose the singular, organic and active mind in each of these poems. In other words, the poetry does not want to reflect an expression or experience, rather it becomes the experience itself. In this manner, one could argue this work has offered a dwelling for transformative experience of poetry unto a place I can call home.

This paper situates Gloria Naylors 1988 novel, Mama Day, within the tradition of 19th century African American womens autobiography. I argue that the slave-narrative can be understood as black autobiography in that ex-slaves used their life story as a political tool in both critiquing slavery and redefining black identity. Mama Day could be understood as a neo-slave narrative since the novel traces a trajectory from Sapphira Wadea young black female slave living in the 19th century to the youngest descendent of her matrilineal line, Cocoa Day, who is living in the 20th century. The novel is set in Willow Springs, a fictional island where Sapphira Wade was enslaved. I argue that Sapphira Wade is able to redefine black femininity through her use of conjure to reclaim Willow Springs from her master and create a safe space for her matrilineal line of Day women. These women follow in Sapphira Wades tradition of black female self-empowerment and self-definition. I find that Cocoa Day, too, follows in this tradition, which is expressed by Naylors choice to allow Cocoa Day to speak in first-person. This paper explores how Cocoas narration can be interpreted as an autobiography and how both her ancestry and migratory experiences shapes this self-crafting of a life story. Furthermore I look at how Cocoa-through her life story-becomes an agent in the construction of a modern black female subjectivity.

This paper examines Herman Melvilles Pierre, and the novels critical reception, in order to investigate and theorize the relevance of Melvilles work for Caribbean writers and historians. This work will contend that the mode in which Melville engages with historical archives, pushes the boundaries between fiction and history, and troubles traditional historiographical techniques of his time is central to the attractiveness of Melvilles works for peoples whose histories were in the process of, and continue to be in the process of, being vigorously suppressed. Melville practices a mode of literary historiography that bears distinct convergences with the historiographical techniques of Caribbean writers like CLR James, Aimé Césaire and Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Furthermore, I examine the critical reception of Melvilles narrative as exemplary of a public discourse of suppression that exposes not only the mechanisms of power in the production of both history and literature, but also the cultural, political, and ideological anxieties of a mid-19th century United States on the brink on civil war.