In this project, I use four Caribbean- and African-American female-authored textsPaule Marshalls Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959); Edwidge Danticats Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994); Natasha Tretheweys Native Guard (2006); and Emily Raboteaus The Professors Daughter (2005)to identify and trace the evolution of a specific mother-daughter dyad through which black women writers illustrate various interrogations of black female identity. In a phenomenon I call matrilineal inscription, maternal figures who are anxious to protect and prepare their daughters for lives as black women attempt to controlor inscribethe narratives of their daughters lives; however, by doing so, they inadvertently create instances of trauma that are mediated through acts of corporeal violence. In turn, daughters who feel the need to claim their agency resist matrilineal influences, and in the process inscribe their own narratives of identity, which are also illustrated through counteractive acts of corporeality. I argue that, through these depictions of matro-filial struggles for physical dominance, both mother and daughter figures challenge the expectations of black female bodies placed on them by external forces. On the other hand, in instances where a daughter rejects the mother-daughter relationship, black women writers illuminate the dangers of denying oneself the opportunity of interpersonal interactions with maternal figures by depicting daughters who, by rejecting such relationships, foreclose on the possibility of establishing their own identities. Ultimately, I argue that, through depictions of matrilineal inscription (or the lack thereof) black women writers illustrate how black female tropes are more than just authorial reactions to stereotypes about black women. Rather, they follow a self-theorizing and still-unfolding trajectory of representation that has, heretofore, remained unidentified, and that has recently begun to question the ways in which black motherhood and black female corporeality have been assumed and defined in extant critical discourse.

This thesis maps the conflation of Cuban authors Juan Francisco Manzano and Placido in John Greenleaf Whittier's The Stranger in Lowell. Through an inadvertent synthesis of the lived experiences of the two poets, the resulting syncretic figure "Juan Placido"initiates a reconsideration of mid-nineteenth century U.S.-Cuban relations. Whittier's revisions and erasures of the Cuban particulars in his cultural translation of the writers into the highly specific context of North American abolitionism ultimately offer an alternative historiographical narrative in which the development of U.S. and Cuban national identities were inextricably interwoven through their negotiation of (anti)slavery in the Americas. Furthermore, The Stranger in Lowell's deployment of well-known slave revolts across the geographies of the hemisphere relocates the island and the continent in a less hierarchical relationship, debasing the nationalist and imperialist discourses that have heretofore driven multicultural approaches to mid-nineteenth century American Studies.

Black Theories of Citizenship in the Early United States, 1793-1860, examines early U.S. citizenship through the work of black activists and intellectuals writing between 1793 and 1861, just after the framing of the Federal Constitution and just before the Civil War. My central premise is that black intellectuals did more than mine already-existing national ideologies for usable parts; rather, they actively engaged in creating and recreating citizenship within the context of the U.S. and in a variously conceived African Diaspora. Building on recent work by literary scholars (Brooks, Ernest, Smith Foster, and Levine) as well as work in American and African American studies, performance studies, and citizenship studies, I analyze civic texts ranging from pamphlets and convention proceedings to periodical literature and scientific treatises to recover an understanding of citizenship as a set cultural and political practices structured by law and custom and communicated through recognizable political styles. These models simultaneously index dominant trajectories of U.S. citizenship and imagine new routes. Focusing on highly collaborative documents including the black state conventions of the 1840s, periodicals (e.g. Colored American, Frederick Douglasss Paper, and Anglo-African Magazine), and understudied writers like William J. Wilson, James McCune Smith, and Frances E. Watkins in conjunction with more canonical sources including Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Black Theories presents a multivalent and dialogic picture of early U.S. literature and political culture. Each chapter takes up a specific text or constellation of texts and considers how it contributes to our understanding of the discursive form and structures of black civic discourse in terms of ethics, politics, economics, and critique.

My dissertation examines the paradoxical complex of 16th and 17th century ideas about children and their often disruptive appearances in English literature. Early modern societys ability to perpetuate itself was intellectually based on idealized models of reproduction that promised the replication of cultural norms by successive generations, insuring a consistent social order. However, this desire for ideally repetitive offspring was regularly undermined by the interactions of the very models that were expected to bring them about. In this project, I argue that Renaissance thinkers struggled to negotiate these failures of continuity in cultural reproduction through their paradoxical ideas about children. This effort is evident in the poetry and drama of the authors I address: Ben Jonson, John Marston, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and John Webster. I also draw from works on pedagogy, conduct, household management, and religion and the profusion of contradictory figurative language they apply to child figures. These purportedly practical texts demonstrate a range of rhetorical strategies for describing and training children available for all of the authors to draw upon. Early modern children threatened to escape conceptual categories of chronology, species, and morality. Attempts to classify them often relied upon comparisons to numerous animals and inanimate objects. This uncertainty about how to define children complicates the passing on of norms and values and so might seem to leave ideas about childhood an unusual source for reproductive solutions. However, these abundant rhetorical possibilities enabled writers to rework versions of cultural reproduction to both assert social stability and reveal volatility. They used paradoxical figurative language in efforts to normalize child figures or to harness their unusual qualities. Yet in the process of asserting adult or authorial control this contradictory rhetoric can attribute agency to the literary child figures themselves. In this project, I argue that attempts by characters and writers to use child characters instrumentally results in the fragmentation of adult authority around these paradoxical children.

This dissertation recovers the long nineteenth-century history of the magic-portrait story, a forgotten genre of prose fiction that climaxed in 1890 with Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray. I argue that the history of the genre constitutes the history of British aestheticism to the extent that the Victorian movement was initiated, defined, and challenged by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Ouida, Wilde, and the many now-obscure writers who published magic-portrait stories during the movements heyday. Originating in Romantic literature as a variant of the Künstlerroman, or artists Bildungsroman, magic-portrait fiction is characterized by a thematic focus on the sexual politics of artistic mastery and a formal integration of aesthetic philosophy, both of which develop through the ekphrasis of a painted portrait. The genre provided a forum for writers to explore gender and sexual identities and to assert or critique a specifically art-critical mode of cultural authority caught up in an ideology of male artistic masters and objectified female sitters. In chapters that join obscure and canonical texts by authors such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Virginia Woolf, A Secret History unsettles conventional definitions of British aestheticism, generally perceived as an archive of avant-garde poetry, painting, and art criticism, revealing instead the fundamental role popular prose fiction played in the history of a high-art movement.

This dissertation recovers the long nineteenth-century history of the magic-portrait story, a forgotten genre of prose fiction that climaxed in 1890 with Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray. I argue that the history of the genre constitutes the history of British aestheticism to the extent that the Victorian movement was initiated, defined, and challenged by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Ouida, Wilde, and the many now-obscure writers who published magic-portrait stories during the movements heyday. Originating in Romantic literature as a variant of the Künstlerroman, or artists Bildungsroman, magic-portrait fiction is characterized by a thematic focus on the sexual politics of artistic mastery and a formal integration of aesthetic philosophy, both of which develop through the ekphrasis of a painted portrait. The genre provided a forum for writers to explore gender and sexual identities and to assert or critique a specifically art-critical mode of cultural authority caught up in an ideology of male artistic masters and objectified female sitters. In chapters that join obscure and canonical texts by authors such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Virginia Woolf, A Secret History unsettles conventional definitions of British aestheticism, generally perceived as an archive of avant-garde poetry, painting, and art criticism, revealing instead the fundamental role popular prose fiction played in the history of a high-art movement.

This dissertation traces confessional speech as a performative mode of social subject formation in English dramatic texts and non-fiction accounts from the early modern period. I explore the confessional speeches that pervade these works to illuminate a self-reflexive sense of the inherent intersubjective power invested in the term and idea of confession. I argue that inhabitations of confessions conventional roles expose a sustained interest in the ways in which the power of this discursive structure might be mobilized. Long established in formal religious and legal practice, and predicated on ritualized configurations of discursive power, by the late sixteenth century, confession had developed a diffuse and complex social currency. My exploration of texts such as Heywood and Bromes The Late Lancashire Witches, Rowley, Dekker and Fords The Witch of Edmonton, Fords Tis Pity Shes a Whore, and Shakespeares Othello, illuminates how representations of confession expose the fissures in and dislocations of the discourses of power that animate them. This dissertations investigation of the interrelated dynamics of performativity, subjectivity, and power proceeds from a theoretical constellation informed by the work of scholars such as Austin, Butler, Felman, Foucault, and Althusser. I draw on this critical apparatus in terms of historically and generically situated representations of confessional interlocution to suggest that its subjective effects are constitutively multiple and simultaneous, revealing the dynamic interplay of configurations and reconfigurations of discursive power at work amidst the normative structures that delineate it as a social ritual.

This dissertation uses insights from narratology and cognitive literary studies to advance a new theory of reference in fictional texts. While reference to real-world entities is a ubiquitous feature of realist fiction, existing theories of fiction have rarely attempted to account for it. Focusing on the Victorian social-problem novel and its offshoots, I argue that engagement with real-world social and political issues is central to the meaning-making capacity of all narrative fiction. In the introductory chapter, I argue that readers easily make sense of ontologically blended texts that combine fictional and real-world entities. This feature of texts and of the reading process can be accounted for by the pre-existing theory of conceptual blending. In Chapter II, I demonstrate how conceptual blends are central to the success or failure of ostensibly realistic fiction. This chapter contrasts a critically praised realist text, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, with an example of failed reference, Edward Bulwar Lytton's Eugene Aram. Referring to existing entities is not enough to ensure that a text will be accepted as realistic or plausible. Chapter III examines the role of convention in fiction. While convention is often assumed to be realism's opposite, recent empirical research on the reading process suggests that some degree of convention is essential for any text to be perceived as referential. This chapter analyzes how two mid-Victorian political novels make use of, and implicitly comment on, existing conventions for representing politics. Finally, Chapter IV examines the function of detailed spatial description in the novel. Often denigrated as a site of pure reference, detailed spatial description is instead one of the novel's key avenues of meaning-making, allowing readers to construct what I term schematic spatial analogies. I analyze the unconventional use of description in Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale and D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow to show how description prompts readers to attach meaning to space.

This dissertation pairs fictional texts with periodicals in four time periods that span the nineteenth century to compare the changing narrative perspectives encoded in the editorial We, or as Anthony Trollope called it, the delicious plural. Despite the seemingly straightforward function of the pronoun, and its consistent ability to influence readers, writers adapted the We to multifarious purposes throughout the century. Many Victorian writers wrote both periodical material and independent fiction, and their texts not only illustrate how formal and stylistic trends in periodicals influenced fiction writing (and vice versa) but also demonstrate how writers developed and expressed opinions about social topics in different literary arenas. The world of periodicals emboldened many writers to speak openly as critical readers, judging and esteeming current events and texts through the language of authority or the language of satire crafted to critique while it unsparingly entertained. These approaches to periodical engagement with the reader molded periodicals uses of We and I voices. In fiction, many authors brought a level of that same authoritative or satirical scope to their narratives. Yet the distinct realm of fiction was not predicated on critiquing, like periodicals, but on showing and exploring and entertaining through sustained plots, which in turn could alter the tone and agenda of We and I voices. This study explores how the We takes on distinct significance in different literary forms by analyzing the role of narration in novels that show evidence of influence from periodical conventions established to represent the self through narrative perspective in four time periodsBenjamin Disraelis Vivian Grey, from the late 1820s; William Makepeace Thackerays Pendennis, from the late 1840s; Anthony Trollopes An Editors Tales and The Way We Live Now, from the late 1860s and the mid 1870s; and George Gissings New Grub Street, from the early 1890s. Their varying uses of We are symptomatic of changing cultural attitudes about such concepts as self-representation, stylistic trends (like realism), politics, commercialism, and generic categorization.

Autobiography, mysticism and spirituality in Henry david Thoreau's Journal