This study looks at Pathetic Drama alongside contemporary changes in thinking about the nature of knowledge and the attendant changes in thinking about the relation of self to the material world. Empiricism and aesthetics hold that knowledge and judgment come from sense experience; but both fields make moves to replace subjective experience with objective truth. As science uses induction to make particular sense experience objective knowledge, so generic form represents an attempt to standardize aesthetic judgment. In both cases the particular experiences of individuals are abandoned for the sake of objectivity. Paradoxically this devalues the individual sense experience purported to be the basis of these fields of knowledge. At the same time, the individual subjects sense of what Habermas calls saturated interiority is threatened by the increasing social importance of public opinion. Pathetic Drama sought to engage its audience sympathetically, offering a way of maintaining the particularities of subjective experience by emphasizing the situational nature both of selves and of affective judgment and resisting the objectifying tendency of formal conventions. By creating an aesthetic experience that is simultaneously private and shared, pathetic drama negotiates the tension between the spectators simultaneous desires for interiority and membership in the public sphere. This placed Pathetic Drama in line with the doctrine of moral sense philosophers like Shaftesbury, Frances Hutcheson, and Adam Smith who sought to ease the tension between individual and public by rendering the division between them permeable.

Morbid Strains studies the development of morbid formal characteristics in Victorian poetry, novels, and life-writing from the mid-nineteenth century to the fin de siècle. During this period, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and Michael Field convert the Victorian fascination with death and the body into literary form. While these authors works span a variety of genres, they share a common characteristic: Victorian critics condemned them as morbid. Through readings of lyric poetry, life-writing, and novels by these authors, I show the development of morbid literary characteristics that will later come to fruition in the aestheticist and decadent movements of the 1890s. Critics have noted the important influence of French authors such as Charles Baudelaire, Theóphile Gautier, and Gustave Flaubert on the aesthetic and literary movements of the fin de siècle. This study of morbid forms in narrative and poetic genres identifies a domestic lineage for British aestheticism and decadence in high culture texts celebrated as uniquely British and popular works that seemed to threaten the status of British literature as an art form.

Much recent historically-focused scholarship has revealed the ways in which the deviant criminality in the work of Edgar Allan Poe can be read as ideologically conservative. This criticism is understandably concerned with whether the violence Poe renders against marginalized American bodies reinforces a social order dependent upon subjugation. But Poes tales can also be read as attacks upon the norms of civil and social life in the nineteenth century. The veneer of conservativism on the surface of his prose reveals, upon scrutiny, characters who are deeply disturbed by the social order. Poes textual corpus is insistently concerned about orders, spaces, and structures, and the movements a subject must enact within them to avoid their taxonomic identifications. Through the reading of the critically-neglected tale The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, this paper joins a body of criticism that argues for Poes work as providing a challenge to normativity. The inmates of Tarr and Fether do not dismantle the system; they change their (spatial) relationship to it, forcing the disciplinary gaze to chase them in its effort to fix and identify. Inside the confining space of the asylum, Poes inmates confuse the discrete conferral of criminality, and everyone must deviate in order to dissolve the paradigms that structure social subjects. Poes stories argue for the total reorganization of the social structure through deviant criminality.

ABSTRACT Pirating Human Rights studies critical theorists and activists insights on rights in order to bring these two differently situated traditions into productive relation. Arguing the lefts critique of rights has led us to the next stage of rightsrights as collective critiquethe literature I analyze documents activists occupation of and resistance to apolitical humanitarian rights. What emerges from this resistance is a radically democratic production of rights that challenges the apoliticalness of humanitarian rights and widens the frame of discourse from accounts of individual pathologies to structural analysis. Shaped by a genealogical and rhetorical approach, this project foregrounds activists refusal of transhistorical claims of good or evil and their insistence that words matter. The language of rights matters, not only because they count differently for the disfigured, but because wordsas containers that do not mean without struggleare a radical site of occupation, resistance, and production. I develop my argument in two parts: part one is an archeology of political rights and part two analyzes the architectures of human rights. The first three chapters place deferral, disruption, and destabalization at the center of a critique of liberalism. Chapter one analyzes The Ripening and Louise Bennetts Bans O Killing to exhume the lost anti-colonial sensibilities beneath the international codification of human rights. Chapter two draws on these anti-teleological impulses against the neo-liberal rhetoric of the World Bank. Analyzing The Harder They Come and No Telephone to Heaven, I argue these texts attention to formalism is part of a larger project to make visible and disrupt global capitals evisceration of Third World rights. Chapter three turns to the links between the generic and doctrinal politics of the alter-globalization movement to trace the network narratives impulse to make visible the unmanageable new protagonists of globalization. Part two uses social geography to analyze the UDHR and an activist graphic to articulate a radical reformulation of human rights as democracy. I conclude with an analysis of parodys, and this dissertations, constitutive political actiontakingto draw out the implications that political will is not granted by gift but by demand.

This dissertation examines the form of the nineteenth-century sonnet in order to demonstrate how this poetry reshapes expectations of Victorian desire, love and marriage. The amatory sonnet sequence, a poetic form which dates back to the early thirteenth century, traditionally chronicled courtly love and unrequited desire. Naked Novels, however, examines how the form of the Victorian sonnet sequence shifts its focus from courtly desire to take as its subject the center of the domestic spheremarriage. I draw a connection between the strict formula of the sonnet and the strict norm of sanctioned intimacy recognized in Victorian marriage in order to problematize both the poetic form and the legal institution. I argue that exposing sites of queernessmoments that question heterosexuality as normativein nineteenth-century amatory poetry also exposes the texts resistance to and critique of social and political structures, particularly marriage. Following a trajectory from mid-century through the fin de siècle, I analyze sonnet sequences by poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Meredith, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Eliot, Augusta Webster and Michael Field.

Although the outbreak of Spanish flu in 1918-1919 has been labeled a forgotten pandemic, it has made a significant mark on literature and culture, especially that of the 1930s. This paper examines three works of that decade that address the pandemic: John OHaras short story The Doctors Son, William Maxwells novel <i>They Came Like Swallows</i>, and Katherine Anne Porters short novel <i>Pale Horse, Pale Rider</i>. These works treat the flu as a material and historical event and as a figure for other threats to the integrity and boundedness of the human body. The Doctors Son provides an entry into contextualizing the impact of the flu on the United States. <i>Swallows</i> delves into the possibilities of contagion as metaphor for other kinds of exchange and boundary crossings. <i>Pale Horse, Pale Rider</i> offers a vision of the modern body as marked by illness and injury in even its most normative manifestations. These works are especially relevant in the twenty-first century, as outbreaks of avian and swine flu trigger memories of 1918, and some currents of discourse on contagious disease tend to stigmatize the illness and those who suffer from it.

This paper is concerned with the status of the object in late Victorian England. It involves a close analysis of Sir Richard F. Burtons translation of Alaeddin; or, the Wonderful Lamp from his Thousand Nights and One Night that considers the use of Aladdins lamp in its material and sexual circulations. The Lamp, as an object in and of itself, resists valuation and by its owners. As a metonymic cultural symbol, it refuses to be commodified, retaining its original valences even as it is absorbed into Victorian culture. Both of these resistances to human desires causes immense anxiety, which can only be resolved through displacement onto the sexual transaction of desire, which takes the woman as its object. Burtons own changes to the text, as well as his footnotes, reinforces the fact that these anxieties cannot be displaced onto the oriental story, but must be encountered in England itself.

Instead of thinking of jazz in the hackneyed vocabulary of canon-building, I explore jazz as a technological construction very much built to reshape spatial and temporal boundaries across the African Diaspora. Jazz technê, a techno-fusion of art and craft, comes out of a tension and distance between notated music in the classical genre and music played by ear, usually hymns, folk songs, and the blues. I trace this tension through the development of a fictional ragtime pianist in James Weldon Johnsons Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and the education of Thelonious Monk, the high priest of bebop. With this technology converted to language, a poet like Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite is able to collapse distance to create a space for the articulation of both particular identity (for him, Afro-Caribbean) and broader identity (and Afro-Diasporic). Jazz technê enables the creation of a unique space that is akin to the imaginary space of the Black underground, where the narrator of Ellisons Invisible Man uses it to create an emancipatory invisibility, evading the racializing gaze above. Yet, Ellisons essay Living with Music and the visual representations of jazz album covers suggest a potentially destructive alternative to this emancipation, especially when the performance of jazz is mediated by the music industry and sound reproduction technologiesjazz is as integral, essential, and at times submerged as Lucius Brockway is as the machine inside the machine.

In the early 1900s Ernest J. Bellocq photographed anonymous, mostly mixed-race prostitutes in the legalized vice district of Storyville in New Orleans. In Bellocqs Ophelia, Natasha Trethewey creates a narrative that seeks to privilege both the material objectsErnest Bellocqs Storyville photographsand one of his historically anonymous subjects, whom Trethewey names Ophelia. Trethewey begins her recuperation of the silent, anonymous prostitute by exercising her power as author to name the subject, and in naming her, Trethewey situates her within a prestigious, but literary history. In this paper, I suggest that Tretheweys interrogation of the art object, either as subject and/or object, reveals that complex negotiations between morality and subjectivity are necessary endeavors in unpacking the history and role of representational in the shaping of how black bodies, specifically southern black bodies are read.

Charles Dickenss novels are full of instances of parental inversion, in which cruel or hapless (and usually male) parents are cared for by their far more capable (and typically female) children. Our Mutual Friend features many such father-daughter relationships, with one exception: that of Bella Wilfer and her father. Bella does not so much take care of her father as discipline himplayfully, but also very physically. The violence of this physicality becomes the means of an erotics of sadomasochism between father and daughter, as Pa Wilfer gleefully submits to Bellas mock-serious reprimands and aggressive manhandling. This paper explores the psychology of Bellas and Wilfers dynamic in relation to pre-Freudian theories of sexuality, Victorian material culture studies, and current critical discourses on Our Mutual Friend.