Since the 1980s, literary scholars in the U.K., Ireland, and the U.S. have recovered the contributions of the nineteenth-century American writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick and her older Anglo-Irish contemporary Maria Edgeworth, establishing both as groundbreaking contributors to their respective national literatures. This dissertation casts new light on both authors by examining their private writings to reconstruct their actual historical relationship to one another and by interpreting their published works in a transatlantic and post-colonial context. Reading their works side by side reveals that both authors were preoccupied with modeling Union—the harmonious union of qualities within the individual, of husbands and wives, of disparate groups within larger societies, and, most importantly, of member states within larger political nations, such as Edgeworth's United Kingdom of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and Sedgwick's young United States of America. Though Sedgwick and Edgeworth lived an ocean apart and never met in person, their literary celebrity and shared literary project connected them. Throughout her career, Sedgwick's readers and critics compared her style, her subject matter, her literary and social mission, and indeed the totality of her literary persona to that of Edgeworth. The dedication of Sedgwick's first novel, A New-England Tale (1822), is an encomium to Edgeworth that establishes how much the novice American admired this mature writer who had already achieved enormous transatlantic literary stature. Edgeworth's response to that dedication initiated an occasional correspondence between the two women, and Sedgwick continued to inscribe her fiction with intertextual references to Edgeworth. Important points of intersection between Sedgwick's and Edgeworth's oeuvres include their literary treatments of women and their writings about women writers, their pioneering literary regionalism, their fictional representations of socioeconomic and ethnic others, and their use of allegory to infuse domestic fictions with national political significance. Both writers employ various narrative strategies in presenting the many aspects of their social and political philosophies to the public in a fictional and often coded form that this dissertation theorizes as the sub-genre of domestic-political fiction. This sub-genre was the means through which both authors modeled their ideals of perfect Union. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2002. / Date of Defense: November 8, 2002. / Maria Edgeworth, Political Fiction, Catherine Sedgewick / Includes bibliographical references. / Dennis Moore, Professor Directing Dissertation; Sally Hadden, Outside Committee Member; Eric Walker, Committee Member; Helen Burke, Committee Member; Chanta Haywood, Committee Member; Julia Stern, Committee Member.

In this thesis, I argue that the works of Walker Percy present a progression from passive to active attitudes toward popular and mass culture and that understanding this progression brings a new perspective to the relationship between intellectuals and popular culture in mid-to-late-twentieth century American literature. I discuss two of Percy's novels, The Moviegoer and Lancelot, and a book of non-fiction satire and parody, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. The first chapter addresses The Moviegoer. In it, I argue that its protagonist, Binx Bolling, deals with the encroaching mass culture of American suburbia of the 1950's by combining the best of both his high and low culture identities into a midcult one, a term defined by Andrew Ross and originally discussed by Dwight MacDonald, a contemporary of Percy. The novel's mere promise of happiness at it's conclusion reflects an ambivalent attitude toward popular culture and the midcult on Percy's part. The second chapter explores the ways in which Lance Lamar, the protagonist of Lancelot, violently subverts popular culture's media by videotaping his wife's acts of infidelity and murdering her lover. I also relate Andrew Ross's discussion of pornography's proliferation in mass media in the late 1960's and 1970's and the implications it has for Lance's anger towards the film company filming an all-but pornographic film at his ancestral home. Lance's violent reactions certainly reflect a changing attitude for Percy, who is more wary of the open sexuality in popular culture, but certainly does not advocate the violent revolution that his protagonist does. The final chapter reflects yet another change in Percy's attitude towards popular culture with Lost in the Cosmos. Rather than choosing fiction, he addresses his concerns with his own voice, albeit with parody, caricature, and satire. But beyond ridiculing popular culture, he recognizes the ways in which intellectuals are susceptible to its influence as well and how this makes the existence of Andrew Ross's "new intellectual" who can speak to both the academic and popular sphere a near impossibility. Ultimately, the resolution of the conflict between intellectuals and popular culture lies with individuals. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2006. / Date of Defense: April 3, 2006. / American Literature After 1945, Popular Culture, Walker Percy / Includes bibliographical references. / Andrew Epstein, Professor Directing Thesis; Darryl Dickson-Carr, Committee Member; Leigh Edwards, Committee Member.

Nine short stories. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2007. / Date of Defense: March 13, 2007. / Short, Stories / Includes bibliographical references. / Robert Olen Butler, Professor Directing Thesis; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member; Virgil Suarez, Committee Member.

The Shambling is a collection of poems that centers around the American cinematic image of the zombie, a creature brought back from the dead and bent on consuming the flesh of the living. Unlike the ghost who returns from the dead in order to right some wrong, the zombie returns from the dead without a reason and can not be stopped. Unlike the ghost, the zombie is corporeal and its threat is not to the individual or to a closed group, but to all of civilization. The zombie haunts me because it is without origin and it seeks no conclusion. Thus zombie as an image and a mythology is open for exploration. Because the zombie is a dark image, I use it as a mode of psychological reaction, a reaction against literary expectation, as a reaction against poetic propriety and as an idea of social limitation which manifests as subconscious longing for the destruction of society. Some of the poems are cinematic and concretely narrative. These seek to explore the social aspects of the zombie. Their themes are personal and post-apocalyptic, toying with the idea of physical deterioration as metaphor for the deterioration of concreteness in poetry and as an expectation of how poetry ought to function, i.e. concretely. Other poems have more energy, anxiety and movement. These poems move away from the concrete by allowing more linguistic possibility to intrude beyond meaning. With this deterioration of meaning I hope to suggest or reflect some kind of mental decay as a kind of metaphor for mindlessness. These poems can be thought of as being invested with the kind of sickness that causes human beings to turn in to zombies. They also seek to represent the deterioration of sense as a metaphor for the descent into zombie-like mindlessness. These poems are those in which the impulse toward sense is most dissolved. These poems are in homage to Paul Celan, and thus are the furthest from clearly making sense. They blur the distinction between sickness and wellness as an exploration of the gap between meaning and language, between concreteness and abstraction. Finally, the whole text is broken up by short, narrow poems I call teeth and which are titled as different kinds of teeth. These poems are designed to be interludes between the larger body of the book which allow the reader to masticate on the possibilities of what he has read. Teeth are a recurrent theme of the book and one which represents the bridge and terminus, the junction between all the possibilities of the book, living and dead, zombie and non-zombie, language and meaning, the spoken, the silent and the eaten. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2008. / Date of Defense: May 1, 2008. / Poems about zombies, Wires, Teeth, Zombies / Includes bibliographical references. / David Kirby, Professor Directing Dissertation; John Marincola, Outside Committee Member; Erin Belieu, Committee Member; Elaine Treharne, Committee Member.

Cole Fortan, the narrator of my novel, is a character who hates himself. He's dropped out of college at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater to be the friendly, neighborhood marijuana dealer, the guy all the kids at Eskimo Joe's go to when they want to get stoned for the weekend. But he doesn't want to be that guy anymore. The truth is that Cole has been lost for a long time, and when we meet him he's drifted extraordinarily close to getting into big time trouble with the law. Cole's suppliers are under investigation and about to go down, and so is Cole. But things are more complicated than that. There's a girl he cares about (Laura), and friends he's known for a long time. Cole makes a decision to leave Oklahoma after his Christmas experience, where he lies to his grandmother about his current occupation. He gives the remainder of his stash to his friend Kyle and narrowly avoids some law enforcement types who are looking for him. From there, Cole is on the road with Florida as his destination. He is going East, and he thinks about his grandfather, who tried to stick out the Dust Bowl in Depression-era Oklahoma, but eventually had to go West to Washington, if only for a little while. In alternating chapters, Cole tells his own story, as well as the story of his grandfather (and eventually, grandmother), starting in the Dust Bowl era and moving up to the contemporary post-9/11 moment. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2006. / Date of Defense: March 15, 2006. / Ecoterrorism, Historical fiction, Dustbowl / Includes bibliographical references. / Robert Olen Butler, Professor Directing Dissertation; Neil Jumonville, Outside Committee Member; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member.

Sylvester Henry "Harry" Scovel (1869-1905) was one of the most celebrated journalists of the Spanish-American War. Almost every scholar who has written about the correspondents of this late nineteenth-century engagement has made use of Scovel's dispatches from the New York World, particularly his on-the-scene reports of the explosion of the Maine. For the first time, all of Scovel's "war" writing for the Joseph Pulitzer owned New York World are here made available in edited form: 132 dispatches dating from the explosion of the Maine on February 15, 1898, to his letter of August 10, 1898, an explanation and apology for the events surrounding his confrontation with General Shafter at the flag-raising ceremony in Santiago. Following an introduction treating the correspondent's life and experiences during the war is a transcription of each article, which has been given a close proofreading and then edited to reflect the discernible intentions of the author within the conventions of contemporaneous usage. The arrangement is chronological, and an "Editorial Methodology" explains how and why these articles are edited as they appear. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2003. / Date of Defense: May 30, 2003. / Journalism, Spanish-American War, Sylvester H. Scovel / Includes bibliographical references. / Joseph R. McElrath, Professor Directing Dissertation; Ernest Rehder, Outside Committee Member; R. Bruce Bickley, Committee Member; John Fenstermaker, Committee Member.

In this thesis, I focus on the early from 1870 to 1940. I confirm that they did try to preserve their ethnic identity through language by applying Benedict Anderson's theory "imagined communities." In the first chapter, I explain the first encounters between the American and the Arab cultures and the influences of the Protestant missionaries in the Arab countries. In the second chapter, I discuss the issue of Arab-American literature and how it reflected the experiences and turmoil of the early Arab immigrants. In the third chapter I apply Andersons' concept of "imagined communities" to the Arab-American ethnicity. / A Thesis submitted to the department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2003. / Date of Defense: May 23, 2003. / Early Arab-American experience / Includes bibliographical references. / Robin Goodman, Professor Directing Thesis; Christopher Shinn, Committee Member; Daniel Vitkus, Committee Member.

This thesis is a collection of lyric poetry and personal essays. The two genres are spliced together in a design intended to use their visual differences and contextual similarities to more fully understand the people, places, and events examined here. The material is based on the author's personal experiences, but is reflected upon and shared in this form in hopes of highlighting the universality of human emotions. Thematically, it delves into the complexities of personal relationships—family dynamics, romantic interests, and one's knowledge of herself—and explores how they change over time. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2005. / Date of Defense: June 24, 2005. / Personal essay, poetry / Includes bibliographical references. / Ned Stuckey-French, Committee Member; Joann Gardner, Committee Member.

This thesis discusses the manner in which imperialism affected race, gender, and class in Victorian England. In Victorian literature, the different periods of imperialism are evident within the literature—early imperialism literature shows how the English were aware of imperialism, but also how it was considered to be an issue usually outside of England, and New imperialism literature shows how England became extremely involved in world affairs. The two stages also exhibit varying degrees of imperialism and conquering both inside the country of England and outside. In order to cope with this issue, many people cross-dressed (dressed, thought, or behaved) in a manner that was not consistent with their own gender, class, or race. Using theory from Anne McClintock as a springboard, I link global imperialism to the internal need within England to control its own people. I trace this phenomenon through early imperialism works Gaskell's Mary Barton, Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Dickens's Great Expectations, and New imperialism works Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and several of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2004. / Date of Defense: March 19, 2004. / Munby, Cullwick / Includes bibliographical references. / Barry Faulk, Professor Directing Thesis; John Fenstermaker, Committee Member; Hunt Hawkins, Committee Member.

In the following paragraphs I shall attempt to deliver a mini-poetics, or at the very least, try to clarify the main components of my thought process when writing these poems. This is dangerous territory. It's all too easy to employ abstract and quasi-religious phrases when talking about something as seemingly ineffable as the process of literary creation; I shall endeavor to avoid doing so wherever possible. Please feel free to overlook those places where I fail. TENSION The concept of tension is central to how I approach writing poems. I may begin with a line or a vague idea of the subject matter, but as I write, it is tension that creates the poem. A former teacher once argued—correctly, I think—that language generates insight. If we agree that insight is a component "good" poetry, then it would follow that one needs first to generate language. This is where I start. I may begin a poem with a line that's been rattling around in my head, but in order to generate language, I first generate tension. I accomplish this on the level of the line. The method I employ most frequently to generate tension is a perhaps obsessive-compulsive attention to line length. I try to make each line in a poem or section approximately the same length. This generates tension by forcing me to carefully consider my words—if a line's too long, I obviously need a shorter word, and vice versa. This attention to line length goes hand-in-hand with an attention to line breaks. Of the latter, I have no special ideas, just the general mandates I believe most poets try to follow—don't break lines on weak words, make the breaks work with the rhythms of the poem, etc. On occasion, I break a line in what I hope is a clever way (cf. the sixth stanza of "From nowhere with love"), but these instances are few and far between. Another way I generate tension is through the use of non-accentual syllabics. "Last Sighs of the Dog" is an example of this—each line has ten syllables. "The North Shore" is another—the syllabic pattern of the first section is mimicked throughout the rest of the poem. The tension the syllabics create has the same effect as an attention to line length—again forcing me to consider more closely my words. The poems here that are non-syllabic and have lines of irregular length either began as one of the two or I just didn't see the necessity for such tension. Sometimes the tension comes built-in. Sometimes the language comes out of my head in prepackaged high-pressure form. But then again, sometimes it does not. It's quite likely that a few of these poems are loose, baggy monsters. THE IDEA It seems the greatest of follies to begin a poem with an idea in mind. A vague one is okay. A nebulous notion even better. But a full-fledged idea is certain death. When one sits down to write a poem about X, then it becomes very difficult to deviate from X—one is committed to making X work (like being in a bad relationship) and spends too much time and effort trying to make X happy. It's better, I think, to make the poem happy (which, in the end, is really the same as making yourself happy). I've tried in this collection to avoid beginning with ideas. The ideas will crop up on their own. Or, as I've written in "Think about beans": subjects have a way of arranging themselves. And anyway, one's intentions in a poem are often very different from what readers will find there. Vladimir Nabokov put it best. In his introduction to Bend Sinister he wrote that "well-wishers [would] bring their own symbols and mobiles, and portable radios, to [his] little party." One will see that I have shamelessly imported this quote in the first "Rorschach" poem in the "Psychological Evaluation" section. One place in this collection where I think there's the stain of a pre-poem idea is in the last section of the title poem. I had settled on titling the collection "Perp" before I had written the poem in which "perp" would appear. I wanted this piece of jargon ripped from the annals of Law & Order to suggest the secret vocabularies that develop in relationships, the inevitability of closure, and the notion that our missteps in life (which most good stories are about) can be seen as criminal behaviors—all very lofty and ambitious, yes, but perhaps the jury's still out on whether or not I've somehow managed to make it work. SOME THINGS YOU MIGHT WANT KNOW ABOUT THE POEMS "Perp," the title poem, is broken into eight sections. Odd numbered sections run forward in time, even numbered sections backward. This may all be a bit confusing, but I couldn't bring myself to follow a more traditionally chronological structure. "Think about beans," takes Herbert Morris's "Ultimate Poem" as inspiration. "Echolalia Frustrata" is a parody, to the syllable, of D.A. Powell's "[darling can you kill me: with your mickeymouse pillows]". The last stanza of "Alas—" blatantly, and perhaps criminally, rips off a passage from J.D. Salinger's Seymour: An Introduction. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2004. / Date of Defense: July 26, 2004. / Creative Writing, Poems, Poetry / Includes bibliographical references. / James Kimbrell, Professor Directing Thesis; David Kirby, Committee Member; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member.