This thesis develops a reflexive methodology to read four North American long form poetic projects: Lorine Niedecker's North Central; Charles Olson's Maximus Poems; Robin Blaser's The Holy Forest; and Susan Howe's Souls of the Labadie Tract. The methodology, 'ecoseriality,' provides a way of reading serial structures in the 'web of life' (Jason W. More). Ecoseriality emerges through two research threads: ecological thinking (Lorraine Code, Dianne Chisholm), an interdisciplinary approach to ecological methodologies, and seriality, an extension of serial poetic form into an interdisciplinary understanding of serial qualities. The project's ecological thinking comprises a recombinant methodology primarily adapted from Moore's theories and methods for reading capitalism in the web of life, a number of philosophical approaches and concepts from Gilles Deleuze and Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, and Fredric Jameson's cognitive mapping. The project's seriality begins with Joseph M. Conte's typology of serial poetic form, Unending Design: the Forms of Postmodern Poetry, reading serial structures across genres and disciplines to refresh understanding of serial poetry and poetics. Ecoseriality develops along three primary, overlapping lines of inquiry: Moore's oikeios, adapted to read competing subjectivities and values brought to bear on relations in the web of life; Jameson's cognitive mapping, adapted into a post-Cartesian strategy for reading the imbrication between matter and meaning; and an examination of how the parts of a series relate to the whole. The project applies these foci to the four case studies, exposing fresh perspectives on the poetry and poetics of each. By reading Howe's 'cannibal cosmology' (Miriam Nichols) through Moore's theories of world-economy and world-ecology, the thesis arrives at an understanding of ecoseriality as an ethical ecological practice within the complex series of relations in the web of life. Ecoseriality thereby emerges as an oikeios for valuing complex relations in the web of life. The analysis concludes with discussion of the cosmological values of the serial poetic projects examined in relation to ecological thinking.

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Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

The chief purpose of this project is to discuss Katherine Mansfield's aesthetic ideas in connection with those of Oscar Wilde and fin de siècle Aestheticism. The proposed study will also analyse her Modernist technique in Symbolist terms, and consider her major themes from aesthetic and political points of view. The primary, underlying concern of this study is to negotiate two, often opposing critical values: the aesthetic and the political. The artist's negotiation of the conflict between aesthetics (art) and politics (society) is a controversial 'modern' critical issue: the issue all serious artists and critics have been facing and consciously dealing with since the late nineteenth century. Fin de siècle Aestheticism and Symbolism form a dominant stream of Modernism because of this intensified shared concern over the delicate relationship between art, life and society. Wilde's stress on the autonomy of art is related to his notion of an ideal relationship between art, life and society: he shows a keen awareness that the autonomy of art and the aesthetic self-realization of the artist could be realized only in a society without any social, cultural or moral hegemony, that is, in a society without moral, social or political oppression. The Wildean 'poeticization' of society lies in his politicization of art; and this aesthetic influences Mansfield's. French Symbolism suggested to Wilde and Mansfield an aesthetic which enabled them to realize their Aestheticism. Wildean and Mansfieldian Symbolism attempt to 'shock' the reader: they aim at breaking the reader's reading habit, and his or her stereotypic point of view and fixed sense of values. Here lie not only the political potential of Symbolism as a Modernist aesthetic but also the aesthetic and political link between their Symbolism and avant-garde Modernism.

This thesis is essentially about the "how" and "why" of the Indian experience as documented in novels by Paul Scott, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and V S Naipaul. The study points to the difficulty of arriving at any conclusive definition of the country and its people. I show that differences in attitudes, responses or behaviour are both overt and subtle, and depend upon whether the writer or the character identifies with the situation or community with which he or she interacts. It is the individual's sense of belonging or not belonging to his or her own group - be this along racial, cultural or gender lines - that accounts for the differing perspectives evident in these novels. The points-of- view of the outsider and the insider can therefore be seen as mutual comments upon the other. Since the struggle between belonging and not belonging becomes acute when the old meets the new, focus is centred on communities experiencing change. These include the British in India, West-Indian Indians and westernised Indians. Despite their differences, all three communities share similar reasons for either an acceptance or rejection of the 'Other'. The thesis argues that the need for emotional stability compels allegiance to the traditional group, while the desire for individuality encourages surrender to the new. The former nurtures a sense of belonging while, it is argued, that the latter is perceived as the hallmark of those who do not belong. Tensions arise when both these needs demand to be met. What I show to be ironic in this struggle between belonging and not belonging is that those things which individuals overtly reject are often unexpressed parts of their personal pysche. The barrier between "them" and "us" is therefore very fragile.

This dissertation examines the meaning of law in Blake's work. I argue that Blake's poetry intersects with contemporaneous challenges to the traditional model of the ancient constitution, a debate which I present as a conflict between custom and code. Blake's support for the French Revolution's overthrow of the customary systems of the ancien regime is countered by his nervousness about the rights-based discourse advanced by leading radical intellectuals such as Thomas Paine, a belief that the new systems which they proposed merely re-stated those which they sought to replace within an even narrower compass. Law is also a contested ground within radical political discourse of this period; although the dominant proposals advocated the enshrinement of fundamental rights and the codification of law, there was also a tendency towards a more enthusiastic radicalism These millenarian groups, emerging from antinomian heresy, rejected the notion of life being framed within a set of moral laws. I argue that Blake cannot easily be placed in either group; his work exhibits a fidelity to the redemptive potential of law, coupled with a real concern that to define freedoms in legal terms serves to limit rather than to liberate. Blake's work thus engages with a problem of the period: how to understand the new discourses of law. The customary account of the ancient English conunon law is predicated on the idea that it is codified, yet not written down; secular, though grounded in divine principle. These ambivalences are exploited by Blake in his poetic exploration of the law in the 1790s. In his nineteenth-century epics, Blake finds increasing help in dissenting religion's reconstruction of a radicalized Jesus. Through this radical prophetic voice, Blake is able to construct a redemptive legality founded on a deinstitutio-nalized Christianity, a constitutionalism that is also recovered from the conventional customary account.

This thesis centres on an examination of Gilles Deleuze's non-subject centred philosophy and the influence of the earlier (seventeenth century) work of Benedict Spinoza, whom Deleuze describes as one of an "alternative" tradition of philosophers, and whom he claims as an antecedent. Historically, the subject has always appeared as a question, or as in question, as a problem around which concepts cluster. The focus here is on Deleuze's approach to the problem of subjectivity, his treatment of it and his attempt to configure an "antisubject" based on his own transformations of Spinozist concepts, which he takes up and modifies for his own purposes. The proposal is that Spinoza provides a key or a way into Deleuzean concepts, and at the same time that Deleuze's readings of Spinoza's theories reinvigorate them. What unites Spinoza and Deleuze, and is a recurring theme of this thesis, is that they both conduct their critiques and elaborate models from within a conceptual framework of a radical immanence that opposes all transcendence, and especially the' transcendent subject of consciousness. It is on the basis of Spinoza's radical immanence and his non-analogical approach to Being/beings that Deleuze constructs a theory of becoming - as "de-individualising" process - that will be his alternative to models of the subject based on identity.

Recent scholarship on the eighteenth-century polymath Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) has focused on his work as a pioneering scientist, a controversial Unitarian polemicist, and a radical political theorist. This thesis provides an extensive analysis of his comparatively neglected philosophical writings. It situates Priestley’s philosophy in the theological context of eighteenth-century rational dissent, and argues that his ideas on ethics, materialism, and determinism came to provide a philosophical foundation for the Socinian theology which came to prominence among Presbyterian congregations in the last decades of the century. Throughout the thesis I stress the importance of rational debate to the development of Priestley’s ideas. The chapters are thus structured around a series of Priestley’s engagements with contemporary figures: chapter 1 traces his intellectual development in the context of the debates over moral philosophy and the freedom of the will at the Daventry and Warrington dissenting academies; chapter 2 examines his response to the Scottish ‘common sense’ philosophers, Thomas Reid, James Beattie, and James Oswald; chapter 3 examines his writings on materialism and philosophical necessity and his debates with Richard Price, John Palmer, Benjamin Dawson, and Joseph Berington; chapter 4 focuses on his attempt to develop a rational defence of Christianity in opposition to the ideas of David Hume; chapter 5 traces the diffusion of his ideas through the syllabuses at the liberal dissenting academies at Warrington, Daventry, and New College, Hackney. The thesis illustrates the process by which Priestley’s theology and philosophy defeated a number of rival traditions to become the predominant intellectual position within rational dissent in the late eighteenth century. In the course of doing so, it illuminates some of the complex interconnections between philosophical and theological discourses in the period.

I explore how knowledge was created and circulated in and between the settlements of the early English East India Company. I aim: to demonstrate connections between scholarship and early colonialism; to highlight the role of non-elite actors in transferring skills and techniques; and to map global knowledge networks based on systems of patronage that cut across national, ethnic, and social boundaries. Chapter 1 uses the life of Samuel Baron, a half-Dutch, half-Vietnamese factor, spy, and broker for the EIC, client of the rulers of Siam and Tonkin, and author of the Description of Tonqueen to examine the importance of passeurs culturels or go-betweens to both the European trading companies and Asian rulers in the period and their role in transmitting geographical and ethnographic information. Chapter 2 examines the local and international botanical and medical networks of two Company surgeons in Madras, based on collections in the Natural History Museum and the surgeons' correspondence with the apothecary James Petiver. Chapter 3 looks in detail at the development of English scholarship on the Malay language: moving from wordlists and manuscript grammars to the first bilingual English-Malay dictionary, published in 1701. I use the texts to examine the early Company's policies of language-learning and teaching and the theoretical and practical basis of linguistic projects in the period. Chapter 4 follows the movement of a travel text, Robert Knox's Historical Relation of Ceylon, with its author on a series of later voyages. I explore the practical uses of such texts to inform bio-prospecting and the transplantation of crops in the Company's search for island bases in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Chapter 5 examines slaves' roles in the transmission of botanical, medical, and cultural knowledge between the 'plantations' of St Helena (South Atlantic) and Bencoulen (Sumatra), through both their work and their resistance.