Thesis (Ph.D.) -- McMaster University, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [236]-245). Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [276]-291).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2008. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on September 22, 2008) Includes bibliographical references.

In this dissertation, I investigate American specular narrative which displays a significant level of visual empiricism and examine the implications of the eyewitness perspective such narrative assumes. Based on the epistemological assumption that "to see is to know," specular narrative imagines an empirical access (via visual processes of the gaze) to a knowable reality, and uses the figure of the eyewitness (by way of narration, focalization, and narrative technique) to render a supposedly transparent relation between narrative and reality. This study draws upon theories of narrative, realism, subjectivity, and the gaze to explore this narrative eyewitness, tracking how the impulse to construct an authentic American identity, which materializes during American colonization, influences early American discourse and recurs as a specular realism in later American narrative. I examine how the illusion of the eyewitness sustains Realist ideology in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narrative (William Dean Howells' A Hazard of New Fortunes, Henry James' The Spoils ofPoynton, and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth); how new spatial and temporal paradigms created by automotive technology affect the eyewitness (and a particular vision of America) in the American road book, specifically Theodore Dreiser's A Hoosier Holiday, and how the specular fetishism of the nonfiction novel, particularly Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, problematizes narrative objectivity and sutures the reader into the narrative as eyewitness / Department of English

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- McMaster University, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 263-273). Also available via World Wide Web.

Originally presented as the author's dissertation.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Full text release at OhioLINK's ETD Center delayed at author's request

There are many factors that contributed to the proliferation of visual codes, metaphors and references to the gendered gaze in women's fiction of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This thesis argues that the visual details in women's novels published between 1778 and 1815 are more significant than scholars have previously acknowledged. My analysis of the oeuvres of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney shows that visuality — the nexus between the verbal and visual communication — provided them with a language within language capable of circumventing the cultural strictures on female expression in a way that allowed for concealed resistance. It conveyed the actual ways in which women ‘should' see and appear in a society in which the reputation was image-based. My analysis journeys through physiognomic, psychological, theatrical and codified forms of visuality to highlight the multiplicity of its functions. I engage with scholarly critiques drawn from literature, art, optics, psychology, philosophy and anthropology to assert visuality's multidisciplinary influences and diplomatic potential. I show that in fiction and in actuality, women had to negotiate four scopic forces that determined their ‘looks' and manners of looking: the impartial spectator, the male gaze, the public eye and the disenfranchised female gaze. In a society dominated by ‘frustrated utterance,' penetrating gazes and the perpetual threat of misinterpretation, women novelists used references to the visible and the invisible to comment on emotions, socio-economic conditions and patriarchal abuses. This thesis thus offers new insights into verbal economy by reassessing expression and perception from an unconventional point-of-view.