Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: A, page: 0620. Advisers: Carol Neely; Robert Markley. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 187-201) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Lehigh University, 2007.

This thesis aims to provide an examination of texts produced by and about the New Woman of the late-nineteenth century, with specific reference to the trope of self-harm. It aims to explore the connections between the fictional bodies of text in which the New Woman was represented, and the damaged bodies of women who committed self-destructive acts. It examines both the religious frameworks within which Victorian women’s fiction operated, and three specific forms of self-harm which feature across a range of textual artefacts. To this end, the thesis discusses New Woman novels, poems, and short stories as well as newspaper and magazine articles, archival materials, and popular works of art, all of which discuss or display the damaged female body. The scope of this project is limited to New Woman writing produced between 1880 and 1900, although it does consider the ways in which the New Woman built on, or challenged, discourses about self-harm which appear in materials produced during the earlier half of the nineteenth century. This research demonstrates that New Woman writers drew on forms of self-harm such as anorexia, alcoholism, and self-mutilation, to express their frustrations at the contradictory requirements of women endorsed by conventional religion, at a time during which attitudes towards the body were changing. It shows how the female form embodied various Victorian political and social debates, and how it was deployed as a strategic symbol, in writing which sought to disrupt women’s subordinate position within the patriarchal system. Consequently, this research contributes to the fields of psychiatric history, New Woman studies, and more generally the study of Victorian women’s writing, by examining both canonical and critically neglected texts by women alongside non-fictional materials from the period. It explores both fictional acts of self-harm, and textual strategies, which have yet to be examined in New Woman writing, and which are key to understanding her complicated place in the male-oriented publishing environment of the Fin de Siècle.

In Australia, we have not yet composed a literature of place in which the Australian geographies sing, so in this dissertation, the author goes travelling with some North American writers in their native landscapes, exploring the practice of landscape witness, of ecological imagination. They carry on there,looking for the ways in which the wild music of the land be discerned and expressed in words. He talks with them about the business of writing the life of places. He takes heed of the natural histories in which their works have arisen, looking for correlations between those physical terrains - the actual earth, the solid ground of their work - and the terrain of these writers' prose, wondering how the prose (and sometimes the poetry) may be said to be an expression of the place. This work, in a sense, is a natural history of six nature writers; it is an ecological imagining of their lives and works and places. Writing the Wild is a journey through the light, the wind, the rock, the water, sometimes the fire that makes the land that houses the writers who compose these lyrics of place. Most of what it learns about those writers, it learns from the places themselves. This dissertation takes landscapes seriously. It reads the works of these writers as though the landscapes of which and in which they write might be worthy of regard in understanding the terrain of their texts. It lets places show light on works of words composed within them. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: Scott P. Gordon.

When John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in Ford's Theatre in Washington on the evening of April 14,1865, he destroyed any possibility that his reputation as an actor would be dispassionately assessed for the foreseeable future. A bitter, fratricidal war was drawing to its close, and Northern newspapers were not interested in being fair; opprobrium was heaped on Booth's name, beginning in the press the following day. Twelve days later he was dead, shot during an attempted arrest. In 1890, his fellow player Clara Morris asserted hopefully, ‘At this late day the country can afford to deal justly with John Wilkes Booth.’ That time had not yet come: in fact, some of the worst -- and silliest -- slanders have been perpetrated in the twentieth century. But surely now, over a hundred years later, it should be possible to set aside that April evening and look dispassionately at Booth's career in the theatre of his time. As well as extending simple justice to a man who seems to have been extremely likeable and idealistic, and an actor interesting enough to deserve study, such a reassessment may serve to correct a distortion which the 'mythologized' view of his career has created: the idea that Edwin Booth was the only promising young tragedian in the early 1860s, which falsifies both Edwin's career and the period in general. Moreover, John's entire career covered a mere ten years, and his four full seasons as a star occurred during the Civil War, an under-researched period. The necessary concentration on so brief a time-span allows a more detailed treatment than would be possible in examining a career of average length, which may in turn illuminate some broader aspects of American theatre during an unsettled and transitional period.

Einladungsschrift--Halle-Wittenberg. / "Anmerkungen" (contains bibliography): p. 30-32.

This thesis is about the complex network of metaphors that emerged around late nineteenth-century conceptions of economic self-interest — metaphors that dramatised the predatory, conflictual and exploitative basis of relations between nations, institutions, sexes and people in an outwardly belligerent fin-de-siècle economy. More specifically, this thesis is about the vampire, cannibal and related genera of economic metaphor which I argue penetrate many of the major discourses of the period in ways that have yet to be understood. In chapters that examine socialist fiction and newspapers; the imperial quest romance; inter-personal intimacies in the writing of Henry James and Vernon Lee; and the Catholic novels of Lucas Malet, I assess the breadth and variety of these metaphors, and consider how they filter the concept of the conflictual ‘economic man’ inspired by Hobbes and formalised in nineteenth-century economic discourses. The thesis builds on Maggie Kilgour’s From communion to cannibalism: an anatomy of metaphors of incorporation (1990), which traces the genealogy – in literature from Homer to Melville – of what she terms ‘metaphors of incorporation’. In basic terms, these are metaphors that originate from a foundational inside-outside binary and involve the assimilation or incorporation of an external reality. Kilgour attempts to demonstrate that with the increasing isolation of the modern individual (signalled by the acts of enclosure and the formalisation of property rights, for instance) acts of ‘incorporation’ previously imagined as symbiotic (early communion), were later conceived as cannibalistic (oedipal rivalry). Representing an appetitive antagonism between aggressor and victim, the figures at the centre of this study – the economic vampire and its cognates – have integrity as metaphors of incorporation. However, deploying a combination of historicist and, at times, Post-Structuralist approaches, this thesis demonstrates that these metaphors refuse to accommodate themselves to a simple unified vision of the kind advanced by Kilgour. Therefore, in this thesis, I map the complexities of these metaphors, explaining how they originate from divergent teleological impulses and how they articulate both simple ideological operations, and more complex feelings of ambivalence about economic realities in the cultural moment of the Victorian fin-de-siècle.

This dissertation addresses the problem of raising consciousness in Walter Benjamin's writings, which focuses on the problem in his major early works, and in his later writings on photography, film, and mimesis generally. It is a closely-read interpretation, following Benjamin in his attempt to present a historical-philosophical treatment of the literature he was examining. However, it moves away from Benjamin's methodology at critical moments, presenting its own reading of the raising of consciousness as a problem not only for political theorists, but for those interested in the philosophy of history as well. The chapters focus on Benjamin's key major early works, the untranslated "Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism," his dissertation, and the essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities. It contains a lengthy chapter on Benjamin's famous Trauerspiel book, and two on mimesis and the essay on the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility. The dissertation casts these works in a different light, one under which they have not been examined previously: this light bears the shadow of Kant. Although this is not a dissertation on Benjamin and Kant, the place of the subject and its historicity is considered when contemplating the raising of consciousness at stake in each individual chapter. The question of temporality is present in each case, and marks the presence of Kant as the figure who attempted so articulately to bridge reason and history. Benjamin realized this, and so his attention to consciousness and its temporality is so keen in all of his writings. Conclusions are always difficult to enumerate, especially when a work sees itself as necessarily unfinished. It is the opinion of this author that it is evident, in each chapter, both how Benjamin wrote about raising consciousness, what that meant in each case examined, and how this author interjected to highlight, stress, and invent new ways to read what is often so terribly obscure.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2000. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 251-271). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.