Early Irish literature, other Celtic literatures and later folklore are rich with descriptions of personal contact with the sacred. The Otherworld, or spiritual aspect of reality, is a constant and vivid presence in the legends. This reality does not seem distant, but rather, always ready to break through into physical reality, transforming those who encounter it. In earlier times, druids, and sometimes heroes and saints, seem to function fully as shamans as described by Mircea Eliade in his definitive work on shamanism, undertaking spirit journeys into the Otherworld. and returning with gifts for their people. In later times, when overtly primal shamanic practice was increasingly repressed, personal contact with the sacred became in many cases less defined and more individual. However, we continue to see contact with the Otherworld in folklore. hagiography and the mystical experiences fostered by later spiritual movements. While scholars such as Carey, Nagy and Melia have recognised and explored some of the shamanic themes present in Early Irish literature, the full complex of these themes, along with their implications for our understanding of Early Irish and Celtic culture, have not yet been hlly examined. A holistic approach to these difficult issues indicates that one must not just dissect the texts themselves for meaning, but take into account the research of archaeologists, anthropologists, psychologists and neuroscientists as well as Celticists. By doing so, I hope to show not only the evidence for Celtic shamanism itself, but suggest possible fbnctions of shamanic experience in Early Irish, and more broadly, Celtic culture, Because shamanic traditions typically have a clear cosmology and ideas about spiritual growth, I have also considered if the early Irish and, more broadly, the Celts may have had such a cosmology and ideas of harmonising with the sacred they came into such intense contact with.

Em uma entrevista feita por Travis Elborough para uma edição especial de quarenta anos da editora Picador, exatamente no ano em que o romance The Sea (2005), de John Banville, recebe o Booker Prize, o escritor irlandês responde da seguinte maneira a uma indagação sobre o título da obra: Acho que eu tinha o título antes de qualquer coisa, e gosto de pensar num ritmo oceânico através de cada página (p.2, tradução nossa). Realmente Banville consegue produzir o deslumbrante efeito de um movimento marítimo que percorre ciclicamente os três eixos espaço-temporais e narratológicos do romance. Entretanto, não há linearidade cronológica na orquestração desses momentos. Apresentam-se na realidade os percursos criativos de uma mente irrequieta, revelando assim os diferentes estados de consciência de Max Morden, o narrador e estudioso dos quadros de Pierre Bonnard. Nota-se, sobretudo, que essa passagem fluida de informações mnemônicas e cognitivas dentro do universo subjetivo do herói é mediada pela presença de outras artes essencialmente as visuais, tais como a pintura e a fotografia , resultando não apenas numa prosa poética que é a marca registrada de Banville, mas igualmente numa rica linguagem interartística, as quais tornar-se-ão o instrumento essencial para a construção metaficcional da narrativa do romance. Não menos relevante é o centro catalisador dessas memórias, ou seja, o recorrente e doloroso sentimento de perda de pessoas queridas, o qual impulsiona Morden na escrita de seu diário. Portanto, buscaremos investigar as características, propósitos e desdobramentos dessa estética multiforme na obra Banvilliana, considerando, mediante noções teóricas sobre ekphrasis, como a interface entre uma linguagem incrivelmente embuizada de poeticidade e o recurso de representações visuais contribuem para uma nova síntese narratológica diante de um mundo mnemônico que tende a se esfacelar, e como a metaficção de The Sea reconstitui, reproduz e, em última instância, celebra os processos intrigantes das memórias de um ser humano. / In an interview carried out by Travis Elborough for a special edition celebrating Picadors 40th anniversary, in the same year the novel The Sea (2005) by John Banville is awarded the Booker Prize, the Irish writer gives the following answer to a question concerning the title of his work: I think I had the title before I had anything else, and I like to think an oceanic rhythm through every page (p. 2). In fact, Banville is able to convey a mesmerising effect of an oceanic movement that cyclically flows through the novels three narratological and spatiotemporal axes. However, there is no chronological linearity in the orchestration of these moments. Actually the creative meanderings of a restless mind are shown, thus revealing the different states of Mordens conscience, the narrator who studies Pierre Bonnards paintings. It is seen, above all, that this fluidic passage of mnemonic and cognitive pieces of information within the heros subjective domain is mediated by the presence of other forms of art especially the visual ones, such as painting and photography , resulting not only in a poetic prose that is Banvilles hallmark, but similarly in a rich interartistic language. These formal aspects will serve as the essential tool for the metafictional construction of the novel narrative. The galvanising centre of these memories has equal importance, that is, the recurrent and painful feeling of losing endeared people, which propels Morden to write his diary. Therefore, we will investigate the characteristics, purposes and unfoldings belonging to this multiform aesthetics of the Banvillian novel, considering by means of theoretical notions of ekphrasis how the interface between an incredibly poeticised language and the resource of visual representations contributes to a new narratological synthesis in the face of a mnemonic world that tends to fall apart, and how the metafiction of The Sea reconstitutes, reproduces and ultimately celebrates the intricate processes of a human beings memories.

<p> This dissertation examines hip-hop fatherhood narratives from 2010-2015 influenced by drug addiction, mass incarceration, underground economies, trauma, and dysfunctional co-parenting. Explicitly, the paper explores how marginalized, urban African American dads are imagined as protectors, providers, and/or surrogates in hiphop lyricism. Additionally, the research pays attention to hip-hop artists&rsquo; depiction of identity orchestration and identity formation of black adolescents and patriarchs by utilizing David Wall&rsquo;s theories on identity stasis. Moreover, the dissertation critically analyzes hip-hop lyrics that reflect different concepts of maleness such as hypermasculine, the complex cool, biblical, heroic, and hegemonic masculinities. In sum, the paper examines rap lyrics use of mimicry calling into question representative black male engagement with American patriarchy.</p><p>

This dissertation takes as its starting point Leo Tolstoy's famous contention that the works of the Russian literary canon represent "deviation[s] from European forms." It is envisioned as a response to (or an elaboration upon) critical works that address the unique rise, formation, and poetics of the Russian novel, many of which are themselves responses (or Russian corollaries) to Ian Watt's study of the rise of the novel in England; and it functions similarly under the assumption that the singularity of the Russian novel is a product of various idiosyncrasies in the Russian cultural milieu. The project is structured as a comparative examination of two pairs of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels from Russia and England, and as such it approaches the question of the Russian novel's distinctiveness in the form of a literary experiment. By engaging in close readings of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) alongside Mikhail Chulkov's The Comely Cook (Prigozhaia povarikha, 1770), and Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853) alongside Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (1880), concentrating particularly on matters of formal design, corporeal integrity and vulnerability, and communal harmony and discord--and by understanding the English texts as a "control group" for an examination of the Russian deviation--it attempts to identify some of the distinctive features of the Russian realist novel. The largest portion of the dissertation is dedicated to The Brothers Karamazov, which I take as an emblematic work in a literary canon that is distinguished by intimations that healing and recovery--as well as the coexistence of both personal freedom and communal rapport--are possible in the real world and in realist narrative.

This dissertation argues that the early modern discourse of conduct, which produced social difference within English households and communities, took on greater importance in a newly global world. In the conduct-obsessed culture of early modern England, two competing and contradictory beliefs about the nature of social difference emerged. The first of these was an ideology of cultivation, a widespread belief that social identity was malleable, that socio-economic status could be determined by measuring an individual's adherence to accepted codes of conduct. The second belief depended upon the idea that social difference was fixed and naturally determined, and thus that somatic differences such as sex and race were deeply significant. For those bearing stigmatized somatic marks, particularly women and non-Europeans, access to cultivating strategies was systematically circumscribed, and this process of socio-economic differentiation was understood as the natural consequence of bodily difference. This dissertation examines the discourse of conduct at work in both domestic and global contexts through early modern English conduct literature, guides to self-improvement through specific cultivating activities or strategies; through plays that stage cultivation as beneficial to self, community, and nation; and through travel writing, where authors attempt to make sense of unfamiliar customs and behaviors. In these works the social and material benefits of cultivation achieved through practices such as good husbandry, educational travel, and hunting for sport are affirmed, even as the limited access of some groups to these same cultivating strategies is reiterated.

How do Victorian novels, those detailed imaginative records of psychic interiority and social life, put into language the aspect of our interior lives that seems most stubbornly nonlinguistic: that is, the insistent claims and impulses of erotic desire? If Victorian culture valued reason and accountability over sheer erotic fulfillment, and at the same time represented love and desire as important social experiences, then how did the Victorian novel represent the process of reasoning about desire without diluting its intensity or making it mechanical? In "Bad Logic," I argue that a surprising array of novelists, including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Henry James, registered the troublesome opacity of erotic life by experimenting with forms of "bad logic," from hasty conclusions to contradictions to tautologies, and finally to the ethical and erotic possibilities of vagueness. These forms bring into view the limitations of logic as a rubric for moral accountability, while at the same time they work as ironic and tacit ways of speaking and thinking about erotic desire. In other words, in the Victorian novel, the singular, embodied feelings of erotic life are imagined not as ineffable, nonsocial, or fully beyond the explanatory powers of logic and the rational mind. Rather, erotic desires represent a profound depth of psychic and affective life that, even in its resistance to sound propositional language, wants to be understood. The resurgence of interest in theories of logic in nineteenth-century England was in fact intimately related to the philosophical problem of the deep, idiosyncratic self that seems to exceed scientific knowledge about thought and its structures, but which nonetheless guides so much of psychic, ethical, and erotic life. Philosophers and social critics as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, George Boole, and George Eliot took up the stubborn problem of logic and its complex relationship to character. But it was the realist novel, I argue, that allowed for the fullest development of this problem through its own strategies for developing fictional character and representing the fullness of psychic and affective life and its often difficult social expression. That the Victorians talked and wrote endlessly about sex and sexuality, in a variety of medical, scientific, sociological, and psychological vocabularies, has been taken for granted since Foucault provided us with our most enduring account of the Victorian "logic of sex." With "Bad Logic," I enter into an ongoing reappraisal of Foucault's influence on the study of sexuality by suggesting that the Victorian impulse toward talking about and representing sexuality and desire may have had a more complex rationale than a utilitarian desire to manage and regulate sexual behaviors. Foucault's late work turned to sexual practice or ethos as a potentially utopian alternative to the "discourse" of sexuality, and yet I argue that novelistic representations of eroticism in language can extend well beyond issues of social power and regulation. Rather, they insist upon the ethical significance of erotic life and upon the importance of balancing the imperatives of rationality against the imperatives of idiosyncrasy. They take seriously, in other words, the difficulties of registering the impulses of the body in language. In addition, "Bad Logic" takes a new approach to a very old question in the study of the novel: how does this genre balance idiosyncrasy with social compromise, or assimilate the individual consciousness to the historically specific social pressures that necessarily shape it? Many critics have answered this question either by detailing the ways in which the novel form itself habituates the individual to ideology (Bersani, Armstrong, D. A. Miller), or on the other hand by showing that some normative models of social intelligibility, such as the liberal ideal of detachment or the ethical ideal of perfectionism, are not incompatible with a powerful model of individual agency (Anderson, Hadley, A. Miller). In "Bad Logic," I propose that in the Victorian novel, even the opacity of erotic life finds its way into models of sociability. Moreover, I show that novelists struggle to make their theories of ethical responsibility capacious enough to accommodate the insistent pressure of erotic desire as it tries to make itself heard.

The novel especially the realist novel has been generally understood as a secular, disenchanted form, but the history of the Indian novel complicates this view. A seminal trajectory of realist novels situated in India, by native and non-resident writers alike, presents a perception of God in the daily that is rooted in Indian religious traditions in contradistinction to the deus absconditus European realist novel which has generally restricted itself to the secular sphere. Despite the conspicuous and consequential enchantment of the Indian novel, even postcolonial literary critics have followed in the critical tradition that takes secularism to be the precondition of the novel and dismisses instantiations of religion as mere anomaly, symptom, or overlay. I contend that the powerful realism brought to India by the British novel was immediately injected with a strong dose of enchantment drawn from the popular religious and mythopoetic imagination. The novel invited God to come down to earth to become more real and more compatible with a self-consciously secularizing India unwilling to dispense with its spiritualism; reciprocally, God's presence in the naturalist novel engendered a radically new sense of both the genre and reality. Of all the existing art forms in India, it was only the realist novel with its worldly orientation that could give shape to the profane illumination in everyday life and provide a forum for the praxis of enchantment. The Indian novel was part of a larger phenomenon in which the enchanted worldview became the grounds for independence from England whose disenchanted ethos was understood as the underpinning and justification for its imperialism. Not surprisingly, the place namely, Bengal and that birthed the novel also sparked India's anti-colonial struggle and its religious revival and reform movements. The novel in particular was seen as a privileged form for preserving a spiritualized cosmology, renovating it in some ways, and using it to enable Indian sovereignty. Straddling both the British and the Indian, the worldly and the spiritual, the novel offered a unique opportunity for cultivating a modern religious sensibility. By analyzing the various literary techniques my novelists deploy to enchant a putatively disenchanted form in a (post)colonial context, I rediscover overlooked possibilities for the novel-writ-large. The trajectory I analyze teaches us that mimetic realism can offer a more congenial home to religious enchantment than the non-mimetic experimental modes, such as magical realism, usually considered more apt. My project charts the course of what I call the enchanted realist novel tradition via five seminal novels set in India and published between 1866 and 1980. In this arc, divinity is first made immanent in the phenomenal world, then it becomes internalized, only to meet with a birfurcated fate in the mid-twentieth century. The indigenous writers continue with realist first-order rendering of the divine in the daily, whereas the more international novelists formally distance themselves from the felt enchantment of the first order they struggle to represent. Another way to view that bifurcation: as the disenchanted, statist worldview comes to prevail in the national imaginary at Independence, the enchanted novel must henceforth either restrict itself to tiny local pockets of extant enchantment; or, if the novel still has ambitions to be a national allegory, it must register disenchantment as the nearly thorough-going a priori to what now can only be called a deliberate re-enchantment.

My central premise in “Revised Lives” is that four English writers - Margaret Cavendish, Anne Halkett, John Bunyan, and John Milton - use the lineal family as a central trope in the autobiographical writings they write in response to the political and social upheaval caused by the civil wars, interregnum, and Restoration (1637-85). By portraying themselves as dislocated heirs who resolutely uphold their families' political legacies, these writers capitalize on the political power inherent in lineage as a repository of political power comprised both of material objects - people and property - and their symbolic meaning - social status and political influence. After the Restoration, Cavendish, Halkett, Bunyan, and Milton repurpose their prewar and interregnum portrayals of lineage - of which all but Milton's emphasized dislocation and political defeat rather than political triumph - for a new political climate, revising their initial works in new, more fictionalized autobiographical narratives. Autobiography in this period thus reaffirms the impression of the lineal family as a political force from which individual agents emerge. In chapter 1, I show how Margaret Cavendish recasts herself and her parents, as she depicts them in her 1656 memoir “A true Relation” as allegorical characters who model royalist political action in her Restoration fiction “The Blazing World”. Chapter 2 argues that royalist Anne Halkett mitigates her record of ongoing alienation as an exile in Scotland, as recorded in her journal Meditations (1658-99), when she reasserts the power of lineal relationships that she witnessed during the 1650s while a royalist conspirator in her 1678 Autobiography. In chapter 3, I explain why John Bunyan separates the individual journeys of the protagonist Christian and that of his wife and children in his two-part allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678; 1684). By splitting the puritan household into two generations (and two narratives), he portrays a father protecting his family from persecution in order to redress his own involuntary separation from his family, chronicled in the spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666). Finally, chapter 4 focuses the relationships between fathers and sons in a selection of John Milton's autobiographical and political poems. In his pre-war and interregnum writings, Milton's sons successfully transform resources they have inherited from their fathers - from education to artistic talent and the legacies of political office - into effective political action. When Milton revisits this model in his Restoration verse tragedy Samson Agonistes (1671), however, he undermines the positive nature of these relationships in Manoa's and Samson's competing interpretations of their family's political legacy. Modern English-language autobiography begins not as a genre solely focused on the story of the self, but, rather, as a genre that uses the lineal family from which the author emerges to construct a political legacy that he or she uses writing to uphold.

This dissertation studies a group of twentieth-century plays from India, Ireland, Nigeria and Britain that have rarely been read together. Through close readings of dramatic texts by authors like Utpal Dutt, Brian Friel, David Edgar and Wole Soyinka and, I examine the significant place of translation figured as dramatic technique in contemporary drama and theatre. The dissertation, therefore, adopts a more formal rather than substantive logic of comparison. Translation, in drama and theatre studies, is usually invoked to either describe the transformation of a literary text from page to the stage, or by way of a more general understanding, as the literal transfer of plays from one language into another. I look at translation within rather than of a dramatic text. This approach allows me to address the insufficient attention that figurative uses of translation have received in drama and theatre studies, and make two critical interventions: first, to demonstrate how a dramatic technique figured in translation disrupts the assumptions of what appears to be a constitutive monolingualism in the writing and reception of drama and theatre. Since the ascendancy of performance studies in the nineteen sixties, critical work on drama and theatre has taken an anti-text, and by extension, anti-literary stance. By contrast, my reading is mindful of the performative aspect of these plays without necessarily privileging it at the expense of the literary in so far as such a distinction can be consistently sustained. The second critical intervention is to locate moments in the texts when acts of translation create new social collectivities and hence serve as a point of departure for a political reading. The emergence of social protest movements on the one hand, and the fall of communism at the end of the Cold War on the other frame the different imaginations of collectivity that I trace in these texts. The first and second waves of decolonization in Asia and Africa, and their subsequent postcolonial predicaments productively supplement this framework. My dissertation also relates to the category of translation as it organizes the prevalent concept of `world literature,' which in its focus on the novel has been insufficiently attentive to drama. I trouble as well as extend the logics of classification by recontextualizing the authors beyond their dominant national-literary configurations.

Twentieth-century British literature bristles with words and phrases in foreign languages, fragmentary residues of conflicts between the English-language text and the national languages and cultures that surround it in this era of war and instability. This project addresses the form and function of these remnants of foreign language - what are here called "multilingual fragments" - analyzing and contextualizing them within the historical use of foreign languages in British discourses of national identity and international politics over the course of the twentieth century. Within modernist literature, phrase- and word-length fragments of translated and untranslated foreign language reveal texts' deep engagement with the political conflicts of their time on the level of the letter, enabling authors to express a variety of political ideologies, from the liberal or cosmopolitan to the reactionary or jingoistic. At the same time, these fragments' inherent contrast between foreign language and English context interlace the text with points of rupture, exposing authorial manipulations of language and disrupting any single-minded ideology to reveal ambivalence, ambiguity, and nuance. This study historicizes and expands the long-held conception of multilingualism as a central aspect of modernist commitment to formal innovation, and provides a more comprehensive context for understanding large-scale experimental works. It argues that it is specifically through the disruptive effects of small-scale multilingual fragments - traces of foreign language so slight that they are at once easily overlooked and subtly influential - that modernist texts engage in complex interventions on issues ranging from wartime xenophobia to debates over class, women's rights, immigration, and the afterlife of empire. This project's attention to word- and phrase-length fragments of multilingualism through a series of case studies reveals a more specific, historicized understanding of what Rebecca Walkowitz has influentially termed twentieth-century literature's "cosmopolitan style": first, in demonstrating the centrality of both canonical and minor, extra-canonical authors in the development of new, internationally-oriented multilingual techniques, second, in exposing the breadth of ideologies and complex political discourse that such techniques can facilitate, and finally, in demonstrating how writers use multilingual fragments to reveal the inherent hybridity of all language. This historical and wide-ranging study contributes to current critical discussions in four major fields: twentieth-century British literature, world literature, translation studies, and women's and gender studies. Contrary to past conceptions of modernist multilingualism as benignly aesthetic, exclusionarily elitist, or unilaterally liberal, it demonstrates that multilingualism can be applied in the service of a range of ideologies, and that the inherent instability of fragmentary multilingualism further complicates expressions of political allegiance or affiliation. Further, it expands our understanding of what constitutes "world literature" by making the case for fragmentary, small-scale multilingualism as a vehicle which transports the concerns of world literature - border-crossing conversation, "gaining in translation" - into texts produced in and for a national readership. Finally, it draws together the canons and concerns of world literature and women's and gender studies in order to make the case for marginalized female and homosexual figures as major innovators of multilingual usage, deliberately manipulating multilingual fragments to disrupt and protest the political status quo.