<p>I argue that the pastoral genre is a literary response to changes in the agrarian economy as landed property is freed from older notions of obligation and political dependence on the monarch. Thus, the Renaissance English pastoral can be read as a cultural form that corresponds to agrarian capitalism and a moment of release of land and natural resources from their embeddedness within local communal formations before they are incorporated into a larger concept of Englishness. While the genre of the pastoral is ostensibly resisting the pressures of modernity - i.e. the corrupting influence of trade and urban life - what struck me is that it does so in ways that look distinctly modern to us, through affirmation of independent forms of intellectual and agrarian labor.</p> / Dissertation

<p> In this thesis, I expand considerations of diaspora as not only a migration of people and cultures but a migration of thought. Specifically, I demonstrate that literary representations of diaspora produce what I consider to be an epistemological migration, challenging the idea that race and culture are stable and impermeable and offering instead racial and cultural fluidity. I assert that this causal relationship is best exemplified by narratives of racial passing written by diasporic writers. Using Homi Bhabha&rsquo;s concepts of mimicry, hybridity, and ambivalence, I analyze Helen Oyeyemi&rsquo;s <i> Boy, Snow, Bird</i> and Zo&euml; Wicomb&rsquo;s <i>Playing in the Light</i>, arguing that <i>Boy, Snow, Bird</i>&rsquo;s narrative form is a form of mimicry that repeats European and African literary traditions and subverts Eurocentrism, while <i>Playing in the Light</i> is a &ldquo;Third Space&rdquo; in which to accept notions of the non-categorical fluidity of race. Through this analysis, I draw particular attention to Oyeyemi&rsquo;s and Wicomb&rsquo;s unique abilities to refract notions of race, rather than presumably reflect a system of strict categories, and, ultimately, I argue that these novels transcend the realm of literature, existing as empowering calls for society&rsquo;s modifications of its racial perceptions.</p><p>

<p>LeJeune, Jeff. Bachelor of Science, McNeese State University, 2001; Master of Arts, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2017. Major: English Title of Thesis: ?The Violent Take It by Force?: Heathcliff and the Vitalizing Power of Mayhem in Wuthering Heights Thesis Chair: Dr. Christine DeVine Pages in Thesis: 92; Words in Abstract: 284 ABSTRACT In Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte employs the character Heathcliff as both a real and mythic being in order to challenge class conventions in Victorian society. She shares this societal contention with other Victorian novelists, but where her contemporaries are typically realistic in their works, Bronte creates a concurrent mythic realm alongside the real in order to allow Heathcliff the space and license to be a Revenant, a symbol used in the folk tradition of the Scots, which I contend was a likely influence on Bronte?s work. Heathcliff?s real nature clashes with this symbolic one, especially when reality will not allow him to be with Catherine, the woman he loves. Her rejection of him serves two central purposes: 1) for the author to spotlight the arbitrary nature of the class system and the decisions individuals make inside it; and 2) for the author to provide a pivot point in the story at which she transforms Heathcliff from a real character to a mythic one. Heathcliff spends the latter half of the novel exacting redemptive punishment on all who have wronged him (and the marginalized he represents), including Catherine herself, a reality he struggles with because he still loves her despite her class-motivated marriage to the hated Edgar Linton. In the end, Heathcliff transgresses his symbolic purpose by going too far in punishing the innocent Hareton, at which point Bronte has him die as unceremoniously as she did Catherine earlier in the novel. Young Hareton and Cathy?s relationship is the fruit of the Revenant Heathcliff?s redeeming work, an ending that, for Bronte, seems to merge more than just the two houses; it seems to also reconcile divergent and conflicting ways of thinking inside the class system.

<p> This thesis takes a look at three major texts: Mark Z. Danielewski&rsquo;s <i> House of Leaves</i> (2000), Charlotte Bront&euml;&rsquo;s <i>Jane Eyre</i> (1847), and Edgar Allan Poe&rsquo;s &ldquo;The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). These texts are certainly linked by the gothic motif, past trauma (and thus memory), and also desire. However, I see these texts as a set for several reasons. These texts are representations of how the gothic motif can be used to supply the narrative, not supplement it. This means, for me, that the narratives of these texts are not just staples of &ldquo;the gothic,&rdquo; but their very <i>architecture</i> is founded upon the gothic tradition. Each text takes place within a house, in a sort of labyrinthine creation, haunting in nature with supernatural manifestations, and, on top of that, a theme of misery within the family. Although these three texts are connected by their treatment and reliance on the gothic motif, I&rsquo;m drawn to them as a set because of 1) the characters&rsquo; transmutability of the spaces they inhabit and 2) the physicality of the publication themselves. I am concerned with the transformations that occur within and without these texts. By that, I mean I am a concerned with transformations within the minds of the characters (development) and the spaces they occupy, as well how these texts call readers to action. Above all, I am concerned with agency, that of the characters within these texts and of the texts themselves. I argue that these spaces within these texts as well as the texts themselves are posthuman. Though, where does regarding these texts as posthuman leave us as scholars? </p><p>

<p> This study investigates how key Victorian novelists, such as Anne and Charlotte Bront&euml;, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, emphasize performativity in their critiques of marriage. Given the performative nature of wedding ceremonies, this project focuses on wedding descriptions in select novels by the aforementioned authors. Such a focus highlights an interesting dilemma. Although we often think of Victorian novels as overwhelmingly concerned with marriage, the few wedding descriptions found in Victorian fiction are aborted, unusually short or announced after the fact. Those Victorian novelists who do feature weddings often describe them as grotesquely theatrical to underscore the empty performativity associated with contemporaneous wedding rituals that privilege form over substance, and to stress deception and inauthentic play-acting in marriage. In these ways, the key Victorian novelists draw attention to a gap between the empty formalism of marriage as a legal, religious and social institution, and the reality of many Victorian marriages. </p><p> Nevertheless, many of the same novelists who show their general distaste for the empty performativity of weddings, acknowledge that theatricality itself plays a more complex role in their marriage plots, raising questions about authenticity, fraud and pious deceptions in marriage. For example, Wilkie Collins complicates the argument about theatrical weddings by stressing that quiet weddings, performed without much pomp and ceremony, may also signify deceptive marriages. Moreover, Thomas Hardy emphasizes the value of festive public weddings, which solidify the spouses&rsquo; connection to their community. Additionally, both the realist and sensation novelists discussed here, especially Anne Bront&euml;, Dickens, Braddon, and Collins, condone temporary play-acting and deception, which extend beyond weddings, if such performances allow their characters to circumvent inflexible and unjust marriage laws. </p><p> In sum, this dissertation analyzes how key Victorian novelists redefine courtship and marriage by focusing on the performative aspects of marriage as a legal and social institution. Those redefinitions are, at times, non-linear and contradictory. They also relate to the continual enmeshing of two primary modes of Victorian narrative, realism and sensationalism, which complicates the view of performativity in marriages as either artificial or authentic. </p><p>

This interdisciplinary study examines how nineteenth-century British ideas about music reflected and influenced the period's gendering of the mind. So far, studies of Victorian psychology have focused on the last half of the century only, and have tended to elide gender from the discussion. This study will contribute to a fuller picture of nineteenth-century psychology by demonstrating that the mind began to be increasingly gendered in the early part of the century but was largely de-gendered by century's end. In addition, because music was an art form in which gender norms were often subverted yet simultaneously upheld as conventional, this study will also contribute to a fuller understanding of the extent to which domestic ideology was considered descriptive or prescriptive. This work makes use of but differs from previous studies of music in nineteenth-century British literature in both scope and argument. Drawing throughout on the work of contemporary music historians and feminist musicologists, as well as general and musical periodicals, newspapers, essays, and treatises from the long nineteenth century, this dissertation argues that music, as a field, was increasingly compartmentalized beginning early in the century, and then unified again by century's end. This division and re-unification reflected changing conceptions of the mind, and coincided with the waxing and waning of domestic ideology. Analyzing a range of literary texts, both canonical and non-canonical, in this context demonstrates that music was portrayed increasingly negatively over the century as it became harder and harder to contain the increasing threat that music posed to traditional gender norms, a threat based in a view of music that began to imply mental equality between men and women. This implication was embraced by some, particularly homosexuals, and feared by others, who tried to rescue traditional norms by displacing gender ambiguity onto foreigners and Jews. Thus, the rise and fall of domestic ideology as well as end-of-century changes in the manifestation of xenophobia and anti-Semitism are related not only to industrialism and Evangelicalism and other historical events but also to changing ideas about the gender of the mind, reflected in and influenced by changing ideas about music. / English

<p>Engaging and Evading the Bard is about British theatrical modernism and its ambivalent relationship to Shakespeare. The conventional narrative of early twentieth-century British theater and drama situates their rise within the broad European context of Continental artistic developments, such as the rise of Henrik Ibsen. Examining the work of George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Peter Brook, this dissertation argues that the inauguration of a specifically British theater, theatricality, and dramatic movement in the modernist period is absolutely contingent on a turn to Shakespeare, the icon par excellence of British drama, British culture, British identity, British history, and British power. The turn to Shakespeare enables the emergence of a British tradition formally and politically distinct from its Continental counterparts.</p> <p></p> <p>This dissertation argues, however, that a modernist logic of paradox, contradiction, and irony governs the dynamics of British theatrical modernism's turn to Shakespeare: the engagement with Shakespeare is always co-extensive with the evasion of Shakespeare. Engaging and Evading the Bard explores the modernist irony towards Shakespeare. For Shaw, a Fabian-inspired anti-idealist political aesthetic (set forth in The Quintessence of Ibsenism) motivates his condemnation of "Bardolatry" throughout his career, most notably in Caesar and Cleopatra. In stark contrast to Shakespeare, a high-church, conservative Christian religiosity and ideological investment in medieval modernism lie at the heart of Eliot's 1935 verse drama Murder in the Cathedral. The interpenetration of media (print and performance) and genre (poetry, criticism, and drama) in The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on The Tempest allegorizes Auden's new-found liminal identity in the 1940s as both a British and American poetic and political subject. Post-war, post-imperial, Cold War geopolitical realities and existential anxieties, especially concerning the Bomb and the threat of nuclear annihilation, lead Brook to adopt the late modernist theatricality of Samuel Beckett in his 1962 Royal Shakespeare Company production of King Lear, a production that succeeds in staging Shakespeare's play as the metatragedy (that is, a tragedy about the failure of tragedy) that it really is.</p> <p>Ultimately, this dissertation problematizes nationalism as an animating force for British theatrical modernism by positioning nationalism in the modernist period in relation to its ethical and political universalist antinomies: socialist internationalism, transatlantic transnationalism, and an emergent utopian postmodernist postnationalism.</p> / Dissertation

<p> Good leadership is arguably important to the success of any organization, nation, or people. Research over the last 50 years indicates that transformational leaders are desirable and that such leaders can be developed. This research assessed whether and to what extent the protagonists in <i> Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire</i> and <i>Mockingjay: The Final Book of the Hunger Games,</i> Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen, respectively, demonstrate the four characteristics of transformational leadership: idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation constructs a philosophy of perception that creates what I call a &ldquo;perceptive ontology of objects.&rdquo; This ontology emphasizes, not the subjective perspectivalism of human identity, but the dynamic emergence of objects into objecthood through impersonal modalities of space, time, light, and sound. Objecthood is an attempt to render perceptive experience as something neither wholly subjective nor wholly objective. Here objects are connected with subjectivity and yet still external. I argue that modernist authors present changeable, novelistic surfaces, which submit the novel&rsquo;s material objects to epistemological doubt. This creates radically interruptive moments of heightened perception, rupturing immediate experience from the more conventionally mimetic, referential, and social surfaces of the novel found within literary realism. These perceptive experiences create representational effects which I call &ldquo;the mimesis of sensation.&rdquo; This creates a sensory surface in the story world through which the reader aligns with the perceptive experiences of characters. This form of readerly connection is distinct from either Aristotelian empathy on the one hand, or Brechtian estrangement, on the other. &ldquo;The moment,&rdquo; a temporality distinct from the present, the modernist works of authors like Mallarm&eacute;, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka foreground perception itself, altering visions of time to construct discrete and static temporalities. These discontinuous moments create forms of abstract continuity. They thus create a dialectical relationship with narrative. </p><p> These event-like ruptures, occurring through encounters with the surface of objects, offer two distinct notions of time that could serve as alternatives to the post-structuralist critique of the materiality of the signifier as seen in theorists like Derrida and Barthes. First, the surface of the text becomes an expansive medium of perception: a collection of perpetual gestures, interruptions, reflections, and possibilities which arises, not through linguistic play, but through a composite surface of language and perception. A totality emerges through perceptive processes in relation to this medium, not through the infinite deferral of the signified, but through the ongoing logical recession of the object through epistemological immanence. Here I also take an important departure from the work of other theorists of modernity&mdash;Baudelaire, Bergson, Benjamin, and Deleuze, and others&mdash;who suggest an imagistic immediacy to the experience of non-chronological time. My notion of the modernist literary object is distinctively not a ready-to-point-to image. I critique the centrality of images in 20^th-century theories of temporality, arguing that modernism constructs moments of readerly critical alignment not through the satisfaction of visual desire, but by foregrounding processes of apprehension, perception, and inquiry: attempting to decipher an object which is never quite fully known. </p><p> Even as the modernist techniques I study draw attention to the artifice of representation and the difficulties of constructing knowledge, they also frame objects of perception, constructing scenes of aesthetic totality&mdash;available to the spectator so long as she acknowledges the mediated lens through which she looks. I see totality as the possibility that perception could be made whole, the possibility that there is a form of subjectless experience in which perceptive inquiry creates order (as forms of abstract continuity). These totalities, perceivable not in chronologies of external perceptible phenomena, but within impersonal faculties of apprehension, as they coincide with these forms of deeper time, also invoke pathos (through the acknowledgment of dimensions of fate). In four chapters, each devoted to a respective modernist author, the project shows how the works of Mallarm&eacute;, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka reveal relationships between what I call modernism&rsquo;s &ldquo;moments&rdquo; and the receding totality of the object. </p><p> Chapter 1 of the dissertation argues that a relationship exists between Mallarm&eacute;&rsquo;s reception of impressionism and the poet&rsquo;s linguistic theory. Here I examine Mallarm&eacute;&rsquo;s writings on the impressionist <i> plein air</i> technique in his essay, &ldquo;The Impressionists and &Eacute;douard Manet&rdquo; (1876). <i>Plein air</i> means more for Mallarm&eacute; than just painting outdoors. Air, in Mallarm&eacute;&rsquo;s eyes, is a full presence. Atmosphere is the key to a deep and abstract form of naturalism in his work. Other subjects in this chapter include atmospheric modalities like breath or respiration, speech and the sounds of words, or aspects of nature like weather. In Chapter 2, the novelistic objects of perceptive ontology in Woolfian impressionism create a temporal rupture from realism&rsquo;s more conventional referential representation. I argue that Woolf creates <i> another type of realism</i> through her experiments with time. Importantly, I break from the work of 20^th-century continental theorists of radical time influenced by Bergson (like Deleuze) in which the image plays a central, functional role. Woolf&rsquo;s moments challenge the idea of a Bergsonian image-form not subject to doubt in order to open the imaginative field of literature to what I call &ldquo;the mimesis of sensation.&rdquo; (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.) </p><p>

<p>This dissertation explores the particular significance of South Asia to international literary and political spheres, beginning with the formative moments of modernist internationalism. At the height of the Harlem Renaissance, W. E. B. Du Bois interrupted his work with the NAACP and the pan-African congresses to write Dark Princess: a Romance. Du Bois's turn to the romance and to India forms the point of departure for my dissertation, for India, both real and imagined, offered modernist intellectuals a space of creative possibility and representative impossibility. The fiction of Cornelia Sorabji, for instance, obfuscates and allegorizes practices of women's seclusion, both to refute imperial feminist solutions and to support her legal activism. From the imperial romance to the anti-racist one, the misrepresentation endemic to the romance genre enables the figuration of a discrepant globe. This modernist practice of transfiguring India, usually in the service of a global political vision, is undertaken both within India as well as outside of it. Rabindranath Tagore, for example, interrupted his leading role in the anti-colonial movement to write Gora, a novel of mistaken identity and inappropriate love, and to mistranslate his own poetry, particularly his Nobel-Prize-winning collection Gitanjali. If realism aims to translate cultural difference, to faithfully carry meaning across boundaries, the romances I consider in my dissertation work instead to mistranslate those differences, to produce a longed-for object beyond cultural specificity. In conversation with postcolonial theorists of Anglophone literary practice, as well as debates around translation in comparative literature, I suggest that we should think about intercultural texts in terms of transfiguration: not the carrying across of meaning from one sign system to another, but the reshaping of culturally specific materials, however instrumentally and inaccurately, in the service of internationalist goals.</p> / Dissertation