Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: Rosemary J. Mundhenk.

Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: Beth Dolan.

<p> By the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Great Britain led the European contest for imperial dominion and successfully extended its influence throughout Africa, the Americas, South East Asia, and the Pacific. National pride in the world's leading empire, however, was laced with an increasing anxiety regarding the unbridled frontier and the hybridization of Englishness and the socio-ethnic and cultural Other. H. Rider Haggard's <i> She,</i> Bram Stoker's <i>Dracula,</i> and Richard Marsh's <i> The Beetle,</i> three Imperial Gothic novels, personify the monstrosity of hybridity in antagonists who embody multiple races and cultures. Moreover, as representatives of various ancient empires, these characters reveal the fragile nature of imperial power that is anchored in the conception of human and cultural evolution. </p><p> Hybridity works to disrupt the fragile web of power structures that maintain imperial dominance and create a fissure in the construct of Britain's national identity. Yet, the novels ultimately contain the invasion narrative by circulating power back to the English characters through the hybrid, polyglot, and metamorphosing English language by which the enemy is disoriented and re-rendered as Other. Using New Historicist and Postcolonial theories, this work examines the aporia of linguistic hybridity used to overcome the threat of racial and cultural hybridity as it is treated in Haggard, Stoker, and Marsh's novels.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: Elizabeth Fifer.

Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: Amardeep Singh.

<p> My dissertation explores how sound informs the representation of cross-cultural interactions within early modern drama and travel writing. "Sounding" implies the process of producing music or noise, but it also suggests the attempt to make meaning of what one hears. "Otherness" in this study refers to a foreign presence outside of the listening body, as well as to an otherness that is already inherent within. Sounding otherness enacts a bi-directional exchange between a culturally different other and an embodied self; this exchange generates what I term the sonic uncanny, whereby the otherness interior to the self vibrates with sounds of otherness exterior to the body. The sonic uncanny describes how sounds that are perceived as foreign become familiar through the vibratory touch of the soundwave that attunes a body to its sonic environment or soundscape. Sounds of foreign Eastern and New World Indian otherness become part of English and European travelers; at the same time, these travelers sound their own otherness in Indian spaces. Sounding otherness occurs in the travel narratives of Jean de L&egrave;ry, Thomas Dallam, Thomas Coryate, and John Smith. Cultural otherness is also sounded by the English through their theatrical representations of New World and Oriental otherness in masques including <i>The Masque of Flowers,</i> and plays like Robert Greene's <i>Alphonsus,</i> respectively; Shakespeare's <i> The Tempest</i> combines elements of East and West into a new sound&mdash;"something rich and strange." These dramatic entertainments suggest that the theater, as much as a foreign land, can function as a sonic contact zone.</p>

Thesis (M.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 2007. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 46-03, page: 1242. Adviser: A. K. Kelly.