<p> My dissertation &ldquo;Seventy Years of Swearing upon Eric the Skull: Genre and Gender in Selected Works by Detection Club Writers Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie&rdquo; shows how the texts produced by Detection Club members Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie challenge assumptions about the value and role of popular genre fiction and demonstrate how the detective novel engages pressing social issues related to gender in modern Great Britain. Sayers and Christie addressed serious concerns of gender in relation to topics including war and an emerging market economy in inter-war Britain; however, because they were doing so in genre fiction, their insights have not been fully explored. The popularity of detective fiction, according to critics, has resulted in a lack of criticism and a distrust of the popular. Christie, more so than Sayers, has been ignored by critics because of her popularity and the formulaic nature of her fiction. Glenwood Irons claims that Christie's popularity is responsible for the &ldquo;general ignorance of the sheer volume of detective fiction written by women&rdquo; (xi), while Alison Light theorizes that the dearth of Christie criticism, because of her popularity, is &ldquo;an absence which the growth of 'genre' studies of popular fiction has yet to address&rdquo; (64). My goal is to understand how Sayers and Christie responded to modern issues through their writing and to set their writing in context with contemporary concerns in inter-war Britain. I advocate for a reexamination of Sayers and Christie that goes beyond their popularity as writers of genre fiction and analyzes the ways in which their fiction incorporates modern concerns.</p>

<p>It is received wisdom that Britain and France played the leading role in overseas expansion in the eighteenth century while the German lands lacked both a central political authority and colonies of their own. We know from the work of scholars such as Susanne Zantop that German intellectuals were fascinated by encounters with non-European cultures, and German genres of travel writing, popular drama, and the philosophy of history all manifest an obsession with thinking about forms of cultural difference. In many cases, such efforts are wrought with ambivalence. The German world traveler Georg Forster is torn between the passionate admiration for a paradise-like Tahiti and the judgment of Tahiti as uncivilized. August von Kotzebue, Germany's most popular playwright around 1800, wrote dramas set in the New World and other exotic locales. In his Bruder Moritz (1791, Brother Moritz), the protagonist seeks to educate the child-like Arabs at the same time as he criticizes his aunt's racial condescension as lacking empathy. In Johann Gottfried Herder's philosophy of history, sympathy for the slaves in European colonies is accompanied by a belief in European cultural superiority. In all these examples, there is more at stake than the fantasies of German colonial rule that Zantop called our attention to a decade ago. My dissertation targets precisely the equivocal nature of the German colonial imagination around 1800 and suggests a different reading strategy.</p> <p>Postcolonial scholarship has critiqued the ways in which visions of European cultural and racial superiority supported the expansion of colonialism. Recently, scholars have also foregrounded how European culture gave rise to a critique of colonial atrocity. My dissertation, however, stresses the co-existence of both Eurocentrism and the critique of colonial violence and understands this seeming contradiction as a response to the challenge from cultural and colonial difference. I identify emotion or the mode of sentimentalism as the channel through which the alleged cultural otherness questions both colonial violence and European superiority with universal claims. In my analysis, non-Europeans are not only the colonized or the oppressed but also regain their agency in co-constructing a distinct vision of global modernity. </p> <p>The dissertation concerns itself with both canonical works and popular culture. I first explore Georg Forster's highly influential travelogue Reise um die Welt (1777/1778, A Voyage Round the World), documenting the interplay between Enlightenment anthropology and the impact of South Pacific cultures. Kotzebue's cross-cultural melodramas imagine different orders of love, sexuality, and marriage and challenge the noble form of bourgeois tragedy as theorized by Friedrich Schiller. Contested by Immanuel Kant, Herder's universal history inaugurates a new logic of organizing different cultures into an organic ongoing process of historical development and, at the same time, articulates cultural relativism as a paradigm shift. My reading strategy through cultural and colonial difference unearths the pivotal roles which the impulses from the non-European world played in the construction of German culture around 1800.</p> <p>By acknowledging both Eurocentrism and anticolonial critiques in these German texts, this dissertation stresses the impact of cultural otherness on the architecture of German thought through sentimentalism and provides both historically and theoretically differentiated understandings of the German colonial imagination in the global eighteenth century.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Melbourne, Dept. of English with Cultural Studies, 2003. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 206-229).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Carleton University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 325-342). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1945. / Published also without thesis note. Vita. Bibliography: p. [400]-438.

Thesis (PH. D.)--University of Chicago, 1913. / Also paged: 313-324, 503-520, 75-97. In 3 parts. "Reprinted from Modern philology, Vol. XII, Nos. 5, 8, and [vol. 13, no. 2] Chicago, 1914-1915." Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-11, Section: A, page: 4701. Adviser: Gary Xu. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 219-231) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Issued also as the author's Inaugural-Dissertation, Heidelberg. / Deals mainly with the treatment of the O.T. narratives in the Antiquitates Judaicae of Flavius Josephus. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Inaug.-Diss.--Bern. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 264-268.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1935. / Bibliography: p. [225]-231.