<p>“Trade in Feelings: Shame in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” traces a genealogy of shame, a difficult feeling which is transformed and reworked in eighteenth-century narratives and which provides a ground for the self-reflective interiority required of commercial subjects. The stakes of this project are twofold. First, while cultural critics (e.g., Ahmed, Probyn, and Sedgwick) have recently theorized shame and suggested its potential for political activism, histories of this feeling have yet to be written. Reading narratives of shame in George Lillo’s <em>London Merchant ( 1731) </em>, Eliza Haywood’s <em>The British Recluse (1722)</em>, multiple editions of Defoe’s <em>Roxana (1724, 1730, 1745[49])</em>, Samuel Richardson’s <em>Clarissa (1747-48)</em>, and Frances Burney’s <em>Evelina (1778)</em>, this chronologically organized study supplies one part of such a history. As such, the analysis builds on and reframes Foucault’s historical narrative of the emergence of the modern disciplined and divided self-consciousness by focusing on the affects that produce and re-produce it, particularly the affect of shame. Second, while Michael McKeon has identified the formative force of questions of virtue and truth on the novel, this thesis suggests that these questions are critically condensed in narratives of shame. The dissertation argues that private shame and the psychological interiority of the eighteenth-century novel are mutually productive. Once a passion which could lead to vice and even murder, by the late eighteenth century shame becomes a feeling which is internalized, and which divides the self. Connected both to the question of truth and the question of virtue, as well as to the status of passion itself, shame informs our sense of emotions as interior, yet remains inextricable from questions of reputation, credit, and civility.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>While eighteenth-century Gothic fiction typically constructs masculinity as tyrannical in a rigid patriarchal structure, Gothic writers such as Horace Walpole were challenging this structure as they were instituting it. Walpole uses Gothic conventions to establish and criticize the cruel, oppressive patriarchal structure in <em>The Castle of Otranto</em>. However, he offers no alternative structure, since even the male characters are powerless to act outside of it. Charlotte Smith introduces Gothic conventions into her sentimental novels in order to undermine patriarchy and to offer an alternative structure of power in which she creates a new social order, challenges gender roles, and demands a more refined masculinity. In <em>Emmeline: The Orphan of the Castle</em>, Smith challenges traditional understandings of masculinity. By incorporating sensibility, she redefines masculinity by affirming its dependence on social status. Thus, Smith effectively establishes social authority as a more powerful force than patriarchy. In <em>Ethelinde or the Recluse of the Lake</em>, Smith further refines masculinity as she uses the power of society to advocate for an equalization of genders, not to degrade masculinity, but to indicate that both men and women are subject to social expectation, and thus to each other. Through her incorporation of sensibility and Gothic elements, Smith promotes a purified masculinity as her male characters must, under the more authoritative force of society, act with selflessness and charity. Smith’s new social structure constructs society as a disciplinary force to which men and women are equally subjected, and which replaces the tyrannical authority and gendered hierarchy evident in the traditional patriarchal structure. Ultimately, Smith promotes a new understanding of society as a gender-neutral space, which demands respectability determined not by wealth or status, but by morality and compassion for others.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>Situating Hamilton, Ontario within the global context of economic restructuring incited by capitalist, neoliberal ideologies, I argue that Hamilton, a “city on the verge of renaissance” (Hume A6), needs to be guided by a more inclusive, citizen-led approach to “rebuilding” the city. To critically understand the complex power imbalances underlying this dominant culture of “rebuild,” I will examine the multifaceted concept of resilience, seeing it as both a tool of domination used by those in power over the public sphere, as well as a personal and communal process that can encompass positive adaptation and growth in the face of change. A key question to be asked throughout is: “Resilience for what and for whom?” (Cote and Nightingale 475). While each chapter will be foregrounded with pertinent theory, I will look to various forms of literature based in Hamilton in order to seek nuanced and imaginative understandings of the current climate of “resilience” that are specific to this place.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

This dissertation argues that Henry James deliberately and ingeniously wrote The Ambassadors (1903) as a double-plotted novel. The traditional plot which follows Lambert Strether to Paris provides cover for the detailed story of Strether’s experiences in Paris as a homosexual man seeking his identity. James conveys the Other Plot by means of code, the primary signifiers of which are references to the well-established homosexual subcultures of London and Paris. In-depth historical research on diverse aspects of homosexual life in the nineteenth century are presented in order to demonstrate how James addresses an audience sympathetic to same-sex love without raising condemnation from moral and literary critics.

This thesis explores how Shakespeare was used by Antebellum American writers to frame slave revolts as either criminal or revolutionary. By specifically addressing The Confessions of Nat Turner by Thomas R. Gray and "The Heroic Slave" by Frederick Douglass, this paper looks at the way invocations of Shakespeare framed depictions of black violence. At a moment when what it means to be American was questioned, American writers like Gray and Douglass turned to Shakespeare and the British roots of the English language in order to structure their respective arguments. In doing so, these texts illuminate how transatlantic identity still permeated American thought. This thesis also argues that the conscious use of British literature, Shakespeare in particular, by abolitionists constitutes a critique of the unfulfilled American ideals they believe slavery undermines. In addressing depictions of slave revolts and black masculinity in this period, this thesis explores how allusions to Shakespeare helped frame the historiography surrounding how slave revolts in America were and are remembered.

<p>Following from such theorists as Sara Ahmed, Lee Edelman and Heather Love, this thesis seeks to address current scholarship on queerness and temporality that conceptualizes queer subjects as complicating traditional notions of linear time, reproduction, and progress. Mobilizing theories of temporal disruption and disorientation, including backwardness and the queer moment, this thesis explores the association between such disruptions and a persistent impulse to reckon with and reconstruct what I refer to as “the fugitive dead,” understood here both as past events and as the ghostly figures of the dead and effaced. Such disruptions can, this project posits, foster queerly generative affinities between seemingly separate categories (e.g. between the present and the past or between the living and the dead), thereby providing alternatives and challenges to normative temporal trajectories.</p> <p>My analysis considers literary representations of such temporal disruptions, drawing on Virginia Woolf’s <em>Mrs. Dalloway</em>, Michael Cunningham’s <em>The Hours</em>, and Alison Bechdel’s <em>Fun Home</em> to explore their treatments of temporal linearity, queer moments, affinity and connection, as well as haunting and spectrality. Furthermore, this thesis also addresses the capacity of literary texts to <em>enact </em>temporal disruption in the form of the revisioning project, which can be figured as the literary attempt to encounter the fugitive dead. Ultimately, this thesis explores the literary and intertextual dimensions of this complex approach to queer temporality, advocating for the generative possibilities of an attentiveness to the continued presence of the past and an engagement with the figures of the lost and disappeared.</p> / Master of English

Lewis Carroll, and George MacDonald are responsible for some of the most popular yet obscure texts in the English Canon. Because Carroll and MacDonald are often credited with pioneering much of their genres — Nonsense Literature and Fantasy Literature — it seems that often they are labeled as originators, and not as active contributing members of a much larger literary tradition. Carroll and MacDonald were close friends and literary confidants, using each other’s works, as well as employing that of other writers. This is a study of the sources Carroll and MacDonald used in an attempt to better understand the underlying meanings and symbols in some of their works. For example, I study the analogous symbols they utilized, along with the words used to express them, to convey their ideas about identity and metamorphosis. I show that they rely on ancient, complex symbols, and the traditional language and meanings associated with them, to communicate deeply embedded messages to their readers. They employ the symbols of the worm, the chrysalis, and the butterfly, in several different guises, in their complex works. It is these symbols that allowed them to elucidate the concepts of the individual’s initial materialist state, followed by the midway period of dreaming/reflecting, and the subsequent spiritual awakening. The analysis of the literary sources they used helps to uncover symbols and themes of interest for Carroll and MacDonald, which in turn help to expose other of their sources, such as the Bestiaries, biblical stories, and the works of Isaac Watts, and William Blake. I attempt to explain how some of these symbols and themes function in the portrayal of coherent, yet creative, meanings in Carroll’s ‘Nonsense’ and MacDonald’s Fantasy.

This thesis discusses performative identity in Djuna Barnes' The Ladies Almanack and Nightwood. Barnes' characters create and perform their identities as an attempt to escape or subvert patriarchal norms and societal prejudices. In analyzing the marginalized performative identity categories (race, class, gender, sexuality), one can glean an understanding of the complex social tensions present during Barnes' era, and understand the socially constructed, confining nature of identity itself.

This paper examines the differences between the Romantic, the Gothic, and the Dark Romantic literary genres by looking at the manifestations of the trope of the double within the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. The notion of the individual versus that of individualism helps highlight the disparity between Gothicism and Dark Romance, and the implications that these differences hold.

This dissertation examines Shakespeare’s role as the most significant precursor to the Gothic author in Britain, suggesting that Shakespeare used the same literary conventions that Gothic writers embraced as they struggled to create a new subgenre of the novel. By borrowing from Shakespeare’s canon, these novelists aimed to persuade readers and critics that rather than undermining the novel’s emergent, still unassured status as an acceptable literary genre, the nontraditional aspects of their works paid homage to Shakespeare’s imaginative vision. Gothic novelists thereby legitimized their attempts at literary expression. Despite these efforts, Gothic writers did not instantly achieve the type of acceptance or admiration that they sought. The Gothic novel has consistently been viewed as a monstrous, immature literary form—either a poor experiment in the history of the novel or a guilty pleasure for those who might choose to read or to write works that fit within this mode. Writers of Gothic fictions often claim that their works emulate Shakespeare’s dramatic pathos, but they do not acknowledge that the playwright also had to navigate similar opposition to his own creative expression. While early Gothic novelists had to contend with skeptical readers and reviewers, Shakespeare had to negotiate the religious, political, and ideological limitations that members of the court, the church, and the patronage system imposed upon his craft. Interestingly, Shakespeare often succeeded in circumventing these limitations by employing the literary techniques and topoi that we recognize today as trademarks of Gothic fiction—spectacle, sublime, sepulcher, and the supernatural. Each of these concepts expresses subversive intentions toward authoritative power. For Shakespeare and the Gothic novelists, the dramatic potential of these elements corresponds directly to their ability to target the sociocultural fears and anxieties of their audience; the results are works that frighten as well as amuse. As my dissertation will show, these authors use similar imagery to surreptitiously challenge the authority figures and institutions that sought to prescribe what makes a work of fiction socially acceptable or worthy of critical acclaim.