The American author Jane Goodwin Austin published 24 novels and numerous short stories in a variety of genres between 1859 and 1892. Austin’s most popular works focus on her Pilgrim ancestors, and she is often lauded as a notable scholar of Puritan history who carefully researched her subject matter; however, several of the most common myths about the Pilgrims seem to have originated in Austin’s fiction. As a writer who saw her work as her means of entering the public sphere and enacting social change, Austin championed women and religious diversity. The range of Austin’s oeuvre, her coterie of notable friendships, especially amongst New England elites, and her impact on American myth and culture make her worthy of in-depth scholarly study, yet, inexplicably, very little critical work exists on Austin. This dissertation provides the most comprehensive biography of Austin to date, compiled largely from archival sources, and examines two of her novels, the 1865 Dora Darling: Daughter of the Regiment, one of the only Civil War-era adventure novels featuring a young girl who engages directly in the war, and the 1889 Standish of Standish, a carefully researched novel of the first few years of the Pilgrim’s Plymouth settlement, based on primary sources, popular culture, and family lore.

An examination of the Shirley Plantation Collection, Hill Carter, Mary B. Carter, their children, the plantation workers and their wardrobe between 1825 and 1835.

To illustrate Melville’s navigation of editorial politics in the periodical marketplace, this study analyzes two stories Melville published in Putnam’s in order to reconstruct the particular historical, editorial, social, and political contexts of these writings. The first text examined in this study is “Bartleby,” published in Putnam’s in November and December of 1853. This reading recovers overtures of sociability and indexes formal appropriations of established popular genres in order to develop an interpretive framework. Throughout this analysis, an examination of the narrator’s ideological bearings in relation to the unsystematic implementation of these ideologies in American public life sets forth a set of interrelated social and political contexts. Melville’s navigation of these contexts demonstrates specific compositional maneuverings in order to tend to the expectations of a popular readership but also to challenge ideological norms. Israel Potter, Herman Melville’s eighth book-length novel, serialized in Putnam’s from July of 1854 to March of 1855, is the focus of the second case study. This study tracks Melville’s engagements and disengagements with a variety of source materials and positions these compositional shifts amid contemporaneous political ideologies, populist histories, middle-class values, audience expectations, and editorial politics. This study will demonstrate that Melville set out to craft texts for a popular readership; however, Melville, struggling to recuperate his damaged credentials, seasoned by demoralizing business dealings, his ambitions attenuated by the realities of the literary marketplace, undertook the hard task of self-editing his works to satisfy his aspirations, circumvent editorial politics, and meet audience expectations.

David Gilmour Blythe's street urchin paintings created during the 1850s are disturbing and often grotesque. The image of childhood that he created was quite different from that of his American contemporaries who adapted the romantic notion of the child from eighteenth-century English painters. Previous scholars have noted the contrast between Blythe's vision of America's street children and the optimistic view offered by other American painters but have not offered a sufficient explanation as to why they differed so radically. This thesis will examine several of Blythe's urchin scenes, as well as his poetry and writings to reveal the clear presence of anti-immigrant sentiment in his painting. Such an analysis will posit Blythe's political beliefs about immigration as a plausible explanation for his peculiar view of the children who occupied Pittsburgh's streets.

ABSTRACT THE FATAL LAMP AND THE NIGHTMARE AFTER CHRISTMAS: THE RICHMOND THEATRE FIRE OF 1811 By Amber Marie Martinez, Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theatre Performance A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Theatre Pedagogy at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2015 Director: Dr. Noreen C. Barnes, Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Theatre “How strange a preface the loud laughter excited by a pantomime, to volumes of smoke and fire” (The American Standard, 27 December 1811). Building fires were not exactly uncommon back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When the church bells began to ring at any time other than Sunday morning, it usually meant a building was on fire. On the night of December 26th 1811, in the midst of a pantomime at the Richmond Theatre, a small flame licked a piece of a backdrop and set it on fire. Fed by the column of air in the hollows and passages of the theatre, and increased by the extremely flammable wood of the boxes, pit, and the canvas ceiling of the lower seats, the fire seemed "like a demon of wrath converging its hundred arms to the center of human life” (Burning of the Richmond Theatre, 1812). I will attempt to examine the night of the Richmond Theatre Fire, an event which shocked a city and soon after the country. 72 persons perished in the flames with more victims dying of their burns within the following days. Every part of the state held someone who lost a friend or relative in the disaster. People were unable to mention the catastrophe without exciting tears of grief. This thesis acts to remind us of one of the most tragic events in our country’s history by exploring the firsthand accounts of people who escaped the fire; a conflagration which fueled the course of religious transformation, aided to regulate laws of theatre buildings, and captivated a nation for a century, before being gradually forgotten over time.

Modernism is a plurality, not a singular concept. This project explores examples of Art Nouveau nudes to describe the particular expressions of the modern through varied and complicated allegorical bodies. The female nude as a nexus for ideals of gender, art, and beauty, is informed by and constructs the understanding of these ideals within society. Art Nouveau thus employed the nude to represent complex manifestations of modernity. Three diverse cases provide the subjects of each chapter. All explore modernism through objects and interiors, in public and private environments, and each connects the decorative arts with accounts of European modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The modernist movement, in these decades, is still predominantly understood through painting. This project draws its case studies from Paris, Glasgow, and Vienna, each a distinct cultural arena during the 1890s and 1900s: the sculptural furniture of François Rupert Carabin (1862-1932); the metalwork of Margaret Macdonald (1865-1933) and her sister Frances Macdonald (1873-1921); and the graphic motifs of Ver Sacrum, created by the artists of the first Vienna Secession (1897-1905). In conception and expression, these nudes articulated the diverse representational practices of different modernisms. They each embody drastically different histories, aesthetics, and social expressions. Their varied modernisms expose the prominent nationalism of Art Nouveau. Examination of these three very different cases expands and complicates current understandings of the nude, allegory, and the modern.

Dépeindre une image de l’Occident à travers cette collection de récits de voyage chinois de 1847 à 1910 et comprendre leurs procédés d’écriture, tel est l’objectif de ce travail doctoral. Avec un weltanschauung homogène et stable formé durant deux mille années de civilisation, les Chinois s’estimaient maîtriser le monde jusqu’au moment où la porte de leur pays soit forcée de s’ouvrir à l’Occident au milieu du XIXe siècle. Les voyageurs chinois sortaient ensuite timidement de leur empire et s’étonnaient devant une autre réalité qui est la modernité. Cet Occident, si neuve et si complexe, mène les voyageurs à dépeindre son image dont la procédure s’avère parallèlement être une recherche du genre approprié à cette destination. Une analyse des paratextes inhabituellement diversifiés, du genre mélangé et de la longueur aussi variée qui s’y observent confirme la tentation et l’évolution de cette recherche.Observateurs avec l’esprit ouvert ou non, les voyageurs parcourent l’Europe et les États-unis en rapportant des informations appréciables pour toute analyse sociologique concernant la vie du peuple occidental, en créant des néologismes pour désigner des réalités aussi étranges que nombreuses. Interprétation une société encore inconnue exige aussi des techniques de l’écriture. L’étude sur les rôles qu’enfile l’auteur tels que le narrateur, le voyageur et le héros ainsi que la rhétorique de l’altérité nous aide à les identifier. / The aim of this doctoral work is to depict an image of the western world through a collection of notes from chinese travellers to the west between 1847-1910. And above all, understand their writing process contributing to it’s construction. Thus putting out the goal of this doctoral achievement.With a homogenous and stable weltanschauung formed during a two thousand years civilisation, the Chinese people used to believe that they master the realities of the world until they were forced to open up their country to the west at mid XIX th century. After an outgoing from their country which was very timid at the beginning, the chinese travellers came to be shocked in front of new facts characteristics of a modern world. That West, so new and so complex, make the travellers to depict it through an image which the process looks parallel to the appropriate type of the destination. An unusally diversified paratext analysis, a mixed type with different lengths which is found and can be seen during the temptation and evolution of this research.Observers with opened or closed mind, the travellers go all through Europe and the US, collecting alongway suitable informations necessary to the sociological analysis of the western people while creating neologisms used to name some strange and multiple facts.The interpretation of an unknown society needs adequate techniques of writing. The study of the role carried by the other’s rhetoric and the author (narrator, traveller and main character) enable us to identify them.

The topic of this thesis is the depiction of marriage in two novels from the Dutch feminist writer from the end of the nineteenth century, Cornélie Huygens. The theoretical part analyses the influence of the literary and historical context, especially of the emerging women emancipation movement, socialism and the general social circumstances of that era. The role of author's personal life is also taken into account as well as the social status of women, their political and literary activities and reception of female authors by literary critics. The practical part consists of literary analysis of two novels written by Cornélie Huygens, in which marriage is the central theme.

Between 1848 – 1870 Dickens’s novels became increasingly outward looking towards transnational spaces. Dickens’s growing interest in China and Chinese commodities such as tea can be seen in his novels where contemporary anxieties about a close association with China and the Chinese is identified. The fraught trading and political relationships between Britain and China both during and after the Opium Wars and the opening of five new ports identifies this nation as one which Dickens perceived to pose a threat to British national identity. Looking at this relationship in terms of commodities, Chinese tea can therefore be a marker not only for a fetishised commodity but also as a representation of a nation. This thesis argues that Dickens’s representation of China through commodities such as tea presents a new way for British national identity to be conceptualised. Dickens’s inclusion of Chinese commodities intersects with other foreign countries that, unlike China, formed part of the British Empire. China’s independence facilitated a commercial freedom that was not available to nations that formed part of the Empire and, as a consequence, increased its commercial power. This thesis underscores some of the significant moments in Dickens’s novels from 1848 -1870 to reveal a commodity dialogue between China and Britain which moves beyond the page and reflects an increasingly interconnected world which was both assimilated and ostracised. This provides a new understanding of Britain that, far from establishing its commercial autonomy, shows how it became increasingly reliant on China and the conversations that these commodities contribute to an understanding of Dickens’s world. The thesis considers the productive readings of China in Dickens’s fiction and the importance of geopolitical commodities in forming an understanding of nation and nationality, identity and culture, and Britain and Britishness through trade.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Charles W. Sanders / Americans during the first half of the nineteenth-century were obsessed with expansion. God had bestowed upon them an innate superiority in nearly all things. American settlers were culturally, economically, racially and politically superior to all others. But how accurate are such statements? Did a majority of Americans support such declarations? The purpose of this dissertation is to examine how Americans wrote and read about expansion. Doing so reveals that for every citizen extolling the unique greatness of Americans, one questioned such an assumption. For every American insisting that the nation must expand to the Pacific coast to be successful there was one who disdained expansion and sought to industrialize what territory the nation already possessed. Americans during the first half of the nineteenth century were of many minds about expansion. The destiny of the United States was anything but manifest. Using a wealth of nineteenth century newspapers this dissertation demonstrates that the concept of Manifest Destiny was far less popular than previously imagined. Newspapers were the primary source of information and their contents endlessly debated. Editors from around the country expressed their own views and eagerly published pertinent letters to the editor that further detailed how Americans perceived expansion. While many people have often read John O’Sullivan’s rousing words he was not necessarily indicative of American sentiment. For every article espousing the importance of acquiring Florida to deny it to the British there was one deriding the notion because they felt Florida to be nothing but a worthless swamp filled with hostile Indians. American justification and opposition to territorial expansion followed no grand strategy. Instead, its most fascinating characteristic was its dynamic nature. In the Southwest expansionist proponents argued that annexation would liberate the land from Papist masters, while opponents questioned the morality of such a conquest. Encouraging or discouraging territorial expansion could take on innumerable variations and it is this flexible rhetoric that the dissertation focuses upon. The debate that raged in the public forum over expansion was both heated and fascinating. The voices of both pro and anti-expansionists were crucial to the development of antebellum America.