Esta tese investiga comunidades escravas na região de Campinas na segunda metade do século XIX. Através da leitura de depoimentos e interrogatórios de cativos e cativas em documentos judiciais de diferentes tipos reunidos no Arquivo Público do Estado de São Paulo (AESP) tem como objetivo compreender as dinâmicas sociais e afetivas que envolviam aqueles indivíduos e as variadas experiências vividas por trabalhadores especializados ou não, casados ou solteiros, de sexo masculino ou feminino que viveram escravizados na região. Questionando a ideia de uma existência forçosa de redes de solidariedade e companheirismo advindas simplesmente do fato de experimentarem juntos a escravidão, esta pesquisa procura perceber manifestações por vezes contraditórias de disputas, amizade, envolvimentos afetivos e sexuais, companheirismo e competição que foram registrados nos autos criminais referentes ao período indicado. / This dissertation investigates slave communities in Campinas, Province de São Paulo, in the second half of the Nineteenth century. Through the analysis of depositions and interrogations of male and female slaves registered in different kinds of court documents gathered in the Arquivo Público do Estado de São Paulo (AESP) this study aims at understanding the social and affective dynamics involving such individuals, as well as the various experiences of skilled or unskilled workers, married or single enslaved men and women who lived in the area. Questioning the idea of an inescapable existence of solidarity and fellowship networks naturally arising from joined experiences of enslavement, this dissertation intends to analyze sometimes contradictory demonstrations of disputes, friendships, sexual and emotional attachment, companionship and competition registered in the documents.

Trata-se de uma pesquisa histórica sobre a educação da população negra na Parahyba do Norte. A partir dos aportes teóricos da história social e da micro-história, e da contribuição de pesquisas em história da escravidão e da população negra, e de investigações sobre a história da educação, foram consultadas fontes primárias como imprensa, relatórios e documentos da instrução pública, literatura memorialística e arquivos eclesiásticos, a fim de acompanhar a relação entre negros e educação ao longo do século XIX. Partiu-se do expressivo percentual de população negra que compunha a província e da ausência de pesquisas sobre a temática para acompanhar as experiências e iniciativas voltadas para a população negra e as oriundas dessa camada da população no contato com a escola e o conhecimento da leitura e escrita numa sociedade que transitava do domínio da oralidade para o da escrita. Analisaram-se leis e regulamentos da instrução com interdições a não brancos a fim de perceber como a administração provincial lidou com a presença negra e comparou-se esse conjunto com os de outras províncias, inserindo-se a Parahyba do Norte no Brasil Império. Discutiram-se sentidos e significados de ser negro na província, observando-se cores, qualidades e condições jurídicas dos sujeitos da tese, denominados em conjunto como negros e destacou-se a instabilidade entre escravidão e liberdade para esses. Foram enfatizadas, também, outras experiências possíveis para homens negros no período a partir de um conjunto de personagens que se sobressaíram por seu pertencimento à elite educacional da região. Para isso, o fio condutor da análise foi a vida e trajetória de um desses sujeitos, o professor, político e coronel Graciliano Fontino Lordão. Entende-se que para que estes tenham logrado esse destaque na sociedade local, inúmeros outros sujeitos de origem negra se relacionavam com o universo letrado. Acompanhou-se o contato com a leitura e escrita na escola e em outros espaços de aprendizado de pessoas escravas, filhos de homens e de mulheres de cor livres, filhos de escravas, pretos, pardos e mestiços, alunos de instituições para pobres e desvalidos desde o início do período imperial até a abolição da escravidão e proclamação da República. A análise dos rastros que sobreviveram nas fontes primárias permitiu observar a heterogeneidade das experiências negras na Parahyba do Norte e as possibilidades de inserção desse grupo no universo letrado. / This is a historical research on education of black population in Parahyba do Norte. Based on theoretical contributions of social history and microhistory, of research on the history of slavery and the black population, as well as investigations into the history of education, primary sources were consulted, such as the press, reports and documents related to the public instruction, memorial literature and ecclesiastical archives, in order to follow the relation between blacks and education throughout the nineteenth century. Considering the expressive percentage of the black population that constituted the province and the lack of research on this topic, we followed the experiences and initiatives towards the black population and those coming from this layer of the population in contact with the school and the knowledge of reading and writing in a society that moved from the domain of orality to writing. We analyzed laws and regulations of the public instruction with prohibitions to non-whites in order to understand how the provincial administration dealt with the black presence. We also compared this legislation with those of other provinces, circumscribing Parahyba do Norte within the Brazil Empire. We discussed the senses and meanings of being black in the province, observing the colors, qualities and legal conditions of the subjects analyzed in this thesis, jointly denominated as blacks, emphasizing the instability among slavery and freedom. We also highlighted other possible experiences for black men in the period from a group of characters who stood out for their membership in the region\'s educational elite. To do this, the guiding thread of the analysis was the life and trajectory of one of these subjects, teacher, politician and colonel Graciliano Fontino Lordão. It is understood that these subjects achieved this prominence in local society since numerous other subjects of black origin had contact with the literacy. We took into account the contact with reading and writing in school and in other learning spaces of slave people, children of free colored men and women, children born to slave women, blacks, mulattos and mestizos, students of institutions for the poor and helpless since the beginning of the imperial period until the abolition of slavery and proclamation of the Republic. The analysis of the traces that remained in the primary sources allowed us to observe the heterogeneity of the black experiences in Parahyba do Norte and the possibilities of insertion of this group in the literacy.

Joaquim Manuel de Macedo foi uma figura importante do Império brasileiro. Durante sua trajetória exerceu muitas atividades foi escritor, político, jornalista, professor, integrou o quadro de sócios IHGB e também foi membro do Conservatório Dramático e da Sociedade da Biblioteca Popular Itaboriense. Dessa maneira, Macedo foi exemplo de um tipo de figura característica do século XIX, que exercia várias funções, participava de muitas instituições e assim se envolveu nas principais discussões do período. Nesse sentido este trabalho procurou demonstrar como acompanhar a sua trajetória, principalmente sua atuação como político, jornalista e professor é um viés importante para compreender um período da história do Brasil, marcado por muitas discussões e mudanças, sobretudo no campo da política. / Joaquim Manuel de Macedo was a major figure of the Brazilian Empire. Throughout his career has had many activities was a writer, politician, journalist, teacher, joined the IHGB the membership and also was a member of the Conservatory of Drama and Society Itaboriense Popular Library. Thus, Macedo was an example of one type of characteristic figure of the nineteenth century, who exercised various functions, participated in many institutions and so became involved in major discussions of the period. In this sense this paper was to demonstrate how to track your career, especially his role as politician, journalist and teacher bias is important to understand a period in Brazil\'s history, marked by many discussions and changes, especially in politics.

This dissertation considers how listening to reading aloud changed the English novel in the context of rising literacy rates and an accelerating print culture. Traditionally, historians associate mass literacy and cheap, fast print with a shift away from communal, oral reading in the nineteenth century. Accounts of the “revolution” in European reading practices at the end of the 1700s posit a turn toward solitary, private, and silent encounters with a wider range of texts. As a rich body of scholarship has shown, however, oral culture was alive and well in nineteenth-century print culture: public speech and speakers—orators, preachers, elocutionists, and storytellers—filled squares, pulpits, and stages (not to mention novel pages) throughout the century. But what about not-so-public speech? Oral delivery in the home? Communal but domestic, oral but routine, “household reading” slips through the cracks of our go-to methods for categorizing and researching the reading experience. Even so, ample evidence—from home entertainment guides, to elocution manuals, to women’s domestic periodicals and recommended reading pamphlets—points to the prevalence of the practice and, as I profile, its central role in period literacy programs. Family-centered and within the domestic sphere, household reading served as a safe literary practice for the century’s so-called “new readers.” Yet, according to the literature of the period, reading aloud was not “safe” at all. My dissertation identifies fiction’s unruly listeners: tired laborers who zone out while listening to the Bible, women who fall asleep to their husbands’ Shakespeare delivery, and children who eavesdrop on their parents reading the newspaper’s sex scandals. Combining sound studies and reading history, I argue that novelists deploy these intractable audience members as part of a larger campaign to articulate the value of the novel in an era still suspicious of the form and its effects on an expanding national reading public. I structure my chapters around texts frequently depicted in scenes of household reading—Shakespeare’s plays, the Bible, and the newspaper—all texts that had safely secured cultural authority and value. These were also texts associated with public speech and performance—texts read aloud in playhouses, churches, or pubs. Yet, each underwent what I call a “reception crisis”: a period when cheaper production and wider circulation brought the text into more households—in short, became affordable and accessible material for home delivery. And, as my chapters discuss, these changes prompted new anxieties about who could access each text and how they would attend (or not attend) to it. The writers I survey allude to these anxieties in order to demonstrate what their own novels can offer a growing literate public. While the authors I study want to borrow some aspect of another text—to adopt, say, Shakespeare’s cultivation of literary taste, the Bible’s moral instruction, or the newspaper’s candid communication of reality—they also need to articulate fiction’s unique offerings. Here, our unruly listeners come into play. They demonstrate how, where, and with which readers a different text, even a supposed guarantor of truth like the Bible, fails to “work.” These noncompliant listeners, then, function like any advertisement created to distinguish a new product from existing competitors. They showcase the promises of fiction by revealing the shortcomings of another text within the context of the period’s new readers and new ways of reading.

My dissertation, The Endless Roar in which We Live: The Figure of Noise in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Fiction is the first extended study that locates an intersection between sound studies and literary studies in order to examine noise as it defines spaces and places, and the characters that live and work in them, in American literature from the second half of the nineteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth century. I evaluate noise in a sampling of American fiction, and consider how the imagined sounds of fiction echo nineteenth-century soundscapes and underscore contemporary discernment of noises – and sometimes the lack of noises – in the national consciousness. I consider the street noise that the upper classes wished away, the factory noise that so many women workers spent a lifetime hearing, and the resounding noise of the United States’ expansion westward. Conversely, I also consider how authors and characters respond to the noises that penetrate their ears and create their soundscapes. Together, these considerations shape my argument that sounds help to construct and characterize localities, just as certain places construct particular sounds. Moreover, however, I argue that noise creates spaces wherein identities – such as those of gender, class, and ethnicity – also often tied to place, are discovered, defined, and challenged. In many ways, classifications of noise are subjective and varied, depending on who makes and who hears the noise, where and why the noise is produced, and how and by whom is the noise interpreted. Considering noise as malleable and interpretable based on context allows me to most effectively examine noise as a facilitator of identity formation.

From the arrival of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVMs) in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1843 through the death of their foundress in 1887, the BVMs created a group identity that they spread through the dispersion of their schools and that they maintained through regular written and personal contact. The identity they maintained was definitely religious in nature, but it was also equally secular. The BVMs provided a type of teaching that historians and geographers of U.S. education have not yet fully investigated, namely Catholic education. These women regularly taught and administered for lifelong careers; interactions among the women teachers and administrators were both deeply personal and pointedly professional; and these U.S. teachers actively supported and benefited from centralization. The research explores the dispersion pattern of the BVM school system, the nature of the institution through the experiences of BVM teachers and administrators, and the importance of recognizing the intertwining secular and sacred aspects of the congregation and its schools. Rather than reducing U.S. education to public education, the findings in this dissertation about BVM teachers and their schools call for a more nuanced understanding of U.S. education in general, one that includes Catholic education as a part of the whole.

The Victorians obsessed over the supernatural and this fascination with the otherworldly emerges in the literature of the day. With this thesis, I look at two nineteenth century novels that exhibit supernatural phenomena: Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847). Both novels, I propose, utilize this aspect of the gothic tradition to enhance their characters' psychological realism. With Villette, I examine the supernatural as a fabricated experience. First, I study the protagonist's psyche and show how her emotional state directly contributes to the appearance of fantastic material. Specifically, I examine Lucy Snowe's childhood experiences in Bretton and then look at her continuing emotional isolation at the boarding school in Villette. I then illustrate how Lucy compensates for this loneliness by transforming the identities of her acquaintances and by often embellishing her own experiences. Following this, I examine her response to an external phenomenon, the ghostly nun. I argue that as Lucy discovers emotional fulfillment via her relationship with Paul Emanuel, she grows increasingly skeptical of the nun. This skepticism climaxes in a scene of violence, after which Lucy successfully denies the existence of the otherworldly. With Wuthering Heights, I examine the supernatural as a genuine phenomenon. To begin, I analyze two significant scenes which frame the main narrative: Lockwood's dream and Heathcliff's death. Both events, I subsequently demonstrate, are instances of supernatural interaction with the real world. Finally, I examine the spiritual and occult beliefs of the lovers, Catherine and Heathcliff. I then show how their ideology influences their decisions and, ultimately, brings about their reunion in the afterlife.

Values in the Air argues that nineteenth-century authors attempted to challenge the individualizing and atomizing effects of the increasingly powerful and abstract investment economy by portraying the necessity of other fields of capital (cultural, social, domestic) to the formation and maintenance of local, knowable communities. I first look at the depiction of a successful integration of diverse capitals embodied in the figure of the male mill owner, wherein the idea of land stewardship is repurposed to include factories. Chapter 2 depicts an encroaching pessimism about tradition’s ability to answer the demands of the modern industrial economy even as the possibility of bringing women into the center of industrial capital as equal participants is foreclosed. With chapter 3, I turn my attention to the way that the abstract nature of the investment economy obscures the value of—and relationships between—different fields of capital. The focus of chapter 3 is how land becomes implicated in the abstract economy, revealing the country estate to be little more than a bargaining chip, and reducing its ability to act as a foil for capitalism. Finally, the relationship between women and the country bank depicts the clash of the myth of separate spheres and the myth of a logical economy. While the scales of Victorian studies generally emphasize the novel’s development of the individual, or its representation of uncountable populations, Values in the Air plots a middle stratum wherein novels model networks and relationships that structure local, knowable communities. Within these communities, it is possible to imagine individual women in positions of financial power even as it is unclear how multiple forms of value can be gendered and exchanged.

Where We Belong: Spatial Imagining in American Women’s Life Narratives, 1859-1912, studies three marginalized and disadvantaged American women’s self-life narratives during a transitional period in American history. In this dissertation, I am taking an interdisciplinary approach. Where We Belong borrows from social geography, new materialism, and autobiography studies in order to complicate critical discussions of women’s space and place in nineteenth-century women’s self-life narratives. Each chapter of Where We Belong presents a case study with the goal to provide a broader understanding of women’s strategies of belonging due to and despite their spatial exclusions. The overarching emphasis in each chapter remains on the female body’s spatial movement. Exploring Eliza Potter’s A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life (1859), Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes; Or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868), and Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912), I claim that material spaces and these women’s corporeal bodies are inseparable. The three cases I present in this project exemplify how marginal women develop strategies of belonging in spaces from which they have been excluded. These women demonstrate ways of belonging (where they are assumed not to) enacted by self-life narratives. Belonging is not a passive way of being: it is activism that disrupts strict categories and definitions, such as blackness, in American literary scholarship. It contains paradoxes of acquiescence and self-declaration.

Nineteenth-Century Pets and the Politics of Touch examines texts of the era in which both humans and animals find empowerment at the point of physical encounter. I challenge contemporary perceptions of human-pet relationships as sweetly affectionate by focusing on touch. I uncover an earlier interest in the close reciprocal relationships between human and nonhuman animals, arguing that these nineteenth-century thinkers presented what I call a “politics of touch,” in which intimate and often jarring physical encounters allow for mutuality and autonomy. I first turn to Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) and protective violence, a condoned ferocity that frequently unites and guards pet and pet keeper against unwanted amorous intrusions, while also showcasing animal agency and the possibility of deviation from the pet keeper’s wishes. Brontë’s animals simultaneously preserve and rework the traditional form of the marriage plot, allowing for powerful animal-centric possibilities. In chapter 2, I analyze the affective maternal and erotic bonds between women and their pets in Olive Schreiner’s novels. While this touch was frequently seen by both protofeminists and people antagonistic to women’s rights as a cause for disdain because affection was supposedly misplaced, it is a crucial part of Schreiner’s feminist project in that it provides forms of maternity outside of the socially mandated wifehood and motherhood that Schreiner so resents for stripping women of their autonomy. For chapter 3, I seek to complicate readings of Count Fosco, the compelling villain of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), to show the disquieting sympathy that privileges odd women and animals. Heeding Count Fosco shows that valuable sympathy is not a pretty picture of a lovely woman walking with her purebred dog, but rather the excessively grotesque images of an unattractive woman holding a dying dog in her arms and mice and birds erotically clamoring over a fat man’s body. The final chapter considers the violent sympathetic touch evidenced in the practice of mercifully killing grieving dogs in Frances Power Cobbe’s animal advocacy texts. I argue that Cobbe’s schema recognizes gender fluidity as she posits a feminized animal grief marked by excess, while she concurrently masculinizes human sympathy by making it violent through mercy killings that complicate our accepted understandings of nineteenth-century sentiment. In contrast to other scholars of nineteenth-century animal studies who look at how humans understand and treat animals, my focus on the reciprocity of human-animal touch keeps animals at the center of my analysis. I argue that nineteenth-century sympathetic and sentimental texts, often dismissed as trite or as creating distance between the sympathizing subject and object of sympathy, demonstrate theoretical and political complexity through representations of shockingly intimate touch. In doing so, Victorian writers anticipated and even transcended recent theoretical conversations in the field of feminist animal studies.