“Human/Nature: American Literary Naturalism and the Anthropocene” examines works of fiction from the genre of American literary naturalism that sought to represent the emergence of the environmental crisis known today as the Anthropocene. Reading works by Jack London, Frank Norris, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Charles W. Chesnutt, I show how the genre’s well-known tropes of determinism, atavism, and super-individual scales of narration were used to create narratives across vast scales of space and time, spanning the entire planet as well as multi-epochal stretches of geologic time. This reading expands existing definitions of American literary naturalism through a combination of literary analysis, engagement with contemporary theory, and discussion of the historical context of proto-Anthropocenic theories of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Whereas most earlier understandings of naturalism have focused on human nature as it is determined by environmental conditions, I follow the inverse: the impact of collective human action on the physical environment. Previous definitions of naturalism have only told part of the story of determinism, making it impossible to recognize until now the genre’s unusual capacity to aesthetically capture humanity’s pervasive impact on the planet. Each of the dissertation’s four chapters focuses on a single author, a single aesthetic strategy, and a single problematic in Anthropocene discourse. My first chapter argues that Jack London’s late work (1906–1916) balanced his attempts to understand the human as a species with a growing interest in sustainable agriculture, resulting in a planetary theorization of environmental destruction through careless cultivation. But London’s human-centered environmental thinking ultimately served his well-known white supremacism, substantiating recent critiques that the Anthropocene’s universalism merely reproduces historical structures of wealth and power. Rather than the human per se, Frank Norris put his focus on finance capitalism in his classic 1901 novel The Octopus, embodying the hybrid human/natural force that he saw expanding over the face of the planet in the figure of the Wheat, a cultivated yet inhuman force that is as much machine as it is nature. I show how Norris turned Joseph LeConte’s proto-Anthropocenic theory of the Psychozoic era (1877) into a Capitalocene aesthetics, a contradictory sublimity in which individuals are both crushed by and feel themselves responsible for the new geologic force transforming the planet. While London and Norris focus on the destructive capacities of human agency, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 novel Herland takes a utopian approach, depicting a society of women with total control of their environment that anticipates conceptions of a “good Anthropocene.” Gilman built on the theories of sociologist and paleobotanist Lester Ward as well as her own experience in the domestic reform movement to imagine a garden world where the human inhabitants become totally integrated into the non-human background. Yet Gilman’s explicitly eugenic system flattens all heterogeneity of culture, wealth, and power into a homogenous collective. My final chapter builds on the critique of the Anthropocene’s universalism that runs through the preceding chapters by asking whether and how the Anthropocene can be approached with more nuance and less recourse to universals. I find an answer in the stories of Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899) and the theory of the Plantationocene, which sees the sameness of the Anthropocene not as “natural” but as produced by overlapping forms of racial, economic, and biological oppression. Registering this production of homogeneity and its counterforces at once, Chesnutt models what I call Anthropocene heteroglossia, juxtaposing multiple dialects and narrative forms in stories set on a former plantation, depicting heterogeneous social ecologies as they conflict and coexist in markedly anthropogenic environments.

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Les romans *Herland* de Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915), *The Female Man* de Joanna Russ (1975) et *Chroniques du Pays des Mères* d'Élisabeth Vonarburg (1992) mettent tous les trois en scène une société utopique exclusivement composée de personnages féminins. Considérant que la science-fiction imagine des mondes autres en reprenant souvent des conceptions stéréotypées, voire sexistes, des femmes, diverses écrivaines, dont Gilman, Russ et Vonarburg, ont repensé la société sous forme d'utopie afin d'illustrer leur capacité à voir le monde autrement, c'est-à-dire dans des contextes où elles ne seraient pas reléguées au second plan. Notre mémoire cherche à prendre la mesure de l'évolution de la représentation des femmes dans les utopies féministes et incidemment à souligner ses liens avec les préoccupations féministes contemporaines à leur parution. Ce mémoire propose une analyse des différents discours qui sont tenus dans les romans, dans les écrits non fictionnels des écrivaines ainsi que dans les entretiens qu'elles ont réalisées au cours de leur carrière afin de déterminer si ceux-ci peuvent être associés aux mouvances féministes de chacune des époques concernées. En nous penchant sur les rôles sociaux, la maternité et les pratiques sexuelles au sein de ces récits, nous interrogeons la manière dont ces auteures remettent en question ou perpétuent les stéréotypes de genre dans la science-fiction.

Background: Compare Goldmann applanation tonometer (GAT) prism and correcting applanation tonometry surface (CATS) prism to intracameral intraocular pressure (IOP), in vivo and in vitro. Methods: Pressure transducer intracameral IOP was measured on fifty-eight (58) eyes undergoing cataract surgery and the IOP was modulated manometrically to 10, 20, and 40 mmHg. Simultaneously, IOP was measured using a Perkins tonometer with a standard GAT prism and a CATS prism at each of the intracameral pressures. Statistical comparison was made between true intracameral pressures and the two prism measurements. Differences between the two prism measurements were correlated to central corneal thickness (CCT) and corneal resistance factor (CRF). Human cadaver eyes were used to assess measurement repeatability. Results: The CATS tonometer prism measured closer to true intracameral IOP than the GAT prism by 1.7+/-2.7 mmHg across all pressures and corneal properties. The difference in CATS and GAT measurements was greater in thin CCT corneas (2.7+/-1.9 mmHg) and low resistance (CRF) corneas (2.8+/-2.1 mmHg). The difference in prisms was negligible at high CCT and CRF values. No difference was seen in measurement repeatability between the two prisms. Conclusion: A CATS prism in Goldmann tonometer armatures significantly improve the accuracy of IOP measurement compared to true intracameral pressure across a physiologic range of IOP values. The CATS prism is significantly more accurate compared to the GAT prism in thin and less rigid corneas. The in vivo intracameral study validates mathematical models and clinical findings in IOP measurement between the GAT and CATS prisms.

Background: Goldmann applanation tonometry (GAT) error relative to intracameral intraocular pressure (IOP) has not been examined comparatively in both human cadaver eyes and in live human eyes. Futhermore, correlations to biomechanical corneal properties and positional changes have not been examined directly to intracameral IOP and GAT IOP. Methods: Intracameral IOP was measured via pressure transducer on fifty-eight (58) eyes undergoing cataract surgery and the IOP was modulated manometrically on each patient alternately to 10, 20, and 40 mmHg. IOP was measured using a Perkins tonometer in the supine position on 58 eyes and upright on a subset of 8 eyes. Twenty one (21) fresh human cadaver globes were Intracamerally IOP adjusted and measured via pressure transducer. Intracameral IOP ranged between 5 and 60 mmHg. IOP was measured in the upright position with a Goldmann Applanation Tonometer (GAT) and supine position with a Perkins tonometer. Central corneal thickness (CCT) was also measured. Results: The Goldmann-type tonometer error measured on live human eyes was 5.2 +/- 1.6 mmHg lower than intracameral IOP in the upright position and 7.9 +/- 2.3 mmHg lower in the supine position (p <.05). CCT also indicated a sloped correlation to error (correlation coeff. = 0.18). Cadaver eye IOP measurements were 3.1+/-2. 5 mmHg lower than intracameral IOP in the upright position and 5.4+/- 3.1 mmHg in the supine position (p <.05). Conclusion: Goldmann IOP measures significantly lower than true intracameral IOP by approximately 3 mmHg in vitro and 5 mmHg in vivo. The Goldmann IOP error is increased an additional 2.8 mmHg lower in the supine position. CCT appears to significantly affect the error by up to 4 mmHg over the sample size.

<p>This dissertation examines Charles Darwin’s major texts together with literary works by turn-of the-century American women writers—Nella Larsen, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Kate Chopin—in order to trace how evolutionary theory shaped transatlantic cultural ideas of race, particularly black identity, and gender. I focus on the concept of “descent” as the overarching theme organizing categories of the human in evolutionary terms. My perspective and methods—examining race and gender from a black feminist perspective that draws on biopolitics theory, as well as using close reading, affect theory, and attention to narrative in my textual analysis—comprise my argument’s framework. By bringing these perspectives and methods together in my attention to the interplay between Darwinian discourse and American literature, I shed new light on the turn-of-the-century transatlantic exchange between science and culture. Throughout this dissertation, I argue that descent constitutes a central concept and point of tension in evolutionary theory’s inscription of life’s development. I also show how themes of human-animal kinship, the Western binary of rationality and materiality, and reproduction and maternity circulated within this discourse. I contribute to scholarly work relating evolutionist discourse to literature by focusing on American literature: in the context of turn-of-the-century American anxieties about racial and gender hierarchies, the evolutionist paradigm’s configurations of human difference were especially consequential. Moreover, Larsen, Gilman, and Chopin offer responses that reveal this hierarchy’s varied effects on racialized and gendered bodies. I thus demonstrate the significance of examining Darwinian discourse alongside American literature by women writers, an association in need of deeper scholarly attention, especially from a feminist, theoretical perspective. </p><p>This dissertation begins with my application of literary analysis and close reading to Darwin’s major texts in order to uncover how they formed a suggestive foundation for late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century ideologies of race and gender. I use this analysis as the background for my investigation of Larsen’s, Gilman’s, and Chopin’s literary texts. In Chapter 1, I conduct a close reading of Darwin’s articulation of natural selection in <i>The Origin of Species</i>and focus on how Darwin’s syntactical and narrative structure imply evolution as an agential force aimed at linear progress. In Chapter 2, I analyze Darwin’s articulation of the development of race and gender differences in <i>The Descent of Man</i>, as well as Thomas Henry Huxley’s <i>Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature</i>, and argue that Darwin’s and Huxley’s accounts suggest how anxiety over animal-human kinship was alleviated through structuring nonwhite races and women as less developed and hence inferior. In Chapter 3, I argue that Larsen’s novel <i>Quicksand </i>interrogates and complicates aesthetic primitivism and biopolitical racism and sexism, both rooted in evolutionist discourses. Finally, in Chapter 4, I focus on Gilman’s utopian novel <i>Herland</i>and select short stories by Chopin. While Gilman unambiguously advocates for a desexualized white matriarchy, Chopin’s stories waver between support for, and critique of, racial hierarchy. Reading these authors together against the backdrop of white masculine evolutionist theory reveals how this theory roots women as materially bound reproducers of racial hierarchy.</p>

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Lilian Westcott Hale (1880-1963) and her daughter Nancy Hale (1908-1988) built successful careers during a period of transition in America, as Victorian mores were replaced by new modern freedoms. Greater independence for women had evolved during the preceding century, before the influential cultural factors which occurred during the early twentieth century like urbanization and world war. This interdisciplinary analysis of Lilian Hale‘s artwork and Nancy Hale‘s writings demonstrates the imprint of the surrounding world on their work. Lilian Hale‘s art is influenced by her Victorian childhood, and Nancy Hale‘s fiction reveals many conflicts of the modern era. The study of these two women is enhanced by the wealth of primary documentation connecting their ideas and their lives to their artistic works. Both of the women ranked among the most respected in their fields during their lifetimes. Their works resonate with elements of their eras, demonstrating what it was to be a woman during the first half of the twentieth century. Lilian Westcott Hale and Nancy Hale both engage the gender constructs of their periods through their work. Lilian Westcott Hale‘s art is divided here into three distinct genres: her still lifes and landscapes express the confining environment the Victorian woman occupied; her idealized women reflect the period‘s taste for female perfection and beauty; her portraits and figure studies point to Hale‘s own distinction between males and females through their clothing and their poses. Unlike Lilian Westcott Hale, Nancy Hale demonstrates woman‘s new freedoms in an open manner, a result of the break with Victorianism. Hale‘s use of a literary medium allows her direct examination of the turmoil caused by the modern breakdown of Victorian structures. Lilian Westcott Hale refrains from harsh judgment of her daughter‘s world, while Nancy Hale‘s modern challenge of the previous era‘s standards leads her into troubling relationships and difficulties balancing her career with her personal life. Their work reveals the cultural ideologies of their respective eras and particularly the changes taking place for women.

This thesis explores precarization of work and subject formation in seven post-referendum Brexit novels through theories of cognitive capitalism and biopolitical production. The analysis is anchored in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s reconceptualization of Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics. Hardt and Negri combine the concept of biopolitics with contemporary theories of cognitive capitalism and immaterial labour, to illuminate how subjects are subsumed into a system of biopower in which capitalistic production has become biopolitical production. I argue that the Brexit novels examined in this thesis demonstrate how the intrinsic bond between production and life shapes the characters’ relationship to the referendum. As the characters are caught between individual goals and communal values, in a system that demands that they take sole responsibility for their own success while also being responsible democratic citizens, the referendum produces conflicted subjects that experience deep internal and external conflicts in relation to Brexit.