The dissertation focuses on the relationship between political thinking and dramatic expression in the early modern period, especially in England. I approach this topic by considering what political historians have termed "the problem of counsel"--a vexed issue situated at the very center of Renaissance moral and political philosophy and informing in multiple ways the relationship between sovereign power and its subjects. Because of drama's central concern with the transformation of speech into action as well as its focus on the moral making of the individual, dramatists found in counsel a powerful instrument with which to develop specific kinds of dramatic character, create tension within individual scenes, and provide motivation for dramatic plots. Counsel also proved a convenient, familiar space within which to think through different, often controversial, political ideas and to give them reality and shape in the embodied representations of the stage. By analyzing and contextualizing plays ranging chronologically from Tudor interludes, such as those by Henry Medwall or John Redford, to Jacobean tragedies, notably Shakespeare's King Lear, the dissertation shows how significant counsel was as a shaping force in the construction of different kinds of plays in the period. It also demonstrates how this varied dramatic material itself contributed to the early modern understanding of the theory and practice of counsel.

Works of literature written by Native Americans have long been treated by readers and critics as expressions of cultural identity: transparent representations of communal world-views, traditional belief-systems, or sets of cultural practices. Often, such ethnographic readings come at the expense of understanding how these texts express the political concerns of their authors. My dissertation pushes back against such readings, showing how Ojibwe writers attempt to use literature as a means of shaping public opinion in the pursuit of pragmatic political goals. Reconsidering Ojibwe writing in this way, I examine how Ojibwe authors use their work to engage in dialog with non-Native readers and writers in the U.S.--an interaction they insist be understood as transnational. By comparing literary representations of the Ojibwe produced by both U.S. writers and the Ojibwe themselves, I show how poems, novels, and dramatic works have been the site at which the possibility of Ojibwe nationhood has been imagined and contested for nearly two centuries. In so doing, I suggest that Ojibwe literature is not a stable and homogenous category, but an expedient response to U.S. settler-colonialism defined by a shared set of political commitments. In so doing, I complicate prior theorizations of indigenous literary nationalism as a project primarily oriented toward cultural separatism, replacing them with a more nuanced model of continual, if agonistic, engagement on the imperfectly leveling field of literary representation.

Ruling Appetites: The Politics of Diet in Early Modern English Literature reveals how eating became inseparable from political and social identity in the early modern English imaginary, and the instrumental role that poets, playwrights, and polemicists played in shaping a growing perception of diet as a primary means of driving social change. From the late Elizabethan period through the Restoration, recurrent harvest failures and unstable infrastructure led to widespread food insecurity and even starvation across England. At once literary producers and concerned social agents, many major early modern authors were closely engaged with some of the worst hunger crises in English history. The pointed and detailed attention to food in early modern literature, from luxurious banquets to bare cupboards, I argue, arose from real concerns over the problem of hunger facing the country. I demonstrate how authors developed literary forms seeking to explain and respond to how changing dietary habits and food distribution practices were reshaping their communities. Moreover, early modern authors turned to food not just as a topical referent or as a metaphorical vehicle but rather as a structural concern that could be materially addressed through literary means. Each chapter of “Ruling Appetites” centers on particular literary techniques—verse forms, stage characters, theatrical set pieces, or narrative tropes—through which authors examined how food influenced economic, social, and political reality. Literary form, in its openness to experimentation and innovation, allowed authors to address how early modern England’s changing dietary culture was transforming its material, social, and imaginative landscape.

Unlike the Russian Civil War or Second World War, the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989) never acquired a stable, dominant narrative in Soviet or Russian culture. Even as the war was in progress, Soviet media revised its evaluation of key events and players to reflect the changing political tides through the 1980s. After the war ended, state leaders were distracted by the political turbulence of the 1990s, and the citizens—largely unaffected by the war on a personal level—were not particularly interested in assessing either the war’s successes or failures. This lack of definition left the descriptions and representations of the Soviet-Afghan War open to the influence of evolving political realities and agendas. This study examines the literary techniques and strategies that writers Svetlana Alexievich and Alexander Prokhanov have employed in articulating different narratives that responded to the shifting demands of the moment. With respect to the several revisions that Alexievich made to her documentary novel Zinky Boys from its initial publication in 1990 through its final version in 2007, I argue that the author’s position as anti-authoritarian and anti-war becomes increasingly rigid. Like many liberal-minded members of the intelligentsia after the fall of the Soviet Union, Alexievich had early hopes for a transition from totalitarianism to democracy in her native Belarus which would be disappointed. The poetics of her documentary prose, I argue, challenge the traditional identities and relationships of author, character, and reader by destabilizing the boundaries and allowing crossovers between roles. By engaging the reader in constructing the deeper meaning of the novel, Alexievich projects her reader into the full and active participation of a citizen building a new post-Soviet state. Prokhanov, situated on the opposite side of the political divide, also made substantial revisions to his novels about the Soviet-Afghan War. Prokhanov’s 1994 novel The Palace is remarkable for its change in message and tone from the narratives of his Soviet-era writing on Afghanistan: it openly questions the Soviet Politburo’s decision to invade, and includes surreal dreamlike sequences that, I argue, reflect his contemporaneous collaboration with Alexander Dugin, founding proponent of neo-Eurasianism. In Dream about Kabul—his 2001 “remake” of his own 1982 novel Tree in the Center of Kabul—Prokhanov’s alter-ego protagonist becomes an even more passive participant in the progression of the Soviet-Afghan War, compared to The Palace, as well as a powerless pawn in the political conspiracies involving the Russian Federation, Israel, and the United States. His reader is more like the obedient subject of a tsar than the politically engaged citizen of a democracy, as envisioned by Alexievich. In my study of the substantial revisions that Alexievich and Prokhanov made to their Soviet-Afghan War stories from the 1980s into the twenty-first century, I demonstrate how the literary representations of a military conflict in recent Soviet history reflect the increasing polarization of political and social realities facing authors and readers in the post-Soviet states of Russia and Belarus. The aesthetic decisions that Alexievich and Prokhanov made in revising their Soviet-Afghan War stories carry political and ethical implications. Thus, the relationship between implied author and implied reader in a literary text becomes a political statement about the relationship between the state and the citizen.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Thesis (M.A. (History)) --University of Limpopo, 2008 / Refer to document

This dissertation examines the interplay between antebellum frontier literature and the counter-imperial impulses that impelled the era's political, cultural, and literary developments. Focusing on selected works by James Fenimore Cooper, Margaret Fuller, Francis Parkman, and Herman Melville, I use historicist methods to reveal how these authors drew upon and contributed to a strong and widespread, though ultimately unsuccessful, resistance to the discourse of Manifest Destiny that now identifies the age. For all their important differences, each of the frontier writings I examine reflects the presence of a culturally-pervasive anxiety over issues such as environmental depletion, slavery, Indian removal, and expansion's impact on the character of a nation ostensibly founded on republican, anti-imperialist principles. Moreover, the later works reflect an intensification of such anxiety as the United States entered into war with Mexico and the slavery debate came to increasingly dominate the political scene. Chapter I emphasizes the ideological contestations bred by the antebellum United States' westward march, and signals a departure from recent critical tendencies to omit those contestations in order to portray a more stable narrative of American imperialism. The chapter concludes by arguing that Cooper established an initial narrative formulation that sought to suppress counter-imperial impulses within a mainline triumphalist vision. Chapter II examines Fuller's first published book, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, in the context of hotbutton controversies over expansion that informed the 1844 presidential contest; employing the metaphor of the dance as her governing trope for engaging unfamiliar landscapes, peoples, and even modes of community, Fuller placed persistently marginalized counter-imperial impulses at the center of her western travelogue. Chapter III discusses Parkman's sub-textual engagement with controversies surrounding the Mexican War; though thoroughly invested in conquest ideologies, Oregon Trail nevertheless resonates with the war's most popular negative associations. Chapter IV explores Melville's attunement to national ambivalences towards rhetorics of Manifest Destiny from the late 1840s through the early 1850s. During this stage of his career, Melville both payed tribute to the Anglo-American triumphalism freighting the antebellum era, and enacted a powerful articulation of the era's counter-imperial impulse.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2001. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 209-217). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis--Strasbourg II, 1972. / Includes indexes. Includes bibliographical references (p. 848-929).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 214-227).