Thesis (D.A.)--Illinois State University, 1984. / Title from title page screen, viewed June 3, 2005. Dissertation Committee: Edward Schapsmeier (chair), Charles Gray, Paul Holsinger, L. Moody Simms, Walter Kohn. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 254-275) and abstract. Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Queensland, 2003. / Includes bibliography.

Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2004. / Includes abstract. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 156-160).

Thesis (M.M.)--Bowling Green State University, 2007. / Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 71 p. : music. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, August, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 543-564)

This thesis is concerned with an analysis of British governmental attitudes and responses to communism in the United Kingdom during the early years of the Cold War, from the election of the Attlee government in July 1945 up until the election of the Wilson government in October 1964. Until recently the topic has been difficult to assess accurately, due to the scarcity of available original source material. However, as a result of multiple declassifications of both Cabinet Office and Security Service files over the past five years it is now possible to analyse the subject in greater depth and detail than had been previously feasible. The work is predominantly concerned with four key areas: firstly, why domestic communism continued to be viewed as a significant threat by successive governments – even despite both the ideology’s relatively limited popular support amongst the general public and Whitehall’s realisation that the Communist Party of Great Britain presented little by way of a direct challenge to British political stability. Secondly, how Whitehall’s understanding of the nature and severity of the threat posed by British communism developed between the late 1940s and early ‘60s, from a problem considered mainly of importance only to civil service security practices to one which directly impacted upon the conduct of educational policy and labour relations. Thirdly, how official counter-subversion methods were formulated and enacted over the period – from remarkably limited beginnings as small-scale vetting reform to a wide-ranging program of surveillance and counter-propaganda by the early 1960s. And finally, whether such responses can be judged as proportional with the benefit of historical hindsight, or if the British government’s conduct should be regarded as an egregious example of reactionary censorship and infringement of civil liberties in the modern era.

The 1950s saw the height of the Beat literature movement. Within this movement moved a cohort of women who helped revolutionize gender relations in the early Cold War era, leading to the emergence of the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. By questioning social gender norms and harnessing their artistic, sexual, and economic autonomy, Beat women built lives of lived art outside proscribed social norms building the base for a new era in gender relations.

This thesis examines the function and presentation of “Nature” in American literature written between 1945 and 1971. It argues that the widespread presence of ecological representations of “Nature” within Cold War literature has been critically overlooked, as a result of Cold War literary criticism’s comparatively narrow concentration on the direct effects of political and ideological metanarratives on texts. It uncovers a plethora of ecological portrayals of the relationship between the human and the environment, and reveals the significance of the role played by non-Western and non-Anglocentric philosophies and spiritualties in shaping these presentations. This study is methodologically informed by the most recent developments in the field of ecocriticism, including Scott Knickerbocker’s work on ecopoetics and Timothy Morton’s explorations of the problems associated with the term “Nature”. It finds significant continuities within these ecological portrayals, which suggest that nuclear discourse had an influential effect on the presentation of “Nature” within Cold War literature. This influence is, however, heavily mediated by the role that non-Western and non-Anglocentric philosophies play in writers’ theorisations of relations of interdependence between the human and the environment. Such literary presentations challenge the understanding that the Nuclear Age represents a conquest of “Nature”. Rather, they reveal that a number of Cold War writers present human interdependence within an ecological system, capable of the annihilation of the human, and of the containment of the new nuclear threat. The thesis’s introductory chapter questions the characterisation of Silent Spring (1962) as the founding text of the modern environmental movement. It outlines this study’s intervention into the field of Cold War criticism, detailing its specific ecocritical methodology and engaging with the legacy of Transcendentalism. Chapter One looks at the work of Paul Bowles, with a primary focus on The Sheltering Sky (1949). It demonstrates the centrality of the landscape to the writer’s creative project, and reveals the substantial influence of the Sufi mysticism on Bowles’s presentation of the human’s relationship to the environment. Chapter Two focuses on the work of the New Mexican poet Peggy Pond Church. It establishes the influence of the writer’s familiarity with the Pueblo Native American worldview on her poetic portrayals of the human and the nuclear as interrelated parts within a greater ecological system. It also uncovers similar portrayals within the work of the “father of the atomic bomb”, J. Robert Oppenheimer. The third chapter analyses the effects of Chinese and Japanese literature and thought on the work of J. D. Salinger. It outlines the function of “Nature” in the work of the specific translators that Salinger names, arguing that this translated Taoism substantially informed the ecological vision present across his oeuvre. Chapter Four explores the impact of Simone Weil on the work of Mary McCarthy. It reads Birds of America (1971), demonstrating the governing influence of Weil’s concept of “force” on McCarthy’s presentation of the human as an interdependent part within a powerful ecological system.

With my dissertation entitled “Between the Flash and Fall of Turning”: “New York” School Poets, American Pragmatism and the Construction of Identity, I seek to account for the depiction of the anti-foundational self which emerges time and again in the poetry of John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch. While theorizing the self as a contingent, provisional, and shifting construct is hardly new to a theoretically oriented academy transiting into the present century, scholars and critics have tended to ground such interpretations in “structural linguistics” and so-called “French philosophy.” One of the goals of this project, therefore, is to propose that the philosophical skepticism toward the self as a site of stable and enduring meaning has always been felt and articulated by American Pragmatism, specifically in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James and John Dewey. While a handful of critics have looked to Pragmatism to account for the protean self in the work of “New York” School Poets, these commentators have tended to focus their attention largely on O’Hara’s and Ashbery’s poetry. This project seeks, on the one hand, to round out this work with close readings of all the major “New York” School Poets, and extend it, on the other, by looking beyond poetry to visual art and classroom pedagogy to examine evidence of a Pragmatist orientation across the disciplines, despite the apparent interpretive consensus that American Pragmatism “goes silent” at mid-century.

This dissertation explores the role of religion in the origins of the Cold War from 1880 to 1948. Building on David Foglesong’s research into the role of religion in shaping American missionaries, businesspeople, and public intellectuals’ perceptions of Russia, as well as Andrew Preston’s insights into the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration’s use of religious tropes to justify intervention against Nazi Germany from 1939 to 1945, this project focuses on the White House and US State Department’s efforts to manage diplomatic tensions and public controversies surrounding religious repression in Russia during the origins of the Cold War from 1880 to 1948. The central finding of this project is that during the period from 1933 to 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his personal allies such as Joseph Davies sought to minimize popular and official criticisms of Soviet religious policies as a part of Roosevelt’s program of pragmatic cooperation with the USSR. Eventually, anti-communist officials in the State Department managed to undermine Roosevelt’s public relations program in order to justify a more confrontational approach to the Soviet regime. Roosevelt’s poor health, growing personal isolation, and neglect of personal relationships with American Catholic leaders after 1943, as well as his failure to create a bureaucracy committed to his vision of post-war cooperation, meant that after his death religion could be used by anti-communists in their campaign to denigrate the Soviet Union. To gain popular support for its containment and roll-back strategies, the Truman administration called for a worldwide Christian crusade to eradicate atheistic communism. By shedding light on how well the Roosevelt administration was able to overcome US-Russian religious tensions, this project supports the “missed opportunities” thesis that the Cold War was not inevitable. It also stands as an example of a growing body of scholarly research linking religion, diplomacy, and US foreign relations. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)