In this dissertation I analyze the social history of an anthropological collection at the Smithsonian Institution. Combining archival and historical research with interviews, I trace the Army Medical Museum (AMM) collection from its origin in the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The Smithsonian's AMM collection is the product of mid- to late-nineteenth century government science. Assembled in the midst of westward expansion and colonization, this collection is the result of numerous government-sanctioned collecting efforts. Accordingly, the objects and human remains that comprise this collection were taken from scores of Native American tribes from all parts of the United States. Amassed during some of the darkest moments in the history of the United States - marked by warfare, death and the displacement of countless Native Americans - the AMM collection represents the Smithsonian's earliest collecting efforts. The social history of this collection spans from the earliest days of the SI to the present, marked by concerns regarding cultural property rights. And what the present moment demonstrates is the continued relevance of this colonial past, especially in the context of repatriation. I analyze critical contemporary issues of repatriation in terms of the historical legacy of collecting in the U.S. and demonstrate the role that collections play in negotiating identities. For that purpose, I begin with the supposition that objects shape as well as materialize identity, and that disciplines define themselves by virtue of what they collect. I examine recent shifts in what is deemed ethically appropriate for collection and how this affects the various ways museum anthropologists define the discipline. Ultimately, this dissertation advances a critical historical analysis of the AMM collection, providing a more dynamic understanding of the role that repatriation plays in redefining the roles of anthropologists within museums.

The relationship between imperialism and nationalism has often been portrayed by theorists of nationalism and post colonial discourse theorists as antagonistic. Anti-democratic, aggressive empires impose their will on subject peoples who, in response, form nationalist movements in opposition to this imperialism. These movements, it is claimed, assert the nation’s right to self-determination and independence. Whilst this was undoubtedly the case in a number of anti-colonial movements, examples can be found that refute the apparently antagonistic relationship between nationalism and imperialism. Nationalism does not always advocate independence from states or empires. Imperialism can be a vehicle for a national mission or can strengthen minority nations. In certain contexts, these two anti-thetical concepts can be reconciled. The thesis investigates the reconciliation of nationalism and imperialism using the concept of imperial nationalism. This concept is used to denote a variety of nationalism that proposes reform of the state/imperial government for the benefit of the nation whilst simultaneously emphasising the benefits of the reform of the empire. An important element of the nationalist discourse will be the maintenance of the imperial connection as beneficial for the nation. A comparative historical analysis of nationalist groups in nineteenth century Scotland and Canada is used to highlight the relationship between nationalism and imperialism in the discourse of nationalist groups. Both Scotland and Canada held relatively privileged positions within the British Empire. Yet Scottish and British Canadian nationalist groups argued the existing systems for governing their respective nations were illegitimate. In Scotland, the Scottish Home Rule Association argued for a Scottish Parliament, focusing on the extent to which the United Kingdom state was unable to cope with the work created by the four home nations and the Empire. An important aspect of home rule for Scotland, however, was its extension to the other home nations and the opportunity it would present of reforming the Imperial Parliament for the benefit of the Empire, and by association Scotland. In Canada, the focus of Canada First and the Imperial Federation League in Canada was on reform of the system of Imperial governance. Canada had not been given control over relations with the United States under the British North America Act and British Canadian nationalists felt Canadian interests had not been taken into account in British dealings with the United States. The answer was to provide Canada with a voice in treaties in the short term and, in the longer term, to reform Imperial government in order to provide Canada with a voice in the affairs of the Empire as whole. The thesis investigates the extent to which these movements were nationalist, imperialist and, finally, how these two concepts were reconciled.

This study is limited largely to teachers in the public or common schools, although a few academy and female seminary teachers and at least one governess are included. It is not a definitive study, but a sufficient number of writings have been examined to make a fair sampling of the range of the nineteenth century American fiction.

This thesis provides the first detailed study of the jury of the Paris Fine Art Salon under the July Monarchy and Second Republic. In 1831, Louis-Philippe delegated the role of jury to the members of the first four sections of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. This thesis analyses the diverse composition of the July Monarchy jury and offers the first account of its procedures and decisions based on a rigorous examination of archival sources. It also examines the nature and extent of the growing opposition to the jury, its eventual abolition in 1848 and the decisions taken in forming a new jury under the Second Republic. In so doing it reveals the failure of the king and his arts administration to respond to the aspirations and expectations of the artistic community under the post-revolution constitutional monarchy. It also shows how the jury’s diverse membership sparked conflict, notably between a conservative group of architects and certain more open-minded members of the painting section, as it sought to adjust its academic values and expectations in response to the artistic developments of the period. My examination of the opposition to the jury among artists and art journalists during this period brings to light the key issues surrounding admission to the Salon at the time. Finally, the analysis of the Second Republic reveals the ways in which this opposition was temporarily satisfied by reforms to the jury, examining the significance of changes not only to its composition, but also to its procedures. At each stage the thesis challenges the simplistic misrepresentations of the Salon jury’s procedures and decisions prevalent during the July Monarchy itself and subsequently in the history of the emergence of modern art in France during the nineteenth century.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the different ways in which naturalist fiction was parodied in France at the end of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates first of all the validity of approaching naturalist literature through the medium of parody by defining and explaining the interrelation between parody and naturalism. If parody, which inscribes texts within texts, seeks by its very nature to reveal the illusory status of literature and makes the reader aware of the literary medium, naturalist fiction obeys the opposite impulse: its mimetic pretences lead it to hide its literariness. The principal aim of the thesis is thus to determine whether and to what extent parody can undermine the mimetic strategies of naturalist literature; and whether parody led to a renewal of naturalist fiction as it has done with other kinds of fiction. The thesis is divided into three parts. Part 1 concentrates on the theory of parody and provides a survey of the different conceptions of parody through the centuries. Chapter 1 of Part 1 deals with definitions of parody as a relatively minor practice. Chapter 2 is devoted to parody as a key factor in the renewal of literary genres as well as being a constituent of modern and post-modern aesthetics. In Chapter 3, I outline a twofold approach to parody: I argue that some texts are parodic by nature and that other texts are potentially parodic. In the former case the text is intentionally parodic, whether the reader is capable of identifying parody or not. In the latter case the very intentionality of parody is put into question. For a comprehensive poetics of parody both modes must be taken into account. Part 2 examines the numerous parodies that arise in the context of the reception of naturalist literature. I have uncovered over a hundred of these multigeneric parodies, which have allowed me to establish an extensive bibliography of the parodies of naturalist literature. Even though some of these parodies can be thought of as slight from a literary point of view, they provide us with invaluable information on naturalism and its literary context. Besides their general sociological and documentary value, these parodies unveil completely unexplored aspects of the literary battle provoked by naturalist writings. In this way new light is shed on the process of reception of naturalist fiction. The parodic dimension that can be found in the works of the so-called second generation of naturalist writers - Paul Bonnetain, Leon Hennique, Henri Ceard and others - is discussed in Part 3 of the thesis. In their works naturalist themes and procedures often become mechanised and overcoded: the strategies used to explore the very limits of the naturalist genre range from the comic grotesque, to the 'shocking', to the absurd. I f in the parodies studied in Part 2 naturalism was parodied from outside, in this phase it is undermined from within by a ' fifty. Interestingly, such practices are also to be found in the works of major writers associated with the naturalist movement (Joris-Karl Huysmans and Octave Mirbeau). Thus I use parody or self-parody as an interpretative grid to cast a different light on certain naturalist writings. Even though parody does not really lead to the renewal of naturalist fiction, it sometimes gives rise to reflection on literariness and the writing process. Such a meta-fictional use of parody is fundamentally innovative and represents a modern trend already evident in the fiction of the last decades of nineteenth-century.

Thesis advisor: Judith Wilt / Though contemporary evangelical Protestants have shown an increased interest in the fine arts, scholars have often seen the aesthetic history of Anglo-American evangelicalism as one marked by hostility and indifference. In contrast to this view, this study argues that the history of evangelicalism's intellectual engagement with the fine arts has been complex and varied. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, evangelicals writing in a variety of denominational periodicals carried on a robust inquiry into aesthetics. This study traces the rise of this discourse among Anglo-American evangelicals and maps some of the main features of the evangelical theoretical landscape between 1830 and 1900&mdash;a high point of evangelical critical activity. <italic>Christians, Critics, and Romantics</italic> describes how evangelicalism's contact with Enlightenment thought initiated a break with the Puritan aesthetic tradition that contributed to the growth of a modern aesthetic consciousness among some eighteenth-century evangelicals. By the 1830s, evangelical aesthetic discourse had come under the influence of romanticism. Not only did many evangelical writers define art according to the expressivist principles adduced by major romantic critics but some went even further in asserting, after Coleridge and the German idealists, that art is an embodiment of a higher reality and the imagination an organ of transcendental perception. Evangelical critics, moreover, valued art for its contribution to the stability and progress of &ldquo;Christian nations&rdquo; such as England and the United States. By refining the moral feelings of individuals, fine art helped to safeguard the socio-moral cohesion of Protestant &ldquo;civilization.&rdquo; For a time, evangelical critics attempted to celebrate art in romantic terms while insisting on art's subordination to traditional Christianity, but such an arrangement ultimately proved unsustainable. By the end of the nineteenth century, a rift had opened up within Anglo-American evangelicalism between conservatives and liberals. This rift, caused in part by the spread of romantic thought and by various other secularizing trends, had important implications for evangelical aesthetic thought. While liberals continued to advance high claims for the spiritual and educational potential of art, conservatives largely abandoned the philosophical exploration of art in order to turn their attention to the threats of Darwinian evolution and biblical criticism. Nevertheless, both liberals and conservative fundamentalists retained in their respective ways many of the aesthetic assumptions of the romantic tradition. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

This thesis traces the re-conceptualisation of melancholia as a biomedical mental disease in Victorian medicine, with an emphasis on the uptake of physiology into British psychological medicine. Language appropriated from experimental physiology allowed physicians to speak about ‘disordered emotion’ as a physiological process occurring when the brain was subjected to repeated ‘irritation’. When it came to diagnosing asylum patients, however, internal biological explanations of disease were of little use. Instead the focus was on externally observable ‘symptoms’, chiefly ‘depression’, ‘mental pain’, and ‘suicidal tendencies’. The late-nineteenth-century symptomatology of melancholia was in part constituted through statistical practices put in place by the Lunacy Commission, and which emphasised certain symptoms and nosological categories in the diagnosing of asylum patients. At the same time, the symptoms that emerged as defining criteria of melancholia were theorised within a biological explanatory framework. Thus, diagnostic descriptions of melancholia travelled back and forth between the casebook and the textbook, producing a disease concept that on the surface displayed remarkable coherence yet simultaneously spoke volumes about the negotiations that take place when medicine seeks to neatly label and classify the complexities of human life. In sum, this thesis shows how melancholia was constituted as a modern diagnostic category in nineteenth-century British medicine. In doing so, it also tells the story of how ‘disordered emotion’ was made into a possible and plausible medical concept.

In the tumultuous atmosphere of the decades leading up to the Civil War, the combined effects of religious millennialism, technological revolutions, and the growth of a capitalist economy led numerous Americans to propose radical schemes for transforming their society. At least a hundred cooperative colonies were founded in the 1830s to 50s, leading Ralph Waldo Emerson to famously observe that it seemed every "reading man" had a "draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket." This dissertation explores a unique strain of mid-nineteenth-century utopianism that featured geometrically distinct architectural and urban plans. These schemes include a square land reform grid and radial republican village proposed by the National Reform Association, phrenologist Orson Fowler's octagon house, Henry Clubb's anti-slavery vegetarian Octagon Settlement Company, a hexagonal city published by the anarchist Josiah Warren, and an ovoid house and circular institution of Equitable Commerce proposed by the Spiritualist John Murray Spear and his followers. I also analyze Thomas Jefferson's octagonal houses and square land grids as precedents for the nineteenth-century utopian projects. The creators of these plans were motivated to embrace geometric forms in part because of an emerging functionalist view that regarded the built environment as capable of not just representing but also directly shaping bodies and minds. At the same time that the geometric utopians spoke a language of functional effects, however, they also, consciously and unconsciously, used their plans as aesthetic and rhetorical devices to convince and inspire potential converts. Social reformers employed geometric diagrams to convey an affect of transparency at a time when many antebellum Americans saw the levers of political and economic power as increasingly mediated and remote. By exploring the links between utopians' ideas about architecture and causes such as phrenology, Spiritualism, anarchism, land reform, abolitionism, vegetarianism, and spelling and writing reform, I construct a deeper context for these geometric utopian projects that recovers some of their radical, imaginative, and critical spark, while shedding new interpretive light on the visual culture of mid-nineteenth-century radical reform movements.

Adopting a narrow sense of 'literature' as the umbrella term for poetry, drama, and fiction, this research examines the British sinologists' studies on Chinese literature from 1807 to 1901, and addresses the specific question of how both the knowledge about, as well as the collective discourse on, Chinese poetry, drama, and fiction were gradually constructed, narrated, accumulated, and standardized in the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century. This study brings together, for the first time, a wide range of little studied sinologists' writings on Chinese literature, including monographs, journal articles, prefaces and introductions to translations, and chapters on Chinese literature in books surveying different aspects of China. Based on extensive archival investigations, this thesis reconstructs a panoramic view of how these diverse sinological texts acted collectively to create a body of knowledge about Chinese literature. Considering sinological literary studies within the historical and literary contexts which are sketched out in Chapter 2, the remaining three chapters of this thesis examine the three narrative forms I have identified in the sinologists' writings on Chinese literature: the expository, or, direct description and explanation of the characteristics of Chinese literature, the comparative studies between Chinese and English or European literatures, and the historical accounts of Chinese literature. With systematic discourse analysis of these writings, this research aims to unfold the vocabulary and rhetoric, the frameworks and perspectives, and the narrative strategies employed by the sinologists in the discursive formation of the knowledge about Chinese literature. I argue that such knowledge and discourse produced in the sinologists' studies must be understood as the result of the complex dynamics among multiple literary and cultural factors including the English and Chinese literary concepts and criticism, the ambivalent cultural attitudes towards China, the implied influence of British imperial power in China, and the varied purposes and criteria of individual sinologists. A study on the nineteenth-century British sinologists' studies on Chinese literature enables us to trace and explain the historical origins of studies on Chinese literature in the English scholarship.

This dissertation proposes ?ghost writer? as a new critical term for the ?author? in accordance with what Roland Barthes calls the ?death of the author.? For this purpose, the dissertation conjoins current gothic criticism, modern authorship theories, and studies of nineteenth-century American literature. Current gothic critics, in their endeavors to re-define the gothic as a serious genre that represents social, cultural, and historical anxieties and terrors, have obscured gothic authors? presence. This indistinct, ghostly authorial existence within gothic criticism becomes relevant to modern authorship theorists? reflection on the end of eighteenth-century sovereign and autarchic authorship due to the ever-interpretable text and ever-interpreting readers, by means of the self-effacing gothic writers in nineteenth-century America. American literary scholars agree on contemporary readers? increasing power to assess writers? performance. Gothic writers, especially susceptible to this power since the ambiguities of the gothic necessitate readers? active constructions, composed their texts without selfassumed authorial intentions. This dissertation considers how the century?s five most representative gothic writers re-configure the author as a ghost that should come into being by readers? belief in what it writes. Chapter I examines the common grounds between the aforementioned three fields in further detail and illuminates the exigency of the ghost writer. Chapter II discusses Charles Brockden Brown?s prototypical expos� in Wieland of Edward Young?s typically romantic formulation of the originary and possessive author. Chapter III shows Edgar Allan Poe?s substantiation of Brown?s expos� through his conception of the author as a reader-made fiction in Arthur Gordon Pym. Chapter IV applies Poe?s author-fiction to Frederick Douglass and Louisa May Alcott, and investigates how those two marginalized writers overcome their spectrality with the aid of readers? sympathetic relation to their texts, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and ?Behind a Mask,? and subsequent validation of their author-ity. Chapter V explores the author?s willing self-transformation into the ghost writer in James?s The Turn of the Screw, and ponders how the ghost writer goes beyond the author?s death. By introducing the ghost writer, this dissertation ultimately aims to trace the pre-modern shift from the autonomous author to the heteronomous author.