Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of English, 2005. / Title from first page of PDF document. Document formatted into pages; contains [1], ii, 79 p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 78-79).

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of English, 2004. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 47-48).

This paper contains, somewhat in detail, Shaw's ideas of the economic relations of man, as they are stated in his political writings and upheld in his plays.

This dissertation examines the evolution of the early English travel narrative as it relates to the development and application of mercantilist economic practices, theories of aesthetic representation, and discourses of gender and narrative authority. I attempt to redress an imbalance in critical work on pre-colonialism and colonialism, which has tended to focus either on the Renaissance, as exemplified by the works of critics such as Stephen Greenblatt and John Gillies, or on the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as in the work of scholars such as Srinivas Aravamudan and Edward Said. This critical gap has left early travel narratives by Sir Francis Moore, Jonathan Harris, Penelope Aubin, and others largely neglected. These early writers, I argue, adapted the conventions of the travel narrative while relying on the authority of contemporary commercial practices. The early English travelers modified contemporary conventions of aesthetic representation by formulating their descriptions of non-European cultures in terms of the economic and political conventions and rivalries of the early eighteenth century. Early English travel literature, I demonstrate, functioned as a politically motivated medium that served both as a marker of authenticity, justifying the colonial and imperial ventures that would flourish in the nineteenth century, and as a forum for experimentation with English notions of gender and narrative authority.

Between 1880 and 1930, the British Empire's vast infrastructural developments facilitated the incorporation of large parts of the globe into what Immanuel Wallerstein and others have called the capitalist 'world-system'. Colonial literature written throughout this period, in recording this vast expansion, repeatedly cites imperial infrastructures to make sense of the various geographies in which it is set. Physical embodiments of empire proliferate in this writing. Railways and trains, telegraph wires and telegrams, roads and bridges, steamships and shipping lines, canals and other forms of irrigation, cantonments, the colonial bungalow and other kinds of colonial urban architecture - all of these infrastructural lines break up the landscape and give shape to the literature's depiction and production of colonial space. In order to analyse these physical embodiments of empire in colonial literature, this thesis develops a methodological reading practice called infrastructural reading. Rooted in a dualistic, yet connected use of the word 'infrastructure', this reading strategy works as a critical tool for analysing a mutually sustaining relationship embedded within these literary narratives. It focuses on the infrastructures in the text, both physical and symbolic, in order to excavate the infrastructures of the text, be they geographic, social or economic - namely, the material conditions of the world-system that underpinned Britain's imperial expansion. This methodology is applied to a number of colonial authors including H. Rider Haggard, Olive Schreiner, William Plomer and John Buchan in South Africa and Flora Annie Steel, E.M. Forster, Edmund Candler and Edward Thompson in India. The results show that the infrastructural networks that circulate through colonial fiction are almost always related to some form of anti-imperial resistance, manifestations that include ideological anxieties, limitations and silences, as well as more direct objections to and acts of violent defiance against imperial control and capitalist accumulation. In so doing, the thesis demonstrates how this literary-cultural terrain and the resistance embedded within it has been shaped by, and has in turn shaped, the infrastructure of the capitalist world-system.

I uppsatsen analyseras Harry Martinsons roman Vägen till Klockrike (1948) ur ett ekonomiskt perspektiv. Syftet är att undersöka hur berättelsens ramverk och de värderingar som uttrycks förhåller sig till en ekonomisk logik. Detta sker genom jämförelser med Georg Simmels The Philosophy of Money (1978) och Chrispoher Newfields artikel "What is Literary Knowledge of Economy?" (2018), såväl som en tidigare studie i Martinsons tankar och poesi av Johan Lundberg, Den andra enkelheten (1992). Resultaten visar att huvudpersonen Bolle kämpar emot en ekonomisk rationalisering som gör honom arbetslös. Samma sätt att tänka avgränsar vad som faktiskt kvalificerar sig som ett yrke. De långa vandringarna som utförs av luffarna, vilka Bolle skall komma att tillhöra, innefattas inte i vad som kan kallas arbete utan luffarna blir istället kriminaliserade och sätts i straffarbete som bättre passar samhällets definition. Att handeln fungerar legitimerande visar även det hur en ekonomisk logik är essentiell för hur föremål såväl som människor värdesätts.     Synen på pengar och andra eftersträvansvärda saker i livet skiljer sig stort mellan luffarna och resten av samhället. För luffarna är pengar av sekundär betydelse, ett medel men aldrig ett mål i sig. Istället sätt friheten främst tillsammans med saker i livet som de flesta tar för givet. Detta är i linje med Martinsons egen syn på samhällsutvecklingen, i vilken han anade stora faror, men från vilken han också beskrev en utväg i form av värderingar som kan sökas och uttryckas i poesin. Dessa värderingar återfinns även i Vägen till Klockrike. / In this thesis, Harry Martinson’s Vägen till Klockrike (1948) is analyzed from an economic point of view. It aims to study how the setting and the values expressed in central conflicts are related to a logic of economy. Methodologically, the novel is read in comparison with Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money (1978) and Christopher Newfield’s article “What is Literary Knowledge of Economy?” (2018), as well as a previous study on Martinson’s poetry and ideas by Johan Lundberg, Den andra enkelheten (1992). The results of the study show that the main character Bolle struggles in the face of economic rationale that is turning him professionally obsolete. The same rationale defines what qualifies as a proper job. The miles of walking enacted by the vagabonds, which Bolle come to join, are not included and instead they are criminalized with economically motivated punishment. Exchange turns out to be a mediating factor which also shows how economic logic plays a vital role in defining the value of objects as well as people. The view on money and other qualities in life differ greatly between the vagabonds and the rest of society. For the vagabonds, money is of secondary importance, a means but never and end in itself. Instead, freedom and the things in life most people take for granted are held in the highest esteem. This is in line with Martinson’s view of developments in his contemporary society, the consequences of which he warned about, but to which he also presented an antidote: a set of values to be sought in poetry. These values are also expressed in Vägen till Klockrike.

Univ., Diss.--Regensburg, 2005. / Literaturverz. S. 201 - 217.

At the end of Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon (1977), Milkman travels to the fictional town of Shalimar, convinced that he is about to reclaim his family's lost inheritance. When he arrives, however, he is sorely disappointed. Instead of the “bags of gold” he was promised, he finds only “Nothing. Nothing at all.” Milkman’s recovery-that-is-not-one encapsulates the simple yet fraught question at the center of this dissertation: How to plot the inheritance not of positive but negative property? Deploying a palimpsestic reading practice, I bring together novels and films, from the twentieth century to the present, that each cohere around this central dilemma: Can the hegemonic form of the British realist novel—the inheritance plot—be rewritten to depict, instead, forms of intergenerational dispossession? In 1973 Raymond Williams surveyed novelistic production in Britain in the nineteenth century concluding that almost ninety percent constitute an “inheritance plot.” This is, according to Williams, any plot in which narrative closure is secured with the intergenerational transfer of property, thereby sedimenting the underlying assumption of a definite relation between economic entitlement and biological property. If, however, nineteenth-century realism naturalized the transmission of wealth, right, and title, “The Inheritance Plot” examines how it has since been refused and mis-used to represent, instead, the inheritance of loss, exile, dispossession, debt, statelessness, and racial trauma. The question, then, that drives my project hinges on a set of productive contradictions: Can the very form that underwrote economic exclusion and juridical alienation be repurposed to trace what Denise Ferriera da Silva calls the oxymoron of “negative accumulation”? Over four chapters, I bring together the fiction of George Schuyler, Willa Cather, Alan Hollinghurst, Helen Oyeyemi, Jordan Peele, Ephraim Asili, Raquel Salas Rivera, and Giannina Braschi, among others, to offer a literary history of the disinherited. Subsequently, I show how each text imaginatively repurposes and rewrites an “inheritance plot” in the attempt to make sense of the intergenerational violence of chattel slavery, empire, and colonialism, while simultaneously exposing the violent fictions that underwrite genealogical regimes of ownership. In tandem, through drawing on Black and Indigenous feminisms, alongside social reproduction and queer theory, I argue that the negativation of the “inheritance plot” has ethical and political significance. In my reading, the inheritance of nothing is—paradoxically—a narrative non-event with a dual function. For instance, Milkman’s inheritance-that-is-not-one serves is both a diagnosis of historical trauma, and it is the sign of a radical reimagination of the world that doesn’t yet lie in succession.