This dissertation develops a conceptual history of human anatomy, both as a discipline and as an epistemological model. Building on recent scholarship in the history of science, I argue that the basic organization of anatomical inquiry inspired a number of literary productions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This project counters important critical trends of the last five decades, which have focused on the ambiguous characterization of an anatomical genre without providing sufficient medical context. I argue that intellectual history reveals a persistent epistemological analogy between the body and textual arrangements of human knowledge. By examining this analogical structure, it is possible to theorize about the components and requirements of anatomical inquiry. Chapter One examines the religious and contexts of anatomy in ancient Greece and medieval Persia and Arabia. In looking at the cosmological doctrines of both societies, I attempt to answer questions about the absence of human dissection in ancient cultures. In the process I identify an alternative mode of inquiry, which I call cosmo-anatomy. Chapter Two discusses the influence of Andreas Vesalius famous De humani corporis fabrica on the organization of anatomical texts in seventeenth-century England. I contend that Vesalius innovative text sets the stage for both medical and literary anatomical arrangements, including such works as Robert Burtons The Anatomy of Melancholy. Chapter Three discusses the poetic backlash against Copernican physics in John Donnes Anatomy of the World. I contend that Donne adapts his anatomy to reveal the fundamental influence of traditional cosmologies on the semiotics of metaphysical poetry. Chapter Four explores the narratological structure of Laurence Sternes Tristram Shandy. I investigate the role of memory reconstruction in shaping Tristrams autobiography, highlighting, in the process, the influence of Enlightenment theories of the brain on the digressive condition of Sternes narrative. Chapter Five considers the importance of the anatomical analogy on philosophical encyclopedias of the eighteenth century. I look as well at Leibnizs plan for the universal library, arguing that the structure of anatomy influences Enlightenment attempts to organize vast amounts of information in a meaningful manner.

This dissertation analyzes the texts of contemporary women writers who consciously engage dominant Catholic, American, and southern ideologies in their narratives and who posit Louisiana as a liminal, hybrid space. Building upon postcolonial concepts of hybridity and performance of cultural memory, I trace a pathway to feminist recovery and reclamation of ancestral memory and spirituality in Valerie Martins A Recent Martyr, Rebecca Wells Little Altars Everywhere and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Brenda Marie Osbeys All Saints, and Erna Brodbers Louisiana. The authors enact spiritual and cultural reclamation through the written expression of key components of postcolonial reconstruction of history, including ancestral memory, hybridization of cultural narratives, and performance of folk ritual and beliefs. The texts engagement of Louisiana as a place which blurs national and ethnic boundaries posits this liminal zone as both a site of historic trauma and oppression and also a position of possibility for cultural reconstruction. The urgent call to reclaim and revalue the subverted other within dominant myths is essential to both feminist Catholic theology and postcolonial theory. Writing through the paradox of female deity as virgin and mother, these texts reconnect women to strong, sensual female deity in hybrid, creole traditions values of femininity which have been hidden and whitewashed in a de-sexualized, sterile image of the Catholic Virgin Mary. A common theme in these writings involves a particularly feminine perspective on the paradox of sacrifice required for belonging and redemption a search for mothers in religion and tradition and for the mother within oneself. This search involves coming to terms with the central conflict of establishing ones individuality versus the sacrifice of individuality required to be a mother and to belong to religious and cultural communities. Akin to this central theme is a feminist desire to revalue and reshape the paradigms that have traditionally subverted the female body and reinforced racial oppression.

This dissertation analyzes American writing from and about the former British and French colonies in order to critique postcolonial theory and also to establish a new genre of expatriate literature. Focusing on the works of J. P. Donleavy, Edith Wharton, Paul Bowles, and Paul Theroux, I argue that reading these Americans disrupts the binary concepts encouraged by postcolonial theory. This project rethinks important dichotomies such as colonizer/colonized, center/margin, metropolis/margin, civilized/primitive, and white/non-white by examining the ambiguous American character in the postcolonial context. I argue that by categorizing the themes of American literature in the colonies, and analyzing the similarities and differences with European colonial writing we will thus see these works emerge as a fascinating sub-genre of postcolonial literature. Furthermore, by examining these themes and this perspective it is possible to see a more complete picture of the complexities and gradations of identity in the postcolonial world.

A critical approach to understanding the analytical power of realism and its representational claims in the late nineteenth-century is to examine the relationship between realism and a common cultural concern that opposes the very tenets of realism, one that necessarily pervaded all aspects of class, gender, nationality, race, sexual orientation, or other classifiable subsets of society typically linked with various schools of literary theory: the subject of religion. In fact, religion, with its disembodied immaterialism, surely the antithesis of realism, represents a unique cultural problem that tests the conceptual biases of the realist mode. One basic issue is that religion itself is a nebulous concept that resists neat explanation in American culture. One might ask what are the ways in which religion was perceived, whether it be considered in relation to a system of ethics, law, or religious practices, or more abstractly, in relation to spiritualism, idealism, or supernaturalism? Can such a metaphysical concept even be located in realist writing and how do realist writers materialize it, particularly in relation to social ethics, an inherent concern of realist writing? Changes in economics, industry, race, and immigration necessarily affected the religious culture of America, and realism, as a literary mode, should be well-suited to capturing such sociological changes; nevertheless, religion in realism is intensely problematic, particularly since realist writers were reacting against earlier modes of sentimental and religious fiction. Examining how prominent practitioners of realism dealt with the religious subject will shed a new understanding on the practice of literary realism as a critical mode and address competing claims of textual authority in relation to the Bible and the realist text in the mediation of social ethics. This project comprises six chapters, which are: 1) Introduction to Religion and Realism: Let Fiction Cease to Lie; 2) Rebecca Harding Davis and Sentimental Literary Realism; 3) William Dean Howells as Writer and Critic of American Literary Realism; 4) Mark Twain and the Bible: I See It Warnt Nothing but a Dictionary; 5) Harold Frederic and Realism: The Damnation of Religion; and 6) Conclusion.

This study focuses on self- reflexivity in early American texts. This self-reflexivity demonstrates that these early American authors were attempting to define American fiction and were participating in a new literary tradition that was developing simultaneously with the development of the new country. After the introduction, Chapter One lays the groundwork for my study by exploring current views of these texts and what led to these views. Chapter Two explores the difficulties facing post-Revolutionary authors and their reactions to these obstacles as reflected in their prefaces and their other writings. I show the way these authors self-consciously respond to the opposition to novels in more nuanced ways and less defensively than is generally acknowledged. In the remaining chapters, I explore the self-reflexivity in the novels themselves. In Chapter Three, I consider three novels by Charles Brockden Brown Wieland (1798), Arthur Mervyn (1799/1800), and Edgar Huntly (1799) novels that explore the nature of the American novel in different ways. In Chapter Four, I analyze The Coquette (1797), Charlotte Temple (1794), and Ormond (1799), to show the ways Hannah Foster, Susanna Rowson, and Brockden Brown subvert the sentimental tradition in order to explore characters as a literary element, to embrace a solidarity among readers, and to focus on a theme of language and writing rather than present a didactic moral. Chapter Five analyzes Royall Tylers The Algerine Captive (1797), Tabitha Tenneys The Female Quixotism (1797), and Hugh Henry Brackdenridges Modern Chivalry (1815). The authors of these novels use self-reflexivity and humor in order to satirize and mock the state of American literary culture at the time. While each chapter focuses on different works and views them from different angles, they all extend my argument that these early novelists are working self-consciously toward developing a definition of American fiction as they are writing. If we reconsider these works in light of their self-reflexive moments then we begin to see that they are much more than harbingers of literature to come but worthy to be considered part of the American literary tradition in their own stead.

Invisible Links, Abject Chains: Habit in Nineteenth-Century British Literature argues that habit is a central characteristic of both Romantic and Victorian theories of imagination, originality, literary production, and subjectivity. Certainly, nineteenth-century culture often treats habit with suspicion, invoking language of bondage, slavery, and dangerous unconscious imitation to apply to everything from reading habits to opium use. However, by tracing a discourse of habit from association theory to pragmatism and drawing from philosophical, educational, medical, and psychological texts, I foreground how Romantic and Victorian texts redeploy habit as a paradoxical form of imaginative agency. In nineteenth-century culture, habit makes possible what seems to be its oppositeinvention, authenticity, and imagination. The variety of activities, attitudes, and behaviors characterized as habitual in nineteenth-century discourse intervenes in how we understand issues such as Romantic genius, the mechanics of creativity and memory, automation and spectatorship, and addiction. Reading key instances in Wordsworth, Baillie, Coleridge, De Quincey, Lamb, Darwin, William James, and Collins, I show how alternative discourses of habit challenge our understandings of the (often self-fashioned) myths inscribed within Romantic and Victorian subjectivity.

This dissertation examines how identitygender, race, sexuality, regional affiliationintersects with considerations of the dramatic genre, commercial and critical factors in the American theatre, and understandings about the American South to complicate how contemporary southern women playwrights represent region. In light of the always-already "performative" nature of the South, and geographical, commercial, and ideological factors that set the South in opposition to the North, southern women playwrights face additional difficulties in navigating issues of authenticity and simulacra, the universal versus the specific, ideas about southern "backwardness" versus northern sophistication, and audience participation in fetishizing or distancing the South. Using drama as their medium creates unique problemsfor instance, the multiple layers of authorship, the collective reception format, and the demand for exaggeration within productionbut it also provides opportunities for southern women playwrights to challenge conventional ideas not only about the South, but also about the assumed universal spectator, who has always been figured as male/white/heterosexual/middle-class, and I arguenot southern. Reading the work of playwrights such as Pearl Cleage, Sandra Deer, Rebecca Gilman, Marsha Norman, and Shay Youngblood, I argue that these women draw on several strategies to respond to these problems of region and genre. Through conscious approaches that involve placing, displacing, and replacing the South, and by foregrounding their challenges to traditional southern notions of gender expression and sexuality, community, and domesticity, these women use the stage to reimagine the South and the dramatic genre.

In this dissertation I argue that science fiction as a genre intervenes in the history-oriented discourse of postcolonial Anglophone Indian literature and refocuses attention on the nations futureits position in global politics, its shifting religious and social values, its rapid industrialization, the clash between orthodoxy and modernity, and ultimately the dream of a multicultural nation. Anglophone Indian science fiction also indicates Indias movement away from a nation trying to negotiate the stigma of colonialism to a nation emerging as a new world power. Thus, this genre reconstructs the Indian identity not only in the domestic sphere, but also in a global context. Reading these works (e.g. by Amitav Ghosh, Ruchir Joshi, Vandana Singh etc.) alongside postcolonial and science fiction theory, I also explore how these texts theorize the intersection of Western and Indian traditions, as well as indigenism and hybridity. I argue science fiction as a genre enables a synthesis of these clashing tendencies in a new way, which projects Indian futures marked by cultural hybridity and, often, exhibits critical and premonitory qualities. Together with the Indian works I also read a number of Anglo-American science fictions about India (e.g. works by Roger Zelazny and Ian McDonald among others) to examine Western ideas about Indian future and how they differ from the Indian texts. Although some of these works try to understand the complex socio-cultural dynamics of India while writing its future, most of the time they impose the Western stereotypes of the Orient. Because of this still persisting Orientalist attitude, I conclude that Anglophone Indian science fiction is the genre that can best project the Indian future in an authentic manner. It can synthesize both Indian and Western cultural influences in a futuristic scenario, while eschewing the bias that Western science fictions exhibit towards India; and at the same time this genre can break free of the historical burden characterizing such reclamatory effort in realistic postcolonial discourse.

Young Adult horror fiction with female protagonists presents sympathetically the untenable situation of adolescent girls within society whereby they are increasingly pressured to embody a doll-like feminine ideal that deprives them of voice and agency. In Young Adult horror fiction, the monstrous Other problematizes what is presented to girls as normal and natural feminine behavior. As a double with a difference, the monstrous Other is an iteration of femininity whose similarity to the original implies the possibility of resisting restrictive gender roles. Because in Young Adult horror fiction the monstrous Other is nearly always a sympathetic character, it is fairly easy for the reader or viewer to identify with this character and thereby formulate her own strategies to resisting a restrictive gender role. Monstrous Bodies: Femininity and Agency in Young Adult Horror Fiction examines three types of monstrous Others, each offering a different model of resistance to feminine subordination. In Chapter 1, the figure of the ghost reacquaints girls with strengths they have repressed in order to be conventionally feminine. The teen female werewolves in Chapter 2 refuse restrictive gender roles by accepting as strong and beautiful the parts of themselves that are at odds with normative femininity. And in Chapter 3, teen witches resist subordination when they can view the world holistically and so reject their cultures hierarchal and oppressive model of knowledge. Young Adult horror fiction does not simply reproduce through the form of the monstrous Other sexist ideas about women. Rather, Young Adult horror fiction uses these tropes of horror to deconstruct sexist ideas about womens supposed essential nature which have been used to justify feminine subordination. In this way, Young Adult horror fiction differs from mainstream horror fiction, which is as likely to affirm sexist ideas about women (as well as racist ideas about non-whites) as it is to challenge these ideas.

In Ephemeral Media, Persistent Action: Public Pedagogies of Collective Resistance, I argue that representations of contemporary activism against corporate globalization, as analyzed in three different sites of commercially-driven media textsnewspapers, film, and websitesteach people to move away from public forms of collective activism and towards privatized and institutionally-sponsored forms as part of the larger project of neoliberalism. Specifically, this dissertation focuses on the representations of, and responses to the representations of, two eventsthe protests against the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Seattle, Washington in 1999 and the protests during the Republican National Convention in 2004 in New York Cityas moments that simultaneously capture the burgeoning movement in the United States against corporate globalization and the development of digital tools for citizen and social media. I analyze digital media interventions in these representations and give examples of how composition teachers might use these same digital tools and what I call an ethos of tactical ephemerality to encourage students to compose not just in response to, but in dialogue with, multiple and precarious publics and counterpublics.