This dissertation explores the relationship between the emergence of English romance and rhetoric of English nationalism in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Four historical romances set in Englands past Havelok the Dane, Guy of Warwick, Of Arthur and Merlin, and Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild are my primary focus. The concepts of England and Englishness that emerged in the late medieval and early modern periods were not the inevitable outcome of the Middle Ages, but the result of complex mediations explored in historical romances. Historical romances offered the primary stage for popular dramatizations of a national community bound by its shared triumphant history, and it is in such romances that ethnic, regional, and national identities were forged and disseminated. My project argues that a vital, though generally unrecognized, aspect of Middle English romance narratives was the castigation and delegitimization of the Scandinavians, or the Danes, who became anathema to England and Englishness even as they settled throughout the British Isles in potentially massive numbers, as recent archeological and linguistic evidence has suggested. In the post-Conquest process of reconciliation between Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Saxon historiographical traditions, the Danes represented a philosophy of non-Christian might is right that was opposed to the God-ordained English system of rightful rule by proper, lawful inheritance. As secular texts written in the vernacular and designed to appeal to a wide range of the public, the historical material in Middle English romances has been perceived as reflective of the historical consciousness of the non-elite. However, my project argues that thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Middle English historical romances were not representative of a gradual emergence of long-buried folk-memory, but were themselves producing a national historical framework stressing continuity over fractures. While it has often been taken for granted that the frequent appearance of the Danes in many Middle English historical romances must have been based on lingering folk memory of pagan invasions centuries earlier, my project shows that historical romances were crafted so as to seem like they were recording popular traditions about the past, when in fact they were creating such traditions themselves.

The dissertation provides a survey of poetry in largely critically neglected decades of Irish literature, arguing that the poetry of Denis Devlin, Thomas MacGreevy, Samuel Beckett, Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, and Blanaid Salkeld represents a crucial phase in the development of Irish poetry. In the first three chapters I argue that Denis Devlin, Thomas MacGreevy, and Samuel Beckett develop a uniquely Irish form of modernism that sits uneasily with both Irish and Continental traditions, examines the horrors of modern war, and in the case of Beckett, proposes a form of humanism based on the physiology of the body that radically departs from Enlightenment models. The Kavanagh chapter examines his reclamation and reformation of the Irish bardic tradition of pastoral dystopianism and Kavanaghs attempts at a new poetic based in anti-Pauline, post-institutionalized Christianity. The fifth chapter explores Clarkes reanimation of technical aspects of pre-eighteenth-century Irish poetry and, despite his public anti-Yeatsian statements, argues that his poetry both carries on and develops the Revivalist project. The Salkeld chapter proposes that Irish feminism operates in the poetry of this period in ways that both undermine and support the projects of Salkelds male counterparts.

In this dissertation I examine the origins, influences and features of Caribbean carnivals as cultural festivals that developed and expanded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly during moments of emancipation. Tracing the historical path of these festivals as they transformed from divisive nationalistic acts to inclusive performative events, I argue that the ontology of carnivalits resistance first to slavery, then to colonialism, combined with its creativity, exists in the interstices of masqueraders performances. I analyze carnival as a festival that remains amorphous while privileging trans-Caribbean features, notably unstructured play. Because of this indeterminacy, representations of carnival in literature and film tend to include multiple viewpoints. I analyze these possibilities in various texts such as in Paule Marshalls The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969), Tomás Gutiérrez Aleas La Última Cena (1976), Earl Lovelaces The Dragon Cant Dance (1979), Wilson Harris Carnival (1985), Pauline Melvilles The Ventriloquists Tale (1997) and Robert Antonis Carnival (2005).

Albert Glover (b. 1942), professor emeritus at St. Lawrence University (Canton, New York), has finished editing / publishing / printing the epic poem, A Curriculum of the Soul (Institute of Further Studies, 2010). The project was started in the late 1960s when Glover and John Jack Clarke (1933-1992) elaborated upon a sketch, or map, drawn up by late modernist poet Charles Olson, entitled A Plan for a Curriculum of the Soul. Subsequently, Clarke assigned 28 parts from the plan to different poets living around the country at the time. It has taken some 40 years and five reassignments for the project to find something of a conclusive end or, perhaps, a new beginning. Prior to drafting his curious plan for a souls curriculum, Olson (1910-1970) served as rector / writing instructor during the 1950s at Black Mountain College, an experimental arts school where, among others, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan taught poetry, Josef Albers and Willem de Kooning painting, Anni Albers textile arts, Buckminster Fuller architecture, Merce Cunningham dance and John Cage music composition. The school closed in late 1956, an event that hastened Olsons return to his New England home environs. Additionally, the closing of Black Mountain College, located outside Asheville, North Carolina, worked to create something of an American artistic diaspora. Situated again in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Olson redoubled his own epic poetic efforts that resulted in the ultimately unfinished Maximus Poems. Olson returned to teaching in the early 1960s when he surfaced at the State University of New York, Buffalo. As serendipity would have it, Glover became a graduate student of Olsons during this time while Clarke served as a fellow instructor in the universitys English department. While the rest might be history, it seems to me that an after-Olson generation / line of American poets are quietly moving out from the diasporatic and cloistered environs they have long inhabited. My work attempts to articulate the notion that A Curriculum of the Soul will serve as something of a fulcrum going forward in the greater landscape that is American epic poetry as established previously by Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle. Additionally, my thesis moves to foreground and explore certain implications of A Curriculum of the Soul as a collaborative epic text and the greater modern / postmodern epoch conditions which fostered its creation.

In this study, I examine the "jazz novel" from a global perspective, following recent trends in musicology which attempt to restore the international gaps in the canonical "American" jazz historical narrative. I introduce the essays by providing some contextual, historical, and theoretical framework for breaking the "sound barrier" comparing visual literature with aural music as well as establishing the value of music in maintaining a transnational community within the African diaspora. In the first chapter, I argue that Ralph Ellison incorporates the transnational fusion of Afro-Cuban jazz both thematically and structurally in his landmark novel Invisible Man. By integrating the Cuban rhythms of the rumba beneath the jazz aesthetic in the text, Ellison formally mirrors Afro-Cuban jazz, precipitating later transnational and international jazz novels. In the second chapter, I examine the transculturation of Scottish folk music and "American" jazz in Jackie Kays novel Trumpet. I claim that Kay finds a model for her protagonist, Joss Moody, in African American jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and an aesthetic corollary for a "more fluid" conception of identity in the subgenre he helped establish bebop. In the reciprocal of my reading of Invisible Man, I argue that Kay combines "American" bebop rhythms beneath a uniquely Scottish voice, moving the setting and characters beyond the United States and more fully demonstrating the global influence and significance of jazz. In addition to the transnational dimension of my argument, I maintain that both novels join other jazz texts in subverting the boundary between author/narrator and reader, proposing a more egalitarian antiphonic relationship between composer, performer, and audience while placing the ultimate agency on the response of the latter. Building on these examples, I conclude that jazz serves as both an ethical and aesthetic model for a less rigid perception of identity and more flexible interaction in an increasingly interconnected, pluralistic global community.

"Understanding Criticism" argues that the dominant narrative of the disciplinary history of literary studies has thwarted an analysis of the entanglement of anti-blackness and literary criticism. In the 1940s and 1950s, the New Critics defined literary criticism and its history as an ongoing progression of critical theories. In doing so, however, the New Critics created a disciplinary object that covered over the relationship of theory to material, social, and institutional practices. As such, it became difficult to evaluate and to track modes of literary critical activity that neither hewed to this narrative, nor manifested in the institutionally endorsed forms of literary theory. In recovering this narrative with methods informed by science studies, ecocriticism, and critical university studies, "Understanding Criticism" illustrates how our sense of the history of literary criticism has been narrowed by the New Critical narrative of disciplinary development and, in particular, how that narrative has concealed practices of literary criticism employed by black intellectuals in the mid-century. By recognizing criticism that did not rely on the cultural capital levied upon institutionally endorsed methods of literary reading, "Understanding Criticism" highlights writers that are not normally associated with the history of literary theory. This dissertation puts Melvin B. Tolson, Langston Hughes, Parker Tyler, and Ann Petry into conversation with those who have long been understood to have a pivotal role in formulating literary criticism, such as Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren. This broader network of critics and critical practices delivers access to an expanded archive of approaches to the interpretation of literature. Ultimately, to apprehend criticism from the interdisciplinary perspective of ecology means to redefine the discipline with renewed attention to activity and unlikely collaboration across social spheres.

In his study, The Negro Church, published in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois prophesized the black church as the driving force behind racial uplift. Subsequently, he posited the Negro preacher as the prominent figure in obtaining equality for the black man in America. Martin Luther King, Jr. as the figurehead of the Civil Rights Movement can be read as the fulfillment of prophesy proclaimed by Du Bois. During his lifetime, Du Bois condemned contemporary intellectual, Booker T. Washington. He was critical of Washingtons accommodationist views, as well as Washingtons intense desire to remain the spokesperson for the Negro race, which led Washington to blacklist other Negro leaders in order to maintain his status. Du Bois called Washington, his desire, and his institute, The Tuskegee Machine. The black preacher is no longer fulfilling the role that Du Bois predicted but rather he is becoming susceptible to the same criticisms that Du Bois constructed about Washington and the Tuskegee Institute. In this thesis, I apply the sociohistorical criteria of Du Bois The Negro Church and his criticism of Tuskegee Machine to Rev. Dr. Creflo Dollars World Changers Church International (1981 present) to highlight how Du Bois vision of the black church, which he argued emerged as a challenge to the socioeconomic status quo in the United States, has now become an extension of it.

This thesis traces the history of Orson Scott Cards Enders Game story across three iterations and three decades of world developmentthe Enders Game novella (1977), the Enders Game novel (1985) and the subsequent parallax version, Enders Shadow (1999)to consider what happens to the form after modernisms dissipation and question whether or not the contemporary Bildungsroman still serves the historico-philsophical function of its 19th-mid-20th century precursors. By analyzing of three parallel narratives of development through Cards literary workthat of Ender Wiggin, that of the Enders Game narrative, and that of the Bildungsroman genrethis essay extends and modifies the work of Franco Moretti and Jed Esty by demonstrating how the Bildungsroman reacts as the global economy transitions from monopoly capitalism to multinationalism. Taken together, Cards three narratives tell the developmental story of the genre itself and culminate with Enders Shadow, a newly figured Bildungsroman that appears within the realm of science fiction and emerges as a formal response to the Young Adult novel of the postmodern era. As such, Enders Shadow exposes the negative effects of late capitalism while at the same time offering a narrative of alterity.

In this thesis, I consider the short story Korea and the novel Knife Song Korea, by physician and writer Richard Selzer to pose questions about how a surgeons professional technique, or surgical style, may be shaped by traumatic experiences in the operating room. Selzer's Korea stories were based on the journals he kept while working as a military doctor during the Korean war, shortly after completing his surgical residency. What we encounter through the disguise of fiction are versions of Selzer's professional autobiography, which resonate strongly with the daily experiences of being a doctor. Events of the stories may be recognizable for anyone who has had encounters working in a medical environment with limited clinical resources and a plethora of patients who are physically devastated by the severity of untreated illness. In particular, Selzer's writing draws attention to the process of déformation professionelle, or literally professional deformation, the term used to describe when one is only able to see the world through one's profession, in physician identity development. Through the Korea narratives, we see that this deformation occurs in tandem with the physician's frequent encounters with traumatic events, affecting his future surgical style.

This thesis argues that Marlowes Dido, Queen of Carthage is a metatheatrical critique of the conditions of performance in the childrens acting companies of early modern England. Dido, based on books 1, 2, and 4 of Virgils Aeneid, tells the story of the love affair between Dido and the Trojan hero Aeneas. However, this play also contains additional scenes to Virgils source text, such as 1.1, which sets up the power dynamics in the play to follow through the interactions between Jupiter, the King of the Gods, and Ganymede, his boy lover. This thesis analyzes the power disparities among other child characters, such as Ascanius, the son of Aeneas, and Venuss son, Cupid, and adult characters, such as Dido, Aeneas, Venus, the Goddess of Love, and Juno, the Queen of the Gods. These relationships among fictional characters mirror those between the child actors of the Children of the Chapel, who played these characters, and the adults, such as Queen Elizabeth, whose statues governed them, the company managers who controlled them, the audiences who commodified them, and the antitheatricalists who criticized them. This thesis concludes that Marlowe evokes the power imbalances between children and adults in the early modern period through Dido, Queen of Carthage.