Abstract Johnny Golightly Comes Home is a nonfiction novel about the writing of two books by Pat Hopkins. In particular it is an account of the author’s often troubled interaction with artist John Anthony Boerma, who once took on the persona of Johnny Golightly after reading Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It is a story about illusion and fantasy in the creation of a work of conceptual art. As the lies are stripped away, so a new character emerges – that of Johnny Gochristly, the messiah sent to take away the parameters of the world. And in this latter-day passion play the unwitting writer has the role of Judas. The accompanying reflexive essay reviews the themes as they appear in the book – especially those of epiphany brought on by trauma, which leads to a divine mission often associated with extreme eccentricity. It concludes with a section on the writing process.

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Because the first part of the twentieth century in Ireland was marked with nationalist milestones like the Easter Rising and the Anglo-Irish War, most accounts of modern Irish literature and culture are nation-centered. This dissertation offers a new understanding of modern Irish writing by placing national identity in conversation with global consciousness, a burgeoning concept in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, this project explores three aspects of globalism: the attachments to foreign countries that Irish writers form; the ways in which these attachments affect their relationships with Ireland; and their subsequent articulation of global consciousness based on these transnational experiences. The introduction provides a critical and historical context for the project by negotiating between the established discipline of Irish Studies and the emerging field of Irish Diaspora Studies. Each chapter then investigates an Irish writer whose work indicates a relationship between global and national consciousness. The Irish-Argentine writer William Bulfin and the evolution of his relationship with gauchos, as it is suggested in his Tales of the Pampas, forms the subject of the next chapter. The second chapter juxtaposes Helen Waddell's The Princess Splendour and Other Stories, which retells fairytales from the Middle and Far East as well as from Ireland, with Lady Gregory's and Douglas Hyde's nationalistic collections of Irish folklore. The third chapter investigates the connection between the feminist underpinnings of Kate O'Brien's novels with the transnational movements that frequently accompany them. The fourth chapter examines the cosmopolitan imperative of Brian Moore's Irish-American novels. Finally, in the epilogue I briefly suggest the ways in which contemporary Irish writing extends the projects begun by these earlier figures.

My dissertation explores non-visual experiences of film through a study of the recurring cinematic figure of the blind heroine in three periods of US cinema - late silent, classical, post-studio. My analysis of films, multi-sensory film "spectatorship" and film production critically depart from the readings offered by semiotic and psychoanalytic film theory, in favor of theories of cinematic perception and theories of genre, namely, melodrama and suspense. My approach reorients theories of film that have explained cinema as an exclusively visual culture towards a broader consideration of sensory perception and film experience.Attention to Helen Keller, as an author and a cinematic protagonist, and to the ability of the figure of the blind heroine to reorganize the structure of the films that address her frames my discussion of modern film form. Film has attempted to represent the spatial, tactile and aural experiences of gendered blind protagonists for sighted viewers - to visually produce non-visual experiences and to move beyond the limitations of its own technologies. In each of the technological periods I examine, film uses cinematography that addresses the body, sonic and visual attention to texture and movement, and narrative and affective structures of melodrama and suspense, to create the audience's aesthetic experience. My work explores the ways in which cinema has been multi-sensory, embodied, and "not-visual" - that is, visual but also more than visual - through critical evaluation of the dominant arguments of film theory, formal analysis of films, and historical accounts of film production.Keller's work and the films I examine offer a theory of the modern phenomenological subject - a subject whose senses are not, finally, located within the body of the individual but are shared with, and borrowed from, the world of human and cinematic bodies they encounter. / Dissertation

This project explicates the ways in which writers from different cultural groups (Anglo American, American Indian, and Mexican American) used literature to defend the land claims of increasingly marginalized peoples within the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. Each of the writers I discuss (Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Alexander Posey, Charles Lummis, and Helen Hunt Jackson) constructs and manipulates racial hierarchies in order to assert the comparative virtues of the cultural group for whom they advocate. I explore each writer's perceptions of proper land use and legitimate land claims and how these perceptions are informed by disparate cultural inheritances. By looking at authors from different backgrounds, writing from different regions in the United States, I am able to establish the frequency with which racialist assumptions guided popular opinion and U.S. law around the turn of the twentieth century--specifically in regards to land claims. I situate my reading of literary works within the historical context that made competitions for land particularly fierce during this period.

Between Women: Alliances and Divisions in American Indian, Mexican American, and Anglo American Literatures of Protest to Colonialism investigates nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers' negotiation of women's rights discourses. This project examines the split between nineteenth-century women's rights groups and the Equal Rights Association to assess how American Indian, Mexican American, Anglo women, and, more recently, Chicana writers provide theoretical insights for new directions in feminisms. This study is grounded historically in order to learn from the past and continue efforts toward "decolonizing feminisms," to borrow a phrase from Chandra Mohanty. To that end, current feminist theories about alliances and solidarity are linked to ways that writers intervene in feminisms to simultaneously imagine solidarity against white male colonialist violence and object to racism on the part of Anglo women. Like all the writers in this study, Sarah Winnemucca's Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) challenges Anglo women to not be complicit with Anglo male colonialist violence. Winnemucca's testimony illuminates the history of alliances between Anglo and Native women and current debates amongst various Native women activists regarding feminism. Between Women traces how Anglo American writer Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884) protests effects of U.S. colonialism on Luiseno people and her negotiation of feminisms compared with Winnemucca's writing and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don (1885) and Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), novels that protest the effects of U.S. colonialism on Mexican Americans, particularly women. It then compares Ruiz de Burton's writing to Helena Mari­a Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Cherri­e Moraga's Heroes and Saints (1994), texts that acknowledge the difficulties of forming alliances between women in the context of exploitation, pesticide poisoning of Chicanas/os, and border policies. The epilogue points to Evelina Lucero's Night Sky, Morning Star (2000), demonstrating how an understanding of the history that Winnemucca engages elucidates American Indian literature in the twenty-first century. By looking deeply at how nineteenth-century conflicts effect us in the present, scholars and activists might better assess tactics for feminisms in the twenty-first century that enact an anti-colonialist feminist praxis.

Canadian artist Helen McNicoll (1879-1915) has long been neglected in art historical scholarship. Although well-known and well-regarded during her lifetime, her work has since been marginalized as feminine and dismissed as old-fashioned. Through the lens of a modernist art historical tradition that has privileged the urban and masculine above all else, McNicoll's Impressionist depictions of sunlit beaches, open fields, and rural women at work may indeed seem quaintly nostalgic. In this thesis, I argue that these images can and should be seen as both representations of modernity and assertions of feminist thought. McNicoll travelled throughout England and Europe, and across the Atlantic Ocean in search of artistic subject matter; viewed within the context of tourism---which has been theorized as a fundamentally modern activity---her images appear modern in ways that have not traditionally been recognized.

As many theorists have pointed out, queer history is often erased within traditional, heteronormative historiography. Consequently, historians cannot recount the gay and lesbian past by conventional techniques of evidence and documentation. Instead they recuperate and reinvent queer history using strategies normally associated with the writing of fiction. This thesis examines three works of late twentieth century lesbian historical fiction that rewrite the past in order to render visible queer intimacy, sexuality, and desire. Jeanette Winterson's The Passion (1987), Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet (1998), and Helen Humphreys' Leaving Earth (1997) employ spectacularly visible lesbian heroines who symbolically reverse lesbian invisibility in mainstream historical narratives by displaying themselves as public figures or stage performers. There are ongoing debates in contemporary queer theory and historiography about the extent to which it is politically useful to privilege highly visible individuals when recovering the marginalized gay and lesbian past. Winterson's, Waters', and Humphreys' novels enact this debate, and exemplify a trend in contemporary lesbian historical fiction in which lesbian heroines are empowered by their ability to control their own visibility and to ensure the perpetuation of their history.

[Truncated abstract] This thesis focuses on the significance of the beauty of Helen of Troy in the Encomium of Helen written by the fourth-century philosopher Isocrates. Previous traditions, and especially epic poetry and tragedy, had assessed Helen’s beauty and either blamed or excused her for causing the Trojan War. Isocrates moved beyond this dichotomy to create a new focus on her beauty as the ultimate source of all that made Greek culture distinctive. Modern scholarship, however, has been generally unsympathetic we may almost say blind to this projected beauty. The meaning of beauty in Isocrates’ work has been overlooked by scholars in favor of its rhetorical structure. The work was criticized for its disjointed arrangement and lack of seriousness. The Helen has been interpreted as a reaction to contemporary rhetorical issues or as merely an educational manifesto. This thesis aims to identify and clarify the ideology underlying Isocrates’ construction of Helen’s beauty in his encomium. … The Helen of Isocrates is also compared with the contemporary Platonic work Phaedrus, which explores beauty as a means of arriving at pure knowledge. In this case, comparisons are drawn thematically and reveal that while the two works share similar topics and aims regarding the notions of beauty, Isocrate’s aesthetic idea is much more practically grounded and intended to be of benefit to the entire society when compared to the more idealistic and individual Platonic notion. Finally, the reasons for Isocrates’ choice of beauty as a major theme for the Helen are explored through a comparison of Helen’s beauty to that of Hellas an equation which Isocrates deems important for the fourth-century society.