<p> Although Lillian Hellman was obsessed with truth, in her memoirs she often exaggerates, confabulates, and lies. So pervasive was Heliman's penchant for making things up that her reputation as a memoirist has suffered under a deluge of criticism. Hellman personified a era of many societal changes: greater sexual freedom for women, more opportunities for women to work, and television's growing impact on creating celebrities. Foremost, however, central to .Hellman's life was-the advent of McCarthyism, a period she describes in <i> Scoundrel Time Scoundrel Time</i> has drawn more criticism--actually vitriol--than any of her works, possibly because it tells many unwanted truths about that era. Despite her proclivity for fabulation:, Hellman's "stories"--her works of fiction presented as fact--often engage those underlying truths essentially "truer" than her surface fictions.</p>

<p> This dissertation discusses how Victorian writers, artists, and critics represent historical queens as shadows of Queen Victoria throughout her long reign (1837&ndash;1901). Focusing on Victorian representations of four queens&mdash;Catherine de Medici, Mary Stuart, Queen Elizabeth I, and Marie-Antoinette&mdash;this project seeks to establish a literary genealogy by showing how British writers drew upon historical interpretations of dead French and English queens to express psychological ambivalence, political anxiety about female monarchy, national, confessional difference, and complex sexual and erotic dimensions. Rather than approach these queens as historical persons, this dissertation concentrates on the literary, figural, and spectral qualities that translate unevenly across cultural, religious and historical lines. The dissertation uses interdisciplinary methods drawn from history, psychoanalysis, and feminism to examine how Victorian writers relate their representational strategies to novels, dramas, visual texts, and historiographies in which the queens are sources of sensation, fascination, English moral exceptionalism, and spectacle. The mix of canonical and non-canonical writers recasts the familiar images of these queens in a new light and brings unfamiliar and long forgotten writers into the discussion. In examining how these cultural texts work against the grain of more canonical texts, the dissertation shows how they have the potential to unsettle what it is thought is known about Victorian attitudes toward female monarchy. Finally, I argue that it matters that Queen Victoria is on the throne because she casts her shadow over these cultural texts while they are being produced and consumed.</p>

published_or_final_version / Literary Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

<p> In 1901, Alice Hegan Rice, a wealthy socialite reformer, published the novel <i>Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch</i> which dealt her experiences working with the poor. By the end of 1902 her novel had become a national phenomenon and finished the decade as one of its five bestselling books. Though the novel was fictional in nature, the book&rsquo;s heroine, Mrs. Wiggs, was based on the life of a real woman, who inhabited the one of the poorest neighborhoods in Louisville, Kentucky at the turn of the twentieth-century, a slum known as the Cabbage Patch. Shortly after the book&rsquo;s publication it became well-advertised that Mary Bass, a widowed mother of five children living in poverty in the Cabbage Patch, was the prototype for the beloved character of Mrs. Wiggs and subsequently and quite undesirably became fetishized by an overenthusiastic public. Mary Bass would end up suing Alice Hegan Rice for libel. The Bass/Rice story supplies an uncommon historical opportunity to analyze the portrayal of poverty in popular fiction in the Progressive Era United States and the classist values behind those representations.</p>

The thesis documents the censorship histories of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Richmal Crompton's William books under Franco, and analyses these censorship histories in terms of the changing character of the regime. Previously unconsulted primary sources are used, such as censors' reports and translation proofs held in the Archivo General de la Administración del Estado at Alcalá de Henares. The censors' reports demonstrate that children's literature and translated literature were treated as special cases by the regime, and that censorship was particularly harsh in both areas. These findings demonstrate the crucial importance of attitudes to childhood and foreignness in the Francoist ideological scheme. The censorship histories of Tom Sawyer and the William books reveal some surprising facts. The William books began to be persecuted by the censors in late 1942, precisely the moment when the regime was seeking a rapprochement with the Allied powers as the course of the War turned in the latter's favour. This prohibition cannot be understood without exploring the factors which differentiate children's literature from adult literature in the context of Francoism. The books' peculiarly English character also had a vital bearing on how they were censored. The history of Tom Sawyer in Spain demonstrates the effect of literary status on censorship practice. Early in the regime, the censors generally considered Tom Sawyer to be a work for adults. From the mid-1950s, however, children's literature was inscribed as a special category in censorship legislation, and the censors began to view editions of the work as specifically intended for children. Tom Sawyer thus encountered censorship problems in the later years of the regime, supposedly more liberal than the earlier period. Again, these problems would be inexplicable without examining the evolution of the publishing industry and Francoist attitudes to literature and the child. The thesis also provides a detailed analysis of the type of suppressions imposed on the books studied, under the following headings: religion; love, sexuality and gender; authority and politics, nation and race; crime, terror and violence.

<p> In this dissertation, I examine the predominantly oral practice of singing lyric poetry among members of the Neapolitan aristocracy in southern Italy during the late-fifteenth century. The tradition of singing Neapolitan lyric developed and gradually gained ascendancy in the Kingdom of Naples over the nearly sixty years of the Aragonese dynasty (1442&ndash;1501)&mdash;both in the capital city of Naples and at feudal courts throughout the Kingdom&rsquo;s rural provinces. The surviving song repertory and its preservation in late-fifteenth-century musical and literary sources bear witness not only to these varied performance contexts, but also to the inherently communal aspect of the tradition as a whole. </p><p> Combining approaches in musicology, ethnomusicology, and literary theory, I question the fixity and purpose of this written repertory in preserving a fluid and dynamic oral practice that flourished as the artistic expression of a subjugated class&mdash;Neapolitan nobles and intellectuals living under Aragonese rule. The manuscript collections, historical descriptions, theoretical and literary works that preserve and transmit the records of this oral practice demonstrate how writing was used to record, recollect, recreate, and ultimately memorialize a communal practice of song-making&mdash;lending value and legitimacy to the Kingdom&rsquo;s local aristocracy&mdash;during a tumultuous time in the history of southern Italy. Some copies, perhaps preserved on less durable media, have likely been lost while others preserve traces of orality with varying levels of fixity and transformation. How and why these records were created and preserved is the central question that this study seeks to answer.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation examines the function of family as a thematic in the contemporary Anglo-American novel. It argues that contemporary aesthetics increasingly presents the family as an enabling platform for conciliation with the social totality: as a space of personal development, readying one for life in the wider social field. This analyses hinges on readings of Jonathan Franzen&rsquo;s <i>Freedom</i> (2010), Zadie Smith&rsquo;s <i> NW</i> (2012), A. M. Homes&rsquo; <i>May We Be Forgiven</i> (2012) and Caryl Phillips&rsquo; <i>In the Falling Snow.</i> In approaching these novels, this project addresses the theoretical lacuna left open by the much-touted retreat of postmodernism as a general cultural-aesthetic strategy. This project identifies these novels as examples of a new and competing ideological constellation: metamodernism. Metamodernism encompasses the widely cited return of sincerity to contemporary aesthetics, though this project explains this development in a novel way: as a cultural expression from within the wider arc of postmodernism itself. One recurrent supposition within this project is that postmodernism, in its seeming nihilism, betrays a thwarted political commitment; on the other hand contemporary metamodern attitudes display the seriousness and earnestness of political causes carried out to an ironic disregard of the political. Metamodernism, in other words, is not a wholesale disavowal of postmodern irony, but a re-arrangement of its function: a move from sincere irony to an ironic sincerity. The central inquiry of this dissertation is into this re-arranged role of family and familial participation amidst this new cultural landscape. My argument is that family and the political have maintained a tense relationship through the twentieth century in the American consciousness. They represent competing models of futurity in a zero-sum game for an individual&rsquo;s life-energy. What metamodernism represents, so this dissertation will articulate, is a new form of anti-politics: a fully gratified impulse to depoliticize. Analyzing what this project terms the &ldquo;politics of the local,&rdquo; this dissertation will argue that the highly popular and successful models of conscientious capitalism have been superseded. Today, increasingly, redemption from consumerism guilt is itself wrapped up in commodities: the utopian impulse celebrated by Fredric Jameson has itself obtained a price tag. The contemporary novel thus reflects new social functions for that which has trumped the political: the family. </p>

<p> This dissertation explores the possibility of an early modern cultural materialism in selected dramatic works of Thomas Middleton in which fasting plays a prominent thematic role. The once venerable Christian practice of fasting was compartmentalized into secular and religious components in the wake of the Protestant Reformation in England even as its overall practical contour was preserved largely intact. It was subjected to conflicting representations and programs for reform, and appropriated by differing political and ecclesiastical factions. The vicissitudes that beset fasting offered a fertile ground for cultivating an understanding about the nature of the material basis of cultural formations and the historical dynamic governing their fates. It is this indigenous cultural materialist understanding, I argue, that Middleton's treatment of fasting in his dramatic works exemplifies. </p><p> The first chapter offers a history of fasting from the early church to its secularization under Queen Elizabeth as Protestant <i>status quo ante</i> in reference to which later departures and appropriations took place. One such departure by King James is the subject of the next chapter on <i>A Chaste Maid in Cheapside</i> in which the king's attempt to re-sacralize fasting is subjected to a materialist satire and made into a springboard for imagining a utopia of a specifically materialist kind. The next chapter on <i>The Puritan</i> contextualizes the play in terms of the puritan attempts to incorporate fasting as part of the Protestant prayer regime in the place of cunning folk's witchcraft and Catholic ecclesiastical magic. <i>Masque of Heroes</i> and Christmas keeping at the Jacobean Inner Temple are the subjects of the last chapter. I discuss the prominence in the masque of the anthropomorphized Fasting Day in connection with inter-generational and inter-constituency struggle for the custodianship of the valued custom of Christmas keeping. </p><p> These studies represent a series of historicist contributions to Middleton scholarship on the individual works. More broadly, they constitute an attempt to exploit insights from cultural history and material culture studies to broaden the scope of the study of religion in early modern English drama. </p>

This thesis analyses the comtesse de Ségur (1799-1874), France's best-selling children's author, both as a cultural icon and as a historical subject. Although Ségur became the best-selling author for young children in the twentieth century, and a publishing phenomenon, her work has often been overlooked by Anglophone historians. This is because she is perceived to be a part of a school of didactic authors derided as “governesses”, and who are usually characterised as bigoted spinsters, in possession of little in the way of real literary talent. The recent tendency in French academic research has therefore been to play down the comtesse de Ségur's politico-religious agenda, in order to distance her work from that of her colleagues, and to explain her enduring popularity. However, such an approach is based upon a questionable reading of such “governess” authors, and is an indication that Ségur's politics recall a part of their history that many French people would prefer to forget. In contrast, it is the contention of this thesis that the comtesse's work must be understood in the context of the religious antagonisms of Second Empire France. Ségur was closely involved with one of the most influential religious propaganda networks of the Second Empire. The informal nature of their activities meant that Ségur's gender did not prevent her from engaging in the political fray. The thesis examines the immediate production of her work in the context of the Catholic drive to propagate „good books‟, and highlights the importance which the religious revival attached to the child and to children‟s literature; it looks at the myth-making process which generated the comtesse de Ségur as a symbol of ideal Christian womanhood, and the role that this played in the politics of identity in the second half of the nineteenth century; and finally it asks what her legacy has been for feminine culture in France. In restoring the comtesse de Ségur to the intransigent Catholic movement, this thesis brings to light a neglected aspect of the Franco-French culture wars, namely the important contribution made by women authors such as Ségur to the massive surge in religious print culture in the mid-century. It questions the old stereotypes that have long surrounded Catholic women, and shows just how engaged they were in the struggle for the nation's soul that raged in post-revolutionary France.