Taking up recent arguments associated with New Lyric Studies, contemporary genre theory, and historical poetics, this dissertation examines the trajectory of the dramatic element in twentieth-century poetry and its specific practice in the verse drama. Particularly, it argues that the persistent interest among twentieth-century poets in composing verse drama arises out of a resistance to what has been called the lyricization of poetry. By investigating the dramas of poets as diverse as Sadakichi Hartmann, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Robert Lowell, and Derek Walcott, among others, this study reconsiders poets’ engagements with the theater as endeavors vital to poetic, and not merely theatrical history. Through an examination of the poetic dramas of Hartmann and Eliot, I argue that the ways modernist poets deploy ritual are not merely anthropological, disinterested acts, but part of a larger interest in creating liturgical, actionable works of poetry, reforming our ideas of modernist interest in religious practices and communal experiences of poetry. Further, I argue that the verse dramas of Stein and Barnes help us to re-frame narratives of poetic subjectivity and repudiate the purported “death of tragedy” in a lyric age, developing a more full picture of poetry’s ability to engage with and present traumatic experience. In the final chapter, I demonstrate by looking to the verse dramas of Lowell and Walcott the ways that the verse drama challenges the lyric’s perceived a-historical status, finding in the theater a place for historical and political engagement. Thus, this dissertation addresses a current scholarly gap in the study of twentieth-century poetry by examining an oft-overlooked, yet vital form created during an era associated with the dominance of the lyric, and argues that by including verse dramas in contemporary accounts of poetry, we find a more fully-formed perspective of twentieth-century poetics and, particularly, the possibilities of poetic practice beyond the boundaries of the lyric. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2016. / June 30, 2016. / History, Lyric, Poetry, Resistance, Tragedy, Verse Drama / Includes bibliographical references. / Andrew Epstein, Professor Directing Dissertation; Lisa Wakamiya, University Representative; S. E. Gontarski, Committee Member; Robert Stilling, Committee Member.

One of the key issues that arises when discussing the long eighteenth century is that of identity: self/individual, and group/national. Whereas recent critical work in both literary studies and historiography has concerned itself with the circumstances surrounding the long eighteenth century's fundamental shifts in conceptions of identity, much of this work overlooks the potential for identity to be relational, rather than either exterior or interior to an individual/group. This dissertation explores the relational nature of identity formation in the long eighteenth century by examining a literary genre and a character that depend upon relational interactions in order to sustain themselves: stage comedies and lawyers. Representative dramatic comedies by writers such as George Farquhar, Richard Cumberland, Thomas Lewis O'Beirne, William Wycherly, Christopher Bullock, Henry Fielding, John O'Keeffe, Colley Cibber, George Colman and David Garrick, and Samuel Foote, offer opportunities to study staged representations of lawyers whose clients' issues essentially become those of identity formation. This dissertation argues that, for many characters struggling to establish an identity that can participate in a national British identity, the key to such participation lies in access to real property; when access to real property is denied them, they must turn to someone who is himself struggling to establish an identity. At this point, lawyers in eighteenth-century British comedies become much more than stock characters or mere comic relief. Instead, the lawyer—often ostracized and derided himself—becomes a mediator not just of individual identity, but of "Britishness." Careful attention to lawyers' success representing different types of clients struggling to establish identities through access to real property highlights both the power of relational identity formation and the key roles that arguably minor characters have in arbitrating issues of national significance. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2017. / March 27, 2017. / British drama, British literature, Eighteenth century, Identity, Law and literature / Includes bibliographical references. / Helen M. Burke, Professor Directing Dissertation; Charles Upchurch, University Representative; Celia R. Caputi, Committee Member; Candace Ward, Committee Member.

This project establishes a critical framework for the examination of a recently emerged trend in speculative fictions texts, which I have dubbed "fantasy remix." Through close examination of two exemplary texts that exhibit the characteristics of fantasy remix, Once Upon a Time and Grimm, I establish a method by which fantasy remix can be identified and examined for its strength as a tool of resistance, subversion, and conformity. There are three major characteristics of the technique that can be used to identify most fantasy remix texts: 1) the incorporation and adaptation of multiple pre-existing fantastic characters, plots, and motifs, such as from fairy tales, folklore, or mythology; 2) the juxtaposition of these fantasy elements with contemporary culture and/or settings; and 3) an emphasis on narrative and/or structural temporal complexity. Fantasy remix texts displaying these characteristics make liberal use of speculative fiction's tendency to subvert reality and to enable its consumers to resist the sometimes-overwhelming bombardment of cultural ideology that suffuses the real world. The fantasy remix's simultaneous tendency to conform, at least superficially, to the status quo increases its chances of effective subversion and resistance, creating a semi-paradoxical situation in which that which does not fit becomes a source of cultural reflection. This dissertation examines the way the fantasy remix technique helps to dismantle and critique ideological conceptions of morality, law, and justice; immanent causality, especially race and racism; and the temporal order inherent to causality, and thus to our ability to make meaning from the world. Meant as a means to expand speculative fiction scholarship with regard to a specific niche technique, the questions posed by this analysis serve as an example for new ways of approaching the dialectic possibilities of a contemporary culture that creatively cannibalizes its own past. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2017. / March 29, 2017. / fantasy, justice, racism, remix, television, temporality / Includes bibliographical references. / Barry Faulk, Professor Directing Dissertation; Donna Marie Nudd, University Representative; Trinyan Mariano, Committee Member; Christina Parker-Flynn, Committee Member.

This dissertation investigates Shakespeare's presence in nineteenth-century American culture and the meanings audiences made of Shakespeare's texts. My interest and my method has been to examine the intersection of textual representation, performative representation and cultural reception of the six most popular Shakespeare plays on the nineteenth-century American stage. The careful and extensive examination of the reviews of many productions and the promptbooks that guided performances has formed the backbone of this inquiry and has suggested how the culture read the performances it was seeing. An analysis of nineteenth-century American Shakespeare productions raises questions about and challenges current beliefs about the attitudes nineteenth-century audiences held on gender, race, ethnicity and democracy. I look at American Shakespearean performance between about 1835 and 1875 to see where the smooth surface of theater history appears to give way—to rupture in some way—and reveal something startling about gender, race, ethnicity and attitudes toward democracy, something that would not be readily apparent without the Shakespearean overlay to bring it out. My reading of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet addresses the practice of women taking on the roles of Romeo and Hamlet and examines how the almost certainly disruptive figure of the transvestite on stage would have called into question gender and gender roles. The discussion of Othello investigates how blackface minstrelsy powerfully influenced productions of the play in the legitimate theater before and after the Civil War; meanwhile, The Merchant of Venice became a site of exploration for audiences struggling with Jewish difference, revealing a collective ambivalence toward American capitalism. In my reading of Richard III and Julius Caesar, I discuss how these two plays, in championing freedom and yet cautioning against unlawful rebellion, provided audiences with a vocabulary in which to frame feelings of uneasiness about the democratic experiment.

This project seeks to examine the way in which modernist novelists John Dos Passos, Claude McKay, Louis Aragon, and Virginia Woolf depict urban spaces in the early-twentieth century metropolises of New York, Paris, and London. These writers depict spaces that have been influenced by capitalist and imperialist powers, yet they also depict places within the urban environment that serve as locations of resistance where they depict power's damaging effects on the spaces of the city. Drawing on significant conversations in the field of postmodern geography, my project situates these modernist writers as critics of the power's ability to produce its own spaces that it, in turn, uses to control and produce docile urban subjectivities. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2015. / April 3, 2015. / Literature, London, Modernism, New York, Paris, Urbanism / Includes bibliographical references. / Barry J. Faulk, Professor Directing Dissertation; Reineir Leushuis, University Representative; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member; S.E. Gontarski, Committee Member; Robin Goodman, Committee Member.

The gramophone's function in literature has generally been examined in relation to media studies and Walter Benjamin's discussion of the reproduction of art through mechanical means, emphasizing the gramophone’s playback of recorded materials. This particular methodology, however, only deals with half of the machine's potential. My project mediates the links between media studies and “thing theory.” By making a distinction between the gramophone as an instrument (through which we access or hear a recording) and the gramophone as a "thing" (an object which draws attention to itself by not behaving as expected, thereby forcing us to confront the object's irreducibility), I trace connections between the physical “thing” as well as its embedded or recorded cultural archives of history, trauma, and identity for Modernist authors and their contemporary audiences. As both a voiced and mute object, the gramophone amplifies embedded accounts of a culture frequently traumatized through violence and disruption; it also bears physical testimony to the scars left behind by those traumatic encounters. My project takes Irish Modernism as its primary focus, and it identifies ways in which the traumas represented by phonograph and gramophone are tied to cultural traumas specific to Ireland. Again to briefly quantify, in my work I discuss (to varying degrees) over 20 Irish texts that evoke the gramophone as an object of some significance and in relation to some aspect of cultural trauma. For instance, in Dracula, the oral traditional of Ireland is under attack by the undead oralities of the phonograph: a machine that presumably preserves living oral culture, is essentially killing what it attempts to preserve. In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, the gramophone is feminized in the context of gendered colonial politics. In Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September and Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock the machine is imbued with the physical and psychological violence of Ireland at war. And in works like Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds and Brian Friel’s The Gentle Island the gramophone is a manifestation of post-war tensions—both psychological and political—that can erupt in violence when left unresolved.

No description available.

No description available.

Between Profits and Primitivism: Rehabilitating White Middle-Class Manhood in America, 1880–1917 uses primary sources in literature and the social sciences to locate and analyze changing discourses, images, and scientific representations of middle-class manhood and masculinity. The first chapter examines the construction of a specific white, middle-class male body. I argue that despite the attention-grabbing muscle men of the period, the middle-class sought a particular type of body, one that emphasized symmetry over swelling muscles and efficiency over superfluous beauty. Through their exercise manuals, I examine the ways physical educators sought to make a science out of streamlining “flabby businessmen.” My second chapter focuses on two works of fiction by Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914). Through my reading of these often overlooked novels, I investigate men's dependence on the new consumer culture. I link this dependence to financial trusts and new market economies which incorporated men of finance into dependent combinations that relied heavily on image. Chapter three explores the role of gender in the construction of the subconscious. I look at the ways hysterical symptomology influenced the construction of the subconscious, as well as contemporary understandings of mystical or supernatural experience in the work of William James and his circle. I argue that James adopted many hysteric symptoms in his characterization of the unconscious in order to “locate” a primitive essence within white intellectual men. My last chapter examines how turn-of-the-century supernatural fiction was influenced by new psychological theories—especially the idea that the unconscious housed a more primitive self Using the stories of Henry James, Jack London and William Dean Howells, I argue that the supernatural experience becomes a place for white educated men to have strenuous, often senorially intense experiences, and to be irrational subjects. My work illustrates the ways in which the massive cultural and social transitions between 1880 and 1917 de-naturalized definitions of manhood and created a national conversation that self-consciously fashioned gender. What I find most intriguing is how often this conversation constructed men as problematic and in need of some physical, mental, or supernatural reconstruction.

This dissertation explores the literary practices located at the intersection between the national and the transnational, discussing transnational narrative spaces as a type of writing that operates outside the national canon. In The Remains of the Day, the problematic narrative that Ishiguro creates can be analyzed in terms of Bakhtin's notion of parodic stylization. Ishiguro reproduces complete images, languages, and ideological belief systems in Bakhtinian parodic stylization and leads the reader to a conclusion that displaces radically the point of view of the narrator. In The Pickup, Gordimer explores transnational identity within a global setting, gesturing toward some kind of transnational identity that dislocates any stable identity formation and signification system in the framework of the nation-state or "Empire." Gordimer imagines and articulates such a revolutionary transformation, especially focusing on the issue of "relocation." The "in-between" area of translation is interrogated as a space where transnational identity is formed both in Morrison's Beloved and Lee's Native Speaker. In Beloved, Morrison is specifically conscious of the representation of slaves by the Master's language, and her literary attempt to examine the process of this problematic representation can be viewed in terms of a particular type of translation practice: a translation of a political, social, and cultural minority into the language of the majority. Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker does not narrate the production of a fully constituted national subject, but shifts in perspective from a nationally oriented narrative of immigration to a fragmented, transnational narrative. The particular construction of transnational identity that re-imagines a particular mode of crossing the Asian American identity is made and unmade through the metaphor of "translator." All the novels embody in various literary forms the possible models for a transnational fiction whose agenda is mainly dissidence/negation and nomadic mobility. Such literary attempts for dissidence/negation should be regarded not in terms of a breakdown, but rather in terms of an opening-up of signification with a new permissiveness that affords the opportunity for alternative meanings and relationships.