Home Feelings with the Past explores modes of historiographical thinking among antebellum writers in order to explore the relations of history and literature as well as the uses of history in literature. Informed by postmodern theory and neo-pragmatism, yet authorized by the practice of antebellum writers, the dissertation departs from a consensus of assumptions and methodologies that have governed American literary studies since the “historical turn” in order to suggest alternative ways of imagining literary history. I contend that the historicist tendency to view literary texts as both constituted by and constitutive of their historical moment risks consigning texts inexorably to a particular cross-section of history, shackling them to a single slice of historical time. In the first part of the dissertation, I show that writers as different as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Catharine Sedgwick, and Ralph Waldo Emerson all imagine history anachronistically, disrupting the historical sequence of events or ventriloquizing voices from one historical period into another in order to imagine alternatives to the sequential course of history. Narratives which themselves refuse to be bound to a single moment in history, I argue, do not invite a critical approach which seeks to link them to a particular historical context. By contrast, in the second part of the dissertation, I demonstrate how old texts might be studied fruitfully by emphasizing historical contexts other than their time of production. Thus, I, too, “commit” anachronism, placing works by James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville in relation to contemporary contexts. Unlike “new” historicists, then, my readings do not assume that text “belongs” to particular moments in time or that I can tell a story about the past uninfected by my own location in history. Rather, I strive to portray these texts as I apprehend or “recognize” them in the context of our own time. The works by Cooper and Melville, then, become not just indices of a bygone era, but documents that place us, as readers, in a constellation of past and present, that allow us to experience history, not simply to know it.

“Normality” is an idea so deeply woven into U.S. culture that it seems always to have existed, yet this interdisciplinary American Studies dissertation reveals otherwise. Beginning by analyzing the appearance of Normality as a regular subject heading in the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature between 1945 and 1963, this project explores how the pressures of war and readjustment made “normality” (re)emerge as one of the most potent epistemological categories of the early post-World War II decades. Each chapter approaches the broader topic of “normality” through focused, in-depth analysis of one particularly revealing postwar text. The story of “Norm and Norma,” two anthropometric models created in 1943 as supposed statistical composites of the “average” American male and female bodies, shows how the impulse to measure and define the “normal” was taken to the level of the body itself. A postwar fashion remnant, the “gray flannel suit” served as a powerful signifier of middle-class identity, and also a target for sociologists anxious over the slippage between “normality” and conformity. James Jones' 1951 first novel From Here to Eternity, a critical and popular success quickly followed by an Oscar-winning film version, invokes then excises homosexuality in a prewar Army setting, in order to erect and normalize a certain brand of violent male heterosexuality in its place. Meanwhile, in the fictional small town of “Peyton Place,” citizens participate in a culture of “keeping up appearances” through the projection of façades and other-directed performances of identity. Such practices resonated with readers caught in the ambiguities of a postwar morality, making Grace Metalious's 1956 novel one of the first sweeping critiques of this culture of “normality.” These discrete examples, taken together, reveal much about this “homogenizing category” of culture: that a cultural preoccupation with the idea of normality did exist at this time; that normality was effectively produced and reproduced at the intersections of scientific/intellectual discourse and popular/material practices; and ironically, that normality would prove to be both powerfully coercive and impossible to achieve. Ultimately, this project reveals that “normality” has been both a subject of, and subject to, history.

This thesis addresses the volatile body as a historiographical and literary category in selected works of Renaissance English literature. Through readings of poems by Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and John Milton, and of plays by Ben Jonson, John Webster, Richard Brome, Philip Massinger, and Sir William Berkeley, I investigate how Renaissance writers trope the idea of transformation in different ways, in different moments, and in different genres. What meanings inhere in the shifting forms they represent, and how do these transformations interplay with both literary and non-literary modalities? Each chapter focuses on metamorphic changes that at times engage with psychological inwardness and at other times manifest social, political, or theological imperatives arising out of the Reformation. My inquiry is not, however, limited to instances of physical transformation: to these writers, shapeshifting is not simply a subject matter or theme but an aesthetic practice preoccupied with molding and remolding literary form itself. Recognizing the formal implications of textualized, topical, and literal transformation helps us understand the complexity of early modern ideas about transformation without losing sight of transformation.s material aspect. Chapter One focuses on Adicia, Spenser.s embodiment of injustice in The Faerie Queene, whose psychosomatic transformation complicates Spenser.s politically topical allegories of justice in Book 5 and opens up new ways to read his approach to Elizabethan historiography. Chapter Two examines Milton.s Satan, whose hardened and altered body manifests his fallen and polluted inner state. Satan's physical volatility and newfound capacity to feel pain is, physiologically and semantically, integral to Milton's phenomenology of evil. Chapter Three considers how Donne.s preoccupation with transformation shapes his sacramental poetics, focusing on Metempsychosis, the Holy Sonnets, and La Corona. This sequence of poems illuminates Donne's sacramental transformation not only conceptually but also formally, manifesting Donne.s turn to poetry as liturgical artifact. Chapter Four explores Stuart dramas that exploit the trope of Aethiopem lavare or "washing the Ethiope white," using washable blackface to enact man-made miracle. The staged transformation of a chaste woman from black to white is in these plays instrumentalized to conform (if not reform) libertine masculinity to patriarchal ideology, especially marriage.

In this dissertation I examine how skin, both human and non-human, was defined and represented on stage in the medieval English cycle plays, and more importantly how those material representations both reflected and transformed medieval understandings of skin and its relationship to the body. I consider how the creators of the medieval English cycle plays dramatized and expanded upon medieval readings of skin as a changeable and transformative outer covering that not only altered the body's physical shape but also defined its essential nature, demarcating the limits of human identity. I propose that skin was used both explicitly and implicitly throughout the cycles as a means of defining and distinguishing human bodies, and that this use enhanced the cycles' larger exploration of the creation, fall, and salvation of mankind. In addition to close readings of the play texts, I also draw on theatre history and production records to tease out an understanding of how the various types of skin depicted on stage were materially represented, as the necessities of theatrical staging required certain alterations and created a space for problematizing accepted readings and traditions. I argue that readings of skin as a literal covering and as a figurative garment regularly became conflated on stage, and the theatre's necessarily literal presentation of bodily change often amplified the metaphorical meanings. While in the gospels the Resurrection is a mystery that can be believed without being seen, on stage it must be embodied and a tangible representation of Jesus Christ's transformed body and skin depicted. In determining ways to present this body of Christ-as-divinity on stage, as well as the other human and non-human bodies within the plays, the medieval cycle producers fashioned outer skins that reflected traditional conceptions, yet also re-shaped and deepened their audiences' understanding. Ultimately, I argue that both the language of the plays and the material representations demonstrate and support a theological reading of skin as a permeable and changeable border between human and non-human, body and soul, and mortality and immortality that delineates not only the limits of the human body but of human identity itself.

Built on original archival research, this dissertation elucidates how the Federal Theatre Project's (FTP) dramas of Depression-era poverty functioned as proselytism for class-conscious social reform. Through a combination of unique narrative structures and mimetic depictions of class struggle, these "poverty dramas" questioned the viability of the American Dream and its related concepts of upward mobility, limitless possibility, and the idea that America functions as a meritocracy. Chapter one discusses the Federal Theatre's relation to the American workers' theatre of the early twentieth century, particularly the ways in which the transactional re-lationship between artist, worker, and artistic production evolved from the theatre of the Progressive era to the emergence of the poverty dramas in the late 1930s. Chapter two discusses two of the New York Federal Theatre's plays. Triple-A Plowed Under critiques class disparity and calls for a more class-conscious American ideology. Class of '29 is read through the work of Pierre Bourdieu to show how the play makes visible the performative aspects of economic class. Chapter three examines the Philadelphia Federal Theatre's rewrite of the famous New York production of One-Third of a Nation. This chapter shows how the Philadelphia production encouraged a more racially pluralistic view of "the people" and a more nu-anced understanding of lived poverty in America. Chapter four shows how the Los Angeles Federal Theatre's The Sun Rises in the West simultaneously represented the conservative American ideology of the nation's dust bowl farmers while allowing for the expression of the play's left-leaning playwrights. The chapter argues that the play's multiple ideological threads, which at first appear in conflict, are in fact compatibly bound through the play's engagement with and re-working of a persevering American myth structured by a Frontier Archetype. The epilogue broaches the topic of what it means to undertake archival research so as to speak directly to the complex if occasionally problematic relation a researcher has with archives. The epilogue also briefly addresses one aspect of the Federal Theatre's legacy: its redefining of the theatre as a "people's art" rather than a cultural event reserved for the cultural and economic elite.

Drawing on recent criticism in food studies and material culture, this dissertation examines representations of recreational consumption in early modern drama. Shakespeare and his contemporaries litter the commercial stage with scenes of appetitive desire, leisurely eating, and conviviality. This dissertation asserts that such moments provide more than comic relief or colorful accents to staged fictions; they coalesce into a socially and politically resonant discourse of profitable consumption. While pastimes such as civic festivals and pageants were common in early modern England, what I term the culture of the everyday feast--commercially organized opportunities to eat, drink, and recreate that occurred in and around London's public theaters--emerged as a new, socially powerful phenomenon. By closely examining depictions of recreational spaces and goods in plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, and many others staged between 1585 and 1615, I demonstrate how recreational experiences not only make social relations visible but also interrogate the sources of social authority. By strategically celebrating and satirizing various alimentary desires and practices, the theater encourages audiences to consider the ways in which leisurely consumption can be constitutive, not corruptive; communal, not isolating; and, above all, socially and politically advantageous. This dissertation adopts two strategies to explore staged depictions of socially profitable consumption. The first is a treatment of theater's engagement with one of early modern London's most popular recreational spaces, the tavern, and the way that chronicle history plays and urban comedies utilize the tavern as a setting in order to negotiate the changing nature of political and social life in urban culture. The second strategy involves case studies of consumable goods, such as tobacco and other novelties, which provide evidence for the material culture that shapes and defines recreational commerce and how it functions dramatically. Taken together, these chapters demonstrate the theater's efforts to distinguish itself within the broader recreational economy of early modern London. The theater does so by incorporating London's other pleasurable practices and spaces into its staged narratives, and imagining the social possibilities--the liberties and limits--that the recreational marketplace affords its participants.

Most studies of European exoticism tend to emphasize its complicity with the hegemonic or imperialistic gaze. This dissertation takes a different approach--exploring the tensions/connections between exoticism and resistance within European culture, especially with regard to representations of the exoticized female body. Its interdisciplinary range spans the 19th century British novel, the work of French and British orientalist artists (particularly Gerome), discourses on ethnology, medicine and criminology, conduct books for women, and the operas of Puccini and Bizet. I argue that several artistic constructions of the exoticized woman (in both male and female authored texts) enact ambivalences which rupture and destabilize the ideological structures of domesticity and imperialism. Moreover, I theorize the figure of the Eastern odalisque (which has so far been analyzed as the passive, eroticized object of the European male gaze) as an equivocal, racially hybrid female body, aligning it with the European courtesan. I redefine the odalisque broadly, as including (and blurring) the categories of harem woman, public dancer, nomad, vampire, and courtesan. I argue that often, the hybridized odalisque not only returns a compelling gaze of her own, but also articulates a powerful, transgressive female presence, continually negotiating cultural anxieties about female self-display and miscegenation. The Introduction and Chapter One survey Puccini's opera Turandot, paintings of seraglio interiors by orientalist artists, medical and ethnological texts by Acton, Ryan, Knox, Lombroso and Ferrero, and the positioning of the courtesan. I read Merimee's gypsy Carmen, LeFanu's vampire Carmilla, and Wilkie Collins's detective Marian Halcombe as exoticized women who unravel the plots of Victorian ethnology. Chapter Two explores the possibilities and limitations of female visibility, power and appetite through a discussion of the "haunted odalisques" in Charlotte Bronte's fiction. Chapter Three examines the dynamics of female adornment within orchestrations of imperial spectacle and regulated self-display in Collins's The Moonstone and No Name, and Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds. The final chapter investigates the links between the racialization of disease (in Victorian imperial medicine) and female insurgence in the fiction of colonial novelist Flora Steel, focusing particularly on the ethnology of the Indian courtesan.

This dissertation investigates Marie-Theresa Kerschbaumer's literary interest in women in historical (principally Austrian) context. It is at once artistic and political. Using some of the ideas from Hayden White's Metahistory as a springboard, I consider how Kerschbaumer conceptualizes women in a Metonymical mode, rather than, for instance, a Metaphorical one in her fiction. After this introduction, White's ideas on historical emplotment, argument and ideologicai implication shape my treatment of Kerschbaumer's major works (excluding Der Schwimmer). I show Kerschbaumer's Mechanistic argument of history in Schwestern (1982), where history is shown to be driven by economic laws. Unlike Karl Marx's more radical view, however, I see Kerschbaumer's ideological implication to be Liberal, because of the slower tempo of change that she envisions. I also discuss her Tragic Romance emplotment of history, where gender, racial, and class conflicts tragically temper an ultimately harmonious end. Der weibliche Name des Widerstands (1980) illustrates Kerschbaumer's Metonymical representation of women who resisted National Socialism. I analyze Kerschbaumer's Contextualist argument of history in Die Fremde (1992) and Ausfahrt (1994), where the various individual, unique experiences amalgamate to form the central character's history. Versuchung (1990) darkens the earlier Tragic Romance emplotment found in Schwestern to a Satire. In this autobiographical work, there is both personal and political despair. This metahistorical approach to Kerschbaumer's literary imagination concludes with an emphasis on the intersection of her art and politics, as it shines a light from the French writer, Helene Cixous, onto the material.

During the past two decades intellectual historians and cultural scholars studying the history of Renaissance medicine have come to different conclusions about the persistence of the classical tradition and the influence of innovation. Where historians see strong continuities in the vocabulary, internal logic, and intellectual culture of Aristotelianism and Galenism into the sixteenth century, new historicists and cultural materialists regard the early modern body as a site where classical and modern medical discourses compete. Their narrative of cultural formation emphasizes discontinuity and instability in the classical synthesis emerging in the seventeenth century, and they argue that this transition underlies a fundamental shift in how literary culture treats the body and the self. This dissertation takes issue with the discontinuity model of Renaissance historiography by arguing that medical humanism sought to recover the medical tradition and establish a progressive medical culture, not by rejecting the scholastic medical synthesis, but by invoking its content and its internal contradictions while maintaining its continued engagement with empirical innovation. The Paracelsian response to Galenism attacked ancient philosophy at its roots in the system of elemental qualities, yet Paracelsian chemical philosophy reproduced features of the analogical philosophy underlying Galenic diagnosis and therapy. In turn, the well-intentioned efforts of English medical humanists to bring about curricular reform in medical education had the unintended effect of promoting vernacular popularizations of medicine used by practitioners lacking access to elite education. Furthermore, in his effort to assert the diversity and particularity of human ability, Juan Huarte revisits a venerable (but still vulnerable) distinction between the doctrine of immortality and the organic powers of the soul. Finally, the instability of Lady Macbeth's sex brings into question the possibility of a regime of self-discipline premised upon the gender assumptions of humoral thought, yet we cannot understand her desire for self-control without also understanding her humoral body. These explorations question the historiographical assumption of discontinuity underlying the early modern period by emphasizing the role of scholastic ideas in the formation of medical culture in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

This study describes a moment when tourism was created in America, and how, in the decades after, it was discovered by a broad swath of American society. Beginning as an infrastructure created for the recreation of wealthy, the tourist world created in the Hudson Valley became increasingly more accessible and visible in the years after 1790, most particularly after 1817. This new visibility heavily influenced artists such as Thomas Cole and writers like James Fenimore Cooper, who created for the tourist market. By the late 1820s, these images combined with the rising prosperity of the period and the falling cost of travel spurred thousands of Americans to travel to these storied sites. By 1830, all classes of Americans had became exposed to tourists and tourism. All this happened in the context of the changing society of American cities, especially New York. There, rapid growth led to increasing social disorder. A search by the gentry for safe enclaves resulted in the tourist sites, but the very infrastructure they created to facilitate their travels was later used by the very classes they had wanted to avoid. The large numbers new tourists from non-wealthy classes began to overload the traditional tourist sites, causing increasingly visible cultural tensions. By eighteen-thirty the Hudson Valley was being written of by the cultural avant-garde as being overexposed. A search for other tourist sites ensued. Exclusivity would be briefly found in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, but others in the gentry sought longer-term solutions including private clubs, summer homes, and semi-private resorts such as Newport. Places such as Saratoga, too, would find ways to reinvent themselves, especially in the light of the decline of other formerly exclusive sites like the nearby Ballston Spa. This study uses a large body of cultural evidence supported by dozens of diaries and letters to demonstrate that by eighteen-thirty the idea of tourism had penetrated deep into American culture, affecting art, literature and commerce. Although it would take another generation before tourism became a truly mass activity, by 1830 the basis of American tourism had been set.