From Reflection to Deception examines the circumstances surrounding the mulata and mulatto in nineteenth-century Cuba. In Chapter One, this analysis argues that Martín Morúa Delgado inverts the paradigm of the literary tradition of narratives about the theme of slavery; he reveals that the tradition is not about realism, but rather artifice. By highlighting a subjective rather than objective narrator, Morúa simultaneously draws attention to the process of writing and the construction of "truths" in a context in which white elite men have controlled access to power and even the imagination. In Chapters Two and Three, this analysis shows how Morúa inverts the social paradigms that apply to mulatas and mulattos and instead applies them to whites. In doing so, he reveals the hypocrisy underlying the prevailing beliefs surrounding the situation of mulatas and mulattos in nineteenth-century Cuba. With Morúa's inversions, he demonstrates that mulata and mulatto representations are social constructions and in short reveals that race and gender are constructed to support the economic and social needs of the nineteenth- century Cuban landowners. By presenting deception as a reflection of reality, Morúa creates a consciousness of perspective whereby he challenges the social structure upon which much of nineteenth-century Cuban society is based. / text

The Victorian era paved the way for the emancipation of the modern British woman. The women who fought for the parliamentary vote, especially those who were imprisoned and experienced the torture of forcible feeding, eventually won their cause. Women who opposed enfranchisement did so for their own reasons. Both sides of the suffrage campaign claimed the majority was on their side and struggled to prove it. This thesis argues that those women who opposed were a subaltern group and compares them with the colonised subjects of the British Empire. The emancipation of women ran against the interests of the state which treated the cause as an insurgent movement. The political leaders spared no effort to thwart the liberation of women and the middle-and upper-class Anti-Suffrage women sided with ruling class interests. This work divides women into three sub-sections; resistance, colonised public and collaborators. Eliza Lynn Linton, Flora Shaw, Janet Hogarth and Gertrude Bell are well known middle-class Victorian women for whom the emancipation was of more benefit than opposition. The study throws a fresh look at these women by tying the notion of the collaborative elite with the State's exploitation of the intellectual subaltern. Linton, Shaw, Hogarth and Bell are studied in detail as case studies for this theory. Through the textual analysis of selected works, published articles, public and private correspondence, available diaries, biographies and autobiographies it emerges that although these women were ardent 'Antis' in public they were feminists in private. The thesis explains the reasons behind their public opposition to the emancipation of women.

In 1871, R. H. Hutton criticized George Eliot for "unfairly running down one of her own characters": Middlemarch's Rosamond Vincy. Hutton blamed Eliot for being cruel to her own creation and used his role as a reader and a critic to lodge a public complaint on Rosamond's behalf. Indignant Reading identifies this response--dissatisfaction and even anger with an author for his/her perceived mistreatment of a fictional character--as a common occasion for literary criticism in the nineteenth century. The indignant readings found in Victorian reviews, letters, and prefaces advance conceptions of plot, characterization, and fictionality distinct from those offered in modern narratological criticism or historicist accounts of Victorian novel practice or literary criticism. Rather than abstracting the aesthetic and ethical concerns from the emotional terms common to Victorian criticism, I see these concerns emerging in conjunction with serious emotional demands and significant, if sometimes inchoate, beliefs about the "rights" of fictional characters. In my discussion of indignation resulting from crimes of plot, I argue that insufficiently motivated events were interpreted by Victorian critics and readers as arising from the author rather than from the text. Discussions of crimes of characterization reveal an implicit tri-partite model of fictional character, in which authors might be incorrect about their own characters as well as cruel toward them. This manner of thinking about authorial accuracy and justice implies, I argue, a conception of fictionality that de-emphasizes the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, modeling the author’s relationship to his fiction on that of the historian to his text. This approach to fiction changes, however, in the twentieth century, alongside restrictive attitudes about the role of affect in performing literary criticism. While indignant reading re-enters the academy as one type of feminist criticism, which emphasizes the ethical at the expense of the affective, indignation in its most emotional form has become a primary mode of expression for fan communities.

My dissertation examines how heroines in nineteenth-century British Literature manipulate conventional objects of feminine culture in ways which depart from uses associated with Victorian marriage plots. Rather than use fashionable objects to gain male attention or secure positions as wives or mothers, female characters deploy self-fashioning tactics to travel under the guise of unthreatening femininity, while skirting past thresholds of domestic space. Whereas recent Victorian literary and cultural criticism identifies female pleasure in the form of consumption and homosocial/erotic desire, my readings of Victorian fiction, from doll stories to the novels of Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Marie Corelli, consider that heroines find pleasure in deploying fashionable objects – such as dolls, clothes, cosmetics, and jewelry – which garner access to public space typically off limits for Victorian women. In the first chapter, girls use dolls to play in wilderness spaces, fostering female friendships. Muted dress provides a cloak of invisibility, allowing the heroine to participate in the pleasure of ocular economies in the second chapter. The third chapter features a female detective who uses cosmetics to disguise her infiltration of men’s private spaces in order to access private secrets. Finally, the project culminates with jewelry’s re-signification as female success in the publishing world. Tracing how female characters in Victorian fiction use self-fashioning as a pathway, this study maps the safe travel heroines discover through wild landscapes, urban streets, and professional arenas. These spaces were often coded with sets of conditions for gendered interactions. Female characters’ proficient self-styling provides mobility through locations guarded by the voices of neighbors, friends, and family who attempt to keep them in line with Victorian gender conventions. Female characters derive an often unexplored pleasure: the secret joy of being where they should not and going against what they are told. In the novels I examine, female protagonists navigate prolific rules and advice about how to arrange and manage their appearances, not to aspire to paragons of Victorian beauty and womanhood but in order to achieve physical and geographic mobility outside domestic interiors.

This dissertation examines the experience of the tens of thousands of Chinese indentured laborers (colonos asiáticos or “coolies”) who went to Cuba and Peru as replacements for African slaves during the middle of the nineteenth century. Despite major sociopolitical differences (i.e., colonial slave society vs. independent republic without slavery), this comparative project reveals the common nature in the transition from slavery to free labor. Specifically, the indenture system, how the Chinese reacted to their situation, and how they influenced labor relations mirrored each other in the two societies. I contend that colonos asiáticos, while neither slaves nor free laborers, created a foundation for a shift from slavery to free labor. Elites in both places tried to fit the Chinese into competing projects of liberal “progress” and conservative efforts to stem this change, causing them to imagine these immigrant laborers in contradictory ways (i.e., free vs. slave, white vs. non-white, hard-working vs. lazy, cultured vs. morally corrupt). This ambiguity excused treating Asian laborers as if they were slaves, but it also justified treating them as free people. Moreover, Chinese acts of resistance slowly helped undermine this labor regime. Eventually, international pressure, which never would have reached such heights if the Chinese had remained passive, forced an end to the “coolie” trade and left these two societies with little option but to move even closer to free labor. That said, this work also considers the ways in which the differing socio-political contexts altered the Chinese experience. In particular, in contrast to Peru, Cuba’s status as a colonial slave society made it easier for the island’s elites to justify exploiting these workers and to protect themselves from mass rebellion. My dissertation places the histories of Cuba and Peru into a global perspective. It focuses on the transnational migration of the Chinese, on their social integration into their new Latin American host societies, as well as on the international reaction to the situation of immigrant laborers in Latin America. / text

This dissertation examines Mark Twain’s literary-critical reputation from the years 1865 to 1882, as he transformed from the regional “wild humorist of the Pacific Slope” to a national and international celebrity who William Dean Howells called “the most popular humorist who ever lived.” This dissertation considers “Mark Twain” not as the name of a literary author, but as a fictional creation who was narrator and implied author of both fictional and non-fiction texts, a performer who played his role on lecture platforms and other public venues, and a celebrity whose fame spread from the American west through America and the world. The key question of this dissertation is the historical position of the “humorist,” a hierarchical cultural category that included high culture literary figures, such as James Russell Lowell and Bret Harte; literary comedians, such as Artemus Ward and Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby; and clowns and minstrels, who were placed at the bottom of the hierarchy. I argue that Mark Twain muddied the hierarchical distinctions between class-appropriate leisure and burgeoning forms of mass entertainment, between uplifting humor and debased laughter, and between the canonical literature of high culture and the passing whim of the merely popular. Through the success of The Innocents Abroad (1869) and the promotion of William Dean Howells, Mark Twain was elevated into critical discussions of literary value, and in the 1870s he entered into venues of higher prestige: so-called “quality” magazines such as the Galaxy and the Atlantic Monthly, lecture stages on the lyceum circuit and in England, and the personal realm of friendship with other authors. While Twain was accepted into some literary cultures, other critics attempted to consign him to literary oblivion, or simply ignored him, while Twain himself betrayed keen anxiety about his role as “stripèd humorist” in respectable literary realms. This dissertation thus focuses on written works, critical interpretations, and performative instances in which “Mark Twain,” as both agent and subject, brought debates over “American Humor,” “American Literature,” and “American Culture” to the fore. / text

Many have noted nineteenth-century composers' tendency to undermine crucial formal boundaries normally found in eighteenth-century sonata forms. This dissertation examines phenomena that undermine the demarcation between the expositional secondary theme and closing section. In this document I refer to such events as "S-C Complications." In their Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (2006), James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy argued that this point of articulation plays a much more crucial role than that of merely forming a boundary between S- and C-space. Rather, it serves as the goal for the entire expositional trajectory, a goal whose presence is felt from the very outset of the movement. The authors refer to this moment as "essential expositional closure," or EEC. In this dissertation I attempt to show what role EEC in Hepokoski and Darcy's sense plays in nineteenth-century movements featuring S-C Complications. I conclude that nineteenth-century composers were very likely aware of the EEC's genre-defining status since they consistently and systematically undermined it. Further, whereas in the late-eighteenth-century repertoire S-C complications were rarely employed, in the nineteenth century they became more normative, and thus non-deformational. In addition to discussing the phenomena's dialogic relationship with eighteenth-century norms, I also address their effect on tonal structure and formal syntax, concluding that S-C Complications frequently have the effect of expanding closure beyond the scope of one cadence. For practical reasons I have limited the scope of this study to non-concerto movements written primarily by Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Brahms.

The murderess in the twenty-first century is a figure of particular cultural fascination; she is the subject of innumerable books, websites, documentaries and award-winning movies. With female violence reportedly on the increase, a rethinking of beliefs about women's natural propensity towards violent and aggressive behaviours is inevitable. Using the Victorian period as a central focus, this thesis explores the contradictory ideologies regarding women's violence and also suggests an alternative approach to the relationship between gender and violence in the future. A study of violent women in representation reveals how Victorian attitudes towards violence and femininity persist today. On the one hand, women have traditionally been cast as the naturally non-aggressive victims of violence rather than its perpetrators; on the other hand, the destructive potential of womanhood has been a cause of anxiety since the earliest Western mythology. I suggest that it is a desire to resolve this contradiction that has resulted in the proliferation of violent women in representation over the last one and a half centuries. In particular, an analysis of mid-nineteenth-century popular fiction indicates that the stronger the ideal of the angelic woman was, the greater the anxiety produced by her demonic antithesis. Wilkie Collins's Armadale and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret illustrate both the contradictory Victorian attitudes towards violent women and a need to reconcile the combination of good and bad femininity that the murderess represents. Revisiting the Victorian murderess in the late twentieth century provides a potential means for resolving this contradiction; specifically, it enables the violent woman to engage in a process of self-representation that was not available to her in the nineteenth century. Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace suggests that any insight into the murderess begins with listening to the previously silenced voice of the violent woman herself.

This thesis attempts to understand the intellectual milieu of Maori society in the early colonial period through the medium of Maori-language sources of information dating from that time. A base in Maori documentary allows Maori history to exist under the same disciplines as that of other literate peoples. The thesis argues that the imposition of English meanings on Maori language has shaded Maori meanings. It offers a rereading of documents including the Treaty of Waitangi in order to restore their Maori historicity. Maori society has also been misrepresented historiographically by the creation of false distance between metropolitan and indigenous culture, including the failure to sufficiently consider the shaping force of literacy on Maori perceptions of citizenship and on the politics of sovereignty that developed at mid-century. The thesis argues that land sales were the main Maori experience of government, and that the government's ability to define the terms of the market reconstrued society in ways which destroyed its former political structure.This turned it into a land-owning collective, in which power lay not in human consequence, as formerly, but in the size of the cultivations to which an owner could prove a right in terms constructed by officials. All members of the kin-group were constutued land owners, and the status of the chief was reduced to the size of the lands to which he could prove ownership. By 1865, when the Native Land Court was instituted, power within Maoridom lay in the land itself: te mana o te whenua. This position was written into culture, and endures into the present. The premise of the thesis is that change towards western norms is the proper frame of study of colonial Maori society, but that the magnitude of change has been obscured, both by the politicisation of the past on presentist premises and by the transformation of colonial models into what is now assumed to be 'traditional Maori society'. In order to separate the colonial from the traditional the thesis looks at precontact society custom regarding authority over land and fisheries. The thesis underscores the magnitude of change when tapu disappeared as the support of chiefs' civil governance, which was played out in the migration of mana (personal power) from chiefs to, modern, land. The disappearance of tapu also, however, aided the rise of Maori civil society within the colony on the basis of the desire for modernity which kept Maori engaged with the government - and therefore still governed. This is studied through letters that detail the operation of civil life in Taranaki and among Ngati Kahungunu, with special reference to the experience of Wiermu Kingi and Renata Kawepo.

The Victorian obsession with the child is also often, in the world of literary criticism at least, an obsession with death, whether the death of the child itself or simply the inevitable death of childhood as a seemingly Edenic state of being. This study seeks to consider the way in which the child figure, in texts by four authors published at the end of the nineteenth century, is aligned with an inversion of this relationship. For Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, George MacDonald, and Henry James, the child is bound up instead with un-death, with a construction of death which seeks to remove the finitude, even the mortality, of death itself, or else a death which is expected or anticipated, yet always deferred. While in “The Child in the House” (1878) and “Emerald Uthwart” (1892), Pater places the child at the nexus of his construction of a death which is, rather than a finite ending, a return or a re-beginning, Lee's interest in the child figure's unique access to a world of art, explored in “The Child in the Vatican” (1883) and “Christkindchen” (1897) culminates in a dazzling vision of aesthetic transcendence with “Sister Benvenuta and the Christ Child” (1906). MacDonald, for whom death is already never really death, uses the never-dead child figure in At The Back of the North Wind (1871) and Lilith (1895) as an embodiment of his own distinct engagement with aestheticism, as well as a means by which to express the simultaneous anticipation and depression he experienced in contemplation of death. Finally James, in What Maisie Knew (1897), explores the child's inherent monstrosity as he crafts the possibility of a childhood which consciously refuses to die. This study explores a trajectory in which the child’s place within such reconsiderations of death grows increasingly intense, reaching an apex with MacDonald’s fantastic worlds, before considering James’s problematisation of the concept of the un-dead child in What Maisie Knew.