This thesis posits Enlightenment articulations of sympathy, in its capacity for establishing connections and its failures, as an appropriate methodology to articulate transatlantic literary exchange. Focusing on the sympathetic gap, the space sympathy must traverse, this thesis investigates the effect of emigration and place on genre and follows the trajectory from documentary to fictive forms and from a small gap to one unable to be bridged. Because the gap of sympathy is a spatial argument, the distance between is crucial as it indicates relationship. The introduction outlines my argument, with particular attention to transatlantic criticism, what is meant by the gap of sympathy, and the triad of place, emigration and genre. The first chapter discusses how Adam Smith articulated how one person is able to maintain a stable identity and is able to connect with another through imaginative comparison. The chapter establishes the trajectory of sympathy as the gap moves from smallest to unbridgeable, through comparison, sympathy and the failure of sympathy. In a series of case studies, Chapters Two through Five test out Smith’s theories in literary works; they examine the trajectory of transatlantic sympathy, where the gap moves from rhetorically being small to gaping, and moves generically from documentary forms to fiction. Chapter Two uses emigration guides written by British emigrants, who, because of their emigrant status, write from both an American and British perspective. The guides, because of their promotional intent, tend to underplay the gap of sympathy. Although they could be read as documentary and objective, the guides evidence ideological and rhetorical similarities to transatlantic fiction and thus serve as an entrance into the themes and stylistics one tends to associate with literary genres. Chapter Three examines the transatlantic correspondence of the Kerr family. As the Kerr family corresponds transatlantically (separated in space by the Atlantic and in time by more than 50 years), the issue of space becomes paramount to understanding the correspondence as well as if sympathy works in this generic register. Generically, the transatlantic letter is meant to provide virtual presence amid long stretches of absence; it also becomes an analogue for the absent other and the means by which the family may continue to be imagined across the gap of sympathy. Chapter Four examines Susanna Rowson’s transatlantic works, particularly Charlotte Temple, Slaves in Algiers, and Reuben and Rachel. Rowson’s own emigrant experience provides an entrée to the pain of transcultural sympathy that we see most clearly in Reuben and Rachel. Throughout her works Rowson also advocates a sympathy that is active and moral, rather than emotionally vacuous. Reuben and Rachel illustrates the gap of sympathy being bridged most effectively in cross-cultural adaptations and yet finally settles for a sympathy that must acknowledge separation and difference as well. Chapter Five explores the failures of sympathy and sociability present in Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic novels, Wieland and Edgar Huntly. Characters’ frontier locations and claustrophobic versions of sociability, as well generically, the gothic turn and failure of epistolary exchange, signals the moral ambiguity connected with becoming ‘this new man’ of America. Brown’s epistolary fiction briefly considered offers another generic attempt to examine how the gap of sympathy may be bridged and extend beyond the confines of the family. The Afterword points to the total breakdown of sympathy as a turn inward and away from sociability, where the self becomes frantic and frenetic (as evidenced by Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer); it points to some useful applications to the gap of sympathy for transatlantic literary studies.

<p>  </p> <p>This dissertation builds on a shift in literary studies as scholars sought to develop new approaches to examining locations in literature. These approaches help scholars address the full spatial dimensions of a narrative, such as architectural features or social constructions of space. I argue that authors use homes to not only meditate on how individuals construct a sense of self, but also to consider the ways individuals interact with their community. I examine works by twentieth and twenty-first-century authors to address four different uses of homes: how homes engage with historical memory, serve as performative spaces, shape experiences of trauma, and address the effects of colonization and diaspora. By addressing different ways homes can be affected and, in turn, affect their occupants, I unpack concerns of housing security and the often-complex relationship between a person and their sense of home. Through a discussion of domestic space, we can further understand how social and political changes affect individual identities and familial structures. This dissertation contributes to scholarship on these authors, as well as develops an interdisciplinary framework for examining space and place in literature by synthesizing spatial theory, architectural theory, and narratology.</p>

Despite shifts in marketing and ideological emphasis from the 1730s to the 1890s, the it-narrative genre (wherein objects and animals recount their own histories) remained surprisingly consistent in the nature of the social commentary it provided. In contrast to earlier studies, mainly devoted to small segments of the phenomenon in Britain or America, this study brings out the transatlantic persistence of the it-narrator’s functioning as a model of moral agency, cognizant of his/her/its obligations within a societal grid. A lens to the contemporary perception of what made it-narratives important is available in the writings of Thomas Reid, an eighteenth-century philosopher who emphasized the tangible reality of moral judgment as a force in "practical ethics." Widely known in Britain and America during this period, Reid’s paradigm, in dialogue with modern histories of material and popular culture, informs my account of how the it-narrative, while certainly responding to specific cultural trends, became ever more solidly perceived as an intertextual forum for understanding moral agency and social justice.

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This thesis addresses the literary representation of food in the period from 1900 through 1945 in the work of Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. Taking up nineteenth-century fascinations with sensual and aesthetic taste, these authors explore the implications of food preparation and consumption in Britain, America and France. They use representations of everyday culinary practices as a way to examine articulations of anxiety about the state of civilization, a fear that is amplified and altered by both World Wars. The thesis approaches the question of the significance of food to literary modernism in two ways. The first is a theoretical analysis of modernist ways of thinking about the dialectic between the concepts of civilization and barbarism. The second is grounded in material history, establishing the contexts and conditions of food culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on sociological thinking from Norbert Elias's conception of the civilizing process and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of distinction, and using a combined methodology of close reading, biographical and historical analysis, I show that food acts as a lens for these authors' ideas about civil society and modernity. My original contribution to knowledge is threefold. The first is my interpretation of 'culinary Impressionism' as an extension and repositioning of current scholarly thinking about Ford's literary Impressionism. The second is my reading of Stein's and Toklas's jointly-authored cookbook draft as evidence of their collaboration. This forms the crux of my argument about Stein adapting domestic culinary techniques into her other writing. The third is in my chapter on Virginia Woolf. My original archival research shows that in A Room of One's Own Woolf's representation of the financial and culinary difference between men's and women's dining in colleges at the University of Cambridge is justified and the material inequality was in fact worse than previously understood. I argue that the disparity in institutional food intensifies Woolf's later reimagining of the term 'civilization' in Three Guineas. While drawing on the work of modernist studies scholars on modernism and the everyday, civilization, and food, my project is unique in demonstrating that food reflects modernist conceptions of civilization and barbarism. My thesis contributes to the understanding of transatlantic aesthetics and gendered productions of modernism by illuminating the centrality of agriculture, cookery, domestic work and institutional dining to modernist authors.

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This thesis considers how Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson, Mohegan writers in Early America, used the hymns of English hymnodist, Isaac Watts. Each chapter traces how either Samson Occom or Joseph Johnson's adapted Isaac Watts's hymns for Native communities and how these texts are sites of affective sovereignty.