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This is a thesis about English and American imaginative identification with Italy in the period 1848–1865, facilitated by and expressed through periodicals and newspapers. At the centre of the thesis sits New England magazine The Atlantic Monthly, which during the Civil War emerged as a vehicle for abolitionist literature, but which also published extensively on Italy. The Risorgimento, the movement that sought Italian unification, triumphed in 1861—the same year that the battle of Fort Sumter signalled the start of the American Civil War that would last until 1865. This thesis investigates the transatlantic relationship between the Risorgimento and the Civil War as it emerged in The Atlantic Monthly, The Springfield Daily Republican and other nineteenth–century publications, and it does so through contextualised readings of Arthur Hugh Clough, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Emily Dickinson. These three seemingly very disparate authors are connected by The Atlantic Monthly: Clough’s epistolary poem on the fall of the 1849 Roman Republic, Amours de Voyage, was first published there in 1858; Harriet Beecher Stowe serialised her historical Italian romance Agnes of Sorrento in The Atlantic Monthly between 1861 and 1862; and Dickinson was inspired to write a series of poems on Italy and volcanoes after reading both The Atlantic Monthly and local morning newspaper The Springfield Daily Republican. They are also connected by their fascination with Italy. This thesis argues that nineteenth–century periodicals need to be studied in a transatlantic context: they cannot be read, in the traditional style of Benedict Anderson, as simple affirmations of nationalism and national culture. Another way of putting it is to say that this thesis is about a series of exchanges of influence and thought that get attached to national projects but are in themselves international.

This thesis assesses the role of the interview form within literature from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The project contends that the interview, although styling itself as a revealing, authentic, private confession, is a genre of life writing that deeply troubles the model of singular Romantic authorship that it simultaneously promotes. The thesis argues that the interview has been a key site for negotiating conceptions of authorship since its inauguration. Exploring issues of publicity, life writing and gossip, through nineteenth-century newspaper depictions of scandals (chapter one), I argue that the act of interview publication is a staging of the speaking self in the public sphere. In chapter two I triangulate discussions of journalism, celebrity and material modernism to argue that the characteristic modernist authorial persona, far from being revolutionary, avant-garde or iconoclastic, was in fact deeply retrograde. Chapter three examines how the interview operated as a negotiation of the study, the marketplace and the middlebrow in the 1930s, with reference to the popular Everyman magazine series “How Writers Work.” The development of an interrogative interview model in the postwar era forms the subject of chapter four, as I demonstrate how the backdrop of the Cold War transformed the ways in which writers as diverse as Ezra Pound and the Beat poets responded to the interview in their work. The penultimate chapter argues that the Paris Review interview offers a hitherto unrecognised link between New Criticism and New Journalism and can revitalise discussions around the historical institutionalisation of literary studies. Chapter six considers the interview’s prominent contemporary position within world literature as a purveyor of literary value and archive of global cultural memory. Overall, the project illustrates how central the interview has been in the cultural construction of authorship in the last 150 years.

This dissertation analyzes the impact of musical transatlanticism on the identities of American communities. I do so through case studies in three time periods: seventeenth-century colonial Massachusetts, the post-Revolutionary Early American Republic, and early twentieth-century Progressive era Chicago. I develop an Atlantic musicology approach that which moves beyond national and nationalist frameworks and traces the strong and lasting musical connections between America and Europe. I explore three kinds of musical transatlanticism: the migration of musicians, the transmission of musical works, and the circulation of ideas about music. Music that crossed the Atlantic Ocean underwent changes wrought by transcription, translation, and contrafacting, and I argue that these changes were instrumental to the self-fashioning of American identity. Intercultural encounter and ideas of difference also drove communities to delineate their conceptual boundaries, although not without ambivalence. Ever in a state of flux, music reflected groups’ self-conceptions both locally and for transatlantic audiences in an ongoing process of conscious and unconscious musical adaptation. A wide-ranging project such as this demands a myriad of historical sources, which range from printed musical volumes to newspapers to diaries and letters. These variegated materials call for an interdisciplinary approach, and I draw on analytic methods from musicology, archival methods from history, and interpretive lenses from ethnomusicology and Atlantic history. I begin with an introduction that elucidates the conceptual and historiographical stakes of the project. The first two case studies focus on puritan psalmody in the seventeenth century. Chapter 1 analyzes puritan ideas about the affective power of music to promote personal piety, and Chapter 2 examines the role of music in colonial encounters with the native population of southern New England. Moving to the late eighteenth century, Chapter 3 traces the circulation of political song, particularly partisan and patriotic American contrafacta of British tunes, through the public print sphere. Chapter 4 turns to the domestic sphere, using one woman’s musical activities as a guide through the contemporary debates over feminine musical accomplishment. Chapter 5 enters Progressive-era Chicago, where European immigrants brought Old World folk repertories to the aesthetically and civically idealistic programs at the Hull-House Settlement. / Music

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of English, 2004. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references.

My dissertation focuses on the poetic production of three criollas —the offspring of Spaniards in the Americas— in dialogic relation with prominent male writers across the Atlantic. The works studied, Clarinda’s Discurso en loor de la Poesía (1608); Epístola a Belardo (1621) by Amarilis; and Sor Juana’s Primero sueño (1692) and La Respuesta (1691), span the entirety of the 17th century, in both the Viceroyalty of Perú and New Spain. Important interventions in Latin American colonial culture have noted criollos’ ambivalence towards the culture inherited from Spain as well as the need to assert their cultural agency through writing. The poets at the center of my study participate in this preoccupation with the added complication of being women, whose works are habitually read in isolation, as exceptions. My dissertation defines a feminine criolla poetics dialogically negotiated with western tradition, be it Spanish gongorismo or Italian humanism, while highlighting the tension between inserting themselves in the canon and critiquing it. In place of readings that emphasize the transfer of discourse and knowledge from the center to the periphery, from the metropole to the colonies, I demonstrate that the writings of these women challenge, or even reverse, this logic. My study analyzes rhetorical and intertextual strategies by which criollas, twice removed from power due to their birthplace and gender, negotiated a space in the canon. My analysis reveals the acute consciousness of gender that informs each woman’s writing; however, I also participate in recent movements in criticism and theory that interrogate conventional notions of power, space and the directionality of colonial exchange. This dissertation examines the processes of cultural appropriation as it defines a feminine criolla poetics dialogically negotiated with western tradition, one that also opens up a space to critique this tradition through parody, irony and textual transformation. This dissertation is written in Spanish.

As representatives of "an earlier stage of civilization," Native Americans in early nineteenth-century literature were integral in conversations of race relations, cultural development, and anthropological strata. They were a baseline of humanity against which more "civilized" nations of the world marked their progress, determined the value of their own cultural advancements, and proclaimed their superiority (Flint 1). They were an object of continuing fascination for Americans and Britons seeking to reinvent themselves in the aftermath of war and revolution, but their image in these nations was used as a derogatory slur (Fulford and Hutchings 1; Flint 6--7). Suggesting that a nation had a kinship with Native Americans was becoming an unfortunately familiar shortcut to suggest disgraceful backsliding into primitive ways. Rather than view Native Americans as markers of social degeneracy, barbarism, or ignorance, Washington Irving argues in his works that these figures could be revived as a positive connecting force for Americans and Britons. He recalls a more dignified Romantic image of the "noble savage" "intelligent, loyal, and proud" to overcome vengeful memories of war and violence. The Indian characters in A History of New York and The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon are more than idle entertainments or broad caricatures; they are carefully crafted Romantic figures that embody the restorative, unifying ideals for which both Americans and Britons yearned in the aftermath of war. Irving uses Knickerbocker's History to reflect the capriciousness of public memory and the sometimes dangerous power of the biased storyteller. He exposes how the Native American legend became tainted by historians who tried to justify the ill-treatment these people received at the hands of the Europeans. In Crayon's Sketchbook, Irving continues to explore the mutability of history by showing how nations like Britain had been successful in inventing a heritage that drew their people together. Finally, in "Traits of Indian Character" and "Philip of Pokanoket," Irving fulfills the promise of the History by restoring the Romantic Indian to a position of respect and power in the American and British memory. Though Irving's writing doesn't attempt to correct the image of Native Americans enough to get at the real people behind the image society invented, he embraces the malleability of these important cultural figures to make observations on how we create and perceive history and align ourselves to the invented past. By re-examining these works through their romantic and historic intent in a transatlantic relationship, we can come to better understand Irving's position as he supported his American nationhood and sentimental British roots with a figure that resonated on both sides.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many British poets attempted to establish a universal poetic image in the European nightingale, often viewing it as a muse or contemporary artist. This use of the songster became so prevalent that it was adopted, along with other conventions, for use in the United States. Yet, despite the efforts of both British and American poets, this imperialized songbird would ultimately fail in America, as the nightingale is not indigenous to the United States. The failure of this nightingale image, I contend, is reflective of the growing need to establish a national identity in nineteenth-century American literature, separate from British convention. In this process of cultural exploration, I believe the northern mockingbird becomes the replacement for the nightingale, and is developed as a distinctly American image through the poetry of Maurice Thompson, Walt Whitman, and others, exemplifying traits of the country through its charismatic song and personality

This thesis identifies a claimant narrative tradition in nineteenth-century American literature and examines the role of that tradition in the formation of American national identity. Drawing on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The American Claimant Manuscripts and Our Old Home (1863) as well as Mark Twain’s The American Claimant (1892), I argue that these writers confronted the paradoxical nature of claimant narratives—what Hawthorne called a “peculiar insanity”—which combined a hereditary sympathy between the United States and Britain with exceptionalist rhetoric about American republican values. Hawthorne’s ambivalence toward the claimant tradition identified the paradox, but his writing merely pointed out inconsistencies, while Twain censured with satire and direct social criticism. America’s British sympathies persisted in later decades, and remained a popular subject of fiction throughout the century, making it ripe for parody by the time Twain wrote his own claimant story. Claimant narratives reinforced class differences in the United States even as they appeared to reject them. The transnational framework of Twain’s novel affords a pointed critical view revealing the latent cruelty of democracy when coupled with attitudes of exceptionalism.

While John Keats never traveled to America and only wrote a handful of admittedly hostile lines about it in his poetry, American writers and readers have consistently regarded Keats as one of the greatest and most influential poets of the past two centuries. His critical reputation in America has been stable since the 1840s, enduring throughout changing tastes and movements, and his biography and work have been utilized in manifold appropriations by American poets and writers. I examine Keats’s attitude toward the United States—which was in conflict with the general feeling regarding the country by his fellow Romantic poets—and briefly review the American reception of Keats’s poetry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries before considering quintessential appropriations of Keats and the Keats biography in works by three American poets: Amy Clampitt, Stanley Plumly, and B.H. Fairchild.