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Doctor of Philosophy / Leadbeater was a man who made the most startling claims for himself, and made them in a very matter-of-fact way.[4] He declared that he had penetrated the depths of the atom by his psychic powers, discovered the ultimate unit of matter whilst sitting in a park on the Finchley Road in London, and had psychically extracted individual atoms of various elements from the showcases in the Dresden Museum whilst he reclined several miles away. He also claimed to have sent sea spirits to dig out atoms of another element from the mines of Sabaranganuwa in Ceylon while he lay in his bed in Madras in India.[5] He claimed to have explored most of the planets in the Solar System, while his body remained on earth, and described their climates and inhabitants in some detail.[6] He claimed to be in regular communication with the Powers which govern the earth from the Inner Planes, the Masters or Mahatmas, the Supermen who constitute the Occult Hierachy of this planet. And, so he said, he conducted parties of pupils to the secret places in Tibet where these same Masters resided, while the bodies of both the pupils and their guide slept securely in their beds.[7](Excerpt from Introduction pp.3-4)

Ascetic Citizens: Religious Austerity and Political Crisis in Anglo-American Literature, 1681-1799, attends to a number of scenes of voluntary self-restraint in literary, political, and religious writings of the long eighteenth century, scenes that stage, what Alexis de Tocqueville calls, “daily small acts of self-denial” in the service of the nation. Existing studies of asceticism in Anglo-American culture during the period are extremely slim. Ascetic Citizens fills an important gap in the scholarship by re-framing religious practices of seclusion and self-denial as a broadly-defined set of civic practices that permeate the political, religious, and gender discourses of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture. This thesis focuses on the transatlantic relevance of the ascetic citizen—a figure whose rhetorical utility derives from its capacity, as a marker of political and religious moderation, to deploy individual practices of religious austerity as a means of suturing extreme political binaries during times of political crisis. My conception of asceticism’s role in Anglo-American society is informed by an understanding of ascetic citizenship as a cluster of concepts and cultural practices linking the ascetic’s focus on bodily control to republican theories of political subjectivity. The notion that political membership presupposes a renunciation of personal liberties on the part of the individual citizen represents one of the key assumptions of ascetic citizenship. The future guarantee of individual political rights is ensured by present renunciations of self-interest. As such, the ascetic citizen functions according to the same economy by which the religious ascetic’s right to future eternal reward is ensured by present acts of pious self-abnegation. That is to say, republican political liberty is enabled by what we might call an ascetic prerequisite in which the voluntary self-sacrifice of civic rights guarantees the state’s protection of such rights from the infringements of one’s neighbour. While the abstemious nature of ascetic practice implies efficiency grounded in economic frugality, bodily self-restraint, and physical isolation, the ascetic citizen functions as the sanctioned perversion of a normative devotional practice that circumvents the division between profane self-interest and sacred disinterestedness. The relevance of ascetic citizenship to political culture is its political fluidity, its potential to exceed the ideological functions of the dominant culture while revealing the tension that exists between endorsement of, and dissent from, the civic norm. Counter-intuitively, the ascetic citizen’s practice is marked by a celebration of moderation, of the via media. Forging a space at the threshold between endorsement/dissent, the ascetic citizen maps the dialectic movement of cultural extremism, forging a rhetorically useful site of ascetic deferral characterized by the subject’s ascetic withdrawal from making critical decisions. Ascetic Citizens provides a detailed investigation of how eighteenth-century Anglo-American authors such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Hannah Webster Foster, and Charles Brockden Brown conceive of individual subjectivity as it exists in the pause or retired moment between competing political orders.

Because of its importance in the history of the verse novel and the history of women’s writing, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) has overshadowed the works of other female verse novelists in Victorian studies scholarship. By focusing on non-canonical works by four understudied women poets writing in the late nineteenth century— Augusta Webster’s “Lota” (1867), Violet Fane’s Denzil Place: A Story in Verse (1875), Emily Pfeiffer’s The Rhyme of the Lady of the Rock, and How It Grew (1884), and Emily Hickey’s “Michael Villiers, Idealist” (1891)—this dissertation expands our understanding of both women’s poetry and the verse novel in the Victorian period. It demonstrates that the genre was taken up in multiple ways after Aurora Leigh by women poets who, like EBB, addressed urgent and controversial social and political issues—such as parliamentary enfranchisement, adultery, marital rape, political sovereignty and land use in the Scottish Highlands, as well as socialism and the Irish Question— through inventive and complex generic combinations. This dissertation does not outline a teleological development of genre but, rather, recovers works through case studies that offer microhistories of verse novels at particular historical moments in order to expand the canon and definition of the Victorian verse novel. / Graduate / 2020-04-25

This document contains a synopsis of Toshi Ichiyanagi’s compositional style, a discussion of his musical philosophy, and an analysis of Trio Webster. Ichiyanagi is a renowned Japanese composer who studied in New York under John Cage’s mentorship. He is also the first composer to introduce Cage’s concept of chance operation to Japanese society. Trio Webster realizes the true exchange of Western and Eastern cultures, and it is accomplished because of Ichiyanagi’s unique experience and philosophy as an international composer. The concept of Japanese classical music and Japanese aesthetics are observed in Trio Webster which is the basis for the depth of the work. Eastern concepts, especially Japanese, can be ambiguous and may be difficult for Westerners to fully appreciate. This study shows the cosmos beyond the practical analysis of Trio Webster and is meant to serve as a guide for those who will perform the works of Ichiyanagi, especially Trio Webster, in the future. This study was facilitated through research and interviews with Ichiyanagi and members of the Webster Trio. Ichiyanagi’s interview is included as an appendix to this document.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2000. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 218-228). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Zugl.: Oldenburg, Univ., Diss., 2007

My dissertation, "Renovating the Closet : Nineteenth-Century Closet Drama Written by Women as a Stage for Social Critique," contributes to a new understanding about nineteenth-century closet drama through three distinct and innovative texts: George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy (1868), Michael Field's Stephania (1892), and Augusta Webster's A Woman Sold (1867). I contend that these three women writers employed the closet drama, a genre written in dramatic form but intended to be privately read or performed, to critique the social, cultural, and ideological limitations placed upon women of their time. In their symbolic use of the genre and innovative experiments with form, Eliot, Field, and Webster created a new stage on which their female protagonists challenge belief systems, institutions, and conventions that confine their gender roles, sexual identity, and social power. My chapter, "'Angel of the Homeless Tribe' : The Legacy of The Spanish Gypsy," shows how George Eliot melds the conventions of epic narrative with those of Victorian closet drama and reveals a dynamic connection between the character development and genre. Eliot's canonical novels are famous for their indictment of the limited roles Victorian culture offered to women. Equally famous are the tragic destinies of her rebellious heroines: they end up dead, unfulfilled, or virtually imprisoned. But scholars have failed to notice that in her experiment with The Spanish Gypsy, Eliot created a female epic: Fedalma, a woman of fifteenth-century Spain, becomes the leader of her "Gypsy" nation, sung into the future by an admiring bard. Eliot's formal experiment makes The Spanish Gypsy an important text for understanding how genre shaped gender representation in Eliot's canon, and in Victorian literature generally. My chapter, "'Something of His Manhood Falls' : Stephania as Critique of Victorian Male Aesthetics and Masculinity," offers Stephania as Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper's commentary on the predominantly-male Aesthetic and Decadent movements of the 1890s. Through the pseudonym Michael Field, Bradley and Cooper wrote their way into, and claimed their own space inside, a very exclusive males-only closet. The chapter demonstrates how Stephania, set in Rome 1002 A.D., reclaims agency for a Victorian artistic "sisterhood" adulterated and exiled by a "brotherhood" of male Decadents (who saw woman as a nemesis to social order, personal salvation, and creative production), both through its form, and its cast of three: Stephania, Emperor Otho, and his old tutor Gerbert. Stephania, a former Empress turned courtesan bent on revenge for her husband's murder, challenges homosocial exclusivity and ultimately triumphs as a symbolic queen and emperor. Successful in her plan to bring down Otho through her seduction and manipulation of both men, Stephania is redeemed and saved; she has restored social order. In its resistance of the boundaries and expectations of the closet drama genre, Stephania projects a new ideology for Victorian womanhood and female authorship. My last chapter, "'I Could Be Tempted' : The Ev(e)olution of the Angel in the House in A Woman Sold," presents A Woman Sold as an early example of Augusta Webster's strategic social rhetoric, as her use of the closet drama acts as a structural metaphor for the sociomythological confinement of the nineteenth-century middle class woman. I investigate how A Woman Sold exposes the notion that marriage for nineteenth-century middle class women symbolized a closet of social and cultural paralysis, as grown from a history of socially and culturally institutionalized gender expectations. At the same time, I demonstrate how Webster employs irony through a nexus of genre, narrative, and form to support and advocate for opportunities outside marriage that encourage female agency to develop. Essentially, the fundamental argument in this dissertation hinges on the ways in which Eliot, Field, and Webster revised the conventional closet drama to renovate and, in turn, reveal the metaphorical and literal closets that confined social and cultural possibilities for nineteenth-century women. / text

Ascetic Citizens: Religious Austerity and Political Crisis in Anglo-American Literature, 1681-1799, attends to a number of scenes of voluntary self-restraint in literary, political, and religious writings of the long eighteenth century, scenes that stage, what Alexis de Tocqueville calls, “daily small acts of self-denial” in the service of the nation. Existing studies of asceticism in Anglo-American culture during the period are extremely slim. Ascetic Citizens fills an important gap in the scholarship by re-framing religious practices of seclusion and self-denial as a broadly-defined set of civic practices that permeate the political, religious, and gender discourses of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture. This thesis focuses on the transatlantic relevance of the ascetic citizen—a figure whose rhetorical utility derives from its capacity, as a marker of political and religious moderation, to deploy individual practices of religious austerity as a means of suturing extreme political binaries during times of political crisis. My conception of asceticism’s role in Anglo-American society is informed by an understanding of ascetic citizenship as a cluster of concepts and cultural practices linking the ascetic’s focus on bodily control to republican theories of political subjectivity. The notion that political membership presupposes a renunciation of personal liberties on the part of the individual citizen represents one of the key assumptions of ascetic citizenship. The future guarantee of individual political rights is ensured by present renunciations of self-interest. As such, the ascetic citizen functions according to the same economy by which the religious ascetic’s right to future eternal reward is ensured by present acts of pious self-abnegation. That is to say, republican political liberty is enabled by what we might call an ascetic prerequisite in which the voluntary self-sacrifice of civic rights guarantees the state’s protection of such rights from the infringements of one’s neighbour. While the abstemious nature of ascetic practice implies efficiency grounded in economic frugality, bodily self-restraint, and physical isolation, the ascetic citizen functions as the sanctioned perversion of a normative devotional practice that circumvents the division between profane self-interest and sacred disinterestedness. The relevance of ascetic citizenship to political culture is its political fluidity, its potential to exceed the ideological functions of the dominant culture while revealing the tension that exists between endorsement of, and dissent from, the civic norm. Counter-intuitively, the ascetic citizen’s practice is marked by a celebration of moderation, of the via media. Forging a space at the threshold between endorsement/dissent, the ascetic citizen maps the dialectic movement of cultural extremism, forging a rhetorically useful site of ascetic deferral characterized by the subject’s ascetic withdrawal from making critical decisions. Ascetic Citizens provides a detailed investigation of how eighteenth-century Anglo-American authors such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Hannah Webster Foster, and Charles Brockden Brown conceive of individual subjectivity as it exists in the pause or retired moment between competing political orders.

American politics from 1832 to 1848 underwent a profound transformation. Whereas in the early years of the republic politics had been based on deference and elitism, by the early 1830's a definite change in the political arena had occurred. With the coming of the "Age of Jackson, " the political rules and styles of the older era began to change. The politics of deference began to give way to the politics of "availability." Because this study is a discussion, examination, and analysis of Webster's and Clay's "appeal to reason, " the sources most heavily consulted were the published and microfilmed correspondence, speeches, and papers of these two statesmen. Other personal papers, correspondence, memoirs, and biographies of other central personalities of the middle period, both protagonists and antagonists, were used in order to place Webster and Clay in proper historical perspective. This dissertation is organized chronologically, and it traces and analyzes the evolution of the candidacies of Webster and Clay for the presidency from the early 1830's through the four presidential elections from 1836 to 1848. Each chapter includes an examination of Clay's and Webster's attempts to secure the Whig nomination and gain the presidency through forceful appeals to the voters' sense of logic and reason. Each chapter also includes a discussion and analysis of why these two men always failed.