Browsing Faculty of Arts and Sciences by Keyword "English literature"
Now showing items 1-20 of 29
-
A Dream Before the Dawn of the Digital Age? Finnegans Wake, Media, and Communications
(2020-11-20)This thesis looks at James Joyce's genre-shattering terminal work Finnegans Wake and the ways in which its interrogation of literary and linguistic communications anticipated future developments in the field of information ... -
Animal Anecdotes: The Politics of Pleasure in Natural History, 1660-1810
(2023-01-18)In “Animal Anecdotes: The Politics of Pleasure in Natural History, 1660-1810” I argue that anecdotes about animals are pleasurable because of the positive affect that they produce, an affect that arises from the anecdote’s ... -
Artificial Humanities: A Literary Perspective on Creating and Enhancing Humans from Pygmalion to Cyborgs
(2020-09-11)This dissertation explores boundaries and relationships between humans and humanlike artificial entities in the twentieth-century and contemporary literature. The central question, What is human?, is posed in relation to ... -
Beyond Aura: Art as Object of Historical Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century
(2022-05-12)This dissertation turns to the originary moment of historicism to investigate what it meant for British culture to treat artworks (from architecture to literary texts) as expressions of historical knowledge in the nineteenth ... -
Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race; or, The Possibility of Children’s Literature
(The Modern Language Association of America, 2011) -
Confessional Fictions: Penance in Medieval Romance c.1150-1450
(2020-09-11)This study explores medieval romance in relation to religious changes from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. While the genre has been viewed as secular literature in tension with spiritual instruction, authors such as ... -
Counter-Republics of Letters: Politics, Publishing, and the Global Novel
(2023-09-08)The international literary field centered in New York is a politicized space, with a progressive cosmopolitan orientation. The dominant position in the field sees world literature—and the global novel in particular—as an ... -
Ephemeral History: Periodical Form and Doubled Time in the British Novel, 1720-1830
(2023-05-15)Ephemeral History reads the emergence of the British novel in relation to a long-overlooked aspect of the contemporaneous media environment: a growing interest in preserving and collecting media that were designed or ... -
Female Revenge on the Early Modern Stage
(2022-06-06)The outsized influence of Hamlet has caused “revenge tragedy” and male protagonists to dominate critical considerations of retributive violence in early modern drama. Female Revenge on the Early Modern Stage centralizes ... -
Fiction's Metronomes: Music, Time, and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel
(2021-05-14)While the British novel emerges in a century increasingly governed by clocks and schedules, it not only assumes a variety of temporal shapes but also grapples with the antinomies of time as at once countable and defying ... -
Hatred and the Eighteenth-Century Writer in Britain
(2022-05-11)Building on literary and historical work on emotions, this dissertation offers a new history of eighteenth-century feeling. Working across genres to reconstruct how writers from Alexander Pope to Frances Burney experienced ... -
Imagined Mothers: The Construction of Italy, Ancient Greece, and Anglo-American Hegemony
(2022-06-06)This dissertation offers a new perspective on Roman appropriations of ancient Greek culture for the construction of cultural hegemony in modern Italy, Britain, and the US. By reading a vast selection of canonical ancient ... -
In Rooms of Their Own: How Coterie Culture Shaped Literary Modernism
(2021-09-22)In Rooms of Their Own investigates the socio-literary practices and material cultures of the modernist coterie (i.e., the intellectual-artistic group or clique) in order to demonstrate modernism’s attraction to and dependence ... -
Indeterminate “Greekness”: A Diasporic and Transnational Poetics
(2022-06-06)As a critical concept, “Greekness” indeterminately characterizes ancient constructions and their contemporary reception histories, rendering it elusive to disciplinary definition. This dissertation reconceives of its ... -
Milton and Sound
(2020-10-01)Milton and Sound offers a study of the role played by sound in the writings of English poet and pamphleteer John Milton (1608-1674). Pushing against the mimetic function typically assigned to sound effects in verse following ... -
Mobility, Diplomacy, and Musical Exchange between England and Venice, 1600-1660
(2021-05-14)Political histories of early modern diplomacy have traditionally avoided discussing the arts, focusing instead on the more bureaucratic concerns of government agents. And though Italian influence is a central theme in ... -
Morphology of the Novel
(2021-09-09)This dissertation takes, as its starting point, morphology in the literal sense: morphology as the visible outward shape of the novel, its unique techniques for spatially organizing the word on the page. It addresses, in ... -
Narrative Lives, Lyric Selves: Autobiography and Poetic Form in 19th-Century Britain
(2020-09-11)This dissertation demonstrates how the autobiographical mode breaks down traditional divisions between lyric and narrative forms in the 19th century. I argue that these formal categories are inadequate to describe the ... -
Our Wars Are Done: Returning from War in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
(2022-09-01)How did Shakespeare stage the end of war? What did early modern military homecomings look like? Our Wars Are Done: Returning from War in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries is the first comprehensive study of ... -
Renaissance Primitivism: Old Worlds, New Worlds, and the Origins of Culture in Early Modern England
(2021-11-16)No traffic, no magistrates, no occupation, no property: when Shakespeare lifted a passage from Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals” for Gonzalo’s ideal commonwealth in The Tempest, he was tapping into one of the richest veins opened ...