Browsing by Subject "Literature, British & Irish"

This dissertation explores the particular significance of South Asia to international literary and political spheres, beginning with the formative moments of modernist internationalism. At the height of the Harlem Renaissance, W. E. B. Du Bois interrupted his work with the NAACP and the pan-African congresses to write Dark Princess: a Romance. Du Bois's turn to the romance and to India forms the point of departure for my dissertation, for India, both real and imagined, offered modernist intellectuals a space of creative possibility and representative impossibility. The fiction of Cornelia Sorabji, for instance, obfuscates and allegorizes practices of women's seclusion, both to refute imperial feminist solutions and to support her legal activism. From the imperial romance to the anti-racist one, the misrepresentation endemic to the romance genre enables the figuration of a discrepant globe. This modernist practice of transfiguring India, usually in the service of a global political vision, is undertaken both within India as well as outside of it. Rabindranath Tagore, for example, interrupted his leading role in the anti-colonial movement to write Gora, a novel of mistaken identity and inappropriate love, and to mistranslate his own poetry, particularly his Nobel-Prize-winning collection Gitanjali. If realism aims to translate cultural difference, to faithfully carry meaning across boundaries, the romances I consider in my dissertation work instead to mistranslate those differences, to produce a longed-for object beyond cultural specificity. In conversation with postcolonial theorists of Anglophone literary practice, as well as debates around translation in comparative literature, I suggest that we should think about intercultural texts in terms of transfiguration: not the carrying across of meaning from one sign system to another, but the reshaping of culturally specific materials, however instrumentally and inaccurately, in the service of internationalist goals.

Engaging and Evading the Bard is about British theatrical modernism and its ambivalent relationship to Shakespeare. The conventional narrative of early twentieth-century British theater and drama situates their rise within the broad European context of Continental artistic developments, such as the rise of Henrik Ibsen. Examining the work of George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Peter Brook, this dissertation argues that the inauguration of a specifically British theater, theatricality, and dramatic movement in the modernist period is absolutely contingent on a turn to Shakespeare, the icon par excellence of British drama, British culture, British identity, British history, and British power. The turn to Shakespeare enables the emergence of a British tradition formally and politically distinct from its Continental counterparts.

This dissertation argues, however, that a modernist logic of paradox, contradiction, and irony governs the dynamics of British theatrical modernism's turn to Shakespeare: the engagement with Shakespeare is always co-extensive with the evasion of Shakespeare. Engaging and Evading the Bard explores the modernist irony towards Shakespeare. For Shaw, a Fabian-inspired anti-idealist political aesthetic (set forth in The Quintessence of Ibsenism) motivates his condemnation of "Bardolatry" throughout his career, most notably in Caesar and Cleopatra. In stark contrast to Shakespeare, a high-church, conservative Christian religiosity and ideological investment in medieval modernism lie at the heart of Eliot's 1935 verse drama Murder in the Cathedral. The interpenetration of media (print and performance) and genre (poetry, criticism, and drama) in The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on The Tempest allegorizes Auden's new-found liminal identity in the 1940s as both a British and American poetic and political subject. Post-war, post-imperial, Cold War geopolitical realities and existential anxieties, especially concerning the Bomb and the threat of nuclear annihilation, lead Brook to adopt the late modernist theatricality of Samuel Beckett in his 1962 Royal Shakespeare Company production of King Lear, a production that succeeds in staging Shakespeare's play as the metatragedy (that is, a tragedy about the failure of tragedy) that it really is.

Ultimately, this dissertation problematizes nationalism as an animating force for British theatrical modernism by positioning nationalism in the modernist period in relation to its ethical and political universalist antinomies: socialist internationalism, transatlantic transnationalism, and an emergent utopian postmodernist postnationalism.

This paper examines the social question: is 19th century women's identity socially determined or do 19th century women have the liberty to forge their own identities as they see fit? In order to answer this question, this paper treats Henry James as ethnographer and "Daisy Miller" and The Portrait of a Lady as ethnographies of American women in Victorian Europe. The primary focus of this paper is Isabel Archer and how she is constructed from Henry James's Daisy Miller and George Eliot's Gwendolen Harleth, in order to demonstrate that while 19th century women were victimized by the tyranny of Victorian patriarchy, 19th century women were also capable of resisting and subverting normative Victorian social expectations for women.

This dissertation argues that the 'realist' ontology implicit in Renaissance allegory is both Aristotelian and neoplatonic, stemming from the need to talk about transcendence in material terms in order to make it comprehensible to fallen human intelligence. At the same time dramatists at the turn of the seventeenth century undermine 'realism' altogether, contributing to the emergence of a new meaning of 'realism' as mimesis, and with it a materialism without immanent forms. My theoretical framework is provided by Aristotle's Metaphysics, Physics and Categories rather than his Poetics, because these provide a better way of translating the concerns of postmodern critics back into premodern terms. I thus avoid reducing the religious culture of premodernity to 'ideology' or 'power' and show how premodern religion can be taken seriously as a critique of secular modernity. My conclusion from readings of Aristotle, Augustine, Hooker, Perkins, Spenser, Shakespeare, Nashe, Jonson and Tourneur is that Hell is conflated with History during the transition to modernity, that sin is revalorized as individualism, and that the translatability of terms argues for the continuing need for a concept of 'substance' in this post-Aristotelian age. I end with a reading of The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous contemplative work from the fourteenth century that was still being read in the sixteenth century, which offers an alternative model of the sovereign individual, and helps me to argue against the view that philosophical idealism is inherently totalitarian.

I argue that the pastoral genre is a literary response to changes in the agrarian economy as landed property is freed from older notions of obligation and political dependence on the monarch. Thus, the Renaissance English pastoral can be read as a cultural form that corresponds to agrarian capitalism and a moment of release of land and natural resources from their embeddedness within local communal formations before they are incorporated into a larger concept of Englishness. While the genre of the pastoral is ostensibly resisting the pressures of modernity - i.e. the corrupting influence of trade and urban life - what struck me is that it does so in ways that look distinctly modern to us, through affirmation of independent forms of intellectual and agrarian labor.

This dissertation draws on the virtue ethics tradition in moral theology and moral philosophy for inquiries regarding the acquired and infused virtues, virtue's increase and remission, and virtue's relation to sacramental practice. I rely on two medieval texts to ask and answer these questions: the Summa Theologiae by Thomas Aquinas and Piers Plowman by William Langland. My arguments are primarily inter- and intra-textual with some attention to the texts' history of interpretation and the socio-historical Catholic culture in which they were written. I conclude that the texts share pedagogical features that teach their readers in what the perfection of virtue consists and show readers how to increase in that perfection.

This thesis follows from the work of David Aers, Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Josef Pieper, and Eberhard Schockenhoff.