Browsing by Subject "English literature"
Now showing items 1-20 of 33
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Akrasia and the Aesthetic: Human Agency and the Site of Literature, 1760-1820
(2016)This study focuses on a series of foundational stylistic and formal innovations in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, and argues that they can be cumulatively attributed to the distinct challenges authors faced ... -
An Eden With No Snake in It: Pure Comedy and Chaste Camp in the English Novel
(2019)In this dissertation I use an old and unfashionable form of literary criticism, close reading, to offer a new and unfashionable account of the literary subgenre called camp. Drawing on the work of, among many others, Susan ... -
Chaucer and the Disconsolations of Philosophy: Boethius, Agency, and Literary Form in Late Medieval Literature
(2016)This study argues that Chaucer's poetry belongs to a far-reaching conversation about the forms of consolation (philosophical, theological, and poetic) that are available to human persons. Chaucer's entry point to ... -
Cruel Operators: History, Empire, and Affect in the Global Anglophone Novel
(2020)“Cruel Operators: History, Empire, and Affect in the Global Anglophone Novel,” reanimates and repoliticizes the idea of “cruel aesthetics” within contemporary literature by placing cruelty at the crux of global capitalism’s ... -
Divorcing the Rake: Male Chastity and the Rise of the Novel, 1753-1857
(2020)Loose understandings of naturalized sexual difference have worked for hundreds of years to bolster both the legal and social oppression of women. This dissertation, Divorcing the Rake: Male Chastity and the Rise of the Novel, ... -
Fictions of Authority: The Normativity of Representation after Shakespeare
(2020)The core claims of this study are that dramatic and political practice mutually depend on rich concepts of mimesis––of exemplary images and formative imitation––for their coherence; that the seventeenth century bears witness ... -
Fictions of Consent: Contract and the Victorian Novel
(2022)This project addresses how democratic regimes founded on ideals of individual agency and personal freedom systematically disadvantage groups and persons. I argue that (neo-)liberalism enacts this inequity not incidentally, ... -
Guided by Voices: Poetry, the Paranormal, and Mythmaking
(2021)This dissertation reconsiders the relationship between nineteenth and twentieth century artists and the paranormal. Historically, the term “paranormal” has denoted an array of otherworldly phenomena that has captivated artists ... -
Labored Romance: The Contemporary Novel and the Culture of Late Capitalism
(2022)Just over 300 years have passed since John Locke proposed that the basis of the individual was property and, in turn, that the labor which was the individual’s first property in his own person was the source of all property ... -
Lines of Relation: Devotional Verse and Active Reading in Late Medieval English Books
(2023)This study locates a medieval poetics of lineation in the manuscript and early print reception of fifteenth-century Middle English penitential poems. I investigate three exemplary poems of penitential devotion alongside ... -
Living in Other Places: Genre and Globalization in the Contemporary Anglophone Novel
(2022)This dissertation reframes current debates over the role national culture and international connection plays in contemporary anglophone fiction in the formalist terms of genre studies. The processes and consequences ... -
Modernist Form: On the Problem of Fragmentation
(2018)This dissertation explores formal fragmentation in the modernist novel. It shows that such fragmentation not only represents the historical conditions of modernism, but also posits the potential for new forms of human relation. ... -
More Than a Feeling: How the Nineteenth-Century British Novel Reformed the Passions
(2020)By the time of David Hume and Adam Smith, as A.O. Hirschman famously tells us, the early modern passions had been rehabilitated as a creative force, one driven by economic interest. From the turn of the nineteenth century ... -
Never God-bereft: allegory and agency in late medieval literature
(2023)For Augustine, Scripture resounds like a Bach cantata. At every moment, its allegories reverberate with many voices. In the Psalmist David’s voice we hear Christ’s, in whose voice we hear the Church’s, in whose voice we ... -
On Foot: Pathways Through Contemporary Literature
(2018)This dissertation explores contemporary walking narratives – fictions formally organized around and guided by journeys “on foot” – in order to consider the deeply rooted literary-historical, aesthetic, and ethical relationships ... -
Out of Service: The Work of Character in the Novel of Post-Industrial Society
(2022)“Out of Service: The Work of Character in the Novel of Post-Industrial Society” argues that the formal innovations in the novel since 1945 reflect the form’s revolutionary redevelopment as a technology of social production. ... -
Out of Time: Alternative Temporalities from Victorian Literature
(2023)The Victorians popularized of the idea of progress as well as the linear and unidirectional temporality that this concept implies. However, the problematic nature of progressive temporality is now more visible than ever. ... -
Performing the Protestant State: Preaching and Playing from Marprelate to Milton
(2021)Performing the Protestant State: Preaching and Playing from Marprelate to Miltonchallenges the prevailing literary-historical account of London’s theaters as an overwhelmingly secular force in England’s political discourse. ... -
Reasoning Rebellion and Reformation: Natural Law and the Ethics of Power and Resistance in Late Medieval English Literature
(2021)Reasoning Rebellion and Reformation: Natural Law and the Ethics of Power and Resistance in Late Medieval English Literature argues that the natural law was a vital ethical, political, and literary discourse in England amid ... -
Risky Business: The Economy of Self-Management in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction
(2020)This study argues that in the eighteenth century a discourse of risk management emerged that fundamentally reshaped the relation of man to the world by imagining that the individual was capable of controlling aspects of ...
