This dissertation argues that silence played a fundamental role in the Victorian novel and in Victorian novel writing, operating as a productive force in service of sympathetic exchange and creative labor. It examines Charles Lamb's and Thomas Carlyle’s foundational roles in detaching silence from its traditional Romantic associations with solitude,...
By showing how the heteroglot and tentative nature of medieval normative worlds furnishes a salutary alternative to contemporary epistemologies of the globe, this dissertation contributes to critical theory that deconstructs the globe as a modern concept defined as a transparent space of circulation and exchange. While studies of the global...
This dissertation explores the interrelationship between time, labor, and literature during the rise of British industrial capitalism. By tracing a tradition of social criticism from Percy Shelley to William Morris that runs through the Chartist movement, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Dickens, it isolates and explicates a distinctive existential mood, or...
This dissertation examines the language of force in Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (MoE) as a site of literary self-reflection. It investigates how the text employs a constellation of “force” terms – including not only the words Kraft, Energie, and Leistung, but also images of physical and chemical forces...
Since Spanish colonial rule to the present, mining has been one of the main economic activities in the Andes. Taking this fact into account, my dissertation explores how two major Andean countries’ cultural production reacted to mineral wealth exploitation from 1880 to 1930. By analyzing foundational novels and influential journalistic...
Beside the Point: Places in Nabokov's The Gift Peter-John Thomas This dissertation is devoted to the habits of thought embodied in Vladimir Nabokov's last Russian novel, The Gift. Nabokov is famous for creating intricate verbal structures which, however, resist conversion into rigorous propositions. Two major categories of critical response have...
This dissertation concentrates on problems of quotation, tradition, and translation in the poetry of Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam. While examining the nature of poetic inheritance, Celan often refers to Russian poetry and, in particular, to Osip Mandelstam, who, in his turn, understands poetry as an essentially dialogic process. Both...
This dissertation argues that theatre was a vital element of postcolonial culture in Ireland in the years 1919-1932, the period in which the Irish nation emerged from revolutionary war to become a stable postcolonial state. Although critics have bemoaned the rising dominance of conservative, anti-modernist playwriting and production in Ireland's...
This Africa is both a literary history and a survey of the West African novel. Gleason explores seventeen novels in French and eight in English, developing a framework of literary criticism that includes the conqueror, the hero, city life, village life, and personal identity. Authors whose works are studied include...
My work in Comparative Literary Studies and French explores the link between the Mande oral tradition and its literature to reveal the presence and absence of the griots' words and their portrayal in the novel. Authors Amadou Hampaté Bâ (L'Étrange Destin de Wangrin); Massa Makan Diabaté (L'Assemblée de Djinns); D.T....