This dissertation traces the meaning and scope of early modern complaint poetry. I argue that what I understand as a secular "poetics of dissatisfaction" arose to fill the void left when religious auricular confession was no longer an institutionalized practice, and that this mode of literary expression was itself shaped...
>"Surprising Metamorphoses: Transformations of Race in Early American Literatures," analyzes early American literary representations of race within the context of contemporaneous belief systems. Contrasting sharply with subsequent periods, much late eighteenth-century thought conceptualized race as an external, mutable bodily condition that could change over time. Identifying how this thinking informs...
This dissertation reconstructs a critical dialogue between British modernists and their Spanish contemporaries on their shared sense of the urgent tasks, in the wake of World War I, of reimagining the cultural heritage of Europe and cultivating cosmopolitan sensibilities. It assembles and analyzes a network of novels, essays, translations, reviews,...
The enormous popularity of The Beggar's Opera gave rise to a remarkable series of plays known as ballad opera, a form that dominated the eighteenth-century London stage during the 1730s, a crucial decade in the development of English theatre. Although virtually every major playwright of the period, including Colley Cibber,...
"Prufrock" to <em>The Waste Land</em>: T. S. Eliot's Periodical Publications, 1915-1922 Randall J. Woods This dissertation presents, in publication date order, the 167 articles published by T. S. Eliot from 1915 to 1922, most of which have never been reprinted. They include literary criticism, book reviews, poetry, philosophical essays, humorous...
This dissertation investigates the ways in which poetry encourages visual images in the reader. This investigation breaks new ground, for in the wake of behaviorist psychology and the linguistic turn in literary theory, literary critics have ignored and often spurned the visual imagination. The project uses Imagist poetry as a...
Early Modern Matters of Life and Death” argues that the political ecology of living, dead, and (in)animate beings in early modernity elucidates the claims of humanism and human exceptionalism that evolved in the period and that still inform present-day anthropogenesis
This dissertation studies fictionalized diasporic subalternity, how it is represented by the authors (of the same social status or a cosmopolitan writer), and how different types of agency layered onto the characters influence each other. The choice of texts includes Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke (2011), Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of...