Situated at the intersection of literary, religious, and economic studies, this dissertation examines how late medieval writers used commercial practice to invent new modes of penitential piety. Challenging scholarship that characterizes the relationship between church and commerce as exclusively antagonistic or corrosive, I argue that the convergence of these two...
Situated at the intersection of literary, religious, and economic studies, this dissertation examines how late medieval writers used commercial practice to invent new modes of penitential piety. Challenging scholarship that characterizes the relationship between church and commerce as exclusively antagonistic or corrosive, I argue that the convergence of these two...
This dissertation argues that writers and artists in Britain and its Empire in the first half of the twentieth century turned time and again to games and sports to find images and forms for their literary and artistic interventions. Furthermore, it shows how, in these works, play served as a...
This dissertation examines how eighteenth-century ethics were reimagined by Enlightenment-era and Romantic women writes to better afford the grounds for political revolution and responsive reform. Whereas Adam Smith’s theatrical model of sympathy casts individuals in the passive role of spectators who feel deeply but are not necessarily moved to act,...
In a new analysis of Renaissance pastoral that draws on ecocriticism, queer theory, and a historicist approach, this dissertation finds a green and inhuman world that opposes the modern view that humans differ significantly from, and enjoy a right of dominion over, nonhuman species and the environment. Through readings of...
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,...
This dissertation argues that the nineteenth-century construction of “emotional susceptibility” turned a much-derided quirk of psychology—the long retention of one’s earliest affective impressions—into a basis for radical interventions into thinking about attachment, ethics, and the Victorian novel. I focus in particular on the work of Henry Mackenzie, Charlotte Brontë, George...
“Entertaining Strangers” reveals how theories and practices of hospitality shaped and were shaped by the early modern print and theater industries. Whereas earlier studies of hospitality and literature have focused on aristocratic patronage, in this dissertation I reveal the vital importance of commercial hospitality as a framework for ethical and...
My dissertation, Geographies of Memory, Trauma, and Pleasure in African American and Caribbean-American Literature examines the geographies of the cane fields, bodies of water, and the back porch to illustrate the speculative ways anti-black violence, intergenerational trauma, pleasure and Black memory co-exist in Black literature. Examining the aforementioned geographies as...
This dissertation argues that British and Ottoman literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are linked and mutually informed in their representations of sovereignty. My study of the poetry, fiction, chronicles and travelogues from these periods demonstrates that both literary traditions respond to the rivalry between the British and Ottoman...
