English Theses and Dissertations
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Item "Many Hands Hands": Early Modern Englishwomen's Recipe Books and the Writing of Food, Politics, and the Self(2006) Field, Catherine; Donawerth, Jane; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)"Many Hands Hands" is a study of early modern Englishwomen's recipe (or "receipt") books. It traces how women explored and expressed matters of food, politics, and self in culinary, medicinal, and cosmetic recipes. The receipt book genre was closely associated with the work of the early modern house, where women were accepted as authorities in matters of household management; thus, the receipt book was particularly accessible to women as they searched for modes of self-expression. Through recipe practice, the housewife managed her own body, as well as the bodies of those under her care (such as her husband, children, servants, and neighbors); at the same time, she occasionally exerted pressure on the body politic of the state. In this period, domestic activities within the home were often politicized, and I argue that the housewife's role and recipe practice were considered central to definitions of English nationhood. In addition to surveying women's manuscript recipe collections, I also analyze printed representations of their recipe practice from the beginning and middle of the seventeenth century. In Shakespeare's All's Well that Ends Well (c.1604), the female practitioner is represented as powerful and capable, yet Helen's specialized knowledge about the (royal) male body makes her a troubling and disturbing figure to the other characters in the play, including Bertram of Rossillion, the man she hopes to marry. The play ultimately valorizes Helen's practice, however, and it reinforces an empirical world view, where with the proper "how to" (or recipe), bodies are knowable and healable, in spite of their transgressive (if predictable) desires. By the middle of the seventeenth century, "how to" books of recipes (in print and in manuscript) come to be increasingly influenced by utopian writings. Printed cookbooks attributed to women reveal utopian longings in the form of royalist nostalgia, a desire to reclaim the past as a place of good household management and national economy. Recipes became a mode through much women and men could reflect on the "how to" workings of the body in order to improve the health of the individual and, ultimately, the body politic of the state.Item FROM TRAVELING EXPEDITIONS, TO MUSEUMS AND TO FILM: NATIVE AMERICANS AND THE IMPACT OF MISREPRESENTATION(2003) Henry, Melissa Ann; Fuegi, John; Harrison, Regina; Robinson, Eugene; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Item Mary Shelley and Utopian Domesticity(2002) Sites, Melissa Jo; Fraistat, Neil R.; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)In her seven novels and other writings, Mary Shelley critiques traditional restrictive domestic ideology while developing a feminist utopian vision of domesticity. She begins with Wollstonecraft's prescription for women's education and adds Godwin's ideas of simplicity, frankness, and forgiveness. Domesticity fosters these very conditions. Ernst Bloch's theory of the utopian function within ideology shows how the false consciousness of domestic and Romantic ideology can bear a utopian impulse. To provide a historical context of domesticity in feminist and reform thought, I discuss the emphasis on education, the importance of community, and the life of the mind in companionate marriage in Mary Astell, Sarah Scott and Margaret Cavendish; I then show how Adeline Mowbray by Amelia Opie and The Empire of the Nairs by James Lawrence illustrate the effects of putting Godwin's and Wollstonecraft's theories into practice. I look at Shelley's exploration of Romantic ideology in Frankenstein while countering prevalent critical misreadings of its nascent ideal of utopian domesticity. I then explore how Mathilda, Midas, Proserpine, and Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot develop contrasting ideas of utopia and dystopia around isolation and community. In her political novels, Valperga, The Last Man, and Perkin Warbeck Shelley developed Wollstonecraft's feminist theories and focused on women's relation to political power. Valperga's Euthanasia exemplifies the powerful Wollstonecraftian citoyenne and Shelleyan Romantic hero. The Last Man illustrates the priority of personal over public concerns, while Perkin Warbeck questions the legitimacy of political ambition. In her domestic novels, Lodore and Falkner, Shelley creates utopian domesticity by modifying Godwin's political system and by revising the Byronic Romantic hero; in Falkner, she rewrites Godwin's Caleb Williams according to a feminist idea of social justice. I conclude by looking at Persuasion by Jane Austen, Records of Woman by Felicia Hemans, and Helen by Maria Edgeworth, which demonstrate awareness of the potential benefits and drawbacks of domesticity, but were less concerned than Shelley with feminist critique.Item Seen From Above(2009) Wylder, Sarah; Plumly, Stanley; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Seen from Above" is largely about being out of place and being an outsider. Settings for these poems range from laboratories to city parks. A tropical hummingbird gets lost and finds its way to Wisconsin. A pack of coyotes moves into an urban cemetery. A clone of an extinct species paws at the glass of its cage. The humans in these poems are as uncomfortable in their own skin as on the streets of a foreign city. The fat woman dreams of being someone else. The fake saints, even in the afterlife, still struggle with ambiguous roles and questions without answers. A young woman sees a dead body and an extinct bird, but no one will hear her alarm.Item "Something Sweetly Personal and Sweetly Social": Modernism, Metadrama, and the Avant Garde in the Plays of the Provincetown Players(2009) Eisenhauer, Louis Andrew; Bryer, Jackson R; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The argument of this study is that many of the experimental productions of the original Provincetown Players (1915-22) should be viewed not simply as modern, but as a mixture of modernist and avant-garde theatre. The Players' early comic spoofs critiqued the modernist zeal for nouveau social and cultural topics of their era, such as free love, psychoanalysis, and post-impressionist art, and were the first American plays to explore the personal as political. Hutchins Hapgood, a founding Provincetown Player, described these dramas as containing at once "something sweetly personal and sweetly social" (Victorian 394). Often employing metatheatrical techniques in their critique of modern institutions, Provincetown productions, this study argues, echoed two key attributes of avant-garde theory: The self-critique of modernism's social role recalls Peter Bürger's description of avant-garde movements developing out of a fear of" art's lack of social impact" in aestheticism and entering a "stage of self-criticism" (Bürger 22). Additionally, by integrating performance into the life of their community, the Players' echo Bürger's theory that the avant-garde attempts to reintegrate autonomous art into the "praxis of everyday life" (22). Discussed in this study are plays created during the summers of 1915 and 1916, including Neith Boyce's Constancy (1915), Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook's Suppressed Desires (1915), John Reed's The Eternal Quadrangle (1916), Wilbur Daniel Steele's Not Smart (1916), and Louise Bryant's The Game (1916). Also considered is Floyd Dell's Liberal Club satire St. George in Greenwich (1913). A second group of expressionistic plays analyzed in this study include verse plays by poet, editor, and troubadour Alfred Kreymborg, such as Lima Beans (1916), Jack's House (1918), and Vote the New Moon (1920) and Djuna Barnes's exploration of Nietzsche in Three From the Earth (1919). A third focus of the study is a group of full-length plays by Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, and Eugene O'Neill: Glaspell's The Verge (1921) and Inheritors (1921); Cook's The Athenian Women (1918); and O'Neill's Before Breakfast (1916), produced by the Provincetown Players, and Bread and Butter (written 1913-14) and Now I Ask You (written 1916), both unproduced.Item Postcolonial Refashionings: Reading Forms, Reading Novels(2009) Comorau, Nancy Alla; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation reads the postcolonial novel through a lens of novel theory, examining the ways in which the postcolonial novel writes a new chapter in the history of the novel. I explore how Postcolonial writers deploy--even as they remodel--the form of the British novel, which provides them a unique avenue for expressing national and individual historical positions and for imaginatively renegotiating their relationships to the canon and the Commonwealth, past and present. In doing so, they remake the forms they have inherited into the genre of the postcolonial novel. The novel, due to its connection to modernity, the nation, and the formation of the subject, holds different possibilities for postcolonial writers than other forms. My dissertation answers readings of postcolonial texts, which, while often superb in their interpretation of the political, fail to focus on genre. In a fashion, postcolonial novels are read as anthropological works, providing glimpses into a culture, and in a peculiar way the novel comes to operate as the native informant. Given the proliferation of the Anglophone postcolonial novel, I argue that it is important that we consider how the postcolonial novel renders established genres into new forms. I focus on a set of postcolonial novels that specifically engage with canonical British novels, calling attention to the fact that while they share much with their predecessors, they function differently than the novels that have come before them. Unlike early postcolonial arguments about empire "writing back" to the center, which position postcolonial and "English" writers in an antipodal power struggle, I argue that the Anglophone postcolonial novel is at once a descendent of the British novel and a genre unto itself--forming a new limb from the British novel's branch. In doing so, these novels perform new ways of writing modernity, the nation, and the subject. Working from a Bakhtinian theory of the modern novel as a form that creates newness, I demonstrate how postcolonial writers use the history and tradition of the British novel to write, revise, and refashion the novel in English.Item A GENRE OF DEFENSE: HYBRIDITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN'S DEFENSES OF WOMEN'S PREACHING(2009) Zimmerelli, Lisa Dawn; Donawerth, Jane; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores how nineteenth-century Protestant women negotiated genre in order to manage more effectively the controversial rhetorical project of defending women's right to preach. After providing a comprehensive overview of the debate of women's preaching in America, this project presents a genre study of a subset of these defenses: those women who do not adhere strictly to their "home" genres, but rather demonstrate a range of generic blending and manipulation in their defenses of women's preaching. This study further reads religion as an integral identity category that was the seat for other activist rhetorics; by extension, then, women's defenses of women's preaching is an important site of activism and rhetorical discourse. Foote, Willard, and Woosley are rhetoricians and theologians; the hybrid form of their books provides them with a textual space for the intersections of their rhetoric and theology. This study examines three books within the tradition of defenses of women's preaching--Julia Foote's A Brand Plucked from the Fire (1879), Frances Willard's Woman in the Pulpit (1888), and Louisa Woosley's Shall Woman Preach? (1891)--as representative of the journey a genre takes from early adaptation to solidification, what Carolyn Miller calls "typified rhetorical action" (151) and as the containers for an egalitarian theology. Foote adapts the genre of spiritual autobiography to include the oral and textual discourses of letters, sermons, and hymn in order to present her holiness theology. Willard experiments with the epistolary genre in order to present her Social Gospel theology. Woosley includes all of the genres of defenses of women's preaching: sermon, spiritual autobiography, editorial letter, and speech; she also appropriates Masonic rhetoric in order to merge the defense of women's preaching with another kind of defense prevalent at the time: the scriptural defense of women. Significantly, each woman resolves "separate spheres" ideology by suggesting a new religious sphere where men and women participate equally: Foote's sphere is the sphere of holiness; Willard's is her reconceptualized Kingdom of God; and Woosley's is a world of action, where men and women, after ritualized initiation, are responsible for building the temple of God.Item The Prescribed Burn(2009) Wirstiuk, Laryssa Andrea; Feitell, Merrill; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Veda is a young Ukrainian-American woman from New Jersey who is creative, insightful, and observant. Her concerns are ordinary yet pressing, and she struggles with obsession, physical distance, and personal identity. Though she loves home, life forces her to leave again and again. Veda is moved by Wildwood, the Pine Barrens, the PATH train, and the Meadowlands. Memories of her favorite landscape ground her, no matter where she happens to be. Veda's parents are a steady, dependable presence, but her peer relationships are her greatest source of interest and inner conflict. Madsy is her best friend and confidante, Arthur is her first love, and Theo inspires such tumultuous passion that he nearly ruins her. Art is her redemptive force. In order to grow, Veda must simultaneously destroy and create.Item In Questionable Taste: Eating Culture, Cooking Culture in Anglophone Postcolonial Texts(2009) Phillips, Delores Bobbie Jean; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation produces an extensive and intensive study of the culture of food in postcolonial literature and cookbooks that describe particular regions and cultures. My interrogation treats novels and cookbooks that depict food and eating in Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean to argue that while both cookbooks and novels depict as unstable the connection between food and culture; the key difference lies in the manner in which each genre describes that instability. My dissertation uses memoir cookbooks (cookbooks that use the autobiographical accounts of their authors as a method of organizing content and providing context for recipes) and literary depictions of cooking and eating to trouble the neat tautology that establishes food and home as interchangeable cultural signifiers of equal weight. I evaluate the work that cookbooks do by comparing them to representations of cooking, eating and food in representative novels that frame depictions of citizenship and the nation in deeply ambivalent terms even as they depict delicious meals, well-laid family tables, and clean, productive kitchens. I use both cookbooks and novels to illustrate how the text under consideration in my dissertation act out the concerns that structure postcolonial critique. If regional cookbooks provide obscured or incomplete insight into the cultures they purport to authentically depict, then the novels I study provide openly ambivalent accounts of cultural identification. My dissertation begins by examining how pan-cultural cookbooks do the work of drawing multiple nations beneath the aegis of the global--and how this work fails to engage the problematic cosmopolitics of globality as revealed in two South Asian novels. I then examine African texts to analyze the difficulties that press bodies into motion--hunger and impoverishment, political disenfranchisement and oppression, and attenuated relationships with cultural traditions. The dissertation then moves to America via the Caribbean, examining diasporic longing in Cuban expatriates and the manner in which regional cookbooks and memoirs construct the past by reinventing the spaces that their authors have left behind.Item Communicating Disease: Medical Knowledge and Literary Forms in Colonial British America(2009) Wisecup, Kelly; Bauer, Ralph; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the literary repercussions of encounters between European, Native American, and African medical philosophies throughout the British American colonies. In particular, I examine the formation and transformation of colonial literary forms in an intercultural and a transatlantic context, by investigating the ways in which colonists incorporated Native and African knowledge to produce various literary forms. I employ anthropological and ethnohistorical studies to show that colonists displaced competing rhetorical practices by incorporating non-European knowledge to present firsthand descriptions of New World medicines and illnesses. Additionally, colonists transformed their literary strategies to subordinate Native and African knowledge as witchcraft and to distance themselves from colonial encounters. Early Americans' incorporation and subordination of non-European medical philosophies authorized colonial medical knowledge as empirical and rational and facilitated conceptions of cultural differences between colonists, Native Americans, and Africans. My introduction examines medical encounters in the context of early modern medical philosophies and rhetorical practices. Chapter one examines how Thomas Hariot mixed Algonquian theories that disease originated in "invisible bullets" with Paracelsian medical philosophies, connecting seeing and knowing in his true report. Chapter two examines Pilgrim Edward Winslow's appropriation and subordination of shamans' medical practices to provide firsthand accounts of New World wonders in his providence tale. Chapter three examines the 1721 inoculation controversy in the context of Africans' testimony about inoculation, which minister Cotton Mather transcribed to connect words and things in his plain style, and which physician William Douglass satirized to reveal the gap between slaves' words and the true, dangerous nature of inoculation. Chapter four examines how James Grainger incorporated obeah, Africans' medico-religious practices, into his georgic poem to produce images of productive slaves and to construct new conceptions of obeah as witchcraft. Finally, the conclusion examines the ways in which colonists' disavowal of Native and African knowledge as magical continued to haunt U.S. Americans' literary practices, as seen in Arthur Mervyn's gothic tale of his encounter with a healthy black hearse driver during a yellow fever epidemic and Richard Allen and Absalom Jones' argument that blacks possessed superior knowledge of the epidemic.