English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Erotic Transgression: Sexualities and Companionship in Graham Greene's Fiction(2011) McHale, Heather Moreland; Auchard, John; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the role of sexuality in Graham Greene's fiction. Instead of compartmentalizing Greene's description of sex as an element of his Catholic perspective, this study reverses this view and argues that sexuality is at the center of Greene's spiritual and moral life. Greene examines facets of sexuality that are often considered perverse or aberrant; his encompassing view of sexual life informs the political, moral, and religious issues of his novels. Key texts include The Man Within (1929), The End of the Affair (1951), The Quiet American (1955), Travels with My Aunt (1969), The Human Factor (1978), and Monsignor Quixote (1982), as well as selected short stories. These texts, as well as Greene's autobiographies and travel writings, reveal a performative, polymorphous, and conflicted sexuality. The chapters of this project discuss sexuality of pain; scopophilia and exhibitionism; the role of fertility and sterility; confession and sexual talk; and the relationships between men. Ultimately, Greene's evolving depictions of sexuality assume a central role in his work and become the most important way that his characters make meaning in a postwar, post-Eliot world. Rather than accept the view of modern life as a wasteland, Greene reinvests it with drama, danger, and existential importance through his exploration of sexuality. His interest in pain, scopophilia, adulterous or triangular relationships, and other forms of unusual sexuality simultaneously normalize these forms by suggesting that they are functional parts of erotic life, and present a radical view of what normative life really is. Rather than arguing that there is no such thing as perversion or aberration, Greene suggests that even ordinary erotic life--inasmuch as there is such a thing--places us in touch with our most existential fears, carries the possibility of creation and the prospect of our own replacement and death, and challenges our metaphysical senses of selfhood and religious belief.Item Novel Heroes: Domesticating the British, Eighteenth-Century Male Adventurer(2011) Bauer, Mariah Mitchell Lynch; Rosenthal, Laura; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the "General Introduction" of his Account of the Voyages and Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere (1773), John Hawkesworth writes that Captain James Cook's portion of the Account is written up from logs kept by the Captain, Sir Joseph Banks, and from "other papers equally authentic." Hawkesworth makes a more surprising admission in revealing that his relation of Cook's Account was influenced, specifically, by Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), and so Richardson's domestic heroine becomes a model for the greatest male adventurer of the age. Hawkesworth's inclination to lean upon a literary model in his effort to textually "domesticate" his rendition of Captain Cook is not as unusual as the editor's open admission of intent and his candid citing of the Pamela source. This project rests upon the assertion that there is far less division between the travel log and the novel than previously argued, and that the writers of period travel narratives drew upon the same themes and used the same aesthetic strategies that novelists deployed. Further, it is my contention that this aesthetic formulation--this peculiar brand of domestic heroism borrowed from period novels and their heroines that is appropriated by the constructed male adventurer and enables him to separate and preserve himself from all external savagery--is a formulation that appears repeatedly in eighteenth-century travel literature. First, I will define "domestic" and describe the masculine variety of "domestic heroism" or "oeconomy" that is being appropriated by male adventurers. In the first two chapters, I will trace the dichotomy of the successful "domestic housewife" or "oeconomic" hero versus the undomesticated anti-hero through a set of examples: Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (versus Swift's Gulliver) and Hawkesworth's Richardsonian Captain Cook (versus Bligh). In the third chapter, I will demonstrate that Mungo Park constructs himself as a deeply vulnerable, gothic, Ann Radcliffe heroine in his Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa. In the final chapter, looking primarily at Dibdin's fictional Hannah Hewit; or, The Female Crusoe, I will argue that since the successful male adventurer must possess both female and male attributes, no room is left for the adventuring woman.Item "Well-Dispos'd Savages": Elite Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century British Literature(2010) Veisz, Elizabeth Hayley; Rosenthal, Laura J; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Writers in eighteenth-century Britain catered to, and helped create, public fascination with the brazen, sometimes illicit, often violent exploits of elite and aristocratic men. Literary critics have seen this elite male figure as part of an outmoded order superseded over the course of the century by the rising British middle class. Debauched aristocratic characters are often reformed over the course of eighteenth-century narratives, reflecting a larger societal shift in values towards polite restraint. As expressed in my dissertation's title phrase, however, many of the period's writers develop elite male characters whose behaviors and self-presentation blur those very boundaries between oppositional categories, like savagery and civilization, on which both Enlightenment theories of human progress and polite culture's prescriptions for decorum were presumed to rest. Through an examination of this paradoxical figure in novelistic, dramatic, and autobiographical literature, my dissertation demonstrates that the oft-repeated reform-of-the-rake narrative calls attention to obstacles and resistance to the ascendancy of a middle-class culture, not to the inevitability of its rise. Each chapter centers on a site that is accessible to a larger public only through literary or dramatic accounts, including the club, the elite school, the court, and the overseas estate. Chapter One, "`Our imperial reign': Addison, Steele, Gay and the London Mohocks," examines writings about a gang of rakish gentlemen rumored to prowl the streets of Augustan London. Chapter Two, "Schools for Scandal: Elite Education and Eighteenth-Century Narrative," uncovers a relationship between key mid-century novels and a longstanding debate about elite schooling. The final two chapters trace the influence of late-eighteenth-century discourses of liberty and sensibility on constructions of elite masculinity. Chapter Three, "Command Performance: Boswell's Libertine Diplomacy," focuses on the journals and travelogues of James Boswell, a self-professed libertine who strove, with mixed results, to restrain his appetite for power and pleasure. Chapter Four, "A `strong transition of place': Cultural Encounter and the reform plot in Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl," offers a new framework in which to read the genre of the national tale by shifting the critical lens from the novel's Anglo-Irish marriage plot to a parallel plot of intersecting and competing masculinities.Item Writing with Image: Verbal-Visual Collaboration in 20th-Century Poetry(2010) Helwig, Magdelyn Hammond; Loizeaux, Elizabeth B; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines verbal-visual collaboration in which a poet and a visual artist work cooperatively to produce a single book. Verbal-visual collaboration is a fertile genre that refigures the historically oppositional relationship between the sister arts and that anticipates today's hypertext experiments in interart forms. I confront the problem of reading a multi-media text and posit “integrated reading” as a constructive critical approach that privileges neither word nor image. Integrated reading stresses relationships and asks questions about how the verbal and visual elements interact, what they say to and about each other, and how they work together to interrogate issues of representation. Examining the nature of poetry from the stance of images, and vice versa, means questioning the nature of representation itself. A central concern of verbal-visual collaborations, and modern poetry, is representation. My integrated readings consider issues of representation demonstrated in the process, presentation, and meaning-making of verbal-visual collaborations. My dissertation has two other goals: to begin to write the history of modern verbal-visual collaboration and to develop a taxonomy of such projects. I focus on three texts: Ted Hughes and Leonard Baskin's Capriccio (1990), Frank O'Hara and Larry Rivers' Stones (1957-1960), and C.D. Wright and Deborah Luster's One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (2004). I trace the specific histories of these works to position each within the history of verbal-visual collaboration and to show how the creative process bears on reading a collaborative text. I describe categories of collaboration based on the working proximity of artist and poet and their relationship to material production, and my taxonomy provides a beginning for classifying the various ways in which poets interact with visual images.