English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item The Development of Theater in Post-Revolutionary Iran from 1979 to 1997(2022) Ahmadian , Nahid; Keshavarz-Karamustafa, Fatemeh; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research studies the development of Iranian dramatic literature and theater in post-revolutionary Iran. In a historical survey from the 1979 revolution to the beginning of the Reform Era, it explores the connection of the dramatic literature and their productions to their cultural contexts and studies the ways these contexts impact the function and formation of Iranian theater. In a chronological survey, this research examines the ways Iranian theater developed new theatrical forms to meet and reflect on the political, social, and cultural demands of an important phase in Iranian history. This research benefits from the methods of postpositivist theater historiography to advance a revisionist historical narrative based on the dynamic dialectics between Iranian theater and its cultural setting. This is summative, analytical, and archival research. Based on archival research grounded in nearly 2000 documents, and 200 plays it also provides resources on Iranian theater history and historiography. By bringing together the list of scholarship, theatrical productions, and historical documents of the 1980s and 1990s, it provides a resource on Iranian post-revolutionary history in one of the most transformative periods in Iranian contemporary history.Item 'The Native Question': Genre, Gender, and Governance in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing(2022) Thompson, Justin; Rudy, Jason; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As one of the writers in my project, Olive Schreiner, stated so plainly, “the native question is the real question.” What she meant — and what I examine in my dissertation — is that the pressing question for nineteenth-century writers was both the past treatment of Indigenous peoples and the future of settler and imperial states, from Canada to India to Australia and New Zealand. Drawing from insights in post-colonial theory and feminist literary criticism, I argue for reading nineteenth-century Anglophone women’s genre writing as inherently political. Though these women were often barred from political debates, I examine the genres in which women cloaked their political philosophy: romance novels, frontier memoirs, travel narratives, and Christian conversion stories. Simultaneously, I consider Indigenous writers to dislocate white writers as the sole narrators of colonialism in the nineteenth century. For example, in one chapter, I consider the Bengali writer and activist Swarnakumari Devi, who is now considered one of the leading women intellectuals of nineteenth-century British India. Her writing, however, was not then and is not now seen as intervening in broader political debates about the future of the Indian subcontinent. I argue, however, that her novel The Fatal Garland advocates a pan-ethnic Indian solidarity as the only political counterweight to British governance. Even contemporary critics often value her more for what she represents than what she actually said. One of my goals in this project is not only to recuperate women writers from historical footnotes into serious subjects of sustained, literary critical study but also to emphasize new modes of understanding history that come into view only by taking into account these little-known and often disregarded works.Item Attend Me: Attention and Animation in Early Modern Drama(2021) DeCamillis, Justine Marie; Bailey, Amanda; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)What does it mean to pay attention and what is the cost? This dissertation explores these questions in the context of a historical shift in the value and purpose of the act of attending. In the late sixteenth century attention which was understood as the foundation of devotional practice, was widely recognized as the most important currency of the commercial and court theaters. Playwrights throughout the beginning of the seventeenth century began to experiment with attention as a form of creative labor and means of animating, transforming, or subjugating bodies in performance. I trace these moments of transformative attention in the works of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, Richard Brome and others to examine how a new form attention in performance redrew the boundaries of an increasingly secularized and commodified self. I engage a wide array of primary sources including popular news pamphlets, recipe books, political treatises, and travel narratives that theorize and debate the biopolitics of attention. In our own moment, attention is critical to the latest stage of surveillance capitalism. Corporations monetize and governmental entities monitor what we attend to as they pay close attention to us. Rather than a recent development, I assert that the stakes of and competition for attention, and concomitantly the price of distraction, gained traction on the early modern stage.Item Feigning a Commonwealth: The Roman Play and Public Discourse in England, 1594-1660(2017) Marks, Jodean Miriam; Leinwand, Theodore B; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Of some eighty Roman history plays written or performed in English between 1550 and 1635, forty-three are extant. The task of studying the political resonances of the whole corpus (rather than focusing solely on Shakespeare and Jonson’s Roman plays) remains to be undertaken. This dissertation begins that task with a selection from the fourteen to sixteen extant plays about the Roman Republic, focusing on three key moments: the founding of the Republic, its death throes, and the reign of Tiberius, when Romans looked back nostalgically to the Republic. The five plays examined here presented a model of republican political culture that contrasted with the monarchical ideology of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England. The spirit, principles, and actions of the republican heroes who inhabited the stage may well have inspired audience members, both those whose reading of classical texts had familiarized them with the historical events presented on stage and those encountering that history for the first time. Three of these plays—Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall—were composed for performance at public theaters and remained popular well into the seventeenth century. Kyd’s Cornelia and Chapman’s Caesar and Pompey were published but never performed. All five plays share a sense that a republican form of government, more than any other, promotes nobility of character and enables human beings to live fulfilling lives. They also share a complex vocabulary that centers on the association of tyranny with slavery: the tyrant is a ruler who treats his subjects as a master treats his slaves. While only one play, Cornelia, appears to condemn monarchy outright (as a violation of the Roman constitution), all appear to suggest that monarchy can easily slide into tyranny. In the early seventeenth century, these plays, and the history they presented, would have called to mind contemporary concerns about the corrosive effects of royal favoritism and the growth of the royal prerogative. More radical perspectives, closer to the Roman republican model, would emerge as differences between the king and Parliament escalated into open conflict in mid-century.Item Inappropriate(d) Literatures of the United States: Hegemonic Propriety and Postracial Racialization(2014) Dykema, Amanda; Chuh, Kandice; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The rise of multiculturalism and its impact on the U.S. academy reached its peak at the end of the twentieth century. Since then the rhetoric of liberal multiculturalism that valorized diversity has largely given way to a neoliberal multiculturalism that celebrates postracialism as a means to dismantle the institutional programs and critical discourses that took racial difference as their starting point. Yet the racially inflected demarcations between positions of privilege and positions of stigma that have historically characterized the U.S. nation-state remain intact. In this context, how do we read race in contemporary literature by U.S. ethnic writers when celebrations of colorblindness dominate public discourse? As a repository for what Foucault has called subjugated knowledges, minoritized literatures hold the potential to de-naturalize the neoliberal status quo, critique the academic discourse that surrounds it, and engage with the political economy within which it is produced. This project argues that the institutional work of disciplining minority subjects--once openly performed by racialization in a way no longer possible under neoliberal multiculturalism--has been continued in part by political, social, and economic forces I group under the umbrella term propriety. I expose how the designation "appropriate" becomes a prerequisite for political recognition and representation, analyzing representative political texts that are fundamental to contemporary definitions of minority subjects alongside national and literary-critical genealogies of discourses of difference. I argue that attachments to values and forms explicitly identified as "appropriate" conceal and maintain race-based hierarchies characteristic of U.S. national identity formation. In response, I theorize inappropriateness as a category of political and literary representation for exploring questions of visibility and enfranchisement central to the national narrative of the United States. Inappropriateness is a political and aesthetic movement that deploys subjects and forms often denounced as improper to the contemporary era. Inappropriate aesthetic works are those which attempt to distinguish difference from "diversity," influence minority subject formation, and shape knowledge production in ways that are counter to the objectives of neoliberal multiculturalism. Four chapters establish a taxonomy of the ways inappropriateness operates: formally, corporeally, nationally, and historically.Item TIME WARPS AND ALTER-NARRATIVES: GAY AND LESBIAN ENGAGEMENTS WITH HISTORY IN BRITISH FICTION SINCE WORLD WAR II(2013) Clark, Damion Ray; Cohen, William A; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Contemporary British gay and lesbian authors engage with history through two distinct methods I call fixed moment/cultural critique and abstract moment/fantasy space. The fixed moment/cultural critique model focuses on a fixed historical moment, usually from the recent past. By focusing on this fixed moment, authors explicitly engage in critiques of the present that question society's homophobia and gay and lesbian people's participation in their own oppression. The abstract moment/fantasy space model uses moments from the distant past, often collapsing historical and narrative time and space to create a fantasy space for lesbians and gay men to reflect on their own cultures and identities and to create links with their literary and historical ancestries. Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953) and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (2004), both demonstrate the vein of historical engagement in gay and lesbian British fiction that builds a political argument challenging heterosexual cultural and political definitions of homosexuality and detailing the effects of such definitions on gay people. They do this while rooting this discussion in a specific near past iconic historical British moment: World War II for Renault, and the height of Margaret Thatcher's rule in the 1980s for Hollinghurst. The second vein of historical engagement is one that holds as its purpose gay and lesbian cultural fantasy. Neil Bartlett's Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall (1990) and Who Was That Man?: A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde (1988) and the Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet (1998) explore authorial engagement with the more distant past as a means of examining the present and creating possible futures. The past in these works is not one sharply defined locus; rather it is broadly defined periods that the authors seek to collapse with the present. In the Coda, I turn to the films of Derek Jarman and Isaac Julien, and the plays of Alexi Kaye Campbell and Jackie Kay to see how the fixed moment/cultural critique and abstract moment/fantasy space models apply to contemporary British art mediums outside of narrative fiction.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 Oracle of Stamboul(2006-05-01) Lukas, Michael; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Oracle of Stamboul is a novel-in-progress about a preternaturally intelligent little girl who changes the course of history. Born on the outskirts of the Ottoman empire at the end of 19th century, Eleonora Cohen follows her father to Stamboul, overcomes adversity, learns about herself, and eventually becomes an advisor to the Ottoman sultan, Abdulhamid II.