English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item “DISCRETION IN THE INTERVAL”: EMILY DICKINSON’S MUSICAL PERFORMANCES(2020) Holmes, Gerard; Smith, Martha Nell; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Discretion in the interval”: Emily Dickinson’s Musical Performances considers Dickinson’s writing in the context of improvisational aesthetics prevalent in musical and writing cultures during her lifetime, but now largely effaced from their print reproductions. Her manuscript poems fall into two broad categories: those she preserved for herself, which I liken to musical scores, and those shared with friends, family members, and acquaintances, often by mail, which I liken to extemporaneous musical performances. These two sets of manuscripts coexist in a dynamic, cyclical, and generative process, through which Dickinson generated a growing set of performance possibilities each time she inscribed a given poem or added a variant word, phrase, or punctuation mark. Collectively, these manuscript variants comprise a set of performance instructions, akin to an improvising composer’s marked-up score or scores. This project accords with recent feminist and manuscript-based Dickinson criticism that considers the poems to be open-ended, allowing recreation by readers with each rereading. My discussion of improvisation is informed by the use of the term within ethnomusicology, which considers extemporaneous creative practice within, and constitutive of, the cultures that produce it. Dickinson's work also arose from, enabled, and constituted a community of readers and writers. Nineteenth-century musical, literary, and religious cultures prized improvisation. In the United States, distinct but interrelated strains of improvisational aesthetics existed within European-American and African-American cultures. Dickinson's engagement with these creative cultures is evident in her letters as well as poems, as a set of key terms and practices. Dickinson’s rewriting and sharing within her self-selected network refused the stabilizing, duplicative tendencies of print, allowing instead a practice of writing in multiple, audience-directed iterations. Rather than revising teleologically, Dickinson writes toward increasing multiplicity and possibility. For improvisers, no single text or performance is definitive. Each increases the set of possible performances. Dickinson's manuscripts, often written extemporaneously to accompany a letter or note, drew from preserved manuscripts, on which she recorded guiding words, phrases, and markings that signal available variations. Her engagement with improvisation has implications for representation of her work in print and online, and for nineteenth-century literary studies more generally.Item An Ethics of Refusal: Sympathy, Intimacy and Fidelity in British Romanticism(2016) Kirch, Lisa Julia Olivia; Wang, Orrin N.C.; Fraistat, Neil; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Despite a current emphasis in Romantic scholarship on intersubjectivity, this study suggests that we still have much to learn about how theories of intersubjectivity operate in Romantic-era writings that focus on the family—the most common vehicle for exploring relationships during the period. By investigating how sympathy, intimacy, and fidelity are treated in the works of Mary Hays, Felicia Hemans, and Mary Shelley, this dissertation discovers the presence of an “ethics of refusal” within women’s Romantic-era texts. Texts that promote an ethics of refusal, I argue, almost advocate for a particular mode of relating within a given model of the family as the key to more equitable social relations, but, then, they ultimately refuse to support any particular model. Although drawn towards models of relating that, at first, seem to offer explicit pathways towards a more ethical society, texts that promote an ethics of refusal ultimately reject any program of reform. Such rejection is not unaccountable, but stems from anxieties about appearing to dictate what is best for others when others are, in reality, other than the self. In this dissertation, I draw from feminist literary critiques that focus on ethics; genre-focused literary critiques; and studies of sympathy, intimacy, and fidelity that investigate modes of relating within the context of literary works and reader-textual relations. Psychoanalytic theory also plays an important role within my third chapter on Mary Shelley’s novel Falkner. Scholarship that investigates the dialectical nature of Romantic-era literature informs my entire project. Through theorizing and studying an ethics of refusal, we can more fully understand how intersubjective modes functioned in Romantic literature and discover a Romanticism uniquely committed to attempting to turn dialectical reasoning into a social practice.Item The Life of Honor: Individuality and the Communal Impulse in Romanticism(2013) Kantor, Jamison Brenner; Wang, Orrin N.C.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)For most scholars of Romanticism, honor is a traditionalist value. It underwrites Edmund Burke's defense against revolutionary radicalism; it is the code of medieval crusaders and tribal highlanders in Walter Scott's novels; and it is a quality reserved for nobles such as Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice, who relies on honor to assert her privilege in the face of the rising middle-class. Despite these conservative connotations, The Life of Honor shows that early-nineteenth-century writers did not simply consider honor a reactionary ethos. Rather, they saw how honor could be progressive and egalitarian--a modern virtue that allowed them to grapple with the dilemmas of emerging liberal society. A personal sense of communal obligation, the modern honor ethic balanced the individualism emphasized by the republican political movement with the demands of a rapidly changing social order. Reading texts from a variety of authors and genres--Godwin's Jacobin novel, Wordsworth's autobiographical poetry, Scott and Austen's historical fiction, and the brutal slave narrative of Mary Prince--I demonstrate how this ancient civic virtue was reinvigorated in response to some of the most pressing cultural questions of the day, conflicts between the self and society that could not be resolved through the operations of sympathy or the power of the imagination. Because this modern form of honor emerged from post-revolutionary life, it was associated with a new political order: liberalism, a set of civic norms that began to thrive in the late-eighteenth-century and that still prevails in Europe today. While the Romantic honor code drew upon the liberal commitment to universal dignity and individual merit, Romantic honor simultaneously illuminated the conceptual problems of liberalism--its propensity to rank independence over obligation; to connect private commercial success with public virtue; and to abstract social predicaments from identity categories like race and gender. Responding to recent scholarship on the liberal disposition in Romantic pedagogy and nineteenth-century Realist aesthetics, The Life of Honor reveals the paradox of a civil society built around the pursuit of individual esteem and thus the wager of Romanticism's political commitments.Item Worlds Trodden and Untrodden: Political Disillusionment, Literary Displacement, and the Conflicted Publicity of British Romanticism(2013) Byrne, Joseph E.; Fraistat, Neil; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study focuses on four first-generation British Romantic writers and their misadventures in the highly-politicized public sphere of the 1790s, which was riven by class conflict and media war. I argue that as a result of their negative experiences with publicity, these writers--William Wordsworth, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Blake--recoiled from the pressures of public engagement and developed in reaction a depoliticized aesthetic program aligned with various forms of privacy. However, a "spectral" form of publicity haunts the subsequent works of these writers, which troubles and complicates the traditional identification of Romanticism with privacy. All were forced, in different ways, to negotiate the discursive space between privacy and publicity, and this effort inflected their ideas concerning literature. Thus, in sociological terms, British Romantic literature emerged not from the private sphere but rather from the inchoate space between privacy and publicity. My understanding of both privacy and publicity is informed by Jürgen Habermas's well-known model of the British public sphere in the eighteenth century. However, I broaden the discussion to include other models of publicity, such as those elaborated by feminist and Marxist critics. In my discussion of class conflict in late-eighteenth-century Britain, I make use of the tools of class analysis, hegemony theory, and ideology critique, as used by new historicist literary critics. To explain media war in the 1790s, I utilize the media theory of Raymond Williams, particularly his conception of media as "material social practice." All the writers in this study were profoundly engaged in the class conflict, media war, and politicized publicity of the British 1790s. They were similar in that they were negatively impacted by these phenomena, but different in their responses, depending on their discrete experiences and concerns. The various results were new conceptions of sensibility and the Gothic, new attitudes towards solitude and obscurity, all eventually incorporated into a new kind of literature now called "Romantic."Item Romantic Vacancy: British Women's Poetry, Skepticism, and Epistemology(2009) Singer, Katherine; Fraistat, Neil; Wang, Orrin N. C.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recent scholarship on Romantic women's writing has frequently been preoccupied with the loss, suffering, and sensibility central to women's poetry. My dissertation investigates how four women poets after the French Revolution eventually react against the cult of emotion that trapped them as primarily feeling subjects. Rather than passively depicting absence, they employ various figures of vacancy, a poetic tactic that productively and actively empties out habituated language and the regnant ideologies of the day. In vacating reified thought, women poets more importantly reconceptualize the Enlightenment thinking subject, rejecting two dominant modes of thought--sensibility and progressive reason--instead experimenting with anhedonia, non-meaning, and counterfactuals. Because these women poets view language as necessarily imposing structures of thinking, their varying poetics propose home-grown epistemologies, in dialogue with English and continental philosophy as well as Romantic theories about the revolutionary potential of language. Moreover, since these poets all share a belief in the intimate connection between poetic form and cognition, my chapters reveal how the poets' formal techniques reify, alter, and create ways of thinking. Though they often work from traditional forms, they make use of repetition, caesura, and footnotes to alter the way poems make and unmake meaning. Even more broadly, these poems about thought do not fall prey to Romanticism's tendency to escape from history into the imagination, yet neither do women poets allow themselves to be confined by either their historical place or their embodied identities. Instead, Romanticism might be defined as a movement that employs non-understanding as a means of keeping ideology, and the history that ideology presupposes, at bay. My first chapter defines vacancy as a trope for linguistic or cognitive breakdown, and my next two chapters on Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson explore how these writers engage respectively with Kantian ideas of free beauty and empiricist epistemologies about idiots. My chapter on Felicia Hemans discusses her use of brain-based models of the mind to create perceptual overload that challenges imperialist thinking, and the final piece demonstrates how Maria Jane Jewsbury uses images to dislodge reified visual representations of gendered or colonial landscapes and bodies.Item Chaos and the Microcosm: Literary Ecology in the Nineteenth-Century(2009) Scott, Heidi; Fraistat, Neil; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates literary responses to environmental change in nineteenth-century England. Two tropes, chaos in narrative and the microcosm in lyric poetry, suggest how literary works may have been precursors of ecological science. I argue that literary epistemology in the long nineteenth-century developed precocious theories of the way nature operates based on contingent narrative and microcosm systems. These ideas were adopted as empirical strategies once scientific ecology emerged in the twentieth-century, and both tropes are prominent in twenty-first century ecological science. Ecology appeared late among scientific disciplines partly because it relies on cooperation between reduction and holism: climate change theory, for example, uses microcosm models to develop narratives of environmental contingency. Five chapters consider these two tropes from historical, literary, and scientific perspectives. The first chapter is a historical introduction to nineteenth-century science that traces the development of environmental awareness from industrial pollution and early studies of nature in microcosm, especially in the work of Charles Darwin and Stephen Forbes. Chapter two investigates four narratives of environmental chaos spanning the long nineteenth-century: Gilbert White, Mary Shelley, Richard Jefferies and H.G. Wells emplot the radical new notion of a post-apocalypse environment in narratives that rely on chaotic discontinuity, rather than the coherent gradualism that marked evolutionary theories of the time. Chapter three examines microcosmic imagery in the work of several important poets, including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, John Clare, Percy Shelley, and Matthew Arnold. I argue that the imagination and close observation of nineteenth-century poets helped the nascent sciences conceive of ways to simplify nature without dismembering its complex structures. Chapter four, devoted to the ecological thinking of John Keats, traces his abandonment of teleological narrative in Hyperion in preference for the microcosmic Odes. Finally, chapter five reconciles the two tropes with an excursion into modern ecosystem science, paying particular attention to our contemporary strategies for investigating climate change. This chapter serves as a summation of the dissertation by complicating the dichotomy between chaotic narrative and model-microcosm, and it brings the study into concerns of the present day.