English Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766

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    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."
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    Visa Denied: U.S. Playwriting and the anti-Political Habitus post-"Angels in America"
    (2013) Pressley, Daniel Nelson; Bryer, Jackson R; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    "Visa Denied: U.S. Playwriting and the Anti-Political Habitus post-Angels in America," a dissertation by Daniel Nelson Pressley, argues that an anti-political prejudice operates across the points of the U.S. theater-making spectrum, with particularly inhibiting results for playwrights even in the two decades following Tony Kushner's influential political epic. Using a reception framework suggested by Susan Bennett and others, along with the memory and "ghosting" ideas of Marvin Carlson and Diana Taylor, the dissertation suggests unrecognized anti-political patterns in criticism and production, explores broken links with the traditions of the 1930s and the lost lessons of workers' theater movements from the 1920s and 1930s, and contrasts contemporary American and British practice and reception by examining dramatic technique in plays by David Hare, Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Arthur Miller and Wendy Wasserstein. The project acknowledges the absorption of political energy on the stage by the rising documentary forms since the emergence of solo performer Anna Deavere Smith, concluding that the acceptance and dominance of fact-based methods, while expanding the drama's vocabulary, contributes to an even greater outsider position for the playwright as political thinker.
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    Cabalas and Cabals in Restoration Popular Literature
    (2004-05-28) Johnson, Susan Kaye; Rosenthal, Laura; English Language and Literature
    Cabala, a mystical Jewish intellectual system, and cabal, a derogatory term for small groups, reflect the political, philosophical, and social crises of the Restoration and illustrate the conflicted environment of these unstable years. Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn seize upon the power and flexibility these words and their associations afford to turn them into generative devices to create and seize authority for themselves and for their opinions. In this process, Cavendish and Behn expand the ways the words are used in popular literature. Few authors use "cabala" and "cabal" in their popular works during this period but Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn stand out for their repeated and extended use of these terms in their popular writings. Margaret Cavendish, denied a place in the intellectual circles of her time, uses a derivation of the traditional, philosophical cabala in her work Blazing World as an avenue to the authority necessary to create worlds in which she, through a cabal, can control the exploration of scientific theories and establish a monarchy that brings about peace. Cabala also shapes Blazing World's structure and plot as a generative, positive means of creation for the fiction and its practitioners. While Cavendish's use of "cabala" is theoretical and "fantastical," Aphra Behn uses both "cabala" and "cabal" to illustrate the dangers of actual events and the impact of the threats present in the world around her. Behn uses these words in her later works, pieces that portray devolving political and social systems and personal honor. In Behn's works, "cabala" and "cabal" become powerful means of expressing the dire consequences of private and public actions, revealing the hopelessness of the late Restoration. By understanding Cavendish's and Behn's use of "cabala" and "cabal," their modern readers can better comprehend the Restoration's similarly conflicted, disintegrating environment as well as the power these words possessed at the time. Once the hope of the early Restoration dissipates, "cabala" and "cabal" signify existing societal and political failings in early eighteenth century literature, with a revival of traditional cabalistic form in later literature.