Search

On the heels of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, historian, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1973), contended the presidency had become too powerful, essentially 'imperial' in nature. Today, concern over a new, 'unitary' presidency, perhaps a 'new imperial presidency' wielding unconstitutional authority unchecked by Congress, has resurfaced (Howell, 2003; Rudalegive, 2005). In response, this dissertation asks two critical questions: What are the determinants of presidential imperial behavior? And secondly, is the imperial presidency an ongoing component of the modern presidency? To evaluate those questions, I apply a multi-level analysis to the Vietnam War, George W. Bush's War on Terror, and the Reagan Administration's handling of both the Iranian arms for hostage dealings and civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Specifically, I draw on the theoretical approaches formulated from the field of Foreign Policy Analysis, a sub-field of International Relations theory. Counter to conventional wisdom, I argue that the 'imperial presidency' is in fact a continual, if at times dormant, component of the modern presidency beginning with the Cold War. The president's evaluation of threats to their administration's military policy agenda serves as our primary independent variable and is strongly influenced by the associated level of domestic policy support stemming from two interactive, intervening variables; the United States Congress and the views of the American public. A third element is found in the American media, which serves as a conduit between Congress, the public and the presidency itself. When support among these three audiences is strong, presidents hold a free hand. Where support is weak, policy limitations exist. However, where support is weak, but the threat to the president's military priorities are perceived by the administration as significant, I argue they have been willing to ignore domestic constraints and proceed in an imperial manner. Those imperial actions represent the study's dependent variable.

This thesis uses the case study of the American firm Augustine Heard & Co. to explore how Americans made, and were made by British colonial society in nineteenth-century Hong Kong. It follows the Heard brothers throughout their firm's rise and decline in China to determine how they and their countrymen balanced often-conflicting colonial and metropolitan interests as they integrated with colonial and treaty port society. I use this American case study to argue that British colonial society provided a space where non-British communities were forced to reconcile their national identity with local colonial society and culture; that doing so helped reinforce colonial social and racial hierarchies and afforded these non-British communities opportunities to exploit colonial systems for their own profit, while also instilling within them a growing interest in the British imperial world, its political affairs, and its commercial networks. This thesis refines the developing global-microhistorical methodology to better address local or individual histories' relationships with broader historical contexts. I trace the Heard brothers' history onto progressively broader historical scales, considering the microhistorical, domestic, social, intraregional, and transnational contexts within which they interacted with British colonial society, defined their goals, and formed their identities. Each chapter adopts one of these scales, building thematically and chronologically on the preceding ones to describe how Americans interacted with colonial space in every aspect of their lives. Similar, in many ways, to the British, but also prepossessed of their own national interests and identity, the American case provides a necessary example of the criteria through which the non-British gained acceptance into colonial society. Centred on Hong Kong, this thesis examines the transnational lives of American traders to measure the strength of competing social, cultural, political, and commercial interests, clarifying the complex ways non-British communities interacted with nineteenth-century British colonialism and shaped Sino-foreign contact.

The Ghosts That Visit Us as We Dream is a poetic manuscript that observes my family's immigration from Tanzania to Canada. The poems are voiced from a variety of familial perspectives to capture how identity reforms and transforms throughout generations. Several of the poems were written as part of my research trip to Tanzania in January 2019, while others meditate on my experiences of growing up in Alberta, Canada. This manuscript principally employs repetitions and figurations of the natural world to reflect on wider themes of womanhood, belonging, cultural dissonance, loss, homeland, and spirituality. Water, in all its forms, becomes one of the collection's major metaphors, representing liminality, crossings, and time as recursive. My work traverses the borders between the imaginary, the inherited, and the present moment. Figurative Homelands: Second-generation Immigrant Experiences in North American Contemporary Poetry examines how second-generation immigrants figuratively represent their North American and ancestral homelands in poetry. It includes a critical analysis of the poetic works of South Asian, Muslim second-generation immigrants, Kazim Ali, Fatimah Asghar and Tarfia Faizullah, and evaluates how they fuse the literal with the figurative in order to explore, give expression to, and take ownership of multidimensional identities. It examines the poetics of diaspora, specifically considering second-generation immigrant diasporic identities, from a multidirectional approach. Moreover, it builds upon the framework of what Sadia Abbas calls the "new Islam," and examines how figurative homelands are constructed within the context of conflictual experiences arising from Islamophobia in the period following 9/11. This research also evaluates how second-generation immigrants craft figurative homelands using intergenerational storytelling and childhood remembrances. Additionally, it examines how loss manifests for writers who live in liminality, and how contradictory experiences or multiplicity are illustrated by gaps in both a poem's formal structure and its conceptual landscape.

This thesis explores how a desire to own guns is constituted within locally situated human lives in an attempt to explain why firearms have become such important objects of contestation in the United States. I spent a year conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Southern California with two organisations - the San Diego County Gun Owners and a pro-LGBTQ+ firearms advocacy group called the Pink Pistols. These activist organisations hold monthly meetings, regular social events, fundraisers, and encourage direct campaigning. Arriving in the field just two months prior to the 2016 United States general election, I found the members of these organisations actively engaged in public debate and recruitment. I accompanied gun owners to shooting ranges across the county, learned to shoot, travelled with them to defensive handgun courses and gun-rights conventions, and engaged in long conversations about why firearms have come to occupy such a central role in their lives. I examine how people understand their use of firearms, particularly for the reason of self-defence, to show how the terms of a national debate about guns can come to feed into the subjective embodied experiences that people have of their gender identity, their sense of belonging in a country, and their understanding of existential safety. Important to this is the ethnographer’s own journey of learning to feel comfortable around firearms and with his interlocutors. Throughout the thesis I engage with anthropological debates on embodiment and technology; how contemporary gendered and national identities are shaped and reformed in a dialogue between a remembered history and subjectively experienced present; and the limits and potential for an anthropological gaze that reserves an important place for empathy in the fieldwork process, even if this empathy is at times hard to give.

This dissertation argues that the concept of the 'heathen' expressed the exclusionary and expansionist precepts of English Protestantism in the Atlantic world between c. 1558 and c. 1700. Building upon recent scholarly developments in the cultural history of unbelief and the global history of Protestantism, the dissertation investigates language as a fundamental bridge between theology and culture in England and North America during the Long Reformation. It demonstrates that Protestants deployed the idea of the 'heathen' in historical, polemical, devotional, and colonial contexts in order to reinforce and reconfigure the relationship between the predestinarian framework of salvation, the postlapsarian condition of human beings, and the boundaries of the true church. Imbued with interconnected theological, rhetorical and literal meanings, the figure of the 'heathen' provided Protestant writers with a diachronic non-Christian persona that played a fundamental role in charting the continuously unfolding sacred history of the 'true religion'. The multivalent and adaptable, yet coherent and provocative concept of the 'heathen' reveals that ideas about numerous forms of non- Christianity were essential to the development of Protestantism. Etymologically derived from the uncultivated environment of the 'heath', the concept of the 'heathen' was pervasive in the English Bibles, where it referred to a fundamental connection between non-belief, idolatry, and the natural world, while also inviting the possibility of salvation through the intertwined physical and spiritual processes of planting, propagation, cultivation and conversion. As a feature of Protestant historical writing about early Christianity in the ancient world, the 'heathen' could refer either to the opponents and persecutors of Christian believers or to prospective converts. Invoking the concept of the 'heathen' could articulate animosity towards Catholicism, but it also exposed the waywardness that seemed to lurk within the professing community of the Church and the individual Christian conscience. Moreover, it could describe the seemingly ignorant and unreformed peoples of rural and remote regions in Britain. The idea of the 'heathen' communicated Protestant efforts to simultaneously exclude such sources of corruption from the Church of England and expand the 'true religion' through the propagation of the Gospel and the conversion of non-Christian peoples. In colonial Virginia and New England, the 'heathen' not only expressed hostility and uncertainty towards the indigenous inhabitants of North America, but also suggested that some non-Christian peoples could be converted and might be saved in accordance with predestinarian and postlapsarian doctrine. Investigating the relationship between theology and culture through the conceptual lens of the 'heathen' reveals an ambivalent and precarious, yet assertive and enduring Protestant effort to propagate the Gospel among the indigenous non-Christian inhabitants of the Atlantic world. As well as exposing the global dimensions of the Protestant preoccupation with non-belief, the 'heathen' also testifies to the underlying role of religious language in both shaping and challenging perceived connections between Christianity, civilisation, and modernity.

Since the new millennium, major Anglophone authors, including Colson Whitehead, Max Brooks, Sandra Newman, Lionel Shriver, Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Chris Beckett, Omar El Akkad and Christopher Brown have popularised post-apocalyptic genre fiction. This popularity appears to be a formal response to new challenges in the twenty-first century, triggered by global trends which range from anthropocentric global warming to globalisation. This thesis addresses how a range of American literary and genre authors adapt a compelling set of post-apocalyptic motifs to imagine new challenges to U.S. politics in the twenty-first century. The most notable of these tropes, dating from the late 2000s to the early 2010s, is the motif of future civil war or secession in America. These texts are concerned with three additional themes or scenarios which are apparent across this canon: censorship (after states separate and information cannot be shared across closed borders); state nationalism (as states compete for resources); and partisan rhetoric (which translates into civil violence). With these three recurrent themes, this thesis proposes that the American post-apocalypse is concerned with first, a new era of partisanship in America and, second, the centrality of media to these profound trends. Despite the global scale of these post-apocalyptic representations, their recurring landscapes are specific to America. These fictions repeatedly engage with key features of America's identity and government in the twenty-first century - from the globalised economy after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis to diplomatic tensions with nations including the Russian Federation. What does this genre revival say about the contemporary moment, especially as populism has come to define American democracy and the international order has become strained? This thesis reassesses this revival within the long history of American apocalypticism, exploring how core texts are responding to the rapidly changing dynamics of twenty-first-century politics and international relations. As Frank Kermode observes in The Sense of an Ending (1966), history continually returns to the apocalypse as the symbolic motif for unfolding significant events. This thesis argues that a new phase in the post-apocalyptic imagination has emerged from American politics. This phase is marked by a long-term disillusionment with political and government institutions. This backlash is evident from the 2016 election of President Trump. However, this disillusionment had gradually emerged over the two previous decades. The 2008 Global Financial Crisis played a crucial part in changing American perceptions of its global power. This event was concurrent with the rise of the Internet as a platform for public debate. The Internet has also changed how misinformation has been deployed both within the U.S. (to stoke political disillusionment) and against U.S. international relations. This thesis argues that the relationship between the U.S.'s uncertain global standing and the post-apocalyptic novel, shadowed by changes in mass and new media, tells an important story. It analyses a diverse range of post-apocalyptic fiction to contend that the genre is central to critiquing the relationship between media, news and American politics. Early twenty-first-century authors re-imagining the post-apocalypse in ways which anticipate and critique key features of American populism. In this canon, the post-apocalypse is driven by misinformation, the cult of personality and mainstream media engagement in partisan rhetoric. With America entering an unprecedented political era, genre fiction is potently articulating the emergence of new political trends, including 'post-truth' politics, which will become vital to rethinking the value basis of future American politics and international relations.

This thesis examines the novels of Chuck Palahniuk and argues his significance in the American literary canon as a novelist writing within the American absurdist tradition. Expanding on the philosophies of Albert Camus and Robert Hauck, this thesis argues that America is a country founded on absurdism. Tracing that legacy through its writers, this thesis asserts the importance of Palahniuk's novels as critiques of postmodern American society. In an increasingly weary American population, the inability to achieve the American Dream has become a source of postmodern anxieties. This thesis demonstrates how Palahniuk identifies and engages with core values within the American Dream, exposing these beliefs as simulacrums. Fight Club, Palahniuk's debut novel, has been co-opted by neoconservative political movements in America. However, this thesis postulates Tyler Durden is an absurdist hero, whose anarchic actions are anti-American. Palahniuk's bibliography is dedicated to the absurdist illumination of the futility of postmodern American identity. Through a close reading of his bibliography, this thesis explores Palahniuk's critique of the simulacrum of the American Dream through the exploration of core American values, including the heteronormative nuclear family, individualism, capitalism, and sexual morality. Finally, this thesis argues that, through Fight Club 2, Palahniuk invokes Barthes' theory of the Death of the Author to distance himself from neoconservative movements, and utilizes the narrative of the novel to once again reassert Tyler Durden as a character opposed to 'traditional' American values.

Amongst recent scholarly interest in vampire fiction, twenty-first century American vampire literature has yet to be examined as a body that demonstrates what is identified here as an evolution into three distinct yet inter-related sub-generic types, labelled for their primary characteristics as Monsters, Dreams, and Discords. This project extends the field of understanding through an examination of popular works of American twenty-first century literary vampire fiction, such as Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, alongside lesser-known works, such as Andrew Fox's Fat White Vampire Blues. Drawing on a cultural materialist methodology, this thesis investigates vampires as signifiers of and responses to contemporary cultural fears and power dynamics as well as how they continue an ongoing expansion of influential generic paradigms. This thesis also incorporates psychological theories such as psychodynamics alongside theoretical approaches such as Freud's consideration of the uncanny as means of understanding the undead as agents of fears and powerplays on a scale from individualized to global. Theories of power inform an argument for vampires as indicators of cultural threats, augmentations, or destabilizations within uchronic Americas. This thesis also draws on post-structuralism to inform an investigation of vampires as cultural indicators. Thus, theorists including Auerbach, Baudrillard, and Faludi are called on to underscore an examination of how modern undead narratives often defy - but do not disavow - cultural dominants, spanning a spectrum from reinforcing to questioning of environment. Through an assessment of central vampiric characters and their effects within the speculative Americas they inhabit, this thesis scrutinizes vampire narratives' interaction with contextualities such as terroristic infiltration and a perceived need for martial hegemony, the fluid form of the American Dream, and the persistence of intra-cultural racial antagonisms. This will be carried out through investigation of two key literary texts within each of the three sections, considering how each epitomizes the sub-genre, engages with key vampiric forms, and extends generic understanding. The narratives on which this thesis focuses range from the apocalyptic of the Monsters section, where overcoming vampire threat is linked to corruption in and of a post-9/11 American 'democratic' corpus, to unattainable wish-fulfilment in the Dreams section, home to attempted occlusions of monstrosity in representations of alternative faces of fear hidden within American Dreams, and a questioning of the divisiveness embedded in modern U.S. culture in Discords, where the most divisive and long-standing cultural challenge - racial antagonism - finds vampiric mimesis. While focus here is on twenty-first century vampire fiction as an evolving form, the literary works investigated carry forward a palimpsestic understanding of generic ancestry. As such, fundamental to this analysis is how each of the texts focused on here also assimilates understanding of earlier key works in the American vampire genre. Although film undoubtedly plays a significant role in the history and reception of America's undead, it only informs this thesis in the form of Tod Browning's 1931 Universal 'monster movie' Dracula, as not only the point of entry into popular awareness for modern vampire fiction, but also a universal referent for all subsequent iterations of U.S. undead. Alongside Bela Lugosi's influential portrayal of Stoker's Count in Browning's film, this thesis focuses on the influence of further iterations of Dracula and the two other foremost variants within twentieth-century American vampire fiction: Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954), in which vampire fiction first fully assimilates into American culture, and Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire (1976), a romanticizing of undead bloodlust in tension with questioning and angst.

This thesis is a critical study of British and American Gothic prose representations of madness and the madhouse. This focuses on historical changes in asylum practice from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, specifically from 1846 to 2014. While Gothic scholarship generally regards madness as being identifiable within most works of the genre, few studies have attempted to explain why it is that the Gothic's fascination with madness has endured beyond its literary origins in the late eighteenth century. Surprisingly, no full-length critical study has yet historically documented the Gothic mode's longstanding preoccupation with the madhouse, especially given how numerous these encounters in Gothic fictions are. For this reason, the present study turns its attention exclusively towards the institutional figure of the madhouse: a territory where madness has already been labelled into existence. The object of this thesis is to demonstrate how the Gothic text is haunted by notions of madness, and how in turn, the madhouse is haunted by discourses of the Gothic. This reading - informed by hauntology - of the Gothic madhouse space argues that by 'gothicising' the medical institution, Gothic fictions appeal to a memory of what has come before and anticipates a future for madness in Western culture. For this reason, Gothic encounters with the madhouse (where madness is simultaneously present and absent) are knowingly engaged with critiquing, politicising, rejecting, or even ignoring, the historical discourses on madness with which they are contemporary. This also examines the genre's complicity and reciprocity in longstanding and prejudicial attitudes towards mental ill-health. Divided into five historical epochs, this thesis reads: the Sweeney Todd story The String of Pearls (1846); Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1861-2); Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897); four tales from H.P. Lovecraft including 'The Tomb' (1917), 'Beyond the Wall of Sleep' (1919), The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927), and 'The Thing on the Doorstep' (1933); Robert Bloch's Psycho (1959); Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962); Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory (1984); Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988); Patrick McGrath's Spider (1990), Asylum (1991), 'Ground Zero' (2005) and Trauma (2007); Sarah Waters' Fingersmith (2002), and John Harwood's The Asylum (2014).

This is an investigation of the epic poetry produced in and about the Ibero-American world during the early modern period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) in trilingual perspective: in addition to the more familiar Spanish- and Portuguese-language texts, consideration is also––and, for the purposes of the thesis, above all––given to material in Latin. Latin was the third of the international literary languages of the Iberian imperial world; it is also by far the most neglected, having fallen between the cracks of modern disciplinary boundaries in their current configurations. The thesis seeks to rehabilitate the Latin-language component as a fully-fledged member of the Ibero-American epic tradition, arguing that it demands to be analysed with reference not only to the classical and classicising traditions but to those same themes and concerns––in this case, the centre|periphery binary––as are investigated for counterparts when in Spanish or Portuguese. The crucial difference is that––while the ends may be the same––the means of thematising these issues derive in form and signifying power from interactions with the conceptual vocabularies and frameworks of the Greco-Roman epic tradition. How is America represented and New World space figured––even produced––in a poetic idiom first developed by ancient Mediterranean cultures with no conception whatsoever of the continent of the western hemisphere? At the core is one such long neglected Ibero-American Latin-language epic by a figure who lived across the Iberian imperial world: the 'De Invento Novo Orbe Inductoque Illuc Christi Sacrificio' (Faenza, 1777) by Catalan-born Jesuit José Manuel Peramás. Peramás’s epic––which has never been the subject of a literary-critical study before––is offered as a test case: an exercise in analysing a Latin-language Hispanic epic qua Hispanic epic and setting it into Ibero-American literary-cultural context. This is to be understood in relation to the field of so-called ‘New World poetics’: an at present emergent zone of inquiry within Iberian colonial studies which until now has been developing almost completely without reference to the Latin-language portion of the corpus.

This thesis investigates urban development and locational memory in New York and Los Angeles during the mid to late twentieth century, as represented both materially in the landscape of the city and textually in fiction and memoir. I begin my study in Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, where paved gardens and concretised river beds lie beneath the gridded urban landscape which hides the past and dislocates memory from what is visible in urban space. Next, through my analysis of Marshall Berman’s reflections on his childhood in the Bronx, I paint a picture of New York during the 1950s, during which the proposals of urban planner and master builder Robert Moses were put to work, dismantling many of the city’s pre-existing urban structures and its institutional memory. Subsequently I move to Los Angeles in the late 1960s, analysing two works of fiction by Joan Didion and Alison Lurie. In this chapter I explore California’s spatial and temporal indeterminacy. From imagined to remembered space, I next examine Didion’s family memoirs and personal essays in addition to D. J. Waldie’s reminiscences. I find that despite attempts to cultivate one’s personal history in textual form, a sense of loss is what is long remembered and hard to control. My thesis comes to a close with L. J. Davis and Paula Fox in the early 1970s when there was a new form of change afoot in the built environment in the form of gentrification. In the fragmented, automobile-dominated Los Angeles; in the dislocated Bronx; in California where the past seems to melt into air; and in brownstone Brooklyn, I show that the experience of what Sigmund Freud deems “the uncanny” is rife, appearing in the cracks between the absent and the present, the invisible and the visible, memory and history. The fissures and gaps in the narratives of each author reflect the various processes and consequences of the imposition of twentieth-century modernism in particular urban spaces during this period.

Al Qaeda killings, posttraumatic stress, and the Gothic together triangulate a sizable space in recent American fiction that is still largely uncharted by critics. This thesis maps that shared territory in four novels written between 2005 and 2007 by writers who were born in America, and whose protagonists are the survivors in New York City after the World Trade Center falls. Published in the city of their tragedy and reviewed in its media, the novels surveyed here include Don DeLillo’s _Falling Man_ (2007), Jonathan Safran Foer’s _Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close_ (2005), Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s _The Writing on the Wall_ (2005), and Jess Walter’s _The Zero_ (2006). The thesis issues a challenge to the large number of negative and dismissive reviews of the novels under consideration, making a case that under different criteria, shaped by trauma theory and psychoanalysis, the novels succeed after all in making readers feel what it was to be alive in September 2001, enduring the posttraumatic stress for months and years later. The thesis asserts that 9/11 fiction is too commonly presented in popular journals and scholarly studies as an undifferentiated mass. In the same critical piece a journalist or an academic may evaluate narratives in which unfold a terrorist's point of view, a surviving or a dying New York City victim's perspective, and an outsider's reaction set thousands of miles away from Ground Zero. What this thesis argues for is a separation in study of the fictive strands that meditate on the burning towers, treating the New York City survivor story as a discrete body. Despite their being set in one of the most known cities of the Western world, and the terrorist attack that they depict being the most- watched catastrophe ever experienced in real-time before, these fictions have not yet been critically ordered. Charting the salient reappearing conflicts, unsettling descriptions, protagonist decay, and potent techniques for registering horror that resurface in this New York City 9/11 fiction, this thesis proposes and demonstrates how the peculiar and affecting Gothic tensions in the works can be further understood by trauma theory, a term coined by Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience (1996: 72). Though the thesis concentrates on developments in trauma theory from the mid 1990s to 2015, it also addresses its theoretical antecedents: from the earliest voices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that linked mental illness to a trauma (Charcot, Janet, Breuer, Freud), to researchers from mid-twentieth century (Adler, Lindemann) who studied how catastrophe affects civilian minds not previously trained to either fight war or withstand cataclysm. Always keeping at the fore the ancient Greek double-meaning of trauma as both unhealing “wound” and “defeat,” the thesis surveys tenets of the trauma theorists from the very first of those who studied the effects on civilian survivors of disaster (of what is still the largest nightclub fire in U.S. history, which replaced front page coverage of World War II for a few days: the Cocoanut Grove blaze in Boston, 1942) up to those theorists writing in 2015. The concepts evolving behind trauma theory, this thesis demonstrates, provide a useful mechanism to discuss the surprising yearnings hiding behind the appearance of doppelgängers, possession ghosts, terrorists as monsters, empty coffins, and visitants that appear to feed on characters’ sorrow, guilt, and loneliness within the novels under discussion. This thesis reappraises the dominant idea in trauma studies of the mid-1990s, namely that trauma victims often cannot fully remember and articulate their physical and psychic wounds. The argument here is that, true to the theories of the Caruthian school, the victims in these novels may not remember and express their trauma completely and in a linear fashion. However, the victims figured in these novels do relate the horrors of their memory to a degree by letting their narration erupt with the unexpectedly Gothic images, tropes, visions, language, and typical contradictions, aporias, lacunae, and paradoxes. The Gothic, one might say, becomes the language in which trauma speaks and articulates itself, albeit not always in the most cogent of signs. One might easily dismiss these fleeting Gothic presences that characters conjure in the fictions under consideration as anomalous apparitions signalling nothing. However, this thesis interrogates these ghostly traces of Gothicism to find what secrets they hold. Working from the insights of psychoanalysis and its post-Freudian re-inventers and challengers, it aims to puzzle out the dimensions of characters’ mourning in its “traumagothic” reading of the texts. Characters’ use of the Gothic becomes their way of remembering, a coded language to the curious. This thesis holds that unexpressed grief and guilt are the large constant in this grouping of novels. Characters’ grief articulation and guilt release, or the desire for symbolic amnesia, take paths that the figures often were suspicious of before 9/11: a return to organized religion, a belief in spirits, a call for vengeance, psychotherapy, substance abuse, splitting with a partner, rampant sex with nearby strangers, torture of suspects, and killing. All the earnest attempts through the above means by the characters to express grief, vent rage, and alleviate survivor guilt do so without noticeable success. True closure towards their trauma is largely a myth. No reliable evidence surfaces from the close reading of the texts that those affected by trauma ever fully recover. However, as this thesis demonstrates, other forms of recompense come from these searches for elusive peace and the nostalgic longing for the America that has been lost to them.

Covering the years 1832 to 1908, a period that saw significant development in prosthetic technologies—in particular artificial legs, teeth, and eyes—this thesis explores representations of prostheses in British and American nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and culture. By considering prosthetic devices such as wooden legs and hook hands alongside artificial body parts that are often overlooked in terms of their status as prostheses, such as wigs and dentures, this thesis is the first to examine holistically the varied and complex attitudes displayed towards attempts to efface bodily loss in this period. Lennard J. Davis has shown how the concept of physical normalcy, against which bodily difference is defined, gained cultural momentum in the nineteenth century as bodily statistics emerged onto the scene (Enforcing Normalcy). This thesis builds on Davis’s work by considering other historical factors that contributed to the rise of physical normalcy, a concept that I show was buttressed by an understanding of the “healthy body” as “whole”. Like Davis, I also explore the denigration of physical difference that such a rise encouraged. The prosthesis industry, which saw tremendous development in the nineteenth century, cashed in on the increasing mandate for physical normalcy. However, as this thesis shows—and where it breaks new ground—while contemporary journalism and advertising often lauded the accomplishments of an emerging group of professional prosthesis makers, fiction tended to provide the other side of the picture, revealing the stereotypes, stigma, scepticism, inadequacies, and injustices attached to the use and dissemination of prosthetic devices. I argue that Victorian prosthesis narratives complicated the hegemony of normalcy that Davis has shown emerged in this period. Showing how representations of the prostheticised body were inflected significantly by factors such as social class, gender, and age, this thesis argues that nineteenth-century prosthesis narratives, though presented in a predominantly ableist manner, challenged the dominance of physical completeness as they either questioned the logic of prostheticisation or presented non-normative subjects in threateningly powerful ways.

The following study argues that existing historical interpretations of how and why the unification of British North America came about in 1867are flawed. It contends that rather than a movement propelled mainly by colonial politicians in response to domestic pressures - as generally portrayed in Canadian-centric histories of Confederation - the imperial government in Britain actually played a more active and dynamic role due to the strategic and political pressures arising from the American Civil War. Rather than this being a basic ‘withdrawal’, or ‘abandonment’ in the face of US power as is argued on the rare occasions diplomatic or strategic studies touch upon the British North American Act: this thesis argues that the imperial motivations were more far-reaching and complex. The British policy on union was bound up with the wish to make the provinces more responsible for defence, a need greatly intensified by the Civil War; however this imperative was meant to help preserve the North American colonies in the empire and even more vitally outside of the orbit of the United States. From the metropolitan government’s point of view Confederation had its genesis in the antebellum period and was a long-term aim - not only to secure the British North America - but even fact to counter United States hegemony in on the continent. Therefore rather than being conceived as a ‘retreat’, it was an overarching plan to challenge Federal preponderance in North America. Due to the security dilemmas arising from the Civil War the long-term nature of this scheme became unworkable and was therefore accelerated to become a short-term response to a strategic dilemma.

This thesis explores how the paratexts to and physical features of English Tudor books about the New World presented the books’ content to their original readers. The contribution this thesis makes to knowledge is threefold. First, the field of study of English travel and colonial literature lacks a bibliographically informed account of how the books’ constitutive elements of type and paper affect meaning. Widespread use of modern editions of the few accessible texts effaces the originals’ rich aesthetic, structural and tactile forms and fails to comprehensively historicise the production and intentions of the books. The careful, contextualised examinations of typefounts and composition included in this thesis go beyond what has been previously done and suggest agendas for further, necessary and illuminating bibliographical work. Second, the thesis presents the first comprehensively investigative survey of how the paratextual elements of the books marketed the New World to Tudor England. It goes beyond John Parker’s fifty-year-old _Books to Build an Empire_ (1965) by considering the full range of forty-three editions’ paratextual apparatus, not just prefaces, proems and dedications. It is simultaneously a counterbalance to the narrow focus on Richard Hakluyt’s anthological _Principal Navigations_ (1598-1600). The thesis begins the much-needed recovery of the conceptual and publication histories of both the constitutive texts reprinted in _Principal Navigations_ and those not included in Hakluyt’s anthology that are nontheless relevant to the history of the genre. Third, this survey that challenges a still powerful teleology: that the publications were unequivocally books to build an empire. Many of these books were in fact marketed as recreational reads. As the paratextual, structural and material features of many of the books this thesis looks at are under-explored and under-reported, close examination of multiple exemplars was necessary to ensure that this thesis is a representative and reliable record of the marketing strategies used to promote Tudor books about America.

In 1963, M.H. Abrams suggested that the ultimate source of Wordsworth's poetry is the Bible, and, in particular, the New Testament. This thesis, however, demonstrates the importance of the Old Testament and offers the first extended analysis of Wordsworth's use of Old Testament rhetoric. It examines both his affectionate perceptions of the natural world, and the Biblical recollections that saturate his writing. The purpose is to align two critical discourses - on Scripture and topography - and in doing so, situate Wordsworth's sense of himself as a poet-prophet in both Britain and America. The four chapters are structured topographically (Dwelling, Vales, Mountains, Rivers), and organised around a phenomenological experience of lived space, as expressed in key poems. Close analysis of Wordsworth's poetic language from Descriptive Sketches to Yarrow Revisited reveals the influence of the Bible (and the recent analysis of sacred Hebrew poetry undertaken by Lowth), while the theories of Heidegger and Bachelard provide a conceptual approach to Wordsworth's investment in nature. The epilogue opens questions of Wordsworth's reception in America by exploring the awareness of cultural and physical geography and sense of Wordsworth's prophetic ministry amongst his heirs. The thesis concludes that Wordsworth's extensive recourse to scriptural language and the physical landscape strengthened his claim to be a Prophet of Nature. His poetry self-consciously adopted the universal 'language of men' - that of the King James Bible.

What did America mean to James Joyce? Little work has been done on the subject, despite a number of works documenting America's dealings with Joyce. This reflects a flagrant and very significant anomaly. American intellectuals, scholars and critics have long dominated the Joyce industry. They have tirelessly promoted his work, both during his lifetime and posthumously. The most prevalent views of Joyce - whether as an international modernist or a postmodern liberal - have been of an author 'invented by Americans', in Flann O'Brien's phrase. This thesis will reverse the vector in question. It will integrally address the question of Joyce's attitude to American history, politics and culture. In doing so, it will aim to raise important questions regarding the 'automatic fit' between America and Joyce that criticism has tended to take for granted. It will thus have important implications for future work on Joyce's literary practice and political and historical principles. The first chapter will focus on the presence of American literary culture in Joyce's works. The second chapter will develop a composite, historical reading of the meanings and functions of American popular culture in selected parts of Joyce's texts. It will focus on a 'mediated America' in Joyce's works as opposed to his allusive use of it. It will consider the question of how far Joyce's writings deal with an America mediated through European and, above all, British and colonial channels which markedly inflect its significance. The third chapter will deal with Joyce and Irish America. My research will focus on three key areas: Irish emigration to America; America and Irish nationalism, including Fenianism and American support for it; and American-Irish culture. The final chapter will focus on Joyce's responses to the American reception of his work in the twenties and thirties, and their incorporation into Finnegans Wake.

Robert Baker Aitken (1917-2010) was an American Zen Buddhist master who stood at the forefront of the American Zen tradition and pioneered many of its novel adaptations. Authoring 13 books on Zen Buddhism, studying under three noteworthy teachers, and having knowledge of the source languages of Zen Buddhist texts and deep knowledge of the tradition as a whole, Aitken was a uniquely experienced master compared to the whole of American Zen. While having to teach in a culture vastly different than anything Buddhism had to experience before and witnessing the abuses which commonly occurred in American Buddhism, Aitken began to lecture on a variety of topics, such as the possibility of an entirely lay Zen Buddhist community in America, how to prevent abuse in American Zen, and the role of sexual activity in one's practice. The purpose of this research is not just to document Aitken's novel adaptations, but to connect them back to the Buddhist tradition throughout history, showing that much of Aitken's reasoning and conclusions have deep roots in various Buddhist traditions, such as Indian Buddhism through its Vinayas, Mahayana Buddhist philosophy through its antinomian stance on sexual activity, Chinese Buddhism through its Bodhisattva Precepts, Japanese Buddhism through its post-Meiji era stance on marriage, and Zen Buddhism throughout time.

This thesis explores critical responses to American-ness, American identity, and most significantly American myth, in independent films about America in cultural terms, and their attempts to deconstruct the myths of nation and culture. The independent films about America analyzed in this thesis range from the 1960s to the 1990s, made by filmmakers across movements and cultures, but they all contain in some measure three key concepts: the “outsider,” the “search,” and a narrative “non-arrival.” Easy Rider (1969) will be explored as the prototype for this paradigm, contrasted with films that reinterpret the road-movie structure away from existential angst and toward richer ambiguities: Alambrista! (1977), Gummo, Stroszek, Chan is Missing, and The Watermelon Woman (1996). Transnationality reflects in the content and production of many “outsider” films; therefore my study replaces the category American films with films in and about America. These films about America are threaded together by the outsider as a position relative to social acceptance and unified identity (the “inside”), and the search as a yearning, a desire for peace, happiness, meaning, etc. molded by transience and instability. The search never yields the result or object the characters intend to find, and within this non-arrival the denial of resolution informs us about the unsurety of life for the outsider, and the elusiveness of the nation as a mythic construct. The unsettling of myth is interpreted as a kind of hauntology, as the ‘haunting’ or persistence of violence and myth is analyzed.

This thesis examines the period in command of British land forces during the American War of Independence of Sir William Howe. The previously untapped resource of a draft of Howe’s famous narrative to the House of Commons underpins the original contribution made by this thesis, which also draws original conclusions from more familiar documents. Howe’s command is considered in the light of four major factors: his relationship with subordinate officers; the composition and quality of his army; his relationship with the American Secretary, Lord George Germain; and his personal qualities and experience. These four factors are then combined to consider key tactical and strategic decisions made by Howe while in command of the British army in North America. No attempt has been made to examine every decision or event during Howe’s period in command. Rather, those most contentious and controversial events, and those that can be reconsidered using new evidence and new interpretations of existing evidence, have been focussed on. This thesis does not (nor was it intended to) systematically counter the prevailing opinions of Howe set down over more than two centuries of historical works. However, it can be seen that Howe had more reasonable grounds for some of his most contentious decisions than has previously been argued and his overall strategy for 1776 was more coherent than he is generally given credit for.

This thesis examines the controversy surrounding the doctrine of atonement among transatlantic Methodist during the Victorian and Progressive Eras. Beginning in the eighteenth century, it establishes the dominant theories of the atonement present among English and American Methodists and the cultural-philosophical worldview Methodists used to support these theories. It then explores the extent to which ordinary and influential Methodists throughout the nineteenth century carried forward traditional opinions on the doctrine before examining in closer detail the controversies surrounding the doctrine at the opening of the twentieth century. It finds that from the 1750s to the 1830s transatlantic Methodists supported a range of substitutionary views of the atonement, from the satisfaction and Christus Victor theories to a vicarious atonement with penal emphases. Beginning in the 1830s and continuing through the 1870s, transatlantic Methodists embraced features of the moral government theory, with varying degrees, while retaining an emphasis on traditional substitutionary theories. Methodists during this period were indebted to an Enlightenment worldview. Between 1880 and 1914 transatlantic Methodists gradually accepted a Romantic philosophical outlook with the result that they began altering their conceptions of the atonement. Methodists during this period tended to move in three directions. Progressive Methodists jettisoned prevailing views of the atonement preferring to embrace the moral influence theory. Mediating Methodists challenged traditionally constructed theories for similar reasons but tended to support a theory in which God was viewed as a friendlier deity while retaining substitutionary conceptions of the atonement. Conservatives took a custodial approach whereby traditional conceptions of the atonement were vehemently defended. Furthermore, that transatlantic Methodists were involved in significant discussions surrounding the revision of their theology of atonement in light of modernism in the years surrounding 1900 contributed to their remaining on the periphery of the Fundamentalist-Modernist in subsequent decades.

While few would deny America is the most powerful nation on earth, there is considerable debate, and controversy, over how America uses its foreign policy power. This is even truer since the “unipolar moment,” when America gained sole superpower status with the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. In the Cold War Reinhold Niebuhr was the main theological voice speaking to American power. In the Unipolar world, the Religious right emerged as the main theological voice, but instead of seeking to curb American power the Religious right embraced Neoconservatism in what I will call “Totemic Conservatism” to support use of America's power in the world and to triumph Manifest destiny in American foreign policy, which is the notion that America is a chosen nation, and this legitimizes its use of power and underpins its moral claims. I critique the Niebuhrian and Religious right legacies, and offer a classical realist strategy for theology to speak to America power and foreign policy, which avoids the neoconservative and religious conservative error of totemism, while avoiding the jettisoning of Niebuhr's theology by political liberals, and, the political ghettoizing of theology by his chief critics. This strategy is based on embracing the understanding of classical realism, but not taking the next step, which both Niebuhr and neoconservativism ultimately do, of moving from a prescriptive to a predictive strategy for American foreign policy. In this thesis, I argue that in the wake of the unipolar moment the embrace of the Religious right of Neoconservatism to triumph Manifest destiny in American foreign policy is a problematic commingling of faith and politics, and what is needed instead is a strategy of speaking to power rooted in classical realism but one which refines Niebuhrian realism to avoid the risk of progressing a Constantinian theology.

From the release of their first single “Surfin’” in 1961 to the release of the album Pet Sounds in 1966, rock history traces the arc of the American rock group the Beach Boys in broad terms of the early-sixties Southern California surf music trend and the revolutionary effects of the Beatles’ stateside arrival in 1964. Typical claims for progress, autonomy, the significance of the album, and myths of authenticity in the study of the emergence of the rock concept, however, tend to promote an essentialist understanding of what rock music is about and what it is for. This study proposes an alternative narrative in which the regulating dichotomies of rock—art versus commerce, seriousness versus schlock, the authentic versus the inauthentic— are historicized, in the case of the Beach Boys’ transition from surf band to a complex studio recording project, as matters of creative practice and conflicting sensibilities. Questioning the conventional wisdom of rock history, this project suggests a counter-story about the significance of creative achievement, failure, and advancement

This thesis examines the relationship between Ulster unionists and the United States during the Home Rule era from 1880 to 1920. As they fought to uphold the Union, Ulster unionists reacted to Irish-American involvement in the Irish nationalist movement with anxiety and fear of the impact on a potential Dublin parliament. At the same time, unionists cultivated an image of a violent and extremist Irish-America in order to counter Irish nationalism and support their own movement. Unionists condemned the American funding of Irish nationalism and United States government interference on the Irish question. However, they were also anxious to show that unionism had international appeal, seeking American support against Home Rule and promoting a self-image of close ties to the United States. This thesis argues that Ulster unionists took a multifaceted and paradoxical approach to America, repudiating American involvement in the Irish nationalist movement while attempting to find opportunities to advance the cause of unionism in the United States. Throughout the Home Rule period, the Ulster unionist record of appeals and responses to the United States was marked by unevenness and contradictions which limited their effectiveness. However, unionists increasingly used an idealized, imagined America to support their own movement. They cited American historical and constitutional examples and fostered an Ulster identity based in part on Scotch-Irish heritage and Protestant connections. Ulster unionists were less insular and more internationally focused than they are generally portrayed. Chapter I introduces the historical context and historiographic framework in which the thesis operates. Chapters II and III provide an overview of the relationship between Ulster unionists and the United States from 1880 to 1920. During this period, unionists attempted to garner American support for their movement while contemporaneously responding to Irish-American nationalism and the involvement of the United States government on the Irish question. Subsequent chapters are arranged thematically, examining the elements of the Ulster unionists’ American strategy. Chapter IV investigates Scotch-Irish ethnic revival and associational culture in the United States, analyzing continued links to Ireland and attitudes toward Irish Home Rule. Chapter V provides case-studies of unionist visits to the United States as they endeavored to counter nationalist influence and build up a unionist following. Chapter VI explores the interconnection of religion and politics in Ulster’s relationship with America. Chapter VII examines the impact of American history and politics on the Ulster unionist movement. Chapter VIII concludes that the inability of Ulster unionists to effectively deal with the United States in the present day has roots in the relationship between unionists and America during the Home Rule era.

Widespread popular fascination with America, and an appreciation of American culture, was not introduced by Hollywood cinema during the early decades of the 20th century, but emerged during the late-Victorian period and was driven by the popular press. By the 1880s, newspaper audiences throughout the country were consuming fragments of American life and culture on an almost daily basis. Under the impulses of the so-called 'new journalism', representations of America appeared regularly within an eclectic range of journalistic genres, including serialised fiction, news reports, editorials, humour columns, tit-bits, and travelogues. Forms of American popular culture - such as newspaper gags - circulated throughout Britain and enjoyed a sustained presence in bestselling papers. These imported texts also acted as vessels for the importation of other elements of American culture such as the country's distinctive slang and dialects. This thesis argues that the late-Victorian popular press acted as the first major 'contact zone' between America and the British public. Chapter One tracks the growing presence of America in the Victorian press. In particular, it highlights how the expansion of the popular press, the widespread adoption of 'scissors-and-paste' journalism, the development of transatlantic communications networks and technologies, and a growing curiosity about life in America combined to facilitate new forms of Anglo-American cultural exchange. Chapter Two explores how the press shaped British encounters with American modernity and created a pervasive sense of a coming 'American future'. Chapter Three focuses on the importation, circulation, and reception of American newspaper humour. Finally, Chapter Four unpacks the role played by the press in the importation, circulation, and assimilation of American slang. It makes an original contribution to a number of academic disciplines and debates. Firstly, it challenges the established chronology of Anglo-American history; America gained a significant foothold in British popular culture long before the twentieth century. Moreover, this was not a result of a forcible American 'invasion' but a form of voluntary transatlantic exchange driven by the tastes and desires of British newspaper readers. Secondly, it argues that America's presence in late-Victorian popular culture has been underestimated by historians who have focused instead on domestically produced culture, engagements with Western Europe, and the cultural dimensions of Empire. Whilst the full extent of America's significance cannot be mapped out in one study, this thesis establishes the extent of America's cultural presence and makes the case for its insertion into future Victorian Studies scholarship. Thirdly, this thesis contributes to the growing field of press history. It maps out connections between British and American newspapers, exploring how the press served to move information between the old world and the new. Finally, this project acts as an early example of born-digital scholarship; a study conceived in response to the development of digital archives. As such, it contributes to discussions on digital methodologies and debates within the field of Digital Humanities. In particular, it demonstrates that digitisation allows researchers to research and write do new kinds of history; to ask new questions, make new connections, and develop new projects - to do things that we couldn't do before.

This thesis examines the experiences and impacts of the deployment of Highland soldiers to North America in the mid to late-eighteenth century. Between 1756 and 1783, Britain sent ten Highland battalions to the North American theatre, where they fought for the duration of both the Seven Years‟ War and the War of American Independence. The pressures of recruiting, utilizing, and demobilizing these men created powerful new forces in the Scottish Highlands, occurring, and in some cases prefiguring, the region‟s severe socio-economic problems. The impact of military contributions to the imperial state also had significant implications for Gaelic self-perception and the politics of loyalty and interest. This thesis asserts the importance of imperial contacts in shaping the development of the Scottish Highlands within the British state. Rejecting the narrative of a centrifugal empire based on military subjugation, this thesis argues that Gaels, of all social groups, constructed their own experiences of empire, having tremendous agency in how that relationship was formed. The British Empire was not constructed only through the extension or strengthening of state apparatus in various geographical spaces. It was formed by the decision of local actors to willingly embrace the perceived advantages of empire. Ultimately, the disproportionately large Highland commitment to military service was a largely negative force in the Highlands. This thesis establishes, however, the importance of political and ideological imperatives which drove these decisions, imperatives that were predicated on inter-peripheral contacts with British America. It establishes the extent to which Highland soldiers willingly ensured the development of British imperialism in the late eighteenth century.

One of the most understudied frontiers, the Kentucky frontier was also one of the most violent. For twenty years this region was affected by a bloody war that came to involve the new settler population, numerous Indian tribes, the British, and the American government. More than a border war, the battle for Kentucky and the trans-Appalachian west came to define the communities which grew up in its midst, altering world views, attitudes, and compounding prejudices. It is the purpose of this thesis to accomplish two goals: first, this work will tackle the lack of recent scholarship on this region by providing a detailed history of the Kentucky frontier during the American Revolution and its subsequent period. The second goal of this thesis is to study, analyse and understand how the violence generated by the war with the Indians helped to shape settler society. By thinking of violence not purely as the result of other, more potent social forces – racism, economic fears, competition for land – it is possible to study and understand its formative impact upon early American society. From the short term development of vendetta fuelled warfare to the long term impact this war had upon relations between white and Native America, the war for the trans-Appalachian west saw violence taking on a particularly important, particularly formative role.

The objective of this thesis is to investigate and understand why and how consent is manipulated in societies where severe coercion seems to be effective in securing power. This text therefore analyses the role and nature of coercion and consent – of armed conflict and news production - in Colombia: a society where severe coercion seems to be both effective and profitable. Part 1 of the thesis studies the role of coercion from the Spanish Conquest and Colonial Period to the current regime in terms of the political, social and economic interests that predominate in each period, in terms of the role of armed groups – the main instruments of coercion - in the implementation of these interests, and in terms of the resistance to these pressures. Part 2 analyses the role of consent in terms of historical interests in Colombian media production, in terms of the role of media organisations – the main instruments of consent - in the implementation of these interests, and in terms of dissent. Part 3 focuses on current Colombian news production because this is the main method through which official information related to the present armed conflict is currently being transmitted to the public and because Colombian news production seems to bridge the gap between coercion and consent: by framing and promoting armed conflict. Part 1 uses historical sources, academic articles, human rights reports and nine personal interviews with representatives of the Colombian Armed Forces, guerrilla groups and human rights organisations to represent the broadest possible political spectrum. Part 2 is based on political pamphlets and literature, newspaper and magazine articles and leaflets and 14 interviews with representatives of mass media conglomerates, alternative movements and media groups. Part 3 uses a sample of 851 current news stories to understand the nature of a hypothetical frame that contextualises the actions of the FARC – the main guerrilla group - as illegitimate challenges to proper authority. (Continued ...).

This thesis inquires into the factors behind Hollywood's depiction of the Middle East. That depiction is not static, but is modified in response to changes in political events and US government foreign policy. Although the events of 9/11 seemed to justify the traditional negative stereotype of Arabs, the image has been partially and rationally re-interpreted. This was due to the rise in prominence of the ideas of a minority of radical and free-thinking members of the Hollywood community who embraced a more intellectual approach, which advocated that the popular Western view of the Arab world was unjustified and based on a fallacious fabrication for Western political advantage. The research further shows that these activists did not owe allegiance to the Hollywood-US government propaganda machine. They were able to fracture this traditional alliance and provide the opportunity for the appearance of films of a radical nature, which were critical of US Middle Eastern policy and projected the Arab world in a new light. The study analyzes a selection of films that represent the Middle East in terms of their philosophy and cinematic structure, which enables them to act as vectors to raise public awareness of the issues and to promote reconciliation and co-existence between East and West.

Destination USA examines the works of the travel writer William Least Heat-Moon and his place ·in the tradition of American travel writing. The study begins with an overview of the current scholarship and trends within contemporary American travel writing and then moves on to limit and to define its scope. Next an outline and an in-depth explanation of the structure and thematics of such works is presented. Contemporary American travel writing has two dominant structures: the on-the~road motif and the intimate journey Of~ place. Woven into these two structures are three main themes common to both. The first theme focuses on the role of selfdiscovery in travel writing. The second theme highlights the role of travel writing in discovering hidden or marginalised American voices. The third theme centres around travel writing's use as a warning about or an assessment of the current American situation. Next a historical overview of the roots of American travel writing is undertaken which highlights the role it has played in the foundation of the country as well as providing the basis for those structures and themes outlined above. From there the dissertation moves onto an analysis of the works of William Least Heat-Moon: Blue Highways (1982), PrairyErth (1991) and River-Horse (1999). Heat-Moan's works provide an effective focal point for the understanding of contemporary American travel writing as a whole. They are forward looking and experimental while retaining a continuity with the tradition of American travel writing. An in-depth analysis of his trilogy on the American landscape is supported by previously unpublished interviews by the author. His works are then examined to uncover how they point to travel writing's elision with naturalist prose and work together to form a multifaceted vision of America. !

The foundation for this study rests upon the military ideology of Revolutionary America, which had as its guiding principle, the conviction that standing armies in peacetime were a liability. To many Americans a standing army represented an ever present threat to their rights as citizens. As a consequence, responsibility for the security of the nation was placed upon the idealised notion of the citizen soldier. This was a citizen, who it was supposed, would, when the need arose, voluntarily renounce his own personal priorities for the sake of the nation. Reality, however, proved otherwise, for citizen soldiers rarely achieved what was expected of them. Yet as this study's examination of the Congressional debates of the 1790's makes clear, the notion of the citizen soldier proved to be extremely resilient. Despite a catalogue of failings, the country's reliance on the state militias for a significant proportion of its military capability persisted. This served to severely handicap the effectiveness of the American military establishment during the War of 1812. Primarily, the effect that the militias had upon the effectiveness of the military establishment is found within the various interactions of citizen soldiers with the regular army. Although these interactions are categorised and analysed within the context of this study, all of them revolve around the issue of consent. Militiamen demanded from the federal government that once they had consented to serve, it was beholden upon the federal government to ensure that they were properly equipped and supplied, as well as being directed towards some worthwhile objective. Yet despite the considerable importance these interactions had upon the military establishment, and their utility in understanding many of its failings, historians of the conflict have failed to adequately consider them. Instead, they have tended to either denigrate the militias' obvious failings, or eulogise their achievements, rather than examine why the militias were capable of performances at both extremes.

This study traces the ways in which the New World was incorporated by European - particularly English - fields of knowledge in the generations following Columbus's 'discovery' of America in 1492. Conceptualisations of America rapidly shifted from virtual incomprehension to a recognition and realisation of the continent's commercial potential. While English Western voyage narratives promoted the Protestant ethos of virtuous conversion, in practice, English commercial interests were determined to exploit American natural resources. Focusing on accounts of contemporary travel, exploration, and fantasy voyage narratives, the thesis charts the emergence of commercial competition between England and other European nation states for the possession of New World territories. Not all English writers, however, responded positively to these expansionist policies. Some writers - such as Phineas Fletcher and Joseph Hall - were concerned about the degenerative influence foreign contact had upon the English nation. Others - such as Richard Hakluyt, Andrew Marvel1, John Dryden and Thomas Sprat - confidently asserted the benifits of travel, trade and colonisation. Occupying an uneasy middle ground were a body of writers - including Sir Francis Bacon, Sir John Davies, John Donne, and John Milton - who debated the benefits of exploration and colonisation and formulated strategies to control their influence. As well as representing a view of 'England' within a concert of powers, voyage narratives voiced a variety of domestic issues. The idea of vnew worlds' captured the imagination of Renaissance writers. In England, the genre of the voyage narrative was a remarkably popular, diverse, and sophisticated literary form. This study demonstrates that Renaissance travel accounts were vehicles to express other social, political, religious, and cultural concerns. From Francis Bacon's empiricism to the proto-feminism of Margaret Cavendish, the thesis details the ways in which concepts of vnew worlds', literal and figurative, were important tropes which allowed English writers to explain, argue and disseminate their ideological positions. Indeed, by 1660, the voyage narrative had become one of the key discourses in which to address, with relative impunity from political repercussions, issues of the recent past.

This dissertation examines how nineteenth-century American authors represented the Bible as a shared public text that people read together while they were on trains, in hospitals, on the battlefield, and abroad. By engaging with recent scholarship on postsecularism, deliberative democracy, and the jeremiad, this study seeks to show how authors brought the Bible into the public sphere and figured shared reading as a site of democratic collaboration across cultural and racial divides. These writers also used biblical allusion to rebuke the nation for failing to meet its democratic ideals and to urge social reform. The Bible’s significance as a cultural touchstone offered writers a canvas to both critique the nation’s prejudice and invite readers into a fellowship of equals. Chapter 1 examines how Herman Melville’s Omoo (1847) uses nineteenth-century perceptions of the Apostles Peter and Paul to decry abusive missionary contact in Polynesia and to advocate for a more tolerant approach to intercultural contact. In these scenes of multicultural encounter, racial equality depends on white Christian readers surrendering their claims to interpretive dominance and social supremacy and showing a willingness to learn new spiritual insights from Indigenous Polynesian readers. Chapter 2 explores how Harriet Beecher Stowe and Hannah Crafts envision African American bible readers as knowledgeable and empowered interpreters and use these interpreters to defy white oppression and form a multicultural democratic space. Chapter 3 examines how Native American authors S. Alice Callahan, Zitkala-Ša, and Leslie Marmon Silko integrated the Bible into Indigenous spirituality and used biblical prophecy to rebuke white colonialism. Chapter 4 analyzes how Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902–1903) uses biblical references to challenge Jim Crow segregation and encourage interracial community. Each of these authors urges greater respect for marginalized communities while also rebuking those in power and warning of future desolation if they continue their oppression. Bible-reading scenes envision collaborations that transform one or both readers, with the democratic ideal being found in the equal meeting of minds.

The American intellectual and diplomatic discourse with the late Ottoman Empire is an understudied field of history. Major works to date are primarily focused on the US relations with the Turkish Republic starting in 1924, which at best may highlight the Barbary Wars and the Treaties of 1830 and 1862 as a precursor. Few works offer, if any, a comprehensive insight into the diplomatic relationship that evolved between the US and the Near East from 1830 to 1930. This research is meant to fill the absence by probing into the service of key American diplomats and intellectuals who visited and sojourned in the late Ottoman Empire and their findings. Therefore, The Intellectual and Diplomatic Discourse of American Progressives and the Late Ottomans, 1830–1930, traces the diplomatic endeavors and histories lending to American congressional and executive decisions of reforms and the formation of American foreign policy in the Near East. The research also analyzes how progressives relied on Ottoman reforms to inform their political theories as diplomatic communications piqued political interests. Ideas began to surface in lectures and publications during the mid-nineteenth century, brought forth by forerunners such as Lieber, Woolsey, and Burgess. By the dawn of the Progressive Era, American intellectuals would infer valuable ideas from the Turks to enhance progressivism in the United States politically, economically, and socially. The notions brought forth by American intellectuals displayed considerable diversity as progressivism continued to evolve into the twentieth century.

Smallville uses both the mythos of Superman, the character of Clark, and the character of corn to explore what it means to become a hero, what values and ideals become a part of that journey, and how location and culture are integral to it all. By exploring themes of Indigeneity, whiteness, masculinity, ruralness, and American identity, I argue that the stories of both corn and Clark Kent are not only significant in terms of American myth, but in how American popular culture is shaped by and shaped into something as seemingly inconsequential as an ear of corn.