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This thesis explores the representation of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in four epic poems spanning the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, investigating how the politico-historical conditions of early modern Spain and Mexico gave rise to varying concepts of heroism. Through an analysis of Gabriel Lobo Lasso de la Vega's *Mexicana* (1594), Antonio de Saavedra Guzmán's *El peregrino indiano* (1599), Juan Cortés Osorio's *Las Cortesiadas* (c. 1665), and Juan de Escoiquiz's *México conquistada* (1798), this thesis establishes a transatlantic dialogue between poets writing from both the Peninsula and the Americas, exploring what the diversity of heroisms embedded in their epics reveals about the complex economic, cultural, religious, and political matrix of early modern Spanish and colonial society. In my consideration of how the figure of Cortés is used as a tool to explore issues of patronage, creole identity, evangelisation, and nationalism, I question not only how heroic discourse is conditioned by historical context, but also by the poets themselves, who, far from objective recorders of Cortés' deeds, harbour their own personal motivations and ideological agendas. Through tracing the epic genealogy of Cortés across three centuries, this thesis not only follows the journey of the conquistador, but also that of the epic genre and its intimate relationship with the history of Spanish imperialism.

This thesis aims to provide a detailed account of Scottish colonisation efforts in the seventeenth century. In the first place, it seeks to provide an update to the only book-length study of the topic, George Pratt Insh's 1922 Scottish Colonial Schemes, which covered Scottish efforts in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, East New Jersey, and Carolina. This thesis critically examines these and other ventures in light of more recent scholarship, particularly in the fields of Atlantic history and transnational studies of the Scottish diaspora. While the insights provided by these newer approaches and a broader Atlantic view are incorporated into this study, it is necessary to understand the political, economic, religious, and constitutional context of Scotland, England, and Stuart Britain to understand Scottish colonial efforts in the seventeenth century. With these underpinnings, this thesis addresses the question of why Scotland failed to establish a formal empire and questions relating to the effects the 1603 union of the crowns had on Scottish and English commerce, Scottish sovereignty, and the distribution of royal patronage in the Stuart kingdoms. Scoto-English relations permeated each of the colonial designs undertaken by Scots in the period. Following these relations, it is argued that the first phase of the union of the crowns (1603-1638) saw new opportunities for Scots to become involved in colonisation. Scoto-English relations changed as a result of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate, setting the stage for the second phase of the union of the crowns (1660-1707), which was characterised by opposition rather than opportunity. By examining these developments, new insight is gained into how colonisation played a role in English, Scottish, and British state-formation. This examination also reveals the long-term context of the Darien venture and the role that colonisation played in the 1707 union between England and Scotland.

Despite a substantial amount of critical work that has been produced concerning the transatlantic nature of early nineteenth century Gothic fiction, there remain areas that require further examination. While many of the recent studies on the subject seek answers to larger questions pertaining to Gothic and its relationships to social and political debates surrounding the Atlantic world, some of the fine details of these relationships have gone with little examination. By exploring some disparate but important characteristics of the genre from a transatlantic perspective, this thesis looks to fill some of these gaps left by scholarship that has largely overlooked the minutiae of transatlantic Gothic. Reading the Transatlantic Gothic Fiction of Walter Scott and Edgar Allan Poe looks to provide more detail about publishing histories, peritexts such as epigraphs and footnotes, the grotesque as a literary aesthetic, and the politics that surround these issues. Each chapter engages with scholarly research on the specified subject and views Scott and Poe's engagement with the subject from a transatlantic perspective. The first chapter examines the publication histories of both Scott and Poe not only to put these authors in a cultural and historical context, but also to demonstrate that with a shared network of readers, critics, editors, printers, and publishers, both Scott and Poe faced a volatile and enigmatic industry that fueled what some might consider to be a certain lack of confidence or insecurity in their more Gothic literature or, at the very least, the Gothic elements in their texts. In response, these authors began to position their works into a cultural model with an aim to please both the critics who were deriding Gothic fiction and the readers who still craved the supernatural. As I demonstrate in Chapter Two, epigraphs became a way to position their works into a respected cultural tradition, while footnotes became tools to tone down the supernatural by making it more plausible. As their texts were becoming more recognized as works of art, Scott and Poe began to develop and refine their own set of aesthetics. The third chapter explores what would become one of the most relevant aesthetics of Gothic fiction, the grotesque. Finally, Chapter Four briefly examines some of the political ideologies of Scott and Poe not only because politics was such an important part of early Gothic fiction, but also because the first three chapters of this research touch on the political positions of Scott and Poe.

This thesis examines material culture and female participation in the British and American anti-slavery campaigns from the 1780s to 1865. It explores the production, distribution and use of abolitionist material culture, within a female transatlantic framework. It considers the home as an overlooked site of political expression and explores how women's personal, social and political networks facilitated their relationships with political objects. This thesis brings together the separate disciplines of material culture and female abolitionists to enrich the current transatlantic anti-slavery narrative. Such an approach allows us to trace the ways material objects were used by abolitionists for political gain and as furnishings for the domestic interior. This thesis incorporates a variety of surviving anti-slavery objects from numerous museum and archival collections and auction houses across Britain and the U.S. Beginning with an analysis of sewing circles we can see how British women were encouraged to employ their traditionally feminine skills to create items for sale at American bazaars. These items were then distributed by and marketed to female abolitionists, combining politics and consumerism. By exploring the household as a site for the display and use of political objects we can assess how women's increasing participation in the anti-slavery movement affected domestic space and the ways these objects were employed in the home for both decorative and practical purposes. By mapping the abolitionist interior, we can see how anti-slavery campaigns permeated transatlantic homes and incorporated all generations, especially girl abolitionists. Finally, the ways female abolitionist writers utilised material culture in narratives addressed to their juvenile abolitionist audience will be examined.

Migrant (1959-1960) and Poor.Old.Tired.Horse.(1962-1967) were two little magazines edited respectively by British poets Gael Turnbull and Ian Hamilton Finlay. This thesis aims to explore the magazines’ contributions to the diversification of British poetry in the 1960s, via their commitment to transnational exchange and publication of innovative poetries. My investigation is grounded on the premise that little magazines, as important but neglected socio-literary forms, provide a nuanced picture of literary history by revealing the shifting activities and associations between groups of writers and publishers. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu and Pascale Casanova, I argue that Migrant and Poor.Old.Tired.Horse were exceptionally outward-looking publications bringing various kinds of poetic forms, both historical and contemporary, local and international, to new audiences, and creating literary networks in the process. A brief overview of the post-war British poetry scene up until 1967, and the role of little magazines within this period, will contextualize Turnbull’s and Finlay’s activities as editors and publishers. Migrant is examined as a documentation of Turnbull’s early years as a poet-publisher in Britain, Canada, and the US. I argue that Turnbull’s magazine is at once a manifestation of the literary friendships he forged, a negotiation of American poetic theories, and a formulation of a new British-American literary network. Identifying Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’ manifesto as a particular influence on Turnbull, I examine aspects of Olson’s conceptualization of poetry as a dynamic process of unfolding in the content and ethos of Migrant. Finlay’s attitudes to internationalism and use of vernacular speech in poetry are compared to those of Hugh MacDiarmid to demonstrate that Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. emerged out of both a rejection and engagement with an older generation of Scottish writers. The content and organisation of the magazine, I argue, bear Finlay’s consideration of art as play. Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s positing of language as games, I examine the magazine as a series of playful procedures where a variety of formal experimentations were enacted.

This thesis discusses contemporary Scottish crime fiction in light of its transatlantic contexts. It argues that, despite participating in a globalized popular genre, examples of Scottish crime fiction nevertheless meaningfully intervene in notions of Scottishness. The first chapter examines Scottish appropriations of the hard-boiled mode in the work of William McIlvanney, Ian Rankin, and Irvine Welsh, using their representation of traditional masculinity as an index for wider concerns about community, class, and violence. The second chapter examines examples of Scottish crime fiction that exploit the baroque aesthetics of gothic and noir fiction as a means of dealing with the same socio-political contexts. It argues that the work of Iain Banks and Louise Welsh draws upon a tradition of distinctively Scottish gothic in order to articulate concerns about the re-incursion of barbarism within contemporary civilized societies. The third chapter examines the parodic, carnivalesque aspects of contemporary Scottish crime fiction in the work of Christopher Brookmyre and Allan Guthrie. It argues that the structure of parody replicates the structure of genre, meaning that the parodic examples dramatize the textual processes at work in more central examples of Scottish crime fiction. The fourth chapter focuses on examples of Scottish crime fiction that participate in the culturally English golden-age and soft-boiled traditions. Unpacking the darker, more ambivalent aspects of these apparently cosy and genteel traditions, this final chapter argues that the novels of M. C. Beaton and Kate Atkinson obliquely refract the particularly Scottish concerns about modernity that the more central examples more openly express.

Scholars have long since identified a quixotic mode in fiction, acknowledging the widespread influence of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605-15) on subsequent texts. In most cases, “quixotic” signifies a preponderance of allusions to Don Quixote in a given text, such that most studies of “quixotic fictions” or “quixotic influence” are primarily taxonomic in purpose and in outcome: they name and catalogue a text or group of texts as “quixotic,” then argue that, by virtue of the vast and protean influence of Don Quixote, the quixotic mode in fiction is always divided, lacking any semblance of ideological consistency. I argue, however, that the very characteristics of Don Quixote that make him such an attractive literary model for such a broad range of narratives—his bookish idealism, his fixation on the upper-classed grandiosity of the lives of noble knights—also form the consistent, ideological groundwork of quixotism: the exceptionalist substitution of fictive idealism for material reality. By tracing the ways in which quixotes become mouthpieces for various exceptionalist arguments in eighteenth-century British and American texts, like Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742), Tobias Smollett's Launcelot Greaves (1760), Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (1792-1815), and Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive (1797), among others, I demonstrate the link between quixotism and exceptionalism, or between fictive idealism and the belief that one (or one's worldview) is an exception to the scrutiny of the surrounding world.

In recent years, the relationship between religion and Enlightenment, traditionally cast in opposition to one another, has received increasing reconsideration. Scholars now recognise that even orthodox religion played a central role within the Enlightenment project. This development has marked a paradigm shift in Atlantic world and Enlightenment historiography. However, while the relationship between religion and Enlightenment has been greatly clarified, there remain major gaps in our understanding of the nature and parameters of this relationship. This thesis contributes to the understanding of religion’s function within Enlightenment thought and practice through a case study of the colonial missionary work of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK). Using primary sources such as institutional records, sermons, journals, diaries and letters, it examines evangelism within the framework of the Enlightenment. The study demonstrates first how both the founders of the SSPCK and the Society’s most fervent advocates of missionary work in the colonies were simultaneously the foremost leaders of the British and American Enlightenment. It then traces the implications of this religious Enlightenment dynamic, illuminating not only the ambitions of the Society’s leadership but also certain contours of intimate encounters between Native Americans, Native Christians and white missionaries. As the SSPCK’s missionary endeavours demonstrate, the relationship between evangelism and Enlightenment not only changed all individuals and institutions involved. It also transformed the very landscape of British Protestant religion. This assessment points to the overarching conclusion that the Enlightenment shaped the very foundation of modern missions. In the process, however, British Atlantic Protestants of many different varieties wove the discourse of the Enlightenment into the tapestry of their understanding of evangelism as a primary means of identity formation, both personally and institutionally. Historiographically, this research forces a reexamination of the nuances of the religious Enlightenment. It also problematizes the static (albeit dominant) interpretation of evangelicalism by observing its emergence in light of the broader conditions of British Atlantic Protestantism.

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 project seeks to define and interrogate the concept of creole modernism through a reading of works by creole-identified writers from the early twentieth century across the Francophone and Anglophone transatlantic. Creole is a term that comes from the history of colonialism and slavery, originally meaning a person born in the Americas. Various definitions of creole provide a racial classification, but these definitions are inconsistent and contradictory, demonstrating that evocations of the creole index racialization without identifying a specific racial identity. By tracing the figure of the creole as a literary representation, from a more traditional regionalism to a modernist ambiguity, I examine how the creole is defined through the overdetermination of racial significations, and thus it is always racialized. I consider examples of creolization in the sites of New Orleans, the French Antilles, Dominica, and Jamaica, as well as the ways in which these spaces extend into the colonial metropoles of Paris and London. My readings of creole modernism include Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s short fiction, Drasta Houël’s poetry, Suzanne Lacascade’s novel Claire-Solange, âme africaine, Jean Rhys’ novel Voyage in the Dark and her short fiction, and Claude McKay’s Jamaican poetry, short fiction, and his novel Banana Bottom. In assessing the representational and ideological function of the creole figure across the transatlantic, I employ a methodological “creolization of theory,” engaging in a dialogue between scholars in feminism and queer studies, postcolonial studies, Black studies and critical race theory, and modernist studies. I argue that the creole is not only fundamental to the structure of modernism as a site of rupture, ambiguity, and forced innovation, but also that representations of the creole signify racialized femininity and are rendered categorically queer through the projections of deviant sexuality and feminized excess implied in the creole’s formation. As a figure engendered through the historical hauntings of colonization and slavery, the creole occupies an ambivalent relation to structures of imperial and national power. It is a figure of fluidity and mobility that demonstrates the porosity of categories and transgresses geographical borders. While not always presenting a revolutionary challenge to the imperial system, the creole nevertheless undermines and resists the stability of classificatory logics.

This dissertation argues that the utopian novel offers an invaluable lens for understanding the social fabric of the antebellum America. The project focuses mainly on four works: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), a fantasy roman à clef of the Brook Farm utopian colony; William Gilmore Simms’ The Yemassee (1835), a novel about the native American threat to the utopia of a slaveocracy; Martin Delany’s Blake; or the Huts of America (1859), a call for pan-African revolt in North America; and Robert Henry Newell’s Avery Glibun; or, Between Two Fires (1867), a fantasy bildungsroman about the antebellum period as a utopia in itself. My readings of these novels examine the different utopian aspects inherent in each text, drawing out the ways readership patterns illustrate that such works both amplify and complicate societal agitation for women’s equality, abolition, attention to class inequities, religious renewal and even political revolution. The common thread linking these topics is a question about the utility of the novel as a demonstrable instrument of social change. The porous political boundaries of the antebellum United States make for a literary environment ripe for the ideals and philosophy of European thinkers to take hold, and hence the term transatlantic. The dissertation approaches the developing field of ‘transatlanticism’ in literary studies, asking how American writers create a diaphanous geopolitical space redolent of an Elysian mythos. On the granular level, the literary analysis unearths evidence of the utopian reasoning of each novelist as he or she posits a counterpoint to the hegemonic structure of antebellum American society. I will argue that the Protestant ideals of social reform enables the novel to reach an emerging middle-class readership with a utopian idealism coupled with a pre-Marxist evangelical spirituality in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

“Neighborly Adoption” examines the predominance of adoption narratives in canonical transatlantic novels and highlights their intervention in a relatively unknown and surprisingly contentious discourse on child adoption. In the 1840s and 1850s, American and British reformers, politicians, and authors were thinking through issues surrounding a growing population of abandoned children in metropolitan cities and the flourishing practice and legal codification of private adoption. While institutional care was still on the rise in this period, writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dickens, and Maria Susanna Cummins criticized these methods, endorsing adoption as a more appropriate model of displaced child care. While critics like Carol J. Singley and Mark C. Jerng have read nineteenth-century adoption narratives as commentaries on whom might be included or excluded from national citizenship, I argue that the adoption plot should be understood as a thoroughly transatlantic phenomenon. American and British authors whose novels were popular on both sides of the Atlantic promote and interrogate what I call “neighborly adoption,” a practice in which a local community of individuals or families collectively raise a displaced child. In these narratives, varied members of the neighborhood—single, married, male, female, poor, and rich—have beneficial and empowering relationships with the children in their community, regardless of biological relation to them. Though adoption today is largely associated with individualistic values—i.e. completing one’s family, a child’s best interest—this project reveals the collective interests at the heart of adoption in nineteenth-century transatlantic literature.

This thesis situates three examples of transatlantic diplomacy practiced by Cherokee and Yamacraw diplomats in the eighteenth century within their Indigenous contexts. Utilizing treaty negotiations, transcripts from diplomatic summits, official correspondence, published journals, and newspapers, this study aims to situate these delegations within an Indigenous and transatlantic sociopolitical context. The aim of this work is to address questions regarding the objectives of the people involved, and to trace the outcomes of their policies. The answers to these questions explain one of many southeastern Indigenous political strategies of the eighteenth century, one that highlights the imperial center as a crucial setting in which Indigenous diplomatic policy was directed. The primary focus of this study, however, remains the North American interior, for the transatlantic diplomats prioritized their homes above all else. This thesis finds that the Cherokee and Yamacraw diplomats both effectuated several of their desired outcomes in the short term, as well as influenced the course taken by successive generations of Indigenous leaders who learned from their triumphs and their failures.

When Puritans crossed the Atlantic Ocean to populate the Thirteen Colonies (whether the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Virginia, Maryland, or others), they did so as loyal subjects of England who wanted a place to freely practice their religion. They never stopped their efforts at reforming the Church of England, nor did they stop seeing themselves as Englishmen. Neither did the Crown. As a result, if the Crown took measures that could affect Puritans in England, it could also affect Puritans in the colonies. In addition, if the Puritans in England became involved in a conflict, colonial Puritans often saw it as their duty to support their comrades in the mother country. Colonial Puritans also knew that if England was reformed in their image (politically and religiously), this would have positive effects not only on the nation itself, but also the colonies. This was particularly true of Virginia and Maryland, where Puritans struggled against the established religious authorities of the Church of England for reform. A study of the struggles of Southern Puritans is critical to understanding the weight of the Puritans’ conflict with the Church of England. Eventually, following the English Civil War, the Puritans temporarily achieved what they wanted in England. Nevertheless, their inability to agree on key matters concerning the government of England led to the collapse of the Commonwealth of England and much infighting within the movement in the decades that followed. The Puritans were actively attempting to complete the English Reformation. They sought no middle ground, but to fully advance the Reformation to its logical conclusions. This firm resolve frequently put the Puritans at odds with the Crown and the Church of England, whether in the mother country or the colonies.

Orifice of Return is a collection of poetry that posits Black femme bodies as living and breathing archives, corporeal manifestations of intuitive and intellectual claims at survival. The poems in this collection illustrate the multifaceted nature of my craft, through which the personal, the collective, and the political are commingled, but wrestling forces. As Audre Lorde declares, there are many kinds of open, the poems of this collection are orifices, textual portals, spatial and temporal fissures, and entryways into Black past, present, and future. These poems use received forms (the ghazal, the ode, the cento, the obverse, litany, etc.) and employ stylistic devices like (direct address, song lyrics, colloquial speech and slang, etc.) These poems interrogate histories and imagine speculative futures for Black folks. They exist in lineage— familial, imagined, literary ancestral, and with the theoretical underpinnings of Black feminist hauntology and Toni Morrison's "rememory." Some of these poems are lyrically driven, while others are performance and rhythmically driven— all facing inwards and outwards, aware of the world they exist in.

“On the Margins: Steady Sellers and the Problem of Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America,” reimagines the trans-Atlantic history of the novel by attending to the importance of cheaply printed canonical books. I demonstrate that some of the most lasting “steady sellers” in literary history—John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote —owe their fame and endurance to cheap trans-Atlantic abridgments and the poor, Black, female, juvenile and otherwise marginalized readers whose growing demand kept them steadily in print. From chapbook abridgments of Robinson Crusoe pitched to working class readers, to toy book adaptations of The Pilgrim’s Progress for young girls, to illustrated, third-person, single volume adaptations of Pamela that subtly reorient the narrative toward questions of interracial sexual violence, and Jacksonian-era political cartoons satirizing Don Quixote, examples and invocations of these stories in early U.S. print culture suggest that the novel’s literary and material coherence was being vigorously renegotiated against the backdrop of an increasingly diverse print marketplace. We see this conflict most clearly in many of the defining American literary works of the nineteenth-century, including Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World(1850), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884). Each of these works dramatizes the divergent interpretations present in the print histories of steady sellers in ways that center the experiences of marginalized readers. In bringing together the uneven circulation histories of steady sellers and the formation of U.S. literary culture, this project aims to challenge critical orthodoxies about the rise of the novel and acknowledge the vital role that poor, female, Black, and juvenile readers played in the formation, negotiation, and contestation of literary canons.

The Romantic period encompasses a pivotal set of decades for the development of British citizenship, a fact that has been underemphasized due to narrow definitions of what citizenship entails. Within the wide discursive arena of national identity in Romantic fiction, however, specific literary tropes and figures emerge that consolidate and challenge the nascent and evolving concept of the British citizen. The figure of the wanderer or stateless being explores a mode of national belonging that is increasingly untethered to land and nativity; tropes of the virtual and disembodiment become central to articulations of political and bureaucratic citizenship in the American revolutionary context; struggles between dependence and independence in sentimental plots of courtship and marriage narrate the citizenly potential of women in the context of couverture; and portrayals of repatriation and exile illuminate how Britain was coming to terms with its population of color in the early post-abolition era. Taken together, the literary texts under discussion here intervene in the emergence of a ‘Romantic’ citizenship discourse in the English-speaking North Atlantic World.

In States of Nature, I trace an alternative prehistory to environmental thought in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates about revolution. I argue that proponents of revolution understood the state of nature not only as a philosophical abstraction but also through their engagements with science, agriculture, and frontier settlement. By contrast, conservatives claimed that revolution would disrupt the relational networks they imagined as vitally entangling human and nonhuman life. In particular, Edmund Burke describes ideal national communities as intricately interwoven, yet tenuous, social ecologies: evolving networks that bind together past, present, and future generations. In the opening chapters, I depict Burke not as a reactionary opponent of change but as a practicing agriculturalist who looks to nature to regulate the pace of social transformation. I also consider challenges to Burke: Thomas Paine’s assertion that revolution, rather than tradition, restores nature’s true order; Mary Wollstonecraft’s warning that normative appeals to the nonhuman world naturalize inequality; and Joel Barlow and Gilbert Imlay’s beliefs that technocratic land transformation would fulfill America’s revolutionary project. In the middle chapters, I read James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels as restaging the Burke/Paine debate in an environmentally and socially precarious frontier setting. I interpret Natty Bumppo not as an embodiment of the state of nature, but as a social being who laments the decline from an intercultural and interspecies Burkean community to a Lockean polity where political belonging is purchased by appropriating natural objects as property. Building upon the temporal turns in queer and critical race studies, I also suggest that Cooper conflates racialized sexuality and environmental determinism, punishing characters he sees as too close to nature by associating their failures to reproduce with the forest’s doomed embrace.In my final chapter, I argue that writers throughout the age of revolution fixated on compost as a political metaphor capable of synthesizing Burkean gradualism and revolutionary renewal. Articulating what I call a “compostable past,” Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman maintain that material bodies and political structures are best reinvigorated through regenerative decay. I argue that their re-workings of America’s revolutionary tradition decouple the lapsed possibility of Burkean ecology from the more pernicious strains of Burke’s social conservatism. By contrast, Charles Chesnutt exposes compost’s role in sustaining Southern slave-holding agriculture, thereby anticipating central concerns of modern environmental justice scholarship.

This dissertation explores a unique religious awakening among early modern Protestants whose primary feature was a revival of ascetic, monastic practices a century after the early Reformers condemned such practices. By the early seventeenth-century, a widespread dissatisfaction can be discerned among many awakened Protestants at the suppression of the monastic life and a new interest in reintroducing ascetic practices like celibacy, poverty, and solitary withdrawal to Protestant devotion. The introduction and chapter one explain how the absence of monasticism as an institutionally sanctioned means to express intensified holiness posed a problem to many Protestants. Large numbers of dissenters fled the mainstream Protestant religions—along with what they viewed as an increasingly materialistic, urbanized world—to seek new ways to experience God through lives of seclusion and ascetic self-deprival. In the following chapters, I show how this ascetic impulse drove the formation of new religious communities, transatlantic migration, and gave birth to new attitudes and practices toward sexuality and gender among Protestants. The study consists of four case studies, each examining a different non-conformist community that experimented with ascetic ritual and monasticism. Chapters two and three examine the prayer practices of two semi-monastic Protestant communities—the ‘Angelic Brethren’ led by the mystic Johann Gichtel and a circle of Quietists led by Charles Héctor Marquis de Marsay. These communities fused the ascetic, mystical teachings on self-renunciation and union with modern mystical traditions in creating their own withdrawn, mystical devotions in an attempt to separate themselves from the world and their own carnal wills. In chapter four, the familiar story of a Protestant cloister in North America, the Ephrata Cloister, is recast as a part of the broader ascetic revival in this dissertation. Particularly attention is given in this chapter to the prevalence of celibacy in Protestantism. The final chapter and conclusion examines the afterlife of ascetic theology and mysticism in the late enlightenment and romantic period which saw a fierce divide over the value and meaning of solitude. From northern Germany, Amsterdam, and across the Atlantic in colonial North America, these dissenters formed utopian communities that strove to keep their distance from civilization even as they engaged in the project of global European expansion, empire, and settlement.

The following dissertation on the trope of the mujer varonil[1] employs bibliographical research in literary criticism and historiography to identify and describe socio-historic attitudes about gender. In particular, this dissertation examines gender as communicated by texts that use the mujer varonil, or “masculine woman”, characterization to either praise or vilify exceptional female subjects in ways that highlight normative limits for masculine and feminine gender expression. Four texts are examined: a male author writes each and each represents a literary genre that was significant in early modern Spain and Spanish America. These genres are the hagiography, the relación, the inquisition proceeding, and the comedia. These texts communicate important attitudes about gender-bending that are associated with cultural limits for gender expression, which inform boundaries that demarcate three normative gender roles: male, female and third gender. The selected texts are didactic because they communicate limits for gender-bending by exceptional females that ultimately reinforce an androcentric social structure and its associated normative gender roles. These texts use the mujer varonil trope to portray their subjects in ways that communicate the limits for female agency. Simultaneously, the texts allow for some agency by praising certain forms of transition to a male identity by people identified as female at birth. The texts and genres explored in this dissertation thus raise important questions about socio-historic limits for normative gender expression in early modern Spain and Spanish America while also providing answers that resolve the ambiguities that they explore. They do this in ways that support the imperial project and the social stability necessary for its success. [1] The term mujer varonil is employed provisionally here. In the language of the times, the word mujer in most contexts did not include virgens. In further research, I plan to address this issue of terminology as it applies to the masculine female in the religious orders. That is outside the scope of this present work.

ABSTRACTRubens in a New World: Prints, Authorship, and Transatlantic IntertextualitybyAaron Michael HymanDoctor of Philosophy in History of ArtUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor Elizabeth Honig, Chair In the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, artists produced works that copied, in part or whole, prints by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) that had been sent across the Atlantic. Focusing on the period from 1650 to 1775, this dissertation uses this transatlantic frame to reassess how works of art relate to one another across geographic distances and cultural divides, and to rethink the terms of originality, invention, replication, and slavish copying through which early modern authorship has been understood. Rubens serves as a lens through which to understand the much greater range of artists—from similarly renowned painters to anonymous makers—who reconstituted his printed compositions in paint and stone in the Americas. Close examination of “copies,” a term this project seeks to trouble, and their contexts allows for exploration of what copying meant for those who engaged in this type of production and the audiences that viewed the resultant works of art. The various kinds of connectivities established through print transmission and artistic copying are bundled under the mantle of transatlantic intertextuality: a system of spatial reference effectuated by the copy and premised upon both the potential for carefully coded relationships of pictorial forms across the Atlantic, and disconnects set up by long-distance print traffic and heterogeneous artistic practices of reproduction.Three chapters move from Europe through the New World and back across the Atlantic. Chapter one focuses on paintings in Mexico City’s cathedral that derive from Rubens’s prints. It argues that artists in New Spain’s capital considered their familiarity with a European canon, as transmitted in print, central to their self-conception as New World creators. Artists including Cristóbal de Villalpando (c. 1649-1714) and Juan Correa (c. 1646-1716) used pictorial and textual citation to assert a connection to a Europe they knew in black and white. European models of emulation were complicated by the space of the Atlantic that lay between European originals and colonial works of art, and by the practices of New World painters, who evidently made little operative distinction between transformative pictorial citation and so-called “slavish” copying. Charting how the popular imagination of prints evinced a colonial dislocation from Europe, I probe how artists of different ethnicities—Villalpando the creole and Correa the free mulato—experienced the intersections of ethnic identity with the geographic distances underscored by the painterly work of copying.Chapter two explores the repetitious reproduction of Rubens’s compositions in and around Cuzco, Peru. The connectedness of the places that housed such paintings meant that viewers in the Andean highlands had repeat encounters with specific compositions and families of forms. Through analysis of archival contracts, I suggest that multiplicity became the condition in which the population of Cuzco and the surrounding region came to think about and see paintings: as objects connected to and in relationship with other local objects. Illustrating this sensibility to “the local” in Cuzco revises assumptions about the one-to-one correspondence between European prints and colonial works of art. Revealing a rhizomatic system of reference, I argue that Cuzco’s artists and patrons forged an alternative model of copying and creativity, one in which the copy was always understood as potently originary. Using seminal theological and catechetical tracts from the period, I further suggest that the semiotic deferral occasioned by multiplied, repeated, and dispersed compositions should be understood within the context of debates about Catholic images and how best to teach Christian neophytes in the Andes.Chapter three focuses on a single printed composition: Rubens’s Austroseraphic Heavens, an allegory of joint Habsburg and Franciscan devotion to the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. The chapter traces the print’s robust reception in Latin America, where the entire composition was copied and where individual figures were excised from it to produce all manner of paintings and sculptures. Close analysis of New World copies in both New Spain and Peru reveals the function of the original Rubens engraving. In two instances, however, the print’s central figure, a kneeling St. Francis bearing three orbs and an Immaculate Virgin on his shoulders, was extracted and made into sculpted bases for miracle-working statues: the so-called Virgins of El Pueblito (Querétaro) and Tepepan (Xochimilco), both in present-day Mexico. Because they were deemed miracle-working, these icons, which included Rubens’s St. Francis as a constitutive component, spawned their own copies in prints, paintings, and sculptures. This chapter traces the complicated intertextuality that linked this broad range of objects—from icons to allegories—and investigates the different ways in which authorship mattered within this pictorial matrix.The conclusion looks back across the Atlantic. Focusing on Rubens’s designs for the triumphal entry of the Cardinal Infante Ferdinand into Antwerp in 1635, and particularly on an allegorical arch figuring the mines of Potosí (present-day Bolivia), this coda suggests how transatlantic transmission and intertextuality might help the field of early modern art history explore European pictorial circulation and practices of copying that have remained marginal to art historical discourse.

“'I Would Prevent You from Further Violence': Women, Pirates, and the Problem of Violence in the Antebellum American Imagination" analyzes how antebellum American pirate stories used the figure of the pirate to explore the problem of violence and the role women play in opposing violent men. This project joins ongoing conversations about women in the nineteenth century in which scholars, such as Nina Baym, Mary Kelley, and Mary Ryan, have made key contributions by recovering a domestic model of nineteenth-century womanhood. As my work demonstrates, antebellum Americans were similarly invested in a more adventurous, and sometimes violent, model of womanhood that was built upon the figure of the gentleman pirate and placed in opposition to violent men. I argue that it is important to think about the pirate story and the figure of the pirate, not only in the context in which it has come to be known—escapist fantasies written for boys and young men—but as a place where authors reinforced, modified, and established different models of gender roles. Frequently within the mid-nineteenth-century American pirate story, authors answered the question of who is allowed to be violent by demonstrating that women had the capacity for violence and constructing scenarios illustrating that women were often the only ones in a position to forcibly oppose violent men.The pirate story uniquely blends different narrative conventions: adventure stories that are often believed to appeal to male audiences and domestic scenarios that are usually understood to resonate with female readers. Although historical and fictional pirates of other eras and geographical locations have been examined, little scholarship has focused on piracy in the antebellum American imagination, even though the figure of the pirate continued to proliferate, especially in popular fiction, throughout the nineteenth century. My project addresses this gap not only by demonstrating the importance of pirates in nineteenth-century American fiction, but also by exploring how American authors, such as James Fenimore Cooper, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, J. H. Ingraham, and Eliza Ann Dupuy, were responding to and revising earlier British depictions of the figure of the pirate by Byron and Walter Scott. In addition to its unique focus on pirates in antebellum American fiction, my project explores a body of popular texts that has been neglected by scholars. These ephemeral stories are difficult to obtain outside of archives and libraries; however, they were extremely popular in their own time. While scholarship has shifted to recognize the value in previously dismissed popular texts, story papers and shilling novelettes have not yet been thoroughly analyzed, and my project seeks to reintroduce a small portion of these texts through archival research centering on the work of Maturin Murray Ballou and Benjamin Barker. By placing transatlantic canonical texts in conversation with formerly neglected ephemeral mediums, I explore stories that resonated with audiences and proposed unconventional violent and heroic models of womanhood, thus disrupting the idea that there was a monolithic version of womanhood in antebellum America.

This dissertation examines the strategies developed by three interconnected transatlantic literary figures to approach the new context of power relations, in the Iberian Peninsula, and how their literary production reflects these strategies. I study specifically the works of the chronicler Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and playwrights Juan Ruiz de Alarcón and Tirso de Molina. I propose to focus on their strategies to navigate the agitated waters of the Spanish court, and to interact with the members of the illustrious peninsular circles. Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the son of a Castilian conquistador named Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega and of an Inca princess named Chimpu Ocllo, represents the figure of the mestizo. Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, born in Mexico to a family that exploited mines, personifies the figure of the criollo. Tirso de Molina, pseudonym of the friar of the order of Blessed Virgin Mary of Mercy Gabriel Tellez, embodies the figure of the Spaniard who returned from the New World. Each of these figures is associated with a distinct region of the vast Spanish empire: the Inca Garcilaso comes from the viceroyalty of Peru, while Juan Ruiz de Alarcón was born in New Spain, and friar Gabriel Téllez visited the island of La Española between 1616 and 1618, before coming back to the Peninsula. Through this study, the atlantic space is conceived as a means of communication that connects everything. Through it, the European kingdoms and ! their colonies on both sides become intertwined in a network of connexions. The traffic of the routes crossing the Atlantic Ocean thus forges a subjectivity, the identity of which is dependant on this circuit. Born from this traffic, the subject who comes and goes is named the transatlantic subject. A witness of the modes of structuration of social relationships both in the metropolis of the Empire and in the colonies themselves, the transatlantic subject will determine their transformation. The historical period this study covers begins with the year of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's birth, 1539, only seven years after the first encounter between Francisco Pizarro and the Inca Emperor Atahualpa in Cajamarca, in 1532. It ends with the death of playwright Tirso de Molina in 1648. Spreading across a century, it also encompasses the reign of four Spanish monarchs: Charles V, Philip II, Philip III and Philip IV. During this period, the figure of the indiano was affected by the growing dependence of the Iberian Peninsula on the transatlantic traffic and commerce with the colonies. During the reign of Philip II, the expansion of the administrative apparatus of the state, which extended its tentacles into the transatlantic trade in order to take advantages of its newly conquered territory, reached its climax. During the reign of his successor, Philip III, and of his favorite the duke of Lerma, the social advance experienced by the officials of the state, who begin to conceive of their administrative mandate as a material possession that might be acquired by money, animates other classes to find new means of achieving a higher social standing. This behavior was imitated by powerful indianos, who looked to acquire titles of nobility through purchase or marriages with noble families in want of money. The first chapter, "A mestizo Courtisan: the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega", studies the Peruvian chronicler Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, one of the earliest figures to engage in the transatlantic voyage and develop his literary production in the Iberian Peninsula. ! In it, I analyze how the mestizo chronicler conceived of and composed a public image of himself as a transatlantic subject in determined moments of his literary production, most notably in his introduction to the Diálogos de Amor by León Hebreo (Madrid, 1598) and his chronicles, the Comentarios reales de los Incas (Lisboa, 1609) and the Historia general del Perú (Córdoba, 1617). Unlike other authors such as Juan Ruiz de Alarcón who resist discourses that, in the Iberian peninsula, impose a particular vision of transatlantic identity upon the subjects who participate into the transatlantic circuit, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega succeeded, I argue, in forming his own subjectivity outside of the coordinates of the emerging stereotypical image of the indiano. The key to his success in preventing his identity as a transatlantic subject from being defined by these discourses, I argue, resides in his ability to fashion himself to the noble discourses of the Peninsula. His family background - he was a descendant of the Castillian hidalgo Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega and of the Inca emperor Túpac Yapanqui - allowed him to present himself as a mediator between the Spanish and the Inca cultures. At the same time, he presented himself as a courtisan, an image that distanced him from that of a plebeian who made his fortune in the Indies and who claimed to be part of the noble class through the purchasing of titles or marriages of convenience. In my second chapter, entitled "Deformity and Stereotype in Juan Ruiz de Alarcón", I study the playwright from New Spain's resistance to the rejection he endured from the Madrid court, owing to his physical appearance and his American origins. The Council of the Indies refused to appoint him to an administrative position for several years, citing his severe vertebral and thoracic malformation. The most illustrious authors of the Court, from Lope de Vega to Francisco de Quevedo and Luis de ! Góngora, publicly humiliated him for his bodily appearance, as well as for being indiano. The stereotype of the indiano in Golden Age theater was highly marked by physical appearance, and especially the inability to go unnoticed. The indiano was represented in a grotesque fashion on stage, disguised with extravagant outfits and a character with irritating mannerisms. Ruiz de Alarcón showed his repulsion for these constructions around the pretended physical appearance of the indiano in his comedy, Las parades oyen, which develops a poetics of the beauty of the soul. In this play, the character of don Juan, a man who is also a victim of a physical malformation, earns the love of doña Ana through the unfurling of his goodness or the real criteria of beauty - that of the soul. In his most famous play, La verdad sospechosa, the playwright from New Spain undermined the usual mechanisms through which the society of the court constructed the stereotype of the figure of the indiano. Through the character of don García, a compulsive liar who fakes that he is an indiano in order to seduce a woman from Madrid, Ruiz de Alarcón demonstrates how these stereotypes were based upon incorrect premises. In reality, he argues, they were but a series of anxieties, felt by metropolitan Spanish society in the seventeenth century. The third and final chapter of the dissertation, "Mirroring Rebellion: Tirso de Molina's Amazonas en las Indias", considers how playwright Tirso de Molina justified his political opposition to the regime of the count-duke of Olivares through the figure of Gonzalo Pizarro, leader of the rebellion of the encomenderos, which took place in Peru from 1544 to 1548. The contorted reconstruction of the events that is conveyed by the jurisconsult Fernando Pizarro y Orellana, an idealized portrait of the leader of the uprising that formed a whole propagandistic apparatus put into play in order to rehabilitate the image of the Pizarro family from Extremadura, drew the ! attention of friar Gabriel Téllez, exiled from the court and betrayed by his own companions of the order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mercy. In his Amazonas en las Indias, Tirso submits the legitimacy of the rebellious act to a trial when it is accomplished in a search to better the State and the institution of the crown. Both rebellions - the upraising of the encomenderos and the composition of the Amazonas en las Indias - I argue, are ultimately a service to the State. In Tirso's play, Gonzalo Pizarro revolts in order to stop the violence that results from the regime of the viceroy Blasco Núñez Vela and, even, to defend the encomenderos. The playwright pretended, through his play, to instruct the young Philip IV and reveal the mistakes that might occur when an indolent king delegates his authority to an unscrupulous tyrant. The very act of composing the work, which the Junta de Reformación had prohibited in 1625, was itself an act of rebellion. The restoration of the image of Gonzalo Pizarro converted itself, as such, into a mere excuse for criticizing the contemporary political circumstances. In this tragedy set in the New World, whose devastation Tirso witnessed during his two-year stay in the island of La Española, the playwright attacks are manifold. He was most critical of the violence that, in Tirso's opinion, had resulted from the socio-political repressions of the count-duke of Olivares. Tirso would not stop looking back at the failed project of colonization, implicitly considered as catastrophic. Ultimately, the playwright indicted the failure of the regime of encomiendas and the boundless ambition of the encomenderos. It becomes clear that assigning a subaltern role to the transatlantic subject inside of the articulation of social relationships in the metropolis and the colonies invites to consider the existence of transatlantic relations of power. The atlantic space, in Early Modern Spain, is not limited to commercial voyages and cultural exchanges: it is also ! a space of resistance, as concretized by the indiano character in the literature of the time. !

The following analysis of antislavery poetry evidences the shared language of abolition that incorporated the societal dynamics of law, gender, and race through shared themes of family, the assumed expectation of freedom, and legal references. This thesis focuses upon four women antislavery poets and analyzes their poems and their individual experiences with their sociohistorical contexts. The poems of Hannah More, Ann Yearsley, Phillis Wheatley, and Sarah Forten show this shared transatlantic language of abolition.

This study investigates and compares the long and short term flexibility of participants' production and perception, by looking at the relationship between topic-based shifting, and second dialect acquisition. 97 participants in London, UK, and Columbus, OH, were recruited to participate in this study, and belonged to one of six categories: English expatriates living in the US, American expatriates living in the UK, English fans of American football, American fans of the English Premier League, and English and American controls. The study consisted of an experimental task followed by an interview. In the experiment, participants rotated between a reading and a listening task. In the reading task, participants read words containing three variables of interest (intervocalic /t/, non-prevocalic /r/, and BATH), across American and English themed topics. In the listening task, participants were played English and American speakers in noise, and were asked to transcribe what they heard. In the production data, we find evidence of second dialect acquisition for all three variables in American participants, including non-migrants with substantial second dialect contact. English participants, however, only show effects of acquisition for intervocalic /t/. I suggest, based on comments in the interview data of my participants, that this asymmetry may at least in part be due to the relative prestige of British and American English, which motivates one group of speakers to maintain, and one group of speakers to lose, their native dialects.We find a robust effect of topic on rhoticity for all speaker groups, and weaker effects of topic on intervocalic /t/ and BATH, that are carried by American fans and controls. Short and long term shifts between dialects do not show signs of being related, and a case can be made that there is actually a negative relationship between experience and topic-based shifting: we see more topic-based shifting in participants with the least transatlantic experience. In perception, I find that English participants have a clear own-dialect advantage in noise, but for Americans, only controls do. Both English and American speakers show some effects of experience on how accurate they are with their non-native dialect in noise relative to their native dialect. There is also an effect of preceding topic on how well American expats do with English accents, and they improve if the preceding topic was English-themed. I find no direct relationships between performance in the reading task and performance in the listening task. This study shows that second dialect contact, even non-migrant contact, involves changes to production and perception, and that it is not symmetrical in cases where there are clear differences in dialect prestige. This study is the most extensive to date exploring how topic can effect speech production, finding robust effects in read speech. Comparing the two processes suggests that topic-based shifts in production and second dialect acquisition are not simply different scales of the same type of linguistic flexibility, but rather reflect different mechanisms of shifting.

Spontaneous feeling has been a cornerstone of Romantic aesthetics since Wordsworth wrote his Preface to Lyrical Ballads. This dissertation unsettles the link between Romantic poetry and the overflow of emotion by arguing that writers from Wordsworth to Emerson persistently turned to Stoicism in reconsidering the role of the passions in both literature and the conduct of life. Drawing on poetry and a broad range of journals, letters, and intellectual prose, I argue that the Romantics were attuned to the way diffuse Stoic attitudes informed the politics and moral psychology of their age. More than a prompt for resignation or acquiescence, Stoicism was a radical and controversial term in a revolutionary age; philosophers like Kant, Spinoza, and Godwin drew on Stoic accounts of the passions in articulating their new ethical systems. In chapters on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Emerson, I argue that the period most polemically invested in emotion as the mainspring of art was also captivated by the idea that aesthetic and ethical judgment demanded a transcendence of emotion. In their poetic search for "confirmed tranquillity," the writers in my transatlantic study transformed Stoicism's austerities as they confronted the limitations of sympathy and redefined their own relations to a cosmopolitan and war-torn world.

This study examines how Irish and American writing from the early twentieth century demonstrates a continued engagement with the formal, thematic and cultural imperatives of the Irish Literary Revival. It brings together writers and intellectuals from across Ireland and the United States - including James Joyce, George William Russell (Æ), Alice Milligan, Lewis Purcell, Lady Gregory, the Fugitive-Agrarian poets, W. B. Yeats, Harriet Monroe, Alice Corbin Henderson, and Ezra Pound - whose work registers the movement's impact via imitation, homage, adaptation, appropriation, repudiation or some combination of these practices. Individual chapters read Irish and American writing from the period in the little magazines and literary journals where it first appeared, using these publications to give a material form to the larger, cross-national web of ideas and readers that linked distant regions. Until recently, scholars have been disinclined to interpret the Revival in a transnational framework, preferring instead to emphasize the cultural work its literature and drama accomplished on behalf of nationalist politics in Ireland. Yet, as this study demonstrates, the movement was imbricated in a process of cultural exchange extending well beyond Ireland's borders, resulting in a variety of revivalist afterlives that testify to the movement's extra-national influence. I use the term "afterlife" to describe the versions of revivalism produced when the movement's original impulses and strategies were, in W. H. Auden's words, "modified in the guts of the living," in some cases long after the peak of revivalist activity was supposed to have passed. The word confers a spectral quality to the movement, describing the Revival's re-emergence in new locations and at later dates. Writers in both countries engaged with revivalism, re-animating many of the debates over questions of identity, belonging and cultural authenticity that had originally motivated the movement's leaders. In doing so, such writers granted the Revival a vital afterlife, demonstrating the relevance of these debates in other national and historical contexts. The relationship this dynamic describes is one of both cross-cultural affiliation, in which intellectuals and writers are actively inspired by the example of the Irish Revival, and one of reverberation - a kind of textual haunting, where the defining features of revivalism echo in later works. The movement survived, in other words, and multiplied, finding new life in Irish and American modernists' experiments with tradition.

This dissertation examines representations of female spirit mediumship during the rise of the Spiritualist movement in the mid–nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. In private séances as well as public trance demonstrations, spirit mediums claimed to channel the dead and convey their messages to their audiences, in addition to disseminating this information to millions of Spiritualists through their memoirs, collections of automatic writing recorded during their trances, and spirit photography. “Otherworldly Impressions” assesses the ways female spirit mediums engaged and shaped British and American cultural identities as they relayed information that became formative to the construction and reimagining of gender, racial and class ideologies. Chapter 1, “Visions of Travel: Paranormal Arctic Exploration, the Franklin Search Expeditions, and The Frozen Deep” provides an analysis of mediums’ contributions to nineteenth-century scientific and imperialist discourses on Arctic exploration through their psychic visions, and assesses Charles Dickens’ and Wilkie Collins’ collaborative fictional work inspired by these events. Mediums’ reports of their communication with spirits frequently intervened in constructions of their nations’ colonial histories; “Suffering as Spectacle: Sensationalized Depictions of Racial Violence in Spirit Narratives” attends to American mediums’ publications of spirit messages that capitalized on this violent history. “Spectral Labor: Women’s Spirit Photography and Constructions of Material Culture” uncovers women’s frequently hidden roles in the development of spirit photography; in a similar vein, “Staged Mediumship: Women’s Public Performances of Spirit Communication” examines mediums’ negotiation of Spiritualist constructions of their profession as well as gender ideologies to produce their public conjuring spectacles. The final chapter, “Assembly Required: Women’s Automatic Writing and the Production of Print Media,” looks at the way women used their automatic writing to obtain authority in the Spiritualist publishing industry as well as challenge conceptions of modern literary production.

This dissertation examines the life and conflicted career of Sir James Wright (1716-1785), in an effort to better understand the complex struggle for power in both colonial Georgia and eighteenth-century British Empire. Specifically, this project will highlight the contest for autonomy between four groups: Britains and Georgians (core-periphery), lowcountry and backcountry residents, whites and Natives, and Rebels and Loyalists. An English-born grandson of Chief Justice Sir Robert Wright, James Wright was raised in Charleston, South Carolina following his father’s appointment as that colony’s chief justice. Young James served South Carolina in a number of capacities, public and ecclesiastical, prior to his admittance to London’s Gray’s Inn in London. Most notably, he was selected as their attorney general and colonial agent prior to his appointment as governor of Georgia in 1761. Wright collected more than public offices in his endless quest for respect and social advancement. He also possessed a voracious appetite for land and became colonial Georgia’s largest landowner, accumulating nearly 26,000 acres, worked by no less than 525 slaves. As governor, he guided Georgia through a period of intense and steady economic and territorial growth. By the time of the American Revolution, Georgia had become fully integrated into the greater transatlantic mercantilist economy, resembling South Carolina and any number of Britain’s Caribbean colonies. Moreover, Governor Wright maintained royal authority in Georgia longer and more effectively than any of his North American counterparts. Although several factors contributed to his success in delaying the seemingly inexorable revolutionary tide, his patience and keen political mind proved the deciding factor. He was the only of Britain’s thirteen colonies to enforce the Stamp Act of 1765 and managed to stay a step or two ahead of Georgia’s Sons of Liberty until the winter of 1775-1776. In short, Sir James Wright lived a transatlantic life, taking advantage of every imperial opportunity afforded him. He earned numerous important government positions and amassed an incredible fortune, totaling over £100,000 sterling. His long imperial career delicately balanced dual loyalties to Crown and colony and offers important and unique insights into a number of important historiographic fields.

This dissertation establishes a transatlantic connection between Brazil, the United States and the Caribbean through the discussion of two contemporary literary movements: Sarau da Cooperifa, in São Paulo, and Nuyorican poetry, from the Puerto Rican poets living in New York City. Although these places share significant differences in terms of colonial and postcolonial history, they share similar experiences in terms of race and class representations. From similar oppressive realities, I argue that they also build similar strategies of resistance and urban discourse. By carrying a secondary citizenship status, Nuyorican poets and poets from the Brazilian periphery find in creative writing ways to reinvent themselves as subjects of their own history, a story written and reinvented in the streets, in the street corners, in barber shops, in the back yard, in bars and pubs. They take the street as epistemological locus in order to expand the concept of political intervention, be it while celebrating life or ritualizing death. In this sense, the street is the site for unrestricted access to poetry, and poetry is the element that fits these subjects in the history of the city. The work of Sergio Vaz, Ferrez, Allan da Rosa, Elizandra Souza, Willie Perdomo, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero and Sandra Maria Esteves is read through the lenses of African Diaspora theories and its relation to literary criticism, anthropology, history, discourse analysis, Black feminist theory and Latino studies. I share Edouard Glissant’s understanding that the Africans, who were forced to come to the Americas and the Caribbean upon slavery, did not bring only their body. They also brought with their body a worldview, a way of dealing with adversity, an epistemological understanding that has allowed them to outlive the physical death by overcoming the imputation of social death. Thus, this dissertation argues that cultural production is a political production, and that it has been used by racialized and impoverished minority individuals and groups across the globe as strategic tool in the struggle against oppression.

By the 1960s, the music of Austrian composer Gustav Mahler had become an exceptionally--and enduringly--popular part of American concert life. But for much of the twentieth century, the place of Mahler's music in America's orchestral canon was passionately debated and not nearly so secure. This dissertation proposes that the growth of transatlantic modernism--in some ways a reaction to Mahler's Austro-German tradition--went hand in hand with the developing appreciation for Mahler's music in the United States between 1920 and 1960. This study focuses on the relationship between this new appreciation for Mahler in America and a network of four influential figures in transatlantic modernism: Nadia Boulanger, the French musician who taught a whole generation of prominent American modernist composers; Aaron Copland, who would become one of the most significant and outspoken figures in American modernism; Serge Koussevitzky, the celebrated conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; and Leonard Bernstein, the composer and conductor most recognized for having popularized Mahler’s music. These figures shared their ideas on Mahler but also developed their own distinctive ones. This dissertation argues that between 1920, when Boulanger attended and wrote about a Mahler festival in Amsterdam, possibly her introduction to Mahler’s music, and 1960, when Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic in a celebration of the Mahler centenary, these four musicians played a significant role in shaping ideas about Mahler in America, and that they did so by placing Mahler in the specific contexts of their priorities as modernists. Methodologically, this study uses archival evidence to unite two strands of recent, significant musicological inquiry: the transnational history of American musical culture, and the transmission, reception, and circulation of music in interpersonal networks.

“The Dixie Plantation State: Antebellum Fiction and Global Capitalism” connects the development of literature of the U.S. South to the ideological tensions inherent in the southern plantation economy before the Civil War. Southern literary form during this time reflects an economy that was sustained by international capitalism but which imagined itself as a version of provincial feudalism. The antebellum southern economy was defined by slavery and individual plantations, which created a culture that was isolated, rural, and oppressive. However, with global trade through cotton plantations as the driving force behind regional profit, the southern economy was also shaped by a form of laissez-faire, liberal capitalism that emphasized individual opportunism and modernization. The texts I discuss create myths of plantation life and re-imagine southern society under the plantation economy in ways that simultaneously support and question the ideological foundations of the system. Literary representation then becomes a method of merging nineteenth-century models of capitalism and international trade with the ostensibly self-contained tendencies of the plantation and the racial oppression of the slave system. Each chapter is organized around a different literary form or genre and incorporates a comparative study of British fiction and fiction of the U.S. South. I argue that the form of nineteenth-century southern literature developed in tandem with the expansion of transatlantic trade. Therefore, the antebellum authors I discuss in this study do not consistently separate literary value from practical business or financial concerns. In chapters that focus on the historical romance, the sketch form, social problem novels, and African-American autobiographical narratives, I highlight the interconnected nature of literary representation and economic change. Authors such as William Gilmore Simms, Joseph Glover Baldwin, George Tucker, Maria J. McIntosh, and Martin Delany drew from British novels such as Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South to represent the South as both economically progressive and culturally traditional. In this sense, fiction allowed southern authors to engage with the quasi-feudal space of the plantation within the modern economic models of the nineteenth century, without fully rejecting or denying either.

This is a transnational history of the early republic that focuses on religious actors. The early American foreign mission movement was an outward-looking expression of the benevolent network of the early republic. Building on transatlantic connections that predated the American Revolution, it represented American evangelicals’ attempt to transform the “heathen world” into part of God’s kingdom. Using ABCFM missions to in India, the Cherokee Nation, and Liberia as case studies, this dissertation examines the relationship between the church and imperial politics. In the 1800s, Americans, who had focused their evangelism on Native Americans, joined British evangelicals in the work of world mission. In the first decades of their work, they saw the potential of imperial expansion as a conduit for evangelization. In practice, evangelicals found great faults with imperial governments. Everywhere, missionaries struggled to determine how linked the projects of Christianizing and “civilizing” ought to be. With regard to gender norms in particular, missionaries found the introduction of “civilization” to be an essential part of their work. The question of slavery ultimately led to a shift in mission policy. By the mid-1840s, the Board insisted that it was a single-issue organization whose sole purpose was the conversion of the world. In so doing, the Board shifted away from the early 19th century model of foreign missions as bearers of “civilization” to a mid-19th century model of a separation between missions and politics.

Rough Crossings investigates the efforts of Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Paul Muldoon to read and revise anti-imperial narratives from across the Atlantic. Drawing on transnational, modernist, and post-colonial studies, this dissertation features texts that are themselves bound up with texts from other national literary traditions. In other words, I look carefully at the ways in which these authors are themselves Atlantic readers. In their writing about empire and its local effects on their homelands, these writers find surprising ways to figure the material conditions of colonial contact at specific historical moments while bringing other times and other places to bear on their representations of those circumstances. While redrawing new spaces of belonging, the texts that compose my version of the Atlantic world also map a space imbued with experiences of loss: Ireland's decimated population after the Famine, housing crises for Catholics in Northern Ireland, the dispossession and removal of Native Americans from their lands, and the retreating national border of Mexico after the U.S.-Mexican War. Rather than being simply deferred until a later time, the dislocation of colonial trauma is worked out spatially in these authors' work. These stories take us to another place in addition to another time in order to witness and break out of the traumas of colonial and racial oppression. In substituting for or recovering from the forgotten, repressed, or dislocated blank spaces of traumatic experience, the texts at the heart of this dissertation begin to imagine new transatlantic revisions to the master narratives of empire. Building on the work of Irish Studies scholars like Seamus Deane and Luke Gibbons, and American Studies scholars like Shelley Streeby and Amy Kaplan, the readings I present in my dissertation offer an alternative view of the imperial thrust of American exceptionalism. Instead of viewing the West as the inevitable extension of America's growing empire, I figure the land beyond the frontier as an exceptional site of overlapping metropolitan and colonial spaces with crucial parallels to Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rough Crossings thus brings regional literature into postcolonial discussions that have often struggled to find room for places like Cather's Prairie, Fitzgerald's Middle West, Bret Harte's California, and Muldoon's rural borderlands in Northern Ireland. This dissertation suggests that the contours of these contested spaces are best understood when seen from both sides of the Atlantic.

Matthew FehskensDissertation Abstract My dissertation studies an aesthetic counter-modernity constructed in Hispanic Letters between the years of 1880-1918. This counter-modernity is characterized as a pursuit of permanence that posits itself to counteract the destabilizing force of progressive techno-scientific modernity. My study incorporates authors from both Spain and Latin America, signaling a shared transatlantic movement in literature that links these authors directly to the crisis of late modernity. Using a critical base of transatlantic theory developed by Paul Giles and Henri Lefebvre, the study explores texts by Rubén Darío, José Enrique Rodó, José Martí, Miguel de Unamuno, Azorín, and Juan Ramón Jiménez to illustrate the various postures of atemporal aesthetic modernity as it was manifested in poetry, prose, travel literature and the essay. My principle task in this dissertation has been to identify this ideology as a response to the tragic existential and social crisis suffered by these authors, thereby demonstrating confluences between the counter-modern literatures of Europe and Latin American and Spanish authors of the era, including these works in the Modernist dialogue shared by the West, from which these peripheral literatures have been critically excluded.I demonstrate the transatlantic counter-modernity developed in Hispanic letters of the 1900 moment by the following means; 1) Theoretically grounding the literature in terms of ideology and not nationalistic literary historiography, namely, the shared experience of modernization in Spain and Latin America and literature’s engagement with this crisis of values, 2) contextualizing Hispanic projects of regeneration and utopia in the over-arching Western tradition of the Romantic organicist paradigm of history, and the Symbolist aesthetic analogy, both being ideologies that seek to supplant linear, destructive time as it was conceived in modernity with a temporal experience of an eternal essence, 3) demonstrating the counter-modern lineage of the Spanish concept of intra-historia, Latin American Arielism, and of Pan-Latinism, 4) showing the same critical experience of bourgeois modernity and linear time in non-canonical literatures of the era, namely the travel journals that reveal a more personal perspective of this counter-modernity, and 5) detailing the transition from the literature of the 1900 moment to the Avant-garde, in which the analogic temporality of the Symbolist tradition gives way to the ironic as the ubiquitous triumph of the modernizing process accomplishes a devaluation of idealist poetic systems while heightening even further the historicity of the Western subject.

In our complex and interconnected world, scholars of international relations seek to better understand challenges spurred by intensified global communication and interchange. This dissertation investigates how network-based solutions of knowledge creation and dissemination may enhance our capacity to produce better policies.This research suggests that in order to overcome policy problems transnationally, three critical aspects should be considered. First, as science and technology policy becomes increasingly critical to resolving global issues it should be regarded as an integral element of the foreign policy process. Second, as liberal IR theory argues, the increasing role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and transnational networks call for an alternative approach in unraveling patterns of cooperation in the twenty-first century. Third, scholars from various theoretical perspectives have emphasized the potential value of transatlantic governance in the global economy.This dissertation concentrates on the idea that knowledge network (KNET) participants constitute a “linchpin” in transatlantic relations. To test this empirically, this research uses hyperlink network analysis to investigate cooperative arrangements and virtual communication patterns between the European Union and the United States. This study reveals the knowledge-based structure of the transatlantic relationship as a core element of the international system, and a primary catalyst in the resolution of transnational policy problems. This research also demonstrates that there is a variety of actors actively involved in these transatlantic virtual networks. While state actors are not invisible, they are not predominant actors in these networks.

This thesis examines cultivation in the lives of Sarah and Columbia Bennett between the years 1852 and 1874. The Bennett women's letters convey an intimate sense of the agro-economic preoccupations (and gardening pleasures) of these slave-owning white women, and the centrality of cultivation in mid-nineteenth-century rural Louisiana within a landscape of country stores, plantations, and people. As the lives of the Bennett women illustrate, white women's gardening knowledge and practice formed a cornerstone of central Louisiana society. The Bennett women's gardening knowledge and skill were primary components in the creation of a self-sustaining plantation household. By cultivating produce and other foodstuffs for consumption, the Bennett women made possible the family's participation in the lucrative market for cotton and other cash crops, a market that also tied their household to plantation economies elsewhere in the transatlantic world.

This dissertation uses the Keithian Schism, a split within the Society of Friends in the last decade of the seventeenth century led by George Keith, to integrate and thus better explore several aspects of Quakerism, the public sphere, and early Enlightenment fears of religious heterodoxy. Quaker history has often narrowly focused on those aspects of Quakerism that set it apart from English society as a whole. The Schism, I first seek to show, reveals how very early modern the Quakers were in their handling of honor culture, public dispute, identity, and political authority. At the same time, these common elements of Quakerism and early modern society are examined within the specific needs of the Society. Starting in the 1670s, the Society of Friends pursued a project of theological reform, and political lobbying in order to achieve legal toleration of their sect. Central to this effort was their ability to control how it was represented by opponents and members alike. Keith was involved with this project, at the levels of creating a less heterodox theological façade for the doctrine of the Inner Light and of using his more educated demeanor to cultivate elite allies (such as the Cambridge professor Dr. Henry More and his student, Anne Conway). Keith's adoption of a Renaissance system of ideas known as the "Ancient Theology" led him toward a more traditional formulation of the nature of Christ that helped provoke the Schism (without determining it). Influenced by English "revisionist" historians, however, I then focus on the narrative of the Schism, first within Pennsilvania and then London, to show that the Schism was also very much about personal honor, corporate identities, and reputation. Finally, the dissertation turns to the period after Keith's expulsion from the Society to reveal two often neglected aspect of the Schism: the role of non-Quakers and of the public sphere produced by the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695. These events reveal first the interest of a broader public in what is usually understood as an event solely within Quaker or colonial Pennsylvanian history. Likewise the entry into the press of numerous former Quakers, Dissenters, Anglicans and printers seeking to use the Schism to their own religious or commercial advantage elaborates recent historical literature concerning the perceived dangers of the public sphere. I set a portion of this Keithian literature, which consisted of a High Anglican attack on Quakerism as Deistic, within the contemporaneous Socinian Crisis and the rise of "societies for the reformation of manners," such as the Anglican S.P.G. and S.P.C.K., which were fundamentally anti-Quaker in their focus, both in England and the colonies. Ultimately, the ability of the Society to utilize it highly organized meeting structure to control its representation in the public sphere demonstrates the manner in which the public sphere of 1690s England was simultaneous dangerous and essential to the Quaker effort to achieve a toleration that extended beyond the merely legal.

This project asks what print culture meant to modernist writers and publishers and explores the multiple ways in which they experimented with the cultural associations, readerly expectations, and visual landscapes offered by various vehicles of print circulation. While recent critical attention has focused on the intersections between modernism and the marketplace, these critical conversations focus intensively on content and on authors’ biographical experiences while mostly neglecting to consider how market forces interact with literary forms. My work argues for a new focus on the connections between material textual production and formal techniques. I draw both on recent textual theory and on archival materials in order to develop my readings of the formal experimentation of modernist texts. This dissertation argues that modernist formal experimentation was in its very essence developed in dialogue with material conditions of publication, circulation, and reading, and with the cultural associations clustered around different modes of transatlantic print culture. Thus, in one chapter I explore Henry James’s play with the printed landscape offered by illustrated popular magazines and newspapers in his story “The Real Thing” and in another I consider how Woolf redefines the material form of a work of biography in her Hogarth Press edition of Flush: A Biography. In addition to chapters focused on modernist experiments with particular print forums, my dissertation also explores moments when modernist writers engage with ideas about print circulation and with the cultural associations offered by different aspects of print culture. In my third chapter, my rereading of The Waste Land argues for Eliot’s interest in the cultural legacy of nineteenth-century narrative circulation and my second chapter contextualizes Henry James’s shifting uses of telegrams in his fiction as part of his career-long investment in the material forms and cultural history of telegraphic communication. Through multiple local readings that situate modernist texts within their historical contexts of production and dissemination, I argue that modernism’s material forms are fundamentally experiments with and in what the modernists themselves saw as a world of print.

Scholars of women's rhetoric, educational history, and composition studies have yet to account fully for the role of student writing in the formation of late nineteenth-century women's colleges and intellectual networks. Claiming an Education studies previously unexamined artifacts of college women's diaries, letters, poetry, and articles published in campus-based magazines or popular periodicals to reveal students' rhetorical strategies for achieving access to two elite men's universities and succeeding academically, though campus culture remained ambivalent, even hostile, toward women students. Girton and Newnham Colleges at Cambridge and Radcliffe College at Harvard provide the primary historical sites for this project, which offers a deeper understanding of how the desire for education motivated women to cross the North Atlantic in multiple directions between 1870 and 1900. Beyond their physical crossings, these women facilitated the circulation of ideas about educated women by fostering a print culture that encouraged women to claim and perform knowledge and exert cultural influence through higher education. Chapter one draws on theories of epideictic rhetoric to demonstrate how institutional history, a sub-genre of educational history, perpetuates narrative values that obscure the collaborative labor flourishing in the shadows of celebrated founders. Chapter two reads the Inter-Collegiate Letters column in the Girton College magazine, The Girton Review, as a textual site where students built transatlantic social networks of college-educated women. Chapter three turns to Alice Mary Longfellow and Helen Gladstone to argue that the problematic dialectic of extraordinary/ordinary in narrative constructions of women's lives, labor, and writing clouds understandings of student influence in women's intellectual and institutional development. Chapter four studies the figure of the frustrated intellectual woman in the work of Amy Levy, a Newnham College student and Victorian writer, and illustrates how other student writers, Levy's peers, adopted a variety of intellectual personae to debate women's place at elite universities. Chapter five explores students' accounts of the academic difficulty they faced at college and their strategies for negotiating the gate-keeping nature of this difficulty through the creation of debating societies, study groups, and reading parties---all places to experiment with performances of the intellectual identities esteemed in prestigious academic environments.

My dissertation analyzes modern women’s novels that interrogate the role of marriage in the construction of female identity. Mapping the character of Clarissa in The Voyage Out (1915), “Mrs. Dalloway’s Party” (1923), and primarily Mrs. Dalloway (1925), I highlight Woolf’s conviction that negotiating modernity requires an exploratory yet protected consciousness for married women. Rhys’s early novels, Quartet (1929), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939), portray women excluded from the rite of marriage in British society. Unable to counter oppressive Victorian mores, her heroines invert the modernist impulse to “make it new” and face immutability instead, contrasting with the enforced multiplicity of identity endured by women of color in Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929) and Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Hurston’s last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), indicts American race and gender relations in the story of a white woman’s modification of her identity within an abusive marriage. In each novel, marital crises reflect the experience of becoming “modern,” of attaining female selfhood in sexually, socially, and racially complicated milieus.

This dissertation examines eighteenth-century Methodism to illustrate how evangelicals created new practices, philosophies and families. This study uses family in its broadest possible terms, as a metaphorical blanket for a community of related people, because Methodists often used familial terms when describing themselves and their relationships with other Methodists. Additionally, it examines nuclear evangelical families, to look at how evangelicals decided to marry, and how they made those decisions within a religious framework. Building on the study of the Atlantic world, this dissertation demonstrates the existence of a shared transatlantic culture of evangelicalism, bound together through print culture, common evangelical language, epistolary networks, leadership hierarchy, and religious practice. This work extensively examines anti-Methodist literature, exploring the dynamic between dissenting and mainstream groups and dissecting the language and debates that volleyed between Methodists and their detractors. Chapter One examines the history of the family and outlines early modern cultural and metaphorical uses of family. Chapter Two examines the history of Methodism, from its inception in England in 1729 through the growing pangs of American Methodism following the American Revolution. Chapter Three traces the family culture of evangelicals and the familial terms of Methodist membership to both the structures and the discourse of Methodism. Through the autobiographical narratives of Methodists, this chapter demonstrates how religious membership dislocated Methodists from their own families. Chapter Four examines anti-Methodist writings to show how eighteenth-century Anglo-American society equated Methodism with sexual deviancy. It includes an analysis of the basis for these accusations within Methodist religious experience, and evangelicals' responses. Finally, Chapter Five examines how Methodists defined certain rules for courtship and marriage, as well as the alternative to marriage, celibacy. While itinerant preachers were strongly advised to remain celibate, this chapter outlines the practice of temporal celibacy and the Methodist practice of finding marriage partners.