British literature

In the eighteenth-century, the novel grew from a new medium to a dominant form of expression. This space, where readers and authors come to grips with the nature of fictionality, serves as a theoretical proving ground for New Materialist, agency-first reading practices. Caught U…

In Modernist Amateur Economists: Heterodox Economic Theory and British Literary Modernism, I argue that a range of British writers of literary modernism responded to a moment of institutional and economic instability by engaging with heterodox economic theories in their literary…

Disability and Race in British Literature, 1580-1833, examines the ways Both Spanish and English peasants and lower classes were regarded as intrinsically different from the nobility in which concepts of disability and race are deployed as human disqualifications in literary, me…

This dissertation examines eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels that use forced marriage as a plot structure to expose and subvert the oppression of women in British society. Each of the novels studied at length re-writes the forced marriage plot of Samuel Richardso…

The Specter of Extinction: Environmental Nihilism in British Science Fiction (1800–1945) argues that the history of British science fiction is inextricable from the career of human extinction as a concept. Charting literary depictions of human extinction through the end of the S…

Critiques of music can be traced to antiquity, but it was not until the eighteenth century that they became the distinct category of writing known as “criticism”. In eighteenth-century Britain, the growth of print and performance multiplied self-appointed arbiters of musical tas…

This dissertation addresses two limitations in recent scholarship on the representations of Islam and Muslims in nineteenth-century British literature. It implements a literary critique of the epistemological nature and repercussions of some of these representations from a nuanc…

This study will look at the representation and manifestation of physical and emotional connections between people and how they reflect the need to belong through three texts which suggest the creation of modern Britain. They include D.H. Lawrence's short story "Daughters of the …

My dissertation examines acts of seeing and looking in the late colonial and newly postcolonial societies of twentieth-century South Asia and Ireland. It argues that such acts are instrumental for maintaining, resisting, and destabilizing the dynamics of power existing between r…