literary history

Averaging Americans: Literature, Statistics, and Inequality was sparked by a computational discovery I made in a corpus of more than 18,000 works of US fiction: statistical words such as average, normal, and typical distinguish postbellum fiction from its antecedents quantitativ…

Mikhail Bulgakov’s mystifying relationship with the Soviet government, and with Joseph Stalin in particular, has long been understood to be a result of the dictator’s aesthetic appreciation for the writer’s early work. In an era defined by Stalin’s Great Terror, Bulgakov escaped…

Secondary World Fantasy has changed significantly since the foundational work of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and the rising popularity of such works necessitates a critical analysis. Lacking the necessary framework and categorization to discuss high fantasy in the proper …

The geographic south’s pervasive image in popular imagination is a monolithic south unified through ultraconservatism, hyper-religiosity, cisgenderism, heterosexuality, whiteness, and patriarchy. This monolithic view paints the south as a region deserving of comeuppance, as one …

“On Occasion: American Poetry at the Margins of the Wage, 1865-1973” shows how poets writing in the U.S. from the mid-nineteenth century to today have reimagined the poetic occasion—the real or imagined event that sanctions the poet to write a poem and that sets the parameters f…

The present study seeks to argue for a literary approach to writing history. In particular, it will use the case of the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and a sample of authors who documented it to show that this approach can add value to our understanding of history be…

Several changes on the socio-political front--the dominance of women writers, the demise of the African Writers' Series and emergence of the Caine prize for African Writing, and the turn to democracy in 1999--have all contributed to reshaping the context in which Nigerian litera…

This dissertation pursues the literary-historical tracks of the image repertoire of "boy-love" (amradparasti) versified for over two centuries in the Urdu ghazal. It critically engages with key positions in sexuality studies and ghazal criticism that have reduced this theme to v…

In the ancient Near East, the transmission of texts was inextricable from processes of revision. Scribes, at least those in positions of authority, made adjustments to their received material. Whether these alterations took the shape of exegetical glosses, omissions, or major ad…