This dissertation looks to the early American literary marketplace and argues that the American maritime genre, assumed to have begun with James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Pilot in 1824, was not an uncontested genre prior to Cooper’s popularization of maritime nationalism. Inst…
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Ancient Egyptian culture has been a powerful influence on a major tradition of English literature that runs from Edmund Spenser‘s The Faerie Queene (1596), one of whose major iconographic centers is the temple of Isis, to John Crowley‘s four-volume novel Ægypt (2007). My dissert…
American studies and literary scholarship have long operated on the assumption that the United States has no official religion. That assumption has led naturally to a circumscribed and incomplete, if not inaccurate, set of traditionally accepted literary-critical conclusions whe…
This dissertation examines American historical romances published between 1820 and 1860 by authors who situated contemporary concerns and social critiques within the historical setting of the American Revolution. The eight major texts treated in this study are James Fenimore Coo…
This dissertation investigates the representation of racial Others in James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers, Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Joseph Conrad's Nostromo. The project appropriates Gayatri G. Spivak's critique in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason of the invocation and …
Literature and the Nationalization of Heroism in Antebellum America locates selected works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James in the context of American heroic biography-more specifically, heroic biography as it represents nationality. …
This study explores the colonial-based historical fiction of Melville (Israel Potter), Sedgwick (Hope Leslie), and Hawthorne (The House of the Seven Gables), and uses references to American textiles and apparel to analyze what John McWilliams calls "the problem of cultural memor…
This study examines the concept of aesthetic autonomy as a colonial construct. It argues that at stake in the imperial contest, as it is symbolically conceived, is "beauty"--the aesthetic negatively defined. This function is indistinct in British literature which, shaped by the …
Melville's revision and completion of his two most ambitious novels, Mardi and Moby-Dick, uncannily mirrored the pregnancies and births of his first two children. With both, Melville revised nearly complete but less ambitious works at learning of the pregnancies. Despite financi…
This dissertation examines Herman Melville's self-consciously intertextual use of antebellum popular texts to register and critique the prevailing ideological assumptions and values which underwrote the American exclusionary culture of the period. Through a subversive dialogue w…
The English Puritans who came to the New World had to cross over the Atlantic Ocean. For many of them this experience paralleled that of ancient Israel. God had called his people from Egypt, over the Red Sea, to Canaan, the promised land. "Crossing over" for the Puritans meant a…
This thesis examines how cartographic discourse shapes interactions between the subject and space in representative nineteenth-century American and British narratives. In this period, mapping became a material expression of the project of Empire and an integral part of the proce…
This study examines Herman Melville's faith-doubt poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1876) and Mark Twain's touristic satire The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim's Progress (1869) as "infidel" counter-texts challenging the conventions of the extensive lite…
This study attempts to unify the writings of Herman Melville's later career by tracing the development of the philosophical and linguistic dualism embodied in Moby-Dick in the characters of Ahab and Ishmael. It follows--by means of close readings of primary texts--the extensions…
Melville's densely allusive prose is the stylistic signature of his fiction. The onrush of prolific allusion in Mardi, coincident with Melville's burgeoning authorial ambition, signals his awakening to the potential of encyclopedic references. Through them, he says, he wishes to…
The year 1853 marked a turning point in the career of Herman Melville; after the failure of Pierre, he turned to the magazines as a new outlet. A consideration of his stories in order of composition is the only true way to gauge Melville's artistic development during this period…
The post-revolutionary sons of America embraced the legacy of the Founding Fathers even as they resisted the authority of those fathers, deemed prescriptive and stifling. My dissertation argues that this ambivalence precipitated a crisis in antebellum consciousness in which simu…
The dissertation examines two issues: first, the impact of religious uncertainty on some experiments in narrative form in the nineteenth century, using works by Melville, Susan Warner, and Dostoevsky as examples; second and more generally, it takes up the theoretical and philoso…
Christianity and modernity are usually perceived as polar opposites. This dissertation, using the techniques of rhetorical and historical criticism, questions this account, termed "Neo-Christian" by William Empson, by examining certain twentieth-century American texts. The first…