The titular “House” from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1851 work The House of the Seven Gables is not just one house: it is an old edifice where the characters live, an intertwined family “house” of the Pyncheons and Maules, the plants and animals who live there alongside the humans, th…
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Becoming Posthuman looks to dystopian and apocalyptic fiction to interrogate what it means to be human in a contemporary global landscape marked by neoliberal politics, white supremacy, and environmental precarity. In particular, this project responds to and examines the converg…
This work was motivated by two major facts: the African environment is at the heart of the continent's relationships with colonialism, neocolonialism and globalization; but there is not enough literary emphasis on this environmental centrality. This work contributes in bridging …
Animation holds a powerful ability to transport viewers to magical worlds as well as reveal aspects about the world around us that cannot be captured by live-action cinema or even expressed through words. An ecocritical look into cartoons has begun to unfold within the field of …
Drawing from literary criticism, ecological philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the wisdom of the female principle--or what Paula Gunn Allen perceives as "Her presence," the "power to make and relate"--this interdisciplinary study challenges dominant assumptions that habitually prev…
African Literature and the Environment: A Study in Postcolonial Ecocriticism, examines how African literary texts document, critique, and offer alternative visions on ecological crises such as the Niger-Delta oil pollution and the dumping of toxic wastes in African waters. The s…
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…
This thesis situates Yann Martel’s Life of Pi within the area of sea studies, analyzing the novel at the intersection of ecocritical ethics, social histories at sea, shipwreck allusions in literary texts, and the burgeoning field of blue cultural studies. My thesis also features…
This dissertation reexamines the work of the Victorian polymath William Morris (1834-1896) through his relationship with the landscape of the River Thames. Morris passed his whole life within the Thames’s system of streams and gentle valleys, and the river flows through his inte…
The study of American literary naturalism frequently relies on a handful of defining characteristics—plots of decline, aesthetic realism, and an emphasis on the deterministic forces beyond human control, to name a few. These characteristics often play out against the backdrop of…
This dissertation addresses how the Hollywood studio system used natural environments within the American West as locations for producing commercial moving images. How Hollywood represented such environments has, at times, significantly affected cultural views toward nature. In …
Beginning in the mid-1860s, the German-American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) used the fortune earned from his painting practice to make speculative investments in railroads, mines, and real estate across the American West, often at or near the sites that he dep…
The question of French literature’s portrayal of the environment has been widely debated in the ecocriticism field, with scholars such as Douglas Boudreau and Marnie Sullivan arguing that ecocriticism is predominately focused on literature written in English. In order to further…
This dissertation examines the metrical experiments of the Romantic poets, William Blake, Charlotte Smith, and John Clare, arguing that these poets saw meter and rhythm not merely as poetic operations but as agents of revelation, markers of linguistic evolution, and confirmation…
Food studies, though important and overflowing with new value and lenses, are still relatively new in academic studies. Even rarer still is the concept of using food studies as the lens through which one performs a literary analysis. This thesis focuses on doing just that. I wil…