Thesiss

My dissertation compares British, German, and French Romantic drama, emphasizing women writers' plays about female combatants in the French Revolution. The term French Revolutionary Theater denotes an extended metaphor for examining the drama of death, war, and political protest…

This study excavates the emotional life of objects imported from the East—Japanese tables, Turkish opium, Malaysian laborers, infected Indian bodies—to explore the way racial objects construct and represent the Orient in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The numerous disc…

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the significance of Thomas Mann's Joseph-novels in the shadow of Europe's decline, from the perspective of those living beyond the great world-holocaust of the early and middle century. Working outward from the focal point of the no…

This dissertation explores how a number of romantic writers, Wordsworth and Whitman especially, presented themselves as prophets, claiming to speak for nature. Like biblical prophets narrating prophetic calls, these writers relate how nature called them to poetry, which raises k…

For this thesis, my aim was to deconstruct the notion of heterosexual love in order to question if and how current stories of love are involved in producing gender inequality. Using discourse analysis, informed by feminist theory, I analysed, in detail, qualitative interviews wi…

This dissertation explores what it means to speak of "space" in the age of empire, arguing that geographical practices are key to understanding the political and poetic practices of the Romantic period. Though I treat a number of writers whose relation to Romantic literature is …

In spite of postmodern attempts by prominent figures such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault to deconstruct the Author, and to expose as fraudulent and false some of the underlying assumptions related to genius, a popular understanding of the Author-as-Genius persists in the …

In contrast to the Greek concept of prophecy as a form of prediction, Romantic prophecy rehabilitates a version of Hebrew prophecy that involves a more ambivalent relationship to history and time. That is, while the rise of prophecy in Romanticism might—like the rise of historio…

In this paper I demonstrate the implicit gender characteristics present in melodic material written for the ‘French’ horn in orchestral literature from the Classical to late- Romantic periods, paying particular attention to the evolution of both their usage and signification. I …

This dissertation examines the philosophy and poetry of three major British Romantic writers (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth) to contest a popular narrative promulgated by literary scholars and intellectual historians that identifies the Ro…

This dissertation uses Friedrich Schlegel’s (1772–1829) literary concept of the arabesque to analyze genre mixture and formal digression in the early Romantic piano concerto. Drawing on both John Daverio’s adaptation of the arabesque for nineteenth-century music (1987;1993) and …

This dissertation examines the ways in which the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British encounter with the Orient redefined literary representations of difference. The Orientalist renaissance which took place from the late seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries wa…