In general, our study is an attempt to communicate with recent work on mimesis, differance, and affect in the belief that this work has radicalized and generalized the concept of communication and, hence, of community (politics, ethics, and art). We will observe, as our most consistent point of reference, that the very term ...

This dissertation seeks to formulate a general theory of the expatriate novel. Central to that theory is the important recognition that the movement of fictional characters away from their familiar surroundings to a place foreign, exotic, at times dangerous is a narrative basic to many American texts. In other words, the study ...

James Baldwin once described the intertwining lives of Anglo and African in American culture as "a wedding," a metaphor that is at once illuminating and hauntingly inappropriate as a characterization of the long and bloody history of racism and slavery in the New World. While capturing the inextricability of blacks and whites ...

In this dissertation, I challenge the prevailing twentieth-century notion that didacticism in the eighteenth-century novel is too overt to warrant further investigation. Although many eighteenth-century authors boast that their works are designed "to instruct," I propose that the reader must look beyond that seemingly formulaic ...

The New England Puritans set out to "irradiate an Indian wilderness," but rightly feared they were being "Indianized" as well. Their Indian captivity narratives, ostensibly celebrations of passive submission to the will of God, in fact represent the violent incorporation of the "wilderness" and its human components into the ...

The unique Middle English prose life of Alexander the Great (the prose Alexander) is the first item in Lincoln Cathedral Library MS. 91 (Lincoln Thornton), a miscellany of religious, historical, pragmatic, and romantic pieces. Although the "control" of the hand varies, sometimes from leaf to leaf, the prose Alexander is written ...

This dissertation is an attempt to show the role the figure of synecdoche plays in Romantic and Post-Romantic poetry. I argue that we cannot understand the pressure on poetic language experienced by these poets unless we recognize the tensions felt between the pull of particularizing descriptions and the need to preserve some ...

I examine the rhetoric of identity in Japanese American writings (1948-1988), focusing on two questions: How did Japanese American writers characterize Japanese Americans? Why did they characterize them in the ways they did? The introduction ("The Making of a Japanese American Identity") presents an overview of the anti-Japanese ...

The R MS of the B-text of Piers Plowman, along with Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 201 (F), has been said to inherit a uniquely correct version of the poem, containing some 170 lines which do not appear in any of the sixteen witnesses belonging to the $\beta$ branch of the of the B-text MSS tradition. The consensus on the ...

The six canonical male poets of the Romantic period are usually given credit for the late-eighteenth-century turn toward a new interest in issues of the self in literature. However, I argue that an under-explored counter tradition of the self in literature was initiated by Mary Wollstonecraft four years before these poets and ...