This thesis follows the development of Marilynne Robinson's ecotheology across her four novels. Robinson's theologically-grounded engagement with the environment is not simply marginal or incidental …
This dissertation examines representations of antisecular religion (herein referred to as the “religion of the disinherited”) in the late nineteenth and twentieth century American novel, …
“Between Law and Justice” considers how American literature after WWII responded to political and philosophical debates about the interrelation of law, conscience, and democracy. From …
This dissertation examines works by Richard Wright, Chang-rae Lee and Junot Diaz, as well as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather films, and how they theorize …
Disorder: Giving Form to Feeling in the Late Twentieth Century United States is a work of close formal literary analysis situated in a cultural history …
This dissertation poses the “essentially shimmering” as a rubric for conceiving how perception and poetry engage materiality in its most evanescent and changeable dispositions. Think …
In this dissertation, I argue that the novel was the laboratory in which emerging theories of embodied cognition developed sensible forms for nineteenth-century American audiences. …
This dissertation aims to explain the emergence of a set of vital, if unrecognized, realist imperatives in American literature and critical thought at mid-twentieth century. …
This dissertation is a study of how literature, intellectual culture, and spirituality scripted the early encounter between English colonists and the Powhatan people of Tidewater …
My dissertation attends both philosophically and historically to the affect of seriousness in contemporary American culture. It focuses specifically on expressions and performances of seriousness, …
This dissertation?"Out of the Many, One: Reading the Federal Republic, 1776-1870"? explores the relationship between early American literature and the political philosophy of federalism in …
This dissertation examines sentimentalism, the body, and time in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American fiction, focusing in particular on the work of Charles Brockden Brown, …
Long before the popularity of postbellum “Yellow Peril” narratives, Asian figures associated with trade occupied central positions in the American literary imaginary. My dissertation, “Pacific …
“Paper Urbanism” explores what I refer to as American literature’s "urban design imagination," as it evolved between the end of the nineteenth century and the …
This dissertation examines the prevalence of illness in postnationalist Afro- and Native American novels, and the ways in which such sickly identities offer alternatives to …
"Postmodern Realism and the Neoliberal Imagination" argues that postmodern fiction’s primary engagement with the politics of neoliberalism is generic, rather than ideological. Neoliberalism, I suggest, …
Professional Sentiments argues that nineteenth-century U.S. fiction revised sentimental models of subjectivity and social relations to evolve an affectivity of professionalism. Challenging a critical practice …