Browsing by Subject "Nineteenth century"
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Item Between boulevard and boudoir : working women as urban spectacle in nineteenth-century French and British literature(2011-08) Erbeznik, Elizabeth Anne; Wettlaufer, Alexandra; MacKay, Carol; Wilkinson, Lynn; Coffin, Judith; Bergman-Carton, JanisBetween Boulevard and Boudoir examines the nineteenth-century obsession with documenting the modern metropolis and analyses visual and verbal portraits of working women to investigate how urban literature invented the seamstress as a type. Approaching the nineteenth-century city as a site of passive voyeurism where social relationships were increasingly mediated by print culture, I argue that sketches of French grisettes and British sempstresses replaced the endless variety among working-class women with a repetitive sameness through the fictionalization of these urban figures. Transforming producers of commodities into objects of consumption, popular fiction showcased the visibility of the city’s working women while ignoring their actual labor. These women were thus portrayed as exploited bodies, rather than exploited workers, destined to adorn, and then disappear into, the crowded city. This dissertation looks first at what Walter Benjamin dubbed “panoramic literature” — texts that sought to describe the metropolis and its inhabitants through a categorization of people and places based on appearances — and asserts that these fragmentary depictions created a widely recognizable urban typology that gained cultural currency and, ultimately, influenced other authors. Analyzing French and British urban text, I maintain, however, that even the most stereotyped representations destabilized the structures of classification that defined the working woman as a type. While novelists Eugène Sue, G.W.M. Reynolds, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning all seem to valorize self-supporting women, I demonstrate that, by turning their workers into wives and expelling them from the city, they discredit the premise of an urban destiny that confined these women to a type. This examination of the unique position of working women in Paris and London not only challenges established notions about nineteenth-century constructions of gender but also provides insight into the anxieties – vis-à-vis the rapidly changing city – that plagued the writers who codified these women as types. Investigating the fictionalization of working women, this study opens up urban literature to considerations of how gender and class determine inclusion within the city as it was produced by print culture.Item Censors, intellectuals, and German civil society, 1815-1848(2014-12) Bunn, Matthew Stephen; Matysik, Tracie; Coffin, Judith; Williamson, George; Crew, David; Belgum, KirstenIn late 1819, reactionary forces led by Prince Clemens von Metternich pushed through a package of legislation aimed at curbing what they saw as a dangerous revolutionary conspiracy. Among those policies was the requirement of preventive censorship for all works published in the newly formed German Confederation under 320 pages. As a result of this policy, German states and intellectuals were set against one another, as publishers, editors, and authors fought for their ability to speak and write without state tutelage, while governments sought not only to control domestic discourse, but also to avoid offending other powerful states. Despite the significance of such a task, however, governments took on the challenge of regulating an ever-growing press with remarkably limited resources, and entrusted a small group of men, drawn from the ranks of educated civil servants, to be censors. This study examines the work of these censors, who, often against their own inclinations, had to mediate between a neo-absolutist state and an increasingly mobilized political press. Charting the development of censorship from the issuance of the Carlsbad Decrees in 1819 until the abrogation of prior restraint in 1848, it argues that censors were not one-sidedly reactionary figures, but rather were often indicative of the attitudes and assumptions of the milieu of educated state servants from which they were drawn. Censorship itself was also not simply repressive, but also had generative effects, as it touched off wide-ranging debates over the meaning of scholarship, politics, and religion. Ultimately, however, the state’s claim to exercise censorship in defense of public order was undermined with the emergence of stark cleavages within German society, which set loose forces beyond the state’s control. The end of censorship thus also spelled the end of fantasies of a politics of consensus, not only for traditionalist conservatives, but also for the liberal movement that had opposed it.Item Chinese coolies in Cuba and Peru : race, labor, and immigration, 1839-1886(2010-08) Narvaez, Benjamin Nicolas; Brown, Jonathan C. (Jonathan Charles), 1942-; Hu-DeHart, Evelyn; Garfield, Seth W.; Gurdiy, Frank A.; Deans-Smith, Susan; Hsu, Madeline Y.This dissertation examines the experience of the tens of thousands of Chinese indentured laborers (colonos asiáticos or “coolies”) who went to Cuba and Peru as replacements for African slaves during the middle of the nineteenth century. Despite major sociopolitical differences (i.e., colonial slave society vs. independent republic without slavery), this comparative project reveals the common nature in the transition from slavery to free labor. Specifically, the indenture system, how the Chinese reacted to their situation, and how they influenced labor relations mirrored each other in the two societies. I contend that colonos asiáticos, while neither slaves nor free laborers, created a foundation for a shift from slavery to free labor. Elites in both places tried to fit the Chinese into competing projects of liberal “progress” and conservative efforts to stem this change, causing them to imagine these immigrant laborers in contradictory ways (i.e., free vs. slave, white vs. non-white, hard-working vs. lazy, cultured vs. morally corrupt). This ambiguity excused treating Asian laborers as if they were slaves, but it also justified treating them as free people. Moreover, Chinese acts of resistance slowly helped undermine this labor regime. Eventually, international pressure, which never would have reached such heights if the Chinese had remained passive, forced an end to the “coolie” trade and left these two societies with little option but to move even closer to free labor. That said, this work also considers the ways in which the differing socio-political contexts altered the Chinese experience. In particular, in contrast to Peru, Cuba’s status as a colonial slave society made it easier for the island’s elites to justify exploiting these workers and to protect themselves from mass rebellion. My dissertation places the histories of Cuba and Peru into a global perspective. It focuses on the transnational migration of the Chinese, on their social integration into their new Latin American host societies, as well as on the international reaction to the situation of immigrant laborers in Latin America.Item Illegible women : feminine fakes, façades, and counterfeits in nineteenth-century literature and culture(2013-05) Eure, Heather Latiolais; Wettlaufer, AlexandraExamining periodicals and novels from 1847 to 1886, I analyze the feminine fake to argue that individuals were beginning during this period to grapple with the discomforting idea that identity, especially gender, might be a social construct. Previously, scholars have contended that this ideological shift did not occur until the 1890s. I apply the term "feminine fake" to the tools that women use to falsify their identities and to the women who counterfeit their identities. Equally, I consider the fake as a theatrical moment of falsifying one's identity. In my first chapter, I set up my theoretical framework, which draws from Laqueur's writings on the cultural history of sex and gender, Poovey's work on the "uneven development" of gender ideology, and Baudrillard and Eco's respective concepts of the simulacra and the hyperreal. Chapter II examines issues of The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine and La Mode illustrée to analyze the feminine fake during the period surrounding the Franco-Prussian War. Using Fraser, Green, and Johnston's writing on the periodical alongside Hiner's theories of the ideological work of the accessory, I argue that the women's magazine, particularly via the "rhetoric of the fake" therein, fashion, and the accessory were crucial sites for the construction of gender at the time. Chapter III looks at performance and the feminine fake in Vanity Fair and La Curée. I re-evaluate Voskuil's theories of "acting naturally" to analyze the charades and tableaux vivants within the novels and illustrate how these performances metaphorically function as society's failed efforts to render feminine identities legible. In Chapter IV, I analyze Lady Audley's Secret and L'Eve future, situating Lady Audley and the android as hyperfeminine, or marked by an identificatory excess rendering them more feminine than any real woman. The threat they pose to legible feminine and human identity drives the need to control their unmanageable identities: at the ends of the novels, the women, along with what I characterize as their inhuman fakery, are irreversibly contained.Item “Now exhibiting” : Charles Bird King’s picture gallery, fashioning American taste and nation 1824-1861(2012-12) Dasch, Rowena Houghton; Rather, Susan; Charlesworth, Michael; Kamil, Neil; Neff, Emily; Smith, JeffreyThis dissertation is an exploration of Charles Bird King’s Gallery of Paintings. The Gallery opened in 1824 and, aside from a brief hiatus in the mid-1840s, was open to the public through the end of the antebellum era. King, who trained in London at the Royal Academy and under the supervision of Benjamin West, presented to his visitors a diverse display that encompassed portraits, genre scenes, still lifes, trompe l’oeils and history paintings. Though the majority of the paintings on display were his original works across these various genres, at least one third of the collection was made up of copies after the works of European masters as well as after the American portraitist Gilbert Stuart. This study is divided into four chapters. In the first, I explore late-colonial and early-republic public displays of the visual arts. My analysis demonstrates that King’s Gallery was in step with a tradition of viewing that stretched back to John Smibert’s Boston studio in the mid-eighteenth century and created a visual continuity into the mid-nineteenth century. In a second chapter, focused on portraiture, I examine what it meant to King and to his visitors to be “American.” The group of men and women King displayed in his Gallery was far more diverse than typical for the time period. King included many prominent politicians, but no American President after John Quincy Adams (whom King had painted before Adams’ election). Instead he featured portraits of many men of commerce as well as prominent women and numerous American Indians. In the third chapter, I look at a group of King’s original compositions, genre paintings. King’s style in this category was clearly indebted to seventeenth-century Dutch tradition as filtered through an eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British lens, in particular the works of Sir David Wilkie. My final chapter continues the exploration of Dutch influences over King’s work. These paintings draw together the themes of King’s sense of humor, his attitudes towards patronage and his methods of circumventing inadequate patronage through the establishment of the Gallery. Finally, they prompt us to reconsider the importance of European precedents in our understanding of how artists and viewers worked together to establish an American visual cultural dialogue.Item Out of place : exilic absence in the writing and photography of Hugo, Zola, and Loti(2016-05) Lehman, Meredith Louise; Wettlaufer, Alexandra; Picherit, Hervé; Wilkinson, Lynn; Neuberger, Joan; Charlesworth, MichaelOut of Place examines the lesser-known photography of three canonical authors, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, and Pierre Loti, during their respective exiles from France, whether involuntary, self-imposed, or self-constructed. By reading the photographs taken of and by these authors in dialogue with their writing, including journal entries, correspondence, fiction, and theoretical writings, I explore the motif of exile which encompasses themes equally characteristic of the then nascent medium: loss, absence, and nostalgia. I argue that photography lent itself well in expressing and mediating the disjunctions of exile and offered an ideal medium for these writer-photographers to construct their artistic selfhood via images of marginalization and absence. Locating exile as a metaphor for creative genius and the exile as an avatar of artistic identity within Romantic-era representations, I look at how this metaphor evolves across different artistic movements and mediums as it shifts from a metaphor to a reality and becomes a trope for representation vis-à-vis questions of impermanence and distance. While prior scholarship has primarly considered exile in terms of the alienating effects of modern culture fostered by a climate of urbanization and capitalism, I study artists who experienced geographic dislocation at critical moments in nineteenth-century France’s history and who represented their placelessness through the lens of photography. Drawing upon the work of Walter Benjamin, Geoffrey Batchen, Eduardo Cadava, and Richard Terdiman, among others, I show that exilic absence mirrors the spectral qualities of photography and its disconcerting crisis of history and memory that brings the past, the elsewhere, and the self within reach, while at the same time, forcing the viewer to realize his/her distance from these ideals. Through the motif of exile, and the affinities it shares with photography, Hugo, Zola, and Loti explore representation as absence made present, providing a crucial lens for re-framing these writers’ aesthetics of representation, and more largely, the complex relationship between literature and photography during this time. This interdisciplinary study thus challenges established notions about the relationship between these two mediums as either rivals or allies in the quest for realist aesthetics and instead shows how the camera served as a tool for artistic self-expression and self-representation for these displaced authors.Item Re-reading the American renaissance in New England and in Mexico City(2010-05) Anderson, Jill, 1979-; Barrish, Phillip; Carton, Evan; Dominguéz-Ruvalcaba, Héctor; Joysmith, Claire; Murphy, GretchenRe-Reading the American Renaissance in New England and in Mexico City is a bi-national literary history of the confluence of concerns unevenly shared by new world liberal intellectuals in New England and in Mexico City. This dissertation seeks to fill a gap in our understanding of the complex history that informs the multi-faceted public and private spheres of the United States and Mexico in the twenty-first century. I introduce translations of nineteenth-century liberal intellectuals from the interior of Mexico who were preoccupied with many of the same ideas and problems characteristic of US American literary nationalism: the nation in moral crisis, the post-/neo-colonial onus of originality in the new world, the hypocrisies of race-based romantic nationalism, and the inherent contradictions of economic and political liberalisms. These inter-textual juxtapositions shift the analysis of US American liberal nationalism from a nation-based narrative of success or failure to the study of the complex, unequally distributed failures of liberalism across the region. Each chapter offers a new contextualization of the US American renaissance that demonstrates the period to be a complex palimpsest of provincial prejudices, liberal nationalisms, and cosmopolitan strategies. In Chapter Two I read the trans-american jeremiads of Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, and Henry David Thoreau and Carlos María de Bustamante, Mariano Otero, and Luís de la Rosa in the aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Chapter Three focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s and Ignacio Ramírez's incommensurate preoccupations with the origins of language and their inter-related post/neo-colonial bids for national recognition on a Eurocentric geopolitical stage. The travel accounts of William Cullen Bryant’s trip to Mexico City in 1872 and Guillermo Prieto’s overnight stay in Bryant’s Long Island home in 1877 set the scene in Chapter Four to explore the bi-national tensions inherent in their oddly inter-related romantic nationalisms. Furthermore, the insights of this bi-national literary history invite us to recognize the contours of our own geopolitical positions, and in recognizing them, to re-orient nationalist epistemologies and literary histories as deeply conversant with contemporaneous traditions otherwise considered peripheral and/or foreign.Item Tearing up the nun : Charlotte Brontë's gothic self-fashioning(2013-05) Sloan, Casey Lauren; MacKay, Carol HanberyThis report explores the ideological motivations behind Charlotte Brontë's inclusion of and alterations to gothic conventions in Villette (1853). By building on an account of the recent critical conversation concerning the conservative Enlightenment force of the gothic, this report seeks to explain the political significance of a specific, nineteenth-century mutation in the genre: Lucy Snowe as an experiment in the bourgeois paradigm. Lucy Snowe's sophisticated consciousness of genre manifests in her minute attention to dress, but the persistence of her personal gothic history means that Villette enacts political tension between individualistic "self-fashioning" and historical determinism as clashing models for the origin of identity.Item Too foul and dishonoring to be overlooked : newspaper responses to controversial English stars in the Northeastern United States, 1820-1870(2010-05) Smith, Tamara Leanne; Canning, Charlotte, 1964-; Jones, Joni L.; Wolf, Stacy; Thompson, Shirley E.; Forgie, GeorgeIn the nineteenth century, theatre and newspapers were the dominant expressions of popular culture in the northeastern United States, and together formed a crucial discursive node in the ongoing negotiation of American national identity. Focusing on the five decades between 1820 and 1870, during which touring stars from Great Britain enjoyed their most lucrative years of popularity on United States stages, this dissertation examines three instances in which English performers entered into this nationalizing forum and became flashpoints for journalists seeking to define the nature and bounds of American citizenship and culture. In 1821, Edmund Kean’s refusal to perform in Boston caused a scandal that revealed a widespread fixation among social elites with delineating the ethnic and economic limits of citizenship in a republican nation. In 1849, an ongoing rivalry between the English tragedian William Charles Macready and his American competitor Edwin Forrest culminated in the deadly Astor Place riot. By configuring the actors as champions in a struggle between bourgeois authority and working-class populism, the New York press inserted these local events into international patterns of economic conflict and revolutionary violence. Nearly twenty years later, the arrival of the Lydia Thompson Burlesque Troupe in 1868 drew rhetoric that reflected the popular press’ growing preoccupation with gender, particularly the question of woman suffrage and the preservation of the United States’ international reputation as a powerfully masculine nation in the wake of the Civil War. Three distinct cultural currents pervade each of these case studies: the new nation’s anxieties about its former colonizer’s cultural influence, competing political and cultural ideologies within the United States, and the changing perspectives and agendas of the ascendant popular press. Exploring the points where these forces intersect, this dissertation aims to contribute to an understanding of how popular culture helped shape an emerging sense of American national identity. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that in the mid-nineteenth century northeastern United States, popular theatre, newspapers, and audiences all contributed to a single media formation in which controversial English performers became a rhetorical antipode against which “American” identity could be defined.