In setting his 1898 tale In the Cage in a telegraph office, Henry James was adapting and investigating a metaphor that earlier novelists had used for the workings of fiction. As invoked by writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, the idealized image of the electric telegraph hints at some of the formal and ideological properties of…[Read more]

In setting his 1898 tale In the Cage in a telegraph office, Henry James was adapting and investigating a metaphor that earlier novelists had used for the workings of fiction. As invoked by writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, the idealized image of the electric telegraph hints at some of the formal and ideological properties of…[Read more]

Theories of the public sphere and of imagined political communities of shared reading have had lasting effects on the theoretical conceptualization of Americanist book history, but they also largely overlook the materiality of texts in ways that early and nineteenth-century American readers and writers did not. This essay reads early and…[Read more]

This is a slightly revised version of the paper I gave for the Out of Narrative Bounds panel organized by the forums TC Medical Humanities and Health Studies and TC Age Studies. This panel was chosen as representative of the presidential theme, Boundary Conditions. In this paper I use Jean-Dominque Bauby’s memoir, The Diving-Bell and the…[Read more]

This essay tackles a question that has preoccupied Francophone postcolonial studies for several decades—namely, what is believed almost unanimously to be the absence of a Francophone equivalent to the slave narrative in English. My article challenges this assumption by reconciling the legacies of slavery in both the Anglophone and Francophone “…[Read more]

This essay examines a longstanding normative assumption in the historiography of slavery in the Atlantic world: that enslaved Africans and their American-born descendants were bought and sold as “commodities,” thereby “dehumanizing” them and treating them as things rather than as persons. Such claims have, indeed, helped historians concept…[Read more]

‘The Selfish Giant’ by Oscar Wilde has a history rooted in Christianity. There are ample journals, books, and even some occasional movies that demonstrate Wilde’s work as a Christian allegory. In a Christian analysis, the giant is seen as either St. Christopher or an unknown man whereas the child who cries is the Christ child. A Christian readi…[Read more]

Sentimental fiction and domestic novels elevated the female voice, giving authority to the womanly experience as wives, mothers, and women. Novels such as Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter and Sara Payson Willis’s Ruth Hall adopted the ideology of feminine behavior and womanliness while, implying tones of dissatisfaction with the role and…[Read more]

This paper will be presented at the upcoming South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) conference Nov.3-6 in Jacksonville, FL. The research is a part of my thesis project that will be completed in spring 2017.

C. S. Lewis’s fourth Narnian chronicle is considered as detective fiction, illustrating principles for solving a murder mystery, especially alertness to the difference between appearance and reality. The human protagonists nearly fail through carelessness, overconfidence, and forgetfulness, combined with the deceit and magic of a shape-shifting v…[Read more]

Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies imagines a society where the body is under total control and the universal beauty of the body after dramatic reconstructive surgery at sixteen guarantees that everyone will be “equal.” To the young adult readership, such a world holds understandable appeal: the idea of avoiding the pains of coming to age in one’s own bod…[Read more]