Inspired by the concept of “zeroness” as defined by the late Swiss writer Robert Walser, A Great and Spherical Zero is a collection of fiction that addresses what it means to be small, or find smallness, and how greatness ...

In this study, I examine the various techniques used by poets to provide consolation. With Tennyson's In Memoriam, I explore the relationship between formal and thematic consolation, i.e., the ways in which the use of ...

Centering my focus on a detailed translation of the poetry of Bai Juyi's New Yuefu, I will reconstruct the poet's world on the foundation of political allegory found within his verse. Bai Juyi once said that there are four ...

This dissertation argues that certain iconic poems have shaped the canon of American poetry. Not merely "canonical" in the usual sense, iconic poems enjoy a special cultural sanction and influence; they have become discourses ...

In the early twentieth century, traditional Europe fell apart. Out of the chaos and uncertainty fostered by World War I grew Modernism, a movement marked by drastic breaks from the traditions of Western art and culture ...

My dissertation focuses on the poetic production of three criollas —the offspring of Spaniards in the Americas— in dialogic relation with prominent male writers across the Atlantic. The works studied, Clarinda’s Discurso ...

This dissertation searches for a body of queer modernist poetry while at the same time attempting to rework the definition of “queer.” In chapter I, I use a reconceptualization of queerness not as an abstract, theoretical ...

My dissertation is a comparative analysis of the juncture at which Chinese poetry became “modern.” The catalyst for this development was the early twentieth-century translation into Chinese of the European Romantics, which ...