The idea of poetry as a literary practice that is concerned with its own ontology has developed through the device of the ars poetica poem—poetry about poetry. Beginning with Horace’s ancient treatise Ars Poetica, published in c. 18 BCE, poets throughout history have sought to explain the nature of their craft through the medium of their craft. In the past century, ars poetica poems have morphed into examples of metalanguage, in which the poems work as vehicles to carry the defining characteristics of poetry itself. In order to track the movement of metalanguage, I examine the progression of the ars poetica poem from the Classical era to the Enlightenment to Modern twentieth and twenty-first century works. My research traces and analyzes the trajectory of poetic modes that discuss language itself. Shifts from didactic to introspective to aesthetic have marked the rhetorical turn of ars poetica, thus exemplifying how poetry as heightened language creates the need for metalanguage. In poetry more than any other literature, each component element is significant, so the elements of a poem inevitably turn in on itself. Ars poetica poems demonstrate how images, rhetoric, narrative, and linguistic mechanisms can all be self-referential. The presence of metalanguage in poetry suggests that the types of poetic knowledge—sensory, emotional, and imaginative—are more than externally meaning-making about “aesthetic” and “ethic” subjects, but that they are intrinsically expressing the nature and value of poetic theory.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate transnational influence in the poetry of Sarah Piatt, a recently recovered nineteenth century American poet. Piatt’s verse, considered by some to be the best poetry of her time second only to the work of Emily Dickinson, is remarkable for its quantity and breadth, but more importantly, for its subversive use of genteel style. Though her poems are generally divided into four overlapping categories, the two thematic classes of her poetry that will be explored in the most detail here are her Civil War poems and her “Irish poems,” which were inspired by an eleven year experience living in Ireland. These poems are examined through close reading and transnational analysis, as a conceptual link exists between Piatt’s perspective of the South during the American Civil War and her depiction of social injustice in her poems about Ireland and the Irish peasantry. These different contexts illustrate how Piatt brings her experience of civil strife and injustice in the United States to Ireland with her, influencing her understanding of political events in Ireland and her sympathies toward the destitute Irish people. As these conceptual ligaments are rarely one-sided, this paper seeks to illuminate the multi-directional nature of the transnational influence that impacts the way that Sarah Piatt’s poetry negotiates understanding at both local and global levels. By examining the complex dynamics of Piatt’s poetry, we can aid not only in the recovery of a deserving poet’s verse, but also clarify our understanding of nineteenth century women’s poetry as a rich body of work which merits greater consideration.

Many have demonstrated that Edmund Burke and other male writers contributed to, if not constructed, a gender binary in which males perpetually subdue and dominate the feminine. For instance, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft deconstructs passages from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, demonstrating that his ideal world is one in which sublime, masculine authority usurps the rights of women. For Wollstonecraft, Burke's efforts to counter revolutionary ideas are of no benefit to women. While these readings are certainly valid, some scholars have expressed the concern that in limiting our understanding of masculinity to its being a fixed institution determined to maintain power over women, we are grossly over-simplifying individual as well as collective masculine experience(s). Thus, I hope for this project to contribute to a more complex portrait of masculinity particularly in the late 18th century. Limiting my discussion to Burke's Reflections and Thomas Paine's Common Sense, I argue that however much these two literary works convey opposing ideologies, elements of their rhetorical strategy reveals that both writers understood that the success of their arguments largely depended on how effectively they controlled the semantic value of manliness. In order to provoke revolution, Paine seeks to assure his readers that engaging in revolution is an indisputable reflection of manhood. But unlike Paine, Burke wrote in order to prevent revolution. In the Reflections, Burke argues that the failure to sustain the pre-established order would result in the failure to retain masculinity. Ultimately, that Paine and Burke fought to control the meaning of manhood suggests masculinity was a loosely defined social institution--one consisting of males who lived in perpetual fear of losing, or failing to perform their masculinity; who were ever in need of affirmation that they were, indeed, men.

Like their Victorian forebears, Modernist authors have always placed keen emphasis on women’s hair, often presenting their luscious locks in vivid and scrupulous detail. Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow (1920) uses hair as a tool of social commentary and trope of the fairytale epic to challenge and even reverse traditional Victorian gender roles and sexuality norms. The tension between the private and public self is also explored; what Modernist women could not say aloud, they expressed through the style, color and length of their hair. Crome Yellow constantly alludes to the hair of the female protagonists Jenny Mullion and Mary Bracegirdle, yet the intentions behind the loaded descriptions of their physical appearance are left up in the air. The characterization of an infamous Fallen Woman and modern flapper girl allows distinctions to be made between the Victorian and Modernist eras that determine the emergence of new gender ideals. This paper will use a close reading of Crome Yellow and Freudian theories on sexuality to explore the multifaceted significance of hair in the Victorian era so we may fully appreciate the past’s influence on modernist eras. A woman’s hair became a phallic image used to engender fear in men, which posits a move towards gender equality and the emergence of the suffragette. Hair was no longer just a physical attribute but a body politic that reflected changes taking place in modernist British society of the entre deux guerres period.

The fear of being unimportant, being erased, and of being finite, grips humans and motivates us to prove that we matter, that we exist. In an attempt to create truth and authentic understandings, our society seeks evidence, proof, and facts, even while acknowledging (and often ignoring) that these “facts” may be hard to establish. In my paper I explore how post-modern novels, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, utilize multi-modal textual souvenirs to function as lodestones and guide readers through fictionalized versions of real historical traumas. These novels can be read as scrapbooks of memory which investigate the social importance and definition of “truth” in the face of traumatic events. My project questions whether or not truth can be found in fiction, non-fiction or even photographs as it looks at the way modern technologies have impacted how authors choose to create historical fiction. The multi-modal nature of these novels forces readers to reflect upon authorial intent and authority in the construction of memory and post memory. Furthermore, by looking at the narratives the authors create about traumatic events such as the Holocaust, the bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima, and the attacks of 9-11, my paper reveals the ways in which collective memories and national narratives can arise from trauma and how these events in turn create social identity for individuals within and across groups. An analysis of the postmodern methods the authors use in an attempt to create this authenticity, along with the expectations society holds concerning their construction, and the impact of individual and cultural desires on the creation of these narratives, uncovers the many fallacies and complexities that come with testimony and the social construction of authentic truth.

Matthew G. Lewis' Gothic novel The Monk (1796) has often been read as a representation of England's disapprobative response to the violence and chaos of the French Revolution.  The novel's subtle treatment of paranoia, which was a common theme during the Reign of Terror, and clear defilement of the virtuous feminine icon of ancient European government indicates a strong ambivalence toward revolutionary sentiment.  It is perhaps a result of its proximity to the events of the French Revolution that its location within the latter years of the Age of Enlightenment is often overlooked.  During the Enlightenment, reliance upon God as a source of meaning had dissipated in favor of understanding humanity through itself. I will argue that The Monk's depiction of intensely oppressive, Godless religious societies suggests the consequences of this shift.  Without a connection to the sacred, humanity spirals toward damnation; the extremes of unconscious desire are inseparable from the individual and activate supernatural forces within the novel.  Lewis creates a scene akin to that of Original Sin in the Book of Genesis, wherein the consequences of succumbing to temptation are not only inevitable but inescapable: the fall of humankind is unavoidable, and God's absence renders redemption impossible.  Ultimately, the novel offers a reconstruction of the Biblical parable in a way that expresses ambivalence about a secularized, post-Enlightenment world from which events like those of the French Revolution can only be expected.