The study and characterization of the literary uses of non-standard AmericanEnglish writing systems was once a topic of research central to the study of American literature. Speech as Writing: Literary Dialect Orthography in the United States 1790-1930 argues that the emergence of new computational tools and theoretical insights enables a return to the general study of at least one common component of literary dialect – non-standard orthography. The use of non-standard orthographic systems in crafting dialect literature differs from the use of non-standard syntax or vocabulary in that it presents a full system of meaning independent from the encoding facet of orthography typically explored by linguistics or cognitive science. "Speech as Writing" employs these insights alongside a computational methodology drawn from corpus linguistics and information theory to explore how this novel understanding of orthography can contribute to novel understandings of nineteenth and early twentieth-century United States literature.

“The Imperfect Form: Literary Fragments and Politics in the Early Republic” examines a style of writing that grew in popularity in America from the 1770s through the middle of the nineteenth century—the fragment. In the burgeoning literary culture of the early American republic, authors commonly titled essays, poems, articles, and portions of novels “fragments” to create an unfinished aesthetic. Early republican reading audiences regularly encountered literary fragments in the corners of periodicals, in newspaper columns, in the pages of novels, and scattered throughout verse collections.

By and large, literary fragments exemplify two trends: the political, in the late eighteenth century, and the aesthetic, in the early nineteenth century. In the first half of my project, I examine how writers in the late eighteenth century consistently associated fragments with marginalized individuals. Material texts like a fragment of a letter, the shred of a diary page, or an illegible pamphlet provided resonant symbols for the fractured subjectivities of veterans, prostitutes, slaves, free blacks, the disabled, and other outcasts. The fragment form presents a way of accessing identities that are otherwise relatively unavailable, and authors like Samuel Jackson Pratt, Mathew Carey, Susannah Rowson, and Hannah Webster Foster used fragmentary texts to reconstruct the political agency of marginal individuals in new, vitally significant ways.

However, during the turn of the century writers began to move away from the intensely political emphasis and toward a more aesthetic fragment (though this movement transpired unevenly). The second half of my project focuses on writers like Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who all explored the formal features of the fragment. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the first usage of “fragment” as a verb occurs in a line from John Keats’s poem Endymion in 1818. Influenced by British and German Romantics, early nineteenth-century American authors begin to think of the fragment more as a verb—something in motion or in process. Attending to the literary history of the fragment thus provides insight into the complex connections among politics, material form, and aesthetic tradition in the early years of American literary culture.

This dissertation examines nineteenth-century American literary writers’ critical engagements with and contributions to the production of geographical knowledge prior to the emergence of geography as a distinct modern discipline. Three writers who are now best known for their works of literature, Charles Brockden Brown, Margaret Fuller, and Emily Dickinson, each in their own way sought to redress problems of content and method that they identified in American geographical texts that proliferated in their milieux. In atlases, gazetteers, and geography textbooks, as well as in works of travel writing and nature essays, these writers found not just limited accounts of the country but also, more broadly, what they judged to be insufficient approaches to attaining, organizing, and communicating knowledge of the external world. Their varied writings—Brown’s periodical publications, Fuller’s travel writing, and Dickinson’s letters and poems—attest to and embody a rich repository of critical geographical discourse in nineteenth-century American letters that has been all but illegible to scholars of geography and literature alike. This dissertation highlights, and attempts to overcome, the structural differences between modern academic disciplines and nineteenth-century knowledge production that have made these writers’ engagements with geography—in the etymological sense of “earth-writing”—difficult to see, let alone appreciate and examine. In addition to expanding conceptions of the kind of work conducted by the individual writers discussed, this dissertation aims to model an approach to accessing, and assessing, the rich and varied economy of knowledge and knowledge production that they not only operated in but, through their acts of writing, brought into existence.

What is black life-writing beyond the canon of the slave narrative? Matters of Life: Writing Lives in the Age of United States Slavery shows that on the margins of the slave narrative exists a plenitude of forms, practices, and concepts that invite reconsideration of the premises that continue to structure understandings of the field of life-writing in the age of slavery. These premises include, but are not limited to, the following claims: that emulative lives begin in enslavement and end in freedom, that sophisticated narrative is the domain of autobiography, that authenticity and truth are the goals of life-writing. Matters of Life explores how biographical novellas, collective biographies, and scrapbooks offer alternative accounts about the possible life stories and forms that such stories take during the age of slavery in the United States.

While the word “diagnosis” can be traced back to the seventeenth century, the verb “to diagnose” does not appear in written works until 1861, when American writers began to contend with new methods of medical examination. Literary texts soon resonated with an underlying fear of “undiagnosable” conditions (1873) and condemned the “evil” of “self-diagnosis” (1883); they began to mimic emergent medical techniques used to define discrete “Names of Sickness,” to use Emily Dickinson’s phrase. This dissertation, "The Names of Sickness: Writing Disability and Revising Diagnosis in Nineteenth-Century America," analyzes texts by women writers from the Civil War through Reconstruction to argue that literature transforms diagnosis from an alienating process of labeling into a tool for social critique. Drawing upon contemporary scholarship in critical feminist and intersectional disability studies, I assert that literature articulates disability even if we cannot—or will not—diagnose authors themselves. The dissertation asks how diagnostic methods can be redirected away from individual bodies and minds and towards systemic issues such as racial prejudice and gender violence—a question that attests to the value of humanistic inquiry during times of political and medical crisis. This first book-length study of disability in American women’s writing is divided into three primary chapters. I first argue that Emily Dickinson defied diagnostic labels while she shaped pain’s expansiveness into poetic form. Chapter Two asserts that Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper” embraces the chaos created by patriarchal medicine to energize collaborative resistance. Finally, Chapter Three argues that Frances E.W. Harper’s novel Iola Leroy figuratively “diagnoses” systemic conditions, such as the “virus of slavery and injustice.” Significantly, Harper does not advocate for the eradication of disability; instead, she asserts the power of community for disabled and chronically ill women. My project thus emphasizes the transformative power of writing and community as it explores the ways women resist and revise diagnostic methods to challenge ableist violence. Ultimately, I assert that literary inquiry is imperative to grappling with crisis for which there is no immediate cure, and advocate for a humanistic approach to interpreting the names we give to sickness.