Medicine is most often understood through the metaphor of war, as in “the fight against Ebola.” What I call the “martial metaphor” is so embedded in the discourses of medicine—and the disciplines that critique it—that we do not think twice about using this construction or about its bioethical implications, much less its origins. As the first cultural history of the martial metaphor, “Medicine Is War: The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture” shows how it gained cultural purchase throughout the nineteenth century to become the figure of speech so prevalent today. The thought of medicine as war didn’t begin as a metaphor; it emerged from the material connections between the military and medicine. These material connections were reflected on and redeployed as a metaphor by such authors as Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Kingsley, Bram Stoker, and Joseph Conrad during the advent of medical modernity to become codified in everyday usage.

Part I discusses how Shelley and Kingsley conflated the cholera epidemics of the first half of the nineteenth century with war in the context of pre-bacteriological theories of disease. Part II addresses the connections between empire, race, and germ theory in the second half of the nineteenth century as articulated through the writings of Stoker, Conan Doyle, and Conrad, where we see that the epistemological change to understanding disease as caused by living organisms challenged Britain’s salubrious racial identity.

“Medicine Is War” accounts for the historical baggage in the language commonly used to articulate the encounter with disease. Scholars such as Pamela Gilbert and Laura Otis who have referenced the metaphor in the context of other investigations of how nineteenth literature dealt with biological anxieties mapped onto political ones and vice versa have not addressed the cultural work of the metaphor itself. By contrast, “Medicine is War” traces how the metaphor’s history influenced its use in the Victorian era, revealing how literature occluded the military history of medical language and circulated the resulting metaphor in the public imaginary.

Through the 18th and 19th centuries a new concept of childhood emerged, and with it came a new genre of literature designed to educate and entertain child readers. This development culminated toward the end of the19th century with the so-called Golden Age of children's literature. The books of this era were characterized by a heightened sense of imagination and play--often portrayed through a fantasy world created uniquely for the child. Texts such as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and J.M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy (1911) illustrate what I am calling Child Worlds. Through the uniquely child-centered settings of Wonderland and Neverland, these books set themselves apart from children's texts written before them--even other fantasy or fairy stories. They do this by creating a space that ennobles the values and perceived weaknesses of childhood. These authors likely knew that their work subverted traditional representations of the child, but with the knowledge afforded by distance and time, we can now see that they were simultaneously undermining a larger system of infantilization in the broader culture. The development of child worlds fits squarely within the greater conversation concerning empire. As scholars such as Peter Hulme, Jill Casid, and Mary Louise Pratt have observed, the New World filled a particular role in the British imagination during the 18th and 19th centuries; it represented the unending potential and exoticism of imagined space. Going beyond this, I will argue that the potential seen in colonial spaces is modeled on the potential that adults of the Enlightenment saw in their own unformed children. In order to truly understand the unique function of child worlds in classic works of children's literature, we must go back and first examine the simultaneous development of the new world in the British imagination, the child as a cultural figure, and the connection between the two through the rhetoric of infantilization. The purpose of this dissertation is to define and explore the system of infantilization, looking at its historical development and tracing its existence in children's literature of the 18th and 19th centuries.

In this dissertation, I analyze “interiority,” which refers to a particular mode of conceptualizing and living in space, as well as a mode of understanding and forming senses of subjectivity and agency. I argue that a unique understanding and practice of subjective and spatial interiority manifested and evolved in a post-Romantic cultural formation in the 19th and 20th century U.S. The interiority that I’m interested in involved an understanding of the subject as hermetic, autonomous, and relatively autochthonous, and an understanding of space as something to be fashioned as a neatly demarcated, insulating, and comforting enclosure. Furthermore, it mutually defined both space and subjectivity through resonances between these understandings and practices of what it meant to be “inside.” This subjective and spatial interiority, as I’ll show, both called for a movement inward and demanded a transcendence of interior spaces and subjectivities, and this ambivalence had real stakes for narratives and practices of freedom, mobility, and agency. I examine this interiority in the writing of authors like Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and David Foster Wallace, and in the cultural practices and discourse of suburban white middle class Americans. I also outline a resistance to this mode of spatial and subjective discourse and practice that I call “counter-interiority,” which involve alternative articulations of and orientations to subjective and spatial interiors. I’ll show how this counter-interiority, which emerged in the work of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Bob Kaufman, and William S. Burroughs, and in the discourse and practice of post-suburban punks, threatened interiority by encouraging the cultivation of practices and understandings of space and subjectivity that favored discomfort, fragmentation, and an interpenetration between inside and outside.

Recently, popular culture has been riveted by depictions of addiction, overdose, and recovery in multiple media formats. These representations obsess over a before-and-after concept aligning drug use strictly with death and destruction and recovery with health and happiness. This mimics traditional examples of drug users as anti-social found in stories rooted in moral panic ubiquitous in mainstream media. Most examples connect both sexual exploration and drug use, arguing they are inherently dangerous and follow a trajectory ultimately ending in death. My work examines transgressive sexual exploration and drug use while questioning issues of culpability and castigation. Although there has been a surge of interest within academia around drug use, most critics focus on abuse and addiction, which is sometimes divorced from drugs completely. Even so, this decision limits the narrative of drug use to the harm it creates in bodies, among people, and within communities. While this work is useful, it also creates a rhetoric that obfuscates the ways in which drug use does not always fit within the narrative of addiction.

In the first chapter, I situate my project within the historical and cultural context of drugs, homosexual identity, illicit pleasures, and queer theory. Next, I trace how the medical discourse's reconfiguration of the drug user as contagious and pathologizing the homosexual identity during the late Victorian period are intricately connected. I argue the 1980s panic of AIDS as the "gay disease" is deeply rooted in these disease-like narrative precursors. Chapter three analyzes the crisis of representation in gay male circuit party culture while questioning the sensationalization of drug use and promiscuous sex. By turning to recent gay and lesbian fiction, I analyze representations of safe drug use and sexual exploration with guidance. In the final chapter, I argue that many prominent theorists have both ingested and digested illicit drugs out of curiosity and a quest for knowledge. Their work provides a strong cultural lens, based on Western ideology, through which to study accounts of drug use; however, their preoccupation with forcing the experience into empirical product-centric normative values of stable identity, time, and space will always fail.

My dissertation, “On Fire: Industrialization, Media Technologies, and the Imagination, 1800-1900,” considers the intersecting discourses of media literacy and industrialization, and argues that fire, in its multiple forms, is a media technology that must be recovered and situated within an archive of moving images. Understanding fire as a media technology allows for a rigorous examination of these discourses and provides insight into nineteenth-century imaginations. My dissertation focuses on Victorian literature and culture, but it also examines continuities between the Victorian and Romantic eras without grouping literary texts and media forms into linear or reductive teleologies.

Chapter 1, “Flame, Page, and Screen: Recovering Fire-Gazing as a Victorian Media Technology,” argues that flame is a moving-image technology and recovers fire-gazing as an intimate form of viewing and producing moving pictures. The chapter also locates latent anxieties about automation in fireside reverie, fears that are usually associated with late nineteenth-century entertainment and communication media. Chapter 2, “Matches and Street Lamps: Illuminating Instruments and the Moving Image,” examines matches and street lamps as image-making technologies within the larger print and visual culture that determined their iconographic imagery. As material culture continued to change in tandem with innovations to heat and light, these outmoded vehicles for firelight became potent symbols of a pre-industrial imagination despite their own industrial origins. Chapter 3, “Burning Down the House in 1834: Spectacular Fire and Live Audience Spectatorship,” argues that the Parliament fire inaugurated modern live-audience disaster spectatorship by analyzing the crowds that gathered on the night of the fire as well as contemporaneous representations of the fire in periodicals, literary annuals, and dioramas. Chapter 4, “Subterranean Fire in the Sky: Animating Vesuvius in Victorian Imaginations,” shows that the enduring myth of subterranean fire provided an inexhaustible narrative technology for the real, imaginary, and ideological engines of British imperialism. My conclusion, “The 1936 Crystal Palace Fire and the End of the Victorian Era,” analyzes the 1936 Crystal Palace fire as an emblem of the mass media consumption that had begun to emerge in the nineteenth century.

This dissertation, which was inspired by information theory, analyzes three nineteenth-century reading and writing systems that relied on dots and dashes to send and receive messages: Braille, Morse code, and phonetic shorthand. Although each was originally developed for a limited group of people, the frequent representation of these systems in literature made them more culturally widespread. In my first chapter, I analyze how schoolchildren at the Massachusetts Institute of the Blind—whose stories were publicly shared by many nineteenth-century authors, including Charles Dickens—learned reading and writing in the early nineteenth century. Particularly, the education of 13-year-old deafblind student Laura Bridgman emphasizes how the labor of lower-middle-class women and female teachers reframed what it meant to learn “reading” and “writing” in the mid-nineteenth century. In my second chapter, I explain how British and American telegraph operators, who were increasingly female in the late nineteenth century, developed the ability to automatically interpret auditory Morse code through the skill of “sound-reading,” as if it was a spoken language unto itself. I use the author and activist Ella Cheever Thayer to draw a historical connection between the female technological workforce and suffragette movement. In chapter 3, I discuss two influential shorthand writing methods—Gurney’s Brachygraphy and Pitman’s Phonography—both of which used dot-and-dash symbols in an attempt to transcribe language phonetically. I then argue that depiction of shorthand in Wilkie Collins’s novel The Moonstone serves as an example of the high hopes nineteenth-century thinkers had for phonographic writing systems, as well as the inevitable failures that they encountered when expecting that any mediated form of communication could be purely objective. Finally, in chapter 4, I draw direct parallels between phonographic shorthand and the groundbreaking theories of Charles Darwin via his grandfather Erasmus Darwin. Ultimately, my dissertation demonstrates that a literary and cultural studies methodology derived from information theory can productively highlight the reading and writing skills of communities who are historically marginalized due to gender, disability, socioeconomic status, and/or nationality, among other identity categories.

This dissertation examines representations of female spirit mediumship during the rise of the Spiritualist movement in the mid–nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. In private séances as well as public trance demonstrations, spirit mediums claimed to channel the dead and convey their messages to their audiences, in addition to disseminating this information to millions of Spiritualists through their memoirs, collections of automatic writing recorded during their trances, and spirit photography. “Otherworldly Impressions” assesses the ways female spirit mediums engaged and shaped British and American cultural identities as they relayed information that became formative to the construction and reimagining of gender, racial and class ideologies.

Chapter 1, “Visions of Travel: Paranormal Arctic Exploration, the Franklin Search Expeditions, and The Frozen Deep” provides an analysis of mediums’ contributions to nineteenth-century scientific and imperialist discourses on Arctic exploration through their psychic visions, and assesses Charles Dickens’ and Wilkie Collins’ collaborative fictional work inspired by these events. Mediums’ reports of their communication with spirits frequently intervened in constructions of their nations’ colonial histories; “Suffering as Spectacle: Sensationalized Depictions of Racial Violence in Spirit Narratives” attends to American mediums’ publications of spirit messages that capitalized on this violent history. “Spectral Labor: Women’s Spirit Photography and Constructions of Material Culture” uncovers women’s frequently hidden roles in the development of spirit photography; in a similar vein, “Staged Mediumship: Women’s Public Performances of Spirit Communication” examines mediums’ negotiation of Spiritualist constructions of their profession as well as gender ideologies to produce their public conjuring spectacles. The final chapter, “Assembly Required: Women’s Automatic Writing and the Production of Print Media,” looks at the way women used their automatic writing to obtain authority in the Spiritualist publishing industry as well as challenge conceptions of modern literary production.

This project illuminates Anglo-American Jewish women writers’ (AAJWW) critical appropriation of counter-history—which David Biale argues is a Jewish hermeneutic for transvaluing historical records to expose the ethical structures of the present—in their writings to critique and expand definitions of citizenship and emerging Jewish nationalisms in England and the United States between 1880 and 1923. In chapter one, “Contingent Sympathies: Politics and Poetics of Pseudepigrapha,” I examine Amy Levy and Emma Lazarus’s use of counter-history and pseudepigraphic dramatic personation to challenge the gender and racial biases of authorship and citizenship with their poetry. In chapter two, “Exposing the ‘Secret History’: Translation and Biblical Midrash,” I utilize translation theories put forward by AAJWW to expose how each relied on a counter-history hermeneutic to expand the role of women within and beyond their Jewish communities. In chapter three, “Novel Counter-histories: Contesting the ‘Jewish Type’ in the works of Amy Levy and Israel Zangwill,” I examine Levy and Zangwill’s novels as counter-histories to Joseph Jacobs and Francis Galton’s composite photographs of the “Jewish type” and expose how imperialist narratives mobilize the gender and racial bias of liberal subjectivity. In chapter four, “Counter-Photography: History as Identity in Early Alternative Zionist Discourses,” I trace the legacy of Jacobs’s “Jewish type” in early political Zionist “fauxtographic” histories—which aimed to rewrite the discourse of modern Jewish identity—and then contrast these histories with AAJWW’s historical works to expose what was being left out of this discourse of identity, namely Jewish women and indigent Jewish refugees. In chapter five, “From Plotzk to Boston: Mary Antin’s Human Document: Immigration, Genre, and Citizenship,” I situate Russian-Jewish author Mary Antin’s memoir within the transatlantic contexts of British and American fin-de-siècle immigration policies and the burgeoning literary sub-genre of invasion fiction to claim her work as a counter-history of the “invasion of America” by Jewish immigrants. In the coda, “On the Edge of Empire: Hannah Barnett Trager & Citizenship in Pre-Mandatory Palestine,” I foreground Trager’s 1923 memoir, Pioneers in Palestine, as a counter-history of pre-mandate Palestine that challenges the gender, class and racial biases of political Zionism’s vision of Jewish nationalism.

This dissertation analyzes the role of celebrity in determining the lives and literary productions of bestselling female authors in the nineteenth century. It identifies celebritydom as a compelling factor in a woman author's development of her literary persona, which affects both her public identity and the literature she produces in accord with that identity. By focusing on Dinah Mulock Craik, Florence Marryat, Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé), and Edna Lyall (Ada Ellen Bayly) "Literary Sensations" considers how star status confers new opportunities and new challenges for women writers in the publicity spotlight. Examining works of published and unpublished fiction, essays, memoir, and stage entertainment alongside contemporary periodical reviews, personal interest stories, gossip, interviews, and author images, I explore how Victorian women writers come to view themselves as celebrities who both shape and are shaped by the various engagements with their publics. My project pays special attention to Craik, Marryat, Ouida, and Lyall to facilitate the larger argument that as celebrity authors women writers embodied a new position in public life in the Victorian period, with the ability to affect theirs and others' domestic and political existence augmented by innovations in journalism and print and media technology.

Even as we urgently need to transition to sustainable energy sources, shifting fuel types alone will not address the persistent structural inequalities of our infrastructures. This dissertation theorizes energy’s infrastructure, which emerged contemporary to classical energy physics in the nineteenth century and naturalized western assumptions about bodies, movement, resources, and possibilities. I argue that the Victorian period is crucial to understanding how certain energy modalities are embedded in our cultural imaginaries, literatures, infrastructures, and sciences. Because energy deals in conversions and relationalities, strategies of representation such as models, fictions, figurative language, and infrastructural forms produce a version of modernity that we recognize while obscuring other possibilities. By studying energy’s nineteenth-century emergence as a scientific concept, therefore, we can approach a twenty-first century energy transition from a culturally responsive, sociopolitical perspective.