This dissertation explores both the production of underclass literature and the vibrancy of material between 1868-1935. During an era of rampant materialism, consumer capitalism, unchecked industrialism, and economic inequality in the United States, poor, working class Americans confronted their socioeconomic status by abandoning the linear framework of capitalism that draws only a straight line between market and consumer, and engaging in a more intimate relationship with local, material things – found, won, or inherited – that offered a sense of autonomy, belonging, and success. The physical seizure of property/power facilitated both men and women with the ability to recognize their own empowerment (both as individuals and as a community) and ultimately resist their marginalization by leveling access to opportunity and acquiring or creating personal assets that could be generationally transferred as affirmation of their family's power and control over circumstance. Reading into these personal possessions helps us understand the physical and psychological conflicts present amongst the underclasses as represented in American literature, and these conflicts give rise to new dynamics of belonging as invested in the transformative experience of ownership and exchange. If we can understand these discarded, poor, and foreign things and people as possessing dynamic and vibrant agency, …

Union is a novel about a Super AI that takes over all human technology.

Charles Stewart Parnell was James Joyce's most significant political influence to a degree that has yet to be fully acknowledged or explored. This thesis proposes a "theory of Parnell" in Joyce's works up to the end of Ulysses, arguing that close attention to Parnell's evolution points to a significant shift in the evolution of Joyce's literary forms. In Joyce's juvenilia, political writings, and early fiction, Parnell always appears with a heroic, even Messianic, cast, which the most significant moments in the fiction pair with a strict adherence to dramatic forms. However, significant moments in both "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man lay the groundwork for stylistic and representative transformations in Ulysses. In that novel, the myth of Parnell is deflated, even as Joyce appropriates its most essential qualities in the development of his panoply of styles. Episodes from "Telemachus" to "Wandering Rocks" critically examine the myth of Parnell even as they link it with the constraints of dramatic forms. Later episodes, most notably "Cyclops," "Circe," and "Eumaeus" attempt to make use of elements of "Parnellite" style, training a community of readers in acts of collective imagination that keep the Parnellite …