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 …

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, …

A collection of interconnected short stories set in diverse corners of Texas, converging on Galveston Island before and after Hurricane Ike.

A collection of poems that explores notions of disability, family, and belief, with a preface that meditates on questions related to the ethical ramifications of various approaches to the making of poetry and art that takes up the suffering of others as subject matter.

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

Brazos is a collection of poetry that comments on and critiques life in a small town in Texas. These poems situate the speaker both in this town and in spaces removed from the town, but the work always grapples with questions of how the speaker identifies himself via the relationship to that space. The creative portion is accompanied by a critical introduction that looks at the intersections of poetry and the lyric essay.

This dissertation examines intra-racial colorism in works by writers who began their careers during the Harlem Renaissance, but whose writings span almost a century. In these writings, colorism; which can be defined as a bias directed toward an individual that is based on skin tone, is portrayed an intra-racial practice that results from the internalization of racist ideals. The practice relies on a hierarchy that most often privileges those closest to the color line. However, these depictions also show that the preponderance of skin tones can sometimes determine who is targeted. For the purposes of this study it is called reverse colorism when the bias is directed by individuals darker in skin tone toward those who are lighter. Consequently, the careful descriptions of the shades and hues of black characters becomes more than aesthetics and can be seen as a coded reference to experiential differences. While Alain Locke hailed the start of the Harlem Renaissance to signal the rise of The New Negro, the writings featured by female writers in this dissertation advance a less optimistic reality for women, who had to contend with both inter- and intra-racial bias because of their skin tone. Colorism is identified as a particularly …