Biblioteca Digital

In the decades following the English Civil War, as the Anglophone world began transitioning to a social order structured by market and finance capitalism, the word cultivation, which earlier had referred exclusively to agricultural processes, acquired increasingly figurative meanings referring to the development of an individual's mind, faculties, and manners. This augmentation of meaning reflected the development of new conceptions of property as an essential feature of personhood that had begun to alter the definition of subjectivity. The circulation of such figurative meanings coincides with the rise of print culture, the development of a literary public sphere, and the professionalization of writing in the eighteenth century. These cultural developments suggest the relative ease with which the new conception of property expressed as literary personality coexisted alongside other forms of capital in Britain. Literary criticism of the last forty years, including the work of Raymond Williams, Clifford Siskin, Jerome Christensen, and Thomas Pfau, has accounted for the many ways in which possessing literary cultivation served the development of a middle-class economy and ideology in eighteenth-and-nineteenth century Britain. Though the figurative meaning of cultivation appears throughout American literature of the long nineteenth century...

In American letters, the Civil War represented a decisive break in literary form, a shift from interiority to exteriority. Sentimentalism harnessed the transformative effects of aesthetic feeling to galvanize political opinion in antebellum America, whereas realist and regionalist writing's empiricist attention to surface and appearance represented a reaction against sentimentalism. Yet postbellum literature is nothing if not a sustained meditation on how the feeling, sensate body negotiates the abstraction of citizenship and political life.

The paradoxes presented by black emancipation, immigration, and women's suffrage forced what today we consider the period's most canonical authors, from Emily Dickinson to W.E.B. Du Bois, to confront the contradictory feelings provoked by a democratic nation that excluded most of its citizens from their fundamental rights. The taste of Ellis Island, Henry James warned in The American Scene, "will be forever in [the] mouth" of the citizen, who must share "the intimacy of his American patriotism with the inconceivable alien." James's literal distaste for immigrants raises the stakes of what it means to locate the experience of belonging neither inside nor outside the body, but at its sensory orifices...

There is a new army marching onto the field of contemporary Russian literature: veterans of the recent Chechen Wars. The war veteran as author and/or protagonist has become increasingly popular, bringing to light social issues concerning the wars, including the presence of social disadaptation due to war trauma. This thesis analyzes the appearance of war trauma in contemporary works, connecting themes arising in the literary works to Russian psychological literature written about war trauma from 2000-2011. The first chapter focuses on the works of Arkady Babchenko, Andrei Gelasimov and Denis Butov and examines the similarities and differences in the manifestation of war trauma in their works. In particular, the thesis will show that the protagonists in each examined work all suffer or suffered from war trauma and disadaptation and are at different steps in the process of recovery from trauma. The second chapter will analyze the discourse in Russian psychological literature over the past twelve years, drawing mainly from studies and discussions presented in Military Medical Journal (Voenno-meditsinskii zhurnal) and Journal of Psychology (Psikhologicheskii zhurnal). This psychological literature provides insight into the work being done in the field of war trauma today...