"Plays thus at being Prosper" : Caliban and the colonised savage in mid-nineteenth-century Britain : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in English at Massey University

Representations of Caliban in Victorian Britain took the form of plays, performances, reviews, poems, paintings, cartoons, sketches, and commentaries. These representations predominantly involved an ambivalence between portrayals of Caliban as human, and as non-human. A similar ambivalence is apparent in Victorian representations of the savage. Taking Robert Browning's "Caliban upon Setebos" as an initial example, this thesis applies Homi Bhabha's model of colonial mimicry to these representations of Caliban in order to show that the ambivalence in them is continuous with the ambivalent aim of the colonial mission, which is both to suppress and to enlighten. This ambivalent colonial mission leads Caliban to be constructed within Victorian colonial discourse in an ambivalent fashion, and he is hence both contained within and subversive against that discourse. Caliban acts as a conceptual site at which colonial ideology can be both defended, by those interpretations of Caliban which are continuous with stereotypical Victorian representations of the savage, and challenged, by those representations which are subversive to the colonial ideology which is the basis of this stereotype. The challenges to colonial ideology come from interpretations of Caliban as an evolutionary figure and as a satirical figure. It is in the process of defending the colonial interpretation that the ambivalence inherent in the colonial model is made clear. Thus Caliban can be seen to be, in these interpretations, a representation of this stereotype of the colonial savage, functioning to justify the ambivalent colonial mission

Broken Hearths: Melville\u27s Israel Potter and the Bunker Hill Monument

When he dedicated Israel Potter to the Bunker Hill Monument, Herman Melville gestured to an eminent national memorial which took so long to build that it appeared to be in ruins before it was finished. Melville's novel addresses the temporal quirks of both patriotic communal commemoration and posthumous personal recognition. </jats:p

Plotting Devices: Literary Darwinism in the Laboratory

Critics of literary Darwinism like to point out the weaknesses of its scientific scaffolding, but the real flaw in this research program is its neglect of literary history and stylistic evolution. A full-fledged scientific approach to literary criticism should incorporate the kind of work being done by Franco Moretti at the Stanford Literary Lab—a quantitative analysis of the history of literary form. While Moretti and the literary Darwinists are almost never mentioned together, I contend that their work is not only compatible but also necessarily so for a more consilient literary criticism. The Darwinian aesthetics promoted by Denis Dutton can help to unite these two approaches

Review of Walden\u27s Shore: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Science, by Robert M. Thorson

With the rise of ecocriticism, many recent studies of Thoreau’s writings have favorably reconsidered the author’s strong relationship with science; this trend received much of its impetus from Laura Dassow Walls’s Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century NaturalScience (Madison, WI, 1995). Similarly subtitled, Walden’s Shore begins by explaining that such scholarship still lacks an engagement with hard science and that a solid understanding of Thoreau’s work, and especially of Walden (1854), requires more intimate knowledge of geological phenomena. Robert Thorson is a professor of geology at the University of Connecticut whose last book, Beyond Walden: The Hidden History of America’s Kettle Lakes and Ponds (New York, 2009), was a general account of small lakes in the Midwest and Northeast; he now restricts his view to Walden’s immediate environs in order to establish Thoreau’s reputation as a ‘‘pioneering geoscientist’’ (16). While countless books and articles have promoted Thoreau’s love of nature, this ‘‘nature’’ is often characterized as organic: flowers, trees, birds, fish, etc. Many overlook the fact that Thoreau, as Thorson insists, was just as strongly attuned to the inorganic: minerals, mountains, rivers, and lakes

Tank tests to determine the effect of varying design parameters of planing-tail hulls II : effect of varying depth of step, angle of after- body keel, length of afterbody chine, and gross load

The second part of a series of tests made in Langley tank no. 2 to determine the effect of varying design parameters of planing-tail hulls is presented. Results are given to show the effects on resistance characteristics of varying angle of afterbody keel, depth of step, and length of afterbody chine. The effect of varying the gross load is shown for one configuration. The resistance characteristics of planing-tail hulls are compared with those of a conventional flying-boat hull. The forces on the forebody and afterbody of one configuration are compared with the forces on a conventional hull. Increasing the angle of afterbody keel had small effect on hump resistance and no effect on high-speed resistance but increased free-to-trim resistance at intermediate speeds. Increasing the depth of step increased hump resistance, had little effect on high-speed resistance, and increased free-to-trim resistance at intermediate speeds. Omitting the chines on the forward 25 percent of the afterbody had no appreciable effect on resistance. Omitting 70 percent of the chine length had almost no effect on maximum resistance but broadened the hump and increased spray around the afterbody. Load-resistance ratio at the hump decreased more rapidly with increasing load coefficient for the planing-tail hull than for the representative conventional hull, although the load-resistance ratio at the hump was greater for the planing-tail hull than for the conventional hull throughout the range of loads tested. At speeds higher than hump speed, load-resistance ratio for the planing-tail hull was a maximum at a particular gross load and was slightly less at heavier and lighter gross loads. The planing-tail hull was found to have lower resistance than the conventional hull at both the hump and at high speeds, but at intermediate speeds there was little difference. The lower hump resistance of the planing-tail hull was attributed to the ability of the afterbody to carry a greater percentage of the total load while maintaining a higher value of load-resistance ratio