The vanishing voyager and the emerging outsider, 1818-1930

While some contemporary scholars have examined the nineteenth-century evolution of voyage and exploration literature, the cultural critic Joseph Roach has shown how surrogation, or reinventive replacement of lost elements, produces culture. I integrate these two critical pursuits by examining nineteenth-century literary surrogations of a haunting pantheon: famous British voyagers who mysteriously vanished overseas. I argue that the occasion of voyager disappearance creates a rupture in the official expedition narrative, which presents writers with the opportunity to reinvent and repurpose that narrative to serve new rhetorical purposes. Nineteenth-century coterie authors repurposed vanished voyagers' narratives to sidelines official voyagers and instead foreground figures that I call outsider voyagers: traveling savages, political pariahs, Byronic heroes, non-English Britons, women, and queer subjects. I contend that nineteenth-century authors including Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and James Malcolm Rymer present their outsider voyager protagonists as travelers, writers, and cultural critics, whose unauthorized voyage narratives depart from the official voyage-narrative tradition by questioning British imperialism, patriarchy, and other elite ideologies. By surrogating historical and largely forgotten vanished voyagers, nineteenth-century British writers facilitated the emergence of the outsider voyager protagonist.Doctor of Philosoph

Mocking Andromeda in Julia Constance Fletcher’s The Fantasticks (1900)

The early 2000s, Catherine Delyfer observes, saw unprecedented scholarly interest in the fin-de-siècle’s ‘more conflicted women artists, essayists, poets, and novelists, whose works often broach New Woman themes but from an aloof, highly literary angle, foregrounding aesthetic issues and complex gendered perspectives’ (Delyfer 14). This characterization perfectly describes the writer Julia Constance Fletcher (1853-1938). Her writing constitutes such production, consistently arguing that social custom inhibits women’s choices or makes it more difficult for them to lead fulfilling and meaningful lives. Contrary to Victorian stereotypes of the New Woman, Fletcher often made her feminist arguments with humour. A particularly aloof and arch intervention in fin-de-siècle gender politics is Fletcher’s stage comedy The Fantasticks (1900). An adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s 1894 comedy Les Romanesques, The Fantasticks has attracted hardly any scholarly attention. However, when read alongside Fletcher’s earlier published writings, it appears to apply risky humor to decidedly feminist ends. Specifically, The Fantasticks deploys a comic situation to mock what Fletcher elsewhere in her corpus identifies as the Andromeda myth: the pervasive cultural narrative wherein a woman seems to need a man to rescue her and is expected to marry her rescuer

‘Zama-Zama’: Afterlives of Extraction in South Africa and Lesotho

This dissertation, Zama Zama: Afterlives of Extraction in South Africa and Lesotho, provides an analysis of violence, risk, injury, and death inside and above South Africa's derelict and abandoned gold mines. Through in-depth multi-sited ethnography with South Africa's artisanal gold miners, or "Zama-Zama's," and the friends, family members, and caregivers they left behind in rural villages in Lesotho, my research explores how vernacular theories of violence, extraction, circulation, care, work, fugitivity, illness, injury, and sovereignty are emerging from the ruins of South Africa’s colonial and apartheid pasts

‘Zama-Zama’: Afterlives of Extraction in South Africa and Lesotho

This dissertation, Zama Zama: Afterlives of Extraction in South Africa and Lesotho, provides an analysis of violence, risk, injury, and death inside and above South Africa's derelict and abandoned gold mines. Through in-depth multi-sited ethnography with South Africa's artisanal gold miners, or "Zama-Zama's," and the friends, family members, and caregivers they left behind in rural villages in Lesotho, my research explores how vernacular theories of violence, extraction, circulation, care, work, fugitivity, illness, injury, and sovereignty are emerging from the ruins of South Africa’s colonial and apartheid pasts

Big Talk, 8/29/2013

Suzanne Murphy talks with Southern Maine Labor Council member Vincent O’Malley and labor art curator Nancy Nesvet about Labor Day.https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/wmpg_bigtalk/1155/thumbnail.jp

Experimental investigations of hardening and heating processes of large steel industrial ingots

Experimental investigation techniques of thermal condition during hardening and heating of large steel ingots made in industrial conditions with account of specific features of production organization and heating units are worked out. Regularities of hardening and heating of blooming and slab ingots are analyzed