Department of English
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Browsing Department of English by Author "Berezowsky, Sherrin"
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Item Biological inheritance and the social order in late-Victorian fiction and science(2011) Berezowsky, SherrinThis dissertation investigates the heightened interest in heredity as a kind of biological inheritance that arises after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and how this interest intersects with concerns about class mobility and the shifting social order. Within this framework, this project considers how heredity became a means of organizing and regulating bodies in keeping with what Michel Foucault terms biopower. It unearths the cultural work within literary and scientific writings as they respond to narratives of self-help and self-improvement by imagining heredity as a means of stabilizing the social order, and by extension the nation, at the very moment that it was undergoing significant change. In studying diverse texts, this project highlights the shared ideological concerns behind both literary and scientific narratives.Item Refashioning the past: technology, nostalgia, and (Neo-)Victorian knitting practices(2016) Berezowsky, SherrinThe recent rise in the popularity of knitting may seem to simply be a nostalgic anti-technological move. Of all knitting traditions, Victorian knitting stands out as a unique case of this turn to the past, because it is a temporal rather than geographic category. However, while the current interest in Victorian knitting (and in what I will call ‘neo-Victorian knitting’) signals a desire to return to the past, its connection to technology is more complex, as both the existence of the category of Victorian knitting as well as current access to the patterns that define this category are fundamentally shaped by the technologies of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, respectively. In drawing connections between the emergence of the category of Victorian knitting and the contemporary interest in neo-Victorian knitting, this paper unearths how these knitting traditions are fundamentally shaped both by contemporaneous technologies as well as a nostalgic yearning for times past.