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1
Williams, Eleanor. "The Divine and Miss Johanna." Ohio : Ohio University, 2006. http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/view.cgi?ohiou1145555978.
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Hugo, Esthie. "Gothic urbanism in contemporary African fiction." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/20691.
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This project surveys representations of the African city in contemporary Nigerian and South African narratives by focusing on how they employ Gothic techniques as a means of drawing the African urban landscape into being. The texts that comprise my objects of study are South African author Henrietta Rose-Innes's Nineveh (2011), which takes as its setting contemporary Cape Town; Lagoon (2014) by American-Nigerian author Nnedi Okorafor, who sets her tale in present-day Lagos; and Zoo City (2010) by Lauren Beukes, another South African author who locates her narrative in a near-future version of Johannesburg. I find that these fictions are bound by a shared investment in mobilising the apparatus of the Gothic genre to provide readers with a unique imagining of contemporary African urbanity. I argue that the Gothic urbanism which these texts unfold enables the ascendance of generative, anti-dualist modes of reading the contemporary African city that are simultaneously real and imagined, old and new, global and local, dark and light - modes that perform as much a discourse of the past as a dialogue on the future. The study concludes by making some reflections on the future-visions that these Gothic urban-texts elicit, imaginings that I argue engender useful reflection on the relationship between culture and environment, and thus prompt the contemporary reader to consider the global future - and, as such, situate Africa at the forefront of planetary discourse. I suggest that Nineveh, Lagoon and Zoo City produce not simply a Gothic envisioning of Africa's metropolitan centres, but also a budding Gothic aesthetic of the African Anthropocene. In contrast to the 1980's tradition of Gothic writing in Africa, these novels are opening up into the twenty-first century to reflect on the future of the African city - but also on the futures that lie beyond the urban, beyond culture, beyond the human.
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Green, Gary L. "The language of nightmare : a theory of American Gothic fiction /." Full-text version available from OU Domain via ProQuest Digital Dissertations, 1985.
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Rivera, Alexandra. "Human Monsters: Examining the Relationship Between the Posthuman Gothic and Gender in American Gothic Fiction." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2019. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1358.
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According to Michael Sean Bolton, the posthuman Gothic involves a fear of internal monsters that won't destroy humanity apocalyptically, but will instead redefine what it means to be human overall. These internal monsters reflect societal anxieties about the "other" gaining power and overtaking the current groups in power. The posthuman Gothic shows psychological horrors and transformations. Traditionally this genre has been used to theorize postmodern media and literary work by focusing on cyborgs and transhumanist medical advancements. However, the internal and psychological nature of posthumanism is fascinating and can more clearly manifest in a different Gothic setting, 1800s American Gothic Fiction. This subgenre of the Gothic melds well with the posthuman Gothic because unlike the Victorian Gothic, its supernatural entities are not literal; they are often figurative and symbolic, appearing through hallucinations. In this historical context, one can examine the dynamic in which the "human" is determined by a rational humanism that bases its human model on Western, white masculinity. Therefore, the other is clearly gendered and racialized. Margrit Shildrick offers an interesting analysis of the way women fit into this construction of the other because of their uncanniness and Gothic monstrosity. Three works of American Gothic fiction--George Lippard's The Quaker City, Edgar Allen Poe's "Ligeia," and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" portray these gendered power dynamics present within the posthuman Gothic when applied to the American Gothic; the female characters are either forced by patriarchy into becoming monstrous, or they were never fully human in the first place.
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Weissenberg, Clare. "This is not an exit : reading Bret Easton Ellis." Thesis, University of Essex, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.361020.
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Jenkins, Jennifer Lei. "Failed mothers and fallen houses: Gothic domesticity in nineteenth-century American fiction." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/186122.
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This study examines the relation between gender and genre in four novels that chart the development of American domestic life from the Colonial to the Gilded Age. In these novels, the presence in the house of women--mothers, daughters, sisters, servants, slaves--often threatens the fathers' dynastic ambitions and subverts the formal intentions of the narrative. These women represent familiar but strange forces of the uncanny which lurk beneath the apparently placid surface of domestic narrative. In "house" novels by Hawthorne, Stowe, Alcott, and James, interactions of the uncanny feminine with dynastic concerns threaten not only the novel's social message of destiny and dynasty, but the traditional form of the novel itself. In The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne constructs a narrative in which patrician fathers and domestic daughters struggle for control of the House and its story. Slavery disrupts domestic life in Uncle Tom's Cabin, inverting and thereby perverting traditional notions of home and family and producing monstrous mothers and failed households. Alcott details the abuses and dangers of reified gender roles in family life, while depicting a young woman's attempt to reconstruct domesticity as a female community in Work. Finally, James displaces domestic concerns entirely from The Other House, portraying instead the violent nature of feminine desire unrestrained by tradition, community, or family. Story and telling work at cross-purposes in these novels, creating a tension between Romantic structures and realistic narrative strategies. These authors depart from the tropes of their times, using gothic devices to reveal monstrous mothers, uncanny children, and failed or fallen houses within the apparently conservative domestic novel. Such gothic devices transcend literary historians' distinctions of romance and sentimental fiction as respectively male and female stories and reveal the fundamentally subversive nature of domestic fiction. For these writers, the uncanny presence of the feminine produces a counternarrative of gender, class, and race, redefines the cultural boundaries of home and family, and exposes the fictive nature of social constructions of gender and domesticity.
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Janicker, Rebecca. "Halfway houses : liminality and the haunted house motif in popular American Gothic fiction." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2014. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/44082/.
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Halfway Houses examines popular American Gothic fiction through a critical focus on what I call the ‘haunted house motif’. This motif, I argue, creates a distinctive narrative space, characterised by the key quality of liminality, in which historical events and processes impact upon the present. Haunted house stories provide imaginative opportunities to keep the past alive while highlighting the complexities of the culture in which they are written. My chosen authors, H. P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson and Stephen King, use the haunted house motif to engage with political and ideological perspectives important to an understanding of American history and culture. Analysing their fiction, I argue that in “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1933) Lovecraft uses haunting to address concerns about industrialisation, urbanisation and modernisation in the early part of the twentieth century, endorsing both progressive and conservative ideologies. Similarly, Matheson’s haunting highlights issues of 1950s suburbanisation in A Stir of Echoes (1958) and changing social mores about the American family during the 1970s and 1980s in Earthbound (1982; 1989), critiquing conformist culture whilst stopping short of overturning it. Lastly, as a product of the counterculture, King explores new kinds of haunted spaces relevant to the American experience from the 1970s onwards. In The Shining (1977) he draws on haunting to problematise inequalities of masculinity, class and capitalism, and in Christine (1983), at a time of re- emerging conservative politics, he critiques Reaganite nostalgia for the supposed ‘golden age’ of the 1950s. At the close of the twentieth century, haunting in Bag of Bones (1998) reappraises American guilt about race and the legacy of slavery. Overall, my thesis shows that the haunted house motif adapts to the ever-changing conditions of American modernity and that the liminality of haunting addresses the concomitant social unease that such changes bring.
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Hale, Alison Tracy. "Pedagogical Gothic : education and national identity in early American sensational fiction, 1790-1830 /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9393.
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Ashe, Bertram Duane. "From within the frame: Storytelling in African-American fiction." W&M ScholarWorks, 1998. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539623921.
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The purpose of this study is to explore the written representation of African-American spoken-voice storytelling in five fictional narratives published between the late nineteenth century and the late twentieth century: Charles W. Chesnutt's "Hot-Foot Hannibal," Zora Neale Hurston's their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Toni Cade Bambara's "My Man Bovanne," and John Edgar Wideman's "Doc's Story.".;Using Walter Ong's suggestion that the relationship between storyteller and inside-the-text listener mirrors the hoped-for relationship between writer and readership, this study examines the way these writers grappled with these factors as they generated their texts.;By paying attention to the teller/listener-writer/readership relationship, this study examines the process whereby the narrative "frame" that historically "contained" and "mediated" the black spoken voice (either through a listener/narrator or a third-person narrator) modulated and developed throughout the century, as the frame opens and closes.;The results of this study suggest that what Robert Stepto calls the African-American "discourse of distrust" was a factor from the earliest fictions and is still very much a factor today.
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Liu, Tryphena Y. "Monsters Without to Monsters Within: The Transformation of the Supernatural from English to American Gothic Fiction." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2015. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/632.
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Because works of Gothic fiction were often disregarded as sensationalist and unsophisticated, my aim in this thesis is to explore the ways in which these works actually drew attention to real societal issues and fears, particularly anxieties around Otherness and identity and gender construction. I illustrate how the context in which authors were writing specifically influenced the way they portrayed the supernatural in their narratives, and how the differences in their portrayals speak to the authors’ distinct aims and the issues that they address. Because the supernatural ultimately became internalized in the American Gothic, peculiarly within female bodies, I focus mainly on the relationship between the supernatural and the female characters in the texts I examine. Through this historical exploration of the transformation of the supernatural, I argue that the supernatural became internalized in the American Gothic because it reflected national anxieties: although freed from the external threat of the patriarchal English government, Americans of the young republic still faced the dangers of individualism and the failure of the endeavor to establish their own government.
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Gibson, Simone Cade. "Critical engagements adolescent african american girls and urban fiction /." College Park, Md.: University of Maryland, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/9110.
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Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2009.Thesis research directed by: Dept. of Curriculum and Instruction. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.
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Ivey, Adriane Louise. "Rewriting Christianity : African American women writers and the Bible /." view abstract or download file of text, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p9987234.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2000.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 211-216). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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anderson, Crystal Suzette. "Far from "everybody's everything": Literary tricksters in African American and Chinese American fiction." W&M ScholarWorks, 2000. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539623988.
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This dissertation examines trickster sensibilities and behavior as models for racial strategies in contemporary novels by African American and Chinese American authors. While many trickster studies focus on myth, I assert that realist fiction provides a unique historical and cultural space that shapes trickster behavior. John Edgar Wideman, Gloria Naylor, Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston use the trickster in their novels to articulate diverse racial strategies for people of color who must negotiate among a variety of cultural influences. My critical trickster paradigm investigates the motives and behavior of tricksters. It utilizes close literary readings that are strengthened by my comprehensive knowledge of the history of African Americans and Chinese Americans. Throughout time, images that define individuals in both groups develop in the popular imagination. The authors use the trickster to critique and revise those representations. African American authors also influence the racial discourse of Chinese American writers. I concluded that the literary trickster's behavior and sensibilities vary from character to character. I found that African American and Chinese American authors share some racial strategies. They also utilize different racial strategies as a result of the different historical and cultural experiences of African Americans and Chinese Americans. Moreover, male and female African American authors differ in the kinds of racial strategies they advocate, just as male and female Chinese American authors. Such research is significant because of its interdisciplinary exploration of racial strategies of African Americans and Chinese Americans. It provides an alternative approach to the study of the trickster. My work also goes beyond the black/white racial paradigm to explore the cultural dialogue between African American and Chinese American writers.
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Kim, Junyon. "Re-imagining diaspora, reclaiming home in contemporary African-American fiction /." view abstract or download file of text, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3147823.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2004.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 223-239). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Belas, Oliver Sandys. "Race and culture in African American crime and science fiction." Thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.499831.
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Hebbar, Reshmi J. "Modeling minority women : heroines in African and Asian American fiction /." New York : Routledge, 2005. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb400508717.
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Hollingsworth, Lauren Colleen. "Reading the (in)visible race African-American subject representation and formation in American literature /." Diss., [Riverside, Calif.] : University of California, Riverside, 2010. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=0&did=2019837021&SrchMode=2&sid=1&Fmt=2&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1274464483&clientId=48051.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2010.Includes abstract. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Title from first page of PDF file (viewed May 21, 2010). Includes bibliographical references. Also issued in print.
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Testerman, Rebecca Lynn. "Desegregating the Future: A Study of African-American Participation in Science Fiction Conventions." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1332773873.
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Holmes, Michele. "The quantum eye looking and identity formation in African-American fiction /." Laramie, Wyo. : University of Wyoming, 2007. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1483331841&sid=11&Fmt=2&clientId=18949&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Mitchell, Shamika Ann. "The Multicultural Megalopolis: African-American Subjectivity and Identity in Contemporary Harlem Fiction." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2012. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/167490.
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EnglishPh.D.
The central aim of this study is to explore what I term urban ethnic subjectivity, that is, the subjectivity of ethnic urbanites. Of all the ethnic groups in the United States, the majority of African Americans had their origins in the rural countryside, but they later migrated to cities. Although urban living had its advantages, it was soon realized that it did not resolve the matters of institutional racism, discrimination and poverty. As a result, the subjectivity of urban African Americans is uniquely influenced by their cosmopolitan identities. New York City's ethnic community of Harlem continues to function as the geographic center of African-American urban culture. This study examines how six post-World War II novels --Sapphire's PUSH, Julian Mayfield's The Hit, Brian Keith Jackson's The Queen of Harlem, Charles Wright's The Wig, Toni Morrison's Jazz and Louise Meriwether's Daddy Was a Number Runner-- address the issues of race, identity, individuality and community within Harlem and the megalopolis of New York City. Further, this study investigates concepts of urbanism, blackness, ethnicity and subjectivity as they relate to the characters' identities and self-perceptions. This study is original in its attempt to ascertain the connections between megalopolitan urbanism, ethnicity, subjectivity and African-American fiction.
Temple University--Theses
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Dabek, Diana I. "Misinterpreted experiences : the tension between imagination and divine revelation in early 19th century Anglo American Gothic fiction." FIU Digital Commons, 2010. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/2649.
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The purpose of this study was to analyze the ways in which 19th century Gothic fiction novelists Charles Brockden Brow and James Hogg explore the themes of religious enthusiasm and divine revelation. A close look at these texts reveals a common interest in the tension between the imagination and reality. By analyzing the philosophical and theological roots of these issues it becomes clear that Wieland and Confessions of a Justified Sinner mirror the anxieties of 19th century Anglo American culture. Questions regarding voice and authority, the importance of testimony, and religious seduction are common to both novels. I maintain that these authors comment on the obscure nature of human rationale by presenting readers with narrators that exhibit traits of delusion and spiritual awakening.
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Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall. "The hero in time the American gothic fiction of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville /." Access abstract and link to full text, 1989. http://0-wwwlib.umi.com.library.utulsa.edu/dissertations/fullcit/8923184.
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Thomas, T. Tipper. "The Wonder Woman Papers." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1192205726.
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Good, Joseph. "The Dark Circle: Spiritualism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction." Scholar Commons, 2012. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4053.
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This dissertation offers critical and theoretical approaches for understanding depictions of Spiritualism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian fiction. Spiritualism has fascinated and repelled writers since the movement's inception in Hydesville, New York, in 1848, and continues to haunt writers even today. The conclusion of this dissertation follows Spiritualist fiction as it carries over into the Neo-Victorian genre, by discussing how themes and images of Victorian Spiritualism find "life after death" in contemporary work. Spiritualism, once confined to the realm of the arcane and academically obscure, has begun to attract critical attention as more scholars exhume the body of literature left behind by the Spiritualist movement. This new critical attention has focused on Spiritualism's important relationship with various elements of Victorian culture, particularly its close affiliation with reform movements such as Women's Rights.
The changes that occurred in Spiritualist fiction reflect broader shifts in nineteenth-century culture. Over time, literary depictions of Spiritualism became increasingly detached from Spiritualism's original connection with progressive reform. This dissertation argues that a close examination of the trajectory of Spiritualist fiction mirrors broader shifts occurring in Victorian society. An analysis of Spiritualist fiction, from its inception to its final incarnation, offers a new critical perspective for understanding how themes that initially surfaced in progressive midcentury fiction later reemerged--in much different forms--in Gothic fiction of the fin-de-siécle. From this, we can observe how these late Gothic images were later recycled in Neo-Victorian adaptations.
In tracing the course of literary depictions of Spiritualism, this analysis ranges from novels written by committed advocates of Spiritualism, such as Florence Marryat's The Dead Man's Message and Elizabeth Phelps's The Gates Ajar, to representations of Spiritualism written in fin-de-siécle Gothic style, including Bram Stoker's Dracula and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. My analysis also includes the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who conceived of Spiritualism as either "the birth of a new science or the revival of an old humbug." Hawthorne's ambivalence represents an important and heretofore completely overlooked aspect of Spiritualist literature. He is poised between the extremes of proselytizing Spiritualists and fin-de-siécle skeptics. Hawthorne wanted to believe in Spiritualism but remained unconvinced. As the century wore on, this brand of skepticism became increasingly common, and the decline of Spiritualism's popularity was hastened by the repudiation of the movement by its founders, the Fox Sisters, in 1888. Ultimately, despite numerous attempts both scientific and metaphysical, the Victorian frame of mind proved unable to successfully reconcile the mystical element of Spiritualism with the increasingly mechanistic materialist worldview emerging as a result of rapid scientific advances and industrialization. The decline and fall of the Spiritualist movement opened the door to the appropriation of Spiritualism as a Gothic literary trope in decadent literature. This late period of Spiritualist fiction cast a long shadow that subsequently led to multiple literary reincarnations of Spiritualism in the Gothic Neo-Victorian vein.
Above all, Spiritualist literature is permeated by the theme of loss. In each of the literary epochs covered in this dissertation, Spiritualism is connected with loss or deficit of some variety. Convinced Spiritualist writers depicted Spiritualism as an improved form of consolation for the bereaved, but later writers, particularly those working after the collapse of the Spiritualist movement, perceived Spiritualism as a dangerous form of delusion that could lead to the loss of sanity and self. Fundamentally, Spiritualism was a Victorian attempt to address the existential dilemma of continuing to live in a world where joy is fleeting and the journey of life has but a single inexorable terminus. Writers like Phelps and Marryat admired Spiritualism as it promised immediate and unbroken communion with the beloved dead. The dead and the living existed together perpetually. Thus, the bereaved party had no incentive to progress through normative cycles of grief and mourning, as there was no genuine separation between the living and the dead. In the words of one of Marryat's own works of Spiritualist propaganda, there is no death.
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Chapi, Aicha. "Towards a reading of Toni Morrison's fiction : African-American history, the arts and contemporary theory /." Thesis, Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1995. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B19671441.
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Evans, Lamona Nadine. "The administrative styles of presidents of black colleges in the academic novel /." Full-text version available from OU Domain via ProQuest Digital Dissertations, 1987.
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Macon, Wanda Celeste. "Adolescent characters' sexual behavior in selected fiction of six twentieth century African American authors /." The Ohio State University, 1992. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487779120905746.
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Jacobi, Kara Elizabeth. ""They Will Invent What They Need to Survive": Narrating Trauma in Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction." Scholarly Repository, 2009. http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/oa_dissertations/229.
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"'They Will Invent What They Need to Survive': Narrating Trauma in Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction" analyzes novels by Octavia Butler, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, and Julia Alvarez through the lens of contemporary theories of trauma, tracing the ways in which survivors struggle to construct narratives that contain and make sense of their experiences. Many of the major theorists of trauma studies emphasize the impossibility of re-capturing traumatic events through creating narratives even while recognizing that the survivor's need to tell her story persists. In my project, however, I explore the ways in which the Kindred, Stigmata, Paradise, The Joy Luck Club, Sula, The Temple of My Familiar, and In the Time of the Butterflies extend theories that insist too readily on the survivor's inability to accurately or completely re-member by depicting characters who, despite difficulty, present narrative accounts of their painful memories. In my own readings of the texts, I emphasize that the complexities highlighted by these texts ultimately foster our deeper understanding of the traumatized subject and her attempts to empower herself through testimony.
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Reilly, Elizabeth Lauren. "The "scab" of slavery interracial female solidarity in literature about the antebellum South /." Click for download, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1588773401&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=3260&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Joo, Hee-Jung. "Speculative nations : racial utopia and dystopia in twentieth-century African American and Asian American literature /." view abstract or download file of text, 2007. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1404340651&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=11238&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2007.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 204-214). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Mckee, Jessica. "Ghosts, Orphans, and Outlaws: History, Family, and the Law in Toni Morrison's Fiction." Scholar Commons, 2014. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/5071.
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This dissertation explores Toni Morrison's most prevalent motifs: the ghost, the orphan, and the outlaw. Each figure advances a critique of dominant narratives, specifically those that comprise history, family, and the law. In Chapter One, I argue that Morrison's ghost stories contrast two methods of memory, one that is authoritative and another that is imaginative, in order to counter the official renderings of history. Her ghosts signal forgotten aspects of American history and provide access to another storyline--one that lies in the shadows of the novel's principal narrative. This chapter compares the ghosts of Love and Home in order to show how Morrison uses ghosts as conduits of a subversive individual and communal memory. In my second chapter, I assert a reading of Morrison's orphans as blues figures. They attest to the destructive effects of race, class, and gender oppression, which render her characters biologically and culturally orphaned. I conclude this chapter by comparing Paradise and A Mercy to show how Morrison's orphaned characters posit an alternative model of kinship that is built from the shared project of liberation. In Chapter Three, I examine Morrison's treatment of the law and its foil--the outlaw. I argue that Morrison foregrounds criminality in the absence of the law and its apparatuses (courts, police) in order to subvert the social institutions that give rise to the ghost and the orphan. I compare the crimes at the heart of Tar Baby and Jazz in order to posit another notion of justice operating in Morrison's fiction. When looked at together, Morrison's triptych threatens the coherence of governing ideologies and offers a meditation on the transformative possibilities of narrative.
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Sanchez-Taylor, Joy Ann. "Science Fiction/Fantasy and the Representation of Ethnic Futurity." Scholar Commons, 2014. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/5302.
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Science Fiction/Fantasy and the Representation of Ethnic Futurity examines the influence of science fiction/fantasy (SFF) as applied to twentieth century and contemporary African American, Native American and Latina/o texts. Bringing together theories of racial identity, hybridity, and postcolonialism, this project demonstrates how twentieth century and contemporary ethnic American SFF authors are currently utilizing tropes of SFF to blur racial distinctions and challenge white/other or colonizer/colonized binaries. Ethnic American SFF authors are able to employ SFF landscapes that address narratives of victimization or colonization while still imagining worlds where alternate representations of racial and ethnic identity are possible.
My multicultural approach pairs authors of different ethnicities in order to examine common themes that occur in ethnic American SFF texts. The first chapter examines SFF post-apocalyptic depictions of racial and ethnic identity in Samuel Delany's Dhalgren and Gerald Vizenor's Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles. Chapter two explores depictions of ethnic undead figures in Octavia Butler's Fledgling and Daniel José Older's "Phantom Overload." Chapter three addresses themes of indigenous and migrant colonization in Celu Amberstone's "Refugees" and Rosura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita's Lunar Braceros: 2125-2148.
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Williams, Andreá N. Andrews William L. "Our kind of people social status and class awareness in post-reconstruction African American fiction /." Chapel Hill, N.C. : University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006. http://dc.lib.unc.edu/u?/etd,380.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006.Title from electronic title page (viewed Oct. 10, 2007). "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English." Discipline: English; Department/School: English.
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McElroy, Ruth Ann. "Spirits at the border : migration and identity in contemporary African - and Latin - American women's fiction." Thesis, Lancaster University, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.246130.
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Piper, Gemmicka F. "Black intimacy in the popular imagination: re-examining African American women’s fiction from 1965-2000." Diss., University of Iowa, 2015. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6622.
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Contemporary African American fiction repeatedly explores intimacy. These explorations have been most sustained in black women’s writing. Although female authors share an interest in romantic interactions, their portrayals reveal wide-ranging attitudes about this theme. Some accounts depict intimacy as a barrier to female advancement. In other texts, feminine success hinges on maintaining a committed relationship. These distinct outlooks not only reflect competing gender discourses within late 20th, early 21st century America but also significant developments in black women’s literature. In this dissertation, I analyze how fictional depictions of heterosexual intimacy reveal crucial facts about black women’s writing. I argue that various subgenres captured under the heading, popular black women’s literature, include narratives about male-female relationships that complicate the efforts celebrated as the black women’s literary renaissance of the 1970s. By focusing on the span from 1965-2000, I suggest that at the same moment when Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor were expressing post-civil rights era black femininity in fictions filled with deteriorating heterosexual intimacy, other black women writers were using popular fiction to expose different possibilities for male-female interconnection. These authors exist in the same socio-cultural milieu as their high modernist peers; however, their writings reflect different reactions to decisions about where intimacy fits in the construction of black identity.
My dissertation contains four chapters, and each chapter engages roughly a decade and considers different dimensions of black female popular literature. Looking at the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s roots of this genre’s interest in intimacy, chapter one establishes Toni Cade Bambara as a founding figure. Chapter two studies the black romance novel from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s concentrating on pioneers, Rosalind Welles and Sandra Kitt. Dealing with Terry McMillan’s rise to fame between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s, chapter three examines chick lit, the site where capitalist feminism and black relationship concerns converge. The final chapter uses Terri Woods’ work to interpret ghetto fiction of the late-1990s. Popular black women’s literature notes the dynamic nature of black cultural identity and responds to that dynamism with portraits of intimacy that register shifting intra-racial realities within the broader context of evolutions in inter-racial democracy. By identifying intimacy as a telling theme in post-civil rights era experience, my research points out the variegated textures of black civic exertion in both literary and political terms.
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Kamali, Leila Francesca. "Spectres of the shore : the memory of Africa in contemporary African-American and Black British fiction." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2007. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4110/.
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This study considers the approach in recent African-American and Black British fiction toward the cultural memory of Africa. Following a brief consideration of the relationship between contemporary conceptions of African-American and Black British cultural identities, I examine the ways in which the imaginative journeys and geographies, evoked by the ideals of Africa and 'Africanness', are employed in the negotiation of historical memory, and in the endeavour to situate black identity in the context of contemporary American and British society. My discussion addresses these questions, initially, in four novels by African-American writers: Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1983), and John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire (1990). I argue that African-American writers situate a memory of an African past within an African-American present, through a form of historical memory which is sensitive not only to tradition, but also to the practice of 'possession'. This fluid form of memory, characteristic of a voodoo tradition, and also, these writers suggest, of a diversity of African-American artforms, allows knowledge of African tradition to be situated within the American present, but is broadly denied by an American trend of forgetfulness toward the past, and devalued by institutionalised racism. African-American texts present uses of language in which the linguistic and the pre-linguistic realms are felt to be continuous with one another, in response to an American language which is centrally occupied by the fraught relationship between black and white Americans. The second half of this study examines the memory of Africa in three Black British works, including Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River (1991), S.1. Martin's Incomparable World (1996), and Bernardine Evaristo's Lara (1997). I suggest here that Black British authors employ the cultural memory of Africa not as an inheritance which is connected to a known 'tradition', but as one of a diverse number of inheritances which are negotiated as part of the process of situating identity as flexible, individual, and unfinished. The memory of Africa is figured as frozen in the past, along with a range of other cultural inheritances, which are taken up and redramatised in the present as part of an attempt to recover the inherent diversity at the heart of an oppressive British fiction of linearity, and of uniform 'whiteness'. Where Britain, historically, has been silent on Britain's black presence, Black British writers simply speak into that silence. Emerging from this fruitful comparison between the two literatures is a sense of the contrasting approaches which are made by black writers toward notions of tradition and the performance of identity, in the context of two very different national histories, and as part of fundamental strategies of survival employed in contemporary social settings. These dramatisations are interrogated against continuous issues of race and racism, but also as diverse solutions for identity where national contexts bear a contrasting significance in an age which is increasingly globalised, and in which imperial power has shifted, and continues to shift, between Britain and America.
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Nephew, Irene J. "An ethnographic content analysis of children's fiction picture books reflecting African American culture published 2001-2005." Manhattan, Kan. : Kansas State University, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2097/1802.
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Nephew, Irene J. "An ethnographic content analysis of children’s fiction picture books reflecting African American culture published 2001-2005." Diss., Kansas State University, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2097/2067.
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Doctor of PhilosophyDepartment of Secondary Education
Jacqueline D. Spears
BeEtta L. Stoney
An ethnographic content analysis was conducted to explore the African American cultural content contained in the text of picture books portraying African Americans published 2001 through 2005. The picture books were limited to beginning readers, stories in rhyme and poetry, historical fiction, fictional biography, and contemporary fiction portraying African Americans and set in the U.S. The books were categorized based on the genre to which they belong and classified as generic books or books with African American cultural content. The African American cultural content in the books in the study was compared to the cultural content contained in picture books in a survey conducted by Rudine Sims Bishop in 1982. Differences between the work of African Americans and non African Americans are discussed. A data collection instrument was constructed and used by several additional raters to test the reliability of the instrument. Each additional rater was given an operational definition for generic books and books with cultural content. The raters were each given one book to evaluate. The research revealed (1) that more than half of the picture books published during the period of this study were classified as generic, (2) in most cases, only the books written by African Americans contained cultural content and (3) more than half of the picture books with cultural content are classified as historical fiction. (4) Although it is possible for a non African American to write an authentic picture book with cultural content, such books are usually the result of in depth research. (5) During the period of this study, not all generic picture books were written by non African Americans; some African American authors choose to write generic books portraying African Americans with minimal content specific to African American culture.
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Twyman, Bruce Edward. "W.E.B DuBois and the use of social science and fiction in the fight against American racism 1897-1911." DigitalCommons@Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, 1991. http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/dissertations/1131.
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Between 1897 and 1911, W.E.B. Du Bois was vigorously involved in the fight against American racism. In this struggle he used both social scientific methodology and fiction. However, he decided that social science would be his primary tool. Du Bois thought racism was based on misconceptions, and he believed these could be overcome with scientific studies. This thesis will examine how DuBois developed his scientific beliefs, and the extent to which Booker T. Washington and his supporters obstructed DuBois's scientific plans. In this regard, the thesis will explore the special significance of his first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece, in his fight against racism.
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Jackson, Akia. "The mobility of memory and shame: African American and Afro-Caribbean women’s fiction 1980’s-1990’s." Diss., University of Iowa, 2019. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6962.
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The purpose of this dissertation is to understand the mixed legacy of shame. I work through the interrelationship between productive shame and debilitating shame and a character’s journey through this spectrum. In my research, I define shame not in the pejorative, but rather I repurpose the term to show its beneficiality in reshaping Black female characters during the period of Black Arts and Power Movements in America and the Caribbean. Essentially, my dissertation will argue that although debilitative shame seems overwhelmingly negative for the female characters, gradually they come to reassess this shame as a positive asset that helps them reevaluate societal and nationalistic expectations associated with their Blackness. I seek to redefine the globalized multiple dimensions of shame that Black authors confront throughout their novels because shame involves an often painful, sudden awareness of the self and trauma previously endured.
Thus, the fluidity of Black transnational experiences frame my interrogation of the impact of colonialism and post-colonialism on the cultural history and collective shame of Afro-diasporic descended characters in Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981), Kincaid’s Annie John (1985), Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven (1987), and Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994). My project complicates mobility by dissecting the disconnections that arise from separation from homelands, family, and cultural familiarity. I analyze the four novels through an ordered methodology of migration, disruption, discontinuity, and the renaming debilitative shame as a positive asset. This methodology informs my argument on the middle ground and Black female characters occupying multiple identities in their movement through different nation-states and empires.
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Ross-Stroud, Catherine Trites Roberta Seelinger. "Non-existent existences race, class, gender, and age in adolescent fiction; or Those whispering Black girls /." Normal, Ill. Illinois State University, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ilstu/fullcit?p3106763.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2003.Title from title page screen, viewed October 12, 2005. Dissertation Committee: Roberta Seelinger Trites (chair), Karen Coats, Janice Neuleib. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-236) and abstract. Also available in print.
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Ullrich-Ferguson, Loretta N. "The beauty of her survival : being Black and female in Meridian, The salt eaters, Kindred, and The bluest eye /." View online, 2008. http://repository.eiu.edu/theses/docs/32211131464907.pdf.
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Hoey, Danny M. Jr. "Can These Bones Live? A Collection of Stories." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2010. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28431/.
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The collection concerns itself with race, gender, masculinity, marginalization, the act of violence as a means of self expression, identity and the performance of identity, love, and loss. The collection also uses historical events-more specifically, events that are central to black culture in Northeast, Ohio- to situate the characters and witness their response to these historical events. I strive to illustrate blackness as both political and fragmented with the characters in my collection. My characters believe that what they are doing-exacting violence, abusing women, disrespecting each other- is somehow the normative; that somehow what it is that they have learned is how they should perform black identity.
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DeVirgilis, Megan. "BLOOD DISORDERS: A TRANSATLANTIC STUDY OF THE VAMPIRE AS AN EXPRESSION OF IDEOLOGICAL, POLITICAL, AND ECONOMIC TENSIONS IN LATE 19TH AND EARLY 20TH CENTURY HISPANIC SHORT FICTION." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2018. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/532513.
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SpanishPh.D.
This dissertation explores vampire logic in Hispanic short fiction of the last decade of the 19th century and first three decades of the 20th century, and is thus a comparative study; not simply between Spanish and Latin American literary production, but also between Hispanic and European literary traditions. As such, this study not only draws attention to how Hispanic authors employed traditional Gothic conventions—and by extension, how Hispanic nations produced “modern” literature—but also to how these authors adapted previous models and therefore deviated from and questioned the European Gothic tradition, and accordingly, established trends and traditions of their own. This study does not pretend to be exhaustive. Even though I mention poetry, plays, and novels from the first appearance of the literary vampire in the mid-18th century through the fin de siglo and the first few decades of the 20th century, I focus on short fiction produced within and shortly thereafter the fin de siglo, as this time period saw a resurgence of the vampire figure on a global scale and the first legitimate appearance in Hispanic letters, being as it coincided with a rise in periodicals and short story production and represented developments and anxieties related to the physical and behavioral sciences, technological advances and urban development, waves of immigration and disease, and war. While Chapter 1 establishes a working theory of the vampire from a historical and materialist perspective, each of the following chapters explores a different trend in Hispanic vampire literature: Chapter 2 looks at how vampire narratives represent political and economic anxieties particular to Spain and Latin America; Chapter 3 studies newly married couples and how vampire logic leads to the death of the wife—and thus the death of the “angel of the house” ideal—therefore challenging ideas surrounding marriage, the family, and the home; lastly, Chapter 4 explores courting couples and how disruptions in the makeup of the public/private divide influenced images of female monstrosity—complex, parodic ones in the Hispanic case. One of the main conclusions this study reaches is that Hispanic authors were indeed producing Gothic images, but that these images deviated from the European Gothic vampire literary tradition and prevailing literary tendencies of the time through aesthetic and narrative experimentation and as a result of particular anxieties related to their histories, developments, and current realities. While Latin America and Spain produced few explicit, Dracula-like vampires, the vampire figures, metaphors, and allegories discussed in the chapters speak to Spain and Latin America’s political, economic, and ideological uncertainties, and as a result, their “place” within the modern global landscape. This dissertation ultimately suggests that Hispanic Gothic representations are unique because they were being produced within peripheral spaces, places considered “non-modern” because of their distinct histories of exploitation and development and their distinct cultural, religious, and racial compositions, therefore shifting perceptions of Otherness and turning the Gothic on its head. The vampire in the Hispanic context, I suggest, is a fusion of different literary currents, such as Romanticism, aesthetic movements, such as Decadence, and modes, such as the Gothic and the Fantastic, and is therefore different in many ways from its predecessors. These texts abound with complex representations that challenge the status quo, question dominant narratives, parody literary formulas, and break with tradition.
Temple University--Theses
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Nylin, Kristina. "Why Read Fiction in the English Language Classroom? : Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye." Thesis, Högskolan i Gävle, Avdelningen för humaniora, 2012. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hig:diva-12828.
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The essay makes a case for the use of the Nobel Prize-winning (1993) author Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye (1970) in the English language classroom. The essay argues that the novel is an excellent reading choice and to what is appropriate according to the learning goals stated in Gy11's course syllabus English 6. Since the course English 6 syllabus is new some aspects different from previous course syllabus English B are mentioned by way of comparison. In order to develop the arguments for using the novel, different perspectives of reading and the learning process are discussed and how they match the curriculum Gy 11. Some points about how Morrison has managed to voice the former unspoken experiences of African American society are made to make it clear why reading The Bluest Eye is such a superb text in relation to the learning goals that are outlined in Gy11.The essay focuses mainly on mother - daughter relationships because most pupils will easily relate to this theme since they have experiences of this relation themselves, and therefore they will find it easy to find issues to discuss after reading the novel.
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Lynch, Sibongile B. "Carnival, Convents, and the Cult of St. Rocque: Cultural Subterfuge in the Work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2012. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/136.
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In the work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson the city and culture of 19th century New Orleans figures prominently, and is a major character affecting the lives of her protagonists. While race, class, and gender are among the focuses of many scholars the eccentricity and cultural history of the most exotic American city, and its impact on Dunbar-Nelson’s writing is unmistakable. This essay will discuss how the diverse cultural environment of New Orleans in the 19th century allowed Alice Dunbar Nelson to create narratives which allowed her short stories to speak to the shifting identities of women and the social uncertainty of African Americans in the Jim Crow south. A consideration of New Orleans’ cultural history is important when reading Dunbar-Nelson’s work, whose significance has often been disregarded because of what some considered its lack of racial markers.
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Mears, Mary D. "Choice and discovery an analysis of women and culture in Flora Nwapa's fiction /." [Tampa, Fla.] : University of South Florida, 2009. http://digital.lib.usf.edu/?e14.2845.
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Erickson, Stacy M. "Animals-as-Trope in the Selected Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1999. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2227/.
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In this dissertation, I show how 20th century African-American women writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison utilize animals-as-trope in order to illustrate the writers' humanity and literary vision. In the texts that I have selected, I have found that animals-as-trope functions in two important ways: the first function of animal as trope is a pragmatic one, which serves to express the humanity of African Americans; and the second function of animal tropes in African-American women's fiction is relational and expresses these writers' "ethic of caring" that stems from their folk and womanist world view. Found primarily in slave narratives and in domestic fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries, pragmatic animal metaphors and/or similes provide direct analogies between the treatment of African-Americans and animals. Here, these writers often engage in rhetoric that challenges pro-slavery apologists, who attempted to disprove the humanity of African-Americans by portraying them as animals fit to be enslaved. Animals, therefore, become the metaphor of both the abolitionist and the slavery apologist for all that is not human. The second function of animals-as-trope in the fiction of African-American women writers goes beyond the pragmatic goal of proving African-Americans's common humanity, even though one could argue that this goal is still present in contemporary African-American fiction. Animals-as-trope also functions to express the African-American woman writer's understanding that 1) all oppressions stem from the same source; 2) that the division between nature/culture is a false onethat a universal connection exists between all living creatures; and 3) that an ethic of caring, or relational epistemology, can be extended to include non-human animals. Twentieth-century African-American writers such as Hurston, Walker, and Morrison participate in what anthropologists term, "neototemism," which is the contemporary view that humankind is part of nature, or a vision that Morrison would most likely attribute to the "folk." This perspective places their celebration of the continuous relations between humans and animals within a spiritual, indeed, tribal, cosmological construction. What makes these particular writers primarily different from their literary mothers, however, is a stronger sense that they are reclaiming the past, both an African and African-American history. What I hope to contribute with this dissertation is a new perspective of African-American women writers' literary tradition via their usage of animals as an expression of their "ethic of caring" and their awareness that all oppression stems from a single source.
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Moffler, Kirsten A. ""A Plea for Color:" The Construction of a Feminine Identity in African American Women's Novels." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2001. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/MofflerKA2001.pdf.
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Wood, Susan M. "Seeing into the mirror the reality of fiction in the work of Carrie Mae Weems /." Diss., Columbia, Mo. : University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10355/4900.
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Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007.The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on November 6, 2007) Includes bibliographical references.