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1
Berger, Aimee E. "Dark Houses: Navigating Space and Negotiating Silence in the Novels of Faulkner, Warren and Morrison." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2000. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2732/.
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Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," as early as 1839, reveals an uneasiness about the space of the house. Most literary scholars accept that this anxiety exists and causes some tension, since it seems antithetical to another dominant motif, that of the power of place and the home as sanctuary. My critical persona, like Poe's narrator in "The House of Usher," looks into a dark, silent tarn and shudders to see in it not only the reflection of the House of Usher, but perhaps the whole of what is "Southern" in Southern Literature. Many characters who inhabit the worlds of Southern stories also inhabit houses that, like the House of Usher, are built on the faulty foundation of an ideological system that divides the world into inside(r)/outside(r) and along numerous other binary lines. The task of constructing the self in spaces that house such ideologies poses a challenge to the characters in the works under consideration in this study, and their success in doing so is dependant on their ability to speak authentically in the language of silence and to dwell instead of to just inhabit interior spaces. In my reading of Faulkner and Warren, this ideology of division is clearly to be at fault in the collapse of houses, just as it is seen to be in the House of Usher. This emphasis is especially conspicuous in several works, beginning with Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and its (pre)text, "Evangeline." Warren carries the motif forward in his late novels, Flood and Meet Me in the Green Glen. I examine these works relative to spatial analysis and an aesthetic of absence, including an interpretation of silence as a mode of authentic saying. I then discuss these motifs as they are operating in Toni Morrison's Beloved, and finally take Song of Solomon as both an end and a beginning to these texts' concerns with collapsing structures of narrative and house.
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Hise, Patricia Jean Fielder. "Carson McCullers Beyond Southern Boundaries: Diagnosing "An American Malady"." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1998. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc935671/.
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The loneliness theme of Carson McCullers' fiction falls into three divisions or levels. And because of her focus on the individual, her general theme of loneliness as it results from human isolation is universal. She develops her "broad principal theme" through an examination of human characteristics common to all human beings. In expressing her concept of isolation as a human condition, however, she presents loneliness as she believes it exists in her own culture, and, for this reason, her works present a loneliness that results from American cultural attitudes and is tempered by a Southern sense of nostalgia. After first establishing an understanding of McCullers' basic theme through an analysis of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, this study analyzes the nature of the Southern tradition and its influence on the criticism of her fiction with particular focus on the problems of determining to what degree her Southern settings inhibit the interpretation of her works beyond a regional perspective. A comparison of thematic elements, events, and characterization in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter to nonfiction critical discussions of American culture in The Image by Daniel Boorstin and The Pursuit of Loneliness by Philip Slater shows that the social context and the theme of isolation in the novel reflect a condition of life that is American, not distinctively Southern. The final portion of this study continues the analysis of McCullers' basic theme in Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, and Clock Without Hands, comparing elements of these later works to The Image and The Pursuit of Loneliness in order to demonstrate the particularly American loneliness of her characters and the value of her works to the tradition of American novel.
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Januzzi, Angela. "Making an "American Classic": Faulkner, Ferber, and the Politics of 20th Century Canon Formation." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2007. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/JanuzziA2007.pdf.
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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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Li, Jing. "Self in community: twentieth-century American drama by women." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2016. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_oa/322.
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This thesis argues that twentieth-century American women playwrights spearhead the drama of transformation, and their plays become resistance discourses that protest, subvert, or change the representation of the female self in community. Many create antisocial, deviant, and self-reflexive characters who become misfits, criminals, or activists in order to lay bare women's moral-psychological crises in community. This thesis highlights how selected women playwrights engage with, and question various dominant, regional, racial, or ethnic female communities in order to redefine themselves. Sophie Treadwell's Machinal and Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother are representative texts that explore how the dominant culture can pose a barrier for radical women who long for self-fulfillment. To cultivate their personhood, working class Caucasian women are forced to go against their existing community so as to seek sexual freedom and reproductive rights, which are regarded as new forms of resistance or transgression. While they struggle hard to conform to the traditional, gendered notion of female altruism, self-sacrifice and care ethics, they cannot hide their discontent with the gendered division of labor. They are troubled doubly by the fact that they have to work in the public sphere, but conform to their gender roles in the private sphere. Different female protagonists resort to extreme homicidal or suicidal measures in order to assert their radical, contingent subjectivities, and become autonomous beings. By becoming antisocial or deviant characters, they reject their traditional conformity, and emphasize the arbitrariness and performativity of all gender roles. Treadwell and Norman both envision how the dominant Caucasian female community must experience radical changes in order to give rise to a new womanhood. Using Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun as examples, this thesis demonstrates the difficulties women may face when living in disparate communities. The selected texts show that Southern women and African-American women desperately crave for their distinct identities, while they long to be accepted by others. Their subjectivity is a constant source of anxiety, but some women can form strong psychological bonds with women from the same community, empowering them to make new life choices. To these women, their re-fashioned self becomes a means to reexamine the dominant white culture and their racial identity. African-American women resist the discourse of assimilation, and re-identify with their African ancestry, or pan-Africanism. In the relatively traditional southern community, women can subvert the conventional southern belle stereotypes. They assert their selfhood by means of upward mobility, sexual freedom, or the rejection of woman's reproductive imperative. The present study shows these women succeed in establishing their personhood when they refuse to compromise with the dominant ways, as well as the regional, racial communal consciousness. Maria Irene Fornes' Fefu and Her Friends and Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles are analyzed to show how women struggle to claim their dialogic selfhood in minoritarian communities (New England Community and Jewish Community). Female protagonists maintain dialogues with other women in the same community, while they choose their own modes of existence, such as single parenthood or political activism. The process of transformation shows that women are often disturbed by their moral consciousness, a result of their acceptance of gender roles and their submission to patriarchal authority. Their transgressive behaviors enable them to claim their body and mind, and strive for a new source of personhood. Both playwrights also advocate women's ability to self-critique, to differentiate the self from the Other, to allow the rise of an emergent self in the dialectical flux of inter-personal and intra-personal relations. The present study reveals that twentieth-century American female dramatists emphasize relationality in their pursuit of self. However, the transformation of the self can only be completed by going beyond, while remaining in dialogue with the dominant, residual, or emergent communities. For American women playwrights, the emerging female selves come with a strong sense of "in-betweenness," for it foregrounds the individualistic and communal dimensions of women, celebrating the rise of inclusive, mutable, and dialogic subjectivities.
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Bredin, Renae Moore. "Guerilla ethnography." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/187034.
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Using contemporary paradigms from Native American, African American, feminist, and post-colonial critical theories, as well the debates around what constitutes anthropology, this dissertation examines the ways in which Native American written literary production and European American ethnography converge in the social production and construction of the "raced" categories of "red" and "white." The questions of how discourses of power and subjectivity operate are asked of texts by Paula Gunn Allen, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Elsie Clews Parsons, all of whom have lived and worked in and around Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico. The matrix in their texts of location (Laguna Pueblo), discourses (fiction and ethnography), "races" (Laguna and White), and gender (female), facilitates an examination of the scripting of "Indian-ness" and "White-ness" and how these categories sustain each other, and how each "contains" and "represents" the other, based in relative domination and subordination. What is posited here is a practice of guerilla ethnography, a practice which reflects "white" back upon itself, creating a picture of what it means to be culturally "white" by one who is "other than white." Texts are examined in terms of a racial and ethnic "whiteness" as a socially constructed category, upsetting the underlying assumption of whiteness as the given or natural center, rather than as another socially constructed category.
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Balic, Iva. "Always Painting the Future: Utopian Desire and the Women's Movement in Selected Works by United States Female Writers at the Turn of the Twentieth Century." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2009. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc11060/.
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This study explores six utopias by female authors written at the turn of the twentieth century: Mary Bradley Lane's Mizora (1881), Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant's Unveiling Parallel (1893), Eloise O. Richberg's Reinstern (1900), Lena J. Fry's Other Worlds (1905), Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), and Martha Bensley Bruère's Mildred Carver, USA (1919). While the right to vote had become the central, most important point of the movement, women were concerned with many other issues affecting their lives. Positioned within the context of the late nineteenth century women's rights movement, this study examines these "sideline" concerns of the movement such as home and gender-determined spheres, motherhood, work, marriage, independence, and self-sufficiency and relates them to the transforming character of female identity at the time. The study focuses primarily on analyzing the expression of female historical desire through utopian genre and on explicating the contradictory nature of utopian production.
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Robinson, Heather Lindsey. "Ours is the Kingdom of Heaven: Racial Construction of Early American Christian Identities." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2016. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc849673/.
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This project interrogates how religious performance, either authentic or contrived, aids in the quest for freedom for oppressed peoples; how the rhetoric of the Enlightenment era pervades literatures delivered or written by Native Americans and African Americans; and how religious modes, such as evoking scripture, performing sacrifices, or relying upon providence, assist oppressed populations in their roles as early American authors and speakers. Even though the African American and Native American populations of early America before the eighteenth century were denied access to rights and freedom, they learned to manipulate these imposed constraints--renouncing the expectation that they should be subordinate and silent--to assert their independent bodies, voices, and spiritual identities through the use of literary expression. These performative strategies, such as self-fashioning, commanding language, destabilizing republican rhetoric, or revising narrative forms, become the tools used to present three significant strands of identity: the individual person, the racialized person, and the spiritual person. As each author resists the imposed restrictions of early American ideology and the resulting expectation of inferior behavior, he/she displays abilities within literature (oral and written forms) denied him/her by the political systems of the early republican and early national eras. Specifically, they each represent themselves in three ways: first, as a unique individual with differentiated abilities, exceptionalities, and personality; second, as a person with distinct value, regardless of skin color, cultural difference, or gender; and third, as a sanctified and redeemed Christian, guaranteed agency and inheritance through the family of God. Furthermore, the use of religion and spirituality allows these authors the opportunity to function as active agents who were adapting specific verbal and physical methods of self-fashioning through particular literary strategies. Doing so demonstrates that they were not the unrefined and unfeeling individuals that early American political and social restrictions had made them--that instead they were intellectually and morally capable of making both physical and spiritual contributions to society while reciprocally deserving to possess the liberties and freedoms denied them.
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Boettcher, Anna Margarete. "Through Women's Eyes: Contemporary Women's Fiction about the Old West." PDXScholar, 1995. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4966.
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The myth of the West is still very much alive in contemporary America. Lately, there has been a resurgence of new Western movies, TV series, and fiction. Until recently the West has been the exclusive domain of the quintessential masculine man. Women characters have featured only in the margins of the Western hero's tale. Contemporary Western fiction by women, however, offers new perspectives. Women's writing about the Old and New West introduces strong female protagonists and gives voice to characters that are muted or ignored by traditional Western literature and history. Western scholarship has largely been polarized by two approaches. First, the myth and symbol school of Turner, Smith, and followers celebrated American exceptionalism and rugged male individualism on the Western frontier. Second, the reaction against these theories draws attention to the West's legacy of racism, sexism and violence. The purpose of the present study is to collapse these theoretical fences and open a dialogue between conflicting theoretical positions and contemporay Western fiction. Molly Gloss's 1989 The Jump-Off Creek and Karen Joy Fowler's 1991 Sarah Canary selfcritically re-write the Old West. This study has attempted to explore the following questions: How can one re-write history in the context of a postmodern culture? How can "woman," the quintessential "Other" escape a modernist history (and thus avoid charges of essentialism) when she has not been in this history to begin with? In this study I analyze how these two contemporary feminist authors, Molly Gloss, and Karen Joy Fowler, face the dual challenge of writing themselves into a history that has traditionally excluded them, while at the same time deconstructing this very historical concept of the West. Fowler's and Gloss's use of diverse narrative strategies to upset a monolithic concept of history-- emphasizing the importance of multiple stories of the Old West-- is discussed in detail.
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Tsang, Wai-ho, and 曾煒豪. "Post-9/11 American gothic family in The hills have eyes duology and Twilight saga." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2012. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B48395079.
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9/11 attacks open the 21st Century into the fear of the Other, which is coincidentally at the core of the Gothic tradition. In post-911 Gothic texts, the tension of Self and Other can be seen from the gothic family (representing homeland and country) and the gothic monster (representing foreign, dangerous intruder) respectively. This essay is a close study of two sets of Hollywood films dealing with such tension - Twilight saga and The Hills Have Eyes duology. It is argued, with Foucault’s notion of Power/Knowledge, that such Hollywood gothic productions further create and hence reinforce the fear of, but not suppress, the Other. The 21st Century Gothic genre is therefore no longer subversive, but appropriated to educate the unaware public.<br>published_or_final_version<br>Literary and Cultural Studies<br>Master<br>Master of Arts
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Sagorje, Marina. "Self and society in Mary McCarthy's writing." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8fd1de71-c10c-4341-8283-ccebfeebf2a7.
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My thesis analyses the oeuvre of the American writer Mary McCarthy (1912-1989), with the focus on the figure of the outsider looking in. McCarthy uses outsider figures in her texts as prisms through which distinctive historical moments as well as problems of gender, race and religion are studied against the backdrop of the changing climate of the American 'red' 1930s, the anxious '50s, and the late '60s torn by the Vietnam war. Examples of McCarthy's recurring protagonists are the New York Bohemian girl of the '30s in the predominantly male world marred by the Great Depression, the Jewish character stereotyped as the Other by the poorly hidden anti-Semitism of the American society of the early 1940s, and the orphan child exposed to adult cruelty, who finds her only solace in the Catholic religion. Their position of being outsiders who live in a society not their own by birthright, is shown to be crucial for their acquisition and knowledge of truth, and links insight to marginality, which is reinforced by McCarthy's technique of ironically detached observation, the 'cold eye' of her prose. McCarthy herself appears as an outsider character throughout her writing, both as the historical figure and as the protagonist of her autobiographies. Her self-image, shaped by her orphaned childhood and her youth as a Bohemian girl among leftist intellectuals, is subject to conflicting impulses of confession and concealment. McCarthy's wide use of autobiographical details in her fiction and elements of fiction in her autobiographies led most critics to study her work from a chiefly biographical point of view. My own approach to Mary McCarthy's writing takes their findings into consideration, and includes the analysis of the historical, political, and social contexts of McCarthy's texts, as well as the intertextual dialogue with a few select writings by McCarthy's contemporaries such as Philip Roth and Sylvia Plath.
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Brantley, Jennifer Susan. "Ruby." Thesis, Kansas State University, 1985. http://hdl.handle.net/2097/9824.
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Weir, Rebecca Jane. "Written war : reportage and the literary, 1861-1866." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.609236.
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Sorrells, David J. "The Evolution of AIDS as Subject Matter in Select American Dramas." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2000. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2600/.
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Dramatic works from America with AIDS as subject matter have evolved over the past twenty years. In the early 1980s, dramas like Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, William Hoffman's As Is, and Robert Chesley's Night Sweat educated primarily homosexual men about AIDS, its causes, and its effects on the gay community while combating the dominant discourse promoted by the media, government, and medical establishments that AIDS was either unimportant because it affected primarily the homosexual population or because it was attributed to lack of personal responsibility. By the mid-eighties and early nineties, playwrights Terrence McNally (Love! Valour! Compassion!)and Paul Rudnick (Jeffrey)concentrated on relationships between sero-discordant homosexual couples. McNally's "Andre's Mother" and Lips Together, Teeth Apart explored how families and friends face the loss of a loved one to AIDS. Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America epic represents living beyond AIDS as a powerful force. Without change and progress, Angels warns, life stagnates. Angels also introduces the powerful drugs that help alleviate the symptoms of AIDS. AIDS is the centerpiece of the epic, and AIDS and homosexuality are inextricably blended in the play. Rent, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical by Jonathan Larson, features characters from an assortment of ethnic and social backgrounds - including heterosexuals, homosexuals, bi-sexuals, some with AIDS, some AIDS-free, some drug users - all living through the diverse troubles visited upon them at the turn of the millennium in the East Village of New York City. AIDS is not treated as "special," nor are people with AIDS pandered to. Instead, the characters take what life gives them, and they live fully, because there is "no day but today" ("Finale"). Rent's audiences are as varied as the American population, because it portrays metaphorically what so many Americans face daily - not AIDS per se, but other difficult life problems, including self-alienation. As such, Rent defies the dominant discourse because the community portrayed in Rent is the American community.
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King, Charla. "Middle Men: Establishing Non-Anglo Masculinity in Southwestern Literature." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2003. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4259/.
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By examining southwestern masculinity from three separate lenses of cultural experience, Mexican American, Native American and female, this thesis aims to acknowledge the blending of masculinities that is taking place in both the fictitious and factual southwest. Long gone are the days when the cowboys chased down the savage Indians or the Mexican bandits. Southwestern literature now focuses on how these different cultures and traditions can re-construct their masculinities in a way that will be beneficial to all. The southwest is a land of borders and liminal spaces between the United States and Mexico, between brown and white, legal and illegal. All of these borders converge here to create the last American frontier. These converging borders also encompass converging traditions, cultures, and genders. By blending the cowboy, the macho, and the warrior, perhaps these Southwestern writers can construct a liminal masculinity more representative of the southwest itself.
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Hicks, Mary G. (Mary Geraldine). "Abraham Lincoln and the American Romantic Writers: Embodiment and Perpetuation of an Ideal." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1992. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500550/.
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The American Romantic writers laid a broad foundation for the historic and heroic Abraham Lincoln who has evolved as our national myth. The writers were attracted to Lincoln by his eloquent expression of the body of ideals and beliefs they shared with him, especially the ideal of individual liberty and the belief that achievement of the ideal would bring about an amelioration of the human condition. The time, place and conditions in which they lived enhanced the attraction, and Lincoln's able leadership during the Civil War strengthened their estimation of him. His martyrdom was the catalyst which enabled the Romantic writers to lay the foundation of the Lincoln myth which has made his name synonymous with individual freedom everywhere even today.
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Hart, Hilary 1969. "Sentimental spectacles : the sentimental novel, natural language, and early film performance." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/297.
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Advisor: Mary E. Wood.
xii, 181 leaves : ill. ; 29 cm. Print copy also available for check out and consultation in the University of Oregon's library under the call number: PS374.S714 H37 2004.<br>The nineteenth-century American sentimental novel has only in the last twenty years received consideration from the academy as a legitimate literary tradition. During that time feminist scholars have argued that sentimental novels performed important cultural work and represent an important literary tradition. This dissertation contributes to the scholarship by placing the sentimental novel within a larger context of intellectual history as a tradition that draws upon theoretical sources and is a source itself for later cultural developments. In examining a variety of sentimental novels, I establish the moral sense philosophy as the theoretical basis of the sentimental novel's pathetic appeals and its theories of sociability and justice. The dissertation also addresses the aesthetic features of the sentimental novel and demonstrates again the tradition's connection to moral sense philosophy but within the context of the American elocution revolution. I look at natural language theory to render more legible the moments of emotional spectacle that are the signature of sentimental aesthetics. The second half of the dissertation demonstrates a connection between the sentimental novel and silent film. Both mediums rely on a common aesthetic storehouse for signifying emotions. The last two chapters of the dissertation compare silent film performance with emotional displays in the sentimental novel and in elocution and acting manuals. I also demonstrate that the films of D. W. Griffith, especially The Birth of a Nation, draw upon on the larger conventions of the sentimental novel.
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Davidson, Ryan J. "Affinities of influence : exploring the relationship between Walt Whitman and William Blake." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2014. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5590/.
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This project explores the nature and extent of the relationship between Blake and Whitman. I examine their works to find affinities in tone, style and themes and seek to understand the origin of these affinities. The resultant discoveries, however, lead to the conclusion that, because of Whitman’s lack of exposure to Blake’s work, these affinities must be accounted for through a coterie of indirect influences on Whitman. Over the course of the introductory chapter, I establish the critical proclivity of connecting William Blake and Walt Whitman, providing examples of such critical interpretation; in addition, I provide an introduction to the key figures, terms, and works with which this thesis engages. The work of the second chapter of this project is to uncover in Whitman’s work, before he could have read Blake, those elements that are read as points of contact between them. Through close readings, I show that those aspects of Whitman’s work which are read as points of contact between Blake and Whitman predate Whitman’s exposure to Blake’s work, and so necessitate an engagement with influences shared by Blake and Whitman. The third chapter articulates the notion that a variety of influences affected Whitman’s composition of Leaves of Grass, and these various influences serve as an explanation for those apparent similarities between Blake and Whitman discussed in chapter two. The final element this chapter engages with is that of nineteenth-century periodical culture; this aspect of the influences articulated in this chapter provides a secondary explanation for the similarities discussed in the second chapter. The fourth and fifth chapters focus on the 1860 and 1867 iterations of Leaves of Grass and the 1867 and 1871–72 versions of Leaves of Grass, respectively, both with special emphasis on the poem that would become “Song of Myself.” The changes seen throughout these iterations will be used to understand Whitman’s evolving prosody as well as his changing public persona. These chapters also engage with the work of Swinburne, in chapter five, and of Gilchrist, in chapter four, as integral elements of this mediated influence of Blake on Whitman. In the final chapter of this work, I summarize my findings, suggest possible avenues for further inquiry, and discuss the implications of this research. There is a trend in Anglo-American literary criticism to see the relationship between America and England as adversarial rather than generative. The concluding chapter of this work will explore the idea of the Anglo-American literary tradition as a continuum—a complex of acceptance, extension, transformation, and refusal—and place the relationship of Whitman to Blake accurately on this continuum.
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Muscolino, Stephen J. "Writing in real-time, fictions of digitization : the novels of Don DeLillo and Dave Eggers." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2017. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/8276/.
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By tracking the intersection of contemporary fiction and the information technologies of the digital age, this thesis argues that the narratives being produced over the past ten years have evolved into a distinct genre of literature, one where the aesthetics of fragmentation and postmodern uncertainty must confront the new realities of a digitally saturated culture and society. In order to demonstrate this alteration in contemporary fiction, this thesis considers novels written within the past ten years that reflect on this new form of textuality, namely Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) and David Eggers’ The Circle (2013). These texts demonstrate a paradigm shift in contemporary literature, a new kind of fiction in which American society, culture, economics, and politics, are all directly affected by various forms of digital mediatisation. These authors reflect an altered cultural zeitgeist within their fiction—writings which can be differentiated from the postmodern literary aesthetic—prompted by neoteric digital technologies coupled with the ubiquitous nature of the Internet. Although this topic is broad and covers multiple fields of scholarly interests, my thesis nonetheless concerns itself with a very specific line of questioning: will our authors have the imaginative wherewithal and social sensitivity to keep pace with changes brought forth by the explosion of information technologies? If so, what type of fiction is likely to emerge from this new digital environment? By taking a focused approach and using contemporary literature as representative of these massive social, economic, and political transformations, my research recalls Kurt Vonnegut’s “Canary in the Coal Mine” dictum: the writer has always been the first to notice the dramatic effects of technology on the individual and the culture at large.
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Birge, Amy Anastasia. ""Mislike Me not for My Complexion": Shakespearean Intertextuality in the Works of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1996. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278175/.
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Caliban, the ultimate figure of linguistic and racial indeterminacy in The Tempest, became for African-American writers a symbol of colonial fears of rebellion against oppression and southern fears of black male sexual aggression. My dissertation thus explores what I call the "Calibanic Quadrangle" in essays and novels by Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. The figure of Caliban allows these authors to inflect the sentimental structure of the novel, to elevate Calibanic utterance to what Cooper calls "crude grandeur and exalted poesy," and to reveal the undercurrent of anxiety in nineteenth-century American attempts to draw rigid racial boundaries. The Calibanic Quadrangle enables this thorough critique because it allows the black woman writer to depict the oppression of the "Other," southern fears of black sexuality, the division between early black and white women's issues, and the enduring innocence of the progressive, educated, black female hero ~ all within the legitimized boundaries of the Shakespearean text, which provides literary authority to the minority writer. I call the resulting Shakespearean intertextuality a Quadrangle because in each of these African-American works a Caliban figure, a black man or "tragic mulatto" who was once "petted" and educated, struggles within a hostile environment of slavery and racism ruled by the Prospero figure, the wielder of "white magic," who controls reproduction, fears miscegenation, and enforces racial hierarchy. The Miranda figure, associated with the womb and threatened by the specter of miscegenation, advocates slavery and perpetuates the hostile structure. The Ariel figure, graceful and ephemeral, usually the "tragic mulatta" and a slave, desires her freedom and complements the Caliban figure. Each novel signals the presence of the paradigm by naming at least one character from The Tempest (Caliban in Cooper's A Voice from the South; "Mirandy" in Harper's Iola Leroy; Prospero in Hopkins's Contending Forces; and Ariel in Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter).
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Abramowitz, Rachel I. "Donald Barthelme and 'Not-Knowing', 1964-1987." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c183d6a9-86f9-4337-b6c5-4efdc6dc0731.
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This thesis argues that Barthelme's major 1985 essay "Not-Knowing" contains within its title Barthelme's central artistic idea, and that not-knowing informs both the subject of his fiction and his philosophy of art. This study will be the first critical treatment of Barthelme that positions his work from beginning to end in terms of the dimensions of not-knowing that came out of his own reading in psychology, art theory, philosophy, religion, and education, offering coherent readings of content and suggesting the ways in which content relates to form. The Introduction explores the origins of Barthelme's ideas of not-knowing, paying special attention to the influence of Mallarmé, Joyce, and Beckett on Barthelme's first characterisations of not-knowing, creativity, and reception. The first chapter gives an in-depth reading of Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), Barthelme's first collection of stories. Though Barthelme had not yet begun to formally theorise his ideas of not-knowing, they were already latent in Come Back, Dr. Caligari's characterisation of psychological experience, specifically in relation to anxiety, boredom, and interpretation. The second chapter looks at the ways in which Harold Rosenbergâs theories of the visual arts, and especially collage, which Barthelme encountered while co-editing Location magazine with Rosenberg in the early 1960s, address form and not-knowing, and how Barthelme treats these issues in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine (1971), Sadness (1972), Guilty Pleasures (1974), and Amateurs (1976). The third chapter shows how Barthelme's university studies in 19th century philosophy, especially Kierkegaard in The Concept of Irony (1841) and Kierkegaard's treatment of Schlegel in that treatise, inform his concern with irony, both in theory and practice, in City Life (1970), Great Days (1979), and Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983). Chapter Four argues that Kierkegaard's theories of education and religion in Either/Or (1843) and The Present Age (1846), as well as the contemporary incarnation of Dewey's ideas of progressive education, both had a profound influence on Barthelme's ideas about the way a society is educated into knowingness, the artist's aspiration toward not-knowing, and the validity of religion in the postmodern world. The conclusion to the thesis reexamines the Introduction's argument about literary influence through a brief reading of The Dead Father (1975). Barthelme is recognised as one of the most important American postmodernist writers, and yet there has been relatively little critical treatment of his oeuvre. The major books that address Barthelme's work, which include Jerome Klinkowitz's Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction (1975) and Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition (1991), as well as Alan Wilde's Horizons of Assent (1981) and Stanley Trachtenberg's Understanding Donald Barthelme (1990), belong to a two-decade span of classifying writers such as Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and John Barth using a limited set of ideas about postmodernism that were interesting as theory at the time, but did little to explore the actual literary, philosophical, and aesthetic content and contexts of these writers' works (with the possible exception of Pynchon). This thesis aims to rescue Barthelme from now-hackneyed ways of talking about postmodernism, which include lumping various aesthetic techniques under the rubric of "metafiction," claiming that the era's sole interest is in surface at the expense of depth, and that the dependence upon clichés is a deliberate expression of artistic exhaustion.
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Allen, Joseph J. "The retina blues : invisibility and cultural visibility." Virtual Press, 1995. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/941584.
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My text formulates a theory of postmodern invisibility while examining the condition of cultural invisibility. As I track strategies of position and space in contemporary American literature and music, I propose a tactic for attaining cultural visibility that draws from Jean Baudrillard's notion of the-more-visible-than-the-visible, postmodern aesthetics and the cultural metaphor of the optics of the vision system.In our technoculture, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and his narrator's choice of an invisible identity, though wonderfully evocative, is no longer a viable solution to the dilemma of cultural invisibility. Later contemporary American fiction, especially Don DeLillo's White Noise, offers a strategy that oscillates between invisibility and visibility and is ineffective in curing cultural invisibility. My project centers on Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and her representation of a storytelling ceremony that can cure the problem of cultural invisibility. Silko proposes a narrative mode capable of representing and accomplishing cultural work by reversing the flow of culture. Nathaniel Mackey's jazz-inspired fiction, Dibot Baghostus's Run (1993), expands Silko's magical blueprint by employing a culturally dense, hyper-visible narrative mode.Like Silko and Mackey, cultural theorist Trinh Minh-ha, anthropologist Michael Taussig, and sociologist Stephen Pfohl employ the more-visible-than-the-visible composition strategy of collage. Their writings, as well as the aesthetic of hiphop, serve as a model for my text because in collage, there is room for disorientation, noise, local elements, plurality, recomposition, hyper-visibility, and the sampling of crosscultural artifacts and debris. Experiencing a montage can shock sensory perceptions into novel paradigms of representation and, as Silko and Mackey hope, bring about a meaningful cultural visibility.For Minh-ha, Silko, and Mackey, stories and other cultural artifacts circulate freely like gifts. The pleasure is in transmitting, circulating, and retransmitting the story: the pleasure of making the story more-than-visible. Then the story functions, as Minh-ha states, "as a cure and a protection [that] is at once musical, historical, poetical, ethical, educational, magical." While my text strives to represent several of these elements, my theory of postmodern invisibility reflects and transmits a narrative mode that is capable of curing the problem of cultural invisibility.<br>Department of English
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Adams, Dana W. (Dana Wills). "Female Inheritors of Hawthorne's New England Literary Tradition." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1994. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc279406/.
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Nineteenth-century women were a mainstay in the New England literary tradition, both as readers and authors. Indeed, women were a large part of a growing reading public, a public that distanced itself from Puritanism and developed an appetite for novels and magazine short stories. It was a culture that survived in spite of patriarchal domination of the female in social and literary status. This dissertation is a study of selected works from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman that show their fiction as a protest against a patriarchal society. The premise of this study is based on analyzing these works from a protest (not necessarily a feminist) view, which leads to these conclusions: rejection of the male suitor and of marriage was a protest against patriarchal institutions that purposely restricted females from realizing their potential. Furthermore, it is often the case that industrialism and abuses of male authority in selected works by Jewett and Freeman are symbols of male-driven forces that oppose the autonomy of the female. Thus my argument is that protest fiction of the nineteenth century quietly promulgates an agenda of independence for the female. It is an agenda that encourages the woman to operate beyond standard stereotypes furthered by patriarchal attitudes. I assert that Jewett and Freeman are, in fact, inheritors of Hawthorne's literary tradition, which spawned the first fully-developed, independent American heroine: Hester Prynne.
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Bryant, Cheney Matt. "Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, and Mid-Twentieth Century US Writing." UKnowledge, 2019. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/101.
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Scholars over the past two decades (Denning, Szalay, Edmunds, Robbins) have theorized the different ways literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century reflects the dawn of the liberal US welfare state. While these studies elaborate on the effect rapidly expanding public aid had on literary production of the period, many have tended to undervalue the lingering influence on midcentury storytelling of private charity and philanthropy, those traditional aid institutions fundamentally challenged by the Great Depression and historically championed by conservatives. If the welfare state had an indelible impact on US literatures, so did the moral complexity of the systems of charity and philanthropy it purportedly replaced. In my dissertation, I theorize modern charity as a cultural narrative that found expression in a number of different writers from the start of the Great Depression and into the early 1960s, including Harold Gray, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, Flannery O'Connor, and Dorothy Day.
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Vines, Jacob L. "Encounters with the American Prairie: Realism, Idealism, and the Search for the Authentic Plains in the Nineteenth Century." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2015. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/2511.
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The Great Plains are prevalent among the literature of the nineteenth century, but receive hardly a single representation among the landscapes of the Hudson River School. This is certainly surprising; the public was teeming with interest in the Midwest and yet the principal landscape painters who aimed to represent and idealize a burgeoning America offered hardly a glance past the Mississippi River. This geographical silence is the result of a tension between idealistic and empirical representations of the land, one echoed in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie, Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies, and Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Margaret Fuller’s more physical and intimate Transcendentalism unifies this tension in a manner that heralds the rise of the Luminists and the plains-scapes of Worthington Whittredge.
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Louckx, Audrey. "Empowering voices: testimonial literature and social justice in contemporary American culture." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/209257.
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Within the last three decades, contemporary North America came to reinvent a socially focused genre of literary personal narratives. These new editorial and writing projects, published in the form of collections of personal narratives, emerged as a tool for the socially voiceless to secure some measure of agency in their contemporary social and cultural situation. Projects such as the Freedom Writers’ Diary or volumes of the Voice of Witness book series fit in the process that is currently labeled social empowerment. Witnesses express a deep urge to share their story in the hope to denounce their experience of an enduring social injustice. The written word, primary a means for self-disclosure, serves to exorcise the suffering associated to this specific predicament. The narrators engage in a powerful self-investigative gesture oriented towards resilience and renewed enfranchisement in regaining control over their life and environment. At the moment of publication, however, these testimonies come to be validated as authentic examples of the injustices they disclose. These examples serve an educational purpose: raising the audience’s awareness and opening deliberative fora for these issues to be discussed and for solutions to be hammered out and eventually implemented. <p>The purpose of this dissertation is to propose a theoretical model for the subgenre of testimonials of social empowerment. With the concept of empowerment as groundwork, the model develops a textual approach framed in a psychosocial structure. I argue that testimonials may be described as examples of Jürgen Habermas’s communicative action. As speech acts aimed at reaching understanding, testimonials capitalize both on the binding and bonding aspects of illocutionary force in the hope to secure with their audience an ongoing dialogue over issues of social justice. The volumes, as unofficial public spheres, mobilize the normative and practical dynamics at work in social movements. These dynamics express as two narrative guiding threads: an aesthetic based on impact, and an ethics based on responsibility. The texts’ aesthetic develops a form of perlocutionary realism instantiating a sense of authenticity and sincerity embodied in the narrators’ voices. The resulting impact is coupled to moral concerns based on a polysemic understanding of social responsibility, on which narrators seek to build their narratives’ ethical potential. A series of case studies allowed to demonstrate that both narrative threads are realized as an appropriation of four paradigmatic forms of rhetorical ethos, each based on a specific realm of the social world: intimacy, justice, spirituality and activism.<p><br>Doctorat en Langues et lettres<br>info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished
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Hogue, Cynthia Anne. "Figuring woman (out): Feminine subjectivity in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and H.D." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/185054.
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Historically, women have not been "speaking subjects" but "spoken objects" in Western culture--the ground on which male-dominated constructions have been erected. In literature, women have been conventionally held as the silent and silenced other. Lyric poetry especially has idealized not only the entrenched figures of masculine subject/feminine object, but poetry itself as the site of prophecy, vision, Truth. Most dramatically in lyric poetry then, the issue of women as subjects has been collapsed into Woman as object, that figure who has been the sacrifice necessary for the production of lyric "song" and the consolidation of the unified masculine voice. It has thus been difficult for women poets to take up the position of speaking subject, most particularly because of women's problematic relationship to Woman. Recent feminist theorists have explored female subjectivity, how women put into hegemonic discourse "a possible operation of the feminine." This dissertation analyzes that possibility in poetry as exemplified in the works of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and H.D. I contend that these paradigmatic American poets constitute speaking subjects in their poetry that both figure Woman conventionally and reconfigure it, i.e. subvert the stability of those representations, thereby disturbing our view. I argue that this double identification produces, in effect, a divided or split subjectivity that is enabling for the female speaker. As an alternative to the traditionally specularized figure of Woman then, such a position opens up distinctly counter-hegemonic spaces in which to constitute the female subject, rendering problematic readerly consumption of the image of Woman as a totality. I explore the attempts to represent women's difference differently--the tenuous accession to, rejection of, or play with the lyric "I" in these poets' works. Dickinson, Moore, and H.D. reconfigure Woman and inscribe female speakers as grammatically and rhetorically, but not necessarily visually, present, thereby frustrating patriarchal economies of mastery and possession.
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Villafranca, Brooke. "Fashioning the Domestic Ideology: Women and the Language of Fashion in the Works of Elizabeth Stoddard, Louisa May Alcott, and Elizabeth Keckley." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2010. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc33208/.
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Women authors in mid to late nineteenth century American society were unafraid to shed the old domestic ideology and set new examples for women outside of racial and gender spheres. This essay focuses on the ways in which Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons, Louisa May Alcott's Behind a Mask, and Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House represent the function of fashion and attire in literature. Each author encourages readers to examine dress in a way that defies the typical domestic ideology of nineteenth century America. I want my readers to understand the role of fashion in literature as I progress through each work and ultimately show how each female author and protagonist set a new example for womanhood through their fashion choices.
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Murillo, Charles Ray. "The other within the other: Chicana/o literature, composition theory, and the new mestizaje." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2004. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2685.
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In this thesis the author explores the notion that American Chicana/o literature serves as an interactive pedagogical site that nurtures a blend of academic and street discourse, proposing the writing of those who exist on the "downside" of the border of non-standard English and academic discourse-basic writers be acknowledged.
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McCrotty, Micah. "North of Ourselves: Identity and Place in Jim Wayne Miller’s Poetry." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2019. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3581.
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Jim Wayne Miller’s poetry examines how human history and topography join to create place. His work often incorporates images of land and ecology; it deliberately questions the delineation between place and self. This thesis explores how Miller presents images of water to describe the relationship between inhabitants and their location, both with the positive image of the spring and the negative image of the flood. Additionally, this thesis examines how the Brier, Miller’s most prominent persona character, grieves his separation from home and ultimately finds healing and reunification of the self through his return to the hills. In his poetry, Miller argues that an essential piece of people’s identity is linked with the land, and, through recognition of the importance of topography on the development of the self, individuals can foster a deeper sense of community through appreciation of their place.
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Derrick, Stephanie Lee. "The reception of C.S. Lewis in Britain and America." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/19765.
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Since the publication of the book The Screwtape Letters in 1942, ‘C. S. Lewis’ has been a widely recognized name in both Britain and the United States. The significance of the writings of this scholar of medieval literature, Christian apologist and author of the children’s books The Chronicles of Narnia, while widely recognized, has not previously been investigated. Using a wide range of sources, including archival material, book reviews, monographs, articles and interviews, this dissertation examines the reception of Lewis in Britain and America, comparatively, from within his lifetime until the recent past. To do so, the methodology borrows from the history of the book and history of reading fields, and writes the biography of Lewis’s Mere Christianity and The Chronicles of Narnia. By contextualizing the writing of these works in the 1940s and 1950s, the evolution of Lewis’s respective platforms in Britain and America and these works’ reception across the twentieth century, this project contributes to the growing body of work that interrogates the print culture of Christianity. Extensive secondary reading, moreover, permitted the investigation of cultural, intellectual, social and religious factors informing Lewis’s reception, the existence of Lewis devotees in America and the lives of Mere Christianity and The Chronicles of Narnia in particular. By paying close attention to the historical conditions of authorship, publication and reception, while highlighting similarities and contrasts between Britain and America, this dissertation provides a robust account of how and why Lewis became one of the most successful Christian authors of the twentieth century.
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Munoz, Cabrera Patricia. "Journeying: narratives of female empowerment in Gayl Jones's and Toni Morrison's ficton." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/210259.
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This dissertation discusses Gayl Jones’s and Toni Morrison’s characterisation of black women’s journeying towards empowered subjectivity and agency. <p><p>Through comparative analysis of eight fictional works, I explore the writers’ idea of female freedom and emancipation, the structures of power affecting the transition from oppressed towards liberated subject positions, and the literary techniques through which the authors facilitate these seminal trajectories.<p><p>My research addresses a corpus comprised of three novels and one book-long poem by Gayl Jones, as well as four novels by Toni Morrison. These two writers emerge in the US literary scene during the 1970s, one of the decades of the second black women’s renaissance (1970s, 1980s). This period witnessed unprecedented developments in US black literature and feminist theorising. In the domain of African American letters, it witnessed the emergence of a host of black women writers such as Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison. This period also marks a turning point in the reconfiguration of African American literature, as several unknown or misplaced literary works by pioneering black women writers were discovered, shifting the chronology of African American literature. <p><p>Moreover, the second black women's renaissance marks a paradigmatic development in black feminist theorising on womanhood and subjectivity. Many black feminist scholars and activists challenged what they perceived to be the homogenising female subject conceptualised by US white middle-class feminism and the androcentricity of the subject proclaimed by the Black Aesthetic Movement. They claimed that, in focusing solely on gender and patriarchal oppression, white feminism had overlooked the salience of the race/class nexus, while focus by the Black Aesthetic Movement on racism had overlooked the salience of gender and heterosexual discrimination. <p><p>In this dissertation, I discuss the works of Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison in the context of seminal debates on the nature of the female subject and the racial and gender politics affecting the construction of empowered subjectivities in black women's fiction.<p><p>Through the metaphor of journeying towards female empowerment, I show how Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison engage in imaginative returns to the past in an attempt to relocate black women as literary subjects of primary importance. I also show how, in the works selected for discussion, a complex idea of modern female subjectivities emerges from the writers' re-examination of the oppressive material and psychological circumstances under which pioneering black women lived, the common practice of sexual exploitation with which they had to contend, and the struggle to assert the dignity of their womanhood beyond the parameters of the white-defined “ideological discourse of true womanhood” (Carby, 1987: 25).<p><p><p><br>Doctorat en philosophie et lettres, Orientation langue et littérature<br>info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished
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Crousier, Elsa. "Marta Traba ou l'art en écriture : recherches sur les dialogues entre littérature, critique d'art et arts plastiques dans l'oeuvre de Marta Traba." Thesis, Lyon, 2016. http://www.theses.fr/2016LYSE2125.
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Marta Traba (1923-1983), écrivaine et critique d’art argentino-colombienne, est principalement connue en Amérique latine pour ses écrits critiques, son engagement pour le développement de l’art moderne en Colombie, et plus largement pour sa « théorie de la résistance » qui prône dans les arts plastiques une défense des identités culturelles latino-américaines. Son œuvre littéraire, en revanche, est beaucoup moins connue. Or, elle est non seulement très riche, mais elle forme le pendant narratif à son œuvre critique, un ensemble de récits innervés, de manière plus ou moins profonde, des conceptions et de la culture trabiennes sur l’art. Il s’agit dès lors de reconsidérer ces deux pans de sa production écrite comme un tout cohérent, et de montrer les influences et les interactions entre sa critique d’art et sa littérature, mais également entre les arts plastiques qui forment sa culture artistique et ses écrits fictionnels. Il apparaît alors que Marta Traba conçoit et pratique son écriture critique comme une écriture « littérarisée » et, réciproquement et surtout, sa littérature comme une littérature « artialisée » : la valorisation constante du regard esthétique sur le monde et d’une sensorialité exacerbée dessine un idéal de contemplation tout au long de son œuvre littéraire ; les insertions continues d’une terminologie critique et de références aux œuvres d’art, sur un mode tantôt clairement didactique, tantôt subtilement ludique, invitent le lecteur à lire ses fictions et poèmes au prisme du sous-texte artistique qui enrichit leur sens ; enfin, le récit devient le lieu d’expérimentation des théories trabiennes de la « résistance », entre réaffirmation de la place de l’Amérique latine sur la carte de l’art mondial, mise à distance défensive des influences nord-américaines et réappropriation locale, par « transculturation », des modèles artistiques étrangers. L’étude de l’artialisation de la littérature trabienne est donc loin d’être l’analyse d’un simple procédé formel : elle dégage, nous semble-t-il, un véritable style trabien, miroir de l’écrivaine et de ses convictions<br>Marta Traba (1923-1983), an Argentinian-Colombian writer and art critic, is most famous in Latin America for her critiques, her commitment to develop modern art in Colombia, and, more generally, for her “theory of resistance” which advocates the defence of the many cultural Latin-American identities in fine arts. Her literary work, however, is far less well-known. And yet, not only is it very rich, but it also constitutes the narrative counterpart to her critiques – a collection of tales innervated, to different degrees, with Traba’s notions on and knowledge of art. It is consequently about reconsidering these two sides of her written production as a consistent whole, and identifying the influences and interactions between her art critiques and her literary work, as well as between the fine arts which make up her artistic culture and her fictional writings.It then appears that Marta Traba devises and practices her critical writing “literarily” as she does, above all, her literary work “artistically”: the constant enhancement of the aesthetic eye on the world and of an intensified sensory experience shape an ideal of contemplation throughout her literary work; the continuous inserts of a critical terminology and of references to art works, sometimes in a clearly didactic mode, sometimes in a subtly playful manner, invite the reader to read her fiction stories and poems in the light of the artistic subtext which enriches their meaning; finally, the tale becomes the place where Traba’s theories of “resistance” are tested, at the crossroads of the re-affirmation of the place of Latin America on the map of international art, of the defensive distancing from North American influences, and of the local re-appropriation, by “transculturation”, of the foreign artistic models. The study of the artistic mutation of Traba’s literary work is therefore far from boiling down to the analysis of a mere formal process: from our point of view, it reveals an authentic style, Traba’s style, which is the mirror of the writer and her convictions
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Crowell, Ellen Margaret. "Aristocratic drag : the dandy in Irish and Southern fiction." 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/12765.
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Hester, Jessica Lynn. "White trash fetish: representations of poor white southern women and constructions of class, gender, race and region, 1920-1941." Thesis, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/1565.
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Maxwell, Angela Christine. "A heritage of inferiority: public criticism and the American South." Thesis, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/3957.
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"Andrew Lytle, southern agrarianism and the quest for yeoman authenticity." Tulane University, 2003.
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This dissertation examines the literary writings of Andrew Lytle, one of the original twelve Nashville Agrarians. During the time period from the 1920's through the 1950's the South transformed from a predominantly agricultural to an industrial region. In the process, the myths of the plantation and yeoman farmer were undermined. A savage Modernist Objectivism replaced the formalistic stability of the Victorian frame of mind. Over the course of thirty years Andrew Lytle's novels, short stories and essays reveal a progression from Romanticism to Realism to Modernism. His literary creations act as a kind of looking glass into the political, economic and social changes that confronted the South But Lytle's real importance as a thinker was his ability to establish the authenticity of his social constituency, the Celtic yeoman farmers of the Southwest. The Great Depression and the Second World War destroyed the sharecropping system. The yeoman farmers were finally liberated from peonage and the mystique of the planters. Through Jung's depth psychology Lytle revealed the identity of the yeoman farmers that was always there but held at bay by superior forces. In the process, he unmasked the true character of the South. Rather than being a hierarchical 'medieval' society as the myth would have it, the South was defined by social-bond individualism, otherwise referred to as Southern libertarianism. Andrew Lytle buttressed yeoman identity and in the process, participated in the multicultural revolution that took place after the Second World War<br>acase@tulane.edu
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Courau, Rogier Philippe. "States of nomadism, conditions of diaspora : studies in writing between South Africa and the United States, 1913-1936." Thesis, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/162.
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Using the theoretical idea of ‘writing between’ to describe the condition
of the travelling subject, this study attempts to chart some of the literary,
intellectual and cultural connections that exist(ed) between black South
African intellectuals and writers, and the experiences of their African-
American counterparts in their common movements towards civil liberty,
enfranchisement and valorised consciousness. The years 1913-1936 saw
important historical events taking place in the United States, South Africa
and the world – and their effects on the peoples of the African diaspora
were signficant. Such events elicited unified black diasporic responses to
colonial hegemony. Using theories of transatlantic/transnational cultural
negotiation as a starting point, conceptualisations that map out, and give
context to, the connections between transcontinental black experiences of
slavery and subjugation, this study seeks to re-envisage such black South
African and African-American intellectual discourses through reading them
anew. These texts have been re-covered and re-situated, are both published
and unpublished, and engage the notion of travel and the instability of
transatlantic voyaging in the liminal state of ‘writing between’. With my
particular regional focus, I explore the cultural and intellectual politics of
these diasporic interrelations in the form of case studies of texts from several
genres, including fiction and autobiography. They are: the travel writings
of Xhosa intellectual, DDT Jabavu, with a focus on his 1913 journey to the
United States; an analysis of Ethelreda Lewis’s novel, Wild Deer (1933), which
imagines the visit of an African-American musician, Paul Robeson-like figure
to South Africa; and Eslanda Goode Robeson’s representation of her African
Journey (1945) to the country in 1936, and the traveller’s gaze as expressed
through the ethnographic imagination, or the anthropological ‘eye’ in the text.<br>Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2008.
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Yoon, Jung-ho. "Images of American soldiers in Korean and American fiction a comparative study /." 2002. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3089490.
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VanderVeen, Arthur Alvin. "Other minds, other worlds pragmatism, hermeneutics, and constructive modernism, 1890-1942 /." Thesis, 2002. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3110696.
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Freeman, Traci Lynn 1970. "The ethics of representation and response in comtemporary American women's autobiographical writing." 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/12770.
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"Plurality of identity and culture: the wanderer motif in contemporary Chinese and Chinese-American writings." Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1996. http://library.cuhk.edu.hk/record=b5888914.
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by Katy Wai Kwan Ho.<br>Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1996.<br>Includes bibliographical references (leaves 146-153).<br>Abstract --- p.i<br>Acknowledgments --- p.iii<br>Chapter Chapter One: --- The Chinese Wanderers in the United States --- p.1<br>Chapter Chapter Two: --- Cultural Fragmentation and Psychical Split: The Wanderer in Dis-placement --- p.35<br>Chapter Chapter Three: --- Chinese (Ethnic)-American (Cultural) Hybridity --- p.75<br>Chapter Chapter Four: --- "The ""Unhomed"" and Multiplicities of Identity" --- p.98<br>Chapter Chapter Five: --- The Images of Wandering --- p.130<br>Bibliography --- p.146
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Werder, Carmen Marie. "Expressed silence: a study of the metaphorics of word in selected nineteenth-century American texts." Thesis, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/6947.
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Expressed Silence: A Study of the Metaphorics of Word
in Selected Nineteenth-Century American Texts
This dissertation explores the patterned use of certain
“metaphors of word”——images of reading, writing, listening, and
speaking——in four American texts: Emerson’s Nature, Thoreau’s
Walden, Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, and Melville’s Moby Dick.
Assumed in my discussion is the modern view of metaphor as a
cognitive device used, not for mere stylistic ornament, but for
creating a certain mental perspective. Based on the
perspectival view and on the experiential—gestalt account of
metaphor, the structures of these metaphors of word are examined
in order to discern the systematic nature of their argument and
to determine the cultural and historical reasons why language
imagery, and not some other type of imagery, was chosen to
represent this argument. After surveying the cultural
influences of democracy, mercantilism, Romanticism, and
Calvinism, I characterize the metaphoric systems of each text
and then move on to a closer study of the role of silence within
these systems.
From this analysis, I conclude that these nineteenth—
century texts reflect a shift away from the book toward the
voice as a predominant symbol, and away from writing toward
speaking as a privileged metaphor. Language imagery works to
represent ways of knowing, so that linguistic and epistemic
concerns become inextricably intertwined. The process of using language operates as a metaphor for the process of gaining
knowledge. In this metaphorics of word, silence emerges as a
particularly striking metaphor in the way that it expresses the
coalescence of being and knowing, the realization that we know
what we know. In this scheme, metaphors of word structure ways
of understanding, and the expressed silence metaphor highlights
the way interior speech can function in the discernment of
knowledge. Ultimately, I contend that the perspective provided
by this nineteenth—century metaphorics of word forecasts the
modern view of rhetoric as epistemic. By employing linguistic
action as a
figure for representing epistemic action, a
metaphorics of word promotes an understanding of rhetoric’s
primary purpose as the interrogation of truth.
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Pillay, Ivan Pragasan. ""Could it be madness - this?" : bipolar disorder and the art of containment in the poetry of Emily Dickinson." Thesis, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/827.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation engages in a critical analysis of the poetry of Emily Dickinson which, to me, suggests that the poet suffered from a type of manic-depression known specifically in psychiatric parlance as bipolar disorder. I argue that although Dickinson experienced much pain and suffering she learnt, through time, to address, understand and contain adversity - that ultimately, she transformed these experiences into the raw materials for poetic creation. Dickinson's poetic achievements are often obscured by a misunderstanding of her mental and emotional constitution. This thesis provides an alternative to the views of those commentators who maintain that Emily Dickinson was insane, neurotic or delusional. I intend, ultimately, to offer the reader a fresh insight into Emily Dickinson's poetry by reading it from the assumption that she suffered from bipolar disorder.<br>Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2007.
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"Words and images: the representations of rebels in 1950s American novels and film." 2006. http://library.cuhk.edu.hk/record=b5892979.
Full textAbstract:
Yong Wai Ting.<br>Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006.<br>Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-103).<br>Abstracts in English and Chinese.<br>Abstract --- p.i<br>論文摘要 --- p.iii<br>Acknowledgements --- p.iv<br>Introduction --- p.1<br>Chapter Chapter One: --- Literary Language Versus Film Language --- p.17<br>Chapter Chapter Two: --- Cinematic Novels Versus Novelistic Cinema --- p.46<br>Chapter Chapter Three: --- Film Adaptation: Transfer Versus Cinematic Reshaping --- p.73<br>Work Cited --- p.100
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LeBlanc, Michael. "Beyond science fiction : Judith Merril and Isaac Asimov’s quest to save the future." Thesis, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/16599.
Full textAbstract:
Critics and historians of science fiction widely recognize the genre's importance as a
forum for political ideas during the 1950s. But the political role of science fiction
diminished during the 1960s, overshadowing the ongoing involvement of sf writers in
future-related debates. This paper employs biography, autobiography, memoir, archival
papers, recordings, and secondary sources to demonstrate that sf writers continued to
discuss the future and its potential problems after the 1950s. Judith Merril and Isaac
Asimov, two giants in science fiction, form the core of this paper's focus. Merril and
Asimov began to discuss the future in essays, interviews, and documentaries in the 1960s.
By the early 1970s, Merril and Asimov were examining the then-emerging problems of
overpopulation and planetary ecology in mainstream non-fiction. Merril and Asimov
demonstrate that sf writers still addressed political and social issues in the 1960s and
early 1970s - even if their involvement increasingly took place outside the boundaries of
science fiction literature.<br>Arts, Faculty of<br>History, Department of<br>Graduate
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Brooks, Amy. "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: 60 Years of American Dialogue on Sex, Gender, and the Nuclear Family." 2016. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/masters_theses_2/316.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis is a two-part work. Its components, a written paper and a one-night symposium/film screening event entitled Tennessee Williams: Gender Play in 2015 and Beyond, have been closely coordinated with my dramaturgical research for the February 2015 University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Theater production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The written inquiry is structured around a chronological, selected American production history of Cat; this history, rendered in a series of three case studies, will (1) synthesize preexisting analyses of Cat’s dramaturgical profile, its impact on American theater, and its position in Williams’s oeuvre; and (2) examine the interplay between this body of scholarship’s primary foci (e.g., gender, sexual identity, and family dysfunction) and the evolving cultural climate in which its subject, Cat, is perennially reinterpreted and restaged. In other words, my thesis reframes Cat as a series of inherently American—and potentially unanswerable—questions posed by Williams to his viewers; it then investigates the artistic and critical responses generated by sixty years of public engagement, or “dialogue,” with those questions. Ultimately, each case study will illustrate my central premise: that the value of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof lies in its ability to resonate, both in production design and reception, with the social, sexual, and domestic challenges of the period in which it is produced.
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Erickson, Paul Joseph. "Welcome to Sodom: the cultural work of city-mysteries fiction in antebellum America." Thesis, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/1543.
Full text
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Nyhuis, Jeremiah E. ""A field lately ploughed" : the expressive landscapes of gender and race in the antebellum slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and William Grimes." Thesis, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/3628.
Full textAbstract:
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)<br>The complicated state wherein ex-slaves found themselves, as depicted in the narratives of Bibb, Jacobs, and others, problematizes the dualistic relationship between North and South that the genre’s structural components work to enforce, forging an odyssey that, although sometimes still spiritual in nature, does not offer the type of resolutions that might easily persuade fellow slaves to abandon their masters and seek a similarly ambiguous identity in the so-called “free” land of the North. For blacks and especially fugitive slaves, such restrictive legal provisions provided an “uncertain status” where, writes William Andrews, “the definition of freedom for black people remained open.” In those slave narratives that dare to depict the limits of liberty in the North, this “open” status is particularly reflected in the texts’ discursive terrain itself, which portends a series of candid observations and brutal details that actively work to deconstruct any sort of mythological pattern associated with the slave narrative genre, thereby offering a more expansive view of the experience for most fugitive slaves.
The Life of William Grimes, a particularly frank and brutal diary of a man’s trials within and without slavery, is one such slave narrative, depicting a journey that, while more consistent with the general experience of ex-slaves in the antebellum U.S., often works outside the parameters of traditional, straight-forward slave narratives like Douglass’s. “I often was obliged to go off the road,” Grimes admits at one point in his autobiography, and although his remark refers to the cautious path he must tread as a fugitive slave, it might just as well describe the thematic and structural characteristics of his open-ended autobiography. Reputedly the first fugitive slave narrative, the publication of Grimes’s Life in 1825 initiated the beginning of a genre whose path had not yet been forged, which likely contributed to its fluid nature. At the time of his narrative’s publication, Grimes’s self-expressed testimony of injustice under slavery was about five years ahead of its time; it wouldn’t be until the 1830s that the U.S. antislavery movement would begin to consciously seek out ex-slaves to testify to their experience in bondage. Once this literary door was open, however, antislavery sentiment became for many early African American authors “a ready forum” for self-expression. Whereas in twenty years’ time Douglass would take full advantage of this opportunity by drawing inspiration from a number of already established narratives, Grimes as an author found himself singularly “off the road” and essentially alone in new literary territory, uncannily reflecting his sense of alienation and helplessness in the North after escaping from slavery aboard a cargo ship in 1815.
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Prozesky, Stellamarie Bartlette. "A small adjective attending light, the archangelic noun : Jessica Powers: a modern metaphysical poet." Thesis, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/11868.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis aims to establish Jessica Powers (1905 – 1988) as a metaphysical poet, to augment the composite definition of metaphysical poetry, and to add two emphases to Christian literary theory. A comprehensive library search on Powers reveals that no scholarly work has been written on her poetry since 2005. A meta-analysis of existing work on Powers demonstrates that the metaphysical aspect of her poetry has not yet been comprehensively examined. Though Powers wrote in a time commonly called ‘post-modern’, my contention is that it would be more accurate to describe her as a metaphysical poet in the traditional sense of that term, as used, for example, of George Herbert (1593 – 1633). I endorse the view that the central theme of all metaphysical poetry is the relation between body and soul (Tanenbaum 2002: 211). It will be seen that this relation is the central concern of Powers’ metaphysical poetry.
My close reading of Powers’ work as metaphysical is according to a Christian literary theory which agrees with Hass ‘that the study of the text and textual hermeneutics in the twenty-first century will continue because of a particular resurgence of religion’ (2007: 856). It is augmented by two emphases, a scientific (based on Gallagher’s 2009 study of the neurophysiology of attention), and a philosophical (based on Fromm’s 1976 analysis of the ‘being mode’, and on Buber’s 1947 analysis of attentiveness to the present moment). My study thereby contributes to Christian literary theory. There are one hundred and eighty two poems in The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers. This thesis refers, to greater or lesser extents, to one hundred and seventy six of the poems, and comprehensive examination of their metaphysical aspect is the primary focus of the thesis.
My examination of the poems demonstrates that Powers’ poetry can justly be described as metaphysical, which definition of her work serves to highlight an important and hitherto neglected aspect of her work, that she is a metaphysical poet of the finest calibre, and that renewed attention to her work is timely.<br>English Studies<br>D. Litt. et Phil. (English studies)