Dissertations / Theses: 'Early postwar American fiction'

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Haevens, Gwendolyn. "Mad Pursuits : Therapeutic Narration in Postwar American Fiction." Doctoral thesis, Uppsala universitet, Engelska institutionen, 2015. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-263167.

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Mad Pursuits: Therapeutic Narration in Postwar American Fiction examines three mid-century American novels—J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963)—in relation to the rise and popularization of psychoanalytic theory in America. The study historicizes these landmark novels as representing and interrogating postwar America’s confidence in the therapeutic capacity of narrative to redress psychological problems. Drawing on key concepts from narrative theory and the multidisciplinary field of narrative and identity studies, I argue that these texts develop a multi-layered, formal problematization of therapeutic narration: the narrativization of the self through modes of interpretation based on character action and development. The study, thus, investigates how the texts both critique the purported effectiveness of being healed through narrative means, as well as how they problematize their society’s investment in this method. I propose that the novels ultimately explore submerged possibilities for realizing what I call fugitive selves by creating self-representations that negotiate and exceed the confines of the paradigmatic models of plot and character of the period. In Chapter One, I argue that the ego and pop psychological movements during the postwar era encouraged the American public to define and realize psychological health, success and happiness through narrativized means. I show in Chapter Two how careful differentiation between narrative levels of interpretation in The Bell Jar reveals the novel’s complication of the self created in narrative, with and against the socio-cultural scripts and therapeutic assumptions of the period. Chapter Three concentrates on The Catcher in the Rye’s various methods of de-composing the narrative identity of the subject created through developmental and therapeutic narration. In the final chapter, I read Invisible Man as a satire of postwar psychoanalytic theory and method specifically concerning racialized narrative identities, and as a reflection on a method of enduring psychological illness. The Conclusion brings together several argumentative strands running throughout the dissertation regarding what the novels contrastively reveal about the perils, and even the possibilities, inherent in the narrativizing of the self in early postwar America.

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Nelson, Cassandra Maria. "Age of Miracles: Religion and Screen Media in Postwar American Fiction." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11554.

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This dissertation examines how four postwar American writers, whose lives and fiction reveal a serious and sustained interest in religion and religious belief, treat screen media in their work. More specifically, it argues that Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and Don DeLillo constitute a group of writers who espouse various forms of Catholic or crypto-Catholic belief. By allowing these writers to take seriously certain pre-modern ideas about metaphysical reality--namely, the possible existence of an immaterial, supernatural realm that transcends the physical, sensible world--these belief systems may have made them more attuned to the seemingly immaterial and supernatural properties of screen media.

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Walker, Christopher. "Terminal fictions : death in the postwar American novel : (a study of Mailer, Gaddis, Pynchon, Coover and DeLillo)." Thesis, University of Sussex, 1991. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.248412.

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Anderson, Daniel Paul Jr. "The Ivory Shtetl: The University and the Postwar Jewish Imagination." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1333727480.

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Donofrio, Nicholas Easley. "The Vanishing Freelancer: A Literary History of the Postwar Culture Industries." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11532.

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Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, a wide range of U.S. fiction writers took jobs--sometimes briefly, but often for several years or more--in the film, broadcasting, publishing, and advertising industries. As a result of their experiences in these industries at a time when corporate employment was on the rise and freelance work was becoming less viable, writers like Raymond Chandler, Norman Mailer, Sylvia Plath, and Ishmael Reed crafted new narrative forms to examine the problems of bureaucratized creativity. While drawing on literary modernism's techniques and strategies, they traded its aesthetics of difficulty and self-sufficiency--its serene disdain for the uninitiated--for a more broadly communicative disposition.

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Mann, Kimberly Lynn. ""Genuine made-in-Americans" : living machines and the technological body in the postwar science fiction imaginary, 1944-1968." W&M ScholarWorks, 2014. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539720301.

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The science fiction imaginary of mid-twentieth century America often takes as its subjects all manner of animate objects --- living machines like robots, cyborgs, automata, androids, and intelligent "thinking" computers. These living machines embody early cold war anxieties about the relationship between humans and their machines, as well as about human "identity" in a world perceived as increasingly technological and fragmented. Built with text and still or moving images, these figures' bodies are formed by metal and plastic, circuits and electronics, at times fused with organic parts -- at the same time that they are also represented as built from the innovation and imagination of cutting-edge American industry and science. These diverse machined bodies are sometimes straightforwardly humanoid in form, and at other times, they are less so, while still others may appear to share little in common with humans at all. as bearers of built bodies, living machines inhabit the interface between human and machine, exposing the ruptures and contradictions of the conception of the modem, technological body: the material and the immaterial, the animate and the inanimate, the subject and the object. While this study analyzes fiction by canonical science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke, its focus is on government documents and images regarding NASA's Projects Mercury (1959-1963) and Gemini (1962-1966), popular journalism articles and images, Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and less well-known pulp science fiction stories from the 1930s through the 1950s.

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Dean, Andrew. "Foes, ghosts, and faces in the water : self-reflexivity in postwar fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4c2e3b07-2454-457a-bf9f-a3f0734c89ba.

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This thesis examines the nature and value of metafictional practices in the careers of postwar novelists. Discussions of metafiction have been central to accounts of postwar literature. Where debates in the 1980s and 1990s about metafiction tended to make claims about its distinctive political and theoretical power, recent work in the study of institutions has folded metafiction into the routine operation of the literary field, and attacked previous claims to distinctive value. In this thesis I both historicize self-reflexive literary practices in the literary field, an element largely absent from the earlier scholarship, and present historically determinate claims about the value of these practices, an element I suggest is missing from the more recent work. To do so, I turn to the study of autobiography, specifically Philippe Lejeune's concept of 'autobiographical space.' In the first chapter, I explore how J. M. Coetzee develops academic literary criticism in his fiction. In the second chapter, I examine how Janet Frame responds to both the demands of a national literature and biographical inquiry into her life. In the third chapter, I address how Philip Roth handles the relationship between the politics of identity and the postwar novel. Self-reflexive practices, I show throughout, are ways of writing that were encouraged by particular formations in the literary field and were handled by writers through more or less explicit treatments of autobiographical space. I argue, though, that while these practices can be remarkably inventive, they carry no guarantees for political, theoretical, or aesthetic value.

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Kuske, Laura Eileen. "Border stories : race, space, and captivity in early national fiction /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9395.

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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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Graydon, Benjamin. "“Good-bye, All My Fathers”: Modernism, Displacement, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction of the Early 1930s." Miami University Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2003. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=muhonors1110917173.

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Tyrrell, Brenda Sue. "Imagining Other Spaces and Places: A Crip Genealogy of Early Science Fiction." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1624898363601246.

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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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Marshall, Rodney Stephen Adam. "Voicing lost language : the politics of urban gay writing: American and British Fiction from the late 1970s to the early 1990s." Thesis, University of Exeter, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.282666.

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Chaplow, Lester Ian. "Tales of a Hollow Earth. Tracing the Legacy of John Cleves Symmesin Antarctic Exploration and Fiction." Thesis, University of Canterbury. Gateway Antarctica, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/5478.

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This thesis examines the hollow-earth theories of John Cleves Symmes and seeks to recognise and restore both his memory and his legacy. I outline Symmes’ theory that the Earth is hollow and habitable within, and accessible via holes at the North and South Poles, consider the impact of this theory on the commencement of the United States Antarctic Exploration program, and demonstrate its lasting legacy within the genre of Symmesian hollow-earth fiction. Previous scholarship has been intermittent, disparate and oddly contextualised, often assigning both Symmes and his theory to the world of the “weird and wonderful.” In order to study Symmes’ legacy, I synthesise previous scholarship and show the continuing presence of his theory – at times unrecognised and unacknowledged – in fiction. Commencing with a description of the series of publications in which Symmes publicised his idea, this thesis looks at his theory’s reception, with a discussion of several books and letters published in response to the theory – from contemporary times through to the current day. In determining the legacy of his theory, rather than the theory itself, I look at possible and probable sources for Symmes’ idea, and place it on the continuum of natural philosophy and science from the thirteenth century so as to set Symmes’ announcement in the perspective of its time. I then address Symmes’ influence on the United States Congress, which culminated in the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842. Finally, I examine Symmes’ legacy in fiction, commencing with an extensive discussion of Symzonia, which some posit was authored by Symmes, and continuing through to the present. I find that while Symmes’ theory, and the ensuing debate about a hollow earth, may have advanced the speed with which the United States commenced Antarctic exploration, with time this exploration would probably have happened anyway. His greatest legacy is through the establishment of a body of hollow-earth fiction based around the fictional hole which now bears his name; “Symmes’ Hole” lives on in literature to the current day.

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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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Spanish
Ph.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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Reis, Ashley E. "With the Earth in Mind: Ecological Grief in the Contemporary American Novel." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2016. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc849760/.

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"With the Earth in Mind" responds to some of the most cutting-edge research in the field of ecocriticism, which centers on ecological loss and the grief that ensues. Ecocritics argue that ecological objects of loss abound--for instance, species are disappearing and landscapes are becoming increasingly compromised--and yet, such loss is often deemed "ungrievable." While humans regularly grieve human losses, we understand very little about how to genuinely grieve the loss of nonhuman being, natural environments, and ecological processes. My dissertation calls attention to our society's tendency to participate in superficial nature-nostalgia, rather than active and engaged environmental mourning, and ultimately activism. Herein, I investigate how an array of postwar and contemporary American novels represent a complex relationship between environmental degradation and mental illness. Literature, I suggest, is crucial to investigations of this problem because it can reveal the human consequences of ecological loss in a way that is unavailable to political, philosophical, scientific, and even psychological discourse.

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Hart, Hilary. "Sentimental spectacles : the sentimental novel, natural language, and early film performance /." view abstract or download file of text, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3120625.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2004.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 176-181). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

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Esteve, Mary Gabrielle. "Of being numerous : representations of crowds and anonymity in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century urban America /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/6683.

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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.
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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Hyland, Skye Seona. "The alliance and the vision : western perceptions of the Soviet Union and its relations with Germany. Did British and American impressions of the Soviet Union and its relations with Germany during the early years of World War II colour the view of both Western powers vis-à-vis their postwar attitude to the Soviet Union? /." Title page, contents and introduction only, 1999. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09AR/09arh996.pdf.

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Heard, Frederick Coye. "Apposition, displacement : an ethics of abstraction in postwar American fiction." 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/21948.

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The decades following two world wars, the European Holocaust and the threat of nuclear annihilation presented American authors with an occupational dilemma: catastrophic histories call out for recognition, but any representation of them risks adding violence to violence by falsifying the account or conflating historical acts of violence with their artificial doubles. This project reimagines the political aesthetics of postmodern American fiction through two major interventions. First, I identify an aesthetic structure of apposition--a parallel relationship between abstract works of art and the everyday world that I take from William Carlos Williams--that allows me to productively resolve a tension in the aesthetics of Hannah Arendt: because representation takes mimesis as a particular end, Arendt disqualifies representational art from politics, which she defines as open-ended action between human beings and not as end-centered state-craft. At the same time, Arendt claims that art is a product of thought, the cognitive activity she associates with political action over and against fabrication. My heterodox reading of Arendt shows that appositional narratives, like political actors, perform their own self-disclosure, beginning the open-ended chain of actions and reactions that Arendt identifies as the substantial form of politics and ethics. Second, I use my revision of Arendt to demonstrate that appositional narratives act politically through the very same metafictional tropes that critics often label as escapist or solipsistic. Rather than copy historical experience, appositional narratives reject illusionary representation and present themselves as actors, inciting their readers to respond with pluralistic, provisional judgment. Taking Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison--three central but rarely-juxtaposed postmodern novelists--as case studies, I show that we cannot properly assess the political implications of postmodern fiction without understanding the specific mechanisms of narrative apposition. Appositional works stand temporarily and self-consciously in the place of the world, displacing it in the experience of their readers. This narrative strategy provides a political alternative for novelists facing the ethical crises of postmodernity. Appositional narratives displace their readers' settled beliefs and press them to exercise their human capacity for judgment. They embrace their responsibility for the world by refusing to represent it.
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Sumares, Nicholas, and 宋明達. "The Suburban Dream, The American Nightmare: John Cheever and Postwar Fiction." Thesis, 2015. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/7c9zsx.

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碩士
東海大學
外國語文學系
103
The suburban fiction found in John Cheever’s short story collections The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1959), Some Places People and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1961), and The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964) presents readers with characters who struggle to come to grips with their lives in the suburbs of postwar America. This thesis will show how these struggles are related to two strongly conflicting ideologies within American culture. It will be shown that these conflicts lie between, firstly, the notion of individuality and the ability to “be whatever you want to be” in America based upon idealized notions of the American Dream and, secondly, the stifling conformity and exclusivity found within American suburbia and its ideology rooted in American capitalism and the mass market – the seeming endpoint to the American Dream. John Cheever’s final novel — Bullet Park (1969) — dealing directly with the suburbs, takes the ideas he has written about previously, and extends them by presenting two protagonists who are two extreme representations of the two conflicting American Dream ideologies. The novel will be offered up as his attempt to warn of the inert, yet destructive, endpoint to the clash between these two conflicting ideologies in American suburbia.

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Wilhite, Keith M. "Framing suburbia : U.S. literature and the postwar suburban region, 1945-2002 /." 2007. http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&doc_number=016426327&line_number=0001&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA.

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Velásquez, Treviño Gloria Louise. "Cultural ambivalence in early Chicana prose fiction." 1985. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/17195596.html.

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McDonald, Brian. "Themes of corporatism in the postwar American novel /." 2000.

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Real, Patricio del. "Building a Continent: The Idea of Latin American Architecture in the Early Postwar." Thesis, 2012. https://doi.org/10.7916/D8736Z1J.

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In January 1943, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened Brazil Builds. This exhibition has been widely credited as initiating the international appraisal and celebration of Latin America's modern architecture. Responsive to the war context and to the museum's engagement with the Office of the Coordinator of Inter American Affairs directed by Nelson Rockefeller, this exhibition presented a clear overlap between politics and modern architecture culture in the Americas that aimed to create a unified and defensible Western Hemisphere. This is a story that, although consistently repeated and alluded to, has never been told because studies of Brazil Builds have emphasized a singular national frame. This dissertation studies the overall trajectory of MoMA's engagement with Latin American modern architecture and culture in the late 1930s and 1940s, and posits its endeavors as leading to the 1955 exhibition, Latin American Architecture since 1945. It argues that the promise of a better world made in 1943 with Brazil Builds was staged in 1955 as a threshold for the entire region and as demonstration of the advantages of a US-led postwar modernization. This work articulates the historical conditions that, in 1955, allowed the British Architectural Review to talk about a "Latin American manner" in architectural modernism. Architectural historians and critics outside the region noticed the contours of a Latin American modern style on the period roughly between 1939 and 1955 and deployed historiographic strategies to include the region's buildings within the history of Western architectural modernism. Rather than a study of an architectural style, this dissertation presents Latin American modernism as a historical concept born out of the tensions between similarity and difference with Western culture at the time of the hegemonic rise of the United States. The need for a regional construct named "Latin America" permeated postwar modernization before the unfolding of the bi-polar world of the Cold War. This work shows that the idea of Latin American architecture was subordinated to early postwar political and cultural anxieties in the United States and highlights MoMA as a key stage in the construction of this historical concept, beyond the specifics of any single exhibition. This study engages international modern architecture culture as refracted through the museum and the varied cast of characters and events supported by this cultural powerhouse to reveal overarching strategies that enabled the idea of Latin America. Guided by US postwar economic and political strategies, the multiple mirror images and distortions produced at MoMA made modernism in the Americas a contested ground challenged by regional Latin American powers and European cultural centers. This dissertation examines five exhibitions that involved the entire museum (Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art), the Department of Painting and Sculpture (Portinari of Brazil) and the Department of Architecture and Design (Brazil Builds, From Le Corbusier to Niemeyer: 1929-1949 and Latin American Architecture since 1945), as well as other related events that influenced architecture culture during this period. This work positions Latin American modern architecture within a Western postwar culture and delineates the forms of inclusion and exclusion--of what and who was modern--that created both physical spaces and mental maps of postwar modernity giving a transnational image of the Western World.

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Den, Hartog Jacqueline M. "A "wild and ambiguous medium" letters and epistolary fictions in early America, 1780-1830 /." 2006. http://etd.nd.edu/ETD-db/theses/available/etd-06292006-131817/.

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Wood, Jessica. "Keys to the Past: Building Harpsichords and Feeling History in the Postwar United States." Diss., 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10161/2456.

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This dissertation traces the range of popular forms and practices associated with the harpsichord in the twentieth century in the United States, focusing on the 1950s, 60s and 70s. It draws on archives of period correspondence, sound recordings, and news clippings, as well as on my interviews with harpsichord builders and performers and on fieldwork I conducted at a prominent American harpsichord company during 2008. I argue that the harpsichord enabled practices and discourses through which the white middle class could critique the post-World War II United States, and that the material aspects of the harpsichord--its sound, its wooden materials and its construction methods--provided a gauge by which to measure how far the postwar everyday had veered from what was imagined to be an "authentic" human existence.

I focus the dissertation around the influence of a particular narrative associated with the harpsichord: that of the aristocratic, delicate instrument decimated by the Industrial Revolution. I first chart the ways that this narrative circulated in academic histories and popular media during the twentieth century, and how it was linked to perceptions of the harpsichord's physical "shortcomings." Focusing on its career in 1940s-60s popular music recordings, I then show how the stereotype of its "tragically disadvantaged" sound shaped acoustic and discursive constructions of that sound. I continue by demonstrating the classed critiques surrounding the instrument's commodification as a "do-it-yourself" kit--an affordable product that seemed to contradict the instrument's history as an elite, custom-made object. Lastly, I show how the harpsichord's story articulated with the biographies and sentiments of specific people, particularly those affiliated with the shop of Massachusetts harpsichord builder Frank Hubbard in late 1960s and early 1970s. Ultimately, I argue that the Movement's ideal of "historical authenticity," along with the post-World War II mass appeal of period instruments and period performance practice, emerged out of time and place-specific meanings, and through multiple social and commodity networks.

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Kirzane, Jessica Kirzane. "The Melting Plot: Interethnic Romance in Jewish American Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century." Thesis, 2017. https://doi.org/10.7916/D85430WR.

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This dissertation argues that interethnic romance narratives reflect and express central religious, political, racial, and gendered identities and agendas of Jewish American literature and culture in the early twentieth century. Chapter One shows that fin-de-siècle Reform Jewish women authors employed interethnic romance narratives to express a belief in America as exceptional as a place of religious and gender egalitarianism. Chapter Two turns to journalist and fiction writer Abraham Cahan, who wrote interethnic romance narratives to weigh the balance between idealism and pragmatism, socialist universalist values and the principles of Jewish nationalism in determining the character of Jewishness in America. Chapter Three demonstrates that Jewish American women’s popular fictions of interethnic romance in the 1920s employed interethnic romance plots to show women’s independence and mobility in light of early feminism and to express the limitations of feminist discourse when it ran counter to their ethnic identities. Chapter Four describes how narratives of interethnic romance written by Yiddish writers I. I. Shvarts, Joseph Opatoshu, Isaac Raboy, and David Ignatov employ tropes of interethnic romance together with geographical border crossings into non-immigrant or non-Jewish spaces, co-locating physical dislocation and disorientation and intimate interpersonal desire and unease. Together, these studies demonstrate the significance of interethnic romance in the American Jewish collective imaginary in this period and reveal the flexibility and longevity of this central theme in American Jewish discourse.

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Kent, Alicia A. "Migrant modernities : historical and generic movement in fiction by African Americans and Native Americans in the early twentieth century /." 2000. http://www.library.wisc.edu/databases/connect/dissertations.html.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Early postwar American fiction'

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