Dissertations / Theses: 'FICTION / African American / Contemporary Women'

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Kim, Junyon. "Re-imagining diaspora, reclaiming home in contemporary African-American fiction /." view abstract or download file of text, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3147823.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2004.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 223-239). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

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Ivey, Adriane Louise. "Rewriting Christianity : African American women writers and the Bible /." view abstract or download file of text, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p9987234.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2000.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 211-216). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

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Graham-Bertolini, Alison. "Home of the Brave: Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction." LSU, 2009. http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04142009-191748/.

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Vigilante literature tells the stories of individuals who rectify injustice by taking matters into their own hands. Examples of this plot can be found in American literature dating from colonial times, when settlers made an effort to preserve their moral code without the aid of an established justice system. The popularity of this theme finds further currency in tales of the frontier and the Wild West, and more recently, Hollywood has capitalized on its popularity by drawing from the myth of American pioneer culture and the theme of the lone avenger. This project identifies an analogous theme in contemporary fiction by women writers, who in the twentieth century began frequently employing female avatars of vigilante justice to challenge (in an illegal or extralegal fashion) those who violate the economic, social, or political rights of women. This dissertation analyzes a collection of novels and short stories by contemporary American women who employ the avatar of the vigilante woman, and demonstrates how female avengers, warriors, bandits, and killers extend and amend the vigilante tradition in the United States.

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Rountree, Wendy Alexia. "THE CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN-AMERICAN FEMALE BILDUNGSROMAN." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2001. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin997212820.

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Hebbar, Reshmi J. "Modeling minority women : heroines in African and Asian American fiction /." New York : Routledge, 2005. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb400508717.

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Mitchell, Shamika Ann. "The Multicultural Megalopolis: African-American Subjectivity and Identity in Contemporary Harlem Fiction." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2012. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/167490.

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English
Ph.D.
The central aim of this study is to explore what I term urban ethnic subjectivity, that is, the subjectivity of ethnic urbanites. Of all the ethnic groups in the United States, the majority of African Americans had their origins in the rural countryside, but they later migrated to cities. Although urban living had its advantages, it was soon realized that it did not resolve the matters of institutional racism, discrimination and poverty. As a result, the subjectivity of urban African Americans is uniquely influenced by their cosmopolitan identities. New York City's ethnic community of Harlem continues to function as the geographic center of African-American urban culture. This study examines how six post-World War II novels --Sapphire's PUSH, Julian Mayfield's The Hit, Brian Keith Jackson's The Queen of Harlem, Charles Wright's The Wig, Toni Morrison's Jazz and Louise Meriwether's Daddy Was a Number Runner-- address the issues of race, identity, individuality and community within Harlem and the megalopolis of New York City. Further, this study investigates concepts of urbanism, blackness, ethnicity and subjectivity as they relate to the characters' identities and self-perceptions. This study is original in its attempt to ascertain the connections between megalopolitan urbanism, ethnicity, subjectivity and African-American fiction.
Temple University--Theses

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Bartlow, Dianne. "On the relationship between altruism and African-American women in contemporary popular music /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p9992377.

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Henninger, Katherine. "Ordering the façade : photography and the politics of representation in contemporary Southern women's fiction /." Digital version accessible at:, 1999. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/main.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres, Orientation langue et littérature
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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Chapi, Aicha. "Towards a reading of Toni Morrison's fiction : African-American history, the arts and contemporary theory /." Thesis, Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1995. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B19671441.

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Jacobi, Kara Elizabeth. ""They Will Invent What They Need to Survive": Narrating Trauma in Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction." Scholarly Repository, 2009. http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/oa_dissertations/229.

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"'They Will Invent What They Need to Survive': Narrating Trauma in Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction" analyzes novels by Octavia Butler, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, and Julia Alvarez through the lens of contemporary theories of trauma, tracing the ways in which survivors struggle to construct narratives that contain and make sense of their experiences. Many of the major theorists of trauma studies emphasize the impossibility of re-capturing traumatic events through creating narratives even while recognizing that the survivor's need to tell her story persists. In my project, however, I explore the ways in which the Kindred, Stigmata, Paradise, The Joy Luck Club, Sula, The Temple of My Familiar, and In the Time of the Butterflies extend theories that insist too readily on the survivor's inability to accurately or completely re-member by depicting characters who, despite difficulty, present narrative accounts of their painful memories. In my own readings of the texts, I emphasize that the complexities highlighted by these texts ultimately foster our deeper understanding of the traumatized subject and her attempts to empower herself through testimony.

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McElroy, Ruth Ann. "Spirits at the border : migration and identity in contemporary African - and Latin - American women's fiction." Thesis, Lancaster University, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.246130.

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Wright, Charlotte M. "Plain and Ugly Janes: the Rise of the Ugly Woman in Contemporary American Fiction." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1994. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278032/.

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Women characters in American literature of the nineteenth century form an overwhelmingly lovely group, but a search through some of the overlooked works reveals a thin but discernible thread of plain, even homely, heroines. Most of these fall into the stereotypical "old maid" category, and, like their real-life counterparts, these "undesirable" women are considered failures, even if they have money or satisfying careers, because they do not have boyfriends, husbands, or children. During the twentieth century, the old maid figure develops into someone not just homely, but downright ugly; in addition, the number of these characters increases, especially in the latter half of the century. In many works written since the 1960s, the woman's ugliness is such an intrinsic part of the story that it could not take place if she were beautiful. In subtle ways, these "ugly woman" stories begin to question the overwhelming value placed on beauty, to question the narrow definition of beauty in American society as a whole, and to suggest that the price for such a "blessing" might indeed be too high. Rather than settling for being a mere "heroine"—which still carries feminine connotations of passive behavior and second-class status—the ugly woman's increase in power over her own life and the lives of others, allows her to achieve a status more in keeping with the more "masculine" and active role of hero.

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Kamali, Leila Francesca. "Spectres of the shore : the memory of Africa in contemporary African-American and Black British fiction." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2007. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4110/.

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This study considers the approach in recent African-American and Black British fiction toward the cultural memory of Africa. Following a brief consideration of the relationship between contemporary conceptions of African-American and Black British cultural identities, I examine the ways in which the imaginative journeys and geographies, evoked by the ideals of Africa and 'Africanness', are employed in the negotiation of historical memory, and in the endeavour to situate black identity in the context of contemporary American and British society. My discussion addresses these questions, initially, in four novels by African-American writers: Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1983), and John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire (1990). I argue that African-American writers situate a memory of an African past within an African-American present, through a form of historical memory which is sensitive not only to tradition, but also to the practice of 'possession'. This fluid form of memory, characteristic of a voodoo tradition, and also, these writers suggest, of a diversity of African-American artforms, allows knowledge of African tradition to be situated within the American present, but is broadly denied by an American trend of forgetfulness toward the past, and devalued by institutionalised racism. African-American texts present uses of language in which the linguistic and the pre-linguistic realms are felt to be continuous with one another, in response to an American language which is centrally occupied by the fraught relationship between black and white Americans. The second half of this study examines the memory of Africa in three Black British works, including Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River (1991), S.1. Martin's Incomparable World (1996), and Bernardine Evaristo's Lara (1997). I suggest here that Black British authors employ the cultural memory of Africa not as an inheritance which is connected to a known 'tradition', but as one of a diverse number of inheritances which are negotiated as part of the process of situating identity as flexible, individual, and unfinished. The memory of Africa is figured as frozen in the past, along with a range of other cultural inheritances, which are taken up and redramatised in the present as part of an attempt to recover the inherent diversity at the heart of an oppressive British fiction of linearity, and of uniform 'whiteness'. Where Britain, historically, has been silent on Britain's black presence, Black British writers simply speak into that silence. Emerging from this fruitful comparison between the two literatures is a sense of the contrasting approaches which are made by black writers toward notions of tradition and the performance of identity, in the context of two very different national histories, and as part of fundamental strategies of survival employed in contemporary social settings. These dramatisations are interrogated against continuous issues of race and racism, but also as diverse solutions for identity where national contexts bear a contrasting significance in an age which is increasingly globalised, and in which imperial power has shifted, and continues to shift, between Britain and America.

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Douglass-Chin, Richard J. "Where the spirit leads me : the autobiographical holy foremothers of contemporary African American women's writing /." *McMaster only, 1998.

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MacDonald, Deneka C. "Locating resistance/resisting location : a feminist literary analysis of supernatural women in contemporary fantastic fiction." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2003. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5344/.

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In this thesis I examine the ways in which feminist and human geographies intersect with contemporary women-centred fantasy fiction. In particular, I consider space and place to be significant to female characters in their role as a physical presence as well as an intangible location. Thus I explore the forest, the body and the mind as territories occupied by the supernatural women. These various spatial themes, I suggest, outline distinctive locations for supernatural female characters and enable them to engage in a position of resistance from patriarchal ideologies. Through a spatial analysis of selected fiction, I reflect on challenges to notions that construct identity, gender and sexuality as well as conflict among women. I argue that the supernatural woman in fiction has been frozen in one-dimensional representation within traditional male-centred texts. This one-dimensionally, I suggest, hinges on the juxtaposition of the overly simplistic good/bad binary that has often illustrated female characters within fantasy fiction. As fantasy is a genre typically more concerned with worlds than characters, the women-centred fantasy text is unique in its exploration and pursuit of the literary character. Given the contemporary and interdisciplinary nature of this thesis, I have drawn upon filmic adaptations of texts at times to illustrate a further level of cultural awareness. The main emphasis is, however, on literary texts and, thus, reference to film is meant to supplement my textual analysis.

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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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Piper, Gemmicka F. "Black intimacy in the popular imagination: re-examining African American women’s fiction from 1965-2000." Diss., University of Iowa, 2015. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6622.

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Contemporary African American fiction repeatedly explores intimacy. These explorations have been most sustained in black women’s writing. Although female authors share an interest in romantic interactions, their portrayals reveal wide-ranging attitudes about this theme. Some accounts depict intimacy as a barrier to female advancement. In other texts, feminine success hinges on maintaining a committed relationship. These distinct outlooks not only reflect competing gender discourses within late 20th, early 21st century America but also significant developments in black women’s literature. In this dissertation, I analyze how fictional depictions of heterosexual intimacy reveal crucial facts about black women’s writing. I argue that various subgenres captured under the heading, popular black women’s literature, include narratives about male-female relationships that complicate the efforts celebrated as the black women’s literary renaissance of the 1970s. By focusing on the span from 1965-2000, I suggest that at the same moment when Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor were expressing post-civil rights era black femininity in fictions filled with deteriorating heterosexual intimacy, other black women writers were using popular fiction to expose different possibilities for male-female interconnection. These authors exist in the same socio-cultural milieu as their high modernist peers; however, their writings reflect different reactions to decisions about where intimacy fits in the construction of black identity. My dissertation contains four chapters, and each chapter engages roughly a decade and considers different dimensions of black female popular literature. Looking at the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s roots of this genre’s interest in intimacy, chapter one establishes Toni Cade Bambara as a founding figure. Chapter two studies the black romance novel from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s concentrating on pioneers, Rosalind Welles and Sandra Kitt. Dealing with Terry McMillan’s rise to fame between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s, chapter three examines chick lit, the site where capitalist feminism and black relationship concerns converge. The final chapter uses Terri Woods’ work to interpret ghetto fiction of the late-1990s. Popular black women’s literature notes the dynamic nature of black cultural identity and responds to that dynamism with portraits of intimacy that register shifting intra-racial realities within the broader context of evolutions in inter-racial democracy. By identifying intimacy as a telling theme in post-civil rights era experience, my research points out the variegated textures of black civic exertion in both literary and political terms.

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Maloul, Linda Fawzi. "From immigrant narratives to ethnic literature : the contemporary fiction of Arab British and Arab American women writers." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.647377.

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The purpose of this thesis is to firmly situate the fictions of contemporary Arab British and Arab American women writers who write in English within the corpus of ethnic and mainstream literary criticism. I aim to position these fictions within their historical and sociopolitical contexts. I also aim to shift the focus from the texts’ female protagonists to male and minor characters in order to explore how the writers construct both political Islam and Islam as a private faith; how they construct Palestinian Muslim masculinities; and how they respond to the events of 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror. I argue that these fictions offer some of the most astute reactions to the events of 9/11 and their repercussions. I also argue that Arab American literature in general and Arab American women’s literature in particular is more canny than its Arab British counterpart. Thus, I aim to show how Arab American literary productions refract a development from the literature of self-exploration to that of transformation allowing them a well-deserved spot in Ethnic-American literary studies and in time, mainstream American literary studies. Another of my aims is to investigate how Arab American and Arab British writers highlight the diversity of Arabs, Muslims and Islam, thus addressing essentialist reductions of Arabs and Muslims as a monolithic group. In chapter one, I investigate how Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun and Leila Aboulela’s Minaret negotiate issues such as Islamic clothing. I also question anew Arab women writers’ perceived role as “cultural commentators.” In chapter two, I explore how Laila Halaby’s West of the Jordan and Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home construct Palestinian Muslim masculinities, and how they challenge the Anglo-American stereotypical representations of Arab Muslim masculinity. In chapter three, I analyse how Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land, Frances Khirallah Noble’s The New Belly Dancer of the Galaxy and Alia Yunis’ The Night Counter negotiate cultural, political and social views of America. I aim to examine whether Halaby, Noble and Yunis’ ambiguous position, as legally ‘white’ citizens who are also members of a marginalized and religiously racialized minority, offers them a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between ‘East’ and ‘West.’ In the conclusion, I offer some suggestions for future research.

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Mears, Mary D. "Choice and discovery an analysis of women and culture in Flora Nwapa's fiction /." [Tampa, Fla.] : University of South Florida, 2009. http://digital.lib.usf.edu/?e14.2845.

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Ross-Stroud, Catherine Trites Roberta Seelinger. "Non-existent existences race, class, gender, and age in adolescent fiction; or Those whispering Black girls /." Normal, Ill. Illinois State University, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ilstu/fullcit?p3106763.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2003.
Title from title page screen, viewed October 12, 2005. Dissertation Committee: Roberta Seelinger Trites (chair), Karen Coats, Janice Neuleib. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-236) and abstract. Also available in print.

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Moss, Maria. "We've been here before women in creation myths and contemporary literature of the Native American southwest /." Münster : Lit, 1993. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/30100337.html.

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Bösch, Susanna A. ""Sturdy Black Bridges" on the American stage : the portrayal of Black motherhood in selected plays by contemporary African American women playwrights /." Frankfurt am Main : P. Lang, 1996. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb376547291.

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Istomina, Julia. "Property, Mobility, and Epistemology in U.S. Women of Color Detective Fiction." The Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1429191876.

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Moffler, Kirsten A. ""A Plea for Color:" The Construction of a Feminine Identity in African American Women's Novels." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2001. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/MofflerKA2001.pdf.

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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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Lynch, Sibongile B. "Carnival, Convents, and the Cult of St. Rocque: Cultural Subterfuge in the Work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2012. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/136.

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In the work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson the city and culture of 19th century New Orleans figures prominently, and is a major character affecting the lives of her protagonists. While race, class, and gender are among the focuses of many scholars the eccentricity and cultural history of the most exotic American city, and its impact on Dunbar-Nelson’s writing is unmistakable. This essay will discuss how the diverse cultural environment of New Orleans in the 19th century allowed Alice Dunbar Nelson to create narratives which allowed her short stories to speak to the shifting identities of women and the social uncertainty of African Americans in the Jim Crow south. A consideration of New Orleans’ cultural history is important when reading Dunbar-Nelson’s work, whose significance has often been disregarded because of what some considered its lack of racial markers.

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Kassem, Niveen. "Masculinity in contemporary African-American fiction : reading Edward P. Jones' The known world, David Bradley's The Chaneysville incident and Gayl Jones' Corregidora." Thesis, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.603395.

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This thesis reads the representations of black masculinity in three contemporary American novels, David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981), Edward P. Jones’ The Known World (2003) and Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975), and demonstrates that all three, in their different ways, connect black manhood with the traumatic history of slavery. Male identities threatened and problematised by slavery are, the thesis suggests, inherited by modern African–American culture. Considering the ways in which these identities resurface in these contemporary novels thus offers insight into the ways in which black masculinity, while apparently condemned to recycle the paradigms of the past, can be seen to re-make and redefine them. In its analysis of Henry Townsend in The Known World, a figure who follows the established discourses of white power, the suggestion is that even as he enacts these ideological forces he simultaneously undermines them through his rejection of hierarchical definitions based on the laws of property ownership. The desire to become a slaveholder and be accepted by upper-class white society is an attempt to constitute his manhood according to the legal framework underlying the institution of slavery. Even as he does this, however, Henry cannot entirely leave his past behind and he finds himself torn between white southern definitions of masculinity and those associated with his slave past. Similar tensions can be seen in the hustler manhood of Moses Washington in The Chaneysville Incident. While attempting to resist the power structures through his criminal activities, he finds himself imitating the agrarian capitalistic principles underlying the practice of slavery. Like Henry, Moses perpetuates the discourses of slavery, embracing the power structures that created slavery as a paradigm on which to model his masculinity. The hypothesis is that both Henry’s and Moses’ expressions of masculinity are actually following definitions of manhood inherited from both the discourses of white power and the Africanised self-definitions of African-Americans evolving since slavery, and, therefore, cannot be viewed as alternative masculinities for African–American culture. In contrast to this reading of Henry and Moses, the thesis goes on to suggest that the figure of Mutt in Corregidora can be regarded as an attempt to delineate a paradigm of masculinity that breaks more effectively with the past. Instead of imitating abusive models of manhood, the novel ultimately resists such violence and rejects processes of emasculation. This thesis, therefore, offers an insight into how the historical emasculation of African–Americans has shaped and is still shaping definitions of black identity.

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Wood, Susan M. "Seeing into the mirror the reality of fiction in the work of Carrie Mae Weems /." Diss., Columbia, Mo. : University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10355/4900.

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Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007.
The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on November 6, 2007) Includes bibliographical references.

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Mayo, Tilicia L. "Black Women and Contemporary Media: The Struggle to Self-Define Black Womanhood." Thesis, Connect to resource online, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/2102.

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Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2010.
Title from screen (viewed on February 26, 2010). Department of Communication Studies, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Catherine A. Dobris, Ronald M. Sandwina, Kim D. White-Mills, Kristina H. Sheeler. Includes vitae. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 68-70).

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Ullrich-Ferguson, Loretta N. "The beauty of her survival : being Black and female in Meridian, The salt eaters, Kindred, and The bluest eye /." View online, 2008. http://repository.eiu.edu/theses/docs/32211131464907.pdf.

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Foster, Benjamin Thomas. "HISTORICAL INTIMACY: CONTEMPORARY RECLAMATIONS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY IN THE DRAMA, POETRY, AND FICTION OF SUZAN-LORI PARKS, NATASHA TRETHEWAY, AND COLSON WHITEHEAD." OpenSIUC, 2015. https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations/1066.

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Three contemporary authors – Suzan-Lori Parks, Natasha Trethewey, and Colson Whitehead – within the African American Literary Tradition explore relationships to history in light of a dominant rhetoric that represents African American history through a white, hegemonic lens. In Parks’ The America Play, Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, these authors comment on historical representation through such symbols as iconic figures like Abraham Lincoln, photographs, and elevators as starting points to explore the possibility of an independent space for African American history. Rather than remarking on just the representation of the artifact, however, the authors enter a conversation on how history is remembered and experienced. Parks, Trethewey, and Whitehead each form their own expression on historical representation; in each case, their works address the ability, or inability, to achieve historical intimacy amidst a push back from hegemonic narratives in the public eye. Historical intimacy, as the leading concept of the dissertation, refers to developing a close proximity to history not as a mere representation but as lived experience. Parks sees historical insight developing only through brief moments of intimate contact, if at all. Trethewey imagines personal, even sensual, familiarity with the subjects of her poems as a way of breaking through social frames and learning to connect with the past. Whitehead works through paradoxes to dissolve representational patterns of discourse, like verticality, and reach for a post-rational space wherein both open historical possibility, which stresses self-reflexivity, and a foundation in a “real,” experienced history unlock the opportunity for the construction of an intimate history. Although no author presents historical intimacy as an achieved goal, their works suggest varying degrees of potential and connection.

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Kim, Min-Jung. "Renarrating the private : gender, family, and race in Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 1999. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p9926560.

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Calabre, Roberta Ventura. "Fighting the Strai(gh)tjacket: black women bonding in Loving Her and The Color Purple." Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 2010. http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/tde_busca/arquivo.php?codArquivo=2812.

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O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar como as relações lésbicas são retratadas nas obras Loving Her e The Color Purple. Ao analisar as relações entre homens/mulheres e mulheres/mulheres, este estudo também revê e critica o golpe triplo sofrido por lésbicas negras, por serem, ao mesmo tempo, mulheres, afro-americanas e homossexuais. Utilizando fatos históricos para situar as obras em um contexto social, além da teoria do lesbian continuum afim de atestar a riqueza e diversidade do laço afetivo entre mulheres, este trabalho vem por desmistificar as noções simplistas em relação à literatura lésbica Afro-Americana, afugentando a sombra que pairava sobre o tabu e elevando a mulher negra, lésbica ou não, a seu lugar de direito na sociedade
The aim of this work is to analyze how lesbian relationships are portrayed in the fictional works Loving Her and The Color Purple. By analyzing the relationships between men/women and women/women depicted in the chosen literary works, this study also revises and criticizes the triple strike suffered by black lesbians for being females, African-Americans and homosexuals. Using historical facts to place the fictional works in a social frame, and using the theory of lesbian continuum to attest the richness and diversity of women bonding, this work demystifies the simplistic notions of African-American lesbian literature, casting away the shadow upon the unspeakable and elevating black women, lesbians or not, to their rightful place in society

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Reeser, Alanna L. ""She believed her ballyhoo" women and advertising in fiction by Edna Ferber, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Fannie Hurst /." Click here for download, 2007. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1317334401&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=3260&RQT=309&VName=PQD.

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Erickson, Stacy M. "Animals-as-Trope in the Selected Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1999. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2227/.

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In this dissertation, I show how 20th century African-American women writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison utilize animals-as-trope in order to illustrate the writers' humanity and literary vision. In the texts that I have selected, I have found that animals-as-trope functions in two important ways: the first function of animal as trope is a pragmatic one, which serves to express the humanity of African Americans; and the second function of animal tropes in African-American women's fiction is relational and expresses these writers' "ethic of caring" that stems from their folk and womanist world view. Found primarily in slave narratives and in domestic fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries, pragmatic animal metaphors and/or similes provide direct analogies between the treatment of African-Americans and animals. Here, these writers often engage in rhetoric that challenges pro-slavery apologists, who attempted to disprove the humanity of African-Americans by portraying them as animals fit to be enslaved. Animals, therefore, become the metaphor of both the abolitionist and the slavery apologist for all that is not human. The second function of animals-as-trope in the fiction of African-American women writers goes beyond the pragmatic goal of proving African-Americans's common humanity, even though one could argue that this goal is still present in contemporary African-American fiction. Animals-as-trope also functions to express the African-American woman writer's understanding that 1) all oppressions stem from the same source; 2) that the division between nature/culture is a false onethat a universal connection exists between all living creatures; and 3) that an ethic of caring, or relational epistemology, can be extended to include non-human animals. Twentieth-century African-American writers such as Hurston, Walker, and Morrison participate in what anthropologists term, "neototemism," which is the contemporary view that humankind is part of nature, or a vision that Morrison would most likely attribute to the "folk." This perspective places their celebration of the continuous relations between humans and animals within a spiritual, indeed, tribal, cosmological construction. What makes these particular writers primarily different from their literary mothers, however, is a stronger sense that they are reclaiming the past, both an African and African-American history. What I hope to contribute with this dissertation is a new perspective of African-American women writers' literary tradition via their usage of animals as an expression of their "ethic of caring" and their awareness that all oppression stems from a single source.

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Huguley, Piper Gian. "Why Tell the Truth When a Lie Will Do?: Re-Creations and Resistance in the Self-Authored Life Writing of Five American Women Fiction Writers." unrestricted, 2006. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-04252006-174728/.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2006.
Title from title screen. Audrey Goodman, committee chair; Thomas L. McHaney, Elizabeth West, committee members. Electronic text (253 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed May15, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (243-253).

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Walker, Amber. "Shakin' Exploitation: Black Female Bodies in Contemporary Hip-Hop and Pornography." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1325121686.

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Jones, Esther. "Traveling discourses: subjectivity, space and spirituality in black women’s speculative fictions in the Americas." The Ohio State University, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1155665383.

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Weber-Fève, Stacey A. "There's no place like home homemaking, making home, and femininity in contemporary women's filmmaking and the literature of the Métropol and the Maghreb /." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1148746370.

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Harwell, Raena Jamila. "This Woman's Work: The Sociopolitical Activism of Bebe Moore Campbell." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2011. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/138885.

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African American Studies
Ph.D.
In November 2006, award-winning novelist, Bebe Moore Campbell died at the age of 56 after a short battle with brain cancer. Although the author was widely-known and acclaimed for her first novel, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (1992) there had been no serious study of her life, nor her literary and activist work. This dissertation examines Campbell's activism in two periods: as a student at the University of Pittsburgh during the 1960s Black Student Movement, and later as a mental health advocate near the end of her life in 2006. It also analyzes Campbell's first and final novels, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine and 72 Hour Hold (2005) and the direct relationship between her novels and her activist work. Oral history interview, primary source document analysis, and textual analysis of the two novels, were employed to examine and reconstruct Campbell's activist activities, approaches, intentions and impact in both her work as a student activist at the University of Pittsburgh and her work as a mental health advocate and spokesperson for the National Alliance for Mental Illness. A key idea considered is the impact of her early activism and consciousness on her later activism, writing, and advocacy. I describe the subject's activism within the Black Action Society from 1967-1971 and her negotiation of the black nationalist ideologies espoused during the 1960s. Campbell's first novel Your Blues Ain't Like Mine and is correlated to her emerging political consciousness (specific to race and gender) and the concern for racial violence during the Black Liberation period. The examination of recurrent themes in Your Blues reveals a direct relationship to Campbell's activism at the University of Pittsburgh. I also document Campbell's later involvement in the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), her role as a national spokesperson, and the local activism that sparked the birth of the NAMI Urban-Los Angeles chapter, serving black and Latino communities (1999-2006). Campbell's final novel, 72 Hour Hold, is examined closely for its socio-political commentary and emphasis on mental health disparities, coping with mental illness, and advocacy in black communities. Campbell utilized recurring signature themes within each novel to theorize and connect popular audiences with African American historical memory and current sociopolitical issues. Drawing from social movement theories, I contend that Campbell's activism, writing, and intellectual development reflect the process of frame alignment. That is, through writing and other activist practices she effectively amplifies, extends, and transforms sociopolitical concerns specific to African American communities, effectively engaging a broad range of readers and constituents. By elucidating Campbell's formal and informal leadership roles within two social movement organizations and her deliberate use of writing as an activist tool, I conclude that in both activist periods Campbell's effective use of resources, personal charisma, and mobilizing strategies aided in grassroots/local and institutional change. This biographical and critical study of the sociopolitical activism of Bebe Moore Campbell establishes the necessity for scholarly examination of African American women writers marketed to popular audiences and expands the study of African American women's contemporary activism, health activism, and black student activism.
Temple University--Theses

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Piep, Karsten H. "Embattled Homefronts: Politics and Representation in American World War I Novels." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2005. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1109634736.

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Smith, Roslyn Nicole. "Medias Res, Temporal Double-Consciousness and Resistance in Octavia Butler's Kindred." unrestricted, 2007. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-11242007-230409/.

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Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2007.
Title from file title page. Elizabeth West, committee chair; Layli Phillips, Kameelah Martin Samuel, committee members. Electronic text (52 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Jan. 30, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-52).

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Jones, Esther L. "Traveling discourses subjectivity, space and spirituality in black women's speculative fictions in the Americas /." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1155665383.

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Piep, Karsten H. "Embattled homefronts politics and representation in American World War I novels /." Oxford, Ohio : Miami University, 2004. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=miami1109634736.

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Benavente, Gabriel. "Reimagining Movements: Towards a Queer Ecology and Trans/Black Feminism." FIU Digital Commons, 2017. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/3186.

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This thesis seeks to bridge feminist and environmental justice movements through the literature of black women writers. These writers create an archive that contribute towards the liberation of queer, black, and transgender peoples. In the novel Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler constructs a world that highlights the pervasive effects of climate change. As climate change expedites poverty, Americans begin to blame others, such as queer people, for the destruction of their country. Butler depicts the dangers of fundamentalism as a response to climate change, highlighting an imperative for a movement that does not romanticize the environment as heteronormative, but a space where queers can flourish. Just as queer and environmental justice movements are codependent on one another, feminist movements cannot be separate from black and transgender liberation. This thesis will demonstrate how writers, such as Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, and Janet Mock, help establish a feminism that resists the erasure of black and transgender people.

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Carey, Cecelia V. "Bildungsroman in contemporary black women's fiction." Thesis, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/1957/33313.

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Bildungsroman in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction is a study of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Both of these writers implement a newer version of the genre of Bildungsroman to reveal the complexities involved in coming of age for a young woman of color. Both novels have protagonists that struggle with racism, sexism, and classism as barriers to their identity formation. This study aims to reveal the ways in which multiple layers of oppression inhibit the progress of contemporary African-American female heroines in modem Bildungsroman.
Graduation date: 2002

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González, María Carmen. "Toward a feminist identity contemporary Mexican-American women novelists /." 1991. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/28143091.html.

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Day, Sara K. "Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Fiction for Adolescent Women." Thesis, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2010-08-8184.

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This dissertation offers the term “narrative intimacy” to refer to an implicit relationship between narrator and reader that depends upon disclosure and trust. By examining contemporary American fiction for adolescent women by critically- and commercially-successful authors such as Sarah Dessen, Stephenie Meyer, and Laurie Halse Anderson, I explore the use of narrative intimacy as a means of reflecting and reinforcing larger, often contradictory, cultural expectations regarding adolescent women, interpersonal relationships, and intimacy. Specifically, I investigate the possibility that adolescent women narrators construct understandings of the adolescent woman reader as a friend, partner in desire, or “bibliotherapist,” which in turn allow the narrator to understand the reader as a safe and appropriate location for disclosure. At the same time, the novels I discuss offer frequent warnings against the sort of unfettered disclosure the narrators perform in their relationships with the reader: friendships are marked as potential sites of betrayal and rejection, while romantic relationships are presented as inherently threatening to physical and emotional health. In order to interrogate the construction of narrative intimacy, I rely upon a tradition of narrative and reception theory concerning the roles of narrator and reader. I also turn to other cultural representations of adolescent women and their relationships, from films, television, and magazines to the self-help and nonfiction literature that provides insight into current psychological, sociological, and anthropological understandings of adolescent womanhood. Ultimately, I argue, the prevalence of narrative intimacy in fiction for adolescent women reflects a complex system that encourages adolescent women to seek intimate interpersonal relationships even as it discourages the type and degree of disclosure that is ostensibly required in the development of intimacy. The narrator thus turns to the reader because the “logical gap”—to borrow a term from Peter Lamarque—between fiction and reality allows for a construction of the reader as a recipient of disclosure who cannot respond with the threats of criticism, judgment, or rejection that may be presented by other characters within the text. The reader, in turn, may come to depend upon narrative intimacy as a space through which to vicariously explore her own understanding of intimacy.

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Kotwasińska, Agnieszka. "Transformations of the Family in Contemporary American Horror Fiction by Women." Doctoral thesis, 2017. https://depotuw.ceon.pl/handle/item/1898.

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Abstract My doctoral dissertation concerns the transformation of familial structures in contemporary American horror fiction by women. The starting point of my analysis was the acknowledgment of certain gaps in horror scholarship, namely, the exclusion of women’s works and the virtual lack of family-themed analyses. The three main goals of my dissertation were then as follows: the close analysis of genre boundaries within the horror canon and its thematic subgenres, the recovery of forgotten or little known women writers of horror, and, finally, the exploration of the role and place of interpersonal and familial relationships in contemporary horror fiction. I have decided to concentrate on family life, in all its diverse forms, as this topic remains a relatively unchartered field in horror analyses. The few exceptions are academic works that focus on such themes as community vs. individual, evil or “creepy” children, or haunted houses. Interestingly, relationships and families are analyzed much more readily and frequently in analyses centered on sexual politics, gender, and sexuality in cinematic (and, to a lesser extent, literary) horror. Such examinations (which are often based on feminist criticism, queer theory, and gender studies) readily engage with family issues, as these are linked to both feminist activism and feminist scholarly work. Similarly, in my dissertation I treat the family as a category capable of shedding light upon such diverse social issues as gender roles, sexuality, femininities and masculinities, heteronormativity, reproductive rights and new technologies of reproduction, domestic abuse, patriarchal culture, the limits of binarism, familial dynamics, parent-child relationship, same-sex couples and alternative kinship, romantic love, close friendship, and support networks which are not based on biological ties, voluntary childlessness and singlehood. It should be noted that the above-mentioned themes are not discussed solely in works written by women, and the essentialist and simplistic division into “male” and “female” perspectives in horror fiction was not a premise of this dissertation. Still, it is clear to me that gender matters in horror, which has been constituted as a predominantly male and masculine field (both in terms of its creators and consumers.) Consequently, identifying oneself as a woman and a horror writer translates into a corpus of work which, by definition, resides on the margins of mainstream horror. Paradoxically, such a marginal position enables women writers to engage more freely with themes which are considered uninteresting and not scary enough, and which are often associated with other fantastic genres such as fantasy or Gothic romance. In my dissertation I focus on sixteen novels published over the course of the last three decades, from 1986 to 2015. The choice of 1986 is not accidental, as in my work I trace the development of contemporary horror fiction from the very moment it began to veer away from realist horror in the vein of Stephen King’s massively popular novels; the moment which later came to be associated with the publication of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood in the mid-1980s. The novels selected for this dissertation (for instance, Caitlin R. Kiernan’s The Red Tree, 2009, Poppy Z. Brite’s Drawing Blood, 1993, Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, 1989, Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, 1991, Sara Gran’s Closer, 2003, Tananarive Due’s The Between, 1995) showcase remarkable diversity of themes, types of narration, and textual devices, and because of that enter into a fascinating, if ambivalent, dialogue with mainstream horror production. All these novels also underscore the increasingly visible instability of generic categories, on which conventional recognizability of horror rests. My dissertation consists of four chapters, preceded by an introduction, in which I discuss the main goals of my thesis, trace the development of American horror fiction throughout the twentieth century (with a special emphasis placed on women’s oeuvre), define such crucial terms as “horror” and “the Gothic,” and provide an overview of major transformations of American kinship in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In order to organize the structure of my dissertation, I delineated four conceptual fields linked with four thematic fields. Each of the four chapters focuses on one analytical category and one literary motif: the uncanny and the haunted houses, the grotesque and the monsters, the abject and the vampires, the haunting and the figure of a ghost. Abstrakt Tematem mojej pracy doktorskiej są transformacje struktur rodzinnych we współczesnej literaturze grozy amerykańskich pisarek. Punktem wyjścia rozważań było dostrzeżenie istotnych braków w korpusie analitycznym literatury grozy, po pierwsze, pominięcia twórczości kobiet a po drugie zbyt rzadko poruszanej kwestii relacji rodzinnych. Co za tym idzie, mojej pracy przyświecały trzy główne cele: przyjrzenie się gatunkowym granicom kanonu horroru i jego tematycznych podgatunków, odzyskanie zapomnianych lub mało znanych postaci kobiecego horroru oraz zastanowienie się nad miejscem relacji interpersonalnych i rodzinnych we współczesnej literaturze grozy. Zdecydowałam się skoncentrować na szeroko rozumianym życiu rodzinnym w literaturze grozy, ponieważ jest to tematyka wciąż rzadko poruszana w analizie horroru. Nieliczne wyjątki od tej reguły to prace skupiające się na takich motywach jak wspólnotowość a indywidualizm, złe/złowrogie dzieci czy nawiedzone domy. Co ciekawe, relacje interpersonalne i rodzinne są analizowane znacznie chętniej i częściej w pracach skupiających się wokół polityki seksualnej, płci kulturowej i seksualności w horrorze filmowym i (rzadziej) literackim. Analizy te są zazwyczaj pisane w oparciu o krytykę feministyczną, teorię queer oraz badania nad płcią kulturową, co z kolei sugeruje, że badacze i badaczki poruszający się w polu krytyki feministycznej chętniej podejmują kwestie rodzinne, które są powiązane zarówno z aktywizmem feministycznym jak i feministyczną pracą akademicką. Idąc tym tropem, w mojej pracy doktorskiej traktują rodzinę jako kategorię, pozwalającą naświetlić różnorakie kwestie społeczne takie jak role płciowe, seksualność, różne wizje kobiecości i męskości, heteronormatywność, prawa reprodukcyjne i nowe technologie reprodukcji, przemoc w rodzinie, kultura patriarchalna, granice myślenia binarnego, dynamika relacji rodzinnych, relacje na linii dziecko-rodzic, pary jednopłciowe i alternatywne struktury rodzinne, romantyczna miłość i bliska przyjaźń oraz struktury wsparcia wykraczające poza biologiczne pokrewieństwo, bezdzietność z wyboru oraz tzw. samotność z wyboru (singlehood). Warto podkreślić, że powyżej zarysowana tematyka nie jest podejmowana wyłącznie przez kobiety, i co za tym idzie, esencjonalistyczny i wielce upraszczający podział na „męską” i „kobiecą perspektywę” w horrorze nie był celem mojej pracy. Jasnym jest dla mnie fakt, iż płeć kulturowa posiada ogromne znaczenie dla literatury grozy, której pole znaczeniowe zostało kulturowo ukonstytuowane jako domena mężczyzn (zarówno pod kątem twórców jak i konsumentów horroru). Co za tym idzie, identyfikowanie się jako kobieta i pisarz horroru przekłada się na twórczość, która niejako z definicji, znajduje się na obrzeżach produkcji głównego nurtu literatury grozy. Paradoksalnie jednak to właśnie marginalna pozycja umożliwia pisarkom podejmowanie tematów uważanych za mało ciekawe lub mało straszne lub takich, które są kojarzone z innymi pokrewnymi gatunkami takimi jak fantasy czy romans gotycki. Moja praca skupia się na analizie szesnastu powieści i obejmuje trzy dekady twórczości amerykańskich pisarek, od 1986 do 2015. Wybór początkowej klamry czasowej jest nieprzypadkowy, albowiem moja praca śledzi rozwój współczesnej amerykańskiej literatury grozy od momentu jej odejścia od realistycznego horroru spod znaku Stephena Kinga; momentu datowanego na połowę lat osiemdziesiątych dwudziestego wieku i łączonego później przez krytyków i krytyczki z publikacją Ksiąg krwi Clive’a Barkera. Wybrane przeze mnie powieści z ostatnich trzydziestu lat (m.in. Caitlin R. Kiernan, The Red Tree, 2009, Poppy Z. Brite, Drawing Blood, 1993, Katherine Dunn, Geek Love, 1989, Jewelle Gomez, The Gilda Stories, 1991, Sara Gran, Closer, 2003, Tananarive Due, The Between, 1995) ukazują niezwykłą różnorodność motywów, typów narracji i zabiegów formalnych, i tym samym wchodzą w fascynujący i często ambiwalentny dialog z horrorem głównego nurtu. Powieści te uwidaczniają również coraz wyraźniejszą chwiejność kategorii gatunkowych, na których opiera się konwencjonalna rozpoznawalność i tradycyjne rozumienie horroru. Rozprawa składa się z czterech rozdziałów poprzedzonych wprowadzeniem, w którym omawiam główne cele pracy, przedstawiam zarys dwudziestowiecznego horroru amerykańskiego ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem twórczości kobiet, definiuję kategorie „horroru” i „gotyku”, i rozważam główne zmiany społeczne na polu organizacji struktur rodzinnych w Stanach Zjednoczonych końca dwudziestego i początku dwudziestego-pierwszego wieku. Organizując strukturę mojej pracy wyznaczyłam cztery pola pojęciowe połączone z czterema polami tematycznymi. Każdy z czterech rozdziałów skupia się na jednej kategorii badawczej i jednym wybranym motywie literackim: niesamowite (Das Unheimliche) i nawiedzone domy, groteska i potworność, abiekt i wampiry, nawiedzenie i duch.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'FICTION / African American / Contemporary Women'

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