To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: Harriet Jacobs.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Harriet Jacobs'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 29 dissertations / theses for your research on the topic 'Harriet Jacobs.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse dissertations / theses on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
Logan, April Catrina. "Theorizing and Performing Socio-political Representation: Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, and Pauline Hopkins." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2011. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/124006.
Full textAbstract:
EnglishPh.D.
"Theorizing and Performing Socio-political Representation: Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, and Pauline Hopkins" focuses on the performance of gender and sexuality in works by three African American women writers who were also public figures. In this study, I examine what I have named the "politics of representation" in these texts, whereby their authors articulate the benefits and drawbacks of capitalizing on the dual socio-political positions of subject and object in American culture. I argue that Wilson, Jacobs, and Hopkins critique and theorize the public demonstration or performance of gendered and sexually categorized African American bodies to achieve political ends. In particular, they challenge the conflation by whites and by black male leaders of masculinity and political recognition. Contrary to what many scholars have argued, these writers envision a political authority for black women not circumscribed by normative concepts of femininity, masculinity, and sexuality popularized by the dominant culture.
Temple University--Theses
2
Russo, Sarah L. "Women's self-writing and medical science : Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Stoddard." Related electronic resource: Current Research at SU : database of SU dissertations, recent titles available, full text:, 2008. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/syr/main.
Full text
3
Zaaraoui, Karima. "Tours et détours du genre : les avatars de l'écriture féminine africaine américaine autour de Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson et Hannah Crafts." Thesis, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2015. http://www.theses.fr/2015PA030003.
Full textAbstract:
L’étude comparative de Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Harriet Jacobs), Our Nig ; Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (Harriet Wilson) et The Bondwoman’s Narrative (Hannah Crafts) s’attache à ouvrir de nouvelles perspectives sur la singularité du sujet féminin noir dans les anfractuosités de l’écriture autobiographique du récit d’esclave. Si ces femmes auteurs se constituent en témoins privilégiés de la condition féminine noire de l’Amérique « antebellum », elles n’engagent pas moins leur plume dans l’activisme. L’enjeu de cette thèse est de revenir sur les liens entre écriture et féminin en prenant comme point de départ l’œuvre elle-même, fût-elle autobiographie ou fiction. La saisie de soi et du monde et la quête identitaire sont des thèmes fondamentaux de la tradition romanesque africaine américaine où des voix marquantes se succèdent. L’affranchissement du genre autobiographique s’affirme comme instance de survie où la mise en perspective de la fiction permet de révéler la vérité du sujet. Ainsi, la question du genre constitue la trame de ce panorama où sont examinés la nature du discours du sujet noir, l’écriture du corps féminin, et le théâtre « ima-gyn-aire » d’un sujet en crise. En véritable héritière de Dickens et Byron, Hannah Crafts s’attache à créer des correspondances entre les genres, tandis que Harriet Wilson adresse une lettre ouverte à Emerson et Harriet Jacobs subvertit le roman sentimental. Ces trois femmes situent, contre toute attente, l’esthétique du récit d’esclave au carrefour de la littérature autobiographique, sentimentale, gothique et picaresque. Nous verrons, à travers ce travail, que ce n’est pas tant l’anatomie qui distingue le sujet mais plutôt la façon qu’a le sujet de se ranger d’un côté ou de l’autre du genre ; le sujet féminin peut désormais évoluer dans un nouvel espace le libérant de l’emprise du masculin. Cette thèse est également l’occasion d’une réflexion sur la dialectique de l’historicité et la littérarité où l’engagement politique de l’auteur du récit d’esclave, qui est appelé à s’imposer comme littérature, invite à porter un nouveau regard sur la production littéraire féminine avant-gardiste, et ainsi donner un nouvel élan à la littérature africaine américaineThe comparative study of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Harriet Jacobs), Our Nig ; Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (Harriet Wilson), and The Bondwoman’s Narrative (Hannah Crafts) aims at opening up new perspectives on the specificity of the female subject, through the slave narrative’s autobiographical writing. If these women writers stand as privileged witnesses of the female condition in Antebellum America, they do not remain passive nonetheless. The aim of this dissertation is to approach the links between « writing » and « feminine », by taking into account the text itself, be it autobiographical or fictionalized. Significantly enough, self-consciousness, identity and the construction of a self through writing are definitely major components of the African American literary tradition in which outstanding voices are singled out. The slave narrative tends to drift away from autobiography in order to afford its survival and conforms to the conventions that proved successful, thus revealing the truth of the subject. In this perspective, gender is the key issue of this study which brings an exclusive insight on black women’s writing. Discursive difference, writing the female body, and a staged conflicted subject are the core themes of this work. As a follower of Dickens and Byron, Hannah Crafts creates a unique blend of genres, while Harriet Wilson’s modus operandi is to rewrite Emerson’s reflections on society, and Harriet Jacobs offers a subversion of the sentimental novel. By all means, these female slave narratives’ « tour de force » lies in the aesthetics and poetics of the genre located at the crossroads of autobiography, sentimental fiction, the gothic and the picaresque. The subject determines its own sexuation, which enables the female subject to break free from the male subject. This dissertation also offers the opportunity to raise the question of history and literature. The slave narrative falls within the frame of literature as the writer’s political stance is an invitation to reconsider avant-garde women’s literary production within the African American literary canon
4
Reynolds, Diana Dial. "Signifying in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Harriet Jacobs' Use of African American English." Thesis, Connect to resource online, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/2195.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2010.Title from screen (viewed on July 19, 2010). Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Susan C. Shepherd, Frederick J. DiCamilla, Stephen L. Fox. Includes vitae. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 48-50).
5
Holgersson‐Shorter, Helena C. "Illegible bodies and illegitimate texts : paradigms of mulatta literature (Harriet Jacobs, Mayotte Capecia, Martinique, Lafacadio Hearn)." Ann Arbor, Mich. : ProQuest Information and Learning, 2005. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?res_dat=xri:ssbe&url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_dat=xri:ssbe:ft:keyresource:Pat_Diss_02.
Full text
6
Hill, Tamara D. "Race, Identity and the Narrative of Self in the Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs and Malcolm X." DigitalCommons@Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, 2019. http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/cauetds/159.
Full textAbstract:
Prophet Muhammad stated, “A white has no superiority over black nor a black has any superiority over white except by piety and good action.” Because of the continual idea of race as a social construct, this study examines the memoirs of Douglass, Jacobs and Malcolm X, as it relates to the narrative of self and identity. They have written their personal autobiographies utilizing diction as a tool that develops their art of storytelling about their distinct life journeys. These protagonists utilize their autobiographical experiences to construct a generational transference of race and identity from when Douglass was born in 1818, to Jacob’s escape to freedom in 1838 to the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965.
Historically, the texts are written from where slavery was still an institution until it was abolished in 1865, proceeding through to the Civil Rights movement. Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs and Malcolm X will experience racial trauma throughout their personal narratives that were life-altering events that severely influenced them as they matured from adolescence to adulthood. The writer has determined that, “Racial trauma can be chracterized as being physically and or psychologically damaged because of one’s race or skin color that permanently has long lasting negative effects on an individual’s thoughts, behavior or emotions,” i.e., African American victims of police brutality are racially traumatized because they suffer with behavioral problems and stress, after their encounters.
This case study is based on the definition of race as a social construct for Douglass, Jacobs and Malcolm X’s narratives that learn to self-identify beyond the restrictions of racial discrimination which eventually manifests into white oppression in a world that does not readily embrace them. Their autobiographies provide self-reflection and a broad comprehension about how and why they were entrenched by race. Douglass, Jacobs and Malcolm X were stereotyped, socially segregated, and internalized awareness of despair because of their race.
Conclusions drawn from Frederick Douglass-Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: American Slave, Harriet Jacobs-Incidences of a Slave Girl, and Malcolm X’s- Autobiography of Malcolm X will exemplify the subject of African American narrators countering racism and maneuvering in society.
7
Roddy, Rhonda Kay. "In search of the self: An analysis of Incidents in the life of a slave girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2001. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2262.
Full textAbstract:
In her bibliography, Incidents in the life of a Salve Girl, Harriet Ann Jacobs appropriates the autobiographical "I" in order to tell her own story of slavery and talk back to the dominant culture that enslaves her. Through analysis and explication of the text, this thesis examines Jacobs' rhetorical and psyshological evolution from slave to self as she struggles against patriarchal power that would rob her of her identity as well as her freedom. Included in the discussion is an analysis of the concept of self in western plilosophy, an overview of american autobiography prior to the publication of Jacobs' narrative, a discussion of the history of the slave narrative as a genre, and a discussion of the history of Jacobs' narrative.
8
Pack, Uraina N. "Afrointratextuality as a means of examining folklore in the emancipation narratives of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs." DigitalCommons@Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, 1997. http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/dissertations/2650.
Full textAbstract:
This study examines the use and documentation of folklore within Emancipation narratives. This examination is predicated on the behavior of the trickster, Br’er Rabbit. Through analysis of Br’er Rabbit’s behavior, three survival techniques used by the authors in this study function as a means of determining his importance to African Americans.
Through research and comparison of narratives, examination of historical references, and critical analyses, the researcher evaluated the behavior and experiences of African Americans within captivity to establish the use of folklore as a survival mechanism. By application of a methodology which evaluates African American experience and culture, the researcher sought to reinforce the connection between literature and culture. The researcher determined that cultural retention was evident and necessary to African Americans regardless of their circumstances.
The conclusions of this analysis validate the importance of the narrative as a historical and cultural source for African American existence in America. The researcher’s methodology suggests that the use of folklore within the narrative is derivative of the imitation and revision of linguistic and physical motion specific to African American culture.
9
Thompson, Scott Lesley. "The role of the engaging narrator in four nineteenth-century American slave narratives /." Access abstract and link to full text, 1995. http://0-wwwlib.umi.com.library.utulsa.edu/dissertations/fullcit/9529032.
Full text
10
Smith, Jacqueline Marie. "Women's Narratives of Confinement: Domestic Chores as Threads of Resistance and Healing." Scholar Commons, 2015. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/5578.
Full textAbstract:
The term "narratives of confinement" redefines the parameters by which first-person, fictive and non-fictive, accounts of female captivity are classified, broadening the genre beyond Indian captivity narratives and slave narratives to include other works in which female narrators describe physical and/or psychological confinement due to tangible or non-tangible forces. Often these narratives exhibit the transformation of the drudgery of housewifery into powerful symbols of resistance and subversion, especially in reaction to traumatic events related to confinement. Needlework and food, including its preparation and distribution, frequently emerge as metaphors that express the ways in which disempowered women seek to regain control in their lives: sewing often represents an effort by women to seize power, blending the creative act with economic achievement; food preparation also relates to creativity and economic achievement and often represents love and nurturing. In this study, I examine three representative narratives of confinement, using close reading and scholarly evidence as support: Mary Rowlandson's 1682 Indian captivity narrative, A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson; Harriet Jacobs' 1861 slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself; and Toni Morrison's 1987 fictional neo-slave narrative, Beloved. My examination begins the dialogue regarding the connection between domestic metaphors and narratives of confinement, broadening scholarship to allow more consideration for the subtle, feminized language of domesticity.
11
Comba, Lily J. "Literary Relationships That Transformed American Politics and Society." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2016. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/877.
Full textAbstract:
Texts such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand each present a different understanding and perspective of relationships based on their time periods and social statures. The type of relationship Stowe focuses on in her novel is that of friendship. Friends, defined as people with whom have a bond of mutual affection, and friendships, the state of mutual trust and support (Merriam-Webster), anchor the relationships that Eva and Eliza create with members on the plantation. These female protagonists turn to friendship as a way to live each day more normally – that is, to somehow alleviate the brutal cruelty of living through slavery. Despite varying odds, trials, and tribulations, seeking friendships that had preservative and supportive qualities allowed the female protagonists in Stowe’s novel to survive their own lives. The friendships Eva and Eliza formed discredit what many paternalist pro-slavery authors used as evidence to justify the institution of slavery. In the paternalist proslavery mindset, slave-owner and slave friendships revealed the benefits of slavery – that the two groups would be happier together rather than apart. Stowe discredits this mentality by relating to her 19th century reader’s emotions, representative of the sentimental genre in which she writes. However, in writing about slavery from a white woman’s perspective, Stowe isn’t fully exempt from the paternalist genre. As I will examine later, many of her statements about slavery and the friendships she narrates embody implicitly racist stereotypes and caricatures that complicate the abolitionist approach to her novel. In this way, she falls under the category of paternalist abolitionism, rather than paternalist proslavery. Stowe also highlights the fleeting nature of these friendships. Many, if not all, of the friendships Eva and Eliza form are not able to last, which is one way Stowe argues against the institution of slavery.
Following Stowe, my discussion of Jacobs will introduce a slave’s perspective to female relationships in slavery. The relationships in Jacobs’ narrative are centered on family, and the power of relying on one’s own blood or close-knit community to survive slavery. Writing also within the sentimental mode, Jacobs focuses on her reader’s emotions in order to propel her anti-slavery argument. The female relationships Jacobs details are grounded in literal and metaphorical motherhood. She highlights these relationships as an emotional and familial, particularly motherly, survival method. Jacobs’ text showcases the importance of family, rather the relationships or friendships formed with strangers– thereby differentiating her argument from Stowe’s.
Nella Larsen’s Quicksand draws on the emotional and social difficulties one biracial woman faced in a world affected by the legacy of slavery and World War I. As a biracial woman, Helga develops relationships with men and women she hopes will support her progressive way of thinking and sense of selfhood. Helga’s relationships are more aptly defined as partnerships – given that “partners” may involve sexual, non-sexual, and business-like dynamics between two people. Helga must find authentic, or non-hypocritical, people to assist in her journey for selfhood and kin. But similarly to the relationships in Stowe and Jacobs, the friendships Helga creates often fail her. The question of why they fail in Quicksand connects directly to the question the novel itself is asking: is the search for selfhood more important than the search for kin? The argument all three works make with these failures represents a call to action – not just for the time period in which their novels were written, but also for future American communities. The continuing consequences of racial and gender discrimination exposed by Stowe, Jacobs, and Larsen show us that real social change must come from people – from the relationships we form.
12
Durkee, Patrick David. "Republican genealogies : selfhood and civic sensibilities in three writers of the American renaissance /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 1998. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p9835403.
Full text
13
Sarnosky, Yolonda P. "Black female authors document a loss of sexual identity Jacobs, Morrison, Walker, Naylor, and Moody /." Instructions for remote access. Click here to access this electronic resource. Access available to Kutztown University faculty, staff, and students only, 1999. http://www.kutztown.edu/library/services/remote_access.asp.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (M.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 1999.Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2836. Typescript. Abstract appears on leaf [ii]. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-67).
14
Lystar, Kimberley J. "Two female perspectives on the slave family as described in Harriet Jacobs' "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" and Mattie Griffith's "Autobiography of a Female Slave"." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/9987.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis will explore an issue in the history of American slavery: the importance of the slave family to individual female slaves. The slave families examined in this thesis do not consist exclusively of blood relations. They also include groups of individuals who came together and depended on and loved one another as much as blood relations. These bonds of affection also constituted family. In the main part of the thesis two sources will be examined in great detail: Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861; and Mattie Griffith's Autobiography of a Female Slave, published in 1856. The main issue to be discussed is how these two women described the interaction of members of slave families. Jacobs was a fugitive slave living in the North when she wrote her slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in the 1850s. Griffith, on the other hand, was a white women who wrote a slave novel entitled Autobiography of a Female Slave in 1856. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
15
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.
Full text
16
Cato, Farrah M. "The alternative tradition of womanhood in nineteenth-century African-American women's writings." Honors in the Major Thesis, University of Central Florida, 1999. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETH/id/54.
Full textAbstract:
This item is only available in print in the UCF Libraries. If this is your Honors Thesis, you can help us make it available online for use by researchers around the world by following the instructions on the distribution consent form at http://library.ucf.edu/Systems/DigitalInitiatives/DigitalCollections/InternetDistributionConsentAgreementForm.pdf You may also contact the project coordinator, Kerri Bottorff, at kerri.bottorff@ucf.edu for more information.Bachelors
Arts and Sciences
English
17
Luttrull, Daniel. "Solidarity Through Vacancy: Didactic Strategies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1586451075218142.
Full text
18
Spong, Kaitlyn M. "“Your love is too thick”: An Analysis of Black Motherhood in Slave Narratives, Neo-Slave Narratives, and Our Contemporary Moment." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2018. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2573.
Full textAbstract:
In this paper, Kait Spong examines alternative practices of mothering that are strategic nature, heavily analyzing Patricia Hill Collins’ concepts of “othermothering” and “preservative love” as applied to Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, Beloved and Harriet Jacob’s 1861 slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Using literary analysis as a vehicle, Spong then applies these West African notions of motherhood to a modern context by evaluating contemporary social movements such as Black Lives Matter where black mothers have played a prominent role in making public statements against systemic issues such as police brutality, heightened surveillance, and the prison industrial complex.
19
Watkins, Emily Stuart. "“That I should always listen to my body and love it”: Finding the Mind-Body Connection in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Slave Texts." VCU Scholars Compass, 2011. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/2363.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis explores the presence of the movement theories of Irmgard Bartenieff, Peggy Hackney, and Rudolf Von Laban in the following texts: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself (1845), The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave (1831), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, Linda Brent (1861), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). The terms and phrases of movement theory will be introduced to the contemporary critical discussion already surrounding the texts, both furthering and challenging existing arguments.
20
Blasingame, Dionne. "The Trauma of Chattel Slavery: A Womanist Perspective Women on Georgia in Early American Times." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2012. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/138.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis explores the psycho-socio-cultural dynamics that surrounded black womanhood in antebellumGeorgia. The goal is twofold: first, to examine how slave narratives, testimonies, and interviews depicted the plight of enslaved black women through a womanist lens and second, to discover what political and socio-cultural constructions enabled the severe slave institution that was endemic toGeorgia. Womanist theory, psychoanalytic theory, and trauma theory are addressed in this study to focus on antebellum or pre-Civil WarGeorgia.
21
Modzelewski, Ann Shirley. "Internal dialogues: Construction of the self in The Woman Warrior." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2003. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2468.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis considers past autobiographical theory and questions whether it addresses the autobiography of the female writer. Autobiographies of Harriet Jacobs, Margaret Sanger, and Maxine Hong Kingston are examined to reveal their polyvocality, use of the autobiographical "I", and rhetorical strategies maintained in order to create a close relationship with the reader. Particular attention is paid to Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism and Sidonie Smith's autobiographical "I."
22
Roy, Michaël. "« My Narrative is just published » : publication, circulation et réception des récits d'esclaves africains-américains, 1825-1861." Thesis, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2015. http://www.theses.fr/2015USPCD080.
Full textAbstract:
Cette thèse entreprend l’étude du corpus des récits d’esclaves africains-américains publiés entre 1825 et 1861 au prisme de l’histoire du livre et de l’édition. À partir de recherches sur archives, elle met au jour les modes de publication, de circulation et de réception de récits emblématiques – ceux de Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, ou encore Harriet Jacobs – et de récits moins connus. Partant, elle remet en cause certaines idées reçues sur ces récits de la période antebellum, dont la critique considère généralement qu’ils furent publiés grâce à l’aide des sociétés antiesclavagistes, qu’ils rencontrèrent un succès considérable auprès de la classe moyenne blanche du Nord et furent tirés à des milliers d’exemplaires, et qu’ils constituèrent rapidement un genre à part dans la production littéraire de l’époque. Il s’agit dans ce travail de montrer la diversité des dispositifs éditoriaux au sein desquels les récits d’esclaves virent le jour, en même temps que de s’interroger sur le rapport des Africains-Américains au livre et à l’imprimé et sur leurs pratiques en matière de publication, à un moment où l’industrie éditoriale est encore en cours d’émergence et où les acteurs du livre ne publient guère d’ouvrages ayant trait à l’abolitionnisme (au moins jusqu’à la parution d’Uncle Tom’s Cabin de Harriet Beecher Stowe en 1852). En réinscrivant les récits d’esclaves dans le réseau de pratiques et de discours qui ont permis leur essor, et en les considérant dans leur dimension matérielle, cette thèse entend montrer la nature hétérogène et fluide d’un objet littéraire souvent perçu par la critique comme formant un tout cohérent et strictement codifiéThis dissertation is at the crossroads of two distinct disciplinary fields : African American studies and the history of the book. More specifically, it examines the publication, circulation, and reception of antebellum slave narratives—the narratives of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as a number of lesser-known works. The story of the slave narrative is well rehearsed : narratives of ex-slaves, critics say, were usually written in collaboration with white abolitionists, with antislavery societies subsidizing publication ; they met with considerable success, going through multiple editions and selling in the tens of thousands ; they were largely directed toward a northern white audience ; and they soon emerged as a distinct genre in antebellum America. None of these statements is fundamentally untrue. The overall picture they paint of antebellum slave narratives is, however, a distorted one. Slave narratives were produced through a variety of authorial economies. Investigating these economies allows to shed new light not only on the slave narrative as a genre, but also on African Americans’ print practices at a time when the publishing industry was still emerging and when book people were reluctant to publish and distribute antislavery literature—at least before Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin came out in 1852. Acknowledging the heterogeneous and fluid nature of what is often perceived as a homogeneous and strictly codified genre gives us a better sense of how slave narratives might have been variously received and consumed in the decades preceding the Civil War
23
Hughes, Tammy L. "Mothers and their metaphoric wombs : the birth of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the lfe of a slave girl /." 2006. http://www.consuls.org/record=b2802224.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (M.A.) -- Central Connecticut State University, 2006.Thesis advisor: Aimee L. Pozorski. "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-61). Also available via the World Wide Web.
24
Chýlková, Jana. "Vyprávění afroamerických otroků v souvislostech: Frederick Douglass a Harriet Ann Jacobs." Master's thesis, 2016. http://www.nusl.cz/ntk/nusl-343033.
Full textAbstract:
in English The aim of this MA thesis is to bring new perspectives on the genre of the African-American slave narrative. Therefore, its wider historical, socio-political and gender contexts are considered and the circumstances surrounding its development and current criticism are briefly outlined. The point of departure is a discussion of definitions that vary among the scholars who select different criteria for the subject of definition. The existing diversity of the texts and voices is discussed in connection to Moses Grandy's Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave in the United States of America. Grandy's narrative, an account of the maritime slave life, is analyzed. Its traditional, uniform narrative structures are juxtaposed with passages where some aspects of his masculine identity, problematized by the institution of slavery, can be traced. Ultimately, the thesis attempts to show that while the conventionalized framework pre-defining the narrative outline and themes is delineated by James Olney, any generally recognized definition of the genre does not exist. As a result of that conclusion, the genre is defined in the scope of this thesis. After the major characteristics of the genre are discussed and the definition of the African- American slave narrative is put forward, more...
25
Chen, Rui-Ching, and 陳瑞卿. ""The Mythic Text" of Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, and Maya Angelou." Thesis, 2007. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/35862102893699914491.
Full textAbstract:
博士國立成功大學
外國語文學系碩博士班
95
Drawing from Holloway's figurative use of the“mythic text,”this dissertation examines the first-person narratives of Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, and Maya Angelou so as to discover how these four Afro-American women writers originate their varied mythic texts, synchronically and diachronically revising both one another and their male counterparts in their own times. With this theoretical approach, I find out that in Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral Wheatley originates her mythic text from the Puritan redemption myth, which is blended with the Puritan captivity narrative form, associates herself with her enslaved fellowmen, claims her African identity, and connects to her African communal past. Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl originates her mythic text by subverting the Christian myth to strongly attack slavery and the hypocritical white Christian slaveholders. With her spiritual rebellion, she further revises the dominant theology, passive Christian womanhood and motherhood. Her memories of an ancestral voice partially empower her to successfully become a fugitive slave along with communal help and maternal love for her children. Hurston originates her mythic text from the black folkloric storytelling narrative and terms it the power of words, which she associates with her female ancestral voice. Through this power, in Dust Tracks on a Road she relates her personal history and retells the history of her Eatonville community. Although the community deprives her of this speaking voice on her mother's deathbed, in Mules and Men she returns to her Southern black rural community to search for a mother figure with conjuring power and to collect the folklore that she heard during her childhood. This homeward journey has her reclaim her past connection with her own ethnic cultural community. Angelou originates her mythic text from her black ethnic cultural roots and deliberately parallels her personal history with that of the grand Afro-American socio-political surroundings. Due to her self-consciousness and identity with her ancestors, family, and community, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) she invents her self and recreates the time when Afro-Americans still have to encounter institutionalized racial prejudice. Because she integrates her personal life with the communal history, she clearly connects her self-development with her ethnic community and thus expresses a communal voice. She relates her life after her homeward trip to Africa and eventually becomes an empowered black woman writer in A Song Flung Up to Heaven, in which she concludes the book with the first line of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Overall, these four writers intertextually represent themselves in/against various contexts, while evolving their racial and gender selves during the varied phases of their lives. Through the memories of words, they are conscious of their collective self and clearly express their communal voice in their “mythic text.”
26
Marshall-Scott, Latasha Chanell. "Jacobs and slave law psychoanalyzing Incidents in the life of a slave girl /." 2003. http://etd.nd.edu/ETD-db/theses/available/etd-09082003-123106/.
Full text
27
Wyckoff, Robert Thomas. "Laying Claim to the Home: Homesteads and National Domesticity in Antebellum America." Thesis, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/149326.
Full textAbstract:
his dissertation examines the rhetoric of the homestead movement in antebellum America as a particular instance of domesticity. Homestead rhetoric alters the modes of identity and subjectivity usually found in domesticity, and alters the home-nation metaphor at the moment when the nation faced an increasing sectional divide that would lead to a Civil War. As deployed by Congressmen, homestead rhetoric used domesticity to define the relationship between manhood and citizenship. Harriet Jacobs uses this rhetoric in her autobiographical Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to shape an identity more in line with male homesteaders than with the subjects of women’s domesticity. E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Haunted Homestead offers the home-nation metaphor as a solution to national crisis, but ultimately the crisis is too large to solve through domesticity.
This dissertation uses Jurgen Habermas’s concepts of lifeworld and system to assess the types of subjects created through the different modes of domesticity. Lifeworld describes modes of communication that foster the agency of individuals, and system describes the instrumentalization of individuals into roles where they are only a means to an end. The lifeworld created through homestead rhetoric is ultimately systematized by the importance of transforming land into property; Harriet Jacobs recognizes that she must escape the systematization of slavery and enter into a new economic system to have her rights fully acknowledged; Southworth’s failure to find a literary solution to national problems suggests the limits of a literary lifeworld, or the extent to which the domestic itself has been systematized. This dissertation concludes by considering how Laura Ingalls Wilder’s experience homesteading in South Dakota can bring an ecocritical perspective to lifeworld and system. Ingalls Wilder rejects the system of commodified nature to find contentment in a lifeworld affirmed through an agrarian relationship to the land.
28
Thango, Linda Thokozile. "Scratching where it itches in the autobiographies of Harriet Jacob's incidents in the life of a slave girl and Bhanu Kapil's Schizophrene." Thesis, 2017. https://hdl.handle.net/10539/24470.
Full textAbstract:
A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Johannesburg, 2017Set within a revisionist and feminist context, this thesis seeks to draw parallels in the autobiographical texts of Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) written by an African American ex-enslaved and Schizophrene (2011) penned by Bhanu Kapil, a British born Asian American, a descendant of a generation that live (d) through/with ‘what happened in a particular country on a particular day in August 14th 1947’ (Quaid). These literary representations will constitute the corpus of this research paper as it attempts to examine how these autobiographies draw attention to and break the notion of prevailing dominant geographies of oppression. In both texts, the authors juxtapose appropriation and hegemony with an alternative literary geographic narrative that seeks to recuperate the liminal (black) body and psyche. This research paper will seek to explore the multiple and interrelated ways in which both authors employ certain strategic mechanisms to re-appropriate tools of social power, thus exposing the frailties of their respective oppressive histories by disrupting their continued, albeit imagined stronghold on them. In employing their autobiographies as anthropological arsenals, these authors seem to demonstrate the manner in which history has attempted through its numerous sites of oppression not only to construct black victims and mere black bodies but also to un-write and evacuate its untidiness. These autobiographies will be employed to reconstruct and re-imagine the authors but symbolically the collective black body as more than objects but rather as humans with subjectivities and self-assertion. The paper further seeks to understand how these autobiographies tend to a vicious past of slavery and partition and how they translate these memories, remembering the depth of their experiences whilst also being haunted by their contemporary echoes. An accent will be given to the ambivalence, perversions and anxieties of these autobiographies.
XL2018
29
Krivdo, Michael Edward. ""What Are Marines For?" The United States Marine Corps in the Civil War Era." Thesis, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2011-05-9268.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation provides analysis on several areas of study related to the history of the United States Marine Corps in the Civil War Era. One element scrutinizes the efforts of Commandant Archibald Henderson to transform the Corps into a more nimble and professional organization. Henderson's initiatives are placed within the framework of the several fundamental changes that the U.S. Navy was undergoing as it worked to experiment with, acquire, and incorporate new naval technologies into its own operational concept. Analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Henderson's programs are provided and comparisons drawn with those priorities established by his successor, Commandant John Harris. In addition, the operations undertaken by the Corps during the Civil War are evaluated in terms of their relative benefit for the national military establishment as a whole.
The Corps organization and operational concept is scrutinized and compared with that of similar military structures. In particular, the relationship between the U.S. Marine Corps and the Confederate States Marine Corps are compared. In the process, the South's Corps, born in part out of that of the North's, exhibited many distinct advantages that the USMC solidly resisted adopting during the war years. The influence of key leaders, both military and civilian, reveals many problems that continued to negatively affect the Corps' ability to meet operational requirements as defined by senior naval and Army commanders.
Yet despite these issues, the Corps' Civil War experiences served as a crucible for forging a new generation of leaders who earnestly fought for reforms and increased professionalization of the unit. Although the Corps suffered from several problems related to lack of institutional vision and leadership failings of some senior officers, at a small unit level the officers and Marines performed their duties in a competent, enthusiastic, and courageous manner. Therefore, Marines continued to be in great demand by naval commanders at all levels, who actively sought their service in a variety of operation.