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Preposterous America: The Language Of Inversion In Thoreau, Melville, And Hawthorne, Rasmus R. Simonsen
Preposterous America: The Language Of Inversion In Thoreau, Melville, And Hawthorne, Rasmus R. Simonsen
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This dissertation stages a series of readings that activate the inherent pull towards a queer aesthetic of “preposterousness” in the American Renaissance. In the introduction, I claim that American Studies and Queer Studies have been mutually implicated ever since F.O. Matthiessen’s seminal work American Renaissance. In this way, I bring to light the nascent strands of homoeroticsm and “deviant” practices that disrupt the teleology of normative masculinity in the nineteenth century. My intervention develops a queer heuristic through an exploration of the classical figure of hysteron proteron—the rhetorical inversion of the order of things. As a master-trope for my …
Transnational Influence In The Poetry Of Sarah Piatt: Poems Of Ireland And The American Civil War, Amy R. Hudgins
Transnational Influence In The Poetry Of Sarah Piatt: Poems Of Ireland And The American Civil War, Amy R. Hudgins
Global Honors Theses
Sarah Piatt, a recently recovered nineteenth century poet, is best known, where she is known at all, as an American poet. While this label is certainly appropriate, it should not obscure Piatt’s decidedly international focus, or more precisely, her transnational focus, especially in regard to Ireland. Piatt’s verse, considered by some to be the best poetry of her time second only to the work of Emily Dickinson, is remarkable for its quantity and breadth, but more importantly, for its subversive use of genteel style. Though her poems are generally divided into four overlapping categories, the two thematic classes of her …
Gothic Slumming: Realist Writers And Gothic Texts In Progressive Era America, Gillian Nelson Bauer
Gothic Slumming: Realist Writers And Gothic Texts In Progressive Era America, Gillian Nelson Bauer
Dissertations
During the Progressive Era, American realist and naturalist writers frequently employed the gothic mode. In contrast with critics who contend that the gothic is a subversive or disruptive mode, I suggest that the relationship between realism and the gothic is one of collaboration rather than conflict. These modally mixed works, which I refer to as gothic realism, express class anxieties that arose during this period, concerns that resulted from the rapid urbanization, immigration, increased cross-class interaction, and economic precariousness that mark the latter end of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth centuries. Following Teresa Goddu, I consider …
Narratives Of Southern Contact Zones: Mobility And The Literary Imagination Of Zora Neale Hurston And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Kyoko Shoji Hearn
Narratives Of Southern Contact Zones: Mobility And The Literary Imagination Of Zora Neale Hurston And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Kyoko Shoji Hearn
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation examines the literary works of the two Southern women writers, Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, based on the cultural contexts of the 1930s and the 1940s. It discusses how the two writers' works are in dialogue with each other, and with the particular historical period in which the South had gone through many social, economical, and cultural changes. Hurston and Rawlings, who became friends with each other beyond their racial background in the segregated South, shared physical and social mobility and the interest in the Southern folk cultures. They wrote fiction about the region and its …