Digital Commons Network^™

Longshoremen's Negotiation Of Masculinity And The Middle Class In 1950s Popular Culture, Tomaro I. Taylor

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis considers mid-20^th century portrayals of working-class longshoremen’s masculinity within the context of emerging middle-class gender constructions. I argue that although popular culture presents a roughly standardized depiction of longshoremen as “manly men,” these portrayals are significantly nuanced to demonstrate the difficulties working-class men faced as they attempted to navigate socio-cultural and socio-economic shifts related to class and the performance of their male gender. Specifically, I consider depictions of longshoremen’s disruptive masculinity, male identity formation, and masculine-male growth as reactions to paradigmatic shifts in American masculinity. Using three aspects of longshoremen’s non-work lives presented in A View from …

Hospitable Climates: Representations Of The West Indies In Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Marisa Carmen Iglesias

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

British expansion to the West Indies in the eighteenth-century resulted in vast economic growth for the British Empire and a rise in literature set in the region. Examining the literature allows for an in-depth exploration of how the Caribbean has become associated as a place of relaxation and escape though its early history of colonialism is fraught with violence. My study builds on the understanding of the Caribbean region in the eighteenth-century and utilizes hospitality theory to articulate the role that cultural exchange and physical setting play in the texts and in the formation of national identity, both in the …

Tracing The Material: Spaces And Objects In British And Irish Modernist Novels, Mary Allison Wise

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Tracing the Material considers how James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy represent material spaces and objects as a way of engaging with the fraught histories of England and Ireland. I argue that these three writers use spaces and objects to think through and critique nineteenth and early twentieth-century conflicts and transitions, particularly in the areas of empire, nationalism, gender, and family. Writing in the 1920s and 1930s, in the decline of British ascendency, the rise of the Irish Free State, and between the World Wars, these writers seek to interpret their history through …

Chosen Champions: Medieval And Early Modern Heroes As Postcolonial Reactions To Tensions Between England And Europe, Jessica Trant Labossiere

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project explores connections between hero and history, text and context. By engaging Postcolonial theories about the roles that invasion and oppression, play in developing national identity and how colonized people respond to such encounters in literature, I examine how experiences of invasion and hostile interaction as represented in medieval and early modern English literature influenced the creation of specific heroic values.

In my first chapter, I analyze The Battle of Maldon and Beowulf as exemplars of the Anglo-Saxon culture, observing that Byrhtnoth and Beowulf work as fictional embodiments of a fantasy of power: men of super-human strength and exceptional …

Developing Little England: Public Health, Popular Protest, And Colonial Policy In Barbados, 1918-1940, Brittany J. Merritt

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes struggles over the development of Barbadian health and sanitation during the period between the world wars. In doing so, it examines how the British Empire tried to use development policies to maintain its power overseas during the interwar years. During this period, British policymakers sought to improve health and sanitation to pacify restive Barbadian laborers influenced by transnational pan-African and socialist ideas following the First World War. However, white Barbadian elites, influenced by ideas of eugenics and population control, opposed metropolitan efforts to develop health and sanitation in the colony. Rather than repairing the colonial relationship, British …