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“Þe Inglis In Seruage”: Textual Englishness, 1175 – 1330, Joseph Richard Wingenbach
“Þe Inglis In Seruage”: Textual Englishness, 1175 – 1330, Joseph Richard Wingenbach
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
For some time, scholars who study English identity formation in the literature produced between the Norman Conquest and the Hundred Years War have addressed the manifold ways English writers imagined and reconstructed the Anglo-Saxon past as a golden era free of the taint of foreign domination. I find the cultural memory of pre-Conquest England to be only a fraction of what constituted literary Englishness, and my research calls for a more nuanced description of English literary identity during the period in question. The hybrid critical approach I employ is a blend of historicist and structural linguistic methodologies that takes both …
Idling Women: The Domestic Bildungsroman And The American City, 1830-1900, Jordan L. Von Cannon
Idling Women: The Domestic Bildungsroman And The American City, 1830-1900, Jordan L. Von Cannon
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In Idling Women: The Domestic Bildungsroman and the American City, 1830-1900, I explore urban narratives of female non-development. In city novels featuring female protagonists, there are two normative arcs of development: either women find new opportunities for marriage, work, and, in some cases, independence in the city, or they fall prey to threats of seduction, poverty, and even death. However, these two plotlines fail to accommodate stories of women who wait to develop, fail at it, or otherwise resist what might be considered character growth. By problematizing distinctions between idleness and the American “work ethic” often tied to the industrialized …
Unsettling Feminist Traditions: Domesticities And Agency In U.S. Black Women's Life Writing, 1850-1926, Martha Pitts
Unsettling Feminist Traditions: Domesticities And Agency In U.S. Black Women's Life Writing, 1850-1926, Martha Pitts
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Since its inception, black feminist criticism has produced a number of sophisticated theoretical works that have challenged traditional approaches to both black literature and U.S. women’s writing, as well as assumptions about canon, the concept of tradition, narrative conventions, and more. Far too often, black feminist criticism has been associated with essentialism and presumed to have an anti-theoretical bias. This project begins at this disjuncture and argues that as a mode of analysis and a strategy of reading, black feminist criticism has lost none of its strengths and potential, and that there are still new paths to take and new …
The Darkest Nation: American Melancholia In Modernist Narratives Of The First World War, Michael Von Cannon
The Darkest Nation: American Melancholia In Modernist Narratives Of The First World War, Michael Von Cannon
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation, entitled The Darkest Nation: American Melancholia in Modernist Narratives of the First World War, re-conceptualizes U.S. modernism by attending to how the historical event of WWI inaugurated melancholia, or sustained grief, as the cornerstone of a new form of nationalism. Scholars have focused either on how consolatory mourning bolstered patriotism or how melancholia led to the demise of such an imagined community and to the growth of cosmopolitanism. I consider, however, an American modernist commitment to the nation of loss expressed, surprisingly enough, in narratives about noncombatants. For a country that entered the military conflict near its end, …