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Plantation Airs: Racial Paternalism And The Transformations Of Class In Southern Fiction, 1945-1971, Brannon Winn Costello
Plantation Airs: Racial Paternalism And The Transformations Of Class In Southern Fiction, 1945-1971, Brannon Winn Costello
Doctoral Dissertations
Plantation Airs explores a crucial aspect of the complicated intersection of race and class in the post-World War II South. Many factors, such as wealth and family, determine an individual’s class – a complicated and highly contested term, especially in the South. However, I argue that one important and often overlooked determinant of class is the performance of attitudes and behaviors associated with a romanticized image of the agrarian, antebellum South, especially racial paternalism. Fred Hobson has argued that Southern literary scholarship has been conspicuously silent about class; my dissertation strives to correct that omission. Drawing from historical scholarship and …
Picturing The Catastrophic Space Of Imagination: The Aesthetic Of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Lauren Todd Taylor
Picturing The Catastrophic Space Of Imagination: The Aesthetic Of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Lauren Todd Taylor
Doctoral Dissertations
In this study, I demonstrate how Swinburne develops an aesthetic that involves re-examining the contradictions and ambiguities arising in the tension between the celebration of the creative power of the imagination and the consideration of the material limitations that constrict the applications of the imagination’s power. He finds artistic integrity and productivity in the failure of the imagination to allow one to transcend the material world, because he determines that such failure allows one to discover many previously undetected possibilities for imaginative expression still inherent in the material world. Swinburne accomplishes this by privileging the fantasy component of art while …
Searching For America: The Development Of The Immigrant Narrative Across Jewish, African, Cuban, And Korean American Literature, Amanda Maree Lawrence
Searching For America: The Development Of The Immigrant Narrative Across Jewish, African, Cuban, And Korean American Literature, Amanda Maree Lawrence
Doctoral Dissertations
Searching for America: The Development of the Immigrant Narrative across Jewish, African, Cuban, and Korean American Literature is a longitudinal study that traces and accounts for the development of immigrant literature within specific ethnic groups, focusing on how different generations rewrite the immigrant narrative of their own cultures. Considering multiple texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Jewish, African, Cuban, and Korean American authors, I examine the changing relationship between language or literary form and identity politics for each group. In addition to exploring individual patterns of development, I suggest ways in which these very different ethnic texts speak …
The Captive Body: Nineteenth- And Twentieth-Century American Women Writers Redefine Pregnancy And Childbirth, Mary Ruth Marotte
The Captive Body: Nineteenth- And Twentieth-Century American Women Writers Redefine Pregnancy And Childbirth, Mary Ruth Marotte
Doctoral Dissertations
The last ten years have borne witness to a proliferation of pregnancy narratives in literature, popular texts and Internet sites that treat the subject realistically and often graphically. This has not always been the case. The publication of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening in 1899 was a turning point, marking the beginning of serious contemplation of how the pregnant condition has affected and continues to affect women’s participation in both social and intellectual endeavors. Since the publication of Chopin’s novel, American women writers, in contrast to their male counterparts, have often sought an understanding of pregnancy that defies the notion of …
Reframing The Subject: Abjection In Twentieth-Century American Literature, Amy Leigh White
Reframing The Subject: Abjection In Twentieth-Century American Literature, Amy Leigh White
Doctoral Dissertations
In response to major societal change in the early years of the twentieth century, modern psychology suggested new ways of thinking about selfhood. One’s relationship with oneself, one’s subjectivity, came to be viewed as being processed through a matrix of factors that the self is subject to. The notion of the Cartesian “self” was thus seriously questioned. Is there an essential self? To what extent is self conditioned by environment? Can we know ourselves? If not, is the self worth talking about?