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Georges Henein, Poete Des Marges., Evelyne M. Bornier
Georges Henein, Poete Des Marges., Evelyne M. Bornier
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation explores the Franco-Egyptian cultural and literary interactions in the mid-20th century, and examines the importance of these exchanges in the writings and intellectual journey of poet Georges Henein (1914--1973). This study is divided into three chapters. In a first chapter, I define the origins and stakes of a francophone Egyptian movement born from a small group of intellectuals of various cultures, who embraced French as their lingua franca. I explore this movement from a socio-historical and literary point of view, and through an overview of the period (1910--1962), lay the ground to a study of Egyptian-born writer Georges …
Tragicomedy: An Attempt At Classification., Jeri Laureen Lowe
Tragicomedy: An Attempt At Classification., Jeri Laureen Lowe
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This study has attempted to identify the specificity of tragicomedy in light of the lack of any critical consensus as to its nature by looking at tragicomedy as theatre. Theatre's difference from other genres lies in the importance of the spectator's role in the theatrical event, and it is the premise of this analysis that it is in the role of the spectator that the specificity of tragicomedy is to be identified. Whereas in tragedy and comedy the spectator is made to participate in closure by a well-constructed structure which leads him/her to a conclusion ("catharsis" or "epiphany"), this study …
How The Villanelle's Form Got Fixed., Julie Ellen Kane
How The Villanelle's Form Got Fixed., Julie Ellen Kane
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This work debunks the myth of the villanelle as a "fixed poetic form" dating back to the sixteenth century or earlier and replaces it with a new-historical account of how a semi-improvisatory musico-poetic genre, the choral-dance lyric, was "translated" across ruptures in lyric technology between oral, manuscript, and print cultures. The "fixity" of the villanelle's written form is shown to be not a matter of long-standing "heritage" or "tradition," but the result of deliberate actions taken by one eighteenth- and one nineteenth-century individual who inserted less-than-truthful passages into otherwise "authoritative" prosodic treatises. Chapter 1 identifies the literary sources responsible for …
Reawakening Sleeping Beauty: Fairy -Tale Revision And The Mid -Victorian Metaphysical Crisis., Cynthia Lynn Demarcus
Reawakening Sleeping Beauty: Fairy -Tale Revision And The Mid -Victorian Metaphysical Crisis., Cynthia Lynn Demarcus
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Despite growing scholarly recognition of subversive social and political content in Victorian fairy tales, their significance in relation to the oft-cited Victorian "spiritual crisis" remains largely unexplored. This interdisciplinary study addresses that critical gap by examining three literary revisions of Sleeping Beauty from the early 1860s as pointed efforts to enter the intensified religious debate following the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species. The three revisions---Charles Dickens's novel Great Expectations (1860--61), Christina Rossetti's narrative poem "Goblin Market" (1862) and George MacDonald's fairy-tale "The Light Princess" (1864)---all appropriate the popular Sleeping Beauty narrative to create a vivid and emotionally …
You Can't Imagine This Life. Diaries And Letters Of A Southern-Jewish Grande Dame, Josephine Joel Heyman, 1901-1993., Cynthia Betty Levy
You Can't Imagine This Life. Diaries And Letters Of A Southern-Jewish Grande Dame, Josephine Joel Heyman, 1901-1993., Cynthia Betty Levy
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Josephine "Jo" Joel Heyman (1901--1993) provides an intimate and touching record of twentieth century upper-middle-class Atlanta-Jewish life through her teenage and young adult diaries and letters. Through her autobiographical writings, this twentieth century Southern-Jewish woman's regional, ethnic, and gender identities are revealed. Mrs. Heyman, an influential civic leader in Atlanta, Georgia, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College. She began writing diaries as a child to express her private feelings and thoughts, and as a young adult she wrote letters from college to her future fiance. The backdrop of her personal story is the story of the Southern-Jewish community, which …
A Critical Edition Of The Passion And Advent Chapters Of The Pre-Caxtonian "Gilte Legende"., Rosary Jackman Crain
A Critical Edition Of The Passion And Advent Chapters Of The Pre-Caxtonian "Gilte Legende"., Rosary Jackman Crain
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation is a critical edition of the Passion and Advent chapters of the Middle English Gilte Legende based an MS Lambeth Palace 72 in collation with other manuscripts. Editions of the Legenda aurea, the original Latin text, and of the Legende doree, an intermediate French text, were also consulted. The introduction begins by reviewing the complete research on the Gilte Legende, describing the manuscripts, their handwritings and orthographies, presenting their affiliations in a stemma, and detailing the editorial process. The transmission of the text is traced from the Legenda aurea (c.1266), the Latin legendary of James Varagine, through the …
Practicing Freedom With Care: The Development Of Warrior-Caregiving In Contemporary Literature From The Americas., Joanna Barszewska Marshall
Practicing Freedom With Care: The Development Of Warrior-Caregiving In Contemporary Literature From The Americas., Joanna Barszewska Marshall
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Taking my cue from Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, I read three contemporary Black writers in the Americas---George Lamming, Barbados; Michelle Cliff, Jamaica; and Jess Mowry, United States---for signs of a response that was ignored when prevailing conceptions of freedom were formulated in early America. Suggesting that the vision embodied in the name of one plantation, Sans Souci, characterized attempts to deal with the anxieties of a slaveholding free republic, I argue that these writers provide an alternative vision by attempting to reconcile the practices of freedom and care, and I engage their vision in dialogue with several theoretical …
Family Portraits: Contemporary Women Novelists And The Nuclear Family., Tamra Lynn Horton
Family Portraits: Contemporary Women Novelists And The Nuclear Family., Tamra Lynn Horton
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
A society whose economy becomes increasingly dependent on commodity fetishism cultivates obsessive materialistic desire in its subjects. The demand for mass consumerism buoys reification, a mania wherein human beings are analogous to goods and vice versa. Successful reification depends upon hegemonic apparatuses: social, legal, and political agencies of dominant ideology. Reification is perhaps most fully realized in the form of fetishized human relationships. In the United States today, the most coercive and unassailable hegemonic apparatus is the institutionalized nuclear family, a social and legal affiliation between individuals so dogmatically fetishized as to have become compulsory. Contemporary American women writers are …
Unrestrained Women And Decadent Old Aristocrats: The Nineteenth-Century Middle Class Struggle For Cultural Hegemony., Ronald Hamilton May
Unrestrained Women And Decadent Old Aristocrats: The Nineteenth-Century Middle Class Struggle For Cultural Hegemony., Ronald Hamilton May
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation examines three popular novels of the Victorian period: W. G. M. Reynolds's Wagner, the Wehr-wolf (1846-7), Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Each work was written during distinct decades of the nineteenth century when certain popular novels were under attack for rotting the minds of their readers, promoting vice, and subverting cultural standards. During the 1840s, when Reynolds's wrote Wagner, the Wehr-wolf , novels that were published in cheap penny weeklies created a sensation among mass readers. In the 1860s, when Braddon wrote Lady Audley's Secret, the sensation novel became popular with …
The Search For Senefiance: Contraires Allegories In The "Roman De La Rose", Camilla Rachal Pugh
The Search For Senefiance: Contraires Allegories In The "Roman De La Rose", Camilla Rachal Pugh
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
It is the thesis of this dissertation that there exists in the Roman de la Rose a system of contraires allegories which move in a direction opposed to the traditional readings of three facets of the text. They are (1) Amant's assault upon the statue/sanctuary, (2) his relationship with Bel Accueil, and (3) the advice which Genius gives to Amour's barons. In addition, when taken cumulatively, the readings advanced argue for the identification of the Roman de la Rose with the Evangile eternel of Joachim de Fiore. These readings depend upon the reader's recognition of Faus Semblant as a contraire …
The Women On/Of The Porch: Performative Space In African-American Women's Fiction., Lajuan Evette Simpson
The Women On/Of The Porch: Performative Space In African-American Women's Fiction., Lajuan Evette Simpson
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Mediating Structures in African-American literature are essential in the formation of identity in the lives of the characters. Contemporary theory has moved into a deeper layer of hermeneutics beyond self/other dichotomies to look at the space between binary opposites. Therefore, modern theorists look at sites of play, of exchange, and of transformation. The porch is such a space. A mediating structure is a space that allows the various characters to develop and define themselves. Because of African-Americans, lack of freedom, it was important for them to find a space in which they were able to move and express their ideas, …
The "Power...To Alter And Amend": Textual Production And Editorial Actions In Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa"., Steven Robert Price
The "Power...To Alter And Amend": Textual Production And Editorial Actions In Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa"., Steven Robert Price
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation is a study of texts, focusing on how texts are constructed (through both words as well as physical attributes) and how they are edited after their initial composition. The scope of this dissertation is limited to Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) and his rare 1750 third edition of Clarissa and to the characters in Clarissa and their familiar letters. I argue that the altering of a text is a negotiation of power between the editor and the author, and that editors advance their personal agendas by undermining the intentions of the author. In Chapter 1, I explain the relevancy of …
"To Play With Fixities And Definites": Byron's Fanciful Real World Games In "Don Juan"., Nancy Clark Victory
"To Play With Fixities And Definites": Byron's Fanciful Real World Games In "Don Juan"., Nancy Clark Victory
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
In his "epic" retelling of the Don Juan tale, Byron playfully transforms his conventional sources into a poem which explores, among other subjects, Byron's poetics. Of the many love relationships in Don Juan, Juan and Haidee's represents not only ideal love, but also a startlingly Romantic expression of poetic activity. The lovers' transformation of the elements of their heretofore hostile world into a natural playworld is accomplished by a fourth variety of Romantic imagination, a Byronic Fancy which surpasses the mechanical nature of Coleridge's "Fancy." Operating in a manner strikingly similar to Coleridge's "secondary Imagination," Byron's poetic faculty also "dissolves, …
Autobiography From St. Augustine To David Antin: Examining The Construction Of The Self As Mutually Reflective Of Cultural Developments In Science And Technology, Art, And Literary Theory., Jessica Lynn Faust
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
In this study, I look at the mutually reflective changes in society and autobiography in works definitive for their various periods: Augustine's The Confessions from antiquity; Rousseau's The Confessions from the eighteenth century; the autobiographical writings of Gertrude Stein, from the modernist period; and, most importantly here, the focus on the development of David Antin's work as representative of both postmodernism and current culture. Specifically, I consider the construction of the self in respect to art, literary theory, memory research, and science and technology. During the second half of the twentieth century, computers have permeated almost every facet of society. …
Functions Of Liminality In Literature: A Study Of Georges Bataille's "Le Bleu Du Ciel", Julien Green's "L'Autre", And Assia Djebar's "L'Amour, La Fantasia"., Malynda Strother Taylor
Functions Of Liminality In Literature: A Study Of Georges Bataille's "Le Bleu Du Ciel", Julien Green's "L'Autre", And Assia Djebar's "L'Amour, La Fantasia"., Malynda Strother Taylor
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
The term "liminality" originated in the work of two socioanthropologists, Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner; it is descriptive of the middle phase in a rite of passage. Whereas the "betwixt and between" transitional pattern is temporary in tribal societies, it often becomes a way of life in the twentieth century. Although their projects differ greatly, Victor Turner's and Jacques Derrida's mutual interest in border spaces brings them both into this discussion. Some of the same phenomena described by the sociological term, liminality, is discussed philosophically as "undecidability" and "aporia." Liminality functions to link and to investigate three disparate twentieth-century …
The Clarity Of The Modern: Or, The Ambiguities Of Henry James And Wallace Stevens., Gregory Angelo Marks
The Clarity Of The Modern: Or, The Ambiguities Of Henry James And Wallace Stevens., Gregory Angelo Marks
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Clarity, in all its various guises, was before the advent of Romanticism looked upon as an unquestioned focus of attention and irrefutable goal of human endeavor. Conversely, ambiguity was seen negatively: it was in language an obstacle to communication; in ethics, an indecisiveness failing action; and in ontology and aesthetics, a slovenly disorder. With Romanticism, this basic consensus regarding these terms ends. No longer an expression of censure, ambiguity is imagined as a liberatory force. Clarity, if attainable at all, is dismissed as mere rigidity. The works of Americans Henry James and Wallace Stevens embody and enact this tension and …
The Control Of Time In Renaissance England: Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, And Donne., Eric C. Brown
The Control Of Time In Renaissance England: Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, And Donne., Eric C. Brown
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
While critics have much analyzed the idea of time, they have left largely unchronicled an important Renaissance conception. Time the destroyer or devourer and time the creator or revealer of truth are familiar early modern tropes. But the inversion of this power structure--humanity not controlled by but controlling time--was equally pervasive. Especially apparent are inversions in which time is acted upon as an instrument objectified for use and abuse. Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Donne all explore this notion of time as controllable instrument, alternately condemning or glorifying time's debasement, enfeeblement, subjugation, and manipulation. For Marlowe, the control of time manifests …
Representations Of Class, Gender, Race, And Religion In The Novels Of Somerville And Ross, 1894-1925., Nicole Pepinster Greene
Representations Of Class, Gender, Race, And Religion In The Novels Of Somerville And Ross, 1894-1925., Nicole Pepinster Greene
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation examines how the Anglo-Irish writers, Edith Somerville and Martin Ross (nee Violet Martin), attempt to define themselves and others in terms of class, gender, race, and religion at a time when self-definition itself is an act of resistance and defiance. This analysis focuses on four novels: The Real Charlotte (1894), co-authored by Somerville and Ross, Mount Music (1919), An Enthusiast (1921), and The Big House of Inver (1925), written by Somerville alone. Since these novels were composed during the most chaotic years of Irish history when the country was in transition from the status of a colonial dependency …
All Blues: A Study Of African-American Resistance Poetry., Anthony Jerome Bolden
All Blues: A Study Of African-American Resistance Poetry., Anthony Jerome Bolden
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, critics of African-American poetry have disagreed vehemently about poetic form. Some, like J. Saunders Redding, for instance, have expressed skepticism about poetry based upon oral forms. Others, like Sterling Brown, have argued that a viable poetics can be developed from black expressive forms. This dissertation analyzes the debate over black poetic form and traces the development of modernist and postmodernist poetics that have been shaped by the specific contours of African-American vernacular culture. Yet this study is not merely formalistic. Although "All Blues" describes a blues aesthetic by examining intersexual relationships between the …
Coincidence And Class In The Victorian Novel., Beverly Maddox Moon
Coincidence And Class In The Victorian Novel., Beverly Maddox Moon
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
In the Victorian novels of this study, Coincidence and Class in the Victorian Novel, coincidence is an unacknowledged paradigm for class mobility. Its role for the most part unremarked, coincidence moves money and property into the hands of the protagonist, allowing the transition between classes to take place. In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Villette, and Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, coincidence is a paradox in that it accomplishes two very different ends, resolution and conflict, simultaneously. As a narrative device, coincidence camouflages narrative gaps, arranging resolution within the text by allowing improved class position; as a narrative strategy, …
American Medusa, American Sphinx: The Female Gaze And Knowledge In Modern Fiction And Film., Janet Clare Wondra
American Medusa, American Sphinx: The Female Gaze And Knowledge In Modern Fiction And Film., Janet Clare Wondra
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Two major arguments define this study, the first being that the gaze, a concept borrowed from film theory, provides a productive approach to many literary texts, whether central to the canon, like The Sound and the Fury and The Great Gatsby, or relatively new to critical attention, like Nella Larsen's Passing. Locating and following the gaze enables literary critics to bring into focus the power relations within narratives and the scopic negotiations by which hierarchies of privilege are established and maintained. Second, the study both argues and demonstrates that feminist film theory has prematurely closed important avenues of investigation by …
Daniel Defoe's "An Essay On The History And Reality Of Apparitions": A Critical Edition., Kathleen Louise Kincade
Daniel Defoe's "An Essay On The History And Reality Of Apparitions": A Critical Edition., Kathleen Louise Kincade
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation is a scholarly edition of Daniel Defoe's An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions, which was published in 1727 and has never been re-edited since his death in 1731. It poses several interesting problems for both the literary critic and bibliographer. This edition is challenging for the bibliographer because, initially, this work was published anonymously. The second edition appeared with the addition of "by Andrew Moreton, Esq." as author. A section of my introduction attributes this work to Defoe by using contemporary theory and methods. Defoe scholars have had a problem attributing works to Defoe. Instead …
Rousseau And The Lyric Natural: The Self As Representation., Pamela Diane Gay
Rousseau And The Lyric Natural: The Self As Representation., Pamela Diane Gay
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's work for the lyric stage comprises several opera libretti (Les Muses galantes and La Decouverte du nouveau monde), an intermede ( Le Devin du village), a scene lyrique ( Pygmalion) and an unfinished opera (Daphnis et Chloce ). These works use as a motif the figure of nature while continually defining and redefining, in a sort of spiral development, the self. Nature represents for Rousseau and others of his century a paradigm allowing for small segments of history to be presented as an evenly construed narrative. For Rousseau, the construction of a narrative in Le Second Discours marks …
The Portrait Of A Psyche: Women's Underworld Journeys In Four Modern American Novels., Kristen Sifert
The Portrait Of A Psyche: Women's Underworld Journeys In Four Modern American Novels., Kristen Sifert
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Drawing from James Hillman's psychological reading of myth, this study traces the emergence of the ancient myth of Psyche in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, Caroline Gordon's The Women on the Porch, William Faulkner's Light in August, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. From the perspective of modern divisions, the novelists look forward to the wholeness of Psyche's reunion with Eros and the assumption of the mortal woman, yet their immediate focus is the transformative journey through the underworld. James elaborates the mythical impact of money; like the coins Psyche pays Charon, who detaches her from a sense of her …
The Flesh And The Spirit: The Female Subject And The Body In The Spiritual Autobiographies Of Anne Hutchinson, Anne Bradstreet And Mary Rowlandson., Mary Clare Carruth
The Flesh And The Spirit: The Female Subject And The Body In The Spiritual Autobiographies Of Anne Hutchinson, Anne Bradstreet And Mary Rowlandson., Mary Clare Carruth
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation approaches Anne Hutchinson's trial transcripts (1637-1638), Anne Bradstreet's "To My Dear Children" (1656), and Mary Rowlandson's "The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson" (1682) from the perspectives of autobiographical scholarship and feminist theory. It places these writers within a subversive matrilineal autobiographical tradition. It analyzes how seventeenth-century American Puritan women engender the conversion genre, which many scholars have assumed to be gender-neutral. In particular, it considers how Hutchinson, Bradstreet, and Rowlandson negotiate cultural inscriptions of the female body as they …
Created Works, Created Selves: Intersections Of Genre And Self-Fashioning In The New World., Leonard Joseph Vraniak Jr
Created Works, Created Selves: Intersections Of Genre And Self-Fashioning In The New World., Leonard Joseph Vraniak Jr
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
John Smith, Roger Williams, and Thomas Morton created images of themselves to attempt to gain position in the New World colonial undertaking, and each uses techniques of specific genres to bolter those images. However, each demonstrates a different degree of self-fashioning. John Smith collects and republishes texts much like Richard Hakluyt did back in England. However, Hakluyt's collections just reproduced texts, while Smith mixed others' writings about his colonial activities with his own work, creating a hybrid text with Smith as the subject. Smith's emphasis upon individual effort mirrors one level of humanistic achievement that Europeans of his era were …
Lex Scripta Et Lex Non Scripta: Tensions Between Law And Language In Late Fourteenth-Century England And Its Literature., Susanne Sara Thomas
Lex Scripta Et Lex Non Scripta: Tensions Between Law And Language In Late Fourteenth-Century England And Its Literature., Susanne Sara Thomas
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This work explores the connections between Middle English literature and transitions occurring within the English legal system. It focuses on the way Chaucer and the Gawain-poet negotiate the tension between the legal potency of the written word and the spoken word. As the common law contains an ongoing negotiation between written and unwritten forms of law, the dissertation discusses the function and significance of the tension between the lex scripta and the lex non scripta. It argues that the increasing displacement of oral and written language in the legal realm is a source of considerable cultural anxiety, and this anxiety …
Among Women: Toni Morrison's Mothers, Sisters, And Daughters., Hazel Ruth Reames Caillouet
Among Women: Toni Morrison's Mothers, Sisters, And Daughters., Hazel Ruth Reames Caillouet
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This work explores the relationships between and among women in the fiction of Toni Morrison. Morrison's mothers, sisters, and daughters cannot function without the love and support of a community of women. Those characters who abandon or reject this community become lost to their own world. Morrison women, thus, find themselves in and through other women. The first two chapters establish Morrison's characters in relation to those of other authors in order to show her unique sense of community. Comparing Morrison's work to Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and her emphasis on individuality and isolation illustrates Morrison's dependence …
Prodigal Daughters And Pilgrims In Petticoats: Grace Greenwood And The Tradition Of American Women's Travel Writing., Paula Kathryn Garrett
Prodigal Daughters And Pilgrims In Petticoats: Grace Greenwood And The Tradition Of American Women's Travel Writing., Paula Kathryn Garrett
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Recovering a forgotten woman writer from the nineteenth century, Prodigal Daughters and Pilgrims in Petticoats: Grace Greenwood and the Tradition of American Women's Travel Writing focuses on the public letters of Grace Greenwood (Sara Jane Clarke Lippincott). In the 1870s, Greenwood successfully communicated feminist ideas as the first woman employed by the New York Times and one of the first women to enter Congressional press galleries. In her letters, often on the front-page of the paper, Greenwood addresses the major woman's rights issues of the time: equal pay, coverture laws, male violence, gender restrictions, educational opportunities, and woman's suffrage. This …
Ambivalent Idylls: Hardy, Glasgow, Faulkner, And The Pastoral., Stephan Randall Toms
Ambivalent Idylls: Hardy, Glasgow, Faulkner, And The Pastoral., Stephan Randall Toms
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Thomas Hardy, Ellen Glasgow, and William Faulkner used the pastoral mode to show the contradictions, inconsistencies, and dangers in some forms of bucolic idyll. The ambivalence of their texts toward the rural world causes many critics to deny or overlook the presence of the pastoral mode in the work of these three novelists. A study of pastoral literature reveals that its characteristics have never been as fixed as many theorists would like to believe. Pastoral redefines, subverts, and reinvents itself as it interacts with different people, cultures, and languages. The theories of Mikhail Bakhtin help us to understand textual ambivalence …