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Moral Performances: Melodrama And Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Jeffrey Taylor Pusch
Moral Performances: Melodrama And Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Jeffrey Taylor Pusch
Dissertations
Despite a high number of ticket sales, theater reviews, and innumerable letters and diary entries detailing trips to the theater, the stereotype that theater in nineteenth-century America was almost culturally invisible continued well into the twentieth century. Indeed, a scan of anthologies of American literature fails to yield any examples of nineteenth-century drama, even though figures like Henry James were also theater critics and playwrights. Just as it did in American life, theater exhibits a strong presence in the literature of the time. Considering theater’s pervasiveness, this dissertation seeks to restore it to its proper place in our study of …
Ladies And Gentlemen, Robert John Bartholomew
Ladies And Gentlemen, Robert John Bartholomew
Dissertations
This collection of short stories treats of the following diverse themes: the redemptive possibilities for seemingly despicable characters; the ways in which circumstances and the social environment affect characters' sexualities and personal relationships; the lengths to which characters are willing to go to get what they want, which want is often the desire to make contact with others; the struggle between characters' narcissism and their need to come to terms with a new self image, a self image which is often at odds with the one they wish for themselves; and the beauty of vulnerability. Additionally, one of the chief …
The Black Plumb Line: Re-Evaluating Race And Africanist Images In Non-Black Authored American Texts, Lashondra Vanessa Robinson
The Black Plumb Line: Re-Evaluating Race And Africanist Images In Non-Black Authored American Texts, Lashondra Vanessa Robinson
Dissertations
This study evaluates Africanisms (representations of racialized or ethnicized blackness) within three contemporary non-black authors’ texts: Jewish American Saul Bellow’s novel Henderson the Rain King, white southerner Melinda Haynes’ novel Mother of Pearl, and Nyurican poet Victor Hernández Cruz’s works “Mesa Blanca” and “White Table.” Though not entirely unproblematic, each selection somehow redefines black identity and agency to challenge denigrated representations of Africanist people and culture. In the process, each author subverts faulty components of American myths of racial purity, particularly stratifying black-white dualisms that promote whiteness, racial supremacy, and resulting undue privilege. This study also traces how Bellow, Haynes …
Running In Absentia, Jeffrey David Tucker
Running In Absentia, Jeffrey David Tucker
Dissertations
Running in Absentia is a collection of short fiction, short-short fiction (also known as flash fiction), and poetry, with a critical introduction.
Moon Landing, Jennifer Ann Marquardt
Moon Landing, Jennifer Ann Marquardt
Dissertations
The following short stories began and were finished—at least as finished as they appear here—during my time at the Center for Writers.
Bitter-Sweet Home: The Pastoral Ideal In African-American Literature, From Douglass To Wright, Robyn Merideth Preston-Mcgee
Bitter-Sweet Home: The Pastoral Ideal In African-American Literature, From Douglass To Wright, Robyn Merideth Preston-Mcgee
Dissertations
Discussions of the pastoral mode in American literary history frequently omit the complicated relationship between African Americans and the natural world, particularly as it relates to the South. The pastoral, as a sensibility, has long been an important part of the southern identity, for the mythos of the South long depended upon its association with a new “Garden of the World” image, a paradise dependent upon slave labor and a racial hierarchy to sustain it. For African Americans, the rural South has been both a home and a place of violence and oppression, particularly during the period of slavery through …