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"Wherein Lies Personal Identity": The Reception Of Locke And Richardson And The Language Of Self In The Letters And Journals Of Exceptional Eighteenth Century American Women, Carolann O'Malley Davis

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation adds a new chapter to the history of the social revolution that accompanied the American Revolution, specifically the revolt against patriarchalism. It is my contention that exceptional women initiated a private revolution to gain recognition of a new personal identity. This private revolution led to the rejection of the system of private government of man over woman, patriarchalism.

I identified seven women, Eliza Lucas Pinckney, Abigail Adams, Esther Edwards Burr, Mercy Otis Warren, Eliza Southgate Bowne, Anne Willing Bingham and Anne Home Shippen, who were especially representative of a network of women who developed a self-consciousness. For these …

The Art Of Living': The Aesthetics Of Everyday Life In Dorothy Canfield Fisher's Novels, Anne Marie Downey

Doctoral Dissertations

In 1924, Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958) wrote, "I have always conceived of everyday life as needing very much the sort of constant effort at composition--that is shapeliness, elimination of unnecessary details, choice of details--as any other work of art." This quotation is the epigraph to my study of five of Fisher's early novels because it reveals a central theme of her fiction: that art is the creation of a daily life that successfully negotiates the "problems of living" (Fisher's phrase) that plague modern America. The five novels that I analyze--The Squirrel-Cage (1912), The Bent Twig (1915), The Brimming Cup (1921), …

Bodies Of Life: Shaker Literacies And Literature, Etta Maureen Madden

Doctoral Dissertations

I examine the roles of literacy and literature among the Shakers from the opening of "Mother" Ann Lee's testimony in 1780 through the early twentieth century to propose that the sect persistently resisted and revised "the world's" literacies. I assert that multiple kinds of reading and writing acts reinforce the beliefs of individuals and the church as a whole, and I argue that the increase in literary acts which appear to contribute to individualism and fragmentation of the institution actually allows Believers to revise their theology so that they see their sect as continuing to grow rather than declining.

In …

The Discourse Of Gratitude In The Novels Of Jane Austen, William Gosnell Sayres

Doctoral Dissertations

Jane Austen is preeminently the novelist of gratitude, and no substantive noun of similar moral content recurs in these texts with the frequency of "gratitude." Gratitude has enormous power in her novels. It is a necessary precursor of love in the formation of bonds between men and women, and no "good" mutual love is possible unless it evolves through the process of gratitude. For successful marriages, gratitude is even more necessary than love. Among the scholars who focus on significant terms in Austen novels, few give more than passing attention to gratitude or to the massive volume of eighteenth-century moralist …

Emerging From The Chrysalis: Isolation And Publication In Nineteenth-Century Literacy Narratives, Lisa Ann Sisco

Doctoral Dissertations

"Emerging From the Chrysalis" begins with the words of Frederick Douglass, who explains in his 1845 slave narrative that learning to read was a conflicted experience, simultaneously enabling and painful. Douglass writes, "I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing." These powerful words reveal a paradoxical "double-consciousness" inherent in nineteenth-century narratives about literacy: literacy's capacity to simultaneously imprison and empower. Douglass's relationship to literacy, both as a character within his narrative and as an author in a historical context, exemplifies the focus of this dissertation.

I borrow my central metaphor from …

Education, Class And Gender In George Eliot And Thomas Hardy, Keith Ronald Jones

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the relationship between education, class and gender in The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Daniel Deronda (1876) by George Eliot; and in The Woodlanders (1887) and Jude the Obscure (1896) by Thomas Hardy. The Introduction discusses how, in nineteenth-century Britain, education was intended to "improve" individuals and society. The Introduction establishes the Marxist and feminist critical background of the study, and briefly surveys the nineteenth-century debates on "The Education Question," and on education for women.

The novels examined show education failing to 'improve.' Maggie Tulliver, in The Mill on the Floss, and Jude Fawley in Jude …