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A World Of Deference: Paradoxes Of Victorian Paternalism In John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, And John Stuart Mill., Peter Mitchell O'Neill
A World Of Deference: Paradoxes Of Victorian Paternalism In John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, And John Stuart Mill., Peter Mitchell O'Neill
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This study examines the residual paternalist ideology in three canonical Victorian texts: namely, John Ruskin's The Nature of Gothic, Charles Dickens's Hard Times, and John Stuart Mill's Autobiography. In exposing an epistemological tension between paternalist and liberal beliefs---especially a putative concern for the working class---that exists in these texts, this discussion concludes that not only are the cultural forces of benevolent authority insidious in Victorian culture, but that the paradoxes that emerge in these texts may reflect a public ambiguity toward the prevalent structures sustaining Victorian paternalism. The three texts examined inscribe hierarchical principles---while ironically exposing them---in generally similar ways: …
Wake Rites: The Ancient Irish Rituals Of "Finnegans Wake"., George Cinclair Gibson
Wake Rites: The Ancient Irish Rituals Of "Finnegans Wake"., George Cinclair Gibson
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
The complex of rites, rituals, and mythic reenactments known in Irish mythology as the Rites of Tara provides an interpretive model for James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Using information and theories pertaining to the Rites of Tara obtained from sources used by James Joyce, a comparison of the Rites of Tara with Finnegans Wake reveals important correlates related to chronology, characters, architectonics, themes, and defining characteristics. The three separate chronological events presented by Wakean scholars as possible dates for the events in the Wake---Easter, an unnamed pagan festival, and the Vernal Equinox---converged on a single day at the Rites of Tara. …
Translating Exile In Panait Istrati's "Mes Departs", Samuel Beckett's "Fin De Partie" And Selected Poems By Paul Celan., Ina Alice Pfitzner
Translating Exile In Panait Istrati's "Mes Departs", Samuel Beckett's "Fin De Partie" And Selected Poems By Paul Celan., Ina Alice Pfitzner
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Translation and exile are two phenomena that marked life in the twentieth century, especially in Europe, and have therefore left their traces in French literature as well. Translation from one language to another is a heightened form of the translation process inherent in any writing. Exile in a foreign country, linguistic exile, is an aggravated form of the exile every human being experiences at some point. Parting from Lucian Blaga's concept of "mioritic space," which is based on the Romanian myth of Mioritza, as well as Walter Benjamin's essay "Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers" [The Task of the Translator], this study …
Girls Who Would Be Gods: The Poetry Of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, And Sylvia Plath., Anna Lynn Priddy
Girls Who Would Be Gods: The Poetry Of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, And Sylvia Plath., Anna Lynn Priddy
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Girls Who Would Be Gods: The Poetry of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath charts the development of these three American poets, from concerns with ambition and competition that appear in their early poetry, letters and journals, to their later creation of myths surrounding themselves and the secondary worlds of their creation. With Plath's explicit wish that she might be God, Bishop's Crusoe-like exile that allows her to create imaginary realms and homes, and Dickinson's not entirely tentative proposal that she might well be the Biblical Eve, these poets indulged in imaginative re-creations of their worlds and their selves. …
Writing The Beloved Community: Integrated Narratives In Six Contemporary American Novels About The Civil Rights Movement., Paul Tewkesbury Iii
Writing The Beloved Community: Integrated Narratives In Six Contemporary American Novels About The Civil Rights Movement., Paul Tewkesbury Iii
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, black southerners in the United States engaged in the series of nonviolent social protests known collectively as the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke often of the integrated "Beloved Community" that would result from this nonviolent direct action. This dissertation examines the ways in which six contemporary American novelists have created fictional narratives about the Civil Rights Movement, narratives that employ "integrationist" literary devices whereby form reflects the theme of the search for the Beloved Community across race, gender, and class lines. That is, each novelist chooses to tell his or her story …
Appalachia On Stage: The *Southern Mountaineer In American Drama., Laura Grace Pattillo
Appalachia On Stage: The *Southern Mountaineer In American Drama., Laura Grace Pattillo
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This study examines the portrayal of Southern Appalachian people and their culture in American drama, discussing works from time periods that range from the 1880s to the 1990s. The plays are grouped into categories that are reflective of mainstream America's perceptions of Appalachian culture: (1) the importance of family and gender roles, including the insider/outsider romance plot, (2) issues of violence and conflict between both internal and external forces within the region in the context of wars, feuds, and environmental and labor abuses, (3) the importance of folk practice and belief including tales of the supernatural, superstitious and astrological traditions, …
Espace Textuel: Espace D'Affirmation D'Une Identite De L'Interstice Dans Les Ouvrages De Leila Houari, "Zeida De Nulle Part"; De Farida Belghoul, "Georgette!"; Et D'Azouz Begag, "Le Gone Du Chaã¢Ba"., Nayat M'Hamed
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
The aim of this dissertation is to explore the works of Houari, Belghoul and Begag to question a prefabricated model of identity and press for new theories which value a concept of a constructed subjectivity and a rupture with a monolithic mentality. The main purpose of this study is to examine, through a series of close textual readings, how the text becomes the only dynamic space for a creative discourse of identity which emerges from an interstitial cultural space. In chapter one I argue that the significant concern of Houari's novel is the heroine's quest for the correct cultural identity. …
I Won't Be Blue Always: Music As *Past In August Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come And Gone", "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom", "The Piano Lesson" And "Fences"., Yolanda Williams Page
I Won't Be Blue Always: Music As *Past In August Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come And Gone", "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom", "The Piano Lesson" And "Fences"., Yolanda Williams Page
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
The purpose of this study is to prove that playwright August Wilson's earliest works, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, The Piano Lesson, and Fences demonstrate the disabling effect of the slave past and the measures that must be taken to overcome that effect. This study seeks to demonstrate that this past can be made enabling through the acceptance of and reconciliation with it. In addition, it will demonstrate that the vehicle for this recognition is music, which becomes an embodiment of the past. This study consists of eight chapters. Chapter One provides an overview of Wilson's …
Catharine Maria Sedgwick's "Hope Leslie": Clues To A Woman's Journey., Sally Mcmillan Tyler
Catharine Maria Sedgwick's "Hope Leslie": Clues To A Woman's Journey., Sally Mcmillan Tyler
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Prevalent in both archetypal and religious literature, the journey motif weaves its way through tales of human growth-stories which grapple with the processes of how people come to be and to know. Such images of identity formation and knowledge construction hold significant implications for the field of education. Indeed, Huebner (1993) notes that "we do not need learning theory or developmental theory to explain human change...The question educators need to ask is not how people learn and develop, but what gets in the way of the great journey---the journey of the self or soul" (p. 405). While Huebner's suggested paradigm …
Faulkner And The Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, And The Politics Of Art., Theodore B. Atkinson Iii
Faulkner And The Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, And The Politics Of Art., Theodore B. Atkinson Iii
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
William Faulkner's most concentrated and flourishing phase of literary production virtually coincided with the Great Depression, yet the relationship between these two monumental developments in American cultural history has remained for the most part unexplored. Consequently, a more complete understanding of Faulkner can be achieved by redressing this critical oversight. Such an endeavor must involve reconstituting relevant features of historical and cultural context so as to comprehend the forces informing Faulknees literary production. A critical approach rooted in Marxist literary theory is useful in this regard, for it challenges persistent notions of Faulkner as a writer resistant to contextual influences …
Kate Chopin's Contribution To Realism And Naturalism: Reconsiderations Of W. D. Howells, Maupassant, And Flaubert., Jean Ann Witherow
Kate Chopin's Contribution To Realism And Naturalism: Reconsiderations Of W. D. Howells, Maupassant, And Flaubert., Jean Ann Witherow
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
No one has previously undertaken a detailed examination of Kate Chopin's documented intertextuality with writers such as W. D. Howells, Hamlin Garland, Maupassant, and Flaubert. My purpose is to examine Chopin's works in the context of writers with whom she interacts and so to reveal her impact on the development of literary realism and naturalism. My study reveals that, though her mature writing eliminates sentimentalism, she never abandons romance elements residual from her youth. Her typically subjective narrator removes narrative authority, intensifies our involvement with characters, and validates the marginalized voice. Darwin and the philosophers temper her Catholicism, yet she …
Gods, Men And Their Gifts: A Comparison Of The "Iliad", The "Odyssey", The "Aeneid" And "Paradise Lost", Paul Norman Anderson
Gods, Men And Their Gifts: A Comparison Of The "Iliad", The "Odyssey", The "Aeneid" And "Paradise Lost", Paul Norman Anderson
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation is an examination of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid and Paradise Lost based upon their similar depictions of gods and men, specifically in regard to their use of gifts. The procedure is lexical and thematic in approach. The word group around which the majority of the evidence is centered is the noun 'gift' and the verb 'to give.' The nature and use of gifts is examined in the four works under consideration. However, the evidence for the notion of gift-giving is not limited by a strict positivistic approach. Evidence from the texts that clearly includes the notion …
Slain In The Spirit: A Vodun Aesthetic In Selected Works Of Simone Schwarz -Bart, Zora Neale Hurston, And Paule Marshall., Maria Thecla Smith
Slain In The Spirit: A Vodun Aesthetic In Selected Works Of Simone Schwarz -Bart, Zora Neale Hurston, And Paule Marshall., Maria Thecla Smith
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This study, focusing on select novels by women writers of the African diaspora, discovers a surprising commonality among works with obvious geographical, cultural and linguistic differences---an affirmation of the philosophical essence of the Vodun religion as an antidote to Western spiritual and cultural moribundity. Each of the novels---Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et Vent sur Telumee Miracle, and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow---alludes to the Vodun pantheon, ancestor veneration and/or rituals in order to valorize the holistic Vodun worldview that recognizes the interconnectedness of all living things and the fluidity of boundaries between …
Suburbianation: Reading Suburban Landscape In Twentieth -Century American Fiction And Film., Robert Andrew Beuka
Suburbianation: Reading Suburban Landscape In Twentieth -Century American Fiction And Film., Robert Andrew Beuka
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
In the years following the end of World War II, a new kind of landscape emerged in the United States, one that would immeasurably alter the way Americans think about place. Critics and commentators greeted the emergence of the environment we know as "suburbia" with a mixed reaction: for some, the suburbs represented the material embodiment of the "American Dream"; for others, architectural and environmental homogeneity marked the new suburbs as an alienating, even dangerous terrain. In the half-century since the onset of mass-suburbanization, the United States---which has, by now, become a primarily suburban nation---has continued to struggle with the …
Hearsay, Testimony And Conference: Citationality In The Works Of Marguerite Duras, Maurice Blanchot And Jacques Derrida., Mary Carla Criner
Hearsay, Testimony And Conference: Citationality In The Works Of Marguerite Duras, Maurice Blanchot And Jacques Derrida., Mary Carla Criner
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation involves an examination of the effects and implications of three modes of citationality: hearsay, testimony and conference. As a term coined by Jacques Derrida, citationality involves the problematization of questions related to borders and limits and to the attempt to re-present the originary event thought to lie beyond the performance of citational acts of bearing witness. In chapter one I situate my project theoretically through an examination of the principles of deconstruction. In particular, Jacques Derrida's work on the metaphysical concepts of presence and speech, in terms of repeatability or iterability, bears heavily on my study. As a …
"A Secret! A Secret!": Confession And Autobiography In The Poetry Of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, And Ted Hughes., Helen Lynne Sugarman
"A Secret! A Secret!": Confession And Autobiography In The Poetry Of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, And Ted Hughes., Helen Lynne Sugarman
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This study explores the impact of changing definitions of confession on the critical reception and interpretation of the poetry of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes. In light of the ongoing criticism concerning "confessional poetry" in the forty-one years since Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959) was published, it may seem difficult to justify yet another study of confessional poetry. However, the term has been so thoroughly assimilated into our critical vocabulary that we have lost an authentic sense of its meaning. "Confessional poetry" is in some ways an arbitrary term that has a very tenuous connection with the poetry …
Tradition, Rhetoric, And Propriety In Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz., Lilian Albertina Contreras-Silva
Tradition, Rhetoric, And Propriety In Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz., Lilian Albertina Contreras-Silva
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
The writings of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz serve as her personal proclamation for the right of a woman to write and lead an intellectual life. The study begins by reviewing the Baroque world and its artistic trends. This is done in chapter one so that Sor Juana's artistic production can be better situated in the world at large. In chapter two, the study proceeds to review the professional nature of Sor Juana's writing. By observing the diverse nature of the nun's work, as well as the compensation for much of it, the nature of Sor Juana's motivation for …
Coming Home: Homecomings And Return Migration In African -American Folklore And Literature Since 1970., Stephanie Gail Hall
Coming Home: Homecomings And Return Migration In African -American Folklore And Literature Since 1970., Stephanie Gail Hall
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation explores homecoming narratives and the representation of return migration in African-American folklore and in African-American literature written since 1970. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, sociological, historical, religious and literary criticism are incorporated to examine African-American church and communal homecomings, personal memoir, and novels as extensions of the Great Migration narrative, leading to a reconfiguration of the South as "home." This study includes an analysis of the structural features of the homecoming narrative, including the "moment of return," the migrant's connection to the Southern landscape, the significance of feast, and rituals of homecoming ceremonies. Subsequent chapters explore the decision to …
A Matter Of Life And Death: Jose Maria Arguedas, Mario Vargas Llosa, And The Postmodern Condition., Lynn Marie Walford
A Matter Of Life And Death: Jose Maria Arguedas, Mario Vargas Llosa, And The Postmodern Condition., Lynn Marie Walford
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Despite all that has been written in recent years on the subject of literary postmodernism, theorists and critics have yet to arrive at a consensus about the meaning of the term. In the context of Latin America, the theoretical disagreement is given an added dimension by an ongoing debate over whether the notion of postmodernism, in any of its manifestations, is relevant to contemporary Latin American letters. This study maintains that at least some of the issues raised in the debate over postmodernism are not only relevant, but crucial to an understanding of the many complex worlds of Latin America …
Anxiety And Orange Blossoms: Sexual Economics In Wedding Texts By Grace Lumpkin, Eudora Welty, And Alice Childress., Ida Maxwell Wells
Anxiety And Orange Blossoms: Sexual Economics In Wedding Texts By Grace Lumpkin, Eudora Welty, And Alice Childress., Ida Maxwell Wells
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This study examines how problematic representations of brides reflect anxiety about women's roles in the marriage market of the early twentieth-century United States in Grace Lumpkin's The Wedding, Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, and Alice Childress's Wedding Band: A Love /Hate Story in Black and White. The study develops a theoretical model of stages young women negotiate in order to participate in the sexual economic process underlying the marriage exchange: initiate, self-fashioner, marriageable woman, bride, wife, and mother. In moving through these stages, the young woman increasingly loses her identity as she fashions herself into the socially-constructed persona "lady," or marriageable …
Successful Pirates And Capitalist Fantasies: Charting Fictional Representations Of Eighteenth- And Early Nineteenth -Century English Fortune Hunters., Robert Gordon Dryden
Successful Pirates And Capitalist Fantasies: Charting Fictional Representations Of Eighteenth- And Early Nineteenth -Century English Fortune Hunters., Robert Gordon Dryden
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Successful Pirates and Capitalist Fantasies investigates British pirate fiction during the emergence of capitalism. I initially began my dissertation with the intention of focusing on historical pirates, privateers, and common sailors (the men who "turned" pirate) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but after close readings of pirate ballads, rogue biographies, plays, novellas, and novels by (among others) Daniel Defoe, John Gay, Charles Johnson, and Jane Austen, I determined that this pirate fiction is not about the historical pirate at all; the deployment of pirate figures in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British fiction is an invented tradition of representation that …
"That Preacher's Going To Eat All The Chicken!": Power And Religion In Richard Wright., Tara Tanisha Green
"That Preacher's Going To Eat All The Chicken!": Power And Religion In Richard Wright., Tara Tanisha Green
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation explores the ways that Richard Wright's work reflects both history and his own personal experiences (memories) of the South. These two elements---history and memory---served to inspire Wright's, the writer's, imagination, and to fuel Wright's, a Black man's, anger and hostility. Wright's technique of (re)writing or mastering the images of Black males as they struggle in environments they perceive as hostile, is compounded by his feelings about religion. Although Wright rejected organized religions, whether Christian, tribal, or Communism, he, ironically, used the figurative language similar to that of sermons, including Biblical stories and symbols, to appeal to his readers …
Silencing Dreiser: Textual Editing And Theodore Dreiser's "Jennie Gerhardt"., Annemarie Koning Whaley
Silencing Dreiser: Textual Editing And Theodore Dreiser's "Jennie Gerhardt"., Annemarie Koning Whaley
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
In 1911 Theodore Dreiser published his novel Jennie Gerhardt . Prior to publication, the editors at Harper and Brothers cut around 16,000 words from the text. In 1992 James L. West III, Distinguished Professor of English and Fellow for the Arts and Humanities Studies at Pennsylvania State University, published a restored "Pennsylvania" edition. Scholars are now unsure of which text better represents Dreiser's original artistic vision for the novel. This dissertation closely examines the changes made to the original manuscript and concludes that these changes alter Dreiser's original artistic vision dramatically. Therefore, the 1911 edition is substantially inferior to the …
The Evolution Of Frank Norris In The American Medievalist Tradition: Norris's Progression From Gothic Juvenilia To Modern Courtly Love In "The Pit"., Holly Ann Hale
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Though most Frank Norris scholars dismiss the author's early gothic works as insignificant elements of the Norris canon, I argue that this frequently ignored juvenilia is essential to understanding Norris's unique development as an American Naturalist. Norris, like other authors of his generation, was caught up in a boyhood enthusiasm for the Middle Ages which was initiated and nurtured by a similar nostalgia for the period among the American elite in the late nineteenth-century. This post-medieval nostalgia for medieval convention came to be known as medievalism and its enthusiasts were called medievalists. Norris's early naturalistic writings, including a number of …
Francis Hayman: An Artist Reading British Literature In The 1740s., Stephen Alan Raynie
Francis Hayman: An Artist Reading British Literature In The 1740s., Stephen Alan Raynie
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
The on-going comparison of the sister arts (poetry and painting) in the eighteenth century recommends a reassessment of Francis Hayman's role as an artist reading and interpreting literary texts. A founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768, Francis Hayman began his artistic career as a scene painter at the Goodman's Fields and Drury Lane theaters. Although Hayman was one of the most prolific book illustrators in mid eighteenth century Britain, relatively little critical attention has been devoted to his work. Moreover, his circle of friends included such Old Slaughter's and St. Martin's Lane Academy regulars as Henry Fielding, William …
Within The Realm Of Possibility: Magic And Mediation In Native American And Chicano/A Literature., Amy Greenwood Baria
Within The Realm Of Possibility: Magic And Mediation In Native American And Chicano/A Literature., Amy Greenwood Baria
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Bloodlines create an overlap in Native American and Chicano/a history, but this dissertation studies these ethnic groups together for reasons beyond this. Native Americans and Chicanos/as share more than blood; overlaps occur in language, religion, and United States geography. Psychic geography for each group also presents a kinship, for in the search for a redemptive personal identity (to stand against the forcible near-extinction of Native Americans and the cultural dismissal of Chicanos/as by their "native" land) each cultural group recognizes its difference. Having very little in dominant culture upon which to build an identity, Native Americans and Chicanos/as have turned …
Memory, Time And Identity In The Novels Of William Faulkner And Marcel Proust., John Stephen Larose
Memory, Time And Identity In The Novels Of William Faulkner And Marcel Proust., John Stephen Larose
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation is a comparative study of first person narrative in Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), and selected novels of William Faulkner, primarily those in which the character of Quentin Compson appears: The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! This comparison is based upon the assumption that the attempts to represent the patterns of thought, memory, or consciousness in these novels is symptomatic of many twentieth-century novels, which dramatize an anxiety about the possibility of a solid ground for knowledge of the world or of the self. The language of these novels …
Rights Of Passage: A Cross -Cultural Study Of Maroon Novels By Black Women., Randi Gray Kristensen
Rights Of Passage: A Cross -Cultural Study Of Maroon Novels By Black Women., Randi Gray Kristensen
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This study investigates the use and implications of the trope of marronage, the African-American practice of self-emancipation to forge alternative New World communities, in selected novels by Black women writers of North America and the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean. It draws on theories of liminality to posit a theory of liberatory practice that deconstructs hegemonic narratives, both personal and historical. Postmodern approaches are deferred in favor of locating these texts and their concerns as deriving from the epistemological consequences of modernity. Cross-cultural Black women's texts were chosen to illuminate the recognition of shared subjugations across national and linguistic borders, as …
Shaping The Subject In "La Chanson De Roland" And In Hermann Broch's "Der Tod Des Virgil", Thomas Lee Miller
Shaping The Subject In "La Chanson De Roland" And In Hermann Broch's "Der Tod Des Virgil", Thomas Lee Miller
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation explores two texts, each of a different era, language and culture, to discover what they may each tell us about the role played by writing in the construction of subjectivity. Accordingly, the first part of the dissertation departs from custom in treating La Chanson de Roland less as a repository of accumulated oral performance than as a document of singular textual integrity. Militating against the premise of textual unity is the uncontested fact that the Roland is clearly divided into two distinct narrative panels. This reading reveals the manner in which the writer of the Roland integrates the …
Ernest Renan And The Question Of Race., Jane Victoria Dagon
Ernest Renan And The Question Of Race., Jane Victoria Dagon
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Racism in France can be traced back to the 1560's when the nobles claimed to be of a separate race in order to obtain special rights and privileges. Soon after in the seventeenth century, scientists started to classify humans according to physical features. With the increase in travel, the slave trade, the fear of the unknown and the fear of contamination, these factors along with physiognomy and phrenology encouraged "biological racism." During the second half of the nineteenth century, Ernest Renan (1823--1892) denounces biological racism and the existence of the so-called "pure races." He is also the first dramatist to …