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When God Becomes Your Enemy- The Theology Of The Complaint Psalms, Ingvar Floysvik

Doctor of Theology Dissertation

The experience of being forgotten, rejected or even attacked by God has been very real for people of all times. An untimely death in the family, prolonged sickness, unfair treatment in the community or in court, or on the larger scale, natural disasters, war and persecution, these and other catastrophes may make individuals or whole communities experience God as an enemy. Readers of the Bible recognize that income psalms the psalmists share these experiences. They complain to God that he has abandoned them or that he is angry with them. The present dissertation is an investigation into the theology of …

Tales From The Magazine Prison House: Democracy And Authorship In American Periodical Fiction, 1825-1850., Laurence Scott Peeples

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, weekly and monthly periodicals emerged as the primary forum for new American literature. In several respects periodicals reflected the multiplicity of rapidly growing Eastern cities: they assembled a variety of "voices" in single texts and maintained a dialogue between editors and readers. At the same time, the magazines sought to "create" a more homogenous middle-class audience that would equate the capitalist transformation of American society with the "natural" progress of democracy. This dissertation examines that process by analyzing the writing and careers of four "magazinists": Nathaniel Parker Willis, Caroline Kirkland, Lydia Maria …

Renouncing Restrictive Narratives: The Southern Lady And Female Creativity In The Works Of Lee Smith And Gail Godwin., Deborah Rae Wesley

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

In this study, I analyze how restrictive female narratives hinder women's creativity in the works of two contemporary Southern women novelists, Lee Smith and Gail Godwin. I focus primarily on the narrative of the Southern lady, how it has changed over the past century and a half, but how it still represses many Southern women. By demanding that women conform to a predetermined definition of who or what they can become, the narrative of the Southern lady asks women to become static images and stifles their individual creativity. Moreover, the class-consciousness and emphasis on appearances that the narrative requires encourages …

Cauldron Of Changes: Feminist Spirituality In Contemporary American Women's Fiction., Janice Celia Crosby

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

My dissertation, Cauldron of Changes: Feminist Spirituality in Contemporary American Women's Fiction, combines feminist perspectives from literary and religious thinkers to inform a discussion of the overlooked aspects of contemporary European-American women's speculative fiction. The introductory chapter provides an overview of the feminist spirituality movement as it incorporates Goddess- and earth-centered religious perspectives, and covers the themes common to both spiritual practice and fiction. "Rewriting History and Legend," the second chapter, shows how the feminist spirituality movement has furthered the feminist project of rewriting myth, legend, and history, thus challenging the foundations of the cultural tradition of the West. In …

A Thorn In The Text: Shakerism And The Marriage Narrative, Robert Michael Pugh

Doctoral Dissertations

Since 1824, fiction writers have attempted to treat the celibate communalist life of the American Shakers within narrative plot patterns that privilege marriage. The resulting stories and novels show Shakerism continually resisting this appropriation. Nevertheless, unable or unwilling to accept Shakerism's subversion of the necessary centrality of marriage, most of these writers have struggled to contain Shakerism's counter-structures of family and of narrative by reducing Shakerism's complexity. Shakerism, however, remains irreducible--a thorn in the text.

This study focuses on fifteen fictions in which well-known and lesser-known writers try to bring Shakerism and marriage together.

The Preface summarizes the Shakers' history …

The Rhetoric Of Realism: American Psychology And American Literature, 1860-1910, Sandra Webster

Doctoral Dissertations

The period following the end of the Civil War in America and extending to just after the turn of the century witnessed the emergence of an independent discipline of psychology as well as the emergence of a uniquely American literary tradition. Though these developments occurred independently and operated out of different traditions, they shared a common interest in the concept of "consciousness." The present study is a comparison of models of consciousness expressed in psychological and literary texts of two periods: The first period covers the emergence of literary realism and American philosophical psychology (1865-1885); the second period covers literary …

Becoming Visionary: Reading And Living In The Existential Mode, Michael Anthony Reardon

Doctoral Dissertations

This study identifies, defines and analyzes a sub-genre of modern Anglo-American fiction distinguished by the presence of "visionary" characters, who possess the ability to see acutely into the contingency and anguish of the human condition in this world rather than--as with the popular conception of "visionary"--our potentialities in another. Their experience of vision flows from an "existential moment," a type of epiphany which discloses the essential Nothingness that exists beneath the systems, structures, attitudes and assumptions through which we attempt to order our daily lives. Most importantly, the visionary's heightened consciousness leads to an existence defined by individual choice, responsibility …

Under Emalien's Roof. (Original Writing);., Laurie. Abel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The first time I saw Emalien Gruhn, I mistook her for a cow. She was working in her rose garden in a black wool skirt and black rubber boots. She was bent over from the waist, and from where I was sitting, I couldn't see anything but her ample rear end. "That's not a cow," said my brother Matthew. "That's Mrs. Gruhn." Mrs. Gruhn was seventy-nine years old and she lived alone except for her dog and a few cats. My brother and I used to wait in the car while my father dropped in to ask Mrs. Gruhn if …

Word And Flesh: Gender Utopias And Dystopias In Three Canadian Science Fiction Novels (William Gibson, Margaret Atwood, Elisabeth Vonarburg)., Patrica Ellen. Mascaro

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many Canadian authors are turning to speculative fiction genres, instead of more realistic genres, to tell their tales. In the cases of William Gibson, Margaret Atwood, and Elisabeth Vonarburg, each author has used the speculative fiction genre of utopian science fiction, to satirically depict restrictive gender roles that exist in contemporary Euro-American society. In opposition to limited gender definitions, the authors also portray positive, subversive, and alternative gender roles. All three authors use landscape as a metaphor for gender. Consistent with landscape patterns identified by Jenny Wolmark in feminist utopian fiction, Atwood, Gibson, and Vonarburg depict "the centre," a imprisoning …

Nurturing In The Novels Of Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, And Ellen Price Wood., Sarah Domingue Spence

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Employing attachment theory of contemporary psychology, I explore nurturing in the novels of Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, and Ellen Price Wood. The heroines' need for nurturing manifests itself in diverse aspects of the genre. In the mother's absence, various attachment figures, such as guardians, surrogate mothers, sister/friend relationships serve as nurturer. In Fanny Burney's novels, Evelina, Cecilia, and The Wanderer, fortune and a family name become important societal goals. Joyce Hemlow's and Margaret Doody's works supply criticism and biographical data. In Radcliffe's Gothic novels, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Italian, the heroines' attachment bond is analyzed using Ellen Moers' …

Imagining Workers: The Working-Class Presence In Late Nineteenth-Century American Literature. (Volumes I And Ii)., William Lynn Watson

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation examines how late nineteenth-century American realist and naturalist narratives defuse the working-class drive for class self-determination and political power. The texts examined are Rebecca Harding Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills" (1861), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner (1871), Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886), William Dean Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900). Each work is examined in the context of a specific proletarian insurgency that was taking place at roughly the same time, and sometimes the same place, in which the author was writing. Each text bears the impress of …

"Vertue Vanish'd": Censorship Of Early English Women Dramatists., Sigrid Marika King

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation traces the impact of censorship on women dramatists from the Renaissance through the late eighteenth century, focusing on the plays of Elizabeth Cary, Aphra Behn, Mary Pix, and Susanna Centlivre. Several types of censorship--politica1, religious, and moral--affected the work of these playwrights, and several agencies--the Master of Revels, the audience, the theatre manager, and the prompter--were involved in censorship of their works. When early modern women wrote for the stage, they confronted the strictures against publication and public exposure. The four playwrights discussed here used a combination of self-censorship and subversive strategies in their work. Self-censorship was particularly …

Murderous Historian: Henry Adams, Modernity, And The Problem Of Subjectivity. (Volumes I And Ii)., Martha Moseley Regalis

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This study traces Henry Adams's evolution from an enlightenment historian to a prescient postmodern theorist, and explores how he came to regard his own intellectual history as paradigmatic of the arc of subjectivity in the West from the Middle Ages to Nietzsche and Bergson. Adams was a self-conscious philosophical nominalist, and he believed that his radical doubts about the capacity of language for embodying meaning had their origin in medieval nominalism. Adams found the seeds of modernity and the problem of subjectivity which were the focus of his own musings on the nature of the self and history in Abelard …

"Rag-Tag And Bob-Ends Of Old Stories": Biblical Intertextuality In Faulkner, Hurston, Wright, And O'Connor., Timothy Paul Caron

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Liqht in August, Moses, Man of the Mountain, Uncle Tom's Children, and Wise Blood all borrow from the South's religious traditions. Recognizing the authority given to the Book, Faulkner, Hurston, Wright, and O'Connor invoke and re-read its central stories, characters, and tropes in order to voice their individual contributions to the South's intra-cultural conversation on race. In various ways, each work claims the necessity of the South to revitalize its practice of biblical interpretation. All of these texts comment upon the South's racial struggles over exactly how the Bible was to be interpreted: is it a book to aid in …

Comedy Of Redemption In Three Southern Writers., Carolyn Patricia Gardner

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The present study discusses a theological motif in the works of three Southern writers, Faulkner, Percy, and Toole, with The Unvanquished, The Moviegoer, and A Confederacy of Dunces being the works chosen for examination. The particular nature of religion in a Southern novel is established early. The Southern novelist is concerned not with sin in the abstract but with the existential angst resulting from it and with the hope of redemption. Also, in the Southern novel, there is humor undergirding even the study of existential angst. God's comedy is the focus of this study of the movement toward redemption in …

La Reconstruction De La Memoire Et Le Traumatisme De La Guerre Dans Le Roman Francais., Frederic Marie Pallez

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The strategy used in the understanding of war and the process of writing are identical: each implies a will to comprehend the situation at hand and a failure to dominate it completely. Among the "resistances" that tend to challenge the representation of war are the psychoanalytical notions of Repetition Compulsion and of Overdetermination. In the text both display symptoms of the writer's trauma after his actual or vicarious participation in conflict. The experience of war as a disturbance of the psyche can be read in both personal and collective memory, This tendency to sublimate the trauma of war through group …

The Thousand Appliances: Virginia Woolf And The Tools Of Visual Literacy., Janice M. Stein

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The texts of Virginia Stephen Woolf are rife with references to writers' tools, which she referred to in her diary as "the thousand appliances one needs for writing even a sentence." This dissertation examines the exact nature of Woolf's "need" for the tools of her craft and their influence upon her thought and art. Pens, and by association, ink and the writer's hands, were the center of all her authorial experiences and provided the literal link between the idea of art and its fruition as a work of art. The graphic shapes of words and paralinguistic devices such as punctuation …

Gwen Bristow: A Biography With Criticism Of Her "Plantation Trilogy"., Billie J. Theriot

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Gwen Bristow was born September 16, 1903. Her father was a minister and church leader and her mother was a homemaker and housemother for residents of Southern Baptist Hospital nurses' home. Both had impressive genealogies. Bristow, a reporter in New Orleans for The Times-Picayune from July 9, 1925, to November 28, 1930, and February 5, 1932, to September 21, 1934, wrote for many periodicals throughout her life. Her marriage to Bruce Manning took her to Hollywood, where she lived from the summer of 1934 until late spring 1980. Bruce Manning's career as a script writer, director, and producer provided a …

Presenting The Past: A Case Study Of Interpretive Development At The Fortress Of Louisbourg National Historic Park (Nova Scotia)., Melanie Adaire. Townsend

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

By examining museum journals and in-house reports this thesis provides a historiographical analysis on the literature of the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Park, tracing its physical and philosophical evolution in relation to the contemporary issues that influenced its development. It disputes the characterization of historic sites as tidy packages that reinforce a perception of the past that is fixed and complete. This thesis suggests that public presentations should not be marginalized, but taken seriously and viewed critically because they serve as milestones for gauging the factors that influence our evolving perception of the past. This study demonstrates how historic …

"A Territory Not Yet On The Map": Relocating Gay Aestheticism In The Age Of Aids, John David White

Digitized Theses

Critical and artistic responses to the AIDS epidemic emerged simultaneously in the mid 1980s, and informed each other over the contested ground of "official" AIDS discourses. As these responses were initially defined, two positions emerged: aestheticism and activism. This study focuses on aestheticism but does so in the context of activism and suggests similarities between the two positions. In my analysis of the literary representations, I focus my attention on the works of Edmund White, Armistead Maupin, Robert Ferro, and Paul Monette, writers who first came to prominence in the 1970s before the epidemic and who have written on the …

Alone Among. (Original Writing);., Debra Lydia. Mattson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstract Not Available. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 34-02, page: 0533. Adviser: E. McNamara. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 1994.

No Answer But Solitude: A Collection Of Poetry. (Original Writing);., Steven Christopher. Markwick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstract Not Available. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 33-04, page: 1084. Adviser: A. MacLeod. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 1994.

Leadership In Literature, Linda M. Ghers

Honors Theses

The purpose of this paper is to explore a controversial topic -- the utility of the arts and the function of aesthetics in society. Because the very nature of art is essentially an abstract representation of reality, to explore its function seems to be outside the realm of possibility. Yet many still consider art to have a didactic function, and the study of any of the arts is based on the premise that the appreciation and creation of art can be useful for instructing humanity about the world beyond the artwork itself. How and what art actually teaches are questions …

Economies Of Desire: Reading Between Toni Morrison And William Faulkner, Nancy Ellen Batty

Digitized Theses

Since the 1970 publication of Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, her work has not only inspired critical praise for its unique portrayal of African-American life, it has also consistently evoked comparison to the work of William Faulkner. While Morrison studied Faulkner in college and wrote her Master's thesis on Faulkner and Woolf, she has repeatedly denied Faulkner's influence, claiming instead a strong affinity between her work and that of other black women writers and African-American cultural forms. As a white southern male writer whose novels are primarily about white southern culture, William Faulkner does seem an unlikely progenitor …

L'Evolution Du Sentiment Religieux Dans Les Contes De Charles Nodier: A La Recherche De La Reconciliation Interieure (French Text), Maura G. Dube

Digitized Theses

En partant des recits de jeunesse dans Les Tristes (1806) et en allant jusqu'au dernier conte Franciscus Columna (1843), cette dissertation trace l'evolution du sentiment religieux dans trente-huit contes de Charles Nodier. Profondement romantique, le sentiment religieux chez Nodier est intimement lie au besoin de reconcilier le monde materiel et l'aspiration au paradis perdu. L'oeuvre de la jeunesse, comme aussi celle de la maturite et de la vieillesse, se definit en effet par une tentative de retour aux origines caracteristique de l'homo religiosus d'apres Mircea Eliade.;Il est donc possible de reperer certaines "constantes" dans les contes de Nodier. Par exemple, …

From Ritual To Rocket: "Gravity's Rainbow" In The Apocalyptic Tradition (Thomas Pynchon), David Joseph Robson

Digitized Theses

This thesis situates Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) in the Apocalyptic tradition. In constructing this tradition I have employed the critical theories--or critical visions--of Northrop Frye, Mircea Eliade, and of the "Toronto School" of communication theorists: Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, and Walter Ong. Ong's conception of the "technologizing of the word" provides the unifying theme of this thesis, a theme which I extend into the postmodern context where it manifests itself in Pynchon's Rocket/Word.;The first chapter examines the way in which pre-literate oral cultures, Hesiod, Plato, Herodotus, and Thucydides are apocalyptic or anti-apocalyptic. The second chapter focuses on the Bible, …

The Presence Of James Joyce In The Poetry And Prose Of A M Klein, Harold Heft

Digitized Theses

This thesis examines the details of A. M. Klein's interest in James Joyce, as well as Joyce's effect on Klein's major works. Klein's fascination with Joyce's literary innovations is apparent in almost every aspect of his literary career, and there is evidence to suggest that Klein's involvement with Joyce's writing spans almost his entire career as a writer. Klein's attraction to Joyce's writing stimulated his artistic development, and his attempts to write critical essays on Joyce's novel Ulysses ultimately drew him away from his creative writing.;In Chapter 1, the available information on Klein's involvement in Joyce studies is presented in …

La Femme Dans Le Monde Imaginaire De Georges Bernanos, Astrid Heyer

Digitized Theses

This thesis undertakes a chronological survey of the role of women in Georges Bernanos' imaginary world. Beginning with his first youthful attempts at short stories in 1907, it analyzes the author's complete fictional writings. This systematic study traces a growing preoccupation with women characters as the author's fictional universe evolves.;Indeed, all three of Bernanos' mature short stories ("Madame Dargent", "Une nuit", "Dialogue d'ombres") revolve around women. Four of his eight novels (La Joie, Un Crime, Un Mauvais reve and Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette) are also dominated by heroines rather than male protagonists. The place of women in his last fictional …

Constructions Of Anarchism In British Fiction, 1885-1914, Noel Patrick Peacock

Digitized Theses

This thesis examines constructions of anarchism in selected fiction published in Britain between 1885 and 1914. It does so in the larger context of ideological constructions of anarchism within late-Victorian and Edwardian media, popular and literary culture. It also makes use, particularly in its first two chapters, of the work of M. M. Bakhtin, through whom it understands the novel as dialogizing these cultural ideologies.;Chapter One documents the emergence of what I call an anarchist typology, or collection of stereotypes of anarchists and anarchism that indicates a late nineteenth century anxiety about the possibility of revolution. It traces the meaning …

The Politics Of Defamiliarization In Blake's Printed Works, Julia Margaret Wright

Digitized Theses

The works of William Blake are notoriously strange. Multimedia artifacts with stylized illustrations and texts that have unusual forms and proper names, they evade the limits of the familiar. But such an evasion is not simply aesthetic. For Blake, the familiar world is entangled in a web of false paradigms that, whether formal or political, alienate individuals from their proper selves. "Familiarity" is an apparently innocuous term that masks easy distinctions between what is proper and what is alien--distinctions that delineate everything from genres to nations and so place invisible, but effective, limits on what can be said and, more …