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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 …
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, …