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Transactional Bond In The Novels Of Charles Brockden Brown, Gretchen Elspeth Digeronimo

Doctoral Dissertations

The six novels and various other fiction pieces Charles Brockden Brown wrote between 1799 and 1801 coherently demonstrate the operation and effect of literary and artistic representation in early Republican America.

In original close readings of Arthur Mervyn, Edgar Huntly, Ormond, and several other works, this dissertation identifies transactional bond and describes how Brown charted the establishment of the public and private individual self through transactional bond in three specific arenas: relationships between the developing self and written, visual, or reported representation; relationships between master/mentors and apprentices; relationships among women.

Bonds that begin, operate, and dissolve between male characters are …

Barbara Pym's Narrative Intersections, Jennifer J. Beard

Doctoral Dissertations

The project of this dissertation is to place Barbara Pym's realism in the context of modernism, anti-modernism, and postmodernism in the twentieth-century English novel. My argument is not that Pym is a late modernist or that she is, per se, a long-lost Postmodernist. She is a realist who has learned the lessons of the former and whose traditional, linear narratives are punctuated by moments of awareness to the fragmented nature of identity and by blips of authorial acknowledgement and even laughter over the simultaneous separation and blending of the text world in which characters live with the "real" worlds of …

Turning To Earth: Paths To An Ecological Practice, Florence Marina Schauffler

Doctoral Dissertations

In highly developed countries like the United States, conventional approaches to environmental change emphasize systemic measures such as policies and regulations. Yet many intractable environmental problems appear to be rooted in the perspectives and practices of individual citizens. Efforts to restore 'outer ecology' may depend, therefore, on transforming 'inner ecology'--the constellation of spiritual and moral values that guide action. This dissertation examines the inner dimensions of ecological change, demonstrating how individuals redefine their relation to earth through a process of 'ecological conversion.'.

In assessing the dynamics of conversion, this work relies primarily on the testimony of six 20th-century American writers: …