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Celticism And American Musical Nationalism, 1889-1904, Daniel Weaver

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, American composers turned with increasing frequency to Irish and Scottish sources of inspiration, a trend that manifested not only in songs but also in large-scale instrumental works such as sonatas and symphonies. Though many of these works have been discussed individually, this Celtic turn has yet to be investigated as a response to questions about national musical identity, an issue that had come to dominate musical discourse in America by the end of the century—particularly in the wake of Czech composer Antonin Dvořák’s challenge to American composers in 1893 to forge a …

“White Skin By Color, French Canadian By Métissage: Heredity Knows No Color”, Paula Y. Wilson

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstract of the Thesis

“White Skin by Color, French Canadian by Métissage: Heredity knows no color”

Beta thalassemia (β-thalassemia) is one of the hereditary disorders unique to French Canadians (Braekeleer). This thesis argues for any correlations that may exist between the social and identity structures. These social and identity structures correspond with the close relationship between the French Canadians and β-thalassemia. The study reveals the specific cultural and linguistic isolation of these people and the principal cause of the distinguishing traits of this disorder as obscure amongst this ethnic group. French Canadians slowly but surely migrated from the French-speaking Providence …

American Undergraduates Undone: Social And Intellectual Dysfunction On Campus, Noelle P. Jones

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The pivotal, formative years of typical undergraduates, ages 18-22, represent a time when students mold their distinctive identities, social personalities, and intellects more intensively than during any other period of their lives. Developmental theorists Arthur W. Chickering and Linda Reisser call this process “journeying toward individuation—the discovery and refinement of one’s unique way of being—and also toward communion with other individuals and groups, including the larger national and global society” (35). In today’s college climate, students flummox and astound parents, professors, and researchers due to their individual immaturity and disengagement with learning. Although these complaints identify nothing new in America, …

The Heart Of Whiteness: Interracial Marriage And White Masculinity In American Fiction, 1830-1905, Lauren M. W. Barbeau

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Building on whiteness scholars’ notion that whiteness can be gained, my dissertation argues that a property in whiteness, and its attendant privileges, can be lost. By examining representations of interracial marriage in American literature between 1830 and 1905, I identify marriage across the color line as one of the primary modes through which white men can lose their privilege. Interracial marriage violates what I term the marriage contract, a tri-party agreement between man, woman, and nation that guaranteed democratic rights to white men and privileges to their dependents in return for white-white marriage. Men who violated this contract by marrying …

The Impacts Of Climate Change On The World’S Economic, Political, And Demographic Structures, Dino Kanlic

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Climate change will have negative impacts on the political, economic, and demographic structures of society. These include a rise in ethnic tensions in the Indian Sub Continent, massive immigration to Europe, regional economic collapse and political destabilization in Africa, the inundation of island nations and economic losses in the Americas among many other changes which will combine to destabilize humanity for generations. International affairs has failed to come up with a solution because global warming is a universal prevention focused problem that trades short term gains for long term losses. Global warming will be solved by the onset of grid …

Round The Corner: Pawnbroking In The Victorian Novel, Jennifer Tate Becker

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

The nineteenth century was a period of great change in the way that money was made, exchanged, and experienced in Britain, especially as wealth became measured increasingly by capital, and a system of banking and credit developed. As Mary Poovey has explained, Victorian writing's preoccupation with money and personal wealth, and its frequent depiction of financial crises, can be seen as an effort to understand the underlying principles of the confusing yet vital financial world that was taking shape. One flourishing financial institution which received much attention in Parliament, the press, and literature was the pawn shop, perhaps because it …

National History And The Novel In 1930s Britain, Erica Delsandro

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Although indebted to scholars whose work has illuminated the distinctiveness of 1930s Britain, "National History and the Novel in 1930s Britain" argues that rather than seeking distinction, writers of the period were more concerned with the task of contextualizing their decade and their own position within a national historiography from which they felt the Great War and military masculinities had excluded them. Focusing on the novelists Christopher Isherwood, Evelyn Waugh, and Virginia Woolf, and the philosopher of history, R. G. Collingwood, I describe how the 1930s inheritors of British cultural privilege found themselves symbolically disenfranchised from a national identity inextricably …

Relational Selves In Eighteenth-Century Literature, Kate Parker

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

We imagine the eighteenth century to be the time when modern individuals constituted themselves against the forces of communal obligation, when marriage emerged as a union based on singular affection, and when heterosexuality cohered as an ideology. But Relational Selves in Eighteenth Century Literature argues that a libertine logic of communal attraction, spontaneous affiliation, and transitory affection remains central to the literary production of modern selfhood in the eighteenth century. It thus departs from well-established critical narratives that entwine the modern self with the eighteenth-century emergence of sexual complementarity, the companionate marriage, and bourgeois individualism. I show instead how eighteenth-century …

Spenser's "Inward Ey": Poetics, Lexicography, And The Motivations For Edmund Spenser's Linguistic Idealism, Lawrence Revard

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Edmund Spenser's concepts of language have been seen as "anti-linguistic" to the extent that his idealism extols the power of thought while depicting speech as a corrupting monster--most notably the Blatant Beast of The Legend of Courtesy, Book 6 of The Faerie Queene. My thesis re-examines Spenser's antipathies for language, telling the story of his definition of the poet both in terms of his understandings of language and his part in the struggle to legitimize English vernacular. I first focus on Spenser's imagery of naming, tongues, writing, and identity in his later work, particularly the Platonic ideas in The Fowre …

Accounting For Mysteries: Narratives Of Intuition And Empiricism In The Victorian Novel, Brooke Taylor

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

This dissertation explores the tensions between an empirical epistemology and an intuitive method of knowing the world as depicted in popular Victorian novels. These narratives attempt to assimilate alternate modes of understanding; however, the uneasiness of the relationship between empiricism and intuition speaks to larger cultural tensions about the possibility of reconciling fact and feeling in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. I argue that intuitive and imaginative modes of cognition are continually privileged in novels that explicitly claim to adhere to empirical forms of knowledge. As I examine the work of Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and George …

Impossible Whiteness: Race, Gender, And American Identity In Early Twentieth-Century American Literature, Tarah Demant

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

In Impossible Whiteness, I reveal whiteness--though oftentimes still an implicit critical assumption of normalcy--as a complex, shifting category in the literature of early twentieth-century America, and show how gender, particularly, disrupts American whiteness. I deconstruct the various ways in which whiteness is defined legally, culturally, and in the marketplace, and demonstrate how Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, and F. Scott Fitzgerald trace these standards of whiteness and the inevitable failure of such racial: and implicitly gendered) refinement. Though critical literature has been slow to consider the role of race for these authors, I reveal them as actively participating in contemporary dialogues …

Blue Notes From Three Songs: Malleable Artifacts As Related To Evolving Cultural Identity, Lou Lucas

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

A consideration of three State Songs, ΓÇ£My Old Kentucky HomeΓÇ¥ by Stephen Foster, ΓÇ£Carry Me Back to Old VirginnyΓÇ¥ by James A. Bland, and ΓÇ£The Missouri WaltzΓÇ¥ with lyrics by James Royce Shannon. The combination of black dialect and negative stereotypes, with elevation to special status impacting identity, necessitated their alteration. Such change reflects societal response to the Civil Rights Movement, while a pragmatic view suggests these malleable artifacts have functioned, and continue to function, as ΓÇ£blue notes,ΓÇ¥ unsettling elements acting to stimulate discourse, becoming participants in the formation of identity and American cultural change.

Mandeville's Intolerance: The Contest For Souls And Sacred Sites In The Travels Of Sir John Mandeville, Robert Patterson

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

As the first medieval text to combine the matter of the East with the matter of the Holy Land, The Travels circulated widely in over 300 manuscripts, making it an important text when studying medieval Christian attitudes toward non-Christians. Although many scholars point to The Travels as a tolerant text ahead of its time, a historicized approach reveals that Mandeville's project is better understood in terms of his intolerant universalism. I argue that in casting non-Christians as proto-Christians who stand as evidence of Christianity's global spiritual hegemony, the author appropriates and consumes them in service of his universalist agenda. I …