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