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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, …
Autobiography From St. Augustine To David Antin: Examining The Construction Of The Self As Mutually Reflective Of Cultural Developments In Science And Technology, Art, And Literary Theory., Jessica Lynn Faust
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
In this study, I look at the mutually reflective changes in society and autobiography in works definitive for their various periods: Augustine's The Confessions from antiquity; Rousseau's The Confessions from the eighteenth century; the autobiographical writings of Gertrude Stein, from the modernist period; and, most importantly here, the focus on the development of David Antin's work as representative of both postmodernism and current culture. Specifically, I consider the construction of the self in respect to art, literary theory, memory research, and science and technology. During the second half of the twentieth century, computers have permeated almost every facet of society. …
Functions Of Liminality In Literature: A Study Of Georges Bataille's "Le Bleu Du Ciel", Julien Green's "L'Autre", And Assia Djebar's "L'Amour, La Fantasia"., Malynda Strother Taylor
Functions Of Liminality In Literature: A Study Of Georges Bataille's "Le Bleu Du Ciel", Julien Green's "L'Autre", And Assia Djebar's "L'Amour, La Fantasia"., Malynda Strother Taylor
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
The term "liminality" originated in the work of two socioanthropologists, Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner; it is descriptive of the middle phase in a rite of passage. Whereas the "betwixt and between" transitional pattern is temporary in tribal societies, it often becomes a way of life in the twentieth century. Although their projects differ greatly, Victor Turner's and Jacques Derrida's mutual interest in border spaces brings them both into this discussion. Some of the same phenomena described by the sociological term, liminality, is discussed philosophically as "undecidability" and "aporia." Liminality functions to link and to investigate three disparate twentieth-century …
The Clarity Of The Modern: Or, The Ambiguities Of Henry James And Wallace Stevens., Gregory Angelo Marks
The Clarity Of The Modern: Or, The Ambiguities Of Henry James And Wallace Stevens., Gregory Angelo Marks
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Clarity, in all its various guises, was before the advent of Romanticism looked upon as an unquestioned focus of attention and irrefutable goal of human endeavor. Conversely, ambiguity was seen negatively: it was in language an obstacle to communication; in ethics, an indecisiveness failing action; and in ontology and aesthetics, a slovenly disorder. With Romanticism, this basic consensus regarding these terms ends. No longer an expression of censure, ambiguity is imagined as a liberatory force. Clarity, if attainable at all, is dismissed as mere rigidity. The works of Americans Henry James and Wallace Stevens embody and enact this tension and …
The Control Of Time In Renaissance England: Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, And Donne., Eric C. Brown
The Control Of Time In Renaissance England: Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, And Donne., Eric C. Brown
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
While critics have much analyzed the idea of time, they have left largely unchronicled an important Renaissance conception. Time the destroyer or devourer and time the creator or revealer of truth are familiar early modern tropes. But the inversion of this power structure--humanity not controlled by but controlling time--was equally pervasive. Especially apparent are inversions in which time is acted upon as an instrument objectified for use and abuse. Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Donne all explore this notion of time as controllable instrument, alternately condemning or glorifying time's debasement, enfeeblement, subjugation, and manipulation. For Marlowe, the control of time manifests …
Representations Of Class, Gender, Race, And Religion In The Novels Of Somerville And Ross, 1894-1925., Nicole Pepinster Greene
Representations Of Class, Gender, Race, And Religion In The Novels Of Somerville And Ross, 1894-1925., Nicole Pepinster Greene
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation examines how the Anglo-Irish writers, Edith Somerville and Martin Ross (nee Violet Martin), attempt to define themselves and others in terms of class, gender, race, and religion at a time when self-definition itself is an act of resistance and defiance. This analysis focuses on four novels: The Real Charlotte (1894), co-authored by Somerville and Ross, Mount Music (1919), An Enthusiast (1921), and The Big House of Inver (1925), written by Somerville alone. Since these novels were composed during the most chaotic years of Irish history when the country was in transition from the status of a colonial dependency …
All Blues: A Study Of African-American Resistance Poetry., Anthony Jerome Bolden
All Blues: A Study Of African-American Resistance Poetry., Anthony Jerome Bolden
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, critics of African-American poetry have disagreed vehemently about poetic form. Some, like J. Saunders Redding, for instance, have expressed skepticism about poetry based upon oral forms. Others, like Sterling Brown, have argued that a viable poetics can be developed from black expressive forms. This dissertation analyzes the debate over black poetic form and traces the development of modernist and postmodernist poetics that have been shaped by the specific contours of African-American vernacular culture. Yet this study is not merely formalistic. Although "All Blues" describes a blues aesthetic by examining intersexual relationships between the …
Coincidence And Class In The Victorian Novel., Beverly Maddox Moon
Coincidence And Class In The Victorian Novel., Beverly Maddox Moon
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
In the Victorian novels of this study, Coincidence and Class in the Victorian Novel, coincidence is an unacknowledged paradigm for class mobility. Its role for the most part unremarked, coincidence moves money and property into the hands of the protagonist, allowing the transition between classes to take place. In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Villette, and Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, coincidence is a paradox in that it accomplishes two very different ends, resolution and conflict, simultaneously. As a narrative device, coincidence camouflages narrative gaps, arranging resolution within the text by allowing improved class position; as a narrative strategy, …
American Medusa, American Sphinx: The Female Gaze And Knowledge In Modern Fiction And Film., Janet Clare Wondra
American Medusa, American Sphinx: The Female Gaze And Knowledge In Modern Fiction And Film., Janet Clare Wondra
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Two major arguments define this study, the first being that the gaze, a concept borrowed from film theory, provides a productive approach to many literary texts, whether central to the canon, like The Sound and the Fury and The Great Gatsby, or relatively new to critical attention, like Nella Larsen's Passing. Locating and following the gaze enables literary critics to bring into focus the power relations within narratives and the scopic negotiations by which hierarchies of privilege are established and maintained. Second, the study both argues and demonstrates that feminist film theory has prematurely closed important avenues of investigation by …
Daniel Defoe's "An Essay On The History And Reality Of Apparitions": A Critical Edition., Kathleen Louise Kincade
Daniel Defoe's "An Essay On The History And Reality Of Apparitions": A Critical Edition., Kathleen Louise Kincade
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation is a scholarly edition of Daniel Defoe's An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions, which was published in 1727 and has never been re-edited since his death in 1731. It poses several interesting problems for both the literary critic and bibliographer. This edition is challenging for the bibliographer because, initially, this work was published anonymously. The second edition appeared with the addition of "by Andrew Moreton, Esq." as author. A section of my introduction attributes this work to Defoe by using contemporary theory and methods. Defoe scholars have had a problem attributing works to Defoe. Instead …
Rousseau And The Lyric Natural: The Self As Representation., Pamela Diane Gay
Rousseau And The Lyric Natural: The Self As Representation., Pamela Diane Gay
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's work for the lyric stage comprises several opera libretti (Les Muses galantes and La Decouverte du nouveau monde), an intermede ( Le Devin du village), a scene lyrique ( Pygmalion) and an unfinished opera (Daphnis et Chloce ). These works use as a motif the figure of nature while continually defining and redefining, in a sort of spiral development, the self. Nature represents for Rousseau and others of his century a paradigm allowing for small segments of history to be presented as an evenly construed narrative. For Rousseau, the construction of a narrative in Le Second Discours marks …
The Portrait Of A Psyche: Women's Underworld Journeys In Four Modern American Novels., Kristen Sifert
The Portrait Of A Psyche: Women's Underworld Journeys In Four Modern American Novels., Kristen Sifert
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Drawing from James Hillman's psychological reading of myth, this study traces the emergence of the ancient myth of Psyche in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, Caroline Gordon's The Women on the Porch, William Faulkner's Light in August, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. From the perspective of modern divisions, the novelists look forward to the wholeness of Psyche's reunion with Eros and the assumption of the mortal woman, yet their immediate focus is the transformative journey through the underworld. James elaborates the mythical impact of money; like the coins Psyche pays Charon, who detaches her from a sense of her …
The Flesh And The Spirit: The Female Subject And The Body In The Spiritual Autobiographies Of Anne Hutchinson, Anne Bradstreet And Mary Rowlandson., Mary Clare Carruth
The Flesh And The Spirit: The Female Subject And The Body In The Spiritual Autobiographies Of Anne Hutchinson, Anne Bradstreet And Mary Rowlandson., Mary Clare Carruth
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation approaches Anne Hutchinson's trial transcripts (1637-1638), Anne Bradstreet's "To My Dear Children" (1656), and Mary Rowlandson's "The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson" (1682) from the perspectives of autobiographical scholarship and feminist theory. It places these writers within a subversive matrilineal autobiographical tradition. It analyzes how seventeenth-century American Puritan women engender the conversion genre, which many scholars have assumed to be gender-neutral. In particular, it considers how Hutchinson, Bradstreet, and Rowlandson negotiate cultural inscriptions of the female body as they …