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Articles 1 - 7 of 7
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Wild Abandon: Postwar Literature Between Ecology And Authenticity, Alexander F. Menrisky
Wild Abandon: Postwar Literature Between Ecology And Authenticity, Alexander F. Menrisky
Theses and Dissertations--English
Wild Abandon traces a literary and cultural history of late twentieth-century appeals to dissolution, the moment at which a text seems to erase its subject’s sense of selfhood in natural environs. I argue that such appeals arose in response to a prominent yet overlooked interaction between discourses of ecology and authenticity following the rise and fall of the American New Left in the 1960s and 70s. This conjunction inspired certain intellectuals and activists to celebrate the ecological concept of interconnectivity as the most authentic basis of subjectivity in political, philosophical, spiritual, and literary writings. As I argue, dissolution represents a …
Moving Experiences: Women And Mobility In Late Nineteenth And Early Twentieth-Century American Literature, Amy Simpson Birk
Moving Experiences: Women And Mobility In Late Nineteenth And Early Twentieth-Century American Literature, Amy Simpson Birk
Theses and Dissertations--English
This project recovers and revises late nineteenth and early twentieth-century narratives of mobility which invoke female protagonists who move from stifling, patriarchal domestic settings in the rural and suburban United States to the more symbolically emancipated settings of New York City and even Europe to reveal both the limitations and possibilities for women’s lives in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. By challenging popular American fiction’s preoccupation with urban white slavery myths and the lingering proscriptive standards for women’s behavior of the Victorian era, the Introduction argues the selected works of this dissertation mark a significant, …
Understanding The Gray: Aging Women In Victorian Culture And Fiction, Hannah T. Ruehl
Understanding The Gray: Aging Women In Victorian Culture And Fiction, Hannah T. Ruehl
Theses and Dissertations--English
My dissertation, Understanding the Gray:Aging Women in Victorian Culture and Fiction, explores the cultural construction of aging for middle-class Victorian women and how aging was experienced and then depicted within novels. Chiefly, I work from midcentury to the end of the century in order to understand the experience of aging and ways women were ascribed age due to their position in society as spinsters, mothers, and progressive women. I explore how the age of fictional women reflects and contributes to critical debates concerning how Victorian women were expected to behave. Debates over separate spheres, how women were perceived in …
Rebooting Masculinity After 9/11: Male Heroism On Film From Bush To Trump, Owen R. Horton
Rebooting Masculinity After 9/11: Male Heroism On Film From Bush To Trump, Owen R. Horton
Theses and Dissertations--English
Conceptions of masculinity on film shifted after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from representations of male heroism as invulnerable, powerful, and safe to representations of male heroism as resilient, vengeful, and vulnerable. At the same time, the antagonists of these films shifted towards representations as shadowy, unknowable, and disembodied. These changing representations, I argue, are windows into the anxieties Americans faced in the aftermath of the attacks. The continuing presentation of power as linked to violence, however, illustrates the ways in which conceptions of masculinity have stayed the same.
American Mnemonic: Racial Identity In Women’S Life Writing Of The Civil War, Katherine Waddell
American Mnemonic: Racial Identity In Women’S Life Writing Of The Civil War, Katherine Waddell
Theses and Dissertations--English
American Mnemonic: Racial Identity in Women’s Life Writing of the Civil War takes up three American women's autobiographies: Emilie Davis’s pocket diaries (1863-65), Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four in the White House (1868), and Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863). Chapter one is devoted to literary review and methodology. Chapter two, "the all-absorbing topic': Belonging and Isolation in Emilie Davis’s Diaries," explores the everyday record of Emilie Davis in the context of Philadelphia’s free black community during the war. Davis’s position as a working-class free woman offers a fresh perspective on the much-discussed “elite” …
“He’Ll Just Be Paul Newman Anyway”: Cinematic Continuity And The Star Image, William Guy Spriggs
“He’Ll Just Be Paul Newman Anyway”: Cinematic Continuity And The Star Image, William Guy Spriggs
Theses and Dissertations--English
Since performers first became credited for their on-screen work in the early twentieth century, stardom has been understood as a primary factor distinguishing cinema as a unique, discrete art form. Much of the work done by canonical film scholars emphasizes film as a continuous medium defined by relation, as well as the irreducible value of human presence in creating meaning that transcends the boundaries of film. These are important cornerstones of star studies, a subfield within film studies that interrogates how film performers accrue and project meaning and value. They also isolate continuity as a singular tool for developing approaches …
Meeting At The Threshold: Slavery’S Influence On Hospitality And Black Personhood In Late-Antebellum American Literature, Rebecca Wiltberger Wiggins
Meeting At The Threshold: Slavery’S Influence On Hospitality And Black Personhood In Late-Antebellum American Literature, Rebecca Wiltberger Wiggins
Theses and Dissertations--English
In my dissertation, I argue that both white and black authors of the late-1850s and early-1860s used scenes of race-centered hospitality in their narratives to combat the pervasive stereotypes of black inferiority that flourished under the influence of chattel slavery. The wide-spread scenes of hospitality in antebellum literature—including shared meals, entertaining overnight guests, and business meetings in personal homes—are too inextricably bound to contemporary discussions of blackness and whiteness to be ignored. In arguing for the humanizing effects of playing host or guest as a black person, my project joins the work of literary scholars from William L. Andrews to …