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A Raucous Entertainment: Melodrama, Race, And The Search For Moral Legibility In Nineteenth-Century America, Sarah M. Olivier
A Raucous Entertainment: Melodrama, Race, And The Search For Moral Legibility In Nineteenth-Century America, Sarah M. Olivier
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Gathering together episodes from American theater history, my dissertation focuses on the destabilizing identities and paradoxical resolutions of so-called "Indian" and slavery plays to address nineteenth-century melodrama's fundamental engagement with race. Melodrama is a spectacular form that uses iconic images to move audiences to feel powerful emotions and to assign moral legibility to societal problems. Given the significant role of territorial expansion and chattel slavery in US history, race has always presented Americans with crucial moral dilemmas. Melodrama has long provided a dominant mode of representation for addressing such dilemmas that hinges upon racially inflected conceptions of good and evil. …
"The Sudden Thrill Of That Change": Framing George Eliot's Social Vision, Cyrus Seaberry Frost
"The Sudden Thrill Of That Change": Framing George Eliot's Social Vision, Cyrus Seaberry Frost
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Although scholarly commentary of the last decade has engaged more intensively than ever with the content of George Eliot's ideas concerning nineteenth-century British culture, the devices and techniques Eliot employs in the transmission of those ideas remain less explored. Consequently, room exists for a study as attentive to the formal characteristics of Eliot's messages as recent scholars have been to the content of those messages. This dissertation seeks to elucidate the ways in which specific formal techniques that characterize Eliot's fictional work evince her engagement with the thinking of social theorists, particularly Ludwig Feuerbach. The project contends that Eliot internalizes …
Catholic Literary Theory: The Conditional Existentialism Of Four Protagonists And Their Creators, Jacob Patrick Pride
Catholic Literary Theory: The Conditional Existentialism Of Four Protagonists And Their Creators, Jacob Patrick Pride
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
According to Catholic literary theory, the novelist, like the Divine Mystery to a certain extent, creates her characters freely and free with the possibility and probability that they may speak against their creator and even finally rebel. This dissertation reflects upon the relative infiniteness of four literary authors - Flannery O'Connor, Mary McCarthy, Walker Percy, and Cormac McCarthy. In the three novels and one imaginative memoir considered in particular, these authors create their existentialist protagonists, who in their turn reflect the conditional existentialism of their creators. This dissertation, thus, seeks to resurrect, with modern sensibilities, the pre-renaissance and renaissance commonplace …
Seeing The God Of New Mexico: Mary Austin's Starry Adventure And The Optic Of Enchantment, Olivia Jayne Mann
Seeing The God Of New Mexico: Mary Austin's Starry Adventure And The Optic Of Enchantment, Olivia Jayne Mann
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines 20th century American writer Mary Austin's last novel, Starry Adventure (1931), a work unjustly ignored by most Austin scholars, yet touted by the photographer Ansel Adams (in a letter to Austin) as "the greatest thing I have ever read." This thesis will be particularly concerned with the concept of vision in the novel and the connections between Austin's fiction and the New Mexican modernism/primitivism movement in the visual arts. I explore what I call Austin's "optic of enchantment," a visual experience of divinity that is uniquely tied to the New Mexican landscape. I break down this optic …
Tears Of A Clown: Reexamination Of Disabled Narrators In William Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury And As I Lay Dying, Alexandra Rose Smith
Tears Of A Clown: Reexamination Of Disabled Narrators In William Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury And As I Lay Dying, Alexandra Rose Smith
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis argues that Darl Bundren of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and Benjy Compson of The Sound and the Fury exhibit certain similarities, suggesting that, in relation to Donald M. Kartiganer's model from the introduction of The Fragile Thread: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner's Novels, they would be paired together better than his initial couplings. This argument proposes to discuss why Darl Bundren is the reincarnated version of Benjy Compson in terms of their internal discourses, narratorial skills, and disability within each novel. As both characters could easily be labeled "disabled," this endeavor will also speculate …