Digital Commons Network^™

Houses That Try To Be Haunted: A Look At Ursuline Convent And The Lalaurie Mansion, Kallye Virginia Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

New Orleans, Louisiana, has a reputation for being one of the most haunted cities in America. Two of the most supposedly “haunted” buildings in the city are the Ursuline Convent, said to be home to vampires, and the Lalaurie mansion, said to be home to ghosts. Whether or not these spaces qualify as “haunted” is irrelevant; what this thesis concerns itself with is why these spaces are still being discussed today. Both contain a long and storied past that date back to the early days of New Orleans, with the convent being around as early as the 1730s and the …

The Champion Of "The Permanent Things:" The Imaginative Conservatism Of Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, And Richard Weaver, Xiang Xu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation deals with the intellectual thought of Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, and Richard Weaver. Renowned today as the prominent thinkers who inaugurated the postwar American conservative intellectual movement, these three thinkers by far have not received enough attention among historians as they deserved.

In my dissertation, by unpacking the central tenets of the conservative thought of the three thinkers, I try to demonstrate that their ideas were not just pertinent to the nascent American conservative movement emerging after the postwar decade, but their intellectual thought are in many ways enduring and timeless, transcending the barren limitations of their own …

Mississippi Modernism: The River Valley And Race In American Culture, 1892-1945, William C. Palmer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mississippi Modernism looks to the Mississippi River Valley of the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth century to analyze the ways individuals expressed and determined their experience in the changing world. By engaging with theories of modernity from Marshall Berman and the Black modernism of Houston A. Baker, Jr. this work proposes the Mississippi watershed as a region where individuals indulge in the processes of modernism remaking the environments, both urban and rural, surrounding them. By thinking about the “dry” and “wet” valleys envisioned by European settlers as Christopher Morris terms it, …

Down The Stream: The Evolution Of Queer Stream-Of-Consciousness Novels Through The Works Of Virginia Woolf And Ali Smith, Turner Nat Byrd

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis attempts to understand the evolution of the stream-of-consciousness genre as it applies to, is written by, or centers queer people. Through generous Marxist-feminist readings of the works of Virginia Woolf and Ali Smith—used in this project as exemplars of the genre—it attempts to understand the differences within both the formal and philosophical/political outlook of the two authors. Specifically looking at Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and Smith’s Hotel World, The Accidental, and Girl Meets Boy, this project posits that Smith, intentionally or not, has effectively re-written the basic narratives and re-visited the same themes as Woolf, …

"No Place In American History": Remembering And Forgetting The Sultana Disaster, Elias John Baker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project examines the historical memory of the Sultana steamboat disaster of April 27, 1865. The Sultana, ferrying recently-released federal prisoners, exploded north of Memphis, killing over 1,700 in the nation’s worst maritime disaster. Contemporaries interpreted the disaster through a variety of lenses, finding evidence of recalcitrant rebels, the heroism of Union soldiers, and critiques of Republican emancipationist wartime policy. Steamboat safety advocates deployed the disaster’s memory to successfully press Radical Republicans for the 1871 Steamboat Act, establishing the nation’s first maritime safety code. The disaster’s survivors gathered at reunions and published personal narratives to secure the Sultana, and the …

The Meat Of The Gothic: Animality And Social Justice In United States Fiction And Film Of The Twenty-First Century, Amber Hodge

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Meat of the Gothic: Animality and Social Justice in United States Fiction and Film of the Twenty-First Century— situates twenty-first century US gothic narratives in relation to animal studies, even as it illuminates how these narratives interrogate the effects of historic and ongoing global systems of human oppression: slavery, imperialism, and capitalism. Instead of reacting to bias by asserting a claim to a humanity perpetually imbricated in divisions of class, race, and gender, present-day authors and filmmakers create characters who form communities that include nonhuman actors as a means of generating empowerment and critique. My approach to these narratives …

Post-Soul Speculation: An Exploration Of Afro-Southern Speculative Fiction, Hilary Word

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT This thesis is an examination of female authored, post-soul, Afro-Southern speculative fiction. The specific texts being examined are My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due, Stigmata by Phyllis Alesia Perry, and Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. Through exploration of these texts, I posit two large arguments. First, I posit that this thesis as a collective work illustrates how women-authored Afro-Southern speculative fiction based in the post-soul era embodies and champions womanist politics and praxis critical for liberation through speculative elements. Second, I assert that this thesis is demonstrative of how this particular type of fiction showcases the importance …

The Effect Of Hyperarticulation On The Perception Of Palatalization In Russian By L1 American English Speakers, Ekaterina Kolshenskaya

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The current study investigates a relationship between the ease of perception of a feature of secondary palatalization in Russian and a speech condition (casual and hyperarticulated). Forty-one L1 American English speakers – the students of the Russian program at The University of Mississippi – took part in two experiments. In addition, the research aimed to explore the influence of a hyperarticulated speech condition on a level of language proficiency of students (beginner or intermediate) and investigate whether students of a certain level benefit from hyperarticulation more. The results of two experiments shothat none of the groups of students benefited from …

Book Of Empire: The Political Bible Of U.S. Literary Modernism, Barry Hudek

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“Book of Empire” reveals that contrary to what is often suggested by scholars, modernism is not a moment of secularization and declining faith and that the Bible is actually a resource for mounting a radical critique of empire, nation-building, and racial oppression that defies conservative notions supporting those undertakings. For Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Zora Neale Hurston, the Bible is a source of moral authority they use to challenge the imperialist, colonialist, and nativist projects of the twentieth-century U.S. In rebranding the Bible as politically radical, these writers are not denying the authority of the Bible, but are re-appropriating …

The Impact Of French Camp Academy On Child Abuse And Neglect, Ji Hoon Heo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Within the last few decades, child abuse and neglect has not improved in the United States. Government services provides facilities and licensed families for abused and neglected children, but children often do not adjust due to negative past experiences. However, there are other non-governmental programs that help counter child abuse and neglect. This research focuses on one student attending French Camp Academy, a Christian-based boarding school in central Mississippi, in order to shed light on possible ways to stop the vicious cycle that children go through. When children receive the acknowledgment and support from a parental figure, they are more …

Representation Of The American South In Marvel Comics, 1963-2016, Katherine Gill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My work tracks the role of the American South and Southern characters in Marvel Comics, from 1963 to 2016. This thesis spring from a simple question: how stereotypical does this Northern industry portray the American South? To achieve this goal, I read a lot of comics, applying literary theory (such as Patricia Yeager and Tara McPherson) as well as American cultural studies (1980s televangelism and the history of human trafficking in America) to my findings. After reading multiple comic books from multiple sources, I settled on four different texts, each with a unique approach to portraying the South: the portrayal …

Neither Slave Nor Free... : Interracial Ecclesiastical Interaction In Presbyterian Mission Churches From South Carolina To Mississippi, 1818-1877., Otis Westbrook Pickett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research focuses on the efforts of a variety of missionary agencies, organizations, Presbyteries, synods and congregations who pursued domestic missionary efforts and established mission churches among enslaved Africans and Native Americans from South Carolina to Mississippi from 1818-1877. The dissertation begins with a historiographical overview of southern religion among whites, enslaved Africans and Native Americans. It then follows the work of the Rev. Cyrus Kingsbury among the Choctaw, the Rev. T.C. Stuart among the Chickasaw, the Rev. Charles Colcock Jones among enslaved Africans in Georgia and investigates the work of the Rev. John Adger and John Lafayette Girardeau among …

Y'All Eat: Foodways, Performative Regional Identity, And The South In The Twenty-First Century, Kirsten Schofield

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Y'all Eat: Foodways, Performative Regional Identity, and the South in the Twenty-first Century" examines the ways in which iconic Southerners--Jim Beam and his ilk, Colonel Harland Sanders, and Paula Deen--create and sustain the hypercontemporary South. Because of their media exposure and place in the popular imagination, these characters force a specific kind of performance in both an intergroup and intragroup context. Close readings of individual appearances and selected portions of these characters' output help to shed light on how these identities are formed, upon what they rely for structure and support, and what this means for modern consumers around the …

Sacrificial Acts: Martyrdom And Nationhood In Seventeenth-Century Drama, Kelley Kay Hogue

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sacrificial Acts: Martyrdom and Nationhood in Seventeenth-Century Drama posits that the importance of sixteenth-century martyrologies in defining England's national identity extends to the seventeenth century through popular representations of martyrdom on the page and stage. I argue that drama functions as a gateway between religious and secular conceptions of martyrdom; thus, this dissertation charts the transformation of martyrological narratives from early modern editions of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments to the execution of the Royal Martyr, Charles I. Specifically, I contend that seventeenth-century plays shaped the secularization of martyrdom in profound ways by staging the sacrificial suffering and deaths of …

Gravesend, William Boyle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gravesend, a novel, is set predominantly in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn, though there are several scenes that take place in a fictional upstate town called Hawk's Nest. The novel centers around three characters: Conway D'Innocenzio, Alessandra Biagini, and Eugene Calabrese. These characters are tied together by Ray Boy Calabrese, who has recently been released from prison for his role in the brutal death of Duncan D'Innocenzio, Conway's brother, sixteen years before. Ray Boy returns and Conway, twenty-nine and working at Rite Aid, seeks revenge. Alessandra, a failed actress who has been in Los Angeles for a decade and has …

Midwives Of Mississippi, Lane Noel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Across the United States as late as 1910, midwives delivered half of all babies. Their practice was primarily among women of white European descent and African American women of the South. The practice of midwifery was commonplace in Mississippi. Together, black midwives and white nurses would help to implement a new public healthcare structure in Mississippi during the 1920s. Records of the Mississippi State Board of Health together with letters from midwives and public health nurses' reports put midwives at the heart of the story of public health reform. Already held in high esteem by their own communities, midwives came …

Alternative Weekly And City Magazine Under One Roof: Contemporary Media, Inc.'S “Memphis Flyer” And “Memphis” Magazine, Cory Taylor Cox

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies the media of alternative weekly publications through a case study of the Memphis Flyer and its relationship with sister publication Memphis magazine, both under the umbrella of Contemporary Media, Inc. History of the publications, targeted demographics and business models will be taken into account to answer proposed research questions. The publications prominence in local media as well as their relationship to the traditional city paper, The Commercial Appeal, is recognized, along with the company's plans for adaptation to new trends in online journalism.

An Attempt At Balance: Staging Guare’S The House Of Blue Leaves, Richard Albert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper is an account of the fully realized production of John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves, presented at the University of Mississippi, November 19, 20, 21, and 22, in the Studio Theater of Bryant Hall.

The first chapter offers a brief history on the play, including some reviews of both the original production and the revival. The second and third chapters offer an analysis of the play and a journal of the production, respectively. The forth and final chapter gives an evaluation of the work done.

Lafcadio Hearn: His Life And His Literary Thought, Ray Bass

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

[No abstract provided.]