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Encounters With The American Prairie: Realism, Idealism, And The Search For The Authentic Plains In The Nineteenth Century, Jacob L. Vines May 2015

Encounters With The American Prairie: Realism, Idealism, And The Search For The Authentic Plains In The Nineteenth Century, Jacob L. Vines

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Great Plains are prevalent among the literature of the nineteenth century, but receive hardly a single representation among the landscapes of the Hudson River School. This is certainly surprising; the public was teeming with interest in the Midwest and yet the principal landscape painters who aimed to represent and idealize a burgeoning America offered hardly a glance past the Mississippi River. This geographical silence is the result of a tension between idealistic and empirical representations of the land, one echoed in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie, Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies, and Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the …


Visionary Nonconformity: Miltonic Resonances And The Poetics Of Religious Dissent In The Long Eighteenth Century, Matthew Vickless Jan 2015

Visionary Nonconformity: Miltonic Resonances And The Poetics Of Religious Dissent In The Long Eighteenth Century, Matthew Vickless

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the wake of three decades of critical recovery work, which has restored poems by women and working-class poets to the British canon, critic Joseph Wittreich's groundbreaking critical model about visionary poetics now may be enhanced in order to reveal a more expansive and fluid Miltonic presence, particularly within much eighteenth-century visionary verse. This dissertation applies and at times refocuses Wittreich to achieve a clearer picture of how visionary poetry developed in Britain after Milton, accounting for key poetic visions by several women poets who wrote during the long eighteenth century. The visionary poetics of Jane Barker, Elizabeth Rowe, Mary …


Organic Angels: Innocence, Conversion, And Consumption In The Antebellum American Novel, Laura Jean Schrock Jan 2015

Organic Angels: Innocence, Conversion, And Consumption In The Antebellum American Novel, Laura Jean Schrock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Midcentury American novelists variously reworked the traditional conversion narrative to reflect a marked cultural shift in attitude towards human "nature," newly conceived as innocent and inclined to salvation. This liberalized aesthetic of conversion takes shape through the trope of the "organic angel," a developmental female figure whose journey from childhood innocence to saintly womanhood merges the processes of sexual maturation and Protestant conversion. Because she purifies self-interested desire by redirecting it towards spiritual ends, the organic angel provides a symbolic reconciliation of the young nation's budding imperial capitalism with its millennial expectations. While traditional emphasis on a maternal ethos at …