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American Literature

University at Albany, State University of New York

Theses/Dissertations

Racism in literature

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Trauma Before The Name : Impersonal Violence In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Carolin Alice Hofmann Dec 2021

Trauma Before The Name : Impersonal Violence In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Carolin Alice Hofmann

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The dissertation studies the pre-history of trauma in US American fiction, examining how experiences of large-scale adversity are represented before the concept of psychological trauma emerges in the late nineteenth century. Distinctly modern forms of violence—diffuse, systemic, lacking direction and intent—bring forth less individual and personal experiences of grief and suffering than those imagined by twentieth-century trauma theory. Studying forms of feeling and of genre that make trauma legible historicizes the way a Western idea of modern subjectivity, as white, self-possessed, agential, and split, has shaped out understanding of how a person processes crisis. The dissertation visits three spaces that …


Caribbean Hauntings And Transnational Regionalism In Nineteenth- And Twentieth-Century American Literature, Bethany Aery Clerico Jan 2011

Caribbean Hauntings And Transnational Regionalism In Nineteenth- And Twentieth-Century American Literature, Bethany Aery Clerico

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Caribbean Hauntings and Transnational Regionalism in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Literature offers a new literary map of U.S. history that is routed through the Caribbean and that intervenes in certain historiographic problems that exceptionalism creates for national literary studies. In the literature of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martin R. Delany, Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison, I tease out references to the Caribbean that other critics have overlooked as a result of strictly national frames of analysis. These references evidence that each text is haunted by a Caribbean presence, a phrase that signifies both a "real" Caribbean, a political and …