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Articles 1 - 30 of 67
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Gestures Of Dissent: Self-Fashioning Performance From Southern Women Writers During The Fin De Siécle, Elisa Fuhrken
Gestures Of Dissent: Self-Fashioning Performance From Southern Women Writers During The Fin De Siécle, Elisa Fuhrken
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This project explores Southern women writers during the latter half of the nineteenth-century who asserted and crafted a modernized identity by turning to various modes of transgressive performance and performance spaces. For women of the nineteenth-century, this meant extricating themselves from a domestic, sentimental identity and apprehending a more fluid, dynamic type of being. The modes of performance, such as spectatorship, orality, and gesture, allowed these women to express and articulate an alternative feminine identity while also engaging with an embodied epistemology. This thesis looks at three Southern women writers: Sherwood Bonner’s novel Like Unto Like and her travel letters …
The Black Petromodernism Of Zora Neale Hurston: Energy, Race, And Mobility, Stuart Mullet
The Black Petromodernism Of Zora Neale Hurston: Energy, Race, And Mobility, Stuart Mullet
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis situates Zora Neale Hurston and the folk communities in her oeuvre within the context of modernity’s dependencies on fossil fuels. Such a disciplinary context provides an energy footing for our understandings of African American migrations in the twentieth century—which radically transformed the nation on multiple levels—and it illuminates the communal values that undergird Black approaches to petromodern forms of mobility. Furthermore, by engaging the Black spaces of the South, my argument begins filling a gap in the energy humanities. Few scholars in this field engage deeply those populations and regions that disproportionately experience the underbelly of petromodernity and …
Masculinity And Cold War Fairy Tales: Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, And Ross Macdonald, Susan E. Wood
Masculinity And Cold War Fairy Tales: Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, And Ross Macdonald, Susan E. Wood
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation examines the use of fairy-tale allusions to explore masculinity in four novels published during the Cold War period. This notable focus on men and masculinity held in common across these four novels from four different decades is interesting because it suggests that the shift in focus to women and feminist ideals in fairy-tale revisions of the 1970s and after is even more stark a shift than has yet been recognized by scholars. This dissertation finds that Eudora Welty’s novella The Robber Bridegroom (1942), Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955), Donald Barthelme’s novel Snow White (1967), and Ross Macdonald’s novel …
“We Got More Yesterday Than Anybody”: Child Ghosts And The National Trauma Of Anti-Black Racism In American Literature, Megan Swartzfager
“We Got More Yesterday Than Anybody”: Child Ghosts And The National Trauma Of Anti-Black Racism In American Literature, Megan Swartzfager
Honors Theses
This thesis examines the roles of haunting in the context of racial violence in three texts: Beloved by Toni Morrison, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, and Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan. In each of these texts, a parent is responsible for the death of a child. In the former two texts, both by Black authors, a Black parent kills a Black child in what they believe to be a protective act in the face of violence by white people. Wolf Whistle, however, written by a white author, is animated by the ghost of a character based on Emmett Till. …
Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature, Josh-Wade Ferguson
Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature, Josh-Wade Ferguson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
“Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature” revises the methodological assumptions that have underwritten our understanding of blues literature and the politics of race and region that surround it. Where previous commentators have defined blues literature primarily through its formal and thematic connections with blues music and with the sociohistorical contours of black southern life more generally this dissertation expands the boundaries of how we conceive blues literature by examining Langston Hughes’ poems “The Weary Blues” (1925) and “Po Boy Blues” (1926) August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984) Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods …
Decolonial Resistance In Latinx Writings From Peru To The United States: A Portfolio, Isabel Norwood
Decolonial Resistance In Latinx Writings From Peru To The United States: A Portfolio, Isabel Norwood
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection begins with the premise that colonial relationships manifest in ways beyond exploitation of one nation by another. It relies on the decolonial theory of Walter D. Mignolo in its assumption that imbalances of power in the realms of race gender sexuality and class are fundamentally colonial. With this more expansive understanding of coloniality in mind I examine resistance to colonial exploitation in a range of texts from across the Americas. The first essay in this collection explores the role of the guinea pig in Andean food culture arguing that the continued consumption of guinea pig represents a form …
Alaska And The Arctic In The U.S. Imaginary, Ryan Charlton
Alaska And The Arctic In The U.S. Imaginary, Ryan Charlton
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Popular narratives of Alaska have long relied on the region’s mythical status as the “last frontier” a perception which enfolds Alaska into a continental narrative of U.S. expansion. This frontier image has foreclosed our ability to appreciate the profound instability which the 1867 Alaska Purchase brought into U.S. national discourse at a time when Americans were eager to adopt a fixed national identity. In the three decades following the purchase Alaska would resist incorporation into the national imaginary challenging the coherence of U.S. national identity and calling into question foundational myths of the United States as a continental and agrarian …
Subverting The Patriarchal Panopticon: Challenges To Eugenics Rhetoric In The Novels Of Mccullers And Welty, Regina Marie Young
Subverting The Patriarchal Panopticon: Challenges To Eugenics Rhetoric In The Novels Of Mccullers And Welty, Regina Marie Young
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
My thesis takes into consideration the scope of eugenics ideologies and their influence on literature specifically two mid-twentieth century authors from the U.S. South Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty. I contend that both writers engage with eugenics rhetoric challenging and subverting the prevailing ideology of the day albeit in differing ways. McCullers and Welty address different facets of eugenics rhetoric in their novels— namely the nature of “defect” and the criteria for “fitness” for “citizenship.” This thesis interrogates the ways in which these writers develop rhetorical strategies for resisting eugenics ideologies in their respective novels Reflections in a Golden Eye …
Freedom At The Freak Show: Carnivalesque Imagery In The Fiction Of Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor And Katherine Anne Porter, Virginia Mccarley
Freedom At The Freak Show: Carnivalesque Imagery In The Fiction Of Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor And Katherine Anne Porter, Virginia Mccarley
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines the function of the circus and the sideshow in the work of Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Katherine Anne Porter, arguing that all of these authors employ Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque as a reaction to and against the expectations put on them as women who are pressured to conform to the Southern ideal. In the first chapter, I argue that Eudora Welty uses the carnivalesque to reveal the performativity of normalcy in both “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies” (1937) and “A Memory” (1937). These performances, in the first story particularly, offer a critique of …
Reevaluating Religion: A Case For Inclusivity Of Lgbtq Christians In The Church, Amber Erin Dupree
Reevaluating Religion: A Case For Inclusivity Of Lgbtq Christians In The Church, Amber Erin Dupree
Honors Theses
This thesis project is focused on understanding the discrimination that is rampant amongst Southern churches regarding their LGBTQ members and offering solutions to this problem that has occurred throughout the many generations of Christianity. In order to understand this discrimination, three books were consulted for the research aspect of this project. The three books include the following: Sweet Tea by E. Patrick Johnson, Don't Be Afraid Anymore by Troy Perry, and Our Tribe by Nancy Wilson. A Questionnaire was also given to people who identified as Southern, Christian, and LGBTQ in order to gain an understanding of the current sentiments …
Haunted Mississippi: Ghosts, Identity, And Collective Identity, Hailey Cooper
Haunted Mississippi: Ghosts, Identity, And Collective Identity, Hailey Cooper
Honors Theses
This thesis wrestles with the duality of the terms haunting and ghosts in relation to Mississippi and its collective identity and narrative. Ghostlore and haunted tourism provide insight into shared cultural constructs and indicate an absence of certain perspectives from more generally held ideas of identity. Analyses of ghost stories from around the state explore these hauntings of history and ghosted narratives, so it is ghosts v. ghosted and hauntings v. haunted. I use ghost stories from Natchez, MS to explore postsouthern spaces and performances of southernness and the narratives around female apparitions to study the role of southern womanhood …
A Modernized Fairy Tale: Speculations On Technology, Labor, Politics, And Gender In The Oz Series, Zachary Hez Hollingsworth
A Modernized Fairy Tale: Speculations On Technology, Labor, Politics, And Gender In The Oz Series, Zachary Hez Hollingsworth
Honors Theses
On the surface, L. Frank Baum's Oz series would appear to merely be fourteen books of inventive children's fantasy, but in truth Baum communicates several personal progressive beliefs to his youthful audience through the use of his fantastical world upon closer examination. For my research, I reread every book in Baum's original Oz series and made note of any potentially relevant allegorical or metaphorical themes. Once I started to notice a trend of themes regarding technology, labor, politics, and gender, I settled on these themes to be the overall focus of my thesis's discussion. I read as many academic essays …
One Or Two Things I Know About Us: Narrative Strategies For Autoethnography, Self-Representation And Healing In Four Memoirs By Poor-White Women From The U.S. South, Joseph Aaron Farmer
One Or Two Things I Know About Us: Narrative Strategies For Autoethnography, Self-Representation And Healing In Four Memoirs By Poor-White Women From The U.S. South, Joseph Aaron Farmer
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation examines autobiographical writings by formerly poor white Southern women, who are rarely considered as a group and are more typically studied with “rough South” male writers, which would suggest that few women have contributed their own gendered experience to discussions of class, race, and sexuality vis-à-vis Southern poverty. Correcting this assumption, I examine formative statements by women from poor white backgrounds, including Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Red Dirt, Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilt, Dorothy Allison’s Trash, and Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle. Each of these writers engage in narrative strategies that do not defend …
Book Of Empire: The Political Bible Of U.S. Literary Modernism, Barry Hudek
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 …
A “Human Endeavor”: Killing In Contemporary U.S. Combat Narratives, William Mackenzie
A “Human Endeavor”: Killing In Contemporary U.S. Combat Narratives, William Mackenzie
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This PH.D dissertation aims to develop a 3-D numerical model of dam-break flows on movable beds. Three tasks are defined to accomplish the goal of this study. The first task is developing a 3-D hydrodynamic model to simulate dam-break flow on fixed beds with simple geometry and test the water surface tracking technique. This model solves the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations using a finite-difference method on rectilinear, staggered grids. The volume-of-fluid (VOF) technique with SOLA-VOF advection scheme is used to capture the free surface motion. The developed model is tested using several experimental dam-break flows and the VOF technique is …
Cold War New York: Postmodernism, Lyricism, And Queer Aesthetics In 1970s New York Poetry, Jared James O'Connor
Cold War New York: Postmodernism, Lyricism, And Queer Aesthetics In 1970s New York Poetry, Jared James O'Connor
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis explores the poetry of Joe Brainard and Anne Waldman, two poets of the critically neglected second-generation New York school. I argue that Brainard and Waldman help define the emerging discourse of postmodern poetry through their attention to cold war culture of the 1970s, countercultural ideologies, and poetic form. Both Brainard and Waldman enact a poetics of vulnerability in their work, situating themselves as wholly unique from their late-modernist predecessors. In doing so, they help engender a poetics concerned not only with the intellectual stakes but with the cultural environment they are forced to navigate. Chapter 1 explores Brainard's …
All Things Loved And Unlovable: Discovering Southern Identity In Black Migration Novels, Michael Holman
All Things Loved And Unlovable: Discovering Southern Identity In Black Migration Novels, Michael Holman
Honors Theses
This thesis traces the development of the ways that the South figures in the imaginations of black writers by examining Southern identity in three novels centered around migratory protagonists. The thesis examines the ways in which folk identity, urban landscapes, remigration, and gender shape the migration experience in each novel. The novels discussed here are Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Quicksand posits the South as a place of unique danger, especially for black women, Invisible Man characterizes it as a place defined by oppressive memory that may be utilized as a resource …
Nella Larsen: An Untold Story Of Race Through Literature, Bria Stephens Stephens
Nella Larsen: An Untold Story Of Race Through Literature, Bria Stephens Stephens
Honors Theses
This study explores the life of Nella Larsen, investigating how her unusual childhood and early adulthood provided substance for her to make critical and unique views on race relations and racially dichotomized communities. The study shows how the Harlem Renaissance was essential in providing this outlet to Larsen; it was an era where African American art was lauded. The investigation required research into Larsen's childhood and early adult life using several different pieces of biographical works. After detailing impactful events in her early life, the study developed further with critical analyzation of her fictional short stories and novels. Additional research …
Everybody's Story: Gertrude Stein's Career As A Nexus Connecting Writers And Painters In Bohemian Paris, Elizabeth F. Milam
Everybody's Story: Gertrude Stein's Career As A Nexus Connecting Writers And Painters In Bohemian Paris, Elizabeth F. Milam
Honors Theses
My thesis examines how the combination of Gertrude Stein's career, Paris, and the time period before, during, and after The Great War conflated to create the Lost Generation and affected the work of Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. Five different sections focus on: the background of Stein and how her understanding of expression came into existence, Paris and the unique environment it provided for experimentation at the beginning of the twentieth century (and how that compared to the environment found in America), Modernism existing in Paris prior to World War One, the mass culture of militarization in World War One …
Photographic Representations Of The South: Eudora Welty And Doris Ulmann, Molly Maher
Photographic Representations Of The South: Eudora Welty And Doris Ulmann, Molly Maher
Honors Theses
Eudora Welty and Doris Ulmann both photographed African Americans living in the South during the 1930s. Ulmann photographed the unique Gullah community in South Carolina, documenting their agricultural work, religious traditions, and lifestyle. Welty photographed the African American community within her home state of Mississippi. Despite a parallel interest in subject matter, Welty stated that she did not like Ulmann's photography. This thesis examines the differences between Welty and Ulmann's techniques and their relationships to the South, their subjects, and literary texts in order to identify why Welty explicitly expressed a dislike for Ulmann's photographs.
Economic Enchantment In Eudora Welty's A Curtain Of Green, Elizabeth Moore
Economic Enchantment In Eudora Welty's A Curtain Of Green, Elizabeth Moore
Honors Theses
This thesis analyzes Eudora Welty's short story collection, A Curtain of Green, and the interactions between its characters and the Mississippi economy. The paper takes into account Eudora Welty's work with the WPA during the Great Depression and her experiences photographing Mississippians throughout the state. Additionally, this thesis uses Welty's terminology when describing her experience of shopping as a child, specifically the enchantment of goods. This material is used to argue that Eudora Welty does address economic elements in her early short stories. Furthermore, this collection demonstrates a difference between gender participation in the economy, particularly among salesmen and female …
The Mockingjay Phenomena: A Study On The Position Of Young Adult Women In Dystopia, Hannah Hultman
The Mockingjay Phenomena: A Study On The Position Of Young Adult Women In Dystopia, Hannah Hultman
Honors Theses
The purpose of this research is to explore the messages and impact of three young adult dystopian trilogies, The Hunger Games, Divergent and The Uglies. In particular, the role of the American female teenager in political, economic and social spheres is discussed through examining the three female teenaged protagonists of these novels. For comparative purposes, George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World function as counterpoints to the young adult novels; the analysis of these different novels will prove that young adult dystopian novels show young adult women that their choices and actions can be integral to their societies …
God's Gonna Trouble The Water, Dominiqua Dickey
God's Gonna Trouble The Water, Dominiqua Dickey
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
"God's Gonna Trouble the Water," is a noir set in Grenada, MS in the 1930s. This novel explores the issues of race, gender, and class via the protagonist, a thirtysomething black woman who despite her low status in the socioeconomic hierarchy of this small southern town is able to navigate the delicate complexities of the environment to search for her missing granddaughter, a mixed raced toddler whose father is the son of a prominent white land owner. Although national history portrays Mississippi as maintaining a polarizing view on race relations, the novel will explore how this idea of Mississippi is …
How To Find What's Lost When What's Lost Is You: The Presence Of Disappearing Bodies In Vietnam, Afghanistan, And Iraq War Literature, Brandy Rachele Williams
How To Find What's Lost When What's Lost Is You: The Presence Of Disappearing Bodies In Vietnam, Afghanistan, And Iraq War Literature, Brandy Rachele Williams
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The focus of this study is on disappearing bodies in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq war literature. The term “disappearing body” has several connotations. Disappearing bodies refers to throwaway or neglected bodies, bodies that routinely absorb into the landscape. Women and African Americans typically fall into this category, but at times, Vietnamese, Afghani, or Iraqi people may fall into this category as well. The race, gender, and region of the author often determines how Others are posited in the literature. Disappearing bodies also occur in the form of grotesquerie. These bodies appear as dismembered, decapitated, mutilated, and wasting away. Bodies disappear …
Representation Of The American South In Marvel Comics, 1963-2016, Katherine Gill
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 …
The Radical South: Grassroots Activism, Ethnicity, And Literary Form, 1960-1980, Elizabeth Fielder
The Radical South: Grassroots Activism, Ethnicity, And Literary Form, 1960-1980, Elizabeth Fielder
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
“The Radical South” examines the art and writings of Civil-Rights-era social movements and locates U.S. based political structures in a hemispheric and global network. I reveal that the Civil Rights Movement, ethnic nationalism, and second-wave feminism were not separate entities; rather, the cultural work of activists was an intersectional effort that defied national strategies, such as non-violent protest and race-based separatism, that were often determined by their urban counterparts. Thus, I argue that new political aesthetics emerged from grassroots activism and set in motion ethnic and racial cultural expressions that embraced multiple, even conflicting, identities. As much as this art …
Read Me: The Emergence Of Female Voice In American Epistolary Fiction, Allison Melissa Ramsey
Read Me: The Emergence Of Female Voice In American Epistolary Fiction, Allison Melissa Ramsey
Honors Theses
The objective of the thesis was to study how the letter, as a narrative device provided by the epistolary genre, supplies unheard female characters with an avenue to speak when their worlds do not allow it. In the novels, the letters not only permit a female character to practice building a voice, but also provide a self-reflection and identification experience, which enables the woman to see where she is, rewrite her role, and control where she wants to go. Through reading Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies, and Maria Semple's …
Between Species: Biopolitics, Resistance, And Interspeciesality, Temple Jo Gowan
Between Species: Biopolitics, Resistance, And Interspeciesality, Temple Jo Gowan
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines three twentieth-century novels—Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale, and Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats—in the context of posthumanist animal studies. A Foucauldian biopolitical lens foregrounds the inextricably linked ways that both human and nonhuman animal bodies are governed and controlled in a biopolitical era. Each chapter focuses on textual links between speciesism and the oppression of particular human groups based on gender, sexuality, and race, arguing that each novel offers new ways of thinking about both our own species, other animal species, and how humans relate to the nonhuman world.
Colorism And African American Women In Literature: An Examination Of Colorism And Its Impact On Self-Image, Jakira Davis
Colorism And African American Women In Literature: An Examination Of Colorism And Its Impact On Self-Image, Jakira Davis
Honors Theses
The purpose of this study is to explore how African American women in literature have been impacted by colorism. Through this study which included a fictional novel from the twentieth century and a non-fictional novel from the twenty-first century we are able to see how women of color have been impacted by colorism. This thesis explores evidence of the impact of colorism and its impact on the image of African American women and young girls. This thesis suggests that there is evidence of colorism found in literature and thus colorism is a real issue in the African American community that …
Material Melancholy: Stranded Objects In Modern Southern Women's Writing, James Travis Rozier
Material Melancholy: Stranded Objects In Modern Southern Women's Writing, James Travis Rozier
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation traces the origins and uses of a specifically southern obsession with the past. Examining how southern women writers represent the compulsion to remember, I demonstrate how, in their narratives, efforts to retain intimate relationships with an idealized past obstruct characters' ability to live in the present. Their fiction aligns neatly with the dynamic described in psychoanalysis as 'melancholia’—not least because, in each case, these relationships with the past are typically ambivalent or even destructive, and the melancholic subjects must 'work through' their damaging attachments. Typical psychoanalytic approaches, however, have neglected how such troubled remembering might be influenced by …