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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Utopian Discourse In Contemporary Speculative Fiction, Casey Alan Jergenson
Utopian Discourse In Contemporary Speculative Fiction, Casey Alan Jergenson
Dissertations
I argue in this dissertation that utopianism is a vibrant form of cultural production in the post-Cold War period, despite the paucity of recent texts depicting €œgood€ societies. Most literary historical accounts of the genre place the decline of the utopian narrative in the early twentieth century, with a brief resurgence in the 1960s and 1970s. Contemporary culture has since become inundated with dystopian and post-apocalyptic visions of the future. If we take this generic distribution at face-value, it seems symptomatic of the utopian idea's retreat from cultural production since the 1980s. Influential critics have resisted this narrative by demonstrating …
Recasting Genre In Tennessee Williams's Apprentice Plays, Christina Ilona Hunter
Recasting Genre In Tennessee Williams's Apprentice Plays, Christina Ilona Hunter
Dissertations
This dissertation investigates Tennessee Williams’s earliest full-length plays, also known as the apprentice plays—Candles to the Sun, Fugitive Kind, Not About Nightingales, Spring Storm, and Stairs to the Roof—by comparing, contrasting and contextualizing them in relation to Daniel Chandler’s generic criteria of drama; namely, narrative, characterization, setting, topics, iconography, and staging techniques. The present study also draws upon an extensive body of scholarship pertaining to genre theory, Williams’s cultural contemporaries, and the historical and psychological backdrop of Depression-era America. In these early plays, Williams diverged sharply from the dramatic generic conventions of his day, manipulating them in new …