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English Language and Literature

University of Massachusetts Amherst

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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Turning Inside Out: Reading And Writing Godly Identity In Seventeenth-Century Narratives Of Spiritual Experience, Meghan Conine Swavely Jul 2018

Turning Inside Out: Reading And Writing Godly Identity In Seventeenth-Century Narratives Of Spiritual Experience, Meghan Conine Swavely

Doctoral Dissertations

Writing about personal experience was a central component of early modern Protestant devotional practice. It was also, this dissertation argues, a creative and social practice through which the godly imagined and crafted their own spiritual identities and constructed interpretive communities into which these identities might be accepted and valued. Exploring the ways in which seventeenth-century Protestants examined interior experience and transformed interiority into a legible expression of the spiritual self, this project proposes that believers used spiritual autobiography to substantiate the intangible and invisible signs of God’s grace, employing narrative and imaginative structures to render idiosyncratic personal experiences familiar, shareable, …


Technologies Of Racial Formation: Asian-American Online Identities, Linh Dich Sep 2012

Technologies Of Racial Formation: Asian-American Online Identities, Linh Dich

Open Access Dissertations

My dissertation is an ethnographic study of Asian-American users on the social network site, Xanga. Based on my analysis of online texts, responses to texts, and participants' discussions of their writing motivations, my research strongly suggests that examining digital writing through participants' complex and overlapping constructions of their community and public(s) can help the field reconsider digital writing as a site of Asian-American rhetoric and as a process of constructing and transforming racial identities and relations. In particular, I examine how community and public, as interconnected and shifting writing imaginaries on Xanga, afford Asian-American users on this site the opportunity …