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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Angels Who Stepped Outside Their Houses: “American True Womanhood” And Nineteenth-Century (Trans)Nationalisms, Gayathri M. Hewagama
Angels Who Stepped Outside Their Houses: “American True Womanhood” And Nineteenth-Century (Trans)Nationalisms, Gayathri M. Hewagama
Doctoral Dissertations
“Angels who Stepped Outside their Houses” examines the fashioning of a gendered white American middle-class Protestant subject called the “American true woman” as a fitting representation of the emerging new American nation, as reflected in the writings of white American women authors from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Locating the formation of this identity on a transnational plane, this work argues that in their myriad texts, these women authors reveal the significant role that imperial Britain and the non-national/not-yet-national colonial Orient played in the (de/)construction/(de/)centering of American true womanhood. For, in the face of a particular Englishness and …
Seeing Whiteness: The Progression And Regression Of White Identity In Four Post-Civil War Literary Generations, Sara N. Stone
Seeing Whiteness: The Progression And Regression Of White Identity In Four Post-Civil War Literary Generations, Sara N. Stone
Dissertations and Theses
This thesis explores the concept of white identity as seen in literary works in four time periods: Reconstruction, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement and the 21st century. It examines the work of Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Kurt Vonnegut and contemporary writers George Saunders, J.D. Vance, and Jonathan Franzen. It seeks to understand patterns in racism, white nationalism, and white supremacy as part of the fundamental construct of the literary white man, and follows the evolution of that construct over time.