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Full-Text Articles in American Studies
Here, There, And In Between: Travel As Metaphor In Mixed Race Narratives Of The Harlem Renaissance, Colin Enriquez
Here, There, And In Between: Travel As Metaphor In Mixed Race Narratives Of The Harlem Renaissance, Colin Enriquez
Doctoral Dissertations
Created to comment on Antebellum and Reconstruction literature, the tragic mulatto concept is habitually applied to eras beyond the 19th century. The tragic mulatto has become an end rather than a means to questioning racist and abolitionist agendas. Rejecting the pathetic and self-destructive traits inscribed by the tragic label, this dissertation uses geographic, cultural, and racial boundary crossing to theorize a rereading of mixed race characters in Harlem Renaissance literature. Focusing on train, automobile, and boat travel, the study analyzes the relationship between the character, transportation, and technology whereby the notion of race is questioned. Furthermore, the dissertation divides …
The "Vast And Terrible" Trauma: American Literary Naturalism, Ethics, And Levinas, Tyler Joseph Efird
The "Vast And Terrible" Trauma: American Literary Naturalism, Ethics, And Levinas, Tyler Joseph Efird
Doctoral Dissertations
In an 1896 essay, Frank Norris wrote that the reading world should abandon those “teacup tragedies” to which it had grown accustomed and embrace a new literature that would depict a “vast and terrible drama.” Realism, Norris claimed, could not be used to achieve an earnest portrait of the conditions that mark individual lives under capitalism. Instead, the world needed a romantic wrestling with the forces of existential inscrutability. Also, the perceived need for literature to depict a clear ethical system needed revising from the perspective of American literary naturalism, a school long denigrated for apparent moral vacuity. Through excruciating …