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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
A Raucous Entertainment: Melodrama, Race, And The Search For Moral Legibility In Nineteenth-Century America, Sarah M. Olivier
A Raucous Entertainment: Melodrama, Race, And The Search For Moral Legibility In Nineteenth-Century America, Sarah M. Olivier
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Gathering together episodes from American theater history, my dissertation focuses on the destabilizing identities and paradoxical resolutions of so-called "Indian" and slavery plays to address nineteenth-century melodrama's fundamental engagement with race. Melodrama is a spectacular form that uses iconic images to move audiences to feel powerful emotions and to assign moral legibility to societal problems. Given the significant role of territorial expansion and chattel slavery in US history, race has always presented Americans with crucial moral dilemmas. Melodrama has long provided a dominant mode of representation for addressing such dilemmas that hinges upon racially inflected conceptions of good and evil. …
Rotten Symbol Mongering: Scapegoating In Post-9/11 American War Literature, David Andrew Buchanan
Rotten Symbol Mongering: Scapegoating In Post-9/11 American War Literature, David Andrew Buchanan
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
A rhetorical approach to the fiction of war offers an appropriate vehicle by which one may encounter and interrogate such literature and the cultural metanarratives that exist therein. My project is a critical analysis—one that relies heavily upon Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic method and his concepts of scapegoating, the comic corrective, and hierarchical psychosis—of three war novels published in 2012 (The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, FOBBIT by David Abrams, and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain). This analysis assumes a rhetorical screen in order to subvert and redirect the grand narratives the United States perpetuates in art …