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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
A Woman's Voice And Identity: Narrative Métissage As A Solution To Voicelessness In American Literature, Kali Lauren Oldacre
A Woman's Voice And Identity: Narrative Métissage As A Solution To Voicelessness In American Literature, Kali Lauren Oldacre
MA in English Theses
The objective of this thesis was to analyze the progression of a woman’s voice in literature looking particularly at three American women writers spanning the 20th and into the 21st century—Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Edwidge Danticat. In conjunction, these three novels show a progression through the history of American women’s literature, demonstrating the successes and failures of voice and silence in their works and the ways in which creating an identity through voice is necessary, even if one must create it complexly. Ultimately, the authors establish a voice in their works that lays the foundation for writers who …
Gothic Naturalism And American Women Writers, Stephanie Ann Metz
Gothic Naturalism And American Women Writers, Stephanie Ann Metz
Doctoral Dissertations
Traditionally, naturalism and the Gothic have been seen as genres that have little to do with one another. However, Frank Norris, one of the practitioners and theoreticians of canonical naturalism, argued that the roots of naturalism lie not in realism (as is often argued) but in romanticism. This project seeks to explore Norris’s claim by positing a new genre—Gothic naturalism. Gothic naturalism is a hybrid genre that combines the Gothic’s haunting nature and representations of the abject, grotesque, and uncanny with canonical naturalism’s interrogation of making choices and the forces of chance, determinism, and heredity. Although naturalism is traditionally seen …
The Gothic Presence Of Poland In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Jill Noel Walker Gonzalez
The Gothic Presence Of Poland In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Jill Noel Walker Gonzalez
English Language and Literature ETDs
The references to Poland in United States print culture indicate that Poland is a significant presence in the nineteenth-century literary imagination. Though often idealized, Poland emerges as a gothic presence registering anxieties about culture, imperialism, slavery, the Other, economic ruin, and identity. Using Roland Barthes theory of cultural code, this dissertation looks to nineteenth-century United States newspapers to consider American readers' cultural knowledge about Poland. The coded history of revolution beneath each reference to Poland indicates that Polish revolution is the mechanism that reveals American anxieties about instability, imperialism, class inequalities, and violence—all of which put pressure on America's mythic …
Southern Transfiguration: Competing Cultural Narratives Of (Ec)Centric Religion In The Works Of Faulkner, O’Connor, And Hurston, Craig D. Slaven
Southern Transfiguration: Competing Cultural Narratives Of (Ec)Centric Religion In The Works Of Faulkner, O’Connor, And Hurston, Craig D. Slaven
Theses and Dissertations--English
This project explores the ways in which key literary texts reproduce, undermine, or otherwise engage with cultural narratives of the so-called Bible Belt. Noting that the evangelicalism that dominated the South by the turn of the twentieth century was, for much of the antebellum period, a relatively marginal and sometimes subversive movement in a comparatively irreligious region, I argue that widely disseminated images and narratives instilled a false sense of nostalgia for an incomplete version of the South’s religious heritage. My introductory chapter demonstrates how the South’s commemorated “Old Time” religion was not especially old, and how this modernist construct …
The Darkest Nation: American Melancholia In Modernist Narratives Of The First World War, Michael Von Cannon
The Darkest Nation: American Melancholia In Modernist Narratives Of The First World War, Michael Von Cannon
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation, entitled The Darkest Nation: American Melancholia in Modernist Narratives of the First World War, re-conceptualizes U.S. modernism by attending to how the historical event of WWI inaugurated melancholia, or sustained grief, as the cornerstone of a new form of nationalism. Scholars have focused either on how consolatory mourning bolstered patriotism or how melancholia led to the demise of such an imagined community and to the growth of cosmopolitanism. I consider, however, an American modernist commitment to the nation of loss expressed, surprisingly enough, in narratives about noncombatants. For a country that entered the military conflict near its end, …