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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Race Patriots: Black Poets, Transnational Identity, And Diasporic Versification In The United States Before The New Negro, Jason T. Hendrickson Nov 2015

Race Patriots: Black Poets, Transnational Identity, And Diasporic Versification In The United States Before The New Negro, Jason T. Hendrickson

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the contributions of black poets in the United States before the New Negro / Harlem Renaissance Movement. Specifically, it focuses on their role in creating and maintaining a tradition of regional transnationalism in their verses that celebrates their African ancestry. I contend that these poets are best understood as “race patriots”; that is, they at once sought inclusion within the nation-state in the form of full citizenship, yet recognized allegiances beyond the nation-state on account of race through a recognition of shared African ancestry across borders. Their verses point to a shared kinship – be it through …


Sweat The Technique: Visible-Izing Praxis Through Mimicry In Phillis Wheatley's "On Being Brought From Africa To America", Karla V. Zelaya Nov 2015

Sweat The Technique: Visible-Izing Praxis Through Mimicry In Phillis Wheatley's "On Being Brought From Africa To America", Karla V. Zelaya

Doctoral Dissertations

“On Being Brought from Africa to America” was written in 1768, seven years after a seven or eight-year-old Phillis Wheatley arrived to British North America. Phillis Wheatley was about fifteen-years-old when she wrote the most reviled poem in Black literature. Charged with thinking white and writing white, “On Being Brought from Africa to America” would condemn Phillis Wheatley as an imitator of the white gaze. Although accused of straightening her tongue, Phillis Wheatley did not imitate the white gaze in “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” She mimicked it. To imitate means to do something the same way. To …


A National Style: A Critical Historiography Of The Irish Short Story, Andrew Fox Nov 2015

A National Style: A Critical Historiography Of The Irish Short Story, Andrew Fox

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the artistic, historical and theoretical concerns that, for the past century, have shaped the Irish short story, the Irish nation and the body of criticism that mediates between the two. In Ireland, I argue, the prevailing critical narrative of the short story’s emergence and ongoing literary purpose has been bound up with the political narrative of the nation state’s decolonization. This process I view as symptomatic of a broader critical tendency to view Irish cultural narratives as inextricable from national ones, whereby literary interventions either are viewed as mere reflections of, or are assimilated to systems of …


Affecting Manhood: Masculinity, Effeminacy, And The Fop Figure In Early Modern English Drama, Jessica Landis Nov 2015

Affecting Manhood: Masculinity, Effeminacy, And The Fop Figure In Early Modern English Drama, Jessica Landis

Doctoral Dissertations

This project identifies and analyzes the fop figure in early modern English drama and treats the figure as a vehicle that reveals the instability of conceptions of masculinity in the period. This project establishes a theatrical history of the character type. Although the fop did not emerge on the English stage as a stock character until late in the seventeenth century, antecedents and proto-fops appear across dramatic genres beginning in the late 1580s. Identifying these characters and deciphering their functions in plot and character development reveals, in part, how cultural anxieties about masculine codes of conduct were manifested. The project …


"The Imagination And Construction Of The Black Criminal In American Literature, 1741-1910", Emahunn Campbell Nov 2015

"The Imagination And Construction Of The Black Criminal In American Literature, 1741-1910", Emahunn Campbell

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation examines the origins of the perception of black people as criminally predisposed by arguing that during eighteenth and nineteenth-century America, crime committed by black people was used as a major trope in legal, literary, and scientific discourses, deeming them inherently criminal. Furthermore, I contend that enslaved and free black people often used criminal acts, including murder, theft, and literacy, as avenues toward freedom. However, their resistance was used as a justification for slavery in the South and discrimination in the North. By examining a diverse set of materials such as confessional literature, plantation management literature, (social) scientific studies, …


Who Do You Think You Are?: Recovering The Self In The Working Class Escape Narrative, Christine M. Maksimowicz Aug 2015

Who Do You Think You Are?: Recovering The Self In The Working Class Escape Narrative, Christine M. Maksimowicz

Doctoral Dissertations

This project considers how socioeconomic impoverishment and society's failure to recognize working class women as valued subjects impinge upon a mother's ability to afford recognition to her daughter's selfhood. Situated within the larger North American literary tradition of fiction animated by flight in search of freedom, the texts here explored constitutes a subgenre that I term the “working class escape narrative.” Combining close readings of fiction by Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, and Sigrid Nunez with sociological research and psychoanalytic theory, I explore a relationship between mother and daughter characterized not by mirroring and bonding but rather the absence of intimacy …


The (Dis)Ability Of Color; Or, That Middle World: Toward A New Understanding Of 19th And 20th Century Passing Narratives, Julia S. Charles Aug 2015

The (Dis)Ability Of Color; Or, That Middle World: Toward A New Understanding Of 19th And 20th Century Passing Narratives, Julia S. Charles

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation mines the intersection of racial performance and the history of the so-called “tragic mulatto” figure in American fiction. I propose that while many white writers depicted the “mulatto” character as inherently flawed because of some tainted “black blood,” many black writers’ depictions of mixed-race characters imagine solutions to the race problem. Many black writers critiqued some of America’s most egregious sins by demonstrating linkages between major shifts in American history and the mixed-race figure. Landmark legislation such as, Fugitive Slave Act 1850 and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) are often plotlines in African American passing literature, thus demonstrating the …


Homosexuality Is A Poem: How Gay Poets Remodeled The Lyric, Community And The Ideology Of Sex To Theorize A Gay Poetic, Christopher M. Hennessy Mar 2015

Homosexuality Is A Poem: How Gay Poets Remodeled The Lyric, Community And The Ideology Of Sex To Theorize A Gay Poetic, Christopher M. Hennessy

Doctoral Dissertations

SourceURL:file://localhost/Users/christopherhennessy/Desktop/DISS/Dissertation_Hennessy._Final.doc This dissertation approaches the work of three canonical post-war gay poets in an effort to construct a discourse on sexuality and the minoritized writer that argues the lyric functions as a historically contingent, politically invested, value-laden genre in which some subjectivities might be prohibited from or find their expression made to signify in ways that re-inscribe oppression. The first chapter theorizes the possiblitites of a gay poetic and analyzes the gay poet’s subjectivity as one obsessed with the ways in which he is marginalized due to expression. In the chapter on Frank O’Hara, the poet is shown to disfigure …