Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- African American Literature (2)
- African American Culture (1)
- African American Writers (1)
- American Women Writers (1)
- American literature (1)
-
- Antebellum American Literature (1)
- Antebellum Literature (1)
- Appropriation (1)
- Authenticity (1)
- Capitalism (1)
- Captivity (1)
- Charity and Philanthropy (1)
- Comics Studies (1)
- Counterculture (1)
- Domestic Service (1)
- Ecology (1)
- Environmentalism (1)
- Hospitality in Literature (1)
- Literature and Philosophy (1)
- Mississippi River (1)
- Narrative (1)
- Postwar literature (1)
- Propaganda (1)
- Puritan (1)
- Revolution (1)
- Rowlandson (1)
- Servants (1)
- Slavery (1)
- Slavery in Literature (1)
- Southern Literature (1)
Articles 1 - 6 of 6
Full-Text Articles in History
Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney
Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney
Theses and Dissertations--English
Scholars over the past two decades (Denning, Szalay, Edmunds, Robbins) have theorized the different ways literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century reflects the dawn of the liberal US welfare state. While these studies elaborate on the effect rapidly expanding public aid had on literary production of the period, many have tended to undervalue the lingering influence on midcentury storytelling of private charity and philanthropy, those traditional aid institutions fundamentally challenged by the Great Depression and historically championed by conservatives. If the welfare state had an indelible impact on US literatures, so did the moral complexity of the systems of charity and …
A Repurposed Narrative: Mary Rowlandson’S Narrative And Pre-Revolutionary Sentiment, Steven F. Thomas
A Repurposed Narrative: Mary Rowlandson’S Narrative And Pre-Revolutionary Sentiment, Steven F. Thomas
Theses and Dissertations--English
Leading into the American Revolution, Puritan captivity narratives gained a resurgent popularity as nationalized sentiment burned towards political upheaval. Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative (1682) was reprinted six times between 1770-1776, signifying an incredible interest in Puritan stories that seemed to antithetically inspire a progressive and radical revolution against England. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God or A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson enhanced an already fervent revolutionary sentiment, transforming a seemingly straightforward captivity narrative into a totem meant to represent the oppressive struggle between England and her most coveted colony.
Such a literary revival taps …
“I’Ve Known Rivers:” Representations Of The Mississippi River In African American Literature And Culture, Catherine Gooch
“I’Ve Known Rivers:” Representations Of The Mississippi River In African American Literature And Culture, Catherine Gooch
Theses and Dissertations--English
My dissertation, titled “I’ve Known Rivers”: Representations of the Mississippi River in African American Literature and Culture, uncovers the impact of the Mississippi River as a powerful, recurring geographical feature in twentieth-century African American literature that conveys the consequences of capitalist expansion on the individual and communal lives of Black Americans. Recent scholarship on the Mississippi River theorizes the relationship between capitalism, geography, and slavery. Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History, and Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the …
Wild Abandon: Postwar Literature Between Ecology And Authenticity, Alexander F. Menrisky
Wild Abandon: Postwar Literature Between Ecology And Authenticity, Alexander F. Menrisky
Theses and Dissertations--English
Wild Abandon traces a literary and cultural history of late twentieth-century appeals to dissolution, the moment at which a text seems to erase its subject’s sense of selfhood in natural environs. I argue that such appeals arose in response to a prominent yet overlooked interaction between discourses of ecology and authenticity following the rise and fall of the American New Left in the 1960s and 70s. This conjunction inspired certain intellectuals and activists to celebrate the ecological concept of interconnectivity as the most authentic basis of subjectivity in political, philosophical, spiritual, and literary writings. As I argue, dissolution represents a …
Meeting At The Threshold: Slavery’S Influence On Hospitality And Black Personhood In Late-Antebellum American Literature, Rebecca Wiltberger Wiggins
Meeting At The Threshold: Slavery’S Influence On Hospitality And Black Personhood In Late-Antebellum American Literature, Rebecca Wiltberger Wiggins
Theses and Dissertations--English
In my dissertation, I argue that both white and black authors of the late-1850s and early-1860s used scenes of race-centered hospitality in their narratives to combat the pervasive stereotypes of black inferiority that flourished under the influence of chattel slavery. The wide-spread scenes of hospitality in antebellum literature—including shared meals, entertaining overnight guests, and business meetings in personal homes—are too inextricably bound to contemporary discussions of blackness and whiteness to be ignored. In arguing for the humanizing effects of playing host or guest as a black person, my project joins the work of literary scholars from William L. Andrews to …
American Culture Of Servitude: The Problem Of Domestic Service In Antebellum Literature And Culture, Andrea Holliger
American Culture Of Servitude: The Problem Of Domestic Service In Antebellum Literature And Culture, Andrea Holliger
Theses and Dissertations--English
My dissertation argues that domestic service alters a culture’s relationship to the laboring body. I theorize this relationship via popular literary and cultural antebellum texts to explore the effects of servitude as a trope. Methodologically, each chapter reads a literary text in context with social and legal paradigms to 1) demonstrate that servitude undergirds myriad articulations of antebellum power and difference; 2) show how servitude inflects the construction of these paradigms; and 3) trace Americans’ changing relationship to the concept of servitude from the Early Republic through the Civil War.
I begin with James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), exploring …