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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Contagious Deadly Sins: Yellow Fever In Nineteenth-Century New Orleans Literature, Kathleen M. Downes
Contagious Deadly Sins: Yellow Fever In Nineteenth-Century New Orleans Literature, Kathleen M. Downes
University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations
Throughout the nineteenth century, New Orleans was repeatedly plagued by yellow fever epidemics. In this paper, cultural representations of yellow fever are considered in three novels: Baron Ludwig Von Reizenstein’s The Mysteries of New Orleans (1854-1855), George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes (1880), and Mollie Evelyn Moore Davis’ The Queen’s Garden (1900). Because the etiology was unknown during the nineteenth century, yellow fever becomes a floating signifier on which to project the ills they observed in New Orleans society. Yellow fever thus becomes a representation of loose sexual mores, as well as a divinely retributive punishment for slavery, or …
“In My Fiction I Never Say Anything Which Is Not Absolutely True”: Reassessing Constance Fenimore Woolson’S Literary Realism, Ashley N. Hemm
“In My Fiction I Never Say Anything Which Is Not Absolutely True”: Reassessing Constance Fenimore Woolson’S Literary Realism, Ashley N. Hemm
University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations
Despite her immense popularity in the nineteenth century, Constance Fenimore Woolson's reputation dwindled substantially in the decades which followed. While her works have been rediscovered over the past thirty years, they are often categorized as regionalist writing or, in the case of her penultimate novel, Jupiter Lights, melodrama. What many fail to consider, however, is that Woolson very much considered herself a realist author, and may have been remembered as such were it not for the influence of William Dean Howells and his peers, whose very narrow parameters for literary realism excluded Woolson, among others. Unfortunately, those parameters are …
"It's No Life Being A Steer": Violence, Masculinity, And Gender Performance In The Sun Also Rises And In Our Time, Brock J. Thibodaux
"It's No Life Being A Steer": Violence, Masculinity, And Gender Performance In The Sun Also Rises And In Our Time, Brock J. Thibodaux
University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations
Nearly all discussions of Hemingway and his work touch on the theme of masculinity, a recurrent theme in all of his works. Examinations of Hemingway and his relationship to masculinity have almost unanimously treated the author as a misogynist and a champion of violent masculinity. However, since the posthumous publication of The Garden of Eden in 1986, there has been much discussion of Hemingway’s uncharacteristic use of androgynous characters in the novel. Critics have taken this as a clue that Hemingway possessed a complex attitude regarding gender fluidity, but have failed to examine the constructions of gender and identity in …
“Cowboy, Paladin, Hero?”: Being Boys And Men In David Foster Wallace’S The Pale King, David J. Guidry
“Cowboy, Paladin, Hero?”: Being Boys And Men In David Foster Wallace’S The Pale King, David J. Guidry
University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations
Often aligned with post-postmodernism, David Foster Wallace’s later work retreats from the ironic detachment and cynicism of postmodernism in favor of a more sincere approach to writing. This is especially evident in his posthumous novel, The Pale King, a work dealing with what it means to be human in the Information Age. After locating the novel’s setting within a recent history of American masculinity and work, this paper examines several of the novel’s male characters as they struggle to be fully realized boys and men, concluding that The Pale King is Wallace’s final statement that enduring the ennui of …