Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Representations Of Masculinities In 1920s American Literature: Ernest Hemingway And Willa Cather, Omar Agustin Moran

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis examines how masculinity is attained through various displays of violence, ambivalence, heterosexuality, and sentimentality in the works of Ernest Hemingway and Willa Cather.

Taking Another Look At Women And Gender In Hemingway's Works, Gwendolyn Dale Binks

Theses Digitization Project

This project supports the contrary argument that Hemingway provided a voice for the post-Victorian woman, a woman exercising her strength within relationships, her sexuality, her femininity, and her freedom from oppression during the twentieth century women's movement.

The Slave In The Swamp: Disrupting The Plantation Narrative, William Tynes Cowan

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

In nineteenth-century plantation literature, the runaway slave in the swamp was a recurrent "bogeyman" whose presence challenged myths of the plantation system. By escaping to the swamps, the runaway, or "maroon," gained an invisibility that was more threatening to the institution than open conflict. The chattel system was dependent upon an exercise of will upon the body of the enslaved, but slaves who asserted control over their bodies, by removing them to the swamps, claimed definition over the Self. In part, the proslavery plantation novel served to transform that image of the maroon from its untouchable, abstract state to a …

Two Steps From The Blues: Creating Discourse And Constructing Canons In Blues Criticism, John M. Dougan

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This dissertation examines the development of blues criticism in its myriad forms from the 1920s to 1990s, its role in the emergence of a blues discourse and history, and the codification of a blues canon. I analyze blues discourse principally as the creation of critics, historians, and musicologists, but also as the result of series of complex, imbricated relationships among writers, musicians, fans, record collectors, and independent entrepreneurs.;Beginning in the 1920s, I outline a pre-history of blues discourse by examining the metamorphosis of the blues as a cultural text shaped by the folklore scholarship, criticism and reportage in the popular …

Katherine Anne Porter And Her Publishers, Alexandra Subramanian

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This biographical dissertation focuses upon Katherine Anne Porter's relationship with her literary agent, Cyrilly Abels, and her editors and publishers, Donald Brace and Seymour Lawrence, who were associated with Harcourt, Brace and Atlantic-Little, Brown respectively. The study is based upon the thousands of pages of correspondence between Porter and her professional associates housed in the Papers of Katherine Anne Porter at the University of Maryland. Porter's professional alliances are placed within the context of nineteenth and twentieth century publishing history and within a long tradition of idiosyncratic author editor/agent dependencies that can be traced throughout American literary history.;The heart of …

"Prologue To A Life": Dorothy West's Harlem Renaissance Years, 1926--1934, Karen Rose Veselits

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This dissertation is a bio-critical study of writer Dorothy West (1907--1998). It focuses on her apprenticeship in Harlem from 1926--1934 during the literary renaissance and lays the groundwork for a biography, long overdue. West's career extends from the Harlem Renaissance to the end of the 20 th century, but she has not received the critical recognition her work merits. The study of West's early work illuminates her later work, The Living Is Easy (1948) and The Wedding (1995); it demonstrates the continuity throughout her writing and makes clear that she struggled with the same themes and issues repeatedly during her …

In Search Of The Self: An Analysis Of Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Ann Jacobs, Rhonda Kay Roddy

Theses Digitization Project

In her bibliography, Incidents in the life of a Salve Girl, Harriet Ann Jacobs appropriates the autobiographical "I" in order to tell her own story of slavery and talk back to the dominant culture that enslaves her. Through analysis and explication of the text, this thesis examines Jacobs' rhetorical and psyshological evolution from slave to self as she struggles against patriarchal power that would rob her of her identity as well as her freedom. Included in the discussion is an analysis of the concept of self in western plilosophy, an overview of american autobiography prior to the publication of Jacobs' …

Walt Whitman: The Optimism Of An Evolutionary Pantheist, Katherine R. Hults

Masters Theses

E.M. Forster may have best described Walt Whitman's prevailing optimism in the following passage:

He is the true optimist—not the professional optimist who shuts his eyes and shirks ... but one who has seen and suffered much and yet rejoices. He is not a philosopher or theologian; he cannot answer the ultimate question and tell us what life is. But he is absolutely certain that it is grand, that it is happiness, and that 'wherever life and force are manifested, beauty is manifested.' (Allen, World 52)

Whitman was aware of the social taboos and social evils of his time, witnessing …

Journey To The Frontiers Of Perception: How Women Wrote About The Westward Movement During The Nineteenth Century In Relation To Land, Animals, And The Domestic Sphere, Brandi Dale Spelbring

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Pirsig's Phaedrus: The Journey Of The Shaman, Joseph E. Levora

Masters Theses

Robert Pirsig, in both his novels Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila, explores the conflict one man has with the beliefs and values of the culture he is living in. This conflict leads him to mental collapse and eventually a kind of rebirth into a new outlook and way of viewing the cultural values and beliefs of the society he is living in. In this thesis, I propose that Phaedrus, the central character of both of Pirsig's novels, can be compared to a shaman. I am not suggesting that Pirsig deliberately intended the reader to view …