Arts and Humanities Commons^™

How She Haunts: Missed Endings, The Fragmentary, And The Female Figure In British Romanticism, Jane Clare Bolin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I discuss a relatively small grouping of fragmentary texts by Coleridge (Sibylline Leaves, “The Three Graves,” “Christabel,” and “Kubla Khan”), De Quincey (Suspiria de Profundis), and Keats (“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and Lamia). In critical discussions of the Romantic fragment, it is most often referred to as incomplete, lacking closure, and unintentionally so. The fragments I have chosen to include transcend such a reading of lack and embrace a perpetuation of possibility. My claim is not that these are exemplary British Romantic fragments but rather that they lend themselves to a …

Anger, Genre Bending, And Space In Kincaid, Ferré, And Vilar, Suzanne M. Uzzilia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how women’s anger sparks the bending of genre, which ultimately leads to the development of space in the work of three Caribbean-American authors: Jamaica Kincaid, Rosario Ferré, and Irene Vilar. Women often occupy subject positions that restrict them, and women writers harness the anger provoked by such limitations to test the traditional borders of genre and create new forms that better reflect their realities.

These three writers represent Anglophone and Hispanophone Caribbean literary traditions and are united by their interest in addressing feminist issues in their work. Accordingly, my research is guided by the feminist theoretical frameworks …

Dark Stars Of The Evening: Performing African American Citizenship And Identity In Germany, 1890-1920, Kristin L. Moriah

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dark Stars of the Evening: Performing African American Citizenship and Identity in Germany, 1890-1920 demonstrates that black performers in Germany developed wide networks in the performance world as they sought artistic opportunities beyond the racist circumscription of the American popular stage. Their performances became emblematic of modernity, globalization, and imperial might for German audiences at the turn of the century. African American-styled blackness contributed to the formation of the city of Berlin while allowing African American performers to assert themselves on the global stage. Groups like the Four Black Diamonds had a lengthy engagement with the popular stage in Berlin, …

Precarious Wife: Narratives Of Marital Instability In Medieval And Early Modern Literature, Emily G. Sherwood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Precarious Wife intervenes in the propagation of the binary--of privilege and marginalization--inherent in discussions of the institutional identity of wife in the medieval and early modern periods by exposing the vulnerability and malleability of the category often ignored or minimized in discussions of pre-modern women. Drawing on Judith Butler's work on vulnerability, this dissertation questions the normative trajectory of daughter, wife, widow for medieval and early modern women that excludes people with alternate narratives or identities. While men's subjectivity spanned multiple identities based on their class, rank, career, religious practices, community, and networks of kinship, women were almost exclusively defined …