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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Writing About The South "In Her Own Way": Gender And Region In The Work Of Southern Women Playwrights, Casey Kayser
Writing About The South "In Her Own Way": Gender And Region In The Work Of Southern Women Playwrights, Casey Kayser
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation examines how identity—gender, race, sexuality, regional affiliation—intersects with considerations of the dramatic genre, commercial and critical factors in the American theatre, and understandings about the American South to complicate how contemporary southern women playwrights represent region. In light of the always-already "performative" nature of the South, and geographical, commercial, and ideological factors that set the South in opposition to the North, southern women playwrights face additional difficulties in navigating issues of authenticity and simulacra, the universal versus the specific, ideas about southern "backwardness" versus northern sophistication, and audience participation in fetishizing or distancing the South. Using drama as …
The Perils And Empowerments Of Mountain Literacies: Reading Loss And Shifting Identities In Appalachian Memoirs And Novels, Erica Abrams Locklear
The Perils And Empowerments Of Mountain Literacies: Reading Loss And Shifting Identities In Appalachian Memoirs And Novels, Erica Abrams Locklear
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation analyzes the literary portrayal of literacy events in memoirs and novels written by Appalachian women during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing from contemporary literacy scholarship, my project engages several definitions of the term "literacy," including theories defining it as a technical skill, a social act, cultural knowledge, or a potent form of ideological power. In a region historically (and often inaccurately) stigmatized as illiterate, "literacy" is a loaded term, a concept doubly associated with cultural pride and with cultural loss. By applying literacy theories to Appalachian literature, I analyze the identity conflicts literacy attainment causes for several …
"I Will Learn You Something If You Listen To This Song": Southern Women Writers' Representations Of Music In Fiction, Courtney George
"I Will Learn You Something If You Listen To This Song": Southern Women Writers' Representations Of Music In Fiction, Courtney George
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation offers a rhetorical analysis of the formation of women’s memory, history, and communities in intersections of musical and literary expression in the American South, a region graced with a vital but underexamined tradition of female musicianship. Recent scholars have deconstructed the imagined narrative of southern culture as static, patriarchal, and white to uncover alternative stories and cultures that exist outside of canonical literature. This project significantly expands current understandings of these conflicting narratives by investigating how women writers recall, reclaim, and re-envision women’s roles in southern music to challenge, comply, and/or identify with women’s prescribed place in the …
Mothering Modes: Analyzing Mother Roles In Novels By Twentieth-Century United States Women Writers, Preselfannie Whitfield Mcdaniels
Mothering Modes: Analyzing Mother Roles In Novels By Twentieth-Century United States Women Writers, Preselfannie Whitfield Mcdaniels
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
For this dissertation, the following novels have been chosen as examples of the many issues that are involved in mothering in United States society: Chapter 1: Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Chapter 2: Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Dorothy West’s The Wedding, Chapter 3: Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife and Christina García’s Dreaming in Cuban, and Chapter 4: Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones. For this study, the term “mothering” is specifically related to the rearing of children by the female parent. Rearing is defined as …