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Full-Text Articles in American Studies

"Undone By Murmurs Of Love": Traumatic Legacies And The Struggle For Personal And Communal Identity Formation In Toni Morrison's Trilogy, Fida Yasin Apr 2011

"Undone By Murmurs Of Love": Traumatic Legacies And The Struggle For Personal And Communal Identity Formation In Toni Morrison's Trilogy, Fida Yasin

All Student Theses and Dissertations

Implications of racial oppression on personal and collective African American identity formation in Toni Morrison’s trilogy are explored in this thesis. Morrison reconstructs African American history in her trilogy, but she also enacts a cultural healing through content and form. Impossible choices are made by characters in Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise who are influenced by the racial trauma they experience and inherit. The legacies of oppression--traumatic memories, fragmentation, stereotypes and negative associations—distort the way these characters view themselves and one another. They are disoriented, isolated, and displaced. Characters recover from their past trauma— together—when they share their stories. …


Caribbean Hauntings And Transnational Regionalism In Nineteenth- And Twentieth-Century American Literature, Bethany Aery Clerico Jan 2011

Caribbean Hauntings And Transnational Regionalism In Nineteenth- And Twentieth-Century American Literature, Bethany Aery Clerico

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Caribbean Hauntings and Transnational Regionalism in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Literature offers a new literary map of U.S. history that is routed through the Caribbean and that intervenes in certain historiographic problems that exceptionalism creates for national literary studies. In the literature of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martin R. Delany, Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison, I tease out references to the Caribbean that other critics have overlooked as a result of strictly national frames of analysis. These references evidence that each text is haunted by a Caribbean presence, a phrase that signifies both a "real" Caribbean, a political and …


Speaking Through Self-Effacement : The Sermonic Influence In Melville, Dickinson, And Thoreau, Katsuya Izumi Jan 2011

Speaking Through Self-Effacement : The Sermonic Influence In Melville, Dickinson, And Thoreau, Katsuya Izumi

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation focuses on how some of the major literary authors of nineteenth-century America attempt to speak through self-effacement by adopting the preaching styles and effects of early Protestant sermons, as well as their purposes for doing so. There is the evanescence of characters in Herman Melville's novels such as Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852), of the speaker in Emily Dickinson's poems, and of the narrator in Henry David Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854). In their works there is a certain type of abhorrence toward the self, and they constantly try to …


Poe As Magazinist, Kay Ellen Mckamy Jan 2011

Poe As Magazinist, Kay Ellen Mckamy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Edgar Allan Poe has long been recognized as one of American literature's most intriguing authors, usually for reasons other than his writing. Most literary studies examine one or two of his tales and perhaps one or two comments he made about the short tale. This dissertation will instead look at the work Poe did while involved in the world of early-American magazines for the last seventeen years of his life. It will explore how the magazine world affected his writing and his theories, especially his theories on the genre of the short story, a genre that Poe essentially described and …