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Full-Text Articles in American Literature
American Culture Of Servitude: The Problem Of Domestic Service In Antebellum Literature And Culture, Andrea Holliger
American Culture Of Servitude: The Problem Of Domestic Service In Antebellum Literature And Culture, Andrea Holliger
Theses and Dissertations--English
My dissertation argues that domestic service alters a culture’s relationship to the laboring body. I theorize this relationship via popular literary and cultural antebellum texts to explore the effects of servitude as a trope. Methodologically, each chapter reads a literary text in context with social and legal paradigms to 1) demonstrate that servitude undergirds myriad articulations of antebellum power and difference; 2) show how servitude inflects the construction of these paradigms; and 3) trace Americans’ changing relationship to the concept of servitude from the Early Republic through the Civil War.
I begin with James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), exploring …
Apparitional Economies: Spectral Imagery In The Antebellum Imaginaton, Holly F. Osborn
Apparitional Economies: Spectral Imagery In The Antebellum Imaginaton, Holly F. Osborn
Theses and Dissertations--English
Apparitional Economies is invested in both a historical consideration of economic conditions through the antebellum era and an examination of how spectral representations depict the effects of such conditions on local publics and individual persons. From this perspective, the project demonstrates how extensively the period’s literature is entangled in the economic: in financial devastation, in the boundaries of seemingly limitless progress, and in the standards of value that order the worth of commodities and the persons who can trade for them.
I argue that the space of the specter is a force of representation, an invisible site in which the …