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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney
Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney
Theses and Dissertations--English
Scholars over the past two decades (Denning, Szalay, Edmunds, Robbins) have theorized the different ways literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century reflects the dawn of the liberal US welfare state. While these studies elaborate on the effect rapidly expanding public aid had on literary production of the period, many have tended to undervalue the lingering influence on midcentury storytelling of private charity and philanthropy, those traditional aid institutions fundamentally challenged by the Great Depression and historically championed by conservatives. If the welfare state had an indelible impact on US literatures, so did the moral complexity of the systems of charity and …
The Revolt Against Mourning: Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner, And Beyond, Andrew Leo Beutel
The Revolt Against Mourning: Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner, And Beyond, Andrew Leo Beutel
Theses and Dissertations--English
The Revolt against Mourning calls into question the widespread critical alignment of literary modernism with Freudian melancholia. Focusing instead on “mourning,” through close readings of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, I demonstrate how their depictions of this notion overturn both its traditional and contemporary understandings. Whereas Freud conceives mourning as a psychic labor that the subject slowly and painfully carries out, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner convey it as a destabilizing, subversive, and transformative force to which the subject is radically passive. For Freud, mourning is a matter …