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Articles 121 - 150 of 312

Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Revolutionary Republics: U.S. National Narratives And The Independence Of Latin America, 1810-1846, James Weldon Long Jan 2011

Revolutionary Republics: U.S. National Narratives And The Independence Of Latin America, 1810-1846, James Weldon Long

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Revolutionary Republics analyzes how U.S. literature depicted the independence of Latin America, focusing on the period from the beginning of the Spanish American revolutions in 1810 to the outbreak of the U.S.-Mexican War in 1846. During this brief timespan, the nation’s literature featured a radical transition in which the independent republics of Latin America shifted from being viewed as “southern brethren” of the United States, a term used by such prominent public figures as Daniel Webster and John Quincy Adams, to hostile enemies allegedly in need of assistance from their northern neighbor. This reversal exposes a contradiction between the imperialist …


Transatlantic Baggage: Expatriate Paris, Modernism, And The Apprenticeship Of Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Blair Bonds Jan 2011

Transatlantic Baggage: Expatriate Paris, Modernism, And The Apprenticeship Of Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Blair Bonds

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“Transatlantic Baggage: Expatriate Paris, Modernism, and the Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway” argues that Hemingway’s expatriation and apprenticeship in modernist Paris from 1921-1925 provided an important impetus for his explorations in gender alterity. The project focuses on a critical-biographical rethinking of Hemingway’s literary development, integrating previous Hemingway biography and gender studies scholarship with new revelations from the manuscript of the forthcoming first two volumes of the Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway. An updated study of the author’s literary formation is long overdue; Charles Fenton’s The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years (1954), for example, has served for …


From Native To Nation: Copway’S American Indian Newspaper And Formation Of American Nationalism, David Shane Wallace Jan 2011

From Native To Nation: Copway’S American Indian Newspaper And Formation Of American Nationalism, David Shane Wallace

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that the publication of Copway’s American Indian (1851) challenges accepted representations of nineteenth-century American Native peoples by countering popular stereotypes. Interrogating a multiplicity of cultural artifacts at the moment of their meeting and investigating the friction created as they rub against one another within the columns of the periodical, I argue that the texts that contribute to the make-up of Copway’s American Indian are juxtaposed in such a way as to force nineteenth-century readers to reconsider the place of the indigenous inhabitants in the American nation. Seemingly disconnected tidbits of information, presented not individually but as components …


Contingent Constellations: Frederick Douglass And The Fact Freedom, Tomohiro Hori Jan 2011

Contingent Constellations: Frederick Douglass And The Fact Freedom, Tomohiro Hori

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Reading the celebrated Narrative (1845) of Frederick Douglass (1817-95) as well as his second autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) alongside the theories of freedom including Immanuel Kant’s and G. W. F. Hegel’s among others, this dissertation examines the process through which the young American slave Douglass discovers the idea of freedom and turns it into the primary object of his pursuit to the point that he stakes his life in his famed battle with the overseer Edward Covey. The experience of hearing other slaves’ voices—such as Aunt Hester’s cries and slave songs—opens his eyes to the darkest reality …


Situation Comedies And The Single Woman On Television, Ashli Leeann Dykes Jan 2011

Situation Comedies And The Single Woman On Television, Ashli Leeann Dykes

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Through an historical overview of the never-married female character in twentieth century situation comedies and an in-depth analysis of three twenty-first century American sitcoms, this dissertation investigates how television creators, writers, producers, and actors have interpreted the figure of the single woman and attempted to make her appealing and acceptable to a broad viewing audience. Because of its traditionally family-friendly offerings and preponderance of female characters in comparison to other popular culture genres, the situation comedy presents a significant case study for the analysis of female representations on television. Through its encouraged identification with characters and portrayals of issues that …


"The Colossal Vitality Of His Illusion": The Myth Of The American Dream In The Modern American Novel, James E. Ayers Jan 2011

"The Colossal Vitality Of His Illusion": The Myth Of The American Dream In The Modern American Novel, James E. Ayers

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that the American dream is a large-scale cultural myth, and that through an analysis of the dream’s mythic structure we can locate a paradigm according to which both American literature and American culture are organized. The American dream has maintained unique relevance across the historical, regional, and cultural diversity of the American nation, in part because it always remains abstract and resists firm definition. Nevertheless, by breaking the broad myth into its most basic elemental parts we can begin to see patterns across the many distinctive versions of the American dream, such that we can identify the …


Radical Realms: A Materialist Theory Of Fantasy Literature, Rich Paul Cooper Jan 2011

Radical Realms: A Materialist Theory Of Fantasy Literature, Rich Paul Cooper

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers a materialist theory of fantasy as the literature of estranged cognition, an entirely novel perspective that challenges all of the existing criticism on fantasy literature by proposing an outlook that emphasizes not impossibility, but infinite possibility. During the late-Victorian period, the form of the fairy tale shifted from the literary fairy tale to ‘fantasy.’ Three formal characteristics reveal that fantasy literature derives from the fairy tale: an indication, thematically or formally, that another dimension has been entered; the making and remaking of genres—stories—in dialectically overdetermined configurations; and a textual conflation between physics and ethics that results in …


Birth Matters: Discourses Of Childbirth In Contemporary American Culture, Jennifer Ellis West Jan 2011

Birth Matters: Discourses Of Childbirth In Contemporary American Culture, Jennifer Ellis West

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this project, I use a rhetorical-cultural approach to examine the multiple and often-contradictory messages circulating in contemporary American culture about the event of childbirth. Though many feminist scholars have shown how professional obstetrics’ view of physiological birth shapes medical practice and women’s experiences in hospitals, few have asked what the American public is learning about birth outside of the hospital, or why that knowledge might matter. In order to fill that gap, I trace a dominant narrative that positions institutionalized biomedical knowledge and technology as the exclusive producers of health and safety for birthing women and their babies in …


Framing Empire: Victorian Literature, Hollywood International, And Postcolonial Film Adaptation, Jerod Ra'del Hollyfield Jan 2011

Framing Empire: Victorian Literature, Hollywood International, And Postcolonial Film Adaptation, Jerod Ra'del Hollyfield

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines how adaptations of Victorian literature made in Hollywood by postcolonial filmmakers contend with the legacy of British imperialism and Hollywood’s role as a multinational corporate entity. Highlighting the increased number of postcolonial filmmakers adapting Victorian literature in Hollywood, the project demonstrates how film adaptation has become a strategy for, in the words of Salman Rushdie, “writing back” to imperial powers. Placing such adaptations of Victorian literature within the tradition of postcolonial rewritings of classic British texts, I bridge fidelity criticism, the auteur theory, and contrapuntal readings of source texts with studies of political economy in order to …


An African American Discourse Community In Black & White: The New Orleans Tribune, Kristi Richard Melancon Jan 2011

An African American Discourse Community In Black & White: The New Orleans Tribune, Kristi Richard Melancon

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In An African American Discourse Community in Black & White: The New Orleans Tribune, an archival study of the first black-owned daily newspaper in the United States, I argue that the newspaper rhetorically constructed a literate African American discourse community worthy of citizenship and equal political rights within the public sphere of Reconstruction United States. Although contemporaneous media in the South depicted blacks as both unable to read and write and as culturally illiterate, I demonstrate how articles across the lifespan of the Tribune represented, as well as encouraged and enabled, multiple literacies within the African American community. I ultimately …


Constructing Hindu Religioscapes: Guruism And Identity In South Asian Diasporic Fiction, Sukanya Gupta Jan 2011

Constructing Hindu Religioscapes: Guruism And Identity In South Asian Diasporic Fiction, Sukanya Gupta

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project draws attention to the modern phenomenon of Guruism. I demonstrate that gurus in South Asian fiction are no longer adopting Guruism for the purposes of religion alone. In the novels I analyze, gurus use religion as a tool to resist dominant power structures, to strengthen/protect themselves in communities that stereotype, to access social/financial mobility and to obtain political power. The actions of these religious leaders have both positive and negative effects, as gurus ultimately desire authority to determine how South Asian communities conceive Hinduism, the function of Hindu religious institutions, and the role that Hinduism must play in …


A Gendered Profession Chaucer‟S Prioress As A Satirical Representation Of Medieval Female Monasticism, Laura Godfrey May 2010

A Gendered Profession Chaucer‟S Prioress As A Satirical Representation Of Medieval Female Monasticism, Laura Godfrey

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


The Young Adult Speaks For Herself: My Reading Of Modern Criticism And The Twilight Saga, Elizabeth Spence May 2010

The Young Adult Speaks For Herself: My Reading Of Modern Criticism And The Twilight Saga, Elizabeth Spence

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


Sea Of Broken Things, Laura Elizabeth Smith Mar 2010

Sea Of Broken Things, Laura Elizabeth Smith

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


Ephemeral Media, Persistent Action: Public Pedagogies Of Collective Resistance, Jessica Ketcham Weber Jan 2010

Ephemeral Media, Persistent Action: Public Pedagogies Of Collective Resistance, Jessica Ketcham Weber

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In Ephemeral Media, Persistent Action: Public Pedagogies of Collective Resistance, I argue that representations of contemporary activism against corporate globalization, as analyzed in three different sites of commercially-driven media texts—newspapers, film, and websites—teach people to move away from public forms of collective activism and towards privatized and institutionally-sponsored forms as part of the larger project of neoliberalism. Specifically, this dissertation focuses on the representations of, and responses to the representations of, two events—the protests against the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Seattle, Washington in 1999 and the protests during the Republican National Convention in 2004 in New York City—as …


Writing About The South "In Her Own Way": Gender And Region In The Work Of Southern Women Playwrights, Casey Kayser Jan 2010

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 …


Monstrous Bodies: Femininity And Agency In Young Adult Horror Fiction, June Pulliam Jan 2010

Monstrous Bodies: Femininity And Agency In Young Adult Horror Fiction, June Pulliam

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Young Adult horror fiction with female protagonists presents sympathetically the untenable situation of adolescent girls within society whereby they are increasingly pressured to embody a doll-like feminine ideal that deprives them of voice and agency. In Young Adult horror fiction, the monstrous Other problematizes what is presented to girls as “normal” and “natural” feminine behavior. As a double with a difference, the monstrous Other is an iteration of femininity whose similarity to the original implies the possibility of resisting restrictive gender roles. Because in Young Adult horror fiction the monstrous Other is nearly always a sympathetic character, it is fairly …


Early American Self-Reflexive Writing: Revising The Tradition, Susie Scifres Kuilan Jan 2010

Early American Self-Reflexive Writing: Revising The Tradition, Susie Scifres Kuilan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study focuses on self- reflexivity in early American texts. This self-reflexivity demonstrates that these early American authors were attempting to define “American fiction” and were participating in a new literary tradition that was developing simultaneously with the development of the new country. After the introduction, Chapter One lays the groundwork for my study by exploring current views of these texts and what led to these views. Chapter Two explores the difficulties facing post-Revolutionary authors and their reactions to these obstacles as reflected in their prefaces and their other writings. I show the way these authors self-consciously respond to the …


Third-Wave Feminism In Select Young Adult Literature, Colleen Mckinney Jan 2010

Third-Wave Feminism In Select Young Adult Literature, Colleen Mckinney

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


Other Tomorrows: Postcoloniality, Science Fiction And India, Suparno Banerjee Jan 2010

Other Tomorrows: Postcoloniality, Science Fiction And India, Suparno Banerjee

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue that science fiction as a genre intervenes in the history-oriented discourse of postcolonial Anglophone Indian literature and refocuses attention on the nation’s future—its position in global politics, its shifting religious and social values, its rapid industrialization, the clash between orthodoxy and modernity, and ultimately the dream of a multicultural nation. Anglophone Indian science fiction also indicates India’s movement away from a nation trying to negotiate the stigma of colonialism to a nation emerging as a new world power. Thus, this genre reconstructs the Indian identity not only in the domestic sphere, but also in a …


Invisible Links, Abject Chains: Habit In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Daniel R. Mangiavellano Jan 2010

Invisible Links, Abject Chains: Habit In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Daniel R. Mangiavellano

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“Invisible Links, Abject Chains: Habit in Nineteenth-Century British Literature” argues that habit is a central characteristic of both Romantic and Victorian theories of imagination, originality, literary production, and subjectivity. Certainly, nineteenth-century culture often treats habit with suspicion, invoking language of bondage, slavery, and dangerous unconscious imitation to apply to everything from reading habits to opium use. However, by tracing a discourse of habit from association theory to pragmatism and drawing from philosophical, educational, medical, and psychological texts, I foreground how Romantic and Victorian texts redeploy habit as a paradoxical form of imaginative agency. In nineteenth-century culture, habit makes possible what …


Paths Of Most Resistance: Navigating The Culture Industry In William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Delmore Schwartz, And Eudora Welty, Jason Dupuy Jan 2010

Paths Of Most Resistance: Navigating The Culture Industry In William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Delmore Schwartz, And Eudora Welty, Jason Dupuy

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores how four modernist writers of the 1930s and 1940s—William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Delmore Schwartz, and Eudora Welty—used their works to present ways to resist and navigate what they present as the frequently reductive worldview offered by the culture industry. Faulkner tends to show the culture industry as selling easy answers that focus on the end result, which allows his characters to approach the culture industry with a sense of fatalism. To resist this, Faulkner stresses a step-by-step, complex dialectical understanding of the culture industry, one that shows the fissures in its seemingly straightforward narratives and allows the …


Review Of A Brave Vessel: The True Tale Of The Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown And Inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest, Michael F. Russo Jun 2009

Review Of A Brave Vessel: The True Tale Of The Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown And Inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest, Michael F. Russo

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Apologia For The "Lusus Nature": Subverting Victorian Gender Ideology In Charlotte Bronte's Villette, Laura Springer May 2009

Apologia For The "Lusus Nature": Subverting Victorian Gender Ideology In Charlotte Bronte's Villette, Laura Springer

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


―[Gliding] All Revealed‖: The Making And Breaking Of Myths In Shirley, Sarah Honorè Berard May 2009

―[Gliding] All Revealed‖: The Making And Breaking Of Myths In Shirley, Sarah Honorè Berard

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


University Writing Center Vs. Secondary English Classroom: Are Collegiate Writing Center Non-Directive Tutoring Strategies Effective In The Teaching Of Writing In The Secondary Classroom?, Mark Ebarb May 2009

University Writing Center Vs. Secondary English Classroom: Are Collegiate Writing Center Non-Directive Tutoring Strategies Effective In The Teaching Of Writing In The Secondary Classroom?, Mark Ebarb

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


All Too Human: Exploring Nietzsche In Four Short Stories, Jason Liban Rose Apr 2009

All Too Human: Exploring Nietzsche In Four Short Stories, Jason Liban Rose

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


“Thefts & Lies”, Joseph Calvasina Apr 2009

“Thefts & Lies”, Joseph Calvasina

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


Exchange Of The Changing Women In Merchant Of Venice, As You Like It, And Twelfth Night, Samantha Jo Richardson Mar 2009

Exchange Of The Changing Women In Merchant Of Venice, As You Like It, And Twelfth Night, Samantha Jo Richardson

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


(Im)Possible Encounters, Possible (Mis)Understandings Between The West And Its Other: The Case Of The Maghreb, Tanja Stampfl Jan 2009

(Im)Possible Encounters, Possible (Mis)Understandings Between The West And Its Other: The Case Of The Maghreb, Tanja Stampfl

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

My work deals with what I call (im)possible encounters, possible (mis)understandings between the West and the Rim of the World (in my case The Maghreb). I focus on writers (such as Paul Bowles, Patricia Highsmith, Edith Wharton, Tayeb Salih, Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Ahdaf Soueif) who stepped across the cultural dividing line to claim a voice of their own; a voice that enabled them to represent and at times misrepresent the host culture they chose to live in, and which acts as a “lieu” and at times “milieu de mémoire.” It is what the late Edward Said aptly called “intertwined histories, overlapping …