English Language and Literature Commons^™

[Introduction To] The Lineage Of Abraham: The Biography Of A Free Black Family In Charles City, Va, Daryl Cumber Dance

Bookshelf

The history of the descendents of Abraham Brown (1769? - 1840) in Charles City County, Virginia.

"A Tolerable Straight Line" : Non-Linear Narrative In Tristram Shandy, Daniel L. Hocutt

Master's Theses

The non-linear narrative of Laurence Sterne's Tri st ram Shandy demands attentive readers. Written under the influence of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the novel satirizes Lockean "associationism" and illustrates language's inability to express ideas accurately. In the novel, words seldom convey characters' intended meanings, yet Tristram uses language effectively to narrate "self" to his readers. Rather than having his mind's workings conform to the linear nature of traditional discourse, Tristram communicates associatively to intelligent, involved readers without imposing linearity. In this study I examine scholars' work to determine Tristram 's position on Locke's ideas and use Seymour Chatman …

Beryl Gilroy: A Bio-Literary Overview, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In 1992 when I joined the faculty at the University of Richmond, I taught a class in black women's literature to a group of mainly white students who had previously read little or nothing in this body of literature. One young senior--a white male--did a paper comparing the sympathetic portrayal of the white male character in Beryl Gilroy's Stedman and Joanna and Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine. His enthusiasm for the rich body of literature to which I had introduced him continued after he graduated, and he often wrote to me about books he was reading …

African-American Proverbs In Context By Sw. Anand Prahlad (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Growing up in Hanover, Virginia, "surrounded by people who cast the world in vibrant and poetic colors," Sw. Anand Prahlad "fell in love with proverbs at an early age" (ix). This lifelong love affair has resulted in a rich collection of African American proverbs that expanded as Prahlad went through college and graduate school, and did postgraduate research. All the while, he was sharpening his critical skills and developing the theoretical framework to establish a model for use in examining the varied components of proverbial speech in the African American community, proceeding on the assumption that in order to understand …

Plotting The Mother: Caroline Norton, Helen Huntingdon, And Isabel Vane, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

The proper Victorian heroine neither acts nor plots. Heroines as disparate as Fanny Price of Mansfield Park and Gwendolen Harleth of Daniel Deronda prove their virtue by failing as actresses. When Fanny protests, “Indeed, I cannot act,” we know that it is because she cannot be other than what she is: virtuous. Gwendolen Harleth’s aborted attempt to make a career as an actress seems, in Daniel Deronda, to signal her essential difference from the Princess Halm-Eberstein, the mother who has abandoned Daniel in order to pursue her acting career. Gwendolen is flawed, but at least she is not an …

In Search Of A Female Self : The Masculinization Of May In Chaucer's Merchant's Tale, Kimberly Diane Whitley

Master's Theses

This examination of Chaucer's Merchant's Tale was undertaken as a response to existing scholarship. While criticism in the past tended toward a literal reading of the text, viewing it as a misogynist Merchant's story attesting to the innate depravity of women, more recent feminist criticism has leaned toward a reading which endeavors to defend the actions of May, claiming an evolvement on her part towards autonomy and self-knowledge. This thesis, taking its cue from French feminist theoretical assertions concerning self, refutes both of these readings. While it acknowledges the subversive nature of May's actions, it is unable to recognize any …

Anna Letitia Barabauld's Poetic Vision: Community, Imagination, And The Quotidian, Carrie Ann Woods

Master's Theses

With the publication of her Poems in 1773, favorable reviews welcomed Anna Letitia Barbauld into the literary world. However, Barbauld has traditionally been left out of English literature anthologies, condemned to the murky depths of obscurity. Why has this talented British poet of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries been undeservedly marginalized? Perhaps she has never achieved the status of a major literary figure because her impulse towards community places her outside the mainstream Romantic tradition dominated by the "egotistical sublime." In the poetry of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats, an …

A Glorious Feast For The Eyes : The Roles Of Iconography And Sight In Chaucer's The Prioress's Tale And The Second Nun's Tale, Kelly Marie Bruce

Master's Theses

This thesis investigates Chaucer's use of iconography and sight in The Prioress's Tale and The Second Nun's Tale and how these elements symbiotically support and enhance the text so that the tales themselves become iconic. An overview of medieval religious practices and doctrines is followed by a discussion of The Prioress's Tale, in which Chaucer's direct reference to a Virgin icon is explored. Further, the analysis focuses on the way in which visual cues supplement the meaning of the written word. A discussion of The Second Nun's Tale follows, exploring the relationship between sight and faith. The importance of …

"Nothingness/ In Words Enclose" : Supplementarity And The "Veil" Of Language In Samuel Beckett's Murphy And Watt, Justin P. Jakovac

Master's Theses

Samuel Beckett has asserted that language is a "veil" in which he must "bore one hole after another..., until what lurks behind it - be it something or nothing - begins to seep through." This thesis employs Derrida's assertion that language involves the play of differance and the supplementarity of the sign. Since the supplement, in Derrida's words, "fills and marks a determined lack," language calls attention to the gap of nothingness already present in the play of differance. Murphy and Watt present both the desire for "semantic succour" of the veil and the awareness - more fully …

"Something For The Girls" : Demeter, Persephone, And Hecate In Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding And The Optimist's Daughter, Amy Davidson Grubb

Master's Theses

Eudora Welty's novels of Southern women and ritual reveal her desire to convey a woman's world and to imbue it with a prelapsarian power of feminine self-knowledge. To create this world, Welty draws upon the mythological signifiers of Demeter, Persephone, and Hecate. Utilizing natural imagery of food and flowers, Welty develops a fecund, spring-like landscape and explores the relationship between character, author, and myth. What begins in Delta Wedding as a search to reaffirm the existence of a world spirit concludes in The Optimist's Daughter as a triumphant rebirth of the feminine spirit. Laurel McKelva Hand, unlike her predecessor Laura …

Voicing Manhood : Masculinity And Dialogue In Ernest J. Gaines's "The Sky Is Gray," "Three Men," And A Gathering Of Old Men, William T. Mallon

Master's Theses

Using concepts both from gender studies of literature and from discourse theory, this thesis explores the relationship between race, masculinity, and dialogue in Ernest Gaines's "The Sky is Gray," "Three Men," and A Gathering of Old Men. In these works, Gaines demonstrates that manhood can be achieved by a process of linguistic appropriation. His African-American male characters become men through the utterance, not the violent act. This thesis examines how Gaines's black men appropriate language among distinct groups: themselves, the extended black community, and the white community.

Myth And Myth-Making In James Branch Cabell's Jurgen : A Comedy Of Justice, Christopher Carson Crenshaw

Master's Theses

Criticism extant on myth in Cabell's Jurgen has focused largely either on the presence of specific mythos in the text, or on the universal application of those myths to the modern world via the cultural-anthropological methods first described in Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough. The common thread in such criticism is that myth is always perceived as an authoritative structure for the transmission of the author's themes. This thesis proposes, however, that the satirical tone and self-conscious allegory of Jurgen systematically combine to strip myth of all authority, placing it in a role which conceals, rather than transmits, …

Notice The Mistletoe, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Selection of African-American folklore on the winter holidays.

"Nothing But Gold Shall Charm My Heart" : Sexual Economics And The Courtesans Of Aphra Behn And Daniel Defoe, Anthony L. Ellis

Master's Theses

Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe both manifest a strong interest in the courtesan, a female figure whose unusual success wins her autonomy from sexual and economic subjugation. In order to remain self-governing, Angellica Bianca and La Nuche of Behn's Rover plays and Defoe's Roxana must pay singular heed to their economic self-interest while forsaking the prospect of genuine romantic love. However, whereas Behn's courtesans undergo sexual "reformations"--figured as the acceptance of love (and marriage) and the resulting loss of independence--to their economic detriment, Roxana maintains the emotional reticence that allows her to continue capitalizing fully on her sexual allure. By …

"Why Don't He Like My Hair?": Constructing African-American Standards Of Beauty In Toni Morrison's "Song Of Solomon" And Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God", Bertram D. Ashe

English Faculty Publications

African-Americans, with their traditionally African features, have always had an uneasy coexistence with the European (white) ideal of beauty. According to Angela M. Neal and Midge L. Wilson, "Compared to Black males, Black females have been more profoundly affected by the prejudicial fallout surrounding issues of skin color, facial features, and hair. Such impact can be attributed in large part to the importance of physical attractiveness for all women" (328). For black women, the most easily controlled feature is hair. While contemporary black women sometimes opt for cosmetic surgery or colored contact lenses, hair alteration (i.e., hair-straightening "permanents," hair weaves, …

The Zea Mexican Dairy: 7 Sept 1926 - 7 Sept 1986. By Kamau Brathwaite (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

I may be hard put to classify the latest work of noted poet, historian, literary critic, linguist, and Africanist Kamau (Eddie) Brathwaite, but I have no problem describing it - compelling, riveting, unforgettable! Begun when Brathwaite received the devastating news that his wife Doris (his Zea Mexican) was dying of cancer, it is a paean to her, a record of his efforts to deal with her dying, death, and absence, an account of their relationship, and an autobiographical confessional. The Zea Mexican Diary includes diary entries, letters, memorates, an epigraph, expressions of sympathy, confessions, autobiographical narrative, poems - but whatever …

Jesse B. Semple And The Black Press : The Voice Of Black People, Mary A. Massey

Master's Theses

Black newspapers play a vital role in keeping people up-to-date with what's happening in the Black community. This study will show how Black newspapers play a vital role in reporting news and comments from an Afro-American perspective. It will provide a historical overview of Black news as well as a close examination of Langston Hughes' columns and his character of Jesse B. Semple within the context of the Black press, particularly the Chicago Defender.

The results of this study will reveal the joys and concerns that Afro-Americans shared with each other through the Black newspapers and show how the character …

The Question Of Free Will In James Joyce's Exiles And William Faulkner's Requiem For A Nun, Robin Hume Brownhill

Master's Theses

Joyce's Exiles and Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun are both unsuccessful naturalistic dramas written by novelists. This study compares the two texts, applying the question, "Is free will possible?" to four common themes within each work: the past, religion, marriage and politics. Within these four contexts, the two plays exhibit similarities of language and content; however, they consistently distinguish themselves on the question of free will. Joyce's work shows a protagonist who "frees" himself, through sacrifice, from the bonds of tradition. Faulkner's work shows a protagonist "doomed" and "damned" to suffer endlessly for her past. Despite their opposing presentations of …

The Representation Of Tabooed Love In Lillian Smith's Fiction, Jane Elizabeth Payne

Master's Theses

My study explores Lillian Smith's autobiographical relationship to her fiction, particularly two novels, Strange Fruit, and One Hour. The focus of this work is Smith's challenge to the category of sexual orientation and her related use of fiction as a source of social commentary and self-reflection. Smith's uses veiled and encoded language and other kinds of tabooed love to study her own lesbian love. She also assumes a male persona to understand and express her erotic attraction to women. I approach Smith's life and literature in chronological order with an emphasis upon characterization, symbolism, narrative technique, and metaphors of nature. …

Various Black Virginians As Told To Daryl Cumber Dance, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Shuckin' and Jivin': Folklore from Contemporary Black Americans, published in 1978, derived from fieldwork done far a doctoral dissertation at Virginia Commonwealth University by Daryl Cumber Dance (the only woman named Daryl I have heard of aside from Daryl Hannah). She gathered stories and verses from black Virginians in colleges, senior citizens' centers, and a penitentiary. Though she doesn't bring to the party an editorial touch as enlivening as Zora Neale Hurston's, she has an ear and-unlike far, far too many assiduous collectors of folktales - knows how to capture vocal rhythms on a page.

Finding The Words : Negotiating Linguistic Communities In Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose, Nanci M. Roberts

Master's Theses

A study of linguistic communities in Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose, this thesis focuses on the relationship between cultural behavior and the use of language. Using anthropological studies on the role of language in society, as well as major criticism of the novel, this paper seeks to prove that only through equalizing linguistic power can the characters achieve a language system which accurately reflects their experience. The paper focuses on four primary communities: the unequal interracial community of Southern slave society, the slave community, the white planter community, and finally the equal interracial community that results after slavery.

Matriarchs, Doves, And Nymphos: Prevalent Images Of Black, Indian, And White Women In Caribbean Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Universally, male writers have tended to create images of women which reveal the familiar male tendency to view women merely as functionaries whose role basically is determined by male needs, male motivations, male fears, and male fantasies. When woman is submissive, docile and pure, she is to be protected and revered; then, she is the virgin/goddess. When she is assertive and strong, she is to be avoided and despised; then, she is the bitch/shrew. When she is passionate and active, she is to be resisted and feared; she is the whore/temptress. While this genera] categorizing of women characters carries over …

Jesse B. Semple And The Black Press : The Voice Of Black People, Mary Ann Massey

Master's Theses

Black newspapers play a vital role in keeping people up-to-date with what's happening in the Black community. This study will show how Black newspapers play a vital role in reporting news and comments from an Afro-American perspective. It will provide a historical overview of Black news as well as a close examination of Langston Hughes' columns and his character of Jesse B. Semple within the context of the Black press, particularly the Chicago Defender. The results of this study will reveal the joys and concerns that Afro-Americans shared with each other through the Black newspapers and show how the …

The Empathetic Savior : Narcissism And The Role Of The Son In "Paradise Lost", Anna Nabb Meade

Master's Theses

I began my research intending to develop a coherent theory regarding the poolside scene in "Paradise Lost." Troubled by the recognition that Eve was created perfect and yet shows a disturbing tendency toward vanity, I began to probe possible interpretations for Milton's allusion to the Narcissus myth. I incorporated Satan and Adam as further exploration of narcissism, and the Father and Son as self-love recognized ideally. Working with the theories of Heinz Kohut, I concluded that certain aspects of the Son's role in the Christian faith are analogous to the role of the therapist in healing the narcissistically impaired individual, …

"Brother", Jonathan K. Stubbs

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Walking Percy's Tightrope : From Alienation To Affirmation, Karen Y. Carter

Master's Theses

Walker Percy's Binx Bolling, of The Moviegoer, and Will Barrett, of The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming, are two Southern existential seekers who move from alienation and despair to create lives of meaningful commitment with the promise of fulfillment. Because of their similarities, we can trace a development in Percy's fiction which parallels the questor's development. These three books move from a preoccupation with death-in-life to a discovery of self and on to individual and cultural rebirth. Thus, The Moviegoer (1960) is about alienation and despair; The Last Gentleman (1966) is about the possibility of human relationships, …

Tristram Shandy And The Discursive Self, Susan Denman Breeden

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

An Interview Of Paule Marshall, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

This Interview was conducted at the home of Paule Marshall in Richmond, Virginia, on June 14, 1991. Much of our discussion focused on Ms. Marshall's recently completed novel, Daughters, published this fall by Atheneum, which she characterizes here as "perhaps my most personal novel." There are, of course, frequent references to her earlier works, which include Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961). The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969), Praisesong for the Widow (1983), and Reena and Other Stories (1983).

"He's Long Gone": The Theme Of Escape In Black Folklore And Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Throughout their experiences in this country, certain segments of the Black population have viewed themselves as enslaved, whether they were chattel owned by slaveowners prior to emancipation, whether they were impressed into peonage and forced to work on white plantations and in chain gangs after slavery, whether they were victims of sharecropping systems that virtually reenslaved them during the twentieth century, whether they were the repressed and disfranchised and persecuted in Southern Jim Crow towns throughout the first half of the twentieth century, whether they are those trapped by unemployment and poverty today, or whether they are among the Blacks …

[Introduction To] New World Adams: Conversations With Contemporary West Indian Writers, Daryl Cumber Dance

Bookshelf

In these interviews, held in the early 1980s, with twenty-two of the major writers of the English-speaking Caribbean, Daryl Dance brings together what is much more than just a valuable source book for readers of West Indian writing. The interviews are highly readable - by turns probing, combative and reflective and always absorbing. Daryl Dance brings to the interviews a rare breadth of knowledge and empathy with the work of the writers interviewed and the openly avowed insights of an African-American woman.

The writers interviewed include Michael Anthony, Louise Bennett, Jan Carew, Martin Carter and Denis Williams, Austin Clarke, Wilson …