At the conclusion of the U.S. Mexican War in 1848, Mexican Americans across the United States found their disjointed communities struggling to adapt to a newly acquired national status. My project argues that Mexican American literary manhood functioned as a representational strategy that instantiated a Mexican American national public and that sutured regional communities into a national whole. Within a transnational, multilingual archive, Mexican American manhood served as a means through which to articulate multiple forms of citizenship and competing cultural investments in U.S. and Mexican national projects. Between 1848 and the 1960s -- that is, prior to the Chicano movement -- USAmerican writers looked to Mexican American manhood for this purpose because it was inseparable from a rival sovereign state, revealed an inconsistent racial hierarchy, and troubled gendered ideals of the civil participation, yet simultaneously contained such contradictions. For Mexican American writers Manuel C. de Baca, Adolfo Carrillo, Maria Cristina Mena, Jovita González, Américo Paredes and José Antonio Villarreal, manhood offered a tactic for imagining participation in national citizenship, unhindered by institutional or legal impediments, although each represented Mexican American manhood in radically different ways. Conversely, authors Gertrude Atherton, Stephen Crane, and Jack London turned to Mexican American manhood as a powerful tool for disenfranchising or assimilating Mexican American communities from and into the U.S. nation. For these authors, Mexican American manhood was instrumental in the dissemination of narratives of American progress because it facilitated claims to continental and imperial expansion, reinforcing ideals of Anglo American manhood and masking claims to whiteness. Through analysis of prose fiction in both English and Spanish, my dissertation explicates the cultural creation of Mexican American literary manhood as a constitutive category of American manhood and as a textual strategy that positions Mexican Americans as national citizens. / text

The edition examines the manuscripts, history and significant variants of Le Crève-Coeur and of 'La Rime en 1940'. Aragon's claim that the collection has its origins in World War 1 is considered, but little evidence for this is found. A more likely catalyst is the colonial war in Morocco of 1925-26 that led to Aragon's conversion to Communism. It is in the 1930s that the poet develops his strategy of poetry as a 'contrebande' against war. The principal influences on Aragon in this undertaking are evoked. A survey is given of the political and historical circumstances of Le Crève-Coeur, and they are shown to be indivisible from the poetry. The main themes of the collection are considered and the degree to which the 'contrebande' technique affects their accessibility. A detailed discussion of 'La Rime en 1940' and of each poem, stanza by stanza, follows.

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The Ulster poet Samuel Thomson (1766-1816) experienced a brief period of fame during the 1790s and early 1800s when he published three volumes of verse and became a regular contributor of poetry to Belfast newspapers and journals. Known in popular memory as the ‘Bard of Carngranny’, Thomson had been closely associated with many radical activists who participated in the 1798 Rebellion, although it has never been established if he himself took part in the armed rising. His earlier poems, many of which are written in the vernacular Scots language, celebrate and parody local life in the rural North of Ireland. This study examines Thomson’s significance as a literary artist; an initiator of literary discussion and correspondence; and the father of a Northern school of Irish poets who span the cusp where eighteenth-century Augustanism and first generation Romanticism meet. Through the thorough examination of a range of evidence from published editions, public press and journal contributions, to the poet’s manuscripts, this study investigates Thomson’s work against the political, social, historical, and theological contexts which informed its composition. It attempts the first full reconstruction of Samuel Thomson’s life and career, paying particular attention to his correspondence and his last volume of verse, Simple Poems on a Few Subjects (1806) which has rarely been scrutinised in any detail. It highlights Thomson’s desire to assume a bardic role as an enthusiastic young radical who identified cultural similarities between his corner of Ireland and Robert Burns’s Ayrshire. The thesis also traces his enduring political engagement. While Thomson’s political radicalism may have cooled during the Union period, it was substituted for a radical spiritualism that adopts some of the visionary traits of early Romantic poetry.

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This thesis (395 pp.) is an edition of a XIVth century transcription of a chronicle in French prose compiled in the early part of the XIIIth century. This compilation is a résumé of all or part of at least five Latin chronicles which recount the history of the dukes of Normandy and kings of England, starting with their mythical origins in Troy and finishing in 1217 with the end of civil strife and foreign intervention in England during the first year of Henry III's minority, and the departure of the Fifth Crusade from all Christendom. The edition comprises an introduction dealing with the general subject area, manuscript classification, authorship, place and time of creating manuscripts and printed editions consulted, description of the base manuscript, language notes, establishment of the text, and ending with a detailed synopsis in English. This introduction contains pp.i-lxxix. There follows the edited base text (pp. 1-108) and critical apparatus (pp. 109-316): variants, rejected readings and emendations, scribal emendations, notes, bibliography, index of proper names, and glossary.

In this comparative study of the expression of futurity in the Spanish of Mexicans in the United States and the sociolinguistically understudied city of Xalapa, Mexico, I explore the distribution of the variants of futurity: the morphological future (MF), the periphrastic future (PF) and the simple present (SP) and the constraints conditioning their occurrence. The data were extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with two socially stratified groups of consultants from each community under study. I conducted statistical regression analyses to test the effects of five social and nine linguistic constraints. The results indicate that the PF registers the highest rate of occurrence with a frequency of 67.6% and the MF is disappearing at the expense of the other variants. In comparison to other studies, Orozco (2007a), Lastra & Martín Butragueño (2010), Claes & Ortíz-López (2011), Gutiérrez (1995) and Blas Arroyo (2007, 2008) found that the PF is the most favored variant at the expense of the others. When comparing the tendencies of these communities with those under study, it becomes apparent that the Mexicans in Baton Rouge and Xalapa are at a more advanced level toward the preferential use of the PF. The type of verb, as reported in previous studies (cf. Orozco 2005, 2007), is the linguistic constraint that most strongly influences the expression of futurity. Regarding the social constraints, in Louisiana and Xalapa, for example, both age and level of education condition the use of the future. Gender, however, shows no significant effect, which differs from what occurs in Barranquilla and New York (Orozco 2007b, Forthcoming), Mexico City (Lastra & Martín Butragueño 2010) and Puerto Rico (Claes & Ortíz López 2011). In general, the significant linguistic factors are consistent with the findings of other speech communities with regard to the type of verb and reflect the universality of the process of grammaticalization. The lack of statistical significance for gender suggests that women and men have similar sociolinguistic behavior. This opens the possibility of exploring other linguistic variables in these and other Mexican communities to determine whether the social trends that are found are limited to the expression of futurity or to the communities under study.

This thesis analyses twelfth- and thirteenth-century French texts from a range of genres to demonstrate how the inter-relation of narrative and place is a catalyst for the production of vernacular literary works. Rooted in close criticism of the texts in question (the Roman d’Eneas, lives of the martyrs Christina of Tyre and Catherine of Alexandria, the Voyage de saint Brendan, lives of the ascetics Alexis and Mary of Egypt, and the Roman de Brut), this study examines the ways in which narration both generates and delimits place. In tandem with this it interrogates the representations of, and disturbances to, the spatial organization of these texts, encompassing such themes as empire-building, genealogy, travel and exile. This juxtaposition of diverse materials opens up mutually illuminating spaces, demonstrating the instability of the entrenched generic categories applied to them and prompting consideration of the ambiguous principles of medieval poetic craft. Hagiography is a particularly pertinent crossing-point for multiple thematic concerns, from the tension between revelation and concealment of the body to the relationship between a state and its citizens. Its location at the confluence of liturgy, lay spirituality and entertainment makes it an apt focus for a study such as this. The thesis also considers questions of cultural and political appropriation and re-appropriation of place, drawing on medieval writers’ and thinkers’ conflicted relationship with their classical antecedents and non-Christian ‘others’. The many and varied journeys undertaken in these texts, meanwhile, offer critical meeting points between practices of writing about place across a range of modes, and they invite consideration of the historical contexts for their production. Foremost in this study, however, is a concern with the ways in which medieval narratives reify story; through close attention to how narratives are produced, preserved and transmitted in these texts, I examine the ethics and efficacy of storytelling as a means for creating place. Whether they re-present foundation myths, the trials of saints, or the fantastical journeys of adventurers, these stories are both container and content for reflections on how authors can relate to their world, and it this sense of the two faces of narrative that underpins my interpretation of these texts and their representations of places and spaces.