Thesis (M.S.)--University of Florida, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 68-72).

Fugitive Nation: Contagious Democracies in American Literature of the Early National Period, 1793-1838 takes aim at the legislative gag-order on racial issues during the early national period. The gag-order suppressed national discussions of slavery and racial injustice until abolitionism rose in the 1830s, and its legacy continues today to impair our historical understanding of this deeply conflicted period of the American past. In order to restore this "fugitive" history, Fugitive Nation reconstructs a historical memory by uncovering the erstwhile silent record of race relations during the early national period, while demonstrating how this history of racial injustice is at the root of a liberal democratic tradition in American Letters. Thus, my study traces the ideological connections among disparate national narratives, from the more literary works of Charles Brockden Brown and James Fenimore Cooper, to the more popular and partisan documents circulating in the early national period. Magazines, congressional and society records, personal narratives, and documentary histories, such as cross-cultural accounts of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic and the annual reports of the American Colonization Society, provide a fuller understanding of the different roles race played in the nation's transformation from colony to state, even as they provide richly nuanced readings of early American literary works. Ultimately, Fugitive Nation corrects the fallacy of the "Great Contradiction"---that racial hierarchies were somehow inconsistent with a liberal Democracy---by demonstrating that America grew out of, and actually required, an increasingly punitive and divisive system of race relations.

In this dissertation, I explore the complex layers of the dynamic American cultures that inform personal experiences, shape national identities, and impinge upon the global order. Situating this project within recent explorations of cultural globalization within American Studies, Cultural Studies, and the Environmental Justice Movement, I examine cultural narratives united by one colonial trope: the colonial conquest of natural resources through the subjugation of feminine body and feminized land (noble savage), and the retreat of the primitive ignoble savage in the face of civilization and progress. These narratives include Henry Adams and Everett Emerson's opposing representations of Captain John Smith, the articulation of America as 'nature's nation' in Thomas Cole's art and the PBS program Frontier House, the Broadway show Miss Saigon, and the now infamous Wen Ho Lee case. These disparate narratives, at the intersection of discourses of nation, nature, race, and gender, accumulate a collective force even in their separate moments. Adams and Emerson demonstrate a linear view of American history that upholds progress in terms of industrialization and expansionism at the cost of nature, and racialized and gendered others. Cole and Frontier House romanticize subjugation in terms of nature, race and gender, which is construed as an inevitable and necessary step towards progress. In the Broadway musical Miss Saigon and media and political representations of the Wen Ho Lee case, such progress contributes to an American identity that plays a leading role within the current the globalized order. The ancient colonial trope remains alive today through these narratives, I argue, because the apparatuses of global capitalist development and environmentalism have created new global regimes of governmentality that continue, under new guise, the structures and relationships under colonialism. These narratives are part of a cultural process productive of a new 'common sense,' an understanding that helps people grasp cultural representations, solve social conflicts, and negotiate political realities. As such, cultural texts are integral aspects of history and politics.

<p> This dissertation examines the function of family as a thematic in the contemporary Anglo-American novel. It argues that contemporary aesthetics increasingly presents the family as an enabling platform for conciliation with the social totality: as a space of personal development, readying one for life in the wider social field. This analyses hinges on readings of Jonathan Franzen&rsquo;s <i>Freedom</i> (2010), Zadie Smith&rsquo;s <i> NW</i> (2012), A. M. Homes&rsquo; <i>May We Be Forgiven</i> (2012) and Caryl Phillips&rsquo; <i>In the Falling Snow.</i> In approaching these novels, this project addresses the theoretical lacuna left open by the much-touted retreat of postmodernism as a general cultural-aesthetic strategy. This project identifies these novels as examples of a new and competing ideological constellation: metamodernism. Metamodernism encompasses the widely cited return of sincerity to contemporary aesthetics, though this project explains this development in a novel way: as a cultural expression from within the wider arc of postmodernism itself. One recurrent supposition within this project is that postmodernism, in its seeming nihilism, betrays a thwarted political commitment; on the other hand contemporary metamodern attitudes display the seriousness and earnestness of political causes carried out to an ironic disregard of the political. Metamodernism, in other words, is not a wholesale disavowal of postmodern irony, but a re-arrangement of its function: a move from sincere irony to an ironic sincerity. The central inquiry of this dissertation is into this re-arranged role of family and familial participation amidst this new cultural landscape. My argument is that family and the political have maintained a tense relationship through the twentieth century in the American consciousness. They represent competing models of futurity in a zero-sum game for an individual&rsquo;s life-energy. What metamodernism represents, so this dissertation will articulate, is a new form of anti-politics: a fully gratified impulse to depoliticize. Analyzing what this project terms the &ldquo;politics of the local,&rdquo; this dissertation will argue that the highly popular and successful models of conscientious capitalism have been superseded. Today, increasingly, redemption from consumerism guilt is itself wrapped up in commodities: the utopian impulse celebrated by Fredric Jameson has itself obtained a price tag. The contemporary novel thus reflects new social functions for that which has trumped the political: the family. </p>

This dissertation establishes gift exchanges as a key concern of numerous nineteenth-century U.S. texts. An ideology of the free gift developed in the nineteenth century as both a defense against the market's perceived threat to personal relationships and as a means of reconceptualizing these relationships in terms consistent with such capitalist tenets as possessive individualism and voluntary contract. My introduction synthesizes multiple models of gift exchange offered by contemporary theory. I resist both idealizations of the gift that overlook important continuities between gift and commodity transactions and equally simplistic demystifications that ignore crucial distinctions: (1) the form of reciprocity each entails, and (2) their respective capacities for reproducing social relationships. Chapter one compares Ralph Waldo Emerson's arguments about gifts' threat to individual autonomy and Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man. Melville, in contradistinction to Emerson, concentrates on gift rituals' facilitating role within market transactions and suggests that individual autonomy might lie in self-consciously performing, not avoiding, gift exchange's obligations. Chapter two examines the frequent depictions of gift-giving in popular domestic novels. Regardless of whether particular authors, such as Susan Warner and Maria Cummins, naturalize the dichotomy between private and public economic transactions by treating gift and commodity exchange as specifically gendered practices, or whether, in the case of Fanny Fern and William Dean Howells, they problematize such oppositions, domestic fiction illustrates that gift practices shape commodity transactions as powerfully as such transactions transform social relations. The concluding chapter examines Harriet Jacobs's, Frances Harper's, and W. E. B. Du Bois's attempts to critique possessive individualism and a racist discourse of paternalism by constructing gift-based concepts of identity and citizenship. Because gift transactions generate a community's sense of mutual obligation, gift exchange's obligatory reciprocity provides an indispensable, if often problematic, metaphor for conceptualizing a national community. The material practices of gift exchange thus provided the nineteenth-century U.S. with a powerful tool for theorizing-and for forging an apparent continuity between---a multitude of concepts, such as individualism, the relationship between private and public life, race relations, and citizenship.

A study of twentieth-century U.S. literature must take into consideration the way in which the South has been posited as a distinct, gothic region within or, at times, outside of the nation as a whole. Unlike other regions of the U.S., which might signify progress and freedom (the North and Northeast) or expansion and hope (the West), the South always signifies either the horrors of slavery and its legacy or, at best, a place of comic backwardness. But what happens when the constructed divide between the South and the nation collapses? When essential differences between the South and the nation are difficult to "tell"? My dissertation is not about a traditional split between the American North and South, but rather interrogates the ideological distinctions between the South and the nation itself. By focusing on how bodies absorb or expel extreme and everyday forms of violence and impurity in literary, cultural, and historical texts, my dissertation works to blur the border between the nation and what stands as its abject, internal other. From narratives of eugenics to narratives of lynching, agrarian manhood to the function of the National Guard, I articulate how stories about paranoia, physical injury, and bodily interiors interfere with the smooth functioning of "America" as an imagined community. In my analyses of works by Erskine Caldwell, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, James Dickey, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, and Toni Morrison (among others), I closely read moments of corporeal and categorical indeterminacy to show how the relation between the South and the nation is always a gothic one, one that can never fully be "told."

This dissertation examines the influence of romantic aesthetics on the development of literary writing as a profession in America during the 1840s and 1850s. In opposition to the new historical claim that literary texts are purely reflective of the ideological presuppositions of the culture in which they were written, my analysis demonstrates how literary writing can function as an effective means of cultural transformation. By examining how Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville, respectively, take up romantic aesthetics in their work, I advance a materialist theory of history that is better suited to the study of culture in a democracy. Unlike the new historical approach to cultural analysis, which interprets historical change with reference to market forces that are thought to be rationally determinate, the materialist approach to cultural analysis I develop understands historical change to proceed via the pragmatic construction of overdetermined social identities that are written in response to changing cultural circumstances. Although this materialist approach requires critics to abandon the project of writing a total and complete history of American cultural life, it is better suited for cultural analysis in a democracy because it insists that we--not some transhistorical force like the market--bear the responsibility for determining our relation to our culture.

Thesis (M.S.)--Humboldt State University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-93). Also available via Humboldt Digital Scholar.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1988. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 134-137). Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.) in Wildlife Ecology--University of Maine, 2007. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 185-214).