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When the Negro was brought by force to a New World, he was subjected to new conditions of life to which he was compelled to adjust himself. He later became one of America's greatest social problems and entered directly or indirectly in the conditioning and determining of personal and group behavior. True, he had been brought here for one purpose only and that was to insure the economic stability of his white masters. Learning, the rights of citizenship, home ownership, participation in governmental affairs and even the right to religious worship were fantastic notions not applicable to these hewers of wood and tillers of soil.1 But the New World underwent changes, and simultaneously the Negroes too. They became men entitled to all the rights attaining thereto. The new race was regarded in a new light. They were new observed politically, economically and educationally. Former masters found themselves trying to check the strides of former slaves, because this racial minority should not be allowed to corrupt the population stock and debase the social standards.2 However, with his freedom, and subsequent growth, the Negro developed certain attitudes toward his environment. In many situations the Negro had been too ignorant or too cowed by superior force to stage his case clearly and openly. It has been left to the educated Negroes of the twentieth century not only to become articulate, but to make art an ally of social protest. Consequently, many of the novels by Negroes have voiced the resentment and yearnings of the masses. The purpose of this paper is to record these attitudes of the Negro as they are revealed in the Negro novel, where there is mirrored a miniature replica of the world in which he lives. This study will be confined to thirty-three novels written by Negroes from 1900 to the present. The scope of the paper will include the general theme and thesis of the novel together with the opinions and attitudes of the characters who appear in the books. Our attention will be focused on those attitudes that grow out of the educational, religious, and economic life of the Negro, three of the most important aspects of the Negro's social environment. 1Benjamin E. Mays and Joseph W. Nicholson, The Negro's Church, New York, [1933], p. 1. 2Edward B. Reuter, The American Race Problem, New York, [1927], p. 2.

This study explores and analyzes the ways in which three contemporary writers--Cormac McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ana Castillo--are revisioning the archetypal frontier myths which have shaped, and continue to shape, American culture. Just as with earlier versions, modern frontier myths are mixed and hybridized, the often troubled offspring of parents from multiple cultures and races co-existing in an uneasy intimacy. Contrary to some scholars' assumption, modern American culture is neither lacking in myths, nor unmarked by centuries of conquest and co-existence with Native cultures and their myths. The myths of both the European and Native worlds collided and combined on the various frontiers of the Americas, and the presence of Indians and Indian myths as well as Mexican and other groups have deeply impacted the shape of those myths which justify and direct American culture today. The still unresolved conflicts and tensions inherent in the history of conquest and colonization in the Americas both keeps traditional myths alive and demands their metamorphosis in response to the realities of life in the U.S. at the start of the new millennium when the very questions these myths struggled to answer--issues of national and racial identity, human interactions with the world of nature, and relationships between the conqueror and the conquered--remain painfully current. The purpose of this study is to trace the living remains of those myths and examine their rebirth at the hands of three contemporary writers. The spaces in which the works of these writers collide offer some sharply differentiated visions, but the spaces in which overlap has occurred, where the myths of one culture have become inextricably, often unknowingly, intertwined with those of another, each forcing the others into new and unsuspected forms, provide the most startling insights. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes tragic, the new myths born from these couplings are nonetheless, like any living story, the expressions of the larger culture from which they spring, both a projection onto a troubled and troubling past and an insistent, prophetic vision of a shared future.

Throughout the nineteenth century, American authors produced literature that depicted the processes and effects of the conquest of North America, particularly the formation of the United States of America. Twentieth-century American writers have continued creating literature that portrays the history of the continent following the advent of Europeans in the "New World." This dissertation analyzes the conventions of historically oriented American literature. Interpretations of John Gast's painting Manifest Destiny and of selected works by James Fenimore Cooper, Timothy Flint, James Kirke Paulding, and William Gilmore Simms yield an exposition of the relevant narrative conventions. Subsequent readings of works by Nash Candelaria, Willa Cather, Cormac McCarthy, Simon Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, and William T. Vollmann provide a basis for understanding how twentieth-century American authors adhere to and depart from conventionality. The central concern with literary conventions in this dissertation is the representation of historical agency. The nineteenth-century expansionist ideology "manifest destiny" serves as a conceptual context in which to discuss authors' attempts to depict the processes and effects of the conquest of North America. Specifically, this study examines the ways in which all of the authors under consideration attempt to show that the conquest of America was historically contingent and/or inevitable. A significant component of interpreting the portraits of history is a thorough consideration of how these writers represent American ethnicities and cross-cultural relations.

Cities, Homes, and Other Ruins in American Literature, 1790-1860 reexamines the ethos of national progress by analyzing how canonical and non-canonical writers refashion images of ruins from European aesthetics to cast the American city as a site of cultural instability. The study highlights the transatlantic currency of concepts associated with ruins and shows how a nation celebrating its birth negotiated powerful ideas about collapsed empires and destroyed cities. As signs of mutability and impermanence, ruins became resonant figures as American writers interpreted cultural instabilities evident in the nation's expanding cities. "Cities" analyzes how American writers employ ruin imagery to treat subjects as diverse as Anglo-Indian relations in the nation's early capital; the dialogue among political secrecy, urban theatricality, and yellow fever in 1790s Philadelphia; the impact of antebellum penitentiaries on conceptions of mind and domestic space; and the mutability of nationhood in the decade before the Civil War. The study demonstrates through interdisciplinary analyses of architecture and material culture how figures of ruin work to disclose a culture's inner dimensions, revealing the internal operations of specific phenomena in early America, including the meanings of law and citizenship, as well as perceptions of race. In literature of the American city, images of ruin provide revelatory views into the normally hidden components of a people's habitas. To argue this, the study explicates patterns of unstable urban settings; these indicate how American writers translate ruin imagery into their art. "Cities" close reads these patterns alongside archival materials to reveal how Philip Freneau, Charles Brockden Brown, Poe, and Melville represent the city as a specific kind of artifice that generates certain meanings, hides others, and continually unsettles the ideas of progress ascribed to American landscapes. To indicate how ruin imagery interpenetrates with the forms of representation that shaped the cities of the early United States, "Cities" synthesizes theories on law, geography, and architecture from the works of Lewis Mumford, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault.

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The dissertation investigates narrative strategies employed by the contemporary American novel to criticize and counteract the dynamics of domination. The study focuses primarily on Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (1990), Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing (2003), and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991). These three novels address problems of sociopolitical repression and racial discrimination arising from the preconditions and heritage of colonial rule and the enslavement of Native Americans and African-Americans. While Johnson, Powers, and Silko refer to concrete historical moments, the critique implicit in their novels does not primarily arise from narrated historical facts or fictional experience, but from the narrative configurations they construct, and in which they embed these facts and experiences. They juxtapose naturalized assumptions about fixed meanings of space, temporality, and ensuing notions of self prevailing in the narrated historical past to ever changing combinations of ethnic, cultural, and social belonging within shifting spatial and temporal parameters, until these assumptions become untenable. Their method of exposition is therefore basically dialogic, and the insights that these novels yield constitute a form of knowledge that becomes available precisely through the combination of dialogics and literary narrative. To the degree that previous assumptions still prevail, all three novels provide a critique of the foundations on which members of Western culture across racial and ethnic lines construct their sense of authority within dynamics of power today. Johnson, Powers, and Silko are associated with African American, mainstream American, and Native American literature, or, in the case of Silko, with the field of American women's writing, and yet, while belonging in these subfields of American studies, go beyond and indeed defy such institutional categories in the conceptual reach of their work. Their novels participate / La thèse examine les stratégies narratives employées par le roman américain contemporain en vue de critiquer et de contrecarrer la dynamique de la domination. L'étude se concentre principalement sur Middle Passage de Charles Johnson (1990), The Time of Our Singing (2003) de Richard Powers et Almanac of the Dead (1991) de Leslie Marmon Silko. Ces trois romans abordent les problèmes socio-politiques de répression et de discrimination raciale découlant des conditions préalables et de l'héritage de la domination coloniale et l'asservissement des Amérindiens et des Afro-Américains. Tandis que Johnson, Powers et Silko se rapportent à des moments historiques concrets, la critique implicite que l'on retrouve dans leurs oeuvres n'est pas principalement issue des faits historiques narrés ou des expériences fictives proposées, mais des configurations narratives qu'ils construisent, et dans lesquels ils intègrent ces faits et ces expériences. Ils juxtaposent des hypothèses établies touchant les significations convenues de la temporalité et de l'espace qui mènent des notions d'autonomie en vigueur dans le passé historique rapporté jusqu'à l'évolution constante des combinaisons de facteurs ethniques, culturels et sociaux appartenant au transfert des paramètres temporels et spatiaux, et ce, jusqu'à ce que ces hypothèses deviennent insoutenables. Leur méthode d'exposition est donc essentiellement dialogique et les propositions offertes par ces romans constituent une forme de connaissance qui devient disponible notamment à travers la combinaison de la dialogique et de la narration littéraire. Dans la mesure où les hypothèses antérieures continuent de prévaloir, les trois romans fournissent une critique des fondements sur lesquels les membres de la culture occidentale à travers les frontières raciales et ethniques construisent leur sens de l'autorité au sein de la dynamique du pouvoir exercé aujourd'hui. Johnson, Powers, et Silko sont associ