<p> USonian identity has been defined controversially since its inception. Its representatives have largely been independent, white, wealthy, male, and heterosexual. However, the actual population of the US is more diverse and possesses much more complex identities. Some of the identifying factors of USonians derive from the US tradition of self-making. Traditional US self-made narratives, as with larger definitions of US identity, lack a full inclusivity and nationally representative characters, as scholars such as Mary Carden explain. However, rather than simply disappearing, traits of the US self-made man, as part of a larger national identity, continue to exist but in ways more suitable to the US nationality that has developed. For example, some of the newer versions of US self-makers include women, ethnic minorities, and homosexuals. </p><p> The more important elements of the changing definitions of US identity and self-making, community building and belonging, arises when more diverse representatives appear in texts ranging from Susan Sontag&rsquo;s <i> In America</i> to works like Lin-Manuel Miranda&rsquo;s <i> Hamilton.</i> This dissertation studies more communal self-making models as well as US representatives who are recognized within texts and by readers in works by authors such as Philip Roth. The modeling of these characters results in the opportunity for readers to identify with them and/or some of their contexts. Such a relationship sets the foundation for what I have termed &ldquo;fabulous ordinariness.&rdquo; This means that despite possessing some fabulous or extraordinary storylines or characteristics, there are daily events, interactions, or traits that readers can empathize with, connect with, or feel represents them. Such experiences with the characters and texts provide the space for a representative relationship to be established and articulated as such. </p><p> The redefinitions of self-making and US identity, along with the enactment of fabulous ordinariness, ask readers to consider how culture, identities, and nationalities are preserved, challenged, and protected. Scholarship addressing traditional US role-models, along with works that support and challenge those representatives and roles, examines contemporary US identities and their connection to the past. This dissertation asks questions concerning the boundaries between fiction and history, culture and its artifacts, as well as readers and their texts.</p>

<p> The dissertation consists of an extended critical essay entitled &ldquo;&lsquo;Character&rsquo;-izing Hysterical Realism: Postmodernism, 9/11, and the Realistic Aesthetic&rdquo; and original fiction in the form of a novella, The Believing Game. The critical essay contextualizes the development of the subgenre of hysterical realism in the literary fiction of the 1990s and examines its regression in the years following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. I suggest that hysterical realism can be partly understood as a hybrid of realism and postmodernism and a &ldquo;bridge&rdquo; from postmodernism to a new, still-emerging post-postmodern fiction. The Believing Game, set in a Midwestern college town, examines the challenges, fears, and desires of a young woman on the verge of falling into disillusionment. In her struggle to maintain self-confidence in the face of various personal crises, the main character may represent the general plight of twenty-something millennials. The novella deals prominently with themes such as faith, desire, love, and the tension between personal independence and social expectation.</p>

<p> Tale and myth have a long history of reinforcing, commenting on, and often subverting the ideologies at work in the society where the stories are being told. This research explores the ways three American novels, Eudora Welty&rsquo;s The Robber Bridegroom, Shirley Jackson&rsquo;s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Toni Morrison&rsquo;s The Bluest Eye, all incorporate variants of the fairytale Bluebeard: a fairytale which centers on domestic trauma. All three novels also re-vocalize the myth of Demeter and Persephone, and this re-vocalization serves to empower the female characters and subvert the dominant patriarchal paradigm. The subversion of white masculine ideology in these novels reflects a changing social structure during the thirty year span in which these three novels were published. Looking at the texts holistically while considering the ways the tale and myth interweave in each offers insight into the way these social changes for women were being narrated and explored. The question of interpretation is central to this research, which explores both feminine and masculine lenses in story. Particularly the ways a woman&rsquo;s sexual agency, decision not to marry, or even inability to escape are narrated and interpreted by the community around her. These fictional communities and the issues explored in the realm of tale reflect the larger society and ideological currents surrounding novels themselves. All three novels incorporate the Bluebeard tale, reject the masculine reading of women in that tale, and work to subvert not just patriarchal ideology but the flat literary trope and ways of writing and reading women.</p>

No description available.

Heretical Necessity explores the various ways in which an idea of value was established and debated through the literature of mid 19th century America. Above all, it concerns moral value, the language of personal virtue and social ethics; this includes notions of sympathy and self-sacrifice promoted in sentimental fiction, which I read alongside Melville's responses in his later work: the perversion of altruism in Pierre, his critique of benevolence in the short stories, and his ironization of trust in The Confidence Man. Charity is a key issue because it refers both to a notion of fellowship integral to the sentimental vision of society and to a principle of unreciprocated (hence antagonistic) action: giving one's all becomes incompatible with the more measured principles of justice on which a democracy has to be based. I argue that moral value is related to the production of value in the economic sphere, since charity is at once a religious and a financial practice, thus linking the Christian notions of fellowship and giving to ideas of utility and luxury in capitalist society. In this respect my work is informed by the idea of symbolic exchange, via the theories of figures like Mauss, Bataille, Baudrillard and Derrida; prompted by these thinkers, I attempt to identify different types of contract in the literature (commercial, social, masochistic, and literary) and incorporate them in the same general analysis, as a way of exploring the structural complexities of the moral narrative and the discourse of American community.

Building on recent studies of twentieth-century elegy, this thesis examines the re-working of elegiac tropes in the poetry of Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman and Robert Lowell - four writers among the Middle Generation of American poets who share a persistent preoccupation with loss. As personal and national disappointments and bereavements are reflected in their distinctly elegiac poetics, their work overtly questions not only the possibility of finding consolation, but also the worth of their subject and the ability of language to express, with any conviction or accuracy, what has been lost. Highly conscious of the elegiac tradition, their work collectively distorts this genre, moulding it into a flexible mode which is more readily able to reflect the historical and cultural developments of the mid-twentieth century. Countering the still-prevalent view of these poets as “confessional” writers, this thesis’ focus on elegy challenges critics who have dismissed these four as solipsistic or narcissistic. Instead, they emerge as a group who were deeply invested in understanding their contemporary scene and whose most significant relationships were textual, rather than biographical. Their writing reveals an ongoing and serious engagement with one another’s work, as they built on each other’s poetic experiments. The thesis complicates the canonical divide which has entrenched these poets as the mainstream establishment, pitted against a more radical “postmodern” avant-garde, which includes the Beats, Black Mountain and the New York School. Through close textual analysis and an exploration of their links with Elizabeth Bishop, Schwartz, Jarrell, Berryman and Lowell are posited as poets whose engagement with the elegy has significantly altered the post-World War II poetic landscape.

In 2001, Neil Gaiman published American Gods, a novel of American life and mythology. As a British author living in the United States, Gaiman has a powerful vantage point from which to critique American culture, landscape, and ideology. Rich with re-invented deities, legends, mythic creatures, and folk heroes cast in a decidedly American mold, American Gods examines the American character, evaluating the myths and beliefs of the culture from the vantage point of an outsider. By examining the character's allegiance to particular cultural legacies (Wednesday as the American con artist, Shadow as the cowboy), I intend to assess this outsider's understanding of what it means to be an American.

"The purpose of this paper is to give a history and an analysis of the Southern Observer, a magazine devoted to book reviews of works by Southern authors, books about the South and articles of general interest to Southerners. The magazine which began January, 1953, and suspended publication December, 1956, was published by the Tennessee Book Company, Nashville, Tennessee"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "May, 1958." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Agnes Gregory, Professor Directing Paper.

This essay presents an analysis of the religious and philosophical ideas present in the early fiction of the contemporary American writer, Cormac McCarthy. It is intended as an intervention into the controversial debate within McCarthy scholarship concerning how the perceptibly ‘religious’ nature of the author’s fictions may be described according to recognised and coherent confessions or perspectives. I argue that McCarthy’s fictions cannot be shown to conform to any particular theological or metaphysical system without significant remainder on account of their being essentially heterogeneous in their construction; and that their religious ‘significance’ lies not in their communication of a positive message, but in the presentation of what is at stake in the contrary interpretations that they uphold. I argue that the essential heterogeneity of McCarthy’s fiction is a development of the author’s reception of the complex aesthetic of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and the posture of serious and searching scepticism which that touchstone of American literature presents. The peculiar aesthetic of Moby-Dick alloys the Hellenic and Hebraic imagination, creating a synthesis of the concrete images of mythical and biblical literature, and of the narrative patterns that are native to tragedy and to romance. The effect of this complex is a literary mode that performs a suspension or opposition between a shapeless, circular, mythical world, and the created and teleological worldview declared by the biblical religions. I demonstrate how McCarthy takes up and imaginatively revises this complex of ideas in three novels (Outer Dark, Child of God, and Blood Meridian) in terms of their relation to the motifs and tropes of tragedy and romance, with a particular concern for their relation to the literature of katabasis, or spiritual and metaphysical ‘descent’. The three novels I have selected demonstrate a consistent and developing approach to McCarthy’s examination of various accounts of the material and physical nature of the world. My analysis sets out how the author’s aesthetic and narrative strategy describes an opposition between a view that is attributable to a broadly defined atheistic naturalism on the one hand, and notions of a teleologically orientated creation that is concordant with the transcendent God of the biblical religions on the other. In providing this description, I interpret how McCarthy uses this Melvillean pattern to test the viability of such oppositions, and in doing so, argue that the author’s distinctive vision should be understood as an apophatic mode that is appropriate to a faith ‘beyond the forms of faith’.

This study investigates the contribution of Romanian and German academic and literary communities to the formation of readerships for Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fiction and examines various conceptualisations of the Canadian writer as a literary celebrity in Romania and Germany by taking into account the response to and institutionalisation of the writer’s literary dystopias in the two countries both before and after the fall of communism in 1989. It aims to demonstrate that publishing, translation and cultural policies complicate the cultural reception of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fiction in Eastern European countries and re-evaluates critical representations of Eastern European readerships and publishing contexts as invisible within the global literary field. By investigating the strategies which publishers, editors and translators employed in the dissemination and institutionalisation of Atwood’s work in Romania and Germany, this thesis examines paradigm shifts both in translation, publishing and marketing strategies and conceptualisations of literary celebrity as shaped by cultural state policies. To this end, the first chapter highlights representations of literary markets and readerships in the Atwood archive, and analyses how the Atwood literary archive values celebrity and translation. The second chapter charts the first translation projects which were carried out in both East Germany and communist Romania and points out how forms of censorship have impacted upon the production, dissemination and circulation of her work in translation. The third chapter draws upon interviews with Romanian academics and examines teaching and reading practices employed within a post-communist context. Finally, the study suggests how further examinations of the response to both Canadian and dystopian fiction within Eastern European contexts might proceed.