A look at the genre of American literary history, as well as at the careers of four nineteenth-century writers, this neo-Marxist study treats the lives and works of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Elizabeth and Richard Stoddard through the productive circumstances of their writing, and through our expectations as consumers of their personalities and texts. Typically, Whitman and Dickinson are recognized as creative individualists who defied the literary and social conventions of their time, while the Stoddards---when they are recognized at all---are remembered in less daring terms. Many critics today regard Elizabeth Stoddard's first novel, The Morgesons, as an unsentimental exploration of sexuality and an innovative foray into realism. Even so, these critics tend to see the radical potential of the novel as compromised by its flawed form, often considered an unsophisticated melding of domestic and realist fiction, and by the failure of Stoddard's subsequent works to build on The Morgesons' critique of middle-class womanhood. Richard Henry Stoddard, meanwhile, is seen as an unremarkable adherent to the genteel tradition, a chapter in American literary history now regarded as stagnantly establishmentarian and conformist. By contrast, Whitman and Dickinson stand forth as the artistic embodiments of personal freedom and innovation.;Close examination of the careers of Whitman and Dickinson (posthumous, in the case of Dickinson) reveals, however, that these celebrated individualists were not as removed from social determinations of identity as their personas suggest, and that their differences from the Stoddards were less a matter of temperament than of personality's articulation through commercialism and publicity. The Stoddards inhabited a literary world where the pre-commercial ideal of refined, amateur anonymity tempered the promotional impulse to peddle authors along with texts. The result for the Stoddards---and their genteel peers---was an authorial identity more conforming than conspicuous, and more explicitly social than subversive. Whitman and the posthumous Dickinson of the 1890s, on the other hand, were commodified in conjunction with the promotion of their texts---by Whitman himself and, in the case of Dickinson, by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. as part of the larger capitalist transformation of subjectivity (what Marxist critics term reification), this promotion of Whitman and Dickinson exemplified the influence of late nineteenth-century literary commercialism on the writing self. The careers of Whitman and Dickinson, in other words, were inextricable from the economic and historical circumstances from which authorship emerged as a profession distinct from the avocation of letters, and from which the author, as a static, marketable persona, emerged as a figure distinct from the writer. The autonomy and originality for which Whitman and Dickinson are acclaimed become, in this light, testaments to ideology. For such independence is a feature of their marketed identities that derives from the objectifying, isolating power of commercialism, rather than from genuine individuality and freedom. Such canonical independence derives, in fact, from what Marx calls the commodity fetish, a perceptual paradigm that isolates and objectifies people, as well as things, in a capitalist system.

The science fiction imaginary of mid-twentieth century America often takes as its subjects all manner of animate objects --- living machines like robots, cyborgs, automata, androids, and intelligent "thinking" computers. These living machines embody early cold war anxieties about the relationship between humans and their machines, as well as about human "identity" in a world perceived as increasingly technological and fragmented. Built with text and still or moving images, these figures' bodies are formed by metal and plastic, circuits and electronics, at times fused with organic parts -- at the same time that they are also represented as built from the innovation and imagination of cutting-edge American industry and science. These diverse machined bodies are sometimes straightforwardly humanoid in form, and at other times, they are less so, while still others may appear to share little in common with humans at all. as bearers of built bodies, living machines inhabit the interface between human and machine, exposing the ruptures and contradictions of the conception of the modem, technological body: the material and the immaterial, the animate and the inanimate, the subject and the object. While this study analyzes fiction by canonical science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke, its focus is on government documents and images regarding NASA's Projects Mercury (1959-1963) and Gemini (1962-1966), popular journalism articles and images, Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and less well-known pulp science fiction stories from the 1930s through the 1950s.

The antebellum American South was a site of continual human mobility and social fluidity. This cultivated a pattern of cultural exchange between black, indigenous, and white Southerners, especially in the Old Southwest, making the region a cultural borderland as well as a geographical one. This environment resulted in the creolization of many aspects of life in the region. to date, the literature of the Old South has yet to be studied in this context. This project traces the diffusion of African-American and Native American culture in white-authored Southern texts.;For instance, textual evidence in Old Southwestern Humor reveals a pattern of adaptations of folklore belonging to African-Americans. Johnson Jones Hooper's Some Adventures of Simon Suggs (1845) in particular reflects the presence of plots and motifs that originated in African trickster tales. Not all white Southern authors were menable to creolization, though. Novelists like William Gilmore Simms drew from but resisted the complete integration of non-white folklore in his historical romances. Native Americans and their culture frequently appear in his The Yemassee (1835), for instance, but always in a separate sphere.;The differences associated with the creolization of Old Southwestern Humor and the lack thereof in Southern historical romances reflect a distinction in Southern attitudes toward westward expansion and its social implications. In particular, the degree to which these authors did or did not resist creolization reflects their opinion about patterns of antebellum emigration and the backwoods social fluidity that contributed to the phenomenon of cultural exchange. Older conservatives like Simms, for instance, perceived the Old Southwest as a threat due to its rowdiness, materialism, and permeable social class. Novels by these authors displaced this milieu into the colonial past at an historical moment at which it became stabilized. The consequent elimination of Native Americans by whites in these texts marked a symbolic victory for order and stasis.;The texts of younger emigres to the South like Hooper reflect an alternate perspective. their embrace of the creative opportunities made possible by the social instability of the Old Southwest corresponds to their enthusiasm for the economic and social promise afforded by this recently settled region. In other words, the authors' openness to creolization mirrors a tolerance of the chaos born of mobility and a lack of structure. Suggs's antisocial exploits are adapted from African-American trickster tales whose characteristic disdain for authority and subversiveness contribute to Hooper's satire of traditional attitudes, including paternalism, which sought to limit this social flux.;These texts' competing viewpoints of the frontier allow scholars to get a sense of the diversity of social and political thought in the region---there was no monolithic Mind of the Old South. Additionally, acknowledging that these texts are a product of the multicultural environment reveals the contributions of Africans and Native Americans to Southern literature at its formative stage.

This dissertation investigates the under-examined relationships between sibling characters in nineteenth-century American literature (1852-1900). Focusing on the depictions of siblinghood in such works as Herman Melville's Pierre, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Charles Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars, and Edith Wharton's Bunner Sisters, I explore how nineteenth-century American authors construct, comment on, and use the sibling bond as an attempt to reconcile tensions of personal and collective identity and the competing drives for family ties and individual experience. In these fictions and others, I argue, siblinghood is a space where the rules of relation are negotiable and unfixed---where brothers and sisters use each other variously as partners in sympathetic union, extensions of their selves, and objects of identification, and do so in ways both supportive of and detrimental to one another. I read these texts with an eye on siblinghood to suggest new perspectives on major nineteenth-century fictions, as well as new ways of thinking about the nineteenth-century family.;In the first chapter, I argue that Melville's Pierre is a seduction novel, in which the site of seduction is the double promise of siblinghood to offer a close and sympathetic relation and the opportunity for virtuous or heroic performance. My second chapter looks at how Louisa May Alcott's Little Women exposes a significant (yet largely unacknowledged) cruelty at the heart of the nineteenth-century American family: that siblings are taught to invest their energies and their affections in one another in youth, but they are also taught that marriage is their goal-which takes them out of their home, and away from their brothers and sisters. Chapter Three explores the significance of the many adult and elderly sister pairs in local color literature of the late nineteenth century, arguing that the depiction of siblings living in close, marriage-like relationships---far beyond the period of time that most siblings share an intimate bond under the same roof---is part of these fictions' larger project of describing and preserving a United States in the midst of massive and rapid change. and Chapter Four investigates the many nineteenth-century authors who set their novels and stories in motion by separating two siblings on opposite sides of the color line, then exploring their relationships and identities as a result of this split.

From Jo March to Scout Finch, the American tomboy figure has become an icon of modern girlhood and a symbol of female empowerment. My dissertation traces the development of the tomboy figure from its origins in nineteenth-century sentimental novels to Harper Lee's classic Civil Rights novel, to Kill a Mockingbird (1960). to the informed reader, it may seem rather paradoxical that nineteenth-century sentimental culture produced the first recognizable tomboy figures, as this era is typically remembered for its indoctrination of conventional femininity. My project is the first to interrogate this apparent paradox and, in so doing, yields important insights into the tomboy figure's role as a social critic in the twentieth century. as tomboys express and struggle with issues of sympathy, invoking a key convention of sentimental fiction, they not only unmask the cultural performance of femininity and heterosexuality but also subvert racial and class hierarchies. By tracing the development of the tomboy narrative over time and through the retrospective lens of sentimentalism, my dissertation yields new insights into the origins of the tomboy figure, as well as the persistence of sentimental ideologies into the twentieth century and beyond.;My project centers upon five women authors: E.D.E.N. Southworth, Louisa May Alcott, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Carson McCullers and Harper Lee. Chapter 1 examines Cap Black, the cross-dressing "newsgirl" protagonist of Southworth's popular sentimental novel, The Hidden Hand (1859); more specifically, this chapter investigates the ties between Cap's gender subversion, urban street life, and non-traditional familial experiences. Chapter 2 analyzes Jo March of Alcott's Little Women (1868) in relation to discourses of poverty, sympathy, and race in the Civil War era. Chapter 3 focuses on Laura Ingalls's struggles with sympathy amid the geographical, cultural and historical "landscapes" of the prairie in Wilder's Little House series, published during the Depression era. Chapters 4 and 5 consider Southern tomboys, Carson McCullers's Frankie Addams and Harper Lee's Scout Finch, who challenge heteronormativity, racial violence and segregationist politics in the twentieth-century South, particularly as they forge sympathetic alliances with other marginalized figures.

In this thesis, the author gives a summary of Ron Rash’s 2008 novel, Serena, and discusses the history behind the novel and the time period that the novel was set in. This thesis discusses the socioeconomic struggles of the Gilded Age, and the role of government intervention in the economy and everyday life during the Reformation Era under Theodore Roosevelt, and the implementation of the National Park Service. The thesis goes on to mention why the Smoky Mountain National Park is especially important, for its natural uniqueness and the important precedent the formation of the park represents in the history of the United States of America. Notable historical figures are also addressed, such as, Horace Kephart, Horace Albright, George Masa, and Gifford Pinchot.

This is a study of five novels written by American women during the middle of the nineteenth century. The novels are Aunt Phillis's Cabin (1852) by Mary Henderson Eastman, Northwood (1827 and 1852) by Sarah Josepha Hale, The Planter's Northern Bride (1854) by Carolyn Lee Hentz, Macaria (1864) by Augusta Evans, and Cameron Hall (1867) by Mary Anne Cruse. In advancing their authors' opinions on sectional issues like slavery and secession, these novels make overt political statements of a kind not usually associated with writers of domestic fiction.;All of the novels in this study conform in some ways to the conventions of the domestic fiction genre, but the authors have bent the framework of that genre to accommodate their political purposes. In some cases genric practices and polemics are mutually disruptive; in some they reinforce each other; and in some the authors choose between politics and domesticity. The degree to which domestic fiction is incompatible with a traditional world view shows that genres are not ideologically neutral. In examining the adaptations made by five novelists, this dissertation demonstrates that "genre" is not a static category. Instead, genres respond to cultural and historical forces.;To read mid-nineteenth-century novels written by women only from a gynocritical perspective--that is, for what they say about women's psychological or social realities--is to miss the way fiction reflects and helps to shape broader political concerns. More nuanced readings of domestic fiction show how a genre associated with women writers and readers became inflected to advance the authors' political opinions. Reading these novels as political-domestic fiction contributes to an ongoing discussion of how American women have always participated in politics.

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