Ethnic women in early twentieth-century America constituted a significant literary and political presence. Their gender politics were varied, according to the specifics of historical and cultural location. My dissertation demonstrates the heterogeneity of gender politics early in this century by detailing how ethnic women's fiction contests the political discourses of ethnic women. I use the multiplicity of issues in Native American, African American, and Jewish American women's texts to illustrate the importance of grounding gender in a particular historical moment. In addition, my study examines the ways in which ethnic women in the United States have used discourse to empower themselves. By reading fiction in relation to political history, I demonstrate how literary strategies of resistance are culturally constructed. An exploratory venture in method, this work develops a historically specific critical practice. Drawing on current feminist criticism as well as poststructuralist theory, I focus initially on the ways in which contemporary critical practices continue to obscure the political agendas in ethnic women's texts. The subsequent four chapters demonstrate how narrative contests rather than reflects history. History, like literature, is dynamic and conflicted; accordingly, I construct pluralistic histories in each chapter, detailing the debates over class, sexual, and ethnic politics within ethnic women's communities. I argue that novels appropriate and rewrite political discourses acting as interpreters, using history to legitimate particular politics. I argue, for instance, that Their Eyes Were Watching God employs the language of the black women's club movement and the "Classic Blues" to refute racist and classist sexual ideologies which position African American women as libidinous, while it simultaneously struggles to advocate sexual subjectivity for women. Drawing upon the writings of Jewish women labor organizers and social workers, as well as Orthodox teachings and the literature of the Haskalah movement, I suggest that Bread Givers challenges notions of femininity which were opposed to manual and wage labor. My final two chapters argue that Mourning Dove's Cogewea employs Native American women's writing from the turn-of-the-century Pan-Indian movement to counter assimilationist ideology and represent gender as a specific means of resisting cultural imperialism.

Esta disertacion estudia dos novelas de Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda y dos de Reinaldo Arenas: Guatimozin, ultimo emperador de Mexico (1846) y El cacique de Turmeque (1860), y El mundo alucinante (1969) y La Loma del Angel (1987). En tanto novelas historicas que son tambien re-escritura, este estudio examina junto con ellas sus hipotextos y metatextos: la Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva Espana (Bernal Diaz), las Cartas de relacion (Cortes) y El carnero (Freile); las Memorias de S.Teresa de Mier, Cecilia Valdes (Villaverde), El siglo de las luces (Carpentier) y Biografia de un cimarron (Barnet). La lectura de estos textos se realize siguiendo principalmente los postulados teoricos de Benedict Anderson, Foucault, Genette, Hutcheon y Hayden White. Las novelas de Avellaneda y Arenas son analizadas dentro de sus respectivos contextos de fundacion nacional: la poetica romantica cubana de mediados del siglo XIX y la poetica de la Revolucion (1959). A Avellaneda y Arenas los une el hecho de ser dos escritores cubanos excluidos del grupo fundacional: Avellaneda como mujer que se niega a cumplir la funcion asignada a su sexo, y Arenas como cuidadano cuyas necesidades y deseos--los del homosexual, entre otros--no coinciden con los del ente abstracto de "el Pueblo". Sin embargo tambien ellos escriben novelas historicas: sus textos hacen parte del discurso sobre la nacion, si bien cuestionando sus supuestos de manera radical y haciendo patentes sus contradicciones. En buena medida para estos autores la realidad son textos: textos que son tema de su excritura y escritura que deviene por tanto re-escritura. La historia que escriben no es la nunca antes contada, sino la historia de como ese relato ha sido escrito; y es tambien la historia que quiere volver a contar el acontecimiento porque no comparte el relato que de el se ha hecho. Las novelas historicas de Avellaneda y Arenas son asi relatos escritos en contra de la historiografia patriarcal y evolutiva que homogeniza la realidad a costa de sus particularidades, y trivializa sus proyectos.

My dissertation is the first systematic study to bring together contemporary legal and literary theory to the analysis of the legal texts of Spain in the New World. By focusing on the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe (1492), and other legal documents, I argue that this legal corpus is also a narrative construct which blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. My purpose is to explore the rhetorical dimension of legal writing as a process of emplotment of colonial encounters. The poetics of legal narrative will be examined applying the theory of "law as literature," a recent cross-disciplinary approach. My point is that all the strategies and approaches developed in the field of colonial literary studies have neglected to examine this corpus of laws as cultural production. Nevertheless, it is precisely rhetoric which provides an accessible medium for exploring the connection between law and literature. My point is that colonial legislation can be understood in its complexity only when it is realized that legal discourse is not merely conceptual--that is, not reducible to a set of definitions--but also literary, by which I mean that its metaphorical and associative quality derives precisely of the need to address the question of imposing principles of social control, which are at the center of any legislative controversy. In other words, Spain's legislation in America should be studied not only as a set of rules or institutions, but as a kind of discursive practice of cultural dominance. This methodological approach is based on the assumption that a nexus between law and literature was at the center of the Conquest of America. Finally, I will conclude by summarizing the objectives of my work. This study should help to increase our understanding of the relation between law and literature. Cataloguing legal texts as new objects of study within Colonial Literature, invites us to raise new research questions which, among other things, challenges the category of what we consider as "colonial texts." The methodological consequences of this broadening of the range of objects of study represents an enrichment of perspectives in colonial literary studies.

This dissertation reopens the literature of the thirties by using a concept known in psychoanalytic discourse as "splitting" to analyze four representative works--Call It Sleep, For Whom The Bell Tolls, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Unpossessed. In object relations theory, splitting refers to the mental processes of projection and introjection that enable separation of comforting and discomforting thoughts. When subjected to analysis using this concept, new issues appear in each text. The dialectical role of splitting--the integrative and moral function of emotional exorcism--emerges as a central concern for Roth and Hemingway. The relationship of splitting to economic exploitation can be seen in Steinbeck's writing. The aesthetic implications of splitting becomes the topic of discussion when analyzing Slesinger's novel. I base my discussion on the assumption that the brutal ethnic, class, and national divisions of this decade suggest that these texts were conducting a correspondence about the mental position of the nation.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2006. / Title from title page screen, viewed on January 18, 2008. Dissertation Committee: Kristin Dykstra (chair), Christopher Breu, Christopher DeSantis. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 220-237) and abstract. Also available in print.

Thesis (D.A.)--Illinois State University, 1985. / Title from title page screen, viewed June 23, 2005. Dissertation Committee: William W. Morgan (chair), Glenn A. Grever, Stanley W. Renner, Ray Lewis White, William Piland. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 191-201) and abstract. Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Cornell University, 2002. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of English Languages and Literature, December 2000. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1999. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 284-288).

Abstract not available