Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1994. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [329]-337).

Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 1997. / Includes vita. Bibliography: leaves 265-281.

"The purpose of this paper is to bring together information about the life of Nancy Hale, one of the superior story-tellers among writers today, and about the published books that she has written. In spite of the rather extensive recognition which Miss Hale has received, there seems to be a dearth of biographical material about her; and this material is available only in bits and pieces of information dispersed throughout a wide body of literature. Her writings too are somewhat elusive since many of them appear in magazines which are not included in any of the indexing services"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "August, 1956." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Sarah Rebecca Reed, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 54-55).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1993. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [257]-278).

My thesis analyses the oeuvre of the American writer Mary McCarthy (1912-1989), with the focus on the figure of the outsider looking in. McCarthy uses outsider figures in her texts as prisms through which distinctive historical moments as well as problems of gender, race and religion are studied against the backdrop of the changing climate of the American 'red' 1930s, the anxious '50s, and the late '60s torn by the Vietnam war. Examples of McCarthy's recurring protagonists are the New York Bohemian girl of the '30s in the predominantly male world marred by the Great Depression, the Jewish character stereotyped as the Other by the poorly hidden anti-Semitism of the American society of the early 1940s, and the orphan child exposed to adult cruelty, who finds her only solace in the Catholic religion. Their position of being outsiders who live in a society not their own by birthright, is shown to be crucial for their acquisition and knowledge of truth, and links insight to marginality, which is reinforced by McCarthy's technique of ironically detached observation, the 'cold eye' of her prose. McCarthy herself appears as an outsider character throughout her writing, both as the historical figure and as the protagonist of her autobiographies. Her self-image, shaped by her orphaned childhood and her youth as a Bohemian girl among leftist intellectuals, is subject to conflicting impulses of confession and concealment. McCarthy's wide use of autobiographical details in her fiction and elements of fiction in her autobiographies led most critics to study her work from a chiefly biographical point of view. My own approach to Mary McCarthy's writing takes their findings into consideration, and includes the analysis of the historical, political, and social contexts of McCarthy's texts, as well as the intertextual dialogue with a few select writings by McCarthy's contemporaries such as Philip Roth and Sylvia Plath.

No description available.

“Black Mothers and the Nation” tracks the ways that texts produced by United States women throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries position the black maternal body as subversive to the white patriarchal power structure for which it labored and that has acted in many ways to abject it from the national body. This study points to the ways in which the black mother’s subversive potential has been repeatedly, violently, and surreptitiously circumscribed in some quarters even as it succeeds in others. Several important thematic threads run throughout the chapters of this study, sometimes appearing in clear relationship to the texts discussed and sometimes underwriting their analysis in less obvious ways: the functioning of the black maternal body to both support the construction of and undermine white womanhood in slavery and in the years beyond; the reclamation of the maternal body as a site of subversion and nurturance as well as erotic empowerment; the resistance of black mother figures to oppressive discourses surrounding their bodies and reproduction; and, finally, the figurative and literal location of the black mother in a national body politic that has simultaneously used and abjected it over the course of centuries. Using these lenses, this study focuses on a grouping of women’s literature that depicts slavery and its legacy for black women and their bodies. The narratives discussed in this study explore the intersections of the issues outlined above in order to get at meaningful expressions of black maternal identity. By their very nature as representations of historical record and regional and national realities, these texts speak to the problematic placement of black maternal bodies within the nation, beginning in the antebellum era and continuing through the present; in other words, these slavery, Reconstruction, and segregation narratives connect personal and physical experiences of maternity to the national body. / The subordination of embodied power : sentimental representations of the black maternal body in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's cabin and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the life of a slave girl -- Recuperating the body : the black mother's reclamation of embodied presence and her reintegration into the black community in Pauline Hopkins's Contending forces and Toni Morrison's Beloved -- The narrative power of the black maternal body : resisting and exceeding visual economies of discipline in Margaret Walker's Jubilee and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose -- Mapping black motherhood onto the nation : the black maternal body and the body politic in Lillian Smith's Strange fruit and Alice Randall's The wind done gone -- Michelle Obama in context. / Access to thesis permanently restricted to Ball State community only / Department of English

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal. / Dans un élan collectif, les écrivaines des années 1970 et 1980, en Europe et en Amérique, s'approprient le thème de la folie jusque-là exploité par les écrivains masculins. Pourquoi? Nous appuyant sur la pensée de Michel Foucault et de Roland Jaccard selon laquelle la folie est une construction sociale, nous suggérons que les romancières, influencées par le mouvement anti-psychiatrique, la crise du sujet humaniste, les théoriciennes féministes françaises et américaines ont l'audace d'inventer un sujet féminin qui devient fou en réponse à des situations sociales ou historiques oppressantes pour les femmes. Pour ce faire, les romancières mettent de l'avant des stratégies d'écriture qui participent à une prise de conscience féministe. Le chapitre I porte sur la place du sujet féminin et de sa folie dans l'histoire littéraire. Les chapitres II, III et IV sont consacrés à l'étude de stratégies romanesques, telles que la déconstruction de l'histoire ou de figures mythiques, la critique de l'institution familiale et la démystification du personnage de la mère dans la relation mère-fille. Ainsi, nous étudions la représentation de la folie combinée à ces stratégies dans cinq romans mettant en scène des héroïnes issues de cultures et de sociétés différentes. Ce sont Songs My Mother Taught Me d'Audrey Thomas (Canada anglais), Les Enfants du sabbat d'Anne Hébert et Les Jardins de cristal de Nadia Ghalem (Québec), The Woman Warrior : Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts de Maxine Hong Kingston et The Bluest Eye de Toni Morrison (États-Unis). La méthode utilisée est celle de l'analyse des discours, laquelle fait appel à plusieurs champs du savoir, celui de l'histoire littéraire, de la philosophie, de la littérature, de la psychanalyse, de la psychiatrie, de certaines études de pratiques culturelles (cultural studies) et du féminisme. Le thème de la folie aura permis aux écrivaines étudiées d'exprimer la réalité des femmes largement ignorée dans les romans et de dénoncer des conditions de vie encouragées par des systèmes répressifs. Le thème de la folie aura également rendu possible un nouvel imaginaire et une écriture qui, repoussant les limites imposées par la logique, est libre et puissante.

Advisor: Mary E. Wood. xii, 181 leaves : ill. ; 29 cm. Print copy also available for check out and consultation in the University of Oregon's library under the call number: PS374.S714 H37 2004. / The nineteenth-century American sentimental novel has only in the last twenty years received consideration from the academy as a legitimate literary tradition. During that time feminist scholars have argued that sentimental novels performed important cultural work and represent an important literary tradition. This dissertation contributes to the scholarship by placing the sentimental novel within a larger context of intellectual history as a tradition that draws upon theoretical sources and is a source itself for later cultural developments. In examining a variety of sentimental novels, I establish the moral sense philosophy as the theoretical basis of the sentimental novel's pathetic appeals and its theories of sociability and justice. The dissertation also addresses the aesthetic features of the sentimental novel and demonstrates again the tradition's connection to moral sense philosophy but within the context of the American elocution revolution. I look at natural language theory to render more legible the moments of emotional spectacle that are the signature of sentimental aesthetics. The second half of the dissertation demonstrates a connection between the sentimental novel and silent film. Both mediums rely on a common aesthetic storehouse for signifying emotions. The last two chapters of the dissertation compare silent film performance with emotional displays in the sentimental novel and in elocution and acting manuals. I also demonstrate that the films of D. W. Griffith, especially The Birth of a Nation, draw upon on the larger conventions of the sentimental novel.