Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1991. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 205-216).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rhode Island, 2005. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 195-202).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Baylor University, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 341-348).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2007. / Principal faculty advisor: Susan Goodman, Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references.

The marriages depicted in Willa Cather's fiction are a crucial element of her works. Although she does not describe in detail the marital relationships between her characters, Cather does depict these marriages realistically, and they are also interrelated with the major themes of her fiction. The marriages in Cather's works are divided into three general classifications: the successful, the borderline, and the failure. The successful marriage is characterized by affection and friendship. In the borderline marriages the partners are mutually dissatisfied with their relationship, but they do not separate or divorce. The marital failures are complete breakdowns that result in irreparable wounds healed only by the complete withdrawal or death of one of the partners. A study of marriage in Cather's works reveals there are more successful marriages than failures.

The theme of madness along the frontier developed in American novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, Willa Cather, and O.E. Rølvaag rely on the frontier and the theme of madness to depict characters’ aberrant behaviors. Using these depictions of madness, I explore questions of religion, violence, gender, and ethnic identity to analyze the psychological impact of the frontier and its role in American literature. Melville and Hawthorne rely on ideas of isolation and the religious fervor of Puritanism to show the forms of madness that plague their characters along the frontier. Cooper focuses on isolationist aspects of madness. Thus, I argue constant movement, senseless violence, and clashes between settlers and the indigenous create a crucible for the creation of an American identity. Willa Cather’s works continue this trend with a focus on the welfare of female, immigrant, and potentially queer protagonists. Cather depicts madness as an inevitable part of Nebraska and frontier life, which is produced by the economic conditions of an industrializing nation along the vestiges of the frontier. Rølvaag uses the theme of madness to explore the movement of Norwegians to the interior of the Midwest. Madness functions as a plot device to illustrate the collective anxiety of the Norwegian immigrant group and their integration into the mainstream of American identity. My dissertation reveals madness as a through line in this diverse body of literature that spans the nineteenth through early twentieth centuries, which complicates the jingoistic narratives popular in this nation’s past. Exploring the theme of madness in these texts provides new perspectives on American literature, perceptions of the nation and the frontier. Above all, it complicates the idea of American identity, its past, and its potential future. / English

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 265-284).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: Susan Goodman & Carl Dawson, Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation is mainly based on the reading of three American novels to explore how female characters deal with their illegitimate pregnancies and how their solutions re-shape their futures and affect their inner growth. Chapter 1 discusses Dorinda Oakley's premarital pregnancy in Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground and draws the circle of limits from Barbara Welter's "four cardinal virtues" (purity, submissiveness, domesticity, and piety) which connect to the analogous female roles (daughter, sister, wife, and mother). Dorinda's childless survival reconstructs a typical household from her domination and absence of maternity. Chapter 2 examines Ántonia Shimerda's struggles and endurance in My Ántonia by Willa Cather before and after Ántonia gives birth to a premarital daughter. Ántonia devotes herself to being a caring mother and to looking after a big family although her marriage is also friendship-centered. Chapter 3 adopts a different approach to analyze Charlotte Rittenmeyer's extramarital pregnancy in The Wild Palms by William Faulkner. As opposed to Dorinda and Ántonia who re-enter domesticity to survive, Charlotte runs out on her family and dies of a botched abortion. To help explain the aftermath of illicit pregnancies, I extend or shorten John Duvall's formula of female role mutations: "virgin>sexually active (called whore)>wife" to examine the riddles of female survival and demise. The overall argument suggests that one way or another, nature, society, and family are involved in illegitimately pregnant women's lives, and the more socially compliant a pregnant woman becomes after her transgression, the better chance she can survive with her baby.

This dissertation examines interactions and circuits of exchange between Anglophone and Hispanophone literary cultures in the wake of the Mexican-American War, particularly those involving African-American, Indigenous, Latin American, and proto Latina/o-American communities. My dissertation grapples with the breadth of multilingual Americas, examining the stakes of U.S. territorial expansion and empire through a range of translations, adaptations, and literary borrowings that enabled the transit and transmutation of texts in the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I focus on works by a range of writers, poets, activists, politicians, and translators, including Carlos Morla Vicuña, John Rollin Ridge, Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, José Martí, Helen Hunt Jackson, Martin Delany, and Willa Cather. I draw upon letters, periodicals, novels, and poems that circulated in the Americas, arguing that choices and practices of translation were in dialogue with shifting frameworks of race and ethnicity in these different contexts. My analysis of these textual forms depicts some of the distinct ways that authors employed translation as a mode of political activism. Ultimately, this dissertation examines the relation between translation and national belonging in these different contexts, unveiling the varied forms by which transgressive translation strategies were harnessed as forms of anti-imperialist work even as they often initiated or replicated neocolonial and imperialist practices.