An important literary movement took place in 1920s and 1930s America, initiated by author, editor, and critic, Mike Gold; however, both the movement and the man have been marginalized or even dismissed due to their entanglements with political communism. This study is an effort to recover Mike Gold and demonstrate his successes and the successes of proletarian art. Due to changing historical and political contexts, proletarian literature, an art form closely associated with Communism, became the target of attacks by a group of anti-Stalinist literary critics in the mid to late 1930s. This anti-Stalinist aesthetic became the lens through which both Mike Gold and proletarian literature was viewed for decades. Criticism of Gold and proletarian literature intensified after World War II and the onset of the Cold War, particularly after the beginning of the McCarthy Communist witch hunts of the 1950s. Gold's proletarian art was seen by mainstream critics as communist propaganda with no inherent literary or social value. Recovery efforts have been underway since the 1960s for proletarian literature; Gold, however, has not received the attention and credit he deserves for initiating and sustaining a unique, largely-successful literary movement meant, quite consciously, to function rhetorically. This project attempts to fill in the gap in Gold scholarship, to contextualize Gold's writings by considering the very specific exigencies to which Gold was responding and by considering Gold's ultimate rhetorical goals. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that Gold quite deftly navigated the obstacles he encountered and succeeded in "sustaining the impulse of radical literature" in the United States throughout the 1930s (Folsom 14).

Rape in the United States is hugely problematic, with current studies estimating that "one out of every six American women have been the victims of an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime" (RAINN). Unfortunately, very few historical or contemporary rape narratives examine rape as a social phenomenon, allow the victims to voice their experiences, or see breaking the silence as a first, and not a final, step towards challenging the occurrence of sexual violence. Of the feminist rape literature that does accomplish this, I examine the novels Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison (1992), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969), Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina García (1992) and Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee (1989). Collectively these books represent a contemporary challenge to current ignorance about rape.

Historians have long debated the degree to which the Civil War transformed the lives of African-Americans. No African-Americans were more powerfully drawn into the vortex of the Civil War's rapidly changing circumstances that those former Mississippi slaves who became members of the United States Colored Troops (USCT). This dissertation argues that the freedmen who joined USCT in the Middle Mississippi Valley cast aside their plantation masters for a new master in the form of the U.S. Army, but subsequently became masters themselves as they gained experience, only to lose their status after the war ended. When General Ulysses S. Grant began his final campaign for Vicksburg, Mississippi, thousands of slaves fled their masters and attached themselves to his army. President Lincoln saw the Freedmen as a resource that could help turn the tide of the war, and dispatched Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas to the Mississippi Valley to recruit freedmen into the army. For the former freedmen, military life was not much different from slavery, for they had exchanged one controlling institution for another, spending long hours drilling, foraging, and building fortifications. Furthermore, as on the plantations, they could suffer corporal punishment, or even death, for misdeeds. Yet, as they gained experience and confidence, they emerged from their garrisons to conduct raids and patrols, and most importantly, win victories, thus exercising mastership over the Middle Mississippi Valley. Their supremacy was short lived, for the conclusion of the war brought many former Confederates home. Defeated, but unbroken, ex-Confederates immediately began waging war, political and real, against the USCT. In the end, the men of the USCT mustered out and returned to work in the fields, returning mastery to their former owners.

This research explores how basic writing students in Texas Christian Universitys Introduction to Critical Writing class viewed themselves as academic writers and how that view changed from the beginning of a semester until the end. Conducted in the fall of 2005 and compiled during the spring of 2006, this work attempts to understand factors that influence a students formation of identity as a writer by using the idea of a community that forms within a classroom as a lens to frame the data. By looking at the students through the lens of a community, issues of educational history, confidence, race, culture, and values became quickly apparent as factors that strongly impacted how students view themselves as writers within a classroom. The studys methodology included pre- and post-questionnaires, semester-long class observations, the analysis of students drafts and final products, and one-on-one interviews with students and the instructor.

This project revises current histories of women's experience with breast cancer in nineteenth-century Britain, including assumptions that women remained silent about the disease. The interdisciplinary study relates medicine to three genres in the nineteenth century--medical nonfiction, personal nonfiction and life writing, and fiction--noting the ways those genres address and incorporate experiences with breast cancer. Though these three genres seem distinct, the dissertation argues for connections that bring them together through the genre category of the breast cancer narrative. The project recovers primary texts that relate to breast cancer in the period, some of which have been published with little (if any) discussion of the impact of breast cancer on the text. Many others, however, have remained unpublished and have been recovered from archives and libraries for the purposes of this project. The larger implications of this project include four key areas of significance. First, I offer possibilities for a change in the way we discuss assumed silences in women's experience, with this study specifically expanding current knowledge about breast cancer in the nineteenth century to include voices and narratives that have been frequently overlooked. Second, this study proposes a method for reading the hidden narratives of breast cancer and for analyzing details beneath the surface texts of life writing. Additionally, though this project focuses on assumed silences specifically related to the experiences of breast cancer, it provides a model for reading other seemingly hidden narratives in print culture and recognizing alternative means of expression that have remained effaced and submerged. Finally, this project offers an interdisciplinary and transhistorical approach to women's experiences with breast cancer. In order to fully analyze life writing, fiction, poetry, periodicals, medical texts, art, and more generally women's experiences with illness, the study adapts and develops models for making connections among the fields of literature, periodical studies, history of medicine, art history, gender studies, and disability studies. The project includes an introductory chapter followed by chapters on medical nonfiction, life writing by the patient, life writing by the patient's friends and family, and fiction.

That Americans are driven by wealth and the pursuit of material markers of financial achievement is anything but new. "We who are without kings"--as Arthur Miller famously termed Americans in "Tragedy and the Common Man" (1949)--have always granted de facto status of nobility to those with the means to show it off. However, this study harmonizes apparently dissonant American notes by dissecting the nation in order to establish a unified voice in Nineteen Twenties Fiction. By juxtaposing the canonical with the obscure, the seemingly conservative with the assumed liberal, the minority with the majority, and the South with the North, the true consistency and complexity of the American economic consciousness comes into greater light. Furthermore, although the Twenties presents a unique historical and literary moment for American writers, the decade ultimately showcases a phenomenon of economic obsession and discomfort that has only expanded and become more defined in contemporary American culture. The primary argument within "The Troubled Economic Consciousness" is that concerns over fiscal identity, labor, and materialism are so overwhelming in the American fiction of the Twenties that even many texts that seemingly share little with the subject of economy are actually engulfed by this overarching discussion. The chapters are organized along geographic delineations that highlight critical examples of the fiction arising in particular regions. The first chapter presents Nineteenth Century precursors to Modernism that evince a vague but perceptible awareness of the developing importance of labor to personal identity. Following this look back at the previous century, the next four chapters each involve a different physical region of Twenties fiction and include the South, the Midwest, the Harlem Renaissance, and expatriate writings. These disparate regions serve to collectively prove the assertion that a common thread of economic anxiety overwhelms literary discourse and cannot be removed from Twenties fiction. Finally, the conclusion asserts a context for the Modernist fiction of the Twenties that is ultimately consistent with the economic consciousness of contemporary American culture. Economic trepidations are ubiquitous in Twenties fiction, but in contemporary American culture, discussions and displays of wealth have become audacious and explicit.

Between 1865 and 1882 the United States Navy experienced both a quantitative and qualitative decline. The navy faced dramatically reduced appropriations following the Civil War as it returned to its traditional peacetime missions and fleet dispositions. Those missions included the promotion and protection of American commerce, protecting American citizens and their property overseas, and acting in support of national policies. The navy accomplished these missions by dispersing its ships, singly and in small squadrons, to areas around the world where America had interests. Beginning in 1873 a series of war scares convinced American naval officers that the navy had fallen hopelessly behind the navies of other countries. A revolution in naval technology, which had begun in the 1860s, continued at an accelerating rate. Officers argued that navy could no longer fulfill its missions and desperately required rehabilitation. Concerned officers called on Congress to build a larger, modern navy. Their efforts bore fruit with the authorization of the ABCD ships in 1883. As the navy rebuilt, furious debates racked the officer corps. The proper role of technology lay at the heart of most of the debates. One of the most serious revolved around the use of steam power. The navy had been using steam power in an auxiliary role since the 1840s. At issue in the 1880s was whether it should remain an auxiliary power source or assume a primary role. The answer had profound strategic ramifications. An all steam navy would require coaling stations in its areas of operation. For those stations to be of use in wartime they would have to be sovereign U.S. territory. Another debate addressed the navy's core missions. By the 1890s the navy had defined a new national security mission and a new force structure centered on battleships. Despite their apparent success, proponents of naval expansion found they had limited influence. Funding never matched requests, resulting in the creation of an unbalanced fleet with an inadequate logistical infrastructure.

The scholarship on Grant is voluminous, but incomplete. To date there is no systematic Clausewitzian evaluation of U. S. Grant or his campaigns. This dissertation attempts to analyze both the life and military history of U. S. Grant in light of the theory of Carl von Clausewitz, as set forth in his book On War. Part one uses well-know events and examples from the American Civil War and military history in general to illustrate the methods and thought of Clausewitz. Part two comprises a biography of Grant, using Clausewitzian theory to analyze and evaluate Grant's actions and campaigns.. . The work pays particular attention to definitions of strategy, tactics and operations and the use and misuse of such terms by both soldiers and historians. Grant's understanding of war parallels that of Clausewitz, though he never was exposed to Clausewitz's writings, or those of other major theorists.

This dissertation explores the religious world of the pre-war United States South. In particular, it focuses on a specific group from 1847-1850, Baptists living in Charleston, South Carolina, and attempts to locate the presence of both southern nationalism and evangelical providentialism. In order to study this group, effort has been made to examine the main newspaper for Baptists in South Carolina, the Southern Baptist, which was printed weekly in Charleston from 1839-1860. The paper enjoyed a stable circulation during the 1850s and provides a window through which one can explore not only the thoughts and actions of Baptist leaders, but also individual Baptists who chose to receive the paper. In addition to the paper, effort has been made to explore the sermons preached and hymns sung in Charleston throughout the 1850s. The study concludes that in order for historians to properly discuss the post-war marriage of religious rhetoric and Confederate memory and the church's description of the loss as a chastisement from God for the greater glory of the South, one has to also understand that prior to the war, Baptist groups, as well as other evangelicals, made the same arguments concerning various other afflictions from God, including disease, war, and death. This focus on God as an afflicter of people, combined with a staunch southern nationalism that developed in the 1850s, forms the soil from which would eventually grow what Charles Reagan Wilson coined the "religion of the lost cause."

"TO UNSPHERE THE STARS ..." : EXPLORING THE EARLY MODERN ONTOLOGICAL/COSMOLOGICAL CRISIS IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE LITERATURE by Connie L. Meyer, Ph.D., 2012 Department of English Texas Christian University Dissertation Advisor: Daniel Juan Gill, Professor of English Ariane Balizet, Professor of English Jill Havens, Professor of English Babette Bohn, Professor of Art History The early modern era is traditionally defined by its significant shifts in a myriad of fields. Advances in one of these fields, astronomy, eventually redefined the physical and philosophical/theological nature of the known universe. This study attempts to connect much of this societal unrest to a previously neglected factor - the impact of Copernicanism on Renaissance thought. This work, epistemological in nature, explores the manner in which selected Renaissance writers, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and John Donne, responded to the shifts in philosophy and cosmology that affected their culture. The crisis that heliocentrism brought to early modernists unfolded over almost seventy years. Copernicus's De Revolutionibus, which first proposed the new system was published in 1543 and Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius, which confirmed the system, was published in 1610. It is this period of uncertainty that this study addresses, examining the era through the lens of selected literary works. This lost certainty was eventually replaced by an alternate form of certainty as defined by Francis Bacon's scientific method and reified in the body of the Royal Society of the mid seventeenth century. As the former concept of the microcosm/macrocosm model was destroyed, I argue that these writers attempted to turn its fragments into metaphors or similes which were devoid of the validating foundation which gave them their substance as well as their attraction. I maintain that Renaissance writers responded to these shifts in various ways, often adopting metadramatic tropes, specific terminology and astronomical concepts lifted from the "new philosophy" into their works in an effort to process and anesthetize the new world order that included a radically altered cosmos.