This thesis examines the work of William Dunbar, a sixteenth century Scottish poet, in order to demonstrate that he is not, as he is often styled, a Scottish Chaucerian. It makes an analysis of the chronological occurrence of forms and themes in his poetry which indicates that his work can be divided into three periods: (1) an initial period in which his work deals with traditional matter and forms; (2) a second period in which he develops a distinctly personal poetic voice; and (3) a final period in which he perfects this personal voice and then relinquishes it for a public, religious one. In turn these three periods indicate Dunbar's poetic growth away from the Chaucerian influence and a concomitant development of his own personal lyric voice. It concludes by examining areas in which Dunbar and Chaucer deal with similar material, revealing that even in areas of similarity, Dunbar's voice is uniquely his own. His distinct poetic voice is then emphasized through an explication of "The Petition of the Gray Horse, Auld Dunbar" which not only prefigures Renaissance poetry but as well exhibits those qualities in his poetry which make his an outstanding Scottish "makar."

In the work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson the city and culture of 19th century New Orleans figures prominently, and is a major character affecting the lives of her protagonists. While race, class, and gender are among the focuses of many scholars the eccentricity and cultural history of the most exotic American city, and its impact on Dunbar-Nelson’s writing is unmistakable. This essay will discuss how the diverse cultural environment of New Orleans in the 19th century allowed Alice Dunbar Nelson to create narratives which allowed her short stories to speak to the shifting identities of women and the social uncertainty of African Americans in the Jim Crow south. A consideration of New Orleans’ cultural history is important when reading Dunbar-Nelson’s work, whose significance has often been disregarded because of what some considered its lack of racial markers.

This dissertation contextualizes and interprets several hundred photographs illustrating six books of poetry by Paul Laurence Dunbar. Although their significance as cultural landmarks is largely unrecognized today, they rank among the largest and most widely distributed bodies of photographs of African Americans in American visual culture. Published between 1899 and 1906, the images in the Dunbar books represent a counterpoint to the much-emphasized publicity photographs made concurrently for the school by Frances Benjamin Johnston, complicating simplistic conclusions about the nature of Hampton Institute and the industrial education movement. Drawing upon substantial original research on the predominantly white Hampton Institute Camera Club and its institutional context, and presenting a biographical portrait of the lead photographer, Leigh Richmond Miner, this study ultimately traces a history of photography at Hampton Institute from the 1890s through the 1920s, reproducing more than 150 unpublished and unrepublished images. This study reveals that the photographs in Dunbar’s works were created explicitly to reconceive pictorial representations of African Americans, and to subtly discredit any reductive conventional perception of racial character altogether. By depicting their subjects photographically, the members of the Hampton Camera Club sought to undermine essentialist characterizations--both derogatory and sentimental--by presenting their subjects as self-determining and multifaceted individuals. In their use of serial photography and by employing African-American creative forms, the books ultimately suggest vernacular origins of a disjunctive, Modernist aesthetic, casting both Dunbar and Hampton as proponents of modernity rather than as icons of retrogressive racial politics. / text

Thesis--Lund. / Bibliography: p. 159-163.

American literature and verse advanced in dialectal writing during the late-nineteenth century. Charles Chesnutt’s “The Goophered Grapevine” (1887), “Po’ Sandy” (1888), and “Hot-Foot Hannibal” (1899); Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1881); Thomas Nelson Page’s “Marse Chan” (1884); and Mark Twain’s “Sociable Jimmy” (1874) and “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” (1874) provided diverse dialect representations. Dialect expanded into poetry with James Whitcomb Riley’s “She ‘Displains’ It” (1888), “When the Frost is on the Punkin” (1882), and “My Philosofy” (1882) and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “The Spellin’ Bee” (1895), “An Ante-Bellum Sermon” (1895), and “To the Eastern Shore” (1903). Dialect styles and how they conveyed political or social perspectives are assessed. Correspondence between late-nineteenth century literary figures as well as periodical reviews reveal attitudes toward the use of dialect. Reader responses to dialect based on their political or social interpretations are explored.

This dissertation examines black writers' appropriations of blackface minstrelsy as central to the construction of a New Negro image in the early twentieth century U.S. Examining the work of artists who were both fiction writers and pioneers of the black stage, I argue that blackface, along with other popular, late-nineteenth century performance traditions like the cakewalk and ragtime, plays a surprising and paradoxical role in the self-consciously “new” narratives that come to characterize black cultural production in the first decades of the twentieth century. Rather than rejecting minstrelsy as antithetical to the New Negro project of forging black modernity, the novelists and playwrights I consider in this study—Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and James Weldon Johnson—adapted blackface and other popular performance traditions in order to experiment with narrative and dramatic form. In addition to rethinking the relationship between print and performance as modes of refashioning blackness, my project also charts an alternative genealogy of black cultural production that emphasizes the New Negro Movement as a cultural formation that precedes the Harlem Renaissance and anticipates its concerns.

Abstract Over the last fifty years scholars have worked to recover the work of late nineteenth, early twentieth-century writer Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Many scholars have acknowledged the impact of New Orleans culture and history in her writing as well as attempted peel back the layers of her stories in order to understand her commentary on structures of race, class, and gender in nineteenth-century New Orleans. This hybrid paper, both creative and academic, subjective and objective, is a reading of her work through the Creole lens. Reading Alice Dunbar-Nelson through a Creole lens illuminates the radical nature of her work which has not always been seen through alternative lenses. This paper is a viewing of the work of Dunbar-Nelson from the marginal space which it illustrates and from which it comes. Through personal narrative and analytical thought this paper explores a different approach to literary criticism.

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