The novel follows the lives of a family in a Texas tourist town after a stranger's arrival.

Contemporary feminist theory, especially in its more dialectical manifestations, is read in this study as describing a relationship between present and future. In this reading, the work of feminist theory contains a present; that is, an articulation of the specific problem or question that it addresses. The work of feminist theory also contains a future, either implicit or explicit, and often both. An explicit future in feminist theory states a praxis-model or specific call-to-arms that claims political effectuality; claims that its implementation might help to ameliorate, in some way, the status quo of sexual politics. An implicit future in feminist theory is a more direct articulation of a praxis-model through its implementation within the work itself. In this case, the theory works as a heuristic device by enacting the critique that it suggests. For example, a work of feminist literary criticism might posit a mode of textual critique that it then implements by reading a given text in the suggested mode. The future in such a theoretical work is the implication that the enacted mode of critique is a praxis-model for further implementation. This study examines feminist theoretical work from the 1950s to the present, with an analytical emphasis on the ways in which the present/future dialectic operates in its structures and claims. I team this analysis with readings of feminist SF. Feminist SF speculates on the potential outcomes of womens struggles with the oppressions of various ideological regimes, such as sexism, classism, and racism. The dialectical tension between present and future is a thematic concern and a structural feature of most feminist SF. I examine feminist SF that engages some of contemporary feminist theorys presuppositions and positions. This study includes analyses of the theoretical work of Simone de Beauvoir, Juliet Mitchell, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Katherine Hayles, Nancy Chodorow, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Teresa de Lauretis, and many others. This study also includes analyses of the feminist science fictional work of Ursula LeGuin, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Monique Wittig, Angela Carter, James Tiptree (Alice Sheldon), Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Rebecca Ore, and Nicola Griffith, among others.

In this project, I analyze seven twentieth-century novels of teaching in order to investigate how notions of home and school are constructed, connected, and perpetuated in popular teaching narratives. Images of teachers in much of this centurys fiction often rest on views of the school as home that are derived from stereotypes of gender, race, and nationalitystereotypes that can be both inaccurate and repressive. For this reason, I examine these texts in light of how they negotiate school space with domestic space (domestic both as personal or familial, and as public or national). I contend that many of these narratives offer little more than simplistic, nostalgic views of what home/school space can be, and even fewer question the very equation of school as home. In those narratives that do probe the school/home connection, the teacher-protagonists often fail to emerge as the sentimental heroes that the teachers of the more conventional novels prove to be. Nevertheless, I argue that the most promising depictions of teachers and their work are those that acknowledge and engage the rich complexities of home and its (sometimes problematic) relation to the classroom, for the very tensions and conflicts that problematize the schools classification as a domestic safe haven are the very tools that can facilitate growth, learning, and self-discovery. The approach for my analysis draws from feminist and cultural studies, as well as educational history. The works I discuss include the following: The Blackboard Jungle; Good Morning, Miss Dove; To Sir, With Love; Spinster; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; Up the Down Staircase; and Election.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's publication of Nature in 1836 began a process of creating a new condition of American thinking, severed from European cultural and intellectual influences. The subsequent lectures The American Scholar and The Divinity School Address furthered this process, calling for an original American literature. Emerson's writing called consistently for poets with the ability to "see" past the material, apparent world to the world of eternal forms, which shaped nature in accordance with a divine moral imperative. Through this connection, man-as-poet would discover God in himself. In short, Emerson effectively transferred divinity from Unitarian doctrine to the individual, thereby asserting each individual as the center of his own moral universe. Emerson's prose utilizes visual metaphors to express ideas which escape conventional language usage. The poet, according to Emerson, would have the ability to trace words back to their original associations with things, and thus reveal the true world of facts. His emphasis on seeing (in all aspects of that term) dominates Emerson's writing and determines an aesthetic which is as much visual as it is verbal. Emerson's theories found disciples in Thoreau and Whitman, but the most interesting extension of his aesthetic came with the development of the motion picture. In the early twentieth century, D. W. Griffith singlehandedly changed the status of films from sideshow amusements to narrative art. Griffith's techniques for creating visual narrative were intuitive and inspired from his imagination, an essential quality of the Emersonian poet. Griffith's own moral imperative was similar to Emerson's; he envisioned a medium which could educate more effectively than language. Charles Chaplin was, from 1920 through 1936, the most recognizable figure in the world because of his unique screen comedies. Chaplin's enduring character, the Tramp, evokes much of Emerson's qualities of the poet in that he envisioned the world beyond the apparent, and creatively reconstituted this world in the way Emerson had done with visual metaphor. Chaplin combined the humanism of Emerson with the democratic possibilities of Whitman to create a uniquely American cinema with universal appeal. Chaplin's body of work remains America's most logical extension of Emersonian philosophy.

This dissertation examines how Southern literary representations of the natural world were influenced by, and influenced, the historical, social, and ecological changes of the 1930s and 1940s. Specifically, I examine the ways that nature is conceived of and portrayed by four authors of this era: Erskine Caldwell, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Faulkner; through their works, I investigate the intersections of race, class, and gender with the natural environment. I argue that during this time of profound regional and national upheaval there exists a climate of professed binary oppositions and that these authors representations of nature in their fiction reflect the tensions of such polarities as past/present, male/female, left/right, white/black, and culture/nature. Although there is no clear linear development of the way the idea of nature is used in Southern literature, the period now termed the Southern Renaissance (roughly 1930-1950) is fueled by a new wave of Southern authors who reconfigure the use of nature in their fiction in conjunction with modernist analyses of the self and the South. The relatively belated arrival of modernism in the South offers a special opportunity for studying the shift from nineteenth- to twentieth-century culture, a change that proceeded in the South in far more concentrated fashion and with greater tension and drama than in the rest of the nation. I focus on the natural environments of the texts as dynamic, expressive spaces, and I also connect the representations of the natural world in selected novels of Caldwell, Rawlings, Hurston, and Faulkner to their responses to issues of race, class, and gender while situating their works within the contexts of Southern history and literary traditions.

This dissertation explores how literary criminal narratives reflected public anxieties over the increasing commercialization of England during the early eighteenth century. It accounts for the popularity of the criminal in literature as well as public concerns about commercialization and the individuality it encouraged, revealing how these concerns were expressed in the most popular form of criminal narrative in this era, the criminal biography. Chapters on the criminal narratives of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe and John Gay reveal how the criminal narrative functioned as a means of critiquing a developing commercial society in England. Bunyan first employs the formula of the criminal biography to offer a prophetic critique of the burgeoning market society in England, while Defoe explores the triumphs and moral dilemmas of life in an age of commercialism. The conclusion reads Gays criminal narrative as the culmination of a nations early and ambivalent experience with the marketplace. Its implication is that in the modern age, commercialism makes us all in some sense criminals.

All of my fiction has to do with relationships. I suspect this is true of most creative writers, but in my place this broad theme takes precedence over other creative aspects of writing, such as language. While I would not call my prose minimalist, I have tried to set down my short stories in a plain rather than an involved or noticeably poetic idiom. As for the three-tiered division into Men, Women, and Children, the stories themselves naturally fell into these three categories, depending on the main, point-of-view character. I found it enthralling to change the authorial voice to conform to the story. It has been an interesting exercise to think my way into the minds of characters who differ from myself in gender and/or age. My ultimate goal, of course, is a synthesis of human experience as I see it. As we pursue our lives as men and women, and children of both sexes, we are all ultimately subsumed under the rubric human beings. I hope both my characters and I have arrived at better ways to be human and humane.

Backwaters is a novel heavily steeped in the supernatural. It chronicles the lives of a mother and son who have been disconnected from one another through a series of curses. Unaware of the other-worldly forces propelling their lives into chaos, each loses themselves to madness and isolation. Their only escape is in loving others too hard, and not each other enough.

"Her Still Singing Limbs: A Collection of Poetry" is a fragmented rumination on the intrinsic loneliness of the human condition. Using the Greek myth of Echos destruction at her beloved Narcissuss hands as the foundation, these poems combine voyeuristic images of beauty and violence to explain why all poets write "songs of exquisite loneliness."

This study seeks to explore and interrogate the viral reality of the 1990s, in which the virus, heavily indebted to representations of AIDS for its metaphorical power, emerged as a prominent agent in science and popular culture. What becomes apparent in both fictional and non-fictional texts of this era, however, is that the designation of virus transcends specific and material viral phenomena, making the virus itself a touchstone for modern preoccupations with self and other. As constituted by the human bodys interaction with pathogenic agents, the binary of self and other may be deconstructed by an interrogation of the virus itself, a permeable and mutable body that lends itself to any number of interpretive possibilities. A uniquely liminal agent, the virus refuses categorization as either life or non-life. However, it is not the liminality of the pathogen that allows for this deconstruction, which serves to frustrate such boundaries in the first place. Rather, the notion that viruses are (always) already a part of who we are as human beings, and that self is not necessarily a self-enclosed autonomous entity, suggests that the binary cannot hold. A virus is unique; an insider/outsider that crosses artificial boundaries, it destabilizes the boundaries themselves, and thus the traditional framework of self and other. Examining viral accounts in popular science writings, film, television, advertisements, philosophy, science fiction, and naturalistic fiction, this study examines the ways in which science and popular culture have characterized both the virus and its psychological and material effects, and suggests that the pathogen-as-signifier may be read in ways that point to the viruss utopian potential as a theoretical category.