From the perspective of the twenty-first century, it might be easy to dismiss frontier literature as a minor historical anomaly, as a descriptor limited to setting, or as an insignificant variation from a country struggling to reach the heights of British fictional norms. However, when American literature began to flourish in the 1820s, it was primarily a literature of the frontier. Examining what this frontier quality means for literary elements beyond setting, such as narrative voice, textual structure, and genre, more clearly explains the importance of the frontier to literary nation-building. After all, the literary frontier ranged across literary genres, inviting new combinations and formal innovations that mark some of the most underappreciated and fascinating examples of American writing. James Seavers A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, for example, carried on the autobiographical captivity narrative tradition by combining the personal narrative with local history, ethnography, and revolutionary legend: a perfect example of the literary frontier. This dissertation examines the centrality of frontier literature during the Jacksonian period and its impulse to ethnographic description of nation. Thus, I consider a range of texts published between 1820 and 1840. Chapter one explains my theoretical bases and includes a brief reading of John Heckewelders ethnography of the Delaware Indians. Chapter two focuses upon Seavers narrative. Chapter three considers the paratextual elements of James Fenimore Coopers The Last of the Mohicans, Catharine Maria Sedgwicks Hope Leslie, Lydia Maria Childs Hobomok, and Ann Sophia Stephens Malaeska, The Indian Wife of a White Hunter. Chapter four analyzes the structural and satirical elements of Edgar Allan Poes The Journal of Julius Rodman and Caroline Kirklands A New HomeWholl Follow? The concluding chapter reflects upon Walt Whitmans poetry and Henry David Thoreaus Walking.

This study develops the Black Masculine Paradigm (BMP), a construct used to trace historically specific components that inform black masculinity and explores the physical and psychological defensive strategies employed by black men in Richard Wright's Black Boy, Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promisedland, Nathan McCall's Make Me Wanna Holler, and James Earl Hardy's B-Boy Blues. Specifically, this project offers that power, money, and sex(uality) are located at the core of the BMP, and these social objectives are negotiated through politicization, prescribed masculinity, and heterosexuality. This project reads the politicization of the black male body through its presence in literature and film. Adding to work included by literary and cultural studies scholars, the study has social and psychological dimensions that suggest an alternate form of black masculinity as well. The study reveals that these strategies affect the black males' economic, social and physical movement, and creates a corrupt national narrative that is informed and disrupted by racism.

Lying in Translation is a thesis of creative non-fiction that is a process of self-discovery as I retell my Hispanic grandmother's stories and the life we lived together. Lala is a woman to be feared and loved by all those who encounter her, and the main thread through the work is whether or not I will ultimately decide to embrace her insanity or running screaming from it. Other questions arise, and hopefully, are answered in this book: What does it mean to be half of one thing and half of another? How do immigrants survive in America, in a land and culture so different from their own? Did this difficulty possibly contribute to Lala's craziness and abuse? Were her actions considered abuse if she performed them out of love, thinking them to be helpful and right? Overall in this work I hope to convey what a fascinating character Lala is. I want readers to be repelled by her and delight in her, to see her as clearly as I can, to love her, to become grateful for their own families yet be jealous of the zaniness of mine.

This study focuses on the question of how Mordred comes to be portrayed as a traitor within the British Arthurian context. Chapter 1 introduces the question of Mordreds treachery. Chapter 2 charts Mordreds origins and development in Welsh and British literature. Chapter 3 focuses on the themes of unity, kinship, loyalty, adultery, and incest that emerge in connection with Mordreds character. Chapter 4 deals with the idea that Mordreds treacherous characteristics have been transferred upon him in the course of the British Arthurian narratives development. Chapter 5 discusses the possibility that Mordreds development is in part due to Geoffrey of Monmouths response to political pressure. Chapter 6 briefly addresses the importance of this study.

In this dissertation, I examine four of Margaret Oliphant's novels, her supernatural fiction, and her literary reviews, revealing how she relies on her knowledge of the cultural sign system, domesticity, and women's value to show how women may successfully navigate middle-class Victorian society. She accomplishes this by identifying the places where women's strengths lie: the boundaries between work and family, between the spiritual and material, amid the everyday details that she herself realizes reveal the workings of society. She sets herself up as a voice of authority within the system itself, not as a distant, all-knowing sage but as someone who shares the tensions that women in the Victorian period experienced while searching for meaningful occupation and serving as the heart of a household, and ultimately reveals that women are able to exert control over themselves in previously unacknowledged ways.

This study reads the rise, reign, and fall of the English gentleman through the lens of the hobbledehoy novels of Anthony Trollope. It explores Trollopes use of the hobbledehoy (a term, now almost archaic, for an awkward young man) in eight novels appearing between 1857 and 1879: The Three Clerks (1857), The Small House at Allington (1864), The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), Phineas Finn (1869), Phineas Redux (1874), John Caldigate (1879), The Way We Live Now (1875), and The Prime Minister (1876). Since the hobbledehoy figure serves as a cultural reference point or touchstone, then by examining the permutations and adjustments in Trollopes hobbledehoy, the study clarifies and challenges existing suppositions regarding Victorian notions of class, gender, and nationality. For example, the work argues that the crisis of gentlemanliness, identified by Robin Gilmour in The Idea of the Victorian Gentleman as developing in the final years of the century, actually begins much earlieras early as 1871. Not only is this argument important for Trollope scholars, but it also has ramifications for the larger world of Victorian studies and the discipline as a whole. For instance, The Hobbledehoys Choice argues that Trollopes hobbledehoy tales form a distinctive sub-genre of the bildungsroman. Additionally, by examining Trollopes hobbledehoy figure within the larger framework of Victorian texts, the dissertation illustrates the shifts in connotations of gentlemanliness from mid to late century. Furthermore, the arc of Trollopes hobbledehoy narratives illustrates the authors initial unswerving belief in the unconditional benefits of hard workideas popularized by the essayist Thomas Carlyle. However, as the century wore on, Trollopes hobbledehoy narratives demonstrate a steadily increasing suspicion of this Carlylean gospel of work. Finally, I argue that Trollopes hobbledehoy novels negotiate a distancing from much of mid-nineteenth-century self-help literature, especially the work of Samuel Smiles. This cultural infusion of the hobbledehoy narrative with the corpus of nineteenth-century conduct literature illuminates the manner in which Victorian conduct literature twists and distorts the traditions of its progenitor, courtesy literature.

This dissertation focuses on the difference between narrators and characters in fiction who tell stories. It also argues that traditional orality persists in American culture and is a significant influence in the fiction of Mark Twain, William Faulkner and Lee Smith. In their work, they try to overcome what some perceive as a structural discrimination inherent in the novel and imbue their characters' speaking voices with authority that is determined by something other than their position in the structural hierarchy. All three authors attempt to give their characters speaking voices which are not necessarily inferior to the narrative or authorial voices in their works. This dissertation also suggests that the "narrator" has changed over time from a written representation of an oral storyteller to a literary function which facilitates a novel's storytelling. It is therefore methodologically useful to distinguish between narrators and storytelling characters. Susan Lanser's and Stephen Ross's concepts of voice help differentiate narrators from storytelling characters and from other voices in literature. By looking at types of storytellers, both narrators and characters, and the types of voice used by authors to represent them, we see how each type of voice acquires discursive authority. This work adapts these concepts in order to begin a discussion of voice in the works of Twain, Faulkner and Smith, and show that each of these authors attempt to give mimetic voices unusual degrees of authority-both in and outside the fictive world. This work looks specifically at storytelling events in several of Twain's short stories, including "A True Story Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It," and how experiments with these characters in his short stories led to the narrative voice in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This is followed by a detailed look at narrators and storytellers in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Smith's The Devil's Dream.

This is a novel about a young woman trying to redefine herself after years of defining herself through her relationships with other people, most specifically her boyfriends, but also her family. The heroine faces many challenges: the end of a long-term relationship, the illness of her niece, complications with her best friends, and a revelation about her parent's relationship. These ordinary obstacles of everyday living will propel the main character into a confrontation with her perception of herself and the world around her.

In The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), the travelogue that launched Trollope's career as a literary figure, she accounts the four years spent living in America with the majority of her children and without her husband. The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1836), published fifteen years before Uncle Tom's Cabin, is the first anti-slavery novel written in English. Other novels, like The Vicar of Wrexhill (1834) and Jessie Phillips (1844) discuss legal matters. A common thread connects much of Trollope's work. That thread is feminism, which places her in the company of (and somewhere in between) Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf. In the first chapter, I discuss Trollope's travelogue, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) and her novel, The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837) in relation to traditional feminine virtues. I argue that Trollope challenges these virtues, suggesting that they are subject to perversion, which endangers women and the societies in which they live. Instead, Trollope sets forth another idea of femininity, supplementing these virtues with education, occupation, self-sufficiency and friendship. In America, Trollope recognizes the danger in the possession of the four virtues alone, and in her novel, set in England, she shows that the addition of education and occupation avert danger and maintain a stable society. In the second chapter, I discuss two of Trollope's protest novels, The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1836) and Jessie Phillips (1844). Both of these novels protest the laws that Trollope felt were unjust. In Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, she discusses the wrongs of slavery in America. Jessie Phillips protests the New Poor Law of 1834 and is also largely concerned with the bastardy clause, seduction and infanticide. I argue that Trollope is interested in challenging the laws of society. She proposes changes in societal laws that govern the relationships between male and female, rich and poor, white and black, and master and slave. Her solution involves a cooperation and coexistence between all of these binaries, with an emphasis on the role of the female. In these novels, Trollope suggests that the morality women possess can aid in the stability in society if the women take an active role.

When George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead was released in 1968, the independent black and white zombie film stunned American moviegoers. Having assaulted the audience with a new level of violence-laden gore, Night of the Living Dead received much attention from both popular and critical audiences, with the former rushing to theaters to see the film over and over and the latter almost universally panning the film for its poor taste and gratuitous violence. Since its release, however, Night of the Living Dead has become one of the most written about horror films in American history, with critics praising the film for its ingenuity and reviving the zombie genre and also for its treatment of American sociopolitical issues, including the most critically noted issue-the Vietnam War. Although I agree with those critics who assert that controversy over Vietnam War is raised in Night of the Living Dead (as well as are many other sociopolitical issues which are well worth exploring), the Vietnam imagery of the film has been almost exclusively analyzed at the expense of exploring what I believe is another important aspect of Night of the Living Dead- its re-inscription of blackness in the zombie film. By exploring the lineage between blackness and the zombie film, I hope to show that Night of the Living Dead is an important film to the study of blackness on the American screen not only because a black man plays the hero of the film, which was revolutionary in and of itself, but also because the film repositioned the manner in which blackness would be depicted in the American zombie film, moving away from the portrayal of black characters and black culture as exotically dangerous towards a more positive representation.