The dissertation seeks to identify and analyze the cultural work performed by the Hollywood youth narrative during the 1980s and early nineties, a period that James Davison Hunter has characterized as a domestic culture war. This era of intense ideological confrontation between philosophical agendas loosely defined as liberal and conservative, increasing social change, and social polarization and gender/sexual orientation backlash began with Ronald Reagans landslide victory in 1980 and continued for twelve years through the presidency of George Bush, Sr. The dissertation examines the Hollywood youth narrative in the context of the family values debate and explicates its role in negotiating and resolving social conflict in a period of intense social change. The dissertation theorizes the historic and cultural function of the Hollywood youth narrative in translating complex social problems into generational and familial conflicts that can be easily, if superficially, resolved through conventional Hollywood genre narrative structures. In the specific instance of the family values debate, the dissertation analyzes how important low-budget Hollywood youth narratives both supported and challenged the traditional translation of social conflict into easily resolved generational conflict to reveal the complex social and economic factors behind the crisis in the American family. The Fifties played a critical role in debates regarding family life during the Reagan and Bush era. The dissertation explicates and contrasts the definitions of the Fifties and the use of 1950s Hollywood film and television materials in the Hollywood youth narrative and Family Values Campaign and demonstrates how young filmmakers used the icons, images and narrative structures of important 1950s Hollywood films to both support and challenge the socially conservative vision of American family life promoted by the Family Values Campaign and its New Right supporters. Through an analysis of Tim Hunters Rivers Edge and Micheal Lehmanns Heathers, the dissertation demonstrates how two Hollywood youth narratives of the period reveal the fundamental contradictions between the New Rights idealized versions of American family values and the values of laissez faire capitalism, the often devastating impact of Reaganomics on the family as a site of social reproduction, and the troubled relationship between youth and consumer culture.

"Of One Kind or Another:" Rape in the Fiction of Eudora Welty explores the ways in which Eudora Welty's repeated inclusion of rape in her fiction reveals and questions southern society and women's roles in it. Despite the vague, even confusing language with which she describes the incidents of rape. Welty offers a rich, forceful commentary upon the culture and women's roles in it. The ambiguity with which she describes rape reveals ambivalence toward the society that Welty may be said at once to protect and to expose. An examination of Welty's use of rape in her fiction reveals a troubling ambivalence, but, in the context of Welty's fiction, the persistent image of rape does allow Welty to voice a critique of southern culture. Chapter One demonstrates Welty's ambivalence towards both the South and violence in it. Chapter Two analyzes the rape imagery in one story from each collection of short fiction, and delves into the conventions of female decorum that these stories expose. Chapter Three explores Welty's commentary on race in southern society that is evidenced in contrasting rape scenes in The Robber Bridegroom. Welty's repeated use of rape imagery invites further exploration of its significance in Welty's fiction. What this repetition reveals, in fact, is Welty's assessment of gender and racial roles in the south. In both her short fiction and in her novella, Welty uses rape to reveal cultural norms and expectations of women in southern society.

This dissertation examines the role of social class and status in the fiction of contemporary novelist and short story writer, Lee Smith. As discussed in the Introduction, the study defines social class broadly, not limiting it to production, but also not discarding its economic underpinning. Max Weber's definition of class as "life chances" provides the starting point; any resources that can improve a person's position in the market place positively impact their "life chances." The resources appearing most often in Smith's fiction include economic capital and property, as well as education, family connections and occupational status. The discussion also builds on Pierre Bourdieu's position that taste plays a crucial role in social class status, shaping not only individuals' life chances but also their perspectives and aesthetics. Chapter two explores Lee Smith's relationship to her childhood home and signature setting of Appalachia, first by examining her personal history in the region and then by exploring the connection of social class to sources for her texts. Indirect sources include local color fiction and some of the stereotypical images it promulgated; direct sources consist of a sampling of source texts from one Smith novels, The Devil's Dream. Chapter three systematically surveys the elements of social differentiation within her texts by utilizing social histories of the region; resources covered include kinship, land ownership and religion. The chapter also examines the varieties of small towns in Smith's fiction, including the stock Southern town, the coal-company town, the county seat town and the boom town. Chapters four and five examine more closely two crucial element yet less tangible elements of social structuring in Smith's work-education and taste. Chapter four accesses scholarship on social class and education, including liberal, reproduction and resistance theory, to discuss the difficulties of physical and social access to schooling in Smith's work. Chapter five incorporates Bourdieu's theory of taste and Richard Peterson's concept of the cultural omnivore, which can be considered an Americanization of Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, to examine the relationship of social class to one of Smith's primary themes, self-creation.

In this study I discuss the importance of audience selection and response upon the dramaturgies of African American playwrights August Wilson and Ed Bullins. Using the theories and criteria for African American art and theatre as espoused by Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Amiri Baraka, and created by the 1960s and 1970s Black Theatre and Black Aesthetic movements, I discuss the importance of audience selection to Wilson's dramas, especially given his tremendous success on Broadway. I also explore the claimed lack of importance of audience to Bullins's dramaturgy, particularly as demonstrated in those plays written during his brief tenure as Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party and those works comprising his twentieth century cycle in which he discusses the lives of members of what he calls the "black underclass." This study relies on theatre reviews from New York Times theatre critics on both Wilson and Bullins as examples of mainstream audience responses to their works. Moreover, I cite published interviews by both playwrights where they discuss their influences, approaches to drama, and the importance and/or lack of importance of audience to their work. This study concludes with the chapter "Same Subject, Different Audience" in which it is noted that although Wilson and Bullins have both been influenced by Baraka and the Black Theatre/Black Aesthetic movements (also indirectly by the theories of Locke and Du Bois), they offer differing representations of the African American experience. The reason for these different approaches to the same subject is because Wilson and Bullins create their works for different audiences. While Wilson presents an African America that features the "common folk" of the culture, and (indirectly) protests against racism and segregation, he creates this world for mainstream audience members. Conversely, Bullins explores the dark side of the African American experience in his "black America," focusing on issues and characters (the other "common folk"-pimps, prostitutes, etc.) that many mainstream American and middle class African Americans theatre patrons wish to ignore.

A fictional work about a wilderness writer and a man who transports prisoners of war set in the Moosehead Lake region of northern Maine.

In complementary response to socio-historisists who discuss the concept of "freedom" in William Wordsworth's poetry as determined from without be it by socio-historical conditions, gender, or imposed ideology I draw from the theory of Nicholas Berdyaev, one of the prominent continental existentialists of the twentieth century, tracing the development of Wordsworth's understanding of freedom towards "genuine liberty" as progressively determined from within. Thus focusing on "existentia" rather than "essentia," I pay particular attention to shaping inner efforts and developing visions of the growing and conscious personality as they are described in <u>The Prelude</u>. Wordsworth hinges his ability to perceive and make perceivable the "external man" upon his own evolving understanding of inner freedom, claiming that his theme is "no other than the very heart of man." In <u>The Prelude</u>, especially of 1850, I find a direct link between the degree of personal freedom gained by the poet and the perfection of the human gestalten he depicts, the connection detailed by this dissertation. The dissertation offers the following chapters: (1) "Introduction. 'To be young was very heaven:' Two Thinkers Bred by Two Revolutions: Wordsworth and Berdyaev;" (2) "The Human Form and Human Independence in Wordsworth: A Link;" (3) "'Man Ennobled Outwardly Before My Sight;'" (4) Uncouth Shapes' and Their Progress from Transgression to Transcendence;" (5) "Wordsworth's Trans-Figuration on Mount Snowdon and 'Genuine Liberty.'" My conclusion suggests that increasing degree of growing personal independence, gained by the developing poet and, possibly, by his reader, is manifested, on the level of imagery, by way of the perfecting of the human gestalten, from one Spot of Time to another, until the poet himself gets into a position to be seen as "an index of delight." Also, agreeing with Herbert Read (p. 210 of <u>The True Voice of Feeling</u>), I see Wordsworth among the first existentialist poets, a position which my comparison with Berdyaev supports. Visually, in <u>The Prelude</u>, the perfect, sublime, human form signals a shift to and back from transcendence, which equals "genuine liberty."

This miscellany represents the pick of the vignettes, tales, and anecdotes the author has gathered and spun out over the past few years. Personal experience, with the exception of a few inessential details, is not represented. The influence of ragtime music, which played with relentless syncopation in the author's head as he composed with pencil and yellow pad, may be discernable to those who take the trouble to read the sentences aloud.

Not applicable.

This thesis is entitled, The Blues in Three Parts: A Collection of Poetry, Short Stories, and a Screenplay. The first part, a collection of poetry, contains themes of childhood and adolescence, love and loss, life struggles, writing, and death. The second part, a collection of short stories, contains five stories centered on similar themes. The third and final part, a screenplay entitled Cow, contains elements of the first two parts as well. The epigraph, which contemplates the idea that the blues is not only music, but all the ups and downs of life, sets the stage for the central thread, blues, which presents itself as music, sadness, and happiness in some form in each of these pieces. All the writing in this thesis reflects tidbits of every day reality, but every piece in this collection is a work of fiction.

This project examines contemporary African American womens literature and the legacy established by literary foremother, Zora Neale Hurston. The discussion is positioned at the cross-section of three on-going conversations: 1) current discourses on Conjure in African American womens literature, 2) analyses of Africanisms in black culture, and 3) previous scholarship on recurring topics in African American womens writing. Here these frames are unified under one thematic: Christio-Conjurea rubric borne of the trans-Atlantic slave trade that designates the fusing of Christian and West African religious tradition in African American culture. Thus, this project establishes a new literary matrix for analyzing twentieth-century black womens writing. Each chapter features a novel viewed through the critical lens of Christio-Conjure. Zora Neale Hurstons and Luisah Teishs research offers a framework for the elements of Christio-Conjure integrated throughout the novels. Chapter two, Christio-Conjure as Historical Fiction, analyzes Jewel Parker Rhodess Voodoo Dreams: A Novel of Marie Laveau (1993), a work that provides a compelling image of the black woman as a Christio-Conjure priestess. Chapter three, Christio-Conjure and the Ghost Story, examines how Tina McElroy Ansas Baby of the Family (1988) incorporates the Christio-Conjure tenet of matrilineage with the cultural transmission of mother wit as African American folk wisdom. Chapter four, Revolutionary Christio-Conjure, addresses the revolutionary aspects of Toni Cade Bambaras The Salt Eaters (1980), highlighting African American communal transformation and afrofemcentric female bonding. Chapter five, Christio-Conjure Activism, examines Ntozake Shanges Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982) with the title characters as proverbial soul sistahs who employ Christio-Conjure in self-actualization and communal healing. Chapter six, Christio-Conjure Romance and Magic, discusses the love story of Cocoa and George against the backdrop of Gloria Naylors revision of the holy trinity in Mama Day (1989). As liberation tales, these novels depict characters that appropriate Christio-Conjure as a source of empowerment. In addition, the authors themselves employ Christio-Conjure in their writing as a reaffirmation of their cultural and literary heritage. As a focal point, then, Christio-Conjure functions as a centering mechanism in contemporary twentieth-century black womens writing, a body of literature historically marginalized.