This dissertation examines epistolary manuscripts circulated among networks of women in eighteenth-century British America. The women saved and collected correspondence, copied important letters into commonplace books, and composed entire journals in letter format for family member or close friends. These writings, as they circulated from hand to hand, helped to solidify culturally significant social networks. This dissertation delves into the markedly performative nature of these writings and asks: even though these women writers, ostensibly, did not intend their texts for public consumption, to what extent did those texts provide public stages on which the women could rehearse, control, inscribe, or elide the fluid, yet often conflicting subject positions of the era? This dissertation examines five specific networks of writing women in eighteenth-century British America. Chapter one focuses on the writings of Elizabeth Fergusson, Annis Stockton, Hannah Griffitts, Milcah Moore, and Susannah Wright, the group of writers known as the "Philadelphia coterie," and uses their letters to establish epistolary patterns that inform my readings of the other networks of women writers—the same patterns that will ultimately influence the earliest epistolary fiction. Chapter two examines the diary of Grace Galloway and the letters of Anne Hulton, two avowedly loyalist women in British America. Chapter three focuses on the life and letters of shopkeeper Elizabeth Murray and her network of women merchants while chapter four examines the letters of the two most historically recognizable women in this study: Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren. The networks of women I address in these chapters span multiple generations, and this multi-generational dynamic leaves a legacy of friendship that can help us better understand and locate the belles lettres of British America. However, the writings generated by these networks also leave a literary legacy that allows us to reconsider other writings in other genres, and it is to that endeavor I turn in the conclusion. The conclusion looks at Hannah Foster's epistolary novels in the context of early-American networks of writing women and uses the women's manuscripts to reposition the early-American novel. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2007. / March 30, 2007. / Correspondence, Manuscript Cutlure, Epistolarity, Commonplace Books / Includes bibliographical references. / Sally Hadden, Outside Committee Member; Leigh Edwards, Committee Member; Karen L. Laughlin, Committee Member.

In this collection of essays, I am looking at a young woman trying to find direction and decide what kind of woman she will be. Growing up, I have often felt like a woman of contradictions. I wanted to be tough, but not so tough that I was no longer "pretty." I was proud of being independent, but afraid of ending up alone. I wanted to travel the world as much as I wanted to find a place to call home. I began to see myself as a composite of gestures: The kind of girl who bought Gin and Tonic cologne. A girl who stole a book of Leonard Nimoy's poetry, danced on a pole she helped build in her living room, wished her life was an Aaron Sorkin script, hated Italian men but loved Italian Americans, and a girl who was as uncomfortable with her desire to date a nice guy as she was with her inability to find one. My one reservation about writing personal essays is that it feels a little self-indulgent. I don't think these stories are important simply because they are about me. Arkansans don't often tell people how fabulous and special they are; we leave that to Texans. If anything, I think these stories are worth telling because they deal with being a young woman finding out what she is capable of and who she wants to become. These essays focus on the struggle to find a balance between child and adult, girl and woman, observer and participant, naughty and nice, which I think many women struggle with. Also, there will be jokes. No one dies in these essays. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I don't typically write that kind of essay. Just as I had to find a balance in the extremes of my personality, I also seek to find the right mix of comedy and drama. Ultimately, I think humor works best when it has aspects of seriousness and there is something at stake. During the process of writing this thesis, I've read a lot more non-fiction in the form of essays, memoirs, and a book about corpses. My main influences remain Sarah Vowell and David Sedaris, not only for their use of humor but also for their conversational tone. I also read quite a bit of Dorothy Parker in college, and I still admire her ability to combine angst and venom in delightful heroic couplets. As a film and tv junkie, I am also looking at British comedies and American dramadies, which I think blend the elements of comedy and tragedy into something that is entertaining but also has a sense of purpose. I'm looking to curve out a niche somewhere between The Full Monty and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I hope you laugh, Ashley McKelvy / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2005. / March 18, 2005. / Creative Non-fiction, Essay / Includes bibliographical references. / Virgil Suarez, Professor Co-Directing Thesis; Ned Stuckey-French, Professor Co-Directing Thesis; Leigh Edwards, Committee Member.

Welcome to Century Village is a collection of short stories narrated by second and third generation Jewish Americans living in South Florida. All of the stories are told in first-person, in a distinctly Yiddish idiom. Most of the stories in the collection are about elderly Jews living in Building E of Century Village, a retirement community in Boca Raton and a world unto itself. These stories have recurring characters that are dealing with similar issues: loneliness, aging, wayward children and grandchildren, and the changing ethnic landscape of their close-knit community and of multicultural South Florida. The stories focus on the primarily Jewish milieu of Century Village, a closed world of clubhouse kibitzers, shuttle bus shoppers, and sun worshippers at the pool. It's a threatened world and a dying world, and these stories render the changing landscape of South Florida, with its shrinking older Jewish community. Since I'm in the process of transforming these Century Village stories into a novel, this thesis also includes an excerpt the opening chapter of the novel. There are four Century Village stories in this collection--with characters from one story appearing in the others--as well as the novel excerpt. The novel begins with the 2000 presidential election, and the opening is told from the point of view of Golda Rosenberg, the queen of the Century Village kibitzers and publisher of the newsletter Voice of the Village, as she goes to Temple Beth Shalom to vote. The next story, "Demitra Silverman," involves Mimi Silverman, who at the age of seventy-two inherits a "half black" great-grandchild. "The Shlemiel of Century Village" is the story of Saul Schwartz, who is trying to toughen up and stop letting the world take advantage of him, but who suddenly finds his n're do well son moving in with him and testing his resolve. Another Century Village story, "Your Own Mother," is told from the point of view of Adele Vogel, who longs for connection with her daughter, but finds that as her health deteriorates, so does the possibility for this connection. The final Century Village story, "Welcome to Century Village," involves a romance between Rose Cohen and Ray Lopez, the first gentile resident of Building E. In addition to the Century Village stories, this thesis includes two stories of third generation Jews in South Florida. "My New Motto" tells the story of a woman deciding between her Cuban handyman or giving up on men altogether, and like the Century Village stories, the voice is influenced by the patterns of Yiddish speech. "Fellow Travelers" is the story of flea market sunglass salesman Abe Levitz, whose son returns from a trip from Russia with a surprise that tests their relationship. Like the Century Village stories, these two stories of the next generation also deal with the changing cultural landscape of South Florida / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Masters of Arts. / Summer Semester, 2003. / March 25, 2003. / South Florida, Jewish Americans, Short Stories / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark Winegardner, Professor Directing Thesis; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member; Virgil Suarez, Committee Member.

Christian Milne's Simple Poems on Simple Subjects contains fifty-six poems, including autobiographical poems, fictional narratives, and songs, all created by the working-class Scottish poet who was born in Inverness in 1773. Milne's collection was published in 1805 by J. Chalmers and Co., in Aberdeen, Scotland. Little is known about the distribution of the volume, but, in the final poem in the volume, Upon Seeing the List of Subscribers to this Little Work, Milne includes the list of the volume's extensive financial supporters, consisting of 523 individual subscribers. The poems appear to be in no particularly significant order, but most of the songs and "tales" are included together while the autobiographical poems are scattered throughout the volume. Most of the poems in the volume are written in the form of pentameter couplets, tetrameter couplets, or stanzas of "common meter," or hymn meter. Milne's poetry has received little critical attention largely due to its scarcity. According to the Worldcat Database, only six copies of Milne's collection exist in libraries worldwide: Glasgow University, Harvard, New York Public Library, University of Alberta, University of Western Ontario, and University of California-Davis. The UC-Davis copy has recently been made available electronically in two databases: the open website British Women Romantic Poets, 1789-1832, sponsored by the Shields Library at UC-Davis since 1999, and the commercial database Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, issued by the Alexander Street Press in collaboration with the University of Chicago in 2002. This electronic availability of rare archival materials provided the opportunities to research Milne's work for this thesis. The one piece of published criticism on Milne's poetry to date is Bridget Keegan's introduction to Milne's collection in the Scottish Women Poets database. Milne, as revealed through her autobiographical Preface, Introductory Verses, and through her array of autobiographical poems, began life as one of ten children, her father a successful cabinet maker. Following the deaths of her mother and eight of her siblings, Milne and her father travelled by foot from Stonehaven, near Aberdeen, to Edinburgh, where the two lived, suffering through poverty and illness. Milne supported her father monetarily, by working as a servant, and emotionally, as he battled consumption and bouts of depression. Her autobiographical introductory sections, as well as her autobiographical poems, reveal a woman who describes her tumultuous past from the relative comfort and security of a seemingly happy marriage back in Aberdeen, enjoying her roles as the wife of a ship's carpenter, Patrick Milne, as the mother of four children, and her role as a writer, as well. All of her poems work together to reveal the complexities of her identity as a working-class mother, wife, and writer. In this thesis, I focus on eleven of Milne's poems and divide them into three chapters, titled, 1) Humble Confidence: Poems of Address to Members of the Upper-Classes; 2) Negotiations of Womanhood, Writing, and Self; and 3) A Scottish Briton: War, Peace, and Nationality. These three groupings specifically examine several crucial elements of Milne's poetry: her negotiation of her own gender and class identity as revealed through her addresses to other women and men, particularly those in the upper classes; her self-reflection and self-analysis as a working-class wife, mother, and writer; and her unique perspective on war, peace, nation and empire as a working-class Scottish woman. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2004. / March 31, 2004. / Working Class / Includes bibliographical references. / Eric Walker, Professor Directing Thesis; Barry Faulk, Committee Member; Helen Burke, Committee Member.

Edith Wharton's writing exhibits an understanding of and fascination with the connections between pain and language. Her novel, Ethan Frome, is her first extended analysis of the cycle of silence and suffering into which her characters fall. She explores how these interests complicate the conflicting pressures of individual necessities and community responsibilities. She also attempts to find ways of breaking the silence of those in pain through the manipulation of physical material rather than verbal expression. World War I compels Wharton to return to the subjects she considered in her earlier novel. However, her understanding and attitude evolves as she begins to experience the awful realities of war. In Ethan Frome, she disapproves of the sacrifice of his individuality for the community, but in most of her war writing, she views the sacrifice of millions of individuals as a horrible but necessary result of the defense of France. In her fiction and nonfiction, Wharton shifts between an insightful analysis of the use of cliché to manipulate and hide the truth, to the use of cliché to describe and glorify the war. However, despite this idealization, Wharton continues to recognize the pain and suffering war caused and looks for ways for war victims to express their inner minds. She details the translation of abstract thought into physical representations, which in turn help reduce a human need. Much of her focus in her war work is on the numerous ways the process of war destroys these physical expressions, and the ways people work against the destruction of these objects. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Summer Semester, 2005. / June 22, 2005. / Pain, Language, War Writing, Elaine Scarry / Includes bibliographical references. / Leigh H. Edwards, Professor Directing Thesis; Darryl Dickson-Carr, Committee Member; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member.

The following is a collection of unconnected short stories inspired by studying the work of short fiction authors, the likes of which include (but are not limited to) Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Raymond Carver, Eudora Welty, and Jane Smiley. It is the author's intent that these stories demonstrate emphasized attention to character, setting, and the poetry of line and image. Themes throughout the enclosed include those of loss and death (both literal and emotional), romantic and platonic love, the value of objects, and the varying levels and complications of self-consciousness. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Fall Semester, 2002. / November 15, 2002. / Somewhere, Way, Stories / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark Winegardner, Professor Directing Thesis; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member; James Kimbrell, Committee Member.

"Ordinary days were best, " Donald Hall writes in his book-length elegy to his wife, Jane Kenyon, who died of leukemia. What I want my poetry to do is convey the spirituality of the ordinary, the knowledge that all the things we love are precious precisely because they are impermanent. Many of my poems express prayerfulness, though they are not religious, and indeed recount my youthful struggles with religion. Many deal with death or cancer, loss and forgiveness. My intention in this collection is to shine a light on the sadness at the core of daily delights and to illuminate the beauty of small things while preparing all the while to leave them. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Fall Semester, 2009. / October 14, 2009. / Family, Marriage, Death, Cancer, Loss / Includes bibliographical references. / Barbara Hamby, Professor Co-Directing Thesis; David Kirby, Professor Co-Directing Thesis; David Ikard, Committee Member; James Kimbrell, Committee Member.

How the Irish Ended History: Postmodern Writings of James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, and Samuel Beckett, forming a pun based on Thomas Cahill's popular book, How the Irish Saved Civilization, takes as its subject, not the monks who preserved history through scholarly diligence during the so-called Dark Ages, but three 20th Century Irish writers who, in reaction to the ideological pressures and limits of Irish nationalist forces, marry cultural representation with experimental writing with the following result: the end of history. James Joyce, Flann O'Brien (nom de plume of Brian Ó Nualláin), and Samuel Beckett interrogate and complicate the notion of the archive as that which stores and disseminates factive and fictive histories. While Joyce's Finnegans Wake, through the collapse of the real and the imaginary in the image of the museyroom (museum), formulates the cure to Stephen Dedalus's nightmare in Ulysses, history being the "nightmare from which [he is] trying to wake," O'Brien's The Third Policeman and The Dalkey Archive corrupt reality with alternative histories that recover the heretical thinking of the nonlinear. The supernatural world of The Third Policeman is, in fact, the product of a bureaucratic machine that rewrites the laws of time and space; whereas The Dalkey Archive reduces the eschatological and the catastrophic to the quotidian and the anticlimactic. Finally, Beckett contracts history into the moment of memory, complicating distinctions between excavation and invention in consciousness itself. While Krapp's Last Tape and That Time expose nostalgia as conscious, creative event, What Where and Catastrophe gesture towards a moment that has yet to be staged. Beckett's Three Novels, on the other hand, unseats the image from distinctions between recollection, imagination, and perception as it suggests a new kind of non-representational image in place of narrative subjectivity. The writings of Joyce, O'Brien, and Beckett effect critiques of conventionalized modes of historicity through discursive maneuvers. By destabilizing signifying relations, constructing systems of paradox, and complicating figures of archives, their writings produce a radical reconfiguration of historical understanding that supplants linearity with an aesthetics of simultaneity. The figure of the archive plays a central role in the historical dynamism generated by these authors' works, as it gestures beyond its function as mere repository of past events and formulates a historical sensibility that prefigures postmodern conditions / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2010. / April 30, 2010. / Molloy, Postmodernity, Irish Literary Revival, Irish History, Irish Nationalism, Postcolonial Ireland, Hyperreality, The Unnamable M, alone Dies / Includes bibliographical references. / S. E. Gontarski, Professor Directing Dissertation; William J. Cloonan, University Representative; R.M. Berry, Committee Member; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member.

A discourse on the language of James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, this thesis engages the roles of particular words in these texts for the purpose of demonstrating Joyce's later poetics. Often these words communicate their own senses, perform their own definitions, and these senses and definitions amount to the subversion of stable meaning. Ultimately these words are a part of language games and Wakean dialectics which constantly outmaneuver reader expectations while simultaneously promoting those expectations. In a manner of speaking, these texts read their readers and, for every hermeneutic a reader attempts to graft onto these texts, the texts say with a smirk, "Yes. I've thought of that already. Guess again." / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Fall Semester, 2003. / August 20, 2003. / James Joyce / Includes bibliographical references. / S. E. Gontarski, Professor Directing Thesis; R. M. Berry, Committee Member; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member.

As artist John Aubrey approaches the end of his life at the Pineywoods Resort, a late-Victorian tuberculosis sanatorium, he makes one last grasp for an enduring legacy when he latches onto Salome, a young nurse who believes she is pregnant with the child of God. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Spring Semester, 2008. / November 30, 2007. / Pineywoods Hotel, Georgia, Thomasville, Tuberculosis, Novel, Salome / Includes bibliographical references. / Sheila Ortiz-Taylor, Professor Directing Thesis; Erin Belieu, Committee Member; Robert Olen Butler, Committee Member; Meegan Kennedy Hanson, Committee Member.