My thesis, "She Had to Be Bad: The Femme Fatale as Serial Killer in 1950s American Pulp Fiction," considers the femme fatale in light of popular fiction and the characterization of female criminals in popular culture. It does not address the role of the femme fatale in film, as that has been covered extensively in many critical texts. Instead, it reviews select pulp novels of the hard-boiled genre from the 1950s in order to understand the femme fatale's role in U.S. popular fiction. Dashiell Hammett's, The Maltese Falcon (1929), Cornel Woolrich's, The Bride Wore Black (1940), Mickey Spillane's, I, the Jury (1947), and Raymond Chandler's, The Long Goodbye (1953), are examined specifically because pulp fiction and American literature in general changed drastically after World War II. Ultimately, the goal of this project is to investigate the femme fatale, who has now become a standard figure in popular culture, and to note how she begins to trouble the categories of gender and sexuality according to the new science of crime and the modern discourse of psychopathology. The femme fatale, who committed homicide, primarily for monetary gain, became the symbol of female criminality and evil. The representations of women in popular culture show criminals as antithetical to the image of female domesticity, and murderous crimes became an index for that departure. The act of committing a crime placed the perpetrator at odds with organized and lawful society. Not satisfied with simply living up to the expectations of her gender as wife and mother, the femme fatale does not disrupt contemporary expectations: she destroys. She is not different; she is deviant. This act of transgression, while against social codes, becomes sensationalized through mass media, creating a sense of pleasure through the fetishization of crime. The media obsession with killers, especially serial killers, is heightened when a woman commits homicide. The femme fatales who graced the covers of the hard-boiled fiction acted as both fantasy and nightmare to the predominately male-reading population. Ultimately, the goal of this thesis is to redeem the femme fatale from her status as a sexual object who is simply a tool of patriarchy. The significance of the femme fatale is that she occupies the role of a serial killer while cunningly concealing her criminality through the mask of domesticity. The femme fatale manipulates, maneuvers and ultimately forces her way into America's consciousness without giving up her image as a sexually independent woman. Many would say that because the femme fatale is a murderer, she cannot be a redeemable figure and offers a negative image for feminists. However, because the crimes of the femme fatale indicate her as a cold and calculating serial killer rather than as a hysteric subject that one would find in Freud, the murderous vixen actually creates a newly imagined space that had not been previous occupied by women because of outdated notions of science and criminology. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of English. / Summer Semester, 2008. / April 16, 2008. / Serial Killer, Pulp Fiction, Mickey Spillane, Frank Miller, Sin City, Hard-Boiled, Detective, Femme Fatale / Includes bibliographical references. / Christopher Shinn, Professor Directing Thesis; Barry Faulk, Committee Member; Linda Saladin-Adams, Committee Member.

The collected stories in the dissertation manuscript, The Widow Sunday, are set primarily in Mississippi, and present a south devoid of reference to contemporary culture. The south of The Widow Sunday is timeless, a microcosm where the surreal bleeds into the real, a place rife with the macabre and the taboo. The collection's concern with morbidity will, perhaps, encourage readers to align it with the 'southern gothic' tradition, or as some critics define it, the "grotesque—'the demented, the deformed, the queer'" (quoted in Donaldson 567). And yet, to call the stories in The Widow Sunday 'southern gothic' is to oversimplify a collection of fiction influenced by a diverse body of writers, from Emily Bronte to Toni Morrison to Flannery O'Connor, a collection concerned not only with atmosphere, but with obsession, and with the inexplicable lure of the macabre. Too often do we categorize southern fiction as 'southern gothic' and too often do we ignore the basic differences between the fiction of, for example, William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, or William Gay and Cormac McCarthy, each with its own particular agendas and obsessions—from the devout Catholicism of an O'Connor story to Gay's interest in the "Gothic fairy tale" (as he calls his story, "The Paperhanger"). Labeling fiction 'southern gothic'—or 'realist' or 'postmodernist' or anything else, for that matter—stamps it as "known" or "understood." But the beauty of literary fiction is that its meanings, its use of language and setting and character, can never be fully known, can never be wholly understood. And yet, critics and readers alike continue to categorize literature, perhaps because the need to understand, to figure out, is a part of our very nature. It is a need which the Gothic tradition itself has exploited for nearly three hundred years. The Gothic has always fed off our fear of the unknown—or, in other words, what we cannot categorize. Judith Halberstam, in her study Skin Shows, claims that the Gothic tradition has from its very beginning marked "a peculiarly modern preoccupation with boundaries and their collapse" (Halberstam 20). In her anthropological work Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas has further defined this blurring of boundaries as the 'impure' or "things that are interstitial, that cross the boundaries of the deep categories of a culture's conceptual scheme" (Douglas cited in Carroll 55). We can further identify the 'impure' in objects or beings if "[they are] . . . categorically incomplete, or formless" (Carroll 55). Certainly the figure of the monster itself (a figure which appears in much of the Gothic fiction of the late Victorian period) embodies this concern with "boundaries and their collapse". The monster is always a hybrid, a half-breed, a mongrel (Frankenstein's creature remains, perhaps, the most classic example—both living and dead, animate and inanimate). But this transgression, this crossing of lines, is not limited to the figure of the monster alone. It extends, in fact, to the setting, the place, and the very atmosphere in which the characters breathe. Prominent features of Gothic fiction are tumbled-down mansions, ruined castles, ominous woods, "marginal, hidden, or abandoned sites: graveyards, sewers, or old houses [. . .] environs outside of and unknown to ordinary social life" (Carroll 57). And if it is this, finally, that makes a work of fiction Gothic, then sure, we can call The Widow Sunday—and its fascination with deformities, its horned woman, its corpses, its abandoned houses and dank, deserted spaces—Gothic. We find in the book a fascination with transgression deeply rooted in the characters themselves, a fascination which theorist Julia Kristeva would call "the abject"—or, "that which does not 'respect borders, positions, rules' and which 'disturbs identity, system, order'" (Kristeva quoted in Hutchings 36). For Kristeva, the abject "also offers a source of fascination and desire, seductively drawing our attention to the limits of our selfhood even as we seek to distance ourselves from that experience" (36). In The Widow Sunday, this combination of desire and disgust emerges over and over again. Nan, the main character in "Scraps," is so inexplicably obsessed with the "impure" that she collects fingernail clippings and hair clippings, objects which, "insofar as they figure ambiguously in terms of categorical oppositions such as me/not me, inside/outside, and living/dead, serve as ready candidates for abhorrence as impure" (Hutchings 55). Milla, from the title story of the collection, finds that her very identity hinges on possessing the Widow Sunday's amputated horn. Caroline, in "The Dancing Imps of Riverfest," is so drawn to the unknown that she takes to rooting out secrets, and discovers more than she is prepared to confront. It would seem, then, that The Widow Sunday—according to the above definition of the Gothic—has been strongly influenced by the genre. But what of the southern gothic in particular? How does this more recent sub-genre factor into a long-standing tradition of Gothic fiction, and what, finally, makes a work of fiction 'southern gothic' and not simply Gothic? Its setting? No. Truman Capote, often deemed a 'southern gothic' writer, set much of his work in New York City, while Cormac McCarthy, also sometimes aligned with the genre, sets his fiction prominently in the western United States. But both of these writers are originally from the south, so perhaps this is the key? A quick scan of such southern gothic anthologies as The Surreal South answers this question, since the authors included are from all areas of the United States. It would seem, then, that one can write about, be from, or currently live in the south to be classified as 'southern gothic.' With a definition as broad as this, one wonders what common ground readers may find in the body of work we call 'southern gothic." Some identify it in the "themes of terror, death, and social interaction" ("Southern Gothic" ii.) that much of this fiction portrays. We have established, then, that for a work of fiction to be classified 'southern gothic' it must have, in some loose way, a connection with the south, and it must also include something of "terror" and morbidity and "social interaction." All of this would seem to place The Widow Sunday neatly within the southern gothic genre. The stories are not only set in the south, but are written by an author who currently lives in the south and is also from the south. And many of the stories can be analyzed in terms of "terror, death, and social interaction"—most notably "Panther Crosses Hinds County", in which the main character's morbid interest in death is placed front and center, and "Belhaven" in which the main character finds herself incapable of any 'normal' interaction with her neighbor. But the above definition of the 'southern gothic' is so broad that we could, if we tried, connect hundreds of novels and stories to the genre, many of whose authors would recoil at such a connection. Eudora Welty is a notable example. As author Susan Donaldson puts it: "considering the stereotypes and the clichés associated with Southern Gothic [. . .] it's quite understandable that Welty herself has often resisted being categorized as a writer of Southern Gothic. 'They better not call me that!' she abruptly told Alice Walker in an interview" (567). Welty's response is indicative of the problems with categorizing literature. Perhaps Welty knew that works of art should not, and often cannot, be categorized; they are too complex, too fraught with contradictions to dismiss as one genre or another. And the fact remains that all literature, from tales of courtly love in the Medieval period to the high realism of the Victorians to the modernists and postmodernists to the southern gothic, has been influenced by what has come before it. The Widow Sunday is no different. The Mississippi presented here is inspired, in part, by the obvious—Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha county and Flannery O'Connor's Georgia, fictional southern landscapes layered atop real ones. But it is also inspired by Thomas Hardy's Wessex, Emily Brontë's moors, Edith Wharton's New York and even, to some extent, Jane Austen's "little bit of ivory". And yes, as we have seen, we can read The Widow Sunday as a product of the Gothic and/or the 'southern gothic'. But better, I would argue, is to toss all categories aside and read it for what it is, a work of fiction intensely concerned with the fascination with morbidity that haunts human nature, a fascination that defies categorization because it remains, finally, universal. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2009. / April 20, 2009. / Surreal, Gothic, Southern, Fiction / Includes bibliographical references. / Robert Olen Butler, Professor Directing Dissertation; Suzanne Sinke, Outside Committee Member; Julianna Baggott, Committee Member; Barry Faulk, Committee Member.

I was working as a bookstore manager in Tucson, Arizona in 1993. It was there I first noticed the habits of bookstore patrons. Most enjoyed browsing the shelves, and they did this by choosing a book, tracing their fingers across the cover, and thumbing through pages stopping only at pictures. Very few "customers" read. Now, 2004, as a patron myself, I continue to notice these habits. Cover designs are more elaborate, more colorful, and bookstores—now combined with coffee shops—are more popular than a decade ago. This collection of stories covers a broad range of human emotion, centering on the premise that although books might seem pretty the stories therein are not, for conflict is the impetus for fiction. The interpersonal relationships studied by this thesis are varied. Leeward, The Cudgels, and Stepping Up examine familial dynamics, with the latter two concentrating on overbearing and absentee parenting, respectively. The Line and Eat to Win concern sexual relationships and philosophies. Whereas Eat to Win examines the logic of the psychopath, Truly Yours follows the thought processes of the victim. Eat to Win also scrutinizes unsavory business ethics, but this second non-pretty aspect is not enough to give the story credit for most distressing within the collection. This position is held for the last story, Leeward, which, in keeping within the theme of irony, is the most optimistic as well. At the end of this story there is hope for the protagonist. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. / Spring Semester, 2004. / April 5, 2004. / Eat to Win / Includes bibliographical references. / Robert Olen Butler, Professor Directing Thesis; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member; John Fenstermaker, Committee Member.

This thesis is a collection of four stories. All the stories are set in India and have women characters as the main protagonists. The stories are about ordinary lives that are neither particularly admirable nor particularly depraved, but all the characters live through and survive experiences that change and haunt them forever. A Vision of the Mahatma is the story of a marriage between Roshini, a young woman, who does not have an inner vision about her place or purpose in this world, and John who claims to have had a vision of Mahatma Gandhi which changes the focus of his life. John wants to give up job and wife in the pursuit of a solution to India's problem of widespread poverty. Their moral power struggle ends when John gently but stubbornly insists on setting up an ashram in rural India leaving Roshini to face a future that promises to be bleak. Five Hundred Acres of Rubber is the story of Asha, a woman, who finds her life in rural India dreary and monotonous. She yearns for life in a city, is fascinated by America and believes that her salvation lies in an arranged marriage to someone/anyone with a job in USA. Asha's family has its share of pain and cruelty, love and loneliness, security and insecurity, and it is against this backdrop that the process of arranging Asha's marriage takes place. Nectar of Kochi is the story of a young girl who is growing up as an only child of devoted but rather insensitive parents in a Indian city. The conflict in this story moves and shifts from one between the narrator and her father who is over-ambitious for her, to one between the narrator and her mother. The narrator observes her mother's adultery even while she, as an adolescent, is growing into sexual awareness. In Nice Virgin Girl another young protagonist is terrified to discover herself pregnant. The fifteen-year old Angelique is torn between several things – between wanting to keep her baby and the shame of revealing her pregnancy, between constantly squabbling parents, and between the traditional Indian culture and the global culture that she accesses through Television. Angelique's mother forces an abortion on her, and Angelique is devastated when she learns that her boyfriend approves of the abortion. The story ends with her realizing that there are unforgivable things in the world just as there are irreversible actions -- like pregnancy and abortion. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in English. / Fall Semester, 2002. / August 30, 2002. / Stories, Vision, Mahatma / Includes bibliographical references. / Janet Burroway, Professor Directing Thesis; Wendy Bishop, Committee Member; Hunt Hawkins, Committee Member.

Chinua Achebe has remarked "that the English language will be able to carry the weight of [his] African experience" (103). However, he warns that "it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings" (103). This project examines the ways in which twentieth-century Caribbean poets, Una Marson (1905-1965 ), Eric Roach (1915-1974) and Claude McKay (1889-1948) "alter" Renaissance forms and poetics in order to suit their own subversive objectives. Each poet demonstrates that their use of certain Renaissance forms sufficiently shoulders the burden of their unique Caribbean "experience" while simultaneously challenging social injustices. Therefore, by appropriating forms traditionally associated with whiteness and privilege, the poets defy socially-constructed notions of authenticity and point to the revolutionary potential of language. Nevertheless, due to their choice of literary form, each poet has been marginalized to some degree. This project is partly a recuperative effort to restore these poets within their rightful place in the Caribbean poetic canon. Through their poetic output, Marson, Roach and McKay reinforce the need for post-colonial scholars to create alternative theories that will account for the complexity of not only their work, but the work of similar Caribbean poets as well. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2005. / April 4, 2005. / Identity, Sonnet, Renaissance, Poets, Caribbean, Harlem Renaissance / Includes bibliographical references. / Daniel Vitkus, Professor Directing Thesis; Jerrilyn McGregory, Committee Member; Bruce Boehrer, Committee Member.

This dissertation compiles poems written between 1996 and 2004. Most were composed in 2003 and 2004 employing surrealist generative methods such as automatic writing and textual cut-up improvisations. The collection is divided into four main parts: Flow and Flux, Going Back, Crepuscular, and Within. Generally speaking, the first and third sections attempt to present a state of mind or world view, whereas the second and fourth represent, respectively, a backward-looking and a progressive poetics. Overall, the dissertation attempts to give a fair summation of the author's career as a poet. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2004. / August 4, 2004. / Going Back, Flow and Flux, Crepuscular / Includes bibliographical references. / David Kirby, Professor Directing Dissertation; Ernest Rehder, Outside Committee Member; Sheila Ortiz-Taylor, Committee Member; Eugene Crook, Committee Member.

This dissertation examines the importance of female friendship alliances in Shakespeare's plays and how such alliances affect those engaged in them as well as the community around them. Their value to individuals and to the broader community is demonstrated both by the presence of supportive interrelationships and by their absence. Focusing on A Comedy of Errors, The Winter's Tale, Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, I seek to reread and reappropriate Shakespeare as a proponent of women's affiliative groups and communities of women. In these plays, positive female alliances have an affirmative effect on the community around them; negative female alliances or females isolated from female friends or supportive female family structures, do not fare well, nor does their immediate community. My methodology is both feminist, in which I rely on the recent critical theories of Phyllis Rackin, among others, and psychological using the insights of Shelley Taylor and her research on the overall health insured by female friendships. While much recent literary criticism of Shakespeare has been relatively silent on Shakespeare's privileging of women in community, contemporary directors of Shakespeare's plays have not. I will therefore examine some of the ways that modern productions of Shakespeare have brought these elements of Shakespeare's work to the forefront as well as, in some cases, offering suggestions for bringing these issues to life on the stage. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2008. / November 5, 2008. / Shakespeare, Community, Women Female, Friendship, Alliance, Bonding, Sisterhood, Shelley Taylor / Includes bibliographical references. / Karen Laughlin, Professor Directing Dissertation; Mary Karen Dahl, Outside Committee Member; Fred Standley, Committee Member; Jim O’Rourke, Committee Member.

This study is an attempt to provide a new alternative to understanding the way that motherhood and the mother-daughter relationship is drawn and conceptualized in Caribbean Women's Writing in relationship to propertied relationships that concern land ownership and the female body. I argue that by invoking the metaphysical powers of the ibeji, the Yoruba belief that twins are spirit children that possess certain powers, we are provided with a new understanding of motherhood and are fully able to comprehend the complexities that motherhood and the mother-daughter relationship entail in relation to the material world. In the selected works, the ibeji serve as a catalyst to spur the women of the texts to restructure Caribbean constructions of the propertied relationships dealing specifically with the land and the female body, as well as to create a new space forged through the possibilities of diaspora that will allow for an alternative space of materiality that has not yet been determined. Thus, the way motherhood and twins intersect is that they bring into dialogue the manner which slavery in the Caribbean was constructed around various propertied relationships such as those of land and body. The authors and text understudy are unique in that they seek to recover and refurbish the Yoruba belief in the ibeji as a means of reconstructing motherhood by overturning and subverting propertied relationships that have been maintained even after the abolishment of slavery and through epochs of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and revolution in the Caribbean. Elizabeth Nunez-Harrell, in her novel When Rocks Dance, seeks to recover authenticity of the African beliefs in the ibeji to propose a new propertied relationship to the land for Afro-Caribbean women by supplanting Western economic power with that of an African pro-creative power. Edwidge Danticat's use of the ibeji in Breath, Eyes, Memory, serves as a connection between mother and daughter and the United States and Haiti that must be reconfigured for the women of Haiti to reclaim ownership of the female body and black female sexuality. In Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban, the ibeji represent the need to create a third space free from socialist model of Cuba as well as the imperialist model of the United States. Rather, a more broadly defined space in diaspora, that is yet to be determined, must be created and allowed to exist outside of the confinements of domesticity. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2005. / April 1, 2005. / Caribbean Women's Writing, Ibeji, Twins, Motherhood / Includes bibliographical references. / Christopher Shinn, Professor Directing Thesis; Jerrilyn McGregory, Committee Member; Candace Ward, Committee Member; Darryl Dickson-Carr, Committee Member.

The poems in this manuscript attempt to navigate the realm between dream states and reality, or between this life and the next; at the same time, they are often obsessed with locating a balance between lyric and narrative, between image and music, and between faith and desire. Despite references to the afterlife, the poems are concerned with this world (its fragile beauty) and the body in this world. They trace one journey through a lush, but also dangerous, landscape. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2003. / July 14, 2003. / Poetry / Includes bibliographical references. / David Kirby, Professor Directing Dissertation; Mark Pietralunga, Outside Committee Member; Hunt Hawkins, Committee Member; James Kimbrell, Committee Member; Sheila Ortiz-Taylor, Committee Member.

The land of ancient Egypt, as with most ancient cultures, was described in terms of its fertility, flooding, and available fresh water. The fertile flood plains of the Nile and the Delta that begins at Giza and Cairo was called Kemet, meaning the black land. The harsh landscape of the Sahara that surrounds the Nile valley was call Deshret, or the red land. The ancient Egyptians referred to themselves as remt-en-Kemet. The story of the ancient kingdoms of Egypt is the story of the various kings' untiring and mostly fruitless efforts to unite these two kingdoms, these two worlds, the find the third land. It is also well known that the ancient Egyptians had some very definite ideas about the afterlife, and the separation of those two worlds. However, the multiple and ever-changing pantheon of gods, and the kings and great pharaohs (along with a few Queens) were able to exist simultaneously in the two lands at once; to live in the third land. In this novel, Dr Walter Rothschild is one of the premier Egyptologists and cryptographers in the world, working at the British Museum in London. His assignment is to crack the Stela of Paser, a real work that has stymied translators for centuries, a cryptographic puzzle that dangles the possibility of a third way of reading it. This turns out to be a possible key to not only discovering a new way of understanding the ancient Egyptians, but also offers strange glimpses at history, time, and space, and regret; ultimately how we all seek the third way, and how this search can defeat or liberate us. / A Dissertation submitted to the English Department in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2003. / March 29, 2003. / Cryptographers, Stela of Paser, Egyptologists / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark Winegardner, Professor Directing Dissertation; Leon Golden, Outside Committee Member; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member; Anne Rowe, Committee Member.