This thesis examines both historical and fictional representations of interracial relationships in the 18th century. My argument in this project is two-fold. First, I argue that some black women used sexual relationships with white men to gain advantages for themselves and their fellow slaves. Second, I argue that novelists of the time period re-wrote history in an attempt to erase the positive aspects of miscegenation. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2007. / Date of Defense: June 8, 2007. / Miscegenation, Slavery, Caribbean, John Stedman, Mary Prince, Aphra Behn / Includes bibliographical references. / Candace Ward, Professor Directing Thesis; Jerrilyn McGregory, Committee Member; Amit Rai, Committee Member.

Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s 1905 novel, The Clansman, was an instant bestseller and its subsequent theater version toured the nation for five years. The novel and play later became the basis for the full-length motion picture and box-office smash, The Birth of a Nation (1915). Dixon's story, despite its gross historical inaccuracies, served as a popular history of Reconstruction, echoing contemporary academic prejudices and reinforcing the codes of white masculinity and racial supremacy that had come under question at the turn of the twentieth century. This process of re-visioning history to validate popular prejudices is key to understanding the creation and success of Dixon's most famous—and notorious—contribution to American culture. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2003. / Date of Defense: March 5, 2003. / Revisionism, Reconstruction, Birth / Includes bibliographical references. / Bruce Bickley, Professor Directing Thesis; Dennis Moore, Committee Member; Mark Winegardner, Committee Member; Elna Green, Committee Member.

Jane Austen's use of disease in her novels is crucial to the interpretation of her work. The most current Austen scholarship continues to debate her political leanings and motivations. John Wiltshire sees an important link between illness and the fate of women in Austen's novels. This means that the instances of disease in Austen are significant to the interpretation of gender politics in eighteenth and nineteenth century England. It is important to pay attention to indisposed women in Austen for this very reason. Illness in general, and especially feigned illness, can be seen as a source of power for women, a means used by female characters in Austen to exert control over their own lives through subversive means. Disease in Austen's novels also serves to reflect the morals of her characters in the midst of a changing cultural landscape. Another critic, Mary Poovey, observes that proper morality was in a state of fluctuation during Jane Austen's life, and her writings mirror this uncertainty. Many female authors before Austen reinforced the traditional role of women in society, but Austen's ambiguity of tone and varying treatment of her heroines calls her political positions into question. In this thesis, I seek to explore the unexamined area where the readings of Wiltshire and Poovey potentially overlap. I hope to build a bridge between Wiltshire's study of the body and Poovey's examination of female propriety. Firstly, I examine instances in Austen's novels of men and women who are punished or reformed by disease. I find that the narratives are not set up in such a way that Austen is condemning all supposedly improper behavior. Often the women who are punished, for example, Marianne Dashwood, are the more favorably depicted characters. At other times, those who are reformed disappear from the narrative, so that the reader cannot tell whether the behavioral changes are permanent. To bring the role of disease into sharper focus, I next look into another of its aspects, the more visible role of invalids and hypochondriacs. In Jane Austen's works, hypochondriacs and invalids serve as examples of men and women who use disease to subvert their social roles. Some succeed while others fail. Why? Does Austen see danger in subversive behavior, or is she simply reflecting some of the values of her time? In order to try to resolve these questions, my last section examines how healthy characters are depicted in Austen's novels. In the end, I conclude that unlimited behavioral freedom, especially for women, is problematic. In order to find physical and social health within the society of Austen's time, women need to have a degree of physical and intellectual in order to be more productive members of society. The healthiest women have a proper man to help guide them, but that isn't to say that men should be in full control. The healthiest men need female guidance, too. Perhaps this is Austen's way of trying to increase female freedom without overturning the patriarchal order altogether. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2007. / Date of Defense: March 26, 2007. / Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Emma, Mansfield Park, Sanditon / Includes bibliographical references. / Eric Walker, Professor Directing Thesis; Margaret Kennedy Hanson, Committee Member; Candace Ward, Committee Member.

"Let's take for granted that the notion of eternal return is utterly true," writes Will Duncan, from prison, as he finally reveals his embarrassing secret to the reader: his earnest belief that his cousin, the infamous Paul Duncan, is the actual, living reincarnation of Jesse James. Of course, Will explains, this theory is less crazy by degrees, in his eyes, while he serves time for helping his cousin rob the first National Bank of MaxMart (the largest retailer in the world) on the day of its grand opening. Will Duncan's narrative serves as the first official biography of his cousin, who did in fact become famous briefly before he died. The novel begins on the day of Paul's return to his hometown of Josephine, Arkansas, after a four-year absence. He initially fled on the eve of his trial for vehicular manslaughter; when he and Will were twenty, they were in a car crash which resulted in the death of the driver of the other car. After Paul comes home, Will attempts to reconcile with his cousin and former best friend. However, Paul has changed drastically. For instance, he carries a pistol. He is also furious to learn that MaxMart has built a sprawling distribution center on the land which he thought he would one day inherit from his father. The two boys go on a road trip to California, from which Will never truly returns. Meanwhile, Ed Brantley, an FBI agent in Little Rock and a law school buddy of Will's father (a local judge), recognizes a mug shot and travels to Josephine just in time to cross paths with the boys. The boys escape to Houston, where Paul has two friends: Jackson Thibodeaux and Victoria Sanchez. While hiding out, Will learns of Paul's four years away, which he offers as a narrative that comprises Book II. In it, Will tells of Paul's initial escape from Josephine at twenty-years old and his struggle to survive and avoid capture. Paul bounces around from a suburban drug house in central Arkansas to New Orleans, where he meets Thibodeaux and Victoria, to New York, where he entertains wild ideas of becoming a successful businessman using a fraudulent resume, and finally to Ohio, where Paul finally extinguishes any hope for living a life he could be proud of. In Ohio, Paul resorts to sticking up a gas station, halfway hoping to get caught. But it works. No longer afraid of much, including what becomes of him, he goes home because his father has been diagnosed with cancer. After simmering in Houston for months, Paul finally initiates his plan for revenge against MaxMart by assaulting delivery trucks, the big eighteen wheelers, on the highway after they leave the distribution center built on his father's former land. Thibodeaux helps, following Paul's leadership and promises of money coming soon. Will feels as though he's stepped onto quicksand. Without lifting a finger, the newspapers are including him as a suspect in everything Paul does. Eventually, he throws up his hands and joins in. And MaxMart decides to open their first bank. By this time, the boys have garnered a huge amount of attention from both law enforcement and the media. However, instead of being universally condemned, many in the community—and nationally as well—support them, or at least support the sentiment of the slogan they mark on every truck they hit: DESTROY MAXMART. Interspersed through Book III is the narrative of Maxwell Foster, MaxMart's founder. Will tells his own version of the now famous story of how Foster rose up through the ranks of retail by relentless effort and business acumen. Fueled by the principle of overstocking and underselling, his MaxMart franchise became the biggest company in the retail industry, and then eventually, around the turn of the century, the largest single employer in the world. At the beginning of the narrative, Max Foster has recently stepped down as CEO after more than fifty years. Without his guidance and ties to the Arkansas community, the current Board of Directors of MaxMart begin a push for a new direction: to move the company out of Arkansas. This decision is the catalyst for those who do not wish to condemn the crimes of Paul and Will and their gang. The Return of Paul Duncan is an investigation, not of the American Dream, but of those who seek it out. It is about the distinctly American mythology of the self-made, the Horatio Alger figure, and the idea that people who become the subjects of myths and legends are ultimately unknowable. It is dark, occasionally violent, and often funny. Will uses the life and outlandish success of Maxwell Foster to contrast against the frustrated, unrealistic, and persistently failed ambitions of Paul Duncan. Also for contrast is a young hip-hop artist from Memphis who crosses paths with Paul a couple of times, and, of course, the life of Jesse James, which is analogous to the life of Paul Duncan in very specific ways, except that Paul never made very much money. And as Foster states in his biography, "making money is the nucleus, the very heart of the American Dream, the radius point of your life from which all other points are measured." / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2009. / Date of Defense: May 26, 2009. / Fiction, Crime / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark Winegardner, Professor Directing Thesis; Julianna Baggott, Committee Member; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member.

Black-white encounter

V.S.Naipaul: The Novelist

Why has popular culture, right-wing political groups, and numerous editorialists assumed that J.R.R. Tolkiens Middle-earth promotes a racialized universe? Did Tolkien, by situating his various characters as races, indicate that within Middle-earth he had created an essentialized structure of difference between peoples? Decoding the ideology of Tolkiens Middle-earth is the work of this paper, and untangling this discourse will supply us with an understanding of the impact and importance of race as it resonates with readers. This paper treats the literary landscape of Middle-earth as analytical space, and this literary analysis is informed by anthropological concepts and methods complimented by the context of Tolkiens historical moment. Discovering these ethnographic representations of the various humanoid characters in Middle-earth allows me to establish the degree to which these depictions contribute to a racialized and racist understanding of Middle-earth. As the greatest impact of Tolkiens work has resulted predominantly from the popularity of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, these are the texts used to question Tolkiens racial message. Tolkien did not ostensibly implant in Middle-earth a racist microcosm of the world. Through close readings, this paper reads the hierarchical structure of Middle-earth as a dialogic space, where even as Tolkien uses racial generalizations he undercuts these assumptions through the plasticity of his characters and their interactions. Middle-earths characters dialogize such racial issues as miscegenation, literary representations of blackness, colonization, and pluralism as its actors explore the tensions inherent in these issues. Thus, while initially Tolkien seems to engage race only as a descriptive tool, he does not freeze these descriptions of difference. Rather, Tolkien uses his characters own flawed racial assumptions to highlight the illogicity of such conjectures. By providing a dialogic racial space, Middle-earth is especially valid for demonstrating the work needed for understanding and respecting cultural difference.

Thesis (M.A.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in English Literature."

Thesis (M.A.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in English Literature."

Thesis (M.A.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in English Literature."