This thesis explores Atwood's depiction of gender in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. In an interview from 1972, Margaret Atwood spoke on survival: "People see two alternatives. You can be part of the machine or you can be something that gets run over by it. And I think there has to be a third thing." I assert that Atwood depicts this "third thing" through her characters who navigate between the binaries of "masculine" and "feminine" in a third realm of gender. As the female characters—regardless of their passive or aggressive behavior—engage in a quest for agency, they must overcome bodily limitations. Oryx—the quintessential problematic, oppressed feminine figure—and Ren are both associated with sex as they are passed from man to man throughout their lives. Furthermore, as other females (namely, Amanda and Toby) adopt masculine traits associated with power in an attempt at self-preservation both before and after the waterless flood, men in the novels strive to subvert this power through rape to remind these women of their confinement within their physical bodies and to reinstitute the binary gender system. The men also span the gender continuum, with Crake representing the masculine "machine" and Jimmy gravitating toward the feminine victim. Crake, who seems to live life uninhibited from his body, appears to escape the bodily confinements that the women experience, while Jimmy's relationship to his body is more complex. As Jimmy competes to "out-masculinize" Crake, and Amanda and Toby struggle to avoid both identification with and demolition by the machine, readers of the novels are invited to think beyond the "machinery" of gender norms to consider gender as a continuum instead of a dualistic factor.

"If a man's work is to be of value the best of him must be in it," wrote George Meredith to Mrs. J. B. Gilman of Concord, Massachusetts. To this credo he subscribed during this long career as a writer. The rare gifts of a richly endowed nature he brought to his work, for he was a philosopher, a poet, a humorist, and a subtle psychologist. The characters he created in his novels add much to his merit as a writer and it is with the delineation of certain of these characters and their prototypes in actual life, that I propose to deal.

In his general plan for Tender Is The Night, Fitzgerald delineates Dick Diver as "a natural idealist, a spoiled priets, givin in for various causes to the idea of the haute bourgeoise [sic] and ih his rise to the top of the social world losing his idealism, his talent and turning to drink and dissipation."1 The rise and fall of Dick Diver is the central concern of Tender Is The Night, and an analysis of the novel reveals that Fitzgerald meticulously arranged the details of Diver's intricate destiny. Many readers of the novel, however, were unable to understand the reasons for Dick's ruin, and there was much negative criticism of Dick's characterization shortly after the novel was published.2

It will be the purpose of this study to begin such a consideration by treating but one aspect of Hemingway’s art, that of the relationship between Hemingway’s view of the world, as seen in his short stories, and the diction he uses to create this fictional world. In effect, the problem resolves itself around these three basic questions: (1) What is the world like that Hemingway creates in his short stories?; (2) What is the diction like that he uses to portray this world?; and finally and most importantly, (3) How well suited is the diction for revealing Hemingway’s fictional world? I.e., is there an organic relationship between this basic element of style and vision.

The cultural productions of Katherine Anne Porter, Anita Brenner, Tina Modotti, Maria Izquierdo, and Juanita Guccione represent a distinctive interweaving of gender and class consciousness, national identification and political resistance, as represented in their artistic work. These five women became transnational carriers of a radical realist and modernist thought, culture, and ideology that became transported through their art when their gendered and classed bodies were left otherwise silenced and boundaried. These women, their cultural productions, and the ways in which their art generates a counter discourse to the dominant and institutionalized conceptions of transculturalism, aesthetics, and re-production, are vital to understanding the co-construction of nationhood as well as the self-determined creation of the individual self. From this overarching framework, I will explore how these women negotiated political conceptions of nationhood, artistic genres such as realism and modernism, and then created their own feminist, transcultural and working-class aesthetics to counter otherwise limited conceptions of individual agency.

An interdisciplinary study of women satirists of the Progressive and Jazz eras, the dissertation investigates the ways in which early modernist writers use the satiric mode either as an elitist mask or as a site of resistance, confronts the theoretical limitations that have marginalized women satirists in the academic arena, and points to the destabilizing, democratic potential inherent in satiric discourse. In the first chapter, I introduce the concept of signifying caricature, an exaggerated characterization that carries with it broad social, political, and cultural critique. Edith Wharton uses a signifying caricature in The Custom of the Country where the popular press, middlebrow literature, and the democratization of language is under attack. Several of Wharton’s satiric stories also ridicule the New Woman, revealing Wharton’s anxiety over women functioning in the public arena. The second chapter features recovery work of May Isabel Fisk, an internationally known comic monologist whose work has been lost to scholars. This chapter examines Fisk’s monologues, paying particular attention to her use of the eiron and alazon comic figures. The dissertation then moves on to Dorothy Parker’s biting satires of Jazz era decadence, the sexual double standard, and the oppressive norms of feminine beauty promoted in mass culture. The study concludes with an analysis of Jessie Fauset’s Comedy: American Style, a novel using a signifying caricature to chastise America’s failed racial policies and an essentialist theory of race. Comedy: American Style is an overlooked Depression era satire that challenges notions of a fixed American cultural nationalism even as it presages the idea of race as a floating signifier.

This thesis explores the women editors of Indigenous magazines published in the beginning of the twentieth century. This thesis will focus on how Indigenous writers influenced modernism, and how these writings offer ways to explore modernism in different contexts. Specifically looking at the Aboriginal Edition of Poetry magazine (1917), Twin Territories (1899), and Tributes to a Vanishing Race (1916) and the women who were involved in the editing and publication of these texts reveal how modernism was influenced by Indigenous writings. By looking at a comparison between what modernism considered to be Indigenous at the time in Poetry which is edited by and includes poems written by Harriet Monroe, Alice Corbin Henderson, Mary Austin, and Constance Lindsay Skinner, I look at the background and intentions of these non-indigenous women and their deep fascinations with sharing what they considered to be Indigenous poetry with the world in Poetry. Chapter One on Poetry: Aboriginal Edition and investigates some of the problematic issues that arose from these seemingly well- intentioned women, who wanted to share their love of Indigenous writings with a larger audience, but just appropriated and published stereotyped versions of poems they themselves wrote which were "influenced" by Indigenous writings. Chapter Two compares Poetry with books published by Indigenous women with poems written by Indigenous authors as provided by Twin Territories, edited by Ora Eddleman Reed and Tributes to a Vanishing Race, a book of Indigenous poems edited by Irene Campbell Beaulieu and Kathleen Woodward. This highlights the accomplishments of women such as Ora Eddleman Reed, Irene Campbell Beaulieu, and Kathleen Woodward, who published poems and other Indigenous writings written by Indigenous authors for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations across the nation. Twin Territories and Tributes to a Vanishing Race provide examples of Indigenous modernism, as modernism was just beginning to form.

In 1780, during the final leg of the American Revolutionary War, Esther Reed penned the broadside “Sentiments of an American Woman.” It circulated in Philadelphia, persuading citizens to turn over their last dollars to the cause. Reed’s broadside called to action the women of Philadelphia; they knocked on doors, campaigned with words, and stepped firmly into the “man’s world” of politics and revolution. Reed’s words were so effective that women in cities across the colonies took to raising money as well. Using New Historicist and feminist reading strategies, this study compares and contrasts Reed’s rhetoric to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, another revolutionary propaganda piece of the era. I argue that the two pieces differ in key aspects due to Paine’s existence in the public sphere and Reed’s in the private. From her position in the private sphere, Reed was able to produce a provocative piece of rhetoric that stands out against other female literature at the time.

T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are two of the most prominent figures of Anglo-American modernist poetry, both having played central roles in the development of a distinct poetic style and atmosphere in the early 20th century by means of their publishing and editing the work of other poets as well as publishing their own poetry. However, Eliot and Pound have an interest in the classical world that is not clearly shared with the majority of other modernist poets, and this interest distinguishes the sense of "modernism" that Eliot and Pound promoted from that of other major modernists like William Carlos Williams. The general notion of modernism representing a radical break from tradition is, in the works of Eliot and Pound, not at all obvious despite the two poets' shared status at the forefront of Anglo-American modernist poetry. This thesis explores the aesthetic theories that Eliot and Pound describe in their prose works and compares them with the aesthetic theories of other modernist poets to illustrate how Eliot and Pound appreciate the past, and in particular the classical world, in ways that other modernists simply do not.

This thesis aims to explore and evaluate the traumatic space of Denver in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Currently, a lack of critical discourse exists to link together Denver, trauma, and theories of spatiality. This thesis evaluates three types of trauma that inform and develop Denver's traumatic space: direct, indirect, and insidious trauma. Paired with spatial theories, the origins of Denver's trauma are mapped throughout the various places of the novel. The result of this analysis reveals a complex and layered traumatic space, with lasting ramifications on Denver's sense of safety, identity, and stability in a post-slavery United States.