This thesis examines the constructions of madness and hysteria as diagnoses used to subjugate the protagonists in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. In juxtaposing these texts, themes including “lone womanhood” surface to identify both protagonists’ means for liberation from patriarchal and colonialist oppression. While for Edna of The Awakening, liberation from the hysteria diagnosis comes through bodily sovereignty, A Question of Power’s Elizabeth is freed from the madness rendering by reclaiming her mental interiority.

This thesis seeks to account for Edgar Allan Poe's reception as an "American" author. Historically, it took time for Poe to become recognized as an American author rather than as an author who happened to also be American. This thesis argues that one major reason for this problem is that the American influences of his work are largely coded, but that Poe nevertheless was writing for an American audience and that his work did develop in response to national influences.

This article seeks to establish the importance of gothic convention and architecture’s role in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Southworth’s The Hidden Hand. By examining these stories’ dualities this article analyzes Poe and Southworth’s projects behind setting up dual spaces. Specific to Poe, this article follows architecture’s effect on mental health. Specific to Southworth, this article investigates her criticism of binaries and convention and how she uses architecture to shape her analysis.

The study is divided into four parts, the first three having to do with the family and the last with work. The first section outlines the relationships of family members, including their attitudes toward themselves, toward each other, and toward society. The next two have to do with “Responsibility” as viewed by the family, and the need for “Stability” within the home and outside it. The final section examines the jobs held by Miller’s characters, their attitudes toward those jobs, and the extent to which an occupation helps to influence the characters and their familial relationships. A close discussion of the family contains, of necessity, a great deal about the jobs held by the family group, so the “work” chapter is to a large extent a correlation and summary of evidence already given. It is hoped that an examination of this sort will lead to a better understanding of the philosophical position from which Arthur Miller wrote his family plays.

The purpose of this thesis is to establish a foundation built on the congruencies between Margaret Fuller’s feminist theory and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction, with the aim of addressing two major points: first, the implications of universalizing gender in the context of identity politics; and second, to show how gender universality is challenged within Hawthorne’s fiction and Fuller’s prose. Given that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s characters depict a range of personal variability, the act of synthesizing Margaret Fuller’s feminist theory with Hawthorne’s fiction functions to link the personal with the political. The overall goal of this study is to substantiate both writers within a feminist discourse and further, as contributory in the fight for gender equality.

A study of any one of Herman Melville’s works is bound to be a fascinating and informative venture. Within the products of his prolific writing career are keen, precise, enlightening observations about nineteenth-century America. Religion, politics, business, literature, and philosophy are all within the realm of Melville’s careful consideration. Melville was a man who reacted to his world with intense curiosity and passion. Melville was also extremely introspective – searching, questioning, and examining himself with equal intensity. “Bartleby the Scrivener” offers an interesting synthesis of Melville’s double vision. Within the confines of this tale are Melville’s reaction to his world and his reaction to himself. The purpose of this study is to examine the kaleidoscopic perspective of Melville, the complexity of his world and mind. Examining Bartleby as a simple man, a superman, and the artist in society acknowledges the complexity of Melville’s mind and art and furthers understanding of this particular story, Melville’s others works and Melville himself. Most scholarly considerations of “Bartleby” have centered on one perspective to the exclusion of all others; to do so is a violation of Melville’s purpose, plan and message. Bartleby is, first of all, considered as a simple man, a fictitious character in a story in relation to other fictitious characters. At this level it is possible to understand how Melville used the basic elements of fiction in his story to show the broad literary motifs with which he was concerned. Within the second level of consideration Bartleby is seen as one of Melville’s supermen, a man who by virtue of his tragic vision, isolated existence, and nonmaterialistic mindset rises above the superficiality, pettiness, and mundane nature of the common man. At the third and final level Bartleby is considered as the artist in society. The autobiographical element in this consideration is extensive. Melville depicts the plight of himself and all creative individuals in modern capitalistic societies, contending that the artist is partially responsible for the intellectual salvation of the common man. The artist’s purpose or quest is to enlighten the understanding of simple men, to help them see the complexity and darkness of reality. Such enlightenment makes supermen out of simple men. An examination of “Bartleby” at these three levels provides an extensive but not exhaustive analysis of Melville’s story. There are finer shades of meaning and more intricate nuances of thought within the story. The purpose of considering Bartleby as simple man, superman, and artist is to understand the processes of Melville’s mind, the essentials of his thought, and the recurrent patterns of imagery and allusions in his literature. It is to identify the most essential specific themes and ideas in the story and to minimize its complexity and obscurity without sacrificing the richness and depth of Melville’s thought. The study is an attempt to understand and meet Melville as far as possible on his own terms.

Ursula K. Le Guin uses dark and light imagery to emphasize her theme of dynamic equilibrium. This theme can be found throughout her work; the novels discussed are The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, and The Beginning Place. In each novel, Le Guin focuses on a different aspect of dynamic equilibrium. The themes are respectively, gender identity, chaos and order, and the individual versus the community. The final novel, The Beginning Place, unites and sums up all three themes. In each novel, one or more main characters suffers from imbalance that reflects the theme of the novel. Throughout the course of the novel, the character learns to find balance, thus resolving the issues that Le Guin discusses.

This thesis explores regionalism as a fictional genre and Willa Cather's experimentations and innovations in her 1918 novel My Ántonia. In it I argue that Cather employs what I will be calling reciprocal regionalism, which expands upon the regionalist relationship between the land and the characters in the story. In My Ántonia and later novels of Cather's, reciprocal regionalism functions in how characters survive, prosper, or perish in the region; the relationship needs to be fluid and adaptable. Using regionalist criticism and close textual analysis of Willa Cather's novels, essays, and letters, I argue that Cather believes in an inherent essentialist relationship between the artist and the muse, the character, and the region. When the relationship falters and fails, the art and the character dies. Furthermore, Cather's commissioning of illustrations for the novel by W.T. Benda illustrate that the relationship between material and personal experience is foremost in truthful representation. This thesis aims to fill a gap in Cather criticism that has so far neglected in studying Cather's fourth novel My Ántonia as a regionalist text, while also exploring how Cather served as an intermediary and experimenter in a rather traditional female written form by questioning its place in the literary canon and revising it as a modernist author.

Scholars and literary enthusiasts have struggled for decades to account for editor Maxwell Perkins’s unparalleled success in facilitating the careers of many of the early twentieth century’s most enduring and profitable writers, among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. This study seeks to penetrate that mystery by dissecting Perkins’s editorial practice and examining how he navigated the competing tensions between commercial success and aesthetic integrity in various circumstances. At play in the construction of his literary legacy are prevailing perceptions of authorship, complex interpersonal relationships, and the inherent battle between art and commerce. Focusing on his day-to-day activities, it is apparent that Perkins was guided by a unique editorial double vision—the propensity to appreciate the aesthetic experience while retaining the critical detachment necessary to appraise a literary work from a commercial standpoint—when solving the paradoxical dilemmas inherent in modern publishing.

To illustrate Melville’s navigation of editorial politics in the periodical marketplace, this study analyzes two stories Melville published in Putnam’s in order to reconstruct the particular historical, editorial, social, and political contexts of these writings. The first text examined in this study is “Bartleby,” published in Putnam’s in November and December of 1853. This reading recovers overtures of sociability and indexes formal appropriations of established popular genres in order to develop an interpretive framework. Throughout this analysis, an examination of the narrator’s ideological bearings in relation to the unsystematic implementation of these ideologies in American public life sets forth a set of interrelated social and political contexts. Melville’s navigation of these contexts demonstrates specific compositional maneuverings in order to tend to the expectations of a popular readership but also to challenge ideological norms. Israel Potter, Herman Melville’s eighth book-length novel, serialized in Putnam’s from July of 1854 to March of 1855, is the focus of the second case study. This study tracks Melville’s engagements and disengagements with a variety of source materials and positions these compositional shifts amid contemporaneous political ideologies, populist histories, middle-class values, audience expectations, and editorial politics. This study will demonstrate that Melville set out to craft texts for a popular readership; however, Melville, struggling to recuperate his damaged credentials, seasoned by demoralizing business dealings, his ambitions attenuated by the realities of the literary marketplace, undertook the hard task of self-editing his works to satisfy his aspirations, circumvent editorial politics, and meet audience expectations.