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This study explores the role of learning and education in American historical fiction written in the 1820s. The United States has been, and still is, commonly considered to be hostile to scholarly learning. In novels and short stories of the 1820s, however, learning and education are recurrent themes, and this dissertation shows that the attitudes to these issues are more ambivalent than hitherto acknowledged. The 1820s was a period characterized by a political struggle, expressed as a battle between intellectuals, represented by the sitting president, John Quincy Adams, a Harvard professor, and anti-intellectuals, headed by the war hero Andrew Jackson. The battle over the place of scholarly learning in the U.S. was played out not only on the political scene but also in historical fiction, where the themes of learning and education become vehicles for exploring national identity. In these texts, whose aim is often to establish an impressive national history, scholarly learning carries negative connotations as it is linked to the former colonizer Britain and also symbolizes social stratification. However, it also stands for civilization and progress, qualities felt to be necessary for the nation to come into its own. The conflicting views and anxieties surrounding the issues of learning and education tend to center on a recurrent character in these texts, the learned person. After providing an overview of how the themes of learning and education are treated in historical narratives from the 1820s, this dissertation focuses on works of three writers: Hobomok (1824) and The Rebels (1825) by Lydia Maria Child, The Prairie (1827) by James Fenimore Cooper, and Hope Leslie (1827) by Catharine Maria Sedgwick.

<p>This study explores the role of learning and education in American historical fiction written in the 1820s. The United States has been, and still is, commonly considered to be hostile to scholarly learning. In novels and short stories of the 1820s, however, learning and education are recurrent themes, and this dissertation shows that the attitudes to these issues are more ambivalent than hitherto acknowledged. The 1820s was a period characterized by a political struggle, expressed as a battle between intellectuals, represented by the sitting president, John Quincy Adams, a Harvard professor, and anti-intellectuals, headed by the war hero Andrew Jackson. The battle over the place of scholarly learning in the U.S. was played out not only on the political scene but also in historical fiction, where the themes of learning and education become vehicles for exploring national identity. In these texts, whose aim is often to establish an impressive national history, scholarly learning carries negative connotations as it is linked to the former colonizer Britain and also symbolizes social stratification. However, it also stands for civilization and progress, qualities felt to be necessary for the nation to come into its own. The conflicting views and anxieties surrounding the issues of learning and education tend to center on a recurrent character in these texts, the learned person. </p><p>After providing an overview of how the themes of learning and education are treated in historical narratives from the 1820s, this dissertation focuses on works of three writers: <i>Hobomok</i> (1824) and <i>The Rebels</i> (1825) by Lydia Maria Child, <i>The Prairie</i> (1827) by James Fenimore Cooper, and <i>Hope Leslie</i> (1827) by Catharine Maria Sedgwick.</p>

Thesis (M.A.) -- Central Connecticut State University, 2009. / Thesis advisor: Antonio García-Lozada. "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Spanish Language and Hispanic Cultures." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 191-201). Abstract available via the World Wide Web.

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This dissertation is a transnational study that argues that a structure of mourning, spoken through and effected by the historical romance, underlies the narrative of national culture as it emerges in the Americas during the early nineteenth century. The writing, consumption and preservation of these texts reveal not only the psychic life of community but also the material basis for that psychic life. Writing and reading, the production and circulation of texts, plays a crucial role in developing this psychic life, and the historical romance was particularly important in the Americas for imagining a national legacy. Current criticism emphasizes the sexual coupling and generative romantic structure of the marriage plot around which many of these novels circulate. This criticism emphasizes the somatic nature of the genre, the corporeal language of romance that is read in the tears of joy and grief spilled by its characters as well as its readers. But while I agree that a libidinal energy is at the heart of both the narrative and its readers’ responses, I argue that the focus on sexual coupling neglects to consider another bodily discourse: that of death and mourning. Mourning enacts a simultaneous identification with and desire for a lost object, a fetishistic relationship that brings together the Freudian “to be” and “to have” and so invests the lost object with both narcissistic and communal attachments. These texts offer their readers the bodies within the narratives, as well as the texts themselves, as the material of a cultural heritage, constructing a nativism that ties the subjects to the land and to the community through a shared lost artifact, their history. Through mourning a common object, the subjects become citizens, native Americans that distance themselves from Europe while supplanting the Amerindian. In combining modern studies of material culture with post Freudian psychoanalytic criticism, the dissertation works to make explicit the relationship between death, citizenship and textuality in order to show the cultural work of fictional historiography in the making of the American nations. / text

This thesis investigates narratives of re-enchantment and disenchantment in three contemporary U.S. novels, Lydia Millet’s Mermaids in Paradise, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, and Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. Drawing on key concepts from ecocritcism and affect theory, I argue that these novels interrogate narratives and affects associated with questions central to the Anthropocene: climate-related dilemmas, questions of environmental justice, and animal ethics. Situating these texts in relation to environmental discourses, I show how affects of wonder and re-enchantment are produced within them through the insertion of anti-mimetic narrative objects into otherwise representationally realistic fictional worlds. These incursions, and the affective shifts they produce, challenge and interrupt in the novels narratives of ecological dread and disenchantment, which I link to the techniques and affects of noir. In each chapter of this study, I show how the dialogical interplay between disenchantment and re-enchantment disrupts preconceptions and assumptions about aspects of ecological crisis, and engenders or reinforces political commitments to environmentally related issues. Chapter One focuses on interspecies politics and animal rights in Mermaids in Paradise, environmental justice is central to the analysis of Tropic of Orange in Chapter Two, and the political dynamics of countercultural environmentalism inform my reading of Inherent Vice in Chapter Three. Throughout, I explore the potential of re-enchantment to suggest an alternative to disenchanted and apocalyptic narratives concerning the environment, and to articulate a productive politics for contemporary ecofiction.

“A Howling in the Paperwork” explores the relationship between ethnography, archival practice, and experimentalism in the work of twentieth century women artists whose syncretic ambitions lead them on a geographical itinerary to and through the greater Caribbean. This dissertation proposes a special synergy between artists with “scattered” bodies of work, in perpetual search of the right form for their creative energy, and the space of the Caribbean with its history of genocides, migrations, and displacements. I focus on women artists, in particular, to foreground the relationship between social precarity and aesthetic innovation. The flight from one technique to another has a push as well as a pull, as women artists have been excluded or expelled from institutional homes for their work, including the university. In the absence of reliable support, the artists I consider come to rely on and refine rigorously subjective methods that prefigure the necessary crisis of objectivity, especially in the social sciences, that would enter mainstream discourse decades later. But even as the artists I consider foreground their own bodies, lives, and communities in their work, they engage diasporic theories of spirit possession, inheritance, and collective creativity that amount to implicit—and sometimes explicit—critiques of the artist as self-contained auteur. Whether or not “there is something strongly feminine” in Caribbean culture, as Antonio Benítez Rojo suggests in The Repeating Island, the idea that there is places women in particularly charged relation to their own creative production in a Caribbean context. My project pays particular attention to the ways these artists attend to one another, taking up the detritus of those who came before as the raw material for new projects. For example, the Cuban-American émigré Ana Mendieta turns to the amateur anthropology of Lydia Cabrera as inspiration for the stone sculptures she carves in the caves of Jaruco, north of Havana, on a return trip to her home island. This relational consciousness does not establish a linear narrative of descent so much as it imagines a transhistorical collaboration in which I, too, participate. Alongside traditional methodologies of close-reading and archival research, I engage their work in more personal ways: I’ve traveled to the caves of Jaruco to visit the almost-ruined remains of Mendieta’s sculptures, I’ve translated Marigloria Palma’s poetry into English, and I’ve interviewed Julie Dash for a literary magazine. Much of the meaning of their work resides in its unmistakable invitation to collaborate in its development and dissemination: the second half of this dissertation considers my own inheritance of feminist practice in the context of Puerto Rican culture.

La présente thèse vise à apporter des éclaircissements sur la réapparition du souci défensif, sa matérialisation et son évolution en Anatolie occidentale et centrale au début du premier millénaire av. J.-C. (Xe-VIe s.). Le territoire soumis à l’examen comprend la Phrygie, la boucle de l’Halys, la Carie, la Lydie, l’Ionie, l’Eolide et la Troade. Cette étude s’intéresse en premier lieu aux différentes méthodes de fortification utilisées au cours de cette période. Par l’examen des principales caractéristiques architecturales des murs de défense (techniques de construction, dispositifs défensifs), cette étude cherche à déterminer de quelle manière ces nouvelles constructions s’inscrivent dans la tradition architecturale anatolienne et dans quelle mesure leurs concepteurs contribuèrent à l’évolution de celle-ci en adoptant et en transformant les méthodes de fortification qui en sont issues. La construction d’un rempart, parce qu’elle impliquait de nombreux acteurs, était un fait de société majeur. Par leur conception, les techniques utilisées pour leur construction, leur emprise dans le paysage, les murailles sont des monuments chargés de symboles et des témoins privilégiés de l’histoire des sociétés qui les ont construites et perfectionnées. Au-delà des considérations archéologiques, cette étude s’attache donc aussi à replacer la construction de fortifications dans le contexte militaire mouvementé de l’Anatolie préclassique et tente également d’évaluer l’impact d’un tel projet de construction dans l’histoire politique et sociale des populations anatoliennes de l’âge du fer. / This thesis aims to shed light on the reappearance of defensive concern, its materialization and its evolution in Western and Central Anatolia in the Early First Millennium BC. (10th-6th c.). The area under consideration includes Phrygia, the Halys bend, Caria, Lydia, Ionia, Aeolis and the Troad. This study focuses primarily on the various fortification methods used during this period. By examining the main architectural features of defensive walls (building techniques, defensive components), this study seeks to determine how these new constructions inherited from the Anatolian architectural tradition and how their designers contributed to make it evolve by adopting and transforming some of its principles. The construction of a wall, because it involved many actors, was also major social phenomenon. Iron Age fortifications sometimes bear witness to the history of the various populations who built and perfected them. Hence, beyond archaeological considerations, this study also aims to place the construction of fortifications in the military context of the tumultuous pre-classical Anatolia. It also attempts to evaluate the impact of such a construction project on the sociopolitical history of Anatolian Iron Age populations: Greeks, Lydians, Phrygians and Carians.

A presente dissertação consiste na análise da obra As pedras do caminho, da escritora gaúcha Lydia Mombelli da Fonseca, no tocante à investigação literária da representação do sujeito feminino, com base em aporte teórico de estudos culturais de gênero, crítica feminista, bem como regionalidade, ideologia patriarcal e identidade. Nesse sentido, observa-se o papel referente à mulher na sociedade, principalmente, por volta da década de 1950, ano de publicação do romance, com o objetivo de desvelar estigmas e comportamentos esperados das mulheres na época, além de promover reflexões a respeito de naturalizações sociais estabelecidas e reproduzidas em relação ao sujeito feminino, ainda, em meio à contemporaneidade. Ademais, este estudo busca demonstrar a participação da mulher como sujeito do processo histórico-cultural enquanto produtora de texto literário, trazendo ao conhecimento acadêmico a autora Lydia Mombelli da Fonseca, a fim de contribuir para o alargamento da história cultural e literária da Região de Colonização Italiana do Rio Grande do Sul e do próprio estado. / Submitted by Ana Guimarães Pereira (agpereir@ucs.br) on 2016-11-23T15:36:15Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao Jaqueline Modelski.pdf: 1377584 bytes, checksum: 5c06aba292ddfb13df6bd8e3f3feea8c (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-11-23T15:36:15Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao Jaqueline Modelski.pdf: 1377584 bytes, checksum: 5c06aba292ddfb13df6bd8e3f3feea8c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-11-23 / The present dissertation consists on the analysis of the novel The stones of the road (As pedras do caminho), by the female gaucho writer Lydia Mombelli da Fonseca, with regard to the literary research of the representation of the female subject, based on theoretical framework of cultural studies of gender, feminist criticism and regionality, patriarchal ideology and identity. In this sense, it is possible to observe the role relating to women in society, especially in the decade of 1950, the year of publication of the novel, in order to unveil stigmas and behaviors expected of women at the time, in addition to promoting reflections on established and reproduced social naturalizations in relation to the female subject, even amidst the present. Furthermore, this study seeks to demonstrate the participation of women as the subject of historical and cultural process as a producer of literary text, bringing to academic knowledge the author Lydia Mombelli da Fonseca, in order to contribute to the expansion of the cultural and literary history of the Italian Colonization Region of Rio Grande do Sul and the state itself.