"It is the purpose of this paper to assemble in a single volume the facts of Mrs. McCullers' life and a bibliography of the works written by and about her. Such a study is of value and interest to librarians and students of Southern literature as well as a practical exercise in bibliography and library research for a prospective librarian"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "January, 1956." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Agnes Gregory, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 38-39).

There is no abstract available for this dissertation.

The main purpose of this thesis is to present and highlight the radical potential in the work of Carson McCullers, primarily through an examination of her representation of young, queer individuals. This thesis argues that McCullers forces her readers to re-think the categories of “child” and “adult” through her creation of ambiguously gendered, sexual child characters.

Born in Columbus, Georgia, Carson McCullers was a Southerner by circumstance, but she maintained an emotional and psychological attachment to the South throughout her life. Her choice of a Southern setting with Southern characters for almost all of her works of fiction illustrates that the place off her birth commanded an unmistakable influence on her creative imagination. Therefore, the major Southern themes of place--the burden off the past, the antipathy toward change, the formal versus the formless existence, and the preference for objects rather than ideas-abound in her fiction. She utilizes those themes consistently to establish the significance of physical place in her fiction.Simultaneously, a second concept of place is operant in the McCullers fiction--the metaphysical sense of place. The duality between the physical and the metaphysical is evident throughout the McCullers canon from one of her earliest untitled stories to Clock Without Hands, her final novel. The early story of the girl who stands outside the gates of a convent and dreams of a marvelous party inside is the first manifestation of that duality.The short fiction incorporates an especially stringent duality. Like the convent gates, the boundaries of the South represent a formidable barrier against the outside world. An either/or dichotomy emerges in the short fiction which contrasts the South to non-Southern locales, particularly New York City.Mrs. McCullers' first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter introduces the physical/metaphysical dichotomy of place in which several characters, especially Mick Kelly, find the physical locale undesirable and long for a more satisfying place.Reflections in a Golden Lye presents an extension of physical/metaphysical dichotomy since the rigidly defined boundaries of the army base setting are similar to those of a small Southern town.The lever/beloved dichotomy in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is simply an embellishment on the physical/metaphysical duality.The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers' most realistic novel, comes close to blending the physical and the metaphysical sense of place. Frankie Addams finds an answer to her metaphysical search for place in Mary Little-John.Mrs. McCullers brings the prototype convent story to its ultimate happy ending in Clock Without Hands by resolving the conflicts between the physical and the metaphysical search for place. In the character of Jester Clane, the author presents a happy fusion off the two conflicting philosophies. He proves that one can open the gates of the convent, enjoy the marvelous party, and return to the physical world with new wisdom and commitment. He finds his metaphysical sense of place by conquering the burden of the past, by overcoming the antipathy toward and by rising above his formless adolescence to become formal, fully developed adult who can transcend the coercive codes of the confined community.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1984. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 180-182).

The theme of isolation in some degree is drawn through every character in every novel by Carson McCullers. This thesis examines the works of McCullers and the ideas of loneliness and isolation in her works and in her life.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Texas at Dallas, 2008. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 212-226)

The succeeding chapters of this thesis are concerned with Carson McCullers' method of handling the Gothic. Their purpose is to describe the modern Gothic elements in McCullers' first three novels: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946) and in her novella: The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1943).

Texte remanié de: Dissertation--Uppsala, Suède--Uppsala universitet, 2005. / Bibliogr. p. 167-176. Index.

As they took stock of the ways that the Great Migration and America’s post-war global role were changing the South, Richard Wright, Carson McCullers, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray crafted narratives that articulated a particular perspective on the South. These writers dreamed of putting the regionally distinctive characteristics that they found valuable in the South into conversation with a sense of expansiveness and possibility, one that they associated with a migratory and increasingly globally-connected nation. In this project, I examine these southern cosmopolitan negotiations in Wright, McCullers, Ellison, and Murray’s southern narratives, and I argue that these writers are crucial to our understanding of the post-migration South in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. / text