No description available.

This creative thesis is comprised of five original short stories and a critical preface. The preface discusses the changing cultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic landscape of the modern American South and the effects-positive, negative, and neutral-these changes have had on the region's contemporary literature, including the short stories contained within.

Katherine Anne Porter wrote The Old Order stories in the early 1930s; and while there is no evidence that she ever revised them on a story level, she revised the order of the stories over more than thirty years in three collections: The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944), The Old Order: Stories of the South from The Leaning Tower, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and Flowering Judas (1955), and The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965). Individually, each story is its own episodic memory based on Miranda’s adult recollections of childhood experiences. Collectively, Porter’s rearrangement of these stories over time both deconstructs and reconstructs Miranda’s narrative from a chronological to a representational recollection. Therefore, while the individual stories reveal memory’s imprint on identity, the progressive reordering of The Old Order stories reveals a reconstructive process of memory which repositions itself over time.

This thesis explores the emotional, physical, and familial repercussions of coal mining in the Appalachian region, especially in regards to relationships within the community. The thesis is divided into two parts; a critical essay in which the objective facts, statistics, and histories of coal mining are addressed, and a short story which shares the subjective experience of the Hicks family.

William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury, Harry Crews in A Feast of Snakes, and Kathryn Stockett in The Help each depict African Americans in roles as domestic servants. The differing historical situations of the novels play a large part in the disparity among the depictions. However, each novel clearly holds black domestic laborers in contrast to their white employers. These texts’ depictions of black domestic servants and the whites for whom they care are at different points strikingly similar and tellingly disparate. The overlaps and fissures between black domestic servants portrayed as mammy’s and uncles and black domestic servants characterized as powerful and morally upright human beings and what those overlaps and fissures demonstrate about the novels and the historical moments of their creations will be the focus of this study.

The Boy in the Tunnel is a domestic coming-of-age novel told from three alternating perspectives. It is about two white teenage girls who cover up the accidental death of their black friend in Atlanta during the summer of 1994. The novel explored the insidious nature of racial prejudice and the many ways in which Americans deny responsibility for wrongdoing—both contemporary and historical. It also explores the intense nature of female teenage friendships and the harsh realities of the adult world in comparison with the relative simplicity of childhood.

Although Paul Hamilton Hayne was the acknowledged poet laureate of the South at the time of his death in 1886, he and his poetry have virtually disappeared from the recent American literary histories and anthologies. Even the literary histories and anthologies of Southern literature tend to down play his role as a man of letters and poet of consequence. This diminution of Hayne's literary reputation has taken place despite the respect for his poetry and criticism that came from leading poets and critics in the United States and England during the mid to late nineteenth century. In this thesis, I analyze the neglect of Hayne's work by first outlining his reception history as a poet. Certain trends are evident, specifically a movement in the United States away from the Anglo-American tradition to a new style of poetry, best represented by Walt Whitman. This change in what was fashionable in poetry has had the effect of undermining Hayne's reputation as a poet. Moreover, Hayne's literary reputation became more tenuous after the War Between the States given his strong affiliation with the conquered Confederacy. To bolster my argument that Hayne's reputation ought not be left to the whims of literary fashion, I conduct a preliminary examination of Hayne's poetry by analyzing several poems. I conclude, after examining the evidence, that Hayne deserves inclusion in the literary canons of American and Southern literature as an important representative nineteenth-century Southern poet writing within the Anglo-American tradition. / Master of Arts

ABSTRACT This project compares and contrasts the ways in which selected texts by William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams render their fictional figures as modern subjects engaged in the complex processes of identity-formation and transformation. These processes are deeply rooted within the context of the American South. The interrelatedness of identity and language is explored by investigating how these texts dramatize selfhood not as an essential or homogenous state, but as a perpetual process of self-fashioning and play amid multiple positionings. The central hypothesis is that identity manifests itself necessarily and continuously as a textual discourse in and through language, and that self-fashioning gives rise to ethical questions, because identity involves not only the subject’s relation to the self, but also his or her relationships with others in closely interwoven personal, familial and communal-cultural bonds. This ethical dimension underscores the relational aspects of selfhood, that is, the notion that the individual is always situated inextricably within the social, and that the fashioning of the self is thus inconceivable without a consideration of the other. The following pairs of texts are compared: As I Lay Dying and The Glass Menagerie; The Sound and the Fury and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof; Light in August and A Streetcar Named Desire.

Inspired by her obsession with the South and informed by the liberating socio-political changes born from the 1970s lesbian feminist movement, North Carolinian author Bertha Harris (1937-2005) provides a poetic exploration of Southern Gothic Sapphism in her complex and tormented novel Confessions of Cherubino (1972). Despite fleeting second-wave era recognition as “one of the most stylistically innovative American fiction writers to emerge since Stonewall,” Harris’s innovation remains largely neglected by readers and cultural theorists alike. Nearly all academic engagements with her work, of which there are few, address her 1976 novel Lover. Instead, this thesis focuses on Confessions of Cherubino and examines the novel’s relationship to poststructural feminist thought that led to a critical but undervalued position within contemporary literature of the queer South, particularly through the work of Dorothy Allison, who has noted Harris’s influence on her writing.

In his novel Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier weaves an intricate web of human stories, all converging to make a memorable statement about love, war, life, and death. This study examines these stories and the mythological, literary, and folk models Frazier employs, and in some cases revises, to tell them. The first chapter explores how Frazier recreates Odysseus in Inman, his main male character, to depict the psychological trauma inflicted by war. The second chapter focuses on Ada, Inman’s pre-war sweetheart, and Ruby, a girl with whom Ada bonds, as challenges to the male pastoral tradition. Ruby’s father Stobrod as trickster, culture hero, and ultimate keeper/creator of songs is the subject of the third chapter. Since Appalachia so strongly influences each of these characters, whether native or outsider, this thesis will also discuss such sense of place and prove that these stories, though universal, could not take place just anywhere.