Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," as early as 1839, reveals an uneasiness about the space of the house. Most literary scholars accept that this anxiety exists and causes some tension, since it seems antithetical to another dominant motif, that of the power of place and the home as sanctuary. My critical persona, like Poe's narrator in "The House of Usher," looks into a dark, silent tarn and shudders to see in it not only the reflection of the House of Usher, but perhaps the whole of what is "Southern" in Southern Literature. Many characters who inhabit the worlds of Southern stories also inhabit houses that, like the House of Usher, are built on the faulty foundation of an ideological system that divides the world into inside(r)/outside(r) and along numerous other binary lines. The task of constructing the self in spaces that house such ideologies poses a challenge to the characters in the works under consideration in this study, and their success in doing so is dependant on their ability to speak authentically in the language of silence and to dwell instead of to just inhabit interior spaces. In my reading of Faulkner and Warren, this ideology of division is clearly to be at fault in the collapse of houses, just as it is seen to be in the House of Usher. This emphasis is especially conspicuous in several works, beginning with Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and its (pre)text, "Evangeline." Warren carries the motif forward in his late novels, Flood and Meet Me in the Green Glen. I examine these works relative to spatial analysis and an aesthetic of absence, including an interpretation of silence as a mode of authentic saying. I then discuss these motifs as they are operating in Toni Morrison's Beloved, and finally take Song of Solomon as both an end and a beginning to these texts' concerns with collapsing structures of narrative and house.

Scholars over the past two decades (Denning, Szalay, Edmunds, Robbins) have theorized the different ways literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century reflects the dawn of the liberal US welfare state. While these studies elaborate on the effect rapidly expanding public aid had on literary production of the period, many have tended to undervalue the lingering influence on midcentury storytelling of private charity and philanthropy, those traditional aid institutions fundamentally challenged by the Great Depression and historically championed by conservatives. If the welfare state had an indelible impact on US literatures, so did the moral complexity of the systems of charity and philanthropy it purportedly replaced. In my dissertation, I theorize modern charity as a cultural narrative that found expression in a number of different writers from the start of the Great Depression and into the early 1960s, including Harold Gray, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, Flannery O'Connor, and Dorothy Day.

The aim of this diploma thesis is to analyse and compare Harper Lee's canonical coming-of- age novel To Kill a Mockingbird to its original forerunner, the novel Go Set a Watchman, which was, however, published several years later. The theoretical part provides a brief synopsis of each of the novels and outlines Lee's life, as well as the main aspects of the historical and social background relevant to the stories, namely the Great Depression, Jim Crow laws, and the Scottsboro Trial. The practical part then investigates and juxtaposes the two novels from thematic and structural perspectives, and considers them specifically through the psychological, sociological, and stylistic prisms. Besides, it compares the factual similarities and differences in storylines and characters, who are often based on Lee's real-life acquaintances. The overall comparison shows how To Kill a Mockingbird, a gently tuned novel of children growing up yet packed with diverse topics, evolved from a rather intricate novel, Go Set a Watchman, dealing with a difficult task of one's individuation and realising that one's father is only a human. To Kill a Mockingbird is set in the 1930s and takes place over several years, while the story of Go Set a Watchman is situated some twenty years later, and its plot culminates in the...

The aim of this diploma thesis is to analyse and compare Harper Lee's canonical coming-of- age novel To Kill a Mockingbird to its original forerunner, the novel Go Set a Watchman, which was, however, published several years later. The theoretical part provides a brief synopsis of each of the novels and outlines Lee's life, as well as the main aspects of the historical and social background relevant to the stories, namely the Great Depression, Jim Crow laws, and the Scottsboro Trial. The practical part then investigates and juxtaposes the two novels from thematic and structural perspectives, and considers them specifically through the psychological, sociological, and stylistic prisms. Besides, it compares the factual similarities and differences in storylines and characters, who are often based on Lee's real-life acquaintances. The overall comparison shows how To Kill a Mockingbird, a gently tuned novel of children growing up yet packed with diverse topics, evolved from a rather intricate novel, Go Set a Watchman, dealing with a difficult task of one's individuation and realising that one's father is only a human. To Kill a Mockingbird is set in the 1930s and takes place over several years, while the story of Go Set a Watchman is situated some twenty years later, and its plot culminates in the...

The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come takes as its backdrop the American Civil War, as the author, John Fox, Jr., champions Kentucky's social development during the Progressive Era. Although often criticized for capitalizing on his propagation of regional stereotypes, I argue that the structure of The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come is much more problematic than that. Recognizing the Bildungsroman as a vehicle for cultural and social critique in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century writing, this project offers an in-depth literary analysis of John Fox, Jr.'s novel, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, in which I contend the story itself is, in fact, an impassioned account of human progress that juxtaposes civilized Bluegrass society and the degraded culture of the southern mountaineer. Indicative of the Progressive Era scientific attitude toward social and cultural evolution, Fox creates a narrative that advances his theory of southern evolution in which southern mountaineers are directed away from their own culturally inferior notions of development and towards a sense of duty to adapt to the civility of Bluegrass culture. This study focuses briefly on defining the Bildungsroman as a genre, from its eighteenth-century German origins to its influence on the American literary tradition. Beginning with Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the Bildungsroman, in its most traditional form, narrates the development of the protagonist's mind and character from childhood to adulthood. Focus will be placed on how the Bildungsroman engages with literature's ability to facilitate the relationship between an individual and social development, as well as how easily the Bildungsroman lends itself to being appropriated and reconfigured. This study will then demonstrate how The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, Fox's local-color narrative, in its focus on the growth of the protagonist, Chad, as an allegory of the development of an Appalachian identity during the Progressive Era, might usefully be understood as an Appalachian Bildungsroman. While Chad, ultimately acquires the polished savoir faire of a skilled Bluegrass gentleman, the tensions between the southern mountaineers and the Bluegrass bourgeois makes his socialization into any one culture impossible, a situation illustrative of the disparity between Appalachia and the rest of America during the Progressive Era. By adapting the Bildungsroman to represent this historical situation, Fox's novel demonstrates the kind of conflict that furthered Appalachian difference as point of contention for the problematic ideals of social and cultural evolution, thus, indicating the need for reconciling Appalachia's marginal position.