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In my dissertation I examine the steps in and performance of revolution through the writings of three Postmodern authors, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and E. L. Doctorow, in light of the model of the biblical Exodus journey and the revolution which precipitated that movement. I suggest that the revolution which began with the Israelites' bondage in Egypt has provided the foundation for American literature. I show that Invisible Man, Beloved, and Ragtime not only employ the motif of the Exodus journey; they also perpetuate the silent revolution begun by the Israelites while held captive in Egypt. This dissertation consists of six chapters. Chapter One provides the introduction to the project. Chapter Two provides the model for this study by defining the characteristics of the Exodus journey, Moses as the leader of the Israelites, and the pattern of revolution established by Michael Walzer in Exodus and Revolution. In Chapters Three, Four, and Five, I apply the model established in Chapter Two to the individual texts. In Chapter Six, I draw three conclusions which arise from my study. My first conclusion is that the master story of the Exodus journey and the Israelites' liberation from Egypt informs all Western literaturewhether the literature reinforces the centrality of the master story to our lives or whether the literature refutes the significance of the master story. Second, the stages of revolution present in the biblical Exodus are also present in twentieth-century American literature. My third conclusion is that authors whose works deal with an exploration of the past in order to effect healing are authors who are revolutionary because their goal is to encourage revolution by motivating readers to refuse to accept the status quo and to, instead, join the revolution which demands change. They do this by asking questions which are characteristic of that which is postmodernnot so much looking for answers as demonstrating that questioning what is, is appropriate and necessary.

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The works of the nineteenth-century American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson continue to be inspiring particularly due to their empowering effect on the individual. It is especially Emerson's concepts of the sovereignty of the individual, the importance of self-definition, the view of life as a transitory flow, and the relationship between freedom and fate which can be practically and usefully applied in the life of an individual. It is possible, then, to understand and evaluate Emerson's works through the practical effects of his concepts, in other words through the prism of pragmatism. Emerson's empowering philosophy can be of use especially to disempowered groups such as African Americans. The Emersonian themes which are to be found in the works of various African-American non-fiction writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr. and Cornel West testify to the relevance of Emerson for this minority group. In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Richard Wright's Native Son, two African-American novels, Emersonian principles are shown to be of utmost importance for the positive development of the protagonists.

This thesis is an analysis of Ralph Ellison’s use of color terminology in his novel, Invisible Man. By taking an in depth look at the circumstances in which Ellison uses specific color terms, the reader can ascertain the author’s thoughts on various historical events, as well as the differences between characters in the novel such as Ras, Dr. Bledsoe, and Rinehart.

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This dissertation explores the reoccurrence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein within twentieth-century American novels. While the inaccurate 1931 film version by James Whale remains the best known adaptation of Frankenstein, I argue that Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Chuck Palahniuk return to Shelley’s 1818 novel to critique racist and misogynistic responses to anxieties about gender and racial power in the age of industrial consumer culture. In doing so, I extend existing scholarship on the American Gothic to demonstrate that The Professor’s House, Invisible Man, Beloved, and Fight Club represent a specifically Shelleyan Gothic tradition in twentieth-century American literature. My project draws upon influential feminist and postcolonial readings of Frankenstein and on the theoretical work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and later critics who have developed her theory to show how the twentieth-century novels echo themes and motifs from Shelley’s novel to critique the destructive effects of male homosociality. Each novel contains a protagonist that resembles Victor Frankenstein and responds to historically specific anxieties about gender, race, and industrial technoscience by creating a doppelgänger who enables participation in a homosocial bond that is initially empowering but proves destructive to women, racial minorities, and eventually the creature and creator figures themselves. My reading reveals unexpected similarities between Cather’s The Professor’s House and Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Cather’s novel appears to glorify Tom Outland as the ideal masculine hero but ultimately reveals him to be a monstrous doppelgänger who acts out the Professor’s oppressive impulses; similarly, Fight Club seems to romanticize the male violence instigated by the doppelgänger figure Tyler Durden but actually echoes Shelley’s critique of male homosociality as monstrous. My reading also reveals previously overlooked similarities between Invisible Man and Beloved, both of which feature a black protagonist who surprisingly resembles Victor Frankenstein by creating a doppelgänger to challenge his or her disempowerment by the structures of white male homosociality but end up emulating the destructive homosocial structures they critique. My dissertation shows how all of these writers share Shelley’s critique yet move beyond it by offering alternatives to the destructive cycle of violence, embodied in each case by a female figure who resists or reclaims the position of the abject other in the homosocial triangle.

This dissertation explores the reoccurrence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein within twentieth-century American novels. While the inaccurate 1931 film version by James Whale remains the best known adaptation of Frankenstein, I argue that Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Chuck Palahniuk return to Shelley’s 1818 novel to critique racist and misogynistic responses to anxieties about gender and racial power in the age of industrial consumer culture. In doing so, I extend existing scholarship on the American Gothic to demonstrate that The Professor’s House, Invisible Man, Beloved, and Fight Club represent a specifically Shelleyan Gothic tradition in twentieth-century American literature. My project draws upon influential feminist and postcolonial readings of Frankenstein and on the theoretical work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and later critics who have developed her theory to show how the twentieth-century novels echo themes and motifs from Shelley’s novel to critique the destructive effects of male homosociality. Each novel contains a protagonist that resembles Victor Frankenstein and responds to historically specific anxieties about gender, race, and industrial technoscience by creating a doppelgänger who enables participation in a homosocial bond that is initially empowering but proves destructive to women, racial minorities, and eventually the creature and creator figures themselves. My reading reveals unexpected similarities between Cather’s The Professor’s House and Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Cather’s novel appears to glorify Tom Outland as the ideal masculine hero but ultimately reveals him to be a monstrous doppelgänger who acts out the Professor’s oppressive impulses; similarly, Fight Club seems to romanticize the male violence instigated by the doppelgänger figure Tyler Durden but actually echoes Shelley’s critique of male homosociality as monstrous. My reading also reveals previously overlooked similarities between Invisible Man and Beloved, both of which feature a black protagonist who surprisingly resembles Victor Frankenstein by creating a doppelgänger to challenge his or her disempowerment by the structures of white male homosociality but end up emulating the destructive homosocial structures they critique. My dissertation shows how all of these writers share Shelley’s critique yet move beyond it by offering alternatives to the destructive cycle of violence, embodied in each case by a female figure who resists or reclaims the position of the abject other in the homosocial triangle.

In Rhythm Changes: Jazz Rhythm in the African American Novel, I demonstrate how novelists from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement adapted jazz rhythm into literary form. In the prologue to Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison famously defines invisibility as a state of being “never quite on the beat.” Ellison frames the novel as a kind of translation of the “invisible” rhythm the narrator hears in Louis Armstrong, a syncopated rhythm rooted in Black aesthetic and cultural forms. “Could this compulsion to put invisibility down in black and white be thus an urge to make music of invisibility?” Ellison was not alone in this project. The writers I study all exemplify what Duke Ellington calls a “tone parallel”—the concept that literary form could reproduce or “parallel” the particularities of musical form. However, these writers find literary strategies to transcend parallelism, such that the lines between medium begin to touch. Considering devices that cut across music and literature—anaphora, antiphonal dialogue, polysyndeton, parataxis—I argue that novelists, not just poets, respond formally to the rhythmic concepts they hear on the bandstand, synthesizing these innovations with a broader literary tradition. Rudolph Fisher’s novel The Conjure-Man Dies brings the complex rhythmic sensibility of Louis Armstrong to detective fiction; Ann Petry’s The Street channels the rhythmic phrasing of Ethel Waters in a “novel of social criticism”; Ellison’s epic unfinished second novel follows the paratactic rhythm of the preacher and jazz trombonist; and Amiri Baraka’s The System of Dante’s Hell projects the rhythm of Sonny Rollins and Cecil Taylor onto Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse.” By finding the literary in the musical and vice versa, these novelist-experimenters move beyond Pater’s credo that all art aspires to the condition of music.