This thesis provides a specific insight into the previously unexplored subject of the black fair in Macon, Georgia from 1906 to 1930. It draws on archives, government papers, newspaper reports, and the correspondence of black leaders in order to create a localised study documenting the attempts of Georgia‘s African Americans to further themselves and to improve race relations within their community. Subsequently, the fair creates a microcosm of wider efforts of black uplift and racial politics in the South during this period. The fair reveals the work of Richard Wright, a figure who demonstrated how local African American leaders often straddled the doctrines of W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, and adapted their philosophies within everyday life. The fair is also illustrative of how leaders such as Washington also cultivated relationships with black community leaders and fellow educators, while also connecting to the black masses. Similarly the celebration and appearance of national black political figures, such as James Napier, encouraged black pride and determination. Furthermore, such exhibits created powerful symbols which connected black political success with economic wealth. The thesis thereby situates the black fair and its organisers within a significant period of black political development, one which contributed to the later Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Institutions such as the African American fair were vital spaces which fostered a sense of black community, economics and autonomy. This thesis helps draw attention to the importance of such recreational spaces, repositioning them within the political and social studies of black southerners during the early twentieth century.

Sir William Macpherson's conclusion - following his public inquiry into the racist murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993 - that the Metropolitan Police was 'institutionally racist', was a seminal moment for policing in Britain. The publication of the Macpherson report in 1999 has been rightly regarded as a victory for the Stephen Lawrence Family Campaign (SLFC), whose activities had been crucial in building pressure on the newly-elected Labour Government to hold a public inquiry into the Metropolitan Police's murder investigation. However, to focus solely on the Lawrence case, and the SLFC, is to obscure the existence of a longer struggle waged by black Londoners to expose the racism that had affected their experience of policing since the Second World War. This thesis explores the development of grassroots political activism within London's Afro-Caribbean community around the issue of policing from 1945 to 1993. Using material from local community archives, this thesis represents the first attempt at documenting the history of race and policing in London from the perspective of the capital's Afro-Caribbean population. Moreover, by taking the end of the Second World War as its starting point, it also breaks new ground in charting the way Afro-Caribbean people in London organised politically in opposition to racist policing prior to the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. Ever since people of Afro-Caribbean descent began to settle in London in increasing numbers in the aftermath of the Second World War, they have continually expressed concern about the way they were policed. While opposition to policing initially emerged in a highly unorganised form, this was fundamentally altered by the arrival of the British black power movement in the late 1960s. Despite its short existence, black power's emphasis upon independent black grassroots political activism outlived the movement and became a feature of the way black Londoners' challenged racist policing during the 1970s and 1980s. Therefore, this thesis contends that the grassroots political campaign that developed around the case of Stephen Lawrence cannot be viewed in isolation from the historical efforts of black people in London to expose racism within the Metropolitan Police.

This thesis examines working-class fatherhood and masculinities in post-war Scotland, the history of which is almost non-existent. Scottish working-class fathers have more commonly been associated with the ‘public sphere’ of work, politics and male leisure pursuits and presented negatively in public and official discourses of the family. Using twenty-five newly conducted oral history interviews with men who became fathers during the period 1970-1990, as well as additional source materials, this thesis explores the ways in which their everyday lives, feelings and experiences were shaped by becoming and being fathers. In examining change and continuities in both the representations and lived experiences of fatherhood during a period of important social, economic, political and demographic change, it contributes new insights to the histories of fatherhood, gender, family, and everyday lives in Scotland, and in Britain more widely. It argues that ideas and norms surrounding fatherhood changed significantly, and were highly contested, during this period. Fathers were both celebrated as ‘newly’ involved in family life, signified by rising attendance at childbirth and increased practical and visible participation in childcare, but also increasingly scrutinised and deemed to be losing their ‘traditional’ breadwinning and authoritarian roles. Although there were significant continuities, a combination of factors caused these shifts, including the changing structure and composition of the labour market, deindustrialisation, the increasing participation of mothers in employment and second-wave feminism. Shifting ideas about gender relations were also accompanied by changing understandings of parent-child relationships and child welfare, in the wake of rising divorce and the growth of one-parent families. In highlighting the complexity and diversity of fatherhood and masculinity amongst working-class men, by placing their relationships, roles, status and identities as fathers at the forefront, and by speaking to men themselves, this thesis adds an important and neglected insight to the Scottish family and provides a fresh perspective on men’s gendered identities. Fathers were central to, rather than on the margins of, family and home life, and fatherhood was, in turn central to men’s identities and everyday lives.

This thesis intends to demonstrate that the idea of the end is a crucial motive of Geoffrey Hill’s poetry. It analyses the verbal and formal means by which Hill attempts to have his poems arrive at ends. The ends are, chiefly, the reconciliation of antagonists in word or thought; and the perfect articulation of the poem. The acknowledgement of failure to achieve such ends provides its own impetus to Hill’s work. The thesis examines in detail Hill’s puns, word-games, rhymes, syntaxes, and genres — their local reconciliations and entrenched contrarieties — and claims for them a significant place in the study of Hill’s poetry, particularly with regard to its sustained concern with ends and endings. Little has been written to date about Hill’s entire poetic corpus as represented in Broken Hierarchies (2013), due to the recentness of the work. This thesis draws from the earliest to the latest of Hill’s poetic writings; and makes extensive use of archival material. It steps beyond the ‘historical drama’ of language depicted in Matthew Sperling’s Visionary Philology (2014) and Alex Pestell’s Geoffrey Hill: The Drama of Reason (2016) and asserts that the drama in Hill’s poetry, seeking to transcend history, is constantly related to its end: not only its termination in time but its consummating purpose.

The decades following the Second World War witnessed a number of important developments affecting young people’s relationships and sexual lives, including the expansion of sex education initiatives and access to reliable contraception. The period has been heralded by some as one of ‘sexual revolution’, led by a rebellious youth whose views and practices were markedly different from those of their parents. This thesis examines the perspectives of young people growing up through these changes in Scotland, uncovering personal perceptions of their impact, or lack thereof, on their own emerging sexual lives. Whilst extant historical studies of sexuality in Scotland have focused on official perspectives and sexual governance, this thesis contributes to a history of sexuality ‘from below’, exploring the experiences of an untapped majority during a time of great change in heterosexual culture. Drawing on a series of oral history interviews with men and women growing up in various regions of Scotland between 1945 and 1980, evaluated alongside memoirs and contemporary surveys of sexual and contraceptive behaviour, this thesis examines the meanings and significance these developments held for young people in practice. These highly personal and subjective sources are key to understanding how young people learned about sexual matters, developed their ideas of appropriate conduct, and managed their early relationships and sexual behaviour. This research uncovers a piecemeal process of sexual learning against an atmosphere of mystery and shame, where educational initiatives and conversations on the topic were not necessarily comfortable or informative. Though growing numbers of young people were engaging in sexual activity outwith marriage, the illicit atmosphere they absorbed while growing up impacted on their perceptions of acceptable behaviour, and their ability to manage risk effectively and experience sex without anxiety. This was a time of flux for Scottish youth, who had to negotiate a path between traditional and liberal pressures, with resilient continuities evident in the form of rigidly gendered scripts defining appropriate behaviour, which continued to inform young people’s courtship practices and sexual experiences throughout the period. Interviewees detailed ongoing practical difficulties, for instance in obtaining contraception, alongside longstanding cultural concerns including the importance of reputation. Risk and fear of pregnancy remained preeminent throughout, despite the arrival of new options for young women in the form of the pill (latterly made available to the unmarried) and legal abortion. Gender, class, religion and region were all potentially significant in determining one’s experience of these issues. In all, the sources analysed here challenge conventional depictions of ‘sexual revolution’ and a confident, rebellious youth, with many interviewees feeling that the ‘Swinging Sixties’ was something that happened elsewhere. Changing patterns of behaviour were evident, but this was neither sudden nor revolutionary, and conventional attitudes to sex and relationships still held remarkable currency for many young people, with a clear separation of sex, marriage and childbearing only gaining ground from the later 1970s.

The Louisiana Creole community in New Orleans went through profound changes in the first half of the 20th-century. This work examines Creole ethnic identity, focusing particularly on the transition from Creole to American. In "becoming American," Creoles adapted to a binary, racialized caste system prevalent in the Jim Crow American South, and transformed from a primarily Francophone/Creolophone community (where a tripartite although permissive caste system long existed) to a primarily Anglophone community (marked by stricter black-white binaries). These adaptations and transformations were facilitated through Creole participation in fraternal societies, the organized labor movement and public and parochial schools that provided English-only instruction. The "Americanization of Creole New Orleans" has been a common theme in Creole studies since the early 1990's, but no prior study has seriously examined the cultural and social transformation of Creole New Orleans by addressing the place and role of public and private institutions as instruments and facilitators of Americanization. By understanding the transformation of Creole New Orleans, this thesis demonstrates how an historically mixed-race community was ultimately divided by the segregationist culture of the early-twentieth century U.S. South. In addition to an extensive body of secondary research, this work draws upon archival research at the University of New Orleans' Special Collections, Tulane University Special Collections, the Amistad Research Center, The Archdiocese of New Orleans, and Xavier University Special Collections. This thesis makes considerable use of census data, draws upon press reports, and brings to bear a wide assortment of oral histories conducted by the author and others. Most scholars have viewed New Orleans Creoles simply as Francophone African Americans, but this view is limited. This doctoral thesis engages the Creole community in New Orleans on its own terms, and in its own idioms, to understand what "becoming American" meant for New Orleans Creoles between 1896-1949.

This thesis examines how mental hygiene principles were adopted for a student audience through the elementary-level health textbooks series, Health and Personal Development, used in Ontario schools from 1952 until 1963. In particular, I explore the didactic messages pertaining to mental hygiene as they related to girls. The results of this analysis demonstrate that healthy mental hygiene and personal development for girls, according to the textbooks, meant becoming wives, mothers, and homemakers, as their own mothers model. While these roles required many skills and responsibilities, and provided women with a certain amount of agency in the female-dominated sphere, girls were represented in the textbooks as having a limited set of options in life: to emulate their mothers’ feminine domesticity, or to risk a life marred by poor mental hygiene.

Gerald Finzi (1901-1956) was an excellent English composer in the twentieth century. He has devoted his whole life to popularize British music and preserve literature. In the songbook Oh Fair to See, Finzi¡¦s wife and son collected seven songs which he had composed but have never published since 1921 to 1956. This study is to discover the close connection between literature and music by analyzing the lyrics and music of these songs. This study mainly contains four parts: the biographical life about Gerald Finzi, the characteristics of Finzi¡¦s art songs, the composing background of Oh Fair to See, and analysis of these songs. Each song shows Finzi¡¦s intuitive sense of blending words and sounds. Finzi employed a wide variety of figures both in the vocal phrases and in the accompaniment with an alternate and extensive use of tonal and model scale, which shows Finzi¡¦s creation that has great combination of music and poetry.

In this dissertation, I examine the practice of what I term serial memoir in the second-half of the twentieth century in American literature, arguing that serial memoir represents an emerging and significant trend in life writing as it illustrates a transition in how a particular generation of writers understands lived experience and its textual representation. During the second-half of the twentieth century, and in tandem with the rapid technological advancements of postmodern and postindustrial culture, I look at the serial authorship and publication of multiple self-reflexive texts and propose that serial memoir presents a challenge to the historically privileged techniques of linear storytelling, narrative closure, and the possibility for autonomous subjectivity in American life writing. As generic boundaries become increasingly fluid, postmodern memoirists are able to be both more innovative and overt about how they have constructed the self at particular moments in time. Following the trend of examining life writing through contemporary theories about culture, narrative, and techniques of self-representation, I engage the serial memoirs of Mary McCarthy, Maya Angelou, Art Spiegelman, and Augusten Burroughs as I suggest that these authors iterate the self as serialized, recursive, genealogically constructed, and material. Finally, the fact that these are well-known memoirists underscores the degree to which serial memoir has become mainstream in American autobiographical writing. Serial memoir emphasizes such issues as temporality and memory, repetition and recursivity, and witnessing and testimony, and as such, my objective in this project is to theorize the practice of serial memoir, a form that has been largely neglected in critical work, as I underscore its significance in relation to twentieth-century American culture. I contend that seriality in contemporary American memoir is a burgeoning and powerful form of self-expression, and that a close examination of how authors are presenting and re-presenting themselves as they challenge conventional life writing narrative structures will influence not only the way we read and understand contemporary memoir, but will impact our approaches to self-reflexive narrative structures and provide us with new ways to understand ourselves, and our lives, in relation to the serial culture in which we live.

This dissertation examines the link between food and writing about food in French modernist texts in nineteenth and twentieth-century French novels, tracing the central role of food in realist fiction as an encoder of bourgeois discourse to its persisting, yet altered, role in modernist texts. While the propagation of gastronomy and culinary discourse through realist texts presupposes and relies on the seamless conversion of diners into readers and the meal into text, this dissertation has at its root the exploration of the narrative potential inherent in the creation of space in conspicuous "second-order" consumption, leaving the diner and the reader, and the meal and the text, side-by-side, in play. I reflect on how the deliberate alignment and co-staging of the meal and the word (or the diner and the reader), rather than their conflation and collapse, throws into relief not only the act of incorporating the meal, but also the extradiegetic moment of incorporating the text, or a (self-)consciousness of the meal as text. I explore how this shift in the staging of food and eating is not only a hallmark of the play that characterizes modernist novels, which inscribe self-conscious moments of their own creation and consumption within the narrative itself, but also a key element in understanding the shifts from realism to modernism, as the meal remains central to both while at the same time crystallizing key differences in how narratives are crafted in each. / Romance Languages and Literatures