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

The current historiography on Mexican immigration from 1850 through 1920, has neglected to seriously study the forgotten migration of American citizens, not big capitalists as those have been well documented, seeking their American Dream in Mexico. Thus, my work seeks to understand how a very unstable international border dominated by constant Indian raids and filibuster attempts, led to transnational migration. A direct consequence of transnationalism is that it created a xenophobia mentality among the masses, and in some instances, a fetishism for anything foreign, especially among elites and the new breed of young politicians under President Diaz. I focus my analysis on the wave of American citizens, mostly former Civil War veterans, who in the 1860s decided to go to Mexico because President Benito Juarez offered them generous incentives such as tax exemptions and large land grants for colonization purposes, if they decided to join his military efforts to rid his country of the French invaders. Beyond just those white American immigrants, the dissertation also looks at the experience that black colonists encountered in a country that proudly boasted that it welcomed anyone, regardless of their skin color, so long as they adhered to the law. So I argue, that after analyzing the experience of several ethnic groups, such as the Italian immigrants in Cordoba, Veracruz, or the colonies of those immigrants seeking religious freedom such as the Mormons and Mennonites in northern Mexico, that indeed, Mexico was the Land of God and Liberty. This was the popular term used by runaway slaves from Texas in the 1850s and by many African Americans from Alabama who sold everything they had in 1895 to pay for their transportation cost to Mexico in search of a better life not found in the United States.

Edward Albee's late-career plays contain realistic characters who struggle to create identities for themselves in an America still clinging to misbegotten cultural ideals of the 1950s (e.g. power, money, the "perfect" family). This thesis seeks to give these relatively unexamined later plays the attention they deserve. Therein, Albee's conception of the American Dream is defined through an analysis of essays on post-World War II American domestic social attitudes. The playwright's biography is also examined. I then discuss Albee's stylistic and thematic groundwork by way of criticism of several early plays (The Zoo Story, The American Dream, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), followed by original textual analysis of three later plays (Three Tall Women, The Play About the Baby, The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?) in an attempt to uncover how Albee's comment on American cultural mythology has changed since the beginning of his career.

Between 1890 and 1927 hundreds of Nova Scotian children and adults were identified as either feeble-minded or mentally deficient through investigations conducted by physicians and philanthropists in the province. The earliest of these studies were not commissioned by the provincial government but instead reflected the middle-class internalization of the eugenic discourse. Reformers, drawn often from medical, religious, educational, and philanthropic vocations, sought with ever-increasing alacrity to respond to perceived social problems, such as poverty, prostitution, venereal disease, and alcoholism, with a scientific solution. The scientific solution that they embraced was eugenics. Eugenic ideology and programs rose to popularity in Europe and North America at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Driven by social anxiety and the medicalization of reproduction, eugenic theory expressed the concerns of the middle classes that those they deemed less fit on the basis of socio-economic class, education or heredity, were reproducing at a higher rate than the ‘desirable’ segments of the population. The application of eugenic theory was shaped by cultural assumptions about gender, class and race which resulted in the same principles finding different expression in different areas across the globe. This dissertation seeks to understand how local circumstances shaped the Nova Scotian understanding of eugenics and its application. It examines the manner in which Nova Scotian physicians and philanthropists, with strong ties to both New England and Britain, participated in the transnational eugenic discourse through both professional and popular publications and organizations. Overall it argues that the expression of eugenics in Nova Scotia culminated in legislation that enforced the inspection, segregation and institutionalization of individuals who were assessed as feeble-minded. In doing so it also calls attention to the need to recognize outcomes other than sexual sterilization as legitimate expressions of eugenic policy. Subsequently the influential role played by regional circumstances in shaping what was considered an acceptable eugenic outcome as well as how eugenic policy was sought and implemented is examined. In investigating what reformers understood to be eugenic, and conversely what they considered dysgenic, a complex discourse surrounding the health of populations and reliant on ideas of gender, race, and class is revealed.

This thesis examines the growth of organized opposition to abortion in the United States, and charts the fortunes of the right-to-life movement at a national level during the 1970s and 1980. Anti-abortionists emerged as a social movement in response to changes in the law, and after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision they struggled to present themselves as a coherent lobby group. The 1970s were thus a time of fluidity and experimentation, as right-to-lifers contemplated different approaches and argued over how best to end legalized abortion. Activists engaged in legislative efforts, political lobbying, and education initiatives, all the while teasing out what exactly it meant to be opposed to abortion. The movement at this time rejected the ideas of absolutists and instead aimed to be as broadly representative of American society as possible. Rather than clearly aligning themselves with the Left or the Right side of politics, the movement pursued a politics of moderation. / This status quo was challenged, however, by the resurgence of conservatism in the late 1970s. As the social conservatives of the so-called “New Right” began to intervene in the abortion debate, right-to-lifers found themselves having to respond to a worldview that spoke only in terms of absolutes. After Ronald Reagan was elected to the Presidency in 1980, anti-abortionists needed to negotiate a political landscape in which they ostensibly had access to power and yet were repeatedly disappointed by the action (or inaction) that came from the White House. This thesis contends that in the 1980s, the relationship between right-to-lifers, the “New Right,” and the Reagan administration was often marked by disappointment and compromise. As the decade drew on, right-to-life leaders increasingly tempered the types of demands they made of the White House and of Republicans in general, and this climate eventually meant that the kinds of activists that rose to prominence within the movement were conservative and the ideas they espoused absolutist.

abstract: Self-awareness and liberation often start with an analysis of the relationship between individual and society, a relationship based on the delicate balance of personal desire and responsibility to others. While societal structures, such as family, tradition, religion, and community, may be repressive to individuals, they also provide direction, identity and meaning to an individual's life. In Kate Chopin's The Awakening and André Gide's L'Immoraliste the protagonists are faced with such a dilemma. Often informed by gender roles and socio-economic class, the container or filter that society offers to shape and mediate human experience is portrayed in both novels as a fictitious self donned for society's benefit --can seem repressive or inadequate. Yet far from being one-dimensional stories of individuals who eschew the bonds of a restrictive society, both novels show that liberation can lead to entrapment. Once society's limits are transgressed, the characters face the infinitude and insatiety of their liberated desires and the danger of self-absorption. Chopin and Gide explore these issues of desire, body, and social authority in order to portray Edna's and Michel's search for an authentic self. The characters' search for authenticity allows for the loosening of restriction and embrace of desire and the body, phenomena that appear to liberate them from the dominant bourgeois society. Yet, for both Edna and Michel, an embrace of the body and individual desire threatens to unsettle the balance between individual and society. As Edna and Michel break away from society's prescribed path, both struggle to find themselves. Edna and Michel become aware of themselves in a variety of different ways: speaking and interacting with others, observing the social mores of those around them and engaging in creative activity, such as, for Edna, painting and planning a dinner party, or for Michel, teaching and writing. Chopin's 1899 novel The Awakening and André Gide's 1902 novel L'Immoraliste explore the consequences of individual liberation from the constricting bonds of religion, society, and the family. In depicting these conflicts, the authors examine the relationship between individual and society, freedom and restraint, and what an individual's relationship to his or her community should be. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. French 2011