Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wyoming, 2007. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Feb. 11, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 51-52).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2005. / Title from title page screen, viewed on April 12, 2007. Dissertation Committee: Anita Tarr (chair), Cynthia Huff, Karen Coats, Roberta Seelinger Trites. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 166-178) and abstract. Also available in print.

his dissertation examines the rhetoric of the homestead movement in antebellum America as a particular instance of domesticity. Homestead rhetoric alters the modes of identity and subjectivity usually found in domesticity, and alters the home-nation metaphor at the moment when the nation faced an increasing sectional divide that would lead to a Civil War. As deployed by Congressmen, homestead rhetoric used domesticity to define the relationship between manhood and citizenship. Harriet Jacobs uses this rhetoric in her autobiographical Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to shape an identity more in line with male homesteaders than with the subjects of women’s domesticity. E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Haunted Homestead offers the home-nation metaphor as a solution to national crisis, but ultimately the crisis is too large to solve through domesticity. This dissertation uses Jurgen Habermas’s concepts of lifeworld and system to assess the types of subjects created through the different modes of domesticity. Lifeworld describes modes of communication that foster the agency of individuals, and system describes the instrumentalization of individuals into roles where they are only a means to an end. The lifeworld created through homestead rhetoric is ultimately systematized by the importance of transforming land into property; Harriet Jacobs recognizes that she must escape the systematization of slavery and enter into a new economic system to have her rights fully acknowledged; Southworth’s failure to find a literary solution to national problems suggests the limits of a literary lifeworld, or the extent to which the domestic itself has been systematized. This dissertation concludes by considering how Laura Ingalls Wilder’s experience homesteading in South Dakota can bring an ecocritical perspective to lifeworld and system. Ingalls Wilder rejects the system of commodified nature to find contentment in a lifeworld affirmed through an agrarian relationship to the land.

"The purpose of this paper is to present the life and works of Laura Ingalls Wilder with special attention paid to those influences that have given her work an enduring quality and to give a critical evaluation of her work as found in reviews written by experts in the field of children's literature"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "August, 1955." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-57).