Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2008. / Title from file title page. Wendy Hamand Venet, committee chair; Timmothy Crimmins, Charles Steffen, committee members. Description based on contents viewed Sept. 22, 2009. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1990. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 85-90). Also available via the Internet.

It is the aim of this dissertation to discuss the creation of historiographic space in the works of Francis Parkman. More specifically, this dissertation intends to analyze Parkman’s The Oregon Trail and Montcalm and Wolfe as literary texts that examine geographies of cultural interaction and transnational empire building. Parkman’s historical narratives, this dissertation suggests, not only describe historically significant sites, such as the Oregon Trail and the Northern Frontier, but further create literary heterotopias. These textual counter geographies, as for instance his conceptualizations of the trading posts of the far West and the wilderness fortifications of the far North, allow Parkman to effectively interrogate American history. By investigating the fruitful juncture between history, geography, and literature this project aims to establish the importance of historical geographies for Francis Parkman’s methodology and define its function for the creation of a national consciousness. In addition to Parkman’s use of space, this dissertation further analyzes the historian’s depiction of historical characters and his subsequent attempts to define American identity. Thereby, my analysis specifically highlights the relationship between Parkman’s literary characters and their environment. In an attempt to trace the impact Parkman’s historical narratives exert on postmodern authors of American literature, the concluding chapters interrogate the re-negotiation of Parkman’s historiographic spaces in Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water and William T. Vollmann’s Fathers and Crows.

The regnant interpretation of the American Civil War includes the fact that it evolved into a “total war,” which adumbrated the total wars of the twentieth century. Mark E. Neely, in 1991, published an influential paper calling this interpretation into question for the first time. In the article Neely revealed that the first mention of “total war” in connection with the Civil War was an article written in 1948 by John Bennett Walters about Gen. William T. Sherman and a raid he ordered on Randolph, Tennessee in reprisal for an attempted hijacking of the packet boat Eugene on the Mississippi River. Walters castigates Sherman’s raid as brutal, cruel, and wanton and tries to depict Sherman as a violent and hateful man who set out to punish Southerners for turning their backs on the Union. He—along with modern residents of Tipton County, Tennessee—claim that Sherman burned the whole town to the ground. But a close investigation of the target of Sherman’s attack shows that Randolph, Tennessee had been a ghost town since the mid 1840s with the result that very little actual damage was done. There may have been as many as six dwellings in the area along with dozens of abandoned and derelict buildings. Sherman’s orders to the troops were to let the citizens know that Union officials abhorred this kind of violence but were forced by guerilla activities to burn their homes to discourage continued attacks on river boats. The residents were given sufficient time to remove their belongings before the buildings were set afire. The results of this investigation suggest that the raid on Randolph might be emblematic of much of the purported devastation of the South by Sherman and his armies. Perhaps the “total war” on the South was illusory and has been greatly exaggerated along with the destructiveness of the Civil War. The term “total war” seems never to have been used in the nineteenth century. Total war is a twentieth-century term and is completely bound up with twentieth-century technology, especially with aircraft as weapons of mass destruction. The kind of destruction encompassed by “total war” was unimaginable in Civil War times, especially the deliberate killing of noncombatant civilians. It is argued, then, that the use of the term “total war” to describe the American Civil War is anachronistic and thus entails the projection of twentieth century realities into the past.

This thesis is a critical analysis of the theology and ethics of dispensationalist Christian Zionism in America. Chapter One introduces the thesis and its method, which draws constructively from history, sociology, and anthropology while remaining substantively theological. Chapter Two describes dispensationalism's origins in nineteenth-century Britain and its dissemination and development in America. Chapter Three moves from broad, historical description to the contemporary and particular through an introduction to Faith Bible Chapel (FBC), an American Christian Zionist congregation. This description arises from an academic term spent at FBC observing congregational life and conducting extensive interviews, as well as fieldwork undertaken in FBC's "adopted settlement" in the West Bank, including interviews with Israeli settlers about partnerships with American Christians. The remaining chapters move to more explicitly doctrinal analysis. Chapters Four through Six are shaped by William Cavanaugh's concept of 'theopolitics' (Theopolitical Imagination, 2002): a disciplined, community-gathering common imagination of time and space. Through the exploration of a key historical text (The Scofield Reference Bible, 1917) and its continuing legacies in the life and thought of FBC, these chapters examine the theopolitics of dispensationalist Christian Zionism, demonstrating that it is a complex system of convictions and practices in which the disciplines of biblicism and biblical literalism form an eschatology which subordinates ecclesiology and Christology, nurturing an imagination of the roles of Christ and the church in time and space which sever social ethics from necessary Christological and ecclesiological sources. John Howard Yoder's work is used to bring this system into relief, and to establish that eschatology per se is not inimical to Christian social ethics. Chapter Seven concludes the thesis with a summary of its findings, as well as a discussion of the positive functions of apocalyptic in Christian social ethics, pointing toward the possibility of alternative ecclesial enactments of apocalyptic theopolitics.

This dissertation will examine the formation of the myth that William T. Sherman laid waste to the state of Georgia in 1864, and almost single-handedly invented the concept of “total war.” It will also examine how Sherman’s reputation has evolved over the years from accusations of being a Southern sympathizer and traitor at the end of the Civil War to the modern image of Sherman as the destroyer of the old South. William Tecumseh Sherman was the most controversial general of the American Civil War. The modern image of Sherman is either a destructive monster who violated the laws of civilized warfare or a strategic genius who invented modern warfare. Both of these images have evolved over the years. In large part, they have been the product of Lost Cause writers trying to reinterpret the history of the war, but also the product of Union generals and politicians attempting to glorify their own place in the history of the war, men with personal grudges against the general and modern historians using Sherman to make their own arguments about contemporary society. The sources used for this dissertation were the journals, letters and memoirs of the participants. The Official Records of both the Union and Confederacy were examined as well as nineteenth and twentieth century newspapers and magazines. This dissertation will show that the modern conception of General Sherman is not the same as the historical fact, but rather a post-war creation. Individuals’ agendas have created and sustained the myth of Sherman to explain defeat in the Civil War, justify later military strategy, condemn later conflicts and for personal gain. It is not enough to know that historical events as commonly understood are inaccurate; it is important to understand how and why these inaccuracies came about.

This doctoral thesis contributes to the ongoing scholarly conversation on literary representation of musical sounds, forms, and compositions. My close examination of the tangible presences of Western art music in the fiction of three contemporary American novelists relocates traditional foci of intermediality and word and music studies from referential precision and structural equivalence across the arts to the problem of readerly experience of music through fictional narrative. Exploring a variety of diegetic encounters with music in William T. Vollmann's Europe Central (2005), William H. Gass's Middle C (2013), and Richard Powers's Orfeo (2014), I draw from cognitive narratology and the philosophy of music, among others, to construct a concise model of musical experience and a system of its literary correlatives, which can provide for the reader's enactive response to music-related themes and means in fiction. I discuss the different strategies the writers apply to communicate the presumably elitist experience of Western classical music as suggestive and relevant to their 21st-century readerships, whether big or small. I order my chapters dialectically, regarding the three authors' literary approaches to musical experience as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. In Chapter I, Vollmann's intermedial transpositions of Dmitri Shostakovich's fictionalized works are shown to be framed by a mimetic bias, under which diegetic music functions as a characterization means for the author's historical preoccupations. The thesis (i) I infer from Vollmann's approach is that music is part of the fictional reality representative/informative/definitive of what that reality is like. Chapter II is devoted to Gass's metafictional distrust of representation, whereupon his novelistic narrative discards diegetic music almost completely and points out ways of experiencing verbal textures musically. Gass's method is thus antithetical (ii) to Vollmann's: music is a metaphor for creativity, indifferent to the subject matter and/or plot, which at representation level may well be a parodic perversion of the very idea of creativity. Powers's balanced treatment of musicalized content and form and his generous supply of multivalent experiential cues are forged to appeal to a broader reading audience, as I argue in Chapter III. In what I see as a synthesis (iii) of Vollmann and Gass, Powers's storyworld contains abundant diegetic music that constructs narrative settings and drives the events of the plot, but is itself graspable through musical metaphors. The findings of the thesis open new directions for research into musico-literary reception. Encouraging a revival of reader-response awareness in literary analysis, musicalized fiction is an untrivial subject for interactive theoretical scrutiny by psychologists and philosophers of music, transmedial narratologists, and cognitive scientists. Empirical studies of actual readers' experience of musicalized prose may prove particularly promising in further investigation of this intersectional phenomenon.

This dissertation seeks to answer the question, what light does the ministry of William T. Brantly shed for understanding the breakup of the Triennial Convention? The dissertation argues that Brantly's longtime mission of uniting Christians in useful effort for a moral revolution exemplified the early vision of the Triennial Convention and that his inability as a Southerner to maintain this mission nationally among Baptists indicated grave disunity within the Convention as early as 1837. After chapter I introduces Brantly in light of current historiography, the dissertation consists of three parts--early history, theology, and later history. In the first part, encompassing the chapters 2 through 4, Brantly's personal mission is defined in the early South, illustrated in his first two Southern ministries, and climaxes in his efforts in Philadelphia. Two mentors and the death of his first wife influenced his personal mission. Two pastorates illustrated his twofold goal of organizing Baptists for missions and ministerial education. In Philadelphia, Brantly attained peace at First Baptist Church and then embodied his ideals in the formation of the Central Union Association. The formation of this new association in contradistinction to the venerable Philadelphia Association raises the question of heresy in doctrine and innovation in practice. These concerns lead into the second part--a theological examination of Brantly's thought. Chapters 5 and 6 examine his views on Calvinism and the authority of Scripture. Chapters 7 and 8 explore his justification of revivalistic new measures and benevolent societies. Chapters 9 and 10 demonstrate that Brandy's idea of evangelical unity possessed a denominational identity, a doctrinal boundary, and an even greater emphasis on active benevolence. The third part examines Brantly within the Triennial Convention. Chapter 11 discusses the Convention's transitional period (1826-1835), when sectionalism risked disunity, but compromise and silence nullified political strife and British interference. Chapters 12 and 13 examine the sectional and sectarian causes behind the visible disunity of the great Bible Convention of 1837. Brantly's stand for evangelical unity and subsequent defeat indicated grave disunity eight years before the Convention broke up. / This item is only available to students and faculty of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. If you are not associated with SBTS, this dissertation may be purchased from <a href="http://disexpress.umi.com/dxweb">http://disexpress.umi.com/dxweb</a> or downloaded through ProQuest's Dissertation and Theses database if your institution subscribes to that service.