<p> Although Lillian Hellman was obsessed with truth, in her memoirs she often exaggerates, confabulates, and lies. So pervasive was Heliman's penchant for making things up that her reputation as a memoirist has suffered under a deluge of criticism. Hellman personified a era of many societal changes: greater sexual freedom for women, more opportunities for women to work, and television's growing impact on creating celebrities. Foremost, however, central to .Hellman's life was-the advent of McCarthyism, a period she describes in <i> Scoundrel Time Scoundrel Time</i> has drawn more criticism--actually vitriol--than any of her works, possibly because it tells many unwanted truths about that era. Despite her proclivity for fabulation:, Hellman's "stories"--her works of fiction presented as fact--often engage those underlying truths essentially "truer" than her surface fictions.</p>

<p> In 1901, Alice Hegan Rice, a wealthy socialite reformer, published the novel <i>Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch</i> which dealt her experiences working with the poor. By the end of 1902 her novel had become a national phenomenon and finished the decade as one of its five bestselling books. Though the novel was fictional in nature, the book&rsquo;s heroine, Mrs. Wiggs, was based on the life of a real woman, who inhabited the one of the poorest neighborhoods in Louisville, Kentucky at the turn of the twentieth-century, a slum known as the Cabbage Patch. Shortly after the book&rsquo;s publication it became well-advertised that Mary Bass, a widowed mother of five children living in poverty in the Cabbage Patch, was the prototype for the beloved character of Mrs. Wiggs and subsequently and quite undesirably became fetishized by an overenthusiastic public. Mary Bass would end up suing Alice Hegan Rice for libel. The Bass/Rice story supplies an uncommon historical opportunity to analyze the portrayal of poverty in popular fiction in the Progressive Era United States and the classist values behind those representations.</p>

<p> USonian identity has been defined controversially since its inception. Its representatives have largely been independent, white, wealthy, male, and heterosexual. However, the actual population of the US is more diverse and possesses much more complex identities. Some of the identifying factors of USonians derive from the US tradition of self-making. Traditional US self-made narratives, as with larger definitions of US identity, lack a full inclusivity and nationally representative characters, as scholars such as Mary Carden explain. However, rather than simply disappearing, traits of the US self-made man, as part of a larger national identity, continue to exist but in ways more suitable to the US nationality that has developed. For example, some of the newer versions of US self-makers include women, ethnic minorities, and homosexuals. </p><p> The more important elements of the changing definitions of US identity and self-making, community building and belonging, arises when more diverse representatives appear in texts ranging from Susan Sontag&rsquo;s <i> In America</i> to works like Lin-Manuel Miranda&rsquo;s <i> Hamilton.</i> This dissertation studies more communal self-making models as well as US representatives who are recognized within texts and by readers in works by authors such as Philip Roth. The modeling of these characters results in the opportunity for readers to identify with them and/or some of their contexts. Such a relationship sets the foundation for what I have termed &ldquo;fabulous ordinariness.&rdquo; This means that despite possessing some fabulous or extraordinary storylines or characteristics, there are daily events, interactions, or traits that readers can empathize with, connect with, or feel represents them. Such experiences with the characters and texts provide the space for a representative relationship to be established and articulated as such. </p><p> The redefinitions of self-making and US identity, along with the enactment of fabulous ordinariness, ask readers to consider how culture, identities, and nationalities are preserved, challenged, and protected. Scholarship addressing traditional US role-models, along with works that support and challenge those representatives and roles, examines contemporary US identities and their connection to the past. This dissertation asks questions concerning the boundaries between fiction and history, culture and its artifacts, as well as readers and their texts.</p>

"The purpose of this paper is to give a history and an analysis of the Southern Observer, a magazine devoted to book reviews of works by Southern authors, books about the South and articles of general interest to Southerners. The magazine which began January, 1953, and suspended publication December, 1956, was published by the Tennessee Book Company, Nashville, Tennessee"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "May, 1958." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Agnes Gregory, Professor Directing Paper.

This study examines the rhetorical creations of "democratic," literary readers in nineteenth-century book prefaces by Catharine Sedgwick, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass. Though diverse, these writers shared a cultural need to envision a serious, literary reader who embodied, nonetheless, the ideals of popular sanction, democratic politics and marketplace culture. Through appeals to the extrapolitical authorities of nationalism, Common Sense, self-culture, domesticity, social reform and commercial popularity, these writers used the partly fictive, partly social discourse of the preface to bridge a gap between their emergent, sense of literary professionalism and the American myth of popular authority--a cultural divide that, in the twentieth century, would be institutionalized in the separation of middlebrow and highbrow cultures. / While many of these nineteenth-century writers and books were commercial and artistic successes in their days, they ultimately failed to establish, once and for all, a viable, unitary tradition of popular, literary reading in the United States. These prefaces still demand the attention of American writers, scholars and teachers, however, for the very reason that these rhetorical tactics more comprehensively define, in their diverse failures, the ongoing cultural challenges of authorizing oneself in a democratic society than they might in some mythic, all-unifying narrative of success. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-09, Section: A, page: 2835. / Major Professor: Jerome Stern. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.

<p> This dissertation reviews the deliberate and evolutionary development of cultural nationalism through food and cuisine, specifically the methods and manners in which Americans during the early Republic conceptualized and produced a distinct national culinary culture. Through multiple forms of evidence including published cookbooks, travelogues, etchings and paintings, nutritional studies, newspaper articles, and essays, Americans and Europeans employed food as a symbolic tool to redefine their definitions of national culture. The production and consumption of certain foodstuffs was indeed an essential component in the process of interpreting the burgeoning American postcolonial national consciousness, often at the expense however of an open and inclusive society. While the current scholarship contends that Americans remained anchored to their colonial British food systems in the early national period, this research reveals a more complicated narrative of identity construction that ultimately highlights a complex ideological and cultural transformation. In short, this work analyzes how intellectual descriptions of American cuisine affected attitudes and perceptions of national character formation in the early American Republic.</p><p>

No description available.

A look at the genre of American literary history, as well as at the careers of four nineteenth-century writers, this neo-Marxist study treats the lives and works of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Elizabeth and Richard Stoddard through the productive circumstances of their writing, and through our expectations as consumers of their personalities and texts. Typically, Whitman and Dickinson are recognized as creative individualists who defied the literary and social conventions of their time, while the Stoddards---when they are recognized at all---are remembered in less daring terms. Many critics today regard Elizabeth Stoddard's first novel, The Morgesons, as an unsentimental exploration of sexuality and an innovative foray into realism. Even so, these critics tend to see the radical potential of the novel as compromised by its flawed form, often considered an unsophisticated melding of domestic and realist fiction, and by the failure of Stoddard's subsequent works to build on The Morgesons' critique of middle-class womanhood. Richard Henry Stoddard, meanwhile, is seen as an unremarkable adherent to the genteel tradition, a chapter in American literary history now regarded as stagnantly establishmentarian and conformist. By contrast, Whitman and Dickinson stand forth as the artistic embodiments of personal freedom and innovation.;Close examination of the careers of Whitman and Dickinson (posthumous, in the case of Dickinson) reveals, however, that these celebrated individualists were not as removed from social determinations of identity as their personas suggest, and that their differences from the Stoddards were less a matter of temperament than of personality's articulation through commercialism and publicity. The Stoddards inhabited a literary world where the pre-commercial ideal of refined, amateur anonymity tempered the promotional impulse to peddle authors along with texts. The result for the Stoddards---and their genteel peers---was an authorial identity more conforming than conspicuous, and more explicitly social than subversive. Whitman and the posthumous Dickinson of the 1890s, on the other hand, were commodified in conjunction with the promotion of their texts---by Whitman himself and, in the case of Dickinson, by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. as part of the larger capitalist transformation of subjectivity (what Marxist critics term reification), this promotion of Whitman and Dickinson exemplified the influence of late nineteenth-century literary commercialism on the writing self. The careers of Whitman and Dickinson, in other words, were inextricable from the economic and historical circumstances from which authorship emerged as a profession distinct from the avocation of letters, and from which the author, as a static, marketable persona, emerged as a figure distinct from the writer. The autonomy and originality for which Whitman and Dickinson are acclaimed become, in this light, testaments to ideology. For such independence is a feature of their marketed identities that derives from the objectifying, isolating power of commercialism, rather than from genuine individuality and freedom. Such canonical independence derives, in fact, from what Marx calls the commodity fetish, a perceptual paradigm that isolates and objectifies people, as well as things, in a capitalist system.

The science fiction imaginary of mid-twentieth century America often takes as its subjects all manner of animate objects --- living machines like robots, cyborgs, automata, androids, and intelligent "thinking" computers. These living machines embody early cold war anxieties about the relationship between humans and their machines, as well as about human "identity" in a world perceived as increasingly technological and fragmented. Built with text and still or moving images, these figures' bodies are formed by metal and plastic, circuits and electronics, at times fused with organic parts -- at the same time that they are also represented as built from the innovation and imagination of cutting-edge American industry and science. These diverse machined bodies are sometimes straightforwardly humanoid in form, and at other times, they are less so, while still others may appear to share little in common with humans at all. as bearers of built bodies, living machines inhabit the interface between human and machine, exposing the ruptures and contradictions of the conception of the modem, technological body: the material and the immaterial, the animate and the inanimate, the subject and the object. While this study analyzes fiction by canonical science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke, its focus is on government documents and images regarding NASA's Projects Mercury (1959-1963) and Gemini (1962-1966), popular journalism articles and images, Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and less well-known pulp science fiction stories from the 1930s through the 1950s.

This dissertation investigates the under-examined relationships between sibling characters in nineteenth-century American literature (1852-1900). Focusing on the depictions of siblinghood in such works as Herman Melville's Pierre, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Charles Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars, and Edith Wharton's Bunner Sisters, I explore how nineteenth-century American authors construct, comment on, and use the sibling bond as an attempt to reconcile tensions of personal and collective identity and the competing drives for family ties and individual experience. In these fictions and others, I argue, siblinghood is a space where the rules of relation are negotiable and unfixed---where brothers and sisters use each other variously as partners in sympathetic union, extensions of their selves, and objects of identification, and do so in ways both supportive of and detrimental to one another. I read these texts with an eye on siblinghood to suggest new perspectives on major nineteenth-century fictions, as well as new ways of thinking about the nineteenth-century family.;In the first chapter, I argue that Melville's Pierre is a seduction novel, in which the site of seduction is the double promise of siblinghood to offer a close and sympathetic relation and the opportunity for virtuous or heroic performance. My second chapter looks at how Louisa May Alcott's Little Women exposes a significant (yet largely unacknowledged) cruelty at the heart of the nineteenth-century American family: that siblings are taught to invest their energies and their affections in one another in youth, but they are also taught that marriage is their goal-which takes them out of their home, and away from their brothers and sisters. Chapter Three explores the significance of the many adult and elderly sister pairs in local color literature of the late nineteenth century, arguing that the depiction of siblings living in close, marriage-like relationships---far beyond the period of time that most siblings share an intimate bond under the same roof---is part of these fictions' larger project of describing and preserving a United States in the midst of massive and rapid change. and Chapter Four investigates the many nineteenth-century authors who set their novels and stories in motion by separating two siblings on opposite sides of the color line, then exploring their relationships and identities as a result of this split.