From Jo March to Scout Finch, the American tomboy figure has become an icon of modern girlhood and a symbol of female empowerment. My dissertation traces the development of the tomboy figure from its origins in nineteenth-century sentimental novels to Harper Lee's classic Civil Rights novel, to Kill a Mockingbird (1960). to the informed reader, it may seem rather paradoxical that nineteenth-century sentimental culture produced the first recognizable tomboy figures, as this era is typically remembered for its indoctrination of conventional femininity. My project is the first to interrogate this apparent paradox and, in so doing, yields important insights into the tomboy figure's role as a social critic in the twentieth century. as tomboys express and struggle with issues of sympathy, invoking a key convention of sentimental fiction, they not only unmask the cultural performance of femininity and heterosexuality but also subvert racial and class hierarchies. By tracing the development of the tomboy narrative over time and through the retrospective lens of sentimentalism, my dissertation yields new insights into the origins of the tomboy figure, as well as the persistence of sentimental ideologies into the twentieth century and beyond.;My project centers upon five women authors: E.D.E.N. Southworth, Louisa May Alcott, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Carson McCullers and Harper Lee. Chapter 1 examines Cap Black, the cross-dressing "newsgirl" protagonist of Southworth's popular sentimental novel, The Hidden Hand (1859); more specifically, this chapter investigates the ties between Cap's gender subversion, urban street life, and non-traditional familial experiences. Chapter 2 analyzes Jo March of Alcott's Little Women (1868) in relation to discourses of poverty, sympathy, and race in the Civil War era. Chapter 3 focuses on Laura Ingalls's struggles with sympathy amid the geographical, cultural and historical "landscapes" of the prairie in Wilder's Little House series, published during the Depression era. Chapters 4 and 5 consider Southern tomboys, Carson McCullers's Frankie Addams and Harper Lee's Scout Finch, who challenge heteronormativity, racial violence and segregationist politics in the twentieth-century South, particularly as they forge sympathetic alliances with other marginalized figures.

This is a study of five novels written by American women during the middle of the nineteenth century. The novels are Aunt Phillis's Cabin (1852) by Mary Henderson Eastman, Northwood (1827 and 1852) by Sarah Josepha Hale, The Planter's Northern Bride (1854) by Carolyn Lee Hentz, Macaria (1864) by Augusta Evans, and Cameron Hall (1867) by Mary Anne Cruse. In advancing their authors' opinions on sectional issues like slavery and secession, these novels make overt political statements of a kind not usually associated with writers of domestic fiction.;All of the novels in this study conform in some ways to the conventions of the domestic fiction genre, but the authors have bent the framework of that genre to accommodate their political purposes. In some cases genric practices and polemics are mutually disruptive; in some they reinforce each other; and in some the authors choose between politics and domesticity. The degree to which domestic fiction is incompatible with a traditional world view shows that genres are not ideologically neutral. In examining the adaptations made by five novelists, this dissertation demonstrates that "genre" is not a static category. Instead, genres respond to cultural and historical forces.;To read mid-nineteenth-century novels written by women only from a gynocritical perspective--that is, for what they say about women's psychological or social realities--is to miss the way fiction reflects and helps to shape broader political concerns. More nuanced readings of domestic fiction show how a genre associated with women writers and readers became inflected to advance the authors' political opinions. Reading these novels as political-domestic fiction contributes to an ongoing discussion of how American women have always participated in politics.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

In Mythologies Roland Barthes contends that automobiles have been "consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriated them as a purely magical object." The Driving Machine explores how this magical object has been appropriated into the myth of American literature by foregrounding and scrutinizing the presence of the automobile in the works of selected writers: principally, Lewis, Fitzgerald, Sinclair, Steinbeck, Caldwell, Faulkner, Kerouac, O'Connor, Updike, Bontemps, Ellison, Wright, Doctorow, Crews, and Joy Williams. / The automobile unites the American fundamentals of individualism and movement--auto-mobility--and the study first examines the literary groundwork for automobility prior to the invention of the car. Next, Lewis's works prove particularly instructive in tracing an evolution from the romantic appeal of the automobile during its early years to an increasing use of the vehicle to satirize conspicuous consumption. Writers began to scrutinize the view of car as liberator of the masses (a view championed by Ford) to expose the realities of mass production and assembly-line technology. / By the thirties, the car had become essential to most Americans, such as Steinbeck's Joads, and had transfigured the rural landscape, as evidenced in Caldwell and Faulkner. During this period the car attained increasingly complex signification, finding itself the center of an intricate relationship of attraction and repulsion. After World War II, the automobile assumed mythical prominence, as in Kerouac's On the Road; however, the social revolution of the sixties and seventies replaced this exalted image with an image of car as polluter and murderer. The oil crises of the 1970s dealt a final blow. Updike grasps these manifold changes in his Rabbit tetralogy. / At the close of the century, Americans view the car with ambiguity and complexity, contemplating the difficult choice of reconciliation or life without vehicles. Literary responses to automobility have never been so multifarious. Works such as Harry Crews's Car and Joy Williams's Escapes present the paradoxical role automobility assumes in our present lives. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-08, Section: A, page: 2923. / Major Professor: Fred L. Standley. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.

No description available.

Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State University, 2007. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-85). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 314-331). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis--University of Michigan. / Photocopy (positive) of typescript. Issued in microfilm form in 1956. Abstracted in Dissertation abstracts, v. 16 (1956) no. 12, p. 2465. Includes bibliographical references.