<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> This dissertation examines the function of family as a thematic in the contemporary Anglo-American novel. It argues that contemporary aesthetics increasingly presents the family as an enabling platform for conciliation with the social totality: as a space of personal development, readying one for life in the wider social field. This analyses hinges on readings of Jonathan Franzen&rsquo;s <i>Freedom</i> (2010), Zadie Smith&rsquo;s <i> NW</i> (2012), A. M. Homes&rsquo; <i>May We Be Forgiven</i> (2012) and Caryl Phillips&rsquo; <i>In the Falling Snow.</i> In approaching these novels, this project addresses the theoretical lacuna left open by the much-touted retreat of postmodernism as a general cultural-aesthetic strategy. This project identifies these novels as examples of a new and competing ideological constellation: metamodernism. Metamodernism encompasses the widely cited return of sincerity to contemporary aesthetics, though this project explains this development in a novel way: as a cultural expression from within the wider arc of postmodernism itself. One recurrent supposition within this project is that postmodernism, in its seeming nihilism, betrays a thwarted political commitment; on the other hand contemporary metamodern attitudes display the seriousness and earnestness of political causes carried out to an ironic disregard of the political. Metamodernism, in other words, is not a wholesale disavowal of postmodern irony, but a re-arrangement of its function: a move from sincere irony to an ironic sincerity. The central inquiry of this dissertation is into this re-arranged role of family and familial participation amidst this new cultural landscape. My argument is that family and the political have maintained a tense relationship through the twentieth century in the American consciousness. They represent competing models of futurity in a zero-sum game for an individual&rsquo;s life-energy. What metamodernism represents, so this dissertation will articulate, is a new form of anti-politics: a fully gratified impulse to depoliticize. Analyzing what this project terms the &ldquo;politics of the local,&rdquo; this dissertation will argue that the highly popular and successful models of conscientious capitalism have been superseded. Today, increasingly, redemption from consumerism guilt is itself wrapped up in commodities: the utopian impulse celebrated by Fredric Jameson has itself obtained a price tag. The contemporary novel thus reflects new social functions for that which has trumped the political: the family. </p>

‘Just Like Hitler’ explores the manner in which Nazism is used within mass American culture to create ethical arguments. Specifically, it provides a history of Nazism’s usage as a metaphor for evil. The work follows that metaphor’s usage from its origin with dissemination of camp liberation imagery through its political usage as a way of describing the communist enemy in the Cold War, through its employment as a vehicle for criticism against America’s domestic and foreign policies, through to its usage as a personal metaphor for evil. Ultimately, the goal of the dissertation is to describe the ways in which the metaphor of Nazism has become ubiquitous in discussion of ethics within American culture at large and how that ubiquity has undermined definitions of evil and made them unavailable. Through overuse, Nazism has become a term to vague to describe anything, but necessary because all other definitions of evil are subject to contextualization and become diminished through explanation. The work analyzes works of postwar literature but also draws in state sponsored propaganda as well as works of popular culture. Because of its concentration on Nazism as a ubiquitous definition of evil, it describes American culture through a survey of its more prominent, popular, and lauded works.

This study describes a moment when tourism was created in America, and how, in the decades after, it was discovered by a broad swath of American society. Beginning as an infrastructure created for the recreation of wealthy, the tourist world created in the Hudson Valley became increasingly more accessible and visible in the years after 1790, most particularly after 1817. This new visibility heavily influenced artists such as Thomas Cole and writers like James Fenimore Cooper, who created for the tourist market. By the late 1820s, these images combined with the rising prosperity of the period and the falling cost of travel spurred thousands of Americans to travel to these storied sites. By 1830, all classes of Americans had became exposed to tourists and tourism. All this happened in the context of the changing society of American cities, especially New York. There, rapid growth led to increasing social disorder. A search by the gentry for safe enclaves resulted in the tourist sites, but the very infrastructure they created to facilitate their travels was later used by the very classes they had wanted to avoid. The large numbers new tourists from non-wealthy classes began to overload the traditional tourist sites, causing increasingly visible cultural tensions. By eighteen-thirty the Hudson Valley was being written of by the cultural avant-garde as being overexposed. A search for other tourist sites ensued. Exclusivity would be briefly found in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, but others in the gentry sought longer-term solutions including private clubs, summer homes, and semi-private resorts such as Newport. Places such as Saratoga, too, would find ways to reinvent themselves, especially in the light of the decline of other formerly exclusive sites like the nearby Ballston Spa. This study uses a large body of cultural evidence supported by dozens of diaries and letters to demonstrate that by eighteen-thirty the idea of tourism had penetrated deep into American culture, affecting art, literature and commerce. Although it would take another generation before tourism became a truly mass activity, by 1830 the basis of American tourism had been set.

This dissertation explores execution literature, a genre of literature popular in the Northeastern American colonies and successor states. The texts I explore are written between 1693 and 1817 and feature people of African descent. There are three types of texts that make up execution literature; execution sermons, written and delivered by pastors written especially for the condemned immediately before his or her execution, last words, autobiographical texts taken from the prisoner's own mouth immediately before death, and dying verse, rhyming poetry written on occasion of the execution of the criminal. Although execution literature can provide a wealth of information, it has tended to be excluded from consideration as a means of discovering more about the experiences of people of African descent by the popularity of Slave Narratives. Whereas enslaved men and women including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince and William and Ellen Craft are well known and their lives well represented in secondary literature, Joseph Hanno, Mark, Phillis, John Joyce and Peter Matthias among others are noticeably absent from the scholarship. Additionally, I argue that Puritans and their descendants were, as Robin Blackburn puts it, “ethno-religious exclusivists.” To refer to Puritans as racists is historically inaccurate. Biological racism as an ideology was invented later, with the advent of the institution of chattel slavery. Puritans and their descendants held a different worldview, reflected in execution literature. They believed themselves to be the direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews of the Bible. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was New Israel, and here they attempted to align their lives as closely with Biblical precedent as possible. The Bible, especially the New Testament, emphasized that people ought to be less concerned with their earthly condition than with their eternal destination. One never knew when he or she would die; therefore it was of the utmost importance to spend one's life preparing for judgment. The significance of execution literature is not in its relationship to other genres of literature written by and about people of African descent. Instead, the literature itself provides a wealth of information that has not been explored to the full.

For Latinos living in the continental United States, migration is an experience that is at once familiar, as a historical phenomenon that shapes our lives, and ephemeral, as a series of momentous events in the lives of individuals, families, and communities that are rarely memorialized. Latino migration has contributed to a redesigned ethnic landscape in the northeastern U.S. although this migration is far less discussed as a contested site of Latino migration than that into the western United States. The two largest groups of Latinos in the Northeast, Dominican and Puerto Rican migrants and their descendants, have recorded the narratives of their migrations in cultural texts through autobiography, folklore, prose, and poetry. The texts I discuss, by Pura Belpré, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Antonia Pantoja, Junot Diaz and Angie Cruz are a part of North American literary history as well as Latino literary history. The core question guiding this research is: how do migration narratives reveal new perspectives, speak back, or contradict our existing understanding of Dominican and Puerto Rican migrations? A secondary question is in what ways do these texts contribute to a collective memory for Latino communities and thereby add to our understanding of ethnic identity? I argue these texts reveal the heterogeneity of the migrants' identities and their migration experiences. Four of the five authors identify with an Afro-Latino diasporic identity and contribute to our memory of Afro-Latino culture. The texts express the differential experience that women and men migrants have in their lives premigration in their home countries, as well as their lives post-migration. A close reading of migration narratives yields evidence of the migrants' agency, contradicting notions of passive Latina women and passive migrants who unquestioningly accept oppressive cultural practices. Tracing the moments of the migrants' agency in the texts balances structural arguments that suggest that migration was almost inevitable since the migrants came from very poor countries. These migration texts reveal erasures, correct stereotypes, and amend existing knowledge with subjugated knowledges that come from the migrants' first person perspective. The new perspectives contribute to a usable past for Latino communities.

This dissertation is a study of the religious and ethical influences on the lives of three American Jewish women: Anzia Yezierska (ca. 1880-1970), immigrant-born author from the Lower East Side who gave poignant voice in her fiction to immigrant Jewish women's lives; Rose Pastor Stokes (1879-1933), immigrant-born political activist and an early member of the American Communist party; and Maud Nathan (1862-1946), an upper-class, American-born Jew who fought for female enfranchisement and better working conditions for store clerks and sweatshop women. In a thematic approach drawing comparisons among the three women, this study explores the role and impact of Jewish religion and values on their personal and professional life choices. Related to this main question are the following secondary questions: As deviant women--women who did not fulfill traditional gender and religious prescriptions for home-bound domesticity--how did these women negotiate their deviance within the Jewish and larger American communities? In their autobiographies, how did they present their lives, and to what extent did they reveal any awareness of the impact of their Jewish birthright upon their life choices? And how did their relations with the significant people in their lives--friends, families, and mentors--influence both their gender and Jewish consciousness? Through close reading of their writings, especially their autobiographies, augmented by selected theoretical work in the presentation of self, I examine how they each defined their Jewishness in ways consonant with their personal and professional aspirations, and how they all drew on their cultural, religious, and class values to play an active public role in their time.