Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

Thesis--Western Reserve University. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 43-51).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1969. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 324-345).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 43-51). Also available in print.

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This paper examines the generational changes in the culture and racial self-identification of Creoles of Color of New Orleans. This study argues that the key to understanding Creole culture is the role that isolationism has played in its history. While White ethnics pursued a path of assimilation, Creoles of Color pursued a path of isolationism. This path served them well during the Jim Crow era, but it suddenly became undesirable during the Black Power era. Now, however, new values of multiculturalism have resurrected Creole identity as a cultural asset.

This historical sociolinguistic study investigates the language of English seamen in the seventeenth century. Built on language data compiled from log books (Matthews 1935) and a survey of the maritime population from 1582, the author argues that the seafaring community had developed its own sociolect, which was based on the dialects of Southern England. Writers (e.g. Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe) and historians describe this “Ship English”: [S]ailors stood out from landsmen in a variety of ways. In the first place by their dress [...] Sailors were also recognisable by their speech, in which technical terms, slang and oaths had thickened to produce a private language. (Burke 1996:44-45) Following Ross and Bailey (1988), the author argues that this sociolect emerged from dialect contact (Trudgill 2004) aboard ship, with Southern dialects as the major input varieties: Several phonological features of Southern Early Modern English (e.g. diphthongization of Middle English /u:/ and /a:/, split of /u/ into /ʌ/ and /ʊ/, /w/-/v/ interchange) are pervasive in the data. Apart from being a interesting case study in itself, the results might be of importance for research on pidgins and creoles and colonial dialects: it has been argued (Hancock 1976) that nautical English has had a profound impact on the emergence of anglophone creoles because it – rather than some kind of Standard English – was the actual “superstrate” variety for most creoles. For the same reason, it might have influenced the emergence of the overseas varieties of English. / text

Throughout the nineteenth century, New Orleans was repeatedly plagued by yellow fever epidemics. In this paper, cultural representations of yellow fever are considered in three novels: Baron Ludwig Von Reizenstein’s The Mysteries of New Orleans (1854-1855), George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes (1880), and Mollie Evelyn Moore Davis’ The Queen’s Garden (1900). Because the etiology was unknown during the nineteenth century, yellow fever becomes a floating signifier on which to project the ills they observed in New Orleans society. Yellow fever thus becomes a representation of loose sexual mores, as well as a divinely retributive punishment for slavery, or a sign of adherence to an unequal, antiquated, aristocratic and un-American social system. Yellow fever, in these texts, exposes the struggles with race and racial superiority and illuminates tensions between groups of whites as New Orleans became an American city.