This master's thesis explores the intersections of labor, socioeconomic class, and constructed American Indian masculinities in the literature of indigenous writers of the Great Plains published after the Native American Renaissance of the late 1960s. By engaging scholars and theorists from multiple disciplines--including Native labor historians such as Colleen O'Neill and Alexandra Harmon, (trans)indigenous studies scholars such as Chadwick Allen and Philip Deloria, and Native literary and cultural critics such as Gerald Vizenor and Louis Owens--this thesis offers an American Studies approach to definitions and expressions of work, wealth, and masculinity in American Indian literature of the Great Plains. With chapters on D'Arcy McNickle's posthumous Wind From an Enemy Sky (1978), Carter Revard's poetry and mixed-genre memoirs, and Thomas King's Truth and Bright Water (1999), this thesis emphasizes the roles of cross-cultural apprenticeships for young Native protagonists whose socioeconomic opportunities are often obstructed, threatened, or complicated by dams, roads, and bridges, both literal and metaphorical, as they seek ways to engage (or circumvent) the capitalist marketplace on their own terms. In highlighting each protagonist's relationship to blood (family and community), land, and memory, the chapters reveal how the respective Native authors challenge and reimagine stereotypes regarding Native workers and offer more complicated and nuanced discussions of Native "traditions" in modernity. (173 pages)

Loyalty to the self, family, and husband create interesting tensions for feminine characters in Appalachian literature. Traditional views of loyalty dictate that the Appalachian woman chooses to be loyal to her husband and family while abandoning her self loyalty. Appalachian women writers define the terms of loyalty and the conflicts these three levels create. Furthermore, studying a progression of novels from 1926 to the present shows that feminine loyalty trends have changed. This argument focuses on examining loyalty trends of feminine Appalachian characters, studying the contentions among those loyalties, specifically showing how loyalty patterns have changed in literature, and offering speculation on why these loyalty patterns have changed progressively in Appalachian literature. The study includes five Appalachian novels: The Time of Man by Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow, Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina, Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver, and The Midwife's Tale by Gretchen Morgan Laskas.

Long acknowledged as a committed poet of place, this thesis examines tones of outsiderness and alienation that characterize George Scarbrough’s poetry. Scarbrough draws on familiarity with his childhood in southeast Tennessee, and from an outsider’s outlook, a perspective veritably prompted by the rejection he suffered as a homosexual and lover of language, Scarbrough’s poetry addresses the daunting themes of fear and nothingness. Analysis of his poetry also reveals qualities of hope and endurance, a commitment to received forms, and Modern innovation. Through his poetic voice, culminating in the alter ego of Han-shan, Scarbrough provides vital insights into the human experience.

Despite contemporary movements towards tolerance and appreciation of differing cultural entities within the United States, the normative standard of beauty serves as a pinnacle of division amongst women. The normative standard of beauty—implemented by the dominant race within the States—encourages discrimination in regards to the perception of African American female beauty. Although information exists identifying the original influence pertaining to the negative perception of African American female beauty, the reason for its continued perpetuation within the African American community remains ill defined. Effects of this standard amongst African Americans are psychological and physiological. The destruction of self-image and appreciation for natural features by African American Women occur as a result. The influence of this standard extends to individuals outside of the African American community also and in turn impact their perception of African American aesthetics. Scholarly and Literary writers have chosen to comment on this topic. Some dissect the features that constitute to the considered level of attractiveness attributed of African American women. As these writers explore the realm aesthetic perception, discriminatory tendencies amongst those from the dominant race as well as the marginalized group—in this case African Americans—are revealed. Theories offering explanations in regards to the perpetuation of negative perceptions of African American female beauty arise.

A collection of poems exploring ghosted ancestors, folktales, the queer black body, gender, and magical realism.

This project explores the ways in which key literary texts reproduce, undermine, or otherwise engage with cultural narratives of the so-called Bible Belt. Noting that the evangelicalism that dominated the South by the turn of the twentieth century was, for much of the antebellum period, a relatively marginal and sometimes subversive movement in a comparatively irreligious region, I argue that widely disseminated images and narratives instilled a false sense of nostalgia for an incomplete version of the South’s religious heritage. My introductory chapter demonstrates how the South’s commemorated “Old Time” religion was not especially old, and how this modernist construct of an idealized past helped galvanize Southern evangelicalism into a religion that more readily accommodated racial hegemony in the present. The following three chapters examine Faulkner’s Light in August, O’Connor’s Wise Blood, and Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Moses, Man of the Mountain. I find that each of these novels embeds traces of forgotten religious dissidence. The modern nostalgia for a purer old-time religion, my readings suggest, says less about the history of religion in the South than it does about New-South efforts to merge evangelical and “Southern” values, thereby suppressing any residual opposition between them.

“Resonant Texts” draws from literary criticism, history, biography, media theory, and the history of technology to examine representations of sound and acts of listening in modern experimental fiction and drama. I argue that sound recording technology, invented in the late 19th century, equipped 20th century authors including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, and Samuel Beckett with new resources for depicting human consciousness and experience. The works in my study feature what I call “close listening,” a technique initially made possible by the phonograph, which forced listeners to focus exclusively on what they heard without the presence of an accompanying image. My study examines the literary modernists’ acute attention to the auditory in their goal to accurately represent the reality of the subjective, perceiving self in increasingly urban, technologically advanced environments.

Through their editorial arrangements of African-American, Euro-American and European poetry, fiction and news, Frederick Douglass’s anti-slavery periodicals (The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper) imagine a cosmopolitan discourse that predates the segregated realities of the antebellum United States. In spite of Southern blockades against the infiltration of Northern texts, Douglass’s material space uniquely capitalized on the limited restrictions of his reprinting culture to relocate the voice of the ‘outraged slave’ onto a global stage. From the poems of Phillis Wheatley and William Cowper to Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Douglass’s own novella “The Heroic Slave,” this project considers how Douglass’s literary inclusions—and exclusions—complicate our static considerations of the historicized Douglass and exhibit his savvy insertions of black print into an exclusive, transatlantic nineteenth-century print culture.

Dans un village du Haut Atlas marocain, une fête abandonnée depuis plus de quinze ans a été renouvelée en 2010, attirant des journalistes, des anthropologues et des associatifs. L’étude du renouvellement de la tradition lors de cette fête, au niveau du discours, du contenu des performances et des interactions sociales, nous permet de réinterroger les modèles théoriques de la fabrication de tradition. Un processus sous-jacent apparaît comme la base de ce renouvellement, la singularisation, une forme particulière de résistance à la culture de l’État-nation ou à toute autre culture hégémonique. La singularisation est présente dans chaque élément de la fête. Elle définit un certain rapport au passé par lequel celui-ci est un miroir inversé du présent, mis en scène comme objet de perte. Elle définit également le choix culturel entre deux traditions musicales présentes dans la région. Ces mécanismes reposent sur une nouvelle logique spatiale qui résulte des récents changements économiques et politiques au Maroc. Dans cette nouvelle organisation spatiale où le pouvoir se situe en dehors du local, les femmes sont marginalisées et les figures intermédiaires deviennent le centre du renouvellement de la tradition. L’étude de la singularisation permet de mettre en lumière des processus de fabrication de l’identité, de dégager les conditions de survie culturelle d’un groupe, de caractériser le rapport entre un événement culturel et le changement social, et de préciser les modèles théoriques sur la tradition. / In a village of the High Atlas in Morocco, a celebration which has been abandoned for more than fifteen years has been renewed in 2010, bringing along journalists, anthropologists and militant associatives. The study of the renewal of tradition in this celebration, through discourse, performances and social interaction, allows us to put into question the models on the fabrication of tradition. The underlying process of this renewal is singularisation, a specific form of resistance to the nationalist culture or any other cultural hegemony. Singularisation is present in every element of the celebration. It determines a specific link to the past by which it appears as the reversed image of the present, staged as object of loss. It also determines cultural choices such as the one between two musical traditions. Such mechanisms respond to a new spatial organization which is a direct consequence of the recent economic and political changes in Morocco. In this organization, power is no more in the local but outside the community’s territory. Women are marginalized and intermediary figures become the center of the renewal of tradition. The study of singularisation enables to explain how identity is made, to determine conditions for the cultural survival of a group, to characterize the relation between a cultural event and social change, and to bring new elements to the theories of tradition.

This thesis examines the use of interior narrative techniques such as free indirect discourse and internal monologue in two of James McBride’s neo-slave narratives, Song Yet Sung (2008) and The Good Lord Bird (2013). Very limited critical attention has been given to these neo-slave narratives that illustrate McBrides attention to characterization and focalized narration. In these narratives McBride builds upon the revelations he explores in his bestselling memoir, The Color of Water (1996, 2006), where he learns to disassociate race and character. What he discovers about not only his mother, but also himself, inspires his re-imagination of the people who lived during the antebellum period. His use of interior narrative techniques deviates from his peers’ conventional approach to the neo-slave narrative. His exploration of the psyche demonstrates a focalized attention to the individual, rather than a characterization of the community, which is typically portrayed in neo-slave narratives. In conclusion, this thesis argues that James McBride’s neo-slave narratives reveal his interest in deconstructing the hierarchal positioning of whites and blacks during the antebellum period in order to communicate that although African Americans were the intended victims, slave masters and mistresses were oppressed by the ideologies of slavery as well.