This study examines the therapeutic qualities of selected short stories and novels by contemporary African American woman writer, J. California Cooper. Specifically, I examine the manner in which Cooper's texts can be appreciated as "healing narratives." Healing narratives, as defined in this study, are those texts in which the author consciously creates fictitious representations of reality, while employing the concept of hope as a central and guiding factor. Those aspects of the narrative that have the ability to heal or "lay hands on" a reader vary because the effectiveness of the story depends upon how well the reader can identify with the protagonist's journey toward self-actualization. In addition to illuminating the therapeutic aspects of Cooper's fiction, I also examine her use of black oral performance and storytelling.

This project discusses the cultural and political significance of a number of lyrics by songwriter and political activist Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie. By drawing on both the singer's personal experiences and relevant American history, I lay out how larger political and cultural forces in society impacted Guthrie's songs. Although this work focuses primarily on his lyrics, my dissertation also draws on his interviews, commercial recordings, drawings, and other writing. Since much of the writing discussed in this work comes from archival collections at the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and the Woody Guthrie Archives, I have covered a wider variety of materials concerning Guthrie than ever done before, thus providing new insights into one of America's most intriguing cultural figures. Also, by using an interdisciplinary approach, I have been able to evaluate Guthrie's political expression through both a literary and a historical perspective, giving this study a rich and varied context.

Africa as a point of reference for Africans dispersed from her shores and their descendants in the Diaspora has perpetuated discourse of longing and ambivalence. For centuries these various sentiments have emerged in Black literary expressions. The quest of this study is to advance Black narrative tradition by proposing a theoretical framework informed by these constructs and predicaments to establish a genre of literature referred to here as Pan African narratives. This work looks at Black response to the dilemma of dispersal and dislocation in the Diaspora from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. More specifically, it examines the emergence of a literary genre at the juncture of the African diaspora and Pan African paradigms. Building on the legacy of slave and migration narratives, Pan African narratives reveal manifestations of Black solidarity and resistance to oppressive forces.

This dissertation integrates rhetorical, historical, and spatial analysis in an effort to expand our understanding of the cultural work performed by antebellum narratives that take slavery in the United States as their subject matter. Specifically, it focuses on the complicated relationship between place and human praxis as revealed in five texts: The Confessions of Nat Turner, Harriet Beecher Stowes Dred, Martin R. Delanys Blake, Frederick Douglasss The Heroic Slave, and Herman Melvilles Benito Cereno. In my attention to literary geographies, I trace spatial patterns in which considerations of organized resistance and slave rebellion are repeatedly placed in wild-spaces such as the Great Dismal Swamp, the Red River region of Louisiana, and the open ocean. Exploring their strict alignment with considerations of violence, I argue that these wild-spaces do not function as passive settings, supporting and paralleling narrative events or themes. Instead they can be seen to drive narrative action as they carry with them powerful cultural associations that translate into plot momentum. My methodological approach employs two general steps. First I document how antislavery writers developed a historically resonant narrative landscape to defuse criticism and buttress their rhetorical indictments of slavery. Second, I investigate how these writers negotiated the complicated demands of such landscapes in order to supplement moral interpretations with creative imaginings of how alternative forms of slave resistance might play out. By isolating the ties between literary landscapes and the narratives imaginings of slave resistance, we are able to see the intensely pragmatic, real world problem-solving in which these writers were engaged. Such a methodology highlights the formative function of place in literary output, while also providing insight into obstacles to real-world reform. I conclude that the narratives I examine served as a forum for cultural experimentation as their writers attempted to work through social and political problems that had no easy or ready solutions. Considerations of place are shown to be essential to antislavery writers attempts to see through the shadow of slavery to its end, and, in doing so, point the way forward.

The study provides a reformulation of culture as space. Building on Michel Certeau's theory of space and place, this study incorporates Karla Holloway's theory of historicity, memory, and metaphor - specifically, how these elements are formed and behave - W.E.B. Dubois's theory of double consciousness, Homi Bhabha's theory of the beyond and interstices, John Fiske's culture of everyday life, Bourdieu's idea of the habitus, Brett Williams' theory of texturing, and Edward Said's travel theory. These critical ideas are woven together to construct an operating construct of space, which allows for that culture to be a dynamic, fluid construction, represented in two genres of literature: English Renaissance Drama and Post Civil War African American fiction. Specifically, Ben Jonson's Volpone, William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, and Zora Neale Hurston's The Complete Stories are analyzed to show how the study's construct of culture as space is a powerful lens for reading the effects of literature on shaping social conscience, regardless of social and historical time. Additionally, the study demonstrates the universality of its critical frame by reading these African diasporic texts: Christine Craig's Mint Tea, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Bessie Head's Serowe, Ntozake Shange's Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo, and Ama Ato Aidoo's The Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa. Finally, analysis of Chester Himes' If He Hollers Let Him Go gives insight into the dialogue between Bakhtin's carnival with the study's construct of space. These readings reveal the necessity in literary studies for new ways of engaging in cross-cultural literary analysis and illustrates through these authors' use of ancestry, myth, humor, and folklore, that human conditions and themes manifest themselves in all cultures.

This dissertation explores the interconnectedness of language and related cultural texts and womens subjectivity. The poststructuralist feminist enterprise of examining and critiquing language and signifying practices for the ways in which they impose social values and of interrogating and undermining the fixity of meanings in cultural texts will serve as my primary frame. Concerned with the individual (gendered) consciousness, poststructuralist feminist theory of subject formation posits that while language, along with ideologically biased texts of the culture, construct subjects, language and the cultural texts also serve as sites of resistance for the deconstruction and reconception of individual and collective subjectivities. Because for many poststructuralist feminists, the language of poetry serves as the vehicle par excellence for the revisioning of language, texts, and subjectivity, a study of the way language relates to subject formation can find fertile ground in a focus on the language of poetry. I center my discussion on the role of language and cultural texts in subject formation around the poetry of Diane Wakoski, who experiments with postmodern parody, linguistic intertextualization, and remythologization. Wakoskis intertextualization and remythologization of cultural texts enables the revisioning process of reconceiving the possibilities of womens subjectivities. Wakoski, through recursive postmodern parody, installs, explores, undermines, and remythologizes a pastiche of texts: traditional, biblical, personal, and cultural myths; cultural icons from history and popular culture; scientific treatises and commentary on art; the architecture of the casino and the landscape of the desert; elements of personal biography, memories, and letters. I interrogate and remythologize Wakoskis texts by recursively visiting key stories, myths, allusions, and themes to demonstrate how Wakoskis poetic language and intertextual technique reflect the process by which women can be both victimized by cultural texts bent on determining their identities and liberated by a renovation of the defining parameters of language. I analyze Wakoskis poetry to discern ways women have been interpellated through language to set roles, relationships, performances, self-perceptions, and even bodies. Language and the cultural texts themselves serve as sites where women can contest the ways in which their subjectivities have been conceived and where these subjectivities can be revisioned.

The nineteenth century marks the emergence of a new literary market directed at the entertainment of children. However, a dichotomy exists concerning the image of childhood. Adults tended to idolize childhood in literature to reflect on their own lives ignoring the needs of children to possess an identity of their own. Essentially children are shadows of adults. Examinations of the shadows of childhoodchildren as shadows of adults, children shadowed by adults, the shadows as identifying children, and the shadows children themselves castlead to a discussion of agency over childhood. Lewis Carroll, entering this new literary market with his Alice series, identifies the misconceptions of childhood calling attention to the shadowed truth in his photography, illustrations and literature. This dissertation integrates psychological, cultural, visual and linguistic analysis in an effort to create a lens through which we can expand our understanding of children and literature written for and about children. Specifically, Lewis Carrolls Alice series serves as an exemplary text on which to base discussions of childhood and the child-literary audience in relation to children as muses for poetry, photographic subjects, illustrated figures, and literary characters. Examining eighteenth- and nineteenth-century education manuals as well as the romantic works of William Blake and William Wordsworth, I trace the various forms of shadows used to discuss childhood. I call on the theories of Perry Nodelman, Lev Vygotsky, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and Sigmund Freud to conclude that Carroll uses these shadows to dispel previous notions of children but also to empower the nineteenth-century child in his photography, illustrations, and Alice books. Furthermore, I extend this lens to discuss images of children in the twentieth and twenty-first century texts of J. M. Barries Peter Pan, J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter books, and Lemony Snickets Series of Unfortunate Events series to argue that contemporary literature for children maintains these shadows which cast darkness on harsher realities from which children need to escape.

Feminism has all too often been reified as a theoretical category. Specifically, Marxist critical categories fail to account for the integral importance of gender in any sociopolitical critique. This dissertation attempts to dereify gender and demonstrate a theoretical model that seamlessly integrates psychoanalysis, Marxism, and feminism. Conspiracy culture in America since World War II is an ideal aperture through which we may envision such a theoretical approach, and indeed see the critical need for such an approach. This dissertation looks at several post-war American conspiracy narratives, including Oliver Stones JFK and Nixon, Don DeLillos Libra, Sidney Lumets Fail Safe, John Frankenheimers The Manchurian Candidate, several novels by Philip K. Dick, and Fox Broadcast Networks The X Files. Through this study of conspiracy culture we see the post-war construction of masculinity and its connections to economic structures.

Contemporary feminist hard-boiled detective fiction has been studied as an adaptation of the traditional masculine hard-boiled detective genre. Writers such as Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, and Marcia Muller create compelling feminist protagonists to fill the role of detective. The successes and failures of these feminist detectives have then been measured against the standards created in the classic genre by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain. The classic hard-boiled masculine genre came of age in the 1930s and 1940s at the same time as proletarian literature. The two genres share many characteristics including reliance upon first person narrative, the tough guy voice, an awareness of political and social hierarchies, and the utilization of realism. While women writers such as Josephine Herbst and Catherine Brody were drawn to the political cause of the proletarian, they were separated from the working class by their socioeconomic ties and from the literary proletarian hero by its masculine conception. Consequently, their fiction often included the middle-class woman intellectual struggling to help the oppressed worker. In these works, gender, class, politics, and social order are intertwined. The characters explore these concepts and what avenues of rebellion and power were open to women at the time. The struggles explored in the writing of women proletarian writers from the 1930s have much in common with the issues examined in contemporary feminist hard-boiled detective fiction. Both genres show women characters with an awareness of the power of language to include and exclude, the importance of physical presentation and performance, the prestige of being associated with specific social classes, the power found in ties to communities and family, a problematic relationship with violence, and the power of revealing and interpreting information. It is clear that feminist hard-boiled detective fiction is then a genre of political protest in the tradition of women proletarian writers of the 1930s.

Short story collection.