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Willa Cather believed literature and journalism were separate and unequal genres. During her decade in Pittsburgh (1896-1906), as she gained recognition as a literary artist, she increasingly censored her early journalism and apprentice fiction. My dissertation promotes the recovery of these writings, especially the unsigned and pseudonymous pieces contained in two affiliated journals she served as an editor: Home Monthly the National Stockman and Farmer. My first chapter describes more then forty additional items from Home Monthly and the Stockman, including poetry, short fiction, and editorials. Annotated tables of contents and contributors' lists for both journals (1896-97) and maps and period photographs are offered in appendices.<br>Employing the methodology of New Historicism, my dissertation returns little regarded works to their approximate contexts of publication. Chapter 2 reads Cather's story "The Conversion of Sun Loo" (1900) as part of the debate over proselytizing the Chinese within the Library, a Pittsburgh magazine whose brief life (Spring and Summer of 1900) coincided with the Boxer rebellion in North China. "Sum Loo," it argues, is a satire upon recent events linking China and Pittsburgh's small Chinese colony.<br>The third chapter recovers a journalistic prototype for a story Cather held among her most "literary." Although Cather preferred to say "Paul's Case" (1905) was inspired by her teaching experience, she borrowed its plot from the city papers of November 1902, which reported the theft of $1,500 from the offices of the Denny Estate by two Pittsburgh boys. This chapter examines not only Cather's adaptation of extra-literary sources, but also her ambivalence toward her first career in journalism.<br>The final chapter concerns two late novellas, "Uncle Valentine" (1922) and "Double Birthday" (1929), written more than a decade after Cather's last physical visit to the city. Both use memories of Pittsburgh and Allegheny City at the turn of the century to attack suburbanization and class stratification, twin problems that she thought were eroding the nation's social fabric in the 1920s. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / English / PhD; / Dissertation;

The past two decades of political and social disintegration in Bosnia and Herzegovina have given birth to literary counterreactions against hegemonic ways of imagining social life in the country. This thesis deals with a particular practice in BosnianHerzegovinian war and post-war literature, which uses infantile perspectives to critically address issues related to the socialist history of Bosnia as part of Yugoslavia, the war in the 1990s, and the socalled transitional post-war period. Drawing on an old Western literary tradition of using the child character to estrange conventional experiences of the world, the texts (by authors such as Miljenko Jergović, Nenad Veličković, Alma Lazarevska, Aleksandar Hemon, and Saša Stanišić) use the skewing and dislocating outlook associated with the infantile subject to expose and undermine perceivably problematic mechanisms in socialist, ethnonationalist, and Western liberal hegemonic discourses. In contrast to previous research on the topic, which has primarily focussed upon the narratological conditions for the infantile perspective, the focus here is on the subversive infantilisation of hegemonic discourse—that is, the very discursive act of representing and contesting dominant concepts, narratives, and representations. The texts are seen as transitional areas through which input from the social world passes and, in this process, is restructured and ultimately transformed into a configuration slightly or radically different from the original input. Theoretically inspired by discourse theory and ideas from New Historicism, the study isolates and investigates a set of techniques through which this reconfiguration occurs. Apart from discussing the use of the basic infantile perspective as such a technique, the study also considers how the notion of the infantile influences techniques of dichotomisation (the production of positional counterpoints), appropriation (the critical subsuming of dominant discourse), and blending (the mixing of dominant and childish imagery). The thesis also addresses the possible political implications of the strategy of subversive infantilisation. Here the approach is influenced by the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière, which enables an understanding of the aesthetic reconfiguration of how Bosnian social life is imagined as a way of constituting a new form of subjectivity that evades the excluding and oppressive framework of hegemonic discourse.

In this essay I plan to show how Wharton, through Lily, criticised society, and more specifically its expectations of women. My thesis is that Wharton and her character Lily exposed the upper class society of New York, and its ruthlessness, by voicing a woman’s point of view. Therefore, the main purpose here is to reveal the complexity of the lives women led in order to fulfil society’s expectations and I thereby plan to explore what it was like living in a world governed by strict rules of conduct.

Although Isaac Watts wrote hymns in the early eighteenth century, some of his hymns, such as “Joy to the World,” “Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed?,” and “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” survive today as well-known hymns. However, little has been written about the rhetorical effects of his hymns. This thesis demonstrates that, like any other literary work, Watts’ hymns can be analyzed rhetorically. This thesis analyzes Watts’ hymns with the aid of Louis Montrose’s New Historicism, showing how Watts’ hymns were impacted by the English culture in which he lived and how they impacted the religious culture to which he belonged and preached: the Dissenters. Watts’ hymns were not the only texts that had an impact on the Dissenters. The psalters were considered by many (Calvin, in particular) to be the only acceptable songs for use in worship. Watts responded to this belief with his hymns, showing that God could be praised in other reverent ways. Watts hymns were successful for many reasons, including their easy-to-understand language, their vivid images, and their ability to focus on the heart of man. Watts used his hymns to help Dissenters keep away from error, particularly the new religion of Deism and the sin of pride. Looking through the lens of New Historicism, Watts’ hymns are rhetorical texts, impacting the culture of Dissenters and responding to the larger English culture. Watts possessed great skill as a writer, poet, and preacher, and this thesis shows how his hymns had a thorough impact on the Dissenters’ culture.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories about the character Sherlock Holmes are known by many people, they excited readers when he first released the stories in different magazines, and they still excite readers to this day. This essay aims to explore the social dimensions in Conan Doyle’s first and last Sherlock Holmes story by searching for indications of social status and formality. The theory that is being used is the new historicist approach, where there is a contrast between the literary and the non-literary texts, meaning that the stories may be affected by what happened in the society when the stories were written. The conclusion for the essay is that characters in both stories are in the beginning not of a higher class, rather a middle class, whilst in the last they become less dependent on one another, they do not need to live together anymore but, they choose to keep working together. Lastly, this essay is about the Swedish classroom and gives examples of how a teacher could use these stories in their classrooms.

This thesis seeks to realign Richard Crashaw’s aesthetic orientation with a broadly conceptualized genre of seventeenth-century devotional, or meditative, poetry. This realignment clarifies Crashaw’s worth as a poet within the Renaissance canon and helps to dismantle historicist and New Historicist readings that characterize him as a literary anomaly. The methodology consists of an expanded definition of meditative poetry, based primarily on Louis Martz’s original interpretation, followed by a series of close readings executed to show continuity between Crashaw and his contemporaries, not discordance. The thesis concludes by expanding the genre of seventeenth-century devotional poetry to include Edward Taylor, who despite his Puritanism, also exemplifies many of the same generic attributes as Crashaw.

This thesis is focused on Václav Řezáč's novel interpretation. To be more specific, it deals with the formation of the psychological novels (Černé světlo, Svědek, Rozhraní) and novels called as constructive novels (unfinished trilogy Nástup and Bitva). Although all of these works were created gradually over fifteen years, a contemporary situation was developing in the meantime as well. That's why we can find ourselves in two different state systems and in two different period atmospheres which significantly influenced the former art. The essential default method is a new historicism which is enriched by hermeneutic approaches.

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