Dissertations / Theses: 'American literature – Greek American authors – History and criticism'

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Suzuki-Martinez, Sharon S. 1963. "Tribal Selves: Subversive Identity in Asian American and Native American Literature." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/565575.

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Go, King-fan, and 吳景勛. "Burdens of the past: a study of Chinese-American writings." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2005. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B37642832.

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Donovan, Kathleen McNerney. "Coming to voice: Native American literature and feminist theory." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/186769.

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This dissertation argues that numerous parallels exist between Native American literature, especially that by women, and contemporary feminist literary and cultural theories, as both seek to undermine the hierarchy of voice: who can speak? what can be said? when? how? under what conditions? After the ideas find voice, what action is permitted to women? All of these factors influence what African American cultural theorist bell hooks terms the revolutionary gesture of "coming to voice." These essays explore the ways Native American women have voiced their lives through the oral tradition and through writing. For Native American women of mixed blood, the crucial search for identity and voice must frequently be conducted in the language of the colonizer, English, and in concert with a concern for community and landscape. Among the topics addressed in the study are (1) the negotiation of identity of those who must act in more than one culture; (2) ethnocentrism in ethnographic reports of tribal women's lives; (3) misogyny in a "canonical" Native American text; (4) the ethics of intercultural literary collaboration; (5) commonality in inter-cultural texts; and (6) transformation through rejection of Western privileging of opposition, polarity, and hierarchy.

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Potts, Dale E. "Woods Voices, Woods Knowledge: Work and Recreation in the Popular Literature of the Northeastern Forest, 1850-1963." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2007. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/PottsDE2007.pdf.

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Potts, Henry M. "Native American values and traditions and the novel : ambivalence shall speak the story." Thesis, McGill University, 1996. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=26754.

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The commitment to community shared by Native American authors such as N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, and Louise Erdrich is partially evinced by each author's readiness to inscribe in novel form the values and traditions of the tribal community or communities with which he/she is closely associated. Many students of the novel will attest to its pliant, sometimes transmutable nature; nevertheless, as this study attempts to make clear, there are some reasons why Native American authors should reconsider using the novel as a means to express their tribal communities' values and traditions. Unambivalent prescriptions, however, seem more suited to the requirements of law or medicine; and so this study also examines some of the reasons why Native American authors should continue to embrace this relatively "new" art form persistently termed the novel.

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Su, Suocai. "Inventing transnational Chinese American identities in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Among the white moon faces, and Shawn Hsu Wong's American knees." Virtual Press, 2004. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1301632.

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My dissertation investigates how Chinese American writers invent transnational Chinese American identities in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, I focus on Amy Tan's The JoyLuck Club (1989), Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homelands (1996), and Shawn Hsu Wong's American Knees(1995). 1 argue that Tan, Lim, and Wong challenge the conventional ideas of a singular, pure, and fixed identity but instead create Chinese American identities in the post-1965 era as multiple, hybrid, and constantly changing to accommodate to an open, diverse, and multicultural America. Specifically, in Tan's work, by describing both the conflicts and connections between the Chinese mothers and their American horn daughters, she represents a group of Chinese American women who transcend their cultural, generational, and linguistic differences to achieve an identity that connects the West with the East. In Lim's work, by portraying the domestic and international movements of herself as an immigrant, she reveals the long and painful process of negotiating multiple cultures and identities that enables her to change from a Chinese Malaysian to a new Asian American woman. In Wong's work, by focusing on how the fourth- and fifthgeneration of Chinese and/or Asian American men and women negotiate racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual identities, Wong meditates on what the term Asian American means in the new age. Together the three works reflect the range, diversity, and invention of contemporary Chinese American identities by Chinese American writers in the new era.
Department of English

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Wolfe, Andrea P. "Black mothers and the nation : claiming space and crafting signification for the black maternal body in American women's narratives of slavery, reconstruction, and segregation, 1852-2001." CardinalScholar 1.0, 2010. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1560845.

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“Black Mothers and the Nation” tracks the ways that texts produced by United States women throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries position the black maternal body as subversive to the white patriarchal power structure for which it labored and that has acted in many ways to abject it from the national body. This study points to the ways in which the black mother’s subversive potential has been repeatedly, violently, and surreptitiously circumscribed in some quarters even as it succeeds in others. Several important thematic threads run throughout the chapters of this study, sometimes appearing in clear relationship to the texts discussed and sometimes underwriting their analysis in less obvious ways: the functioning of the black maternal body to both support the construction of and undermine white womanhood in slavery and in the years beyond; the reclamation of the maternal body as a site of subversion and nurturance as well as erotic empowerment; the resistance of black mother figures to oppressive discourses surrounding their bodies and reproduction; and, finally, the figurative and literal location of the black mother in a national body politic that has simultaneously used and abjected it over the course of centuries. Using these lenses, this study focuses on a grouping of women’s literature that depicts slavery and its legacy for black women and their bodies. The narratives discussed in this study explore the intersections of the issues outlined above in order to get at meaningful expressions of black maternal identity. By their very nature as representations of historical record and regional and national realities, these texts speak to the problematic placement of black maternal bodies within the nation, beginning in the antebellum era and continuing through the present; in other words, these slavery, Reconstruction, and segregation narratives connect personal and physical experiences of maternity to the national body.
The subordination of embodied power : sentimental representations of the black maternal body in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's cabin and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the life of a slave girl -- Recuperating the body : the black mother's reclamation of embodied presence and her reintegration into the black community in Pauline Hopkins's Contending forces and Toni Morrison's Beloved -- The narrative power of the black maternal body : resisting and exceeding visual economies of discipline in Margaret Walker's Jubilee and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose -- Mapping black motherhood onto the nation : the black maternal body and the body politic in Lillian Smith's Strange fruit and Alice Randall's The wind done gone -- Michelle Obama in context.
Access to thesis permanently restricted to Ball State community only
Department of English

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Reyes, Karen Stoner. "Finding a new voice : the Oregon writing community between the world wars." PDXScholar, 1986. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/3602.

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The period of 1919 to 1939 was a significant one for the development of the literature of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. The literary work produced in the region prior to the first world war was greatly influenced by the "Genteel tradition" of the late nineteenth century. By 1939, however, the literature of Oregon and the region had emerged from the outdated literary standards of the pre-war period and had found a new, realistic, natural voice, strongly regional in nature and rooted in the modern American tradition.

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Li, Jing. "Self in community: twentieth-century American drama by women." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2016. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_oa/322.

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This thesis argues that twentieth-century American women playwrights spearhead the drama of transformation, and their plays become resistance discourses that protest, subvert, or change the representation of the female self in community. Many create antisocial, deviant, and self-reflexive characters who become misfits, criminals, or activists in order to lay bare women's moral-psychological crises in community. This thesis highlights how selected women playwrights engage with, and question various dominant, regional, racial, or ethnic female communities in order to redefine themselves. Sophie Treadwell's Machinal and Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother are representative texts that explore how the dominant culture can pose a barrier for radical women who long for self-fulfillment. To cultivate their personhood, working class Caucasian women are forced to go against their existing community so as to seek sexual freedom and reproductive rights, which are regarded as new forms of resistance or transgression. While they struggle hard to conform to the traditional, gendered notion of female altruism, self-sacrifice and care ethics, they cannot hide their discontent with the gendered division of labor. They are troubled doubly by the fact that they have to work in the public sphere, but conform to their gender roles in the private sphere. Different female protagonists resort to extreme homicidal or suicidal measures in order to assert their radical, contingent subjectivities, and become autonomous beings. By becoming antisocial or deviant characters, they reject their traditional conformity, and emphasize the arbitrariness and performativity of all gender roles. Treadwell and Norman both envision how the dominant Caucasian female community must experience radical changes in order to give rise to a new womanhood. Using Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun as examples, this thesis demonstrates the difficulties women may face when living in disparate communities. The selected texts show that Southern women and African-American women desperately crave for their distinct identities, while they long to be accepted by others. Their subjectivity is a constant source of anxiety, but some women can form strong psychological bonds with women from the same community, empowering them to make new life choices. To these women, their re-fashioned self becomes a means to reexamine the dominant white culture and their racial identity. African-American women resist the discourse of assimilation, and re-identify with their African ancestry, or pan-Africanism. In the relatively traditional southern community, women can subvert the conventional southern belle stereotypes. They assert their selfhood by means of upward mobility, sexual freedom, or the rejection of woman's reproductive imperative. The present study shows these women succeed in establishing their personhood when they refuse to compromise with the dominant ways, as well as the regional, racial communal consciousness. Maria Irene Fornes' Fefu and Her Friends and Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles are analyzed to show how women struggle to claim their dialogic selfhood in minoritarian communities (New England Community and Jewish Community). Female protagonists maintain dialogues with other women in the same community, while they choose their own modes of existence, such as single parenthood or political activism. The process of transformation shows that women are often disturbed by their moral consciousness, a result of their acceptance of gender roles and their submission to patriarchal authority. Their transgressive behaviors enable them to claim their body and mind, and strive for a new source of personhood. Both playwrights also advocate women's ability to self-critique, to differentiate the self from the Other, to allow the rise of an emergent self in the dialectical flux of inter-personal and intra-personal relations. The present study reveals that twentieth-century American female dramatists emphasize relationality in their pursuit of self. However, the transformation of the self can only be completed by going beyond, while remaining in dialogue with the dominant, residual, or emergent communities. For American women playwrights, the emerging female selves come with a strong sense of "in-betweenness," for it foregrounds the individualistic and communal dimensions of women, celebrating the rise of inclusive, mutable, and dialogic subjectivities.

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Robinson, Heather Lindsey. "Ours is the Kingdom of Heaven: Racial Construction of Early American Christian Identities." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2016. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc849673/.

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This project interrogates how religious performance, either authentic or contrived, aids in the quest for freedom for oppressed peoples; how the rhetoric of the Enlightenment era pervades literatures delivered or written by Native Americans and African Americans; and how religious modes, such as evoking scripture, performing sacrifices, or relying upon providence, assist oppressed populations in their roles as early American authors and speakers. Even though the African American and Native American populations of early America before the eighteenth century were denied access to rights and freedom, they learned to manipulate these imposed constraints--renouncing the expectation that they should be subordinate and silent--to assert their independent bodies, voices, and spiritual identities through the use of literary expression. These performative strategies, such as self-fashioning, commanding language, destabilizing republican rhetoric, or revising narrative forms, become the tools used to present three significant strands of identity: the individual person, the racialized person, and the spiritual person. As each author resists the imposed restrictions of early American ideology and the resulting expectation of inferior behavior, he/she displays abilities within literature (oral and written forms) denied him/her by the political systems of the early republican and early national eras. Specifically, they each represent themselves in three ways: first, as a unique individual with differentiated abilities, exceptionalities, and personality; second, as a person with distinct value, regardless of skin color, cultural difference, or gender; and third, as a sanctified and redeemed Christian, guaranteed agency and inheritance through the family of God. Furthermore, the use of religion and spirituality allows these authors the opportunity to function as active agents who were adapting specific verbal and physical methods of self-fashioning through particular literary strategies. Doing so demonstrates that they were not the unrefined and unfeeling individuals that early American political and social restrictions had made them--that instead they were intellectually and morally capable of making both physical and spiritual contributions to society while reciprocally deserving to possess the liberties and freedoms denied them.

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Chan, Suet Ni. "Women at crossroads : a study of women's search for identity in twentieth century Chinese-American fiction." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2009. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_ra/1095.

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Burrows, Sonja S. 1973. "Beyond the comfort zone: Monolingual ideologies, bilingual U.S. Latino texts." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10866.

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xii, 206 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.
This project examines reader reception of U.S. Latino-authored narratives that engage in varying degrees of textual code switching and bicultural belonging. The analysis builds on the argument that these narratives, as part of a larger body of minor literatures, play a role in revolutionizing traditional Anglo-American discourses of knowledge by marginalizing the monolingual and monocultural reader historically positioned as the prototype of cultural literacy in the United States. This project further proposes that marginalization is achieved by a textual appropriation and structural weakening of the dominant language and culture via the creation of a narrative space that privileges code switching to articulate bicultural identities. U.S. Latino texts that alternate between English and Spanish mirror the misunderstandings and failures of intelligibility in the multicultural situations they depict, thereby requiring the monolingual and monocultural reader to experience this unintelligibility first-hand. In order to tackle broader questions about how these literary texts and their reception reflect what is at stake politically, nationally, and culturally for Latinos in the United States today, this interdisciplinary project draws upon a diversity of perspectives originating from linguistics, literary analysis, sociology, and history to identify how literary texts mirror bicultural identity for Latinos. As a part of this analysis, the project examines the history of Spanish language use in the United States, Latino immigration history, the standard language ideology privileging English monolingualism, the persistence of bilingualism, oral and written code switching, the publishing industry, and analyses of reader responses to bilingual texts based on survey data. In situating these histories within discussions about the bilingual, bicultural nature and reception of the U.S. Latino narrative, this project shows how the linguistic makeup and the subsequent receptivity of these texts minor the bicultural identity and changing social positioning of the Latino population in the United States.
Committee in charge: Robert Davis, Chairperson, Romance Languages; Analisa Taylor, Member, Romance Languages; Monique Balbuena, Member, Honors College; Holly Cashman, Member, Not from U of O; David Vazquez, Outside Member, English

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Larson, Sidner John. "Issues of identity in the writing of N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Silko and Louise Erdrich." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/186638.

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A Native American Aesthetic: The Attitude of Relationship discusses issues of identity that arise from my own experience and in the writing of N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Silko, and Louise Erdrich.

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Schein, Marie-Madeleine. "The Evolution of Survival as Theme in Contemporary Native American Literature: from Alienation to Laughter." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1994. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278840/.

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With the publication of his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, House Made of Dawn. N. Scott Momaday ended a three-decade hiatus in the production of works written by Native American writers, and contributed to the renaissance of a rich literature. The critical acclaim that the novel received helped to establish Native American literature as a legitimate addition to American literature at large and inspired other Native Americans to write. Contemporary Native American literature from 1969 to 1974 focuses on the themes of the alienated mixed-blood protagonist and his struggle to survive, and the progressive return to a forgotten or rejected Indian identity. For example, works such as Leslie Silko's Ceremony and James Welch's Winter in the Blood illustrate this dual focal point. As a result, scholarly attention on these works has focused on the theme of struggle to the extent that Native American literature can be perceived as necessarily presenting victimized characters. Yet, Native American literature is essentially a literature of survival and continuance, and not a literature of defeat. New writers such as Louise Erdrich, Hanay Geiogamah, and Simon Ortiz write to celebrate their Indian heritage and the survival of their people, even though they still use the themes of alienation and struggle. The difference lies in what they consider to be the key to survival: humor. These writers posit that in order to survive, Native Americans must learn to laugh at themselves and at their fate, as well as at those who have victimized them through centuries of oppression. Thus, humor becomes a coping mechanism that empowers Native Americans and brings them from survival to continuance.

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Taylor, Juko Tana. "Misrecognized and Misplaced: Race Performed in African American Literature, 1900-2015." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2017. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc984162/.

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In my dissertation, I explore the ways in which racial identity is made complex through various onlookers' misrecognition of race. This issue is particularly important considering the current state of race relations in the United States, as my project offers a literary perspective and account of the way black authors have discussed racial identity formation from the turn of the century through the start of the twenty-first century. I highlight many variations of misrecognition and racial performance as a response to America's obsession with race.

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Shen, Li Ting Sherry. "Blurring in Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You." Thesis, University of Macau, 2018. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b3953897.

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Balic, Iva. "Always Painting the Future: Utopian Desire and the Women's Movement in Selected Works by United States Female Writers at the Turn of the Twentieth Century." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2009. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc11060/.

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This study explores six utopias by female authors written at the turn of the twentieth century: Mary Bradley Lane's Mizora (1881), Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant's Unveiling Parallel (1893), Eloise O. Richberg's Reinstern (1900), Lena J. Fry's Other Worlds (1905), Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), and Martha Bensley Bruère's Mildred Carver, USA (1919). While the right to vote had become the central, most important point of the movement, women were concerned with many other issues affecting their lives. Positioned within the context of the late nineteenth century women's rights movement, this study examines these "sideline" concerns of the movement such as home and gender-determined spheres, motherhood, work, marriage, independence, and self-sufficiency and relates them to the transforming character of female identity at the time. The study focuses primarily on analyzing the expression of female historical desire through utopian genre and on explicating the contradictory nature of utopian production.

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Hazelton, Hugh. "Latinocanadá, a critical anthology of ten Latin American writers of Canada." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/nq26380.pdf.

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Sagorje, Marina. "Self and society in Mary McCarthy's writing." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8fd1de71-c10c-4341-8283-ccebfeebf2a7.

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My thesis analyses the oeuvre of the American writer Mary McCarthy (1912-1989), with the focus on the figure of the outsider looking in. McCarthy uses outsider figures in her texts as prisms through which distinctive historical moments as well as problems of gender, race and religion are studied against the backdrop of the changing climate of the American 'red' 1930s, the anxious '50s, and the late '60s torn by the Vietnam war. Examples of McCarthy's recurring protagonists are the New York Bohemian girl of the '30s in the predominantly male world marred by the Great Depression, the Jewish character stereotyped as the Other by the poorly hidden anti-Semitism of the American society of the early 1940s, and the orphan child exposed to adult cruelty, who finds her only solace in the Catholic religion. Their position of being outsiders who live in a society not their own by birthright, is shown to be crucial for their acquisition and knowledge of truth, and links insight to marginality, which is reinforced by McCarthy's technique of ironically detached observation, the 'cold eye' of her prose. McCarthy herself appears as an outsider character throughout her writing, both as the historical figure and as the protagonist of her autobiographies. Her self-image, shaped by her orphaned childhood and her youth as a Bohemian girl among leftist intellectuals, is subject to conflicting impulses of confession and concealment. McCarthy's wide use of autobiographical details in her fiction and elements of fiction in her autobiographies led most critics to study her work from a chiefly biographical point of view. My own approach to Mary McCarthy's writing takes their findings into consideration, and includes the analysis of the historical, political, and social contexts of McCarthy's texts, as well as the intertextual dialogue with a few select writings by McCarthy's contemporaries such as Philip Roth and Sylvia Plath.

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Bredin, Renae Moore. "Guerilla ethnography." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/187034.

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Using contemporary paradigms from Native American, African American, feminist, and post-colonial critical theories, as well the debates around what constitutes anthropology, this dissertation examines the ways in which Native American written literary production and European American ethnography converge in the social production and construction of the "raced" categories of "red" and "white." The questions of how discourses of power and subjectivity operate are asked of texts by Paula Gunn Allen, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Elsie Clews Parsons, all of whom have lived and worked in and around Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico. The matrix in their texts of location (Laguna Pueblo), discourses (fiction and ethnography), "races" (Laguna and White), and gender (female), facilitates an examination of the scripting of "Indian-ness" and "White-ness" and how these categories sustain each other, and how each "contains" and "represents" the other, based in relative domination and subordination. What is posited here is a practice of guerilla ethnography, a practice which reflects "white" back upon itself, creating a picture of what it means to be culturally "white" by one who is "other than white." Texts are examined in terms of a racial and ethnic "whiteness" as a socially constructed category, upsetting the underlying assumption of whiteness as the given or natural center, rather than as another socially constructed category.

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Bennett, Sarah. "The American contexts of Irish poetry, 1950-present." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669957.

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Bird, Lori. "Beauty in Bronzeville." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2004. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/BirdL2004.pdf.

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Clarke, Joni Adamson. "A place to see: Ecological literary theory and practice." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/187115.

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"A Place to See: Ecological Literary Theory and Practice" approaches "American" literature with an inclusive interdisciplinarity that necessarily complicates traditional notions of both "earliness" and canon. In order to examine how "Nature" has been socially constructed since the seventeenth century to support colonialist objectives, I set American literature into a context which includes ancient Mayan almanacs, the Popol Vuh, early seventeenth and eighteenth century American farmer's almanacs, 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu's autobiography, the 1994 Zapatista National Liberation army uprising in Mexico, and Leslie Silko's Almanac of the Dead. Drawing on the feminist, literary and cultural theories of Donna Haraway, Carolyn Merchant, and Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Edward Said, Annette Kolodny, and Joseph Meeker, I argue that contemporary Native American writers insist that readers question all previous assumptions about "Nature" as uninhabited wilderness and "nature writing" as realistic, non-fiction prose recorded in Waldenesque tranquility. Instead the work of writers such as Silko, Louise Erdrich, Simon Ortiz, and Joy Harjo is a "nature writing" which explores the interconnections among forms and systems of domination, exploitation, and oppression across their different racial, sexual, and ecological manifestations. I posit that literary critics and teachers who wish to work for a more ecologically and socially balanced world should draw on the work of all members of our discourse community in cooperative rather than competitive ways and seek to transform literary theory and practice by bringing it back into dynamic interconnection with the worlds we all live in--inescapably social and material worlds in which issues of race, class, and gender inevitably intersect in complex and multi-faceted ways with issues of natural resource exploitation and conservation.

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Kelly, Alice Rose. "'A change of heart' : representations of death and memorialisation in First World War writing by women, 1914-39." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708210.

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Young, Erin S. "Corporate heroines and utopian individualism: A study of the romance novel in global capitalism." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11460.

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x, 195 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.
This dissertation explores two subgenres of popular romance fiction that emerge in the 1990s: "corporate" and "paranormal" romance. While the formulaic conventions of popular romance have typically centralized the gendered tension between hero and heroine, this project reveals that "corporate" and "paranormal" romances negotiate a new primary conflict, the tension between work and home in the era of global capitalism. Transformations in political economy also occur at the level of personal and emotional life, which constitute the central problem that contemporary romances attempt to resolve. Drawing from sociological studies of globalization and intimacy, feminist criticism, and queer theory, I argue that these subgenres mark the transition from what David Harvey calls Fordist capitalism to flexible or global capitalism as the primary social condition negotiated in the popular romance. My analysis demonstrates that corporate and paranormal romance novels reflect changing ideals about intimacy in a globalized world that is increasingly influenced, socially and culturally, by the values and philosophies that dominate the marketplace. Each of these subgenres offers a distinct formal resolution to the cultural and social effects of a flexible capitalist economy. The "corporate" romances of Jayne Ann Krentz, Nora Roberts, Elizabeth Lowell, and Katherine Stone feature heroines who constantly navigate the dual and intersecting arenas of work and home in an effort to locate a balance that leads to success and happiness in both realms. In contrast, the "paranormal" romances of Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, Kelley Armstrong, and Carrie Vaughn dissolve the tension between home and work, or the private and the public, by affirming the heroine's open and endless pursuit of pleasure, adventure, and self-fulfillment. Such new forms of romantic fantasy at once reveal the tension in globalization and the domination of corporate and masculinist values that the novels hope to overcome.
Committee in charge: David Leiwei Li, Chair; Mary Elene Wood; Cynthia H. Tolentino; Jiannbin L. Shiao

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Erickson, Stacy M. "Animals-as-Trope in the Selected Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1999. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2227/.

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In this dissertation, I show how 20th century African-American women writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison utilize animals-as-trope in order to illustrate the writers' humanity and literary vision. In the texts that I have selected, I have found that animals-as-trope functions in two important ways: the first function of animal as trope is a pragmatic one, which serves to express the humanity of African Americans; and the second function of animal tropes in African-American women's fiction is relational and expresses these writers' "ethic of caring" that stems from their folk and womanist world view. Found primarily in slave narratives and in domestic fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries, pragmatic animal metaphors and/or similes provide direct analogies between the treatment of African-Americans and animals. Here, these writers often engage in rhetoric that challenges pro-slavery apologists, who attempted to disprove the humanity of African-Americans by portraying them as animals fit to be enslaved. Animals, therefore, become the metaphor of both the abolitionist and the slavery apologist for all that is not human. The second function of animals-as-trope in the fiction of African-American women writers goes beyond the pragmatic goal of proving African-Americans's common humanity, even though one could argue that this goal is still present in contemporary African-American fiction. Animals-as-trope also functions to express the African-American woman writer's understanding that 1) all oppressions stem from the same source; 2) that the division between nature/culture is a false onethat a universal connection exists between all living creatures; and 3) that an ethic of caring, or relational epistemology, can be extended to include non-human animals. Twentieth-century African-American writers such as Hurston, Walker, and Morrison participate in what anthropologists term, "neototemism," which is the contemporary view that humankind is part of nature, or a vision that Morrison would most likely attribute to the "folk." This perspective places their celebration of the continuous relations between humans and animals within a spiritual, indeed, tribal, cosmological construction. What makes these particular writers primarily different from their literary mothers, however, is a stronger sense that they are reclaiming the past, both an African and African-American history. What I hope to contribute with this dissertation is a new perspective of African-American women writers' literary tradition via their usage of animals as an expression of their "ethic of caring" and their awareness that all oppression stems from a single source.

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Greenshields, Mary Clare, and University of Lethbridge Faculty of Arts and Science. "The Amazon in the drawing room : Natalie Clifford Barney's Parisian salon, 1909-1970 / Mary Clare Greenshields." Thesis, Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Dept. of English, c2010, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10133/2606.

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This thesis is organised into two chapters and an appendix. The first chapter explores the significant American expatriate movement in France in the early part of the twentieth century, in an effort to answer the question ―Why France?‖ The second chapter examines the life and work of Natalie Clifford Barney, an American expatriate writer in Paris, who wrote predominantly in French and ran an important weekly salon for over sixty years. Specifically, her aesthetic and subject matter, her life, and her fraught publishing history are considered. The appendix is a translation of Barney's 1910 book of aphorisms entitled Éparpillements.
v, 110 leaves ; 29 cm

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Birge, Amy Anastasia. ""Mislike Me not for My Complexion": Shakespearean Intertextuality in the Works of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1996. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278175/.

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Caliban, the ultimate figure of linguistic and racial indeterminacy in The Tempest, became for African-American writers a symbol of colonial fears of rebellion against oppression and southern fears of black male sexual aggression. My dissertation thus explores what I call the "Calibanic Quadrangle" in essays and novels by Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. The figure of Caliban allows these authors to inflect the sentimental structure of the novel, to elevate Calibanic utterance to what Cooper calls "crude grandeur and exalted poesy," and to reveal the undercurrent of anxiety in nineteenth-century American attempts to draw rigid racial boundaries. The Calibanic Quadrangle enables this thorough critique because it allows the black woman writer to depict the oppression of the "Other," southern fears of black sexuality, the division between early black and white women's issues, and the enduring innocence of the progressive, educated, black female hero ~ all within the legitimized boundaries of the Shakespearean text, which provides literary authority to the minority writer. I call the resulting Shakespearean intertextuality a Quadrangle because in each of these African-American works a Caliban figure, a black man or "tragic mulatto" who was once "petted" and educated, struggles within a hostile environment of slavery and racism ruled by the Prospero figure, the wielder of "white magic," who controls reproduction, fears miscegenation, and enforces racial hierarchy. The Miranda figure, associated with the womb and threatened by the specter of miscegenation, advocates slavery and perpetuates the hostile structure. The Ariel figure, graceful and ephemeral, usually the "tragic mulatta" and a slave, desires her freedom and complements the Caliban figure. Each novel signals the presence of the paradigm by naming at least one character from The Tempest (Caliban in Cooper's A Voice from the South; "Mirandy" in Harper's Iola Leroy; Prospero in Hopkins's Contending Forces; and Ariel in Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter).

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Boettcher, Anna Margarete. "Through Women's Eyes: Contemporary Women's Fiction about the Old West." PDXScholar, 1995. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4966.

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The myth of the West is still very much alive in contemporary America. Lately, there has been a resurgence of new Western movies, TV series, and fiction. Until recently the West has been the exclusive domain of the quintessential masculine man. Women characters have featured only in the margins of the Western hero's tale. Contemporary Western fiction by women, however, offers new perspectives. Women's writing about the Old and New West introduces strong female protagonists and gives voice to characters that are muted or ignored by traditional Western literature and history. Western scholarship has largely been polarized by two approaches. First, the myth and symbol school of Turner, Smith, and followers celebrated American exceptionalism and rugged male individualism on the Western frontier. Second, the reaction against these theories draws attention to the West's legacy of racism, sexism and violence. The purpose of the present study is to collapse these theoretical fences and open a dialogue between conflicting theoretical positions and contemporay Western fiction. Molly Gloss's 1989 The Jump-Off Creek and Karen Joy Fowler's 1991 Sarah Canary selfcritically re-write the Old West. This study has attempted to explore the following questions: How can one re-write history in the context of a postmodern culture? How can "woman," the quintessential "Other" escape a modernist history (and thus avoid charges of essentialism) when she has not been in this history to begin with? In this study I analyze how these two contemporary feminist authors, Molly Gloss, and Karen Joy Fowler, face the dual challenge of writing themselves into a history that has traditionally excluded them, while at the same time deconstructing this very historical concept of the West. Fowler's and Gloss's use of diverse narrative strategies to upset a monolithic concept of history-- emphasizing the importance of multiple stories of the Old West-- is discussed in detail.

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Moore, Elizabeth Roosevelt. "Being Black existentialism in the work of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin /." Access restricted to users with UT Austin EID Full text (PDF) from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International, 2001. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3034939.

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Tait, Lisa Olsen. "Mormon Culture Meets Popular Fiction: Susa Young Gates and the Cultural Work of Home Literature." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 1998. http://patriot.lib.byu.edu/u?/MTNZ,25499.

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Davies, Ben. "Exceptional intercourse : sex, time and space in contemporary novels by male British and American writers." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2582.

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This thesis provides a theory of exceptional sex through close readings of contemporary novels by male British and American writers. I take as my overriding methodological approach Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, which is a juridico-political state in which the law has been suspended and the difference between rule and transgression is indistinguishable. Within this state, the spatiotemporal markers inside and outside also become indeterminable, making it impossible to tell whether one is inside or outside time and space. Using this framework, I work through narratives of sexual interaction – On Chesil Beach, Gertrude and Claudius, Sabbath’s Theater, and The Act of Love – to conceptualise categories of sexual exceptionality. My study is not a survey, and the texts have been chosen as they focus on different sexual behaviours, thereby opening up a variety of sexual exceptionalities. I concentrate on male writers and narratives of heterosexual sex as most work on sex, time and space is comprised of feminist readings of literature by women and queer work on gay, lesbian or trans writers and narratives. However, in the Coda I expand my argument by turning to Emma Donoghue’s Room, which, as the protagonist has been trapped for the first five years of his life, provides a tabula rasa’s perspective of exceptionality. Through my analysis of exceptionality, I provide spatiotemporal readings of the hymen, incest, adultery, sexual listening and the arranged affair. I also conceptualise textual exceptionalities – the incestuous prequel, auricular reading and the positionality of the narrator, the reader and literary characters. Exceptional sex challenges the assumption in recent queer theory that to be out of time is ‘queer’ and to be in time is ‘straight’. Furthermore, exceptionality complicates the concepts of perversion and transgression as the norm and its transgression become indistinct in the state of exception. In contrast, exceptionality offers a new, more determinate way to analyse narratives of sex.

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Skinner, Jeremy. "The Binfords and Mort Publishing Company and the Development of Regional Literature in Oregon." PDXScholar, 2011. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/156.

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During the first half of the twentieth century there was a flourishing of publishers in the United States that specialized in books with content targeted for regional audiences. One of the largest regional publishers west of the Mississippi was the Binfords & Mort publishing company of Portland, Oregon. In 1930, Binfords & Mort began publishing works of fiction, history, poetry, children's literature, and natural history by Pacific Northwest authors with content focused on the Pacific Northwest. Between 1930 and 1984, when the Binford family sold the publishing company, Binfords & Mort published around one thousand titles, and became a one of the leading influences on the Oregon literary scene. Although Binfords & Mort did not publish books that received widespread critical praise from national literary critics, its books sold well to Oregon readers. This thesis examines the economic and cultural contexts for Binfords & Mort, and its larger cultural impacts. The thesis also challenges the standard claim that Oregon literature underwent a major shift toward modernism after the publication of H.L. Davis's and James Stevens's critique of Oregon writing, Status Rerum in 1927. Instead, the thesis proposes that by looking at the output of Oregon's most popular publisher, Binfords & Mort, one finds that an older style of writing focused on the pioneer period continued to be popular well into the twentieth century. These publications had a widespread impact on Oregon's cultural development.

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De, Wagter Caroline. "Mouths on fire with songs: negotiating multi-ethnic identities on the contemporary North american stage." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/210237.

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A travers une étude interculturelle détaillée et comparée de la production théâtrale minoritaire canadienne et américaine, ma thèse cherche à mettre en lumière les les apports thématiques et esthétiques du théâtre multi-ethnicque nord-américain contemporain à la tradition anglo-américaine du 20ème siècle. Les communautés asiatiques, africaines et aborigènes sont retenues comme poste d'observation privilégié de l'expression esthétique de la condition multiculturelle postcoloniale dans le théâtre nord-américain de la période allant de 1972 à nos jours. Sur base d'un corpus de pièces de théâtre, ma recherche m'a permis de redéfinir les grandes articulations des notions d'hybridité, d'identité et de communauté/nation postcoloniale.

Through a detailed cross-cultural approach of the English Canadian and American minority theatrical production, my thesis aims to identify the thematic and aesthetic contributions of multi-ethnic North American drama to the Anglo-American tradition of the 20th century. My study examines North American drama from the vantage points of African, Asian, and Native communities from 1972 until today. Relying on a number of case studies, my research opened up new avenues for rethinking the notions of hybridity and identity in relation to the postcolonial community/nation.

Doctorat en Langues et lettres
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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Hart, Hilary 1969. "Sentimental spectacles : the sentimental novel, natural language, and early film performance." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/297.

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Advisor: Mary E. Wood. xii, 181 leaves : ill. ; 29 cm. Print copy also available for check out and consultation in the University of Oregon's library under the call number: PS374.S714 H37 2004.
The nineteenth-century American sentimental novel has only in the last twenty years received consideration from the academy as a legitimate literary tradition. During that time feminist scholars have argued that sentimental novels performed important cultural work and represent an important literary tradition. This dissertation contributes to the scholarship by placing the sentimental novel within a larger context of intellectual history as a tradition that draws upon theoretical sources and is a source itself for later cultural developments. In examining a variety of sentimental novels, I establish the moral sense philosophy as the theoretical basis of the sentimental novel's pathetic appeals and its theories of sociability and justice. The dissertation also addresses the aesthetic features of the sentimental novel and demonstrates again the tradition's connection to moral sense philosophy but within the context of the American elocution revolution. I look at natural language theory to render more legible the moments of emotional spectacle that are the signature of sentimental aesthetics. The second half of the dissertation demonstrates a connection between the sentimental novel and silent film. Both mediums rely on a common aesthetic storehouse for signifying emotions. The last two chapters of the dissertation compare silent film performance with emotional displays in the sentimental novel and in elocution and acting manuals. I also demonstrate that the films of D. W. Griffith, especially The Birth of a Nation, draw upon on the larger conventions of the sentimental novel.

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Murillo, Charles Ray. "The other within the other: Chicana/o literature, composition theory, and the new mestizaje." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2004. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2685.

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In this thesis the author explores the notion that American Chicana/o literature serves as an interactive pedagogical site that nurtures a blend of academic and street discourse, proposing the writing of those who exist on the "downside" of the border of non-standard English and academic discourse-basic writers be acknowledged.

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Veillette, Marie-Paule. "La représentation de la folie dans l'écriture féminine contemporaine des Amériques." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/NQ57482.pdf.

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Villafranca, Brooke. "Fashioning the Domestic Ideology: Women and the Language of Fashion in the Works of Elizabeth Stoddard, Louisa May Alcott, and Elizabeth Keckley." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2010. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc33208/.

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Women authors in mid to late nineteenth century American society were unafraid to shed the old domestic ideology and set new examples for women outside of racial and gender spheres. This essay focuses on the ways in which Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons, Louisa May Alcott's Behind a Mask, and Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House represent the function of fashion and attire in literature. Each author encourages readers to examine dress in a way that defies the typical domestic ideology of nineteenth century America. I want my readers to understand the role of fashion in literature as I progress through each work and ultimately show how each female author and protagonist set a new example for womanhood through their fashion choices.

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Hogue, Cynthia Anne. "Figuring woman (out): Feminine subjectivity in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and H.D." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/185054.

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Historically, women have not been "speaking subjects" but "spoken objects" in Western culture--the ground on which male-dominated constructions have been erected. In literature, women have been conventionally held as the silent and silenced other. Lyric poetry especially has idealized not only the entrenched figures of masculine subject/feminine object, but poetry itself as the site of prophecy, vision, Truth. Most dramatically in lyric poetry then, the issue of women as subjects has been collapsed into Woman as object, that figure who has been the sacrifice necessary for the production of lyric "song" and the consolidation of the unified masculine voice. It has thus been difficult for women poets to take up the position of speaking subject, most particularly because of women's problematic relationship to Woman. Recent feminist theorists have explored female subjectivity, how women put into hegemonic discourse "a possible operation of the feminine." This dissertation analyzes that possibility in poetry as exemplified in the works of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and H.D. I contend that these paradigmatic American poets constitute speaking subjects in their poetry that both figure Woman conventionally and reconfigure it, i.e. subvert the stability of those representations, thereby disturbing our view. I argue that this double identification produces, in effect, a divided or split subjectivity that is enabling for the female speaker. As an alternative to the traditionally specularized figure of Woman then, such a position opens up distinctly counter-hegemonic spaces in which to constitute the female subject, rendering problematic readerly consumption of the image of Woman as a totality. I explore the attempts to represent women's difference differently--the tenuous accession to, rejection of, or play with the lyric "I" in these poets' works. Dickinson, Moore, and H.D. reconfigure Woman and inscribe female speakers as grammatically and rhetorically, but not necessarily visually, present, thereby frustrating patriarchal economies of mastery and possession.

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Derrick, Stephanie Lee. "The reception of C.S. Lewis in Britain and America." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/19765.

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Since the publication of the book The Screwtape Letters in 1942, ‘C. S. Lewis’ has been a widely recognized name in both Britain and the United States. The significance of the writings of this scholar of medieval literature, Christian apologist and author of the children’s books The Chronicles of Narnia, while widely recognized, has not previously been investigated. Using a wide range of sources, including archival material, book reviews, monographs, articles and interviews, this dissertation examines the reception of Lewis in Britain and America, comparatively, from within his lifetime until the recent past. To do so, the methodology borrows from the history of the book and history of reading fields, and writes the biography of Lewis’s Mere Christianity and The Chronicles of Narnia. By contextualizing the writing of these works in the 1940s and 1950s, the evolution of Lewis’s respective platforms in Britain and America and these works’ reception across the twentieth century, this project contributes to the growing body of work that interrogates the print culture of Christianity. Extensive secondary reading, moreover, permitted the investigation of cultural, intellectual, social and religious factors informing Lewis’s reception, the existence of Lewis devotees in America and the lives of Mere Christianity and The Chronicles of Narnia in particular. By paying close attention to the historical conditions of authorship, publication and reception, while highlighting similarities and contrasts between Britain and America, this dissertation provides a robust account of how and why Lewis became one of the most successful Christian authors of the twentieth century.

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Phiri, Aretha Myrah Muterakuvanthu. "Toni Morrison and the literary canon whiteness, blackness, and the construction of racial identity." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002255.

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Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark, observes the pervasive silence that surrounds race in nineteenth-century canonical literature. Observing the ways in which the “Africanist” African-American presence pervades this literature, Morrison has called for an investigation of the ways in which whiteness operates in American canonical literature. This thesis takes up that challenge. In the first section, from Chapters One through Three, I explore how whiteness operates through the representation of the African-American figure in the works of three eminent nineteenth-century American writers, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. The texts studied in this regard are: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Leaves of Grass, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This section is not concerned with whether these texts constitute racist literature but with the ways in which the study of race, particularly whiteness, reveals the contradictions and insecurities that attend (white American) identity. As such, Morrison’s own fiction, written in response to white historical representations of African-Americans also deserves attention. The second section of this thesis focuses on Morrison’s attempt to produce an authentically “black” literature. Here I look at two of Morrison’s least studied but arguably most contentious novels particularly because of what they reveal of Morrison’s complex position on race. In Chapter Four I focus on Tar Baby and argue that this novel reveals Morrison’s somewhat essentialist position on blackness and racial, cultural, and gendered identity, particularly as this pertains to responsibilities she places on the black woman as culture-bearer. In Chapter Five I argue that Paradise, while taking a particularly challenging position on blackness, reveals Morrison’s evolving position on race, particularly her concern with the destructive nature of internalized racism. This thesis concludes that while racial identities have very real material consequences, whiteness and blackness are ideological and social constructs which, because of their constructedness, are fallible and perpetually under revision.

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Regoczy, Lucia Graciela, and n/a. "Espiritu de subversion : la construccion del discurso de la mujer en la narrativa posmoderna hispanoamericana." University of Otago. Department of Languages and Cultures, 2007. http://adt.otago.ac.nz./public/adt-NZDU20070927.141659.

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This thesis offers a typology of Postmodern women�s discourse from a sociological perspective. By focusing on the reading of Gioconda Belli�s Sofia de los presagios, Isabel Allende�s Paula, and Anacristina Rossi�s La loca de Gandoca, it examines how each writer achieves, thanks to the process of dialogism and the carnivalesque, a critique of social and aesthetic values, associated with Eurocentric discourse. Thanks to these two processes, the values associated with the marginalized position of women in Latin America, are brought to the surface, offering a better understanding of the relation that exists between women�s literary production and the cultural environment. Chapter one offers an overview of the concepts associated with Posmodernism, and its relevance in the Latin American context. This chapter also outlines the key concepts associated with dialogism and the carnivalesque. Chapter two examines the use of the carnivalesque in two plays by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Los empenos de una casa and Amor es mas laberinto as antecedents of subversive writing in Spanish American women�s writing. It discusses how Sor Juana through appropriation and inversion, transforms her texts into a critique of marginalized social groups. This chapter proposes that Sor Juana sets the model for the subversive nature of Spanish American women�s writing. Chapter three offers a reading of Cristina Peri Rossi�s El libro de mis primos as an example of radical feminist discourse produced in the 60�s, focusing on the use of parody and irony as means of transgressing patriarchal discourse. Chapter four examines Gioconda Belli�s Sofia de los presagios, and the incorporation of ancestral and modern myths, to accentuate women�s marginality and the conflicting and contradictory nature of Nicaraguan society. Chapter five focuses on a reading of Isabel Allende�s Paula in which the techniques of magical realism and the carnivalesque are brought together to criticize social and cultural practices that marginalize women. Chapter six examines Anacristina Rossi�s La loca de Gandoca. It focuses on the way Rossi makes use of popular music, romantic literature, poetry, and bureaucratic discourse, to denounce the exploitation and destruction of Costa Rica�s natural resources through ecotourism.

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Munoz, Cabrera Patricia. "Journeying: narratives of female empowerment in Gayl Jones's and Toni Morrison's ficton." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/210259.

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This dissertation discusses Gayl Jones’s and Toni Morrison’s characterisation of black women’s journeying towards empowered subjectivity and agency.

Through comparative analysis of eight fictional works, I explore the writers’ idea of female freedom and emancipation, the structures of power affecting the transition from oppressed towards liberated subject positions, and the literary techniques through which the authors facilitate these seminal trajectories.

My research addresses a corpus comprised of three novels and one book-long poem by Gayl Jones, as well as four novels by Toni Morrison. These two writers emerge in the US literary scene during the 1970s, one of the decades of the second black women’s renaissance (1970s, 1980s). This period witnessed unprecedented developments in US black literature and feminist theorising. In the domain of African American letters, it witnessed the emergence of a host of black women writers such as Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison. This period also marks a turning point in the reconfiguration of African American literature, as several unknown or misplaced literary works by pioneering black women writers were discovered, shifting the chronology of African American literature.

Moreover, the second black women's renaissance marks a paradigmatic development in black feminist theorising on womanhood and subjectivity. Many black feminist scholars and activists challenged what they perceived to be the homogenising female subject conceptualised by US white middle-class feminism and the androcentricity of the subject proclaimed by the Black Aesthetic Movement. They claimed that, in focusing solely on gender and patriarchal oppression, white feminism had overlooked the salience of the race/class nexus, while focus by the Black Aesthetic Movement on racism had overlooked the salience of gender and heterosexual discrimination.

In this dissertation, I discuss the works of Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison in the context of seminal debates on the nature of the female subject and the racial and gender politics affecting the construction of empowered subjectivities in black women's fiction.

Through the metaphor of journeying towards female empowerment, I show how Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison engage in imaginative returns to the past in an attempt to relocate black women as literary subjects of primary importance. I also show how, in the works selected for discussion, a complex idea of modern female subjectivities emerges from the writers' re-examination of the oppressive material and psychological circumstances under which pioneering black women lived, the common practice of sexual exploitation with which they had to contend, and the struggle to assert the dignity of their womanhood beyond the parameters of the white-defined “ideological discourse of true womanhood” (Carby, 1987: 25).

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres, Orientation langue et littérature
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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LALIOTOU, Ioanna. "Migrating Greece : historical enactments of migrations in the culture of the nation." Doctoral thesis, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/1814/5869.

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Defence date: 29 May 1998
Examining board: Prof. John Brewer, European University Institute ; Prof. Richard Johnson, The Nottingham Trent University ; Prof. Mark Mazower, University of Sussex ; Prof. Luisa Passerini, European University Institute, Supervisor
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017

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Freeman, Traci Lynn 1970. "The ethics of representation and response in comtemporary American women's autobiographical writing." 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/12770.

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Peña, Ezequiel. "Reconfiguring epistemological pacts: a lacanian and post-lacanian discouse analysis of Chicano cultural nationalist, Chicana feminist, and Chicano/a dissident intellectual subject positions." Thesis, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/2040.

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Rodríguez, Rodrigo Joseph. "Whose house is it anyway? : architects of the 'house' leitmotif in the literature from Mexican America." 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/14519.

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The literature written and being spoken by writers of Mexican origin in the United States continues to reformulate the notion of borders as well as subjects and forms within and beyond the house leitmotif. Writings by Sandra Cisneros, Pat Mora, and Tomás Rivera construct public and private spaces that merit validation in historical, literary, and cultural contexts. As architects, Chicana and Chicano writers challenge the nationalist canon and house.
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Crowell, Ellen Margaret. "Aristocratic drag : the dandy in Irish and Southern fiction." 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/12765.

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"Strategies of authorship by ethnic minorities: construction of identity by three Chinese-American writers." 2002. http://library.cuhk.edu.hk/record=b5891202.

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Wong Yuen-wing Catherine.
Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 110-112).
Abstracts in English and Chinese.
Acknowledgements --- p.i
Abstract --- p.ii
摘要 --- p.iv
Introduction Ethnicity and Novel Writing in the Multicultural Society --- p.1
Chapter Chapter One --- Working Against Assimilation: Reassurance of Her Chinese Cultural Ethnicity in Her Memoirs --- p.17
Chapter Chapter Two --- Breaking the Mirage of the Assimilating Culture: Empowering One's Identity by Embracing One's Ethnic Culture --- p.46
Chapter Chapter Three --- Emerging of Two Different Identities: Ethnicity Formation by Means of Adjustment --- p.74
Conclusion Articulating One's Ethnicity: Moving to a Larger Self --- p.101
Selected Bibliography --- p.109

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Padilla, Laura Kathleen. "Land of Enchantment, Land of Mi Chante: four arguments in New Mexican literature." Thesis, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/2786.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'American literature – Greek American authors – History and criticism'

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