Dissertations / Theses: 'Authors, American – 20th century – Juvenile literature'

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Hendricks, Michael Todd. "KNOWING AND BEING KNOWN: SEXUAL DELINQUENCY, STARDOM, AND ADOLESCENT GIRLHOOD IN MIDCENTURY AMERICAN FILM." UKnowledge, 2014. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/14.

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Sexual delinquency marked midcentury cinematic representations of adolescent girls in 1940s, 50, and early 60s. Drawing from the history of adolescence and the context of midcentury female juvenile delinquency, I argue that studios and teen girl stars struggled for decades with publicity, censorship, and social expectations regarding the sexual license of teenage girls. Until the late 1950s, exploitation films and B movies exploited teen sex and pregnancy while mainstream Hollywood ignored those issues, struggling to promote teen girl stars by tightly controlling their private lives but depriving fan magazines of the gossip and scandals that normally fueled the machinery of stardom. The emergence and image of the postwar, sexually autonomous teen girl finally began to see expression in mainstream melodramas of the late 50s, and teen girl stars such as Sandra Dee and Natalie Wood created new, “post-delinquent” star images wherein “good girls” could still be sexually experienced. This new image was a significant departure from the widespread belief that the sexually active teen girl was a fundamentally delinquent threat to the nuclear family, and offered a liberal counterpoint to more conservative teen girl prototypes like Hayley Mills, which continued to have cultural currency.

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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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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
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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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Modzelewski, Ann Shirley. "Internal dialogues: Construction of the self in The Woman Warrior." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2003. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2468.

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This thesis considers past autobiographical theory and questions whether it addresses the autobiography of the female writer. Autobiographies of Harriet Jacobs, Margaret Sanger, and Maxine Hong Kingston are examined to reveal their polyvocality, use of the autobiographical "I", and rhetorical strategies maintained in order to create a close relationship with the reader. Particular attention is paid to Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism and Sidonie Smith's autobiographical "I."

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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
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Rocca, Alexander Gordon. "Buying Time: Literary Philanthropy and 20th Century American Literature." Thesis, 2017. https://doi.org/10.7916/D8PR87CP.

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This dissertation analyzes the influence of cultural philanthropy on 20th and 21st-century American literature. Modern cultural philanthropy emerged in the late 19th century out of the fortunes of wealthy industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie, and grew to be one of the three pillars of the 20th-century literary economy alongside the publishing market and the university system. I trace the origins and evolution of literary philanthropic institutions through authorial case studies to show how funding from the Guggenheim Foundation, the PEN American Center, the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Program, and the MacArthur Foundation have opened avenues for collective political action and individual aesthetic innovation alike, while at the same time extending the power and influence of institutions over the cultural sphere. Through readings of Walter Francis White, Langston Hughes, Philip Roth, Leslie Marmon Silko, Maxine Hong Kingston, and David Foster Wallace, I show how philanthropic institutions have sought to make modernity hospitable for writers—part of what John Dewey in the 1930s called modernity’s “lost individuals”—by incorporating them and their work into the American democratic project. The effect, I argue, has been the democratization of American literature and an unprecedented efflorescence of writing by the varied people and social groups that at once constitute America and its most profound aspirations. Literary philanthropy seeks to transform the literary imagination from a luxury for individual aesthetic ends into an integral component of the common good.

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Raymond, Virginia Marie. "Mexican Americans write towards justice in Texas, 1973-1982." 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/6260.

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"Mexican Americans Write Toward Justice in Texas, 1973 - 1982" examines literature produced in the course of struggles for justice conducted by Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and their allies, the origins of this literature, and its effects. Three areas -- police brutality, exploitation of farmworkers, and inequitable, inadequate public education - troubled Mexican Americans activists across the political spectrum. Additionally, many people were appalled by U.S. treatment of immigrants. The poetry and plays of Nephtalí De León, Heriberto Terán, Gil Scott-Heron, Carlos Morton, and an activist teatro in Houston exemplify a long tradition of cultural production that simultaneously mourns and organizes in response to violence against Mexicans in Texas. The Texas Farmworker Union (TFWU) newspaper, El Cuhamil , documents the cacophony of voices participating in farmworker mobilizations for social justice in Texas. El Cuhamil also reorients the narratives about farm worker organizing from a U.S.- centered "civil rights" perspective to a Mexican-centered one. Two U.S. Supreme Court decisions arising from Texas, San Antonio v. Rodríguez (1973) and Plyler v. Doe (1982), illustrate how federal courts began to retreat from the engagement with social justice that had characterized much civil rights jurisprudence between roughly 1946 and 1973. These decisions also reveal the contradictions at the heart of constitutional equal protection at its "best" or most effective. This dissertation seeks to understand how Mexicans and Mexican Americans tested a variety of rhetorical strategies - U.S. citizenship, Aztlán, the international working class, Catholic universalism, and human rights - to articulate their needs and desires and make claims in popular culture, labor organizing, and the law. I situate these writings historically and in U.S. Southwestern literature, Mexican American literature, U.S. civil rights jurisprudence, and Mexican intellectual traditions. A subsidiary contribution of this dissertation is its tentative exploration of the distinct trajectories of Mexican Americans in what is now the Texas Plains and Panhandle. The alienating sense of "nothingness" that some people attribute to this region derives from the conditions under which Anglo settlement began in the 1880s. Modernity, here, did not alter or overlap with the modes of production that preceded it, but violently obliterated them.
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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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Herrera, Olga Lydia. "City of myth, muscle, and Mexicans : work, race, and space in twentieth-century Chicago literature." Thesis, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/ETD-UT-2011-05-3157.

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Chicago occupies a place in the American imagination as a city of industry and opportunity for those who are willing to hustle. Writers have in no small part contributed to the creation of this mythology; this canon includes Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, and Richard Wright. What is it about these authors that make them the classics of Chicago literature? The “essential” books of Chicago enshrine a period during which the city still held a prominent position in the national economy and culture, and embodied for Americans something of their own identity—the value of individualism, and the Protestant work ethic. Notably absent are the narratives from immigrants, particularly those of color: for a city that was a primary destination for the Great Migration of African Americans from the South and the concurrent immigration of Mexicans in the early part of the 20th century, it is remarkable that these stories have not gained significant attention, with the exception of Richard Wright’s. This dissertation interrogates the discourse of ambition and labor in the Chicago literary tradition from the perspective of three Mexican American authors from Chicago—Carlos Cortez, Ana Castillo, and Sandra Cisneros. These authors, faced with late 20th century deindustrialization and the enduring legacy of segregation, engage with the canonical narratives of Chicago by addressing the intersections of race and citizenship as they affect urban space and labor opportunities. Rather than simply offering a critique, however, the Mexican American authors engage in a re-visioning of the city that incorporates the complexities of a fluid, transnational experience, and in doing so suggest the future of urban life in a post-industrial America.
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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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Courau, Rogier Philippe. "States of nomadism, conditions of diaspora : studies in writing between South Africa and the United States, 1913-1936." Thesis, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/162.

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Using the theoretical idea of ‘writing between’ to describe the condition of the travelling subject, this study attempts to chart some of the literary, intellectual and cultural connections that exist(ed) between black South African intellectuals and writers, and the experiences of their African- American counterparts in their common movements towards civil liberty, enfranchisement and valorised consciousness. The years 1913-1936 saw important historical events taking place in the United States, South Africa and the world – and their effects on the peoples of the African diaspora were signficant. Such events elicited unified black diasporic responses to colonial hegemony. Using theories of transatlantic/transnational cultural negotiation as a starting point, conceptualisations that map out, and give context to, the connections between transcontinental black experiences of slavery and subjugation, this study seeks to re-envisage such black South African and African-American intellectual discourses through reading them anew. These texts have been re-covered and re-situated, are both published and unpublished, and engage the notion of travel and the instability of transatlantic voyaging in the liminal state of ‘writing between’. With my particular regional focus, I explore the cultural and intellectual politics of these diasporic interrelations in the form of case studies of texts from several genres, including fiction and autobiography. They are: the travel writings of Xhosa intellectual, DDT Jabavu, with a focus on his 1913 journey to the United States; an analysis of Ethelreda Lewis’s novel, Wild Deer (1933), which imagines the visit of an African-American musician, Paul Robeson-like figure to South Africa; and Eslanda Goode Robeson’s representation of her African Journey (1945) to the country in 1936, and the traveller’s gaze as expressed through the ethnographic imagination, or the anthropological ‘eye’ in the text.
Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2008.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Authors, American – 20th century – Juvenile literature'

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