In this dissertation, I bring together film theory, literary criticism, anthropology and psychology to develop a paradigm for the study of teen films that can also be effectively applied to other areas of pop culture studies as well as literary genres. Expanding on Thomas Doherty's discussion of 1950s teen films and Ian Jarvie's study of films as social criticism, I argue that teen films are a discrete genre that appeals to adolescents to the exclusion of other groups. Teen films subvert social mores of the adult world and validate adolescent subculture by reflecting that subculture's values and viewpoints. The locus of this subversion is the means by which teenagers, through the teen films, vicariously experience anxiety-provoking adult subjects such as sexual experimentation and physical violence, particularly the extreme expressions of sex and violence that society labels taboo. Through analyzing the rhetoric of teen lifestyle films, specifically the teen romance and sex farce, I explore how the films offer teens vicarious experience of many adolescent "firsts." In addition, I claim that teen films can effectively appropriate other genres while remaining identifiable as teen films. I discuss hybrid films which combine the teen film with the science fiction genre, specifically Back to …

Most primitive mythologies recognize that suffering can provide an opportunity for growth, but Western man has developed a mythology in which suffering is considered evil. He conceives of some power in the universe which will oppose evil and abolish it for him; God, and more recently science an, technology, were the hoped-for saviors that would rescue him. Both have been disappointing as saviors, and Western culture seems paralyzed by its confrontation with a future which seems death-filled. The primitive conception of death as that through which one passes in initiatory suffering has been unavailable because the mythologies in which it was framed are outdated. However, some post-World-War-II novels are reflecting a new mythology which recognizes the threat of death as the terrifying face the universe shows during initiation. A few of these novels tap deep psychological sources from which mythical images traditionally come and reflect the necessity of the passage through the hell of initiation without hope of a savior. One of the best of these is Wright Morris's The Field of Vision, in which the Scanlon story is a central statement of the mythological ground ahead. This gripping tale uses the pioneer journey west to tell of the mysterious …

This dissertation presents a thematic study of the novels of John Nichols. Intended as an introduction to his major works of fiction, this study discusses the central themes and prominent characteristics of his seven novels and considers the impact of the Southwest on his work. Chapter One presents biographical information about Nichols, focusing on his political awakening and subsequent move to Taos, New Mexico. A visit to Guatemala, after the publication of The Sterile Cuckoo. his first novel, brought Nichols to a realization that America was not a benevolent world power. He began to consider capitalism a voracious, destructive economic system, a view which informed the subjects and themes of his five novels written after The Wizard of Loneliness. In 1969, Nichols left New York City, moving to Taos, New Mexico, an area with a history of physical and economic aggression against its predominantly Native American and Hispanic population. The five polemical novels, all set in northern New Mexico, were written after this move. Chapters Two through Four discuss Nichols's seven novels, analyzing theme and reviewing critical response. /V Chapter Two discusses The Sterile Cuckoo (1965) and The Wizard of Loneliness (1966), novels written prior to Nichols's political awakening. Both …

The problem with which this investigation is concerned is that of the warrior-hero ideal as it evolves in Shakespeare's English and Roman plays, and its ultimate failure as a standard for exemplary conduct. What this study demonstrates is that the ideal of kingship that is developed in the English histories, especially in the Second Tetralogy, and which reaches its zenith in Henry V, is quite literally overturned in three Roman plays--Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. The method of determining this difference is a detailed analysis of these groups of plays. This analysis utilizes the body of Shakespearean criticism in order to note the almost total silence on what this study shows to be Shakespeare's growing disillusionment with the hero-king ideal and his final portrait of this ideal as a failure. It is the main conclusion of this study that in certain plays, and most particularly in the Roman plays, Shakespeare demonstrates a consciousness of something more valuable than political expediency and political legality. Indeed, the tragedy of these political heroes lies precisely in their allegiance to the standard of conduct of the soldier-king. Brutus, Antony, and Coriolanus, among others, suffer defeat in their striving to capture a higher …

This study is an examination of the rhetorical concept of the dialectic as it is realized in selected works of North American dystopian literature. The dialectic is one of the main factors in curtailing enlightenment rationalism which, taken to an extreme, would deny man freedom while claiming to bestow freedom upon him. The focus of this dissertation is on an analysis of twentieth-century dystopias and the dialectic of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor parable which is a precursor to dystopian literature. The Grand Inquisitor parable of The Brothers Karamazov is a blueprint for dystopian states delineated in anti-utopian fiction. Also, Dostoevsky's parable constitutes a powerful dialectical struggle between polar opposites which are presented in the following twentieth-century dystopias: Zamiatin's Me, Bradbury's Farenheit 451, Vonnegut's Player Piano, and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. The dialectic in the dystopian genre presents a give and take between the opposites of faith and doubt, liberty and slavery, and it often presents the individual of the anti-utopian state with a choice. When presented with the dialectic, then, the individual is presented with the capacity to make a real choice; therefore, he is presented with a hope for salvation in the totalitarian dystopias of modern twentieth-century literature.

Although Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) and Robert Penn Warren (1905- ) belong to different periods of American literary history, the thematic parallels in their fiction indicate their close association in the American tradition of the romance and demonstrate ideological correspondences between writers of the New England Renaissance and the Southern Renaissance. Hawthorne and Warren are appropriate subjects for comparison not only because they represent the two greatest periods of American literary production but also because they share, across the span of a century, a common view of the human condition. This study focuses on one idea or cluster of ideas in each chapter with concentration on one major fictional work by each author. Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" (1835) and Warren's "Blackberry Winter" (1946) are classic treatments of initiation. Each author utilizes archetypal patterns to dramatize the possibilities for moral, emotional, and psychological maturity. In Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and Warren's Band of Angels (1955), the theme of initiation is expanded to incorporate understanding and accepting the past. Alienation becomes the dominant theme in Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance (1852) and Warren's At Heaven's Gate (1943). Through the pain of self-discovery, characters in Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860) and Warren's …

The purpose of this study is to suggest the influence of certain characters in eighteen works by English Renaissance authors upon the Byronic Hero, that composite figure which emerges from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the Oriental Tales, the dramas, and some of the shorter poems.

Nineteenth-century women were a mainstay in the New England literary tradition, both as readers and authors. Indeed, women were a large part of a growing reading public, a public that distanced itself from Puritanism and developed an appetite for novels and magazine short stories. It was a culture that survived in spite of patriarchal domination of the female in social and literary status. This dissertation is a study of selected works from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman that show their fiction as a protest against a patriarchal society. The premise of this study is based on analyzing these works from a protest (not necessarily a feminist) view, which leads to these conclusions: rejection of the male suitor and of marriage was a protest against patriarchal institutions that purposely restricted females from realizing their potential. Furthermore, it is often the case that industrialism and abuses of male authority in selected works by Jewett and Freeman are symbols of male-driven forces that oppose the autonomy of the female. Thus my argument is that protest fiction of the nineteenth century quietly promulgates an agenda of independence for the female. It is an agenda that encourages the woman to …

This dissertation explores Fanny Fern's literary position and her role as a social critic of American lives and attitudes in the nineteenth-century. A reexamination of Fern's literary and non-literary works sheds light on her firm stand for the betterment of all mankind. The diversity and multiplicity of Fern's social criticism and her social reform attitudes, evident in Ruth Hall. Rose Clark, and in voluminous newspaper articles, not only prove her concern for society's well-being, but also reflect her development of and commitment to her writing career.

"The Religious Dimensions of William Faulkner: An Inquiry into the Dichotomy of Puritanism" traces a secular mode of thinking of American moral superiority and the gospel of success to its religious origins. The study shows that while the basis for American moral superiority derives from the typological correspondence between sacred history and American experience, the gospel of success results from the Puritan preoccupation with work as a virtue instead of a necessity because labor improves one's lot in this world while securing salvation in the next. By explaining how Puritanism begins as a rejection of worldliness but ends as an orgy of materialism, my study raises and addresses the paradoxical nature of the Puritan legacy: Why should the Puritan work ethic, when subverted by its logical conclusion---the gospel of success, result in the undoing of Puritan spirituality in its mission of redeeming the Old World? Furthermore, this inquiry examines the role Puritanism plays in creating the mythologies of America as the New World Garden, the white man as the American Adam, the black man as the American Ham, and the white woman as the American Eve. In the Puritan use of biblical typology, blacks and women function as the white …

The study inquires into the dynamic relationship between Protestantism and culture in The Faerie Oueene. The American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr makes penetrating analyses of the relationship between man's cultural potentials and the insights of Protestant Christianity which greatly illuminate how Spenser searches for a comprehensive religious, ethical, political, and social vision for the Christian community of Protestant England. But Spenser maintains the tension between culture and Christianity to the end, refusing to offer a merely coherent system of principles based on the doctrine of Christianity.

Elizabeth Stoddard (1823-1902) has been overlooked by most modern literary critics and scholars. She needs to be incorporated into the canon of the American novel in order to establish a deserved critical visibility and to retain it for many years to come. Her groundbreaking fiction, unconventional by any nineteenth-century standard, especially as evidenced by The Morsesons and by some of her short stories, is characterized by penetrating psychology, individuality, and enduring literary qualities.

A modern interpretation of Wuthering Heights suggests that an unconscious incest taboo impeded Catherine and her foster brother, Heathcliff, from achieving normal sexual union and led them to seek union after death. Insights from anthropology, psychology, and sociology provide a key to many of the subtleties of the novel by broadening our perspectives on the causes of incest, its manifestations, and its consequences. Anthropology links the incest taboo to primitive systems of totemism and rules of exogamy, under which the two lovers' marriage would have been disallowed because they are members of the same clan. Psychological studies provide insight into Heathcliff and Catherine's abnormal relationship—emotionally passionate but sexually dispassionate—and their even more bizarre behavior—sadistic, necrophilic, and vampiristic—all of which can be linked to incest. The psychological manifestations merge with the moral consequences in Bronte's inverted image of paradise; as in Milton's Paradise, incest is both a metaphor for evil and a symbol of pre-Lapsarian innocence. The psychological and moral consequences of incest in the first generation carry over into the second generation, resulting in a complex doubling of characters, names, situations, narration, and time sequences that is characteristic of the self-enclosed, circular nature of incest. An examination of Emily Bronte's …

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 …

One aspect of the current revaluation of Victorian thought and literature is the examination of the crisis of religious faith, in which the proponents of doubt and denial took different directions: they became openly cynical and pessimistic; they turned from religion to an aesthetic substitute; or they concluded that since mankind could look only to itself for aid, the primary duties of the individual were to find a tenable creed for himself and to try to alleviate the lot of others. The movement from the agony of doubt to a serene, or at least calm, humanitarianism is the subject of this study. The discussion is limited to four novelists in whose work religious doubt and humanitarianism are overt and relatively consistent and in whose novels the intellectual thought of the day is translated into a form appealing to the middle-class reader. Their success is attested by contemporary criticism and by accounts of the sales of their books; although their work has had no permanent popularity, they were among the most discussed authors of their time.

Romantic heroes are questers, according to Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye. Whether employing physical strength or relying on the power of the mind, the traditional Romantic hero invokes questing for some sense of self. Chapter 1 considers this hero-type, but is concerned with defining a non-questing British Romantic hero. The Romantic hero's identity is problematic and established through contrasting narrative versions of the hero. This paper's argument lies in the "inconclusiveness" of the Romantic experience perceived in writings throughout the Romantic period. Romantic inconclusiveness can be found not only in the structure and syntax of the works but in the person with whom the reader is meant to identify or sympathize, the hero(ine). Chapter 2 explores Byron's aesthetics of literature equivocation in The Giaour. This tale is a consciously imbricated text, and Byron's letters show a purposeful complication of the poet's authority concerning the origins of this Turkish Tale. The traditional "Byronic hero," a gloomy, guilt-ridden protagonist, is considered in Chapter 3. Byron's contemporary readers and reviewers were quick to pick up on this aspect of his verse tales, finding in the Giaour, Selim, Conrad, and Lara characteristics of Childe Harold. Yet, Byron's Turkish Tales also reveal a very different …

This dissertation attempts to demonstrate how Nathaniel Hawthorne's lifelong friendship with Franklin Pierce influenced the author's literary imagination, often prompting him to transform Pierce from his historical personage into a romanticized figure of notably Jacksonian qualities. It is also an assessment of how Hawthorne's friendship with Pierce profoundly influenced a wide range of his work, from his first novel, Fanshawe (1828), to the Life of Franklin Pierce (1852) and such later works as the unfinished Septimius romances and the dedicatory materials in Our Old Home (1863). This dissertation shows how Pierce became for Hawthorne a literary device—an icon of Jacksonian virtue, a token of the Democratic party, and an emblem of steadfastness, military heroism, and integrity, all three of which were often at odds with Pierce's historical character. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the Hawthorne-Pierce friendship. The chapter also assesses biographical reconstructions of Pierce's character and life. Chapter 2 addresses Hawthorne's years at Bowdoin College, his introduction to Pierce, and his early socialization. Chapter 3 demonstrates how Hawthorne transformed his Bowdoin experience into formulaic Gothic narrative in his first novel, Fanshawe. Chapter 4 discusses the influence of the Hawthorne-Pierce friendship on the Life of Franklin Pierce, Hawthorne's campaign biography …

This paper examines the metaphoric structures that underlie Chopin's major novel, The Awakening, as well as those underlying selected short stories. Drawing on the modern theory of metaphor described by Mark Turner, George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson, the author argues that conceptual metaphors are the structural elements that underlie our experiences, thoughts, and words, and that their presence is revealed through our everyday language. Since these conceptual structures are representative of human thought and language, they are also present in literary texts, and specifically in Chopin's texts. Conceptual metaphors and the linguistic forms that result from them are so basic a part of our thinking that we automatically construct our utterances by means of them. Accordingly, conceptual metaphor mirrors human thought processes, as demonstrated by the way we describe our experiences.

The primary purpose of this study is to show that John Steinbeck's concern with alienation is pervasive and consistent from the beginning of his career as a writer until the end. The pervasiveness of his concern with alienation is demonstrated by examining his two early collections of short stories and by showing how alienated characters in these stories resemble alienated characters in all the author's major works of fiction. Since much confusion surrounds the meaning of the word "alienation," it is necessary to begin with a definition of "alienation" as it is used to discuss Steinbeck. An alienated character in Steinbeck's fiction is a person who is separated from another person, group of persons, society, or the person's ideal self. This study is concerned with characters who create their own alienation rather than with those who are merely helpless victims.

Walt Whitman has long been celebrated as a Romantic writer who celebrates the self, reveres Nature, claims unity in all things, and sings praises to humanity. However, some of what Whitman has to say has been overlooked. Whitman often questioned the goodness of humanity. He recognized evil in various shapes. He pondered death and the imperturbability of Nature to human death. He exhibited nightmarish imagery in some of his works and gory violence in others. While Whitman has long been called a celebratory poet, he is nevertheless also in part a writer of the Dark Romantic.

This study discusses the evolution of the English country-house poem from its inception by Ben Jonson in "To Penshurst" to the present. It shows that in addition to stylistic and thematic borrowings primarily from Horace and Martial, traditional English values associated with the great hall and comitatus ideal helped define features of the English country-house poem, to which Jonson added the metonymical use of architecture. In the Jonsonian country-house poem, the country estate, exemplified by Penshurst, is a microcosm of the ideal English social organization characterized by interdependence, simplicity, service, hospitality, and balance between the active and contemplative life. Those poems which depart from the Jonsonian ideal are characterized by disequilibrium between the active and contemplative life, resulting in the predominance of artifice, subordination of nature, and isolation of art from the community, as exemplified by Thomas Carew's "To Saxham" and Richard Lovelace's "Amyntor's Grove." Architectural features of the English country house are examined to explain the absence of the Jonsonian country-house poem in the eighteenth century. The building tradition praised by Jonson gradually gave way to aesthetic considerations fostered by the professional architect and Palladian architecture, architectural patronage by the middle class, and change in identity of the country …

Studies of the English Renaissance reveal a patriarchal structure that informed its politics and its literature; and the drama especially demonstrates a patriarchal response to what society perceived to be the problem of women's efforts to grow beyond the traditional medieval view of "good" women as chaste, silent, and obedient. Thirteen comedies, whose creation spans roughly the same time frame as the pamphlet wars of the so-called "woman controversy," from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, feature women who have no public power, but who find opportunities for varying degrees of power in the private or domestic setting.

Previous critics have paid insufficient attention to the political implications of Yeats's life-long preoccupation with a wide range of Western and Eastern religious traditions. Though he always preserved some skepticism about mysticism's ability to reshape the material world, the early Yeats valued the mystical idea of oneness in part because he hoped (mistakenly, as it turned out) that such oneness would bring Catholic and Protestant Ireland together in a way that might make the goals of Irish nationalism easier to accomplish. Yeats's celebration of mystical oneness does not reflect a pseudo-fascistic commitment to a static, oppressive unity. Like most mystics—and most modernists—Yeats conceived of both religious and political oneness not as a final end but rather as an ongoing process, a "way of happening" (as Auden put it).

Jane Austen sprinkles deaths throughout her novels as plot devices and character indicators, but she does not tackle death directly. Yet death pervades her novels, in a subtle yet brutal way, in the lives of her female characters. Austen reveals that death was the definition and the destiny of women; it was the driving force behind the social and economic constructs that ruled the eighteenth-century woman's life, manifested in language, literature, religion, art, and even in a woman's doubts about herself. In Northanger Abbey Catherine Morland discovers that women, like female characters in gothic texts, are written and rewritten by the men whose language dominates them. Catherine herself becomes an example of real gothic when she is silenced and her spirit murdered by Henry Tilney. Marianne Dashwood barely escapes the powerful male constructs of language and literature in Sense and Sensibility. Marianne finds that the literal, maternal, wordless language of women counts for nothing in the social world, where patriarchal,figurative language rules, and in her attempt to channel her literal language into the social language of sensibility, she is placed in a position of more deadly nothingness, cast by society as a scorned woman and expected to die. Fanny Price …