This study explores intersections between performance, race and masculinity within a variety of expressive cultural contexts during and after the African American Civil Rights Movement. I maintain that the work of James Baldwin is best situated to help us navigate this cross section, as his fiction and cultural criticism focus heavily on the stage in all its incarnations as a space for negotiating the possibilities and limits of expressive culture in combating harmful racial narratives imposed upon black men in America. My thesis begins with a close reading of the performers populating his story collection Going to Meet the Man (1965) before broadening my scope in the following chapters to include analyses of the diametric masculinities in the world of professional boxing and the black roots of the American punk movement. Engaging with theorists like Judith Butler, bell hooks and Paul Gilroy, Underground Men attempts to put these seemingly disparate corners of American life into a dynamic conversation that broadens our understanding through a novel application of critical race, gender and performance theories. Baldwin and his orbiting criticism remain the hub of my investigation throughout, and I use his template of black genius performance outlined in works like Tell Me …

Using a sociolinguistic and post-colonial approach, I analyze Irish dramas that speak about language and its connection to national identity. In order to provide a systematic and wide-ranging study, I have selected plays written at approximately fifty-year intervals and performed before Irish audiences contemporary to their writing. The writers selected represent various aspects of Irish society--religiously, economically, and geographically--and arguably may be considered the outstanding theatrical Irish voices of their respective generations. Examining works by Alicia LeFanu, Dion Boucicault, W.B. Yeats, and Brian Friel, I argue that the way each of these playwrights deals with language and identity demonstrates successful resistance to the destruction of Irish identity by the dominant language power. The work of J. A. Laponce and Ronald Wardhaugh informs my language dominance theory. Briefly, when one language pushes aside another language, the cultural identity begins to shift. The literature of a nation provides evidence of the shifting perception. Drama, because of its performance qualities, provides the most complex and complete literary evidence. The effect of the performed text upon the audience validates a cultural reception beyond what would be possible with isolated readers. Following a theoretical introduction, I analyze the plays in chronological order. Alicia LeFanu's The …

How does one teach the language and literature of the film? Where does one begin? What should be included in such a study? The answers to these questions do not exist and will not until much earnest effort and time have been spent toward their discovery. Certainly this thesis does not contain the final answers. It does contain some tentative answers, however, answers that can be put into practice in the classroom, examined, modified, rejected, or accepted. The ideas and suggestions are only invitations to explore; from such exploration will come the real advancements in this important field.

The province of this paper, therefore, is to reveal Emily Dickinson's concept of God which resulted from her personal confinement and subsequent delving as a "solitary dissenter."

Millay and Dickinson, born more than sixty years apart, were subject to vastly different influences and environments, although their homes were in the same geographic area. Their poetry reflects the difference of their times and their own temperament, but both wrote from a great depth and understanding of feeling and experience about subjects common to all mankind - death, love, anguish, the significance of nature.

This thesis is concerned with systematically investigating the relationship between Emily Dickinson's many personal tragedies and the crisis poems which grew out of them. Its basic organization is formed by discussing specific periods of her life in each chapter.

The problem with which this study is concerned is the importance of music in the life and poetry of Emily Dickinson. The means of determining this importance were as follows: (1) determining the experiences which the poet had in music as the background for her references to music in the poems, (2) revealing the extent to which she used the vocabulary of music in her poems, (3) explicating the poems whose main subject is music, (4) investigating her use of music in the development of certain major themes, and (5) examining other imagery in her poetry which is related to music.

Charles Stewart Parnell was James Joyce's most significant political influence to a degree that has yet to be fully acknowledged or explored. This thesis proposes a "theory of Parnell" in Joyce's works up to the end of Ulysses, arguing that close attention to Parnell's evolution points to a significant shift in the evolution of Joyce's literary forms. In Joyce's juvenilia, political writings, and early fiction, Parnell always appears with a heroic, even Messianic, cast, which the most significant moments in the fiction pair with a strict adherence to dramatic forms. However, significant moments in both "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man lay the groundwork for stylistic and representative transformations in Ulysses. In that novel, the myth of Parnell is deflated, even as Joyce appropriates its most essential qualities in the development of his panoply of styles. Episodes from "Telemachus" to "Wandering Rocks" critically examine the myth of Parnell even as they link it with the constraints of dramatic forms. Later episodes, most notably "Cyclops," "Circe," and "Eumaeus" attempt to make use of elements of "Parnellite" style, training a community of readers in acts of collective imagination that keep the Parnellite …

For convenience and for control, the analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne's style presented here is limited to a selection of his short stories. The short story form will serve better to illustrate the thesis of this paper, that Hawthorne's style is used deliberately to create, in part, the neutral territory he desired. The shorter form has been chosen, additionally, because it requires of its author a certain discipline--superfluous elements of style must be abandoned so that the story can get on about its business. Hawthorne's short fiction, moreover, contains nearly all the stylistic techniques which he later used in his novels.

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 …

This thesis explores the topic of leadership through the war novels of: Styron and Uris, Jones, Mailer and Shaw, Cozzens, Hersey and Heller and finally, Wouk and Michener.

It seems obvious that Shakespeare was interested in Hotspur as something more than a strictly historical character. The firey character found in I Henry IV is no longer recognized as the Ill-fated rebel from Holinshed and Daniel. Holinshed offers only a spark which Shakespeare uses to build a very real flame. The events leading up to the rebellion and the rebellion itself are historical, but the name of Hotspur in Holinshed is no more outstanding than that of Worcester, Glendower, or any of the other rebels. In Shakespeare's drama no other rebel character even approaches the development of Hotspur.

Using trauma theory, I analyze the disjointed narrative structure of gothic works from 1764-1853 as symptomatic of the traumatic experience. Gothic novels contain multiple structural anomalies, including gaps in experience that indicate psychological wounding, use of the supernatural to violate rational thought, and the inability of witnesses to testify to the traumatic event. These structural abnormalities are the result of trauma that characters within these texts then seek to prevent or repair via detection.

The major purpose of this thesis is to present a discussion of the motif of the faithful wife as it appears in the domestic drama of the Elizabethan Age; in addition, an account of the literary history of the theme will be given, in order that the use made of the story in Elizabethan drama may be correctly evaluated.

Some of the most interesting facets of Edgar Allan Poe's fiction are his imaginative speculations concerning the metaphysical experiences of the soul, the individual psychic "identity." His interest focuses primarily on three related aspects of the soul's experiences (1) metempsychosis (or reincarnation and transmigration); (2) suspension between "death" and the after-life or states of unconsciousness and consciousness, sleep and waking; and (3) the terrors, real or imagined, of premature burial.

The last one hundred years of American literature have witnessed the development of three elemental movements: naturalism, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, represented by such authors as Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser; nihilism, predominant in the 1920's and 1930's, represented best by Ernest Hemmingway; and the post-World War II literature which will be called literature of the quest, represented by such authors as Saul Bellow, William Styron, Philip Roth, John Updike, and others. The first chapter will show briefly the historical development of these three movements in American literature, their distinctive features, and their relationship to American moral and social values. Chapters Two through Four will analyze in detail the three distinctive aspects of this emerging literary form--the literature of the quest. The last chapter will focus on one novel, Letting Go, by Philip Roth, as an example of this literature.

This dissertation examines memoirs and non/fiction of the Vietnam War, written by combat veterans (Tim O'Brien, Tobias Wolff, Ron Kovic), and army nurses (Lynda Van Devanter and Joan Furey), and war correspondents (Micheal Herr), most of whom joined the antiwar movement, and used their own war wounds as incontrovertible evidence against it. Since these authors' traumatization compromised their memories of combat, their narratives feature literary devices reflective of post-traumatic stress disorder symptomatology (e.g. flashbacks, non-linear plots, repetition, disassociation). Their authenticity stems from the military jargon, lewd dialogue, and dark humor contained within. A mix of truth-telling and bullshitting paradoxically coexist in these texts; as trauma theories elucidate, improvisation (of details) does not diminish the integrity of a traumatic memory, or the memoir itself. In an era of Nixonian follies, whistleblowing became a high stakes endeavor for journalists and veterans. They exposed the military's standard operating procedures that violated the Geneva Conventions such as free-fire zones, wide-scale bombings, and chemical warfare (e.g. Napalm, Dioxin, Agent Orange). Desiring reformation, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War conducted their own Winter Soldier Investigation into the Mỹ Lai massacre, sending spokesperson John Kerry to testify during the Fulbright Hearings. Women served thanklessly in the war, …

This study aimed to assess the character in Recent American fiction. It concludes that writers of Negro literature have been quick to see the effectiveness of the use of Negro religious beliefs and practices in giving reality and substance to their racial pictures. Black men have to live in a white man's world. As a whole, contemporary American fiction gives a panorimic view of Negroes of almost every section.

This study is a survey of plays of Negro authorship in America from 1858 to 1970. It is intended to give a historical view of the Negro effort in the drama and show general trends during the twentieth century. The paper is arranged chronologically, beginning with the first play by a Negro author in 1858 and continuing through the 1960's. Synopses of plays are offered, but very little historical or sociological information is given and little literary criticism is added.

The author's purpose has been to trace in a very broad and general manner the trend of naturalism up to this point where the central figure of our study, Theodore Dreiser, enters into the picture. This survey is designed primarily to give the reader an indication of what naturalism is, both in philosophy and method, and a very brief historical background of the movement.

This study will outline the two great literary genres of character-writing and satire, upon the tradition and practice of which Joseph Addison and Richard Steele based their characters of women in the Spectator. The three-fold purpose of this study is to determine how the Spectator was influenced by, and what it in turn contributed to, the two literary genres, the "Character" of women and satire on women; and to present the social status of the female audience as it existed and as the Spectator sought to improve it.

Though scholars have discussed postmodernism in Islam and South Asia before, they tend to (i) assume Muslims as a monolithic group, bypassing the diversity of different cultures and the interaction of these cultures with indigenous practices of Islam; (ii) study postmodernity synchronically, thereby eliding histor(ies) and the possibility of multiple temporalities; and (iii) compare postmodernity in non-Western countries with Western standards, and when these countries fail this test, declare them not-yet-postmodern, or even modern. Negligible and scant discussions of postmodernity that do take place inside Pakistan, most of which are published in newspaper articles, tend to focus on Western postmodernity and its evolution and contemporary position. There is no book-length discussion of postmodernity and postmodernist literary texts from Pakistan and its curious sociopolitical blend of Indo-Muslim and Anglo-Indian influences and interaction with the Islamic political foundations of the country. This project discusses postmodernity and postmodern literature in Pakistan. I argue that, because of a different political, cultural, and literary climate, postmodernity and postmodern literature in Pakistan are distinct from their Western counterparts. Because of technological advancement and neoliberal globalization, Pakistan experiences a different kind of postmodernity resulting in the production of a different kind of postmodern literature. I trace the …

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.

This dissertation tries to locate Milton's optimistic view of man and nature as expressed in Comus, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, and Paradise Lost in the long tradition of natural law that goes back to Aristotle, Cicero, and Aquinas.