English Theses and Dissertations
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Item Conrad's Secret Sharer as the Pole within: The Polish Father as Doppelgänger(1996) Strohecker, Dorothy Pula; Kleine, Donald W.; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)"Conrad' s Secret Sharer as the Pole Within: The Polish Father as Doppelgänger" establishes an As If hypothesis that presents "The Secret Sharer" as a paradigm for reading the Conradian canon. Although other critics have written on Conrad 's father figure, his Polishness, and the double, my essay assumes a combined methodology based on biographical, psychological, symbolic, and doppelgänger strategies for setting up my thesis and text decoding. The first three chapters provide the background and methodology to be applied to "The Secret Sharer" explication in the last two chapters. Beginning with Chapter I, "Conrad's Polishness and the Dual Polish Father Figure," the biographical and cultural basis for Conrad's Polish matrix and his ambivalence as "Homo Duplex" are explored. Chapter II, "Conrad and the Fictional Father," reviews the proliferation of Conradian father figures, seeing the Lacanian metaphor of the father in its conflict over law and desire as significant in Conrad's generation of themes of crisis over identity involving betrayal, guilt, and questions of fidelity to paternal ideals. In addition, the father is discussed as "symbol" in preparation for equating the Polish father, Apollo, with the doppelgänger. Chapter III, "Conrad's Symbolic Approach to Fiction: The Double as Symbol: Motifs of the Doppelgänger" stresses Conrad's claim that all great art is symbolic. The double is examined as symbol of the unconscious in its many doppelgänger motifs. Finally, in Chapters IV and V, "The Secret Sharer as Pole Within: The Doppelgänger as Apollo, the Polish Father" Parts I and II, concepts from preceding chapters are used to formulate the thesis for "The Secret Sharer" as paradigm for interpreting Conrad's fiction. In this hypothetical approach, there is no attempt to be definitive and no intention to be dogmatic; the only purpose is to explore cognitive possibilities of meaning to enrich, not reduce, the close reading of "The Secret Sharer" and provide a paradigm of thesis generation for Conrad's major fiction.Item African-American Modernism in the Novels of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen(1992) McManus, Mary Hairston; Joyce, Joyce Ann; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Because early critical evaluations of the literary works of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen were superficial, their reading audience generally regarded both writers as sentimentalists and authors in the genteel tradition. A close analytical study of Plum Bun, The Chinaberry Tree, Quicksand, and Passing reveals the presence of a feminist sensibility not widely discerned. The themes which these two writers employ are typically mainstream modernist, whereas their strategies are African-American. Both Fauset and Larsen depict the mulatta as alienated, restless, and confused in her quest for autonomy and self-expression. Because the mulatta image is acceptable to a wide reading audience, it becomes an ideal narrative strategy for deflecting attention from issues of female sexuality, female subjectivity, and female spaces. Fauset and Larsen bring their writing into the modern era by conjoining the historical, African-American technique of masking with thematic strands which adhere to the modernist ideology. Such a literary plan requires a redefining of modernism to include race and gender. When the execution of that plan results in an empowering of oppressed groups and a heightened consciousness of the female presence in literature and in society, we have African-American modernism. Fauset and Larsen expand upon a sensibility which their literary predecessor Frances Harper suggested in her novel. These two writers of the Harlem Renaissance anticipate by approximately fifteen years the handling of feminist issues by such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, and Ann Petry. Fauset's and Larsen's novels, along with those of Hurston, West, and Petry, demonstrate the evolution of sexuality from a masked female issue for reasons of morality and respectability to the greater openness seen in later works. The mulatta's significance as a masking strategy diminishes as these writers exercise a female subjectivity. Fauset's reliance upon a female subjectivity results in greater use of material consumption while Larsen explores unconventional female spaces. Both writers display African- American modernist tendencies through experimenting with greater sexual expression, individuality, and displacement of the woman from a male-centered perspective. Fauset and Larsen use the mulatta in their novels to explore new and broader arenas for female expression. Likewise, a re-configuration of modernism to include empowerment of race and gender insures both Fauset and Larsen a less marginalized position in the literary world.Item Women's Search for Identity in Modern Fiction (1881-1927): Self-Definition in Crisis(1987) Grant, Wilda Leslie; Panichas, George A.; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)A study of eight women in the novels of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf reveals the validity of the statement of Henry James that "the novel is history." Each of the eight characters reflects the position of women at a specific point in the history of the modern world. The situations in which the eight women find themselves demonstrate the unique ability of each author to develop a character who parallels conditions that existed for women in the period in which the author wrote. Conventions governing the place and expectations of women changed radically toward the end of the nineteenth century. Modern English fiction dramatically recorded theses changes over time in the evolution of the female character as it was developed in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and in The Golden Bowl (1904) by Henry James, in Nostromo (1904) and in Victory (1915) and in Women in Love (1921) by D.H. Lawrence, and in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and in To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf. James's Isabel Archer and Charlotte Stant, Conrad's Emilia Gould and Lena, Lawrence's Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, and Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay are endowed with charm, intelligence, courage, moral integrity, and patience. These virtues do not vary qualitatively as one generation leads to the next. What does vary, as the eight novels show, is the measure of free choice available to the women; and this measure is significantly connected to their places in historical time. The eight novels register the continuous process of women's search for self-definition. Viewed separately, the novels offer insightful character studies of eight women with remarkable emotional strength, whose actions respectively set the pace in the novels. Grouped as a unit, the novels in which these women appear present a poignant commentary on the status of women in the years between 1881 and 1927, years that included not only the havoc of the Great War, but also a growing reassessment of social and moral values.Item Philip Freneau's Wildflower: An Analysis of the "Amanda" Poems(1981) Lovelock, Frank A.; Vitzthum, Richard C.; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)According to Philip Freneau's biographers, an early disillusionment appears to have resulted from Freneau's first experiences at sea as well as from an abortive love affair that began on the island of Bermuda in 1778. Freneau left behind scores of poems which detail his years in the Caribbean, seven of which, after much revision, he grouped together in 1809 and linked directly to his experiences in Bermuda. And although it can be shown that Freneau, incorporated diverse biographical material into these poems, the resulting fiction demonstrates that the poet was able to transcend his own unhappiness through literary art. These seven poems, subsequently labelled the "Amanda" poems in honor of the woman they seem to celebrate, have been ignored by Freneau's critics, who often regard them as little more than conventional love verses. The present study challenges this assumption and attempts to demonstrate that the creation of the "Amanda" story was of central importance to Freneau. The research has included a linear comparison of the known variants of the "Amanda" poems and has found that although the series comprises only seven poems in its final format, it holds major clues to unlocking the mysterious forces which shaped Freneau's intellectual, emotional, and artistic maturity. The study examines not only the poems in the "Amanda" series but also many other poems with structural or thematic ties to the series. Since Freneau's experience in the West Indies is the most pervasive motif in his work, "Amanda" surfaces in numerous poems, and her image becomes a vehicle through which the poet tests a sequence of metaphysical abstractions. To Freneau, she first comes to represent unattainable beauty, then disappointment, and finally resignation. As such, the myth of "Amanda" is arguably more important to Freneau than her real-life model. Whoever she was, "Amanda" profoundly affected the poet, his philosophy, and his art; and her influence on him has been overlooked far too long.Item JOHN PAYNTER'S JOINING THE NAVY: AN EXPRESSION OF LITERARY ASSIMILATIONISM AT THE NADIR(1999) Warner, Charles Fletcher III; Logan, Shirley; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)This thesis examines the travel narrative Joining the Navy, or A broad with Uncle Sam, written by African-American enlisted sailor John Paynter in the late nineteenth century. Paynter's narrative is considered in terms of what Dickson Bruce calls "literary assimilationism," a phenomenon describing the strategy of late nineteenth and early twentieth century black authors to reproduce American mainstream values in their writing, in order to de-emphasize their racial otherness. Like civilian America, the American navy embraced Jim Crow policies during the post-Reconstruction era, and Joining the Navy adopts an assimilationist approach to a critique of these policies. Specifically, the thesis shows how Paynter's construction of his identity, his descriptions of his interactions with his shipmates, and his observations of the European, Asian, and African cultures with which he comes into contact are informed by an assimilationist strategy. The thesis suggests how Paynter's assimilationism both consciously and unconsciously critiques American racial attitudes.Item "On One Fix'd Point": The Evolution of Philip Freneau's Rational Philosophy(1992) McNair, Mark Hill; Vitzthum, Richard; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Although most critics who have examined Philip Freneau's work have contended that the poet's philosophic enquiries were scattered and therefore not worthy of critical attention, this dissertation asserts that Freneau's search for an ordered universe that included the presence of a supreme being and the immortality of the soul was in fact more structured than has been previously thought. It focuses on the disappointing results of Freneau's application of Scottish Common Sense realism to the physical world and the rational presuppositions he initially formulated in previously unstudied prose essays that would ultimately lead to the deistic tenets he embraced after 1800. Though much of his early poetry bears a strong resemblance to the work of English pre-romantics such as Cowper, Collins, and Thomson, Freneau's Common Sense empiricism undercuts both the pastoral romanticism and Berkeleyan idealism of these works with realistic images of natural decay and violence, thereby displacing romantic tendencies with empirical observation. But Freneau's hard-nosed realism proves disappointing during the 1780's, for his Common Sense approach, which posited that humans have direct contact with objective reality, finds no evidence of the existence of a deity, little hope of human immortality, and a natural world that both nurtures and destroys indiscriminately. The contradictions of renewal and decay in nature become so great that the poet questions humanity's ability to perceive and understand the physical world. But out of his pessimism Freneau constructs a rational solution that accounts for nature's contradictions and the limits of human perception. In a group of four "Philosopher of the Forest" essays appearing in the 1788 Miscellaneous Works, Freneau determines that discord in nature is part of a divine plan beyond human understanding that has been conceived and set into motion by a remote deity who is also beyond comprehension. From this seed Freneau builds over the next thirty years a rational vision of a universe that, while too complex for humanity's limited intellect, nonetheless provides the materials by which humans, through the active application of reason and science, can begin to comprehend nature's discord as part of a larger design that is necessarily perfect.Item Harold Frederic: His Fictive Imagination and the Intellectual Milieu(1980) Clark, Jean Marshall; Thorberg, Raymond; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Harold Frederic reflects in his novels and stories the intellectual milieu of the latter nineteenth century. Most of the major philosophic concerns of the age are present in one way or another in his fiction: metaphysical idealism, Comtian positivism, Darwinism, the Higher Criticism, pragmatism, and, as the power of reason-indeed reason itself-came more and more into distrust, a voluntarism deriving from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. While Frederic tended to synthesize ideas rather than to develop his own systematic philosophy, the psychological penetration of his characters evidences his awareness of such concerns. He is a careful craftsman in the drawing of his fictional personalities, and he often makes explicit note of the inclusion of intellectual elements in their delineations. Frederic's atypical writing possibly reflects his atypical lack of artistic isolation. His continued journalistic activity as well as his membership in various literary and political clubs might account for his remaining highly responsive to contemporary politics, economics, and religion. His fictional canon reads like a small compendium of the thought of the century's closing decades, tracing its broad diverse movements and interrelated philosophic strands. His early writing was vitalized by the new currents of thought generated by sociologists and economists in revolt against the social Darwinists, and by new approaches instituted by the Bible exegetes. Included among these were the views most compatible with his own liberalism and his optimistic attitude toward life. Later such hopes as they inspired found themselves weighed in the dramatic balance of his fiction against an unvanquished Darwinism, a spreading skepticism, as well as the darker visions of voluntarism. His final work, while yet bearing witness to an open, inquiring mind, shows a receptiveness to the blending of the spiritual and scientific conceived by American pragmatism. Frederic's writing, according to Walter Taylor, "anticipates the mingled realism, naturalism, and disillusion of the twentieth century." It is to employ a wrong set of terms, however, to assess him, as Charles Child Walcutt does, as "a kind of naturalist manqué," making implicit comparison thereby with, say, Crane or Dreiser. More to the point is the statement by Austin Briggs that "in the works of no other American novelist does one so fully sense what it was like to be alive in those turbulent years."Item A Straining in the Text: Women Writers and the Deconstruction of the Sentimental Plot 1845-1900(1993) Taylor, Megan Gray; Smith, Martha Nell; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)In the nineteenth century, most sentimental marriage-plot novels by women include a female bildungsroman that terminates with the heroines containment in marriage. The tension between this bildungsroman and the expectations of the marriage-plot novel are examined as a deconstructive gap through which women interrogated the cultural and social realities of their lives under cover of the socially accepted form of the marriage-plot novel. A discussion of the historical realities of women's lives is presented and an embedded interrogation of this reality in the novels is exposed. This examination is Anglo-American in nature including studies of Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Louisa May Alcott and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. At the heart of this deconstructive gap is the experimentation with female relationships, relationships that progressively emerge as the focus of these novels and the decentering force of the marriage-plot. Specifically, female mentoring relationships, which educate the heroine in the ways of the marriage market and, by implication, in the ways of survival in patriarchy, are the source of experimentation. In addition, the psycho-social underpinnings of female development are explored to facilitate an understanding of the nature of these relationships. All of the authors considered in this study have a self-consciousness about their participation in the sentimental tradition and an irony about the expectations the form contains and the reality that their characters experience. Bronte's Shirley, Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, Alcott's Little Women and Work: A story of Experience, and Phelps's Silent Partner demonstrate the power of female relationships to facilitate private survival in a world marked by separate spheres and limited opportunity. A recurring theme in all these novels is the idleness imposed on middle-class women and the heroine's desire for meaningful work. In a chronological progression, the resolution in marriage becomes increasingly less tolerable and/or satisfying, a progression that culminates in the deconstruction of the marriage closure in alternative communities of women (post-marriage) or single alternatives.Item The Fragmented Vision of Claude McKay: A Study of His Works(1989) Griffin, Barbara Jackson; Bryer, Jackson; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Claude McKay, born in Jamaica in 1890, played a significant role in the development of Black American literature. His search for a Black aesthetic and his poems of defiance gave inspiration to young Black artists hungry to explore new ideas. Their creative spirit flowered into the Harlem Renaissance. But, McKay, whose themes helped to stimulate this movement, was plagued by the very concepts that helped to define it. Throughout his life, he was ambivalent about three things: his Afrocentric universe, his role as rebel spokesman, and his relationship to Jamaica. Already a poet of some consequence in Jamaica, McKay thought of America as a grander arena for his voice, but when he arrived in Charleston, South Carolina in 1912, he was shaken by the intense racism of America. His upbringing in rural Clarendon Hills had not prepared him for what he witnessed. By nature, a proud man, McKay turned his lyrical expression into an instrument that would change the arrogance of the Whites. "Harlem Dancer" and "Invocation" (1917) implied the nobility of African roots and affirmed the superiority of primitivistic value system over Western cultural standards. But in McKay's psyche lay the germ of ambivalence that rejected the code of any "world" not sanctioned by the West. During the years following World War I, when relations between Whites and Blacks were strained, McKay became a rebel spokesman for the masses with his defiant poem "If We Must Die" (1919). It urged oppressed people to stand valiant in the face of defeat. But McKay later denied that the poem spoke for Blacks and further questioned the artistic worth of his other "militant" poems. McKay was also ambivalent about his homeland. Throughout most of his life, he ignored in his writing the political, social, and economic realities of Jamaica and evoked instead the image of an Edenic island that offered him refuge from the complexities of the twentieth century.Item John Payne Collier and the Shakespeare Society(1980) Wagonheim, Sylvia Stoler; Schoenbaum, Samuel; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)During the early years of the nineteenth century, the heightened interest in manuscripts and early printed editions precipitated the growth of publishing and printing societies which subsequently flourished throughout the 1800's. The object of these societies was generally to preserve through reproduction--and distribution to a select few--rare literary documents. One of the first societies to limit its scholarly scope to William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but to open its resources to a far-flung literary community, was the Shakespeare Society founded in 1840 through the efforts of several eminent Victorian editors, most prominently John Payne Collier. Throughout its eleven years of active existence (1841-52), the Society produced forty-eight full-length scholarly studies and four volumes of Papers including the first accurate biography of Inigo Jones, the first printed edition of Sir Thomas More (three pages of which are thought by many to be in the hand of Shakespeare), the first publications of the full cycle of the Coventry mystery plays and the Chester Whitsun cycle, and the reprints of several Shakespearean source plays including Timon. Moreover, the Society represents a dramatic advance in conscientious investigative scholarship over the limited and exclusive social book clubs of the early part of the century and, for this reason alone, deserves attention and recognition. The aim of this study is to explore the origin of the Shakespeare Society and to document its contributions to the continuum of Shakespearean and Elizabethan scholarship. The first chapter charts the cultural currents from which the Society originated. The focus here is primarily on the unrestrained bibliomania of the period and on the steadily increasing desire of the English middle class to read, see, and understand the work of their national poet. Chapter two serves a dual purpose. It recalls previous Shakespeare associations in order to illustrate the advances in structure and scholarly objective demonstrated by the Shakespeare Society of 1840, and it examines the financial troubles which plagued the Society throughout its existence and contributed to its demise. Subsequent chapters recall and assess in the light of modern scholarship the individual dramatic and nondramatic achievements of the Society. They examine the Society's attempts to apply historical methods to the study of Shakespeare's non-dramatic literary milieu, and they record the disheartening evidence of systematic and premeditated fraud perpetrated by John Payne Collier on the scholarly community--often through the pages of the Society's publications. Chapters five and six highlight the Society's editorial achievements in dramatic literature: its ground-breaking editions of early English drama, its critical attention to the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries, and its painstaking researches into the life and work of Shakespeare himself. Chapter seven reviews the four-volume sequence of The Shakespeare Society's Papers, which fostered cooperative literary scholarship through short contributions from amateur as well as professional scholars. The final segment represents an attempt to characterize, through the use of manuscript as well as published sources, the gentlemen of the Society's Councils. This study concludes on a bitter-sweet note since the questions of authenticity directed to the scholarship of John Payne Collier not only damaged his reputation, but also cast suspicion on all of his scholarly activities. On the other hand, Collier's industry in forming and maintaining the Shakespeare Society is unquestionably laudable. Through his efforts, the Society gathered together the most knowledgeable men of the period in the first cooperative attempt to encourage the systematic dissemination and exchange of literary information and to apply methods of historical research to Elizabethan literary scholarship.