English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Translating Grace: Postsecularity in Twentieth-Century American Fiction(2021) Gonch, William; Mallios, Peter; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The early twentieth century saw the rise of new, secular ways of imagining and understanding religion, especially through social sciences such as psychology and anthropology. TRANSLATING GRACE: POSTSECULARITY IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION investigates creative responses to this secular imaginary by novelists invested in religion’s continuing power. For the four primary subjects of this study—Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, and Marilynne Robinson—secular ways of imagining religion were at once challenges and opportunities. They foreclosed conventional expressions of religious ideas, experiences, and narratives, but they could be used creatively to reimagine religious stories and symbols, giving them fresh life and applying them to new challenges. I propose the metaphor of translation to understand the creative exchange between secular and religious writing. Literary translation is a creative activity that stretches the boundaries of a target language so that it may mean things that it has never meant before; similarly, writing of religion in this period is a translational attempt to stretch secular categories. Novelists jettison conventional religious narratives and symbols and invent new literary forms to make religious experiences and beliefs register for new readers. In doing so, they create new ways of experiencing and reckoning with religion. Translating Grace reassesses accounts of religion and literature by emphasizing the creative potential of religious writing. Previous studies of this period theorize a crucial break around 1960. Before that point, literature secularizes; artists look to art as a substitute for religion and treat religion’s fading as inevitable. After 1960 there is renewed interest in religious narratives, symbols, and practices, but it is “weak” religion, shorn of doctrinal and metaphysical claims. In contrast, I propose that “strong” religion persists as an important creative presence in 20th century literature. Whether strong or weak, religion becomes more self-conscious about its need to make itself comprehensible. Writers engage, sometimes subversively, sometimes playfully, with secular imaginaries. In this way, fiction drives a wider transformation of life within religious communities as they reimagine their place within a now-more-secular culture and world.Item Henry Dumas: Prophet of the Afrosurreal Renaissance(2019) Jackson, Jeremy Alexander; Nunes, Zita; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This literary biography locates the life and work of Henry Dumas – one of the most unique and under-studied writers of the Black Arts Movement – as a radical, revolutionary nexus of Afrosurrealist thought. Afrosurrealism, a term popularized by scholar D. Scot Miller, is a genre of Black American writing wherein Black artists mobilize the aesthetic techniques of surrealism to express the particular experience of being Black in America. Through his “skill at creating an entirely different world organically connected to this one,” to quote Amiri Baraka, Henry Dumas serves as a vital connecting point between the previous era of Black surrealism and our current Afrosurreal Renaissance. Thus, this literary and critical biography advances a twofold goal: to grant Dumas his rightful place as a central figure in African American literary history, and to recognize the expansive and important scope of the modern Afrosurrealist tradition.Item Global Sympathy: Representing Nineteenth-Century Americans' Foreign Relations(2013) Sillin, Sarah; Levine, Robert S; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Over the past two decades, scholars have established sympathy's key role in nineteenth-century literary culture and the development of U.S. nationalism. While examining the bonds that feeling forges among citizens, however, critics have largely neglected the question of how sympathy also links Americans to the larger world. Representations of global sympathy--wherein characters from different cultures share one another's joy and pain--pervade nineteenth-century U.S. literature. My project analyzes how authors narrativized the nation's political, territorial, and cultural changes, while underscoring the persistent importance of feeling in defining America's global role. "Global Sympathy" tells a story about what happens when writers imagine Americans as the kith and kin of foreign peoples. Beginning in the early national period, the first chapter explores how James Fenimore Cooper employs tropes of foreign friendship to establish Americans' equality to the British, inviting readers to re-imagine the British Empire as a valuable trading partner. My second chapter considers the importance of Christianity to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Maria Cummins, whose Protestant American heroines become metaphorical sisters to people in Italy and Syria, respectively. Read together, these pre-Civil War writers evoke confidence in Americans' ability to navigate foreign relations amidst political instability. Yet with increasing U.S. expansion, writers in the second half of the nineteenth-century expressed growing concern about America's foreign influence. Chapters three and four center on minority writers who employ sentiment to criticize the effects of imperialism on "foreign" peoples both within and outside the nation. María Amparo Ruiz de Burton participates in Gilded Age literary critiques of America as unfeeling and undemocratic, and develops an international courtship narrative to convey U.S. oppression of both "native" Californios and foreign nations like Mexico. Pauline Hopkins's turn-of-the-century fiction constitutes part of a broader body of literary responses to the Spanish-American War. Hopkins questions U.S. imperialism and racism by imagining the world, rather than the nation, as a family. More broadly, this project analyzes how Hopkins and all of the writers I study translate foreign politics into intimate terms and--by depicting U.S. citizens' affective ties to diverse peoples--insist on America's obligations to the international sphere.Item Rewriting Eastern Wisdom: Buddhism and Hinduism in American Literature from Jack Kerouac to Maxine Hong Kingston(2013) Garton-Gundling, Kyle; Kauffman, Linda; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While recent scholarship on post-1945 American writers has re-examined the role of religion, few scholars have focused on Asian religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. My dissertation explores the varied strategies by which American writers inscribe Asian religions in their fiction. I argue that Asian religions have been crucial in post-1945 American literature's engagement with American freedom. Key writers have used Asian thought to critique American individualism, while also reshaping Eastern beliefs through Western political ideals. My study thus illuminates a two-way relationship between Asian traditions and socially engaged American writing. By examining this body of literature, I uncover new ways of thinking about religion, transnationalism, and ethics. Each chapter links a specific literary trope to a particular aspect of Eastern thought. My first chapter, "Crazy Wisdom and Beat Zen: Jack Kerouac, Tom Robbins, and Gary Snyder," explores how these influential Beat writers challenge American conformity by celebrating the Buddhist figure of the eccentric sage. My second chapter, "Secret Arts and Paranoia: Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo," shows how Pynchon's Vineland and DeLillo's Underworld demystify secret Eastern knowledge in order to challenge the assumption that secrecy warrants paranoia. My third chapter, "Asian Religion and African Dreams: Alice Walker and Charles Johnson," demonstrates that Walker and Johnson reinterpret African American identity, portraying Hindus and Buddhists as African Americans' spiritual ancestors. My fourth chapter, "Buddhist Nonself and Asian American Identity: Lan Cao and Maxine Hong Kingston," explores how Cao and Kingston use Buddhist teachings of nonself to question what it means to be Asian American.Item "Is this your manly service?": Religion, Gender, and Drama in Early Modern England, 1558-1625(2011) Moretti, Thomas J.; Leinwand, Theodore; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project argues that the interplay between religion and gender on the early modern English stage was a crucial means toward religious mediation and theatrical affect. Playwrights exploited the tensions between gender and reformed Christianity to expose the inconsistencies and contradictions within the period's religious polemic, to combine various religious expressions and habits of thought, to deepen sensitivity toward England's tenuous religious settlements, and to advance their art form. Furthermore, this project argues that the theater was better equipped than any other cultural and political institution to handle England's complex religious situations. This study, then, engages a broader scholarly effort to understand the relationship between theater and religion during England's ongoing reformations. Chapter 1 discusses how reformed biblical exegesis underwrote the staging of female piety in Lewis Wager's Calvinist Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene (1566). Because this play surprises audiences with its endorsement of Mary's devotion, Wager qualifies our sense that the Reformation was relentlessly committed to repressing sensual worship and stamping out iconophilic fervor. To heighten theatrical affect, his play inverts associations between femininity and sin even as he defends the theater in Calvinist terms. Chapter 2 assesses the interaction of religion, gender, and kingship in Shakespeare and company's three Henry VI plays (~1592-95). By heightening the tensions between militant Protestantism and Christian humanism, the playwrights ask searching questions about the compatibility of reformed Christianity and kingship and about the place of Christian piety on the popular stage. To test various dramatic paces, to tap the theatrical possibilities of a weak and peaceful Christian king, and to unsettle audiences, Shakespeare and his collaborators show what is lost and gained by a culture that cannot reconcile masculine rule to reformed Christian piety. Chapter 3 argues that Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger's The Virgin Martir (1622) takes advantage of Jacobean religious compromises and impasses. By staging a martyrdom that invokes sensual beauty and physical vulnerability, this play stresses reform, recalls John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, and endorses what Lancelot Andrewes called "the beauty of holiness": the iconic splendor that reformers stripped from the Mass. As it bears witness to Jacobean England's vexing religious settlement, the play exploits the recurring post-Reformation conflict between text, reform, and godly masculinity on the one hand, and spectacle, ceremonialism, and feminized piety on the other.Item Inching Toward Salvation(2010) Norris, Meredith Suzanne; Feitell, Merrill; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collection of short stories focuses on post-religion in the modern-day South. It follows the lives of characters faced with the struggle between hedonistic desire and following their fear-driven Christian upbringing.