English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Anxious Journeys: Past, Present, and Construction of Identity in American Travel Writing(2012) Packer-Kinlaw, Donna; Auchard, John; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Travel writing ostensibly narrates leisurely excursions through memorable landscapes and records the adventures associated with discovering new scenes. The journey presumably provides an escape from the burdens of daily life, and the ideal traveler embraces the differences between home and another place. Yet, the path can sometimes lead to distressing scenes, where travelers struggle to situate themselves in strange and unfamiliar places. Americans, in particular, often demonstrate anxiety about what sites they should visit and how such scenes should be interpreted. The differences between their ideas about these spaces and the reality can also foment anguish. More, American travelers seem to believe that personal and national identities are tenuous, and they often take steps to preserve their sense of self when they feel threatened by uncanny sights and scenes. Thus, their travel narratives reveal a distinct struggle with what is here identified as the anxiety of travel. This dissertation identifies its triggers, analyzes its symptoms, and examines how it operates in American-authored narratives of travel. While most critics divide these journeys into two groups (home and abroad), this dissertation considers tension in both domestic and transatlantic tours. This broader approach provides a more thorough understanding of the travel writing genre, offers more information on how this anxiety functions, and helps us to formulate a more specific theory about the roles of anxiety and travel in identity construction. It also invites a reassessment of destination and what constitutes a site, and makes it easier to recognize disguised anxiety. The first chapter examines Willa Cather's articles from her 1902 journey to England and France, and is especially concerned with Cather's anxiety over history, culture, other women, and the prospect of interpreting travel itself. The second chapter explores Theodore Dreiser's A Hoosier Holiday as a dual text that reveals both Dreiser's impressions of 1915 America and his nostalgic desire to recover his lost boyhood. The third chapter analyzes Henry James's subject position as a tourist in The American Scene, tracks his touristic gaze, and studies his approach to tourism, both in Europe and in his natal land.Item THE FICTIVE FLAPPER: A WAY OF READING RACE AND FEMALE DESIRE IN THE NOVELS OF LARSEN, HURST, HURSTON, AND CATHER(2004-11-24) Abbott, Traci B.; Lindemann, Marilee; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study seeks to reevaluate the 1920s icon of assertive female sexuality, the flapper, as represented in the novels of four women writers. Although cultural images often designate, by their very construction, normal and alteritous social categories, I argue that the flapper's presence and popularity encourage rather than restrict this autonomy for even those female populations she appears to reject, notably lower-class women, non-white women, and homosexuals. Specifically, the flapper was predicated upon the cultural practices and beliefs of many of the very groups she was designed to exclude, and therefore her presence attests to the reality of these women's experiences. Moreover, her emphasis on the liberating potential of sexual autonomy could not be contained within her strictly defined parameters in part because of her success in outlining this potential. Each chapter then focuses upon images of black and white female sexuality in the novels, chosen for their attention to female sexual autonomy within and beyond the flapper's boundaries as well as the author's exclusion from the flapper's parameters. Nella Larsen's Passing suggests that the fluidity of female sexual desire cannot be contained within strict dichotomies of race, class, or sexual orientation, and women can manipulate and perhaps even transcend such boundaries. Fannie Hurst's Imitation of Life offers a critique of the flapper's excessive emphasis on sexual desirability as defined by conspicuous consumption, maintaining that lower-class white and black women can and should have access to sexual autonomy, while Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston similarly questions the denigration of working-class and non-white women in this model with her affirming view of Janie Woods, but also complicates the cultural presumption that any woman can find autonomy within a heterosexual relationship if such relationships are still defined by conventional notions of gender power. Finally, Willa Cather's last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, contends modern black and white women have the right to control their own sexual needs within an unusual antebellum setting. Thus, all of these novel provide other models of sexual autonomy besides the white, middle-class, heterosexual flapper while harnessing the flapper's affirming and popular imagery.