English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item While Opening a Family Album(2021) Rojas, Claudia; Collier, Michael; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collection of 30 poems center vulnerability in response to the everyday interactions and concerns of a female speaker. Personal trauma is contextualized through dreams, memory, and history. These poems explore love of the self, family, and community. Issues of immigration, gender, and race frame the speaker’s experiences. While these poems are based on real life, some poems transform the real into fictionalized stories. These poems are written through various written forms: free verse, prose, fixed form. English is the primary language used with Spanish words or phrases used on occasion.Item 'At all Times, and in all Places, Adored and Oppressed': Gender, Temporality, and Conjectural History in the Transatlantic World, 1600-1800.(2020) Durand, Emilee; Chico, Tita; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines scenes which imagine the collision between primordial time and the time of history to demonstrate that conjectural history is a productive term for understanding how temporality is embedded in constructions of race and gender in transatlantic literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The collision of temporalities in the texts of this dissertation is a product of an Enlightenment project. This project depended upon the temporalization of difference as a mechanism for narrating the progress of human societies. The following readings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts consider the transatlantic encounter as one inextricably involved with the process of the temporalization of difference. While this dissertation examines texts often included in the category of transatlantic literature, it also reads conjectural histories as joint participants in creating fictions about the Americas. Viewed in this way, conjectural history identifies both a mode of creating knowledge and certain kind of narrative which can emerge from a variety of texts irrespective of genre. Indeed, as this dissertation demonstrates, prints and maps, plays and poems, travel narratives and novels can all mobilize conjectural histories of their own. Drawing out the imaginative work required by conjectural histories, this dissertation shows how they are conceptually linked to more recognizable transatlantic encounter narratives. Because of its immediate and continual association with “early,” “young” or “backwards” humanity, the Americas as setting for encounter, both fictionalized and historical, necessarily activates the temporality of pre-history. Such a textual and visual collision theorizes difference through a temporal architecture. Scenes in which contact, social contract, and sexual contract are collapsed mobilize their own conjectural histories, using temporal frameworks to construct the genres of race and gender. By embedding these scenes in remote times and spaces, texts authorize and naturalize sets of relations between nascent human categories. The texts examined in this dissertation demonstrate how the reenactment of contact works to create narratives of human progress racialized and gendered by/within a temporal architecture made possible by contact’s collision of temporalities.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 Screams Somehow Echoing: Trauma and Testimony in Anglophone African Literature(2008-07-26) Brown, Michelle Lynn; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Postcolonial literary critics note persistently recurring representations of colonial violence in post-independence Anglophone African novels. I suggest that complex psychological and political processes of colonial trauma compel this narrative repetition. This dissertation juxtaposes postcolonial and trauma studies in order to analyze literary representations of colonial violence in terms of race, gender, identity, and the post-independence nation-state. To do so, I engage with black feminisms, African history, Subaltern Studies, and Latin American testimonio studies. I contend that, despite variations in aesthetic mode, melancholia, haunting, and mourning recur in realist and postmodern Anglophone African and diaspora novels with interesting variations beyond the usual stylistic differences. This tendency spans sub-Saharan Africa, the Atlantic, and generations. My work suggests that we use the vocabulary of psychoanalysis to fruitfully read post-independence literature as testimony representing the trauma of colonial occupation. Trauma and justice studies teach that testimony is the route to surviving productively after an experience of traumatizing violence. While mine is not the first analysis of Anglophone African literature to employ the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, it is the first to suggest doing so in the context of traumatic testimony. I explore three modes of telling--testimonial bodies, censored testimony and its ghosts, and trans-generational testifying wounds--represented in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments (Ghana, the United States, and France), Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (Zimbabwe), Nuruddin Farah's Maps (Somalia), Moses Isegawa's Abyssinian Chronicles (Uganda and the Netherlands), Meja Mwangi's Carcase for Hounds (Kenya), Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl (Nigeria and Britain), and in Zoë Wicomb's David's Story and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (South Africa). Modes of telling crisscross the continent, suggesting that traumatic suffering binds different communities together. Read as traumatic testimonies, the texts critique the intersected, normalizing discourses of globalization, trans-Atlantic migration, women's rights, and decolonization. They demonstrate that moments of national birth mark historical sites of potential for the collective to revise the past, create a national citizenry, and chart a socially progressive future through transformative mourning processes.Item When the Clothes Do Not Make the Man: Female Masculinity and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century British Literature(2006-08-01) Jansen, Leslie; Lanser, Susan S; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recently, masculinity has garnered much attention from scholars of eighteenth-century literature and history. However, these studies focus almost exclusively on the masculinity performed by men. Likewise, studies of female masculinity tend to examine masculine women only within the context of women. My dissertation lies at the convergence of these two areas of inquiry by examining the implications of female masculinity on normative masculinity and the link between these masculinities and nationalism from the early to late eighteenth century, with particular emphasis at the mid-point of the century. I argue that female masculinity was integral to the development and construction of an idealized masculinity and that both positive and negative responses to female masculinity fostered nationalist propaganda and aided in the development of the British Empire. In the first chapter, I trace the shifting grounds of normative masculinity and argue that what constitutes masculinity narrows as the century progresses and is defined by its resistance to any connection with French culture, particularly within the rising middle class. Chapter two examines three female soldier narratives, some of the only positive representations of female masculinity. I argue that the authors praise female masculinity as a means of creating a heroic masculinity to serve the nation. The third chapter examines the function of female husbands. I argue that these texts employ female husbands as a means of inciting xenophobia and promoting nationalism, through narrative strategies of silence and disclosure. In the final chapter, I discuss the masculine women who populate four domestic novels. I posit that female masculinity functions as a means of authorizing sentimental masculinity, a mode of masculinity popular in mid-to late eighteenth-century novels. Through the examination of texts such as novels, pamphlets, and biographies, my dissertation insists that female masculinity was an integral force in the construction of normative masculinity and was intimately linked to a nationalist agenda in the eighteenth century.Item A Familiar Curve of Vein: Poems and Translations(2004-05-18) Keefe, Anne; Plumly, Stanley; Creative WritingThe themes in this collection of poems center on issues of gender and memory. The poems are self-consciously aware of their status as art objects, and gender and power dynamics are examined within the artistic process through ekphrastic interaction with the visual. The collection also includes new verse translations of Spanish-language poets, Julia de Burgos, Pablo Neruda, and Federico García Lorca. These translations adhere less strictly to literal line-by-line readings, and instead, focus on conveying the emotional content of the original texts. The translations are balanced by original poems that explore moments of separation and coalescence between the cultures of two languages by creating a space in which both English and Spanish are musical possibilities.