Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Subject: search.filters.subject.nineteenth century

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    A Character Singer in Male Attire: Annie Hindle in America, 1868–1886
    (2017) Ace, Rachel; Warfield, Patrick R; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In 1868 Annie Hindle brought to the American variety theater male impersonation, in which a female character vocalist assumed a realistically male stage persona to sing men’s comic songs about courting women. But Hindle’s gender-transgressive behavior was not limited to the stage: her romantic relationships were primarily with other women, twice disguising herself in male dress to marry. Despite what appears a clear connection between the onset of male impersonation, gender-transgressive dress, and same-sex desire, scholarship on male impersonation has treated a reading of Hindle’s act that engages with the category of sexuality as speculative. Through an examination of Hindle’s repertoire and performance context, this thesis demonstrates that her performance should be read as a form of sexual commentary. Because in the nineteenth-century United States male dress signaled that a woman engaged in same-sex practices, this thesis reads male impersonation as a recognizable representation of unconventional sexual identity.
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    SO AS TO COMPASS THE INTEREST: ARTISAN DRAMATURGY, COPYRIGHT REFORM, AND THE THEATRICAL INSURGENCY OF 1856
    (2014) Tobiason, Aaron M.; Nathans, Heather S; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In 1856, a change in American copyright law finally gave playwrights control over performances of their work. That change was the culmination of decades of concerted and sustained efforts by a small number of playwrights and their political allies, men who embraced a theatrical aesthetic at odds with antebellum American production practices. I argue that previous scholarship has underestimated the importance of the 1856 law to the development of American theatre. Using a series of case studies, I propose that antebellum theatrical production was guided by a system of artisan dramaturgy. Key to this formulation is the concept of bespoke playwrighting: those who composed antebellum performance texts were more wrights than writers, handicraftsmen and women whose medium was the manuscript rather than the printed text. They drew freely from an extensive public domain created and protected by American copyright law. Published and unpublished plays, novels, songs, poems, current events - all were raw materials for the antebellum dramatist, to be combined, recontextualized, and reimagined. The system of artisan dramaturgy encouraged plays tailored to particular actors, companies, and audiences. These practices, among others, vexed playwrights who resented subjecting their plays to the messy, collaborative undertaking of antebellum American playmaking. I explore how their vision for the theatre drew on a particular understanding of natural rights, one that led them to see copyright as the most effective way to alter the economic conditions of playwriting. I document the largely unexplored legislative history of their efforts, which ultimately interposed statutory law into an art form that had been regulated almost entirely by the common law. The1856 legislation accelerated a process that would ultimately alter the balance of power among the various theatrical collaborators in favor of the playwright, driving greater and greater synergy between dramatic text and performance and ultimately allowing playwrights to supplant the primacy of the actor or manager in shaping performances. By so doing, it also significantly reduced the vibrancy, flexibility, and innovation that had characterized the antebellum American theatre.
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    Redefining Religion through Literature in Nineteenth Century France
    (2013) Cefalo, Erica Maria; Brami, Joseph; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    From the Enlightenment to the end of the nineteenth century, France experienced political change and literary innovation which resulted in new definitions of the relationship between mankind and God. Current research in nineteenth century French literature has discovered a wealth of diverse and provocative topics within this humanist tradition precisely because it was a time of experimentation and change which gave birth to new viewpoints on everything from gender roles and sexuality to socialism and human rights. This dissertation delves into the evolution of an often overlooked element of French life which went hand in hand with social and intellectual innovation: religion and spirituality. Under the Catholic monarchy, France had traditionally relied on religion as the foundation for a collective morality. Enlightenment philosophy challenged traditional religious concepts and France's post-Revolutionary break with the Catholic Church encouraged intellectuals to continue exploring new notions of the divine. This dissertation focuses on a number of spiritual ideas put forward by various writers. While some, such as Chateaubriand, Ballanche and Lamennais famously advocated a return to Catholicism, others like Mme de Staël and Lamartine used their writings as a means for devising a new spiritual direction that would rely less on institutionalized religion and more on the conscience. Advancements in science and in the study of history ushered in a new awareness of the relationship between the past and the future which inspired scientifically minded intellectuals, such as Auguste Comte and Emile Zola, to consider themselves as part of a progressive succession of human beings more dominated by time and society than by any god. By shedding what they saw as outmoded conceptions of the universe, philosophers, poets and novelists alike moved to embrace a more progressive spiritual direction incorporating compassion, empathy and justice as sources for moral truths. These are concepts that have carried over into secular France today as citizens continue to focus on ethical concerns in political debates that touch on topics such as welfare programs, immigration, and secularism.
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    The Brandstetter Tunebook: Shape-Note Dissemination and the Germans of Western Maryland
    (2012) Barnett, Joshua Rush; Warfield, Patrick; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The newly discovered personal tunebook of Maria Brandstetter (1820) reveals that shape-note hymnody was alive in the mountains of Western Maryland in the early nineteenth century. The tunebook's presence in the region fills in a gap left by the usual dissemination story of shape-note hymnody, which emphasizes an exchange between Eastern Pennsylvania and the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. The tunebook is also connected to the German community that migrated from Pennsylvania into Maryland and Virginia in the early 1800s, and thus sheds light on the musical culture of the German-American immigrants of Western Maryland. Finally, the contents of the Brandstetter tunebook suggest that pivotal Virginia shape-note composer and compiler of the Kentucky Harmony, Ananias Davisson, may have first been exposed to shape-note music by migrating Germans like the Brandstetter family.
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    Miss Schooled: American Fictions of Female Education in the Nineteenth Century
    (2005-04-20) Alves, Jaime Osterman; Auerbach, Jonathan; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation argues that the emergence of schoolgirl culture in nineteenth- century America presented significant challenges to subsequent constructions of normative femininity. Seeking to understand how literary texts both shaped and reflected the century's debates over adolescent female education, I concentrate on fictional works and historical documents that feature descriptions of girls' formal educational experiences between the 1810s and the 1890s. In Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.'s Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny, selections from the Wreath of Cherokee Rosebuds (a student-written school newspaper), S. Alice Callahan's Wynema: A Child of the Forest, Frances E. W. Harper's Trial and Triumph and Iola Leroy, and other texts, I contend that the trope of the adolescent schoolgirl is a carrier of shifting cultural anxieties about how formal education would disrupt the customary maid-wife-mother cycle and turn young females off to prevailing gender roles. To assuage these anxieties and garner support for the controversial work of adolescent female education, schools incorporated into their curricula dominant ideals of femaleness from the contexts of family, the scientific-medical field, the press, and racial and community uplift movements, and delivered these ideals as "lessons" to girls from the white middle- and upper-classes, mixed racial and ethnic heritages, dispossessed Native American tribes, and working-class African-American families. In four chapters, I explore how nineteenth century Americans perceived of and represented the distinct life stage of female adolescence, and how they imagined the processes of institutional sex-role socialization that would involve schools and other organizations in the activity of molding adolescent girls into ideal American women. I have been most intrigued by narratives of female education that depict girls' exploitation of their opportunities at school to consider and respond to their cultures' idealizations of American womanhood. By tracing the figure of the schoolgirl at crossroads between educational and other institutions--in texts written by and about girls from a variety of racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds-- my study joins an emerging critical project to transcend the limitations of "separate spheres" inquiry and enrich our understanding of how girls negotiated complex gender roles in the nineteenth century.