College of Arts & Humanities
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1611
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Quiet Country(2021) Hensley, Alannah; Arnold, Elizabeth; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Quiet Country is a collection of poetry exploring love, violence, and grief. These poems examine the way poverty, addiction, and inter-generational cycles of abuse shape the landscape of rural Arkansas, and address patterns of violence toward children, animals, and women. The collection also includes a six-poem, Queer reimagining of the myth of Cassandra of Troy.Item The Family Sadness(2019) Fruchter, Temima Sarah; Fuentes, Gabrielle L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Family Sadness is a novel-in-progress that spans four generations of women in one Eastern European Jewish family and engages the idea of a speculative queer lineage. The story zigzags geographically and temporally, moving from Poland in the 1920’s to Brooklyn in the 1950’s, to Maryland in the 1980’s, and finally to contemporary Warsaw. The characters communicate across space and time, and their stories are woven through a body of invented Jewish folklore that collages age-old Jewish folk tropes with a contemporary queer sensibility. The narration of this book is polyphonic – humans and other creatures, animate and inanimate, contemporaries and time-travelers all participate in building this universe. Shiva, the youngest in this lineage, travels to Warsaw amidst ancestral refractions. This is, in part, a story about how stories are made. About how what feels impossible is sometimes truest, and about what is visible when we start to pay attention.Item The Great House of Benjamin West: Family, Workshop, and National Identity in Late Georgian England(2014) Fox, Abram Jacob; Pressly, William L; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Anglo-American painter Benjamin West (1738-1820) holds a unique position in the history of Western art. Active during the foundational periods of not one, but two, national schools of art to which he could rightfully claim membership, West recognized his inimitable position in the development of English and American art and sought to position himself at the forefront of each nation. This dissertation examines his fluid national and artistic identities over the course of his instructional relationships with his American students, and the shifting personal and professional goals harbored by each party. While scholars have acknowledged the relation of West's pedagogical practice to his identity as an artist, this study presents an organic account of the relationships between teacher and students as an embodiment of West's ongoing and unprecedented attempts at fame, fortune, and legacy. This legacy was central to Benjamin West's identity as an artist. His professional career was dedicated to the self-aggrandizement of his identities as an (exotic) American, a prolific painter of high-minded scenes of history and religion, and the head of a workshop teeming with artists who shared his heritage, though not always his aesthetic inclinations. Over his career he cultivated a reputation as a welcoming instructor, always willing to give advice or lessons to any artist who approached him. This was not solely an act of altruism. Instead, it was the cornerstone of his construction of a proverbial House of West, a workshop-family whose members and their works would reflect back on the genius of the master, just as strongly as his own oeuvre. Through the examination of four case studies of his instruction of American students – that of Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull, and a circle of students led by Washington Allston – this study integrates Benjamin West's teaching practice with his career aspirations, positioning his pedagogy within the greater framework of his self-presentation. In doing so, it presents a history painter engrossed in the promulgation of his name throughout history, through his own artistic output and those of his children and students, as the progenitor of American artists working in the European tradition.Item Heads of State, Heads of Households: Social and Political Power Relationships in Early America(2011) Johnson, Mark Allen; Lyons, Clare A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis explores familial and political power relationships in the American colonies after the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688 through the establishment of the independent American republic. It investigates how early American statesmen, such as Presidents and state governors, related with their families and with the public. By examining the private and public correspondence and public addresses of these characters as government leaders and heads of household, it will explain how patriarchal ideals, laws, and practices persisted and changed during the political upheaval of the American Revolution and establishment of the republic with the creation of the Constitution. It will also demonstrate how familial relationships affected people's political understandings.Item Stoic Farmers, Silent Women: The Portrayal of the Icelandic Family in two Novels by Halldór Laxness(2008-05-05) Parker, Robert Jennings; Oster, Rose-Marie G; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Nobel Prize winning author Halldór Laxness enjoyed using the "typical" Icelandic farmer as his protagonist. Always at his side are his family members, with whom interactions are often very limited and rather reserved. Within the dynamic of this stoic family, there are several discourses to be seen, all of which speak to the state of women and the hierarchy of the family in Iceland during this somewhat depressing time in their history. The minimal presence of voice is apparent throughout the majority of Laxness' works and is especially present in Independent People (1946) and Paradise Reclaimed (1960). A general silence from all characters, husbands and wives as well as sons and daughters, is an important element and helps to better understand the culturally reserved Scandinavian people, especially Icelanders.