The title of this dissertation, The Problems of Leisure in the Industrial-Era US, riffs on a phrase that became common amongst American academics in the 1970s: “the problem of leisure.” For the industrial-era American bourgeoisie, however, leisure wasn't a problem but many problems. The crystallization of leisure in its modern form—clearly defined, regularly recurring, and commercially exploitable periods of free time—created a host of fears and desires that, in turn, precipitated many different responses, including the two that I examine in this project: mid-nineteenth-century liberal efforts to control working-class uses of leisure time by “improving” working-class tastes, and the later efforts of modernists to distinguish their own uses of leisure from the purportedly more commercialized and degraded leisure practices of others, especially other within the middle class. The former efforts were spearheaded by William Ellery Channing, whose gospel of culture did two critical things. First, it insisted that culture, which Channing defined as the development of our God-given powers, required spiritual, as opposed to economic, forms of wealth. This argument helped to neutralize what I claim was the anti-capitalist potential of culture, the way it, more so than the older bourgeois conception of legitimate leisure (recreation), had the capacity to inspire a critique of the division of labor and of industrial capitalism more generally. Second, Channing's gospel posited the spread of “the means of culture” (“Self-Culture” 22)—in the forms of parks, picture galleries, lectures, and other publically provisioned, non-commercial forms of leisure—as the most effective solution to the amusement problem, the problem of working-class people consuming commercialized forms of pleasure that social reformers deemed morally degrading and socially disruptive. But my case studies of two other writers, Henry Thoreau and Ernest Hemingway, suggest that, as the demand for culturally san (open full item for complete abstract)

The posthumous publication of Ernest Hemingway's The Garden of Eden raised questions within the academic community surrounding the topics of gender and sexuality. Though he is typically known as a writer who favors heterosexual and heavily masculine themes, this novel challenges those notions by introducing aspects such as same-sex experimentation, gender role reversal, and the complicated dynamic of a three-person relationship. The first portion of this thesis focuses on the establishment of the aforementioned qualities within the novel, supporting and further arguing that the elements blatantly reject what is typically discussed about Hemingway's works. In addition, the film adaption of the novel is evaluated at length in order to understand a more modern response to his work within popular culture. Finally, this thesis explores two short stories, Mr. and Mrs. Elliot and The Sea Change. As both of the stories are cited as early blueprints to The Garden of Eden, their inclusion suggests Hemingway began thinking of these time-period taboos long before the 1986 publication of the novel. The overall argument emphasizes the importance of rereading and revisiting the Hemingway canon in order to bring more continuous and evolved conversation into academia and popular culture at large.

The publishing industry has experienced major evolutions during the last century. Everything from the format of publishing to the use of operating systems and means of department communication underwent changes as the result of new technologies. Coinciding with these changes, a clear evolution in the role of the editor took place. The technological revolution taking place in the late twentieth century forced editors to adapt and take on new roles created by the advancing industry. In filling these new roles, editors faced the special challenge of balancing the old ways of editing with new technology so that they could maintain the close relationships of traditional editor-author partnerships, while also continuing to support the publishing industry as it transitioned into the twenty-first century.

TANGEDAL, ROSS K., Ph.D., May 2015 ENGLISH A MOST PLEASANT BUSINESS: INTRODUCING AUTHORSHIP IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE (357 PP.) Dissertation Advisor: Robert W. Trogdon Authorial introductions, prefaces, and forewords have been part of literature for centuries. However, they are rarely the focus of analysis; scholars and readers find them secondary, auxiliary, or unnecessary in regards to the primary text to which they are attached. Though several scholars brand authorial prefaces as biographical material, very few recognize the space as more than secondary. Prefaces service the needs of the author function fully, with public consumption the major goal. These devices serve as frames to the text proper and strategically alter meaning, intention, and reception prior to the consumption of a literary product. These aspects of publishing assist in the increased sales of books. However, these pieces do not exist solely to promote the sale of books. Authorial prefaces promote and represent a certain type of authorship integral to the growth of American authority in the twentieth century. These pieces help us trace the authorial careers and artistic moves of several writers not only biographically but also textually. Why were certain books given prefaces and others not? Why did authors choose to remove, replace or revise prefaces and prologues in subsequent editions of specific texts? What can be said for an author's legacy in the context of his or her prefaces? How much direction is given in them, and where can that direction help or hinder certain readings of texts? Can the preface in production change the textual makeup of the given text, and can that text be permanently altered because of it? Do unpublished or unfinished/aborted prefaces say as much about an author's professional attributes as his/her published texts? These questions are paramount in understanding the business of literature in the twentieth century (open full item for complete abstract)

This dissertation focuses on representations of homosexuality in the works of writers Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, E.M. Forster, and Stephen Spender. I focus on British and American authors because of a shared history and common culture - they often knew each other, each other's works, and used the similar literary trope of homosexuality in their writings. I argue that male authors from this period use representations of homosexuality to deconstruct normative discourses of the state and masculinity, showing how these discourses limit individuality and the important role of sexuality in maintaining the normativity of the state. In the introduction, I situate my analysis between the trials of Oscar Wilde and the Stonewall Riots, drawing on theorists such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michel Foucault, and Louis Althusser to show how my representative authors challenge dominant discourses of gender, masculinity, and the state. The first chapter begins by historicizing representations of homosexuality within legal, scientific, and moral discourses as a way to think about the relationship between literary presentations and arguments occurring at the time. Chapters two through five examine the works of Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, E.M. Forster, and Stephen Spender. In terms of representations of homosexuality, each chapter moves from covert and disguised to increasingly more open and public representations. They also feature an intensification of more direct reverse-discourses, or counter-discourses, that challenge and subvert dominant discourses. Ultimately, I contend that the authors find a way to create a common idiom in order to depict a sense of crisis during this time period, challenge dominant discourses, and offer a new way to view identity. In the conclusion, I contrast Wilde's trials with the trial resulting from the assassination of Harvey Milk. These two trials demonstrate the drastically different discourses concerning homosexuality and highlight an (open full item for complete abstract)

This project redresses the scarcity of literary criticism that deals with the fictions of Ernest Hemingway in relation to black cultural productions of the twentieth century. Building from a postcolonial theoretical framework, it establishes a historicized dialogue in which African-American authors such as Langston Hughes and James Baldwin strategically confront, appropriate, and repurpose Hemingway's modernist narratives. This dialogue dramatizes my conviction that black writers of the Harlem Renaissance and post-Renaissance decades were tactically reading and resisting Modernism's central texts in ways that can be seen to anticipate critical deconstruction. Reading Hemingway through minority discourse thus gives this project a new purchase on his aesthetic choices, at the same time that it complicates and augments existing theories about influence, ingenuity, and power in twentieth-century African-American literature.

This dissertation examines the influence of Ecclesiastes on the fiction of prominent US authors including Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Ernest Hemingway. While critics from J. Hillis Miller to Carol J. Singley have addressed Ecclesiastes' presence in these texts, this project argues that Ecclesiastes provided a nearly inevitable allusive choice for turn-of-the-twentieth-century US writers. The biblical book anticipates scientific and philosophical developments of the era and shares foundational modern ideas on nature's indifference, the value of a realistic presentation of life, and a concern over life's meaninglessness. The project requires scholars to rethink the role of religious allusion in late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts by unearthing a fairly comprehensive religious engagement in a literary period often thought antithetical to religion.

This project examines the evolutions in stylistic use during the first major period of Ernest Hemingway's career, culminating in the 1929 publication of A Farewell to Arms. Drawing from source texts and secondary scholarship, this research shows the author's frequent mimicry of the styles of contemporary authors admired by Hemingway early in his career; especially Ring Lardner, Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce. Following side-by-side comparisons of Hemingway's works with those of his contemporaries, this project examines the specifics of the author's own writing style as it emerges out of the earlier, more imitative works. Having found other scholarship to be lacking in in-depth analyses of stylistic traits, this project heavily focuses on the grammatical and syntactical structures of examined texts for their effect on the expression of content.

TAKEUCHI, MASAYA, Ph.D., December 2011 English, Kent State University MALE HOMOSOCIAL LANDSCAPE: FAULKNER, WRIGHT, HEMINGWAY, AND FITZERALD (288 pp.) Director of Dissertation: Robert Trogdon This dissertation examines various homosocial systems—a rigid system regulated by racial and gender codes and a transformative system conditioned by the postwar capitalist environment—in representative novels by William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It also analyzes masochistic and sadistic masculinities—the introspective, self-destructive self and the reflexive, aggressive self—of male characters depicted as living in these systems. Faulkner's and Wright's texts describe how the taboo against miscegenation shadows and controls racial relationships between whites and blacks and reveal the self-division and self-punishment of men in a white-dominated society. In Faulkner's Light in August, for example, the southern white community restores order and solidifies male bonding through the castration of a possible black man, Joe Christmas. In castrating Christmas, Percy Grim displays his homophobic reaction to the interracial intimacy between Christmas and Gail Hightower and his negro-phobic reaction to Christmas' sexually approaching a white woman, Joanna Burden. Meanwhile, Hemingway's and Fitzgerald's texts illuminate how postwar disillusionment about the world and the advent of commercialism affect and transform male association and partnership, showing the construction of female subjectivity and male anguish and endurance in an ever-changing environment. In The Sun Also Rises, for instance, Jake Barnes' grouping with war veterans provides space where Brett Ashley can manipulate and control male desires amid the disturbance of fluid values due to the postwar emergence of commercialism. Her manipulation of male desires reflects the circulation of financial criteria for judging love and friendship with the advent of consumer economy. This di (open full item for complete abstract)

During significant periods of their lives, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway were invested emotionally and creatively in Spain. In numerous letters, stories, and essays, each writer treated Spain as a creative point of departure, and Spain—or the image of Spain—essentially emerged as a physical as well as symbolic space of discovery, rediscovery, and regeneration. Ultimately, their writing not only speaks to the cross-current of American-Spanish relations over the past several centuries but literally becomes embedded in a larger, more extensive twentieth-century transnational narrative. Stein's admiration of and friendship with Pablo Picasso, which began in 1905, transformed her writing. Through Picasso, Stein theorized a special understanding or “likeness” between Americans and Spaniards, which, when fully pronounced by the 1930s, explained how the two distinct countries were mutually, even exclusively, responsible for the “twentieth century” and “modern” art. As one of the era's most visible transnationalists, Dos Passos discovered in Spain almost a second home—a productive space and spark for his professional endeavors and a pleasant retreat from the commercialization and industrialization of post-War Europe and America. Although his life's work dealt with many of the places he had known and traveled, Spain was an early inspiration and source for material. Hemingway's approach to Spain was fundamentally as a student, even if his public stature, then and since, appears to show a mastery of Spanish language and culture. Like Dos Passos and Stein, Hemingway used Spain as both a sounding board for his own imaginative work and as an instructive example for an American or Western audience who were curious to discover what made Spain so unique or “different.” While such diverse authors professed privileged, insider access along the way, their widely read “images of Spain” publicized and endorsed the value of Spanish culture, w (open full item for complete abstract)

This thesis addresses how setting and character in short stories can affect and reflect one another. Does place function as more than a location where plot occurs? How does it become a part of the characters themselves? Three short stories, “Babylon Revisited,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” by Ernest Hemingway, and “Where I'm Calling From,” by Raymond Carver, are analyzed for their abilities to successfully link aspects of their settings to the qualities of characters. The essay finds that place is most effective when it influences the characters while also reflecting their emotional and mental status. Three original short stories by the author are then presented as attempts to consider the relationship between setting and character.