Browsing by Subject "Paul Laurence Dunbar"
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Item In different voices : form, identity, and the twentieth-century American persona poem(2015-05) Frye, Elizabeth Bradford; Bremen, Brian A.; Bennett, Chad; Kevorkian, Martin W; Lesser, Wayne; Wheeler, LesleyIn arguing for the persona poem as a viable tradition in American literature, Elizabeth Frye reconstructs a lineage of dramatic poetry that spans the entire twentieth century. Through comparative studies of canonical poets predominately working in the aftermath of high modernism, she examines several significant performances and contends that the genre persists as a site of necessary and complicated cross-identifications. Chapter One elucidates the profound connection between Langston Hughes’s and Gwendolyn Brooks’s use of the persona poem and the Great Migration. Frye understands the blues-inflected utterances of Hughes’s collection Fine Clothes to the Jew as deeply invested in formal itinerancy and geographic indeterminacy. Similarly, she suggests that Brooks’s dramatic projections of American soldiers in the aftermath of World War II betray the poets’ dual obsessions with large-scale migration and polyvocality. Chapter Two continues to treat the persona poem as a socially invested phenomenon. Frye reads the gendered vulnerability in scenes of nascent national development in John Berryman’s “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” and Robert Hayden’s “A Letter from Phillis Wheatley” as a response to the horrors of World War II and the transatlantic slave trade. Chapter Three scrutinizes the “confessional” paradigm by revisiting the other voices and other selves that recurrently interrupt Robert Lowell’s Life Studies and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. By insisting on the importance of dramatic poetry in these collections, Frye further complicates the frequently invoked conflict between impersonality and personality. Finally, a coda recognizes the work of Natasha Trethewey and Elizabeth Alexander as indicative of the contemporary gravitation toward the persona poem. She positions Trethewey and Alexander as the heirs to several poets whose poems are discussed in this study. In detecting a sense of bereavement in these poets’ willfully incomplete projects of recovery, Frye proposes that the persona poem is not only a powerful tool of historical engagement, but a means of critically examining the limits of both literary community and communion with the past.Item Out from behind the mask : the illustrated poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and photography at Hampton Institute(2005-08) Sapirstein, Ray Julius; Fishkin, Shelley Fisher; Abzug, Robert H.This dissertation contextualizes and interprets several hundred photographs illustrating six books of poetry by Paul Laurence Dunbar. Although their significance as cultural landmarks is largely unrecognized today, they rank among the largest and most widely distributed bodies of photographs of African Americans in American visual culture. Published between 1899 and 1906, the images in the Dunbar books represent a counterpoint to the much-emphasized publicity photographs made concurrently for the school by Frances Benjamin Johnston, complicating simplistic conclusions about the nature of Hampton Institute and the industrial education movement. Drawing upon substantial original research on the predominantly white Hampton Institute Camera Club and its institutional context, and presenting a biographical portrait of the lead photographer, Leigh Richmond Miner, this study ultimately traces a history of photography at Hampton Institute from the 1890s through the 1920s, reproducing more than 150 unpublished and unrepublished images. This study reveals that the photographs in Dunbar’s works were created explicitly to reconceive pictorial representations of African Americans, and to subtly discredit any reductive conventional perception of racial character altogether. By depicting their subjects photographically, the members of the Hampton Camera Club sought to undermine essentialist characterizations--both derogatory and sentimental--by presenting their subjects as self-determining and multifaceted individuals. In their use of serial photography and by employing African-American creative forms, the books ultimately suggest vernacular origins of a disjunctive, Modernist aesthetic, casting both Dunbar and Hampton as proponents of modernity rather than as icons of retrogressive racial politics.