Browsing by Subject "nineteenth century"
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Item LAWS AND ATTITUDES CONCERNING PAUPERISM IN TEXAS DURING THE LATE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES(5/23/2014) Logsdon, Joshua Heath; Logsdon, Joshua Heath; Eoff, Shirley M.; Dewar, David P; Campbell, SuzanneThis thesis examines the poor laws of Texas during the 19th and 20th centuries. It argues that even though laws required counties to provide enough aid to the poor to make them comfortable, commissioners provided only a limited amount of relief. This was due to a limited amount of funds and a negative public view toward paupers. This information is contextualized within the laws and attitudes present across the nation at the time. The research followed a historical approach to the materials which were found in newspapers, court records, commissioners’ court minutes, and collections within archives.Item Looking for comfort: heroines, readers, and Jane Austen's novels(Texas A&M University, 2007-04-25) Himes, Amanda E.Comfort??????with its various connotations of physical ease, wealth, independence, and service??????is an important concept to Jane Austen, who uses comfort in her novels to both affirm and challenge accepted women??????s roles and status in her culture. In the late eighteenth century, new ideas of physical comfort emerged out of luxury along with a growing middle class, to become something both English people and foreigners identified with English culture. The perceived ability of the English to comfort well gave them a reason for national pride during a time of great anxieties about France??????s cultural and military might, and Austen participates in her culture??????s struggle to define itself against France. Austen??????s ??????comfort?????? is the term she frequently associates with women, home, and Englishness in her works. Austen??????s depiction of female protagonists engaged in the work of comforting solaces modern readers, who often long for the comfort, good manners, and leisure presented in the novels. Surveys of two sample groups, 139 members of the Jane Austen Society of North America and 40 members of the online Republic of Pemberley, elicit data confirming how current readers of Austen turn to her works for comfort during times of stress or depression. Although some readers describe using Austen??????s novels as a form of escapism, others view their reading as instructive for dealing with human failings, for gaining perspective on personal difficulties, and for stimulating their intellects. Austen??????s fiction grapples with disturbing possibilities, such as the liminal position of powerless single women at the mercy of the marriage market and fickle family wishes, as much as it provides comforting answers. Comforts (decent housing, love in marriage, social interaction) are such a powerful draw in Austen??????s works because women??????s discomfort is so visible, and for many, so likely. Thus, Austen??????s comfort challenges as much as it reassures her audience.Item The Family of God: Universalism and Domesticity in Alice Cary's Fiction(2012-02-14) Galliher, Jane M.Until recently Alice Cary's works have gone largely unnoticed by the literary community, and those critics who have examined her writings have recognized her primarily as a regionalist sketch writer. However, studying Cary's total body of fiction, including her novels and children's fiction as well as her sketches, and examining the influence of Christian Universalism upon her work reveals that Cary is a much more complex and nuanced writer than she has been previously understood to be. This dissertation explores the way that Cary questions stereotypes of accepted behavior specifically as they pertain to the identities of men, women, and children and offers a more flexible and inclusive religious identity rooted in Universalist ideals. In her depictions of women, Cary uses tropes from gothic stories, fairy tales, and sentimental fiction to criticize evangelical faith, Transcendentalism, and separate spheres-based stereotypes of women's behavior, and she undermines these stereotypes and replaces them with a Universalist emphasis on communal service and identity. Similarly, Cary's depictions of manhood are influenced by her desire to dissect preconceived notions of masculinity like that of the Self-Made Man and his earlier counterparts the Genteel Patriarch and the Heroic Artisan and replace these stereotypes with a Universalist model that embraces gender fluidity and sacrifice of self interest for the larger community. Cary's treatment of children continues her critique of nineteenth century stereotypes. Cary, unlike most early nineteenth century writers, exposes the dangers of romanticized visions of middle class children, which physically isolated children from their families and endangered working class children by increasing the demand for child labor; thus Cary's Universalism leads her to depict all children, not just the wealthy ones, as God's children and worthy of protection. Cary also uses children metaphorically to represent minorities and tentatively question the treatment of African Americans and Native Americans. Cary stands as a prime example of an author who has been overlooked and whose obscurity has hindered the construction of literary history, particularly in regard to the antebellum roots of realism and the influence of liberal religious belief on realistic fiction.