Dissertation
Booked: "Womanhood is too tightly bound to give me scope"
Washington State University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
05/2010
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000006036
Abstract
This dissertation illuminates and examines the formal or paratextual elements employed by four 19th Century American female authors: Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, and Mar a Amparo Ruiz de Burton. It demonstrates the ways in which formal elements are as useful a tool to the literary critic as a traditional rhetorical analysis. Gerard Genette, in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, argues for the importance of paratextual elements, or what enables a text to become a book and be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public (1). Paratexts exist at the place where authorship and the literary marketplace intersect, and offer literary critics a way to use the formal features of a book as a point of entry for analysis. Paratextual studies are foundational, in that they reveal the formal features that lay the groundwork for content.
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Details
- Title
- Booked
- Creators
- Michelle Esther Alexander Fankhauser
- Contributors
- Augusta Rohrbach (Chair)Victor Villanueva (Committee Member)Donna M. Campbell (Committee Member) - Washington State University, Department of English
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Department of English
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 119
- Identifiers
- 99901055118701842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation