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Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4902-8373
AccessType
Open Access Dissertation
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
English
Year Degree Awarded
2020
Month Degree Awarded
February
First Advisor
Nicholas K Bromell
Second Advisor
Hoang G Phan
Third Advisor
Randall Knoper
Fourth Advisor
Adam Dahl
Subject Categories
Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature | Literature in English, North America
Abstract
“Angels who Stepped Outside their Houses” examines the fashioning of a gendered white American middle-class Protestant subject called the “American true woman” as a fitting representation of the emerging new American nation, as reflected in the writings of white American women authors from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Locating the formation of this identity on a transnational plane, this work argues that in their myriad texts, these women authors reveal the significant role that imperial Britain and the non-national/not-yet-national colonial Orient played in the (de/)construction/(de/)centering of American true womanhood. For, in the face of a particular Englishness and an Oriental otherness that these texts produce, American true women become interstitial and ambivalent subjects.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/4akx-mw86
Recommended Citation
Hewagama, Gayathri M., "ANGELS WHO STEPPED OUTSIDE THEIR HOUSES: “AMERICAN TRUE WOMANHOOD” AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY (TRANS)NATIONALISMS" (2020). Doctoral Dissertations. 1830.
https://doi.org/10.7275/4akx-mw86
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1830