Off-campus UMass Amherst users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your UMass Amherst user name and password.
Non-UMass Amherst users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
Dissertations that have an embargo placed on them will not be available to anyone until the embargo expires.
Author ORCID Identifier
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