Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

5-1999

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

George B. Hutchinson

Committee Members

Allison Ensor, Dorothy Scura, James Fitzgerald

Abstract

By demonstrating the interest that Mark Twain, Ellen Glasgow, and W. E. B. Du Bois had in certain aspects of Indian religious traditions, this study makes several new claims about American literature. First, three lesser-known novels by these respective writers–No. 44. The Mysterious Stranger, The Wheel of Life, and Dark Princess: A Romance—can be more fully understood and richly experienced when their authors' interest in Indian religion is taken into consideration. Secondly, American writers have been more consistently and complexly interested in India than has been recognized. The critical commonplace is that Indian religion has primarily influenced poets connected with the Transcendentalist and Beat movements, but this study shows that American literary interest in India has continued from the early nineteenth century through the twentieth and that prose and poetry have been equally fruitful means of expressing such interest. A look at the different American perspectives on India also complicates the notion of Orientalism propounded by Edward Said. To be sure, India is often the object of Orientalist discourse, and two novels-Max Wvlie's Hindu Heaven and Francis Marion Crawford's Mr. Isaacs--help define the parameters of American Orientalism. However, in contradiction to Said's insistence that Westerners writing about the East inevitably treat it as "exterior" or alien to themselves. Twain, Glasgow, and Du Bois find personal meaning in Indian concepts and accordingly create works of art that incorporate those ideas on a fundamental level. Their willingness to look to Indian religion as they search for a meaningful vision of human existence shows how they engage in a constructive cross-cultural encounter along the lines of Fred Dallmayr's notion of "Dialogical Exchange."

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