Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department

English

Committee Chair

Michael Germana

Committee Co-Chair

Kathleen Ryan

Committee Member

Erin Brock Carlson

Committee Member

Jason Phillips

Abstract

By examining mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century American literary texts, this dissertation project aims to theorize the ways in which whiteness relies on conceptualizations of time to hegemonize non-white subjects and prescribe their historical representations. Because whiteness is dynamic in its emergence and effects and ubiquitous in sociopolitical and cultural realms, this dissertation holistically turns to white, Black, and Indigenous writers to delineate how whiteness functions throughout the period and how racialized subjects negotiate it. Portraying the nation’s history as lived experience rather than objectified knowledge, the racialized authors I examine undermine the concept of linear progressive time that subtends structural racism. Whereas the recent scholarship of African American literature has emphasized racialized people’s unique temporalities, it takes the temporality of whiteness, which is typically characterized as linear, future-oriented, and teleological, as somewhat monolithic phenomenon. My contention is not to refute these characterizations of the temporality of whiteness but to demonstrate and dissect the workings of such temporality in white writers’ representations of history, identifying epistemic limitations in their productions of knowledge. My dissertation examines how white writers reiterate the temporality upon which a white spatial imaginary relies and how non-white authors attempt to challenge the underlying ideologies and reclaim their historical presence.

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