'Examined, cracked, changed, made new': Conversion themes and structures in American short fiction

A religious people, Americans have always enjoyed stories about people who change their habits and actions for the better. But strangely enough, American conversion fiction before World War II, from 1799 to 1945, either depicts protagonists lacking moral freedom, or else shows that freedom, but vitiates it by ending the narratives with the protagonists suffering material disaster or deprivation.;Conversion fiction after World War II is different. Using themes and structures from earlier conversion stories, post-war writers of conversion fiction rearrange and re-emphasize these elements creating stories which seem almost to belong to a new genre of fiction. Their ability to present protagonists who think about good and evil and then choose one or the other gives post-war conversion fiction writers the opportunity to portray non-deterministic characters. Also, the post-war writers, for some reason, avoid building disaster into stories about moral success.;This dissertation examines five post-war conversion writers, James Baldwin, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O'Connor, J. D. Salinger, and John Updike, isolating thematic and formal elements of fifteen of their conversion stories and analyzing the effects of these elements upon the depiction of moral freedom in the protagonists.;Comparing and contrasting these fifteen post-war stories with fourteen pre-war conversion stories, the dissertation attempts to show how a gradual conversion process, a materially happy or neutral ending, a flawed helper of the protagonist, and multi-valued religious allusions help emphasize moral freedom in the protagonist.;The final chapter suggests, by a short survey, the intellectual contexts in which both pre and post-war stories were planned and written.