Literature in English, North America Commons™
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Recent Articles in Literature in English, North America
The Mask Of The 'American Dream', Saraswathi Nookala '15 
Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy
The Mask Of The 'American Dream', Saraswathi Nookala '15
2013 Spring Semester
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology are heralded as some of the greatest insights into human nature in American literature. Both authors ask the reader to scrutinize the actions and emotions of the characters in their books to understand the true meaning behind their double-sided statements. From analyzing the characters of Tom and Daisy Buchanan and Lambert Hutchins, the reader can conclude that although they have the inordinate amount of wealth everybody in America works toward, they are dissatisfied, and use their money and aristocratic position to project the exterior of contentment ...
Transatlantic Print Culture And The Rise Of New England Literature, 1620-1630, Sean Delaney 
Northeastern University
Transatlantic Print Culture And The Rise Of New England Literature, 1620-1630, Sean Delaney
History Dissertations
Despite the considerable attention devoted to the founding of puritan colonies in New England, scholars have routinely discounted several printed tracts that describe this episode of history as works of New England literature. This study examines the reasons for this historiographical oversight and, through a close reading of the texts, identifies six works written and printed between 1620 and 1630 as the beginnings of a new type of literature. The production of these tracts supported efforts to establish puritan settlements in New England. Their respective authors wrote, not to record a historical moment for posterity, but to cultivate a particular ...
"Radiant Imperfection": The Interconnected Writing Lives Of Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, Don Mckay, And Jan Zwicky, Kostantina Northrup 
Western University
"Radiant Imperfection": The Interconnected Writing Lives Of Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, Don Mckay, And Jan Zwicky, Kostantina Northrup
University of Western Ontario - Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Over the course of the past two decades, Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, Don McKay, and Jan Zwicky have come to be known as a coterie of ecological writers and ethicists. All five poets have inhabited the Canadian university at various points throughout their careers, and by discussing their ecopoetics in light of their commentary on academic epistemologies and contemporary education in the humanities, this dissertation observes how the poets’ respective approaches to aesthetics, philosophy, and pedagogy are intimately intertwined. By contextualizing the group’s ecopoetics in light of their academic interventions, I argue that their public reputations as ...
Storied Truths: Contemporary Canadian And Indigenous Childhood Trauma Narratives, Michelle Coupal Western University
Storied Truths: Contemporary Canadian And Indigenous Childhood Trauma Narratives, Michelle Coupal
University of Western Ontario - Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This dissertation reconceptualizes generic distinctions between fiction and testimony in accounts of childhood trauma. Scholars such as Leigh Gilmore have argued that while writers of trauma stories are burdened by legalistic definitions of evidence and anxieties about truth-telling, they nonetheless push at the limits of autobiography, often scuffing the border between fact and fiction, in their effort to bring their traumatic stories into language. There has not, however, been a sustained effort to understand and legitimize the place of fiction in testimony, particularly in cases of adult narrations of recovered memories of childhood traumas. My research addresses this lacuna by ...
Impossible Storyworlds And The (Unnatural) Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym, Mitchell C. Lilly 
Marshall University
Impossible Storyworlds And The (Unnatural) Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym, Mitchell C. Lilly
Theses, Dissertations and Capstones
The following thesis defends reading Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as an early example of an “unnatural narrative” in American literature. Adapting unnatural narrative theory, a recent area of study in narratology developed to analyze the existence of unnatural storyworlds, minds, and acts of narration prevalent in postmodern fiction, this thesis analyzes the unnatural dynamics at play in Pym’s storyworld and storytelling that do not comply with what the reader knows is otherwise physically, logically, or humanly impossible in the physical world. Legitimating Poe’s novel as a work of unnatural narrative coincides with ...
Melville In Tahiti: A Gis Approach, Jessica Ewing 
Boise State University
Melville In Tahiti: A Gis Approach, Jessica Ewing
Student Research Initiatives
This presentation will focus on Melville's period in and around Tahiti in 1842, a part of the biographical record vexed by conflicting scholarly accounts of Melville's whereabouts and actions, and by inconsistencies—as well as outright falsehoods—among surviving documents and the author's own account of his experiences in his second book Omoo. Digitally expanding on methods of traditional scholarship, I will present the evidence in visual, electronic form by using ArcGIS software to map Melville’s movements, supplying relevant data and documentation and mapping alternate interpretations of the author's travels. The layered digital maps will ...
Third Way Poets: Navigating The Streams Of Modern And Postmodern Poetic Uncertainty, James A. Richie Northeastern University
Deterring A Critical Catharsis: An Inquiry Into The Rhetoric And Ethics Of Punishment In Wieland; Or The Transformation, Mike Haen 
Marquette University
Deterring A Critical Catharsis: An Inquiry Into The Rhetoric And Ethics Of Punishment In Wieland; Or The Transformation, Mike Haen
Maria Dittman Library Research Competition: Student Award Winners
From Hammurabi’s Code to modern-day penitentiaries, a society’s chosen punishment models contribute to that society’s ethics. In Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or the Transformation (1798), characters interact with one another in an isolated community. These interactions center on Wieland’s murder of his family, and how his mind was influenced toward murder by Carwin, an ex-convict. Here, a reader is faced with deciding who to blame. However, solely focusing on criminal culpability ignores a rhetorical problem left unexamined by past scholars—that of criminal punishment in the novel. This problem involves two issues—first, the factors ...
Life Inside The Spectacle: David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, And Storytelling In The Age Of Entertainment, John Hawkins 
Liberty University
Life Inside The Spectacle: David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, And Storytelling In The Age Of Entertainment, John Hawkins
Masters Theses
This project explores George Saunders's In Persuasion Nation and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest as interventionary literature. The thesis asserts that the two works confront the problems of isolation and dehumanization created by entertainment-based consumerism; they do so by depicting satirically exaggerated consumer societies and placing well-developed, sympathetic characters in those settings. The thesis includes a consideration of Jameson and deBord's theories of spectacle and Wallace's stated concerns with postmodern irony as an ineffective form of critique.
Women As Victims In Tennessee Williams' First Three Major Plays, Ruth Foley Liberty University
Women As Victims In Tennessee Williams' First Three Major Plays, Ruth Foley
Masters Theses
Although Tennessee Williams does not openly champion the rights of women in his plays, he presents strong cases against their social alienation in a harsh and brutal world governed by men. Williams' emotional leanings, sensitivity, and intuition enable him to see life through women's eyes. In The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Summer and Smoke, Williams astutely sounds the battle cry for women to fight against male oppression. He shows how Amanda Wingfield, Laura Wingfield, Blanche Dubois, Stella Kowalski, and Alma Winemiller are held hostage to the rules governing patriarchal society and become unhappy marginalized victims. The ...
Subverting A Mythology: Examining Joseph Campbell's Monomyth In The Fiction Of H. P. Lovecraft, Wesley VanDenBos Liberty University
Subverting A Mythology: Examining Joseph Campbell's Monomyth In The Fiction Of H. P. Lovecraft, Wesley Vandenbos
Masters Theses
American horror author H. P. Lovecraft's tales of monsters and madness, collectively known as the Cthulhu Mythos, have exploded in popularity in the last few decades and attracted both critical and casual interest. Inspired by his childhood mythological readings, Lovecraft created these chilling stories as a more modern version of ancient myths, drawing upon yet subtly altering the sources that influenced him. The author of this thesis draws attention to the differences between classic myths and the Cthulhu Mythos, using the monomyth of Joseph Campbell as a framework through which to view both ancient mythologies and Lovecraft's tales ...
The Genderization Of Crime Fiction From The Victorian Era To The Modern Day, Ariana Scott-Zechlin 
University of Puget Sound
The Genderization Of Crime Fiction From The Victorian Era To The Modern Day, Ariana Scott-Zechlin
Book Collecting Contest Essays
Although Victorian crime fiction was originally “feminine” in its sensation fiction origins, it became increasingly masculinized as the genre developed. Eventually, Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories set forth the detective duo archetype of two white middle-class males, and it has remained the genre’s defining model ever since. This essay describes a book collection which explores this transition from feminine to masculine in the crime fiction genre of British literature and questions to what extent modern day authors are both challenging this model and remaining confined by it.
Symbolic Capital And The Performativity Of Authorship: The Construction And Commodification Of The Nineteenth-Century Authorial Celebrity, Whitney Helms 
University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Symbolic Capital And The Performativity Of Authorship: The Construction And Commodification Of The Nineteenth-Century Authorial Celebrity, Whitney Helms
Dissertations & Theses, Department of English
Victorian and Antebellum writers were the first literary figures to construct and perform their authorship within the sphere of celebrity. Unlike their Romantic predecessors who endured fame as an unexpected consequence of their popularity, the Victorians and their contemporaries understood celebrity as a condition of authorship. This dissertation takes as its subject the origins and development of symbolic power for authors as it was expressed in the trappings of celebrity and mass culture and argues that authorship became no longer strictly a profession of writing, but rather a performative endeavor that could be presented through diverse commercial markets. Investigating the ...
Significant Themes In 19th-Century Literature, Matthew L. Jockers, David Mimno University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Significant Themes In 19th-Century Literature, Matthew L. Jockers, David Mimno
Faculty Publications -- Department of English
External factors such as author gender, author nationality, and date of publication affect both the choice of literary themes in novels and the expression of those themes, but the extent of this association is difficult to quantify. In this work, we apply statistical methods to identify and extract hundreds of "topics" from a corpus of 3,346 works of 19th-century British, Irish, and American fiction. We use these topics as a measurable, data-driven proxy for literary themes. External factors may predict fluctuations in the use of themes and the individual word choices within themes. We use topics to measure the ...
Speculative Matter: Generic Affinities, Posthumanisms And Science-Fictional Imaginings, Laura Wiebe 
McMaster University
Speculative Matter: Generic Affinities, Posthumanisms And Science-Fictional Imaginings, Laura Wiebe
Open Access Dissertations and Theses
The boundaries of science fiction, as with any genre, are relational rather than fixed, and critical engagements with Western/Northern technoscientific knowledge and practice and modern human identity and being may be found not just in science fiction “proper,” or in the scholarly field of science and technology studies, but also in the related genres of fantasy and paranormal romance. This thesis offers an interdisciplinary examination – a science-fictional and posthumanist reframing – of the lines of affinity and relationality between these discursive and imaginative domains. Bringing together genre theory and critical posthumanism – itself informed by postmodern and poststructuralist feminism, postcolonialism, science ...
Beat Consumption: The Challenge To Consumerism In Beat Literature, Amien Essif 
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Beat Consumption: The Challenge To Consumerism In Beat Literature, Amien Essif
Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at the University of Tennessee
Critics of the Beat generation, from their contemporaries to the present day, often contend that the Beats’ opposition to consumer culture was superficial. Writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs failed, according to these critics, to present a coherent and principled response to consumerism. This paper, however, argues that while in many ways the Beats continued to participate in consumer culture, they developed a distinct form of consumption—Beat consumption—which attempted to regain sovereignty for the Beat consumer. Through an analysis of Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and On the Road as well as several of ...
The Strongest Wind, Vinesh Kannan '15 Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy
The Strongest Wind, Vinesh Kannan '15
2012 Fall Semester
The essence of the American Dream is that it promises those who embrace it a spirit of hope that they can become anything they wish, doctors, lawyers, mothers, volunteers, or even heroes. Just as these dreams are different, the way in which Americans embrace them is just diverse. When considering the conglomeration of identities in a society such as that of America, such differences can often be strange, unfamiliar, and even harsh from a new perspective. In her short story, “Rules of the Game,” Amy Tan, a writer of Asian descent herself, prompts her audience to ponder a new perspective ...
Material Memory: Willa Cather, “My First Novels [There Were Two]”, And The Colophon: A Book Collector’S Quarterly, Matthew J. Lavin 
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Material Memory: Willa Cather, “My First Novels [There Were Two]”, And The Colophon: A Book Collector’S Quarterly, Matthew J. Lavin
Matthew J Lavin
No abstract provided.
Exploring Discourses Of Appropriation: Collecting Modern Canadian Cultural Identity, Sarah E. Little McMaster University
Exploring Discourses Of Appropriation: Collecting Modern Canadian Cultural Identity, Sarah E. Little
Open Access Dissertations and Theses
By applying Canadian literary theory, museum theory, and material culture theory to 20th and 21st century Canadian literature, I argue that physical objects reflect Canada's continued engagement in colonial practices and the nation's resistance to acknowledging these practices. The act of selecting and including (which is also necessarily an act of excluding) objects in personal and institutional collections speak to the anxiety of the Euro-Canadian settler that is produced by a conflicting sense of privilege and colonial complicity. Collecting is a means of negotiating self- and shared knowledge, and by re-collecting and repatriating those things that haunt us ...
My Mark Twain: Old Man River, Amelia Grabowski '13 
Gettysburg College
My Mark Twain: Old Man River, Amelia Grabowski '13
Student Publications
Flowing across his pages, the Mississippi River inextricably winds itself through Mark Twain’s canon. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that my image of Clemens, my Mark Twain, is as a personification of his beloved river. Twain draws his readers to the water’s edge, seduces readers to stare into his depths, and reflects the achievements and failings of humanity. Furthermore, like the Mississippi River, Twain embeds himself in the American psyche.
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