Digital Commons Network^™

“The Other One”: An Unpublished Chapter Of Sarah Orne Jewett’S The Country Of The Pointed Firs, Melissa J. Homestead, Terry Heller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) has long been central to literary critical debates about the nature and character of American literary regionalism. In the early 1990s, some New Historicist critics aligned the emergence of the literary movement with the rise of tourism as two means by which urban elites defined themselves as a socially and racially privileged class in the postwar nation. In an influential analysis of the mutually reinforcing development of the literary marketplace and class and cultural hierarchies, Richard Brodhead describes regionalism in Cultures of Letters (1993) as evidencing “an elite need for …

Teaching Attentive Reading And Motivated Writing Through Digital Editing, Amanda A Gailey

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Though English departments, including my own at the University of Nebraska, have been teaching digital humanities (DH) courses for over a decade, hyperbolic claims about the perils and promises of using computers in the study of literature continue to appear in the press. A piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books likens the algorithms used by some digital humanities methods to fascism (Marche). Another, in The Huffington Post, compares the rise of digital humanities to “our uncritical acceptance of drone attacks” (Mohamed). On the other hand, digital humanists such as Franco Moretti, who famously promote “distant reading” as opposed …

"More Than Custom Has Pronounced Necessary”: Exploring The Correlation Between Gendered Verbs And Character In The 19th Century Novel, Nebraska Literary Lab, Oliver Baylog, Laura Dimmit, Travis Heller, Gabi Kirilloff, Shannon Smith, Grace Thomas, Chandler Warren, James Wehrwein

Department of English: Presentations, Talks, and Seminar Papers

During the 19th century, gender politics played a crucial role in shaping the emergence of the novel as a popular and successful form of literature. Not only were middle class women becoming an important part of the reading public, women were also authoring novels and creating complex heroines that at times pushed against, and at other times bolstered, traditional conceptions of propriety and femininity. Along with a rise in popularity came a rise in the critique of the novel as a valid literary genre; many critics claimed that novels were capable of corrupting their female readership. Authors responded to this …

Shelterbelt: Land That Speaks, Ryan Oberhelman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis is a collection of short stories drafted in between 2012 and 2014. The stories in this collection have been selected for their common themes of masculinity, work, fractured families, and rural decline. Many stories offer fragmented, non-linear approaches to narrative.

Note: This thesis deposited as hard copy only. There is no digital document associated with this record. beyond the title page and abstract.

Student Engagement And Action In Classroom And Community: Place-Based Education And Social Action For The High-Achieving Student, Rachel M. Jank

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This paper briefly discusses the work done in a college-preparatory, Senior English class to combat the disengagement present in many educational institutions. This disconnect does not allow for learning retention and, therefore, does not allow for students to apply the moment of learning to life outside of the secondary classroom. The work I do is based off of Jessica Singer Early, Bruce Bigelow, Linda Christensen, and many other master teachers who work with the educational designs of Place Consciousness and Social Action within their respective classrooms. The theories of John Dewey and Paulo Freire suggest that a non-traditional style of …

Walt Whitman And Civil War Washington, Kenneth M. Price

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Walt Whitman famously described his visits to thousands of wounded Civil War soldiers in Memoranda During the War, a volume with a largely ignored subtitle: "Written on the Spot in 1863-'65." I want to highlight that subtitle and its emphasis on space and time-its geo-temporal specificity-to ask what it meant to have a writer of Whitman's sensibilities thrust into the nation's capital city in the final three years of the war, when it had become a city of hospitals. More wounded soldiers were treated in Washington, DC, than in any other city, and Whitman, a visitor to dozens of hospitals, …

Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture, Gregory E. Rutledge

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In his article "Race, Slavery, and the Revaluation of the T'ang Canon" Gregory E. Rutledge re-evaluates—from the purview of African Diaspora literary studies—historiography that considers the place of East African slave lore in T'ang Dynasty fiction. Julie Wilensky's "The Magical Kunlun and 'Devil Slaves': Chinese Perceptions of Dark-skinned People and Africa before 1500" (2002), a revision of Chang Hsing-lang's "The Importation of Negro Slaves to China Under the T'ang Dynasty (A.D. 618- 907)" (1930), is pivotal since it occupies the nexus between European-American, East-Asian, and African-Diasporic canons and policies. Rutledge situates Wilensky's and Chang's works in the context of Edward …

Veiled Movements In The Vale Of Esthwaite, Jack Vespa

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The Vale of Esthwaite (1787), Wordsworth's first sustained effort at original composition, was first published in 1940 by Ernest De Selincourt in Poetical Works of Wordsworth as an example of the juvenilia. Among scholars who have treated the De Selincourt version of the poem, Geoffrey Hartman's account in Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 is the fullest, which argues that The Vale of Esthwaite turns upon the mind of a poet enthralled by nature despite signs that his imagination may well be independent of nature (76-89). Other treatments of De Selincourt's edition appeared in F. W. Bateson, Paul Sheats, Thomas Weiskel, James Averill, …

Victorian Sexual Politics And The Unsettling Case Of George Eliot’S Response To Walt Whitman, Beverley Rilett

Department of English: Faculty Publications

George Eliot and Walt Whitman, two of the most influential writers of the nineteenth century, are rarely discussed in relation to one another. They did not correspond, nor did either writer ever cross the Atlantic. There may have been several degrees of separation between Eliot and Whitman personally, but even from a distance, the two writers influenced each other’s careers. There has been some misconception that Eliot disdained and discounted Whitman. This essay seeks to refute that assumption by examining the context in which Eliot appeared to reject him. Perhaps more significantly, this essay breaks new critical ground by attributing …

Adding To Blake Set To Music: A Bibliography, Ashanka Kumari

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

William Blake, like other Romantic-era poets, was inspired by and wrote about the world around him. The hundreds of poems he wrote later inspired other genres such as music. In 1990 the University of California Press published Blake Set to Music: A Bibliography of Musical Settings of the Poems and Prose of William Blake written by Donald Fitch. This bibliography lists 1,412 pieces up to 1988. The following bibliography consists of pieces of music written after Fitch’s bibliography was published or, in a few cases, a composition written before Fitch’s bibliography was published, but not mentioned in that bibliography. This …