Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Arts and Humanities Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

American Literature

Slavery

Institution
Publication Year
Publication
Publication Type
File Type

Articles 1 - 30 of 32

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

The Impact Of Family Environment And Religion In Purple Hibiscus And Beloved, Thoa Phan Jan 2023

The Impact Of Family Environment And Religion In Purple Hibiscus And Beloved, Thoa Phan

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the repercussions of slavery-induced dehumanization and trauma depicted in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and explores Kambili’s stifling home life characterized by her father’s rigid Catholicism in Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Morrison’s Beloved emphasizes the importance of personal engagement with the history of slavery so as to fully comprehend its horrors and overcome them. In Purple Hibiscus, the paper investigates the role religion plays in causing trauma, as Eugene’s strict adherence to Catholicism and dismissal of traditional rituals inflict both physical and psychological pain on his family. The complex and multifaceted depiction of religion in these novels …


The Burdens And Blessings Of Responsibility: Duty And Community In Nineteenth- Century America, Leslie Leonard Jun 2022

The Burdens And Blessings Of Responsibility: Duty And Community In Nineteenth- Century America, Leslie Leonard

Doctoral Dissertations

The Burdens of Responsibility traces the emergence of moral responsibility as both a concept and problem in the nineteenth-century United States. Drawing on a range of sources –works of literature, philosophy, domestic manuals, newspaper archives – I show how many Americans began to conceive of moral responsibility as distinct from both duty and rules of behavior prescribed by traditional social roles. Although ethicists today take this distinction for granted, it was an emergent and problematic space in the nineteenth-century United States, brought into being by historical forces, including the rise of market capitalism, abolition, changing women’s roles, and increasing concern …


‘The Master And The Man Must Change Places For A Season’: Untangling Historical Narratives Of Race And Loyalty In ‘The Spy,’, David N. Gellman Jan 2021

‘The Master And The Man Must Change Places For A Season’: Untangling Historical Narratives Of Race And Loyalty In ‘The Spy,’, David N. Gellman

History Faculty publications

No abstract provided.


African American Literary Traditions In Justina Ireland’S Young Adult Novels Dread Nation And Deathless Divide, Gabrielle Sleeper Dec 2020

African American Literary Traditions In Justina Ireland’S Young Adult Novels Dread Nation And Deathless Divide, Gabrielle Sleeper

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Justina Ireland’s young adult novels Dread Nation (2017) and Deathless Divide (2020) tell the story of a Black girl by the name of Jane living in the aftermath of the Civil War, around 1880.


“We Got More Yesterday Than Anybody”: Child Ghosts And The National Trauma Of Anti-Black Racism In American Literature, Megan Swartzfager May 2020

“We Got More Yesterday Than Anybody”: Child Ghosts And The National Trauma Of Anti-Black Racism In American Literature, Megan Swartzfager

Honors Theses

This thesis examines the roles of haunting in the context of racial violence in three texts: Beloved by Toni Morrison, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, and Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan. In each of these texts, a parent is responsible for the death of a child. In the former two texts, both by Black authors, a Black parent kills a Black child in what they believe to be a protective act in the face of violence by white people. Wolf Whistle, however, written by a white author, is animated by the ghost of a character based on Emmett Till. …


The Gothic Other: A Critique Of Race, Gender, Slavery, And Systemic Oppression Found In Nathaniel Hawthorne, Toni Morrison, And Hannah Crafts, Kelly Franklin May 2020

The Gothic Other: A Critique Of Race, Gender, Slavery, And Systemic Oppression Found In Nathaniel Hawthorne, Toni Morrison, And Hannah Crafts, Kelly Franklin

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines three novels all communicating ideas about race, gender, and slavery under the conventions of Gothic literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) show how patriarchy oppressed and haunted women while keeping slavery at the margins. Beloved (1987), by Toni Morrison, fictionalizes the account of a female slave who murdered her child to assert her power and reject slavery. However, Morrison rewrites and defies aspects of the Gothic mode by bringing the ghost of the murdered child back to life, and later showing steps the community can take to heal from their collective trauma. The …


“I’Ve Known Rivers:” Representations Of The Mississippi River In African American Literature And Culture, Catherine Gooch Jan 2019

“I’Ve Known Rivers:” Representations Of The Mississippi River In African American Literature And Culture, Catherine Gooch

Theses and Dissertations--English

My dissertation, titled “I’ve Known Rivers”: Representations of the Mississippi River in African American Literature and Culture, uncovers the impact of the Mississippi River as a powerful, recurring geographical feature in twentieth-century African American literature that conveys the consequences of capitalist expansion on the individual and communal lives of Black Americans. Recent scholarship on the Mississippi River theorizes the relationship between capitalism, geography, and slavery. Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History, and Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the …


Contesting Slavery In The Global Market: John Brown’S Slave Life In Georgia, Michael Drexler, Stephanie Scherer Jan 2019

Contesting Slavery In The Global Market: John Brown’S Slave Life In Georgia, Michael Drexler, Stephanie Scherer

Faculty Journal Articles

John Brown, author of Slave Life in Georgia, published in London in 1854, proffered a radical approach to ending slavery in the USA in step with Marxian economics. In this paper, we will explain how Brown’s representation of subjectivity may have caused critics to neglect it. Brown treats freedom as something foreign and external. He has to learn what freedom means, first through exposure to a model of liberal citizenship and then through the experience of several modulations of fugitive liberty. Brown’s social world is wholly determined by external forces. Whether slave or freeman, he faces ambiguous situations. Is …


Tailoring Landscapes: Multivalent Terrain And The Politics Of Black Geography In Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, Cara Fitzgerald Jan 2018

Tailoring Landscapes: Multivalent Terrain And The Politics Of Black Geography In Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, Cara Fitzgerald

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis foregrounds the import of national geography in nineteenth-century African American literature. Authors like Elizabeth Keckley and Martin Delany confront problems of national geography by interrogating illusion, rewriting geographic space, and constructing themselves within both the physical and conceptual geography of the nation. In so doing, they challenge the fallacy of a uniform national geography and attend to the myriad historical conditions that exist within geographic spaces.


Douglass’ Reply To A. C. C. Thompson’S ‘Letter From Frederick Douglass,’ As Reprinted In The Anti-Slavery Bugle: A Critical Edition Of Both Letters, With A Summary Of Maryland’S Fugitive Slave Laws, Kayla Hardy-Butler Jan 2018

Douglass’ Reply To A. C. C. Thompson’S ‘Letter From Frederick Douglass,’ As Reprinted In The Anti-Slavery Bugle: A Critical Edition Of Both Letters, With A Summary Of Maryland’S Fugitive Slave Laws, Kayla Hardy-Butler

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Kayla Hardy-Butler presents a famous letter by Frederick Douglass, as it was published in Ohio, with the letter that prompted it. This edition also includes a summary of Maryland slave statutes from the time to better explain the day-to-day experience of slavery debated in this correspondence.


A Canada In The South: Marronage In Antebellum American Literature, Sean Gerrity Feb 2017

A Canada In The South: Marronage In Antebellum American Literature, Sean Gerrity

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers maroons—enslaved people who fled from slavery and self-exiled to places like swamps and forests—in the textual and historical worlds of the pre-Civil War United States. I examine a counter-archive of US literature that imagines marronage as offering alternate spaces of freedom, refuge, and autonomy outside the unidirectional South-to-North geographical trajectory of the Underground Railroad, which has often framed the story of freedom and unfreedom for African Americans in pre-1865 US literary and cultural studies. Broadly, I argue that through maroons we can locate alternate spaces of fugitive freedom within slaveholding territory, thereby complicating fixed notions of the …


Shakespeare And Black Masculinity In Antebellum America: Slave Revolts And Construction Of Revolutionary Blackness, Elisabeth Mayer Jan 2017

Shakespeare And Black Masculinity In Antebellum America: Slave Revolts And Construction Of Revolutionary Blackness, Elisabeth Mayer

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores how Shakespeare was used by Antebellum American writers to frame slave revolts as either criminal or revolutionary. By specifically addressing The Confessions of Nat Turner by Thomas R. Gray and "The Heroic Slave" by Frederick Douglass, this paper looks at the way invocations of Shakespeare framed depictions of black violence. At a moment when what it means to be American was questioned, American writers like Gray and Douglass turned to Shakespeare and the British roots of the English language in order to structure their respective arguments. In doing so, these texts illuminate how transatlantic identity still permeated …


Reconciling The Past In Octavia Butler's Kindred, Haley V. Manis Dec 2016

Reconciling The Past In Octavia Butler's Kindred, Haley V. Manis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses the observations of Nancy J. Peterson on historical wounds as a springboard to discuss Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred and its use of both white and black characters to reexamine the origins of the historical wounds and why they are so difficult to deal with even today. Other scholarly works will be used to further investigate the importance of each character in the story and what they mean to the wound itself. Specifically, Dana is analyzed alongside the other main characters: Rufus, Alice, and Kevin. Though Dana’s relationships with these characters, Kindred’s version of the past can be …


The Novel Of Sentiment In A Short Story: Reflections On Teaching “Theresa”, Adam Kotlarczyk Jul 2016

The Novel Of Sentiment In A Short Story: Reflections On Teaching “Theresa”, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

I introduced “Theresa” in between units on “The Age of Reason” and “American Romanticism.” Thus it was foregrounded by works like Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Phyllis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and followed by stories by Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe. Strictly speaking, this puts “Theresa” slightly out of sequence; its serialization in 1828 precedes by at least ten years the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Irving that we study. Despite this, the text functioned well as a transitional piece, although I would consider moving it deeper into the Romantic unit. The exotic setting, relative to our other …


The Novel Of Sentiment In A Short Story: Reflections On Teaching “Theresa”, Adam Kotlarczyk Jul 2016

The Novel Of Sentiment In A Short Story: Reflections On Teaching “Theresa”, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

I introduced “Theresa” in between units on “The Age of Reason” and “American Romanticism.” Thus it was foregrounded by works like Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Phyllis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and followed by stories by Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe. Strictly speaking, this puts “Theresa” slightly out of sequence; its serialization in 1828 precedes by at least ten years the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Irving that we study. Despite this, the text functioned well as a transitional piece, although I would consider moving it deeper into the Romantic unit. The exotic setting, relative to our other …


The Novel Of Sentiment In A Short Story: Reflections On Teaching “Theresa”, Adam Kotlarczyk Jul 2016

The Novel Of Sentiment In A Short Story: Reflections On Teaching “Theresa”, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

I introduced “Theresa” in between units on “The Age of Reason” and “American Romanticism.” Thus it was foregrounded by works like Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Phyllis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and followed by stories by Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe. Strictly speaking, this puts “Theresa” slightly out of sequence; its serialization in 1828 precedes by at least ten years the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Irving that we study. Despite this, the text functioned well as a transitional piece, although I would consider moving it deeper into the Romantic unit. The exotic setting, relative to our other …


"The Imagination And Construction Of The Black Criminal In American Literature, 1741-1910", Emahunn Campbell Nov 2015

"The Imagination And Construction Of The Black Criminal In American Literature, 1741-1910", Emahunn Campbell

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation examines the origins of the perception of black people as criminally predisposed by arguing that during eighteenth and nineteenth-century America, crime committed by black people was used as a major trope in legal, literary, and scientific discourses, deeming them inherently criminal. Furthermore, I contend that enslaved and free black people often used criminal acts, including murder, theft, and literacy, as avenues toward freedom. However, their resistance was used as a justification for slavery in the South and discrimination in the North. By examining a diverse set of materials such as confessional literature, plantation management literature, (social) scientific studies, …


Creating Difference: The Legal Production Of Race In American Slavery, Shaun N. Ramdin Apr 2015

Creating Difference: The Legal Production Of Race In American Slavery, Shaun N. Ramdin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the legal construction and development of racial difference as considered in literature written or set during the final years of American slavery. While there had consistently been a conceptual correspondence between black skin and enslavement, race or racial difference did not become the unqualified explanation of enslavement until fairly late in the institution’s history. Specifically, as slavery’s stability became increasingly threatened through the nineteenth century by abolitionism and racial slippage, race became the singular and explicit rationale for its existence and perpetuation. I argue that the primary discourse of this justificatory rationale was legal: through law race …


The Novel Of Sentiment In A Short Story: Reflections On Teaching “Theresa”, Adam Kotlarczyk Jan 2015

The Novel Of Sentiment In A Short Story: Reflections On Teaching “Theresa”, Adam Kotlarczyk

Faculty Publications & Research

I introduced “Theresa” in between units on “The Age of Reason” and “American Romanticism.” Thus it was foregrounded by works like Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Phyllis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and followed by stories by Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe. Strictly speaking, this puts “Theresa” slightly out of sequence; its serialization in 1828 precedes by at least ten years the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Irving that we study. Despite this, the text functioned well as a transitional piece, although I would consider moving it deeper into the Romantic unit. The exotic setting, relative to our other …


Features Of Independence: Teaching “Theresa - A Haytien Tale”, Michael P. Dean Jan 2015

Features Of Independence: Teaching “Theresa - A Haytien Tale”, Michael P. Dean

Faculty Publications & Research

One of the core beliefs of the Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA) states that we believe that “diverse perspectives enrich understanding and inspire discovery and creativity,” and in keeping with that aim, I chose to participate in the Just Teach One: Early African American Print project. As a school primarily focused on STEM subjects, IMSA still offers a robust English curriculum that values and supports a diverse literary canon, and our incoming sophomores are asked to complete a two-part Literary Explorations course that features America texts from colonial era up to the 21st century.


All Things Were Working Together For My Deliverance: The Life And Times Of Twelve Years A Slave, Mary Niall Mitchell Jan 2014

All Things Were Working Together For My Deliverance: The Life And Times Of Twelve Years A Slave, Mary Niall Mitchell

Mary Niall Mitchell

No abstract provided.


From Natural Law To Natural Inferiority: The Construction Of Racist Jurisprudence In Early Virginia, Allen P. Mendenhall Dec 2012

From Natural Law To Natural Inferiority: The Construction Of Racist Jurisprudence In Early Virginia, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

Science informed American jurisprudence during the age of the Revolution. Colonials used science and naturalism to navigate the wilderness, define themselves against the British, and forge a new national identity and constitutional order. American legal historians have long noted the influence of science upon the Founding generation, and historians of American slavery have casually noted the influence of science upon early American racism as organized and standardized in slave codes. This article seeks to synthesize the work of American legal historians and historians of American slavery by showing how natural law jurisprudence, anchored in scientific discourse and vocabulary, brought about …


Crabb, Alfred Leland, 1884-1979 (Mss 367), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives May 2011

Crabb, Alfred Leland, 1884-1979 (Mss 367), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and bibliography (click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Collection 367. Correspondence, book and article manuscripts, and research material of Alfred Leland Crabb, a native of Warren County, Kentucky and later professor at George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, Tennessee. The topics of the manuscripts include historical fiction related to Nashville and Bowling Green, biographies of prominent Nashvillians, and articles on all levels of education. Much of the unpublished material is fiction but draws from Crabb's Plum Springs school days and his student experiences at Western Kentucky University.


Le Mélange Of Francophone Culture In William Wells Brown’S Clotel, Sandra Andrade Jan 2011

Le Mélange Of Francophone Culture In William Wells Brown’S Clotel, Sandra Andrade

Undergraduate Review

In Clotel; Or, The President’s Daughter, William Wells Brown argues that for fugitive African American slaves France represented freedom. This connection between African Americans and France that is familiar to many Americans in the twentieth century was existent at the time of Brown’s own escape. The Francophone culture became a major motivator in the author’s personal life and also in his writings. This project covers many themes, including the “tragic mulatta”, American identity, American freedom and slavery, and explores readings from Anna Brickhouse’s Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere, and Eve A. Raimon’s The Tragic Mulatta …


Artistic Liberty And Slave Imagery: "Mark Twain's Illustrator," E. W. Kemble, Turns To Harriet Beecher Stowe, Adam Sonstegard Mar 2009

Artistic Liberty And Slave Imagery: "Mark Twain's Illustrator," E. W. Kemble, Turns To Harriet Beecher Stowe, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Reader Response And The Interpretation Of "Hop-Frog," "How To Write A Blackwood Article," And "The Tell-Tale Heart", Brian Yothers Dec 2007

Reader Response And The Interpretation Of "Hop-Frog," "How To Write A Blackwood Article," And "The Tell-Tale Heart", Brian Yothers

Brian Yothers

This essay discusses ways in which reader response can enrich the teaching of Poe's short fiction.


Thomas Collection (Mss 31), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives Dec 2007

Thomas Collection (Mss 31), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid for Manuscripts Collection 31. Manuscripts, letters, writings, etc., of the Thomas family of Bowling Green, Kentucky, including sermons and speeches of Frank Morehead Thomas, Methodist minister (1868-1921); and poems, essays and newspaper articles written by his mother, Elizabeth (Wright) Thomas (1842-1931). Full-text scans are available (Click on "Additional Files" below) for the Spanish-American War letters that Frank Thomas sent home to his family.


Olaudah Equiano's Views Of Slavery In His "Narrative Of The Life", Corie Dias Jan 2004

Olaudah Equiano's Views Of Slavery In His "Narrative Of The Life", Corie Dias

Undergraduate Review

No abstract provided.


Hooks, Malinda (Cunningham), 1853-1948 (Sc 1440), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives Jan 1997

Hooks, Malinda (Cunningham), 1853-1948 (Sc 1440), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 1440. "Recollections and Thoughts", 1930, written for her family by Malinda Hooks, Trigg County, Kentucky. She writes of her childhood, family, and the Civil War. Includes her poetry and two unidentified photographs.


"He's Long Gone": The Theme Of Escape In Black Folklore And Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance Jan 1992

"He's Long Gone": The Theme Of Escape In Black Folklore And Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Throughout their experiences in this country, certain segments of the Black population have viewed themselves as enslaved, whether they were chattel owned by slaveowners prior to emancipation, whether they were impressed into peonage and forced to work on white plantations and in chain gangs after slavery, whether they were victims of sharecropping systems that virtually reenslaved them during the twentieth century, whether they were the repressed and disfranchised and persecuted in Southern Jim Crow towns throughout the first half of the twentieth century, whether they are those trapped by unemployment and poverty today, or whether they are among the Blacks …