Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Of Sonnets And Archives: Robert Graves, Laura Riding, And The Erasure Of Modern Poetry, Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

In the nearly eighty years since Laura Riding and Robert Graves ceased their collaborative endeavors there has been much speculation as to the nature and extent of their literary partnership. Graves retold the past to his biographers, constructing Laura Riding as a queen yogi figure wielding an almost sinister influence. In response to these accusations Riding returned fire with volley after volley of “corrective” letters which she sent to Graves’s biographers as well as any magazine or student that she found to be sympathizing with Grave’s account of the creative partnership. At the time of her death in 1991, Riding …

Preposterous America: The Language Of Inversion In Thoreau, Melville, And Hawthorne, Rasmus R. Simonsen

Rasmus R Simonsen, PhD

This dissertation stages a series of readings that activate the inherent pull towards a queer aesthetic of “preposterousness” in the American Renaissance. In the introduction, I claim that American Studies and Queer Studies have been mutually implicated ever since F.O. Matthiessen’s seminal work American Renaissance. In this way, I bring to light the nascent strands of homoeroticsm and “deviant” practices that disrupt the teleology of normative masculinity in the nineteenth century. My intervention develops a queer heuristic through an exploration of the classical figure of hysteron proteron—the rhetorical inversion of the order of things. As a master-trope for my investigation, …

Sacred Uncertainty: Religious Difference And The Shape Of Melville's Career, Brian Yothers

Brian Yothers

Sacred Uncertainty (published April 2015) explores Herman Melville's engagement with a wide range of religious traditions across his entire career.

Connecting Literature And History: Fitzgerald’S The Great Gatsby Museum Project, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

Despite mixed reviews at the time of its 1925 publication, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has come to be one of the most widely taught American books and has become a popular candidate for the title of the “Great American Novel.” Uniquely intertwining social history, biography, and literature, the text challenges readers to understand the culture and history of the Jazz Age and to see its interrelationship with the lives and motivations of the characters, as well as with the author himself. This project encourages students to engage and work closely with one of the historical elements that influenced …

Hawthorne’S “The Minister’S Black Veil”: Group Activities And Interpretations, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

Although the better-known The Scarlet Letter (1850) still draws more attention from many high school English teachers, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s darkly enigmatic short story “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1836) touches on similar themes and provides readers with diverse avenues for exploration, discussion, and analysis. Containing dramatic, psychological, and moral elements, in addition to its literary ones, it is a complex text that can confound teachers and students alike with its range of interpretations and ambiguity. This lesson allows students in small groups to choose and focus on one interpretive element. It also accommodates different learning styles, offering both creative and analytical …

The American Dime Museum: Bodily Spectacle And Social Midways In Turn-Of-The-Century American Literature And Culture, James C. Fairfield

Theses and Dissertations--English

The freak played a significant role in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century entertainment, but its significance extended beyond such venues as sideshows and minstrel shows. This dissertation examines the freak as an avatar emblematic of several issues, such as class and race, traditionally focused on in studies of Turn-of-the Century American literature and culture.

Disability and freakishness are explored as central to late-nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Americans’ identity. Freakishness is applied to a series of ways in which Americans in this period constructed their identity, including race, gender, and socioeconomic class, showing the dual role that the freak played for many …

Narrating Rewilding: Shifting Images Of Wilderness In American Literature, Aaron Andrew Cloyd

Theses and Dissertations--English

Narrating Rewilding analyzes interactions between imaginative writings and environmental histories to ask how novels and creative nonfiction contribute to conversations of wilderness rewilding. I identify aspects of rewilding in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, and Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge within a context of William Cronon’s and James Feldman’s works of environmental history, and I argue that the selected imaginative works offer alternative ramifications of rewilding by questioning Cronon’s and Feldman’s anthropocentric basis.

While Cronon and Feldman argue that a rewilding wilderness expresses interconnections between human history and expressions of nature, and that a return of …