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Articles 1 - 30 of 35
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
"No, Not There": The Literary Precarity And Profundity Of Queer Spatiality, Samuel James Aftel
"No, Not There": The Literary Precarity And Profundity Of Queer Spatiality, Samuel James Aftel
Theses and Dissertations--English
Love, broadly defined, needs space to grow. For love to materialize and sustain itself (in both literature and society), it must find hospitable geosocial, institutional, and psychic terrain. This is especially true for queer intimacies beyond heteronormative relationality, for the prospect of love’s radical––or reactionary––possibilities is contingent upon the more general sociality in which it develops. Yet love is often a worldmaking and, sometimes, historic mechanism unto itself. Love and its concomitant sexualities must therefore be understood within and without normative structures of hegemony; the workings of (neo)colonialism and capitalism––as well as patriarchy, white supremacy, and heterosexism––dictate to love, and …
Conceive And Control: Cultural-Legal Narratives Of American Privacy And Reproductive Politics, Emily Naser-Hall
Conceive And Control: Cultural-Legal Narratives Of American Privacy And Reproductive Politics, Emily Naser-Hall
Theses and Dissertations--English
Law and literature share a foundation in narrative. The literary turn in legal scholarship recognizes that the law itself is a form of narrative, one that simultaneously reflects socio-cultural norms and creates social and political regulations with a complex matrix of power. Cultural narratives from the 1950s to the mid-1970s pertaining to reproductive politics, domesticity, and national identity both produce and are productive of legal rulings that govern and restrict private acts of sexuality and speech. The Supreme Court used cases concerning sex and reproduction to enumerate, explicate, and complicate the right to privacy, which appears nowhere in the U.S. …
Myth, Mockery, & Misery: An Evolution Of Disillusion In Modern-War Expression, Richard W. Halkyard
Myth, Mockery, & Misery: An Evolution Of Disillusion In Modern-War Expression, Richard W. Halkyard
Theses and Dissertations--English
Industrialization in 19th-Century America yielded a regrettable by-product: the modernization of warfare. Mass armies, technological innovation, and unprecedented rates of industrial productivity prompted the creation of machines designed to inspire fear, increase destructive capability, and inflict mass-death. The modernization of warfare altered forever the way war was experienced and represented literarily. Authors who attempted to represent the Civil and Spanish-American Wars, as well as World War I, articulated modernized warfare with a disillusionment which stems from the tragically dehumanizing effects of mechanical violence on an industrial scale. Myth, Mockery, & Misery argues that as far back as 1862, romantic idealization …
Curious Natures: Constructing Queer Ecologies In Early America, Richard Lee Parmer Jr.
Curious Natures: Constructing Queer Ecologies In Early America, Richard Lee Parmer Jr.
Theses and Dissertations--English
This dissertation argues that early American writers often constructed queer ecologies in order to naturalize Anglo-American civilization and justify its expansion into Native American territories. Since there is so little textual evidence on the subject, the major challenge to studying sexuality in early America is approaching sexuality studies creatively—to broaden both our understanding of what counts as sexual discourse and our frameworks for analyzing it. My dissertation addresses this challenge through what many ecocritical scholars of sexuality call queer ecology. In their groundbreaking anthology on the topic, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erikson remind us that, historically and in the present, …
Transformative Subjects: American Children’S Periodicals, 1855-1905, Emily R. Dehaven
Transformative Subjects: American Children’S Periodicals, 1855-1905, Emily R. Dehaven
Theses and Dissertations--English
Through this dissertation, I explore the ways that authors and editors use the form of children’s periodicals to discuss questions of childhood independence, the structure of the family, and the balance of power between children and adults with regards to literary texts. I examine the ways in which adults and children negotiate control over the periodicals and over the images of transformation present within those texts. Periodicals offer a unique opportunity for interaction between readers and editors. Magazines and newspapers encouraged readers to write into the magazine to offer their own insights and opinions. Readers of children’s magazines even had …
Outsiders To Whom? Reimagining The Creation Of Young Adult Literature In The United States, Kyle W. Eveleth
Outsiders To Whom? Reimagining The Creation Of Young Adult Literature In The United States, Kyle W. Eveleth
Theses and Dissertations--English
The study of young adult literature has become widespread within Children’s and Young Adult Literature specifically and literary studies as a whole. However, the term “young adult” which defines and focalizes both the literature itself and the ostensible readers for whom it is produced remains a poorly-examined area. The present study examines the creation of one branch of what we now call “young adult literature” from its roots in the United States in the early twentieth century to its emergence as a dominant literary form in the mid-to-late 1960s. In doing so, it seeks to reconcile emerging professional, psychological, sociological, …
Poéticas Minimalistas De La Ciudad Contemporánea: Iribarren, Mínguez Y Del Val, David Delgado López
Poéticas Minimalistas De La Ciudad Contemporánea: Iribarren, Mínguez Y Del Val, David Delgado López
Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies
Throughout the Spanish poetic production of the 20th century, cities have developed a relevant role as a recurring space at the same time as society urbanized and an exodus took place from agricultural areas to the work centers offered by the cities. Since the second half of the 19th century the city has been the meeting place for people from different backgrounds where the poet found, from his exclusive point of view, a new universe to develop in his work. However, the evolution of capitalist society sponsored the poet's transition from an artist to a worker in the …
Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney
Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney
Theses and Dissertations--English
Scholars over the past two decades (Denning, Szalay, Edmunds, Robbins) have theorized the different ways literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century reflects the dawn of the liberal US welfare state. While these studies elaborate on the effect rapidly expanding public aid had on literary production of the period, many have tended to undervalue the lingering influence on midcentury storytelling of private charity and philanthropy, those traditional aid institutions fundamentally challenged by the Great Depression and historically championed by conservatives. If the welfare state had an indelible impact on US literatures, so did the moral complexity of the systems of charity and …
Moving Experiences: Women And Mobility In Late Nineteenth And Early Twentieth-Century American Literature, Amy Simpson Birk
Moving Experiences: Women And Mobility In Late Nineteenth And Early Twentieth-Century American Literature, Amy Simpson Birk
Theses and Dissertations--English
This project recovers and revises late nineteenth and early twentieth-century narratives of mobility which invoke female protagonists who move from stifling, patriarchal domestic settings in the rural and suburban United States to the more symbolically emancipated settings of New York City and even Europe to reveal both the limitations and possibilities for women’s lives in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. By challenging popular American fiction’s preoccupation with urban white slavery myths and the lingering proscriptive standards for women’s behavior of the Victorian era, the Introduction argues the selected works of this dissertation mark a significant, …
A Theory Of Veteran Identity, Travis L. Martin
A Theory Of Veteran Identity, Travis L. Martin
Theses and Dissertations--English
More than 2.6 million troops have deployed in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, surveys reveal that more than half feel “disconnected” from their civilian counterparts, and this feeling persists despite ongoing efforts, in the academy and elsewhere, to help returning veterans overcome physical and mental wounds, seek an education, and find meaningful ways to contribute to society after taking off the uniform. This dissertation argues that Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans struggle with reassimilation because they lack healthy, complete models of veteran identity to draw upon in their postwar lives, a problem they’re working through collectively …
American Culture Of Servitude: The Problem Of Domestic Service In Antebellum Literature And Culture, Andrea Holliger
American Culture Of Servitude: The Problem Of Domestic Service In Antebellum Literature And Culture, Andrea Holliger
Theses and Dissertations--English
My dissertation argues that domestic service alters a culture’s relationship to the laboring body. I theorize this relationship via popular literary and cultural antebellum texts to explore the effects of servitude as a trope. Methodologically, each chapter reads a literary text in context with social and legal paradigms to 1) demonstrate that servitude undergirds myriad articulations of antebellum power and difference; 2) show how servitude inflects the construction of these paradigms; and 3) trace Americans’ changing relationship to the concept of servitude from the Early Republic through the Civil War.
I begin with James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), exploring …
Book Review: The Gilded Age And Progressive Era: A Historical Exploration Of Literature, Jennifer A. Bartlett
Book Review: The Gilded Age And Progressive Era: A Historical Exploration Of Literature, Jennifer A. Bartlett
Library Faculty and Staff Publications
One of the latest volumes in ABC-CLIO/Greenwood’s “Historical Explorations of Literature” series, The Gilded Age and Progressive Era is a useful and interesting introduction to framing key literary works of this time period in their historical context. Each volume in the series presents a discussion of four or five representative works of a historical era, such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicano Movement, the Jazz Age, and the Civil War Era.
Regimes Of Prestige And Power: Transnational Authorship And International Acclaim In Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds, Kyle Eveleth
Regimes Of Prestige And Power: Transnational Authorship And International Acclaim In Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds, Kyle Eveleth
disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory
This essay will examine the reception of Rutu Modan’s international-award-winning graphic novel Exit Wounds (2007) in the massive cultural centers of the United States and France by situating its success within the inter/transnational dynamics of the contemporary comics market, or what James English would term an “economy of prestige.” My essay reconsiders Exit Wounds beyond its popular status as an international phenomenon—that is, one that crosses national borders but which maintains distinctions between those nations it enters and its home state—by considering it a transnational work—one which blurs the lines between nation-states in its form, function, and reception. To do …
Mind Against Matter: Isolating Consciousness In American Fiction, 1980-2010, Eric E. Casero
Mind Against Matter: Isolating Consciousness In American Fiction, 1980-2010, Eric E. Casero
Theses and Dissertations--English
Mind Against Matter uses cognitive literary theory to explore a set of contemporary texts that emphasize characters’ feelings of alienation and isolation from their social and material worlds. Focusing on novels by Nicholson Baker and David Markson, short stories by David Foster Wallace, and the film The Truman Show, I consider how these texts focus on characters’ individual, subjective experiences while deemphasizing their physical environments and social contexts. I argue that by privileging subjectivity in this way, these texts portray their characters as independent, to varying degrees, from their material and cultural surroundings. The texts isolate individual consciousness, causing …
The Age Of Intervention: Addiction, Culture, And Narrative During The War On Drugs, Ashleigh M. Hardin
The Age Of Intervention: Addiction, Culture, And Narrative During The War On Drugs, Ashleigh M. Hardin
Theses and Dissertations--English
While addiction narratives have been a feature of American culture at least since the early 19th century’s temperance tales, the creation of the Johnson Intervention in the late 1960s and the corresponding advent of the War on Drugs waged by U.S. Presidents have wrought significant changes in the stories told about addiction and recovery. These changes reflect broader changes in conceptions of agency and the relationship of subject to culture in the postmodern era. In the way that it iterates the imperatives of the War on Drugs initiated by Richard Nixon, the rhetoric of successive U.S. Presidents provides a …
Father Of All Destruction: The Role Of The White Father In Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Cinema, Felicia Cosey
Father Of All Destruction: The Role Of The White Father In Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Cinema, Felicia Cosey
Theses and Dissertations--English
Since September 11, 2001 a substantial number of English-language, post-apocalyptic films have been released. This renewed interest in the genre has prompted scholars to examine the circumstances within western society that make post-apocalyptic films appealing to audiences. The popularity of these films derives from a narrative structure that reinforces conservative notions of good and bad and moral absolutism. The post-9/11, post-apocalyptic film typically features a white male hero who, in one way or another, reestablishes the pre-apocalyptic social order through proclamations of mandatory and prohibitive laws that must be adhered to by the survivors. The hero of post-apocalyptic film does …
Come Together: Desire, Literature, And The Law Of The Sexual Revolution, Eir-Anne E. Edgar
Come Together: Desire, Literature, And The Law Of The Sexual Revolution, Eir-Anne E. Edgar
Theses and Dissertations--English
While some scholars have viewed the Sexual Revolution as a “war” with winners and losers, this project finds that all Americans were subject to the fantasy of liberation. This fantasy takes different forms during the era, including relaxed sexual strictures against pre-marital sex, the availability of birth control, and an increased focus on sexual pleasure. However, the seemingly liberatory quickly becomes conservative, coming into focus through the analysis of court cases and legal mandates that protected the declining structures of marriage and heteronormativity. Beginning with widespread fears about interracial mixing in the early 1950’s, escalated by the end of segregation …
Southern Transfiguration: Competing Cultural Narratives Of (Ec)Centric Religion In The Works Of Faulkner, O’Connor, And Hurston, Craig D. Slaven
Southern Transfiguration: Competing Cultural Narratives Of (Ec)Centric Religion In The Works Of Faulkner, O’Connor, And Hurston, Craig D. Slaven
Theses and Dissertations--English
This project explores the ways in which key literary texts reproduce, undermine, or otherwise engage with cultural narratives of the so-called Bible Belt. Noting that the evangelicalism that dominated the South by the turn of the twentieth century was, for much of the antebellum period, a relatively marginal and sometimes subversive movement in a comparatively irreligious region, I argue that widely disseminated images and narratives instilled a false sense of nostalgia for an incomplete version of the South’s religious heritage. My introductory chapter demonstrates how the South’s commemorated “Old Time” religion was not especially old, and how this modernist construct …
Capitalism And "Blithedale": Exploring Hawthorne's Response To 19th Century American Capitalism, Kyle G. Phillips
Capitalism And "Blithedale": Exploring Hawthorne's Response To 19th Century American Capitalism, Kyle G. Phillips
disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory
With the intensive migration of the American public from rural to urban settings in the mid-nineteenth century came many logistical problems. Chief among them was the contention that the city was a place fundamentally void of, or else lax with morals. The examination into these issues explores why Americans felt the city was a catalyst for immorality, specifically examining prostitution and the exploitation of the working poor. It seeks to answer these questions within the framework of the anchor text, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Blithedale Romance”.
Recontextualizing Pudd'nhead: Minstrelsy, Race, And The Performance Of Progress, Collin A. Skeen
Recontextualizing Pudd'nhead: Minstrelsy, Race, And The Performance Of Progress, Collin A. Skeen
Theses and Dissertations--English
This thesis examines how Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson does much more than simply bridge the recurring racial and cultural behaviors of the antebellum South with the reality of late-19th century America; instead, I argue that Twain’s novella acts as a performative text, participating in a dialogue with a number of cultural forces—literature, theatre, politics, and commercialism—as a way of commenting on popular conceptualizations of late-nineteenth century social progress. Using the critical perspective of Performance Studies, it is clear that Twain’s novel is demonstrating how nineteenth century America used certain sets of symbols and signs to perform race, ultimately critiquing the …
Partial Minds: The Strategic Underrepresentation Of Consciousness In Postwar American Novels, Nathan A. Shank
Partial Minds: The Strategic Underrepresentation Of Consciousness In Postwar American Novels, Nathan A. Shank
Theses and Dissertations--English
Partial Minds argues that contemporary American novels strategically break conventionally-defined norms for the representation of fictional minds to highlight unusual character thoughts. Certain states of mind—including traumatic experiences, conflicting feelings, some memories, and the simultaneous possession of multiple identities—are more difficult to represent than others, and so some authors or narrators reject conventional cognitive representations, such as naming feelings, if they seem poor tools for effectively communicating that character’s exceptional quality to the reader. For example, the trauma of Marianne in Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys is represented by the narrator, her brother Judd. But in attempting to …
A Posture Of Removal: Mary Rowlandson’S Location, Position, And Displacement, Aaron Cloyd
A Posture Of Removal: Mary Rowlandson’S Location, Position, And Displacement, Aaron Cloyd
disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory
Drawing on work from autobiographical studies that distinguishes between but correlates position and location, this paper examines Mary Rowlandson’s situatedness in The Sovereignty and Goodness of God and argues that she is a figure of removal and displacement. Although Rowlandson seeks to position herself through voice, actions, and text, such expressions of agency occur within the locating structures of culture, expectation, and memory. The resultant tension between self- positioning and other-locating leaves Rowlandson perpetually removed as she is unable to fully reposition herself within any significant site.
Hybridity, Trauma, And Queer Identity: Reading Masculinity Across The Texts Of Junot Díaz, Hannah Fraser Legris
Hybridity, Trauma, And Queer Identity: Reading Masculinity Across The Texts Of Junot Díaz, Hannah Fraser Legris
Theses and Dissertations--English
When writing about Junot Díaz’s Drown (1996) Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and This is How You Lose Her (2012), I focus on the iterations of masculinity depicted and embodied by Yunior de las Casas, the primary narrator of this collection. I explore the links between diaspora, hybridity, masculinity, and trauma, arguing that both socio-historical and personal traumatic experience reverberates through the psyches and bodies of Díaz’s characters. I demonstrate the relationship between Yunior’s navigation of the United States and the Dominican Republic and his ever-shifting sexuality, self-presentation, and gender identity. The physical and discursive spaces he must …
Observing Art Through The Lens Of Oscar Wilde, Brian Hancock
Observing Art Through The Lens Of Oscar Wilde, Brian Hancock
Lewis Honors College Capstone Collection
Oscar Wilde was a fascinating literary figure who took center stage in England near the end of the nineteenth century. He not only created popular art, but discussed and defined art in original and inventive ways as well. An observance of five of Wilde’s more popular works, including four essays and his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, was performed with the intention of deciphering his complex views on the subject of art. While Wilde arguably arrogantly attempts to alienate art from society, it can ultimately be discerned that he believed the purpose of art was to inform …
The Road To The American Dream - Analysis Of Its Distortions Through The Grapes Of Wrath And Little Miss Sunshine, Autumn Murphy
The Road To The American Dream - Analysis Of Its Distortions Through The Grapes Of Wrath And Little Miss Sunshine, Autumn Murphy
Lewis Honors College Capstone Collection
While most book-to-movie adaptations are transparent, this project explores the nuanced adaptation of the novel The Grapes of Wrath into the movie Little Miss Sunshine. Little Miss Sunshine promulgates a unique approach to adaptation; additionally, the analysis of these two works provides conclusions for matters beyond literature. The project addresses the “American Dream” and differing perspectives on “winning” and “losing.” The initial step was a close reading of The Grapes of Wrath and a critical viewing of Little Miss Sunshine. From there, a research plan was developed, focusing on distortions of “The American Dream.” The research materials included …
Grace After Battle: World War One And The Poetry Of John Crowe Ransom, David A. Davis
Grace After Battle: World War One And The Poetry Of John Crowe Ransom, David A. Davis
The Kentucky Review
No abstract provided.
Floyd Collins And The Sand Cave Tragedy: A Possible Source For Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Lucas Carpenter
Floyd Collins And The Sand Cave Tragedy: A Possible Source For Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Lucas Carpenter
The Kentucky Review
No abstract provided.
The Native American Presence Ln Mary Oliver's Poetry, Robin Riley Fast
The Native American Presence Ln Mary Oliver's Poetry, Robin Riley Fast
The Kentucky Review
No abstract provided.
The Harpe's Head: A Legend Of Kentucky: James Hall's Passionate Innovation, Eric Atherton
The Harpe's Head: A Legend Of Kentucky: James Hall's Passionate Innovation, Eric Atherton
The Kentucky Review
No abstract provided.
The Poor Girl And The Bad Man: Fairytales Of Feminine Power, Elisabeth Panttaja
The Poor Girl And The Bad Man: Fairytales Of Feminine Power, Elisabeth Panttaja
The Kentucky Review
No abstract provided.