Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Sister Carrie---Theodore Dreiser, New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1900, Elliot Gorn

Elliot Gorn

Facing the naturalistic, nonjudgmental rendering in Sister Carrie of the stresses of survival in Chicago and New York was seen by some as scandalous. Nonetheless, Theodore Dreiser’s first novel eventually became an American classic and has been published in countless editions. The Heritage edition (1937) includes illustrations by Reginald Marsh (1898– 1954), including one in which the main character, a country girl on a train bound for Chicago, is approached by a salesman whose mistress she will eventually become.

Modern Women, Modern Work: Domesticity, Professionalism, And American Writing, 1890-1950, Francesca Sawaya

Francesca Sawaya

Focusing on literary authors, social reformers, journalists, and anthropologists, Francesca Sawaya demonstrates how women intellectuals in early twentieth-century America combined and criticized ideas from both the Victorian "cult of domesticity" and the modern "culture of professionalism" to shape new kinds of writing and new kinds of work for themselves.

Sawaya challenges our long-standing histories of modern professional work by elucidating the multiple ways domestic discourse framed professional culture. Modernist views of professionalism typically told a racialized story of a historical break between the primitive, feminine, and domestic work of the Victorian past and the modern, masculine, professional expertise of the …

The Difficult Art Of Giving: Patronage, Philanthropy, And The American Literary Market, Francesca Sawaya

Francesca Sawaya

The Difficult Art of Giving rethinks standard economic histories of the literary marketplace. Traditionally, American literary histories maintain that the post-Civil War period marked the transition from a system of elite patronage and genteel amateurism to what is described as the free literary market and an era of self-supporting professionalism. These histories assert that the market helped to democratize literary production and consumption, enabling writers to sustain themselves without the need for private sponsorship. By contrast, Francesca Sawaya demonstrates the continuing importance of patronage and the new significance of corporate-based philanthropy for cultural production in the United States in the …

The Significance Of John S. Mbiti's Works In The Study Of Pan-African Literature, Babacar Mbaye

Babacar Mbaye

No abstract provided.

‘Steady Stream … Mad Stuff … Half The Vowels Wrong …’: Water, Waste And Words In Beckett’S Plays, Katherine Weiss

Katherine Weiss

No abstract provided.

Virginia As A Response To Parental Influence, Ashley Quaye Andrews Lear

Ashley Quaye Andrews Lear

In his 1807 poem, "Resolution and Independence," a poem that brings to mind Oliver Treadwell's artistic crisis in Virginia, William Wordsworth describes the precipice that he faces when trying to come to terms with the emotional extremes he must allow himself in creating the art he desires.

End Of Paragraph, Rowan Cahill

Rowan Cahill

Maria Susanna Cummins' London Letters: April 1860, Heidi Lm Jacobs

Heidi LM Jacobs

Within scholarship on Maria Susanna Cummins (1827-1866), there are two recurrent phrases: "author of the best-selling novel The Lamplighter" and "little is known about her life." Despite the early contextualization of Cummins by various scholars, most of the recent critical work on Cummins has centered on her first and best-known novel, The Lamplighter (1854). Very little critical attention has been paid to Cummins's life, her career as a publishing author, her lesser known novels, her periodical publications, and her archived letters. Written in the weeks preceding the publication in the United States and Britain of her third novel, El …

Symbolic Geography And Psychic Landscapes: A Conversation With Maya Angelou, Joanne M. Braxton

Joanne Braxton

No abstract provided.

Autobiography And African American Women’S Literature, Joanne M. Braxton

Joanne Braxton

No abstract provided.

Trouble No More, Anthony Grooms

Tony Grooms

Second Edition of Anthony Groom's award-winning collection of short stories, Trouble No More, set throughout the American South, presents stories that engage with history, politics, class, race, childhood, and life. They are the personal and public troubles of the African American middle class. These stories are about families, intact and estranged, about ordinary lives in extraordinary times.

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

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 …

Booker T. Washington And W.E.B. Du Bois: Guiding Students To Historical Context, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

Seldom have two vastly different visions been expressed as clearly and as elegantly as in Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition Address (1895) and W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” (from The Souls of Black Folk, 1903). Awash in memorable rhetoric, these competing philosophies foresaw very different paths for America, and for black social progress, at the dawn of the twentieth century. This lesson introduces students to the ideas and informational texts of Washington and DuBois while challenging students to research some of the historical context in which these men lived, worked, and thought.

Booker T. Washington And W.E.B. Du Bois: Guiding Students To Historical Context, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

Seldom have two vastly different visions been expressed as clearly and as elegantly as in Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition Address (1895) and W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” (from The Souls of Black Folk, 1903). Awash in memorable rhetoric, these competing philosophies foresaw very different paths for America, and for black social progress, at the dawn of the twentieth century. This lesson introduces students to the ideas and informational texts of Washington and DuBois while challenging students to research some of the historical context in which these men lived, worked, and thought.

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 …

Fictional Journalists: News Work In American Novels, Bonnie Brennen

Bonnie Brennen

No abstract provided.

Conquering A Wilderness: Destruction And Development On The Great Plains In Mari Sandoz's Old Jules, Lisa Lindell

Lisa R. Lindell

Jules Ami Sandoz came to America in 1881 at the age of 22. Following a three-year sojourn in northeastern Nebraska, he headed further west, settling in the recently surveyed region northwest of the Nebraska Sandhills. In Old Jules, the biography of her pioneer father, Mari Sandoz presented a character filled with conflicts and contradictions. Pitted against Jules's dynamic vision of community growth was his self-centered and destructive nature. Well aware of the more unsavory qualities exhibited by her father. Sandoz nonetheless maintained that he and others like him were necessary to the development of the West. This recognition did not …

Baddest Modernism: The Scales And Lines Of Inhuman Time, Charles M. Tung

Charles M. Tung

No abstract provided.

"Some Perilous Stuff": What The Religious Reviewers Really Said About The Scarlet Letter, Lisa Smith

Lisa Smith

No abstract provided.

"The Livery Of Religion": Reconciling Swift's Argument And Project, Lisa Smith

Lisa Smith

Discusses Jonathan Swift's essays `An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity' and `Project for the Advancement of Religion and Reformation of Manners' with their focus on Christianity and the values of the society. Christian hypocrisy; Power and influence of the Church; Reader's perception of Swift's work.

Hawthorne And The Christian Review: Three New Discoveries, Lisa Smith

Lisa Smith

No abstract provided.

Newspaper Editors’ Attitudes Toward The Great Awakening, 1740-1748, Lisa Smith

Lisa Smith

No abstract provided.

Moving At The Speed Of Love: Alex Caldiero's Some Love, Scott Abbott

Scott Abbott

Poet Alex Caldiero's SOME LOVE is tangled in the poetic complexities of love, and yet, as the reviewer discovers, the poems here can be every bit as fleshy and uncomplicated as the real thing.

Whitman, Walt. Franklin Evans, Or The Inebriate: A Tale Of The Times., Ed. Christopher Castiglia And Glenn Hendler [Review], Jon Miller

Jon Miller

No abstract provided.

"Father Walt": Frances Willard And Walt Whitman, Jon Miller

Jon Miller

No abstract provided.

Petroleum V. Nasby, Poet Of Democracy, And His "Psalm Of Gladness", Jon Miller

Jon Miller

Reprints David Ross Locke’s parodic letter-poem (written in the persona of “whiskey-addicted Copperhead” Petroleum V. Nasby), “A Psalm of Gladness—The Veto of the Civil Rights Bill, and other Matters, occasioning a Feeling of Thankfulness in the Minds of the Democracy,” and analyzes how the satire “associates Nasby’s style of ‘jubilation’ with the poetry of Walt Whitman,” showing how “the satire does not attack Whitman’s verse so much as it condemns it by association with the style of Nasby.”

"Dear Miss Ella": George L. Chase's Whitman-Inspired Love Letters, Jon Miller

Jon Miller

Analyzes and reprints Minnesota minister Chase's 1872 courtship letters to Ella Wheeler, in which Chase, who knew Whitman, writes at length about Whitman and his work.

The Continental Op And Women, Mary Freier

Mollie Freier

The Continental Op, by his own admission, does not fit the stereotype of the hardboiled detective. At five foot six, one hundred ninety pounds, he would be more likely to be played on film by Danny DeVito or Jason Alexander than Humphrey Bogart or Alan Ladd. However, Dinah Brand, the primary female character in Red Harvest, does not conform to the stereotype of the femme fatale. In many ways, the Op is much more practical than his counterparts in Hammett’s other fiction, and Dinah Brand, a large, powerful woman, is drastically different from her counterparts as well. In this paper, …

Cats As Detectives In Library Mysteries, Mary Freier

Mollie Freier

Cats have become ubiquitous as detectives or detective assistants in twenty-first century mysteries, although the trend began with the “The Cat Who” books, the first of which was published in the nineteen-sixties. Cats have a fine history in the detective genre, but current depictions of cats as detectives include the cats conversing with other animals and even the human detective in the novel. Some of these cats possess supernatural abilities, and even those who don't possess impressive intelligence. Cats are notorious, of course, for being curious, and the librarians who function as amateur sleuths are similar in this regard. Some …