Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Faulkner's Mothers: The Relationship Of Fact To Fiction In The Sound And The Fury And As I Lay Dying, Spring P. Zuidema

Theses & Honors Papers

The author explores the relationship between actual events and circumstances in Faulkner’s own life and the fiction hat he wrote in his novels. William Faulkner was able to write his best work because he expected nothing from it. He was previously rejected by publishers, but furthermore rejected by his own family and two love interests. His mother was the only constant in his life. However she lacked love and caring and was domineering. These feelings of inferiority in Faulkner reflect in the children he wrote about and the traits of his mother reflect in the mothers in his novels as …

Setting The Hook Of Realism: A Study Of The Early Career Of William Dean Howells, George C. Lanum Iii

Theses & Honors Papers

This thesis looks at the early writings of William Dean Howells and how they create and cement the ideas of realism both in himself and in his readers. It studies his transition from being a romantic writer to being a realistic writer, leading the way forward for other well-known realism writers.

A Literary And Field Guide To The Trees In Willa Cather’S Nebraska Novels, Linnea M. Fredrickson

Open Access Master's Theses (through 2010)

Willa Cather, one of America’s foremost novelists and short-story writers, was deeply interested in and profoundly affected by the places she lived and encountered. One small aspect of her knowledge of places was familiarity with the trees of the locale. A number of influences during her youth gave her the gift of tree awareness: a great-grandfather who was a forest conservationist, a home in the northern Virginia mixed-deciduous forest that was named for its prominent trees, perhaps the sound of her own first name, the wrenching contrast of a move to the nearly treeless mixed-grass prairie of Nebraska when she …

Lee Smith's The Last Day The Dogbushes Bloomed And Family Linen: Children's Loss Of Innocence, Bree A. Poliey

Theses & Honors Papers

Author Lee Smith began writing years ago as a small child. She is now highly acclaimed and a distinguished author. Her works, including nine novels and many short stories, range in topics from Southern life and mountain customs to family feuds and profound relationships. Each of the topics offering resounding voices, unique perspectives, and spirited approaches to the world. The research explores Lee Smith’s the last day the dogbushes bloomed and family linen. Despite the difference in techniques and level of maturity evident in Smith’s novels, both her first novel and those later in her career explore many of the …

Contents, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

"Dead Girl-Bag": The Janet Smith Case As Contaminant In Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe", Tanis Macdonald

Tanis MacDonald

Article discussing the trope of the white woman as pharmakon in SKY Lee's historical novel.

Journeys: A Critical Analysis Of The Diary Of Sarah L. Wadley, Regina C. Davis

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

As a young woman living in Louisiana during the Civil War, Sarah Lois Wadley documented in her diary the fractured, conflicted perspective that was her experience as a woman living in the war ravaged South. Her writing is evidence of the confusion she felt as a result of the discrepancy between the expectations of Southern patriarchal society and her own needs as a woman. Wadley’s diary is a complex text similar to a novel in that it relates events through a construct that reflects her response to her reader’s/society’s expectations. From a deconstructionist perspective, the power of Wadley’s text lies …

I'Ll Take My Land: Contemporary Southern Agrarians, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

For many earlier southern white writers, the southern rural landscape was the repository of nostalgia for lost ways of life, whether it was the plantation fantasy that Thomas Nelson Page pined for in his stories In Ole Virginia (1887) or the segregated agrarian ideal that many contributors yearned for in I'll Take My Stand (1930). For modern southern white writers, beginning most prominently with William Faulkner, the rural landscape has conjured up unsettling guile about a way of life that flourished on the backs of the black people who tilled that land. And not surprisingly, for many black writers the …

The Flowers That Bloom In The Spring: A Critical Look At Flower Imagery In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Elizabeth Peloso

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Cukor's Little Women And The Great Depression: Sacrifice, Morality, And Familial Bliss, Katherine Kellett

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 4 Fall 2002

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Old Man And The Sea: Hemingway, Heteroglossia, And The Hero's Voice, Carole Sue Spitler

Theses Digitization Project

In this subjective hero concept lies an intriguing aspect of Bakhtin's paradigm: A hero is not necessarily a living entity; a hero can be ideas, objects and locations. When viewed through the lens of traditional western rhetorical theory, Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea appears as a monologue wherein Santiago seemingly speaks for the author about the subject of doom and man's relationship to the world.

Pecan Grove Review Volume 7, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

Creative writings by students, faculty, and staff of the St. Mary's University community.

This Man's Heart: Masculinity In The Poetry Of E.E. Cummings, Willis John Whitesell Iii

Masters Theses

"This Man's Heart: Masculinity in the Poetry of E.E. Cummings" explores changing masculinity in the life and poetry of E.E. Cummings. The relationship between Cummings and his father, his first male role model, became strained when Cummings was a teenager finding his own male identity. As he rebelled against his father, a Unitarian minister, he began writing poetry in a modernist style under the direction of a new mentor, Ezra Pound.

Cummings' early modernist poems criticize conventional male roles and configurations of masculinity as outdated. As Cummings continued to grow as a man and writer, he confronted new realities which …

The Rise Of Mass Culture Theory And Its Effect On Golden Age Detective Fiction, Sarah Jean Trainin

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis will explore the segregation of detective fiction from the general fiction market between 1920 and 1940.

We Weren’T Always White: Race And Ethnicity In Italian/American Literature, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

John Irving, Female Sexuality, And The Victorian Feminine Ideal, Tara Coburn

Masters Theses

In an interview about The Cider House Rules, John Irving states, "It is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel" (qtd. in Herel, para. 18). However, in book reviews, jacket blurbs, literary criticism, and Irving's own writing, readers and critics and Irving often assert that he is a neo-Victorian novelist, and the Victorians were a notoriously political bunch. Though Irving does not admit to the political nature of his writing, the way he treats feminist politics in his fiction has drawn particular notice by the media, who often label him as a feminist writer. …

Reading Mainstream Possibilities: Canadian Young Adult Fiction With Lesbian And Gay Characters, Paulette Rothbauer

Paulette Rothbauer

No abstract provided.