American Studies Commons^™

Georgia Ghosts: History, Folklore, And The Roots Of The Southern Gothic, Katherine M. Mcdowell

Master's Projects

There is something quintessentially human about ghost stories, yet particular regions tend to be more powerfully associated with haunted folktales than others. One of the regions is the southeastern United States. In fact, these oral traditions appear to have influenced the area's best-known literary subgenre: the Southern Gothic.

Why is the South considered haunted? Are there particular qualities in historical events that make them more likely to engender ghost stories? What makes the South's folkloric spirits so powerful that they appear even in modern literature? Most of all, what connects the region's history and folklore with the Southern Gothic? By …

Radical Folk Heroes: Anansi & Br’Er Rabbit’S West African Origins & Their Forced Pilgrimages, Sage Adia Swaby

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

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.

A Return To The Region: 
Reconstructing The Past In Jewett, Cather, And Hurston
 (1896-1935), Anna L. Russian

Senior Projects Spring 2019

My senior project focuses on three works of American literature, starting from 1896 and ending in 1935. During this time period, the United States was undergoing drastic cultural and industrial changes, both of which indefinitely reshaped the American landscape. My project seeks to understand these changes through Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918), and Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935). All three works look beyond the city, and instead look inward toward small regional communities in Maine, Nebraska, and Florida. With the regional focus placed on the narratives, my project …

Clarke, Kenneth Wendell, B. 1917 (Mss 635), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 635. Manuscripts, notes, publisher’s correspondence, and photographs relating to the scholarly work of WKU English and folklore professor Kenneth W. Clarke, principally "Bud Long: The Birth of a Kentucky Folk Legend" and "The Harvest and the Reapers."

Texas-Mexico Border Cultural Production: Ethnographic Aesthetics And Modernity In Folklore, Literature, And Film, Margie Montanez

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation develops the trope of an ethnographic aesthetic to dissect the cultural production of Jovita González, Américo Paredes, and more recent works by Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Lourdes Portillo. The dissertation argues that Texas-Mexican cultural production actively produces knowledge. In other words, when understood within the framework of ethnographic aesthetics, Texas-Mexican border cultural anticipates and imagines local futures in a constant shifting colonial space. Texas-Mexico border cultural production is not passive or residual but is in fact active and emergent.

The dissertation situates Texas-Mexico border cultural production as responding to and within post-national American Studies discourse that “stresses …

Folklore For A New Generation: Charles Chesnutt's Updated Trickster Figure, Peter Mccollum

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Amidst a surge of plantation fiction writing during the era of American Realism, Charles Chesnutt was arguably one of the most controversial yet prolific authors to address the recent advent of slavery. The Conjure Woman was a publication of seven frame narratives that employed the traditional style of a former slave telling tales of “the old days,” and though Chesnutt's work may have mirrored such authors as Thomas Nelson Page, the tales broke from tradition with surprisingly stark accounts that are clearly based on Chesnutt's own conversations with former slaves. Much like another contemporary, Joel Chandler Harris, Chesnutt looks backward …

Narratives Of A Fall: Star Wars Fan Fiction Writers Interpret Anakin Skywalker's Story, Sarah Gerina Carpenter

3 Digital Curation

Trout, Allan Mitchell, 1903-1972 (Mss 346), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 346. Correspondence and writings relating to the career of Allan Mitchell Trout, political reporter and columnist for the Louisville Courier-Journal. Includes letters from readers, written mostly on the occasion of his retirement, collections of Trout's "Greetings" columns, speeches and articles, historical memorabilia, correspondence relating to the Allan M. Trout Collection at Western Kentucky University, and messages of sympathy to his wife after Trout's death.

Philips, Emanie Louise (Nahm) Sachs Arling, 1893-1981 (Mss 317), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 317. Professional correspondence, short stories, book and story manuscripts, author's notes, reviews, and primary and secondary research materials relating to the literary career of Emanie Louise Nahm Philips, a Bowling Green native. Includes some photographs, notices and reviews relating to her work as an artist, family biographical material, and personal correspondence.

Janice Holt Giles Symposium, 17-18 May 1991 (Mss 283), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 283. Five videocassette recordings of the Janice Holt Giles Symposium presentations made on 17-18 May 1991. Also inlcudes, "Janice Holt Giles", a publication based on papers delivered at the Symposium.

Ellis, James Tandy, 1868-1942 (Sc 110), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "additional files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 110. Letters, 1897-1939 (16 items), written to James Tandy Ellis, poet, humorist, columnist, and lecturer of Ghent, Kentucky. Also includes Ellis' poems and writings, 1891 (5); printed items; clippings; commissions as Assistant Adjutant and Adjutant General of Kentucky; and miscellaneous items.

"I Put The Tale Back Where I Found It": Feeling The Past Through "The Warmth Of The Human Voice", Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In this article, I examine my revelations and growth related to folk culture and literature connected to the African American community. I borrow from and play on the Sudanese formulaic ending for the folktale; it seemed to me appropriate - even obligatory- that "I put the tale back where I found it." This maxim is symbolic, reflecting what I find one of the most characteristic elements of Black folklore - that is, the focus on the group, the community, in terms of the source of the historical situation of the tale; the moral lesson; the content, style, and delivery; and …

The World Would Do Better To Ask Why Is Frimbo Sherlock Holmes?: Investigating Liminality In Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure-Man Dies, Adrienne Gosselin

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Various Black Virginians As Told To Daryl Cumber Dance, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Shuckin' and Jivin': Folklore from Contemporary Black Americans, published in 1978, derived from fieldwork done far a doctoral dissertation at Virginia Commonwealth University by Daryl Cumber Dance (the only woman named Daryl I have heard of aside from Daryl Hannah). She gathered stories and verses from black Virginians in colleges, senior citizens' centers, and a penitentiary. Though she doesn't bring to the party an editorial touch as enlivening as Zora Neale Hurston's, she has an ear and-unlike far, far too many assiduous collectors of folktales - knows how to capture vocal rhythms on a page.

Folklore: A Study And Tales From The Ozarks, Sharon Hibbard

Honors Theses

From its inception, folktale research has had a two-pronged aim: it has been interested, on the one hand, in the nature and origins of oral narration not fixed in writing; and it has been interested in folk culture as expressed in the content and form of the folktale. These two points of view have resulted in two different kinds of research methods. One has sprung essentially from comparative literature and has been established as a new branch of that discipline; the other has developed from the French sociological and the British anthropological schools, which consider of folk tradition--to which the …