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Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in American Literature
Cultivating Spaces For American Citizenship In Pauline Hopkins’S Contending Forces, Jonathan Puckett
Cultivating Spaces For American Citizenship In Pauline Hopkins’S Contending Forces, Jonathan Puckett
Honors Theses
Rediscovered through archival recovery in the late 1970s, Pauline E. Hopkins (1859-1930) was an African American author, journalist, and activist at the beginning of the twentieth century. In Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900), Hopkins’s African American characters craft spaces, both sacred and secular, where they can freely exercise their citizenship in the Jim Crow era. As Hopkins utilizes the sentimentalist genre to portray realistically life at the turn of the century, my thesis highlights the historical and literary significance of sacred spaces like Boston’s black Baptist churches. I also review two minor characters …
Robert Frost’S Ulteriority: Saying One Thing In Terms Of Another – The Inexpressible, Nicolette S. Stackhouse
Robert Frost’S Ulteriority: Saying One Thing In Terms Of Another – The Inexpressible, Nicolette S. Stackhouse
Honors Theses
Robert Frost’s poetry, which is famously rich in double meaning—saying one thing but meaning something else—is also concerned with pragmatism. Pragmatism implies that there is no one fundamental universal truth. I contend that Robert Frost’s poetry says that duplicity of meaning, or ulteriority, is something to be embraced. Frost wants the uncertainty of meaning to be understood by the reader as vital to life and the mind’s processes. The simple fact that so many readers search for the hidden meanings in his poetry justly proves this point. As a pragmatist, Frost was aware that the process of getting to a …
The Orphan Train Adventures Series: The Kelly Siblings’ Trek To Responsibility, Ashten T. Redell
The Orphan Train Adventures Series: The Kelly Siblings’ Trek To Responsibility, Ashten T. Redell
Honors Theses
The Orphan Train Adventures, a series of historical novels by Joan Lowery Nixon (1927-2003), is concerned with the responsibility exercised by its child characters during the antebellum and Civil War periods. This thesis examines how Nixon, by illustrating the positive effects of responsibility through her child characters, suggests the value of cultivating responsibility in children of the contemporary period. Nixon’s use of the mid-nineteenth-century setting and the rearing practices associated with this time allows her to demonstrate positive acts of responsibility in her main characters—six siblings sent west from New York City on …
‘My Freedom Is A Privilege Which Nothing Else Can Equal’: The Life And Writings Of Venture Smith And Phillis Wheatley, American Slaves, Donald Holmes Ii
‘My Freedom Is A Privilege Which Nothing Else Can Equal’: The Life And Writings Of Venture Smith And Phillis Wheatley, American Slaves, Donald Holmes Ii
Honors Theses
Slavery in the United States was an evolving institution that lasted nearly 400 years. To understand the colonial era of slavery within the United States, I examine the life and times of Venture Smith, as documented in his autobiography, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa (1798), and that of Phillis Wheatley using The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley (1988). Both Smith and Wheatley were African-born slaves brought to America during the eighteenth century. In Smith’s narrative, he concludes by proclaiming “my freedom is a privilege which nothing else can equal” (31). This statement …