American Literature Commons^™

Bess Streeter Aldrich, Abigail Ann Martin

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“Nebraska,” wrote Bess Streeter Aldrich, “is only the state of my adoption, but I am sure that I feel all the loyalty for it which the native-born bears . . . while I am not a native Nebraskan, the blood of the midwestern pioneer runs in my veins and I come rightly by my love for the Nebraska pioneer and admiration for the courage and fortitude which he displayed in the early days of the state s history ...” (Introduction to The Rim of the Prairie).

William Humphrey, Mark Royden Winchell

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Unlike Europeans, Americans inhabit a vast land with a short history. For that reason, we have always tended to mythologize our experience in terms of space rather than time. In his essay “Boxing the Compass,” Leslie Fiedler even goes so far as to argue that American Literature can be broken down into regional subgenres—the Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western. Most readers, however, would recognize only two of these categories. Whether or not there is such a thing as an “Eastern” or a “Northern,” the South and the West clearly have been ahead—or perhaps behind—the rest of the country in cherishing …

Ua35/11 Student Honors Research Bulletin, Wku Honors Program

WKU Archives Records

The WKU Student Honors Research Bulletin is dedicated to scholarly involvement and student research. These papers are representative of work done by students from throughout the university.

• Balyeat, Douglas. Expectations Gap: Where Were the Auditors?
• Brown, Kaye. Larry McMurtry: Saddle Up or Leave the Old West Behind
• Fridy, Geraldine. Stephen Crane's Maggie. Another Example of Patriarchal Misogyny?
• Hazelwood, Shirley and Kay Redfern. Effectiveness of Psychosocial rehabilitation Programs: Do They Make a Difference in the Re-hospitalization of the Mentally Ill?
• Johnson, Sean. Effects of Time-out as a Procedure to Decrease Maladaptive Behavior
• Leibering, Elisa, Michelle Nye and LauraLee Wilson. Euthanasia: Legal, …

Toni Morrison's Reclamation Of Her Past, Timothy Kelly Nixon

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

"He's Long Gone": The Theme Of Escape In Black Folklore And Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Throughout their experiences in this country, certain segments of the Black population have viewed themselves as enslaved, whether they were chattel owned by slaveowners prior to emancipation, whether they were impressed into peonage and forced to work on white plantations and in chain gangs after slavery, whether they were victims of sharecropping systems that virtually reenslaved them during the twentieth century, whether they were the repressed and disfranchised and persecuted in Southern Jim Crow towns throughout the first half of the twentieth century, whether they are those trapped by unemployment and poverty today, or whether they are among the Blacks …

The Constitution As Literature, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

Although presumably no one would say that the Constitution offers its readers an experience that cannot be distinguished from reading a poem or a novel, there is nonetheless a sense in which it is a kind of highly imaginative literature in its own right (indeed its nature as law requires that this be so), the reading of which may be informed by our experience of other literary forms. But to say this may be controversial, and the first step toward understanding how such a claim can be made may be to ask what it is we think characterizes imaginative literature …

Marianne Moore: Facets Of The Crystal, Mary Virginia Katzeff

Masters Theses

Marianne Mooore's poetry embodies two different types of work. As well as the objective poetry that her contemporaries called modernist or Imagist (labels which she rejected), she also wrote quite personal, subjective poems. Two factors, theme and subject matter, unify her work and give evidence of her distinct poetic voice.

The content and form of Moore's work developed from her personal life and interests. In her childhood, loss of a beloved grandfather and changes of household, as well as a lifelong attachment to her mother, affected the poet deeply, as evidenced by her consistent theme of protection. Exotic animals populate …

A Woman's Quest For Happiness: O'Neill's "Private Myth", Andrea Ximena CampañA Garcia

Masters Theses

Following the approach used by James Hurt in his book Catiline's Dream to determine Henrik Ibsen's "private myth" which he retold in play after play, I have delineated O'Neill's "private myth" in a narrower way concentrating on his female characters. Examining parallel motifs in the lives of the dominant women in Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, and Mourning Becomes Electra, I have detected this mythic pattern involving the O'Neillian woman: She goes through an early innocent and submissive state guided by an initial vision of happiness which can be regarded as fairly conventional. But when her …

"What Mean?": The Postmodern Metafiction Within William Gaddis's "The Recognitions", Sean Butler

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

A New Reading Of Ruth Suckow, Judith Pierson

Masters Theses

By 1950, after three decades of writing, Ruth Suckow (1892-1960) was a well-respected writer whose work seemed headed for a permanent position in the canon of American literature. Instead, Suckow's fiction steadily became less known through the following decades. The question of why her work came to be ignored and why such a position is unwarranted is addressed in A New Reading of Ruth Suckow. The conclusion is that a regionalist categorization and a related gender bias in the literary canon have adversely affected Suckow's works.

Gender bias is reflected in the critical assumptions which ascribe an inferior position to …

Running On Empty: The Myth Of The Automobile In Three Works By Chester Himes, Christopher Blair Hailey

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Out Of Left Field: William Saroyan's Thirties Fiction As A Reflection Of The Great Depression, Hildy Michelle Coleman

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Generational Theory And Collective Autobiography, John D. Hazlett

John D Hazlett

Hazlett's essay examines the emergence of generational theory at the beginning of the 20th Century, considers some of the reasons for its popularity, and then shows how generationalism influenced the autobiographical writing of two self-proclaimed generational groups: the writers who came of age in the 1920s, and the group of activists and writers who came of age in the 1960s.