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English Language and Literature Commons

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Modern Literature

Department of English: Faculty Publications

2015

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Taking My Parents To College, Jennine Capó Crucet Aug 2015

Taking My Parents To College, Jennine Capó Crucet

Department of English: Faculty Publications

I was a first-generation college student as well as the first in our family to be born in America — my parents were born in Cuba — and we didn’t yet know that families were supposed to leave pretty much right after they unloaded your stuff from the car. We all made the trip from Miami, my hometown, to what would be my new home at Cornell University. Shortly after arriving on campus, the five of us — my parents, my younger sister, my abuela and me — found ourselves listening to a dean end his welcome speech with the …


American Novelist Catharine Sedgwick Negotiates British Copyright, 1822–57, Melissa J. Homestead Jan 2015

American Novelist Catharine Sedgwick Negotiates British Copyright, 1822–57, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

American novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick had an unusually long career and her books were reprinted in Britain in a variety of circumstances and formats. Both her first novel, A New-England Tale (1822), and her last, Married or Single? (1857), appeared in London editions arranged by her or her American publishers, as did many of her books in between (including travel, children’s and conduct books). However, her works also appeared in unauthorized reprints. Sedgwick thus makes an interesting case study of how law and custom regulated the reprinting of American literary texts in Great Britain after 1820. Focusing on the British …


Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, And The Historiography Of Lesbian Sexuality, Melissa J. Homestead Jan 2015

Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, And The Historiography Of Lesbian Sexuality, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Since the publication of Surpassing the Love of Men in 1981 and Sharon O'Brien's biography Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice in 1987, Cather's fiction has been subjected to scores of queer readings. These readings are, in many respects, premised on a very different understanding of gender, sexuality, and identity than Faderman and O'Brien deploy in their biographical identifications of Cather as a lesbian. Nevertheless, these queer readings rest upon a biographical foundation, and in particular upon an understanding of Cather as secretive, private, and afflicted with shame. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in an influential reading of The Professor's House that inspired …