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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Girlhood And Engendered Alienation In The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter And A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Lauren C. Dolese
Girlhood And Engendered Alienation In The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter And A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Lauren C. Dolese
University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations
Utilizing a girls’ studies perspective and materialist feminist lens, this paper seeks to put Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) in conversation with Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943). Besides being published in the early 1940s, both works feature young girls navigating class struggles, exploring their identities, and struggling against dominant ideologies specific to their time and place. McCullers’ and Smith’s novels depict how a patriarchal, capitalist society imposes upon young women a narrow, misogynistic view of themselves and the women around them—facilitating the social reproduction of oppression and alienation. In depicting these realities of …
A Fire Stronger Than God: Myth-Making And The Novella Form In Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, Chinh Ngo
A Fire Stronger Than God: Myth-Making And The Novella Form In Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, Chinh Ngo
University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations
Using concepts of cognitive evolutionary theory, the author explores how narrative storytelling manifests itself in Denis Johnson's novella Train Dreams. The novella form is also discussed, focusing on its manipulation of linear time, its naturalization of supernatural elements, and its deconstruction of dichotomous relationships. Utilizing the novella's distinct structural and thematic elements, Johnson's text shows the myth of American expansionism and industrial progress and that of Kootenai holism in collision, resulting in a narrative renegotiation that seeks to affirm coexistence and complexity.