English Language and Literature Commons^™

“Between That Earth And That Sky”: The Idealized Horizon Of Willa Cather’S My Ántonia, Miriam A. Gonzales

Anthós

Since its 1918 publication, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia has been lauded for Cather’s masterful description of the Nebraska prairie landscape; since the mid-1980s, this text has also been the subject of countless queer theoretical analyses, many of which focus on what their authors perceive as an obstructed romantic connection between the novel’s two main characters, Jim Burden and Ántonia Shimerda. While these two subjects may not initially seem correlative, a more recent—and unrelated—critical essay illuminates a new way of examining Cather’s attention to setting. When we view My Ántonia in conjunction with José Esteban Muñoz’s “Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics …

The Storyteller's Trance In The Turn Of The Screw, Leslie C. Slape

Anthós

An examination of the presence and effect of the "storyteller's trance" on the narrators and their audience in The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898).

Thank you to Professor Sarah Ensor for advice and encouragement.

Representation Of The Mother’S Body As A Narrative Conduit For Wartime Themes In Saga, Bess Pallares

Student Research Symposium

“Representation of the Mother’s Body as a Narrative Conduit for Wartime Themes in Saga” examines how both diagetic and extradiagetic art creates a visual syuzhet to convey themes of interdependence and transgenerational memory in the comic book series Saga. My method of research was a narrative analysis of volumes 1-4 of Saga, particularly focusing on the artistic representation of two mothers’ bodies within the narrative and on covers of the books, as related to the themes and story. As a result, I found in the artistic syuzhet that the representation of two characters’ bodies as they interact …

Social Media Blogs-To-Books: Changes In Content And The Editorial Process, Kyra Hearn

Book Publishing Final Research Paper

Publishers have recently released a number of books that derive their content from Tumblr or Twitter accounts. Previously, it was more common to see publishers release books that derived their content from blogs. Since all of these social media platforms produce content in different ways, how does this influence—if at all—the publisher's editorial process? Also, how does the content change—if at all—from the original social media platform to its presentation in a book?

Independent Publishers And Transition To Nonprofit: Distress Call Or Mission-Based Evolution?, Meagan Lobnitz

Book Publishing Final Research Paper

It has been widely reported in recent years that a few independent publishing houses, which were formed as for-profit organizations, have adopted nonprofit status. Given the sheer quantity of independent publishing houses in the United States and the complexities involved with establishing and maintaining nonprofit status, it is worthwhile to explore whether or not there has in fact been growth in nonprofit publishing houses in recent years, to consider if that growth is indicative of a trend, and to inquire what factors may lend to the success or failure of nonprofit independent publishers. Furthermore, it is useful to consider the …

Imagine That! Word Balloons In Children's Picture Books, Erika Schnatz

Book Publishing Final Research Paper

When did speech bubbles first appear in children’s picture books? In what ways have speech bubbles been co-opted from comic books to serve picture book narratives? What does this example suggest about the future of children’s books co-opting the visual language of comic books? The visual language of comics has slowly permeated American popular culture since the first regular newspaper strip, Richard Felton Outcault's The Yellow Kid, back in 1895. From the onomatopoetic visuals in the campy '60s Batman television series and pop art paintings of Roy Lichtenstein, to the never-ending string of superhero-based blockbuster movies today, comics …

A Publisher’S Look At Ebooks And Their Affect On Young Readers, Caitlin Waite

Book Publishing Final Research Paper

As publishers it is important to learn about new reading platforms and how to use them to the benefit of readers. There have been numerous advancements in the past several years with regard to electronic books (or eBooks), including an emergence of technology that allows for relatively easy and cost effective ways to create eBooks for children. As eBook technology advances, questions are arising about the eBook’s validity as a learning tool, and whether it is even safe for children to be using eBooks at all. Studies have been conducted in the recent past with the goal of answering these …

E-Books And Author Payments: The Affect Of Digital Publishing On Author Royalties, Missy Lacock

Book Publishing Final Research Paper

From digital rights management to retail costs, controversy has always accompanied ebooks— although it hasn’t even been a decade since Amazon first released the Kindle. This discussion, however, explores another question: How have e-books affected author payments?

The most significant change in author payments has been e-book royalty rates. While the standard rates are seven and a half percent for trade paperback books and fifteen percent for hardcover books, royalty rates for e-books are twenty-five percent—the same today as they were when e-books first flooded the market in 2009. While royalty rates are higher for e-books than their printed counterparts, …

Changing Publisher-Author Relationships In The Midst Of Developing Crowd-Funded Publishing Platforms, Margaret Schimming

Book Publishing Final Research Paper

With the growth in crowd-funded publishing houses and imprints, it is high time to consider the implications of this type of publishing arrangement for author–publisher relationships. What are some of the factors that drive an author to this type of publishing arrangement? How do these relationships differ from traditional author-publisher relationships?

The Considerations Of Editing Previously Published Works, Ariana Marquis

Book Publishing Final Research Paper

How, if at all, do editors adjust their methods when they are editing something that has been previously published (e.g. a short story that previously appeared in a literary journal and will now be published as part of a collection of short stories)? What is their justification for these adjustments (or lack thereof)? How does their understanding of these adjustments (or lack thereof) compare to the products of their efforts?

Critical Editions And The Promise Of The Digital: The Development And Limitations Of Markup, Alexandra Haehnert

Book Publishing Final Research Paper

This paper seeks to explore the technology underlying current digital editions—which I maintain are wanting in their exploitation of the digital medium—in more detail; its focus is squarely on editorial praxis, not on editorial theory (leaving aside the fact that all praxis is informed by specific theoretical assumptions). Neither am I concerned with questioning whether digital techniques render traditional critical editing obsolete; in fact, I am convinced that they do not, and my paper proceeds from this standpoint. Similarly, I am only marginally interested in exploring the augmentation of digitized texts with multimedia elements as described by Boot and van …

The Migration Of Bibliographic Methodology, Zachary Thomas Eggemeyer

Book Publishing Final Research Paper

This paper will examine the bibliographic methodology used by book historians to detect a print forgery, and it will attempt to show those same methodologies can be applied to digital documents by digital humanities scholars to uncover digital forgeries. To accomplish this it will be necessary to examine a known case of forgery and detail the exact methods used to uncover it, as well as look at the methods and tools available to digital humanities scholars. Doing this should allow us to map the forensic methods of analytical bibliography to their digital counterparts. The goal will be to establish a …