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 …

Living Oil: Petroleum Culture In The American Century By Stephanie Lemenager, Bart H. Welling

The Goose

Bart H. Welling reviews Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Cenutry by Stephanie LeMenager.

Mary Hallock Foote: Reconfiguring The Scarlet Letter, Redrawing Hester Prynne, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

It took 28 years after Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850 for Mary Hallock Foote to render drawings for one of the novel’s first illustrated editions, which was probably the first ever to be illustrated by a woman.(1) It took 130 years after the publication of Foote’s illustrated edition in 1878 for Project Gutenberg to digitize and disseminate Hawthorne’s novel with Foote’s illustrations.(2) It has taken seven years for Hawthorne scholarship to commence addressing and examining Foote’s edition, and theorize what her drawings suggest about the act of seeing, for the heroine’s audiences in the book, and for …

Christian Lady Rhetorica: Americanization Of Marian Rhetoric In Early American Sentimental And Seduction Novels, Stephanie Laszik

English Department Theses

In the larger scope of religious feminine iconography, the Virgin Mary stands out as a vessel of cultural rhetoric. As medieval studies in religion, culture, and language indicate, the Virgin Mary's biblical speeches, combined with her image as a mother and follower of God, create a unique opportunity for authors of fiction to explore the Marian manifestations in their characters. This project illuminates the occurrences of Marian Rhetoric as they are found in American sentimental and seduction novels as tools for cultural change. The American sentimental and seduction novels discussed in this project, show a need for the cultural commentary …

George Saunders And The Postmodern Working Class, David Rando

David P. Rando

George Saunders peoples his stories with the losers of American history—the dispossessed, the oppressed, or merely those whom history’s winners have walked all over on their paths to glory, fame, or terrific wealth. Among other forms of marginalization, Saunders’s subject is above all the American working class. In the last twenty or more years, however, for reasons that include the fall of the Soviet Union, the impact of poststructuralist theory, conceptualizations of identity that more and more take race and gender into consideration alongside class, and the general cultural turn in class analysis, it has become increasingly difficult to write …

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.

Creating Difference: The Legal Production Of Race In American Slavery, Shaun N. Ramdin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the legal construction and development of racial difference as considered in literature written or set during the final years of American slavery. While there had consistently been a conceptual correspondence between black skin and enslavement, race or racial difference did not become the unqualified explanation of enslavement until fairly late in the institution’s history. Specifically, as slavery’s stability became increasingly threatened through the nineteenth century by abolitionism and racial slippage, race became the singular and explicit rationale for its existence and perpetuation. I argue that the primary discourse of this justificatory rationale was legal: through law race …

Writing The Nation: A Concise Introduction To American Literature 1865 To Present, Amy Berke, Robert Bleil, Jordan Cofer, Doug Davis

English Open Textbooks

Writing the Nation: A Concise Guide to American Literature 1865 to Present is a text that surveys key literary movements and the American authors associated with the movement. Topics include late romanticism, realism, naturalism, modernism, and modern literature.

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A Tale Of Acadie: Le Grand DéRangement Acadien Et Son Identité LittéRaire, Molly I. Parent

Senior Theses and Projects

In 1755, close to 12,000 Acadians, the descendants of French colonists, were expelled by British forces from their home in present-day Nova Scotia. They were then dispersed throughout the thirteen Atlantic colonies of the British Empire and forced to begin their lives anew in the wake of the trauma that they had suffered. This event has since been coined the “Grand Dérangement,” a title that ultimately suggests the havoc that was caused by the disruption of a culture. The Acadians were a people who had separated themselves from the European powers that fought over their land, a people who found …

Shannon Ravenel Editorial Papers, 1977-1990., Beth S. Harris

Finding Aids: Guides to the Collections

This is a collection of editorial papers for Best American Short Stories, published by Houghton Mifflin. The collection includes reading records, letters of notification, permissions, contracts, reviews and clippings related to BASS, manuscripts, drafts of introductions to the annual volumes, editorial correspondence to authors, Houghton Mifflin staff, and between the series editor and the guest editor.

Vergilian Allusions In The Novels Of Willa Cather, Nathaniel Wagner

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This work aims to explore the nature of Vergilian allusion in the novels of Willa Cather - how the author implicated classical language in her own texts as well as the purpose and efficacy of such allusions. By surveying traces of Vergilian passages and rhetorical techniques such as ecphrasis and anacolouthon across three of the writer's major novels, My Antonia, The Professor's House and Shadows on the Rock, this study reveals an important and persistent aspect of Cather's artistic program. The author intentionally and regularly uses Vergilian language and figures to lend a sense of grandeur to the small, individual …