History Commons^™

William Faulkner's Southern Landscape, Rachel V. Ford

English Undergraduate Honors Theses

The American South is a region full of rich and complicated history, undergoing slavery, war, poverty, ecological devastation, and racial violence. One of the most famous and distinctly southern writers of the twentieth century is William Faulkner, whose works challenge the idealistic Lost Cause mentality of white supremacy and highlight major issues within southern society. Faulkner’s writings are set in Mississippi, grounded with a distinct sense of place. The southern landscape provides more than simply a backdrop to the stories, but plays an active role in plot and character development. This thesis examines three of Faulkner’s novels, discussing their historical …

"Do Not Fashion The Other": Representing Contemporary Haudenosaunee Literature 2016, Michael Patrick Brewster

Master's Theses

Historically, the issue of representation in postcolonial studies is one of some contention. While scholarship might recognize the necessity for highlighting the plights and struggles attendant to postcolonial societies, the primary literature being studied is most often written by natives of those societies themselves. This gap is especially evident with Indigenous cultures, because there are relatively few Indigenous scholars working in the academy. We are at the point now when we have a multiplicity (but not a plurality) of Indigenous voices writing literature (poetry, memoir, fiction, film, etc.) and academic criticism. However, there is value in non-Natives reading and writing …

"In The Land Of Tomorrow": Representations Of The New Woman In The Pre-Suffrage Era, Natalie B. O'Neal

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This digital anthology explores feminism in selected short fiction by women writers from the 1911 run of the popular women’s magazines Woman’s Home Companion, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Farmer’s Wife. This fiction furthered the women’s rights movement by allowing women to imagine a world similar to their own with a heroine who voiced their desires and enacted change. Rather than the more experimental, inaccessible literature of avant garde high modernist writers consumed by the upper class, popular fiction reached a wider, middle class audience and was more effective at producing a progressive zeitgeist following the stilted Victorian …

Lineages Of The Literary Left: Essays In Honor Of Alan M. Wald, Howard Brick, Robbie Lieberman, Paula Rabinowitz

Robbie Lieberman

For nearly half a century, Alan M. Wald’s pathbreaking research has demonstrated that attention to the complex lived experiences of writers on the Left provides a new context for viewing major achievements as well as instructive minor ones in United States fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism. His many publications have illuminated the creative lives of figures such as James T. Farrell, Willard Motley, Muriel Rukeyser, Philip Rahv, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Kenneth Fearing, and Arthur Miller. He has delved into a consideration of Sidney Hook and pragmatism, brought attention to debates within tendencies associated with Cannonism and Shachtmanism, and developed …

The Accessibility Of The American Dream To Racial Minorities In America, Kimberly Wong

English Class Publications

For centuries, people have had the American Dream. It has permeated the media in various forms: Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby,” and even the movie “An American Tail,” where animated Russian mice sing, “There are no cats in America and the streets are full of cheese!” The term “the American Dream” was first made popular in 1931 by James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America. Adams believed the American Dream was a “dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller …

Purely American: How Art From Harlem And Broadway Shaped American Culture, Emily Knocke

English Class Publications

The United States of America is a relatively young country, if you consider its foundations established in the late eighteenth century. For this reason, the art forms of visual art, theatre, and literature were already well-developed by the time America had established a unique voice. Although their beginnings were segregated by race, socioeconomic status, popularity, and a couple of streets in New York City (see Figure 1), two musical styles stick out as entirely American art forms: the Broadway musical and jazz. While Harlem Renaissance writers and artists argued for a separate but valued black culture, the unique American art …

It's Reigning Men: American Masculinity Portrayed Through Stanley Kowalski, Nina Hefner

English Class Publications

“Be a man!” Popular culture shouts this seemingly innocent command at males of all ages. Throughout the twentieth century, both men and women experienced shocking changes to society’s expectations of their gender norms. With the rise of the feminist movement during the twentieth century, women were able to leave the home and embrace the workforce. More opportunities opened up for women, such as factory jobs and secretary positions, making America’s society more egalitarian between the sexes. On the other hand, after the trauma of WWII and the onset of the Cold War, men experienced a twist in society’s expectations during …

Warren, Robert Penn, 1905-1989 (Sc 2988), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 2988. Letter, 20 March 1952, of Robert Penn Warren, New Haven, Connecticut, to Mrs. Carl P. Rollins. He refers to his “wandering loquacity about the sadistic Lewises” (an apparent reference to his poem Brother to Dragons) being included in certain minutes, but observes that the entry will be “much shorter” than the poem itself.

Warren, Robert Penn, 1905-1989 (Sc 2977), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2977. Newspaper and magazine clippings, programs and correspondence relating to the 80th anniversary of the Rhodes Scholars program at Oxford University. Robert Penn Warren participated in these festivities as a program alumnus. Includes a brief correspondence between Warren and fellow Rhodes alumnus Don Price.

Unhealed Cultural Memories: Styron’S Nat Turner, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel about the leader of a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831, was highly praised after its publication in 1967. Then African American essayists in William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond took issue with the novel and rejected Styron’s asserted right to reimagine Nat Turner’s life and to assume his voice, claiming their rights of racial heritage and historical accuracy to castigate Styron for his offensive presumption. That distant argument of unshared assumptions and crossed purposes between high-minded and hypersensitive artists and intellectuals of another day may throw refracted …

The Fictions Of Whiteness: Transatlantic Race Science, Gender, Nationalism, And The Construction Of Race In Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (1823-1867), Philip E. Kadish

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Fictions of Whiteness argues that political beliefs preceded and determined the race science theories which nineteenth century American white novelists applied or invoked in their work, the inverse of the current critical consensus. For issues ranging from Indian removal to slavery and Reconstruction, and utilizing theories from of Condorcet, Buffon, Camper, Louis Agassiz, James Pritchard, Johannes Blumenbach, and George Borrow these authors shifted allegiances to divergent race theories between and within works, applied those theories selectively to white, black, and Indians characters, and applied the same scientific race theories to politically divergent rhetorical ends. By analyzing shifting application of different …

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …

Payne, William Samuel, 1941-2015 (Sc 2968), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2968. Letters of William Samuel Payne to Cora Jane Spiller, Bowling Green, Kentucky, mostly with news of his cousin, Louise (Natcher) Murphy, a novelist and the daughter of Kentucky Congressman William H. Natcher.

The Color Of Memory: Reimagining The Antebellum South In Works By James Mcbride Through The Use Of Free Indirect Discourse, Janel L. Holmes

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the use of interior narrative techniques such as free indirect discourse and internal monologue in two of James McBride’s neo-slave narratives, Song Yet Sung (2008) and The Good Lord Bird (2013). Very limited critical attention has been given to these neo-slave narratives that illustrate McBrides attention to characterization and focalized narration. In these narratives McBride builds upon the revelations he explores in his bestselling memoir, The Color of Water (1996, 2006), where he learns to disassociate race and character. What he discovers about not only his mother, but also himself, inspires his re-imagination of the people who …

Inviting Us To Come Closer: Philip Levine's Portraits Of Detroit (Forthcoming), Christina Triezenberg

Christina Triezenberg

No abstract provided.

"It's No Life Being A Steer": Violence, Masculinity, And Gender Performance In The Sun Also Rises And In Our Time, Brock J. Thibodaux

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Nearly all discussions of Hemingway and his work touch on the theme of masculinity, a recurrent theme in all of his works. Examinations of Hemingway and his relationship to masculinity have almost unanimously treated the author as a misogynist and a champion of violent masculinity. However, since the posthumous publication of The Garden of Eden in 1986, there has been much discussion of Hemingway’s uncharacteristic use of androgynous characters in the novel. Critics have taken this as a clue that Hemingway possessed a complex attitude regarding gender fluidity, but have failed to examine the constructions of gender and identity in …

The Meadow: A Novel, Scott Albert Winkler

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

THE MEADOW: A NOVEL

by

Scott A. Winkler

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2015

Under the Supervision of Professor George Clark

The Meadow considers the question of how all Americans, both civilians and military personnel alike, are affected by the United States’ military actions. Set during the Vietnam era, The Meadow tells the story of Walt Neumann, who is torn between his dream of going to college and his father’s insistence that his sons serve their nation as he did in World War II. Circumstance unexpectedly enables Walt to pursue his dream, but he also comes to realize the source …

All Play And No Work: The Protestant Work Ethic And The Comic Plays Of The Federal Theatre Project, Paul Gagliardi

Theses and Dissertations

Given the massive unemployment of the era, the subject of work dominated the politics and culture of the Great Depression. In particular, most government programs of the New Deal sought to provide jobs or reinforce long-standing American views of working. These aims were reflected by the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), which was charged with providing jobs to unemployed theatre workers and uplifting the spirits of audiences. But the FTP also strove to challenge its audiences by staging overtly political theatre. In this context, many comic plays -which have long been ignored by scholars of the FTP - actually challenged work …

Imagining Boston: The City As Image And Experience (1986), Shaun O’Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

I want to discuss community and imagery, social division and literary unity, Boston poetry and prose. In most issues of NEJPP I will focus upon those recent books that fire our imaginations and help us shape our sense of local and regional place. In this issue, however, I want to look back at the tradition of imagery that resonates in Boston's history. Old ideas of Boston are quickly being buried under layers of architectural and cultural renewal. While the suburbs become more urbanized and the commuter roads more clogged, downtown Boston is in the midst of the greatest building boom …

Boston And New York: The City Upon A Hill And Gotham (2006), Shaun O’Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article is about the author's experience with visiting New York during it's rebirth after 9/11. He speaks about the history of both cities and how they have each grown into their own to become places of future enterprise and cultural cohesiveness.

Reprinted from New England Journal of Public Policy 21, no. 1 (2006), article 9.

Suffering Sisters, Silent Majorities, And Societal Oppression: Comparing The Anti-War Themes And Strategies Of Kurt Vonnegut’S Slaughterhouse-Five And Katherine Anne Porter’S “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”, Melissa N. Miller

Senior Honors Theses

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” are quite dissimilar in style, but these two works convey overall anti-war themes. The works were written in different eras, portray different wars, and are strongly influenced by the lives of the authors themselves; however, these unique factors work together in both works to convey similar messages regarding war’s oppressive nature and corruption of mankind. Vonnegut and Porter employ various methods to communicate these messages, some unique to the respective works and some shared by the two. The characters of Montana Wildhack and Miranda Gay—two oppressed female characters imprisoned …

"Casting Aside That Ficticious Self.": Deciphering Female Identity In The Awakening 2015, Anne L. Dicosimo

Master's Theses

Kate Chopin’s female protagonists have long since fascinated literary critics, raising serious questions concerning the influence of nineteenth-century female gender roles in her writing. Published in 1899, The Awakening demonstrates the changeability of the various representations of woman. In the nineteenth century, the subject of women may be divided into two categories: the True Woman and the New Woman. The former were expected to “cherish and maintain the four cardinal virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity” (Khoshnood et al.), while the latter sought to move away from hearth and home in order to focus on education, professions, and political …

A Critical Analysis Of The Killer Angels, Andrea Nicholson

Student Writing

No abstract provided.

Bayard Vs. Drusilla: The Burden Of War And Legacy, Kate Shillingford

Student Writing

No abstract provided.

Changing Roles In William Faulkner’S The Unvanquished, Bailey George

Student Writing

No abstract provided.

Sketches At Home And Abroad: A Critical Edition Of Selections From The Writings Of Nathaniel Parker Willis, Jon Miller, Nathaniel Parker Willis

Jon Miller

Critics and general readers highly regarded the poetry and prose of Nathaniel Parker Willis (18061867) during the "American Renaissance" of creative literature in the decades before the Civil War. As an editor and frequent contributor to one of the young nation's most successful and elegant literary magazines, The New-York Mirror, Willis achieved an international reputation for his witty and worldly tales and letters. This new edition collects outstanding examples of Willis's short fiction written at the peak of his abilities. These tales of adventure embellish and improve Willis's own experience as a bachelor adventurer during the 1830s, relating, for example, …

The Akron Offering: A Ladies' Literary Magazine, 1849-1850, Jon Miller

Jon Miller

FREE FULL-TEXT PDF DOWNLOAD From 1849 to 1850, Calista Cummings edited and published Akron's first literary magazine, The Akron Offering. At the time, Akron was a booming canal town on the verge of even greater prosperity. By turns religious, comic, romantic, and political, this extraordinary collection of early midwestern creative literature expresses a wide range of sometimes contradictory opinions on both the important questions of its day and the important questions of today: historical events such as the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the 1848 revolutions in Europe are considered alongside more timeless contemplations on truth, justice, and beauty. …

Arnow, Harriette Louisa (Simpson), 1908-1986 (Sc 2936), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding Aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 2936. Letter, 6 March 1964, of Harriette Simpson Arnow, Ann Arbor, Michigan, to “Mrs. Holland,” in response to a compliment for her novel Hunter’s Horn. Arnow briefly recalls her publications since The Dollmaker and notes “unenthusiastic” reviews in Kentucky of her most recent work. She also mentions an article about her in the previous fall’s Louisville Courier-Journal Magazine [8 December 1963].

Summers, Hollis Spurgeon, 1916-1987 (Sc 2935), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding Aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2935. Letter, 8 April 1953, of Hollis Summers, Lexington, Kentucky, to Frances Richards, a member of the WKU English faculty, expressing good wishes to her and her students after his recent visit to Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Murton, Jessie Wilmore (Jones), 1886-1973 (Mss 439), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid for Manuscripts Collection 439. Correspondence, writings, scrapbooks, and financial records of Kentucky native and poet Jessie Wilmore Murton. Although born and raised in Kentucky, she spent most of her adult life in Battle Creek, Michigan. Her poetry and prose was published in several solo books and anthologies and appeared extensively in religious publications of the mid-twentieth century. The contents of Box 9 Folder 7 related to the League for Sanity in Poetry has been scanned and can be accessed by clicking on "Additional Files" below.