American Literature Commons^™

Reading Ecogothic Memory In Contemporary Southern Swamp Novels, Megan Caroline Brockhard Knight

Theses and Dissertations

The ecogothic is a lens through which to engage memory, southern constructivism and identity, environmental intervention, and the literature of the American Southeast. This project establishes a framework of literary criticism that defines the ecogothic, interprets memory as truth imagined, and identifies the position of memory in the environment as a construction with which it is necessary to grapple to understand identity. This framework, compiled of existing and original scholarship, is then applied to three contemporary swamp narratives written by three different southern women writers. The swamp setting creates a unique microcosm of gothic liminality, neither fully land nor water, …

Eco-Domestic Femininity: The Collapse Of Domestic And Wild In Southern Women’S Writing, Christina Xan

Theses and Dissertations

When the Agrarians set out to assert their definition of southern in I’ll Take My Stand (1930), they planted roots deep in the ground of the south that slowly wrapped its tendrils around its descendants. In the years that have followed, southern women have had to push back against these limiting boundaries. Their individual stories are linked by the communal lineage of the south, specifically the binary of domestic and wild. Traditionally, southern women have had to stay in the boundaries of the home, cultivating domesticity, ordering the space, and warming the hearth. The land itself, posed as opposite from …

The Disruption Of Kinship: Interracial Relationships, Displacement, And Marginalized Mixed-Race Families In Korean War Literature, Hyunwook Kim

Theses and Dissertations

The Korean War (1950–1953) left a profound mark on the Korean peninsula, its people, and their diaspora, with its impact still felt today. Korean War literature serves as a vital source for understanding the war's social and cultural ramifications, particularly for marginalized groups, including military sex workers, mixed-race children, and mixed Korean adoptees. Emphasizing the role of interraciality in their experiences, the dissertation delves into literary representations that depict encounters between Korean women and American soldiers, leading to the formation of novel mixed-race families both within military camp towns in Korea and domestic spaces in the United States. While much …

"I Will Write Mad Stories": The Hysterical "I" In The Diaries Of George Eliot, Charlotte Forten Grimke, Virginia Woolf, And Sylvia Plath, Jaclyn Marie Swiderski

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This dissertation focuses on the long history of hysteria and the ways in which it has been used to denigrate and silence disabled women. Women diagnosed as hysterical, by either the medical establishment or the court of public opinion, are denied the right to generate knowledge about and for themselves – they are epistemologically disabled. The author argues that hysterical women have unique ways of looking at and understanding the world which push back against their epistemological disablement. In order to uncover some of this history of hysterical women, this dissertation uses the diaries of four “hysterical” women over the …

An Emerging Voice In United States Literature: 19th-Century Poetry In Los Angeles, Savannah Salazar

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The 19^th century was a time when British and American literatures

flourished greatly. This period is a favorite among students of English

studies and it has produced works that instill a great sense of pride in

British and American readers. However, in the realm of American

literature, there exists an entire body of literature that has been forgotten

to time and archived away. 19^th-century Los Angeles was occupied by

Spanish-language newspapers that produced a body of poetry that has

rarely been researched or discussed.

This thesis will be close-reading poetry from 19^th-century Angeleno

newspapers, such …

Shared Shame And Affect In Nella Larsen's Passing, Claudia Ludwick

All Theses

This project focuses on the negative affect of shame in Nella Larsen’s 1920s American novel, Passing. While shame is a universal feeling everyone feels, the project argues that Larsen’s two main characters, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, feel a specific type of invisible shame that pulls on them differently. For Irene, this shame is reactive and aggressive, but for Clare, this shame is passive and often ignored. The project details where and how the shame manifests for each character, particularly focusing on how shame can be seen visibly and invisibly in and on the body. Because no other character recognizes …

Wildcat, Karl Martin

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Wildcat (2023), directed by Ethan Hawke.

Podcasts Reclaim Literature By Women: A Comparative Study, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

This presentation samples some prominent podcasts which highlight my longtime academic specialty, literature by women. At least three podcasts on Individual writers, Emily Dickinson, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Elizabeth Robins receive attention. At least two podcast series that examine collections of women writers deserve acknowledgment. These are: Lost Ladies of Lit hosted by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew in Los Angeles and one sponsored by Women's Fiction Writers Association, the Debut Author Podcast hosted by novelist Maggie Smith, "Hear Us Roar." I am interested in not only the content and how it is presented, but the ease of use and reach …

African American Women’S Writing: A Critical Edition Of A Narrative Of The Life And Travels Of Mrs. Nancy Prince (1856), Susan E. Landwer

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation expands on current knowledge of how Black women of the early nineteenth century not only participated in political and social movements within the United States but were instrumental in effecting fundamental social and economic progress both domestically and abroad. They did this while grappling with what their US citizenship meant to them within a gendered and race-based hierarchy. In the process, they had their own labor to sustain their livelihood and apprenticed the future labor of others. Centering on Nancy Gardner Prince (1799-1859), a Black activist born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, I explore how Prince was not an exception …

Representations Of Violence Against Native American Women, Christine York

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

It is the aim of this study to provide detailed attention to the representation of violence against Native American women throughout American films and literature. Native American women have been persecuted against since the times of colonization; however, there has been a recent uptake in this crime. This crime has been seen throughout many forms of art, but has not often been a focal point to these artforms. In order to argue that the violence these women experience needs to be central to the texts they are seen in, a comparison between three different texts is imperative. These texts are …

Traces Of The House Of The Catechumens In The Plot Against America, Roy Humlicek-Spindler

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

The purpose of this paper is to give readers of the novel The Plot Against America by Philip Roth background information to better understand the novel. It argues that Philip Roth was aware of the Jewish to Catholic conversion institution of the early modern period known as the “House of the Catechumens,” and uses his knowledge of it to inform the experiences of the character Sandy Roth, a Jewish teenager, in the novel. Sandy’s experiences with the institution called the “Office of American Absorption” in a historically fictitious 20th-century America bear striking resemblances to the Jewish experience in the House …

The Making Of A Survivor: Chopin's Use Of Identity And Rebirth In The Awakening, Amber L. Budd

The Confluence

In recent research of American literature, many scholars have read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and construed the novel’s ambiguous ending as an indication that the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, commits suicide after the ending. Scholars have developed this hypothesis due to contextual evidence, societal expectations at the time Chopin wrote the novel, and Edna’s perceived development of identity over the course of the novel. In this paper, I analyze the popular theories arguing for Edna’s suicide or survival and then examine those articles in conjunction with my own analysis of The Awakening. By doing so, I aim to prove that, …

Iguza N Wurfan Tasuqilt N The Grapes Of Wrath, Arezki Boudif

Journal of Amazigh Studies

N/A

Reimagining The Single-Author Seminar: Teaching Wheatley Peters, Milton, And The Master’S Discourse, Kate Ozment

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This article discusses a senior-level literature course that puts into dialogue Phillis Wheatley Peters and John Milton. Wheatley Peters’ poetry on tyranny and freedom during the American Revolution, especially “America,” is compared to Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Areopagitica, and Paradise Lost, which explore the same themes during the English Civil War. Students trace how Milton’s transformative but narrowed ideas of freedom for enfranchised subjects in England are powerfully reimagined by Wheatley Peters in double meanings of freedom for the colonies and enslaved subjects. Secondary sources allow students to engage in the canon-building of Milton as …

Bad Becomings: Autobiographical Writing, Queer/Trans Theory, Melancholia, Jacob Elias Aplaca

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bad Becomings surveys queer autobiographical works published over the last 30+ years to better understand the animosities and complicities of the queer and the so-called normative. While the limited scholarship on queer autobiographical writing has characterized this corpus of texts based on an edginess, a radicality, and a rejection of the liberal individual that both flies in the face of “traditional autobiography” and indulges queer theory’s persistent idealization of queer culture as radical and antinormative, this dissertation asks that we suspend our desire for so absolute a differentiation. Rather than assume that “queer” automatically makes “autobiography” radical and antinormative, I …

The Redemption Of History: Poetics And Politics In The Modern Epic, Giacomo R. Bianchino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation, “The Redemption of History: Poetics and Politics in the Modern Epic.” provides a materialist theory of the modern epic, focusing on the way that the poets deployed this form towards political ends. Building on theories of the epic going back to the German Romantics, it argues that the modern form is predicated on the idea that it has departed from the conditions that made the ancient form possible. It examines the way that writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century developed the idea that the immediacy of the social “totality” expressed by the ancient epopee was …

A Glimpse Into The Constructed Wilderness: The Evolving Stories From Bryson, Strayed, And Krakauer, Halston Leigh Belcastro

English Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity

This thesis examines how humans have constructed the idea of wilderness through literature in the United States. I argue that the concept of wilderness evolves over time and continues changing due to technological advances, climate change, reflections of the past, and the romanticization of ordinary people who venture out into the wilderness for an extended period. The definitions of the wilderness are elusive and individual. The wilderness can be viewed as a place for solitude, or as a space to reflect on the past and reconcile with the present. However, there is a collective view of wilderness that emerges from …

Marvelous Ordinariness: Re-Engaging With Realism’S Social Function, Miranda Ochoa Natera

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

Against Romanticism, European literary realism of the 19th century aimed to provide an objective representation of reality through mimesis that could capture the truth in an objective way. Yet, its positivist approach severely narrowed down the complexity of truth, reality, and the mundane by wrongfully drawing the universal from the particular. A new way of engaging with realist literature from any time period, called Marvelous Ordinariness, rearranges this triad in ways that expand our understanding of our own and other realities portrayed. Using Alejo Carpentier’s description of “lo real maravilloso,” Marvelous Ordinariness unfolds in three layers that resemble Carl Jung’s …

Eng 155: Introduction To Literary Studies, Joseph Donica

Open Educational Resources

An OER syllabus covering the ways humans have read and continue to read literature from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. An emphasis is placed on the application of critical thought to writing expository essays and responding to readings.

“Our Experience Is Fragmentary”: Partial Redemption In Marilynne Robinson’S Gilead Tetralogy, Zachary Stevenson

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Although the characters and thematic throughlines vary across the four books in the Gilead series, each book takes an interest in the reality of division and considers ways of negotiating and healing that division. Whether the divisions are theological, familial, socioeconomic or racial, their presence haunts the text and the question of their resolution always hovers near the surface. Taken together, these considerations of difference across the four books demonstrate that Robinson populates her novels with chasms that her characters bridge, but only partially so. This coexistence of alienation and reconciliation allows Robinson to articulate a vision of Christian community …