American Literature Commons^™

Sublett Family (Sc 146), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans (Click on "additional files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 146. Bill of Charles Sublett for tanning calf skin, 1808; tax receipt (fragment) to Charles Sublett, Warren County, Kentucky, 1817; promissory note signed by William Sublett, 1826; three notes on religious doctrine; scrapbook of articles and poems about Kentucky and Kentuckians compiled by Paul H. Murphy, 1932.

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 1844-1911 (Sc 2423), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid, scans and typescripts (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 2423. Letters of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps to Richard Watson Gilder, editor of The Century Magazine. Two letters relate to her submission of the manuscript for the story “Jack” and explain her eagerness to read and correct the proof. She also writes of her home in East Gloucester, Massachusetts and of the challenge of composing short stories. A third letter from Newton Center, Massachusetts discusses her submission of chapters of her memoir, offers to make changes, and advises of her availability by telephone.

Jean O’Brien’S Firsting And Lasting: Writing Indians Out Of Existence In New England And Ann Morrison Spinney’S Passamaquoddy Ceremonial Songs: Aesthetics And Survival [Book Review], Siobhan Senier

English

No abstract provided.

Cotter, Joseph Seamon, 1861-1949 (Sc 378), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "additional files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 378. Letter, 27 August 1934, from Joseph S. Cotter, Louisville, Kentucky, to James Tandy Ellis, a fellow poet, which relates an incident of Cotter’s early life.

Hancock, Elizabeth Ann (Moore), B. 1924 (Sc 2412), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2412. Three Christmas cards to Patricia M. Hodges from Elizabeth Ann "Libby" Hancock, Santa Fe, New Mexico, daughter of the author Janice Holt Giles. One includes a letter with family news. Also included is a Christmas card to Hodges from The Giles Society Board of Directors.

Authors Correspondence (Mss 337), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid for Manuscripts Collection 337. Correspondence between authors and researchers and staff of the Kentucky Library & Museum, primarily regarding historical and genealogical resources. Correspondents also write about their work and publications.

Trout, Allan Mitchell, 1903-1972 (Mss 346), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 346. Correspondence and writings relating to the career of Allan Mitchell Trout, political reporter and columnist for the Louisville Courier-Journal. Includes letters from readers, written mostly on the occasion of his retirement, collections of Trout's "Greetings" columns, speeches and articles, historical memorabilia, correspondence relating to the Allan M. Trout Collection at Western Kentucky University, and messages of sympathy to his wife after Trout's death.

Persistence: "My Grandmother's Eyes" And Other Memories, Christine Fede Williams

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Persistence: “My Grandmother’s Eyes” and Other Memories is a collection of five essays based on the author’s life. “My Grandmother’s Eyes” depicts the difficult, but loving, communication between the author and her grandmother, who speaks Italian as a first language. “Christmas: A Journey” compares and contrasts the celebration of Christmas in the author’s Italian-American family and her celebration of Christmas as an adult. “Room in My Heart” describes the events leading up to a decision to adopt a child. “Renaming Oriental Avenue” follows three threads: the author’s relationship to the Monopoly game; the author’s study of the Japanese language and …

Willa Cather [From Blackwell Encyclopedia Of Twentieth-Century American Fiction], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Willa Cather is known primarily for her novels representing the experiences of women immigrants on the Nebraska prairies in the late nineteenth century, but Cather’s 10 novels and scores of short stories’ produced over a career spanning 50 years actually range widely over space and time, from seventeenth-century Quebec to twentieth century New York. A social conservative who proudly identified herself as one of the backward-looking, her experiments with fictional form and her approach to culture nevertheless ally her with modernism. It is, perhaps, the depth and diversity of Cather’s body of work and the impossibility of reducing her achievement …

Reading From The Heart Out: Chief Bromden Through Indigenous Eyes, Kimberly R. Connor

Public and Nonprofit Administration

This essay offers a re-reading of an American classic—Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—that rejects the conventional interpretation, one which positions the white protagonist McMurphy as the secular iconoclastic hero bravely enacting an existential drama. Instead, this reading pursues an interpretation that explores the implications and ironies of Kesey’s choice to narrate his novel from the perspective of the Native American Chief Bromden. By choosing a traditionally marginalized member of society to offer a social critique, Kesey is able to redirect our attention away from an interpretation that focuses on the incoherent ramblings of a presumed schizophrenic and …

Women & Language: Essays On Gendered Communication Across Media, Melissa R. Ames

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

The present volume of essays examines women's communication as it has evolved historically across multiple mediums. Part I explores how women became "gossip girls" and the important role of gossip in the perception and practice of female communication. Essays in Part II cover the convergence of oral and written communication in women's literature. Gendered performance in such arenas as salsa dance, Dr. Phil and the Internet is examined in Part III, and essays in Part IV discuss women's communication in the technology-rich 21st century. This excerpt features the introduction and one essay from the co-editor.

Women & Language: Essays On Gendered Communication Across Media, Melissa R. Ames

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

The present volume of essays examines women's communication as it has evolved historically across multiple mediums. Part I explores how women became "gossip girls" and the important role of gossip in the perception and practice of female communication. Essays in Part II cover the convergence of oral and written communication in women's literature. Gendered performance in such arenas as salsa dance, Dr. Phil and the Internet is examined in Part III, and essays in Part IV discuss women's communication in the technology-rich 21st century. This excerpt features the introduction and one essay from the co-editor.

Le Mélange Of Francophone Culture In William Wells Brown’S Clotel, Sandra Andrade

Undergraduate Review

In Clotel; Or, The President’s Daughter, William Wells Brown argues that for fugitive African American slaves France represented freedom. This connection between African Americans and France that is familiar to many Americans in the twentieth century was existent at the time of Brown’s own escape. The Francophone culture became a major motivator in the author’s personal life and also in his writings. This project covers many themes, including the “tragic mulatta”, American identity, American freedom and slavery, and explores readings from Anna Brickhouse’s Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere, and Eve A. Raimon’s The Tragic Mulatta …

Nature, Domestic Labor, And Moral Community In Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours And Elinor Wyllys, Richard M. Magee

English Faculty Publications

Cooper's argument for a domestic ideal situated within a rural setting reinforces the importance of community connections through a shared sense of morality, as well as understanding of the natural world. Community alone—the human connections—never seems to be enough in Cooper's formulation, but must always exist with an awareness of the world outside the narrow confines of one's own domestic sphere. Concern for one's fellow-beings necessitates a concern for the world in which these beings live, and Cooper understands that when any bonds are broken—such as the bonds that connect us to the natural world—other bonds are threatened. Thus, when …

God Bless America, Land Of The Consumer: Fitzgerald’S Critique Of The American Dream, Kimberly Pumphrey

Undergraduate Review

In James Truslow Adams’ book, The Epic of America, he defines the American dream as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement” (404). In the middle of the roaring 1920’s, author F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, examining the fight for the American dream in the lives of his characters in New York. Fitzgerald illustrates for the reader a picture of Gatsby’s struggle to obtain the approval and acceptance of high society and to earn the same status. …

Mary Rowlandson: The Captive Voice, Elizabeth Scarbrough

Undergraduate Review

The arrival of the Puritans in Massachusetts, the ensuing relationship they developed with the Native Americans and its deterioration over the following years are historical facts that are commonly known, but the reality that numerous women and children were kidnapped for ransom in the years referred to as “King Philip’s War” might surprise many Americans. In fact, on February 20, 1676, in the town of Lancaster, Massachusetts, along with several of her neighbors, Mary Rowlandson and her young daughter were violently ambushed, torn from their homes, and taken hostage by a multi-tribal band of Indians. She was ransomed and released …

Building A Collaborative Online Literary Experience, Joe Essid, Fran Wilde

English Faculty Publications

Key Takeaways

-Educators and students collaborated in constructing an immersive literary experience at the University of Richmond and then reenacted the narrative as a team.

-Considerable planning goes into such simulations to make them effective collaboration spaces.

-In creating a simulation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, a team of distributed groups negotiated different approaches to believably embody Poe's characters and period.

-Despite limitations in the software and the planning process during and after a beta test, students experienced Poe's story in a new and rewarding way.

Effective virtual simulations can embed participants in imaginary …

Postwar Media Manifestations And Don Delillo, Joshua Adam Boldt

Online Theses and Dissertations

Media's influence on postwar American culture is undeniable. Don DeLillo's fiction is often a commentary on that influence. Hyperreality, Simulacra, Consumerism, and News Addiction are all regular themes in DeLillo's novels; this paper explores all of these concepts through the lens of media theory. Special attention is given to the novels White Noise, Americana, and Mao II, as well as to the media theorists Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, and Antonio Gramsci. The paper is both a history and a critique of postwar consumer culture and the role that media plays in the construction of that culture.

Identity, Reality, And Truth In Memoirs From The Iraq And Afghanistan Wars, Travis L. Martin

Online Theses and Dissertations

This research uses trauma theory, memoir theory, narratology, and recent scientific research into the effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) to explore developments in the memoir coming from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Specifically, the author examines the works of Shoshana Johnson, Colby Buzzell, and Anthony Shaffer to uncover the ways in which identity, reality and truth present themselves in the destabilized narratives of traumatized subjects.

Travis Martin is himself a veteran of the Iraq War, using his first-hand knowledge as a compass to guide him through intricate memoirs written by his contemporaries. Beginning …

Introduction To Willa Cather And Modern Cultures [Cather Studies 9], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

To some, linking Willa Cather to "the modern" or more narrowly to literary modernism still seems an eccentric proposition. As Richard Millington has pointed out, "one will look in vain for Cather's name in the index of most accounts, whether new or old, of the nature and history of Anglo-American modernism" (52). Perhaps she fails to feature in these accounts because in her public pronouncements and certain recurring motifs in her fiction, she appeared to turn her back on modernity. Cather was skeptical about many aspects of the culture that took shape around her in the early decades of the …