American Literature Commons^™

Ourself Behind Ourself, Concealed: The Thematic Importance Of Doubling In Nineteenth And Early Twentieth-Century American Gothic Literature, Katharine Mclaren Todd

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Without question, Gothic literature provides an impressively suitable venue for the expression of societal anxieties and frustrations, especially those concerning power, patriarchy, and the socially sanctioned roles of women (i.e. to be obediently passive wives and nurturing mothers) and men (i.e. to be representatives of strength, rationality, morality, and order). While it might seem as though supernatural entities or outside forces are often to be feared in Gothic literature, the most sinister force is usually that of the protagonist's unsettled mind. The shadowy haunted houses and often isolated, gloomy, and claustrophobic spaces in which terrorized protagonists are trapped frequently mirror …

Playing The Game: Violence And The Revolt Against Normative Masculinity In John Updike's Rabbit Run, Norman Mailer's An American Dream, And Phil Andros's $Tud, Ann Marie Schott

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will examine two high-brow examples of Cold War literature by white male authors, Norman Mailer's An American Dream (1965) and John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), and examine them through the lens of the lesser-known gay pulp $tud (1966) by Phil Andros. Although $tud's gay hustler protagonist Phil seems to be a progressive, even transgressive example of an alternate masculinity, he is actually heavily invested in the binary strictures of normative masculinity and therefore works to uphold or reinforce normativity. $tud, therefore, is not about deviance from a masculine norm but rather a meditation on the ways that American …

Reforming Tastes: Taste As A Print Aesthetic In American Cookery Writing, Sarah Wurgler Walden

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many eighteenth-century philosophers such as Kant and Hume worked to develop discourses of taste as a means of standardizing cultural behaviors. Using physical taste as a metaphor for aesthetic perception and judgment, these writers could both define and abstract group boundaries. As American writers worked to distinguish their nation from their British forebears, many recognized the utility of taste-based discourse and worked to develop cultural tastes around shared principles of egalitarianism and democracy. Cookbooks and domestic writing soon engaged these discourses, as it was the task of women to cultivate a virtuous citizenry, and—through domestic print culture—to demonstrate the deleterious …

Southern Noir: Appropriations And Alterations Of A Twentieth-Century Form, Bob Hodges

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Southern noir conjoins the two seemingly antithetical words in a telling fashion. The word noir conjures images of cheap films about detectives, criminals, and luckless men scurrying across a city at night with expressionistic shadows and light play, a foreboding sense of doom, and deadly seductive femmes fatales nipping at their heels. The understanding of noir as a symptom of urban modernity inextricably linked to cities and cinema stands in stark contrast to the traditional understanding of the south as rural, retrograde, and a repository for all the antiquated, “coercive forms of human society” in labor and social practices (Greeson …

Inside And Outside Southern Whiteness: Film Viewing, The Frame, And The Racing Of Space In Yoknapatawpha, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Though neither film nor film viewing is ever named in As I Lay Dying, both the apparatus of cinema and what we might term its sociohistorical effects are evoked powerfully by and in the novel. These include the passing before the reader’s “gaze” of the discrete, separate “frames” of the various characters’ monologues, as well as, in particular section, a fascination with watching machinery that resembled the interest of early film biewers in the cinematic apparatus (see Doane 108).

If Vardaman and his family are not explicitly depicted as film viewers, they nevertheless show signs of what has been …

Review: Sisters Red

Georgia Library Quarterly

Book review of "Sisters Red," by Jackson Pearce.

Writing The Northland: Jack London's And Robert W. Service's Imaginary Geography, Cara Erdheim

English Faculty Publications

Book review by Cara Erdheim.

Giehmann, Barbara Stefanie. Writing the Northland: Jack London's and Robert W. Service's Imaginary Geography. Würzburg, Germany: Könighausen & Neumann, 2011.

Repugnant Aboriginality: Leanne Howe’S Shell Shaker And Indigenous Representation In The Age Of Multiculturalism, Monika Siebert

English Faculty Publications

Surprisingly for a novel evidently invested in representations of contemporary Choctaw traditionalism as a viable alternative to settler society, LeAnne Howe’s 2001 Shell Shaker gives unrelenting play to the gruesomeness, horror even, of the traditional rituals it depicts, at the risk of reinforcing stereotypes of Indian savagery. And yet, these depictions of the repugnant, that is, of ancient practices now prohibited by law or found reprehensible by a public sense of ethics, allow Howe to escape the integrative thrust of contemporary multiculturalism by pre-emptying identification through difference, an interpretive logic according to which we are all the same because we …

"The Wound And The Voiceless: The Insidious Trauma Of Father-Daughter Incest In Six American Texts", Christine Lynn Grogan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cathy Caruth's pioneering study of trauma and the posttraumatic forges a connection between the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the literary as such. Since trauma defies linguistic processing, she explains, the language used to describe it will always be figural. For this reason Caruth privileges imaginative literature, with its highly mediated nature, as a means of representing the otherwise "unclaimed" experience of trauma. Her influential reflections inform a crucial direction within trauma studies: the search for a narrative voice that articulates trauma effectively.

But how should we think about trauma that is not a singular "event" but a chronic …

How To Get From Here To There: Poetic Connections In Tracy Letts's "Man From Nebraska," "August: Osage County," And "Superior Donuts.", Deborah Ann Kochman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, Kochman examines the textual references to poetry in contemporary playwright Tracy Letts's "Man from Nebraska," "August: Osage County," and "Superior Donuts" and explores how specific references function as a "poetic exchange" between the protagonists and the respective agents of change or moral touchstones in each play and how these "poetic exchanges" suggest a diminishment or elevation of the intrinsic value of art -- specifically, poetry -- as a force for personal and cultural renewal. While Letts's writing is hardly "poetic" and his structure closer to "narrative," he focuses on "the repressed" - both emotionally and socially --and …

Poe As Magazinist, Kay Ellen Mckamy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Edgar Allan Poe has long been recognized as one of American literature's most intriguing authors, usually for reasons other than his writing. Most literary studies examine one or two of his tales and perhaps one or two comments he made about the short tale. This dissertation will instead look at the work Poe did while involved in the world of early-American magazines for the last seventeen years of his life. It will explore how the magazine world affected his writing and his theories, especially his theories on the genre of the short story, a genre that Poe essentially described and …

Cold War Playboys: Models Of Masculinity In The Literature Of Playboy, Taylor Joy Mitchell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

"Cold War Playboys: Models of Masculinity in the Literature of Playboy" emphasizes the literary voices that emerged in response to the Cold War's redefinitions of space and sexuality and, thus, adds to the growing national discourse of Cold War literary and masculinity studies. I argue that the literature Playboy includes has always been a necessary feature to creating its masculinity model; however, that very literature often destabilizes the magazine's grand narrative because it presents readers with alternative models of masculinity. To make that argument, I presume five things: 1) masculinity, like femininity, is a construct; 2) the mid-century masculinity …

Front Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Contents, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 13 Fall 2011

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven. Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. ISBN 90-420-0534-3 299 pages, bibliography, index. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek presents a framework of comparative literature based on a contextual (systemic and empirical) approach for the study of culture and literature and applies the framework in audience studies, film and literature, women's literature, translation studies, new media and scholarship in the humanities and in the analyses of English, French, German, Austrian, Hungarian, Romanian, and English-Canadian modern, contemporary, and ethnic minority texts. Copyright release to the author in 2006.

With Malice Towards None: Six Stories And A Novella, Burke Nixon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A fiction collection consisting of six short stories folloby a novella. The pieces attempt to be comic, but also--with debatable success--to be more than just comic. As the title suggests, one of the collection's thematic concerns is mercy and its absence. Most of the pieces are set in Texas; characters in the collection include a female student in an absurdly incompetent public high school, a parking cop, the best friend of a stand-up comedian, an Abilene man whose life goal is to be struck by lightning, and an unselfconscious grandfather character, who bookends the beginning and end of the collection. …

William Faulkner's Hebrew Bible: Empire And The Myths Of Origins, Scott T. Chancellor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I propose that William Faulkner's literary imagination is charged by a Jewish sensibility rooted in reverence for the Bible as a text that is as vital and relevant in his time as in any since its composition. The Hebrew Bible's narrative method of compiling, redacting, doubling, and retelling, and its attention to curses, genealogies, covenants, and nation-building, reverberate in Faulkner's time as resoundingly as in any preceding it. There are myriad links in Faulkner's work between the Hebrew Bible, Southern Christianity, and American colonialism that merit our attention within ongoing discussions of Faulkner, empire, and nation-building, the Bible and colonialism, …

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 …