American Literature Commons^™

"Under The Fig-Tree": Anti-Federalist Conceptions Of American National Identity, Clara Kernodle

Tenor of Our Times

The constitutional convention of 1787 gave America some of her most energetic and exciting few months in American history. The Federalists proposed the Constitution as a replacement for existing government, opposed by Anti-Federalists on principled grounds. Thus ensued a mountain of political writing and propaganda that historians still study today. The Anti-Federalists lost the debate, and then were lost to history. Few Americans have even heard of the Anti-Federalists and even fewer scholars study their writings. But reading and evaluating Anti-Federalist writing is an important part of studying the Founding era and Constitutional debates. The Anti-Federalists, as much as their …

Profound And Absurd Poems By E. Stewart Saunders, E. Stewart Saunders

Libraries Faculty and Staff Creative Materials

A collection of poems written between 2020 and 2026

Temporalities Of Translation In Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Rumi Coller-Takahashi

Living in Languages

Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia features two fictional worlds, Urras and Anarres, with distinct political structures and languages. Anarres is created by the revolutionaries who departed capitalistic Urras to create a new anarchist community, and its language was invented so as to have no word for “property” or “class.” However, the artificial distinction in the languages do not hold up the binary of possession and non-possession in these worlds, as the word “possession” permeates interpersonal relationships even on Anarres. To replace the binary approach of the revolution, the novel proposes an alternative mode of …

Where Did Her Torch Glow Go?, Josephine Smith

FUSION

This project is a short video presentation with accompanying written reflection connecting the poem "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus, a poem about immigration to the United States, to modern events regarding immigration in the country.

Review Of Digital Literary Redlining: African American Anthologies, Digital Humanities, And The Canon, Tracy A. Fernandez Rysavy

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

How Questions Of Editing Shape Our Learning: Introducing Students To Digital Manuscripts, Marlowe Daly-Galeano

Feminist Pedagogy

This article presents a pedagogical approach for introducing literature students to digital manuscripts and editorial processes through hands-on engagement with archival materials. The teaching activity centers on May Alcott Nieriker's essay "London Bridges," using four different versions of the text—two handwritten manuscripts, one nineteenth-century periodical publication, and one contemporary republication—to illuminate how editorial decisions shape literary canons and student learning. The four-part assignment integrates literary analysis, manuscript transcription, variant identification, and editorial decision-making to help students understand the material conditions that determine which texts survive and become part of academic curricula. Through this assignment, students gain critical insights into the …

(Introduction To The Special Issue) Restoring Women’S Literary Past: Exploring Digital Recovery Pedagogy Through An Intersectional Feminist Lens, Alice Martin, Tracy A. Fernandez Rysavy

Feminist Pedagogy

In Roopika Risam (New Digital Worlds, 2018) and Lauren Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio’s (Data Feminisms, 2020) recent work, they call for more attention to the intersecting relationships between feminist practice, content, and technical specifications through an awareness of the ways the design and implementation of technology can exclude and objectify people. In response to this, we introduce a special issue on teaching digital recovery in the classroom, with a focus on recovering women writers of America through digital projects.

Teaching Phillis Wheatley (Peters) As A Working Artist, Lenora Warren

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

In recent years, the challenge of teaching the poetry of Phillis Wheatley (Peters) has been managing my students’ expectations of what constitutes “representative” African American literature and coming to a more comprehensive idea of constitutes both “political” and black art. In managing some initial confusion around Wheatley’s muted response to her enslavement I have landed on presenting Wheatley’s insistence of her work as a poet as “labour” to be the most interesting tact to take with students. For Wheatley it is the imperative of becoming a poet that allows her access to what might be seen as a more vital …

On Being Brought From Gambia Or Ghana To Colonial Boston: Teaching Phillis Wheatley And Place, D. Quentin Miller

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

In this pedagogical article, I describe my classroom practice in which the context of place becomes supremely important when introducing Wheatley’s work to students. With the help of experiential learning in the form of a walking tour of Wheatley's Boston and some maps, I call attention to spatiality as a crucial context for framing the poet’s most persistent concerns. The article contains images that can be useful to instructors who do not have the benefit of teaching Wheatley in Boston.

Introduction: Concise Collection On Teaching The Works Of Phillis Wheatley Peters, Part Ii, Mona Narain, Sarah Ruffing Robbins

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

This short essay introduces part two of a two-part Concise Collections special issue on teaching Phillis Wheatley Peters. It discusses how the life and works of the poet can be taught in various educational settings.

Gods' Man, Lynd Ward

Zea E-Books Collection

Lynd Ward (1905–1985) was born in Chicago and studied at Columbia Teachers College in New York City and at the National Academy of Graphic Arts and Bookmaking in Leipzig, Germany. He began working as a book illustrator in 1927, and in 1929 published this first “wordless novel,” Gods’ Man. He eventually published five more such works, as well as illustrations for more than 100 other books, plus drawings, lithographs, watercolors, and children’s stories.

Gods’ Man is credited as the first American wordless novel. It tells a story about a struggling young artist who makes a pact with a mysterious …

Cormac’S Court: Knights Without God In A Savage Land; Or, Chivalry And Existentialism In Cormac Mccarthy’S The Road, Zoë Margaret Metelerkamp

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Cormac McCarthy scholars have examined the influence of romantic grail quest literature and existential philosophy on McCarthy’s oeuvre, but they have treated these subjects independently of each other. This thesis offers a novel exploration of McCarthy’s use of these specific philosophical and literary precedents by focusing on the ways The Road unifies medieval literary principles in Chretien’s Perceval with the existential chivalry Søren Kierkegaard extrapolates in Fear and Trembling.

Heart Of Stone: Geomorphization Through Stone-Oriented Affects, Grace F. Foster

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis draws from the work of geologist Marcia Bjornerud to bring a scientific (specifically geologic) understanding of humanity’s relationship to our home planet to bear in a literary context. I employ Bjornerud’s term “geomorphization” to expand from inter-species kinship to inter-substance kinship and to establish stone as an active, lively subject without relying on anthropomorphization. Geomorphization as I define it refers to recognizing similarity between ourselves and stone/Earth on the basis of our stoniness rather than stone’s human-ness. Geomorphizing ourselves entails what Bjornerud calls “timefulness,” a geologic perspective on temporality that sees the past as continually acting in the …

Living The American Dystopia: Parallels Between Louise Erdrich's Future Home Of The Living God, Leni Zumas's Red Clocks, And Us Abortion Legislation, Erin R. Walden

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis highlights the parallels between contemporary U.S. culture and legislation (particularly after the overturning of Roe v. Wade) and two pieces of feminist speculative fiction: Louise Erdrich’s novel Future Home of the Living God and Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks. Through a rhetorical analysis of political and cultural discourse, legislation, and the two novels, utilizing the frameworks of theorists such as Catharine MacKinnon, Michel Foucault, and Stacy Alaimo, I investigate the similarities in legislation, culture, rhetoric, and atmospheres of reproductive dystopian fiction and our current political environment after the U.S. Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health …

America The Not Yet Beautiful: Unfulfilled Promises In A Racist-Capitalist Society, Kaitlyn Tibbetts

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis draws from Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again” to analyze four American novels that demonstrate the United States’s unfulfilled promises for lower-class individuals and minorities. The four novels examined in this thesis include: The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, There There by Tommy Orange, and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez. Utilizing theoretical frameworks such as social reproduction theory, intersectionality, and Burden-Shelly’s theorizations on racist-capitalist oppression, this thesis argues that the policies and systems that the U.S. is founded on are designed to primarily benefit economically …

The Ache Of Modernism: Death, Affect, And Intersubjectivity In Twentieth-Century American Literature, Alex Gergely

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation suggests that we can locate, describe, and experience death as an aesthetic mood called the ache of modernism. The ache is an atmosphere found in twentieth-century literature that goes beyond simply “positive” or “negative” feeling and encourages audiences to come to an affective and existential relationship with their mortality. As an intersubjective mood deriving from an attunement on death, it illuminates the historical and philosophical moment of many twentieth-century authors while clarifying their texts’ continued resonance today. This project therefore draws on the thought of major philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, …

Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, And The Question Of The “True” Ariel: Complicating Binaries In Plath’S Literary Legacy, Jacob C. Quinn

Theses and Dissertations--English

This thesis aims to complicate common binaries that have defined critical responses to Sylvia Plath’s Ariel since its first publication in 1965, and which emerged as the result of her husband Ted Hughes’ alterations to her original selection and arrangement of poems. Hughes’ editing emphasizes a narrative which ends in bleak fatality, whereas Plath’s original narrative concludes on a note of bittersweet hope. I read Hughes’ choice of ending as highly influential on Plath’s reception and legacy. The tone of her immediate reception, largely shaped by Al Alvarez, characterized Plath as an “extremist” poet whose work should be read through …

Cultus: Eco-Phenomenology In The Work Of John Steinbeck, Robinson Jeffers, And Jack London, Carter D. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations--English

In the face of increasingly dire environmental crises, proposed solutions have gravitated toward imperatives for faster, cleaner, and more efficient technologies and resources. While practical solutions are necessary, they are entirely insufficient to deal with an underlying issue driving environmental degradation: unbridled instrumental reason. In this dissertation, I suggest a theoretical posture, cultus, which attempts to balance the necessity of instrumental action with the guiding counterweight of receptivity. Furthermore, I argue that such personal receptivity is uniquely fostered in aesthetic experiences, attuning the individual to the non-identical and renewing a relationship of care.

I examine the life and work of …

Into Me See: Visibility, Recognition, And The Need To Be Seen In Kazuo Ishiguro’S Never Let Me Go, Vicki L. Wine Carney

Anthós

While critical scholarship on Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go often emphasizes bioethics, transhumanism, and the commodification of life, this lens overlooks the novel’s profound engagement with the psychological necessity of visibility. This paper argues that the tragedy of the clones is fundamentally a crisis of recognition, where invisibility is not incidental but structurally produced to facilitate exploitation. Drawing on Caroline Levine’s concept of the "Form of Utility" and Axel Honneth’s Theory of Recognition, this study examines how systemic indoctrination and objectification deny the clones their innate humanity to soothe the conscience of the "normals." Furthermore, it analyzes the characters’ …

Imagined Afterlives: Anti-Black Medical Violences In Contemporary Black Arts, Katie Schadler

Honors Theses

“Imagined Afterlives: Anti-Black Medical Violences in Contemporary Black Arts” is a multi-genre exploration that studies the following works: Venus (1996) by Suzan Lori Parks, Get Out (2017) by Jordan Peele, and Dawn (1987) by Octavia Butler. I respectively study an experimental play, a psychological horror film, and a speculative novel to understand how Black creatives are depicting and responding to anti-Black violences, particularly medical violences. This work brings together Black art spanning from the late 1980s to 2017 as well as historical events and figures from the eighteenth century all the way to a not-so-distant future. While these works defamiliarize …