American Literature Commons^™

“Where Inner And Outer Meet”: Dissociation And The Creative Process, Joseph Shoulders

Robert Penn Warren Essay Contest

No abstract provided.

Correspondence With The Season Of Autumn, Seth Nevin

Robert Penn Warren Essay Contest

No abstract provided.

American Novels Amidst The Rise Of New Media: Emergent Publics And Forms, Sarah Ruth Jacobs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines long-term shifts in the quantities and demographics (namely the race and educational attainment) of twentieth-century American literary readers alongside the rise and popular consumption of new media (namely television and the internet). The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are testament to a great expansion in the numbers and demographics of literary readers, and in turn an increase in the variety and intended audiences of literary publications. Examples include the rise of “middlebrow” readers and books in the 1940s and the rise of African-American, feminist, and countercultural small presses in the 1960s and 1970s. However, even as the variety …

The Bioethical Significance Of “The Origin Of Man’S Ethical Behavior” (October 1941, Unpublished) By Ernest Everett Just And Hedwig Anna Schnetzler Just, Theodore Walker Jr.

Journal of the South Carolina Academy of Science

Abstract –

E. E. Just (1883-1941) is an acknowledged “pioneer” in cell biology, and he is perhaps the pioneer in study of egg cell fertilization. Here we discover that Just also made pioneering contributions to general biology and evolutionary bioethics.

Within Just’s published contributions to observational cell biology, there are substantial fragments of his theory of ethical behavior, a theory with roots in cell biology. In addition to such previously available fragments, Just’s fully developed theory is now available. This recently discovered unpublished book-length manuscript argues for the biological origins of ethical behavior (evolving from cells to humans, within a …

Writing And Well Being: Story As Salve In The Work Of (More Than) Two Updikes, Sue Norton

Books/Book Chapters

Analysis of the work of David Updike and Linda Updike in relation to John Updike.

Mary Ellen Miller: In Memoriam, Frank Steele

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Editorial Preface, Joan Romano Shifflett

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

James A. Grimshaw, Jr.: In Memoriam, William Bedford Clark

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Melville’S Battle-Pieces And Warren’S Wilderness (Eleanor Clark Award Winner, 2017), Mary Cuff

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Vardis Fisher's Last Essay, Alessandro Meregaglia

Library Faculty Publications and Presentations

When Vardis Fisher died on July 9, 1968, the Idaho novelist left behind an extensive bibliography: more than two dozen novels, collections of short stories, essays, and poetry, as well as three books written for the Federal Writers’ Project. But he also left behind multiple projects in mid-process. Obituaries and memorials noted that Fisher was at work on a book called The American West: The World’s Greatest Physical Wonderland. Biographers over the ensuing decades also mentioned this incomplete project but didn’t elaborate further.

Heroism And Indeterminacy In Oliver Stone's Jfk And Don Delillo's Libra, Tim Engles

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Two Roads Diverged: Iaas @ 50, Sue Norton

Articles

This article joins others in The Irish Journal of American Studies reflecting back on the history of the Irish Association of American Studies and the teaching of American literature and American Studies in Ireland.

Creating A Place For Monstrosity: The Forced Liminality And Limited Mobility Of Codified Monstrosity In Leigh Bardugo's King Of Scars, Kaylee Brooke Lambert

Online Theses and Dissertations

The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) outlines the purpose of young adult (YA) literature as addressing the unique needs of adolescents, which are “distinguished by unique needs that are – at minimum — physical, intellectual, emotional, and societal in nature” (Cart “Value” para. 8). This unique period in life is liminal, a time between childhood and adulthood. Adolescents search for meaning in the world around them, with literature as one avenue for self-discovery and affirmation. Mental health is one area teenagers seek answers, and YA literature has attempted to provide spaces to navigate those questions in popular contemporary works …

Elizabeth Bishop's Perspectives On Marriage, Jeffrey Westover

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Marriage can never be renewed except by that which is always the source of true marriage: that two human beings reveal the You to one another.
- Martin Buber

In a number of texts, both published and unpublished, Elizabeth Bishop addresses the themes of marriage, love, and courtship. Such issues were vexed ones for her. As a young woman, she rejected Robert Seaver’s marriage proposal (Millier, Elizabeth Bishop 112). Later, her friend Pauline Hemingway wondered in a letter whether she and Tom Wanning were engaged (Millier, Elizabeth Bishop 201), and Robert Lowell famously confessed to her that she was the …

Nine Stories And The Society Of The Spectacle: An Exploration Into The Alienation Of The Individual In The Post-War Era, Margaret E. Geddy

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the thematic links between three of J. D. Salinger’s short stories published in Nine Stories (“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Down at the Dinghy,” and “Teddy”), ultimately arguing that it is a short-story cycle rooted in the quandary posed by the suicide of Seymour Glass. This conclusion is reached by assessing the influence of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” on these stories, something that is understood through the Marxist frame of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle.

The Cast Of A Giant's Shadow, Angela Kay Steineman

Masters Theses

Adapting fairy tales and folklore has been an ongoing endeavor by storytellers and artists since the very first story was repeated. The evidence can be seen in the many versions of fairy tales like those of the sleeping beauty, from Giambattista Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia” to Walt Disney’s Maleficent. However, unlike their European counterparts, adaptations of American tales outside of children’s literature are not as ubiquitous. My writing rectifies this by adding to the resurging interest as seen in recent retellings like Matt Bell’s Appleseed: The Monstrous Birth (2019).

In an effort to reframe the American tall tale …

Proletarian Modernism : Aesthetic Intervention In Naturalist Epistemology In Steinbeck, Wright And Mccullers, Kenji Kihara

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation explores three proletarian novels published at the end of the Depression era—John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—in light of how their aesthetics complicates the inherited epistemology of literary naturalism in response to the changing political climates in the age of the Popular Front. Calling these texts “proletarian modernism,” I investigate how their aesthetics mediate the relations among Marxist ideas, political solidarity and the American value of individualism in an age when it became gradually difficult to fundamentally criticize capitalism and liberalism.

Dickinson At Thirty, Philip Pardi

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

When we say there are “no Mozarts in literature,” we point to an enticing fact: writers become. Pick any text you love or revere, and there was a moment earlier in the author’s life when it could not have been written. The writers we remember develop over time; they change and are changed. Their careers divide, if not always easily, into a before (often thought of as a kind of apprenticeship) and an after (a work or body of work that has a significant claim on our attention). Personal relationships, lived experiences, social and political contexts, readers real and imagined, …

The Legacy Of Uncle Tom : The Transformation Of Black Masculinity And Racial Politics, Lauren R. Weeks

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The main aim of this thesis is to reveal the immense effect that literature can have on society spanning generations. It explores the restriction of black men’s political possibilities due to their perceived relationship with the character Uncle Tom, which not only causes harm to black activist projects by inciting disunity, but also becomes a source of inner turmoil for black men who struggle to be identified in society. This project offers to call these harmful standards that black men are judged by, due to the creation of Uncle Tom, as the binary of black masculinity. By analyzing how this …

Idealist And Materialist Approaches To Abolition In Uncle Tom's Cabin And The Daughter Of Adoption, Jillian Shea

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Sentimentalism was a popular aesthetic, moral, political, and literary movement in the 18th and 19th centuries in the United States and England, and both Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption (1801) use sentimentalism in their attempts to advocate for the abolition of slavery. Scholars such as Lauren Berlant critique sentimentalism, specifically Stowe’s use of sentimentalism, for its potential to make structural problems appear as if they can be assuaged by personal change, and I situate this understanding of sentimentalism within an idealist framework, or a framework that primarily emphasizes subjectivity’s role in …