American Literature Commons^™

But What Has Helga Crane To Do With The West Indies? Plantation Afterlives In The Black Atlantic, Rachel Mckenzie Carr

Theses and Dissertations--English

“But What Has Helga Crane to Do with the West Indies? Plantation Afterlives in the Black Atlantic” situates the emergence of the southern gothic in modernist American and Caribbean works as a response to the shifting cultural narrative of the plantation in the twentieth century. In this project, I argue that the plantation seeps out of its place and time to haunt landscapes it may never have touched and times in which slavery is long over. While the plantation system is broadly recognized as a literary, political, and cultural force in nineteenth-century literary studies, I conceive it is also a …

Paintings Inspired By African American Literature, Erinn Dady

A with Honors Projects

For this honors project, the student created 5 paintings inspired by the coursework assigned from The Norton Anthology of African American Literature Third Edition Volume 1, with the goal of encouraging new readers to explore this genre and diverse points of view.

Sleight Of Hand: Gender, Performance, And (In)Sincerity In E. D. E. N. Southworth’S The Hidden Hand, Samantha Martin

Scripps Senior Theses

One of the many cultural anxieties that existed during the nineteenth century in antebellum America centered on the dubious status of authenticity of one’s emotions, gender expression, or socioeconomic class. The fluctuating socioeconomic landscape of antebellum America destabilized the logic of categorization, rendering it an ineffectual means by which to evaluate others’ identities. In her novel The Hidden Hand, or, Capitola the Madcap, E. D. E. N. Southworth explores instead of censures the transformative properties of the self, specifically in terms of gender and class. Her interest in this lack of authenticity, or transparency regarding one’s self and intentions, …

"A Dark, Abiding, Signing Africanist Presence" In Walker Percy’S Dr. Tom More Novels, David Withun

The Coastal Review

Many of the tropes, commonplaces, symbols, and values used and reflected by American literary works written by white authors, as Toni Morrison writes, are “in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence.” The black/white racial binary and racial différance that mark this presence inform the use of racialized characters as signifiers in the novels of Walker Percy. In the Dr. Tom More novels Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome, Percy adopts racial symbolism as a means toward his critique of the American notion of “the pursuit of happiness.” In Love in the Ruins, Percy …

A Repurposed Narrative: Mary Rowlandson’S Narrative And Pre-Revolutionary Sentiment, Steven F. Thomas

Theses and Dissertations--English

Leading into the American Revolution, Puritan captivity narratives gained a resurgent popularity as nationalized sentiment burned towards political upheaval. Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative (1682) was reprinted six times between 1770-1776, signifying an incredible interest in Puritan stories that seemed to antithetically inspire a progressive and radical revolution against England. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God or A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson enhanced an already fervent revolutionary sentiment, transforming a seemingly straightforward captivity narrative into a totem meant to represent the oppressive struggle between England and her most coveted colony.

Such a literary revival taps …

All That You Say Is Beautiful: Stories, Omaria Sanchez Pratt

Theses and Dissertations--English

From the city of High Point to New York City, this collection portrays a certain black experience. Through a sociological lens, the stories in All That You Say is Beautiful study intersections of class, race, family, and sexuality by bending forms, expectations, and seeks to understand what it means to be human when your experience is not that of mainstream American culture.

“I’Ve Known Rivers:” Representations Of The Mississippi River In African American Literature And Culture, Catherine Gooch

Theses and Dissertations--English

My dissertation, titled “I’ve Known Rivers”: Representations of the Mississippi River in African American Literature and Culture, uncovers the impact of the Mississippi River as a powerful, recurring geographical feature in twentieth-century African American literature that conveys the consequences of capitalist expansion on the individual and communal lives of Black Americans. Recent scholarship on the Mississippi River theorizes the relationship between capitalism, geography, and slavery. Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History, and Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the …

Show Her It's A Man's World: How The Femme Fatale Became A Vehicle For Propaganda, Leann Bishop

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

During World War II women joined the workforce in droves due to propaganda such as Rosie the Riveter. When Soldiers began returning from the war they wanted stability and normalcy. They wanted to return to the America they left where women ran the household and men went to work. Women, however, experienced a new sense of freedom from working and wanted to continue their liberation. It was during this time that femme fatales, the sultry women of film noir became popular. They represented the liberated women of the 1940s. The film industry saw an opportunity to use these women found …

Under The Sign Of Suicide, Theodore Emmanuel Prassinos

Wayne State University Dissertations

“Under the Sign of Suicide,” examines modernist writers’ intense and sustained preoccupation with and representations of suicide. Beyond numerous essays on the topic, we also find many fictional characters such as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Svidrigailov and Kirilov both taken by gunshot, Stavrogin and Smerdyakov both by hanging. We also find Franz Kafka’s George Bendemann who takes his life by drowning, and Virginia Woolf’s Septimus Smith by impaling, Her character, Rhoda, dies off a cliff. In American literature, we find Edna Pontellier, Quentin Compson, Clare Kendry, Semour Glass, Teddy McArdle, Willy Loman, Tod Clifton, and on and on. This list is surely …

The Center Of All Beauty: Radical Democracy, Materiality, And The Poetic Subject In Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Marcus Merritt

Wayne State University Dissertations

In The Center of All Beauty, I trace a strain of poetics in twentieth-century American poetry from William Carlos Williams through Frank O’Hara, Alice Notley, and Amiri Baraka. This poetics is founded in a radically democratic conception of the poetic subject and in the use of poetry as a tool for developing critical knowledge about the material conditions within which the poetic subject is constituted. In Spring and All and The Embodiment of Knowledge, Williams articulates a poetics that denies the authority of any grounds upon which any poetic subject would be considered inadequate to poetic speech and outlines a …

Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature, Josh-Wade Ferguson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature” revises the methodological assumptions that have underwritten our understanding of blues literature and the politics of race and region that surround it. Where previous commentators have defined blues literature primarily through its formal and thematic connections with blues music and with the sociohistorical contours of black southern life more generally this dissertation expands the boundaries of how we conceive blues literature by examining Langston Hughes’ poems “The Weary Blues” (1925) and “Po Boy Blues” (1926) August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984) Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods …

Decolonial Resistance In Latinx Writings From Peru To The United States: A Portfolio, Isabel Norwood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collection begins with the premise that colonial relationships manifest in ways beyond exploitation of one nation by another. It relies on the decolonial theory of Walter D. Mignolo in its assumption that imbalances of power in the realms of race gender sexuality and class are fundamentally colonial. With this more expansive understanding of coloniality in mind I examine resistance to colonial exploitation in a range of texts from across the Americas. The first essay in this collection explores the role of the guinea pig in Andean food culture arguing that the continued consumption of guinea pig represents a form …

Subverting The Patriarchal Panopticon: Challenges To Eugenics Rhetoric In The Novels Of Mccullers And Welty, Regina Marie Young

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My thesis takes into consideration the scope of eugenics ideologies and their influence on literature specifically two mid-twentieth century authors from the U.S. South Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty. I contend that both writers engage with eugenics rhetoric challenging and subverting the prevailing ideology of the day albeit in differing ways. McCullers and Welty address different facets of eugenics rhetoric in their novels— namely the nature of “defect” and the criteria for “fitness” for “citizenship.” This thesis interrogates the ways in which these writers develop rhetorical strategies for resisting eugenics ideologies in their respective novels Reflections in a Golden Eye …

Mobilizing Genre, Revising Politics: The Intersection Of Audience, Author, And Allusion In Contemporary Latinx Fiction, Jason Klus

Master’s Theses

This thesis examines contemporary Latinx authors’ use of popular cultural and generic allusions to challenge limiting labels that audiences place on their fiction. Confronting readings that privilege Latinx literature as either imbued with the political rigor of the 1960s’ Civil Rights Movement or an assimilationist attitude, I argue that these writers deliberately appropriate images and tropes familiar to Anglo-American readers to assure success in the literary marketplace while challenging their readers’ expected conclusions. My first chapter analyzes Sandra Cisneros’s reimagining of popular U.S. figures in light of ethnic storytelling practices in her 2002 novel Caramelo. The second chapter examines …

Cosmic Consciousness And Rawlings’S The Sojourner, Ashley Q. Lear

Publications

The epigraph for Rawlings’s The Sojourner quotes I Chronicles 29:15, “For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.” This opening image is one of many hints to the cosmic consciousness that Rawlings writes into her narratives.

Contesting Slavery In The Global Market: John Brown’S Slave Life In Georgia, Michael Drexler, Stephanie Scherer

Faculty Journal Articles

John Brown, author of Slave Life in Georgia, published in London in 1854, proffered a radical approach to ending slavery in the USA in step with Marxian economics. In this paper, we will explain how Brown’s representation of subjectivity may have caused critics to neglect it. Brown treats freedom as something foreign and external. He has to learn what freedom means, first through exposure to a model of liberal citizenship and then through the experience of several modulations of fugitive liberty. Brown’s social world is wholly determined by external forces. Whether slave or freeman, he faces ambiguous situations. Is …

Always Already Imprisoned: The Panoptic Power Of Capitalism In American Literature, 1900-1940, Andrew Spencer

Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

ALWAYS ALREADY IMPRISONED: THE PANOPTIC POWER OF CAPITALISM IN AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1900-1940

By Andrew Blair Spencer, Ph.D.

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Virginia Commonwealth University, 2019

Director: Dr. Richard Fine, Professor, Department of English

By applying the theories of control that Michel Foucault outlines in Discipline and Punish to the capitalist system, I argue that capitalism functions in much the same was as Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon in that it perpetually imprisons individuals who live under its purview. As I see it, capitalism works on …

"Bachelor Buttons": Feminist And Womanist Essays And Poems, Billy E. Clem Jr.

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

In this critical and creative dissertation, I sketch a brief study of selected multicultural hybrid texts in contemporary US Anglophone literary studies; discuss their implications for reading, writing, and teaching; and present my own hybrid text.

Second-wave feminist and womanist theories and practices opened literary and cultural studies to new and exciting ideas and methods for reading, teaching, and writing both canonical and non-canonical Anglophone texts. One genre emerging anew by these theories, practices, and practitioners is the literary hybrid text, a multi-genre form composed of a variety of prose genres, poetry, drama, and/or visual imagery. Hybrid texts ask readers …

The Downfall Of Colonial And Dark Romantic Masculinity In The Witch: A New England Folktale, David Miles Harrington

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This thesis discusses the film The Witch (2015), directed by Robert Eggers, specifically, the character of William and his failures as a Puritan man. Puritan masculinity is a surprisingly understudied area of American literature and, to enter into the field, I use William and The Witch as a portal into various historical and literary interpretations of seventeenth-century Puritan maleness. The project takes a palimpsestic approach to these layers of influence on Eggers’s film. From Hawthorne’s Reverend Hooper in “The Minister’s Black Veil” and Young Goodman Brown in “Young Goodman Brown” to real-world Puritans Roger Williams and Samuel Sewall. This thesis …

Exceptionalism And Transatlanticism In Early American Literature (1760-1860) And Classic Hollywood Cinema (1930-1960), John M. Price

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores the seemingly contradictory characteristics of two distinct art forms in two distinct eras. When exploring the period 1760 to 1860, scholars of transatlanticism argue that the literature of Great Britain and the young United States are of one unified cultural identity, and yet this period is also one in which American writers sought to establish a unique national voice. To understand this dichotomy, this dissertation examines the parallels between Early American Literature, or EAL, and classic Hollywood cinema (1930-1960). This exercise in intertextuality demonstrates how both mediums in both periods absorbed influences from other countries and other …