American Literature Commons^™

Magic, Magicians And Detective Fiction: Essays On Intersecting Modes Of Mystery, Edited By Rebecca Josephy, G. Connor Salter

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Magic, Magicians and Detective Fiction edited by Rebecca Josephy considers how magic appears in detective stories, from the seemingly miraculous exploits of Arsene Lupin to the moral dilemmas of occult detective Elvis Infante.

What Will We Do With The Christmas Pudding?: Joy Davidman, William Lindsay Gresham, And "Christmas In The Workhouse", Gabriel C. Salter, Clark Sheldon

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

The poem "Christmas in the Workhouse" archived in William Lindsay Gresham's papers at first appears to be a random transcript in his files. Exploring the work's publication history and Gresham's contributions to War Poems of the United Nations, a book edited by his second wife Joy Davidman, suggests that in fact "Christmas in the Workhouse" is part of the larger story of how they informed each other's work in the 1940s.

La Vida Es Sueno's Segismundo, A Case Study On Isolation, Kiel Garrett

Undergraduate Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Ashes Of Power, Bailey Huffman

FUSION

The objective of this project was to write a creative work using a theme found in an American writer's literary text studied throughout the course and create a visual and/or auditory piece. By doing this, students can further interpret the literary texts, themes, and genres found in American Literature. For my short story, “Ashes of Power,” I chose to focus on the theme of “powerlessness” found in the 1985 play Fences written by August Wilson. The story is told through the point of view of a young and strong woman, Xena, and is set in a fantasy world that is …

How We Survive: A Poem Analyzing Life, Death And Necessity, Pierce H. Dornink

FUSION

This poem is an analysis of the short story "Living Like Weasels" by Annie Dillard. It focuses on life and death, as well as how life is fleeting, and draws on themes expressed in the source work.

This poem was created as part of a multimodal project for an American Literature class in the Fall of 2024 using the following prompt:

You are responding to literature using creative techniques in two phases. In the first phase, you will compose a 2-4 page piece of creative writing that includes a theme we’ve studied in the class that has significance to you. …

A Mirror Of Us, Amber J. Chrones

FUSION

This is a project of empowerment. "A Mirror of Us" embraces patriarchal liberation, while celebrating divine femininity. Inspired by “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this multimodal project aims to shatter conformist ideologies that are all too common.

This poem was created as part of a multimodal project for an American Literature class using the following prompt:

You are responding to literature using creative techniques in two phases. In the first phase, you will compose a 2-4 page piece of creative writing that includes a theme we’ve studied in the class that has significance to you. That creative writing …

Just A Memory, Shakila Arab

FUSION

This poem is a response to “I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain” by Emily Dickinson. It was written for a World Literature class using the following prompt:

You will imitate at least five elements of an original text we read this semester. Following your imitation, you will write a paragraph describing the five elements you imitated and how your imitation exemplifies the literary movement of the piece you are imitating.

Truth, Fiction, And Abolition, Xiao Wang, Samuel Weiss

Michigan Law Review

A review of Chain-Gang All-Stars. By Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

Controlling The Narrative: How The United Daughters Of The Confederacy Shaped Collective Memory Through Romance Novels, Karie L. Cobb

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

While existing scholarship on the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) reveals the immense influence the organization wielded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I assert that their legacy has had a broader and more insidious reach than previously believed. Through close analysis of two foundational romance novelists’ works published during the rapid escalation of the genre’s popularity, I contend that the rhetoric of the UDC shaped generations of Southerners as demonstrated through repetitions and parallels of the Lost Cause ideology found in UDC publications and sponsored materials within romance novels written by white Southern women who came of age …

Monima: A Novel Of The Immigrant Experience In The Multilingual Early Republic, Betsy Klima, Len Von Morzé

English Faculty Publication Series

First published in 1802, Monima offers a unique look at the lives of the poor in Philadelphia: Describing her novel as "a very plain picture of life," a plea on behalf of the "oppressed, and life-worn children of affliction,'' the author exposes the class fractures within a society we have mythologized as egalitarian (99). Such myths, the novel shows, are based on ignorance; as one character, awakened to the existence of the poor, remarks, "one half of the world don't know how the other half live" (196). Though the identity of Monima's author was not discovered for over 220 years, …

When Dystopia Becomes Political Criticism: Why Margaret Atwood Wrote The Handmaid's Tale, Celeste Deale

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

When Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, she didn’t think it’d still be relevant nearly forty years later. Yet, her use of historical imagination helped her create a novel that permeates time and space. This essay explores the production and reception of The Handmaid’s Tale, asking how the novel was both a product of the political and cultural context of its production in the 1980s and a critique of Atwood’s own contemporary moment. Atwood drew on biblical themes, Puritan history, and the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu to construct Gilead's social and political order and comment on American …

Queen's Pride: A Queer Reading Of Star Wars Character Padmé Amidala, Madeleine Loewen

Mythopoeic Society Seminar Proceedings

Ever since Luke Skywalker and Han Solo first appeared onscreen together in 1977, LGBTQ+ Star Wars fans have harnessed the power of queer reading to write themselves back into a galaxy far, far away, despite Lucasfilm’s long-term disapproval of such practices. Nonetheless, there exists little scholarly literature on queerness in the franchise, and even less on the potentially sapphic characters. Queen Padmé Amidala, first introduced onscreen in Episode I: The Phantom Menace, proves a surprising—but no less salient—queer figure in Star Wars. From her intimate relationships with her handmaidens, to her experimentation with gender performativity, to her quiet yet …

Between Languages And Religions: Omar Ibn Said's Voice In The Arabic Narrative And English Translations, Rumi Coller-Takahashi

Living in Languages

The Life of Omar ibn Said (1831) is a narrative written by an enslaved person in Arabic and went through multiple English translations over the centuries. This article examines the ways in which these translations involve the nineteenth-century Christian agenda as well as the translators’ decisions in the twentieth-first century that multiply Omar ibn Said’s voice. In response to the recent scholarship’s effort to find Omar’s “true self” in his writings, which shows the meshing of Christian and Islamic faith, I aim to foreground his voice as a powerful presence at the intersections of the two languages and religions. My …

Recognizing Speculative Literature: Conceiving Identity In The Archives Of Enslavement, Gabriella Greco

Theses and Dissertations

One of the key problems of the archive of enslavement, borne out of the violent erasure of enslaved identities, is the struggle to reconstruct and honor those lost identities. Recognizing Speculative Literature: Conceiving Identity in the Archives of Enslavement investigates postcolonial archival processes and the resulting documents to identify a spectrum of speculative literary genres that can be used to supplement traumatic archival erasures, often of female voices and identities, to further understand the power dynamics. To clarify, I use the term ‘speculative literature’ here to refer to a mode of literature that relies on the few fragments that may …

[Review Of The Book The Pioneer And The Innkeeper: Adventures In Uncertainty And Faith Around The World, By C. & M. Wilson], John E. Snellings

Department of Family and Community Medicine Faculty Publications

[First paragraph] The full breadth and powerful impact of family medicine as a global specialty is on full display in The Pioneer and the Innkeeper: Adventures in Uncertainty and Faith Around the World. In this compelling memoir, readers follow the life and career of Dr Cal Wilson, a family physician and global health expert, as he and his family pursue medical missions across the world. Not to be outdone by her husband, Mimi Wilson’s life story is co-featured in the book, and her own heart for service (in forms slightly different from those of her husband), create a dynamic …

Pressing Matters: American Print Culture And The Development Of Proto-Romanticism, Daniel Young

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the distinctive features of post-independence American print culture and their influence on the emergence of American Romanticism. Advancements in printing technology, the establishment of paper mills, and the proliferation of newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets created a dispersed and unrestricted print environment. This accessibility allowed for a dynamic exchange of ideas, disseminated revolutionary concepts, and cultivated a unique American ethos characterized by individualism and intellectual freedom. Key works such as Washington Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. and Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland and Edgar Huntly illustrate how early American Romanticism evolved to reflect the unique American …

Is Sex Necessary? Or Why You Feel The Way You Do, James Thurber, E. B. White

Zea E-Books Collection

Contents: The Nature of the American Male : A Study of Pedestalism • How to Tell Love From Passion • A Discussion of Feminine Types • The Sexual Revolution : Being a Rather Complete Survey of the Entire Sexual Scene • The Lilies-and-Bluebird Delusion • What Should Children Tell Parents? • Claustrophobia, or What Every Young Wife Should Know • Frigidity in Men • Answers to Hard Questions • Glossary

The year was 1929, the height of the Roaring Twenties and the eve of the Crash and Great Depression. A “Sexual Revolution” was in progress, and two writers from The …

Centuries Of A Heavy Conscience: American Ecogothic In Cormac Mccarthy’S The Orchard Keeper And Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians, Michaela Smith

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

With the rising concern about negative human treatment of the Earth, studies in the Gothic—a genre which always invites conversation about concerns and anxieties—have recently expanded to include the ecogothic. This critical framework at its core combines the Gothic with ecocriticism and invites conversation about the human impact on the natural landscape and its creatures. The American Gothic is already a genre that discusses guilt and remorse regarding the nation’s colonization of Indigenous people and role in slavery; however, the conversation about American emotions can be expanded to include ecogothic guilt. This sentiment is especially true when considering the ecogothic …

Robert Frost And The Myth Of Adam And Eve, Theo Johnson

CMC Senior Theses

What exactly it is about the story of Adam and Eve that fascinated Robert Frost is hard to say. Of course, he is not the first to engage with it in writing – for much of recorded human history, the Genesis account of man’s creation has held a place of unparalleled importance in our understanding of what it is to be human, provoking innumerable exegetic responses. In popular literature, too, it has served as inspiration for some of the most celebrated English and American poems. From the “bloodless myth” of Geoffrey Hill’s “Genesis” to the great theodicy of John Milton’s …

The Dirt Underneath My Fingernails: The American Pastoral And 21st-Century Food System Reform, Annabella Isaacson

Scripps Senior Theses

The following is an amalgamation of my experiences personally and vested interests academically, and is meant to be read as just that. As a thesis that combines Environmental Analysis and Writing & Rhetoric degrees, this project challenges traditional academic forms by integrating creative nonfiction and poetry with academic writing and analysis. This thesis attempts to fuse the academic and personal essay into one cohesive piece. The inconclusive nature of the narratives and explorations that follow are intended to represent my process in grappling with the histories and significance of American pastoral literature through the ways in which this genre has …