Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

American Literature Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

3,915 Full-Text Articles 2,955 Authors 4,887,062 Downloads 203 Institutions

All Articles in American Literature

Faceted Search

3,915 full-text articles. Page 65 of 107.

"Do Not Fashion The Other": Representing Contemporary Haudenosaunee Literature 2016, Michael Patrick Brewster 2016 SUNY College Cortland

"Do Not Fashion The Other": Representing Contemporary Haudenosaunee Literature 2016, Michael Patrick Brewster

Master's Theses

Historically, the issue of representation in postcolonial studies is one of some contention. While scholarship might recognize the necessity for highlighting the plights and struggles attendant to postcolonial societies, the primary literature being studied is most often written by natives of those societies themselves. This gap is especially evident with Indigenous cultures, because there are relatively few Indigenous scholars working in the academy. We are at the point now when we have a multiplicity (but not a plurality) of Indigenous voices writing literature (poetry, memoir, fiction, film, etc.) and academic criticism. However, there is value in non-Natives reading and writing …


"Out Of The Dark Confinement!" Physical Containment In Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Protest Literature, Allison Lane Tharp 2016 University of Southern Mississippi

"Out Of The Dark Confinement!" Physical Containment In Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Protest Literature, Allison Lane Tharp

Dissertations

Most scholarship on American protest literature tends to focus on the protest literature of specific, politically marginalized groups, such as black protest, women’s protest, or working class protest. My project redefines how we read nineteenth-century American protest literature by investigating the connections between the protest texts of these three marginalized groups. In particular, I argue that mid-nineteenth-century protest authors incorporate images of physical confinement and entrapment within their texts to expose to privileged readers the physical and ideological containment and control marginalized subjects encounter in their daily lives. Drawing from rhetorical theories of argumentation and audience engagement, and incorporating historical …


William Faulkner's Southern Landscape, Rachel V. Ford 2016 University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

William Faulkner's Southern Landscape, Rachel V. Ford

English Undergraduate Honors Theses

The American South is a region full of rich and complicated history, undergoing slavery, war, poverty, ecological devastation, and racial violence. One of the most famous and distinctly southern writers of the twentieth century is William Faulkner, whose works challenge the idealistic Lost Cause mentality of white supremacy and highlight major issues within southern society. Faulkner’s writings are set in Mississippi, grounded with a distinct sense of place. The southern landscape provides more than simply a backdrop to the stories, but plays an active role in plot and character development. This thesis examines three of Faulkner’s novels, discussing their historical …


Robert Frost’S Ulteriority: Saying One Thing In Terms Of Another – The Inexpressible, Nicolette S. Stackhouse 2016 University of Southern Mississippi

Robert Frost’S Ulteriority: Saying One Thing In Terms Of Another – The Inexpressible, Nicolette S. Stackhouse

Honors Theses

Robert Frost’s poetry, which is famously rich in double meaning—saying one thing but meaning something else—is also concerned with pragmatism. Pragmatism implies that there is no one fundamental universal truth. I contend that Robert Frost’s poetry says that duplicity of meaning, or ulteriority, is something to be embraced. Frost wants the uncertainty of meaning to be understood by the reader as vital to life and the mind’s processes. The simple fact that so many readers search for the hidden meanings in his poetry justly proves this point. As a pragmatist, Frost was aware that the process of getting to a …


Keats And America: Attitudes And Appropriations, Jessica Hall 2016 East Tennessee State Universtiy

Keats And America: Attitudes And Appropriations, Jessica Hall

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While John Keats never traveled to America and only wrote a handful of admittedly hostile lines about it in his poetry, American writers and readers have consistently regarded Keats as one of the greatest and most influential poets of the past two centuries. His critical reputation in America has been stable since the 1840s, enduring throughout changing tastes and movements, and his biography and work have been utilized in manifold appropriations by American poets and writers. I examine Keats’s attitude toward the United States—which was in conflict with the general feeling regarding the country by his fellow Romantic poets—and briefly …


New Appalachians Of The Twenty-First Century: Reinventing Metanarratives And Master-Images Of Southern Appalachian Literature, Kelsey Alannah Solomon 2016 East Tennessee State University

New Appalachians Of The Twenty-First Century: Reinventing Metanarratives And Master-Images Of Southern Appalachian Literature, Kelsey Alannah Solomon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Appalachian studies tradition ascertains that Appalachian people politically, socially, and academically represent a heterogeneous minority group of our own. In post-capitalistic America, however, the Appalachian region serves as a hotspot for media misrepresentation and tourism that perpetuate through works of fiction, nonfiction, and scholarship both negative and positive stereotypes in the overall American consciousness. Twenty-first-century Appalachian authors, I contend, are reinventing Appalachia from its postmodern rubble through fictionalized reconceptualizations of our region’s history, shifts in our collective consciousness from anthropocentric to ecocentric, and subversions of the heteronormative discourse of our internal colony through explorations of the psychosexual. The contemporary …


Beyond "Main Street": Small Towns In Post-"Revolt" American Literature, Rachael Price 2016 University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

Beyond "Main Street": Small Towns In Post-"Revolt" American Literature, Rachael Price

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“Beyond Main Street” examines the impact and legacy of the literary movement that Carl Van Doren, in an infamous 1920 article from The Nation, referred to as the “revolt from the village.” This movement, which is widely acknowledged to encompass such writers as Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis, pushed back against the primacy of the heretofore-dominant pastoral tradition when it came to depictions of rural America. These authors sought to create a more accurate portrayal of the small town, one that, while not completely eschewing the pastoral, also exposed the more seedy side of village life. Critics …


Divining The Southwest: Liminality, Pragmatism, And Regionalism In "Death Comes For The Archbishop", Alex C. Blomstedt 2016 University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

Divining The Southwest: Liminality, Pragmatism, And Regionalism In "Death Comes For The Archbishop", Alex C. Blomstedt

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work aims to explore the themes of pragmatism and liminality, particularly as they pertain to spirituality, in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. By taking an interdisciplinary critical approach to the novel, I will synthesize its spiritual affect into a sensibility called “pragmatic liminality.” Finally, I will connect this sensibility to other works in the Southwestern literary canon and elucidate the foundational importance that pragmatic liminality has to the Southwestern “sense of place” and its role in the larger narratives of regionalism in American literature.


The Stories Of Junot Díaz: Genre And Narrative In Drown And This Is How You Lose Her, Luis Fernando Marin 2016 University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

The Stories Of Junot Díaz: Genre And Narrative In Drown And This Is How You Lose Her, Luis Fernando Marin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how Junot Díaz creates and constructs his literary alter-ego and narrator, Yunior de las Casas, and examines the Social and cultural aspects, such as race, ethnicity, and gender, that condition or influence Yunior’s construction. I argue that Díaz uses the short story as a subversive genre and modernist narrative techniques, such as shifts in space-time and focalization, to reflect Yunior’s diasporic, fragmented subjectivity. My analysis includes narratological and generic readings of Drown and This Is How You Lose Her, with a brief look at The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, paying particular attention to Yunior as …


“In The End We All Come To Be Cured Of Our Sentiments”: Violence And Cultural Anxiety In Cormac Mccarthy’S Border Trilogy, Stephen Michael Turner 2016 Arkansas State University

“In The End We All Come To Be Cured Of Our Sentiments”: Violence And Cultural Anxiety In Cormac Mccarthy’S Border Trilogy, Stephen Michael Turner

Student Theses and Dissertations

Each of Cormac McCarthy’s works contain unflinching violence and gore. A majority of McCarthy critics agree that the presence of violence within his work remain disconnected from each novel's plot and theme. This examination of Cormac McCarthy's "Border Trilogy" illustrates the political and historical relationship between the United States and Mexico, as represented through various characters within the trilogy, and also explores the role that cultural anxiety plays as a primary motivator for violence. The loss of a certain way of life is a major concept found within McCarthy’s work, and the “Border Trilogy” serves as a meditation on this …


Passing For Power: A Literary Look At Passing As A Means Of Determining Identity And Claiming Agency, Jeanna Leah Mason 2016 Arkansas State University

Passing For Power: A Literary Look At Passing As A Means Of Determining Identity And Claiming Agency, Jeanna Leah Mason

Student Theses and Dissertations

Historically, passing has been associated with race, such as when a black man or woman with light-colored skin would assume a white identity for a specific purpose. In early incarnations, passing was generally temporary and was used as an escape from the degradations of slavery or the economic and legal restrictions under Jim Crow laws. In Pudd’nhead Wilson, Twain uses Tom Driscoll’s passing to illustrate identity formation and the illogic of using legal definitions to determine race. In Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner uses the Bon family’s experiences to explore society’s influence on each one’s experience with passing. Finally, in Passing, Larsen …


"In The Land Of Tomorrow": Representations Of The New Woman In The Pre-Suffrage Era, Natalie B. O'Neal 2016 University of Nebraska-Lincoln

"In The Land Of Tomorrow": Representations Of The New Woman In The Pre-Suffrage Era, Natalie B. O'Neal

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This digital anthology explores feminism in selected short fiction by women writers from the 1911 run of the popular women’s magazines Woman’s Home Companion, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Farmer’s Wife. This fiction furthered the women’s rights movement by allowing women to imagine a world similar to their own with a heroine who voiced their desires and enacted change. Rather than the more experimental, inaccessible literature of avant garde high modernist writers consumed by the upper class, popular fiction reached a wider, middle class audience and was more effective at producing a progressive zeitgeist following the stilted Victorian …


Empathy In Its Entirety, Callie Reymann 2016 Wright State University

Empathy In Its Entirety, Callie Reymann

Best Integrated Writing

Reymann critically analyzes three novels through the lens of empathy and then applies her critical analysis and observations to her experiences as a person diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome.


Conflicting Cultural Identity And The Baz Benin In Edwidge Danticat’S Claire Of The Sea Light, Kellianne Rinearson 2016 Wright State University

Conflicting Cultural Identity And The Baz Benin In Edwidge Danticat’S Claire Of The Sea Light, Kellianne Rinearson

Best Integrated Writing

Rinearson explores the connection between the gangs in Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light and mythological figures in Haitian folklore thus adding nuance to the discussion of Caribbean cultural identity.


The Grimké Sisters: Radical Defenders Of Women’S Rights And Abolition, Megan Bailey 2016 Wright State University

The Grimké Sisters: Radical Defenders Of Women’S Rights And Abolition, Megan Bailey

Best Integrated Writing

Bailey examines the intersection of gender and religion in the abolition movement of the American Civil War and argues that the Grimké sisters’ effectiveness in preaching against slavery was undermined by the perception that they were too radical.


Best Integrated Writing 2016 - Complete Edition, 2016 Wright State University

Best Integrated Writing 2016 - Complete Edition

Best Integrated Writing

Best Integrated Writing includes excellent student writing from Integrated Writing courses taught at Wright State University. The journal is published annually by the Wright State University Department of English Language and Literatures.


The Jungle Book Review, Cathleen Dionne 2016 Johnson & Wales University - Providence

The Jungle Book Review, Cathleen Dionne

MBA Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Watersheds In Life, Molly Morgan 2016 Western Kentucky University

Watersheds In Life, Molly Morgan

Robert Penn Warren Essay Contest

No abstract provided.


Watershed, Matthew Doyle 2016 Caverna High School

Watershed, Matthew Doyle

Robert Penn Warren Essay Contest

No abstract provided.


The Systems Of Life, Madeline Stephenson 2016 Western Kentucky University

The Systems Of Life, Madeline Stephenson

Robert Penn Warren Essay Contest

No abstract provided.


Digital Commons powered by bepress