American Literature Commons^™

The Reader's Complicity: Universality In Waiting For The Barbarians, The Laramie Project, And The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, Aubrey Kosa

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Mockingjay Phenomena: A Study On The Position Of Young Adult Women In Dystopia, Hannah Hultman

Honors Theses

The purpose of this research is to explore the messages and impact of three young adult dystopian trilogies, The Hunger Games, Divergent and The Uglies. In particular, the role of the American female teenager in political, economic and social spheres is discussed through examining the three female teenaged protagonists of these novels. For comparative purposes, George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World function as counterpoints to the young adult novels; the analysis of these different novels will prove that young adult dystopian novels show young adult women that their choices and actions can be integral to their societies …

Between Species: Biopolitics, Resistance, And Interspeciesality, Temple Jo Gowan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines three twentieth-century novels—Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale, and Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats—in the context of posthumanist animal studies. A Foucauldian biopolitical lens foregrounds the inextricably linked ways that both human and nonhuman animal bodies are governed and controlled in a biopolitical era. Each chapter focuses on textual links between speciesism and the oppression of particular human groups based on gender, sexuality, and race, arguing that each novel offers new ways of thinking about both our own species, other animal species, and how humans relate to the nonhuman world.

God's Gonna Trouble The Water, Dominiqua Dickey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"God's Gonna Trouble the Water," is a noir set in Grenada, MS in the 1930s. This novel explores the issues of race, gender, and class via the protagonist, a thirtysomething black woman who despite her low status in the socioeconomic hierarchy of this small southern town is able to navigate the delicate complexities of the environment to search for her missing granddaughter, a mixed raced toddler whose father is the son of a prominent white land owner. Although national history portrays Mississippi as maintaining a polarizing view on race relations, the novel will explore how this idea of Mississippi is …

Review Of Writing The Environment In Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness Of Early Scribes Of Nature, Edited By Steven Petersheim And Madison P. Jones Iv, Matthew Guzman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

As editors Steven Petersheim and Madison Jones acknowledge in their Introduction, the field of ecocriticism owes much to the work of scholars such as Lawrence Buell, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Leo Marx. Petersheim and Jones’s intention for Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature is to extend the conversation about American writers of nature in a similar vein as Karla Armbruster and Kathleen Wallace’s Beyond Nature Writing (2001). One would expect names such as Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Melville to be included in a conversation about nineteenth-century American “nature” or “environmental” writing. Although these canonical names do indeed crop up throughout …

Orbic Bards: Religious Liberalism And The Problems Of Representation In The Postbellum Works Of Walt Whitman And Herman Melville, Anthony Gus Cohen

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In an attempt to reconcile the critical camps that attempt either to christianize or otherwise, "scripturize" nineteenth century literary texts with the converse, which attempts to paint them cynically as "infidel countertexts" this project seeks to find a middle ground. The works of Herman Melvile and Walt Whitman steeped in the increasingly liberal religious atmosphere of New York City following the Civil War, both strive to offer up an impressively accurate historical and poetical record, free from the problems of hearsay that nagged the deists and transcendentalists, and instead attempted to offer something that instead was nearer to reason, and …

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Gender And Power In Waiting For Godot, Ryan Wright

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Blind With Superstition, Cursed With Illusions: Masculinity And War In Bierce’S “Chickamauga”, Salina Patterson

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Game Debate: Video Games As Innovative Storytelling, Melissa Somerdin

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Contents, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

James Joyce’S Gnomon Of Pain In “Grace” And “The Dead”, Bari K. Boyd

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 18 Fall 2016

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Time In American High Modernism: Reading Fitzgerald, Hemingway, And Faulkner, Masahiko Seki

Wayne State University Dissertations

There were important changes about understanding of time in the early 20th century. Newtonian view of time that supports linearity and irreversibility of time was challenged in various fields. This trend promoted high modernists to seek new representations of time.

On the whole, high modernists denied Newtonian view of time and tried to describe merging of the past, the present, and the future. They often envisioned a romantic moment, in which this merging is perfectly achieved. But unlike European high modernists, American high modernists were more attracted to a traditional understanding of time that emphasizes a decisive difference between the …

The Radical South: Grassroots Activism, Ethnicity, And Literary Form, 1960-1980, Elizabeth Fielder

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“The Radical South” examines the art and writings of Civil-Rights-era social movements and locates U.S. based political structures in a hemispheric and global network. I reveal that the Civil Rights Movement, ethnic nationalism, and second-wave feminism were not separate entities; rather, the cultural work of activists was an intersectional effort that defied national strategies, such as non-violent protest and race-based separatism, that were often determined by their urban counterparts. Thus, I argue that new political aesthetics emerged from grassroots activism and set in motion ethnic and racial cultural expressions that embraced multiple, even conflicting, identities. As much as this art …

Read Me: The Emergence Of Female Voice In American Epistolary Fiction, Allison Melissa Ramsey

Honors Theses

The objective of the thesis was to study how the letter, as a narrative device provided by the epistolary genre, supplies unheard female characters with an avenue to speak when their worlds do not allow it. In the novels, the letters not only permit a female character to practice building a voice, but also provide a self-reflection and identification experience, which enables the woman to see where she is, rewrite her role, and control where she wants to go. Through reading Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies, and Maria Semple's …

Novelistic Intimacies: Reading And Writing In The Late Age Of Print, Vincent Michael Haddad

Wayne State University Dissertations

In Novelistic Intimacies, I consider the political and aesthetic structure of intimacy in a diverse set of narrative forms produced in the so-called digital age, or the late age of print—from encyclopedic and metafictional novels to graphic storytelling and Afrofuturist fantasy. As an organizing principle, intimacy forces us to consider, at once, how novelists have attempted to restore language and narrative with personal meaning after postmodernism—often termed New Sincerity or post-irony. At the same time, intimacy allows us to see how novelists have experimented on the materiality of the book and the eroticism of language to invent new, impersonal modes …

“Yellow Crowfoot In The Pond,/Not Lotus, Not Lily”: Mapping The River, Mapping Voices, Pamela J. Rader

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This paper examines the prosody of Chin’s eponymous poem, "The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty," through an eco-critical lens. While it does not dismiss the hybrid cultural influences of the poem, it focuses on the ways the non-human agents, or the figures in the poem’s landscape, “speak.” Poetry, like the poem’s terraced gardens, traces tension between the controlling human forces experienced by the narrating female I personas and the natural world’s affective inclinations.

The Transition From The Psychical To The Psychological: An Examination Of William James’ Influence On Henry James’ “The Turn Of The Screw”, Harry A. Jones Iv

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will show that, in its original form, “The Turn of the Screw” acted as a monument to the intellectual unity shared between Henry James and his brother William. Through evaluating James’ biography, memoirs, and letters with William, this thesis will illustrate the subtle collaborative inspirations that initially helped James write the first twelve-part serial edition of “The Turn of the Screw” for Collier’s Weekly, which ran from January 27, 1898 until April 16, 1898. I will also demonstrate the effect of William’s philosophy and his death on the revisions James’ made to his story as published in the …