American Literature Commons^™

Threads Of Truth : Aesthetics Of A Sacrificed Self In The Nineteenth-Century American Romance Of Susanna Rowson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James And Kate Chopin, Anne S. Jung

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Abstract

Altered States : Challenges To Narratives Of State Unity In 19th Century American Fiction, Aaron Minar Wittman

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation critiques the treatment of State spaces in four 19th Century American novels--Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly (1793), James Fenimore Cooper's Wyandotte; or, the Hutted Knoll (1843), John Rollin Ridge's The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854), and Herman Melville's The Piazza Tales (1856)--to expose underlying resistances to the limiting historical narratives that fuel and justify the imperialistic expansion of State. Through a close examination of the narrative construction and interpretation of geographic features, topographical layouts, and other environmental elements, I detail how these texts engage issues of State expansion and appropriation, establishing prominent correlations between territorial capture, …

I Have Been Somewhere: Place In The South Carolina Poems Of Nikky Finney And Kwame Dawes, Purvis L. Cornish

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following thesis focuses on the role of “place” in the poems of two black South Carolinian poets, Nikky Finney and Kwame Dawes. Borrowing from cultural and humanistic geographers’ myriad understandings of place, as well as philosophers’, I examine the ways in which Finney’s Rice and Dawes’s Wisteria function as meditations on and transmutations of the South Carolina low country in both its physical and non-physical dimensions, ultimately shedding light on historically silenced and marginalized emplaced realities. I also examine how Finney and Dawes employ different strategies of emplacement and their influence on the poems’ structure and meaning. In the …

Material Melancholy: Stranded Objects In Modern Southern Women's Writing, James Travis Rozier

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation traces the origins and uses of a specifically southern obsession with the past. Examining how southern women writers represent the compulsion to remember, I demonstrate how, in their narratives, efforts to retain intimate relationships with an idealized past obstruct characters' ability to live in the present. Their fiction aligns neatly with the dynamic described in psychoanalysis as 'melancholia’—not least because, in each case, these relationships with the past are typically ambivalent or even destructive, and the melancholic subjects must 'work through' their damaging attachments. Typical psychoanalytic approaches, however, have neglected how such troubled remembering might be influenced by …

More Than Death: Fear Of Illness In American Literature 1775-1876, Sarah Schuetze

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century narratives about personal and collective experiences with disease train American readers to fear illness while warning them against the dangers of being afraid. Such narratives depict the way illness ravages the physical body, disrupts interpersonal relationships, and threatens to dismantle social or municipal organization. In other words, the story of sickness is a story of terror-inducing dis-order. I study disease with a lens informed by cultural and disability studies to show that what makes disease historically and culturally significant is its power—through the body—to dis-order relationships, society, and knowledge. Anxieties about this dis-order …

A Public Duty: Medicine And Commerce In Nineteenth-Century American Literature And Culture, Heather E. Chacon

Theses and Dissertations--English

Using recent criticism on speculation and disability in addition to archival materials, “A Public Duty: Medicine and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture” demonstrates that reform-minded nineteenth-century authors drew upon the representational power of public health to express excitement and anxiety about the United States’ emerging economic and political prominence. Breaking with a critical tradition holding that the professionalization of medicine and authorship served primarily to support and define an ascending middle class, I argue that the authors such as Robert Montgomery Bird, Fanny Fern, George Washington Cable, and Pauline Hopkins fuse the rhetoric of economic policy and public …

The American Dime Museum: Bodily Spectacle And Social Midways In Turn-Of-The-Century American Literature And Culture, James C. Fairfield

Theses and Dissertations--English

The freak played a significant role in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century entertainment, but its significance extended beyond such venues as sideshows and minstrel shows. This dissertation examines the freak as an avatar emblematic of several issues, such as class and race, traditionally focused on in studies of Turn-of-the Century American literature and culture.

Disability and freakishness are explored as central to late-nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Americans’ identity. Freakishness is applied to a series of ways in which Americans in this period constructed their identity, including race, gender, and socioeconomic class, showing the dual role that the freak played for many …

Journal Of The National Association Of University Women - Spring 2015, Nauw

The Journal of the National Association of University Women

THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY WOMEN

JOURNAL OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY WOMEN

SPRING 2015

Previously Undocumented Art Criticism By Walt Whitman, Wendy J. Katz

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Whitman’s “Letters from a Travelllling Bachelor,” written for the New York Sunday Dispatch (October 14, 1849, through January 6, 1850) are well known, as is his practice of contributing news about Brooklyn and Brooklyn artists to the Dispatch as well as to other newspapers like the Evening Post.1 But his extended description of a painting by Jesse Talbot, Encampment of the Caravan, in the Evening Post (“Encampment of the Caravan,” April 29, 1851; p. 1), and his critique of the National Academy of Design annual exhibition in the Dispatch of the following year (“An Hour at the Academy of Design,” …

Colorism And African American Women In Literature: An Examination Of Colorism And Its Impact On Self-Image, Jakira Davis

Honors Theses

The purpose of this study is to explore how African American women in literature have been impacted by colorism. Through this study which included a fictional novel from the twentieth century and a non-fictional novel from the twenty-first century we are able to see how women of color have been impacted by colorism. This thesis explores evidence of the impact of colorism and its impact on the image of African American women and young girls. This thesis suggests that there is evidence of colorism found in literature and thus colorism is a real issue in the African American community that …

Organic Angels: Innocence, Conversion, And Consumption In The Antebellum American Novel, Laura Jean Schrock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Midcentury American novelists variously reworked the traditional conversion narrative to reflect a marked cultural shift in attitude towards human "nature," newly conceived as innocent and inclined to salvation. This liberalized aesthetic of conversion takes shape through the trope of the "organic angel," a developmental female figure whose journey from childhood innocence to saintly womanhood merges the processes of sexual maturation and Protestant conversion. Because she purifies self-interested desire by redirecting it towards spiritual ends, the organic angel provides a symbolic reconciliation of the young nation's budding imperial capitalism with its millennial expectations. While traditional emphasis on a maternal ethos at …

Speaking In Wild Tongues: The Borderlands Of Eudora Welty And Alice Walker, Sara Gabler Thomas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Borderlands/La Frontera Gloria Anzaldúa describes her experience undergoing a dental procedure as a battle between her wild tongue and the dentist. Beginning with a discussion of Anzaldúa’s concept of the wild tongue, this project asks how writers across the US South depict unruly tongues and infelicitous speech. Methodologically, this thesis inverts the comreading model in literary studies of reading Third World writers through First World theorists. Instead, beginning with Anzaldúa, I propose to reverse this process and assert a new reading methodology of reading First World writers through Third World theorists. The trope of the wild tongue will mobilize …

Thin Bodies, Elizabeth Meliza Tran

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Thin Bodies, is a fictional thriller revolving around a retrospective, female voice. It is a short novel-length view into the insular community of the sorority, specifically in the U.S. Deep South. The town and university are both fictional, as are the characters, sororities, and events, but they are based in realistic institutions of socialization and community. Sarah Beth, our protagonist and narrator, considers her coming-of-age through her recruitment, initiation, ensuing leadership, and eventual fall from grace in her sorority, Theta Kappa. The group of women that this novel intends to characterize struggle with identity and how they are perceived against …

Dog's Best Friend?: Vivisecting The "Animal" In Mark Twain's A Dog's Tale, Matthew Guzman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

“A Dog’s Tale” encapsulates the duality that the domesticated dog as both loyal “friend” and dependable scientific “instrument” denotes. Twain paints a dark portrait of man’s association with “beast.” Additionally, the story presents much more than a simple anthropomorphic tale. Although the nonhuman narrator has humanlike characteristics, one is always aware that Aileen Mavourneen is a dog. Nowhere is this divide more apparent than in the narrator’s failed attempts to “understand” the language and behavior of the human characters. The tale epitomizes the dogma of man’s rule over “lower” creatures, but it does not fully reaffirm these accepted beliefs. Rather, …

Perversions Of The American Dream In The 20th Century Novel: Requiem For A Dream And The Great Gatsby, Mary C. Menzemer

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The American Dream’s outlines are pretty clear: find a good job, make enough money, raise a good family, love your neighbors and friends, and uphold American laws. In this essay, I am going to explore what happens when the dream’s goals are darkened, corrupted, and attempted to be found by unconventional means and shortcut through the lens of two novels written in the 20^th century, at the height of the American Dream’s popularity: Requiem for a Dream and The Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, at a time when a slew of immigrants were seeking better …

"Horses And Oil In His Blood": Mythopoetics And Western Petromelancholia In Alexandra Fuller's The Legend Of Colton H. Bryant, Lindsay Stephens

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Alexandra Fuller’s book The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, often read as merely a sad biography of a young man who meets his demise in the Wyoming energy patch, performs urgent cultural work. Fuller captures Wyoming’s shift from conventional (Easy Oil) extraction to the extreme (Tough Oil) extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, at the dawn of the twenty-first century. This shift to Tough Oil involves far more than engineering concerns, as Stephanie LeMenager points out in her cultural critique Living Oil. LeMenager terms our national failure to acknowledge the crises that accompany Tough Oil practices …

In Defense Of Marianne Dashwood: A Categorization Of Language Into Principles Of Sense And Sensibility, Ashley Bonin

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

No abstract provided.

The Woman Warrior: The Silent Creation Of A Third Space, Hayley Struzik

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

No abstract provided.

Intergenerational Trauma: A Look At Sherman Alexie's Child Characters, Kiersten Sargent

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.