The Black Gum Well,
2012
Eastern Kentucky University
The Black Gum Well, Carolyn Ruth Pennington
Online Theses and Dissertations
The writing of the novel as a creative thesis in American literature was a special project approved by the English department of Eastern Kentucky University. Beyond the university's departmental requirements in the course of study for a a Master of English in American literature, I did an independent study of creative writing texts recommended by the creative writing department at Easter Kentucky University. I attended three summer workshops at the Hindman Settlement School Writer's Workshop, Hindman, Kentucky, with classes under professors/authors Robert Morgan, Gurney Norman, Lee Smith and other noted others. My undergraduate study of the English novel and my …
From Periodical To Book In Her Early Career:
E. D. E. N. Southworth’S Letters To Abraham Hart,
2012
University of Nebraska - Lincoln
From Periodical To Book In Her Early Career: E. D. E. N. Southworth’S Letters To Abraham Hart, Melissa J. Homestead
Department of English: Faculty Publications
E.D.E.N. Southworth's correspondence with Henry Peterson of the Saturday Evening Post and Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger, both of whom serialized her novels in their weekly story papers, is sometimes dramatic and emotional. In September 1849 Peterson chided Southworth for a “capital literary error” in an installment of her novel The Deserted Wife, in which the Reverend Withers uses his patriarchal authority to maneuver the young, unwilling Sophie Churchill into marriage. The incident would make readers “thro[w] down the tale in disgust,” he warns, and he omitted it from the serialization. In December 1854 he raised …
Introduction To E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering A Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist,
2012
University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Introduction To E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering A Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist, Melissa J. Homestead, Pamela T. Washington
Department of English: Faculty Publications
In early 1901, Willa Cather visited Prospect Cottage in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., the longtime home of the recently deceased novelist Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevirte (E. D. E. N.) Southworth. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1819 to southern parents (her father from Virginia, her mother from Maryland), Southworth lived in Washington with her family until she married Frederick Hamilton Southworth and moved with him to Wisconsin in 1841. When he deserted her and their two children,' she returned to Washington and taught school to support herself, running to writing to supplement her income from teaching. Within a few …
A Chronological Bibliography Of E. D. E. N. Southworth's Works Privileging Periodical Publication,
2012
University of Nebraska - Lincoln
A Chronological Bibliography Of E. D. E. N. Southworth's Works Privileging Periodical Publication, Melissa J. Homestead, Vicki L. Martin
Department of English: Faculty Publications
Previous attempts at a comprehensive bibliography of E. D. E. N. Southworth's fiction have organized her works alphabetically by book title or chronologically by book publication date. Serialization information--if included at all--is subordinated to book entries or listed separately. These bibliographic conventions better suit authors who published fewer novels than Southworth did and/or did \ not routinely serialize their works. As a result, earlier bibliographies have caused confusion about the size and chronology of Southworth's body of work. Adding to the confusion, her book publisher T. B. Peterson arbitrarily broke many of her novels that appeared in serial form under …
Writing The Self: Feminist Experiment And Cultural Identity,
2012
Wayne State University
Writing The Self: Feminist Experiment And Cultural Identity, Jill Darling
Wayne State University Dissertations
This dissertation examines how twentieth-century experimental women writers construct non/narrative texts whose text-subjects mediate identity and call for increased possibilities for subject-identification in the world. The use of innovative formal strategies and experiment with narrative, combined with the content of identity critique, make these texts political projects that variously explore gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity in relation to contemporary American culture. In this project I bring discussions of identity into the theorization of formally innovative writing. I work to move away from the kinds of essentializing practices of identity politics--in which subjects are fit into specific identity categories--and toward more …
"Last Scientists Of The Whole" : The Poetics And Politics Of Deep Image,
2012
University at Albany, State University of New York
"Last Scientists Of The Whole" : The Poetics And Politics Of Deep Image, Peter Conrad Monaco
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Abstract: "Last Scientists of the Whole": The Poetics and Politics of Deep Image
American Modern Aphonic "Virtuality" Beyond Western Metaphysics : Eliot, Stevens, Hughes, And Bishop,
2012
University at Albany, State University of New York
American Modern Aphonic "Virtuality" Beyond Western Metaphysics : Eliot, Stevens, Hughes, And Bishop, Cheol-U Jang
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This project examines how a general idea of time is revealed in American modernists' works and why its relationship to the term, "the virtual," prompts a critical revaluation of the literary period of "Modernism." This idea of relating time to virtuality illustrates how American modernists seek an alternative power of the poetic imagination. I explore this through the works of four exemplary American modernists: T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, and Elizabeth Bishop, each of whom makes an attempt to reflect the reality of the rapidly changing modern world by showing us in their works the fleeting nature of …
Terr(Or) Incognito : Unveiling Poe's Titanic Universe,
2012
University at Albany, State University of New York
Terr(Or) Incognito : Unveiling Poe's Titanic Universe, Kraig Harry Odabashian
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This thesis investigates the role of dialectics in Edgar Allan Poe's fiction and prose. With particular attention to "Eureka" (1848), as well as "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1838) and Ligeia (1838/45), I argue that much of Poe's thought relies on theological sources including the writings of Jonathan Edwards and the Gospel of John.
"Only A Girl Like This Can Know What's Happened To You" : Traumatic Subjects In Contemporary American Narratives,
2012
University at Albany, State University of New York
"Only A Girl Like This Can Know What's Happened To You" : Traumatic Subjects In Contemporary American Narratives, Allison Virginia Craig
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This project is primarily concerned with the difficulty of representing traumatic experience and the problem of seeing violence and exploitation as natural and inevitable functions of social life. It argues that texts attempting to expose exploitive hierarchies and structural injustices often risk having their stories subsumed and commodified by the profuseness and proliferation of countervailing messages about individual choice and personal freedom. This struggle is highlighted through historicizing five contemporary American narratives--Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm, the films Boys Don't Cry and Monster, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Linda Hogan's Solar Storms--with and against critical concerns and popular texts. Furthermore, by employing …
Sylvia Plath At Yaddo : A Poet Finds Her Voice,
2012
University at Albany, State University of New York
Sylvia Plath At Yaddo : A Poet Finds Her Voice, Sarah Elizabeth Morse
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Since Sylvia Plath's death in 1963 critics have not stopped trying to piece together her life and work. Most of their focus lies on her last collection, Ariel, widely considered her best work. This thesis looks at a lesser-known time, before Plath had even published her first book of poetry named "The Colossus." In 1959 Plath spends eleven weeks at a writer's residence in Saratoga Springs, New York called Yaddo. While there she produces some of her most mature work to date, dealing with difficult topics for the first time such as suicide and issues with her deceased father and …
"God, Hieroglyphics" : Extrapolating The Third Dimension In "Go Down, Moses" And "The Crying Of Lot 49",
2012
University at Albany, State University of New York
"God, Hieroglyphics" : Extrapolating The Third Dimension In "Go Down, Moses" And "The Crying Of Lot 49", Jacob Alexander Waddy
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Abstract
Divisions And Mixing In "Go Down, Moses" By William Faulkner,
2012
University at Albany, State University of New York
Divisions And Mixing In "Go Down, Moses" By William Faulkner, Emiko Dodo
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This thesis examines the divisions and boundaries made by the mechanisms of separation that authorize a false perception of land, animals, blacks and women as commodities in William Faulkner's "Go Down, Moses." Asserting that "Go Down, Moses" describes mixing as well as divisions, this study demonstrates that the dichotomous boundaries imposed upon nature and humans repeatedly fail to function. Wilderness and plantation land can never be separated as they exist in mixture. And the racial boundary between whites and blacks is destabilized and blurred by characters like Lucas Beauchamp and Tomey's Turl, who engage in resistance against the society whose …
Midnight In A Perfect World,
2012
University at Albany, State University of New York
Midnight In A Perfect World, Jaron Serven
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
What follows is a collection of short stories dealing with the experience of growing up in America during the Digital Age, written in a creative fictional method. The stories directly deal with the themes of coming to terms with the past, friendship, facing tough choices, maintaining love in an unloving world-overall, expressing the look and feel of what it is like to be young, to see through the eyes of a generation inheriting a world of questionable morals. The collection pulls from numerous resources in the genre of the contemporary American bildungsroman, but also from much literary criticism dealing with …
Mysterious Ways : A Novel,
2012
University at Albany, State University of New York
Mysterious Ways : A Novel, Angela Pneuman
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Mysterious Ways: A Novel
Contriving History : Making Dead Time In Select Works Of William Faulkner,
2012
University at Albany, State University of New York
Contriving History : Making Dead Time In Select Works Of William Faulkner, Anthony Joseph Delgado
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
The protagonists of three of William Faulkner's major novels, Absalom, Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury, and Go Down, Moses each suffer from a compromised self that originates out of a past that contains excised elements. This revised history, which redacts past sins of rape, murder, and racial mixing, serves as a foundation for the present, passed down to the Faulknerian protagonists, Quentin, Jason, and Isaac, along lines of paternal inheritance. The three novels each suggest that when an idea of the self in the present is founded upon a past that has been rewritten, a shattering occurs when that …
Theologies Of Pain In American Puritanism : The Human Body And Spiritual Conversion From Anne Bradstreet To Jonathan Edwards,
2012
University at Albany, State University of New York
Theologies Of Pain In American Puritanism : The Human Body And Spiritual Conversion From Anne Bradstreet To Jonathan Edwards, Lucas Hardy
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This dissertation studies the many ways in which physical pain produces instances of personal piety in poems, narratives, and theological tracts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Puritan New England. Specifically, the project revises the idea that spiritual regeneration happened only through Puritan contacts with established liturgical means and precast homiletics; it contends instead that conversion occurred because of bodily pain. Analyzing four canonical Puritan writers--Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards--Theologies of Pain demonstrates that texts of even the most historically mainstream Puritans contend with the disruptive force of pain. Anne Bradstreet sees pain as an …
The Cost Of Kinship: Southern Literary Families And The Capitalist Machine,
2012
University of Mississippi
The Cost Of Kinship: Southern Literary Families And The Capitalist Machine, Joshua Sean Lundy
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The purpose of this thesis is to examine the thematic role of families and the familial in the literature of the Southern Renaissance. Whereas a number of scholars have come at this matter from a strictly cultural perspective, this analysis utilizes an economic framework. Following the example set by Karl Marx, Freidrich Engels, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, I attempt to formulate an understanding of the southern family not as an independent and singular social organism, but, rather, as a mechanism for the distribution of capital, firmly embedded within modern capitalism's expansive network of production, consumption, and exchange. My argument …
From Country To Country Club: The Landscapes Of Walker Percy,
2012
University of Mississippi
From Country To Country Club: The Landscapes Of Walker Percy, Joyce Garrett Butterworth
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
When Walker Percy emerged on the literary scene in 1961, the American landscape had begun to transform in new and dramatic ways. As more and more Americans moved from city centers to suburban developments, Percy found that, in more ways than one, the center would not hold. This American cultural transformation was well underway when Percy wrote The Moviegoer, perhaps the first novel from the American South to have as its subject matter a suburban dilemma. Challenging, as Percy does, traditional notions of southern place and community, this thesis seeks to discover in Percy's body of work whether the rise …
Two Trains Running: Capture And Escape In The Racialized Train Cars Of The Jim Crow South, 1893-1930,
2012
University of Mississippi
Two Trains Running: Capture And Escape In The Racialized Train Cars Of The Jim Crow South, 1893-1930, Raleigh Mixon Robinson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The role of the railroad in the modern American experience—and its role in making that experience modern—cannot be overstated. This thesis proposes to tell one of many possible railroad stories. By focusing on the historical and cultural relevance of a series of bodies in transit, I examine the implementation of railroad segregation law and the response by African-American performers. The thesis begins at the end of the nineteenth century with the Homer Plessy test case and continues across three decades, meeting along the way novelists Charles Chesnutt and James Weldon Johnson and musicians W. C. Handy, Henry "Ragtime Texas" Thomas, …
The Queen Of The Household: Mothers, Other Mothers, And Female Genealogy On The Plantation In Postslavery Women's Fiction,
2012
University of Mississippi
The Queen Of The Household: Mothers, Other Mothers, And Female Genealogy On The Plantation In Postslavery Women's Fiction, Correna Catlett Merricks
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
In many ways, the plantation defined the U.S. South because it was the primary site of production, and therefore income, for prominent southerners. In addition to being a site of production, the plantation created a complex series of connected relationships that was imagined by the plantocracy to be a large family unit. It functioned according to a specific hierarchical model that was primarily based on a patriarchal understanding of genealogy. Yet Kate Chopin's "Désirée's Baby" and "La Belle Zoraïde," Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Julia Peterkin's Scarlet Sister Mary, Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, …
