American Literature Commons^™

Four Indian-Related Novels By Lucia St. Clair Robson, Kenneth Estes Hall

ETSU Faculty Works

Excerpt: Lucia St. Clair Robson began publishing historical novels in 1982 with Ride the Wind, which draws on the history of the Comanches, and has continued to work in the field of historical fiction. Four of her novels focus closely on historical personages: Ride the Wind (Cynthia Ann Parker and Quanah Parker); Light a Distant Fire (Osceola of the Seminoles); Walk in My Soul (Tiana Rogers of the Cherokee and Sam Houston); and Ghost Warrior(Lozen of the Chiricahua Apache).

The Haitian Connection In Connie May Fowler’S Sugar Cage, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

In her first novel, Sugar Cage (1992), Connie May Fowler, a white Floridian with Cherokee ancestry and an early exposure to Voodoo, employs some of the narrative conventions of magical realism as a way around the impasse of Southern race relations in Florida in the 1960s. Her otherwise modernist narrative technique of nine first-person narrators emphasizes the isolation of her characters at the same time that the variety of viewpoints encourages readers to see both the interracial and international connections that elude or confuse her characters. The cultural and transnational complexities she explores, especially as regards the importation of African …

Faulkner's Literary Historiography: Color, Photography, And The Accessible Past, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

This paper looks at changes in visual representation in the 1930s as a means of understanding Faulkner's newly historiographic methods in this decade. The advent of Kodachrome® in 1935 as the first widely used color film stock presaged the turn toward the black-and-white documentary mode so important to the nation's efforts to "countenance," or see, the economic crises of the period. Faulkner's descriptive and representational practices in the period 1929-36 also shifted from a more pervasive use of coloration to a style like the silver halide photos prevalent in the middle nineteenth century--the period of the past-tense events in Absalom, …

William Faulkner, William James, And The American Pragmatic Tradition (Review), Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

In his book's final sentence, David Evans is concerned that we "assure a future for Faulkner, and a Faulkner for the future" (236). Taken at a glance, this concern might imply a need to safeguard Faulkner's continuing relevance: pointing to the future and Faulkner together suggests that their mutuality is not, in fact, certain. And in light of shifting critical approaches to this canonical writer, not to mention the diminishing importance of author studies as well as scholarly genres like the monograph, Evans's caution makes a certain critical sense.

Yet the statement's fuller meaning within the context of this new …

Faith And (Un)Certainty In The Writing Of Stowe, Hawthorne, And Dickinson: The Intersecting Language Of Theology And Feminism, Denise Yezbick

Wayne State University Dissertations

This research considers how Hawthorne's, Dickinson's, and Stowe's writing express the prevailing culture's attitudes toward the operation of meaning in religion. It poses the question: Is a crisis of meaning threatening to the religious sensibility? Looking at Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and specific poems of Dickinson, I show how their writing gestures to a kind of religious sensibility that is not threatened by such a crisis, but suggests, rather, that it is essential to a genuine openness to otherness, and ultimately to the Divine. The fiction and poetry of these two authors express this both negatively, as an attack on …

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 …

A Letter And A Dream: The Literary Friendship Of Ellen Glasglow And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Ashley Quaye Andrews Lear

Humanities & Communication - Daytona Beach

No abstract provided.

Mother Of Three Drowns Children And Other Stories, Laura L. Stubbins

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A collection of short stories depicting fictional characters facing what is absent from their lives.

This Fact Which Is Not One: Differential Poetics In Transatlantic American Modernism, Sarah Ruddy

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation proposes that the literary fact, first discussed by Jurij Tynajnov in his 1924 essay "The Literary Fact," and later in "On Literary Evolution" (1929), names an intersection of literary formalism and social representation central to experimental modernist texts in the twentieth century. The poetics of literary fact that I propose finds its basis in Russian Formalist and Frankfurt School theory and reflects several important twentieth century social moments to illustrate how historical and social facts seek poetic form. In my use of the term, "fact" is the materiality of history as it moves from the social world, carrying …

Lola Ridge : Poet And Renegade Modernist, Anna Hueppauff

Theses : Honours

This thesis examines the poetry of Lola Ridge as a form of alternative Modernism. Poet, editor, anarchist, Lola Ridge is largely an unknown identity in Modernist discourses. Primarily recognised as a social justice poet, her work has been viewed through a traditional Modernist lens and excluded to the periphery as ‘sentimental’. This thesis argues that Ridge personally and professionally exceeds these categories. She modelled a practice of engagement in her personal life by actively participating in rallies and protests against injustice, and living in poverty in solidarity with the poor, giving her work an authenticity worth investigating. Her poetry provides …

"You Are Safe": Black Maternal Politics Of Resistance And The Question Of Community Consensus In African American Women's Literature, Daniela Marinova Koleva

Theses and Dissertations

The study focuses on a number of African American women's literary texts that employ the figure of the black mother and the motif of infanticide to engage in critical statements about system arrangements, repressive practices, and theory designs with direct effect upon black people's choices for organizing their lives and existence. Such critical statements are inevitably political and their construction is offered in a most provocative and startling way given the choice of maternal infanticide to make the claims.

Angelina Weld Grimke's "The Closing Door" (1919), Georgia Douglas Johnson's Safe (c.1929), Shirley Graham's It's Morning (c. 1938-1940), and Toni Morrison's …

“Reckoning” With America’S Past: Robert Penn Warren’S Later Poetry, Joan Romano Shifflett

Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren’s later poetry, specifically Rumor Verified and Altitudes and Extensions, deserves closer critical attention to the function served by the American past. Whether it is facing the bloody reality of westward expansion or acknowledging the alienation and dehumanization that results from the Industrial Revolution, Warren’s poems suggest a method of self-reflection that yields a fuller sense of American identity and, consequently, an awareness and knowledge of how to live in this modern world. A close study of the poetic techniques in “Going West” serves as a model for how Warren uses historical backdrops to employ his underlying philosophy …

Racism Recognized And The Reformation Of The South In Ernest Gaines‘, La Toya Session

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

According to Ernest Gaines‘ personal experiences as a Southerner, without addressing the history of slavery, the quest for human dignity becomes meaningless. The discourses and the ideologies of the characters in AGathering of Old Men represent a call for social change. A Gathering of Old Men is however, more than just a novel about whites dominating blacks; it is a novel about the fight for humanity in spite of the threat of a new social order. The social repercussions of slavery and the denial of black manhood are central issues in A Gathering of Old Men, but Gaines also exhibits …

Moral Performances: Melodrama And Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Jeffrey Taylor Pusch

Dissertations

Despite a high number of ticket sales, theater reviews, and innumerable letters and diary entries detailing trips to the theater, the stereotype that theater in nineteenth-century America was almost culturally invisible continued well into the twentieth century. Indeed, a scan of anthologies of American literature fails to yield any examples of nineteenth-century drama, even though figures like Henry James were also theater critics and playwrights. Just as it did in American life, theater exhibits a strong presence in the literature of the time. Considering theater’s pervasiveness, this dissertation seeks to restore it to its proper place in our study of …

Barking At Death: Hemingway, Africa, And The Stages Of Dying, James Plath

Scholarship

From amazon.com: Considering the time Hemingway spent not only on the safaris but also in preparing for them beforehand and writing about them afterwards, Africa was a major factor in his life and work. But surprisingly little scholarship has been devoted to this aspect of Hemingway's oeuvre. This book fills that empty niche, opening the way for a long-delayed and multi-faceted conversation on a neglected aspect of Hemingway's work. Topics treated include historical, theoretical, biographical, theological, and literary interpretations of Hemingway's African topics and motifs.

Stuart, Jesse Hilton, 1907-1984 (Sc 2486), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 2486. Letter from Jesse Stuart to Riley Handy, 8 February 1975, confirming Lee and Joy Pennington as the subjects of a work which he names as "Which Tree Would You Rather Be," and its suitability as a morality tale for children.

Table Of Contents

The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard & Pulp Studies

Prefatory Remarks, by Mark E. Hall

Jeffrey Catherine Jones (1944 - 2011), rememberance by Charles Hoffman

"Ode," poem in memoriam by Charles Hoffman

Howard's Escape?, letter by Barbara Barrett

Castration Anxiety, letter by Jeffrey Shanks

Acknowledgements

Faction and Fiction in "Barack the Barbarian," by Jeffrey Kahan

Gloria, by Rusty Burke and Rob Roehm

Theosophy and the Thurian Age: Robert E. Howard and the Works of William Scott-Elliot, by Jeffrey Shanks

"Howard's Horror," review by Jason Ray Carney

"Black Wings:" Lovecraft's Widening Gyre, review by John Goodrich

"Malygris, Malnéant, and Malinbois, Nut No Malfeasance," review by Steve Tompkins

Briefly Noted, by …

A Psychoanalytical Approach To Bich Minh Nguyen's Stealing Buddha's Dinner, Wenying Xu

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

Racial minorities in the U.S. are often tormented by the tension between the corporeal and the ontological, with the former experienced as confining and the latter expansive. Such ambivalence often expresses itself in one's relationship with food. Here I propose to illustrate how Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytical theory on desire can assist us in understanding ethnicity as a bodily performance, which I venture to call an embodied ontology, applying this concept to Bich Minh Nguyen's Stealing Buddha's Dinner (2007).

Brashear, William Helm, 1855-1942 (Mss 14), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 14. Manuscripts of William Helm Brashear's poems, essays, play, and eulogy of Clarence Underwood McElroy. A few letters (6) and many clippings of his published works are included. Also scrapbooks have published poems pasted in them (3). Brashear was from Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Historicizing The Present In 9/11 Fiction, Todd Kuchta

Re-visioning Terrorism

Reconfiguring the debate on the historical efficacy of postmodern fiction, novels inspired by 9/11 seek to view the present itself as history. McEwan’s Saturday, DeLillo’s Falling Man, and Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist attempt to move beyond the view of history-as-text. Rather than evoking “the presence of the past,” they present characters trying to situate themselves in a new historical reality. Žižek’s account of Lacan illuminates DeLillo’s attempt to historicize the present, while McEwan gestures toward Foucault’s view of the present as exit. Only Hamid engages the historical potential of the present.