Literature in English, North America Commons^™

True Crime As A Literature Of Advocacy, Leslie Rowen

Undergraduate Theses

True crime is often dismissed as a genre of cheap paperbacks with little literary merit and highly sensational, pornographic content. By contrast, my paper proposes an alternative literary history of true crime which merits further investigation because of its focus on advocating for justice where the justice system failed. I begin with Catharine Williams’ 1833 piece Fall River: An Authentic Narrative, an early example from true crime literature. The text disputes the acquittal of a Methodist preacher for the murder of a female mill worker, arguing that the trial was unfairly slanted in the defendant’s favor. More than a century …

American Prometheus: Carnegie's Captain, Bill Jones, Tom Gage

Trade & Scholarly Monographs

American Prometheus: Carnegie’s Captain, Bill Jones presents a compelling historical memoir of the illustrious life of rebellious steel genius and inventor, Captain Bill Jones.

Hero of the Civil War and Johnstown Flood, Captain Bill Jones built and supervised the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, which in its first five years advanced to the rank of the world’s most productive and profitable steel mill. His “hands-on, all over” style solved Carnegie’s production problems on the spot, enlisted baseball teams from the Works’ departments to defuse ethnic strife, promoted the eight-hour work day, and patented inventions, including the Jones Hot Metal mixer, which …

Female Insanity: The Portrayal Of A Murderess In Alias Grace, Maria Medlyn

Honors Capstone Projects

In this paper, I analyze Margaret Atwood’s biographical novel Alias Grace which is based on the life of Grace Marks, a servant who was convicted of murdering her employer and his housekeeper. I use feminist and psychological perspectives to recount Atwood’s interpretation of the 1800s social hierarchy and the use of labels in controlling individuals. First, I explain the severe oppression of women in the 19^th century. For example, women in this era were financially controlled by men, held to high moral standards, expected to be chaste yet submissive, and restricted to domestic roles. Next, I describe the changing …

Private Deaths: The Impossibilities Of Home In The Modernist Novel, Ava Bindas

English Honors Projects

This project examines novels by Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Nella Larsen featuring female characters who contemplate or commit suicide. Relying on a composite theoretical framework that weaves together geography theories of spaces as well as gendered theories of bodies by authors like Judith Butler, Rita Felski, and Victoria Rosner, I argue women commit suicide because their modern homes fail to accommodate their gendered bodies. Focusing less on the moment of death than on the conditions that make choosing to live impossible, this project tracks how, during a moment of supposed liberation, conceptions of gender, modernity, and domestic …

A Scholarly Fictional Narrative Portraying The Stigma That Surrounds Mental Illness And Its Place In Literature, Adrianna Robinson

Honors Theses

The purpose of this scholarly fictional narrative is meant to reveal the struggles that individuals with mental illness go through, not only in their personal lives, but also with their place in society. I lay out research around the stigma that surrounds mental illness first, defining both public and self-stigma in relation to mental illness. I also briefly mention Girl, Interrupted and “The Yellow Wallpaper,” to show how authors have addressed the stigma that surrounds mental illness in literature in the past. The research is an important part of understanding why I write the fictional narrative the way I do, …

Precarious Positions Of Femininity In Contemporary Literature: A College Course Creation, Ireland Atkinson

Honors Theses

In an effort to understand college instruction, I created a collegiate literature course and its logistical materials. This process manifested in the creation of a syllabus, schedules, assignments, and a teaching philosophy statement. With the title “Precarious Positions of Femininity in Contemporary Literature,” the course is in an interdisciplinary format that explores gender and women’s studies with literary scholarship as its medium. All of the texts are not only written by female authors, but also address women’s issues and the precarious positions their femininity puts them in. With a focus on the intersectionality and the diversity of the female experience, …

Cross Crossings Cautiously: Uses Of African American Vernacular English In American Literature, Emily Crnkovich

English Honors Projects

This project uses sociolinguistics to theorize the use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in literature across three time periods: the Antebellum era, the post-bellum/Reconstruction era, and the Harlem Renaissance. Different dialects of English encode different power structures, and in order to interrogate those power structures I track how white and black authors represent the language of African American characters on the page and how audiences interpret that language. I find that African American authors tend to embrace the variability and diversity of natural language better than their white counterparts, whose use of literary dialect often falls into essentialist clichés.

Comparative Literary History, Michael J. Griffin Ii

Criticism

Review of Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel by David James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 223. $95.00 cloth.

The Art Of Stasys Krasauskas, Mykolas Sluckis, Stasys Krasauskas

Ontario Review

No abstract provided.

A Conversation With Margaret Atwood, Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates

Ontario Review

No abstract provided.

To Kill A Mockingbird, The Help, And The Regendering Of The White Savior, Brett Seekford

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

Filmmakers continue to use the “White Savior “ archetype to construct racialized messages in the post-Civil Rights era. These protagonists, who resolutely defend the rights of African Americans, ultimately focalize whiteness and marginalize black characters and voices. Though a white savior features prominently in both To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and The Help (2011), The Help’s regendering of the archetype invites viewers to imagine a world in which a white savior is no longer necessary. The Help’s update on the white savior trope from Atticus Finch to Skeeter Phelan allows for deeper development of black characters and a …

( Re ) Claiming History And Visibility Through Rhetorical Sovereignty: The Power Of Diné Rhetorics In The Works Of Laura Tohe, Jessica Marie Safran Hoover

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the intricate intersections of code switching, trickster discourse and rhetorical sovereignty in the scholarship of Diné author Laura Tohe, as Tohe operationalizes survivance and alliance in complex ways, ways that “actuate a presence” in the face of ongoing attempts to render American Indian peoples absent from American rhetorical, literary, and geographic landscapes. Existing research in American Indian literatures and rhetorics often focus on the need for reclaiming rhetorical sovereignty. Yet, little work has been done to emphasize connections between the use of code switching, translation, and trickster discourse in order to give visibility to past and contemporary …

Strange Things Keep Happening To Me: Postcolonial Identity And Henry James's Ghosts, Conor J. Scruton

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

While there have been many studies of Henry James's ghost stories, there has been surprisingly little scholarship written on postcolonial tensions in these works. In American literature, the figure of the Native American ghost is a common expression of Western settler guilt over native erasure and land seizure. In both his American and British ghost stories, though, James focuses more on the horror within the colonizer than the terrifying, ghostly other from the edge of the empire. As such, these ghost stories serve as a more significant critique of colonialism and imperialism than Gothic texts that merely demonstrate the colonizer’s …

Games & Disguise: The Businessman In 19th & 20th Century Literature, Megan Koperna

Senior Honors Projects

No abstract provided.

Beauty Outside Our Doors: Conservation Stories Of Black Hawk County, University Of Northern Iowa. Environmental Literature (Spring 2017).

Environmental Literature Project

Beauty Outside Our Doors collects stories, poems, essays, and interviews with people of Black Hawk County, Iowa, giving voice to their relationship to the land, in their own words. From beekeeping to family farms to kayaking down the Cedar River and nature therapy, this work serves as a witness to the beauty to be found here—and the challenges we still face as citizens and lovers of the natural world.

Published as a collaboration between the Soil and Water Conservation District and students in the Spring 2017 Environmental Literature class at the University of Northern Iowa, this unique anthology invites you …

Silence Emerging From Birds, Rebecca Macijeski

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation represents the culmination of five years of creative activity in poetry. Included within this document are three main components: 1.) a critical introduction to my book-length manuscript of original poems complete to satisfy the requirements of creative writing within the English Department; 2.) a description of my creative activity reflected in that book-length manuscript, and; 3.) a sample of previously published original poems from the manuscript. I will describe each of these components in greater detail below.

The critical introduction to the creative work seeks to explore and examine various aesthetic and theoretical influences on my poems. The …

The Mask Strikes Back: Blackness As Aporia In Moby-Dick And Benito Cereno, Jerome D. Clarke

Student Publications

What is the American Gothic a reaction to? Whereas other thinkers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne locates the building blocks of the American Gothic in Puritan Christianity or Amerindian Genocide, I argue that Melville posits the genesis of chattel slavery and the construction of racial category as the repressed events that haunt the Americas and return uninvited. By using the Gothic motif of the living corpse, the famed writer of Moby-Dick addresses the social bereavement which Blackness comes to represent in the Americas. By looking for truth on the skin and flesh, the main characters of Moby-Dick and “Benito Cereno” represent …

Transatlantic Grammars: Lindley Murray And William Cobbett, Peter J. Manning

Department of English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Joyce Carol Oates's A Book Of American Martyrs, Eric K. Anderson

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

A review of Joyce Carol Oates's novel A Book of American Martyrs considering her fiction's dialogue with controversial political issues in American society.

The Environmental Humanities In A Post-Truth World, Amanda M. Di Battista, Paul Huebener

The Goose

Editorial introduction to The Goose Volume 15, Issue 2 (2017).