Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Huckleberry Finn And The Picaresque As Lens Against Debt Peonage, Cory Dahlstrom

Annual Graduate Student Symposium

The literary genre of picaresque originated in Sixteenth Century Spain, but has become a prominent staple in American culture–especially post-Civil War. This project specifically discusses the role Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn played in analyzing the failures of reconstruction’s provision toward African American freedom and equality.

Penelope’S Daughters, Barbara Dell`Abate-Çelebi

Zea E-Books Collection

A feminist perspective of the myth of Penelope in Annie Leclerc’s Toi, Pénélope, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and Silvana La Spina’s Penelope.

At the origin of Western literature stands Queen Penelope—faithfully waiting for her husband to come home: keeping house, holding on to the throne, keeping the suitors at arm’s length, preserving Odysseus’ place and memory, deserted for the pursuit of war and adventures, and bringing up a son alone, but always keeping the marriage intact. Yet recently the character of Penelope, long the archetype of abandoned, faithful, submissive, passive wife, has been reinterpreted by feminist criticism and re-envisioned by …

Antitheatricality And Irrationality: An Alternative View, Kent Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

"Over the last three decades, antitheatrical authors like Stephen Gosson, Phillip Stubbes, and William Prynne have become increasingly visible in the literary and cultural studies of the early modern period. Even so, the tendency has been to treat these authors as ideological extremists: reactionary hacks whose opposition to stage plays originates in outrageous ideas of the self, impossible notions of right and wrong, and bizarre beliefs about humanity’s susceptibility to external suggestion. This characterization can be traced back to several of the pioneering studies in the field, including Jonas Barish’s The Antitheatrical Prejudice (1985) and Laura Levine’s Men in Women’s …

The Weight Of “Glory”: Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, And Women’S Issues In Middlemarch, Megan Armknecht

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Activism, Community And Cultural Heritage: “Communitism” In Creek Literature, Rachel Maria Cain

Honors Theses

"Communitism" refers to literature that encourages activism by celebrating and promoting American Indian communities. This thesis investigates how the literary works, The Fus Fixico Letters (1902 – 1908) and Drowning in Fire (2004), are communitist by supporting specific political and social changes in Creek communities. Through The Fus Fixico Letters Alexander Posey promoted his progressive political convictions, including that Creeks should embrace land allotment and endorse the creation a separate state for American Indians. Drowning in Fire, by Craig Womack, takes place throughout 1904 – 1993 and relates traditional Creek stories and practices to modern life. The novel delves …

Selected Nick Adams Stories: Ernest Hemingway’S Sense Of Place, Brendan M. Raleigh

Student Publications

This thesis examines how Ernest Hemingway’s use of natural imagery and physical elements in several of his semi-autobiographical Nick Adams stories offer insights into his character, especially Nick Adams. It analyzes Adams’s interactions with the physical world and compares these interactions with his interpersonal relationships and his own development. The short stories that this thesis examines include “Indian Camp,” “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” “Now I Lay Me,” “The End of Something,” “The Three Day Blow,” and “Big Two-Hearted River.” In these stories, Hemingway uses the natural world as a defense mechanism for Nick Adams, a character who turns …

Discarding Dreams And Legends: The Short Fiction Of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, And Eudora Welty, Katy L. Leedy

Dissertations (1934 -)

This project examines four Southern women writers—Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty—who use the genre of the short story and the setting of the farm or insular living space to critique Southern regional identity. I argue that the social critiques of these southern female short story writers have been overlooked because stereotypes rooted in the fantasy of the idealized southern woman has limited critical perceptions of these authors’ engagements with cultural or political issues, when in reality their short fiction helped to influence the shifting expectations of the mid-twentieth century South. This study provides a …

Morality And Pleasure In Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Sarah Bonney

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In “Morality and Pleasure in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried,” I examine how representations of pleasure in O’Brien’s novel indicate how the soldiers establish a new code of morality during their military service in Vietnam. Although civilians live with a binary understanding of acceptable and unacceptable behavior, the soldiers must commit immoral acts in order to serve honorably, thereby conflicting with this previous understanding. Western ideology asserts that pleasure accompanies moral behavior; because the soldiers perform violent acts, they must ascertain a new understanding of morality in order to continue to feel pleasure throughout and in spite of …

The Art Of Death: Murder According To Poe, Hitchcock, And De Quincey, Jeanine Bee

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This paper examines the works of both Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock in light of Thomas De Quincey’s series of essays entitled “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” In his essays, De Quincey presents murder as an art form that can be criticized and appreciated just as any other fine art. While De Quincey’s essays faced some negative reaction when they were originally published, both Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock seem to have found something worthwhile in De Quincey’s ideas about the art of murder; Poe and Hitchcock both present murder as an art form …

Reexamining Virtue In Arthur Mervyn, Clarissa Mcintire

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Though Arthur Mervyn focuses primarily on the deadly 1793 invasion of the yellow fever into Philadelphia and humanitarian responses to it, the novel’s juxtaposition of contemporary societal attitudes towards fever victims with those towards unchaste or fallen women underlines striking similarities between the two. In this article I claim that, when applied to unchaste women, the novel’s argument for improved treatment of diseased and infected persons also establishes the unreliability of sexual purity as a standard of respectability due to the potential for a woman’s virtue to be taken from her. Therefore, because Arthur’s society judges the respectability of individuals …

Writing Resistance: Agency And Politics In The Postmodern And Contemporary Novel, Bradley Michael Poling

Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks to substantiate a key ambivalence at the heart of contemporary literature: what does it mean to "return" to politics? Critics of contemporary literature have outlined the new literary aesthetic, using social and political engagement as a key component in distinguishing the contemporary novel from its postmodern predecessor. This project, in response to this claim, will examine both the discursive and representation politics of two landmark postmodern novels, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Don DeLillo's Libra, while examining Jennifer Eganâ??s A Visit from the Goon Squad as a descendent of this literary lineage. This project argues that the …

Whitefield's Music: Moorfields Tabernacle, The Divine Musical Miscellany (1754), And The Fashioning Of Early Evangelical Sacred Song, Stephen A. Marini

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Evangelical hymnody was the most significant form of popular sacred song in eighteenth-century Anglo-America. John and Charles Wesley built their Methodist movement on it, but little is known about the music of their great collaborator and eventual rival, George Whitefield (1714-1770). The essential sources of Whitefield's music are the development of ritual song at his Moorfields Tabernacle in London, his Collection of Hymns for Social Worship (1753) prepared for that congregation, and a little-known tunebook called The Divine Musical Miscellany (1754) that contains the first and definitive repertory of music known to be sung at Moorfields. This essay recovers Whitefield's …

Reconsidering The Emergence Of The Gay Novel In English And German, James P. Wilper

Purdue University Press Books

In Reconsidering the Emergence of the Gay Novel in English and German, James P. Wilper examines a key moment in the development of the modern gay novel by analyzing four novels by German, British, and American writers. Wilper studies how the texts are influenced by and respond and react to four schools of thought regarding male homosexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first is legal codes criminalizing sex acts between men and the religious doctrine that informs them. The second is the ancient Greek erotic philosophy, in which a revival of interest took place in the …

For The Progress Of “Faustus And Helen”: Crane, Whitman, And The Metropolitan Progress Poem, Jeremy Colangelo

Department of English Publications

This essay is meant to invigorate a critical discussion of the progress poem—a genre that, while prevalent in American literature, has been virtually ignored by critics and scholars. In lieu of tackling the genre in its entirety, a project too large for just one article, the author focuses the argument through the well-known alignment between Walt Whitman and Hart Crane on the subject of the modern city. It is through the progress poem genre that Crane and Whitman’s peculiar place in metropolitan poetics can best be understood, and it is through their poetry that scholars can begin to approach the …

“The Languages Of Other People”: The Experiences Of Tutors, Administrators, And Students In A South African Multilingual Writing Center, Nicole Bailey

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This ethnography, conducted at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, conveys the experiences of tutors, students, and administrators in a multilingual writing lab. As the number of both multilingual and international students in American universities increases, more writing centers in the United States have begun to explore the idea of multilingual tutoring. This study offers implications for establishing American multilingual writing centers based on data that emerged from observations and interviews conducted at Stellenbosch. Several themes emerged from the data that have important implications for American centers. First, there must be a clear understanding of what defines a multilingual writing center. …

Imitation, Kathryn M. Rogers

The Goose

Poetry by Kate Rogers

Agonie | The Agony, Jerry Auld, Gilles Mossiere

The Goose

Un accident d’alpinisme s’est produit en 1920 près du mont Assiniboine dans les Rocheuses canadiennes. Le professeur Winthrop E. Stone fit une chute mortelle après s’être décordé sous le sommet du mont Eon ; sa femme Margaret, n’ayant pu compléter la descente, dut attendre les secours pendant sept jours, sans eau, nourriture ni vêtements chauds. Cette tragédie la marqua à vie, et elle n’en reparla jamais. Jon Whyte, écrivain de Banff, s’est inspiré de ces événements dans The Agony of Mrs. Stone, poème publié en 1977, qui sert de toile de fond à cette nouvelle. / A climbing accident took …

Fire Sale, Emily Mcgiffin

The Goose

a poem.

Glove, David Zieroth

The Goose

a poem

Bee Work | Departure, Anne Simpson

The Goose

How do we get closer to the nature of the bee’s, or any non-human's, experience, mystery that it is? This essay is a lyrical meditation on the power (and challenges) of poetry and language to access non-human worlds.