Literature in English, North America Commons^™

"Take It And Like It": Violence In The Pulp Magazines, Brian Flota

Libraries

No abstract provided.

“Can’T Repeat The Past? Why, Of Course You Can!” F. Scott Fitzgerald’S Greatest Lie, Sean Kirby

Senior Honors Projects

“Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!” Jay Gatsby, the protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, said this to his friend Nick Carraway in order to convince both himself and Nick that he could recapture Daisy Buchanan, his former love. However, some of Fitzgerald’s critics argue that, on a second level, Fitzgerald is asking this question of his own audience. Fitzgerald used his life as a frame for his own work, so some critics argue that he stays stuck in the past and writes from his own limited world view. I believe the argument that Fitzgerald …

A Changed Opinion On “A Small Good Thing”, Sai Somasundaram '14

2014 Spring Semester

Suspense, surprise, shock, and awe are all parts of a great story, especially when intertwined together to keep the reader guessing until the last second. In Raymond Carver’s “A Small Good Thing”, the main characters go through a tragic story in which they come face to face with the vastness of the world, and the sincerity of human nature. When Scotty, the young boy who the story is centered around, is involved in an accident and hospitalized, his parents Howard and Ann, end up embarking on a journey to understand who is leaving them mysterious calls about their ailing …

A Matter Of Principle: The Influence Of America’S Declaration Of Independence On Post-Declaration Literature, Kenneth J. Winkleman

McNair Scholars Research Journal

This study explores the ways in which selected principles contained within America’s Declaration of Independence are addressed in works of post-Declaration literature. The examined works are from the nineteenth-century. It was during this time that America’s writers were attempting to establish a uniquely American literature, and the Declaration of Independence, with its rhetoric of equality and unalienable rights, provided a fertile ground for that effort. Drawing upon scholarship from the document itself, I discuss the Declaration and provide a brief explication of the principles contained within the preamble. I then compare and contrast how those same principles are incorporated and …

Seeing The Rebel: Or, How To Do Things With Dictionaries In Nineteenth-Century America, Tim Cassedy

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Minor Characters With Major Impacts : Examining Giovanelli’S Role In Henry James’ Daisy Miller 2014, Zachary Lang

Master's Theses

Henry James’s first journey into the world of the American girl came in the form of one of his most read novellas, Daisy Miller. Through the eyes of Frederick Winterbourne, the reader begins a study of Daisy Miller, a character whom James uses to showcase many of the issues that were prevalent at the time including the role of women, societal standards, and class mobility. Winterbourne and Daisy are the principal characters, and as such they are given the most attention from readers and critics alike. The minor character Giovanelli, however, has received little critical attention. Despite being a minor …

Hippie Caulfield: The Catcher In The Rye's Influence On 1960s American Counterculture, Richard Neffinger

Masters Theses

This study covers the influence of The Catcher in the Rye on the 1960s youth counterculture in America. Drawing heavily from postmodern and new historicist theory, The Catcher in the Rye has developed a unique connection with the American public, most notably youth culture. This study examines why youth are so attracted to the character of Holden Caulfield and what implications their connection has meant and will mean for future generations of young Americans.

Tammy Rae Carland's Queer Riot Grrrl Zine"I ( Heart ) Amy Carter": A World Of Public Intimacy, Annah-Marie Rostowsky

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes Tammy Rae Carland's queer Riot Grrrl zine I (heart) Amy Carter as a counterpublic sphere engendered by acts of public intimacy that make visible the intersectional complexities of gender, sexuality, class, and race that insidious traumas continually work to conceal. It looks to Ann Cvetkovich's inquiries into the positive aspects of public cultures in the book An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2006) as well as Mimi Thi Nguyen's investigation of the Riot Grrrl race crisis in the article "Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival" (2012) as frameworks to critique Carland's visual and textual …

Space & Distance As I Require: The Journals And Prose Fragments Of Philip Whalen 1950-1966, Brian Unger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Space & Distance As I Require: The Journals & Prose Fragments of Philip Whalen 1950 - 1966 presents the early journals, prose fragments, and a few unpublished poems and essays by San Francisco Renaissance and Beat Generation poet Philip Whalen (1923-2002). This work includes a scholarly apparatus with both general literary and textual introductions, a critical bibliography that reflects my literary-historical concerns, brief section introductions, annotations, and an informal concordance with Whalen's poetry utilizing The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen (ed. Rothenberg, 2007) as a reference work.

Philip Whalen was an Irish-American writer with roots in small town Oregon, a …

Clue, Code, Conjure: The Epistemology Of American Detective Fiction, 1841-1914, Jennifer Weiss

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation posits American detective fiction between 1841 and 1914 as a meaningful category and interrogates forms of knowledge used in this genre. The conventional wisdom on detective fiction creates a dichotomy of British and American production, with British detective fiction in a rational style dominating in importance into the 1920s, and American detective fiction dominating in importance with the "hard-boiled" style of the 1930s and '40s (as described by Raymond Chandler). This dissertation argues that American detective fiction is a meaningful category before and beyond the hard-boiled style.

Abductive reasoning, a form of logic based on observation, hypothesis, and …

Common Knowledge: The Epistemology Of American Realism, Mark Sussman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation, Common Knowledge: The Epistemology of American Realism, focuses on realist fiction (primarily the novel) at the end of the nineteenth century. Its motivating claim is that the central descriptive and thematic imperative of realism--to depict life "as it is" rather than in some idealized form--emerged in response to crises in the status of knowledge that resulted from an attempt by writers and readers to come to a common understanding of the relationship between private experience and an increasingly fragmented social world. While William Dean Howells's definition of realism as a form of writing that displays "fidelity to experience …

The Cyborg Griffin: A Speculative Literary Journal, Hollins University

Cyborg Griffin: a Speculative Fiction Literary Journal

Notes:

copyrighted

Hollins Student Publication

Scope: short stories, artwork, poetry, essays, and comics

Paper copies shelved in University Archives.

Travel Sized: A Collection Of Essays, Wendi L. Kozma

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Travel Sized: A Collection of Essays investigates the importance of memory and understanding the self in relation to one’s experiences with travel and food. It is the author’s contribution to the genre of creative nonfiction and explores themes of body, self-awareness and self-realization through events that shaped who she is, both personally and professionally. The collection houses eight essays—each focusing on space, the body, and exploration of memory to better understand one’s self. Subjects range from coming to terms with one’s size to appreciating one’s experiences both stateside and abroad. At the center of the collection is the need, no, …

Introduction: The Rise Of The American Biographical Novel, Michael Lackey

English Publications

No abstract provided.

A Foray Into Library Digital Publishing: The British Virginia Project At Virginia Commonwealth University, Kevin Farley

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

The British Virginia project involves a collaboration between Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Libraries and faculty members in the departments of English and History at VCU, with the project led by Dr. Joshua Eckhardt (English). As of April 25, 2013, the project has published its first title: an online edition of a sermon preached to the Virginia Company by William Symonds. To ensure the success of this project, a number of details required careful planning, including library outreach, IT involvement, and digital publishing protocols. Our example has deepened a move toward a dynamic and creative digital environment for researchers across campus. …

Covered In Dust: Coming Of Age In A Gazebo Factory, Jason A. Ney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Covered in Dust: Coming of Age in a Gazebo Factory is a memoir that chronicles the three summers I spent working in the factories at Chestnut Hill Gazebos. The memoir focuses on three narrative strands: the day-to-day life of a factory worker, the struggles within and eventual breakdown of my relationship with my girlfriend, and how my job at Chestnut Hill helped me critique my fundamentalist Christian roots by forcing me into a deeper understanding of my faith and its relationship to the world outside the confines of my upbringing. The critical afterword uses essays by Leona Toker and other …

Decay And Perversion In Jacksonian America: George Lippard’S The Quaker City, Keith Lydon

Undergraduate Review

In the United States, the period between the termination of the 18th century and the commencement of the 19th century is characterized by the struggle to forge a national identity that was uniquely American in its independence from European influence. American writers of this period understood that the creation of an American literature distinct from the influence of Europe and shaped by the social, political, and natural environment of the United States would provide the country with the first vestiges of the autonomous cultural identity it so desperately desired. However, this work proved to be problematic, as with little financial …

Local Color's Finest Hour: Kentucky Literature At The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Brian Clay Johnson

Online Theses and Dissertations

This thesis takes into consideration literature created by various authors during the period 1890 to 1910, the turn of the twentieth century. This thesis looks specifically at the works produced during that time period by authors from Kentucky, living in Kentucky, or with strong ties to the state. The texts themselves illustrated these ties, as they all focused on or related to Kentucky at the time.

The data that was gathered for this thesis came directly from the writings themselves. In order to research the appropriate authors and the works they produced, the author read all of the materials discussed …

Judy Malloy's Seat At The (Database) Table: A Feminist Reception History Of Early Hypertext Literature, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

When Robert Coover anointed Michael Joyce the ‘granddaddy’ of hypertext literature in a 1992 New York Times article, it could scarcely have been imagined that this pronouncement would come to define the origin of electronic literature. This short article examines the human and machinic operations obscuring Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger, a hypertext that predates afternoon. Malloy's reputation was stunted because Uncle Roger was algorithmically invisible, a factor that became increasingly important as the Web's commercial capacities matured. afternoon's endurance can be traced to its ISBN, which made afternoon easy for readers to find and united disparate stewards in preserving access …

Blood As A Binding Agent In Cormac Mccarthy's _The Crossing_, Erin M. Martin

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

In Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing, one of the most important aspects of blood is the way it connects Billy Parham to his family and the world around him. Billy's actions are driven largely by his desire to maintain his moral code and his connections to nature and his maternal grandmother. His link to nature begins with an encounter with a wolf pack and continues with an attempt to return a she-wolf to her homeland. The connection to his grandmother provides him with the means to do so when he crosses the border from New Mexico into Mexico. Billy's ability …