Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Joiner-Rogers Collection (Mss 590), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and full text scans of selected items (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Collection 590. Personal and professional papers of Christian County, Kentucky teacher and administrator Erleen (Joiner) Rogers, and novels, poems, skits, epigrams and witticisms written by her father, Robert Tinnon Joiner. Includes a collection of Joiner’s writings titled Nonsense and Wisdom From Flat Lick, Rogers’ family history titled Seven Generations in and From Flat Lick, other family data, and photographs.

Protest Lyrics At Work: Labor Resistance Poetry Of Depression-Era Autoworkers, Rebecca S. Griffin

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that scholarly inquiry into American poetry of the Great Depression is incomplete without a critical understanding of poems produced within the labor movement. Through archival research and methodologies drawn from American studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and labor history, this dissertation demonstrates that autoworkers from 1935-1941 developed a rich poetic discourse that championed their cause. Autoworker poets—including autoworker song lyricists—used humor and borrowed extensively from popular, religious, and “folk” cultures to craft their own poetic styles and trope sets. They wrote about a diverse range of topics from their hopes for the unionization movement, to scab conversions, …

"Daring Propaganda For The Beauty Of The Human Mind:" Critical Consciousness-Raising In The Poetry And Drama Of The Black Power Era, 1965-1976, Markeysha D. Davis

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a literary and intellectual history of the contributions of black American theorists, poets, and dramatists in the 1960s and 1970s towards the establishment of black critical consciousness in order to lay grounds for black people to experience a fuller existence as human beings through black-centered creations and presentations. Through the following chapters, I establish the framework and evolution of black psyche-liberation theories—spanning Du Bois’s theory of double-conscious through the contributions of black artist-theorists like Baraka, Neal, and Woodie King, Jr., followed by examinations at length of the theories of black liberation in praxis by the poets and …

The Strains Of Confessional Poetry: The Burdens, Blunders, And Blights Of Self-Disclosure, Lara Rossana Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When a provocative style of autobiographical verse had emerged in postwar America, literary critics christened the new genre “confessional poetry.” Confessional poets of the 1960s and ’70s are often characterized by scholars of contemporary poetry as a cohort of writers who, unlike previous generations before them, dared to explore in their work the personal and inherited traumas of mental illness, family suicides, failed marriages, and crushing addictions. As a result, the body of work these writers produced is often experienced as a collection of stylized, literary self-portraits. What can these self-portraits reveal to us about the connection between confessional poetry …

Boone, Joy (Field) Bale, 1912-2002 (Mss 588), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 588. Papers of poet, editor and activist Joy Bale Boone, Elkton, Kentucky, relating primarily to her service as chair of the Committee for the Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies at Western Kentucky University. Includes correspondence, Committee records, collected data on Robert Penn Warren, and photographs. Also includes audio and video interviews of Boone and colleagues.

Echo Soundings: Essays On Poetry And Poetics By Jeffery Donaldson, Tonia L. Payne

The Goose

Review of Jeffery Donaldson's Echo Soundings: Essays on Poetry and Poetics.

Watersheds In Life, Molly Morgan

Robert Penn Warren Essay Contest

No abstract provided.

The Systems Of Life, Madeline Stephenson

Robert Penn Warren Essay Contest

No abstract provided.

Watershed, Matthew Doyle

Robert Penn Warren Essay Contest

No abstract provided.

“Yellow Crowfoot In The Pond,/Not Lotus, Not Lily”: Mapping The River, Mapping Voices, Pamela J. Rader

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This paper examines the prosody of Chin’s eponymous poem, "The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty," through an eco-critical lens. While it does not dismiss the hybrid cultural influences of the poem, it focuses on the ways the non-human agents, or the figures in the poem’s landscape, “speak.” Poetry, like the poem’s terraced gardens, traces tension between the controlling human forces experienced by the narrating female I personas and the natural world’s affective inclinations.

Anne Sexton's Environmental Animality, Dan A. Wylie Prof

Animal Studies Journal

What does it mean to study the intersection of environment, animals and literature, at this juncture in human history? How might it manifest at the level of an individual poet’s work, with what consequences? This paper approaches these questions through the poetry of Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, Anne Sexton. Sexton’s poetry has been exhaustively studied for its psychological dimensions and forcefulness, for her treatment of madness, suicide, and family relationships in particular. Despite a high density of animal imagery, this animal element is conventionally skimmed over. This article argues that animal presences constitute a minor but unavoidable strand amongst the …

Sarah Hall's 1806 Poem, "Sketch Of A Landscape In Cecil County, Maryland, At The Junction Of The Octorara Creek With The Susquehanna, Suggested By Hearing The Birds Sing During The Remarkably Warm Weather In February 1806.", Jon Miller

Jon Miller