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Full-Text Articles in American Studies

Breaking Free: Detectives Let The Guilty Walk, Cassandra Holcombe Jan 2022

Breaking Free: Detectives Let The Guilty Walk, Cassandra Holcombe

All Master's Theses

In a genre like detective fiction, known for affirming social order, the refusal to enforce rule of law seems like an anomaly. The number of famous detectives who have let a perpetrator go suggests that release of suspects is not a break in genre conventions, but is a wider pattern that needs to be acknowledged. This study investigates that pattern by measuring the complexity of thirteen detectives: eleven of whom release perpetrators and two of whom do not, to serve as a control group. The higher the complexity of the character, the more human the character seems to be. The …


Metaphysics Of Mania: Edgar Allan Poe's And Herman Melville's Rebranding Of Madness During The American Asylum Movement, Alexis Renfro Jan 2017

Metaphysics Of Mania: Edgar Allan Poe's And Herman Melville's Rebranding Of Madness During The American Asylum Movement, Alexis Renfro

All Master's Theses

The “madman’s” place throughout history has tended to be a mystery on both ontological and epistemological levels. From the perception of the madman as a crazed oracle in the sixteenth century to the perception of the madman as a criminal in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the nineteenth-century madman was even more difficult to define. Because insanity was deemed the inverse of bourgeois normativity and conservative moral standards, those categorized as mad in America during mid-1800s were institutionalized in reformed mental asylums, establishments which sought to homogenize human behavior through moral treatment. Both Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville drew …


Gender Revolution Of The Jazz Age: The Source Of Disillusionment In The Works Of F. Scott Fitzgerald And Ernest Hemingway, Mary Killeen Jan 2017

Gender Revolution Of The Jazz Age: The Source Of Disillusionment In The Works Of F. Scott Fitzgerald And Ernest Hemingway, Mary Killeen

All Master's Theses

The Lost Generation was forced to develop their own principles regarding gender identity in an environment of ever-shifting cultural norms, which called into question all of their predetermined ideas on femininity, masculinity, and the ways in which members of the opposite sex should interact with one another. Although much of their writing is set amid and seems to embrace the evolving social culture of the early twentieth-century, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway largely criticize the gender revolution of the 1920s and blame evolving gender roles for the collapse of their generation. Nevertheless, I argue that Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s cultural …


Mark Twain's Study Of The Effects Of Slavery And Its Relationship To Training, Sharon Faye Nielson Jan 1971

Mark Twain's Study Of The Effects Of Slavery And Its Relationship To Training, Sharon Faye Nielson

All Master's Theses

This paper presents a study of Mark Twain's treatment of slavery, especially in relation to his theory of training. In his novels Huckleberry Finn, Puddn'head Wilson, The Prince and the Pauper, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court Twain portrays the effects of slavery and training on the personality of the slave and the slaveholder. Twain deals largely with the psychological effects of slavery, which tend to dehumanize both slave and slaveholder, deeply and permanently marking their personalities.


The Church In The Dramas Of T. S. Eliot, Rebecca Ellen Dunn Jan 1970

The Church In The Dramas Of T. S. Eliot, Rebecca Ellen Dunn

All Master's Theses

From the desolation of a sterile Waste Land populated by straw men, Eliot's dramas increasingly portray a world of great meaning and hope. His early dramas portray a hostile and insensible world which must be fought and completely rejected by religious persons who are called to martyrdom and sainthood. Eliot's acceptance of the material world and comfort with its society brings a steady transformation of his spiritual vision when at the end of his dramas the world is one of common people who strive to find meaning and "make the best of a bad job," illumined by a vision of …


The Continuance Of Romance In American Fiction, Oliver James Benham Dec 1969

The Continuance Of Romance In American Fiction, Oliver James Benham

All Master's Theses

Critics recognize an important tradition of American romance in the nineteenth century, yet they pay little if any serious attention to the continuing tradition of romance in the literature of this century.