American Studies Commons^™

“I Know What Nothing Means”: Nostalgia, Hope, And The Postmodern Search For The Sublime, Kathryn L. Donati

Theses and Dissertations

Amid simultaneous crises of self, nation, digital citizenship, global health, climate change, and socio-political polarization, to name but a few of the catastrophes that seem to define life in the global West in the twenty-first century, where do we find hope? Do we find it at all? Is there any hope to be found? These are the questions that serve as the genesis for this undertaking in which I locate the origin of these crises far before the events of the 2016 and 2020 elections, far before even the panic of Y2K. I begin my examination of hope in contemporary …

Trauma In Weird Literature: Weird Experiences And Neuropsychiatric Conditions, Mijin Cho

AUCTUS: The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship

This study aims to explore the element of trauma or shock in weird fiction using H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space” as the focal text. I am interested in the cognitive estrangement and body disfigurement following encounters with the weird, which in this case would be the meteorite’s Colour, on the characters experiencing it in the story, including the Gardners and Ammi. The goal is to investigate our reactions to being pushed past our thresholds as human beings using analysis of characters, diction, and rhetoric in weird fiction stories and non-fiction patient narratives to better understand how weird …

Snapshots Of A Fictional Past: Photographic Nostalgia In The Early 20th Century Art Novel., Harry A. Jones Iv

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue that the proliferation of a mass codependent relationship with nostalgia in the twentieth century shares a parallel history with the widespread adoption of the reproducible image being used by collective audiences as a supplement for natural memory, or what Proust names “voluntary memory.” This conflict between nostalgia-hungry consumers and artists inspired groups such as Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionists and artistically minded authors like Henry James, who employed increasingly complex photographic and literary practices to resist the images’ tendency to debase the aesthetic quality of their own work. Authors such as Marcel Proust and William Faulkner used …

Olympia, Wilderness, And Consumption In Laird Barron’S Old Leech Cycle, John Glover

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

This book chapter considers the cosmic horror fiction of Laird Barron through a blended ecocritical/postcolonial lens, focusing on its representation of the Pacific Northwest and Olympia, Washington. Wilderness and consumption are both strongly represented concepts in Barron’s Old Leech Cycle of stories, aligning with colonial perceptions of the American West as a largely unpeopled space ripe for exploitation. The eldritch horrors of these tales align with well-established traditions in weird fiction, and they are also perfectly suited to locations historically identified with resource extraction.

Once Upon A Time/There Was A Story That Began: Novelty, Endings, And Chronotope In John Barth’S The Tidewater Tales, Zachary K. Gibson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the use of frame tales, genre blending, multi-voiced narration, and circular structure in John Barth’s 1987 novel, The Tidewater Tales. It tracks the isomorphy of Barth’s general aesthetic project, set forth in his essays, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” “The Literature of Replenishment,” and “Very Like an Elephant: Reality Versus Realism,” onto the theoretical aesthetics of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Both Barth and Bakhtin praise the novel its omnivorous capability to accommodate, and juxtaposes conflicting genres against one another; they each see the novelist as an “arranger” or “orchestrator,” who reassembles pre-existing forms to make them …

Always Already Imprisoned: The Panoptic Power Of Capitalism In American Literature, 1900-1940, Andrew Spencer

Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

ALWAYS ALREADY IMPRISONED: THE PANOPTIC POWER OF CAPITALISM IN AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1900-1940

By Andrew Blair Spencer, Ph.D.

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Virginia Commonwealth University, 2019

Director: Dr. Richard Fine, Professor, Department of English

By applying the theories of control that Michel Foucault outlines in Discipline and Punish to the capitalist system, I argue that capitalism functions in much the same was as Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon in that it perpetually imprisons individuals who live under its purview. As I see it, capitalism works on …

The Prodigal Daughter: An Edition Of An Anonymous Text, Paige Deans

Theses and Dissertations

The Prodigal Daughter (1736) is a poem that, on the surface, appears to be an approachable text that was likely geared towards a children’s audience during New England’s first Great Awakening, within the approachable format of a chapbook. However, when explored further, The Prodigal Daughter reveals a complicated textual history during a time of theological and social revival in New England. This thesis considers the historical context of The Prodigal Daughter’s narrative, as well as the poem’s publication history. The text’s transmission is carefully examined and encapsulated in this edition—giving the reader a transcription that is the result of …

Good Game, Greyory Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic …

I Am An Author: Performing Authorship In Literary Culture, Justin R. Greene

Theses and Dissertations

Authorship is not merely an act of putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard; it is a social identity performance that includes the use of multiple media. Authors must be hyper- visible to cut through the dearth of information, entertainment options, and personae vying for attention in our supersaturated media environment. As they enter the literary world, writers consciously create characters and narratives around themselves, and through the consistent and believable enactment of these features, authors are born. In this dissertation, I analyze the performance of authorship in U.S. literary culture through an interdisciplinary framework. My work pulls from …

Black Lives Examined: Black Nonfiction And The Praxis Of Survival In The Post-Civil Rights Era, Ariel D. Lawrence

Theses and Dissertations

The subject of my thesis project is black nonfiction, namely the essay, memoir, and autobiography, written by black authors about and during the Post-Civil Rights Era. The central goals of this work are to briefly investigate the role of genre analysis within the various subsets of nonfiction and also to exemplify the ways that black writers have taken key genre models and evolved them. Secondly, I aim to understand the historical, political, and cultural contributions of the Post-Civil Rights Era, which I mark as hitting its stride in 1968. It is not my desire to create a definitive historical framework …

Reception Claims In Supernatural Horror In Literature And The Course Of Weird Fiction, John Glover

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

This chapter explores H. P. Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," considering the ways in which Lovecraft attempted to construct favorable conditions for the reception of his own work. The writing of the essay was a pivotal moment in Lovecraft's career and authorial self-fashioning. Both it and he went on to influence the development of weird fiction in Lovecraft's lifetime and subsequently, lasting well into the current period of reevaluation of the author's legacy and person.

Work/Death, Of Each In Their Own, Micah H. Weber

Theses and Dissertations

Writings in support of my visual thesis, including some background, and bibliographic information: Oregon/Death/Animation/Vocation and the artist as an agent of potential.

Relocations Of The 'Outraged Slave': Transatlantic Reform Conversations Through Douglass's Periodical Fiction, Nikki D. Fernandes

Theses and Dissertations

Through their editorial arrangements of African-American, Euro-American and European poetry, fiction and news, Frederick Douglass’s anti-slavery periodicals (The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper) imagine a cosmopolitan discourse that predates the segregated realities of the antebellum United States. In spite of Southern blockades against the infiltration of Northern texts, Douglass’s material space uniquely capitalized on the limited restrictions of his reprinting culture to relocate the voice of the ‘outraged slave’ onto a global stage. From the poems of Phillis Wheatley and William Cowper to Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Douglass’s own novella “The Heroic Slave,” this project considers how …

“‘It’S A Cu’Ous Thing Ter Me, Suh’: The Distinctive Narrative Innovation Of Literary Dialect In Late-Nineteenth Century American Literature”, Kym M. Goering

Theses and Dissertations

American literature and verse advanced in dialectal writing during the late-nineteenth century. Charles Chesnutt’s “The Goophered Grapevine” (1887), “Po’ Sandy” (1888), and “Hot-Foot Hannibal” (1899); Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1881); Thomas Nelson Page’s “Marse Chan” (1884); and Mark Twain’s “Sociable Jimmy” (1874) and “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” (1874) provided diverse dialect representations. Dialect expanded into poetry with

James Whitcomb Riley’s “She ‘Displains’ It” (1888), “When the Frost is on the Punkin” (1882), and “My Philosofy” (1882) and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “The Spellin’ Bee” (1895), “An Ante-Bellum Sermon” …

The Color Of Memory: Reimagining The Antebellum South In Works By James Mcbride Through The Use Of Free Indirect Discourse, Janel L. Holmes

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the use of interior narrative techniques such as free indirect discourse and internal monologue in two of James McBride’s neo-slave narratives, Song Yet Sung (2008) and The Good Lord Bird (2013). Very limited critical attention has been given to these neo-slave narratives that illustrate McBrides attention to characterization and focalized narration. In these narratives McBride builds upon the revelations he explores in his bestselling memoir, The Color of Water (1996, 2006), where he learns to disassociate race and character. What he discovers about not only his mother, but also himself, inspires his re-imagination of the people who …

The Transition From The Psychical To The Psychological: An Examination Of William James’ Influence On Henry James’ “The Turn Of The Screw”, Harry A. Jones Iv

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will show that, in its original form, “The Turn of the Screw” acted as a monument to the intellectual unity shared between Henry James and his brother William. Through evaluating James’ biography, memoirs, and letters with William, this thesis will illustrate the subtle collaborative inspirations that initially helped James write the first twelve-part serial edition of “The Turn of the Screw” for Collier’s Weekly, which ran from January 27, 1898 until April 16, 1898. I will also demonstrate the effect of William’s philosophy and his death on the revisions James’ made to his story as published in the …

American Girls, Elizabeth Farschon

AUCTUS: The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship

These four pieces explore different aspects of American life through the eyes of female characters. Best in Show, Meadows, and Dads and Dancers each capture childhood moments where being a girl really counts, whether for better or for worse. While the poems tell specific stories, the questions and realizations are common for many girls growing up in America. How do we teach girls about their bodies and worth through the ways we allow men, especially their fathers, to interact with them? How are gender roles established even in childhood playtime?

The fourth poem, Venus, contrasts the first …

Speed And Resolution In The Age Of Technological Reproducibility, Shawn Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

The rate of acceleration of the biologic and synthetic world has for a while now, been in the process of exponentially speeding up, maxing out servers and landfills, merging with each other, destroying each other. The last prehistoric relics on Earth are absorbing the same oxygen, carbon dioxide and electronic waves in our biosphere as us. A degraded .jpeg enlarged to full screen on a Samsung 4K UHD HU8550 Series Smart TV - 85” Class (84.5” diag.). Within this composite ecology, the ancient limestone of the grand canyon competes with the iMax movie of itself, the production of Mac pros, …

"Dollars Damn Me": Editorial Politics And Herman Melville's Periodical Fiction, Timothy R. Morris

Theses and Dissertations

To illustrate Melville’s navigation of editorial politics in the periodical marketplace, this study analyzes two stories Melville published in Putnam’s in order to reconstruct the particular historical, editorial, social, and political contexts of these writings. The first text examined in this study is “Bartleby,” published in Putnam’s in November and December of 1853. This reading recovers overtures of sociability and indexes formal appropriations of established popular genres in order to develop an interpretive framework. Throughout this analysis, an examination of the narrator’s ideological bearings in relation to the unsystematic implementation of these ideologies in American public life sets forth a …

Edgar Allan Poe And Science: Unraveling The Plot Of The Universe, Murray S. Ellison

Theses and Dissertations

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) lived at the perfect time to write about several of the most dramatic technological developments ever recorded in history. Up until the nineteenth century, professional scientists were almost the exclusive agents for writing about science. However, during this period, non-professional writers also emerged as important conveyors of popular science news to the public. Though Poe was a lay writer, his popular writing conveyed several of the most important new discoveries of the Industrial Age. He also projected his views about how nineteenth-century technologies might impact civilizations of the future. Poe’s writing offers a key example of …

Portraiture And Text In African-American Illustrated Biographical Dictionaries, 1876 To 1917, Dennis Williams Ii

Theses and Dissertations

Containing portraiture and biography as well as protest text and affirmative text, African- American Illustrated biographical dictionaries made from 1876 to 1917 present Social Gospel ideology and are examples of Afro-Protestantism. They are similar to the first American illustrated biographical dictionaries of the 1810s in that they formed social identity after national conflict while contesting concepts of social inferiority. The production of these books occurred during the early years of Jim Crow, a period of momentous change to the legal and social fabric of the United States, and because of momentous changes in modern American print industries. While portraits within …

The Cabellian: A Journal Of The Second American Renaissance (Vol. Iv, No. 2, 1972)

The Cabellian: A Journal of the Second American Renaissance

Cabell and Santayana In the Neo-Humanist Debte / Joe Lee Davis -- The Jewel Merchants, an Opera:

A Case History / Louis Cheslock -- The Demiurge in Jurgen / Margaret Ann Schley -- The Cabellian Picara as Women’s Liberationist / Hugh J. Ingrasci -- Ellen Glasgow: Manners and Art / Blair Rouse -- Evolution of a Menckenite / Betty Adler -- Assault with Deadly Typewriter: The Hecht-Bodenheim Vendetta / Abe C. Ravitz -- Howard Pyle, Illustrator / Murray Blander -- Van Wyck Brooks Redux: An Essay Review / James R. Vitelli -- Book Reviews: Spiller, the Van Wyck …

The Cabellian: A Journal Of The Second American Renaissance (Vol. Iv, No. 1, 1971)

The Cabellian: A Journal of the Second American Renaissance

Cabell’s Comic Mask / Dorothy B. Schlegel -- Cabell’s Game of Hide and Seek / Edgar E. MacDonald -- Jurgen (a poem) / Harlan L. Umansky -- Dating in Figures of Earth / Lin C. Siegle -- Cabelliana at Several Libraries -- Ellen Glasgow: The Novelist in America / Blair Rouse -- Academic Challenge and the Humanities: Some Answers to Queries about the University in the 1970’s / Scott C. Osborn -- More Photographs from the Life Story of James Branch Cabell with Text by the Editor -- The Cabell Society: A Report / Julius Rothman -- From the Editor’s …

The Cabellian: A Journal Of The Second American Renaissance (Vol. Iii, No. 2, 1971)

The Cabellian: A Journal of the Second American Renaissance

Cabell and His Critics / Dorothy B. Schlegel -- James Branch Cabell “In Time’s Hourglass” / Warren A. McNeill -- Photographs from the Life Story of James Branch Cabell with Text by the Editor -- Epitaphe (ballade by Villon) / trans. by Richard Crowder -- The Danish Jurgen / Julius Rothman -- Acquisitions of the Cabell Library since August 1970 / Maurice Duke -- Born a Collector / George T. Keating -- Book Reviews: Taylor, The Passages of Thought / Joe Lee Davis -- Scott, The Southern Lady / Ernest Earnest -- Blake, Novelists’ America / James Ringo -- Earnest, …

The Cabellian: A Journal Of The Second American Renaissance (Vol. Ii, No. 2, 1970)

The Cabellian: A Journal of the Second American Renaissance

Richmond Renascence: The Virginia Writers’ Club of the 1920’s and The Reviewer / Betty Farley Carson -- Beyond Life and Jurgen: The Demiurge / Emmons Welch -- Cabellian Harmonics—Why and How? / Warren A. McNeill -- Virginiana at the Cabell Library / Maurice Duke -- Francois Villon (Sonnet) / Viola Jacobson Berg -- Book Reviews: Ruland, Rediscovery of American Literature / Albert E. Stone -- Bode, Mencken / Carl R. Dolmetsch -- Adler, Man of Letters: A Census of the Correspondence of H. L Mencken / Julius Rothman -- Wagenknecht, As Far as Yesterday / James Ringo -- …

The Cabellian: A Journal Of The Second American Renaissance (Vol. Iii, No. 1, 1970)

The Cabellian: A Journal of the Second American Renaissance

The Influence of Provencal Poetry on James Branch Cabell / Edgar E. MacDonald -- Alexander Dumas, Père (Sonnet) / Viola Jacobson Berg -- Vardis Fisher and James Branch Cabell: A Postscript / Joseph M. Flora -- Cabell’s Hamlet Had an Uncle and Shakespeare’s Hamlet / Desmond Tarrant -- Deems Taylor’s Musical Version of Jurgen / G. N. Gabbard -- Young Jurgen: A Comedy of Derision / Gerard Previn Meyer -- Inside Book Two of James Branch Cabell’s The Silver Stallion / Penn Dameron -- Abstract of a Bibliographic Article on Cabell / Maurice Duke -- Vardis Fisher Memorial / Opal …

Kalki, Studies In James Branch Cabell (Vol. 4, No. 4, 1970)

Kalki, Studies in James Branch Cabell

No abstract provided.

The Cabellian: A Journal Of The Second American Renaissance (Vol. Ii, No. 1, 1969)

The Cabellian: A Journal of the Second American Renaissance

Cabell’s Translation of Virginia / Dorothy B. Schlegel -- Vardis Fisher and James Branch Cabell: An Essay on Influence and Reputation / Joseph M. Flora -- The Unheeding South: Donald Davidson on James Branch Cabell / M. Thomas Inge -- Recent Acquisitions of the Cabell Library / Maurice Duke -- Tentative Checklist of Current Retail Values of Collectible Cabell Editions Supplement I – Cabelliana / Nelson Bond -- Cabelliana in Hawaii / Robert H. Canary -- Frances Joan Brewer’s Bibliography: Its Genesis / George E. F. Brewer -- Another Opinion of Ingénue Among the Lions / Edgar E. MacDonald -- …

The Cabellian: A Journal Of The Second American Renaissance (Vol. I, No. 2, 1969)

The Cabellian: A Journal of the Second American Renaissance

James Branch Cabell (1879-1958) / Desmond Tarrant -- A Case of Literary Piracy? / Dorothy B. Schlegel -- The Storisende Edition: Some Liabilities / Edgar E. MacDonald -- A Three-Quarter-Length Portrait of Carl Van Vechten / James Ringo -- A Grand Old Bookman / Edward Wagenknecht -- The First Fifty Years of Jurgen / I. R. Brussel -- The Naming of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Cabell Library / Maurice Duke -- Dissertations on Cabell / Julius Rothman -- Book Reviews: Cabell, Ladies and Gentlemen / Julius Rothman -- Mayfield, The Constant Circle / Betty Adler -- Bond, Nightmares and Daydreams …

Kalki, Studies In James Branch Cabell (Vol. 2, No. 3, 1968)

Kalki, Studies in James Branch Cabell

No abstract provided.