American Studies Commons^™

From Man To Meteor: Nineteenth Century American Writers And The Figure Of John Brown, Amanda Benigni

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

On November 2, 1859, John Brown laid siege to the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, then Virginia, in an effort to seize weaponry which he planned to employ in a full scale slave insurrection. From the moment he entered the public eye during his brief trial and execution, John Brown and his legacy were figured and refigured by prominent writers and thinkers of the time. The result of this refiguring was an image under constant metamorphosis. As the image of John Brown cycled through the Civil War, it moved further and further from the actual man and became a metaphor …

About The Birthplace (Volume 7), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Sex, Drugs, And Mingling Spirits: Teaching Nineteenth-Century Women Poets, Cheryl Walker

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

Book abstract:

Twentieth-century modernism reduced the list of nineteenth-century American poets to Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and (less often) Edgar Allan Poe. The rest were virtually forgotten. This volume in the MLA series Options for Teaching marks a milestone in the resurgence of the study of the rest. It features poets, like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Lydia Huntley Sigourney, who were famous in their day, as well as poets who were marginalized on the basis of their race (Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alexander Posey) or their sociopolitical agenda (Emma Lazarus, John Greenleaf Whittier). It also takes a fresh look at poets …

Dedication Page (Volume 7), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

About The Advisory Group To The Center (Volume 7), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Title Page (Volume 7), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Contents (Volume 7), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Cass Mastern, Josiah Royce, And The Envelope Of Responsibility, Joseph Wensink

Robert Penn Warren Studies

In Warren’s All the King’s Men, Jack’s ultimate reconciliation does not come, as most readers see it, from learning to accept full responsibility for his actions where he formerly had none, but rather from his ability to define for himself, through his historical researches and creation of iconic “images,” a clear picture of the boundaries of his responsibility—its burdens as well as its limits. This envelope of responsibility is for Warren thoroughly historical—and envelope whose contours change through time, crucially dependent upon the narration of past events in the present. Jack’s “brass-bound idealism” is, despite his sarcasm, a quite sophisticated …

Robert Penn Warren In The 21st Century: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, James A. Grimshaw Jr.

Robert Penn Warren Studies

Seven years into the 21st century, an informal look at the state of Warren studies reveals both reason for hope and for deep concern.

About The Center (Volume 7), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

About The Circle (Volume 7), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

The Editing Of Jack Burden, Nathan Snow

Robert Penn Warren Studies

In comparing Jack Burden as narrator in the 1946 version of All the King’s Men to Jack Burden as narrator in Noel Polk’s 2001 Restored Edition of the novel, the originally published Jack Burden emerges as the better narrator, and the 1946 version is the better for it. Warren’s original editor, Lambert Davis, deserves some of the credit for this improvement.

Narrator Myopia In “Goodwood Comes Back”, Bill Mccarron, Paul Knoke

Robert Penn Warren Studies

In “Goodwood Comes Back,” Warren creates an emotionally myopic narrator whose inability to see Goodwood for who he really is ironically points to the fact that, however short-lived, Goodwood’s personal comeback has been as triumphant as his foray into baseball. The contrast between Goodwood’s intimate knowledge of baseball and the narrator’s ignorance of the game sets the narrator up as a foil to Goodwood. His limitations only serve to highlight Goodwood’s accomplishments.

Editor’S Foreword (Volume 7), Mark D. Miller

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Observations On Robert Penn Warren’S “The Day Dr. Knox Did It”, James A. Perkins

Robert Penn Warren Studies

“The Day Dr. Knox Did It” may be read as Warren’s artistic response to the suicide of Ernest Hemingway. The poem repeats an important motif from Warren’s second, unpublished and untitled novel, written in the 1930’s. It also contains some interesting correspondences—and equally important contrasts—to the work of Ernest Hemingway, especially the short story “Indian Camp.”

“The Deepest And Widest Metaphor For Life” Re-Visions Of Christian Faith In Robert Penn Warren’S Later Poetry, Nicole Camastra

Robert Penn Warren Studies

While it would be foolish to assert that Warren was a committed Christian and unequivocal believer, a kind of tempered faith does exist in some of Warren’s poems from Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978. Manuscript revisions of “Amazing Grace in the Back Country” and “Heart of the Backlog” reveal Warren’s struggle to find faith, not his conviction of living in it. However, “Heart of Autumn,” the final poem in the volume, points to the conscious act of surrendering to the depth of theistic conflict in its preceding counterparts.

Raised In The Briar Patch: Misreading Warren’S Essay On Race, Leverett Butts

Robert Penn Warren Studies

As human beings, we are prone to all sorts of misreadings: of literary works, of others, of ourselves. This scholarly and personal visit to “The Briar Patch” reveals a younger Warren subtly, perhaps even unconsciously, advocating integration in a world that in the 1920’s was not (and some might say still isn’t) ready to accept full equality.

Selected Bibliography: Robert Penn Warren 2005-2007, Robin L. Condon

Robert Penn Warren Studies

A listing of two years’ worth of “The Good.”

Notes On Contributors (Volume 7), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Review Of Reclaiming Authorship: Literary Women In America, 1850-1900, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Like Naomi Z. Sofer's Making the America of Art (2005) and Anne E. Boyd's Writing for Immorality (2004), Susan Williams Reclaiming Authorship seeks to recreate and analyze how American women authors in the second half of the nineteenth century understood their own authorship. All three include Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson as subjects, but Williams includes authors who did not conceive of their authorship in a high cultural mode (Maria Cummins, Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Abigail Dodge), and she traverses the careers of Alcott and Phelps so as to emphasize their movements in and out of …

"I Put The Tale Back Where I Found It": Feeling The Past Through "The Warmth Of The Human Voice", Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In this article, I examine my revelations and growth related to folk culture and literature connected to the African American community. I borrow from and play on the Sudanese formulaic ending for the folktale; it seemed to me appropriate - even obligatory- that "I put the tale back where I found it." This maxim is symbolic, reflecting what I find one of the most characteristic elements of Black folklore - that is, the focus on the group, the community, in terms of the source of the historical situation of the tale; the moral lesson; the content, style, and delivery; and …

'The Senator And The Socialite: The True Story Of America's First Black Dynasty,' By Lawrence Otis Graham, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

Lawrence Otis Graham attempts to tell the important story of the Bruces and their legacy in The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America’s First Black Dynasty. Starting his story before the Civil War, Graham follows the “First Black Dynasty” through its ultimate fall from grace in mid-twentieth-century New York City. As with his previous bestseller, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class (1999), Graham takes on the ambitious task of capturing the meaning and importance of an underappreciated group of American’s.

Louisa May Alcott [From Oxford Encyclopedia Of Women In World History], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

American fiction writer best known as the author of the girls’ novel Little Women (1868-1869). Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, to Abigail May Alcott and the progressive educator Bronson Alcott. The March family of Little Women was an idealized version of her own family, which was far less stable and more mobile. Alcott’s father’s idealistic education, and reform ventures regularly failed, necessitating the family’s frequent moves, and she and her mother increasingly provided the family’s economic support. Her childhood and adolescence were split primarily between Concord and Boston, Massachusetts, where she was deeply influenced by members of her father’s …

Willa Cather [From The Oxford Encyclopedia Of Women In World History], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

American novelist, Born in Virginia, Cather moved with her family to Nebraska in 1883 and is best known as a novelist of the American prairie. However, her life history and literary output belie this characterization. As a student at the University of Nebraska she published short stories and poems and worked as a journalist. This experience earned her a position at the Home Monthly magazine in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When the magazine failed, she stayed in Pittsburgh, first returning to newspaper journalism and then teaching high school. For several years she lived in the family home of Isabelle McClung, a young …

Introduction To Signet Classic's The Song Of The Lark By Willa Cather (2007), Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In May of 1912, Willa Cather traveled to Winslow, Arizona, to visit her brother, Douglass, who worked for the railroad. The year before, she had begun a leave of absence from McClure's Magazine, where she had been an editor since 1906, so that she could focus her energies on writing fiction. Although she had been publishing short fiction regularly since 1892, her first novel-the cosmopolitan, somewhat derivative Alexander's Bridge ‒ did not appear until 1912. Feeling tired and unwell, she, like many other Americans, sought renewal in the dry air and open spaces of the desert. After six years in …

"Unrighteous Compact": Louisa May Alcott's Resistance To Contracts And Promises In Moods, Nina Bannett

Publications and Research

Alcott’s first adult novel, Moods, initially published in 1864, presents oral promises between women as extralegal alternatives to standard legal contracts between men and women. In the 1864 edition of Moods, Alcott's protagonist, Sylvia Yule, fails to understand the constraints of marriage as a type of contract, and the results are dramatic. In fact, Alcott undermines the idealized marriage plot so crucial to her later, wildly popular works like Little Women (1868-69). In the 1864 Moods, Alcott boldly questions both legal contracts and oral promises characteristic of nineteenth-century conceptions of romantic love and heterosexual friendship.

Review: We Are All Welcome Here, Teresa Pacheco

Georgia Library Quarterly

Review of the novel "We Are All Welcome Here," by Elizabeth Berg.

Review: When Light Breaks, Sarah Trowbridge

Georgia Library Quarterly

Review of the novel "When Light Breaks," by Patti Callahan Henry.

Cuban Femininity And National Unity In Louisa May Alcott's Moods And Elizabeth Stoddard's "Eros And Anteros", Nina Bannett

Publications and Research

This book chapter compares the depictions of Cuban women in Louisa May Alcott's first adult novel Moods (1864) and Elizabeth Stoddard's short story "Eros and Anteros" (1862). Both writers configure a love triangle between an Anglo man and two women, one Anglo and one Cuban. In both texts, the Cuban woman is rejected as an unsuitable choice for an Anglo man. Alcott’s and Stoddard’s decision to re-value the Anglo woman as the more appropriate choice can be read as a rejection of the popular nineteenth-century political doctrine of manifest destiny and, at least with Alcott, of the United States’s dependence …

American Fantasies Of Masculine, Physical Labor And The Dangerous Bodies Of Pacific Island Whalemen In Roger Starbuck's The Golden Harpoon And Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Jennifer Schell

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Throughout the nineteenth-century, writers, such as James Fenimore Cooper and Joseph C. Hart, fairly consistently appropriated the New England whaling industry for national purposes. They claimed the economic successes of the industry as American successes, and they positioned the whalemen as exemplary American workers. However, not all American whalemen were native-born Americans; some were foreign-born laborers. The presence of Polynesian workers and their racialized laboring bodies - often described as monstrous, grotesque, and repulsive - disrupted nationalistic appropriations of the whaling industry and its workers. What was so dangerous about these men was not just that were reputed to be …