American Studies Commons^™

Black Eve Or Madonna? A Study Of The Antithetical Views Of The Mother In Black American Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Within these two extreme views of woman - the mother who brings death and destruction versus the mother who brings life and salvation - where does the Black American mother stand? It seems to me that it would not be inappropriate to look at the literature, not as mere fiction, but rather as an interpretation and compilation of history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and a host of other areas. Thus the true literary artist reveals life more accurately and with more insight than any historical facts and statistical details, because he deals with the truth of the human heart, with the …

Fitzgerald's Use Of The Four Elements In The Great Gatsby, John Philip Hawkins

Masters Theses

A great deal has been written about the conscientious effort that went into the design of F. Scott Fitzgerald's popular novel, The Great Gatsby, with its various allusions and numerous symbols. A careful reading of this novel will unveil the author's preoccupation with numerous metaphysical images, particularly the four elements--air, earth, water, and fire--which are considered to be the essential components of all matter.

Fitzgerald uses the four elements in The Great Gatsby to coordinate mood and physical settings, to give dimension to the settings, and to bring characters into sharper focus. The novel employs four settings, each one …

Saul Bellow's Henderson The Rain King: A Fusion Of The Comic And The Serious, George William Russo

Masters Theses

Bellow's comic vision points to a compromise between the romantic notion that self-perfection is attainable and the pessimistic notion that man is ultimately impotent and thus destined to fail. Through Henderson, Bellow shows that although man does not--and ultimately cannot--completely free himself of somatic demands and limitations, he is nevertheless not defeated by them and thus not left a victim of emotionless observations.

Bellow draws upon four sources in Henderson's nature to create the humor in the novel and highlights Eugene Henderson as a comic hero by dramatizing that Henderson proves to be his own ironist. These sources can be …

The Hemingway Hero: A Reconsideration, Anne Hunt

Theses & Honors Papers

No abstract provided.

Ruth Suckow, Abigail Ann Hamblen

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In her Memoir Ruth Suckow speaks of the small Iowa town where she was born as a place that looked ahead toward fresh beginnings. She describes other towns where she lived as older and more settled. But all of them, she implies, are dependent upon the sunshine, rains, and rich fields of the great farming region that is known as the Midwest, the Middle West, or Mid-America.

Virginia Sorensen, L L. Lee, Sylvia B. Lee

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“If you burrow for roots, it was the fault of my grandmother,” the protagonist of Virginia Sorensen’s novel The Man with the Key remarks. And although we must ignore the half-ironic reference to a fault—and remind ourselves that an author’s characters are not the author—this metaphor is an exact image of Virginia Sorensen’s world and of her works. Sorensen has published eight novels, most of them about the American West, as well as a number of short stories and a group of children’s books. Her roots are the very essence of almost all, and certainly of the best, of her …

Alfred Henry Lewis, Abe C. Ravitz

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

He was a cowboy and a lawyer, a journalist and a novelist. At ease passing the time of day with drifters in front of Melinda's House of Call at Watrous (Mora County) in the sparse territory of New Mexico or debating socio-economic philosophy with sophisticated Tammany politicians just outside City Hall in New York, Alfred Henry Lewis—Western regionalist and Eastern muckraker—was enchanted by America’s land of legend and myth beyond the frontier, and he forever glanced backward with nostalgia at his “pampas years,” when he roved "for many moons" between “the Canadian in the Panhandle and the Gila in Arizona.” …

Don Berry, Glen A. Love

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In his first two novels of the early Oregon country, Trask and Moontrap, Northwestern author Don Berry placed himself within what has come to be perhaps the essential tradition in serious Western American literature. Like such earlier writers as Willa Gather, Robinson Jeffers, and Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and like his contemporary fellow-Northwesterner Gary Snyder, Don Berry conveys to us a sacramental belief that transcendent power or energy awaits man’s explorations within the natural world. Further, Berry’s work asserts that this participation, this ultimate reconciliation with the patterns of earth and sky, water and rock, must be undertaken in …

Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa), Marion W. Copeland

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Because Charles Eastman’s best known book is his earliest, Indian Boyhood (1902), and because that autobiography and its sequel, From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916), have been most often used as sources for studies of the cultural transition of the Sioux, the literary value of those and of Eastman’s later books has gone largely unexamined. Eastman subtitled the 1916 volume The Autobiography of an Indian, but one cannot therefore assume that the conventions of European-American autobiography control Eastman’s work.

Depiction Of Blacks In The Works Of Ernest Hemingway, Sheila Marie Foor

Masters Theses

Ernest Hemingway, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, is one of America's outstanding literary figures. Criticism of his work has been voluminous--ranging from bitterly derogative to superlative--with most of it focusing upon the famous 'Hemingway code hero,' upon his crisp, concise writing style, and upon his much-publicized personal life.

One example of negative assessment by critics is the one concerning black portraiture in Hemingway's fiction. However, no work deals exclusively with this aspect of his writing. The purpose of this thesis is, first, to present a general discussion on the nature of prejudice and examination of black …

Mr. Sammler's Planet: The Terms Of The Covenant, Michelle Loris

English Faculty Publications

For Saul Bellow the essential quest is spiritual: it is a search for humanness in a world that daily assaults and denies such a search. This struggle to be human is the author's one story and the various versions of that same story simply indicate the individual progress each protagonist—Joseph, Asa, Wilhelm, Herzog, Sammler—makes on that journey. To find the genuinely human is the hero's task.

L. Frank Baum And The Technology Of Love, Robert Bruce Goble

Masters Theses

L. Frank Baum, throughout his books of fantasy, especially the Oz series, gradually resolves the conflict of pastoralism and technology by developing a technology managed by love. Baum uses magic as a representation of both pastoralism and technology. Fairy magic, the capacity for love, represents pastoralism, and ritual magic, the capacity for good or evil depending upon who wields it, represents technology. Baum deals with the ways in which ritual magic or technology can be misused through selfishness and ignorance and points out how destruction can be avoided if technology were managed by not greed for power and money but …

Salute To Iowa, James Hearst

James Hearst Documents

The typescript of the essay "Salute to Iowa" published in The Sandlapper November 1977. The essay includes his poems The Reason for Stars, Hog economy, and The Cure.

Letter From Donald Fish, Donald Fish

James Hearst Documents

A letter from Donald E. Fish concerning the publication of a book of selected poems by James Hearst from 1977.

Regional Fiction As A Source Of Michigan History: A Collection Of Readings, Larry B. Massie

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

On The Trail Of Laura Ingalls Wilder Part Ii, Mary Evelyn Thurman

Publications

No abstract provided.

Wit And Humor In The Slave Narratives, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

This passage suggests something of the nature of Black humor and the function it has served, not only in the slave narratives, but in the folk tales and throughout the history of recorded literature from William Wells Brown to Amiri Baraka. The life revealed in all of these sources is shown to often be alternately degrading and courageous, tragic and absurdly comic, hopeless and yet enduring; indeed that life could hardly ever be termed merely amusing. And the Black character, though he may be seen to laugh, can hardly be deemed carefree, unbothered, satisfied, even truly happy. Indeed the paradox …

Approaching American Culture Through Art And Poetry (An Exploration Of Ten Themes), Emily M. Bufferd

MA TESOL Collection

My project consists of forty-five paintings, twenty-five postcard-size prints, twenty slides, three postcard-size photographs and thirty poems, each representing one or more of ten themes chosen as a basis for teaching about United States culture. These ten themes signify dominant concerns of Twentieth Century America and are arranged, in the following pages, with those works pertinent to the particular theme. This approach to culture is intended for use in an advanced ESL class, its purpose being to increase awareness of and promote discussions about our culture. Inscluded also are: a brief rationale for the project, a list of the criteria …

Josiah Gregg And Lewis H. Garrard, Edward Halsey Foster

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

New Mexico and that vast region spanned by the Santa Fe trail—a region utterly unlike anything east of the Mississippi—must have seemed enormously exotic and exciting to Americans a hundred and fifty years ago. It was a segment of the continent which most Americans knew only through books, and there were many of them, highly colored and occasionally inaccurate, to satisfy, or increase, their curiosity. American interest in the region expanded as the decades passed and culminated, of course, in the Mexican War and American possession of the Southwest.

George Catlin, Joseph R. Millichap

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

George Catlin, the first and best observer of the Plains Indians, died in 1872, impoverished and ignored. As America enters its third century as a nation, it seems that American history might have caught up with him. In the 1970’s Catlin at last is receiving the attention which is his due as an adventurer, as an anthropologist, and as an artist, both literary and graphic. His drawings, paintings, and lithographs are being shown in museums and libraries across the country; his most important book, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians (1841) has …

Charles Warren Stoddard, Robert L. Gale

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Charles Warren Stoddard (1843-1909) was a personable San Francisco bohemian with a flair for precious poetics and a gift for describing Western and foreign locales. He became the friend of distinguished writers both regionally and internationally known, but he also became a self-indulging old sybarite who neglected his great literary talent. He is best known for his brilliant South-Sea Idyls, Mashallah!, The Lepers of Molokai, A Troubled Heart, In the Footprints of the Padres, The Island of Tranquil Delights, and several shorter works, and also for his friendship with such diverse personalities as Ina Coolbrith, Prentice Mulford, Mark Twain, Father …

E.W. Howe, Martin Bucco

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Edgar Watson Howe’s quaint niche in American literary history rests squarely on his first and best novel, The Story of a Country Town (1882). In 1856 the infant Howe and his parents trekked West, "to grow up with the country.” But unlike the early work of Bret Harte, Edward Eggleston, and Mark Twain, Howe’s Country Town blasted the Jeffersonian garden with the raw winds of Darwinism and Necessity and stressed Western drabness and tragic failure. His early hardships on the land, in printshops, and at home informed both his grim fiction and his country-town journalism. Before he became celebrated in …

Edward Abbey, Garth Mccann

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

To an assembly of professional historians meeting in Colorado in August 1974, Vine Deloria, Jr., complained that the accumulated bulk of research and writing dealing with the cowboy, cavalry, and fndian era of the American West stands in stark contrast to the dearth of attention paid by historians to what has happened since Wounded Knee. Everyone, apparently, knows all the cliches about the old West, but few know anything at all about the new West—about its history, its meaning, its place within developing American culture.

Salute To Iowa, James Hearst

James Hearst Documents

The typescript of the essay "Salute to Iowa" with edits later published in The Sandlapper November 1977. The essay includes his poems The Reason for Stars, Hog economy, and The Cure.

The Role Of Betrayal In Selected Drama Of Tennessee Williams, Craig E. Sanderson

Masters Theses

Much of the critical analysis of Tennessee Williams' drama concerns itself with the inherent conflict between ideals and reality in the universe as perceived by Williams. Such analysis, however, has not considered this conflict as a source of betrayal, or betrayal as a dominant theme in Williams' drama. In at least four of his plays it becomes evident how each of the individual characters in Williams' drama endures the conflict of reality and ideals, and the extent to which their respective approaches to the resolution of this struggle result in betrayal. Four plays--all regarded as among his most successful and …

From Rendezvous To Picket Fence: Tracing The Changing Frontier And Novelistic Development In A. B. Guthrie, Jr.'S Western Pentology, Raymond Charles Schmudde

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

In The Beginning: A New View Of Black American Etiological Tales, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

A substantial number of Black folktales may be designated as etiological "myths" in that they tend to focus on the world as it evolved and to frequently portray the role of God in explaining why the Negro is, to quote from one tale, "so messed up," why he is black, why he has big, ugly feet and hands, why his hair is kinky, and why he must remain a poor laborer in a rich society. The causes of all of these "inferior" traits of the Negro appear to be certain alleged defects in his character-his tardiness, his ignorance, his disobedience …

Female Initiates In Faulkner, Nancy Joan White

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Howells, Marriage, And Swedenborg: The Influence Of Swedenborg's Teachings On Howells' Portrayal Of Marriage In His Novels, Nancy Danner Marlow

Masters Theses

Over one-half of Howells' novels are concerned with marriage and courtship. Like many other aspects of his thinking, Howells' ideas of marriage were influenced by the teachings of Emmanuel Swedenborg, an eighteenth century Swedish scientist and theologian. The bulk of Swedenborg's teachings regarding marriage are found in his The Delights of Wisdom Concerning Conjugial Love, published in 1768. Howells showed the influence of Swedenborgianism on the marriages in his novels in three major areas: the actual marriages in his novels, matters relating to marriage, and marital failures.

An important element in Swedenborgianism is the belief in marriages in heaven. …

Letter From John Culver, John C. Culver

James Hearst Documents

A letter from John C. Culver congratulating James Hearst on his recognition by the Iowa Arts Council.