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Articles 1 - 30 of 87
Full-Text Articles in American Studies
"There Is Nothing Else Like It": The Innovative Personality Of Lowney Turner Handy, Nathan Crews
"There Is Nothing Else Like It": The Innovative Personality Of Lowney Turner Handy, Nathan Crews
Masters Theses
No abstract provided.
The Cast Of A Giant's Shadow, Angela Kay Steineman
The Cast Of A Giant's Shadow, Angela Kay Steineman
Masters Theses
Adapting fairy tales and folklore has been an ongoing endeavor by storytellers and artists since the very first story was repeated. The evidence can be seen in the many versions of fairy tales like those of the sleeping beauty, from Giambattista Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia” to Walt Disney’s Maleficent. However, unlike their European counterparts, adaptations of American tales outside of children’s literature are not as ubiquitous. My writing rectifies this by adding to the resurging interest as seen in recent retellings like Matt Bell’s Appleseed: The Monstrous Birth (2019).
In an effort to reframe the American tall tale …
Workers, Athletes And Artists: The Historical Continuity Of White Control Of Black America, Courtney Walton
Workers, Athletes And Artists: The Historical Continuity Of White Control Of Black America, Courtney Walton
Masters Theses
From the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first century, black Americans have been subject to different forms of control. This subjection of blacks to societal demands arose in part because black people are viewed as inferior to white people. Because of this misconstrued perception, black people are forced to present an acceptable level of blackness to prevent punishment. Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch" (1938), Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (1928), and Langston Hughes's "The Negro Artist and Racial Mountain" (1926) detail their lives at the tum of the …
Introducing The Hero Of Stasis: An Examination Of Heroism In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest And The Pale King, Gregory Robert Peterson
Introducing The Hero Of Stasis: An Examination Of Heroism In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest And The Pale King, Gregory Robert Peterson
Masters Theses
No abstract provided.
Deceiving, Fraudulent, And Seductive: The Discourses Of Money In Us Novels Of The Early Republic, Fabian Rempfer
Deceiving, Fraudulent, And Seductive: The Discourses Of Money In Us Novels Of The Early Republic, Fabian Rempfer
Masters Theses
This thesis focuses on the importance of money and the representations of its various physical manifestations (such as coin, paper money) in American fiction of the 1790s. My project traces the transition from the colonies' financial dependency on Britain to their independency, relating to the monetary union created after the passage of the constitution. I argue that this shift from financial dependency to independency influences books such as Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson, Kelroy by Rebecca Rush, Ormond or the Secret Witness and Arthur Mervyn by Charles Brockden Brown. My project highlights, on the one hand, the importance of such …
Female Anti-Heroes In Contemporary Literature, Film, And Television, Sara A. Amato
Female Anti-Heroes In Contemporary Literature, Film, And Television, Sara A. Amato
Masters Theses
The anti-hero character has steadily become more popular in contemporary literature, film, and television. Part of this popularity is due to the character's appeal to the audience. This character type often commits acts that challenge the regulations of society. These acts, however, can become wish fulfillment for some audience members, making the acts of the character a vicarious experience as well as making the character more relatable because of the character's flawed nature.
This study will trace some of the evolution of the female anti-hero by discussing an ancestral character of the female anti-hero—Hester Prynne the protagonist of Nathanial Hawthorne's …
Mental Illness In Early American Fiction: Charles Brockden Brown And The Sentimental Novelists, Katie E. Walk
Mental Illness In Early American Fiction: Charles Brockden Brown And The Sentimental Novelists, Katie E. Walk
Masters Theses
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed the development of the United States of America as a new nation. This development brought with it new ideologies and social and political change; included in these changes was the way that sexual conduct outside of marriage was dealt with. Because the emerging legal system became less concerned with matters of morality, some people became frightened that sexual promiscuity would become rampant. The sentimental novel or seduction tale became a means of attempting to control sexual behavior when the law was not able to step in.
The way that madness, a term …
The Lyric And The Lathe: Dreams Of Perfect Poetic Efficiency, 1800-1917, Steven A. Nathaniel
The Lyric And The Lathe: Dreams Of Perfect Poetic Efficiency, 1800-1917, Steven A. Nathaniel
Masters Theses
This study examines patterns of efficiency in the poetry and theory of William Wordsworth, Hilda Doolittle, and other figures from the Modernist and Romantic periods. I begin by defining perfect efficiency as occurring when energy transforms, without loss, inside a closed energy system, and I offer perpetual motion machines as hypothetical examples of this impossible state. I then demonstrate the process of efficiency in William Wordsworth's poetry, which begins with circumlocutory poetic cycles but contracts into terse repetitions. Since technical efficiency is calculated by the formula output/input, poetry's subjectivity makes poetic efficiency difficult to measure. However, I suggest that repetitions …
Imprisonment, Punishment, And Progress In Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Ashley Breanne Waggoner
Imprisonment, Punishment, And Progress In Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Ashley Breanne Waggoner
Masters Theses
No abstract provided.
Narcissistic Intertextuality In The Works Of Bret Easton Ellis, Jennifer Grindstaff
Narcissistic Intertextuality In The Works Of Bret Easton Ellis, Jennifer Grindstaff
Masters Theses
This thesis examines the works of Bret Easton Ellis, specifically his three latest novels: Glamorama, Lunar Park, and Imperial Bedrooms, and identifies the metafictional and intertextual elements in these texts. For my purposes, I am defining metafiction as fiction that draws attention to itself and makes the reader aware that he or she is reading fiction. Intertextual will be defined as elements in the novels that appear in other works of fiction. In the case of Ellis, he is drawing upon and reusing elements from his own fiction. These elements include characters that reappear in novels other than the text …
Speaking Silence Fluently: Encouraging Student Understanding Of Counterhegemonic Strategies In African American Literature, Kathleen S. Decker
Speaking Silence Fluently: Encouraging Student Understanding Of Counterhegemonic Strategies In African American Literature, Kathleen S. Decker
Masters Theses
This thesis suggests that while mainstream multicultural education claims to promote both diversity and equality, it fails to adequately address, let alone improve, the living conditions of minority students. It further suggests that when teachers help students read through the lenses of critical multiculturalism and critical whiteness studies, students can better see that both canonical and non-canonical African American authors deliberately employ nuanced strategies to resist white supremacy. Specifically through the use of purposeful and discreet silences, these authors serve to promote new and actively counterhegemonic ways of thinking in the classroom.
Each chapter pairs two texts--one canonical and one …
Athenaïse, Calixta, And Creole Constraints: An In Depth Look At Chopin's Portrayal Of Women, Nicole Reichert
Athenaïse, Calixta, And Creole Constraints: An In Depth Look At Chopin's Portrayal Of Women, Nicole Reichert
Undergraduate Honors Theses
No abstract provided.
Book Reviews: Place, Language, And Identity In Afro-Costa Rican Literature, By Dorothy E. Mosby, And The Fugitive Race: Minority Writers Resisting Whiteness, By Stephen P. Knadler, Tim Engles
Faculty Research & Creative Activity
No abstract provided.
Book Reviews: Place, Language, And Identity In Afro-Costa Rican Literature, By Dorothy E. Mosby, And The Fugitive Race: Minority Writers Resisting Whiteness, By Stephen P. Knadler, Tim Engles
Faculty Research & Creative Activity
No abstract provided.
Review Of Place, Language, And Identity In Afro-Costa Rican Literature, By Dorothy E. Mosby, And The Fugitive Race: Minority Writers Resisting Whiteness, By Stephen P. Knadler, Tim Engles
Faculty Research & Creative Activity
No abstract provided.
Lacunae: Narrative "Lacks, Holes Or Gaps" In Faulkner's And Morrison's Novels, Phyllis Ann Karpus
Lacunae: Narrative "Lacks, Holes Or Gaps" In Faulkner's And Morrison's Novels, Phyllis Ann Karpus
Masters Theses
The moment a reader opens a book, turns to the opening lines and begins to read, a circular relationship immediately develops with the author and the text. An implied alliance is formed wherein the author, most often through a narrator, omniscient or otherwise, proposes to the reader that he/she accept a degree of responsibility for understanding the plot, theme, and the underlying meaning in the work.
Retrospectively the theory sounds simple and, with many authors, it is effective. William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, however, not only command but also demand, the reader's absolute attention in, and responsibility to, many of …
The Soldier's Strife: An Introspective View Through The Work Of Tim O'Brien, Mandy Solomon
The Soldier's Strife: An Introspective View Through The Work Of Tim O'Brien, Mandy Solomon
Masters Theses
No abstract provided.
The Role Of Place In Malcolm Cowley's Blue Juniata And Exile's Return, Robert Pratte
The Role Of Place In Malcolm Cowley's Blue Juniata And Exile's Return, Robert Pratte
Masters Theses
This study examines the various ways in which Malcolm Cowley develops and uses sense of place in his works Blue Juniata: Collected Poems and Exile's Return. Through examination of the literature, I identify four phases of place sense. Starting with childhood in the Identification phase, I illustrate the development of Cowley's place perspective through his poems and writings. As he moves through Adventure and Exile phases, I discuss their relation to the Identification phase and to each other. Likewise, I consider the role of the Nostalgia phase as a bridge from literary to experiential perception. Through close examination of his …
This Man's Heart: Masculinity In The Poetry Of E.E. Cummings, Willis John Whitesell Iii
This Man's Heart: Masculinity In The Poetry Of E.E. Cummings, Willis John Whitesell Iii
Masters Theses
"This Man's Heart: Masculinity in the Poetry of E.E. Cummings" explores changing masculinity in the life and poetry of E.E. Cummings. The relationship between Cummings and his father, his first male role model, became strained when Cummings was a teenager finding his own male identity. As he rebelled against his father, a Unitarian minister, he began writing poetry in a modernist style under the direction of a new mentor, Ezra Pound.
Cummings' early modernist poems criticize conventional male roles and configurations of masculinity as outdated. As Cummings continued to grow as a man and writer, he confronted new realities which …
John Irving, Female Sexuality, And The Victorian Feminine Ideal, Tara Coburn
John Irving, Female Sexuality, And The Victorian Feminine Ideal, Tara Coburn
Masters Theses
In an interview about The Cider House Rules, John Irving states, "It is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel" (qtd. in Herel, para. 18). However, in book reviews, jacket blurbs, literary criticism, and Irving's own writing, readers and critics and Irving often assert that he is a neo-Victorian novelist, and the Victorians were a notoriously political bunch. Though Irving does not admit to the political nature of his writing, the way he treats feminist politics in his fiction has drawn particular notice by the media, who often label him as a feminist writer. …
The Ruins Of Childhood: Jim Thompson, Erskine Caldwell, And William Faulkner Expose Guilt And Consequence, Robert Thomas Newell
The Ruins Of Childhood: Jim Thompson, Erskine Caldwell, And William Faulkner Expose Guilt And Consequence, Robert Thomas Newell
Masters Theses
In this thesis, I examine the novels of Jim Thompson, Erskine Caldwell, and William Faulkner and, in turn, depict their exploration of poisoned childhood. This theme is prevalent in many of these authors' works, and I not only illustrate what horrors children are put through in their novels, but I also show that uncaring and unthinking adults are the root cause. The ruining of a child's life is a rippling problem; often times, adulthood is ruined because of a person's childhood.
I explore the devastation that irresponsible adults can have on their impressionable children. Through either neglect or selfish values, …
Yoknapatawpha As Camelot: The Influence Of The Arthurian Legends On The Writings Of William Faulkner, Sally Dye
Yoknapatawpha As Camelot: The Influence Of The Arthurian Legends On The Writings Of William Faulkner, Sally Dye
Masters Theses
In my thesis I examine works of William Faulkner which show the influence of the legends of King Arthur. In the introduction to the thesis, I discuss evidence that Faulkner was not only familiar with the characters of the Arthurian legends but was also aware of many of the different versions of these stories.
The main sections of my thesis consist of character studies of various characters from Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha works in light of their similarities to their Arthurian counterparts. The King Arthur section includes the characters of John Sartoris of The Unvanquished and Thomas Sutpen of Absalom, Absalom!, …
James Welch's Winter In The Blood: Thawing The Fragments Of Misconception In Native American Fiction, Mario A. Leto Ii
James Welch's Winter In The Blood: Thawing The Fragments Of Misconception In Native American Fiction, Mario A. Leto Ii
Masters Theses
The conventional scholarly view of Native American literature asserts that Native authors often portray their characters as alienated and despairing individuals that are incapable of attaining the means for dispelling those negative feelings. As a result, the characters are presumably destined to forever wander the barren reservation, unable to grasp their fleeting cultural traditions or the modern Euroamerican way of life. James Welch, with his novel Winter in the Blood, challenges that stereotypical scenario by allowing his nameless protagonist to discover a previously unknown link to his traditional Blackfeet heritage. Through the knowledge of his ancestors and the unconscious …
A Woman's Quest For Happiness: O'Neill's "Private Myth", Andrea Ximena CampañA Garcia
A Woman's Quest For Happiness: O'Neill's "Private Myth", Andrea Ximena CampañA Garcia
Masters Theses
Following the approach used by James Hurt in his book Catiline's Dream to determine Henrik Ibsen's "private myth" which he retold in play after play, I have delineated O'Neill's "private myth" in a narrower way concentrating on his female characters. Examining parallel motifs in the lives of the dominant women in Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, and Mourning Becomes Electra, I have detected this mythic pattern involving the O'Neillian woman: She goes through an early innocent and submissive state guided by an initial vision of happiness which can be regarded as fairly conventional. But when her …
A New Reading Of Ruth Suckow, Judith Pierson
A New Reading Of Ruth Suckow, Judith Pierson
Masters Theses
By 1950, after three decades of writing, Ruth Suckow (1892-1960) was a well-respected writer whose work seemed headed for a permanent position in the canon of American literature. Instead, Suckow's fiction steadily became less known through the following decades. The question of why her work came to be ignored and why such a position is unwarranted is addressed in A New Reading of Ruth Suckow. The conclusion is that a regionalist categorization and a related gender bias in the literary canon have adversely affected Suckow's works.
Gender bias is reflected in the critical assumptions which ascribe an inferior position to …
Selective Methods Of Teaching Secondary English: The Scarlet Letter: A Study And Application Of The Collaborative And Mastery Learning Methods, Janine M. Kardas
Selective Methods Of Teaching Secondary English: The Scarlet Letter: A Study And Application Of The Collaborative And Mastery Learning Methods, Janine M. Kardas
Masters Theses
This study is about the relationship of content in teaching to the process in teaching for the purpose of helping students to become better readers of literature. This study investigates two selected teaching strategies supported by research to be effective, and applies them to the teaching of a canonical piece of literature, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. This study employs literary theory in the development of the objectives and applies both cooperative learning and mastery learning methods to the teaching of this novel. Two sets of lesson plans are developed from the objectives and subsequently analyzed for their effectiveness …
Zora Neale Hurston’S Search For Identity In Moses, Man Of The Mountain, Joan E. Sebastian
Zora Neale Hurston’S Search For Identity In Moses, Man Of The Mountain, Joan E. Sebastian
Masters Theses
Zora Neale Hurston, Afro-American writer of the 1920s and 1930s, has gained critical recognition for her novels and studies about the Afro-American masses. Hurston, also an anthropologist and folklorist, worked directly with southern Afro-Americans through her research in both of these fields. Her folklore collecting journeys enabled her to see and to capture the cultural traditions and oral heritage of Afro-Americans. It was her search into the cultural traditions, moreover, that led her to find her own identity. Hurston, therefore, depicted her protagonists as searching for an identity in most of her novels, with this quest especially apparent in Moses, …
Preservation Of The Family Unit In Adolescent Novels, Mary M. Hutchings
Preservation Of The Family Unit In Adolescent Novels, Mary M. Hutchings
Masters Theses
This thesis discusses the development of the family story from the late nineteenth century to the present, beginning with What Katy Did as an example of the earlier moral story from which this genre grows. It then focuses on Little Women as the beginning of the modern family story and uses Jo from Little Women as the starting point to discuss the development of the female adolescent protagonist in these stories. And lastly, comparing Little Women to modern family life stories which began to appear about 1940, the thesis discusses changes in didacticism which have occurred since the late nineteenth …
Pilar And Brett: Female Heroes In Hemingway, Jean Kover Chandler
Pilar And Brett: Female Heroes In Hemingway, Jean Kover Chandler
Masters Theses
The significant works on the hero have always assumed that the hero is male. However, feminist writers, such as Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope, have recently shown many women who are, in fact, heroic in both American and British literature. The main problem is that both cultures have often been unable to recognize female heroism, primarily because of their long-conditioned patriarchal perspectives.
Men go on heroic quests; women either help or hinder them along their paths. Thus, women have been considered as supporting characters only, and they are called heroines. But some authors have created female heroes who are not …
Jean Toomer's Cane: A Work In The American Grotesque Genre, Kathryn M. Olsen
Jean Toomer's Cane: A Work In The American Grotesque Genre, Kathryn M. Olsen
Masters Theses
In my thesis I will discuss the fact that Jean Toomer’s Cane is a grotesque work, one which in several ways resembles Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. While Jean Toomer never specifically alludes to any of the characters in Cane as grotesques, they consistently exhibit three of the strongest, most characteristic elements of the grotesque: physical and/or psychic deformities, alienation from the reader/viewer, and, most importantly, unrelenting conflict from two opposing elements. In fact, the figures in Cane show even more development of grotesque themes than the characters in Winesburg, Ohio, a collection known for its portrayals of modern …