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Articles 1 - 30 of 103
Full-Text Articles in American Studies
A Study Of Geo-Regional Place-Consciousness In American Literature, Eugene Slepov
A Study Of Geo-Regional Place-Consciousness In American Literature, Eugene Slepov
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The ancient Greek notions of topos, or place, and choros, or region, emerge from a an oral, narrative-based tradition that predates geography. These concepts remind us that that best source of material to study place is to be found in literary fiction. American fiction in particular will give us the evidence by which we can compile a qualitative, experiential understanding of the role of place in people’s lives. This dissertation inquires into the formation of the imaginative constructions that characters put upon place—such as through the process of consolidating and dwelling in places—and the way place puts …
Reading In Place: Ordinary Language Philosophy, Wendell Berry, And Post Critique, Calvin L. Coon
Reading In Place: Ordinary Language Philosophy, Wendell Berry, And Post Critique, Calvin L. Coon
MSU Graduate Theses
The twenty-first century, marked by neoliberalism and suspicious, visibly violent far-Right politics, has presented new challenges to critical and literary theorists. In response, some theorists advocate for a postcritical turn, challenging both the surface/depth picture of language and the privileged status of suspicion in interpretation in order to explore alternative pictures of language and reading that can better address the challenges of our own day. In this thesis, I connect one of these alternatives, Toril Moi’s use of Ordinary Language Philosophy in literary studies, to Wendell Berry’s prioritization of place in environmentalist activism. In connecting these two thinkers, I contend …
Girlhood And Engendered Alienation In The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter And A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Lauren C. Dolese
Girlhood And Engendered Alienation In The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter And A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Lauren C. Dolese
University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations
Utilizing a girls’ studies perspective and materialist feminist lens, this paper seeks to put Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) in conversation with Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943). Besides being published in the early 1940s, both works feature young girls navigating class struggles, exploring their identities, and struggling against dominant ideologies specific to their time and place. McCullers’ and Smith’s novels depict how a patriarchal, capitalist society imposes upon young women a narrow, misogynistic view of themselves and the women around them—facilitating the social reproduction of oppression and alienation. In depicting these realities of …
Introduction: How American Literature Understands Poverty, Clare E. Callahan, Joseph Entin, Irvin Hunt, Kinohi Nishikawa
Introduction: How American Literature Understands Poverty, Clare E. Callahan, Joseph Entin, Irvin Hunt, Kinohi Nishikawa
English Faculty Publications
Together, the essays in this issue of American Literature stage what is at stake in how literature understands poverty, elucidating not only the problem of poverty but also, and especially, the problem of how we see it. To see poverty differently, they might conclude, is not only a matter of what we see. It is a matter of reflecting on how we see.
Hungry For More: American Food Writing And Globalization, Andrew Kleinke
Hungry For More: American Food Writing And Globalization, Andrew Kleinke
Theses and Dissertations
My dissertation, Hungry for More: American Food Writing and Globalization, investigates several food-focused texts including novels, travelogues, culinary memoirs, and TV shows. I take an interdisciplinary approach by incorporating literary theory into the field of food studies to argue that food texts from the United States reveal a growing anxiety towards what, how, and where we eat. As I show, food writing plays a prominent role in shaping many Americans' interactions with the world. More specifically, I argue that globalization has changed, and continues to transform, access and attachments to food. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I examine …
Science And Madness: Echoes Of Freudian Psychoanalysis In The Works Of H.P. Lovecraft And The Weird, Brandon J. Cordova
Science And Madness: Echoes Of Freudian Psychoanalysis In The Works Of H.P. Lovecraft And The Weird, Brandon J. Cordova
FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The purpose of this thesis was to highlight the influence of psychoanalysis on the writing of H.P. Lovecraft through a literary analysis of his critical essays, scientific essays, personal correspondence, and fiction. The subjects of note were Lovecraft’s intense focus on the sciences as an inspiration for his work, his awareness of Freudian psychoanalytic principles, and his application of those principles in his contributions to weird fiction. In doing so, this thesis explored alternative interpretations of some of Lovecraft’s more well-known stories and provided nuance to a bigoted, problematic figure of American literature. This paper highlighted the significant role of …
Reconstructing Queer Outsiders: Intersecting Identities Of Contemporary Gay Ethnic American Poets, Anthony Salazar
Reconstructing Queer Outsiders: Intersecting Identities Of Contemporary Gay Ethnic American Poets, Anthony Salazar
Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations
This dissertation explores poetry and memoirs written by recent poets who identify as gay, ethnic, and American. As a result of the complex process of both integrating their intersecting identities and confronting various forms of oppression, the work of gay ethnic American poets has become necessarily more layered than that of their white heteronormative counterparts. They have also transformed a genre traditionally defined by the limited and limiting category “gay” into a multivalent “queer” medium that embraces a futurity of vast and unapologetically ambiguous possibilities. Their very act of emphasizing ethnicity and sexuality in relation to other intersecting identities ultimately …
American Performance: Artistic Experience And The American Dream, Savannah M. Barrow
American Performance: Artistic Experience And The American Dream, Savannah M. Barrow
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The American Dream was first epitomized by Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography (1791), in which he instructs his fellow citizens on how to procure the American promises of social mobility and economic prosperity. However, the moral and social performances reinforced by Franklin’s recipe-for-success promote an ideological system that prevents marginalized communities such as women, immigrants, and people of color, from procuring the Dream’s most foundational features. Inequitable access to the Dream is a theme revisited throughout American literature, wherein disenfranchised characters consume the aspirational narrative of American social mobility through art, media, and propaganda. This essay tracks the representation of …
Trauma Before The Name : Impersonal Violence In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Carolin Alice Hofmann
Trauma Before The Name : Impersonal Violence In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Carolin Alice Hofmann
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
The dissertation studies the pre-history of trauma in US American fiction, examining how experiences of large-scale adversity are represented before the concept of psychological trauma emerges in the late nineteenth century. Distinctly modern forms of violence—diffuse, systemic, lacking direction and intent—bring forth less individual and personal experiences of grief and suffering than those imagined by twentieth-century trauma theory. Studying forms of feeling and of genre that make trauma legible historicizes the way a Western idea of modern subjectivity, as white, self-possessed, agential, and split, has shaped out understanding of how a person processes crisis. The dissertation visits three spaces that …
Defining African American Authorship, April Quattlebaum
Defining African American Authorship, April Quattlebaum
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
James Weldon Johnson and Melvin B. Tolson are pivotal figures of the early 20th century. They represent a fundamental question that has been and is indeed still in the minds of African American authors: What is a Black author? African American authorship necessarily involves the challenge of forging a literary identity in the face of a society structurally and temperamentally predisposed to marginalize and dismiss them. In their creative and scholarly works, Johnson and Tolson methodically dissect Black authorship, looking both to the past and to their present situation as they strive to imagine a future for African American literary …
Scenes Of Subversion: How Monstrous Subjectivities Affect Futurity In Gothic Horror, Salvatore S. Dibono
Scenes Of Subversion: How Monstrous Subjectivities Affect Futurity In Gothic Horror, Salvatore S. Dibono
Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen begins his conclusory section of his influential essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” stating, “Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return” (52). Yet, Lee Edelman in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive makes a statement which complicates the idea of the monster being “our child” when discussing that the normative (conservative) movement will “recurrently frame their political struggle…as a ‘fight for our children—for our daughters and our …
Grappling With The Aftereffects Of Modernism In American Literature And Culture: Spiritual, Political, And Ecological, Joseph Neary
Grappling With The Aftereffects Of Modernism In American Literature And Culture: Spiritual, Political, And Ecological, Joseph Neary
Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects
In this portfolio, Joe Neary examines various texts within contemporary American culture, including David Foster Wallace’s short story, “Good Old Neon,” Harmony Korine’s film, Spring Breakers, Richard Powers’ novel, The Overstory, and Bruce Holsinger’s book of criticism, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror.
Meeting Places : The Entanglements Of Poetry And Science In The Modern American Imagination, James H. Searle
Meeting Places : The Entanglements Of Poetry And Science In The Modern American Imagination, James H. Searle
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
“Meeting Places: The Entanglements of Poetry and Science in the Modern American Imagination” explores how Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Carlos Williams, and Muriel Rukeyser responded to the rise of modern science and industrial technology by reflecting on the similarities and differences between the poetic and scientific imaginations. Across four chapters, I show how the growth of the natural and social sciences from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century spurred these writers to rethink the social and cultural functions of literature in a democratic society. Unlike many of their peers, these figures refused to treat science either as a …
Despite The Blues: Richard Wright And Ralph Ellison’S Blues Based Works, Miranda Virginia Reale
Despite The Blues: Richard Wright And Ralph Ellison’S Blues Based Works, Miranda Virginia Reale
Senior Projects Spring 2020
Ain't got no mother, ain't got no culture
Ain't got no friends, ain't got no schoolin'
Ain't got no love, ain't got no name
Ain't got no ticket, ain't got no token
Ain't got no god
–Nina Simone, “Ain’t Got No-I Got Life,” from the album Nuff Said (1968).
In between human intention and reality lies a disproportionate space that Albert Camus labels “the absurd.” Modern man’s affliction is thus absurd, as orthodox systems turn obsolete, the traditional virtues of the past cease to be familiar. The epistemology of the absurd may not have developed from American soil; but I …
Love And Revolution: Queer Freedom, Tragedy, Belonging, And Decolonization, 1944 To 1970, Velina Manolova
Love And Revolution: Queer Freedom, Tragedy, Belonging, And Decolonization, 1944 To 1970, Velina Manolova
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation examines literary works by U.S. writers Lillian Smith, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry written in the early part of the postwar period referred to as the “Protest Era” (1944-1970). Analyzing a major work by each author—Strange Fruit (1944), The Member of the Wedding (1946), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Les Blancs (1970)—this project proposes that Smith, McCullers, Baldwin, and Hansberry were not only early theorists of intersectionality but also witnesses to the deeply problematic entanglements of subjectivities formed by differential privilege, which the author calls intersubjectivity or love. Through frameworks of queerness, racialization, performance/performativity, tragedy, and …
Such News Of The Land: U.S. Women Nature Writers, Thomas S. Edwards, Elizabeth A. Dewolfe
Such News Of The Land: U.S. Women Nature Writers, Thomas S. Edwards, Elizabeth A. Dewolfe
History Faculty Books
This pathbreaking collection, which contains 19 essays from scholars in a variety of fields, illuminates the work of two centuries of American women nature writers. Some discuss traditional nature writers such as Susan Fenimore Cooper, Mary Austin, Gene Stratton Porter, and Annie Dillard. Others examine the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Anzaldua, and Leslie Marmon Silko, writers not often associated with this genre. Essays on germinal texts such as Marjory Stoneman Douglas's The Everglades: River of Grass stand alongside examinations of market bulletins and women's gardens, showing how the rich diversity of women's nature writing has shaped and expanded …
On The Margins, Rowan Cahill
On The Margins, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
Marxist Ideology In Alice Chilress’S Like One Of The Family, Elizabeth Elliott
Marxist Ideology In Alice Chilress’S Like One Of The Family, Elizabeth Elliott
The Downtown Review
This paper explores Alice Childress work Like One of the Family, a collection of short stories originally published as a column the newspaper Freedom, and how Childress uses the highly personable work to advocate for socialist ideology and exhibit how socialism could positively affect the black working class, particularly domestic workers. Through her work, Childress humanizes the domestic worker, a group that was often not only disenfranchised by whites but also prohibited from labor organizing with other African-Americans. She engages with Marx’s ideology in an understandable and personal way: by utilizing the African-American oral tradition. This exposed her audience to …
The Jeremiad In American Science Fiction Literature, 1890-1970, Matthew Schneider
The Jeremiad In American Science Fiction Literature, 1890-1970, Matthew Schneider
Theses and Dissertations
Scholarship on the form of sermon known as the American jeremiad—a prophetic warning of national decline and the terms of promised renewal for a select remnant—draws heavily on the work of Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch. A wealth of scholarship has critiqued Bercovitch’s formulation of the jeremiad, which he argues is a rhetorical form that holds sway in American culture by forcing political discourse to hold onto an “America” as its frame of reference. But most interlocutors still work with the jeremiad primarily in American studies or in terms of national discourse. Rooted in the legacy of Puritan rhetoric, the …
Dresses And Dollars: Domesticity And Economy In Little Women And The Morgesons, Tess Walsh
Dresses And Dollars: Domesticity And Economy In Little Women And The Morgesons, Tess Walsh
Senior Theses
Although popular discourse in 19th century America sought to divide public and private life into masculine and feminine spheres, a textual analysis of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott and The Morgesons by Elizabeth Drew Stoddard, which were both written in the later half of the 19th century by New England women writers, demonstrates that domesticity was informed and shaped by economic forces. Details of characters' clothing, homes, dining habits, and social relationships all reveal that far from being a separate sphere, the American home at this time was perhaps the space in which financial status and economic forces were …
Decolonial Resistance In Latinx Writings From Peru To The United States: A Portfolio, Isabel Norwood
Decolonial Resistance In Latinx Writings From Peru To The United States: A Portfolio, Isabel Norwood
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection begins with the premise that colonial relationships manifest in ways beyond exploitation of one nation by another. It relies on the decolonial theory of Walter D. Mignolo in its assumption that imbalances of power in the realms of race gender sexuality and class are fundamentally colonial. With this more expansive understanding of coloniality in mind I examine resistance to colonial exploitation in a range of texts from across the Americas. The first essay in this collection explores the role of the guinea pig in Andean food culture arguing that the continued consumption of guinea pig represents a form …
Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature, Josh-Wade Ferguson
Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature, Josh-Wade Ferguson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
“Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature” revises the methodological assumptions that have underwritten our understanding of blues literature and the politics of race and region that surround it. Where previous commentators have defined blues literature primarily through its formal and thematic connections with blues music and with the sociohistorical contours of black southern life more generally this dissertation expands the boundaries of how we conceive blues literature by examining Langston Hughes’ poems “The Weary Blues” (1925) and “Po Boy Blues” (1926) August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984) Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods …
Sleight Of Hand: Gender, Performance, And (In)Sincerity In E. D. E. N. Southworth’S The Hidden Hand, Samantha Martin
Sleight Of Hand: Gender, Performance, And (In)Sincerity In E. D. E. N. Southworth’S The Hidden Hand, Samantha Martin
Scripps Senior Theses
One of the many cultural anxieties that existed during the nineteenth century in antebellum America centered on the dubious status of authenticity of one’s emotions, gender expression, or socioeconomic class. The fluctuating socioeconomic landscape of antebellum America destabilized the logic of categorization, rendering it an ineffectual means by which to evaluate others’ identities. In her novel The Hidden Hand, or, Capitola the Madcap, E. D. E. N. Southworth explores instead of censures the transformative properties of the self, specifically in terms of gender and class. Her interest in this lack of authenticity, or transparency regarding one’s self and intentions, …
Alaska And The Arctic In The U.S. Imaginary, Ryan Charlton
Alaska And The Arctic In The U.S. Imaginary, Ryan Charlton
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Popular narratives of Alaska have long relied on the region’s mythical status as the “last frontier” a perception which enfolds Alaska into a continental narrative of U.S. expansion. This frontier image has foreclosed our ability to appreciate the profound instability which the 1867 Alaska Purchase brought into U.S. national discourse at a time when Americans were eager to adopt a fixed national identity. In the three decades following the purchase Alaska would resist incorporation into the national imaginary challenging the coherence of U.S. national identity and calling into question foundational myths of the United States as a continental and agrarian …
‘The Shadow And The Law’: Stevenson, Nabokov And Dostoevsky, Rose France
‘The Shadow And The Law’: Stevenson, Nabokov And Dostoevsky, Rose France
Studies in Scottish Literature
Discusses Vladimir Nabokov's comments in lectures at Cornell praising Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde while condemning Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and compares the two novels' treatment of the double in their central character with Nabokov's Humbert Humbert in Lolita.
Representations Of Women In The Literature Of The U.S.-Mexico War, Janel M. Simons
Representations Of Women In The Literature Of The U.S.-Mexico War, Janel M. Simons
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
This dissertation examines figures of women as represented in the literature of the U.S.-Mexico war in order to think through the ways in which the border conflict was preserved in nineteenth-century U.S. American collective memory. Central to my dissertation is a consideration of the intersections of history, myth, legend, and fiction in the memorialization of this war. This dissertation demonstrates that a close look at fictionalized accounts of women’s experiences of and roles in the U.S.-Mexico war highlights the ways in which historical fictions influence how we remember this moment of our collective past.
Focusing on popular accounts of the …
Canal Boy To President 1881 Miller Ed.Pdf, Jon Miller
Canal Boy To President 1881 Miller Ed.Pdf, Jon Miller
Jon Miller
No abstract provided.
Sickly Sentimentalism: Sympathy And Pathology In American Women's Literature, 1866-1900, Nicole Zeftel
Sickly Sentimentalism: Sympathy And Pathology In American Women's Literature, 1866-1900, Nicole Zeftel
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Sickly Sentimentalism: Pathology and Sympathy in American Women’s Literature, 1866-1900 examines the work of four American women novelists writing between 1866 and 1900 as responses to a dominant medical discourse that pathologized women’s emotions. The popular fiction of Metta Fuller Victor, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Orne Jewett, and E.D.E.N. Southworth mobilized sentimental style and sympathetic affect to challenge the medical trend of treating female sentiment as a sickness. At the level of narrative, this challenge took the form of deviating from the domestic and marriage plots prevalent in women’s popular fiction of their period. Through forms of sentimental writing my …
The French Revolution In Early American Literature, 1789–1815: Translations, Interpretations, Refractions, Courtney Chatellier
The French Revolution In Early American Literature, 1789–1815: Translations, Interpretations, Refractions, Courtney Chatellier
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The French Revolution in Early American Literature, 1789-1815: Translations, Interpretations, Refractions, examines the meaning of the French and Haitian Revolutions in early U.S. literary culture by analyzing American novels, periodical fiction, and essays that engaged with French revolutionary politics (by writers including Judith Sargent Murray, Martha Meredith Read, Charles Brockden Brown, and Joseph Dennie); as well as translations and reprints of French texts by writers including Stéphanie de Genlis, Sophie Cottin, and Jean-Baptiste Piquenard that circulated among American readers during this period. Drawing on archival research, and the methodology of book history, this study establishes that translations—though often disregarded by …
Douglass’ Reply To A. C. C. Thompson’S ‘Letter From Frederick Douglass,’ As Reprinted In The Anti-Slavery Bugle: A Critical Edition Of Both Letters, With A Summary Of Maryland’S Fugitive Slave Laws, Kayla Hardy-Butler
Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature
Kayla Hardy-Butler presents a famous letter by Frederick Douglass, as it was published in Ohio, with the letter that prompted it. This edition also includes a summary of Maryland slave statutes from the time to better explain the day-to-day experience of slavery debated in this correspondence.