American Literature Commons^™

The Enduring Hold Of The Bible On Modern Literature: Exploring The Fall Narrative As A Conceptual Metaphor For American Literature In John Steinbeck’S East Of Eden, Lauren Stotsky

Undergraduate Honors Theses

There is no greater work of literature, perhaps, than the Bible. The Bible has shaped and influenced more literature, art, and culture than any other work in our time. The effects of the Bible’s words are still woven into modern literature today, illustrating that the Bible’s themes, allegories, parables, fables, metaphors, and characters are things that we humans are unable to depart far from even many decades later. One of the very first stories in the Bible, found at the beginning in Genesis, tells of Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve’s depiction as the first kind of our species and …

Tension Within Immigrant Identity In South Asian And Asian Characters In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Everything I Never Told You, And Disgraced, Dania Abdelsalam

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis examines the ways American fiction in the past two decades marked a renewal of the study of the immigrant experience. By examining this renewal, I argue that the conversation is no longer focused on the treatment of assimilation but moves into the psychological shock that transpires after assimilation is achieved. This shock is a critical condition of belonging to two opposing identities. Using Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Celeste Ng’s novel Everything I Never Told You (2014) and Ayad Akhtar’s play Disgraced (2012), I clarify that these works present protagonists from South Asian and East Asian …

The Gothic Other: A Critique Of Race, Gender, Slavery, And Systemic Oppression Found In Nathaniel Hawthorne, Toni Morrison, And Hannah Crafts, Kelly Franklin

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines three novels all communicating ideas about race, gender, and slavery under the conventions of Gothic literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) show how patriarchy oppressed and haunted women while keeping slavery at the margins. Beloved (1987), by Toni Morrison, fictionalizes the account of a female slave who murdered her child to assert her power and reject slavery. However, Morrison rewrites and defies aspects of the Gothic mode by bringing the ghost of the murdered child back to life, and later showing steps the community can take to heal from their collective trauma. The …

The Figure Of The Animal In Modern And Contemporary Poetry By Michael Malay, Brian Bartlett

The Goose

Review of Michael Malay's The Figure of the Animal in Modern and Contemporary Poetry

Fire And Snow: Climate Fiction From The Inklings To Game Of Thrones By Marc Dipaolo, Jamie Campbell Martin

The Goose

Review of Fire and Snow: Climate Fiction from the Inklings to Game of Thrones by Marc DiPaolo

Motions Like Sleep In Robert Penn Warren’S “Lullaby”, Cameron Fontes

Robert Penn Warren Essay Contest

No abstract provided.

“Where Inner And Outer Meet”: Dissociation And The Creative Process, Joseph Shoulders

Robert Penn Warren Essay Contest

No abstract provided.

Correspondence With The Season Of Autumn, Seth Nevin

Robert Penn Warren Essay Contest

No abstract provided.

Mary Ellen Miller: In Memoriam, Frank Steele

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Editorial Preface, Joan Romano Shifflett

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

James A. Grimshaw, Jr.: In Memoriam, William Bedford Clark

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Melville’S Battle-Pieces And Warren’S Wilderness (Eleanor Clark Award Winner, 2017), Mary Cuff

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Elizabeth Bishop's Perspectives On Marriage, Jeffrey Westover

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Marriage can never be renewed except by that which is always the source of true marriage: that two human beings reveal the You to one another.
- Martin Buber

In a number of texts, both published and unpublished, Elizabeth Bishop addresses the themes of marriage, love, and courtship. Such issues were vexed ones for her. As a young woman, she rejected Robert Seaver’s marriage proposal (Millier, Elizabeth Bishop 112). Later, her friend Pauline Hemingway wondered in a letter whether she and Tom Wanning were engaged (Millier, Elizabeth Bishop 201), and Robert Lowell famously confessed to her that she was the …

Nine Stories And The Society Of The Spectacle: An Exploration Into The Alienation Of The Individual In The Post-War Era, Margaret E. Geddy

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the thematic links between three of J. D. Salinger’s short stories published in Nine Stories (“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Down at the Dinghy,” and “Teddy”), ultimately arguing that it is a short-story cycle rooted in the quandary posed by the suicide of Seymour Glass. This conclusion is reached by assessing the influence of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” on these stories, something that is understood through the Marxist frame of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle.

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 …

Idealist And Materialist Approaches To Abolition In Uncle Tom's Cabin And The Daughter Of Adoption, Jillian Shea

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Sentimentalism was a popular aesthetic, moral, political, and literary movement in the 18th and 19th centuries in the United States and England, and both Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption (1801) use sentimentalism in their attempts to advocate for the abolition of slavery. Scholars such as Lauren Berlant critique sentimentalism, specifically Stowe’s use of sentimentalism, for its potential to make structural problems appear as if they can be assuaged by personal change, and I situate this understanding of sentimentalism within an idealist framework, or a framework that primarily emphasizes subjectivity’s role in …

Curious Natures: Constructing Queer Ecologies In Early America, Richard Lee Parmer Jr.

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation argues that early American writers often constructed queer ecologies in order to naturalize Anglo-American civilization and justify its expansion into Native American territories. Since there is so little textual evidence on the subject, the major challenge to studying sexuality in early America is approaching sexuality studies creatively—to broaden both our understanding of what counts as sexual discourse and our frameworks for analyzing it. My dissertation addresses this challenge through what many ecocritical scholars of sexuality call queer ecology. In their groundbreaking anthology on the topic, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erikson remind us that, historically and in the present, …

(In)Equities In The Publishing Industry: The Politics Of Representation, Hallie R. Lepphaille

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project contains an overview and key introductory sections of an intersectional, equity-based literary publishing course textbook. The full-length edited collection, currently under external review for publication, seeks to rectify long-held disparities of the publishing industry in regard to hiring, acquisitions, developmental editing, and considerations in audience, readerships, and marketing. Each chapter examines the ways that racism, ableism, heterosexism, and cisnormativity, operate in the industry, limiting who is represented at an editor’s desk and in the pages of published books. The collection is intended to be utilized in upper-division and graduate-level literary publishing courses. This project is a response to …

Perspectives On Lynching In William Faulkner's Fiction And Nonfiction, Tabitha Fisher

Master’s Theses

This thesis analyzes William Faulkner's "Mob Sometimes Right" (1931), Light in August (1932), Intruder in the Dust (1948), and "Letter to the Leaders in the Negro Race" (1953) alongside recent critical perspectives for their depictions of lynching and black empowerment to determine Faulkner's racial narrative regarding racial violence and civil rights.

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Contents, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Leading The Soul: Use Of Rhetoric In Horace’S Odes, Kelly Freestone

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Ship Of Fools: Hieronymus Bosch In Response To Sebastian Brant, Ella Parker

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

“If I Cannot Inspire Love, I Will Cause Fear”: Reading The Creature’S Development Through Godwin’S Educational Theory In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein, Mikaela Huang

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Roald Dahl And The Construction Of Childhood: Writing The Child As Other, Madeline Spivey

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Portraiture And The Convergence Of Social Classes In Bleak House, Heather Twele

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Losing The West: A Critical Analysis Of Crane’S “The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky", Kaylee Weatherspoon

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 22, 2020, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Review Of When Novels Were Books. By Jordan Alexander Stein., Mark A. Mattes

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

But novels ARE books, you might be thinking. Jordan Stein points out that this is true, but not in the way that many of us have thought to be the case. Twentieth- and twenty-first century literary history, Stein argues, has too often failed to deliver a programmatic discussion of the media history of genre. Attention to changes and continuities in the early Anglophone novel’s artifactual status within an evolving, transatlantic media ecology, supplements, and in some cases rethinks, critical understandings of the development of novelistic form. Stein’s method is axiomatic for those working at the intersection of form and format: …