American Literature Commons^™

The Akron Offering: A Ladies' Literary Magazine, 1849-1850, Jon Miller

University of Akron Press Publications

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From 1849 to 1850, Calista Cummings edited and published Akron's first literary magazine, The Akron Offering. At the time, Akron was a booming canal town on the verge of even greater prosperity. By turns religious, comic, romantic, and political, this extraordinary collection of early midwestern creative literature expresses a wide range of sometimes contradictory opinions on both the important questions of its day and the important questions of today: historical events such as the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the 1848 revolutions in Europe are considered alongside more timeless contemplations on truth, justice, and …

The New Man: Evolving Masculinity In F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side Of Paradise, "Winter Dreams," And "The Swimmers", Adrian Nicole Coursey

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The evolving culture and ethos of American capitalist modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was marked by a nervousness, or neurasthenia. Strongly gendered, it was characterized among men by effeminacy and an anxiety about masculinity. Confronted by the eroding ideals of Victorian American self-reliance and independence, a stout-hearted willingness to labor to establish one's masculinity seemed an increasingly doubtful prospect for men in the new modern age. Under the twin influences of industrial capitalism and a market economy and a fledgling women's movement, affecting, especially, the work place, the American male felt nervous, anxious, and emasculated. In …

Wallpaper Mania, Ellen Corrigan

Faculty & Staff Research & Creative Activity

Text panels from "Wallpaper Mania," a local exhibit in support of the Booth Library installation of the National Library of Medicine traveling exhibition The Literature of Prescription: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and "The Yellow Wall-Paper," on display September 23-November 2, 2013.

Zora Neale Hurston As Womanist, Cheryl Hopson

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Zora Neale Hurston is today recognized as an American and African American literary great. What Hurston has come to mean for black women writers such as Alice Walker can be gleaned from an assertion made by Walker in her canonical essay, “Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and Partisan View” (1979), included in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Walker writes, “I became aware of my need of Zora Neale Hurston’s work some time before I knew her work existed” (83). Alice Walker is greatly responsible for the resurgence of interest in, and the creative and critical reassessment of, …

The Fall Of The Yellow Wallpaper, Rachel Payne

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

Many have acknowledged the Gothic influence of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” on Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Critics often examine the opposition of genres in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” arguing it as either a feminist movement or Gothic tale. However, the Female Gothic genre centers the female role inside a Gothic tale. This genre typifies a criticism of oppressive patriarchies and support for female independence. Both “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” demonstrate women who overcome repressed voices by finding their expressions through writing.

On The Verge Of Change: Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, Mallary Taylor

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis discusses the effects of war on the southern plantation lifestyle depicted in Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding. This thesis focuses on the female characters who adapt to the absence of the husbands during wartime. Wars are the catalyst for societal change in the novel, and the women must adapt to the new social changes that are encroaching upon the plantation. The chapters explore each individual reaction of female characters in the novel. The female characters in Delta Wedding represent varying wars of reacting to shifting social norms brought about by war.

From Martyrs To Mothers To Chick In Choos: The Medieval Female Body And American Women's Popular Literature, Gina M. Sully

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Placing the generic conventions of medieval hagiography, Nina Baym's insights about nineteenth-century American sentimental fiction's overplot, and contemporary American women's popular literature into tension illuminates some important commonalities. First, biographers of the medieval virgin saints and authors of contemporary American women's popular literature deploy the same overplot that Baym identifies as characteristic of American women's nineteenth-century popular fiction. Second, in order to define feminine virtue and establish the virtue of their protagonists, nineteenth-century and post-millennial American women writers rework the contrastive tropes by which hagiographers establish their heroines' virtue. Third, struggles for ascendance in the domestic realm gesture toward its …

Happily Ever After? Redefining Womanhood And Marriage In Nineteenth-Century Novels, Laura Elizabeth Cox

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and Henry James challenged patriarchal conventions and assumptions by redefining womanhood and marriage in their novels, particularly by breaking from the traditional marriage ending. While Pride and Prejudice, North and South, and Jane Eyre end in marriage, these novels depict a freely chosen companionate marriage based on equality; Villette replaces the typical marriage ending with complete independence; and Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady both portray the decisive rejection of the marriage ideal for a life of renunciation. This thesis analyzes the ways in which these novels challenge nineteenth-century society, as well …

Woman At The Top: Rhetoric, Politics, And Feminism In The Texts And Life Of Annie Smith Peck, Hannah Scialdone-Kimberly

English Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this focuses on the autobiographical rhetoric and public identity of Annie Smith Peck, a scholar, mountain climber and woman rhetor from the turn of the century. My qualitative case study of Peck examines how she worked as a woman rhetor to create a popular identity for herself in both mountain climbing and scholarship. I also focus on how Peck worked to identify herself with her audience; here, I use Burke's concept of "identification," as a way of adding to (rather than substituting for) traditional rhetoric. My project brings new findings in that I examine data on Peck …

Failed Heroes: Hypermasculinity In The Contemporary American Novel, Josef D. Benson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My study highlights a link of U.S. American hypermasculinity running through Cormac McCarthy's two novels Blood Meridian (1985) and All the Pretty Horses (1992), Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), and James Baldwin's Another Country (1960). My literary interpretations of these texts suggest that U.S. American hypermasculine man originated in the American frontier and transformed into a definition of hegemonic masculinity embraced by many southern rural American men. These southern rural American men then concocted the myth of the black rapist in order to justify the mass murder of African American men after Reconstruction, inadvertently creating a figure more hypermasculine …

Mothers At Work: Reconstruction And Deconstruction Of Patriarchy In Gone With The Wind, Catherine Willa Staley

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In this thesis, I explore the performances of motherhood in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and how those performances conflict with culturally constructed expectations of that role. An analysis of Scarlett O’Hara and Melanie Wilkes, and how each woman compares to the South’s model for motherhood, reveals implications that extend beyond the novel’s Civil War setting to reveal the ongoing negotiation of modern readers still living within patriarchal conceptions of mothering. In Chapter 1, I outline the novel’s spectrum of motherhood, which is composed of characters who nurture and manage others. Each individual on that spectrum contributes to or …

Literacy, Discourse, And Identity: The Working-Class Appalachian Woman Academic, Sarah Marie Mcconnell

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Drawing on conversations about the politics surrounding literacy acquisition, I take a deeper look into the effects of obtaining membership within an academic discourse community on Appalachian women from the working class. The tensions that develop between the two opposing discourses promotes a sense of loss as they create distance between these women and their home community, alter relationships, and disrupt identity. Working-class Appalachian women occupy the borderlands between discourses: one foot in their Appalachian community; the other in their academic community. They negotiate their fragmented identities in order to play the appropriate role within the appropriate context. Their status …

"Thrown On Their Own Resources": Collaboration As Survival In Imitation Of Life, Kristi Branham

Gender & Women's Studies Faculty Publications

The article presents an analysis of the film adaptation of "Imitation of Life," a 1933 novel by Fannie Hurst. It states that the repetition of the story across the first half of the twentieth century shows its resonance for U.S. audiences. It mentions that the woman question and the race question are brought together in the passing story in both the 1934 and 1959 film versions of the novel.

Silence And Self-Making: Black Lung Rhetoric And The Ken Hechler Letters, Jennifer De Pompei

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis combines history, rhetoric, and feminist identity studies to discuss the subject of black lung disease and the Appalachian coal miner. The first chapter examines the "evolution of mentalities" in historical and popular discourse surrounding the miner, which reflects James V. Catano's subversive form of the self-making identity in Ragged Dicks. The second chapter uses the feminist theory of silence as a form of control and power to understand the absence of black lung disease from the literature of coal. The final chapter is a case study of the correspondence between Congressional Representative Ken Hechler of West Virginia and …

From Periodical To Book In Her Early Career: E. D. E. N. Southworth’S Letters To Abraham Hart, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

E.D.E.N. Southworth's correspondence with Henry Peterson of the Saturday Evening Post and Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger, both of whom serialized her novels in their weekly story papers, is sometimes dramatic and emotional. In September 1849 Peterson chided Southworth for a “capital literary error” in an installment of her novel The Deserted Wife, in which the Reverend Withers uses his patriarchal authority to maneuver the young, unwilling Sophie Churchill into marriage. The incident would make readers “thro[w] down the tale in disgust,” he warns, and he omitted it from the serialization. In December 1854 he raised …

Introduction To E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering A Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist, Melissa J. Homestead, Pamela T. Washington

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In early 1901, Willa Cather visited Prospect Cottage in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., the longtime home of the recently deceased novelist Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevirte (E. D. E. N.) Southworth. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1819 to southern parents (her father from Virginia, her mother from Maryland), Southworth lived in Washington with her family until she married Frederick Hamilton Southworth and moved with him to Wisconsin in 1841. When he deserted her and their two children,' she returned to Washington and taught school to support herself, running to writing to supplement her income from teaching. Within a few …

A Chronological Bibliography Of E. D. E. N. Southworth's Works Privileging Periodical Publication, Melissa J. Homestead, Vicki L. Martin

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Previous attempts at a comprehensive bibliography of E. D. E. N. Southworth's fiction have organized her works alphabetically by book title or chronologically by book publication date. Serialization information--if included at all--is subordinated to book entries or listed separately. These bibliographic conventions better suit authors who published fewer novels than Southworth did and/or did \ not routinely serialize their works. As a result, earlier bibliographies have caused confusion about the size and chronology of Southworth's body of work. Adding to the confusion, her book publisher T. B. Peterson arbitrarily broke many of her novels that appeared in serial form under …

"Only A Girl Like This Can Know What's Happened To You" : Traumatic Subjects In Contemporary American Narratives, Allison Virginia Craig

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project is primarily concerned with the difficulty of representing traumatic experience and the problem of seeing violence and exploitation as natural and inevitable functions of social life. It argues that texts attempting to expose exploitive hierarchies and structural injustices often risk having their stories subsumed and commodified by the profuseness and proliferation of countervailing messages about individual choice and personal freedom. This struggle is highlighted through historicizing five contemporary American narratives--Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm, the films Boys Don't Cry and Monster, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Linda Hogan's Solar Storms--with and against critical concerns and popular texts. Furthermore, by employing …

Anticipative Feminism In F. Scott Fitzgerald’S This Side Of Paradise And Flappers And Philosophers, Andrew Riccardo

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

No abstract provided.

"To Bend Without Breaking": American Women's Authorship And The New Woman, 1900–1935, Amber Harris Leichner

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation focuses on constructions of female authorship in selected prose narratives of four American women writers in the early twentieth century: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zitkala-Ša, and Gertrude Schalk. Specifically, it examines portraits of women in pieces that appeared in national magazines from 1900-1935 that bracket these writers’ careers and that reflect anxieties about their professional authorial identities complicated by gender and, in the case of Native American Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Sioux) and African American Gertrude Schalk, race as well. In a period characterized by fierce debates over the role of women in a dawning modern age, these writers participated …

Mother Of Three Drowns Children And Other Stories, Laura L. Stubbins

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A collection of short stories depicting fictional characters facing what is absent from their lives.

"When Love Is Born In A Cage Not Of Lts Own Building ": The New Woman And Fiction Of Kate Chopin, Jennifer Battistoni

All Student Theses and Dissertations

This project explores the New Woman as developed and defined through the literature of Kate Chopin.

Sew Speak! Needlework As The Voice Of Ideology Critique In The Scarlet Letter , "A New England Nun," And The Age Of Innocence, Laura L. Powell

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In the Nineteenth Century, needlework, and embroidery in particular, became a signifier of feminine identity. Needlework was such a significant part of women’s lives and so integral to the construction of femininity in nineteenth-century America that both pictoral and narrative art demonstrate numerous representations of women embroidering. The sheer volume of these representations in the Nineteenth Century suggests that the practice of embroidery provides a way of speaking for women—a representation of the voice of subjectivity silenced by patriarchal ideology. Because needlework serves as a signifier of ideal femininity, it provides uniquely fruitful and previously unexplored opportunities for investigating how …

Reasonable Conversions: Susanna Rowan's Mentoria And Conversion Narratives For Young Readers, Karen Roggenkamp

Faculty Publications

Though not well known, Rowson's Mentoria-a curious conglomeration of thematically-related pieces from multiple genres, including the essay, epistolary novel, conduct book, and fairy tale-offers particularly fertile ground for thinking about the nexus between eighteenth-century didactic books and earlier works for young readers.2 At the heart of Mentoria is a series of letters describing girls who yield, with dire and frequently deadly consequences, to the passionate pleas of male suitors.3 Fallen women populate Rowson's world, and scholars have traditionally read Mentoria within the familiar bounds of the eighteenth-century seduction novel.4 However, Rowson's creation transforms the older tradition of didactic, child-centered conversion …

Willa Cather [From Blackwell Encyclopedia Of Twentieth-Century American Fiction], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Willa Cather is known primarily for her novels representing the experiences of women immigrants on the Nebraska prairies in the late nineteenth century, but Cather’s 10 novels and scores of short stories’ produced over a career spanning 50 years actually range widely over space and time, from seventeenth-century Quebec to twentieth century New York. A social conservative who proudly identified herself as one of the backward-looking, her experiments with fictional form and her approach to culture nevertheless ally her with modernism. It is, perhaps, the depth and diversity of Cather’s body of work and the impossibility of reducing her achievement …

Women & Language: Essays On Gendered Communication Across Media, Melissa R. Ames

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

The present volume of essays examines women's communication as it has evolved historically across multiple mediums. Part I explores how women became "gossip girls" and the important role of gossip in the perception and practice of female communication. Essays in Part II cover the convergence of oral and written communication in women's literature. Gendered performance in such arenas as salsa dance, Dr. Phil and the Internet is examined in Part III, and essays in Part IV discuss women's communication in the technology-rich 21st century. This excerpt features the introduction and one essay from the co-editor.

Women & Language: Essays On Gendered Communication Across Media, Melissa R. Ames

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

The present volume of essays examines women's communication as it has evolved historically across multiple mediums. Part I explores how women became "gossip girls" and the important role of gossip in the perception and practice of female communication. Essays in Part II cover the convergence of oral and written communication in women's literature. Gendered performance in such arenas as salsa dance, Dr. Phil and the Internet is examined in Part III, and essays in Part IV discuss women's communication in the technology-rich 21st century. This excerpt features the introduction and one essay from the co-editor.

Nature, Domestic Labor, And Moral Community In Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours And Elinor Wyllys, Richard M. Magee

English Faculty Publications

Cooper's argument for a domestic ideal situated within a rural setting reinforces the importance of community connections through a shared sense of morality, as well as understanding of the natural world. Community alone—the human connections—never seems to be enough in Cooper's formulation, but must always exist with an awareness of the world outside the narrow confines of one's own domestic sphere. Concern for one's fellow-beings necessitates a concern for the world in which these beings live, and Cooper understands that when any bonds are broken—such as the bonds that connect us to the natural world—other bonds are threatened. Thus, when …

Introduction To Willa Cather And Modern Cultures [Cather Studies 9], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

To some, linking Willa Cather to "the modern" or more narrowly to literary modernism still seems an eccentric proposition. As Richard Millington has pointed out, "one will look in vain for Cather's name in the index of most accounts, whether new or old, of the nature and history of Anglo-American modernism" (52). Perhaps she fails to feature in these accounts because in her public pronouncements and certain recurring motifs in her fiction, she appeared to turn her back on modernity. Cather was skeptical about many aspects of the culture that took shape around her in the early decades of the …

Delta Woman With Faulkner And Hitchcock, Mi-Jeong Kim

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Lacan, as a post-structuralist, combined Saussure's linguistics with Freud's psychology and linked Derrida's notion of "the other" to his notion of "objet petit a" as the impossible object of the subject's phallic desire, in order to re-think the modern consciousness of "the self." In the Lacanian account, "the other" does not exist as the 'absolute' transcendental without involvement, but ex-sists as the traumatic and 'extimate' exteriority with-in "the self." The ex-centric other is epitomized by the iconic (inverted) triangular center of Lacan's Borromean Knot. As the immanent exteriority of both the subject and the Symbolic, the feminine (w)hole, resembling vaginal …