American Literature Commons^™

Community Pride Reporter, 01/1994, Community Pride Reporter

Community Pride Reporter (1993-1999)

No abstract provided.

Community Pride Reporter, 12/1993, Community Pride Reporter

Community Pride Reporter (1993-1999)

No abstract provided.

Community Pride Reporter, 11/1993, Community Pride Reporter

Community Pride Reporter (1993-1999)

No abstract provided.

Community Pride Reporter, 10/1993, Community Pride Reporter

Community Pride Reporter (1993-1999)

No abstract provided.

Community Pride Reporter, 09/1993, Community Pride Reporter

Community Pride Reporter (1993-1999)

No abstract provided.

Community Pride Reporter, 08/1993, Community Pride Reporter

Community Pride Reporter (1993-1999)

No abstract provided.

Marsha Norman's Ghosts: The Embodiment Of The Past On The Stage, Jennifer Anne Workman

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study focuses on the role of the ghost figure in Marsha Norman's drama. In order to understand how this ghost figure is unique to her drama, but at the same time has roots in the American theater, I first examine her relationship to her American predecessors and their portrayal of the past in order to later show how the ghost figure is Norman's "device" that she uses to explore the past on the stage. I then attempt to determine her relationship to the current movements with which she is most often associated: new realism and feminism. Because new realism …

Community Pride Reporter, 07/1993, Community Pride Reporter

Community Pride Reporter (1993-1999)

No abstract provided.

Paintings And Drawings In Willa Cather's Prose: A Catalogue Raisonné, Polly P. Duryea

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Paintings and Drawings in Willa Cather's Prose: A Catalogue Raisonné considers the specific artists and their visual art that greatly influenced Willa Cather's textual compositions. The Catalogue draws upon the author's research of Cather-related art from both American and European libraries and art museums. This art includes painting, drawing, illustration, and tapestry. A detailed and alphabetized list of selected artists and paintings that Cather preferred is provided. The artists are cross-referenced with Cather's own statements about their work or style. Included is biographical data for each artist, the named work of art, and often the date executed, the location then …

Teaching Dickinson As A Gen(I)Us: Emily Among The Women, Cheryl Walker

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

In this article, Walker argues that those who teach the poetry of Emily Dickinson should not only compare her to other recognized and lauded American poets, such as Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore. This method offers no cultural context to provide ligature. It views high art as to be only about language and, on the score of tropological discourse, any two poets could be connected, even across vast expanses of time and distance. While it's useful for students to see how elements of her work connect her not only …

Bibliography For Work In Comparative Literature And Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping: The Rhetoric Of The New Women's Reality, Cynthea Reid Preston

Theses Digitization Project

Discusses the alternate women's reality developed by Robinson in her novel.

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 …

Marge Piercy's Small Changes: Welcome To The Sexual Revolution, Nancy Topping Bazin

English Faculty Publications

Marge Piercy's novel Small Changes is encyclopedic in its incredibly detailed, all-encompassing feminist analysis of female and male behavior in the late 60's and early 70's. The behavior of the younger generation is compared and contrasted with that of their parents. The overall impression given by the novel is that, despite the very different life-styles of the two generations, very little change has, in fact, occurred. At the end of the novel, sexism prevails and no significant threat to male control of the power structure has developed. From examination of the title, Piercy seems to place her emphasis not upon …

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society Officers And Trustees Meeting June 23, 1989, The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society

Saffy Collection - All Textual Materials

Agenda and meeting notes for the June 23, 1989 meeting of the officers and trustees. Dr. Saffy – Secretary, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society.

H. D. And Time, Cheryl Walker

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

From the introduction to the volume:

"Cheryl Walker presents the work of poet H.D. as a paradigm for the changed relationship to history women have undergone during the modern period: H.D.'s early period is characterized by an avoidance of chronological time..."

A Feminist Critic Responds To Recurring Student Questions About Dickinson, Cheryl Walker

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

Book abstract:

The life and the range of topics and tones of Emily Dickinson suit her to be included in such courses as American literature, Romanticism, realism, nineteenth-century culture, and women’s literary traditions. Her poetry poses numerous challenges for readers because of its compressed style, indeterminacy, and constant surprises; her biography fascinates students and critics alike.

This volume emphasizes instruction of Dickinson’s poetry at the undergraduate level. Like other volumes in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, it is divided into two parts. The first, “Materials,” discusses editions of Dickinson’s poetry, aids to teaching, reference works, biographies, critical …

The Big One: Literature Discovers Aids, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

Among the works discussed in this essay: An Intimate Desire to Survive, by Bill Becker; Epitaphs for the Plague Dead, by Robert Boucheron; A Cry in the Desert, by Jed A. Bryan; The World Can Break Your Heart, by Daniel Curzon; Safe Sex, by Harvey Fierstein; "The Castro," in Cities on a Hill: A Journey Through Contemporary American Culture, by Frances FitzGerald; As Is, by William M. Hoffman; Plague: A Novel About Healing, by Toby Johnson; The Normal Heart, by Larry Kramer; To All the Girls I've Loved Before: An AIDS …

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

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 …

"A Terror And A Dream": Domestic Imagery In The Poetry Of Anne Sexton, Frances S. Waters

English Theses & Dissertations

Women writers often experience a conflict between traditional feminine roles and the less traditional role of the female writer. And for those writers, like Anne Sexton, who choose not to choose between roles, the result is conflict. This conflict, recognized by previous critics and evident in Sexton's biography and poetry, results in a domestic imagery expressing this vacillation. In this study, submitted in partial fulfillment for the M. A. degree in English, I provide an in-depth study of Sexton's domestic imagery. I concern myself with two imagery patterns: one, in which the symbolic image's meaning changes randomly with no controlling …

Zora Neale Hurston, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Some new information is occasionally being ferreted out that may help to cast additional light on some of these issues, but quite clearly Zora Neale Hurston will remain something of an enigma - too complex a figure to reach any easy conclusions about, except perhaps that she defies simple characterization. People responded to her (and still do) very emotionally: her detractors despise her bitterly; her defenders love her passionately. All agree that she was eccentric, colorful, entertaining, humorous, and unforgettable.

Perhaps the most crucial question to pose about her is why one of the most important figures in the Harlem …

A Room Of One's Own: The Women's Room, Lou Ellen Crawford

Masters Theses

The recent resurgence of feminism has been accompanied by the development of feminist fiction. Identifying those characteristics by which feminist fiction adds to the American novel a new and valid perspective, feminist criticism has also flourished. Feminist critics agree that fiction with a new perspective demands critical evaluation from that same perspective; and Cheri Register provides a concise, thorough list of five elements which comprise effective feminist fiction. Of Register's five criteria, Carol Heilbrun stresses the equalizing, conciliatory influence of androgyny. Recent feminist authors have written many novels which perform one or more of the functions prescribed by Register. Three …

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 …

Escape In Thurber : From Delight To Delirium, Carol Richardson Boyko

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

James Thurber (1894-1961) is the outstanding American literary humorist of the twentieth century, whose writing spans two periods of American humor: pre- and post-World War II. Pre-war humor is characterized by a debunking of traditional values: the sanctity of women and marriage, patriotism, hero worship, and the supremacy of common sense. The hero of this era is the victim, the slightly neurotic man who does not fit into high-pressured city life. Post-war humor moves from playfulness to bitterness, from misogyny to misanthropy, from man's displacement in inhuman society to man's displacement in the world.

The theme of escape in Thurber …

Annals Of The Cobweb Club, Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat

Annals of the Cobweb Club

Book containing hand-written notes from meetings of the Cobweb Club, a women's organization with which Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat was heavily involved. Contents include lists of special guests, notes on meeting discussions, and a drawing of flowers and a cobweb in the front of the book. Inserts and clippings are included in the order they are found within the book.

An Arrow Against Profane And Promiscuous Dancing Drawn Out Of The Quiver Of The Scriptures, Increase Mather

Electronic Texts in American Studies

When a dancing master arrived in Boston in 1685 and offered lessons and classes for both sexes during times normally reserved for church meetings, the Puritan ministers went to court to suppress the practice. Increase Mather (1639-1723) took the leading part, writing and publishing this tract, which compiles arguments and precedents for the prohibition of “Gynecandrical Dancing, [i.e.] Mixt or Promiscuous Dancing, viz. of Men and Women … together.” These justifications were certainly shared with the court, which found the dancing master guilty, fined him £100, and allowed him to skip town.

Mather’s tract on dancing is an overwhelming compendium …