American Literature Commons^™

Mccombs, Harold Spillman (Mss 165), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscript Collection 165. Poetry volumes, 1918-1973, written by McCombs, a native of Edmonson County who taught in several Kentucky communities. Also includes oral history interview with his daughter, Doris Cloar, concerning her father's work, family history, and the November 5, 2005 tornado in Munfordville, Kentucky. Photographs of tornado damage included.

From Man To Meteor: Nineteenth Century American Writers And The Figure Of John Brown, Amanda Benigni

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

On November 2, 1859, John Brown laid siege to the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, then Virginia, in an effort to seize weaponry which he planned to employ in a full scale slave insurrection. From the moment he entered the public eye during his brief trial and execution, John Brown and his legacy were figured and refigured by prominent writers and thinkers of the time. The result of this refiguring was an image under constant metamorphosis. As the image of John Brown cycled through the Civil War, it moved further and further from the actual man and became a metaphor …

Review Of Reclaiming Authorship: Literary Women In America, 1850-1900, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Like Naomi Z. Sofer's Making the America of Art (2005) and Anne E. Boyd's Writing for Immorality (2004), Susan Williams Reclaiming Authorship seeks to recreate and analyze how American women authors in the second half of the nineteenth century understood their own authorship. All three include Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson as subjects, but Williams includes authors who did not conceive of their authorship in a high cultural mode (Maria Cummins, Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Abigail Dodge), and she traverses the careers of Alcott and Phelps so as to emphasize their movements in and out of …

'The Senator And The Socialite: The True Story Of America's First Black Dynasty,' By Lawrence Otis Graham, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

Lawrence Otis Graham attempts to tell the important story of the Bruces and their legacy in The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America’s First Black Dynasty. Starting his story before the Civil War, Graham follows the “First Black Dynasty” through its ultimate fall from grace in mid-twentieth-century New York City. As with his previous bestseller, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class (1999), Graham takes on the ambitious task of capturing the meaning and importance of an underappreciated group of American’s.

Louisa May Alcott [From Oxford Encyclopedia Of Women In World History], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

American fiction writer best known as the author of the girls’ novel Little Women (1868-1869). Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, to Abigail May Alcott and the progressive educator Bronson Alcott. The March family of Little Women was an idealized version of her own family, which was far less stable and more mobile. Alcott’s father’s idealistic education, and reform ventures regularly failed, necessitating the family’s frequent moves, and she and her mother increasingly provided the family’s economic support. Her childhood and adolescence were split primarily between Concord and Boston, Massachusetts, where she was deeply influenced by members of her father’s …

Willa Cather [From The Oxford Encyclopedia Of Women In World History], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

American novelist, Born in Virginia, Cather moved with her family to Nebraska in 1883 and is best known as a novelist of the American prairie. However, her life history and literary output belie this characterization. As a student at the University of Nebraska she published short stories and poems and worked as a journalist. This experience earned her a position at the Home Monthly magazine in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When the magazine failed, she stayed in Pittsburgh, first returning to newspaper journalism and then teaching high school. For several years she lived in the family home of Isabelle McClung, a young …

American Fantasies Of Masculine, Physical Labor And The Dangerous Bodies Of Pacific Island Whalemen In Roger Starbuck's The Golden Harpoon And Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Jennifer Schell

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Throughout the nineteenth-century, writers, such as James Fenimore Cooper and Joseph C. Hart, fairly consistently appropriated the New England whaling industry for national purposes. They claimed the economic successes of the industry as American successes, and they positioned the whalemen as exemplary American workers. However, not all American whalemen were native-born Americans; some were foreign-born laborers. The presence of Polynesian workers and their racialized laboring bodies - often described as monstrous, grotesque, and repulsive - disrupted nationalistic appropriations of the whaling industry and its workers. What was so dangerous about these men was not just that were reputed to be …

Private Fleming At Chancellorsville: "The Red Badge Of Courage" And The Civil War, Cara Erdheim

English Faculty Publications

Book review by Cara Erdheim:

Lentz, Perry. Private Fleming at Chancellorsville: The Red Badge of Courage and the Civil War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006.

Boston And New York: The City Upon A Hill And Gotham, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article is about the author's experience with visiting New York during it's rebirth after 9/11. He speaks about the history of both cities and how they have each grown into their own to become places of future enterprise and cultural cohesiveness.

Review Of Dripping Dry: Literature, Politics, And Water In The Desert Southwest, By David N. Cassuto, Cory Shaman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Concentrating primarily on the environmental history of the last 100 years in the American Southwest, David N. Cassuto examines what he suggests is the nexus of political dispute regarding water in the region: the intractable tension between the ideologies of reclamation and restoration. After an initial chapter on John Wesley Powell and the 19th century origins of the hydraulic West, the book proceeds with an exploration of four representative texts in order to demonstrate what Cassuto has identified as the successive stages of the reclamation movement: "At the beginning of the twentieth century, Mary Austin believed in spite …

The Role And Effect Of Advertising On Women During World War Ii, Laura Elizabeth Francis

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

Advertising had an overwhelming effect on women during World War II; many women were influenced by advertising in the media to behave a certain way, buy certain products, and also support the war effort in a variety of ways. In the 1940s while many American women’s husbands, fiances, boyfriends, brothers, and sons were going off to fight in the War abroad, many women were fighting a war of their own on the home front. While men could prove they were active patriotic citizens by fighting in the military and taking government positions, female’s roles were re-written to show what they …

De La Mujer Invisible Al Feminismo Ineludible: Política Y Antropología En La Historiografía De La Mujer, Robert H. Holden

History Faculty Publications

La historiografía de la mujer, desde el comienzo de su etapa contemporánea en los años setenta del siglo pasado, es analizada en dos vertientes relacionadas: Una, su politización al servicio del movimiento social que aboga por la extensión de los derechos de la mujer y que dió luz a dicha historiografía; dos, el papel central que ha jugado la pregunta antropológica, ‘¿Qué es la mujer’?, y la variedad de respuestas que esta pregunta ha generado. El autor sostiene que tanto la intensa politización como el desarrollo de una antropología cada vez más materialista, como tendencias interdependientes, han llegado a caracterizar …

The "Essential Renewing Fantasy": The Vietnam Experience In American Literature, Jeffrey Gross

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this study, I employ the idea of postmodern naturalism to illustrate how Tim O'Brien addresses the postmodern era following the Vietnam War, which he achieves through form and characterization, and how he blends in a naturalistic framework where events and powers beyond his characters' control affect their lives. Such a study of six of O'Brien's novels-Northern Lights, Going After Cacciato, The Nuclear Age, The Things They Carried, In the Lake of the Woods, and July, July-is important because it unveils common motifs and structural strategies employed by O'Brien in developing an evolved and postmodern version of naturalism. Rather than …

At Home In The City: Urban Domesticity In American Literature And Culture, 1850-1930, Elizabeth Klima

University of New Hampshire Press: Open Access Books

An interdisciplinary study of urban literature and domestic architecture in the United States from 1850-1930. With chapters on the hotel, Central Park, tenement houses, and apartment buildings, At Home in the City juxtaposes literary criticism with a history of the built environment to show the inception of American modernity. Works treated include: The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ruth Hall by Fanny Fern, The Bostonians by Henry James, How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis, Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist urban utopias, and Nella Larsen's Quicksand.

Braber, Thomas Cornelius, 1922-2008 (Sc 1437), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 1437. World War II poem written by U.S. soldier Thomas C. Braber about the Omaha Beach battle (6 June 1944) on the European battlefront. Also printout of a photo of Braber and his salvage group on Omaha Beach, and related data.

Selected Definitions For Work In Communication And Media Studies & Selected Bibliography Of Publications In Comparative Media Studies, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Toward A Framework Of Audience Studies In Comparative Cultural Studies, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

"The Future Good And Great Of Our Land": Republican Mothers, Female Authors, And Domesticated Literacy In Antebellum New England, Sarah Robbins

Faculty Articles

In an 1830s review of Lydia Maria Child's Good Wives published in Sarah Hale's Ladies' Magazine, the enthusiastic commentator quoted above sets Child's latest book within a thriving literary culture that values didactic literature. Acknowledging the importance of a genre I call the domestic literacy narrative, the reviewer confidently asserts that "the prevalent rage for reading" promises to promote not only familial but national well-being-promises, that is, if more books like Child's are regularly published to help train women to direct their family's reading and extract from it principles and behaviors consonant with their country's "future good."

Selected Bibliography For The Study Of Central And East European Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Constructivism And Comparative Cultural Studies, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Gilchrist, Ellen Louise, 1935-2024 (Sc 1336), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscript Small Collection 1336. Letter written to Kentucky author Ellen L. Gilchrist from Paula Quinn, WKU journalism professor, after a scheduled interview did not materialize. Gilchrist's response is handwritten on the letter. Includes newspaper clipping about Gilchrist's presentation at WKU, and Quinn's explanatory letters, 2001.

Chronological Bibliography Of The Works Of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Lucinda Damon-Bach, Allison Roepsch, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This two-part bibliography has been built by consulting the Bibliography of American Literature (BAL) and the bibliographies compiled by Sister Mary Michael Welsh ("Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Her Position in the Literature and Thought of Her Time up to 1860," Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1937) and Richard Ranus Gidez ("A Study of the Works of Catharine Maria Sedgwick," Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1958); library cataloging records; and the personal records of Lucinda Damon-Bach and Melissa J. Homestead. In most cases, entries have been confirmed through books, periodicals, photocopies, or microfilm received through interlibrary loan. We were not able …

Giles, Janice (Holt), 1905-1979 (Sc 1300), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 1300. Letter, 16 June 1973, written to Dolores Hayford, Oakland, California, by Janice Holt Giles, Knifley, Kentucky, responding to Hayford's comments about her book "The Kinta Years" and expressing her views on child-parent relationships.

Swinford, Mac, 1899-1975 (Sc 1449), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 1449. Letter, 21 April 1970, of U.S. District Court Judge Mac Swinford, Lexington, Kentucky, to Crawford Crowe, Bowling Green, Kentucky, fulfilling a request for a copy of his book Kentucky Lawyer. He declines to vouch for the accuracy of the book's historical facts "other than as legend."

[Introduction To] Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators And American Identities, Laura Browder

Bookshelf

In the 1920s, black janitor Sylvester Long reinvented himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and Elizabeth Stern, the native-born daughter of a German Lutheran and a Welsh Baptist, authored the immigrant's narrative I Am a Woman--and a Jew; in the 1990s, Asa Carter, George Wallace's former speechwriter, produced the fake Cherokee autobiography, The Education of Little Tree. While striking, these examples of what Laura Browder calls ethnic impersonator autobiographies are by no means singular. Over the past 150 years, a number of American authors have left behind unwanted identities by writing themselves into new ethnicities.

Significantly, notes …

Style Guide Of Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Copyright Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture ©Purdue University, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Towards The History Of Hungarians In Alberta, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Selected And Annotated Bibliography Of German-Canadian Literature And Criticism, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Pre-1900 German-Canadian Ethnic Minority Writing, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.