American Literature Commons^™

Eng 155: Introduction To Literary Studies, Joseph Donica

Open Educational Resources

An OER syllabus covering the ways humans have read and continue to read literature from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. An emphasis is placed on the application of critical thought to writing expository essays and responding to readings.

Appealing To Truancy: How Mary Oliver Escapes Americana, John Wise

Student Writing

How the work of Mary Oliver disagrees with the American Cultural way of thinking.

Adam Binder Series (White Trash Warlock, Trailer Park Trickster, & Deadbeat Druid) By David R. Slayton, Phillip Fitzsimmons

Faculty Articles & Research

Book review of the Adam Binder Series by David R. Slayton. Book review by Phillip Fitzsimmons.

Sherwood Anderson And The Industrial Corruption Of Midwestern Individualism, Hudson Rice

Senior Honors Theses

Sherwood Anderson’s literary Midwest reflects many of the idealistic characteristics resulting from the region’s frontier, agrarian origin. The most prominent of these characteristics is the region’s emphasis on and appreciation of human particularity. His novels Winesburg, Ohio and Poor White document the region’s unique relationship with individual particularity and how this particularity clashed with a new industrial lifestyle. The two novels reflect the Midwest’s unique understanding of individuality and offer an explanation for why the region’s response to an industrial cultural overhaul was so damaging for the Midwest’s identity, as the traditional identity was supplanted by an industrial one.

Ruslan And Lolita: Nabokov's Pursuit Of Pushkin's Monsters, Maidens, And Morals, Ludmila Lavine

Faculty Journal Articles

This article discusses the Russian precursor to Humbert’s explicit “kingdom by the sea”: Pushkin’s mock-epic Ruslan and Liudmila (RL). An amalgam of Slavic and Western folklore that scandalized the reading public in its day, Pushkin’s work underpins Nabokov’s own transnational position as a writer whose splash onto the Anglophone scene was accompanied by similar outcries of smut and pornography. In addition to a multitude of fairy-tale sources already documented in the scholarship, Lolita’s cluster of mermaids, sleeping beauties, dark magic, invisibility, pursuit and captivity, physical topography, and “brothers”-rivals finds in Pushkin’s RL a synthesizing subtext. Moreover, Pushkin’s play …

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 …

Olympia, Wilderness, And Consumption In Laird Barron’S Old Leech Cycle, John Glover

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

This book chapter considers the cosmic horror fiction of Laird Barron through a blended ecocritical/postcolonial lens, focusing on its representation of the Pacific Northwest and Olympia, Washington. Wilderness and consumption are both strongly represented concepts in Barron’s Old Leech Cycle of stories, aligning with colonial perceptions of the American West as a largely unpeopled space ripe for exploitation. The eldritch horrors of these tales align with well-established traditions in weird fiction, and they are also perfectly suited to locations historically identified with resource extraction.

Colonial Prehistories Of Indigenous North America, Mark A. Mattes

Faculty Scholarship

One of the most common inquiries received by Filson Historical Society librarians concerns the myth of Prince Madoc and the Welsh Indians. Of the myth’s many versions, the one most familiar to Ohio Valley History readers goes like this: Madoc, a Welsh prince escaping an internecine conflict over political rule at home, supposedly sailed to North America in the twelfth century. His force either landed at the Falls of the Ohio or made it there after landing further south and being driven north by hostile locals, possibly Cherokee people. Madoc and his contingent intermixed with Indigenous populations, whose fair-haired, blue-eyed, …

Toward An Archaeology Of Manuscripts, Mark A. Mattes

Faculty Scholarship

The title of Rachael Scarborough King’s edited collection of essays, After Print, refers at once to Peter Stallybrass’s insight that printing is a provocation of manuscript, as well as to what the study of manuscripts looks like when we move away from stadial and supersessionist print culture paradigms of authorship and publication and instead embrace archival methods and interpretive approaches that center on concepts of media interrelation in early modern manuscript cultures, such as Margaret Ezell’s concept of social authorship.The essays in King’s collection, including an epilogue by Ezell herself, bear the fruits of such intermedial and transmedial approaches, bringing …

Joanne Kyger And “The Kook Strain” In Olson: A Reading, Patrick James Dunagan

Gleeson Library Faculty and Staff Research and Scholarship

Jerome Rothenberg's "that dada strain" at once hilarious grandiose epic lyric historical and ever adventurous charts the highs discovered in his reading of the dada era. In like occurrence this writing seeks to poke around in the occult cupboards of Olson's mystical leanings. Looking not only at his work and assorted readings/engagements but delving also into the works of various others (Joanne Kyger, Jack Hirschman, Paul Blackburn, Gerrit Lansing, David Meltzer, Robert Duncan, Diane di Prima, Robin Blaser et al) who fell in alongside as well as after his work's star-eyed haul. Loquaciously gifted as a talker, how much (if …

Old Industries, Old Conflicts: The Significance Of American Epic Novels, Arturo Alcazar

Honors Projects

This essay focuses on three American epic novels: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, and Underworld by Don DeLillo. More specifically, the essay examines the themes of ambiguity, redemption, good and evil, isolation, and violence as they are depicted in these three novels and what they indicate about America and its people and society.

Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton

Publications and Research

This article historicizes musical symbolism in Melvin B. Tolson’s poem “Dark Symphony” (1941). In a time when Black writers and musicians alike were encouraged to aspire to European standards of greatness, Tolson’s Afro-modernist poem establishes an ambivalent critical stance toward the genre in its title. In pursuit of a richer understanding of the poet’s attitude, this article situates the poem within histories of Black music, racial uplift, and white supremacy, exploring the poem’s relation to other media from the Harlem Renaissance. It analyzes the changing language across the poem’s sections and, informed by Houston A. Baker Jr.’s study of “mastery …

Animal-Human Vocabulary Builder, Domenick Acocella, Rene Cordero

Open Educational Resources

The assignment helps students individually build a usable, expanding vocabulary of terms and concepts, enabling each to further contribute to the ongoing, evolving written, oral, and visual conversations centered on the use of and thought about animals for food, clothing, work, entertainment, experimentation, imagery, and companionship.

Choke, Brooksie Harrington

English Faculty Working Papers

No abstract provided.

Spiritual Activism And Political Solidarity In So Far From God And Mother Tongue: Two Views By Two Authors, Jean Paul Russo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

SPIRITUAL ACTIVISM AND POLITICAL SOLIDARITY IN SO FAR FROM GOD AND MOTHER TONGUE: TWO VIEWS BY TWO AUTHORS

by

Jean Paul Russo

Florida International University, 2020

Miami, Florida

Professor Anne Castro, Major Professor

This thesis focuses on the intersection between spirituality and political action in the works of two Latinx authors, Demetria Martinez and Ana Castillo. Building on Gloria Anzaldua’s theories of trauma, narrative, and what she terms ‘conocimiento,’ I contend that the novels So Far From God, and Mother Tongue, present an alternative approach to political action that is derived from a common experience of suffering and trauma as …

A Sailor's Intimacy: Homosocial Labor In Nineteenth-Century Oceanic Narratives By Dana And Melville, Adrian R. Salgado

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies the male sailor community in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and how they are portrayed in terms of homosociality and intimacy. The presence of a homosocial community on board a sailing vessel provided a means of forming a group of men that cultivated relationships and communications through the production of labor with one another. Both Melville and Dana engaged readers in the workings of a sailor’s life and how those interactions on board a ship with fellow sailors formed a premise for the evaluation of maritime labor in nineteenth-century oceanic …

Ai And The Other, Rosetta Dudley

Student Writing

Literary analysis in MLA format of 3 poems: "Conversation," "Cuba, 1962," and "Disregard" by Ai Ogawa which each address Othered speakers and characters. Links made to Emily Dickinson's writing and being Othered as a woman and non believer in a Puritan society. Overall theme: transcendence of circumstances as Other with the use of apostrophe and conceit.

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 …

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

Faculty 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: …

Race, American Enlightenment, And The End Times, Mark A. Mattes

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter examines eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century visions of apocalypse regarding the future of black lives in the American body politic. It begins with readings of Jefferson’s fear of a black planet in Notes on the State of Virginia and Crèvecoeur’s depictions of racial terror in Letters from an American Farmer. The chapter then investigates the writing of an African American herald of the end times, Christopher MacPherson. The chapter reads the apocalyptic jeremiad of MacPherson’s pamphlet, Christ’s Millennium (1811), as a reparative response to the suppression of black voices and the annihilation of black lives.

Non/Human: (Re)Seeing The “Animal” In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Matthew Guzman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Non/human: (Re)seeing the “Animal” in Nineteenth-Century American Literature uses canonical literary texts as specific anchor points for charting the unstable relations between human and nonhuman animals throughout the century. I argue that throughout the nineteenth century, there are distinct shifts in the way(s) humans think about, discuss, and represent nonhuman animals, and understanding these shifts can change the way we interpret the literature and the culture(s). Moreover, I supplement and integrate those literary anchors, when appropriate, with texts from contemporaneous science, law, art, and other primary and secondary source materials. For example, the first chapter, “Cooper’s Animal Movements: Across Land, …

‘Some Foods Are Considered Aphrodisiac Because They Resemble Sexual Organs’: On Isabel Allende’S Aphrodite, Anke Klitzing

Articles

At the age of 56, well into her second marriage and a grandmother herself, novelist Isabel Allende decided to find out whether aphrodisiacs are all they are made out to be. She wrote Aphrodite: The Love of Food and Food of Love after extensive research into erotic literature across some centuries and continents, and this foundation of age-old wisdom also means that the book, while published in 1998, remains a timeless source of inspiration and enjoyment.

The Phenomenology Of It All, Justin M. Campbell

2019 Symposium

Who is consumed when we read? Does the reader consume the text or does it consume us? This essay explores the complex and possibly parasitic relationship between reader and text. This unique exchange of knowledge and ideas between reader and texts during this relationship is the phenomenology of reading. During this, the text is transformed via the consciousness of the reader from a passive, inanimate object to an active living breathing immortal entity that transcends both space and time. In doing so, the unhuman text becomes an active consumer of the human reader in the same way the reader believes …

Wallaceward The American Literature Survey Course Takes Its Way, Ralph Clare

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Finding a comfortable fit for David Foster Wallace's work in the American literature survey is a challenge that raises a host of questions regarding Wallace and American literature itself. Wallace criticism has tended to situate his oeuvre in relation to postmodernism in general and, more specifically, to postmodern metafiction. This is an important critical task, to be sure. Like many, I have taught Wallace's stories, essays, and novels in an array of courses, including twentieth-century American literature, postmodernist literature, and the single author course, all formats in which I had a luxurious amount of time to get students acquainted with …

The Intermedial Politics Of Handwritten Newspapers In The 19th-Century U.S., Mark A. Mattes

Faculty Scholarship

Handwritten newspapers appeared in a variety of social contexts in the 19th-century U.S.1 The largest extant portion of 19th-century handwritten newspapers emerged from home and school settings. More far-flung examples include those written aboard ships during exploratory and military voyages. Others were produced within institutions such as hospitals and asylums. Such works were written during times of privation, including life in an army regiment or a prisoner-of-war camp during the Civil War. At other times, handwritten newspapers accompanied efforts at westward settlement and transcontinental railway journeys. Impromptu papers could follow in the wake of natural disasters that knocked out print-based …

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 …

Cultural And Narrative Shifts Of Nineteenth Century Children's Literature In Hawthorne's Wonder Book For Girls And Boys, Kristen Clark Brandt

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Both folklorists and literary critics have been drawn to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s body of work because of his distinctive style and incorporation of folk motifs. Such motif-spotting presents no challenge in Hawthorne’s juvenile literature like his retellings from Greek mythology in Wonder Book for Girls and Boys; however, contemporary folklore redirects the focus of this scholarship to “how particular literary uses of folklore fit into a larger, more fundamental concept of what folklore is and how and what folklore communicates” (de Caro & Jordan 2015:15). Hawthorne’s work interacts with other forms of cultural expression in the nineteenth century such as dominant …

Racial Constructions And Activism Within Graphic Literature. An Analysis Of Hank Mccoy, The Beast, Juan D. Alfonso

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Through a post-modern lens, I will primarily focus on comics books published by Marvel Comics to demonstrate the myriad of ways in which graphic literature is used as a subversive tool of sociopolitical discourse. I will demonstrate this by deconstructing and redefining the role of myth as a means of transferring ethical practices through societies and the ways in which graphic literature serves this function within the space of a modern and increasingly atheistic society. The thesis first demonstrates how the American Civil Rights Movement was metaphorically translated and depicted to the pages of Marvel’s X-Men comics to expose its …

Clarke, Mary Louise (Washington), 1913-1999 (Mss 634), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 634. Research, correspondence and photographs relating to the scholarly study of Kentucky author Jesse Stuart by WKU English and folklore professor Mary (Washington) Clarke. Includes correspondence with Stuart, editors and other scholars in connection with her book Jesse Stuart’s Kentucky and other publications. Also includes research and correspondence relating to Clarke’s book Kentucky Quilts and Their Makers.

Finding Aid To The Collection Of Margaret Wade Deland Materials, Margaret Wade Deland, Colby College Special Collections

Finding Aids

The collection includes correspondence, manuscripts, and first publications of Maine writer, Margaret Wade Deland. The bulk of the collection consists of letters written by Deland to various correspondents between 1884 and 1944. The collection also contains manuscript items of varying length, clippings, published writings, and a few photographic prints. Born Margaret Wade Campbell near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1857, Deland moved to Boston in 1880. She is known principally for the novel "John Ward, Preacher" and her 'Old Chester' books, based on communities where she grew up. She received a Doctorate of Letters from Bates College in 1920, and had a …