American Literature Commons^™

Review Of Women And Authorship In Revolutionary America And Learning To Stand And Speak: Women, Education, And Public Life In America’S Republic, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Two books the 1980s had a deep influence on the study of American women novelists of the early republic and the antebellum era. Mary Kelley’s Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (1984) presented twelve popular women novelists as deeply conflicted about their role as public producers of culture. The chapters in Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986) that treat women novelists and their readers as worthy of serious analysis significantly altered the course of scholarship on the early American novel. Angela Vietto clearly frames Women and Authorship in Revolutionary …

Thomas Collection (Mss 31), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid for Manuscripts Collection 31. Manuscripts, letters, writings, etc., of the Thomas family of Bowling Green, Kentucky, including sermons and speeches of Frank Morehead Thomas, Methodist minister (1868-1921); and poems, essays and newspaper articles written by his mother, Elizabeth (Wright) Thomas (1842-1931). Full-text scans are available (Click on "Additional Files" below) for the Spanish-American War letters that Frank Thomas sent home to his family.

Calvert-Obenchain-Younglove Collection (Mss 30), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans of selected items (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Collection 30. Correspondence, diaries, writings, business papers, scrapbooks, clippings, genealogical notes, weather records, and photographs of the Calvert, Obenchain, and Younglove families of Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Obenchain, Lida (Calvert), 1856-1935 (Sc 1539), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 1539. Note from Corinne C. McCormack, Bowling Green, Kentucky, thanking Lida Calvert Obenchain (pen name "Eliza Calvert Hall") for the donation of her book, "A Book of Hand Woven Coverlets" to the Woman's Library, and Obenchain's reply.

Obenchain, Josephine (Stephenson), 1864-1953 (Sc 1536), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 1536. Whimsical paper written in dialect by Josephine Obenchain titled "History of the Kentucky Club of Dallas, Inc."

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

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.

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."

In The Fullness Of Time: The Literature Of Denise Giardina, Cathy Pleska

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Appalachia can lay claim to many authors who have written works worthy of critical analysis and scholarly research, as the literature they have produced warrants consideration. This consideration, however, is often not forthcoming, and it is the situation concerning West Virginia author Denise Giardina. To date there has been no definitive, full-length study on her and her literature. As an author of considerable talent, who by any measure has published literature of significant quality, she deserves serious scholarly study, not just as an author of regional literature, but also as a contemporary author of the late twentieth century.

The purpose …

Magic - No! Miracle - Yes! The Founding And Early Development Of The University Of South Alabama, James F. Caldwell

James Caldwell Book

This document's purpose is to present a thesis in the form of memoirs to account for my involvement in the development of the University of South Alabama. It was made possible by a confluence of several factors including federal legislation to help the nation meet the problems of demobilization of the military forces of the United States, the sweep of historic events having to do with the election of Harry Truman as president of the United States in 1948, the political situation in Alabama that led to the election of George C. Wallace as the governor of the State of …

Hooks, Malinda (Cunningham), 1853-1948 (Sc 1440), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 1440. "Recollections and Thoughts", 1930, written for her family by Malinda Hooks, Trigg County, Kentucky. She writes of her childhood, family, and the Civil War. Includes her poetry and two unidentified photographs.

Benjamin Franklin And His Critics: John Adams, Mark Twain, And David Herbert Lawrence, Marzuki Jamil Baki Bin Haji Mohamed Johar

Masters Theses

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) provided the paradigm for special qualities in each of his multiple careers which have since been regarded as characteristically American. Franklin's Autobiography is the epitome of Franklin's spirit. The first edition of the Autobiography appeared in French in 1971 and the first edition in English, published in 1793, was actually an anonymous retranslation of the French edition. Franklin's grandson, William Temple Franklin prepared Parts One, Two, and Three in 1818. In John Bigelow's 1868 edition, all four parts appear for the first time in English. In the twentieth century, there have been three major editions, each more …

Representations Of Gender In Juvenile Literature During The Era Of The American Revolution, Sandra Strohhofer Pryor

History Theses & Dissertations

This study investigates representations of gender in fiction during the era of the American Revolution. Literature has an important role in creating and responding to cultural values, as well as in conveying ideologies. Through analysis of fictional stories for children, the simultaneous presence of themes of gender, religion, liberalism, and republicanism will be documented. Children's stories from England were reprinted in America after the Revolution. The continuity between late nineteenth century American success narratives and their early eighteenth century British precursors, as well as their gendered nature, will be demonstrated.

American fiction of the late eighteenth century foreshadowed both the …

Stuart, Jesse Hilton, 1907-1984 (Sc 1341), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 1341. Letter, 1 October 1947, by Kentucky author, Jesse Stuart, Riverton, Kentucky, to Ann Cade, Morgantown, Kentucky. He relates that he has written ten books and suggests that she write his publisher about the availability of the books.

Annie Wood: A Portrait, Jo Ann Mervis Hofheimer

Institute for the Humanities Theses

In 1871, Anna Cogswell Wood and Irene Kirke Leache founded a school for girls in Norfolk, Virginia which had a profound influence on the community. The Leache-Wood Seminary became Norfolk's center for cultural pursuits. After the death of Irene Leache in 1900, Annie Wood established a memorial to perpetuate her friend's interest in literature, music, art, drama, and spiritual studies. Wood began a number of cultural programs which grew to shape the cultural life of the town in remarkable ways, leading directly to the Virginia Symphony, the Norfolk Little Theater, the Irene Leache Memorial, the Norfolk Society of Arts, and …

Giles, Janice Holt, 1905-1979 (Mss 39), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Manuscripts, galley proofs and research material for janice Holt Giles's books; published and unpublished articles and short stories; poems; reviews and clippings relating to Giles's work; correspondence of Giles, her husband (Henry Earl Giles) and daughter (Elizabeth Moore Hancock); correspondence of Giles, her literary agent, and publisher; Holt and Giles family material.

Ua35/11 Student Honors Research Bulletin, Wku Honors Program

WKU Administration Documents

The WKU Student Honors Research Bulletin is dedicated to scholarly involvement and student research. These papers are representative of work done by students from throughout the university.

• Allen, Melody. Women in Control of Courtship in As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice and All's Well That Ends Well
• Amlani, Islamshah. Electron Stimulated Desorption of Alkali Halides
• Brillhart, Kelly. Women Without Men: Hemingway's Female Characters
• Burton, Lori. Financial Statements with Environmental Concerns: An Exploratory Study of the Impact on the Auditor's Role and Responsibilities
• Combs, Vicki. Dancing the Descent: Energy and Entrophy in William Carlos Williams
• Davis, Julie. Prelude to …

Ua35/11 Student Honors Research Bulletin, Wku Honors Program

WKU Administration Documents

The WKU Student Honors Research Bulletin is dedicated to scholarly involvement and student research. These papers are representative of work done by students from throughout the university.

• Bachert, Sara. Rational Portrayal of the Irrationational in The Pit and the Pendulum
• Bell, Suzanne. Early Secret Involvement of the United States Military in Cambodia
• Brock, Beth. The Informal Caregiving System: The Frail Elderlys' Avenue of Choice
• Daniel, Janice. Child Sexual Abuse
• Johnson, Linda. International Telecommunications Trade with Japan
• Jones, LaMont. Ernie Pyle: Journalist Without Peer
• Kesserling, Marcia. Attitudes Toward the Need for Computer Literacy
• Lewis, Gloria. John Donne's Attitude Toward Love
• Majdi, …