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Articles 1 - 8 of 8

Full-Text Articles in American Literature

Navigating With Harriet Quimby, Rachael Peckham Jul 2014

Navigating With Harriet Quimby, Rachael Peckham

English Faculty Research

My maternal grandmother Ruth never missed an episode of the game show Jeopardy! One night in 2008, while I was working on my dissertation about a long-forgotten aviatrix with whom my family and I share connections, Grandma Ruth called to tell me about a Jeopardy! clue she had just heard: "The first woman to fly across the English Channel." My grandmother was reserved and soft-spoken, but I imagine her slapping the armrests of the recliner, disturbing the outstretched cat at her side, and beating all three contestants to the buzzer: "Who is Harriet Quimby?"--the subject of my dissertation.


Mothers At Work: Reconstruction And Deconstruction Of Patriarchy In Gone With The Wind, Catherine Willa Staley Jan 2012

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 …


Silence And Self-Making: Black Lung Rhetoric And The Ken Hechler Letters, Jennifer De Pompei Jan 2012

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 …


The Body Of Light : Poems, Alicia Matheny Jan 2007

The Body Of Light : Poems, Alicia Matheny

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This creative thesis explores the different facets of Pink Floyd and their music, drawing inspiration from albums varying from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967) to Dark Side of the Moon (1973). Using images drawn from nature, the cosmos, and Pagan mythology, this thesis also incorporates biographical details found in Nicholas Schaffner’s important biography, Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey (New York: Harmony Books, 1991). There are also experiments with form in the poems, in that in many of the poems, instead of commas, there are tab spaces. Each space expresses the silence between each word. …


Nothing Personal : A Collection Of Nonfiction Essays Exposing The Perverted Experiences Of Life, Interactions, And Responses, Benjamin P. Taylor Jan 2006

Nothing Personal : A Collection Of Nonfiction Essays Exposing The Perverted Experiences Of Life, Interactions, And Responses, Benjamin P. Taylor

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Nothing Personal is a collection of nonfiction essays playfully written in response to subtle misunderstandings. Such misunderstandings, in this creative thesis, are fueled by an unexplained divorce, alcoholism, the new absence of love, and the difference between the personal and the traditional church. The essays also expose the science of conversation and other lighter occurrences and happenings in an esteemed pursuit to live life more humorously.


Pynchon In Popular Magazines, John K. Young Jul 2003

Pynchon In Popular Magazines, John K. Young

English Faculty Research

Any devoted Pynchon reader knows that “The Secret Integration” originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post and that portions of The Crying of Lot 49 were first serialized in Esquire and Cavalier. But few readers stop to ask what it meant for Pynchon, already a reclusive figure, to publish in these popular magazines during the mid-1960s, or how we might understand these texts today after taking into account their original sites of publication. “The Secret Integration” in the Post or the excerpt of Lot 49 in Esquire produce different meanings in these different contexts, meanings that disappear when reading …


Billing Below Title : The Contested Autobiographies Of Frances Farmer And Louise Brooks, Karen M. Anderson Jan 2003

Billing Below Title : The Contested Autobiographies Of Frances Farmer And Louise Brooks, Karen M. Anderson

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Today autobiography and memoir hold great interest for the average reader as well as the literary scholar. Some argue this form has replaced the novel as the dominant modern/postmodern narrative expression. Its study crosses departmental boundaries, surfacing in disciplines such as psychology, as well as English/literature. This thesis focuses on the autobiographies of two Euro-American actresses of the early twentieth century. Intersecting the study of film, narrative, autobiography (“female” or feminist, as well as canonical or “male”) and modernism, it focuses on text and subtext, analyzing reasons for both the works’ and actress/authors’ cultural marginalization. In art as well as …


Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, And Postmodern Popular Audiences, John K. Young Jul 2001

Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, And Postmodern Popular Audiences, John K. Young

English Faculty Research

In this essay the author examines the "Oprah Effect" on the career of Toni Morrison, who after three appearances on "Oprah's Book Club" has become the most dramatic example of postmodernism's merger between Morrison's canonical status and Winfrey's commercial power has superseded the publishing industry's field of normative whiteness, enabling Morrison to reach a broad, popular audience while being marketed as artistically important.