American Literature Commons^™

Remaking The Red Death: An Interactive Fiction Post-Mortem, Kenton T. Howard

ELO (un)supervised 2026

This individual talk provides a post-mortem discussion of an interactive fiction game the author created, ReMasque of the Red Death, for the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 5. The game is a web-based interactive fiction recreation of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story “The Masque of the Red Death” built using ink and Inky, an interactive fiction scripting engine, with 2D art assets created in Sketchpad, a mobile-based digital drawing app. The game was produced entirely without the usage of AI tools. This talk will cover the initial ideation for the game, creating a basic prototype of the game’s core systems, …

Three In One: An Examination Of Women’S Roles In The Life And Literature Of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Ashley Lear

The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature

No abstract provided.

Voice Of The Frog: Found Poetry And The Revelation Of An Eastern Aesthetic In The Creative Works Of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Antoinette Libro

The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature

No abstract provided.

The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal Of Florida Literature, Volume Xxxiii (2026): Full Issue

The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature

No abstract provided.

The Heterotopic Horizon In Zora Neale Hurston’S Their Eyes Were Watching God, Emily Norton

The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature

No abstract provided.

An Interview With David Nolan, Teri Sopp

The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature

No abstract provided.

Norman Berg And The Literary Formation Of Pat Conroy, Jacob Lupfer

The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature

No abstract provided.

“Ora’S Deep Lament”: Inspired By Mk Rawlings And My Persevering Pioneer Great-Grandmother, Kathlyne Mcdonald Walkup Sheppard

The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature

No abstract provided.

In The Walls, Taylor S. Arnold

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

In the Walls is a collection of short and flash fiction that uses gothic and speculative elements to explore isolation, identity, gender roles, and experiences of women, including pressures of conformity and the persistent draw of the domestic. In “Poltergeist,” a scorned ghost discovers her supernatural abilities when her husband brings home a new woman. “Home For Sale,” an experimental story structured as a Zillow listing, contains the tale of a housewife’s psychological unravelling amid paranormal encounters in her family’s new home. The titular story, “In the Walls,” focuses on a woman who attempts to conform to a homemaker role …

Specters, Fred Lambert

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

Specters is a collection of interconnected short fiction that explores the lives of various characters affected by the Iraq War. Touching upon themes of mortality, dehumanization, guilt, and the trauma inflicted by senseless violence, the stories in this collection aim to blur the line between the concrete and the phantasmagoric. The titular story follows a young Marine whose grip on reality is called into question during the Second Battle of Fallujah. In “Demons,” a recruit undergoing the chaotic and brutal grind of Parris Island begins to wonder if his drill instructors are possessed. “Kill Bodies” chronicles the repeated killing of …

The Place Between Places, Harrison Burke

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

The Place Between Places is a collection of essays centered on belonging. Focusing on the composition of city streets, theme parks, and hidden pockets of wonder, belonging is explored as the product of place and culture. The perspective of the collection shifts between reflection and active exploration, using present moment journeys as catalysts to unravel the past. In every new discovery there is a ghost, past and present journeys fighting for their place in the constructed narrative called “self.”

The collection primarily makes use of braided essays and nonlinear storytelling. “Animal” blends together three night walks through New York, Seoul, …

Taming Wildfires, Bianca Dagostino

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

Taming Wildfires is a novella immersed in the mind of a young woman named Lilla with intense, undiagnosed mental illness attempting to reenter society after losing the crutch of her long-term partner. The novella engages with the intersection of queerness, mental illness, interracial relationships, and the society of recent past (2023-2024), and deals with themes of isolation, loss, self-image, and emotional healing. Readers are invited fully into Lilla’s mind as she navigates a long-term friendship strained by proximity and a new romance marred by omission. These relationships are overcast by her loss, her skewed reality, and her conflicting desires to …

Voicing The Violence: Carmen Maria Machado's Contribution To A Queer Archive, Audrey C. Bryant

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This project analyzes In the Dream House (2019) alongside “The Husband Stitch” and “Eight Bites” from the collection Her Body and Other Parties (2017) by Carmen Maria Machado. The first, a memoir, details Machado’s personal experience with domestic abuse between partners who share a female gender identity; the latter is a collection of short stories outlining everyday violations made against women. Scholars have discussed these works with specifications including female domestic horror, Machado’s use of retellings, and domestic violence and abuse. This project fills a gap in the discourse by intersecting and connecting queer theory with archival studies to support …

A Story Of Oppression A Psychological And Creative Approach, Juan R. Morillo

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The aim of this project is to survey the manner in which oppression is expressed in selected works of literature. It is a topic that not only am I familiar with through my studies of literature and psychology, but one that I, as well as every Venezuelan expatriate has witnessed and felt for their country. The project focuses on social and political oppression, using the current Venezuelan crisis as a focal point, and selected literary sources as a framework. I will analyze dystopian classics such as George Orwell's 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, as well as Margaret Atwood’s The …

Before They Could Be Saved: Aids Voices Before Protease Inhibitors, Julian J. Willis

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The intent of this thesis is to explore writing during the start of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. States. This time period encompasses the early 1980s to mid-1990s before Protease Inhibitors were FDA approved which was the medical breakthrough drug that helped turn an HIV diagnosis from a death sentence to a chronic condition. This thesis will be an examination of three themes: “Gay White Cis Male Experience of HIV/AIDS”,” Marginalized Identity Experience of HIV/AIDS” and an exploration of two plays written during the height of the AIDS epidemic that were later turned into HBO productions: The Normal Heart …

Creating A Reverberating Beat: Digital Curation Of The Women Writers Of The Beat Generation, Elena Maria Rogalle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The focus of my study is the creation of a special topics American literature or Women's Studies course about the women writers of the Beat Generation; this course provides students with a variety of explorations of women's writing during and after Post World War II America. This period saw many changes in terms of women's roles as they challenged the mid-20th century societal constructs. My research examines the women Beat writers by centering on their distinct women's discourse and how their voices challenged the patriarchally-driven canon of Beat Generation writers. To accomplish this task, my research focuses on expanding the …

Resurrecting An American Archive: A Mid-20th-Century Case Study Of Louise Amory (1892-1979), Barbara A. Marquis

Honors Undergraduate Theses

In 1950, Roger and Louise Amory founded the Johann Fust Community Library in Boca Grande, Florida. After the death of Louise's son John Austin Amory III in 2018, John's son ­– and Roger Amory's namesake – donated a collection of Louise Amory's papers to the Library Foundation. The archive consists of 140 pages, mostly handwritten. Louise wrote most of the material between 1949 and 1954. As Executive Director of the Foundation, I solicited the help of one of our docent volunteers, and we took on the challenge of transcribing her writing.

I was excited to undertake the resurrection of this …

Hemingway Drunk: A Study Of Prohibition, Medico-Legal Rhetoric, And The Autonomy Of Masculinity, Graham P. Studdard

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis uses a combination of medical humanities, queer public theory, and literary analysis to showcase the uniquely American connections between alcoholism and masculinity in the literature of Ernest Hemingway. By situating both Hemingway and his characters within the medico-legal rhetoric of modernism’s famous Parisian Jazz-age, which occurred at the same time as American prohibition, I reveal changes in white American men’s relationships with gender, bodily autonomy, and the patriarchy that are often overlooked due to Hemingway’s publicly constructed masculine persona. My work provides new queer interpretations of The Sun Also Rises (1926) and the posthumous Garden of Eden (1986) …

The Language Of Personas: Poetic Masks In Confessional And Black Arts Poems, Grecia Espinoza

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis considers Confessional poetry and Black Arts poetry against the backdrop of the political and social culture of the 1950s that influenced the styles of these two major poetic movements. I examine Sylvia Plath's and Nikki Giovanni's distinct poetic personas and the language they employ in relation to each other as representatives of confessional and Black Arts poetry, two poetic styles often thought to be inherently opposed to each other, one personal and one political. I identify connections between these seemingly different poets and movements through close readings of key poems by Plath and Giovanni that situates them within …

"A Past Unremembered: The Transformative Legacy Of The Black Speculative Imagination" Exhibition Catalog, Julian Chambliss, Phillip Cunningham

2020-2021 Afrofuturism Syllabus - Week 20 - "A Past Unremembered: The Transformative Legacy of the Black Speculative Imagination" Exhibit

Exhibition catalog for "A Past Unremembered: The Transformative Legacy of the Black Speculative Imagination," co-curated by Dr. Julian Chambliss and Dr. Phillip Cunningham as part of the annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities. The exhibit locates Afrofuturist thought in earlier eras of American history and focuses on how African American writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries used speculative/science fiction to imagine a better, freer, more equitable future for Black people.

Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish": A Definitive Mid-Twentieth Century Poem., Teddy Duncan

Digital Repository: Showcase of Undergraduate Research Excellence

No abstract provided.

The Study Of Free Will In The East And The West, Nicholas J. Colecio

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to understand the origins of the enduring differences between the Eastern and Western interpretations of free will and determinism. In my piece, I work to determine the roots of these differences and to what degree these differences have been challenged and disrupted in the 20^th century. In this pursuit, I analyze the different philosophies of free will in the East and West and then apply these philosophies to the literature of both regions. For the eastern scholarship, I am using Yukio Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and Motojirō …

Spiteful Houses, Sweet Homes: Analyzing Denver's Traumatic Space In Beloved, Tyler Dick

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis aims to explore and evaluate the traumatic space of Denver in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Currently, a lack of critical discourse exists to link together Denver, trauma, and theories of spatiality. This thesis evaluates three types of trauma that inform and develop Denver's traumatic space: direct, indirect, and insidious trauma. Paired with spatial theories, the origins of Denver's trauma are mapped throughout the various places of the novel. The result of this analysis reveals a complex and layered traumatic space, with lasting ramifications on Denver's sense of safety, identity, and stability in a post-slavery United States.

A Deconstruction Of Puritan Ideology Through The Works Of John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, And Mary Rowlandson, Rocco S. Fazzalari

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Originated by Jacques Derrida, deconstruction analyzes the relationship between text and meaning. This thesis applies Derrida's theory of deconstruction to three early American Puritan figures: John Winthrop, Mary Rowlandson, and Anne Bradstreet. By questioning the conceptual distinctions known as oppositions in Puritan ideology through the works of these aforementioned individuals, this thesis questions and corrupts the binaries within each text used. The emergence of new meaning through a deconstruction of Puritan ideology establishes a valid site from which to explore radical, repressed, historical, cultural, and theological narratives of religious prosperity. By enforcing narratives from Derrida's Of Grammatology, post-structuralist ideology will …

Defining Hybridity: Frantz Fanon And Post-Colonialism In Louise Erdrich's Shadow Tag, Scott Morrison

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

This essay focuses on issues of assimilation, identity, and hybridity as they apply to the Native American characters in Louise Erdrich's Shadow Tag. It interprets the stages of colonization, as proposed by Frantz Fanon, within the novel's storyline by focusing on the specific characterization of its three major characters: Irene, Gil, and Riel. These three characters metaphorically represent the players in a colonial system—the colonized subject, the colonizing force, and the generations of hybrids who result from colonization—in order to depict a truth about Native American identity in contemporary America. According to Fanon, the three phases of colonization are assimilation, …

F. Scott Fitzgerald As A "Hot Nietzschean": The Influence Of Friedrich Nietzsche's Philosophy In This Side Of Paradise, The Beautiful And Damned, And The Great Gatsby, Lindsey Carman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Beginning in 1915, F. Scott Fitzgerald was exposed to the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche under the guidance of mentors and from his personal reading lists. While reading Nietzsche, Fitzgerald's concern with the rise of cultural pessimism in 1920s America appeared in his fiction. Interestingly, both the philosopher and author explore the decline of Western culture in the twentieth century––a period of identity crises that affected America and Europe. This thesis investigates Fitzgerald's misreading of Nietzschean ideas that appears in his fiction to highlight the author's interest in explaining the cause of America's decline. In particular, this thesis appropriates a Nietzschean …

(Un)Natural Bodies, Endangered Species, And Embodied Others In Margaret Atwood's Oryx And Crake, Marcy Galbreath

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The developing knowledge of life sciences is at the crux of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake as she examines human promise gone awry in a near-future dystopia. This thesis examines aspects of posthumanism, ecocriticism, and feminism in the novel's scientific, cultural, and environmental projections. Through the trope of extinction, Atwood's text foregrounds the effects of human exceptionalism and instrumentalism in relation to the natural world, and engenders an analysis of human identity through its biological and cultural aspects. Extinction thus serves as a metaphor for both human development and human excesses, redefining the idea of human within the context of …

Elizabeth Bishop And Her Women:Countering Loss, Love, And Language Through Bishop's Homosocial Continuum, Donna Rogers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Elizabeth Bishop's seemingly understated and yet nuanced poetry with a specific focus on loss, love, and language through domesticity to create a poetic home. In this sense, home offers security for a displaced orphan and lesbian, moving from filial to amorous love, as well as the literary home for a poet who struggled for critical recognition. Further, juxtaposing the familiar with the strange, Bishop situates her speaker in a construction of artificial and natural boundaries that break down across her topography and represent loss through the multiple female figures that permeate her poems to convey the uncertainty …

Silence, Absence, And Mystery In Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit, Solar Storms, And Power, Kathryn Erickson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Mean Spirit, Solar Storms, and Power, Linda Hogan uses the devices of silence, absence, and mystery to articulate the oppression and marginalization of Native Americans. Specifically, because of the environmental crises that produce conflict in each novel, the project benefits from ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and ecopsychology. Also, because of various interpretations that open up when silence is examined, theories of deconstruction strengthen the thesis. Ultimately, Hogan's characters move from silence as a form of tyranny to silence as a form of reconnection with tribal ways. As the characters discover pathways to native traditions, they also discover spiritual connections with the …

Henry James, Virginia Woolf, And Frank Lloyd Wright: Interiority, Consciousness, Time, And Space In The Modernist Novel And The Home, Carol Michaelsen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

During the Modernist period, generally defined between the years 1890 and 1945, artists were attempting to break away from previous forms and styles. For example, writers like Henry James and Virginia Woolf sought to change the novel by exploring the consciousness of characters, while playing with the ideas of time and space to create the present moment. The thesis explores the modernist techniques used by James and Woolf, but also connects the work of the writers with the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Using Joseph Frank's theory of spatial form, my work explores the similarities between Wright's designs of private …