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Articles 121 - 150 of 495
Full-Text Articles in American Literature
Everybody's Story: Gertrude Stein's Career As A Nexus Connecting Writers And Painters In Bohemian Paris, Elizabeth F. Milam
Everybody's Story: Gertrude Stein's Career As A Nexus Connecting Writers And Painters In Bohemian Paris, Elizabeth F. Milam
Honors Theses
My thesis examines how the combination of Gertrude Stein's career, Paris, and the time period before, during, and after The Great War conflated to create the Lost Generation and affected the work of Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. Five different sections focus on: the background of Stein and how her understanding of expression came into existence, Paris and the unique environment it provided for experimentation at the beginning of the twentieth century (and how that compared to the environment found in America), Modernism existing in Paris prior to World War One, the mass culture of militarization in World War One …
Nella Larsen: An Untold Story Of Race Through Literature, Bria Stephens Stephens
Nella Larsen: An Untold Story Of Race Through Literature, Bria Stephens Stephens
Honors Theses
This study explores the life of Nella Larsen, investigating how her unusual childhood and early adulthood provided substance for her to make critical and unique views on race relations and racially dichotomized communities. The study shows how the Harlem Renaissance was essential in providing this outlet to Larsen; it was an era where African American art was lauded. The investigation required research into Larsen's childhood and early adult life using several different pieces of biographical works. After detailing impactful events in her early life, the study developed further with critical analyzation of her fictional short stories and novels. Additional research …
Cold War New York: Postmodernism, Lyricism, And Queer Aesthetics In 1970s New York Poetry, Jared James O'Connor
Cold War New York: Postmodernism, Lyricism, And Queer Aesthetics In 1970s New York Poetry, Jared James O'Connor
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis explores the poetry of Joe Brainard and Anne Waldman, two poets of the critically neglected second-generation New York school. I argue that Brainard and Waldman help define the emerging discourse of postmodern poetry through their attention to cold war culture of the 1970s, countercultural ideologies, and poetic form. Both Brainard and Waldman enact a poetics of vulnerability in their work, situating themselves as wholly unique from their late-modernist predecessors. In doing so, they help engender a poetics concerned not only with the intellectual stakes but with the cultural environment they are forced to navigate. Chapter 1 explores Brainard's …
All Things Loved And Unlovable: Discovering Southern Identity In Black Migration Novels, Michael Holman
All Things Loved And Unlovable: Discovering Southern Identity In Black Migration Novels, Michael Holman
Honors Theses
This thesis traces the development of the ways that the South figures in the imaginations of black writers by examining Southern identity in three novels centered around migratory protagonists. The thesis examines the ways in which folk identity, urban landscapes, remigration, and gender shape the migration experience in each novel. The novels discussed here are Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Quicksand posits the South as a place of unique danger, especially for black women, Invisible Man characterizes it as a place defined by oppressive memory that may be utilized as a resource …
Photographic Representations Of The South: Eudora Welty And Doris Ulmann, Molly Maher
Photographic Representations Of The South: Eudora Welty And Doris Ulmann, Molly Maher
Honors Theses
Eudora Welty and Doris Ulmann both photographed African Americans living in the South during the 1930s. Ulmann photographed the unique Gullah community in South Carolina, documenting their agricultural work, religious traditions, and lifestyle. Welty photographed the African American community within her home state of Mississippi. Despite a parallel interest in subject matter, Welty stated that she did not like Ulmann's photography. This thesis examines the differences between Welty and Ulmann's techniques and their relationships to the South, their subjects, and literary texts in order to identify why Welty explicitly expressed a dislike for Ulmann's photographs.
Representation Of The American South In Marvel Comics, 1963-2016, Katherine Gill
Representation Of The American South In Marvel Comics, 1963-2016, Katherine Gill
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
My work tracks the role of the American South and Southern characters in Marvel Comics, from 1963 to 2016. This thesis spring from a simple question: how stereotypical does this Northern industry portray the American South? To achieve this goal, I read a lot of comics, applying literary theory (such as Patricia Yeager and Tara McPherson) as well as American cultural studies (1980s televangelism and the history of human trafficking in America) to my findings. After reading multiple comic books from multiple sources, I settled on four different texts, each with a unique approach to portraying the South: the portrayal …
How To Find What's Lost When What's Lost Is You: The Presence Of Disappearing Bodies In Vietnam, Afghanistan, And Iraq War Literature, Brandy Rachele Williams
How To Find What's Lost When What's Lost Is You: The Presence Of Disappearing Bodies In Vietnam, Afghanistan, And Iraq War Literature, Brandy Rachele Williams
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The focus of this study is on disappearing bodies in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq war literature. The term “disappearing body” has several connotations. Disappearing bodies refers to throwaway or neglected bodies, bodies that routinely absorb into the landscape. Women and African Americans typically fall into this category, but at times, Vietnamese, Afghani, or Iraqi people may fall into this category as well. The race, gender, and region of the author often determines how Others are posited in the literature. Disappearing bodies also occur in the form of grotesquerie. These bodies appear as dismembered, decapitated, mutilated, and wasting away. Bodies disappear …
Between Species: Biopolitics, Resistance, And Interspeciesality, Temple Jo Gowan
Between Species: Biopolitics, Resistance, And Interspeciesality, Temple Jo Gowan
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines three twentieth-century novels—Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale, and Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats—in the context of posthumanist animal studies. A Foucauldian biopolitical lens foregrounds the inextricably linked ways that both human and nonhuman animal bodies are governed and controlled in a biopolitical era. Each chapter focuses on textual links between speciesism and the oppression of particular human groups based on gender, sexuality, and race, arguing that each novel offers new ways of thinking about both our own species, other animal species, and how humans relate to the nonhuman world.
God's Gonna Trouble The Water, Dominiqua Dickey
God's Gonna Trouble The Water, Dominiqua Dickey
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
"God's Gonna Trouble the Water," is a noir set in Grenada, MS in the 1930s. This novel explores the issues of race, gender, and class via the protagonist, a thirtysomething black woman who despite her low status in the socioeconomic hierarchy of this small southern town is able to navigate the delicate complexities of the environment to search for her missing granddaughter, a mixed raced toddler whose father is the son of a prominent white land owner. Although national history portrays Mississippi as maintaining a polarizing view on race relations, the novel will explore how this idea of Mississippi is …
Economic Enchantment In Eudora Welty's A Curtain Of Green, Elizabeth Moore
Economic Enchantment In Eudora Welty's A Curtain Of Green, Elizabeth Moore
Honors Theses
This thesis analyzes Eudora Welty's short story collection, A Curtain of Green, and the interactions between its characters and the Mississippi economy. The paper takes into account Eudora Welty's work with the WPA during the Great Depression and her experiences photographing Mississippians throughout the state. Additionally, this thesis uses Welty's terminology when describing her experience of shopping as a child, specifically the enchantment of goods. This material is used to argue that Eudora Welty does address economic elements in her early short stories. Furthermore, this collection demonstrates a difference between gender participation in the economy, particularly among salesmen and female …
The Mockingjay Phenomena: A Study On The Position Of Young Adult Women In Dystopia, Hannah Hultman
The Mockingjay Phenomena: A Study On The Position Of Young Adult Women In Dystopia, Hannah Hultman
Honors Theses
The purpose of this research is to explore the messages and impact of three young adult dystopian trilogies, The Hunger Games, Divergent and The Uglies. In particular, the role of the American female teenager in political, economic and social spheres is discussed through examining the three female teenaged protagonists of these novels. For comparative purposes, George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World function as counterpoints to the young adult novels; the analysis of these different novels will prove that young adult dystopian novels show young adult women that their choices and actions can be integral to their societies …
Read Me: The Emergence Of Female Voice In American Epistolary Fiction, Allison Melissa Ramsey
Read Me: The Emergence Of Female Voice In American Epistolary Fiction, Allison Melissa Ramsey
Honors Theses
The objective of the thesis was to study how the letter, as a narrative device provided by the epistolary genre, supplies unheard female characters with an avenue to speak when their worlds do not allow it. In the novels, the letters not only permit a female character to practice building a voice, but also provide a self-reflection and identification experience, which enables the woman to see where she is, rewrite her role, and control where she wants to go. Through reading Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies, and Maria Semple's …
The Radical South: Grassroots Activism, Ethnicity, And Literary Form, 1960-1980, Elizabeth Fielder
The Radical South: Grassroots Activism, Ethnicity, And Literary Form, 1960-1980, Elizabeth Fielder
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
“The Radical South” examines the art and writings of Civil-Rights-era social movements and locates U.S. based political structures in a hemispheric and global network. I reveal that the Civil Rights Movement, ethnic nationalism, and second-wave feminism were not separate entities; rather, the cultural work of activists was an intersectional effort that defied national strategies, such as non-violent protest and race-based separatism, that were often determined by their urban counterparts. Thus, I argue that new political aesthetics emerged from grassroots activism and set in motion ethnic and racial cultural expressions that embraced multiple, even conflicting, identities. As much as this art …
I Have Been Somewhere: Place In The South Carolina Poems Of Nikky Finney And Kwame Dawes, Purvis L. Cornish
I Have Been Somewhere: Place In The South Carolina Poems Of Nikky Finney And Kwame Dawes, Purvis L. Cornish
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The following thesis focuses on the role of “place” in the poems of two black South Carolinian poets, Nikky Finney and Kwame Dawes. Borrowing from cultural and humanistic geographers’ myriad understandings of place, as well as philosophers’, I examine the ways in which Finney’s Rice and Dawes’s Wisteria function as meditations on and transmutations of the South Carolina low country in both its physical and non-physical dimensions, ultimately shedding light on historically silenced and marginalized emplaced realities. I also examine how Finney and Dawes employ different strategies of emplacement and their influence on the poems’ structure and meaning. In the …
Material Melancholy: Stranded Objects In Modern Southern Women's Writing, James Travis Rozier
Material Melancholy: Stranded Objects In Modern Southern Women's Writing, James Travis Rozier
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation traces the origins and uses of a specifically southern obsession with the past. Examining how southern women writers represent the compulsion to remember, I demonstrate how, in their narratives, efforts to retain intimate relationships with an idealized past obstruct characters' ability to live in the present. Their fiction aligns neatly with the dynamic described in psychoanalysis as 'melancholia’—not least because, in each case, these relationships with the past are typically ambivalent or even destructive, and the melancholic subjects must 'work through' their damaging attachments. Typical psychoanalytic approaches, however, have neglected how such troubled remembering might be influenced by …
Organic Angels: Innocence, Conversion, And Consumption In The Antebellum American Novel, Laura Jean Schrock
Organic Angels: Innocence, Conversion, And Consumption In The Antebellum American Novel, Laura Jean Schrock
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Midcentury American novelists variously reworked the traditional conversion narrative to reflect a marked cultural shift in attitude towards human "nature," newly conceived as innocent and inclined to salvation. This liberalized aesthetic of conversion takes shape through the trope of the "organic angel," a developmental female figure whose journey from childhood innocence to saintly womanhood merges the processes of sexual maturation and Protestant conversion. Because she purifies self-interested desire by redirecting it towards spiritual ends, the organic angel provides a symbolic reconciliation of the young nation's budding imperial capitalism with its millennial expectations. While traditional emphasis on a maternal ethos at …
Speaking In Wild Tongues: The Borderlands Of Eudora Welty And Alice Walker, Sara Gabler Thomas
Speaking In Wild Tongues: The Borderlands Of Eudora Welty And Alice Walker, Sara Gabler Thomas
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
In Borderlands/La Frontera Gloria Anzaldúa describes her experience undergoing a dental procedure as a battle between her wild tongue and the dentist. Beginning with a discussion of Anzaldúa’s concept of the wild tongue, this project asks how writers across the US South depict unruly tongues and infelicitous speech. Methodologically, this thesis inverts the comreading model in literary studies of reading Third World writers through First World theorists. Instead, beginning with Anzaldúa, I propose to reverse this process and assert a new reading methodology of reading First World writers through Third World theorists. The trope of the wild tongue will mobilize …
Thin Bodies, Elizabeth Meliza Tran
Thin Bodies, Elizabeth Meliza Tran
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Thin Bodies, is a fictional thriller revolving around a retrospective, female voice. It is a short novel-length view into the insular community of the sorority, specifically in the U.S. Deep South. The town and university are both fictional, as are the characters, sororities, and events, but they are based in realistic institutions of socialization and community. Sarah Beth, our protagonist and narrator, considers her coming-of-age through her recruitment, initiation, ensuing leadership, and eventual fall from grace in her sorority, Theta Kappa. The group of women that this novel intends to characterize struggle with identity and how they are perceived against …
Colorism And African American Women In Literature: An Examination Of Colorism And Its Impact On Self-Image, Jakira Davis
Colorism And African American Women In Literature: An Examination Of Colorism And Its Impact On Self-Image, Jakira Davis
Honors Theses
The purpose of this study is to explore how African American women in literature have been impacted by colorism. Through this study which included a fictional novel from the twentieth century and a non-fictional novel from the twenty-first century we are able to see how women of color have been impacted by colorism. This thesis explores evidence of the impact of colorism and its impact on the image of African American women and young girls. This thesis suggests that there is evidence of colorism found in literature and thus colorism is a real issue in the African American community that …
The Ghost Of Ravishment That Lingers In The Land: The Beginnings Of Environmentalism In Seraph On The Suwanee And Go Down, Moses, Elisabeth Anne Wagner
The Ghost Of Ravishment That Lingers In The Land: The Beginnings Of Environmentalism In Seraph On The Suwanee And Go Down, Moses, Elisabeth Anne Wagner
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner are recognized for their environmental writing. However, few scholars have acknowledged the sophisticated environmentalism present in Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee and Faulkner's fictional depiction of Lafayette County in Go Down, Moses. This thesis seeks to prove that Hurston and Faulkner were keenly aware of the ecological problems of their hometowns through a close reading of each book alongside the environmental history each book was based on, Eatonville, Florida and Lafayette County, Mississippi respectively. Each author's distinct regional environmental knowledge helped Hurston and Faulkner to see larger national and global problems with using land …
Cold War Pulp: Gender And Fiction In The Age Of Liberation, James Lewis Hood
Cold War Pulp: Gender And Fiction In The Age Of Liberation, James Lewis Hood
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The early decades of the twentieth century saw incredible changes in both literacy and general publishing. Once literature had been the domain of the elite, but now it was the daily pleasure of compeople. The changes in American culture in the middle of the century, combined with this revolution in publishing and literacy, combined to produce texts frequently referred to as pulp-fiction, works easily and cheaply produced for a mass-market. This market actively catered to diverse interests, perhaps most significantly the sexually alienated. Works of gay and feminist pulp fiction served to show alienated gay men and women, as well …
Uneven Ground: Figurations Of The Rural Modern In The U.S. South, 1890-1945, Benjamin S. Child
Uneven Ground: Figurations Of The Rural Modern In The U.S. South, 1890-1945, Benjamin S. Child
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
New modernist studies has opened wide the discussion about what modernism means, when it begins, and, compellingly for the purposes of this project, where it occurs. Exploring intersections between modernization, modernism, labor, and segregation in the agricultural South, this dissertation demonstrates how the effects of nascent industrialization, emergent technologies, and "modern" thought are animated by figures and spaces associated with--or performing--versions of rurality. The project is divided into three major sections. In the first, I suggest that the contradictions of African American life in the post-Reconstruction world are parsed in the period's literature through the presence of a veiled georgic …
Modern(Izing) Burial In Interwar American Literature, Victoria Marie Bryan
Modern(Izing) Burial In Interwar American Literature, Victoria Marie Bryan
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation aims to study literary representations of interwar American deathways as reflections of modernity. The study of burial in United States history tends to focus on mid- to late-nineteenth century movements that distance the dead from the living. This dissertation argues that these practices left Americans ill-equipped to process the influx of death from the conflict areas of World War I, keen to allow the further development of the funeral industry during the interwar period, and anxious about the certain rise in death tolls that would result from World War II. Interwar literature, therefore, exhibits a difficulty in meaning-making …
Gravity In A Jar: A Poetic History Of The People, Places, And Events Of Detroit, Morgan Mccomb
Gravity In A Jar: A Poetic History Of The People, Places, And Events Of Detroit, Morgan Mccomb
Honors Theses
In this thesis, I explore the history of the city of Detroit in order to better understand the factors that have led to Detroit's current state. The research materials I have used are standard history books as well as newspaper articles, journals, and published interviews with former and current Detroit residents. I have incorporated this research into the construction of both a strict research element as well as poetry in order to present varying accounts of the city of Detroit beginning in the early 20th century and continuing into the present-day. I have found that the history of Detroit has …
Eleven Criminals: Stories, Brendan Steffen
Eleven Criminals: Stories, Brendan Steffen
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This is a work of fiction about criminality and masculinity. It explores all kinds of crimes, both real and imagined.
Silk Road: A Novel, Elizabeth Mckay Mcfadden
Silk Road: A Novel, Elizabeth Mckay Mcfadden
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Silk Road: A Novel
Southern Bestsellers In The Twenty-First Century, Jodie Free
Southern Bestsellers In The Twenty-First Century, Jodie Free
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis explores the concept of bestsellers in the twenty-first century, with a particular focus on six novels written by contemporary southern authors. These novels are analyzed through the lens of social consciousness, with attention to how they reflect current social issues, and how they engage with and subvert cultural and literary stereotypes. Bestsellers are books that are widely read, shared and discussed, often because they connect to concerns about identity; this study speculates on the influence of bestsellers on national and regional reader identity, specifically race, gender and class. Chapter I explores feminine roles in Lee Smith's The Last …
Physicians, Patients, And Poets, Mary Ball Markow
Physicians, Patients, And Poets, Mary Ball Markow
Honors Theses
I examined the works of William Carlos Williams, Peter Pereira, Rafael Campo, Tory Dent, Lucia Perillo, and John Rybicki to gain a better understanding of the field of medicine. I selected these authors based upon their varied experiences with illness, disease, and loss. Their prose and poetry illuminate the nature of medicine and provide insight into human nature as well. The thesis has been edited for the SMBHC Thesis Repository to protect the copyright interests of some authors and publishers. The table of contents has been edited to reflect the changes.
Suffering And Coping In The Novels Of Anne Tyler, Camden Story Hastings
Suffering And Coping In The Novels Of Anne Tyler, Camden Story Hastings
Honors Theses
Through an exploration of the causes of the characters' suffering and their mechanisms for coping, this thesis shows that by developing the perseverance necessary to navigate ordinary, everyday obstacles, Tyler's characters cope with extraordinary circumstances causing them pain. They also realize that victories in the little things lead to discoveries about themselves and the sources of their distress. The six novels discussed here include The Accidental Tourist, Saint Maybe, The Beginner's Goodbye, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years, and Breathing Lessons. Nine major characters from these six novels are explored and, while various causes lead to their individual …
Narratives Of Southern Contact Zones: Mobility And The Literary Imagination Of Zora Neale Hurston And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Kyoko Shoji Hearn
Narratives Of Southern Contact Zones: Mobility And The Literary Imagination Of Zora Neale Hurston And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Kyoko Shoji Hearn
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation examines the literary works of the two Southern women writers, Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, based on the cultural contexts of the 1930s and the 1940s. It discusses how the two writers' works are in dialogue with each other, and with the particular historical period in which the South had gone through many social, economical, and cultural changes. Hurston and Rawlings, who became friends with each other beyond their racial background in the segregated South, shared physical and social mobility and the interest in the Southern folk cultures. They wrote fiction about the region and its …