American Literature Commons^™

Pim Pedagogy: Toward A Loosely Unified Model For Teaching And Studying Comics And Graphic Novels, James B. Carter

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

The article debuts and explains "PIM" pedagogy, a construct for teaching comics at the secondary- and post-secondary levels and for deep reading/studying comics. The PIM model for considering comics is actually based in major precepts of education studies, namely constructivist foundations of learning, and loosely unifies constructs inherent therein with other available frames and frameworks for studying comics. As such, the article fills a dire need in the scholarly literature on comics pedagogy and paves a way for those who seek to teach comics courses in the future but who need direction and for those who seek to study/read comics …

Previously Undocumented Art Criticism By Walt Whitman, Wendy J. Katz

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Whitman’s “Letters from a Travelllling Bachelor,” written for the New York Sunday Dispatch (October 14, 1849, through January 6, 1850) are well known, as is his practice of contributing news about Brooklyn and Brooklyn artists to the Dispatch as well as to other newspapers like the Evening Post.1 But his extended description of a painting by Jesse Talbot, Encampment of the Caravan, in the Evening Post (“Encampment of the Caravan,” April 29, 1851; p. 1), and his critique of the National Academy of Design annual exhibition in the Dispatch of the following year (“An Hour at the Academy of Design,” …

Dog's Best Friend?: Vivisecting The "Animal" In Mark Twain's "A Dog's Tale", Matthew Guzman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

“A Dog’s Tale” encapsulates the duality that the domesticated dog as both loyal “friend” and dependable scientific “instrument” denotes. Twain paints a dark portrait of man’s association with “beast.” Additionally, the story presents much more than a simple anthropomorphic tale. Although the nonhuman narrator has humanlike characteristics, one is always aware that Aileen Mavourneen is a dog. Nowhere is this divide more apparent than in the narrator’s failed attempts to “understand” the language and behavior of the human characters. The tale epitomizes the dogma of man’s rule over “lower” creatures, but it does not fully reaffirm these accepted beliefs. Rather, …

Advertising "In These Times:" How Historical Context Influenced Advertisements For Willa Cather's Fiction, Erika K. Hamilton

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Willa Cather's novels were published during a time of upheaval. In the three decades between Alexander's Bridge and Sapphira and the Slave Girl, America's optimism, social mores, culture, literature and advertising trends were shaken and changed by World War One, the "Roaring Twenties," and the Great Depression. This dissertation examines how Cather's fiction was advertised in periodicals during this time, how literary and historical context influenced advertisements, and how publicity for Cather conversed with and diverged from advertising trends. Each chapter explores Cather's opinions on publicity strategies such as author photos, reviews, gossip, prizes, speaking engagements and endorsements, while …

"Hunger Is The Best Sauce": Frontier Food Ways In Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House Books, Erin E. Pedigo

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House book series for the frontier food ways described in it. Studying the series for its food ways edifies a 19th century American frontier of subsistence/companionate families practicing both old and new ways of obtaining food. The character Laura in Wilder's books is an engaging narrator who moves through childhood and adolescence, assuming the role of housewife. An overview of the century's norms about food in America, the strength of domesticity as an ideal, food and race relations, and the frontier as a physical place round out this unexplored area of Little House …

Introduction To E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering A Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist, Melissa J. Homestead, Pamela T. Washington

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In early 1901, Willa Cather visited Prospect Cottage in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., the longtime home of the recently deceased novelist Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevirte (E. D. E. N.) Southworth. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1819 to southern parents (her father from Virginia, her mother from Maryland), Southworth lived in Washington with her family until she married Frederick Hamilton Southworth and moved with him to Wisconsin in 1841. When he deserted her and their two children,' she returned to Washington and taught school to support herself, running to writing to supplement her income from teaching. Within a few …

A Chronological Bibliography Of E. D. E. N. Southworth's Works Privileging Periodical Publication, Melissa J. Homestead, Vicki L. Martin

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Previous attempts at a comprehensive bibliography of E. D. E. N. Southworth's fiction have organized her works alphabetically by book title or chronologically by book publication date. Serialization information--if included at all--is subordinated to book entries or listed separately. These bibliographic conventions better suit authors who published fewer novels than Southworth did and/or did \ not routinely serialize their works. As a result, earlier bibliographies have caused confusion about the size and chronology of Southworth's body of work. Adding to the confusion, her book publisher T. B. Peterson arbitrarily broke many of her novels that appeared in serial form under …

"To Bend Without Breaking": American Women's Authorship And The New Woman, 1900-1935, Amber Harris Leichner

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation focuses on constructions of female authorship in selected prose narratives of four American women writers in the early twentieth century: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zitkala-Ša, and Gertrude Schalk. Specifically, it examines portraits of women in pieces that appeared in national magazines from 1900-1935 that bracket these writers’ careers and that reflect anxieties about their professional authorial identities complicated by gender and, in the case of Native American Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Sioux) and African American Gertrude Schalk, race as well. In a period characterized by fierce debates over the role of women in a dawning modern age, these writers participated …

From Periodical To Book In Her Early Career: E. D. E. N. Southworth’S Letters To Abraham Hart, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

E.D.E.N. Southworth's correspondence with Henry Peterson of the Saturday Evening Post and Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger, both of whom serialized her novels in their weekly story papers, is sometimes dramatic and emotional. In September 1849 Peterson chided Southworth for a “capital literary error” in an installment of her novel The Deserted Wife, in which the Reverend Withers uses his patriarchal authority to maneuver the young, unwilling Sophie Churchill into marriage. The incident would make readers “thro[w] down the tale in disgust,” he warns, and he omitted it from the serialization. In December 1854 he raised …

"What's A Goin' On?" People And Place In The Fiction Of Edythe Squier Draper, 1924-1941, Aubrey R. Streit Krug

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This essay is devoted to looking back into the life and fiction of Edythe Squier Draper, a twentieth-century writer in Oswego, Kansas. Many of Draper’s stories are set in southeastern Kansas. Through them, we gain a sense of how she attempted—and at times failed—to perceive, articulate, and adapt to her place on the Great Plains. Draper claimed the identity of a rural woman writer by writing herself into narratives of colonial, agricultural settlement, and she both complicated and perpetuated stereotypes of class and race in her fiction. By examining her and her characters’ perspective on their place in the Great …

Introduction To Willa Cather And Modern Cultures [Cather Studies 9], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

To some, linking Willa Cather to "the modern" or more narrowly to literary modernism still seems an eccentric proposition. As Richard Millington has pointed out, "one will look in vain for Cather's name in the index of most accounts, whether new or old, of the nature and history of Anglo-American modernism" (52). Perhaps she fails to feature in these accounts because in her public pronouncements and certain recurring motifs in her fiction, she appeared to turn her back on modernity. Cather was skeptical about many aspects of the culture that took shape around her in the early decades of the …

Willa Cather [From Blackwell Encyclopedia Of Twentieth-Century American Fiction], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Willa Cather is known primarily for her novels representing the experiences of women immigrants on the Nebraska prairies in the late nineteenth century, but Cather’s 10 novels and scores of short stories’ produced over a career spanning 50 years actually range widely over space and time, from seventeenth-century Quebec to twentieth century New York. A social conservative who proudly identified herself as one of the backward-looking, her experiments with fictional form and her approach to culture nevertheless ally her with modernism. It is, perhaps, the depth and diversity of Cather’s body of work and the impossibility of reducing her achievement …

Did A Woman Write “The Great American Novel”? Judging Women’S Fiction In The Nineteenth Century And Today, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In the fall of 2009, as I was preparing to teach a senior capstone course for English majors on the nineteenth-century American novel and questions of literary value and the canon, I went trolling for suggestions of recent secondary readings about canonicity. The response came back loud and clear: “The canon wars are over. We all teach whatever we want to teach, and everything is fine.” My experiences with students suggest that, at least in American literary studies before 1900, the canon wars are not over, or, perhaps, they have entered a new stage. Most of my students had heard …

Review Of Teaching Graphic Novels, By Katie Monnin, Susan Spangler

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

No abstract provided.

Rationale For Pride Of Baghdad, Crag Hill Ph.D.

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

A rationale for teaching the graphic novel Pride of Baghdad at the secondary level.

Rationale For Magneto: Testament, Brian Kelley

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

A rationale for teaching the graphic novel Magneto:Testament in secondary schools.

Sequential Art, Graphic Novels, And Comics, Brian Kelley

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

The first global distribution of a paper prepared for the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Graphic Novels Special Interest Group of the International Reading Association,the Executive Board of the New Jersey Reading Association, and the Legislative and Professional Standards Committee of the NJRA.

Edith Lewis As Editor, Every Week Magazine, And The Contexts Of Cather's Fiction, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

On 26 August 1915 the New York Times reported the spectacle of two "Women Editors" who became "Lost in Colorado Canon" as a "Result of Trip with Inexperienced Guide." "Miss Willa Sibert Cather, a former editor of McClure's Magazine, and Miss Edith Lewis, assistant editor at Every Week, had a nerve-racking experience in the Mesa Verde wilds," they reported, giving Lewis and Cather roughly equivalent status as magazine professionals and comic fodder ("Lost"). The war in Europe was still far away for most Americans that August, although the sinking of the Lusitania in May had inched the conflict closer. In …

Susanna Rowson’S Transatlantic Career, Melissa J. Homestead, Camryn Hansen

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The contention that Charlotte is best understood as part of Rowson’s career, a career that spanned a period of years and the Atlantic Ocean, is central to our analysis and to the recovery of Rowson’s authorial agency. In Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America, Angela Vietto argues for the importance of the “literary career” as a category of analysis for women, of “examinin[g] the course writers followed in their pursuit of writing as a vocation—their progress in a variety of kinds of projects, both in their texts and in their performances as authors” (91). Although we leave the work …

Comic Vision, Gale Acuff

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

A narrative, rhetorical poem

The Mother Tongues Of Modernity: Modernism, Transnationalism, Translation, Roland K. Végső

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The relation of modernism to immigrant literatures should not be conceived in terms of an opposition between universalistic and particularistic discourses. Rather, we should explore what can be called a modernist transnationalism based on a general universalist argument. Two examples of this transnationalism are explored side by side: Ezra Pound’s and Anzia Yezierska’s definitions of the aesthetic act in terms of translation. The readings show that the critical discourses of these two authors are structured by a belief in universalism while showing opposite possibilities, both generated by modernist transnationalism. The essay concludes that we now need to interpret the cultures …

New Engagements With Documentary Editions: Audiences, Formats, Contexts, Andrew Jewell

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Conference Presentations and Speeches

This paper is an effort to think about something different than the creation of documentary editions. It is an effort to think about the reading of them. Specifically, I want to think about the ways the reading of documentary editions is changing, or how it might change. First, however, a caveat: much of what I say is speculative and anecdotal. Though others’ research has been consulted, I’m heavily influenced by what I observe is happening with readers of my own editing project, The Willa Cather Archive, a digital thematic research collection dedicated to the life, work, and environs of the …

The Willa Cather Archive In The Classroom, Andrew Jewell

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

This essay discusses many of the opportunities for teachers I believe are present in the Willa Cather Archive (http://cather.unl.edu), particularly in the way the Archive makes new materials available or older materials available in a new way. Additionally, this essay suggests some of the implications of the Archive’s digital presentation of resources. However, the place of digital scholarship in academic life is still evolving, and students and teachers are just getting accustomed to using the form. Given this circumstance, many of my thoughts are inconclusive, observations based upon preliminary understandings into how this resource affects our classrooms. I avoid confident …

Review Of Kate Field: The Many Lives Of A Nineteenth-Century American Journalist And Maria Mitchell And The Sexing Of Science: An Astronomer Among The American Romantics, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Literary historians writing biographies have increasingly shifted from critical biography (the author’s life as a means to interpret his or her literary works) to cultural biography (an author’s life and works in various cultural contexts). As literary historians whose biographical subjects (both nineteenth-century American women) are not primarily literary figures, Bergland and Scharnhorst represent a further step away from critical biography.

As a journalist (and popular lecturer, advocate of reform, playwright, and actress), Kate Field is a more literary figure than astronomer Maria Mitchell, but Scharnhorst has produced neither a critical nor a cultural biography. Instead, he presents a chronological …

Review Of Axes: Willa Cather And William Faulkner And Violence, The Arts, And Willa Cather, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Willa Cather and William Faulkner represent an intriguing and potentially productive pairing for comparative study. Their works and careers are located at the rich intersection between regional ism and modernism, and both early 20th-century writers often looked back to the 19th century in their fiction. Even in the absence of influence or intertextual reference, these commonalities would give a literary historian much to say. However, in her study of these two authors, Merrill Maguire Skaggs exhaustively catalogs similarities and differences as proof of a decades-long competition between the authors at the expense of depth and subtlety in her analysis of …

Transcultural Transformation: African American And Native American Relations, Barbara S. Tracy

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The intersected lives of African Americans and Native Americans result not only in Black Indians, but also in a shared culture that is evidenced by music, call and response, and story. These intersected lives create a dynamic of shared and diverging pathways that speak to each other. It is a crossroads of both anguish and joy that comes together and apart again like the tradition of call and response. There is a syncopation of two cultures becoming greater than their parts, a representation of losses that are reclaimed by a greater degree. In the tradition of call and response, by …

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 published in 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 …

Faulkner In The Fifties: The Making Of The Faulkner Canon, Roland K. Végső

Department of English: Faculty Publications

First three paragraphs:

As many commentators of the period noted, one of the most significant events of early post-war literary culture in the United States was William Faulkner’s sudden rise to international fame. The most extensive investigation of this dramatic revaluation of cultural status was carried out by Lawrence D. Schwartz in his Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism. Schwartz examines in detail the cultural and political processes that led to Faulkner’s discovery in the 1940s after the primarily negative reception of his works in the 1930s by leftist critics. He argues that Faulkner’s entry into …

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 …

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 …