American Literature Commons^™

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 …

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

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Presentations

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 …

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 …

The Willa Cather Archive In The Classroom, Andrew Jewell

University of Nebraska-Lincoln 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 …

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 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 …

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 …

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 …

Introduction To Signet Classic's The Song Of The Lark By Willa Cather (2007), Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In May of 1912, Willa Cather traveled to Winslow, Arizona, to visit her brother, Douglass, who worked for the railroad. The year before, she had begun a leave of absence from McClure's Magazine, where she had been an editor since 1906, so that she could focus her energies on writing fiction. Although she had been publishing short fiction regularly since 1892, her first novel-the cosmopolitan, somewhat derivative Alexander's Bridge ‒ did not appear until 1912. Feeling tired and unwell, she, like many other Americans, sought renewal in the dry air and open spaces of the desert. After six years in …

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 …

Behind The Veil? Catharine Sedgwick And Anonymous Publication, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Catharine Sedgwick's name appeared on the title page of only one of her books published during her lifetime, her 1835 Tales and Sketches, a volume collecting pieces that had originally appeared in the annually published "gift books" in the preceding nine years. Sedgwick is the earliest writer included in Mary Kelley's influential book on women's authorship, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America, and Kelley claims that women writers published anonymously or pseudonymously because of the great anxiety that appearing in public through the medium of print caused them: "The literary domestics could write and, as …

Little Squatter On The Osage Diminished Reserve: Reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's Kansas Indians, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Laura Ingalls Wilder was a person of her time and place. She fictionalized her memories to give what she honestly believed was the truest possible account-true in deeply human ways as well as in accurate details-of one family's settlement history on the Great Plains frontier. I have never really liked her work. While my sister read all the Little House books, I read ... Zane Grey. That I do not share Wilder's values and point of view is no argument against the books-I do not share Zane Grey's values and point of view, either. But Zane Grey is not held …

In Our Very Bones: Poems By Twyla Hansen, Twyla Hansen

Nebraskiana Publications: Resources and Materials on the 37th State

DISTANCES

1 Midwestern Autumn, 2 Going to the Graves, 3 Memorial Day, 4 On the Screen Porch, 5 Gophers, 6 Lilac Tripping, 7 The Separator, 9 Conspiracy, 11 My Neighbor's Daughter Learning To Drive, 12 Platte River State Park, Late January, 13 Spring Equinox, 14 When You Leave, 15 My Husband Snoring, 16 Full Moon, Total Eclipse, 17 My Father's Miniatures, 18 Wind, 20 If My Father Were Still Alive

ON THE PRAIRIE

23 Song of the Pasque Flower, 24 Blue Moon, 25 Crane River, 26 Nine-Mile Prairie, 27 Late May, 29 Prairie Trout, 30 Vines, 31 Building a Bat …

Paintings And Drawings In Willa Cather's Prose: A Catalogue Raisonné, Polly P. Duryea

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Paintings and Drawings in Willa Cather's Prose: A Catalogue Raisonné considers the specific artists and their visual art that greatly influenced Willa Cather's textual compositions. The Catalogue draws upon the author's research of Cather-related art from both American and European libraries and art museums. This art includes painting, drawing, illustration, and tapestry. A detailed and alphabetized list of selected artists and paintings that Cather preferred is provided. The artists are cross-referenced with Cather's own statements about their work or style. Included is biographical data for each artist, the named work of art, and often the date executed, the location then …

How To Live In The Heartland, Twyla Hansen

Nebraskiana Publications: Resources and Materials on the 37th State

Foreword by William Kloefkorn -7, How to Live in the Heartland -11, Airing Out -12, Country Girl -13, January Thaw -14, Making Lard -15, Headlines: Hometown Weekly -16, Nuance -17, My Brother Randall Teaches Me to Ride a Bicycle -18, Seamstress -19, Eddie -20, Nine-Mile Prairie, Mid-May -22, The Pine Grove -23, Kissing Cousins -24, Scars -25, Trumpetcreeper Vine -26, 1964 -27, Friday Night at the Plaza -28, After the Farm Sale -30, Highway -31, Night Shift at the Old Hospital, 1968 -32, Fantasy -34, Eyewash -35, Navigating the North Platte from Lingle to Torrington -36, When the Prairie Speaks …

Spindrift Gazes, Ronald Charles Kurtenbach

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Spindrift Gazes is a collection of short stories that thematically relate to how human dignity is engendered and how that sense of dignity is challenged, undercut, and regained. These fictional constructions are particularly concerned with issues of transformation, how and why change takes place. Of particular emphasis is how differing kinds of human relationships are instrumental in the nature of those changes. Of fundamental concern is to give fictional form to human rights issues.

Advisor: Judith Slater

"Preface" To Vision And Refuge: Essays On The Literature Of The Great Plains, Frederick C. Luebke

Department of History: Faculty Publications

SEVEN OF THE EIGHT ESSAYS in this volume were prepared originally for the first and second annual symposia sponsored by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Those by Barbara Meldrum, John Milton, Paul Reigstad, and Bernice Slote were presented at the conference on "The Cultural Heritage of the Plains," held in April 1977; the essays by Chester Fontenot, Tomas Rivera, and Dorothy Burton Skardal were prepared for the symposium on "Ethnicity on the Great Plains," held a year later. The contribution by Paul Olson was written especially for this volume. Selected essays from the 1977 and 1978 …

America's First Negro Poet: The Complete Works Of Jupiter Hammon Of Long Island, Jupiter Hammon, Stanley Austin Ransom Jr, Oscar Wegelin, Vernon Loggins

Electronic Texts in American Studies

Introduction by Stanley Austin Ransom, Jr.

Biographical Sketch of Jupiter Hammon by Oscar Wegelin

Critical Analysis of the Works of Jupiter Hammon by Vernon Loggins

THE POETRY OF JUPITER HAMMON

An Evening Thought. Salvation by Christ, With Penetential Cries

An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatly

A Poem for Children, With Thoughts on Death

A Dialogue Entitled, "The Kind Master and the Dutiful Servant"

THE PROSE OF JUPITER HAMMON

A Winter Piece

An Evening's Improvement

An Address to the Negroes of the State of New York

Bibliography of the Works of Jupiter Hammon

L'Aspect Metaphysique Du Mal Dans L'Oeuvre Litteraire De Charles Baudelaire Et D' Edgar Allan Poe, Arnolds Grava

University Studies (University of Nebraska) (1888–1984)

L'oeuvre litteraire de Poe et celle de Baudelaire ont ete l'objet de nombreuses recherches faites par des hommes de lettres et des critiques distingues tant en Europe qu'en Amerique depuis la seconde moitie du siecle dernier jusqu'a. nos jours. II est assez curieux de constater qU'aucune de ces oeuvres critiques n'a traite, du moins directement, Ie cote philosophique, c'est·a.-dire, les implications meta physiques de la production litteraire des deux poetes. Par-ci, par-Ia on peut trouver quelques chapitres, generalement trop courts, consacres a. l'etude plus ou moins approfondie, soit du satanisme baudelairien, soit de l'esprit de la perversite chez Poe. C'est …

Emily Dickinson's Approach To Poetry, Donald E. Thackrey

University Studies (University of Nebraska) (1888–1984)

One of the most fascinating aspects of any poet is his conception of his art. Many poets have written extensively on the theory of art around which they orient their poetry. Others have clearly revealed their theories by writing criticism of other authors. Emily Dickinson, however, left no critical essays, no elucidation of her artistic principles. It is quite probable, indeed, that she did not consciously concern herself to any extent with poetic theory. She may have written, and written in her unique way, through an instinctive need which would admit of no plodding deliberation or stylistic experimentation. Still, such …

Is Sex Necessary? Or Why You Feel The Way You Do, James Thurber, E. B. White

Zea E-Books in American Studies

Contents: The Nature of the American Male : A Study of Pedestalism • How to Tell Love From Passion • A Discussion of Feminine Types • The Sexual Revolution: Being a Rather Complete Survey of the Entire Sexual Scene • The Lilies-and-Bluebird Delusion • What Should Children Tell Parents? • Claustrophobia, or What Every Young Wife Should Know • Frigidity in Men • Answers to Hard Questions • Glossary

Two paragons of twentieth-century letters launched their publishing careers in 1929 with this wry and delightful book about sex and sexuality.

James Thurber (1894–1961) was a journalist, writer, cartoonist, and longtime …

Some Aspects Of The Intellectual Poise Of George Robert Gissing, Glenn Orville Kelley

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Thls study, Some Aspects of the Intellectual Poise of George Robert Gising, had its inception in a course in The Novel, an Intepretation of Life, offered by Doctor Frederick A. Stuff in the summer session of the University of Nebraska in 1926. More narrowly, it began with that part of the course treating of the mode in literature known as realism. In one reference, Wilson Follett's The Modern Novel, was found the following statement relative to the novels of George Gissing, an author of whom the writer of this thesis had not previously heard.

"Hardly any parallel could show …

Caroling Dusk: An Anthology Of Verse By Negro Poets, Countee Cullen , Editor

Electronic Texts in American Studies

Poets: Paul Laurence Dunbar • Joseph S. Cotter, Sr • James Weldon Johnson • William Edward Burghardt Du Bois • William Stanley Braithwaite • James Edward Mccall • Angelina Weld Grimke • Anne Spencer • Mary Effie Lee Newsome • John Frederick Matheus • Fenton Johnson • Jessie Fauset • Alice Dunbar Nelson • Georgia Douglas Johnson • Claude McKay • Jean Toomer • Joseph S. Cotter, Jr • Blanche Taylor Dickinson • Frank Horne • Lewis Alexander • Sterling A. Brown • Clarissa Scott Delany • Langston Hughes • Gwendolyn B. Bennett • Anna Bontemps • Albert Rice • …

Color, Countee Cullen

Electronic Texts in American Studies

Poet, playwright, novelist, graduate of DeWitt Clinton High, New York University, and Harvard University, Countee Cullen (1903–1946) emerged as a leading literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Color (1925), his first published book of poetry, confronts head-on what W.E.B. DuBois called “the problem of the 20th century—the problem of the color line.” The work includes 72 poems, such as the following:

Incident (For Eric Walrond)

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, …

Increase Mather: The Foremost American Puritan, Kenneth B. Murdock

Zea E-Books in American Studies

The classic biography of preeminent colonial Massachusetts minister and President of Harvard College, Increase Mather (1639-1723). This is the work that re-started Puritan studies in America.

“A book which will be indispensable to students of early American history.” —Times Literary Supplement

“It is a book to welcome and appreciate.” —American Historical Review

“The available sources have been used carefully, and the story is told with great literary skill.” —The Sewanee Review

“[Murdock’s book] opened the sluice gates to powerful streams of scholarship that in the next two decades revised our understanding of American Puritanism.” —Philip F. Gura, in A Concise …

American Bibliography By Charles Evans. Volume 3: 1751-1764, Charles Evans

Electronic Reference Materials

A Chronological Dictionary of all Books, Pamphlets and Periodical Publications Printed in the United States of America from the Genesis of Printing in 1639 Down to and Including the Year 1820 with Bibliographical and Biographical Notes

VOLUME 3: 1751-1764

American Bibliography By Charles Evans. Volume 2: 1730-1750, Charles Evans

Electronic Reference Materials

A Chronological Dictionary of all Books, Pamphlets and Periodical Publications Printed in the United States of America from the Genesis of Printing in 1639 Down to and Including the Year 1820 with Bibliographical and Biographical Notes

Volume 2: 1730-1750