American Literature Commons^™

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 …

Visionaries Of The American West : Mari Sandoz And Her Four Plains Protagonists, Lisa R. Lindell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The authorial reputation of Mari Sandoz has long rested in the shadow of other writers of her era. First of all, Sandoz wrote from and about a relatively remote region of the United States. In addition, she firmly refused to produce popular works at the expense of sacrificing the truth she perceived and wished to express. Consequently, Sandoz has often been classified as a regional writer and her works have been overlooked by many readers and critics. Her status as a woman, her unconventional writing style, point of view, and subject matter, and the blending of historical and fictional elements …

Shattering The Myth : A Feminist Study Of Sister-Sister Relationships In Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House Books, Ellen T. Simpson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

From the Introduction:

From horses and buggies through steam railway _engines to the prominence of the automobile, Laura Ingalls Wilder lived through a historically critical American experience--pioneering. At age sixty-five she published her first novel, Little House in the Big Woods, the first book in an as yet unforeseen nine book series about her experiences as a young girl raised on the Midwestern plains. Little House in the Big Woods is actually a compilation of her father's tales. Wilder feared that these stories and their value would be lost unless she preserved them in writing. ldealistica!ly, she wanted to tell …

A Comparative Study Of Frederick Manfred's Lord Grizzly And A.B. Guthrie Jr.'S The Big Sky, Carol Dornberger-Jackson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to do a comparative study of two books by two men who are interested in the mountain man and his period in American history. Frederick Manfred and A. B. Guthrie Jr., authors of Lord Grizzly and The Big Sky, have a deep love for the American West. Their books are about America's frontier and the dreams of the mountain men who first explored it. The mountain men's dreams were of freedom from civilization, excitement in discovery, and love for the vast sea of plains and soaring grandeur of mountains. The spirit of the wild …

The Treatment Of Adolescence In Contemporary American Literature., Goldie Mae Fertig

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Interpretation Of The American Civil War In American Fiction., Florence Murray Bailey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Part Of Tossed By Fortune Historical Novel, Rene J. Rousseve

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis, submitted to Xavier University in partial fulfillment of requirements for a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1932, presents a portion of an original historical novel titled "Tossed by Fortune," set in colonial New Orleans and Louisiana during the 1760s. The narrative follows Louis de Montaigne, a young French Creole nobleman, and his family as they experience the political upheaval surrounding the transfer of Louisiana from French to Spanish rule under the Treaty of Paris.

The excerpt traces events from the arrival of news of Louisiana's brief reannexation to France, through the formal cession of the colony to Spain, …

The Negro In Literature, A. W. Arnaud

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis traces the development of the Negro in American literature from its origins in the spirituals through the flowering of the "New Negro" Renaissance of the early twentieth century. Arnaud opens by defining literature as the artistic record of a people's inner life and argues that Negro literary expression developed first through song, tracing the movement from oral spirituals through the early poetry of the enslaved and freed population toward increasingly sophisticated literary forms.

The thesis presents Paul Laurence Dunbar as the foremost early exponent of Negro poetry, examining his biography and his work in both classic English verse …