American Literature Commons^™

Review Of Soulfires: Young Black Men On Love And Violence, Amilcar Shabazz

Afro-American Studies Faculty Publication Series

A review of a literary and cultural anthology on African American males on love and violence.

Sex/Textual Conflicts In The Bell Jar: Sylvia Plath's Doubling Negatives, Renée C. Hoogland

English Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Conquering A Wilderness: Destruction And Development On The Great Plains In Mari Sandoz's Old Jules, Lisa Lindell

Hilton M. Briggs Library Faculty Publications

Jules Ami Sandoz came to America in 1881 at the age of 22. Following a three-year sojourn in northeastern Nebraska, he headed further west, settling in the recently surveyed region northwest of the Nebraska Sandhills. In Old Jules, the biography of her pioneer father, Mari Sandoz presented a character filled with conflicts and contradictions. Pitted against Jules's dynamic vision of community growth was his self-centered and destructive nature. Well aware of the more unsavory qualities exhibited by her father. Sandoz nonetheless maintained that he and others like him were necessary to the development of the West. This recognition did not …

Edith Wharton's "Secret Sensitiveness" The Decoration Of Houses, And Her Fiction, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Surely one of the reasons that Edith Wharton lived most of her life in France was that she greatly admired the way the French "instinctively applies to living the same rules that they applies to artistic creation." Wharton believed that the French had an eye for beauty, or what she called "the seeing eye," in contrast to Americans whose sight had been dimmed by the puritanism of their Anglo-Saxon heritage. However, in her last and unfinished novel, The Buccaneers (1938), Wharton suggests through her American protagonist's relationship with her European governess, Laura Testvalley, that the art of seeing can be …

Moore, Opal, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Moore, Opal (b. 1953), poet, short story writer, essayist, educator, and critic of children's literature. Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Opal Moore was influenced from childhood by the particular dynamics of the Pentecostal church; echoes of that institution reverberate in her plots, themes, characters, tone, and language. When Moore entered Illinois Wesleyan University's School of Art in 1970, she was so shocked by her first real encounter with racism and her sens~ of powerlessness in the face of it that she sought some control over what was happening to her by writing, thus initiating her first journals. She also …

New Narratives Of Southern Manhood: Race, Masculinity, And Closure In Ernest Gaines's Fiction, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

In his fiction Ernest Gaines is interested not only in deconstructing stereotypes but also in presenting new models of southern manhood, for both black and white men. While Gaines has employed traditional definitions of manhood in his fiction, the vision he presents in his most recent novel, A Lesson Before Dying, is similar to that of Cooper Thompson and other contemporary theorists of masculinity, who believe that young men must learn 'traditional masculinity is life threatening' and that being men in a modern world means accepting their vulnerability, expressing a range of emotions, asking for help and support, learning non-violent …

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

Nebraskiana Publications

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 …

Out Of Despair, Into The Wilderness: A Study Of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim At Tinker Creek And Gary Snyder's Myths & Texts, Megan Casey

Honors Theses, 1963-2015

Annie Dillard and Gary Snyder are both contemporary American writers. Though Dillard's and Snyder's styles, concerns, and preoccupations differ, the narrators in Dillard's narrative Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Snyder's long poem Myths & Texts undergo spiritual progressions that are astonishingly similar. Each narrator moves out of the dualistic world view of modern science into an experience of the world's paradoxical nature. Dillard and Snyder both create, through metaphor and mythopoeia, visions that offer an alternative world view from that of the despairing modern wasteland. I call my theoretical approach ecological criticism, and after performing close readings of Pilgrim at …

Frank Bergon, Gregory L. Morris

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The story of Frank Bergon and of his fiction might well be said to begin with his grandparents. Bergon’s maternal grandparents—Esteban and Petra Mendive—both came to America, around the turn of the century, from the Basque region of Spain. His grandfather, born in Guernica, arrived first and eventually met his wife-to-be—a mail-order bride—at the train station in Salt Lake City. The two moved to Battle Mountain, Nevada, and there started a grocery and the Basque hotel; Bergon remembers, in fact, his grandmother operating the hotel until well into her eighties and well after her husband’s death. Esteban and Petra Mendive …

Bernard Devoto, Russell Burrows

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Bernard DeVoto spent the years of the Second World War hard at work on two books. Although very different from one another, both books happened to have Western settings, far from the home DeVoto had been making for himself and his family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of these books seemed to pour itself from him, mounting to 100,000 words, then swelling to 150,000, and rounding out at about 170,000. Its subject was the mountain fur trade, the larger-than-life stories of Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Tom Fitzpatrick, Joe Meek, Chief Joseph, Black Hawk, and many other trappers and natives. Making the …

Laura Jensen, Dina Ben-Lev

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Poet and critic Tess Gallagher has described Laura Jensen as “the Einstein of the ordinary.” Just as Einstein's theories disrupted the then common-sense understanding of a universe governed by immutable laws, Jensen’s poems transform our view of the everyday things we take for granted, the ordinary birds and flowers we no longer notice. “Behind a poem is a bad intention / to make the reader worry deeply,” Jensen writes in “What Is Poetry?”, a poem from her first chapbook (After 16). Her poems “worry” us because they force us to confront our fear of the unpredictability of the world. …

Garrett Hongo, Laurie Filipelli

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Garrett Kongo’s poetic voice rises from cultural, historical, and personal memories. As a Yonsei (a fourth-generation Japanese American) born in Hawai i and raised largely in Los Angeles, his concerns span time and place, and his style links Asian and European traditions. He writes from the crowded trains and serene temples of his ancestral homeland, the lush jungles and active volcanoes of his birthplace, and the racial tension and dispossession of life in urban America, fitting the pieces together in a mosaic of self, family, and culture.

Hooks, Malinda (Cunningham), 1853-1948 (Sc 1440), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 1440. "Recollections and Thoughts", 1930, written for her family by Malinda Hooks, Trigg County, Kentucky. She writes of her childhood, family, and the Civil War. Includes her poetry and two unidentified photographs.