American Literature Commons^™

Thomas Collection (Mss 31), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid for Manuscripts Collection 31. Manuscripts, letters, writings, etc., of the Thomas family of Bowling Green, Kentucky, including sermons and speeches of Frank Morehead Thomas, Methodist minister (1868-1921); and poems, essays and newspaper articles written by his mother, Elizabeth (Wright) Thomas (1842-1931). Full-text scans are available (Click on "Additional Files" below) for the Spanish-American War letters that Frank Thomas sent home to his family.

Calvert-Obenchain-Younglove Collection (Mss 30), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 30. Correspondence, diaries, writings, business papers, scrapbooks, clippings, genealogical notes, weather records, and photographs of the Calvert, Obenchain, and Younglove families of Bowling Green, Kentucky. Selected items from the collection can be viewed in full text by clicking on the "Additional Files" links below.

Obenchain, Lida (Calvert), 1856-1935 (Sc 1539), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 1539. Note from Corinne C. McCormack, Bowling Green, Kentucky, thanking Lida Calvert Obenchain (pen name "Eliza Calvert Hall") for the donation of her book, "A Book of Hand Woven Coverlets" to the Woman's Library, and Obenchain's reply.

Obenchain, Josephine (Stephenson), 1864-1953 (Sc 1536), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 1536. Whimsical paper written in dialect by Josephine Obenchain titled "History of the Kentucky Club of Dallas, Inc."

Examining The Myth Of Narcissus And Its Role In Moby-Dick, Gerald E. Hansen

Student Works

In Moby-Dick's famous opening line, "Call me Ishmael," Melville establishes the creation of identity as one of the core purposes of the narrator and central themes of the subsequent narrative. The narrator does not say whether Ishmael is his real name only that this and the accompanying connotations are the identity by which he wants to be known and perhaps through which he sees himself. In these first three words, Ishmael immediately suggests that he wants to shape and control how he is perceived by himself and others.

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 …

The House Of A Thousand Candles: The Lake Maxinkuckee Link, Craighton T. Hippenhammer

Faculty Scholarship – Library Science

Three homes claim the title of “House of a Thousand Candles” based on connections with Meredith Nicholson, the author of the 1905 bestseller of the same name. This article makes the case for the home in Culver, Indiana, located on Lake Maxinkuckee, which Nicholson never owned, rather than the other two, one in Indianapolis and the other in Denver, which he had. This version of the article closely mirrors the original one published in the journal Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, Summer, 2007, except that it includes an excised paragraph and footnotes and excludes published photographs.

Mccombs, Harold Spillman (Mss 165), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscript Collection 165. Poetry volumes, 1918-1973, written by McCombs, a native of Edmonson County who taught in several Kentucky communities. Also includes oral history interview with his daughter, Doris Cloar, concerning her father's work, family history, and the November 5, 2005 tornado in Munfordville, Kentucky. Photographs of tornado damage included.

Selected Bibliography Of Work On Canadian Ethnic Minority Writing, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, Asma Sayed, Domenic A. Beneventi

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Placards: Mkr Society, Edna Saffy And Grady Johnson

Saffy Collection - All Textual Materials

Name cards for Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society event designating the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Farm a National Historic Landmark, March 3, 2007.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña's "Tekno Poética" Web Verse, Lost And Found In A Webspora, Angélica Huízar

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

For an author who likes to cross borders Guillermo Gómez-Peña (1955) has certainly reached audiences in both the U.S. and Mexican artistic, literary, theoretical, and political arenas. Now, with the advent of more technological mediums such as the Internet, the borderless artist makes use of the global fetish that, in theory, reaches a global community. As a prelude to his performances, workshops, conferences and lectures, Gómez-Peña’s collaborative webiste engages his readers in video-poetic selections, and hypertext poetic medley with topics that are sure to catch their interest with poems such as "Apocalypse," "Sexo," "Militias," and the video-poems "Apocalypse" and "Califas." …

Childhood Trauma And Its Reverberations In Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Novelist Bebe Moore Campbell was only five when Emmett Till was murdered on August 28, 1955. But in Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (1992) she seeks to answer the question that black teenagers in Mississippi, and indeed many people from all over the United States, asked after seeing the photograph of Till's mutilated and bloated body: "How could they do that to him? He's only a boy" (Dittmer 58). Campbell embraces the view that Lillian Smith expressed in Killers of the Dream (1949): "The warped, distorted frame we have put around every Negro child from birth is around every white …

The French Faulkner: Vision, Instrumentality, And Sanctuary's 'Lake Of Ink', Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Like Edgar Allan Poe and the American film noir, William Faulkner enjoyed a critical reception in France that anticipated his American audience by several years. While not the first critics to admire Faulkner’s writing, readers like Maurice Coindreau, Andre Malraux, and Jean-Paul Sartre were among the earliest readers to recognize a particular quality to his fiction, one that, especially in the case of certain novels, evaded Faulkner’s contemporary American readers. As certain examples of this cross-cultural acceptance demonstrate, such as Baudelair’s translation of Poe in the nineteenth century and his exalting of Poe as a poetic genius, or Raymond …

"I Put The Tale Back Where I Found It": Feeling The Past Through "The Warmth Of The Human Voice", Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In this article, I examine my revelations and growth related to folk culture and literature connected to the African American community. I borrow from and play on the Sudanese formulaic ending for the folktale; it seemed to me appropriate - even obligatory- that "I put the tale back where I found it." This maxim is symbolic, reflecting what I find one of the most characteristic elements of Black folklore - that is, the focus on the group, the community, in terms of the source of the historical situation of the tale; the moral lesson; the content, style, and delivery; and …

Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives And The Second Generation By Lisa D. Mcgill (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Using second generation Americans Harry Belafonte, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Piri Thomas, and the meringue hip hop group Proyecto Uno, Lisa D. McGill considers in Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation the issues of identity formation of those whose heritage ultimately includes Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, most often New York City. Though her subjects come from different national, racial, and language backgrounds; though they have made their names in different media; and though they have different views of race, identity, and culture, she convincingly makes the argument that "African America becomes powerful site …

'The Senator And The Socialite: The True Story Of America's First Black Dynasty,' By Lawrence Otis Graham, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

Lawrence Otis Graham attempts to tell the important story of the Bruces and their legacy in The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America’s First Black Dynasty. Starting his story before the Civil War, Graham follows the “First Black Dynasty” through its ultimate fall from grace in mid-twentieth-century New York City. As with his previous bestseller, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class (1999), Graham takes on the ambitious task of capturing the meaning and importance of an underappreciated group of American’s.

Using The Novel To Teach Multiculturalism, Michelle Loris

English Faculty Publications

Description of a fourteen week course taught by Michelle Loris, professor of English at Sacred Heart University. The course, titled Recent Ethnic American Fictions, introduced students to several concepts from contemporary literary theory. The theories included New Criticism, Deconstruction, Cultural Studies, New Historicism, and Feminist Theory. The assumption was that these concepts would give students the tools to become critical readers, which would then provide them with a deeper understanding of these multicultural novels and their particular cultural contexts.

For a semester, reading and thinking about these multicultural novels engaged and challenged the students' assumptions about themselves and the …

Private Fleming At Chancellorsville: "The Red Badge Of Courage" And The Civil War, Cara Erdheim

English Faculty Publications

Book review by Cara Erdheim:

Lentz, Perry. Private Fleming at Chancellorsville: The Red Badge of Courage and the Civil War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006.

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 …

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 …

"Unrighteous Compact": Louisa May Alcott's Resistance To Contracts And Promises In Moods, Nina Bannett

Publications and Research

Alcott’s first adult novel, Moods, initially published in 1864, presents oral promises between women as extralegal alternatives to standard legal contracts between men and women. In the 1864 edition of Moods, Alcott's protagonist, Sylvia Yule, fails to understand the constraints of marriage as a type of contract, and the results are dramatic. In fact, Alcott undermines the idealized marriage plot so crucial to her later, wildly popular works like Little Women (1868-69). In the 1864 Moods, Alcott boldly questions both legal contracts and oral promises characteristic of nineteenth-century conceptions of romantic love and heterosexual friendship.

Cuban Femininity And National Unity In Louisa May Alcott's Moods And Elizabeth Stoddard's "Eros And Anteros", Nina Bannett

Publications and Research

This book chapter compares the depictions of Cuban women in Louisa May Alcott's first adult novel Moods (1864) and Elizabeth Stoddard's short story "Eros and Anteros" (1862). Both writers configure a love triangle between an Anglo man and two women, one Anglo and one Cuban. In both texts, the Cuban woman is rejected as an unsuitable choice for an Anglo man. Alcott’s and Stoddard’s decision to re-value the Anglo woman as the more appropriate choice can be read as a rejection of the popular nineteenth-century political doctrine of manifest destiny and, at least with Alcott, of the United States’s dependence …

Sex, Drugs, And Mingling Spirits: Teaching Nineteenth-Century Women Poets, Cheryl Walker

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

Book abstract:

Twentieth-century modernism reduced the list of nineteenth-century American poets to Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and (less often) Edgar Allan Poe. The rest were virtually forgotten. This volume in the MLA series Options for Teaching marks a milestone in the resurgence of the study of the rest. It features poets, like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Lydia Huntley Sigourney, who were famous in their day, as well as poets who were marginalized on the basis of their race (Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alexander Posey) or their sociopolitical agenda (Emma Lazarus, John Greenleaf Whittier). It also takes a fresh look at poets …

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 …