American Literature Commons^™

Friends Or Foes? How 19th Century Lds Literature Supported Manifest Destiny, Richard Edward West

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

"They felt that the Indians had to become civilized according to non-Indian standards. They did not know or understand the Indians' way of life nor did they want to."

-Idaho Indians: Tribal Histories

This quote refers to the United States government, but it could have also referred to many nineteenth-century members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). This religion, centered in Salt Lake City, Utah, was one of the faiths that most influenced the Native Americans in the western United States. The LDS settlers and Native Americans had an unusual relationship - one that was very …

Emily Dickinson's And Christina Rossetti's Portrayals Of Goblins And Their Threat To Feminine Integrity, Miki Jean Hazard

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

The Still Life: Domesticity, Subjectivity, And The Bachelor In Nineteenth-Century America, Matthew Cohen

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

"The Still Life" explores debates over single manhood in the culture of the nineteenth-century United States. Until recently, the "bachelor" was less an identifiable social type than a battleground for discourses of privacy and intimacy, sympathy and sentiment, and labor and leisure. Representations of the bachelor tended to excite readers' concerns about the relationships among emotion, public behavior, and intellectual prowess. Concentrating on constructions of the bachelor within specific discursive arenas, this dissertation examines "bachelorhood" as a way culture organized a wide range of ideologies and experiences. Though the bachelor's particular significance faded in the twentieth century, a conceptual roadblock …

In Parisian Salons And Boston's Back Streets: Reading Jefferson's "Notes On The State Of Virginia", David W. Lewes

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

A Literature Of Combat: African American Prison Writers Of The Vietnam Era, John William Weber

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

This Man's Heart: Masculinity In The Poetry Of E.E. Cummings, Willis John Whitesell Iii

Masters Theses

"This Man's Heart: Masculinity in the Poetry of E.E. Cummings" explores changing masculinity in the life and poetry of E.E. Cummings. The relationship between Cummings and his father, his first male role model, became strained when Cummings was a teenager finding his own male identity. As he rebelled against his father, a Unitarian minister, he began writing poetry in a modernist style under the direction of a new mentor, Ezra Pound.

Cummings' early modernist poems criticize conventional male roles and configurations of masculinity as outdated. As Cummings continued to grow as a man and writer, he confronted new realities which …

The Role Of Taoism In The Social Construction Of Identity In The Joy Luck Club, Rebekah Elizabeth Shultz

Theses Digitization Project

No abstract provided.

John Irving, Female Sexuality, And The Victorian Feminine Ideal, Tara Coburn

Masters Theses

In an interview about The Cider House Rules, John Irving states, "It is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel" (qtd. in Herel, para. 18). However, in book reviews, jacket blurbs, literary criticism, and Irving's own writing, readers and critics and Irving often assert that he is a neo-Victorian novelist, and the Victorians were a notoriously political bunch. Though Irving does not admit to the political nature of his writing, the way he treats feminist politics in his fiction has drawn particular notice by the media, who often label him as a feminist writer. …