American Literature Commons^™

Rex Beach, Abe C. Ravitz

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

One apocalyptic adventure marked the productive life and prolific literary career of Rex Ellingwood Beach (1877-1949), novelist, journalist, pioneer screenwriter, and sportsman: at the turn of the century as a spirited twenty-three-year-old spoiling for adventure and seeking quick wealth, he joined the mass of frenzied humanity heading for the gold fields of the Klondike. Though a fortune in nuggets eluded him and though his land speculation never brought the truly big score, Rex Beach discovered something more valuable than “gold in the pan": Alaska.

Harold Bell Wright, Lawrence V. Tagg

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In 1894 a penniless and ailing twenty-two-year-old man went into the Ozark Mountains near the town of Branson in southwestern Missouri in the hope of regaining his health. While his efforts were successful, the trip also set in motion the experiences that led to the writing of some of the most popular Western novels of the period, best sellers that brought fame and fortune to their author—Harold Bell Wright. He spent the next fifty years in the American West, and when he died he left behind a legacy of epic stories about the Ozarks, California, and Arizona.

Caroline Lockhart, Norris Yates

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

When Caroline Lockhart traveled the mere four blocks to her editorial office at the Cody, Wyoming Enterprise, she often rode horseback and wore boots, spurs, and a Stetson. “Clumping and jingling” (Boyett 21 Aug. 1989: A-10), she played in person the two roles she consistently projected in her fiction: exemplar of how a woman with courage, will power, and initiative could attain goals traditionally reserved for men, and preserver of what she considered the most admirable and picturesque elements of Old West culture. During her long and eventful life, she pioneered as a woman reporter, crusaded as an editor, …

Father Knows Best, Judith Roof

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In his essay, "Althusser's Mirror," Carsten Strathausen reveals the paternal politics inherent to any gesture of appropriation. Molding Lacan to an Althusserian mirror, Strathausen demonstrates parallels between Lacan's mirror stage and Althusser's interpellated subject. The resemblance, created through what Strathausen suggests is Althusser's mis-reading of Lacan, reveals their mutual influence. The question of influence, however, becomes an issue of tradition Althusser links to a politics of legitimacy and right he associates with a figure of paternity. While the process of filiation would seem to extend from Lacan to Althusser in the logic of the mirror employed by Strathausen to renew …

Putting Masculinity Into Words: Hemingway's Critique And Manipulation Of American Manhood, Timothy L. Barnard

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

The Political-Domestics: Sectional Issues In American Women's Fiction, 1852-1867, Beverly Peterson

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This is a study of five novels written by American women during the middle of the nineteenth century. The novels are Aunt Phillis's Cabin (1852) by Mary Henderson Eastman, Northwood (1827 and 1852) by Sarah Josepha Hale, The Planter's Northern Bride (1854) by Carolyn Lee Hentz, Macaria (1864) by Augusta Evans, and Cameron Hall (1867) by Mary Anne Cruse. In advancing their authors' opinions on sectional issues like slavery and secession, these novels make overt political statements of a kind not usually associated with writers of domestic fiction.;All of the novels in this study conform in some ways to the …

William Carlos Williams's "Spring And All": The Oneness Of Experience, Molly Elayne Jones

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Practicing Poetry, Teaching Law, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Various Black Virginians As Told To Daryl Cumber Dance, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Shuckin' and Jivin': Folklore from Contemporary Black Americans, published in 1978, derived from fieldwork done far a doctoral dissertation at Virginia Commonwealth University by Daryl Cumber Dance (the only woman named Daryl I have heard of aside from Daryl Hannah). She gathered stories and verses from black Virginians in colleges, senior citizens' centers, and a penitentiary. Though she doesn't bring to the party an editorial touch as enlivening as Zora Neale Hurston's, she has an ear and-unlike far, far too many assiduous collectors of folktales - knows how to capture vocal rhythms on a page.

The Concept Of The Local In Williams' Developing Poetics: The Poet's Perception And Representation Of The Poor, Jon Montgomery

Masters Theses

The present study serves as a thematic, critical perspective on William Carlos Williams' poetry on the poor; specifically, I address his representation of the poor in his poetry and his attitude towards them. From 1914-38, his attitude towards the poor goes through three significant stages of change. Roughly, the stage boundaries can be marked by decade: the 1910s, the 1920s and the 1930s.

In the first stage, Williams recognizes his empathetic and aesthetic distance from the poor, since his aesthetics rest primarily on his youthful fascination with Keats. The poet desires to reflect properly the lives of the poor. The …

Robert Frost And Maya Angelou: Poet-As-Rhetor In The Presidential Inauguration: Textual Symbols And The Symbol Of Enactment, Donna M. Witmer

Masters Theses

This criticism uses an organic approach to examine the rhetorical properties of Frost's and Angelou's inaugural poems and their individual enactments respective of the constraints and exigencies in the Presidential inaugurations of Kennedy and Clinton. Apparently responding to the constraints of television's sound bite as well as to exigencies of the traditional inauguration and the need to serve a new generation and a culturally diverse population, the Clinton Administration combined the poetic form, used to heighten an emotional response, with an enactment as a synecdochic symbol, used to assert sociopolitical ideology.

Preparation And Confession: Reconsidering Edmund S. Morgan's Visible Saints, Michael Ditmore

Michael Ditmore

No abstract provided.