American Literature Commons^™

Campbell, Arthur L. (Sc 2254), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2254. Correspondence between Arthur L. Campbell and H.L. Mencken related to Campbell's newspaper column "How's Your English Today" and his requests for permission to quote Mencken in his column. Mencken's last two letters were written by his secretary owing to his poor health.

Keeping History Alive: David Mccullough And The Debate Between Popular And Academic History, James R. Allen

History

The purpose of this paper is to explore the differences between academic history and popular history through David McCullough, one of the most successful popular history writers. It attempts to reconcile the schism between the two schools of thought, and provide a middle ground where each can stand.

A Christmas Tree And Other Stories, Jillian Lang

All Theses

The stories presented in this thesis are written mainly in the vein of literary minimalism and post-Modernism. The stories focus on a variety of themes, as related to human emotions and reactions. The thesis begins with A Christmas Tree, which focuses on the opinions and reactions of a mentally-handicapped man as he struggles with his desires to be an average, contributing member of society. The second story in the collection, The Little Red Schoolhouse, focuses on sexuality and how pride and dishonesty can ruin an otherwise successful relationship.A Learned Helplessness and Supper Club, stories three and four in the collection, …

Before It Rains, Veronica O. Parkman

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him should not parish but have everlasting life." Contemporary Christian literature is becoming first choice in public libraries and bookstores throughout the country. From novels about end-time prophesy to autobiographies of world-renowned pastors, works written for and about Christians have reached an all-time high. Before it Rains is indeed, according to the scriptural definition of salvation found in the King James Version of the bible, a contemporary Christian novel; the characters must go through the biblical process of accepting Jesus Christ as their …

"To Drink From Places": Uncovering A Rich Way Of Life Near The Grand Canyon's North Rim, Melinda Snow Rich

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The chapters of this thesis focus on the history and stories of the people who built and traveled down the highways--Highway 89A, Highway 89, and Highway 67--that branch out from the junction in front of Jacob Lake Inn, the Bowman/Rich family's 87-year-old lodge. The family's role in building roads, supporting and encouraging the growing tourist industry in Kanab and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and the converging effects of these choices have created the unique family culture and contributed to the history of the Grand Canyon region over time. Ultimately this thesis is about relationships, about the connections, …

Use(Ful In(Form)Ation, Dustin Lapray

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

I cleaned my room early in the spring of 2009, sorted laundry and cleaned off my oft-cluttered desk. In the process I found an old Mead Composition Notebook from a Film and Literature course I took at the College of Southern Idaho. Inside the back cover I discovered a page of useful information. The charts and measurements included: a multiplication table, 12 other tables intended to measure everything from paper, drugs, liquid and time, metric nomenclature and, finally, conversion tables from the metric system into American standard systems of measurement. I tore the back cover from the notebook and tacked …

Seven Fictions, Stephen Leech

All Theses

A collection of seven short stories focusing on issues of reality and unreality, particularly such issues as they arise in America, both as a political ideal and a manifest nation. The collection uses genre fiction as a means to illuminate these issues in new and relevant ways.

The United States' 'Empire State Of Mind:' Identity And Postcolonialism In A Post-9/11 World, Margaret Mcgill

All Theses

This thesis examines the relevance of postcolonialism in a world changed by the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks, which resulted in the openly aggressive and expansive nature of the United States in the years following, seeming reminiscent of European colonialism and soundly establishing a perception of the U.S. as an empire. Comparing Junot D’az's pre-9/11 Drown with his post-9/11 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Andrea Levy's pre-9/11 Small Island with Joseph O'Neill's post-9/11 Netherland, I explore the effects and influences of the United States imperial reach that surface in post-9/11 literature to contend its overwhelming presence has …

Our Mountain Home: The Oscar And Emma Swett Ranch, Carolyn Toone

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In this thesis, I examined the lives of my great-grandparents, Oscar and Emma Swett. Oscar began a homestead in the Uinta Mountains in 1909, which he successfully ran for nearly sixty years. My grandmother was born on the ranch, and my own father spent much of his time there. I look at how land policy changed from encouraging ranching and farming in the early 1900's to tourism and recreation in the 1960's, with the coming of the Flaming Gorge Dam. The lives of my great-grandparents and their children were shaped by these changes and they felt the consequences of the …

Smith, C. Jason - Compiler (Sc 2242), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2242. "Concordance to Robert Penn Warren's 'All the King's Men'" (based on the first edition). Also includes associated letter.

Sachs, Emanie (Nahm), 1893-1981 (Sc 2241), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 2241. Letters of Emanie Nahm Sachs, written from New York City and Bowling Green, Kentucky, to John Wilson Townsend, Lexington, Kentucky. Sachs discusses research for her (never published) history of Kentucky and comments on Kentucky authors. Includes Sachs's newspaper advertisement soliciting information for her history. Also includes a letter from Townsend's widow regarding donation of the letters.

Morton, David, 1886-1957 (Sc 2232), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2232. Eighty-six poems by Kentucky poets, copied by hand from the publications in which they were published. The poems were chiefly authored by Elkton, Kentucky native David Morton, but the collection includes works by Kalfus Kurtz Gusling, Anna Blanche McGill, and Robert Burns Wilson.

Sketches At Home And Abroad: A Critical Edition Of Selections From The Writings Of Nathaniel Parker Willis, Jon Miller, Nathaniel Parker Willis

University of Akron Press Publications

Critics and general readers highly regarded the poetry and prose of Nathaniel Parker Willis (18061867) during the "American Renaissance" of creative literature in the decades before the Civil War. As an editor and frequent contributor to one of the young nation's most successful and elegant literary magazines, The New-York Mirror, Willis achieved an international reputation for his witty and worldly tales and letters.

This new edition collects outstanding examples of Willis's short fiction written at the peak of his abilities. These tales of adventure embellish and improve Willis's own experience as a bachelor adventurer during the 1830s, relating, for example, …

Review: Also Known As Harper, Jennifer Green

Georgia Library Quarterly

Review of the middle grade novel "Also Known as Harper," by Ann Haywood Leal.

When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Write Poetry: A Biography Of American Poet Walter Griffin, Lawrence Sterne Stevens

Dissertations, Theses and Capstone Projects

The first four chapters of a biography of the poet Jasper Walter Griffin. They cover the first thirty years of his life, including Griffin's fatherless childhood in rural South Carolina, his imperious grandmother, his time at Gordon Military School (now Gordon College) in Barnesville, Ga., his tumultuous time in the Army in the U.S. and France, his brushes with the law, and a decade of defiance and anger, of various jobs from bellhop on Nantucket Island to carnival barker in Florida to shady home-improvement contract salesman, and of vagabonding around the U.S. as he searched for what he calls 'the …

The Library, Terra Elan Mcvoy

Georgia Library Quarterly

The article presents the poem "The Library," by Terra Elan McVoy. First Line: New York loneliness in my mouth; Last Line: and disappear.

Genre, Database, And The Anatomy Of The Digital Archive, Elizabeth J. Vincelette

English Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to define shared characteristics of literary digital archives, specifically to explore how conceptual and structural qualities of such archives express generic qualities. In order to describe digital media such as database or digital archives, scholars resort to metaphors, and this study offers the metaphor of anatomy as a generic inscription with historical and methodological implications. The definition of the anatomy genre draws from Northrop Frye's in Anatomy of Criticism, in which Frye describes how anatomies are characterized by proliferating lists, the mixing of prose and non-prose forms, and self-reflexivity--under the guise of knowledge …

Davis, Anne Pence, 1901-1982 (Sc 2213), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 2213. Letter, 15 December 1975, from Anne Pence Davis to Dorothy Edwards Townsend responding to her request for biographical material, probably for inclusion in Kentucky in American Letters, vol. III, 1913-1975. Includes two news clippings about Davis' novel The Top Hand of Lone Tree Ranch.

Mass-Marketing "Beauty": How A Feminist Heroine Became An Insipid Disney Princess, Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

Originally published in Beyond Adaptation. Ed. Phyllis Frus & Christy A. Williams. McFarland, 2010

Mass-Marketing "Beauty": How a Feminist Heroine Became an Insipid Disney Princess by Marc DiPaolo

To see more or purchase works by Marc DiPaolo, visit his Amazon page here: https://www.amazon.com/Marc-DiPaolo/e/B004LV7W6Y%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

Table Of Contents

The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard & Pulp Studies

"The Shadow of the Beast:" A Closer Look, by Charles Hoffman

"Marchers of Valhalla," Creation, and the Cult of Castration, by Jeffrey Kahan

Celtic Influences in the Works of Robert E. Howard, by Philip Emery'

A Second Look: "The Lost Land of Lemuria," by Morgan Holmes

Visualizing Howard's World: "The Savage Sword of Conan," by Charles Hoffman

The Good, the Bad, and Howard in the "Cross Plains Universe," by Morgan Holmes

Remembering "Wolfshead," by Charles Hoffman

Crabtree, Julie Anne, B. 1988 (Fa 483), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid and full text (click on "Additional Files" below) for Folklife Archives Project 483. Folklore material classified by genre. Information collected by Julie Anne Crabtree related to folklore genres for a folk studies class at Western Kentucky University.

Waggener, Tom (Fa 491), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 491. Taped interviews conducted by Tom Waggener about the "Giles House." Includes transcriptions, photographs, and typescripts.

Johnston, Annie Fellows, 1863-1931 (Sc 2163), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and full text of letters (click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 2163. Letters of Annie Fellows Johnston to Ruth Clement in Tokyo, Japan. Johnston responds to Clement's praise of "The Little Colonel" and her gift of a Japanese book, and sends Clement a copy of her story "The Three Weavers."

Watkins, Dianne (Winkler), 1941-2024 (Sc 2141), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2141. Oral interviews done with Appalachian writer Verna Mae Slone in which she discusses her life, her family, and her writing. Slone was a dollmaker, quilter, and quintessential storyteller.

(Un)Natural Bodies, Endangered Species, And Embodied Others In Margaret Atwood's Oryx And Crake, Marcy Galbreath

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The developing knowledge of life sciences is at the crux of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake as she examines human promise gone awry in a near-future dystopia. This thesis examines aspects of posthumanism, ecocriticism, and feminism in the novel's scientific, cultural, and environmental projections. Through the trope of extinction, Atwood's text foregrounds the effects of human exceptionalism and instrumentalism in relation to the natural world, and engenders an analysis of human identity through its biological and cultural aspects. Extinction thus serves as a metaphor for both human development and human excesses, redefining the idea of human within the context of …

Bedtime Stories : How To Hope And Cope With The American Dream, Sabrina Jones

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

A multi-genre work combining New Journalism and literary analysis. The narrator (played by ―Girl in the bedtime stories) presents a critical essay exploring destabilized truths and dangers in an American dream that turns modern man into a machine. The goal is to show how the dream has evolved from the original Puritan dream set out by early American settlers/writers to the Postmodern vision of success (or failure) we read about today and what kind of effect this dream has on the average scholar. The thesis is broken up by reflections on her learning imbedded in dialogue with her always opinionated …

Autobiography As Self-Defense In The Works Of Agnes Newton-Keith And Michelle Kennedy, Robin Heim

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis examines the captivity narrative, Three Came Home, written in 1947 by Agnes Newton-Keith, and the poverty narrative, Without a Net: Middle Class and Homeless (with Kids) in America: My Story, written in 2005 by Michelle Kennedy. When examined together through the lens of Trauma Theory, these narratives provide evidence of how similar the survival skills and strategies are between the American female POW's and the American females experiencing downward mobility. This thesis will also show how language uncovers and decodes the presence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder not often associated with women in poverty.

Reality, Skewed, Kathleen Camerlin

Undergraduate Review

Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise explores basic human connections and illustrates how they shift when viewed through the lens of post-modernity. The protagonist, Jack Gladney, tries to validate and substantiate his own existence through the connections he forges not only with his job and studies but also with his family, attempting to find meaning in the way his relatives interact with each other and their post modern world, where it is “no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between a generality embedded in life and a generality represented in representations of life” (Frow 420). In this fracturing, consumer-driven, postmodern world, what …

Early American Literature In The Elementary School Classroom, Amanda Sullivan

Undergraduate Review

The goal of the American educational system should be to teach an individual to become an independent thinker who can form his or her own view. This goal is very hard to obtain, because textbooks often provide a skewed view, but if educators make creative use of literature, students can learn to become independent thinkers. Students need to acquire this deeper understanding in order to learn critical literacy or the ability to “question, examine or […] dispute” texts (McLaughin 14). One important tool educators can use to help develop this critical capacity is literature, in particular literature about slavery. Grade …

The Obama Effect On American Discourse About Racial Identity: Dreams From My Father (And Mother), Barack Obama's Search For Self, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Joseph Curl reported that the Obama organization "would not answer when asked why the biracial candidate calls himself black," replying only that the question didn't "seem especially topical." Biracial ancestry and racial identity are still sensitive subjects in the United States, not suitable for sound bites. But they are perfect topics for the introspective musings of an autobiography, and Barack Obama must have thought he had answered this question in depth in Dreams from My Father (1995). In his introduction, Obama hesitates to use the term "autobiography" because it connotes, he says, "a certain closure"; …