American Literature Commons^™

Sylvia Plath At Yaddo : A Poet Finds Her Voice, Sarah Elizabeth Morse

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Since Sylvia Plath's death in 1963 critics have not stopped trying to piece together her life and work. Most of their focus lies on her last collection, Ariel, widely considered her best work. This thesis looks at a lesser-known time, before Plath had even published her first book of poetry named "The Colossus." In 1959 Plath spends eleven weeks at a writer's residence in Saratoga Springs, New York called Yaddo. While there she produces some of her most mature work to date, dealing with difficult topics for the first time such as suicide and issues with her deceased father and …

"God, Hieroglyphics" : Extrapolating The Third Dimension In "Go Down, Moses" And "The Crying Of Lot 49", Jacob Alexander Waddy

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Abstract

Divisions And Mixing In "Go Down, Moses" By William Faulkner, Emiko Dodo

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This thesis examines the divisions and boundaries made by the mechanisms of separation that authorize a false perception of land, animals, blacks and women as commodities in William Faulkner's "Go Down, Moses." Asserting that "Go Down, Moses" describes mixing as well as divisions, this study demonstrates that the dichotomous boundaries imposed upon nature and humans repeatedly fail to function. Wilderness and plantation land can never be separated as they exist in mixture. And the racial boundary between whites and blacks is destabilized and blurred by characters like Lucas Beauchamp and Tomey's Turl, who engage in resistance against the society whose …

Midnight In A Perfect World, Jaron Serven

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

What follows is a collection of short stories dealing with the experience of growing up in America during the Digital Age, written in a creative fictional method. The stories directly deal with the themes of coming to terms with the past, friendship, facing tough choices, maintaining love in an unloving world-overall, expressing the look and feel of what it is like to be young, to see through the eyes of a generation inheriting a world of questionable morals. The collection pulls from numerous resources in the genre of the contemporary American bildungsroman, but also from much literary criticism dealing with …

Mysterious Ways : A Novel, Angela Pneuman

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Mysterious Ways: A Novel

Contriving History : Making Dead Time In Select Works Of William Faulkner, Anthony Joseph Delgado

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The protagonists of three of William Faulkner's major novels, Absalom, Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury, and Go Down, Moses each suffer from a compromised self that originates out of a past that contains excised elements. This revised history, which redacts past sins of rape, murder, and racial mixing, serves as a foundation for the present, passed down to the Faulknerian protagonists, Quentin, Jason, and Isaac, along lines of paternal inheritance. The three novels each suggest that when an idea of the self in the present is founded upon a past that has been rewritten, a shattering occurs when that …

Theologies Of Pain In American Puritanism : The Human Body And Spiritual Conversion From Anne Bradstreet To Jonathan Edwards, Lucas Hardy

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation studies the many ways in which physical pain produces instances of personal piety in poems, narratives, and theological tracts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Puritan New England. Specifically, the project revises the idea that spiritual regeneration happened only through Puritan contacts with established liturgical means and precast homiletics; it contends instead that conversion occurred because of bodily pain. Analyzing four canonical Puritan writers--Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards--Theologies of Pain demonstrates that texts of even the most historically mainstream Puritans contend with the disruptive force of pain. Anne Bradstreet sees pain as an …

The Cost Of Kinship: Southern Literary Families And The Capitalist Machine, Joshua Sean Lundy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the thematic role of families and the familial in the literature of the Southern Renaissance. Whereas a number of scholars have come at this matter from a strictly cultural perspective, this analysis utilizes an economic framework. Following the example set by Karl Marx, Freidrich Engels, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, I attempt to formulate an understanding of the southern family not as an independent and singular social organism, but, rather, as a mechanism for the distribution of capital, firmly embedded within modern capitalism's expansive network of production, consumption, and exchange. My argument …

From Country To Country Club: The Landscapes Of Walker Percy, Joyce Garrett Butterworth

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When Walker Percy emerged on the literary scene in 1961, the American landscape had begun to transform in new and dramatic ways. As more and more Americans moved from city centers to suburban developments, Percy found that, in more ways than one, the center would not hold. This American cultural transformation was well underway when Percy wrote The Moviegoer, perhaps the first novel from the American South to have as its subject matter a suburban dilemma. Challenging, as Percy does, traditional notions of southern place and community, this thesis seeks to discover in Percy's body of work whether the rise …

Two Trains Running: Capture And Escape In The Racialized Train Cars Of The Jim Crow South, 1893-1930, Raleigh Mixon Robinson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The role of the railroad in the modern American experience—and its role in making that experience modern—cannot be overstated. This thesis proposes to tell one of many possible railroad stories. By focusing on the historical and cultural relevance of a series of bodies in transit, I examine the implementation of railroad segregation law and the response by African-American performers. The thesis begins at the end of the nineteenth century with the Homer Plessy test case and continues across three decades, meeting along the way novelists Charles Chesnutt and James Weldon Johnson and musicians W. C. Handy, Henry "Ragtime Texas" Thomas, …

The Queen Of The Household: Mothers, Other Mothers, And Female Genealogy On The Plantation In Postslavery Women's Fiction, Correna Catlett Merricks

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In many ways, the plantation defined the U.S. South because it was the primary site of production, and therefore income, for prominent southerners. In addition to being a site of production, the plantation created a complex series of connected relationships that was imagined by the plantocracy to be a large family unit. It functioned according to a specific hierarchical model that was primarily based on a patriarchal understanding of genealogy. Yet Kate Chopin's "Désirée's Baby" and "La Belle Zoraïde," Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Julia Peterkin's Scarlet Sister Mary, Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, …

Athenaïse, Calixta, And Creole Constraints: An In Depth Look At Chopin's Portrayal Of Women, Nicole Reichert

Undergraduate Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Infinite Intrusions: Solipsism And David Foster Wallace's Authorial Objectivity, Jacob Daniel Smith

Undergraduate Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

One Time, One Place? Richard Wright And Eudora Welty's Shared Visual Politics In The Depression Era, Mallory Blasingame

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis questions the absence of critical comparative studies of Mississippi-born authors Richard Wright and Eudora Welty. It argues that, though the authors' writing has traditionally been understood as residing on opposite sides of the political spectrum, they share a political vision of the rural South and urban North in the Depression era that is established in their documentary works—Wright's 12 Million Black Voices (1941) and Welty's One Time, One Place (1971)—and extends into such fictional works as Wright's "Big Boy Leaves Home" (1936) and Native Son (1941) and Welty's "Moon Lake" (1949) and "Flowers for Marjorie" (1941). In chapter …

The Haitian Connection In Connie May Fowler’S Sugar Cage, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

In her first novel, Sugar Cage (1992), Connie May Fowler, a white Floridian with Cherokee ancestry and an early exposure to Voodoo, employs some of the narrative conventions of magical realism as a way around the impasse of Southern race relations in Florida in the 1960s. Her otherwise modernist narrative technique of nine first-person narrators emphasizes the isolation of her characters at the same time that the variety of viewpoints encourages readers to see both the interracial and international connections that elude or confuse her characters. The cultural and transnational complexities she explores, especially as regards the importation of African …

Faulkner's Literary Historiography: Color, Photography, And The Accessible Past, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

This paper looks at changes in visual representation in the 1930s as a means of understanding Faulkner's newly historiographic methods in this decade. The advent of Kodachrome® in 1935 as the first widely used color film stock presaged the turn toward the black-and-white documentary mode so important to the nation's efforts to "countenance," or see, the economic crises of the period. Faulkner's descriptive and representational practices in the period 1929-36 also shifted from a more pervasive use of coloration to a style like the silver halide photos prevalent in the middle nineteenth century--the period of the past-tense events in Absalom, …

William Faulkner, William James, And The American Pragmatic Tradition (Review), Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

In his book's final sentence, David Evans is concerned that we "assure a future for Faulkner, and a Faulkner for the future" (236). Taken at a glance, this concern might imply a need to safeguard Faulkner's continuing relevance: pointing to the future and Faulkner together suggests that their mutuality is not, in fact, certain. And in light of shifting critical approaches to this canonical writer, not to mention the diminishing importance of author studies as well as scholarly genres like the monograph, Evans's caution makes a certain critical sense.

Yet the statement's fuller meaning within the context of this new …

Disciplining The Body: Societal Controls Of Gender, Race And Sexuality, Michelle Renae Bright

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

"To Bend Without Breaking": American Women's Authorship And The New Woman, 1900–1935, Amber Harris Leichner

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation focuses on constructions of female authorship in selected prose narratives of four American women writers in the early twentieth century: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zitkala-Ša, and Gertrude Schalk. Specifically, it examines portraits of women in pieces that appeared in national magazines from 1900-1935 that bracket these writers’ careers and that reflect anxieties about their professional authorial identities complicated by gender and, in the case of Native American Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Sioux) and African American Gertrude Schalk, race as well. In a period characterized by fierce debates over the role of women in a dawning modern age, these writers participated …

Four Indian-Related Novels By Lucia St. Clair Robson, Kenneth Estes Hall

ETSU Faculty Works

Excerpt: Lucia St. Clair Robson began publishing historical novels in 1982 with Ride the Wind, which draws on the history of the Comanches, and has continued to work in the field of historical fiction. Four of her novels focus closely on historical personages: Ride the Wind (Cynthia Ann Parker and Quanah Parker); Light a Distant Fire (Osceola of the Seminoles); Walk in My Soul (Tiana Rogers of the Cherokee and Sam Houston); and Ghost Warrior(Lozen of the Chiricahua Apache).

Mother Of Three Drowns Children And Other Stories, Laura L. Stubbins

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A collection of short stories depicting fictional characters facing what is absent from their lives.

Contents, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Anticipative Feminism In F. Scott Fitzgerald’S This Side Of Paradise And Flappers And Philosophers, Andrew Riccardo

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 14 Fall 2012

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

This Fact Which Is Not One: Differential Poetics In Transatlantic American Modernism, Sarah Ruddy

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation proposes that the literary fact, first discussed by Jurij Tynajnov in his 1924 essay "The Literary Fact," and later in "On Literary Evolution" (1929), names an intersection of literary formalism and social representation central to experimental modernist texts in the twentieth century. The poetics of literary fact that I propose finds its basis in Russian Formalist and Frankfurt School theory and reflects several important twentieth century social moments to illustrate how historical and social facts seek poetic form. In my use of the term, "fact" is the materiality of history as it moves from the social world, carrying …

Faith And (Un)Certainty In The Writing Of Stowe, Hawthorne, And Dickinson: The Intersecting Language Of Theology And Feminism, Denise Yezbick

Wayne State University Dissertations

This research considers how Hawthorne's, Dickinson's, and Stowe's writing express the prevailing culture's attitudes toward the operation of meaning in religion. It poses the question: Is a crisis of meaning threatening to the religious sensibility? Looking at Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and specific poems of Dickinson, I show how their writing gestures to a kind of religious sensibility that is not threatened by such a crisis, but suggests, rather, that it is essential to a genuine openness to otherness, and ultimately to the Divine. The fiction and poetry of these two authors express this both negatively, as an attack on …

A Letter And A Dream: The Literary Friendship Of Ellen Glasglow And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Ashley Quaye Andrews Lear

Humanities & Communication - Daytona Beach

No abstract provided.

"You Are Safe": Black Maternal Politics Of Resistance And The Question Of Community Consensus In African American Women's Literature, Daniela Marinova Koleva

Theses and Dissertations

The study focuses on a number of African American women's literary texts that employ the figure of the black mother and the motif of infanticide to engage in critical statements about system arrangements, repressive practices, and theory designs with direct effect upon black people's choices for organizing their lives and existence. Such critical statements are inevitably political and their construction is offered in a most provocative and startling way given the choice of maternal infanticide to make the claims.

Angelina Weld Grimke's "The Closing Door" (1919), Georgia Douglas Johnson's Safe (c.1929), Shirley Graham's It's Morning (c. 1938-1940), and Toni Morrison's …