American Literature Commons^™

Perversions Of The American Dream In The 20th Century Novel: Requiem For A Dream And The Great Gatsby, Mary C. Menzemer

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The American Dream’s outlines are pretty clear: find a good job, make enough money, raise a good family, love your neighbors and friends, and uphold American laws. In this essay, I am going to explore what happens when the dream’s goals are darkened, corrupted, and attempted to be found by unconventional means and shortcut through the lens of two novels written in the 20^th century, at the height of the American Dream’s popularity: Requiem for a Dream and The Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, at a time when a slew of immigrants were seeking better …

"Horses And Oil In His Blood": Mythopoetics And Western Petromelancholia In Alexandra Fuller's The Legend Of Colton H. Bryant, Lindsay Stephens

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Alexandra Fuller’s book The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, often read as merely a sad biography of a young man who meets his demise in the Wyoming energy patch, performs urgent cultural work. Fuller captures Wyoming’s shift from conventional (Easy Oil) extraction to the extreme (Tough Oil) extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, at the dawn of the twenty-first century. This shift to Tough Oil involves far more than engineering concerns, as Stephanie LeMenager points out in her cultural critique Living Oil. LeMenager terms our national failure to acknowledge the crises that accompany Tough Oil practices …

In Defense Of Marianne Dashwood: A Categorization Of Language Into Principles Of Sense And Sensibility, Ashley Bonin

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

No abstract provided.

The Woman Warrior: The Silent Creation Of A Third Space, Hayley Struzik

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

No abstract provided.

Intergenerational Trauma: A Look At Sherman Alexie's Child Characters, Kiersten Sargent

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

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.

Contents, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.

Git Vs Ge: The Importance Of The Dual Pronoun In Beowulf, Kenneth R. Sikora Iii

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

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.

Feminism And The Force Of Institutions In Twenty-First Century Dystopian Novels, Stephanie Roman

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 17 Fall 2015

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

No abstract provided.

Cumulative Index Of Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture (1999-), Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

"Dollars Damn Me": Editorial Politics And Herman Melville's Periodical Fiction, Timothy R. Morris

Theses and Dissertations

To illustrate Melville’s navigation of editorial politics in the periodical marketplace, this study analyzes two stories Melville published in Putnam’s in order to reconstruct the particular historical, editorial, social, and political contexts of these writings. The first text examined in this study is “Bartleby,” published in Putnam’s in November and December of 1853. This reading recovers overtures of sociability and indexes formal appropriations of established popular genres in order to develop an interpretive framework. Throughout this analysis, an examination of the narrator’s ideological bearings in relation to the unsystematic implementation of these ideologies in American public life sets forth a …

Mental Illness In Early American Fiction: Charles Brockden Brown And The Sentimental Novelists, Katie E. Walk

Masters Theses

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed the development of the United States of America as a new nation. This development brought with it new ideologies and social and political change; included in these changes was the way that sexual conduct outside of marriage was dealt with. Because the emerging legal system became less concerned with matters of morality, some people became frightened that sexual promiscuity would become rampant. The sentimental novel or seduction tale became a means of attempting to control sexual behavior when the law was not able to step in.

The way that madness, a term …

"I Looked Here; I Looked There; Nowhere Could I See My Love." The Problem Of "Presence" In The Black Riders And Other Lines, Nat Gustafson-Sundell

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Although the poems of The Black Riders and other lines, by Stephen Crane, have often been treated as if they are simple--easy to interpret and easy to categorize--these poems actually support a multiplicity of interpretations. The multiplicity of interpretations available in the poems informs the possibility of tracing a variety of interrelationships through the poetry. While a few previous scholars have treated the poems as if they are interrelated, the interrelationship of the poetry has not been explicitly and substantially addressed as a feature of the poetry. The poems, in fact, support a combinatorial complexity only previously hinted at in …

From This Dark Place To The Other: Violence And Connection In The Poetry Of Brian Turner, Alan R. Swirsky

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Brian Turner is a poet and American soldier who served in Iraq at the start of the 21^st century. His poetry is about his experiences as a soldier interacting with the Iraqi people, his time in America following the war, PTSD, and the endless violence in the war zone. As a comparatively recent entry into the genre of War Poetry, his work pays homage to the writers who preceded him, like Wilfred Owen and Bruce Weigl, while also referencing Middle Eastern poets typically outside the scope of American literature. Through Turner’s recurring themes and motifs, connections are established between …

'She Shall Not Be Moved': Black Women's Spiritual Practice In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Paradise, And Home, Rondrea Danielle Mathis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

‘She Shall Not Be Moved’: Black Women’s Spiritual Practice in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Paradise, and Home argues that from The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s debut novel, to her 2012 novel, Home, Morrison brings her female characters to voice, autonomy, and personal divinity through unconventional spiritual work. The project addresses the history of Black women’s activist and spiritual work, Toni Morrison’s engagement with unconventional spiritual practice, and closes with a personal interrogation of the author’s connection to Black women’s spiritual practice.

Public Relations: Diaspora, Media, And The State(S) Of American Literature, Nathan Allen Jung

Dissertations

Like any good public relations campaign, this dissertation aims to offer a persuasive interpretation of certain key facts. The facts, as I see them, are as follows: first, a great number of contemporary novels and poems explore the personal and social consequences of diasporic migration. Second, these texts, along with their print and electronic paratexts, share a pervasive interest in media. And third, these works are rarely read in conversation with one another, despite their mutual concern for migration and media. Owing to this last point in particular, scholarship has failed to fully address the broader media theories developed in …

Edgar Allan Poe And Science: Unraveling The Plot Of The Universe, Murray S. Ellison

Theses and Dissertations

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) lived at the perfect time to write about several of the most dramatic technological developments ever recorded in history. Up until the nineteenth century, professional scientists were almost the exclusive agents for writing about science. However, during this period, non-professional writers also emerged as important conveyors of popular science news to the public. Though Poe was a lay writer, his popular writing conveyed several of the most important new discoveries of the Industrial Age. He also projected his views about how nineteenth-century technologies might impact civilizations of the future. Poe’s writing offers a key example of …

Representations Of Gatsby: Ninety Years Of Retrospective, Christine Anne Auger

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous character, has starred in a variety of stage and screen adaptations in the ninety years since he was first introduced in The Great Gatsby (1925). This dissertation explores the Gatsby character as depicted in six important adaptations of the novel, including two Broadway productions, Owen Davis’ 1926 drama and John Collins’ 2010s play, Gatz, and four major motion pictures: Herbert Brenon’s 1926 lost silent film (starring Warner Baxter); Elliott Nugent’s 1949 black and white film (starring Alan Ladd); Jack Clayton’s 1974 color film (starring Robert Redford); and Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 3-D film (starring …

Wrestling With Angels: Postsecular Contemporary American Poetry, Paul T. Corrigan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the current “secular age,” more and more people find beliefs and behaviors associated with traditional religion intellectually and ethically untenable. At the same time, many “postsecular” writers, both believers and nonbelievers, continue to write with religious or religiously-inflected forms, themes, and purposes. In the United States, postsecular poets “wrestle with angels” by engaging constructively and deconstructively with matters traditionally considered the domain of religion and spirituality. While the recent work of Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, John McClure and others puts the concept of the postsecular at the cutting edge of various fields of study, including religion, sociology, and literature, …

Falling Men In 9/11 American Fiction, Justin D. Shaw

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

“Falling Men in 9/11 American Fiction"

Gender critics such as Judith Butler and Michael Kimmel argue that post-9/11 American culture has embraced a traditional gender binary that positions men as the dominant protectors of women, children, and the nation as a whole, exemplified by the widespread veneration of heroic firefighters, soldiers, and the civilians of flight 93 in the media (Kimmel 249). This regression reinforces hegemonic masculinity in American culture, which R.W. Connell defines as “the pattern of practice (i.e., things done, not just a set of role expectations or an identity) that allow[s] men’s dominance over women to continue” …