American Literature Commons^™

Motherhood Makes A Matriarchy, Lily Mann

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

This analysis will discuss the topic of matriarchies, how they created, and how they are sustained. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story: Coven are used as examples of matriarchies, wherein Hawthorne’s matriarchy is at its start, whereas Murphy’s matriarchy is coming to a potential end. This will be examined through a comparative analysis between the characters in Hawthorne’s early American work with the characters in Murphy’s contemporary work. Ultimately, Hawthorne’s matriarchy is much more insidious and potentially damaging to a patriarchal norm than Murphy’s reclusive patriarchy. Hawthorne’s matriarchy has the option to disrupt a patriarchal …

"Tell Nobody But God": Reading Mothers, Sisters, And "The Father" In Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Cheryl Hopson

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

In my reading of The Color Purple, I make several interconnected arguments, the first being that “The Father,” that is any male, sanctioned by patriarchy, and in the context of a patriarchal, sexist male order, disrupts what would otherwise be a powerful and sustaining relationship, that of the mother-daughter relationship. I continue that sisterhood that is multifaceted and intergenerational serves as a corrective to the disrupted maternal and filial relationship. It is sisters in the novel and not mothers who step in to “mother,” that is nurture, protect, support, as well as challenge one another, even in the most harrowing …

Writings: Sandy Hill Sink, Edna Louise Saffy

Saffy Collection - All Textual Materials

Handwritten pages, Sandy Hill Sink and miscellaneous writings.

Writings: Project Notes, Edna Louise Saffy

Saffy Collection - All Textual Materials

Handwritten project notes.

For The Cobweb Club: Mottoes, Margaret J. M. Sweat

Annals of the Cobweb Club

Ribbon-bound booklet containing handwritten mottoes for the Cobweb Club.

The Way We Dream Now: History, Theory, And Lgbtq Memoir In America, Megan Paslawski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines American memoirs written after 2000 by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer authors with an eye to how the recent institutionalization of queer theory and the open production of LGBTQ histories affect these writers’ conceptions of their lives, aspirations, and cultures. I argue that these memoirs, sometimes consciously, find themselves struggling with what are also competing ideas within queer theory about the queerness of futurity even as they turn to the past of queer/trans literature and history to bolster their senses of possible identities and communities. This often has the effect of positioning contemporary LGBTQ writers as …

Defining Hybridity: Frantz Fanon And Post-Colonialism In Louise Erdrich's Shadow Tag, Scott Morrison

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

This essay focuses on issues of assimilation, identity, and hybridity as they apply to the Native American characters in Louise Erdrich's Shadow Tag. It interprets the stages of colonization, as proposed by Frantz Fanon, within the novel's storyline by focusing on the specific characterization of its three major characters: Irene, Gil, and Riel. These three characters metaphorically represent the players in a colonial system—the colonized subject, the colonizing force, and the generations of hybrids who result from colonization—in order to depict a truth about Native American identity in contemporary America. According to Fanon, the three phases of colonization are assimilation, …

Tailoring Landscapes: Multivalent Terrain And The Politics Of Black Geography In Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, Cara Fitzgerald

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis foregrounds the import of national geography in nineteenth-century African American literature. Authors like Elizabeth Keckley and Martin Delany confront problems of national geography by interrogating illusion, rewriting geographic space, and constructing themselves within both the physical and conceptual geography of the nation. In so doing, they challenge the fallacy of a uniform national geography and attend to the myriad historical conditions that exist within geographic spaces.

Finding Aid To The Collection Of Margaret Wade Deland Materials, Margaret Wade Deland, Colby College Special Collections

Finding Aids

The collection includes correspondence, manuscripts, and first publications of Maine writer, Margaret Wade Deland. The bulk of the collection consists of letters written by Deland to various correspondents between 1884 and 1944. The collection also contains manuscript items of varying length, clippings, published writings, and a few photographic prints. Born Margaret Wade Campbell near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1857, Deland moved to Boston in 1880. She is known principally for the novel "John Ward, Preacher" and her 'Old Chester' books, based on communities where she grew up. She received a Doctorate of Letters from Bates College in 1920, and had a …

The Purloined Letters: A Collection Of Mail Robbery Reports From Ohio Papers, 1841-1850, Marc Cibella

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Marc Cibella’s essay introduces and explains why nineteenth-century Americans got excited about newspaper reports of mail robbery.

Colonel John Johnston's "Biography Of Tecumtha" (1854), Caitlin Metheny

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

In this installment, we have a biography of the Shawnee leader Tecumseh by Colonel John Johnston (here and, in some sources, spelled Johnson), who worked for decades as an “Indian agent”—an official liaison between the US government and indigenous peoples—at Fort Wayne and Piqua. Johnston's biography is followed by a critical essay by Caitlin Metheny.

F. Scott Fitzgerald As A "Hot Nietzschean": The Influence Of Friedrich Nietzsche's Philosophy In This Side Of Paradise, The Beautiful And Damned, And The Great Gatsby, Lindsey Carman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Beginning in 1915, F. Scott Fitzgerald was exposed to the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche under the guidance of mentors and from his personal reading lists. While reading Nietzsche, Fitzgerald's concern with the rise of cultural pessimism in 1920s America appeared in his fiction. Interestingly, both the philosopher and author explore the decline of Western culture in the twentieth century––a period of identity crises that affected America and Europe. This thesis investigates Fitzgerald's misreading of Nietzschean ideas that appears in his fiction to highlight the author's interest in explaining the cause of America's decline. In particular, this thesis appropriates a Nietzschean …

Reception Claims In Supernatural Horror In Literature And The Course Of Weird Fiction, John Glover

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

This chapter explores H. P. Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," considering the ways in which Lovecraft attempted to construct favorable conditions for the reception of his own work. The writing of the essay was a pivotal moment in Lovecraft's career and authorial self-fashioning. Both it and he went on to influence the development of weird fiction in Lovecraft's lifetime and subsequently, lasting well into the current period of reevaluation of the author's legacy and person.

Breaking Chains Of Oppression: Popular Culture And The Plundering Of Blackness, Corina Sacajawea Ambrose

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis focuses on the ways in which white supremacy created mass incarceration, specifically mass incarceration of black individuals, and how this continues to perpetuate a racial caste system in the United States. First, I examine contemporary novelist Colson Whitehead‘s The Underground Railroad to provide a historical background of white supremacy and slavery. Then, I argue that pop culture is one area in which artists are focused on the abolition of the prison-industrial complex and ending mass incarceration. Finally, I focus on JAY-Z‘s music video “The Story of O.J.“ and Beyoncé‘s visual album Lemonade and her 2018 Coachella performance to …

An American Myth In The (Re)Making: The Timeless Fantasy Appeal Of 'The King And I', Lina Purtscher

Scripps Senior Theses

It is now well-known that The King and I has little claim to truth. Recent research has exposed the inaccuracy of the “biographical” works on which the musical is based: Anna Leonowens invented many things about her personal background and experiences. Much of her life, then, is a contrived fantasy. Yet her life of fantasy has been resurrected in countless adaptations, including the 1951 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical and its 2015 revival production, that ceaselessly draw audiences. The fascination of American audiences with Anna’s tale lies their belief in the timeless American ideals that her fantasy employs: those of freedom …

African-American Poetry, Music, And Politics, Tyler H. Macdonald

Honors Theses

The 2016 decision to award songwriter and musician Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature sparked a worldwide debate on the relationship between music and poetry and raised many questions about music’s place in literary canon. However, this debate is nothing new. Questions about the relationship between music and poetry have long been debated. Some scholars believe the two disciplines should be studied separately, while others prefer to consider the connections between the two.

My project begins with a question: if Bob Dylan’s songs can be considered poetry, what other forms of music might also be considered poetry? Rap implements …

The Library In The Mountains And The Writing On The Wall : Fragmented Memories And Cultural Amnesia In Ursula K. Le Guin, Erin Michelle Roll

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Memory, especially its loss, plays a prominent role in the work of Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929). The Telling (2000) and Voices (2006), two of Le Guin’s most recent works, go into great detail on what happens when a memory is lost or destroyed, usually under duress. The former, the last book in Le Guin’s Hainish cycle, deals with a goal to preserve books and learning from a regime that has made it a misguided goal to eradicate all elements of past culture in an effort to modernize the country. In the latter, part of Le Guin’s Annals of …

Misfitology : Misfit Narratives In Ideology, Kennedy Lyn Coyne

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This hybrid thesis, part critical and part fiction, examines experimental and nontraditional texts that showcase how misfits allow viewers and readers to glimpse ideological structures—particularly interpellation. It argues that the misfit is essential to the visibility of the ideological process because the misfit shows the disconnect between the inverted and the real world. The inverted world seems like the real world but it is masked by ideology. This thesis examines how a pair of films – David Lynch’s films Blue Velvet and Mullholland Drive – and a pair of novels – Eileen Myles’ Chelsea Girls, and Chris Kraus’ I Love …

Before Nature's Nation : Ecological Thought And Early American Poetry, Joshua Bartlett

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project examines early American encounters with the natural world through the context of contemporary ecocriticism. In readings of Puritan poets Anne Bradstreet and Michael Wigglesworth, African-American poet Phillis Wheatley, and Mohegan minister Samson Occom, it demonstrates how poetic attentions to nature transformed collective antagonism toward the “howling wilderness” into personal feelings of affection and wonder. Likewise, it develops an understanding of the “ecological” that is both methodology, a way of thinking about specific things, such as trees or stones, and epistemology, a kind of thinking that emphasizes relational perception. It then situates these experiences amidst both canonical Americanist scholarship …

Dis/Inheritance : Love, Grief, And Genealogy In Faulkner, Daisuke Kiriyama

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation is devoted to the close examination of two novels of William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses. I find in them the repression and return of prohibited emotions and a consistent pattern of “the race between the pursuing white man and the fleeing black man.” I explore how these are related to the Faulknerian conception of time and the establishment and disruption of the conventional Southern notions of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The white man’s pursuit, performed in various forms, ultimately aims to prove his mastery and masculinity, racial superiority, or everything that whiteness means to …

Writer Re-Written: What Really (Might Have) Happened To Atticus And Scout, Rob Atkinson

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

A Modernized Fairy Tale: Speculations On Technology, Labor, Politics, And Gender In The Oz Series, Zachary Hez Hollingsworth

Honors Theses

On the surface, L. Frank Baum's Oz series would appear to merely be fourteen books of inventive children's fantasy, but in truth Baum communicates several personal progressive beliefs to his youthful audience through the use of his fantastical world upon closer examination. For my research, I reread every book in Baum's original Oz series and made note of any potentially relevant allegorical or metaphorical themes. Once I started to notice a trend of themes regarding technology, labor, politics, and gender, I settled on these themes to be the overall focus of my thesis's discussion. I read as many academic essays …

Wild Abandon: Postwar Literature Between Ecology And Authenticity, Alexander F. Menrisky

Theses and Dissertations--English

Wild Abandon traces a literary and cultural history of late twentieth-century appeals to dissolution, the moment at which a text seems to erase its subject’s sense of selfhood in natural environs. I argue that such appeals arose in response to a prominent yet overlooked interaction between discourses of ecology and authenticity following the rise and fall of the American New Left in the 1960s and 70s. This conjunction inspired certain intellectuals and activists to celebrate the ecological concept of interconnectivity as the most authentic basis of subjectivity in political, philosophical, spiritual, and literary writings. As I argue, dissolution represents a …

Meeting At The Threshold: Slavery’S Influence On Hospitality And Black Personhood In Late-Antebellum American Literature, Rebecca Wiltberger Wiggins

Theses and Dissertations--English

In my dissertation, I argue that both white and black authors of the late-1850s and early-1860s used scenes of race-centered hospitality in their narratives to combat the pervasive stereotypes of black inferiority that flourished under the influence of chattel slavery. The wide-spread scenes of hospitality in antebellum literature—including shared meals, entertaining overnight guests, and business meetings in personal homes—are too inextricably bound to contemporary discussions of blackness and whiteness to be ignored. In arguing for the humanizing effects of playing host or guest as a black person, my project joins the work of literary scholars from William L. Andrews to …

Literary Didacticism And Collective Human Rights In Us Borderlands: Ana Castillo's 'The Guardians' And Louise Erdrich's 'The Round House', Tereza M. Szeghi

English Faculty Publications

There is now a sizable body of scholarship on the relationship between human rights and literature. James Dawes suggests that the work of human rights is largely a matter of storytelling ("Human Rights in Literary Studies"). Joseph Slaughter contends, in turn, that "literary works and literary modes of thinking have played important parts in the emergence of modern human rights ideals and sentiments, as well as in the elaboration of national and international human rights laws" ("Rights" xiii). More specifically, in her oft-cited Inventing Human Rights, Lynn Hunt argues that contemporary human rights thought derives from the rise of …

Tracing Writer/Reader Identity In, And In Response To, Queer Latinx Autohistoria-Teorìa, Corrina Wells

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project examines how diverse representation changes the discourse around queer latinx identities. This project extends theories of representation that show how a text changes the imaginary of the reader through a two-part methodology. First, through explicating Spit & Passion and A Cup of Water Under My Bed, this project examines how these texts construct a readers’ imaginary. Then, through a corresponding qualitative assessment on readers’ responses to the texts, this project identifies the extent to which the texts change the beliefs and understandings of a small group of students. Articulating an ecology of identity using the texts under examination, …

Haunted Mississippi: Ghosts, Identity, And Collective Identity, Hailey Cooper

Honors Theses

This thesis wrestles with the duality of the terms haunting and ghosts in relation to Mississippi and its collective identity and narrative. Ghostlore and haunted tourism provide insight into shared cultural constructs and indicate an absence of certain perspectives from more generally held ideas of identity. Analyses of ghost stories from around the state explore these hauntings of history and ghosted narratives, so it is ghosts v. ghosted and hauntings v. haunted. I use ghost stories from Natchez, MS to explore postsouthern spaces and performances of southernness and the narratives around female apparitions to study the role of southern womanhood …

Review Of John James Audubon: The Nature Of The American Woodsman, By Gregory Nobles, Matthew Guzman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

When we think about American ornithology, John James Audubon is often the first name that comes to mind. As evidence to Audubon’s lasting ability to enrapture readers, it bears repeating that an original Double Elephant Folio of Birds of America sold for an astounding $11.5 million in 2010 (2). Yet, for a man who produced such stunning and memorable visual and literary work on the avifauna of North America, some of the important details of his life and origins have remained highly contested. Even though Gregory Nobles’s new biography is not explicitly tied to the study of the Great Plains, …

Disarming “Nature” As A Weapon: A Queer Ecosemiotic Reimagining Of Futurity And Environmental Ethics Through Memoir, Sam Lauer

Master’s Theses

In this thesis, I posit that the need for an active, conscious, and radical queering of ecocriticism as a literary and cultural theory has arisen in light of the postmodern problematization of “nature” and the “natural,” along with the queerness of society, culture, and science. The way we understand “nature” (in life and in texts), whether of physical environments, inherent selfhood, or normalcy, begs to be appropriately informed by discourses and realities of queerness in order for both social and environmental healing to take place. I have analyzed three works of queer creative nonfiction—memoirs—to illuminate the ways in which the …

“Jailed On The Charge Of Sodomy”: A Same-Sex, Interracial Marriage In 1888, Adam Yeich

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Adam Yeich explains and presents an Ohio newspaper report of a same-sex, interracial marriage in 1888 in Arkansas. This article includes the full text of the newspaper report, an introduction explaining its significance, and a bibliography.