American Literature Commons^™

Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature, Josh-Wade Ferguson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature” revises the methodological assumptions that have underwritten our understanding of blues literature and the politics of race and region that surround it. Where previous commentators have defined blues literature primarily through its formal and thematic connections with blues music and with the sociohistorical contours of black southern life more generally this dissertation expands the boundaries of how we conceive blues literature by examining Langston Hughes’ poems “The Weary Blues” (1925) and “Po Boy Blues” (1926) August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984) Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods …

Decolonial Resistance In Latinx Writings From Peru To The United States: A Portfolio, Isabel Norwood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collection begins with the premise that colonial relationships manifest in ways beyond exploitation of one nation by another. It relies on the decolonial theory of Walter D. Mignolo in its assumption that imbalances of power in the realms of race gender sexuality and class are fundamentally colonial. With this more expansive understanding of coloniality in mind I examine resistance to colonial exploitation in a range of texts from across the Americas. The first essay in this collection explores the role of the guinea pig in Andean food culture arguing that the continued consumption of guinea pig represents a form …

Subverting The Patriarchal Panopticon: Challenges To Eugenics Rhetoric In The Novels Of Mccullers And Welty, Regina Marie Young

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My thesis takes into consideration the scope of eugenics ideologies and their influence on literature specifically two mid-twentieth century authors from the U.S. South Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty. I contend that both writers engage with eugenics rhetoric challenging and subverting the prevailing ideology of the day albeit in differing ways. McCullers and Welty address different facets of eugenics rhetoric in their novels— namely the nature of “defect” and the criteria for “fitness” for “citizenship.” This thesis interrogates the ways in which these writers develop rhetorical strategies for resisting eugenics ideologies in their respective novels Reflections in a Golden Eye …

Mobilizing Genre, Revising Politics: The Intersection Of Audience, Author, And Allusion In Contemporary Latinx Fiction, Jason Klus

Master’s Theses

This thesis examines contemporary Latinx authors’ use of popular cultural and generic allusions to challenge limiting labels that audiences place on their fiction. Confronting readings that privilege Latinx literature as either imbued with the political rigor of the 1960s’ Civil Rights Movement or an assimilationist attitude, I argue that these writers deliberately appropriate images and tropes familiar to Anglo-American readers to assure success in the literary marketplace while challenging their readers’ expected conclusions. My first chapter analyzes Sandra Cisneros’s reimagining of popular U.S. figures in light of ethnic storytelling practices in her 2002 novel Caramelo. The second chapter examines …

Contesting Slavery In The Global Market: John Brown’S Slave Life In Georgia, Michael Drexler, Stephanie Scherer

Faculty Journal Articles

John Brown, author of Slave Life in Georgia, published in London in 1854, proffered a radical approach to ending slavery in the USA in step with Marxian economics. In this paper, we will explain how Brown’s representation of subjectivity may have caused critics to neglect it. Brown treats freedom as something foreign and external. He has to learn what freedom means, first through exposure to a model of liberal citizenship and then through the experience of several modulations of fugitive liberty. Brown’s social world is wholly determined by external forces. Whether slave or freeman, he faces ambiguous situations. Is …

From Beyond The Grave: Dead Narrators In Young Adult Literature, Jessica L. Branton

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

While scholars and critics have explored various aspects of young adult literature, few have focused on the popular, but odd, use of dead narrators. When examining the dead narrators of Veronica Roth’s Allegiant, Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why, Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall, and Jess Rothenberg’s The Catastrophic History of You and Me, it becomes clear that the dead narrators are used as a foil for adolescent growth and maturation, and they also allow young readers to empathize with and accept death through the protagonists. These protagonists experience a proto-adulthood as they die too soon to …

Black Hawk In Translation: Indigenous Critique And Liberal Guilt In The 1847 Dutch Edition Of Life Of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, Frank Kelderman

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

"Bachelor Buttons": Feminist And Womanist Essays And Poems, Billy E. Clem Jr.

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

In this critical and creative dissertation, I sketch a brief study of selected multicultural hybrid texts in contemporary US Anglophone literary studies; discuss their implications for reading, writing, and teaching; and present my own hybrid text.

Second-wave feminist and womanist theories and practices opened literary and cultural studies to new and exciting ideas and methods for reading, teaching, and writing both canonical and non-canonical Anglophone texts. One genre emerging anew by these theories, practices, and practitioners is the literary hybrid text, a multi-genre form composed of a variety of prose genres, poetry, drama, and/or visual imagery. Hybrid texts ask readers …

The Downfall Of Colonial And Dark Romantic Masculinity In The Witch: A New England Folktale, David Miles Harrington

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This thesis discusses the film The Witch (2015), directed by Robert Eggers, specifically, the character of William and his failures as a Puritan man. Puritan masculinity is a surprisingly understudied area of American literature and, to enter into the field, I use William and The Witch as a portal into various historical and literary interpretations of seventeenth-century Puritan maleness. The project takes a palimpsestic approach to these layers of influence on Eggers’s film. From Hawthorne’s Reverend Hooper in “The Minister’s Black Veil” and Young Goodman Brown in “Young Goodman Brown” to real-world Puritans Roger Williams and Samuel Sewall. This thesis …

Exceptionalism And Transatlanticism In Early American Literature (1760-1860) And Classic Hollywood Cinema (1930-1960), John M. Price

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores the seemingly contradictory characteristics of two distinct art forms in two distinct eras. When exploring the period 1760 to 1860, scholars of transatlanticism argue that the literature of Great Britain and the young United States are of one unified cultural identity, and yet this period is also one in which American writers sought to establish a unique national voice. To understand this dichotomy, this dissertation examines the parallels between Early American Literature, or EAL, and classic Hollywood cinema (1930-1960). This exercise in intertextuality demonstrates how both mediums in both periods absorbed influences from other countries and other …

A Lingua Franca Afloat And Ashore: Contact English In American Sea Fiction, 1824 To 1914, Fredrik Reidar Stark

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines how American sea writers between 1824 and 1914 promoted new perceptions of English as a various and expanding intercultural and international language. It argues that presentations of language contact form a critically underemphasized component of American nautical literature. It surveys how such presentations take shape in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot (1824) and The Crater (1847), Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), and Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years before the Mast (1840). It asserts that Herman Melville’s innovative presentations of contact between pidgins and native varieties of English in Typee (1846) and Omoo …

Workers, Athletes And Artists: The Historical Continuity Of White Control Of Black America, Courtney Walton

Masters Theses

From the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first century, black Americans have been subject to different forms of control. This subjection of blacks to societal demands arose in part because black people are viewed as inferior to white people. Because of this misconstrued perception, black people are forced to present an acceptable level of blackness to prevent punishment. Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch" (1938), Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (1928), and Langston Hughes's "The Negro Artist and Racial Mountain" (1926) detail their lives at the tum of the …

Always Already Imprisoned: The Panoptic Power Of Capitalism In American Literature, 1900-1940, Andrew Spencer

Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

ALWAYS ALREADY IMPRISONED: THE PANOPTIC POWER OF CAPITALISM IN AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1900-1940

By Andrew Blair Spencer, Ph.D.

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Virginia Commonwealth University, 2019

Director: Dr. Richard Fine, Professor, Department of English

By applying the theories of control that Michel Foucault outlines in Discipline and Punish to the capitalist system, I argue that capitalism functions in much the same was as Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon in that it perpetually imprisons individuals who live under its purview. As I see it, capitalism works on …

The Prodigal Daughter: An Edition Of An Anonymous Text, Paige Deans

Theses and Dissertations

The Prodigal Daughter (1736) is a poem that, on the surface, appears to be an approachable text that was likely geared towards a children’s audience during New England’s first Great Awakening, within the approachable format of a chapbook. However, when explored further, The Prodigal Daughter reveals a complicated textual history during a time of theological and social revival in New England. This thesis considers the historical context of The Prodigal Daughter’s narrative, as well as the poem’s publication history. The text’s transmission is carefully examined and encapsulated in this edition—giving the reader a transcription that is the result of …

[Review Of The Book Looking For Lorraine: The Radiant And Radical Life Of Lorraine Hansberry, By I. Perry], Kaa Vonia Hinton

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

[Introduction] Chicago, Illinois, native, Lorraine Hansberry wrote the highly acclaimed A Raisin in the Sun (1959), the first play produced on Broadway by a Black woman. The play's title is inspired by one of poet Langston Hughes's poems, "Harlem," and focuses on a Black American family with dreams of buying a home in a white neighborhood in segregated Chicago. A Raisin in the Sun is taught widely in high schools and colleges in America, and most of us who are aware of Hansberry know about the critical success of her play, but do we know much more than that about …

The Intermedial Politics Of Handwritten Newspapers In The 19th-Century U.S., Mark A. Mattes

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Handwritten newspapers appeared in a variety of social contexts in the 19th-century U.S.1 The largest extant portion of 19th-century handwritten newspapers emerged from home and school settings. More far-flung examples include those written aboard ships during exploratory and military voyages. Others were produced within institutions such as hospitals and asylums. Such works were written during times of privation, including life in an army regiment or a prisoner-of-war camp during the Civil War. At other times, handwritten newspapers accompanied efforts at westward settlement and transcontinental railway journeys. Impromptu papers could follow in the wake of natural disasters that knocked out print-based …