American Literature Commons^™

Within The Shadow Of The Cowboy: Myths And Realities Of The Old American West, Katherine Lamb

Undergraduate Theses

It has been argued that the American cowboy is the most widely misunderstood and misinterpreted figure in American history. This mythic figure does not look like the real ranch hands who littered the American West throughout the nineteenth century, nor does he act like them. Instead, he is set apart, as a figurehead of masculinity and American ideals, determined to roam the frontier as a guardian of justice and stability. This version of the cowboy, however, is not bound within the pages of novels or within limitations of film. Instead, the cowboy’s ideals, persona, look, and code remain a vivid …

The Esoteric Quality Of Montaigne’S Essays: The Essay As A Philosophic Response To Extreme Forms Of Skepticism, Victoria Russo

Honors Program Theses and Projects

According to Judith Shklar (1990, 611) not only is Montaigne Emerson’s hero, but Emerson is the American thinker in whom one finds the greatest understanding and appreciation of Montaigne’s Essays (see also Shklar 1989). The kinship between Montaigne and Emerson extends beyond the latter’s appreciation of the former. Both essayists address the topics of skepticism and the relationship between skepticism and how one ought to live. In doing so, both Emerson and Montaigne speak to the philosophical importance of literature and how one should understand the relationship between literature and philosophy.

Recommended Reading: Book List Books And Middlebrow Tastemaking, Cheryl Read

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The term “middlebrow” has historically been hurled as a pejorative to signify cultural objects and consumers of them which are watered down, inauthentic, and invested in quick social gain. I argue that the literary middlebrow can be better understood if its definition expands to include a mode of reading characterized by being mediated by cultural arbiters and purposeful in that literature functions as an instrument for self-improvement. In this dissertation, I use book list books, lists of recommended reading published as standalone books themselves, to trace the history of a middlebrow mode of reading from the late nineteenth century to …

Final Master's Portfolio, Jonathan Correa

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

Jonathan G. Correa's Master's Portfolio

'Disembodied Bones': Recovering The Poetry And Prose Of Elinor Wylie 2021, Sarah R. Bullock

Master's Theses

Picking a book to read is like diving for a pearl, writes Elinor Wylie, a 20th Century American poet, novelist, essayist and prominent magazine literary editor. In her essay "The Pearl Diver", she writes that it is the diver that risks the unknown- unaided by diving equipment in the form of library indexes-who gains the greatest joy, Wylie states (Fugitive Prose, 869). Wylie explains:

I venture to perceive an analogy between the rebellious pearl diver and myself, in my slight experience with public libraries...how much more delightful, how much more stimulating, to abandon the paraphernalia of card indexes and mahogany …

Old Industries, Old Conflicts: The Significance Of American Epic Novels, Arturo Alcazar

Honors Projects

This essay focuses on three American epic novels: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, and Underworld by Don DeLillo. More specifically, the essay examines the themes of ambiguity, redemption, good and evil, isolation, and violence as they are depicted in these three novels and what they indicate about America and its people and society.

Reading On The Home Front: The Evolution Of U.S. Children’S Literature And American Values During Wartime Conflicts, Sophie Barton

Honors Theses

Children’s print culture is an understudied dimension of American history. It is well established that children’s history is vital to understanding the role of the child in American history and how modern childhood has developed. This study aims to uncover how children’s print culture plays a vital role in understanding how children’s perspectives changed and the varied messages adults imposed on children during the Civil War, World War One, and World War Two. In this Honors Thesis, I study various types of print productions including short stories, comics, and school textbooks in order to understand the various ways adults attempted …

Impression, Storm, Victoria Rego, Victoria Anne Rego

All NMU Master's Theses

This novel, set in a cypress swamp near Charleston, South Carolina, explores issues in gender, sexuality, the body, and place. An experiment in form, the novel is structured to replicate the passing of a hurricane over land. This model allows the narrative to expand its scope to encompass the swamp as a larger entity amidst the ecosystem of the coastal south. By weaving together the narratives of the plant, animal, human, ghost, and mythic members of the swamp, the narrative seeks to interrogate the ways that these different levels of an ecosystem intercede upon, assist, and redirect each other in …

A World Of Infinite Possibilities: Recoding Popular Culture In Modern U.S. Ethnic Fiction, Todd Martinez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This project examines how the U.S. ethnic authors Ralph Ellison, Maxine Hong Kingston and Junot Díaz reflect the dynamic, reciprocal process of transculturation by decoding popular cultural forms. Using strategies made available by cultural studies, hemispheric theory and neoMarxism, critical attention will be directed to each author’s major literary work: Ellison’s Invisible Man, Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey, and Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This dissertation further analyzes a hitherto overlooked area of U.S. multiethnic literary studies: the ethnic subject’s relationship to encoded popular culture forms and how they impact dentity formation. Recent scholarship has focused on the ethnic …

The Infinite Crisis: How The American Comic Book Has Been Shaped By War, Winston Andrus

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

This thesis project argues that war has been the greatest catalyst for the American comic book medium to become a socio-political change agent within western society. Comic books have become one of the most pervasive influences to global popular culture, with superheroes dominating nearly every popular art form. Yet, the academic world has often ignored the comic book medium as a niche market instead of integrated into the broader discussions on cultural production and conflict studies. This paper intends to bridge the gap between what has been classified as comic book studies and the greater academic world to demonstrate the …

Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton

Publications and Research

This article historicizes musical symbolism in Melvin B. Tolson’s poem “Dark Symphony” (1941). In a time when Black writers and musicians alike were encouraged to aspire to European standards of greatness, Tolson’s Afro-modernist poem establishes an ambivalent critical stance toward the genre in its title. In pursuit of a richer understanding of the poet’s attitude, this article situates the poem within histories of Black music, racial uplift, and white supremacy, exploring the poem’s relation to other media from the Harlem Renaissance. It analyzes the changing language across the poem’s sections and, informed by Houston A. Baker Jr.’s study of “mastery …

Grappling With The Aftereffects Of Modernism In American Literature And Culture: Spiritual, Political, And Ecological, Joseph Neary

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this portfolio, Joe Neary examines various texts within contemporary American culture, including David Foster Wallace’s short story, “Good Old Neon,” Harmony Korine’s film, Spring Breakers, Richard Powers’ novel, The Overstory, and Bruce Holsinger’s book of criticism, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror.

Final Master's Portfolio, Alyssa Zuber

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This MA explores the body's response to trauma, social media's impact on modern young women, the Women's Health Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and how the memoir can be used as a tool to explore radical honesty.

The Hunger Games Trilogy And Young Adult Dystopian Literature: Guiding Adolescents In Addressing The Issues Of Media, Power, And Violence, Brooke Sandlin

Merge

No abstract provided.

Interracial Relations: History And Cultural Identity In The Invention Of Wings, Taylor Hopkins

Undergraduate Research and Scholarship Symposium

The historical fiction novel The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd displays a notable relationship between feminist and racial ideals during the nineteenth century. The story is based on the historical figure, Sarah Grimké, an American abolitionist and advocate for women’s rights. Over the course of thirty-five years, the narration alternates between the two main characters: Sarah Grimké and Hetty Handful Grimké, a young slave on the Grimké plantation. The interactions between the two begin when Hetty is presented to Sarah as a personal waiting maid for Sarah’s eleventh birthday. As the story continues, the dynamics between the two …

Selection From A Corrected Typescript Of Majorie Kinnan Rawlings’ Novel The Yearling, Sarah Virgina Dumitrascu

Showcase of Osprey Advancements in Research and Scholarship (SOARS)

Project of Merit Winner

Digital Projects Showcase Exhibitor Award

With the recent advent of digital word processors, physical representations of editorial practices have largely disappeared while a misconception about writing as an instantaneous or single-draft process has emerged. Compounding this issue is the prominence of literary studies that emphasize the works of renowned authors as products, rather than processes. My digital textual editing project, “A Selection from a Corrected Manuscript of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s novel The Yearling”, seeks to transcribe the manuscript of Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, The Yearling, which is marked with typed and hand-written revisions. Utilizing TEI-XML encoding, my …

Intersections Of Race And Place In Short Fiction By New Orleans Gens De Couleur Libres, Adrienne D. Vivian

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although New Orleans joined the United States following the Louisiana Purchase, the city’s French colonial period continued to influence New Orleanians. The lives and writing of nineteenth century New Orleans gens de couleur libres, free people of color, document continued exchanges with France and the Caribbean despite the city’s increasing Americanization. Drawing from Westphal’s theoretical work on geocriticism, Intersections of Race and Place in Short Fiction by New Orleans Gens de Couleur Libres locates sites of transgressivity and their representations in writers Michel Séligny, Adolphe Duhart, and Victor Séjour’s French language short stories. Chapter One examines New Orleans’s historical and …

Graduate Session: Presentation 1 - A Master At Work In ‘The Purloined Letter", Valerie Davis

Life of the Scholar Multidisciplinary Conference

I explore how critics of Poe's "Purloined Letter," through their rigorous, compartmentalized, and focused examination, tend to miss the simple joy of reading it at face value as a detective story.

Undergraduate Session Iii: Presentation 1 - Disrupting The System: How Harriet Beecher Stowe Used Uncle Tom's Cabin To Challenge Calvinistic Ideals Of Christianity, Michelle P. Lominac

Life of the Scholar Multidisciplinary Conference

Analyzing Harriet Beecher Stowe's methods of challenging traditional Calvinistic beliefs in her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Hanay Geiogamah’S Body Indian And Foghorn As “Plays With A Purpose”, Danica Čerče

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Hanay Geiogamah’s Body Indian and Foghorn as ‘Plays with a Purpose,’” written against the backdrop of critical whiteness studies, Danica Čerče discusses how Geiogamah’s theatrical rhetoric intervenes in the assumptions about whiteness as a static, privilege-granting category and system of dominance. By focusing on various techniques and strategies mobilized to define and affirm Native Americans’ authentic rather than imposed identities, the article shows that humor is one of the prime textual devices in Geiogamah’s plays to renegotiate what Walter Mignolo calls “the racist structure of power.”

Problems With Perceptual And Cognitive Idiosyncrasies In Li Wenjun’S Translation Of The Benjy Section Of Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury, Aaron L. Moore

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Problems with Perceptual and Cognitive Idiosyncrasies in Li Wenjun’s Translation of the Benjy Section of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury,” Aaron Lee Moore conducts a close explication of a 2014 English-Chinese edition of part of The Sound and the Fury. Li Wenjun’s translation of the Benjy section of The Sound and the Fury is certainly admirable in its graceful rendering of Faulkner’s complex, idiosyncratic prose style into accessible Chinese—and particularly laudable in its meticulous tracking of the a-chronological sequence of Benjy’s stream of consciousness narrative. However, problems arise in the translation due to an …

The Language Surrounding Huckleberry Finn’S Jim, Tristan Quinn

Emerging Writers

This article explores how in the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the identity of the character Jim contrasts with African American stereotypes through the language used by the character himself and through the language used by other characters to describe him.

Mental Illness And Femininity In Late Nineteenth-Early Twentieth Century Anglo-American Literature, Bianca Cristina Basone

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis attempts to prove that the diagnosing and treatment of mental illness in Victorian Anglo-American literature was heavily gendered and therefore misogynistic. To do so, four characters will be studied: Lady Audley in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, the unnamed female narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and Septimus Warren Smith in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Using the first three characters I intend to show that women during the nineteenth century were diagnosed as mentally ill because they did not partake in social gender norms, deviating by doing something …

American Mythology: How Storytelling Shapes Modern Cultural Perceptions, Kristin Maynard

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis will examine the American storytelling tradition, paying particular attention to American folktales and legends that arose as the nation expanded westward, such as the stories of Paul Bunyan, John Henry, Billy the Kid, etc. This text will utilize a lens of European narrative tradition (especially those which lent themselves to the written records of oral fairy tales and folktales) and trace the cultural significance and social purpose of these formative American stories. I will discuss the reasons why we so readily recognize the echoes of outside narrative traditions in American storytelling and the ethical implications of these narratives …

Diy Feminisms In The Third Space: Female Rhetorical Techniques Performed In Multi-Generational Alternative Media, Cristen M. Fitzpatrick

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation looks at the creation of both a literal and figurative clubhouse created by women, for women, through alternative publishing endeavors, including pamphlets, zines, and blogs, as women patchworked a “do-it-yourself” (DIY) feminism from the mid-20th century through today. I discuss alternative media utilized by marginalized, radical feminist groups and the application of newly-discovered feminist rhetoric throughout. I begin with an overview of feminist literacy and rhetoric, leading to a discussion of the pamphlets of the Women’s Movement in the 1960s. This sets the stage for the zines of the next generation, the 1980s and 1990s, in which women …

From The Trenches To The Writer’S Desk: Establishing A Collection Of Children’S Books Authored By Military Veterans In An Academic Library, Casey D. Hoeve

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

Kansas State University possesses a collection of juvenile literature to aid Education and English Department programs. KState is also the university with the largest military population in the state. It was discovered that several famous children’s authors were military veterans. Building upon this research, over 160 children’s authors who served in the military were identified. K-State Libraries NEH Endowment Committee funded the curation of a military veteran children’s literature collection, the only known academic library to possess such a collection. The collection enabled the libraries to provide outreach through access to the materials, internet resources, and special collections exhibits.

Animal-Human Vocabulary Builder, Domenick Acocella, Rene Cordero

Open Educational Resources

The assignment helps students individually build a usable, expanding vocabulary of terms and concepts, enabling each to further contribute to the ongoing, evolving written, oral, and visual conversations centered on the use of and thought about animals for food, clothing, work, entertainment, experimentation, imagery, and companionship.

Andrea Revised: Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist As Revolutionary By Martin Duberman, Phyllis Chesler

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Book Review: How To Be An Antiracist By Ibram X. Kendi, Shuntay Tarver

Counseling & Human Services Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Resurrecting An American Archive: A Mid-20th-Century Case Study Of Louise Amory (1892-1979), Barbara A. Marquis

Honors Undergraduate Theses

In 1950, Roger and Louise Amory founded the Johann Fust Community Library in Boca Grande, Florida. After the death of Louise's son John Austin Amory III in 2018, John's son ­– and Roger Amory's namesake – donated a collection of Louise Amory's papers to the Library Foundation. The archive consists of 140 pages, mostly handwritten. Louise wrote most of the material between 1949 and 1954. As Executive Director of the Foundation, I solicited the help of one of our docent volunteers, and we took on the challenge of transcribing her writing.

I was excited to undertake the resurrection of this …