American Literature Commons^™

Stuart, Jesse Hilton, 1907-1984 (Sc 902), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 902. Letter written by Jesse Hilton Stuart, Greenup, Kentucky, to Elizabeth Cossey, Bowling Green, Kentucky, thanking her for her letter and stating that he has no materials to send her for a classroom display. Also envelope.

Mitchell, Bernice Margaret, 1903-2000 (Sc 893), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 893. Correspondence of Bernice Mitchell, Burnside, Kentucky, concerning the book Burnside, Kentucky, 1890-1990: The First One Hundred Years, and her acquaintance with author Harriette Simpson Arnow.

David Foster Wallace To The Rescue, James K.A. Smith

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Warren, Robert Penn, 1905-1989 (Sc 883), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 883. Letters, 1978-1984 (17), written by Robert Penn Warren in response to Kentucky poet Charles Semones’ letters, discussing mainly the poetry. Also letter, 1993, giving data about the Warren letters.

Blakey, Margoline (Pace), 1910-1999 (Sc 869), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 869. Paper written by Margoline (Pace) Blakey titled “Alice Hegan Rice.”

White, Mary F. (Townsend), 1854-1933 (Sc 842), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 842. Letters from Henry T. Coates and Company, Publishers, to Mrs. Alfred L. White, New York, regarding the use of a photograph of “the Rookery” in a fictional revolutionary war monograph entitled Pemberton, or 100 Years Ago, by Henry Peterson. Includes letter, 28 July 1898, from Lavalette Wilson, Haverstraw, New York, civil engineer and surveyor, questioning the place the leading character, Major André, lodged the night prior to his capture.

Dockery, Admiral Porter, 1885-1968 (Sc 2658), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2658. Compilation of Dockery’s poetry titled “Verse of a Traveling Showman” edited by Eldon Doyle Dockery.

Dean, Harry Moseley, 1884-1958 (Sc 2659), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2659. A volume of Harry Moseley Dean's poetry compiled by Gayle R. Carver.

The Cowboy Hero In American Fiction: Myth And Realism In The Virginian And Lonesome Dove, Lindsay Lane Penn

Student Theses and Dissertations

A cultural icon and national myth, the cowboy has been a hero of American fiction for more than one hundred and fifty years. The emergence of the Western hero in dime novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries combined with the Western motion picture boom of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s created a cowboy myth, one that often features tall, dark, and handsome gunslingers in picturesque surroundings. As with all myths, debunking is inevitable, and the late twentieth century began the current trend toward Western realism in which the appearance, duties, personality, and environment of the cowboy are depicted …

Hancock, Elizabeth Ann (Moore), B. 1924 (Sc 906), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 906. New Year’s greeting, designed using family members’ photos, of Elizabeth Ann (Moore) Hancock, Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Constance Mills, Bowling Green, Kentucky, and data about each family member’s 1993 activities. Mrs. Hancock is the daughter of Kentucky author Janice Holt Giles.

Bodies Of Debt: Interrogating The Costs Of Technological Progress, Scientific Advancement, And Social Conquests Through Dystopian Literature, Melissa R. Ames

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

This essay discusses the successes and challenges of teaching a particular cross-curricular course that focused on controversial issues appearing in scientific research and dystopian literature. The course studied narratives that wrestle with ethical concerns surrounding “progress” (societal achievements, technological advancement, scientific discoveries, and so forth). Contemporary debates and specific issues addressed throughout this course included cloning, stem cell research, black market organ transplants, human trafficking, surveillance technology, euthanasia, and capital punishment. In alignment with research concerning best practices in teaching social responsibility topics, this course was centered on a set of inquiry questions that stretched across all units, texts, and …

Wallpaper Mania, Ellen Corrigan

Faculty & Staff Research & Creative Activity

Text panels from "Wallpaper Mania," a local exhibit in support of the Booth Library installation of the National Library of Medicine traveling exhibition The Literature of Prescription: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and "The Yellow Wall-Paper," on display September 23-November 2, 2013.

The Limits Of Violence: People And Property In Edward Abbey's "Monkeywrenching" Novels, David Thomas Sumner

Faculty Publications

This paper explores Edward Abbey’s fiction asking what kind of ethical imperative his monkeywrenching novels offer. While advocating the destruction of property in defense of wilderness, The Monkey Wrench Gang draws a clear ethical distinction between the destruction of property in defense of wilderness and the harming of people. Yet the sequel, Hayduke Lives!, blurs this ethical line when a security guard is killed during the novel’s final eco-sabotage scene. After exploring several possible textual explanations for this apparent change and then interviewing several of Abbey’s close friends regarding this issue, the author concludes that the shift does not …

A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction And The Language Of Photography, 1939–1945 By Stuart Burrows (Review), Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Stuart Burrows's book makes a strangely familiar claim. Its premise traces an arc in literary history and understandings of vision and epistemology that we think we know but which, in Burrows' hands, in fact turns toward a different idea about American prose realism than one with which we're familiar (that is, that writers responded to the daguerreotype by emulating its representational fidelity). Realist writers like Hawthorne, Stephen Crane, and the early James, Burrows shows, were hardly naïve about the changes in perception wrought by a then-new technology of vision like photography. For their realism is not a version of fiction …

Isabel Archer's "Delicious Pain": Charting Lacanian Desire In The Portrait Of A Lady, Phyllis E. Vanslyck

Publications and Research

This essay offers a reading of Henry James's Portrait of a Lady that examines Isabel Archer's choices through a Lacanian lens. This reading traces Isabel's consistent turning away from, even against, the very postulates she claims to live by. Isabel’s discovery of love through the ideal image of herself she finds mirrored in Gilbert Osmond’s gaze leads to a reversal of her most noble impulses. Her choice of a suitor also points to something that would seem the opposite of desire, but which is, in fact, its foundation. In choosing Gilbert Osmond, Isabel seeks to experience, however unconsciously, what Jacques …

Gothic Slumming: Realist Writers And Gothic Texts In Progressive Era America, Gillian Nelson Bauer

Dissertations

During the Progressive Era, American realist and naturalist writers frequently employed the gothic mode. In contrast with critics who contend that the gothic is a subversive or disruptive mode, I suggest that the relationship between realism and the gothic is one of collaboration rather than conflict. These modally mixed works, which I refer to as gothic realism, express class anxieties that arose during this period, concerns that resulted from the rapid urbanization, immigration, increased cross-class interaction, and economic precariousness that mark the latter end of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth centuries. Following Teresa Goddu, I consider …

Zora Neale Hurston As Womanist, Cheryl Hopson

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Zora Neale Hurston is today recognized as an American and African American literary great. What Hurston has come to mean for black women writers such as Alice Walker can be gleaned from an assertion made by Walker in her canonical essay, “Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and Partisan View” (1979), included in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Walker writes, “I became aware of my need of Zora Neale Hurston’s work some time before I knew her work existed” (83). Alice Walker is greatly responsible for the resurgence of interest in, and the creative and critical reassessment of, …

Review Of Digital Detroit: Rhetoric And Space In The Age Of The Network, Timothy Barney

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In 1971, rogue Wayne State geographer William Bunge (placed on a federal list of dangerous intellectuals) published Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution, a radical polemic about how everyday citizens of a Detroit ghetto could challenge oppression and become geographers of their own neighborhoods. Forty years later, Jeff Rice (formerly a Wayne State professor himself) revisits Detroit geography, but this time largely from his laptop (and without, I hope, the same kind of federal harassment). For while Bunge’s Fitzgerald and Jeff Rice’s Digital Detroit share similar terrain, as well as a love for the city in all its contradictions, …

Speaking Silence Fluently: Encouraging Student Understanding Of Counterhegemonic Strategies In African American Literature, Kathleen S. Decker

Masters Theses

This thesis suggests that while mainstream multicultural education claims to promote both diversity and equality, it fails to adequately address, let alone improve, the living conditions of minority students. It further suggests that when teachers help students read through the lenses of critical multiculturalism and critical whiteness studies, students can better see that both canonical and non-canonical African American authors deliberately employ nuanced strategies to resist white supremacy. Specifically through the use of purposeful and discreet silences, these authors serve to promote new and actively counterhegemonic ways of thinking in the classroom.

Each chapter pairs two texts--one canonical and one …

Narratives Of Southern Contact Zones: Mobility And The Literary Imagination Of Zora Neale Hurston And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Kyoko Shoji Hearn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the literary works of the two Southern women writers, Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, based on the cultural contexts of the 1930s and the 1940s. It discusses how the two writers' works are in dialogue with each other, and with the particular historical period in which the South had gone through many social, economical, and cultural changes. Hurston and Rawlings, who became friends with each other beyond their racial background in the segregated South, shared physical and social mobility and the interest in the Southern folk cultures. They wrote fiction about the region and its …

Injurious Benevolence : How Washington Irving's "The Sketchbook" And "A Tour On The Prairies" Illuminates Nineteenth Century Us-Indian Policy, Ashley Tanzillo

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The most common narratives of encounters with the indigenous race are from the early colonial period of American history. Indian relations were central to the struggle of early American settlers to tame the American wilderness and flourish as colonies under the Crown. After the Revolution, however, it seems that the Indian position in history has been thought of as a side story to the main event of American Independence. In this thesis I explore an alternate perspective, a reading of history which promotes the idea that after the American Revolution, the fate of the new nation was irrevocably defined by …

Trans-Relational Poetics And Outsider American Modernist And Postmodernist Poetry, Anna Elena Eyre

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation is concerned with how language mediates the relationship between self and other, and in particular, mythopoetic language. The political potential of myth has long been condemned, so much so that the word "myth" is now synonymous with "false." I argue that this is a result of what I term as heroic mythopoesis wherein the relationship between self and other is predicated on a violent separation that reinforces conceptions of identity. In contrast, in what I term as trans-relational mythopoesis this relationship is contingent on an embodied exposure between self and other that reciprocally translates and transforms conceptions of …

The Subject As Subjective : Benjamin Franklin's Biographers, Alex Starr-Baier

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This Thesis is a case study in biographical subjectivity. We are taught in primary school to trust biographies, as they are meant to objective. However, the truth is each biographer brings with them their own bias, and thus leaves with their own perception of their subject. I chose to focus on Benjamin Franklin because a good example of this phenomenon. Franklin's fascinating and full life brings with it a treasure trove of biographical speculation. Each Biographer, in constructing their own version of Franklin, manipulates the facts of Franklin's life. I traced Franklin's biographical legacy through time, from the 1800's to …

Literary Know-How : Restructuring Creative Writing And Literary Studies, Jonas Casey-Williams

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The emerging field of creative writing studies has provided new conceptions of creative writing's role within the English discipline. These conceptions focus on the relation of creative writing to composition studies, and there remains a need to reconsider creative writing's relation to literary studies.

Faulkner And "The Football", Jason Joseph Zerbe

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will examine William Faulkner's career-long engagement with popular discourses surrounding collegiate football, and American sports more generally. Although Faulkner is often vieas a paragon of American high modernism, his development as a fiction writer during the "Gold Age of Sports" which spanned the 1920s fostered an attentiveness to popular sports writing that had a marked influence on several of his novels. More importantly, as much of writing about college football began to center on the South after the Southeastern Conference became the first collegiate organization to offer open athletic subsidies in 1935, Faulkner's concern with the sport becomes …

Re-Imagining America: Twenty-First Century Disaster And Salvation In Contemporary Fiction, Mary Ellen Gray

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores four contemporary novels set in the American South and analyzes the understandings of American pasts, perceptions of current social and political crises, and projections of possible future paths they contain. Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones tell stories of disasters the natures of which reflect prominent anxieties concerning the twenty-first century position of the United States as a global power. The total destruction leaving behind an unrecognizable nation that McCarthy imagines in his post-apocalyptic novel suggests the viewpoint that the degree to which the U.S. is indicted in the use of unethical practices …

Matrices Of Disorder: Class, Race, And The Policing Of Normative Southern Femininity In William Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, And Requiem For A Nun, Claire B. Mischker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this project, I apply Judith Butler's late twentieth century theory of gender performance, outlined in her book Gender Trouble , to three major novels from William Faulkner's early career, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Sanctuary, and to one novel from his later period, Requiem for a Nun. This project examines the main female characters of these novels: Caddy Compson, Addie and Dewey Dell Bundren, Temple Drake, and Nancy Mannigoe, respectively, to reveal how race and class are indelible to the performance of gender in the literature of the early twentieth century South. The focus …

Animals, Maria Alicia Gomez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Animals tells the stories of various characters and their lives within the neighborhood of Shadow and Anima Streets. The novel is structured in fragments that cycle through multiple characters from the local bar owner, to the homeless men roaming the alleys, a horse that befriends and old blind widow, a lion that roams the streets and a woman who slowly turns to stone. The novel treats themes of friendship, isolation, and community.

A New Way Of Living: Bioeconomic Models In Post-Apocalyptic Dystopias, Margaret A. Wells

Theses and Dissertations--English

The objective of this thesis is to explore the relationship between moralities and bioeconomies in post-apocalyptic dystopias from the Victorian era to contemporary Young Adult Fiction. In defining the terms bioeconomy and biopolitics, this works examines the ways in which literature uses food and energy systems to explore morality and immorality in social orders and systems, including capitalism and our modern techno-industrial landscapes. This work examines science fiction portrayals of apocalypses and dystopias, including After London: Or, Wild England and The Hunger Games, as well as their medieval and contextual influences. These works are analyzed in light of genre …

Why Speak Of American Stories As Dreams?, Cara Erdheim

English Faculty Publications

The term "American Dream" conjures literary images of perseverance and promise on the one hand but disillusionment and defeat on the other: Ben Franklin pulling himself up by the bootstraps, Huck Finn "lighting out" for the territories, Gatsby insisting that he can "repeat the past," Willy Loman burying his face in his hands. Whether one accepts it as a reality, punctures it as a myth, or presents it as a nightmare, the American Dream has maintained its powerful presence in scholarly conversations throughout the decades. Traditionally, scholars have referred to classic American Dream texts such as Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1791–1790), …