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Articles 1891 - 1920 of 3915

Full-Text Articles in American Literature

“Always The Truth, And Always The Lie”: Language As Symbol In Brother To Dragons, Allison Vanouse Jan 2012

“Always The Truth, And Always The Lie”: Language As Symbol In Brother To Dragons, Allison Vanouse

Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren, in an introductory note to Brother to Dragons, writes that the poem is not ruled by action, but by its characters’ “inner urgencies ... the urgencies of argument.” He seems to be addressing something about the agency of language. In addressing the intoxicating puissance of argument itself, Warren activates a strange and uneasy space between words and the truths they try to describe. It is by navigating this space that he draws parallels between the voice of Thomas Jefferson — struggling with the unfulfilled legacy of his political writings — and the troubled role of the poet …


Notes On Contributors (Volume 9), Robert Penn Warren Studies Jan 2012

Notes On Contributors (Volume 9), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.


About The Center (Volume 9), Robert Penn Warren Studies Jan 2012

About The Center (Volume 9), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.


"Thrown On Their Own Resources": Collaboration As Survival In Imitation Of Life, Kristi Branham Jan 2012

"Thrown On Their Own Resources": Collaboration As Survival In Imitation Of Life, Kristi Branham

Gender & Women's Studies Faculty Publications

The article presents an analysis of the film adaptation of "Imitation of Life," a 1933 novel by Fannie Hurst. It states that the repetition of the story across the first half of the twentieth century shows its resonance for U.S. audiences. It mentions that the woman question and the race question are brought together in the passing story in both the 1934 and 1959 film versions of the novel.


Reintegrating Human And Nature: Modern Sentimental Ecology In Rachel Carson And Barbara Kingsolver, Richard M. Magee Jan 2012

Reintegrating Human And Nature: Modern Sentimental Ecology In Rachel Carson And Barbara Kingsolver, Richard M. Magee

English Faculty Publications

Rachel Carson and Barbara Kingsolver were both trained as scientists and may be expected to embrace the rationalist, mechanical view of nature as something separate from, and perhaps even inferior to, the world of humans. Yet these two women both promoted a more complex approach to modernism's scientific paradigm in which nature is not merely a separate entity for dispassionate study but also an integral part of the human community. Both women display in their rhetorical choices a keen understanding of the language of community and interconnection, and their language and writing styles constantly promote the reintegration of humans and …


Another World Entire: The Posthumanism Of Cormac Mccarthy, Margaret Henson Pless Jan 2012

Another World Entire: The Posthumanism Of Cormac Mccarthy, Margaret Henson Pless

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cormac McCarthy's novels are thought experiments in what it might mean to write posthuman works of fiction. In a close reading of three of his novels, Child of God, The Crossing, and The Road , this project reveals how McCarthy's stories paradoxically unravel the dangerous human desire to make of our world a story. His characters, Lester Ballard, Billy Parham, and the boy, become posthuman as they live increasingly outside of narrative. Their existences extend beyond the page, in a radical intimacy with the world, evident in the haunting and elusive presences, and absences, of wolves, hawks, trout, and even …


After A Funeral, Before A Test; And Other Stories, David Stewart Robinson Jan 2012

After A Funeral, Before A Test; And Other Stories, David Stewart Robinson

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

After a Funeral, Before a Test; and Other Stories is a collection of nine fictional short stories. Their focus is diverse in regard to multiple aspects of creative fiction: subject matter, theme, style, setting and characters. Despite the array of material, one common method was to provide narration that would invite readers to make their own interpretation rather than to present overt, didactic stories. This narrative strategy was accomplished by using fictional concepts of setting, the objective correlative, and literary minimalism. Other elements include surrealism, Hemingway’s “iceberg effect,” and psychologically complex narrators. Literary influences include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great …


Silence And Self-Making: Black Lung Rhetoric And The Ken Hechler Letters, Jennifer De Pompei Jan 2012

Silence And Self-Making: Black Lung Rhetoric And The Ken Hechler Letters, Jennifer De Pompei

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis combines history, rhetoric, and feminist identity studies to discuss the subject of black lung disease and the Appalachian coal miner. The first chapter examines the "evolution of mentalities" in historical and popular discourse surrounding the miner, which reflects James V. Catano's subversive form of the self-making identity in Ragged Dicks. The second chapter uses the feminist theory of silence as a form of control and power to understand the absence of black lung disease from the literature of coal. The final chapter is a case study of the correspondence between Congressional Representative Ken Hechler of West Virginia and …


The Curious Case Of Asa Carter And The Education Of Little Tree, Laura Browder Jan 2012

The Curious Case Of Asa Carter And The Education Of Little Tree, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

Little Tree was number one on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list on October 4, 1991, when historian Dan T. Carter published an op-ed piece in the New York Times that demolished the image of the book’s author, explaining that Forrest Carter was in reality Asa Carter, and he was no Indian. Rather, Dan Carter (no relation) wrote, “Between 1946 and 1973, the Alabama native [Asa Carter] carved out a violent career in Southern politics as a Ku Klux Klan terrorist, right-wing radio announcer, home-grown American fascist and anti-Semite, rabble-rousing demagogue and secret author of the famous 1963 speech …


Lola Ridge : Poet And Renegade Modernist, Anna Hueppauff Jan 2012

Lola Ridge : Poet And Renegade Modernist, Anna Hueppauff

Theses : Honours

This thesis examines the poetry of Lola Ridge as a form of alternative Modernism. Poet, editor, anarchist, Lola Ridge is largely an unknown identity in Modernist discourses. Primarily recognised as a social justice poet, her work has been viewed through a traditional Modernist lens and excluded to the periphery as ‘sentimental’. This thesis argues that Ridge personally and professionally exceeds these categories. She modelled a practice of engagement in her personal life by actively participating in rallies and protests against injustice, and living in poverty in solidarity with the poor, giving her work an authenticity worth investigating. Her poetry provides …


The Black Gum Well, Carolyn Ruth Pennington Jan 2012

The Black Gum Well, Carolyn Ruth Pennington

Online Theses and Dissertations

The writing of the novel as a creative thesis in American literature was a special project approved by the English department of Eastern Kentucky University. Beyond the university's departmental requirements in the course of study for a a Master of English in American literature, I did an independent study of creative writing texts recommended by the creative writing department at Easter Kentucky University. I attended three summer workshops at the Hindman Settlement School Writer's Workshop, Hindman, Kentucky, with classes under professors/authors Robert Morgan, Gurney Norman, Lee Smith and other noted others. My undergraduate study of the English novel and my …


From Periodical To Book In Her Early Career: E. D. E. N. Southworth’S Letters To Abraham Hart, Melissa J. Homestead Jan 2012

From Periodical To Book In Her Early Career: E. D. E. N. Southworth’S Letters To Abraham Hart, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

E.D.E.N. Southworth's correspondence with Henry Peterson of the Saturday Evening Post and Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger, both of whom serialized her novels in their weekly story papers, is sometimes dramatic and emotional. In September 1849 Peterson chided Southworth for a “capital literary error” in an installment of her novel The Deserted Wife, in which the Reverend Withers uses his patriarchal authority to maneuver the young, unwilling Sophie Churchill into marriage. The incident would make readers “thro[w] down the tale in disgust,” he warns, and he omitted it from the serialization. In December 1854 he raised …


Introduction To E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering A Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist, Melissa J. Homestead, Pamela T. Washington Jan 2012

Introduction To E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering A Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist, Melissa J. Homestead, Pamela T. Washington

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In early 1901, Willa Cather visited Prospect Cottage in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., the longtime home of the recently deceased novelist Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevirte (E. D. E. N.) Southworth. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1819 to southern parents (her father from Virginia, her mother from Maryland), Southworth lived in Washington with her family until she married Frederick Hamilton Southworth and moved with him to Wisconsin in 1841. When he deserted her and their two children,' she returned to Washington and taught school to support herself, running to writing to supplement her income from teaching. Within a few …


A Chronological Bibliography Of E. D. E. N. Southworth's Works Privileging Periodical Publication, Melissa J. Homestead, Vicki L. Martin Jan 2012

A Chronological Bibliography Of E. D. E. N. Southworth's Works Privileging Periodical Publication, Melissa J. Homestead, Vicki L. Martin

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Previous attempts at a comprehensive bibliography of E. D. E. N. Southworth's fiction have organized her works alphabetically by book title or chronologically by book publication date. Serialization information--if included at all--is subordinated to book entries or listed separately. These bibliographic conventions better suit authors who published fewer novels than Southworth did and/or did \ not routinely serialize their works. As a result, earlier bibliographies have caused confusion about the size and chronology of Southworth's body of work. Adding to the confusion, her book publisher T. B. Peterson arbitrarily broke many of her novels that appeared in serial form under …


Writing The Self: Feminist Experiment And Cultural Identity, Jill Darling Jan 2012

Writing The Self: Feminist Experiment And Cultural Identity, Jill Darling

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines how twentieth-century experimental women writers construct non/narrative texts whose text-subjects mediate identity and call for increased possibilities for subject-identification in the world. The use of innovative formal strategies and experiment with narrative, combined with the content of identity critique, make these texts political projects that variously explore gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity in relation to contemporary American culture. In this project I bring discussions of identity into the theorization of formally innovative writing. I work to move away from the kinds of essentializing practices of identity politics--in which subjects are fit into specific identity categories--and toward more …


"Last Scientists Of The Whole" : The Poetics And Politics Of Deep Image, Peter Conrad Monaco Jan 2012

"Last Scientists Of The Whole" : The Poetics And Politics Of Deep Image, Peter Conrad Monaco

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Abstract: "Last Scientists of the Whole": The Poetics and Politics of Deep Image


American Modern Aphonic "Virtuality" Beyond Western Metaphysics : Eliot, Stevens, Hughes, And Bishop, Cheol-U Jang Jan 2012

American Modern Aphonic "Virtuality" Beyond Western Metaphysics : Eliot, Stevens, Hughes, And Bishop, Cheol-U Jang

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project examines how a general idea of time is revealed in American modernists' works and why its relationship to the term, "the virtual," prompts a critical revaluation of the literary period of "Modernism." This idea of relating time to virtuality illustrates how American modernists seek an alternative power of the poetic imagination. I explore this through the works of four exemplary American modernists: T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, and Elizabeth Bishop, each of whom makes an attempt to reflect the reality of the rapidly changing modern world by showing us in their works the fleeting nature of …


Terr(Or) Incognito : Unveiling Poe's Titanic Universe, Kraig Harry Odabashian Jan 2012

Terr(Or) Incognito : Unveiling Poe's Titanic Universe, Kraig Harry Odabashian

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This thesis investigates the role of dialectics in Edgar Allan Poe's fiction and prose. With particular attention to "Eureka" (1848), as well as "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1838) and Ligeia (1838/45), I argue that much of Poe's thought relies on theological sources including the writings of Jonathan Edwards and the Gospel of John.


"Only A Girl Like This Can Know What's Happened To You" : Traumatic Subjects In Contemporary American Narratives, Allison Virginia Craig Jan 2012

"Only A Girl Like This Can Know What's Happened To You" : Traumatic Subjects In Contemporary American Narratives, Allison Virginia Craig

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project is primarily concerned with the difficulty of representing traumatic experience and the problem of seeing violence and exploitation as natural and inevitable functions of social life. It argues that texts attempting to expose exploitive hierarchies and structural injustices often risk having their stories subsumed and commodified by the profuseness and proliferation of countervailing messages about individual choice and personal freedom. This struggle is highlighted through historicizing five contemporary American narratives--Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm, the films Boys Don't Cry and Monster, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Linda Hogan's Solar Storms--with and against critical concerns and popular texts. Furthermore, by employing …


Sylvia Plath At Yaddo : A Poet Finds Her Voice, Sarah Elizabeth Morse Jan 2012

Sylvia Plath At Yaddo : A Poet Finds Her Voice, Sarah Elizabeth Morse

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Since Sylvia Plath's death in 1963 critics have not stopped trying to piece together her life and work. Most of their focus lies on her last collection, Ariel, widely considered her best work. This thesis looks at a lesser-known time, before Plath had even published her first book of poetry named "The Colossus." In 1959 Plath spends eleven weeks at a writer's residence in Saratoga Springs, New York called Yaddo. While there she produces some of her most mature work to date, dealing with difficult topics for the first time such as suicide and issues with her deceased father and …


"God, Hieroglyphics" : Extrapolating The Third Dimension In "Go Down, Moses" And "The Crying Of Lot 49", Jacob Alexander Waddy Jan 2012

"God, Hieroglyphics" : Extrapolating The Third Dimension In "Go Down, Moses" And "The Crying Of Lot 49", Jacob Alexander Waddy

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Abstract


Divisions And Mixing In "Go Down, Moses" By William Faulkner, Emiko Dodo Jan 2012

Divisions And Mixing In "Go Down, Moses" By William Faulkner, Emiko Dodo

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This thesis examines the divisions and boundaries made by the mechanisms of separation that authorize a false perception of land, animals, blacks and women as commodities in William Faulkner's "Go Down, Moses." Asserting that "Go Down, Moses" describes mixing as well as divisions, this study demonstrates that the dichotomous boundaries imposed upon nature and humans repeatedly fail to function. Wilderness and plantation land can never be separated as they exist in mixture. And the racial boundary between whites and blacks is destabilized and blurred by characters like Lucas Beauchamp and Tomey's Turl, who engage in resistance against the society whose …


Midnight In A Perfect World, Jaron Serven Jan 2012

Midnight In A Perfect World, Jaron Serven

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

What follows is a collection of short stories dealing with the experience of growing up in America during the Digital Age, written in a creative fictional method. The stories directly deal with the themes of coming to terms with the past, friendship, facing tough choices, maintaining love in an unloving world-overall, expressing the look and feel of what it is like to be young, to see through the eyes of a generation inheriting a world of questionable morals. The collection pulls from numerous resources in the genre of the contemporary American bildungsroman, but also from much literary criticism dealing with …


Mysterious Ways : A Novel, Angela Pneuman Jan 2012

Mysterious Ways : A Novel, Angela Pneuman

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Mysterious Ways: A Novel


Contriving History : Making Dead Time In Select Works Of William Faulkner, Anthony Joseph Delgado Jan 2012

Contriving History : Making Dead Time In Select Works Of William Faulkner, Anthony Joseph Delgado

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The protagonists of three of William Faulkner's major novels, Absalom, Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury, and Go Down, Moses each suffer from a compromised self that originates out of a past that contains excised elements. This revised history, which redacts past sins of rape, murder, and racial mixing, serves as a foundation for the present, passed down to the Faulknerian protagonists, Quentin, Jason, and Isaac, along lines of paternal inheritance. The three novels each suggest that when an idea of the self in the present is founded upon a past that has been rewritten, a shattering occurs when that …


Theologies Of Pain In American Puritanism : The Human Body And Spiritual Conversion From Anne Bradstreet To Jonathan Edwards, Lucas Hardy Jan 2012

Theologies Of Pain In American Puritanism : The Human Body And Spiritual Conversion From Anne Bradstreet To Jonathan Edwards, Lucas Hardy

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation studies the many ways in which physical pain produces instances of personal piety in poems, narratives, and theological tracts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Puritan New England. Specifically, the project revises the idea that spiritual regeneration happened only through Puritan contacts with established liturgical means and precast homiletics; it contends instead that conversion occurred because of bodily pain. Analyzing four canonical Puritan writers--Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards--Theologies of Pain demonstrates that texts of even the most historically mainstream Puritans contend with the disruptive force of pain. Anne Bradstreet sees pain as an …


The Cost Of Kinship: Southern Literary Families And The Capitalist Machine, Joshua Sean Lundy Jan 2012

The Cost Of Kinship: Southern Literary Families And The Capitalist Machine, Joshua Sean Lundy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the thematic role of families and the familial in the literature of the Southern Renaissance. Whereas a number of scholars have come at this matter from a strictly cultural perspective, this analysis utilizes an economic framework. Following the example set by Karl Marx, Freidrich Engels, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, I attempt to formulate an understanding of the southern family not as an independent and singular social organism, but, rather, as a mechanism for the distribution of capital, firmly embedded within modern capitalism's expansive network of production, consumption, and exchange. My argument …


From Country To Country Club: The Landscapes Of Walker Percy, Joyce Garrett Butterworth Jan 2012

From Country To Country Club: The Landscapes Of Walker Percy, Joyce Garrett Butterworth

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When Walker Percy emerged on the literary scene in 1961, the American landscape had begun to transform in new and dramatic ways. As more and more Americans moved from city centers to suburban developments, Percy found that, in more ways than one, the center would not hold. This American cultural transformation was well underway when Percy wrote The Moviegoer, perhaps the first novel from the American South to have as its subject matter a suburban dilemma. Challenging, as Percy does, traditional notions of southern place and community, this thesis seeks to discover in Percy's body of work whether the rise …


Two Trains Running: Capture And Escape In The Racialized Train Cars Of The Jim Crow South, 1893-1930, Raleigh Mixon Robinson Jan 2012

Two Trains Running: Capture And Escape In The Racialized Train Cars Of The Jim Crow South, 1893-1930, Raleigh Mixon Robinson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The role of the railroad in the modern American experience—and its role in making that experience modern—cannot be overstated. This thesis proposes to tell one of many possible railroad stories. By focusing on the historical and cultural relevance of a series of bodies in transit, I examine the implementation of railroad segregation law and the response by African-American performers. The thesis begins at the end of the nineteenth century with the Homer Plessy test case and continues across three decades, meeting along the way novelists Charles Chesnutt and James Weldon Johnson and musicians W. C. Handy, Henry "Ragtime Texas" Thomas, …


The Queen Of The Household: Mothers, Other Mothers, And Female Genealogy On The Plantation In Postslavery Women's Fiction, Correna Catlett Merricks Jan 2012

The Queen Of The Household: Mothers, Other Mothers, And Female Genealogy On The Plantation In Postslavery Women's Fiction, Correna Catlett Merricks

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In many ways, the plantation defined the U.S. South because it was the primary site of production, and therefore income, for prominent southerners. In addition to being a site of production, the plantation created a complex series of connected relationships that was imagined by the plantocracy to be a large family unit. It functioned according to a specific hierarchical model that was primarily based on a patriarchal understanding of genealogy. Yet Kate Chopin's "Désirée's Baby" and "La Belle Zoraïde," Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Julia Peterkin's Scarlet Sister Mary, Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, …