American Literature Commons^™

Hancock, Elizabeth Ann (Moore), 1924-2019 (Sc 1900), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 1900. Letters and portions of letters written by author Janice Holt Giles, Knifley, Adair County, Kentucky to her daughter Elizabeth, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Includes references to her family and friends, her daily life, and her writing habits.

Havighurst, Clark Canfield, B. 1933 (Sc 1897), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Senior thesis: "The South and Robert Penn Warren" completed at Princeton University, 1955. Also includes typed comments by Princeton faculty and handwritten comments from Warren scholar Victor H. Strandberg.

Walt Whitman: A Man Of Compassion, Kaitlyn Cyr

Excellence in Research Awards

Although Walt Whitman was such a complex man, I focused on his time in the Civil War which showed what a caring, compassionate man he was and proved that he was more than a poet

Mr. Chipping And Mr. Hundert: Manliness, Media, And The Classical Education, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics & Religious Studies Faculty Publication Series

James Hilton’s genial portrayal of a Latin master in a turn-of-the-century British public school, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, was published as a magazine story in England in 1933, in book form in America a year later; it has inspired two film versions, one in 1939, one in 1969, and a full-length Masterpiece Theatre production for television in 2002. In 1994, Ethan Canin published his short story, “The Palace Thief,” presenting the unique tribulations of an ancient history teacher at an elite Virginia prep school; it was made into the 2002 film, The Emperor’s Club. Both stories are predicated on …

Bewilderment And Illumination: Catch-22 And The Dark Humor Of The 1960s, Kirsten Staaby

Masters Theses

It is often hard to deal with certain subjects in a way that would not be offensive or painful. Dark humor is a popular and powerful way to deal with serious issues in a manner that is both edifying and enjoyable. In his novel Catch-22, Joseph Heller deals with the atrocities of war, and the subsequent effects it has on people and society as a whole. Heller's novel incorporates the dark humor that became popular in the 1960s, and that was used by this generation to deal with the tensions they faced in the political and cultural realms. There is …

Persephone In The River Phlegethon; Or, The Women At Gettysburg, Brenda A. Ayres

Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper identifies the heroic women who participated in the Battle of Gettysburg, both on the homefront and on the battlefield.

Artistic Liberty And Slave Imagery: "Mark Twain's Illustrator," E. W. Kemble, Turns To Harriet Beecher Stowe, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Hamilton, Weston A. - Collector (Sc 118), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans (Click on "additional files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 118. Militia drill meeting notice scheduled in Russellville, Kentucky, 1818; slave bill of sale, Logan County, Kentucky, 1860; a young woman’s letter to a friend, 1875; letter written by Kate Bosher, 1910; and letter written by Cale Young Rice, 1926, regarding biographical data, with a postscript by Alice Hegan Rice.

Ellis, James Tandy, 1868-1942 (Sc 110), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "additional files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 110. Letters, 1897-1939 (16 items), written to James Tandy Ellis, poet, humorist, columnist, and lecturer of Ghent, Kentucky. Also includes Ellis' poems and writings, 1891 (5); printed items; clippings; commissions as Assistant Adjutant and Adjutant General of Kentucky; and miscellaneous items.

Spence, Ruth Potts, 1894-1988 (Sc 1840), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 1840. Letters from Alice Hegan Rice (4), Cale Young Rice (13) and Laban Lacy Rice (1) to Ruth Potts Spence, who met the Rices at Camp Nakanawa in Mayland, Tennessee and maintained a friendship with the couple. The letters discuss writing, current events, family matters, and grief.

Marcilliat, Gene (Fa 354), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid and full-text scan of collection (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project 354. "Books by Lucy Furman: [Folk Elements in Furman's Writings]" collected by Gene Marcilliat for a Western Kentucky University folk studies class.

Cobb, Irvin Shrewsbury, 1876-1944 (Sc 82), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "additional files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 82. Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb's original manuscript of an editorial, "A Leaf From a Memory Book," which appeared in "Kentucky Progress Magazine" (Spring 1933), and two letters concerning the manuscript.

Allison, Young Ewing, Jr., 1890-1965 (Sc 80), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "additional files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 80. Letter written by Young Ewing Allison, Jr., Louisville, Kentucky, to Miss Julia Neal, Auburn, Kentucky, in reply to an inquiry concerning Lucy Furman.

Heaven Overland, Jim Murphy

KSU Press Legacy Project

These poems record, from our own language—spoken on the street in Atlanta or Dayton or Chicago, in the graveyard in Charleston, on the rivers of Ohio or Missouri or Illinois, on the road in Mississippi, or on the radio anywhere in America—momentary beauties, to show us that song, however rare, proceeds from the common tongue. So these poems promise that any speech, that any mouth, might be an occasion for beauty or blessing.

Everywhere in this collection, ears, eyes, minds open to discover new abundance in landscapes thought familiar. These poems discover in America and its history boundless vistas, to …

Location And Landscape In Literary Americanisms: H. L. Davis And F. Scott Fitzgerald, David T. Sumner

Faculty Publications

Well into the twentieth century, western American literature was still dismissed as regional or was boxed in by the genre expectations of pulp Westerns. This chapter focuses less on the causes of an eastern dismissal of western literature and more on what is unique about western literature, including how it reflects the larger western experience. Sumner looks at the particular Americanisms evident in the letters of the American West, using two short stories to make his argument: H. L. Davis’s Open Winter and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Babylon Revisited.

The Genesis Of The Chicago Renaissance: Theodore Dreiser, Langston, Cara E. Erdheim

English Faculty Publications

Book review by Cara Erdheim.

Hricko, Mary. The Genesis of the Chicago Renaissance: Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James T. Farrell. London & New York: Routledge, 2009.

Table Of Contents

The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard & Pulp Studies

Articles:

From the Editor’s Desk (The Dark Man V4n1), by Mark Hall

Reviews of “Braddock: The Rise of the Cinderella Man” by Jim Hague and “Cinderella Man: James Braddock, Max Baer, and the Greatest Upset in Boxing History” by Jeremy Schaap, by Chris Gruber

Review of “Jack London and the Klondike: The Genesis of an American Writer” by Franklin Walker, by Steve Trout

A Comparison of the Ideology of Robert E. Howard’s Conan Tales and J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”, by Ian Nichols

Reviews:

The Lord of Samarcand and Other Adventure Stories of the Old Orient …

Review Of Kate Field: The Many Lives Of A Nineteenth-Century American Journalist And Maria Mitchell And The Sexing Of Science: An Astronomer Among The American Romantics, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Literary historians writing biographies have increasingly shifted from critical biography (the author’s life as a means to interpret his or her literary works) to cultural biography (an author’s life and works in various cultural contexts). As literary historians whose biographical subjects (both nineteenth-century American women) are not primarily literary figures, Bergland and Scharnhorst represent a further step away from critical biography.

As a journalist (and popular lecturer, advocate of reform, playwright, and actress), Kate Field is a more literary figure than astronomer Maria Mitchell, but Scharnhorst has produced neither a critical nor a cultural biography. Instead, he presents a chronological …

Review Of Axes: Willa Cather And William Faulkner And Violence, The Arts, And Willa Cather, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Willa Cather and William Faulkner represent an intriguing and potentially productive pairing for comparative study. Their works and careers are located at the rich intersection between regional ism and modernism, and both early 20th-century writers often looked back to the 19th century in their fiction. Even in the absence of influence or intertextual reference, these commonalities would give a literary historian much to say. However, in her study of these two authors, Merrill Maguire Skaggs exhaustively catalogs similarities and differences as proof of a decades-long competition between the authors at the expense of depth and subtlety in her analysis of …

The Priestly Imagination: Thomas Merton And The Poetics Of Critique, Michael W. Higgins

Mission & Culture Publications

The article looks at the representation of ideals of the poet-priest in the works of Thomas Merton. It provides an analysis of Merton's poetics of critique. For Merton, John the Baptist represents the model anchorite as well as the first Cisterician and the greatest Trappist. The indivisible and comprehensive dimensions of Merton as a whole man are represented by John the Baptist, John of the Cross and John the Beloved. The two types of Merton's poetics of critique are ecclesial/monastic and societal.

Ellen Glasgow: The “'Feminine' Façade” And The “'Masculine' Mind", Ashley Quaye Andrews Lear

Humanities & Communication - Daytona Beach

No abstract provided.

"Ain't You Heard"?: The Jazz Poetry Of Langston Hughes, Kristin Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

It all began with a piano bench. At the age of four, I sat next to my first piano teacher, as she told me the names of the keys. 'This is C, D, E . . . ," she said, her finger touching each key. moving through the entirety of a C-major scale. Afterward she asked, "Now. which one is F?" Though I touched the incorrect key, A instead of F, I remember being fascinated by the realization that I could create music by depressing those keys, making little wooden hammers strike strings in the piano's hidden belly. That fascination …

Review: Late For School, Tracy Walker

Georgia Library Quarterly

Review of the children's book "Late for School," written by Mike Reiss and illustrated by Michael Austin.

Spotlight On Teen Reading

Georgia Library Quarterly

The 2008 nominees for the Georgia Peach Award for Teen Readers.

A Natural History Of The Mind : Edwards, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Michael Edmund Jonik

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project examines how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American writers drew on European natural science and philosophy - specifically in terms of concepts of form, perception, and experience - to open new possibilities for thinking the relationship between the mind and the physical world. In each of the moments of American intellectual history here considered - the natural theology of Calvinism, the idealistic natural history of Transcendentalism, and the movement towards an evolutionary process-philosophy of Pragmatism - "place" becomes not only geographical location, but a dynamic field of interactions of natural historical, literary, theological, and philosophical knowledge. I trace this through …

Quiet Testimony : The Ethical Impulse Of Silence In Emerson, Douglass, Melville, And James, Shari Goldberg

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project proposes that Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville and Henry James invoke silence in order to make evident, if not audible, the oppression of slaves and the absence of the dead. Challenging the opposition between advocacy and quietism that has largely structured scholarship on nineteenth-century American literature, I argue that these writers produce testimony by engaging voicelessness in their texts. In effect, their work revises the idea that testimony consists in a first-person report of past events. Quiet Testimony consequently suggests that, in signal American texts, political claims may not be explicitly argumentative, a testifying subject bears …

The Cultural And Literary Discourse Of War In 20th Century America, Robert Michael Ficociello

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In The Cultural and Literary Discourse of War in 2oth-century America, war is re-examined and re-historicized from an American perspective. First, war is contextualized in relation to urban studies, anthropology and literature. The dominant model, war is an extension of politics, for the analysis of war is decentered, and politics becomes the extension of war. In respect to America since the Revolutionary War, the nation is literally birthed from war, and the nation becomes an extension of that war. The perpetual re-writing of that war is seen through the discourses of history, politics, and literature. Therefore, the Cold War can …

Specular Subjects : Technologies Of Vision In The Transatlantic Novel, 1719-1850, Matthew Henry Pangborn

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Scholars of the long eighteenth century have traced the rise in modern Anglophone culture of an observational, episto-factual standard of truth and value, new techniques of surveillance and disciplinarity, image-based and global networks of consumption and exchange, and a mass culture honing its ostensibly comprehensive power of sight through new media of text and image. While debate has occurred over the origins and meanings of the ascendancy of such an overwhelmingly visual mode of engagement with the world, scholars have tended to examine such topics in isolation, with little attention to the ethical and political consequences of the material practices …

The Willa Cather Archive In The Classroom, Andrew Jewell

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

This essay discusses many of the opportunities for teachers I believe are present in the Willa Cather Archive (http://cather.unl.edu), particularly in the way the Archive makes new materials available or older materials available in a new way. Additionally, this essay suggests some of the implications of the Archive’s digital presentation of resources. However, the place of digital scholarship in academic life is still evolving, and students and teachers are just getting accustomed to using the form. Given this circumstance, many of my thoughts are inconclusive, observations based upon preliminary understandings into how this resource affects our classrooms. I avoid confident …

Female Captivity Narratives In Colonial America, Kathryn O'Hara

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

The female captivity narrative provides a complex view of colonial American history by recounting the experiences of women captured from their colonial homes by Native Americans. Male editors, often family friends or town ministers, generally compiled the experiences of female captives, and separating the voice of the female captive from influence of the male editor presents a challenge. Puritan captivity narratives in particular demonstrate conflict between attempts by Puritan ministers to impose a unified religious message in the sagas and the captives’ individual experiences, which often contradicted Puritan doctrine. During the early colonial era, ministers’ attempts to promote the Puritan …