American Literature Commons^™

Bess Streeter Aldrich, Abigail Ann Martin

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“Nebraska,” wrote Bess Streeter Aldrich, “is only the state of my adoption, but I am sure that I feel all the loyalty for it which the native-born bears . . . while I am not a native Nebraskan, the blood of the midwestern pioneer runs in my veins and I come rightly by my love for the Nebraska pioneer and admiration for the courage and fortitude which he displayed in the early days of the state s history ...” (Introduction to The Rim of the Prairie).

Winston M. Estes, Bob J. Frye

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Winston Estes is a regional writer. His published and unpublished fiction, with few exceptions, focuses on the Southwest—Texas in particular. In November 1973 his fourth book, A Simple Act of Kindness (1973), received the Southwest Fiction Award from the Border Regional Library Association in El Paso. Among his hundreds of unpublished letters is one of 21 September 1970 to P.G. Wodehouse. After thanking Wodehouse for his kind remarks about Estes's first novel, Another Part of the House (1970), Estes notes that he is about to finish his next book: “It, too, has a Texas setting. I’ve spent years trying to …

A New Reading Of Ruth Suckow, Judith Pierson

Masters Theses

By 1950, after three decades of writing, Ruth Suckow (1892-1960) was a well-respected writer whose work seemed headed for a permanent position in the canon of American literature. Instead, Suckow's fiction steadily became less known through the following decades. The question of why her work came to be ignored and why such a position is unwarranted is addressed in A New Reading of Ruth Suckow. The conclusion is that a regionalist categorization and a related gender bias in the literary canon have adversely affected Suckow's works.

Gender bias is reflected in the critical assumptions which ascribe an inferior position to …

A Woman's Quest For Happiness: O'Neill's "Private Myth", Andrea Ximena CampañA Garcia

Masters Theses

Following the approach used by James Hurt in his book Catiline's Dream to determine Henrik Ibsen's "private myth" which he retold in play after play, I have delineated O'Neill's "private myth" in a narrower way concentrating on his female characters. Examining parallel motifs in the lives of the dominant women in Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, and Mourning Becomes Electra, I have detected this mythic pattern involving the O'Neillian woman: She goes through an early innocent and submissive state guided by an initial vision of happiness which can be regarded as fairly conventional. But when her …

Inside The American Stratification System: Imageries From The Black Writers, Clinton M. Jean

Trotter Review

The following paper was given at a seminar, "Teaching African-American Literature," at the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies of Harvard University in April 1991. The paper addresses several questions. If social science, as a matter of scientific principle, must choose to avoid ethical conclusions, do black novelists, poets, and essayists help fill the ethical void? But then, are they objective enough?

"He's Long Gone": The Theme Of Escape In Black Folklore And Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Throughout their experiences in this country, certain segments of the Black population have viewed themselves as enslaved, whether they were chattel owned by slaveowners prior to emancipation, whether they were impressed into peonage and forced to work on white plantations and in chain gangs after slavery, whether they were victims of sharecropping systems that virtually reenslaved them during the twentieth century, whether they were the repressed and disfranchised and persecuted in Southern Jim Crow towns throughout the first half of the twentieth century, whether they are those trapped by unemployment and poverty today, or whether they are among the Blacks …

Marianne Moore: Facets Of The Crystal, Mary Virginia Katzeff

Masters Theses

Marianne Mooore's poetry embodies two different types of work. As well as the objective poetry that her contemporaries called modernist or Imagist (labels which she rejected), she also wrote quite personal, subjective poems. Two factors, theme and subject matter, unify her work and give evidence of her distinct poetic voice.

The content and form of Moore's work developed from her personal life and interests. In her childhood, loss of a beloved grandfather and changes of household, as well as a lifelong attachment to her mother, affected the poet deeply, as evidenced by her consistent theme of protection. Exotic animals populate …

Vol. 11, No. 4 (1991), William Boozer

Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review

No abstract provided.

Professing American Literature: A Report From Brazil, Arnold Gordenstein

New England Journal of Public Policy

This American professor discovered that although his Brazilian students appeared to be entirely receptive to American literature, they were often culturally blocked from the concepts the books contained. He also found that some key American ideas don't translate well into Brazilian culture and that it is nearly impossible for a professor abroad to present literature in a politically and culturally neutral way.

Representative Men, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

"Representativeness" is the theme of Shaun O'Connell's essay, "Representative Men." Reviewing six books, one about an actual man and five about fictional men, O'Connell sees them as attempts to define "representative men" of the 1980s, "an era," he observes, "when the worst were full of passionate intensities, particularly among men." Each antiheroic man in these books, he concludes, was "selfish, domineering, dangerous to women, and deceitful, yet each man was also committed to a system of values and ideas that made him an interesting case history — values which, in some instances, redeemed his failings."

As usual, O'Connell, in his …

Vol. 11, No. 3 (1991), John N. Duvall, Gregory Sendi, John Ruemmler, Allen D. Boyer

Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

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

Articles:

The Horror Fiction of Robert E. Howard, by Steven R. Trout

Solomon and Sorcery, by Michael Kellar

The Old Deserted House: Images of the South in Howard’s Fiction, by Rusty Burke

“Come Back to Valusia Ag’in, Kull Honey!”: Robert E. Howard and Mainstream American Literature, by Marc A. Cerasini

On Howadian Fairyland, by Don Herron

Cultural Trends in Literature, by Thomas R. Reid

Barbarian Aftermath, by Don Herron

A Voice from the Past, by Paul Spencer

The Expurgated Solomon Kane, by Vernon M. Clark & Steven R. Trout

The Robert E. Howard Home, by Rusty Burke

Short Story:

“Bill …

The Parties Quarrae, Michael E. Malone

Institute for the Humanities Theses

During Thomas Jefferson's educational days in Williamsburg, Virginia, he was fortunate to have the association with three learned men, William Small, George Wythe, and Lt. Governor Francis Fauquier. The men met often at the governor's palace during the years 1760-64. Jefferson referred to their association as the "parties quarrae."

Most historians agree that the time spent with Small, Wythe, and Fauquier had profound influence on the establishment of Jefferson's "enlightenment" philosophy. Little, however, is known about the details of the regular meetings in the palace.

The focus of this creative project is the fictional discovery of Jefferson's "lost" Autobiography, finished …

Vol. 11, No. 2 (1991), Arthur F. Kinney

Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review

No abstract provided.

Mothers And Daughters: A Study Of Edith Wharton, Patricia K. Waller

English Theses & Dissertations

Whether due to her own mother's coldness, or to the fact that she herself did not have children, or to some other factor or combination of factors, Edith Wharton seemed unable to envision a warm, satisfying mother-daughter relationship. The mothers in her fiction are often detached and/or absent, and the daughters suffer from the faulty or nonexistent relationships with their mothers. The "motherless" daughters--Lily Bart, Mattie Silver, and Charity Royall--never achieve adulthood in any real sense. They lack autonomy and remain dependent on others. Other daughters--Nona Manford and Judith Wheater--must take over the parental role when their mothers fail to …

A Record Of The Present Moment: A Comparison Of The Early And Later Narrative Work Of Gertrude Stein, Elisa Stuber Cohen

English Theses & Dissertations

Gertrude Stein began and ended her literary career with the narrative, a mode of discourse which she reworked and altered to fit her vision of twentieth-century reality. In her early work with the narrative (Three Lives and The Making of Americans), she reevaluated traditional techniques of plot, theme, and character and began to emphasize the textual surface over referential meaning. But feeling restricted by the narrative, Stein left it behind in search of the value of the individual word, which she thought was lost in nineteenth-century rhetoric. For the next twenty-five years, she concentrated on poetry, plays, and …

Baldwin’S “Sonny’S Blues”: The Scapegoat Metaphor, Patricia R. Robertson

Studies in English, New Series

No abstract provided.

Vol. 11, No. 1 (1991), William Boozer, Evans Harrington

Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review

No abstract provided.

Of Time And The River: Critics And Reviewers, John E. Bassett

Studies in English, New Series

No abstract provided.

The Irving Influence In The Snopes Trilogy, Clyde Wade

Studies in English, New Series

No abstract provided.

My Size Felt Small, Pat Gardner

Studies in English, New Series

No abstract provided.

From The Wasteland To East Egg: Houses In The Great Gatsby, Hilton Anderson

Studies in English, New Series

No abstract provided.

A Birder’S Re-Reading Of Poe’S “Romance”, Audrey Lavin

Studies in English, New Series

No abstract provided.

James Kirke Paulding And The Picturesque Tour: “Banqueting On The Picturesque” In The 1820s And ’30s, Beth L. Lueck

Studies in English, New Series

No abstract provided.

Virginia Frazer Boyle: An Annotated Bibliography, Melissa Yow

Studies in English, New Series

No abstract provided.

More Analogues And Resources For Poe’S Fiction And Poems, J. Lasley Dameron

Studies in English, New Series

No abstract provided.

Kate Chopin’S Fiction: Order And Disorder In A Stratified Society, Pearl L. Brown

Studies in English, New Series

No abstract provided.

Lawerence Clark Powell, Gerald Haslam

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Passion is the trait that most marks the varied careers of Lawrence Clark Powell. Not blind passion, of course, but as innovative librarian, as educator, as scholar, as critic, and as novelist, he has proceeded with an ardor that stands out: this son of the Southwest cares. Little is merely perfunctory or abstract in Powell’s work.

Debate, Social Criticism And Rhetoric In The Left Hand Of Darkness: An Analysis Of Strategy, Ellen Irene Elfstrom

Theses Digitization Project

No abstract provided.

The Framing Of Charles W. Chesnutt: Practical Deconstruction In The Afro-American Tradition, Craig Werner

Studies in English, New Series

No abstract provided.