American Literature Commons^™

An Analysis Of The Revisions Of Willa Cather's Two Editions Of The Song Of The Lark, Cherrlyn Eller

Theses Digitization Project

No abstract provided.

“Dream Other Dreams And Better”: Mark Twain’S Developing Narrative Strategies, Martha A. Turner

Studies in English, New Series

No abstract provided.

James W. Gargano, Ed. Critical Reviews On Henry James: The Early Novels. Critical Reviews On Henry James: The Late Novels., Louis J. Budd

Studies in English, New Series

No abstract provided.

Ernest Haycox, Richard W. Etulain

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In the mid-1950s noted journalist and historian Bernard De Voto referred to novelist Ernest Haycox (1899-1950), as “the old pro of horse opera,” the writer who “came closer than anyone else to making good novels” of the popular Western. Haycox, continued De Voto, “left his mark—I should say brand—on the style as well as the content of the Western” (14). In the nearly two generations since Haycox’s death many other commentators on the Old West as well as several writers of Westerns have agreed with De Voto in assigning Ernest Haycox a pivotal role in the development of the fictional …

John C. Van Dyke: The Desert, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

During the late spring of 1898, a strange figure made his way eastward through windy San Gorgonio Pass and disappeared into the thousands of square miles of desert beyond. He didn’t know where he was going, his horse carried only Spartan supplies, and, to top off his prospects, he was seriously ill. The few men who watched him leave civilization shook their heads. Surely he would die out there in the uninhabited, bleak spaces stretching off for hundreds of miles, die of starvation, thirst, snake bite, madness—almost pick what you will. At the time, coastal southern California was booming with …

D'Arcy Mcnickle, James Ruppert

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

A man of many talents, D’Arcy McNickle was noted as a public official, historian, Indian Rights advocate, and novelist. Through his writing and years of tireless public and personal service, McNickle influenced the history of white/Indian interaction, an interaction which was the focus of his energies and intellect. Today many scholars consider him to be the grandfather of Modern Native American Literature and Modern Native American Ethnohistory.

Preservation Of The Family Unit In Adolescent Novels, Mary M. Hutchings

Masters Theses

This thesis discusses the development of the family story from the late nineteenth century to the present, beginning with What Katy Did as an example of the earlier moral story from which this genre grows. It then focuses on Little Women as the beginning of the modern family story and uses Jo from Little Women as the starting point to discuss the development of the female adolescent protagonist in these stories. And lastly, comparing Little Women to modern family life stories which began to appear about 1940, the thesis discusses changes in didacticism which have occurred since the late nineteenth …

The Big One: Literature Discovers Aids, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

Among the works discussed in this essay: An Intimate Desire to Survive, by Bill Becker; Epitaphs for the Plague Dead, by Robert Boucheron; A Cry in the Desert, by Jed A. Bryan; The World Can Break Your Heart, by Daniel Curzon; Safe Sex, by Harvey Fierstein; "The Castro," in Cities on a Hill: A Journey Through Contemporary American Culture, by Frances FitzGerald; As Is, by William M. Hoffman; Plague: A Novel About Healing, by Toby Johnson; The Normal Heart, by Larry Kramer; To All the Girls I've Loved Before: An AIDS …

You Can't Go Home Again: James Baldwin And The South, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

James Baldwin, like innumerable other Black artists, has found that in his efforts to express the plight of the Black man in America, he has been forced to deal over and over again with that inescapable dilemma of the Black American - the lack of sense of a positive self-identity. Time after time in his writings he has shown an awareness of the fact that identity contains, as Erik Erikson so accurately indicates, "a complementarity of past and future both in the individual and in society." Baldwin wrote in "Many Thousands Gone," "We cannot escape our origins, however hard we …

Pilar And Brett: Female Heroes In Hemingway, Jean Kover Chandler

Masters Theses

The significant works on the hero have always assumed that the hero is male. However, feminist writers, such as Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope, have recently shown many women who are, in fact, heroic in both American and British literature. The main problem is that both cultures have often been unable to recognize female heroism, primarily because of their long-conditioned patriarchal perspectives.

Men go on heroic quests; women either help or hinder them along their paths. Thus, women have been considered as supporting characters only, and they are called heroines. But some authors have created female heroes who are not …

Zora Neale Hurston’S Search For Identity In Moses, Man Of The Mountain, Joan E. Sebastian

Masters Theses

Zora Neale Hurston, Afro-American writer of the 1920s and 1930s, has gained critical recognition for her novels and studies about the Afro-American masses. Hurston, also an anthropologist and folklorist, worked directly with southern Afro-Americans through her research in both of these fields. Her folklore collecting journeys enabled her to see and to capture the cultural traditions and oral heritage of Afro-Americans. It was her search into the cultural traditions, moreover, that led her to find her own identity. Hurston, therefore, depicted her protagonists as searching for an identity in most of her novels, with this quest especially apparent in Moses, …

Jean Toomer's Cane: A Work In The American Grotesque Genre, Kathryn M. Olsen

Masters Theses

In my thesis I will discuss the fact that Jean Toomer’s Cane is a grotesque work, one which in several ways resembles Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. While Jean Toomer never specifically alludes to any of the characters in Cane as grotesques, they consistently exhibit three of the strongest, most characteristic elements of the grotesque: physical and/or psychic deformities, alienation from the reader/viewer, and, most importantly, unrelenting conflict from two opposing elements. In fact, the figures in Cane show even more development of grotesque themes than the characters in Winesburg, Ohio, a collection known for its portrayals of modern …

The Miller-Matisse Connection: A Matter Of Aesthetics, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

When Tropic of Cancer was published in Czechoslovakia in 1938, a working drawing from Bonheur de vivre by Henri Matisse appeared on the cover. While the choice of illustration certainly reflects the admiration for Matisse's work that Henry Miller expresses within the novel, Miller's interest in Matisse as an artist also reveals much about the novelist's aesthetics.

San José Studies, Fall 1987, San José State University Foundation

San José Studies, 1980s

Volume 13, Issue 3

Alistair Cooke: A Response To Granville Hicks' I Like America, Kathleen Manwaring

The Courier

Written at the urging of his friend Louis Birk, managing editor of Modern Age Books, I Like America was Granville Hicks' attempt to present to a middle-class audience "the official line of the Communist Party in the Popular Front period". Published when the slogan 'Communism is Twentieth-Century Americanism' identified the interests of the mass of the American population, which was suffering from the Depression and the inadequate response of the New Deal for relief, with the aims of the Party, the book was later described by Hicks as "a venture in propaganda". The Granville Hicks Papers in the George Arents …

Vol. 7, No. 3 (1987), William Boozer, M. Thomas Inge

Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review

No abstract provided.

Vol. 7, No. 4 (1987), Carole Conklin, William Boozer

Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review

No abstract provided.

Commentary: Trotter Review, Vol. 1, Issue 2, Wornie L. Reed

Trotter Review

This issue of the Trotter Institute Review is devoted to the portrayal of blacks in the media. The mass media can be a positive or negative force in the struggle for racial progress. Unfortunately, the black community faces media that provide many negative influences. Consequently, there is a continuing need to address this issue.

The mass media is a major instrument of socialization in the American society. As such, it helps to determine how an individual sees the world. The prevailing definitions of social reality and social problems, as well as the characterization of groups of individuals, are learned through …

In Search Of Lost Cultures: Books 1987, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

Shaun O'Connell reviews a number of books whose focus is the "loss and tenuous preservation" of cultural values. He detects signs of a cultural crisis in which "literature and American life are increasingly detached" and disturbing indications of a loss of "national consensus," of trust, and perhaps of polity itself. Two hundred years after the signing of the Constitution, he writes, in this year of celebration, we learned in minute detail of the Iran-Contra deceits and duplicities, of government by secret White House junta having replaced the rule of law. Most dismaying of all, we did not appear to be …

Christian Morality In J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings, Lari E. Mobley

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

[Abstract not included]

Vol. 7, No. 2 (1987), Beverley E. Smith, Doreen Fowler

Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review

No abstract provided.

Vol. 7, No. 1 (1987), William Boozer, Karl J. Leone

Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review

No abstract provided.

Ua35/11 Student Honors Research Bulletin, Wku Honors Program

WKU Administration Documents

The WKU Student Honors Research Bulletin is dedicated to scholarly involvement and student research. These papers are representative of work done by students from throughout the university.

• Baum, Carole. A Glance at Phenomenology and Its Approach to Literary Criticism, 1987
• Coble, Terrell. Personality Determinants: Research Results and Implications for Intervention, 1987
• Crase, Kim. Recent Developments in Products Liability, 1987
• Flora, Joan. Simms's Frontier Characters, 1987
• Ford, Doug, David Gray and Nick Nauman. Right-to-Work Laws, 1987
• Gray, Michael. Through Pontormo's Eyes, 1987
• Jackson, Jewel. Is Creativity Teachable? 1987
• Logsdon, Doug. James I as King Lear, 1987
• Schneringer, Joseph. Weather Stations in …

City Folks In Hoot Owl Holler: Narrative Strategy In Lee Smith's Oral History, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Over the years American writers have perceived Appalachia differently depending on how America has perceived itself. While those who have approved of the American way of life have looked down on mountain life, those who have disapproved have seen Appalachia as an alternative culture from which America might take a lesson (Appalachia, 65). In 1873 the journalist William Harney and the editors of Lippincott Magazine "discovered" Appalachia, and historian Henry Shapiro argues that since then America has thought of this mountainous portion of eight southern states as a discreet region, "in but not of America" (Appalachia, 4). In …

Lanford Wilson, Mark Busby

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Vincent, the main character in Lanford Wilson’s first Broadway play, The Gingham Dog, explains that he left his small Kentucky town for New York because he was “sick of small peopleambitions—hopes—small hopelessness,” and he thought that New Yorkers “could comprehend something outside themselves, respond.” It was perhaps a similar attraction that brought Lanford Wilson from a small farm near Ozark, Missouri, to the bright lights of the Great White Way, but just as Vincent eventually discovers, Wilson learned that continuing connections with one’s region remain. He also knows that coming home is not always wrapped in comfortable nostalgia. Nonetheless, …

Helen Hunt Jackson, Rosemary Whitaker

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Amherst, Massachusetts, is noted as the birthplace of Emily Dickinson, universally recognized as one of America’s finest poets. Yet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Amherst was better known as the birthplace of Helen Hunt Jackson, who had been a childhood friend of Emily Dickinson’s and had become a prominent writer while Dickinson remained in obscurity. Emily and Helen were two of the “Amherst girls,” an unusual group of offspring of Amherst College faculty, administrators, and trustees. One of the group, Emily Fowler, who acquired some brief notice as an author, wrote about her youth, “There was a …

Ole Edvart Rølvaag, Ann Moseley

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Like the Norwegian folk hero the Ash Lad whom he was so fond of writing about, Ole Edvart Rølvaag's life and works can be seen as a search for the truth about himself and his world—both the Norwegian world whence he came and the American world to which he came. Combining realism with myth, Rølvaag explores the physical, psychological, and moral effects of Midwestern life on the immigrant pioneer as well as the rich mythic background that supports and universalizes the characters, structures, and themes of his fiction. In his analysis of the tension between Norwegian cultural traditions and the …

Reel Blacks: Everything Is Not Satisfactual, Patricia A. Turner

Trotter Review

An unaccompanied black adult female at a matinee performance of Song of the South is about as out of place as Big Bird at a cockfight. However, having encouraged the students in my course on black media images to see the film during its fortieth anniversary run, I felt obligated to reexamine it myself. So there I sat, surrounded by exuberant white pre-schoolers and their parents, watching as animation and live action seamlessly interchanged on the screen in Walt Disney’s adaptation for Joel Chandler Harris’ classic collection of Afro-American folktales.

Place, Perception, And Identity In The Awakening, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

A charming house on a fashionable street in New Orleans, with furnishings "after the conventional type" and a yard kept "scrupulously neat" (931). An island paradise where the gulf melts "hazily into the blue of the horizon" (882) and acres of yellow chamomile reach out to plantations fragrant with lemon and orange trees. These two settings, which Kate Chopin uses in The Awakening, reflect two different ways of life. The first is structured and refined, the second is more natural. Life in New Orleans is lived according to a "programme" (932). Every Tuesday afternoon Edna Pontellier receives female callers, and …

John Gardner And The Morality Of Choice, James C. Schaap

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.