American Literature Commons^™

The Textual Gutter: How Gene Luen Yang Redefines The Gutter In Boxers & Saints To Tell A Transnational Tale, David Lucas Jr

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This paper attempts to provide a new understanding of the gutter and how it is used to significant effect in Gene Luen Yang's, Boxers & Saints. This research draws upon the work of Scott McCloud to establish a framework for the theoretical applications of the gutter. Most prior research focuses on the gutter within the page. This article demonstrates how Yang pushes the concept of the gutter further by creating a new type of gutter that moves beyond the pages and across texts. Then the research attempts to demonstrate how the idea of the textual gutter heightens the transnational elements …

A Companion To The Works Of Elizabeth Strout, Katherine Montwieler

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Including an exclusive interview with bestselling American novelist Elizabeth Strout, this groundbreaking study will engage literature scholars and general readers alike.

Written in accessible language, this book is the first to offer a sustained analysis of Elizabeth Strout’s work. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the O. Henry Award, among other accolades, Strout has achieved a vast popular following as well. Amy and Isabelle was made into a television movie; Olive Kitteridge, which sold more than one million copies, was adapted as a miniseries; The Burgess Boys has been optioned for HBO; and My Name Is Lucy Barton was …

Reseña De Mundos Y Seres Poshumanos En La Literatura Contemporánea. Estudio Comparado De Kafka, Borges, Santa Cruz, Delillo Y Bellatin, De Sophie Dorothee Voo Werder. Medellín: Editorial Universidad De Antioquia, 2020, Luz Gabriela Hernández

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

Reseña de Mundos y seres poshumanos en la literatura contemporánea. Estudio comparado de Kafka, Borges, Santa Cruz, Delillo y Bellatin, escrito por Sophie Dorothee voo Werder y publicado en Medellín por la editorial Universidad de Antioquia en 2020.

Introduction: How American Literature Understands Poverty, Clare E. Callahan, Joseph Entin, Irvin Hunt, Kinohi Nishikawa

English Faculty Publications

Together, the essays in this issue of American Literature stage what is at stake in how literature understands poverty, elucidating not only the problem of poverty but also, and especially, the problem of how we see it. To see poverty differently, they might conclude, is not only a matter of what we see. It is a matter of reflecting on how we see.

Novel Epidemics: Contagion And Metaphor In Us Literature, Maxwell Clement Cassity

Dissertations - ALL

Metaphors of epidemic and contagion have played a powerful role in shaping American identity by using disease to symbolically mark out certain raced and classed populations as outsiders to the social body. In the twentieth century, epidemics and epidemiological reading came to dominate not only the fields of science, but also literary and cultural production and its critical lenses. “Novel Epidemics” examines how American novelists William Faulkner, Ishmael Reed, and Helena María Viramontes used epidemic as a fictional framework for examining and critiquing the ways that the US social body was imagined, constructed, and reinforced through an epidemiological lens. Using …

American Literatures Prior To 1865, Scott D. Peterson

Open Educational Resources Collection

This work was created as part of the University Libraries’ Open Educational Resources Initiative at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.

A web version of this text can be found at https://umsystem.pressbooks.pub/alpt1865/.

This anthology of American Literatures Prior to 1865, is organized chronologically into four units, focusing on Colonial Literature, Literature of Native American Perspectives and Discovery, Literature of Nineteenth Century Reform, and Literature of the New Nation. It includes introductions to the many authors included to enhance the reader's contextual understanding of the chosen texts. This anthology is essential reading for any student or scholar of Early American literature.

The Child In The Basement: Debilitating Mechanisms In American Science Fiction, Tessa Swehla

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project examines the tension between progressive narratives about the future that often frame disability as a medical condition with no place in the future and deliberate debilitation of certain populations for the sake of commodification. These two ideas would seem in conflict with one another, but together, they form a strategy of control. Using the interconnected discourses of medicine and US science fiction, this project synthesizes ideas from debility and disability theory, posthuman studies, medical humanities, and computer science and programming to demonstrate how these two ideas coexist. Each section includes an interchapter that introduces the key idea and …

Bildung And Flânerie: Aesthetics, Genre, And Modes Of Development In The Moviegoer, Sean P. Phillips

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis frames Walker Percy's The Moviegoer (1961) as a novel that pits the fading tradition of the Bildungsroman, aligned with what its protagonist calls the "vertical" throughout the text, against the supposed alternative of "the search", aligned with horizontal wandering. As the vast changes of modernity, namely technology and industrialization, transformed Western society throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, many novelists began to see the Bildungsideal as incompatible with their new world. Walker Percy's novel begins with a similar conclusion, and I track how The Moviegoer engages with the Bildungsideal and its supposed failure to sustain itself into the …

Herstory& Female Identity: Postmodern Feminist Revision Of Female Characters In Islamic Narrative In Mohja Kahf’S Hagar Poems, Aya Elbably

Dentistry

Contending with the re-reading and re-writing of history that has always excluded women from its grand narratives, postmodern feminist writers have always sought to revise canonical texts from a gynocentric perspective. Through their revisionary fiction, they aimed at challenging the subordinate, marginal and invisible position of the women characters in these texts. In place of the alleged objectivity of these accounts, postmodern feminist revisionist writers transform these ancient tales while employing female insight to re-narrate the story of humanity, yet through women’s perspective. Thus, they create new texts to challenge the fundamental gender stereotypes, namely the binary images generated by …

Womanist Poetics: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, And Audre Lorde, Aya Telmissany

Theses and Dissertations

Today, the sentimentality associated with poetry is often condescendingly dubbed in a patriarchal society as “feminine poetry.” The first women poets who dared to attempt the pen were often met with attacks on their femaleness and harsh critiques of their writing which was likened to sorcery and witchcraft. Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Audre Lorde are three American women poets who countered these attacks and turned them inside out in favor of their own womanist poetics. They wrote about experiencing the world as women and most importantly about experiencing poetry as women. What happens to poetry when a woman appropriates …

The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to define the term rememory, which Toni Morrison coins in her novel Beloved, and explore its interplay with water imagery in the novel and in two Nubian short stories, namely Haggag Oddoul’s “The River People” and Yahya Mukhtar’s “The Nile Bride.” The three narratives have core common features: they centralize water bodies as key sites of events, they depend heavily on the retelling of history and mythology, and they are told predominantly from the perspective of women. How do the writers weave rememory, history, and mythology to produce these narratives? Are they attempting to …

Passing Down: Nella Larsen's Questioning Of Eugenic Ideology, Sky R. Mcleod

Anthós

This article looks at Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing and examines how eugenic ideology of the time period are explored and critiqued through the story and characters. The novel follows two light skinned black women who grew up together and are reunited as adults. This reconciliation takes place under the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance where the expectations of New Negro womanhood mix with a growing wave of eugenic thought and practices. In the 1920’s many influential thinkers, including black leaders such as W. E.B. Du Bois, were convinced that the only way to move the human race forward was …

William Carlos Williams’ “The Young Housewife”: A Postcritical Reading Vis‐À‐Vis Shel Silverstein's 'The Giving Tree', Sue Norton

Books/Book Chapters

Using the framework of Rita Felski in her 2015 book The Limits of Critique, this essay offers a postcritical analysis of William Carlos Williams’ 1915 poem “The Young Housewife.” Its intention is to show how Williams’ poem or any poem can be approached through a variety of critical lenses, but that these may get in the way of more immediate, rewarding ways of reading. Shel Silverstein's well-known 1964 short book The Giving Tree is similar at the level of “plot” to “The Young Housewife.” Taken in tandem, these two texts neatly exemplify the value of postcritical/non-resistant reading.

Review Of William Faulkner And Mortality; A Fine Dead Sound, By Ahmed Honeini, Routledge, 2021, Pp. Xi+ 194, $ 96,00 (Hardback), Isbn: 9780367501327., Marietta Kosma

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Book review of William Faulkner and Mortality; A Fine Dead Sound, by Ahmed Honeini, Routledge, 2021, pp. xi+ 194, $ 96,00 (hardback), ISBN: 9780367501327.

A New Politics Of Black Regality: Zora Neale Hurston And Alice Walker’S Monarchical Method, William Martin

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Literary critics conducting a comparative study of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple diligently tend to the relationship between the two women, particularly at an intertextual level. This paper sheds light on an important third member of this relationship: Black women readers. An articulation of Black regality, which involves the incorporation of monarchical symbols and titles in characterizations of Black people, provides these readers with political tools poised to liberate Black women from hegemonic male authority and control. Examining the significance of adornment for the self exclusively to combat invisibility, the power …

Fantasizing A Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels And Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow, Wynter Lastarria

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

“Fantasizing a Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels and Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow” closely reads one novel and one play written in the early twenty-first century and set in the Jim Crow period. Analyzing how Toni Morrison’s novel Love (2005) and Lynn Nottage’s drama By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (2011) take up Jim Crow era Black history together, I find that both works intentionally offer incomplete, subjective and fictive narrations of black life during Jim Crow to deny readers a sense of realism. In doing so, these authors represent a group of African American novelists and playwrights that …

"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, Daniel C. Jacobson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes a reevaluation of the overlooked connections between American popular music and modernist literature’s scope and formal experimentation which arose in the mid-20th century. Because Lou Reed’s ever-changing persona situates his work uncomfortably between high art and pop-culture, modernism and “post-modernity,” literature and music, and ethics and aesthetics, I intend to consider Reed as this dissertation’s empty, refracted center. One that will allow for a critique of several major intellectual movements, both inside and outside the academy, that continue to influence thinking about art, ethics, and material culture. Additionally, I hope to show that the work of a …

Fulfilling The Search For Completeness In Harper Lee’S To Kill A Mockingbird And Delia Owens’ Where The Crawdads Sing, Kyra M. Sica

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) and Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing (2018), set in the 1930s and 1960s, respectively, portray coming of age stories narrated from the points of view of two female protagonists, Scout and Kya. In Mockingbird, Lee conveys Scout’s maturation via a first-person narrative, recounting the events she witnesses between 1933 and 1935 as a linear flashback when she is an adult, whereas Owens conveys maturation in Crawdads, which happens over the course of Kya’s life, from a roving third-person narrative point of view, between 1952 and 2009. Both novels immerse the …

Grotesque Masculinities In The Works Of Harry Crews, Barry Hannah, And Padgett Powell, Matt Brandon Blasi

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“Grotesque Masculinities in the Works of Harry Crews, Barry Hannah, and Padgett Powell” explores how these authors use the grotesque to complicate, distort, and criticize hegemonic white Southern masculinity as represented in contemporary American literature. In “Grotesque Masculinities,” I argue that the presence of the grotesque mode in these author’s works offers a unique critical perspective by which to better understand how masculinity is constructed by and for white Southern men in literature, and how alternative configurations of identity are not only possible, but necessary to decenter whiteness and heteronormativity as dominant categories. Using what sociologists refer to as body-reflexive …

Review Of The Man Who Thought Himself A Woman, Ed Christopher Looby, Carrie D. Shanafelt

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Christopher Looby's anthology of queer nineteenth-century American short stories is a fascinating collection of both obscure and familiar texts that together constitute a powerful argument for the queerness of the short story and for the centrality of queerness to American literary aesthetics.

Mapping The Geographic Imagination In Harriot Stuart And Euphemia At An Hbcu, Leah M. Thomas

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Teaching Charlotte Lennox’s Harriot Stuart (London, 1750) and Euphemia (London, 1790) offers a transatlantic perspective of the New York region and its diverse population of African Americans, Native Americans, and European Americans as understood from a British woman novelist who lived in New York in the 1740s during the time in which both novels are set. In addition to this diversity, her novels demonstrate the conflicts and networks within this part of America, all of which can be explored through historical and geographical contexts of contemporaneous maps. These maps not only engage the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) focus …

The Experience Of White Captives Among The Natives Of The Old Northwest Territory Between 1770 And 1850, Analucia Lugo

The Purdue Historian

In the late 18^th to mid-19^th centuries, hundreds of white settlers were taken captive by Native American groups across the Old Northwest Territory. Reasons for their capture varied from revenge to adoption, however, the treatment they received greatly depended on the captive’s gender. While females were more likely to be kept alive and better-taken care of, males faced a greater probability of facing violence or even death, though torture was common among both groups. Many captives undertook participatory roles within their respective captive communities, with some deciding to assimilate completely into a new way of life. Captivity narratives …

A Pandemic Of Greed And A Disease Of Poverty In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque Of The Red Death", Benjamin Herrick

Master's Theses

The breakers tripped. Again. The breakers, a mandatory halt to trading on the floor of the stock exchange in response to the S&P falling more than 7% from the previous close. This was instituted after the Crash of 1987 to calm the markets before trading is allowed to resume. They are supposed to mitigate a drastic crash. They have only ever triggered once before, in 1997. Not for the tech bubble. Not even in the crash of 2008. All trading stops for fifteen minutes when the Level One breaker trips. If it drops further in the same day, the Level …

F. Scott Fitzgerald’S Homme Épuisé: Usurping The “Madwoman” In Tender Is The Night (1934) [2022], Emma Hill

Master's Theses

Nineteenth-century women writers commonly use themes of entrapment and madness in what are now classified as gothic novels. In texts such as Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, and The Yellow Wallpaper, confinement and madness are synchronous in developing the figure of “the madwoman.” These texts were written during a time when it was uncommon for female writers to seek publication, and many used pseudonyms to get their works published or to be taken seriously by critics. The “madwoman” emerged as a powerful trope to articulate what writing under a patriarchal system feels like. That is to say, confinement scenarios resulting from female …

A Claiming Of Kin: A Linguistic Analysis Of Southern Appalachian English In Melissa Range's Scriptorium: Poems, Jolee White

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The research studies the Southern Appalachian dialect present in five poems in Melissa Range’s Scriptorium: Poems. The linguistic phenomena characteristic of Southern Appalachian English observed and analyzed in the poems include lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects. The research seeks to bring attention to this Appalachian woman writer as well as to bring understanding of her reasoning behind incorporating the dialect in her poetry. It establishes that the five poems by Range contain the lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects of the SAE dialect. It holds meaning both grammatically and pragmatically within the context of the poem and Appalachia.

Sacred Earth: The Role Of The Natural Divine Within Wendell Berry's "Manifesto", T. Greyson Gurley Ma

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Kentuckian writer and poet, Wendell Berry, is often associated with environmental literature and advocacy. However, often overlooked, much of Berry’s work is inherently religious in nature, specifically Christian. Berry’s poetry expresses many of his personal beliefs regarding life, spirituality, religion, interconnection, stewardship, and agriculture. In particular, Berry often uses characters to communicate these aforementioned personal ideas. This practice can be seen through his utilization of the character of the Mad Farmer within a great deal of his poetry, including poetry dedicated to the Mad Farmer himself. Although this character expresses many of the same beliefs as Berry, he is not …

The Unarticulated Unseen: Britt Bennett’S “The Vanishing Half” And Her Intent On Revealing The Unseen In The Tradition Of Racial Passing, Caroline Maas Rue

All Theses

Throughout the trajectory of passing literature, there have been varying projections of racial identity as it is intertwined with choice and power. Despite the many commonalities between the archetypal passing novel, the differences in the way that passing is demarcated in various novels is indicative of the racial climate out of which it came. This paper considers Britt Bennett’s 2020 novel, The Vanishing Half, as a socio-political artifact of an allegedly post-racial era. In considering Bennett’s novel as a reflection of post-raciality, a comparative study incorporating Nella Larsen’s Passing, Douglas Sirk’s Adaptation of Imitation of Life, and Danzy …

American Fears: H.P. Lovecraft And The Paranoid Style, Bailey Marvel

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Why is H.P. Lovecraft still relevant? That is the one the questions put forward by this thesis. Lovecraft is known for his creation of Lovecraftian horror, also known as cosmic horror. However, his bigoted view on race and class muddies this legacy. What this thesis seeks to explore is how Lovecraft’s work demonstrates the fears and anxieties central to the America psyche. The paranoid style can be found in American discourse throughout history but it can also be found in the works of Lovecraft himself. Lovecraft was a prejudiced and paranoid man, and his prejudices and paranoia are a major …

Decolonizing Female Archetypes: Creating An Oppositional Consciousness In Contemporary Chicana And Iraqi Women’S Fiction, Semah Salih Hussein

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In dominant imperialist discourses, women, such as Iraqi women and Chicanas, have been marginalized in political, social and economic structures and have been manipulated to maintain imperialist exploitation and processes. They have been frozen within certain archetypal configurations. Iraqi women have been misrepresented as victims of their culture and traditions, and Chicanas have been represented in derogatory terms or excluded from mainstream hierarchies of representation. This study examines some counternarratives and oppositional subjectivities/ consciousnesses provided by Iraqi and Chicana women writers through their utilization of the legacy of a number of fictional and historical female figures. The primary texts analyzed …

135th Street Branch: Librarianship And The Passing Fictions Of Regina Anderson Andrews And Nella Larsen, Caitlin Matheis

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this thesis, I examine how two writer-librarians that worked in the 135^th Street Branch of the New York Public Library in the 1920's, Regina Anderson Andrews and Nella Larsen, grappled in their fiction writing with questions of classification, information, and knowledge that encompassed their daily work in the library. I begin by contextualizing the branch within the Harlem Renaissance and Arturo A. Schomburg's call for the preservation of Black history and literature at a time when the field of librarianship was being professionalized by implementing library schools and classification standards. I then provide readings of Andrews's one-act play …