American Literature Commons^™

Selection From A Corrected Typescript Of Majorie Kinnan Rawlings’ Novel The Yearling, Sarah Virgina Dumitrascu

Showcase of Osprey Advancements in Research and Scholarship (SOARS)

Project of Merit Winner

Digital Projects Showcase Exhibitor Award

With the recent advent of digital word processors, physical representations of editorial practices have largely disappeared while a misconception about writing as an instantaneous or single-draft process has emerged. Compounding this issue is the prominence of literary studies that emphasize the works of renowned authors as products, rather than processes. My digital textual editing project, “A Selection from a Corrected Manuscript of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s novel The Yearling”, seeks to transcribe the manuscript of Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, The Yearling, which is marked with typed and hand-written revisions. Utilizing TEI-XML encoding, my …

Intersections Of Race And Place In Short Fiction By New Orleans Gens De Couleur Libres, Adrienne D. Vivian

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although New Orleans joined the United States following the Louisiana Purchase, the city’s French colonial period continued to influence New Orleanians. The lives and writing of nineteenth century New Orleans gens de couleur libres, free people of color, document continued exchanges with France and the Caribbean despite the city’s increasing Americanization. Drawing from Westphal’s theoretical work on geocriticism, Intersections of Race and Place in Short Fiction by New Orleans Gens de Couleur Libres locates sites of transgressivity and their representations in writers Michel Séligny, Adolphe Duhart, and Victor Séjour’s French language short stories. Chapter One examines New Orleans’s historical and …

Graduate Session: Presentation 1 - A Master At Work In ‘The Purloined Letter", Valerie Davis

Life of the Scholar Multidisciplinary Conference

I explore how critics of Poe's "Purloined Letter," through their rigorous, compartmentalized, and focused examination, tend to miss the simple joy of reading it at face value as a detective story.

Undergraduate Session Iii: Presentation 1 - Disrupting The System: How Harriet Beecher Stowe Used Uncle Tom's Cabin To Challenge Calvinistic Ideals Of Christianity, Michelle P. Lominac

Life of the Scholar Multidisciplinary Conference

Analyzing Harriet Beecher Stowe's methods of challenging traditional Calvinistic beliefs in her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Hanay Geiogamah’S Body Indian And Foghorn As “Plays With A Purpose”, Danica Čerče

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Hanay Geiogamah’s Body Indian and Foghorn as ‘Plays with a Purpose,’” written against the backdrop of critical whiteness studies, Danica Čerče discusses how Geiogamah’s theatrical rhetoric intervenes in the assumptions about whiteness as a static, privilege-granting category and system of dominance. By focusing on various techniques and strategies mobilized to define and affirm Native Americans’ authentic rather than imposed identities, the article shows that humor is one of the prime textual devices in Geiogamah’s plays to renegotiate what Walter Mignolo calls “the racist structure of power.”

Problems With Perceptual And Cognitive Idiosyncrasies In Li Wenjun’S Translation Of The Benjy Section Of Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury, Aaron L. Moore

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Problems with Perceptual and Cognitive Idiosyncrasies in Li Wenjun’s Translation of the Benjy Section of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury,” Aaron Lee Moore conducts a close explication of a 2014 English-Chinese edition of part of The Sound and the Fury. Li Wenjun’s translation of the Benjy section of The Sound and the Fury is certainly admirable in its graceful rendering of Faulkner’s complex, idiosyncratic prose style into accessible Chinese—and particularly laudable in its meticulous tracking of the a-chronological sequence of Benjy’s stream of consciousness narrative. However, problems arise in the translation due to an …

The Language Surrounding Huckleberry Finn’S Jim, Tristan Quinn

Emerging Writers

This article explores how in the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the identity of the character Jim contrasts with African American stereotypes through the language used by the character himself and through the language used by other characters to describe him.

Mental Illness And Femininity In Late Nineteenth-Early Twentieth Century Anglo-American Literature, Bianca Cristina Basone

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis attempts to prove that the diagnosing and treatment of mental illness in Victorian Anglo-American literature was heavily gendered and therefore misogynistic. To do so, four characters will be studied: Lady Audley in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, the unnamed female narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and Septimus Warren Smith in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Using the first three characters I intend to show that women during the nineteenth century were diagnosed as mentally ill because they did not partake in social gender norms, deviating by doing something …

American Mythology: How Storytelling Shapes Modern Cultural Perceptions, Kristin Maynard

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis will examine the American storytelling tradition, paying particular attention to American folktales and legends that arose as the nation expanded westward, such as the stories of Paul Bunyan, John Henry, Billy the Kid, etc. This text will utilize a lens of European narrative tradition (especially those which lent themselves to the written records of oral fairy tales and folktales) and trace the cultural significance and social purpose of these formative American stories. I will discuss the reasons why we so readily recognize the echoes of outside narrative traditions in American storytelling and the ethical implications of these narratives …

Diy Feminisms In The Third Space: Female Rhetorical Techniques Performed In Multi-Generational Alternative Media, Cristen M. Fitzpatrick

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation looks at the creation of both a literal and figurative clubhouse created by women, for women, through alternative publishing endeavors, including pamphlets, zines, and blogs, as women patchworked a “do-it-yourself” (DIY) feminism from the mid-20th century through today. I discuss alternative media utilized by marginalized, radical feminist groups and the application of newly-discovered feminist rhetoric throughout. I begin with an overview of feminist literacy and rhetoric, leading to a discussion of the pamphlets of the Women’s Movement in the 1960s. This sets the stage for the zines of the next generation, the 1980s and 1990s, in which women …

From The Trenches To The Writer’S Desk: Establishing A Collection Of Children’S Books Authored By Military Veterans In An Academic Library, Casey D. Hoeve

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

Kansas State University possesses a collection of juvenile literature to aid Education and English Department programs. KState is also the university with the largest military population in the state. It was discovered that several famous children’s authors were military veterans. Building upon this research, over 160 children’s authors who served in the military were identified. K-State Libraries NEH Endowment Committee funded the curation of a military veteran children’s literature collection, the only known academic library to possess such a collection. The collection enabled the libraries to provide outreach through access to the materials, internet resources, and special collections exhibits.

Animal-Human Vocabulary Builder, Domenick Acocella, Rene Cordero

Open Educational Resources

The assignment helps students individually build a usable, expanding vocabulary of terms and concepts, enabling each to further contribute to the ongoing, evolving written, oral, and visual conversations centered on the use of and thought about animals for food, clothing, work, entertainment, experimentation, imagery, and companionship.

Andrea Revised: Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist As Revolutionary By Martin Duberman, Phyllis Chesler

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Book Review: How To Be An Antiracist By Ibram X. Kendi, Shuntay Tarver

Counseling & Human Services Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Resurrecting An American Archive: A Mid-20th-Century Case Study Of Louise Amory (1892-1979), Barbara A. Marquis

Honors Undergraduate Theses

In 1950, Roger and Louise Amory founded the Johann Fust Community Library in Boca Grande, Florida. After the death of Louise's son John Austin Amory III in 2018, John's son ­– and Roger Amory's namesake – donated a collection of Louise Amory's papers to the Library Foundation. The archive consists of 140 pages, mostly handwritten. Louise wrote most of the material between 1949 and 1954. As Executive Director of the Foundation, I solicited the help of one of our docent volunteers, and we took on the challenge of transcribing her writing.

I was excited to undertake the resurrection of this …

Hemingway Drunk: A Study Of Prohibition, Medico-Legal Rhetoric, And The Autonomy Of Masculinity, Graham P. Studdard

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis uses a combination of medical humanities, queer public theory, and literary analysis to showcase the uniquely American connections between alcoholism and masculinity in the literature of Ernest Hemingway. By situating both Hemingway and his characters within the medico-legal rhetoric of modernism’s famous Parisian Jazz-age, which occurred at the same time as American prohibition, I reveal changes in white American men’s relationships with gender, bodily autonomy, and the patriarchy that are often overlooked due to Hemingway’s publicly constructed masculine persona. My work provides new queer interpretations of The Sun Also Rises (1926) and the posthumous Garden of Eden (1986) …

The Language Of Personas: Poetic Masks In Confessional And Black Arts Poems, Grecia Espinoza

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis considers Confessional poetry and Black Arts poetry against the backdrop of the political and social culture of the 1950s that influenced the styles of these two major poetic movements. I examine Sylvia Plath's and Nikki Giovanni's distinct poetic personas and the language they employ in relation to each other as representatives of confessional and Black Arts poetry, two poetic styles often thought to be inherently opposed to each other, one personal and one political. I identify connections between these seemingly different poets and movements through close readings of key poems by Plath and Giovanni that situates them within …

Teaching Trauma In Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, Kat Shuman

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Using Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, this thesis outlines how to ethically and effectively teach literature that deals with trauma. My personal teaching philosophy as well as the current pedagogy surrounding trauma literature preface a detailed syllabus, lesson plans, assessments, and activities that would be useful in teaching a course centered around literature that deals with trauma. This thesis highlights the merits of teaching trauma fiction in the literature classroom.

"A Past Unremembered: The Transformative Legacy Of The Black Speculative Imagination" Exhibition Catalog, Julian Chambliss, Phillip Cunningham

2020-2021 Afrofuturism Syllabus - Week 20 - "A Past Unremembered: The Transformative Legacy of the Black Speculative Imagination" Exhibit

Exhibition catalog for "A Past Unremembered: The Transformative Legacy of the Black Speculative Imagination," co-curated by Dr. Julian Chambliss and Dr. Phillip Cunningham as part of the annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities. The exhibit locates Afrofuturist thought in earlier eras of American history and focuses on how African American writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries used speculative/science fiction to imagine a better, freer, more equitable future for Black people.

Twentieth-Century Feminine Visionary Poetics : Vulnerable Visions Of Survival And Healing:, Lucyna Prostko

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

H.D. and Denise Levertov, two visionary poets of the twentieth century, represent both female poets’ awakening of political and historical consciousness and their engagement with the poetics of vulnerability and survival. H.D. and Levertov offer lyrical visions that dismantle the binaries of real and unreal, earthly and transcendent, and individual and communal. The subject of this project is visionary imagination and its various reverberations, limitations, and potentialities. What is at stake in feminine visionary twentieth-century poetics is the creation of imaginative worlds, the space of possibility, and the shaping of a lyrical form that encompasses the voices of survival, vulnerability, …

Meeting Places : The Entanglements Of Poetry And Science In The Modern American Imagination, James H. Searle

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

“Meeting Places: The Entanglements of Poetry and Science in the Modern American Imagination” explores how Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Carlos Williams, and Muriel Rukeyser responded to the rise of modern science and industrial technology by reflecting on the similarities and differences between the poetic and scientific imaginations. Across four chapters, I show how the growth of the natural and social sciences from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century spurred these writers to rethink the social and cultural functions of literature in a democratic society. Unlike many of their peers, these figures refused to treat science either as a …

Masculinity And Cold War Fairy Tales: Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, And Ross Macdonald, Susan E. Wood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the use of fairy-tale allusions to explore masculinity in four novels published during the Cold War period. This notable focus on men and masculinity held in common across these four novels from four different decades is interesting because it suggests that the shift in focus to women and feminist ideals in fairy-tale revisions of the 1970s and after is even more stark a shift than has yet been recognized by scholars. This dissertation finds that Eudora Welty’s novella The Robber Bridegroom (1942), Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955), Donald Barthelme’s novel Snow White (1967), and Ross Macdonald’s novel …

‘The Master And The Man Must Change Places For A Season’: Untangling Historical Narratives Of Race And Loyalty In ‘The Spy,’, David N. Gellman

History Faculty publications

No abstract provided.

Wilderness Of Freedom: Slave Narratives, Captivity Narratives, And Genre Transformation In Keckley's Behind The Scenes, Hannah Gautsch

Theses and Dissertations--English

As a modiste well-versed in the social expectations of the domestic world, Elizabeth Keckley crafted an autobiography that would appeal to this wide variety of audiences. Throughout the 1850s, women across the nation negotiated the terms of True Womanhood and identified activism as a space where women could engage with national concerns. At the same time, literary production in the US was increasing exponentially, creating room for literature to be used as a means of social change. Contemporary scholars have devoted much attention to the ways Keckley’s Behind the Scenes combines elements of multiple genres to assure its long-term survival …

Race Youth In Twentieth-Century American Literature And Culture, Claire E. Lenviel

Theses and Dissertations--English

Race Youth in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture argues for the centrality of black youth, both real and literary, to the trajectories of African American literature and its repudiation of white supremacy. Drawing on research into the rise of the adolescent and teenager as distinct social categories, I argue that age-based subjectivity should inform how we read race-based subjectivity. My first chapter explores how early twentieth-century black periodicals push back against white supremacist theories of human development in an explicit appeal to what I call “race youth,” the children and adolescents who would take up the mantle of racial uplift. …

Songs For High Voice: An Annotated Guide To African Romances, Op. 17 By Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Makeda Danielle Hampton

Theses and Dissertations--Music

African Romances, Op. 17, composed in 1897 by African-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), is a collection of seven songs for high voice that is uniquely both African and American. The lyrics of this song cycle were first published in the book Majors and Minors, a collection of poems published in 1895 by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906).

An analysis of resources supports that academic discourse in Black vocal music has been underrepresented due to the absence of centralized information, such as published scores, recorded materials, catalogs, and guides for study and performance. While in depth research focusing on the art …

Gestures Of Dissent: Self-Fashioning Performance From Southern Women Writers During The Fin De Siécle, Elisa Fuhrken

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project explores Southern women writers during the latter half of the nineteenth-century who asserted and crafted a modernized identity by turning to various modes of transgressive performance and performance spaces. For women of the nineteenth-century, this meant extricating themselves from a domestic, sentimental identity and apprehending a more fluid, dynamic type of being. The modes of performance, such as spectatorship, orality, and gesture, allowed these women to express and articulate an alternative feminine identity while also engaging with an embodied epistemology. This thesis looks at three Southern women writers: Sherwood Bonner’s novel Like Unto Like and her travel letters …

Margaret Atwood’S The Testaments As A Dystopian Fairy Tale, Karla-Claudia Csürös

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 23, 2021, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.