American Literature Commons^™

Inappropriate Attire: Fashion, Nationality, And Shame In Quicksand And Pachinko, Minyoung Park

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, Minyoung Park examines how fashion in Quicksand by Nella Larsen and Pachinko by Min Jin Lee functions not simply as a visual strategy for passing but as a site where the wearers’ conflicting feelings—shame, desire, and defiance—emerge and persist. Rather than evaluating the success or failure of passing, the article shifts focus to the process of dressing—selecting, maintaining, and reflecting on clothing—through which identity is negotiated and feelings are embodied. The protagonists, Helga and Sunja, often dismissed as failures, are reconsidered as figures whose attention to their inappropriate or excessive fashion reveals their emotional labor and strenuous …

On Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction And The Reshaping Of The American Canon By Alexander Manshel, Pieter Vermeulen

Criticism

Review of Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon by Alexander Manshel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024. Pp. 352. $140.00 hardcover; $35.00 paperback.

Unveiling Injustices In Theodore Dreiser's “An American Tragedy” And Susan Glaspell's “A Jury Of Her Peers”, Athena Maria Dotsikas

Theses and Dissertations

Crime and its representation in new age media is seeping into every avenue of discussion nowadays. The influence of crime is most notably evident in literature, where real cases inspired fictional novels and short stories that explore social issues and injustices. Since the 16th century, true crime has captivated human curiosity while also shedding light on the United States legal and justice system. Ultimately, true crime narratives provide a deeper understanding of human psychology and the reasons behind a number of gruesome and horrific incidents. This thesis investigates how Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Susan Glaspell’s A Jury of …

The Islamic Orient In Antebellum America: The Influence Of Edgar Allan Poe In Contemporary Arabic Literature, Sohaib Alkamal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation posits a comprehensive overview of the debate about Orientalism, particularly early American depictions of the Islamic Orient. The study investigates the antebellum American portrayal of the Islamic Orient, focusing on Edgar Allan Poe’s Orientalist readings. While Said’s Orientalism concentrates heavily on aspects of power in West-East relations throughout history, this study expands on several aspects of Said’s book. This study provides a new approach to exploring the field of Orientalism by giving a voice to Arabic sources that are absent in Said’s Orientalism and rarely known to Western audiences. Such sources are medieval Islamic sources, which include phantasies …

Our Relentless Objectification Of Native Americans: As Exemplified By Louise Erdrich And Cherie Dimaline, Lena Kozubek

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research

Indigenous communities relentlessly challenge the normalized commodification of their culture and beliefs. One way they actively address these oppressions is through storytelling. Their accounts educate readers and encourage them to re-frame modern perspectives and how stereotypes affect Native communities. Their stories are not a simple myth; instead, they serve as an active participant to combat actions that treat Indigenous people as an anomaly. We should treat Native Americans as human beings who invariably struggle with present-day degradations, commodification, and continual displacement. Indigenous authors reclaim their narrative by using their historical context and storytelling skills to dissect the parallels between fact …

Love And Power: Narrative Resistance In The Contemporary Literature And Film Of The Americas, Tania Nicolaou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project analyzes the ways in which narratives of love, care, and intimacy support sociocultural change through cinema, literary fiction, and memoir in Indigenous, immigrant, and diasporic communities in the United States, Haiti, and Cuba. The project’s intervention revolves around how we compare and examine narratives of the marginalized, underrepresented, and misremembered in a way that does not focus primarily on pain and trauma, but on experiences that embody radical change, healing, and a shift in the colonial matrix of power. The chapters consider love as constructed through family, identity, memory, and nationhood, all in relationship to what love looks …

"The Way It Comes—Through Nature:" Christian Realism, Rural Landscapes, And Divine Confrontations In Flannery O'Connor's Farm Fiction, Ashton Bailey Thomas

Master's Theses

Flannery O’Connor, though often labeled a Southern Gothic writer, preferred to place herself in the genre of “Christian Realism.” For her, the grotesque nature of her stories’ endings reflects not grace itself but the culmination of repeated rejections of grace. In her essays and letters, O’Connor argues that grace should be depicted “the way it comes—through nature,” equating the spiritual with the natural world. In her stories’ farm landscapes, O’Connor presents an ever-present grace through nature that, though often ignored or rejected, serves as a catalyst for spiritual confrontations. When this grace is continually denied, violence becomes the only force …

Negotiating (Im)Migrant Identity In The (Un)Assimilated Nation: American Literature Of The Late Nineteenth Century, Haley M. Steffens

English Language and Literature ETDs

This dissertation examines representations of immigration, assimilation, and multinational cultural identity in late nineteenth-century American literature, autobiography, and print culture. Through a comparative analysis of diverse authors and immigrant communities, the project explores how literary and popular culture narratives framed the expectations and limitations of assimilation for disparate populations. By contextualizing these works within historical immigration policies, labor economies, government instability, and burgeoning nationalism, this study reveals how fiction and media shaped public attitudes toward assimilation and influenced policy. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that late, long-nineteenth-century literature functioned as both a reflection of and response to national debates about immigration, …

Langston Hughes And The “Afro-American Narrative” Tradition, Paul Haynes

Theses and Dissertations

After introducing Langston Hughes and defining Robert B. Stepto’s “Afro-American narrative” tradition, Chapter One presents a biography of Hughes from his birth in 1902 until he came under the patronage of Charlotte Osgood Mason in 1927. Chapter One also addresses the aesthetic expectations of the Harlem Renaissance and the extent to which Hughes either met or failed to meet those expectations. Chapter Two presents a reading of Not without Laughter as an integrated narrative, addressing how Hughes’s authenticating strategies and Mason’s authenticating devices evenly control the novel. Chapter Three presents a reading of Hughes’s short-story cycle, The Ways of White …

Voices In The Borderlands: Reimagining Identity, Cultural Belonging, And Dystopian Spaces In Anzaldúa’S Borderlands And Viramontes’S “The Cariboo Café”, Oralia G. Ramos

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores how Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) and Helena María Viramontes’ short story “The Cariboo Café” (1985) portray marginalized individuals navigating liminal spaces of identity, oppression, and survival. Borderlands/La Frontera and “The Cariboo Café” show how systematic violence and displacement shatter the self, pushing characters to navigate trauma in a dystopian space. Sonya, Macky, the café owner, and the grieving mother represent Anzaldúa’s concepts of borderland subjectivity, betrayal, and spectral haunting.

Sonya and Macky, two undocumented children, represent Anzaldúa’s borderlands subjects and reside in a state of nepantla, an in-between space of cultural dislocation. The café owner …

Transgressive Fiction And The Problem Of Negative Affect: A Case Study Of Samuel Delany’S Hogg, Brian Thornton

Master's Theses

Samuel Delany began drafting Hogg in March of 1969 and worked on it intermittently before completing the novel in October of 1973.1 Yet Hogg remained unpublished until 1995 before finally seeing the light of day “during the ‘transgressive turn’ in American literature” (Mitchell 1). As such, the novel is historically situated along what Jonathan Mitchell calls a “dual temporality,” which “allows the novel to be located as an intervention in two key moments in America’s LGBT+ history: first, the developments in identity politics coming out of the socio-political cultural shifts of the 1960s; and, second, the post-AIDS awareness 1990s”.

“More Than What [They] Made Us To Be”: From Passing To Perception In Victorian And Modern Vampire Media, Lauren Sieberg

English (MA) Theses

Throughout Victorian Gothic horror fiction, vampires function as deviant figures, maneuvering within social confines of passing until their status quo-threatening identity is exposed. Of the popular vampires from this period, most gradually fail to maintain status as social insiders—as demonstrated with Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula or Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, who possess the temporary capacity to pass until their hidden monstrosity is revealed over time. Even if Gothic monsters are confined to a limited space and time far from society, this is still not enough; in accordance with the Victorian culture of morality policing by dominant groups, the vampiric Other …

Love Y Ganas; A Revolutionay Revelation, Thomas J. Salas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

My thesis does not have an abstract.