Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons^™

Pecan Grove Review Volume 21, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

Creative writings by students, faculty, and staff of the St. Mary's University community.

Introduction To Creative Writing, Sheila Y. Maldonado

Open Educational Resources

English 220 Introduction to Creative Writing - readings and exercises in fiction, drama, and poetry

Pecan Grove Review Volume 20, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

Creative writings by students, faculty, and staff of the St. Mary's University community.

Treading The Winepress; Or, A Mountain Of Misfortune, Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, Gabrielle Brown, Eric Willey, Jean Macdonald

Undiscovered Americas

“Every life hath its chapter of sorrow. No matter how rich the gilding or fair the pages of the volume, Trouble will stamp it with his sable signet.”

So begins the novel Treading the Winepress; or, A Mountain of Misfortune by Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, which, had it appeared in book form in 1885–1886 instead of serialized in The Boston Advocate, would have been the second novel published by a black woman in the United States. Instead, Allen has been mostly forgotten by literary history. Now, thanks to the painstaking efforts of editors Gabrielle Brown, Eric Willey, and Jean …

Motherhood And The Periodical Press: The Myth And The Medium, Susan A. Malcom

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this study, I utilize close readings of the periodically published works of three women writers – Kate Chopin, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Elia Peattie –through the lenses of historical/biographical, affective, and biosocial theories. Examining these works against the backdrop of America’s mythologized mother exposes the social ubiquity of the myth and the realities of motherhood nineteenth-century women experienced.

Chapter one examines the mythological nature of American motherhood as it evolved from a politically and socially nuanced Republican Mother and the role of American periodicals as a medium of perpetuating that myth. Historically, American motherhood was an extended function …

Representing The Angakkuq: Exploring Inuit Mythology Through Fiction, Abigail Studebaker

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

This project is both a creative and critical foray into Inuit mythology. The Critical Preface unpacks how magical realism, young adult literature, and multicultural literature shaped the writing of the project, which is the first five chapters of a novel-in-progress titled Angakkuq. Angakkuq tells the story of a teenage girl, Alasi, of Inuit and American heritage living in the U.S. who begins experiencing strange, seemingly magical phenomena. As her story unfolds, she finds herself at the intersection of the past and the present, struggling to formulate her own identity while more and more is revealed about her father’s childhood growing …

Pecan Grove Review Volume 19, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

Creative writings by students, faculty, and staff of the St. Mary's University community.

Pecan Grove Review Volume 18, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

Creative writings by students, faculty, and staff of the St. Mary's University community.

Comanche Boys, Benjamin D. Honea

Theses and Dissertations--English

Comanche Boys is a novel that was written and revised during Benjamin Honea’s time at the University of Kentucky. The novel focuses on Brandon, who lives in rural southwest Oklahoma, and how the arrival of two people in his life, one old and one new, changes his future irrevocably. Taking place at the intersections of modern American and Native American life, the narrative explores history, culture, mythology, faith, despair, racism, poverty, vengeance, and justice. The struggles of the past and present, the lost and reclaimed, propel and pervade the lives of the characters.

Pecan Grove Review Volume 17, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

Creative writings by students, faculty, and staff of the St. Mary's University community.

Pecan Grove Review Volume 16, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

Creative writings by students, faculty, and staff of the St. Mary's University community.

A Thousand Splendid Suns: Sanctuary And Resistance, Rebecca A. Stuhr

Rebecca A Stuhr

In his novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, author Khaled Hosseini provides a vivid portrait of a country shattered by a series of ideological leaders and wars imposed on it by foreign and internal forces. The narrative, which spans several decades, is driven by the stories of two women, Laila and Mariam, who, despite starkly different beginnings, find themselves intimately connected and dependent upon one another. Hosseini’s women, much like the country of Afghanistan itself, appear to be propelled by the whims of outside forces, familial and societal, with little chance of influencing their own lives and futures Yet Laila and …

Trauma And The Representation Of The Unsayable In Late Twentieth-Century Fiction, Katina Rogers

Publications and Research

This dissertation explores the ways in which several fiction writers from France, the U.S., and Latin America experiment with the form of their works in writing about traumatic experience, as they navigate the tension between a propulsion toward expression and toward silence. Some of these traumas are vast, as in Edmond Jabès’ Le livre des questions (1963-1973), which addresses not only the Holocaust, but also questions of exile and identity. Others are on a smaller scale, such as Jacques Roubaud’s Quelque chose noir (1986), Julio Cortázar's Los autonautas de la cosmopista (1983), and Macedonio Fernández’s Museo de la Novela de …