Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Shaping A Body Of One’S Own: Rebecca Harding Davis’S Life In The Iron Mills And Waiting For The Verdict, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The "Beyondness Of Things" In The Buccaneers: Vernon Lee's Influence On Edith Wharton's Sense Of Places, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Since its publication in 1938, readers have been at odds in their assessment of The Buccaneers, Edith Wharton's only novel set in England. While her literary executor, Gaillard Lapsley, and many early reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic saw great promise in the unfinished novel, a few critics like Edmund Wilson wrote the work off as 'an old-fashioned story for girls' and judged Wharton's skill 'dulled' in this her last book. In the 1980's, however, feminist critics found much to value in the novel: from protagonist Annabel St. George's self-actualization to the comradeship of the American girls and the …

Review Of Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman's Life, Susan Naramore Maher

English Faculty Publications

At the end of her memoir, Moving Out, Polly Spence assesses all the little ironies of her life and concludes, "[each] time everything seemed just right, each time I thought I'd found it all—the work, the love, and the ideal way to live—something brought change to me." Change is a central motif in her narrative, reflected in a title that underscores movement and mobility, not settlement. Spence's Nebraska life provides a toehold on the slippery surface of twentieth-century culture in America.

A Review Of Cyberactivism: Online Activism In Theory And Practice, Kevin Eric De Pew

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Painting, Photography And Fidelity In The Tragic Muse, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

Photographs can approach the elegance of paintings, but reproductions can show the distortion of photographs - so The Tragic Muse (1890) suggests, complicating critical understandings of James and visual art. Dramatizing artists' fidelity, James resists assuming that families, races, and genders provide similar options. Fidelity in art can mean 'infidelity' in life, lead to 'adulterated' reproductions, and impugn understandings of inherited and performed identities - concerns which resurface in The American Scene (1907) when James contemplates immigrant populations and in A Small Boy and Others (1913) when a family daguerreotype becomes evidence of his own fidelity.

Pynchon's Age Of Reason: Mason & Dixon And America's Rise Of Rational Discourse, Jason Mcentee

English Faculty Publications

By drawing upon astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon for the unlikely protagonists of Mason & Dixon (1997), Thomas Pynchon develops a revisionist history of these two Englishmen as they come to terms with America in the so-called Age of Reason, which was informed by a European philosophical movement with its roots in rational discourse aimed at cultural and political intellect that eventually served as the foundation for American independence and democracy. But as Thomas Paine suggests, time wields a stronger power than does reason, and what history calls the Age of Reason may remind one of an ideal …

I'Ll Take My Land: Contemporary Southern Agrarians, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

For many earlier southern white writers, the southern rural landscape was the repository of nostalgia for lost ways of life, whether it was the plantation fantasy that Thomas Nelson Page pined for in his stories In Ole Virginia (1887) or the segregated agrarian ideal that many contributors yearned for in I'll Take My Stand (1930). For modern southern white writers, beginning most prominently with William Faulkner, the rural landscape has conjured up unsettling guile about a way of life that flourished on the backs of the black people who tilled that land. And not surprisingly, for many black writers the …

Late Stevens, Nothingness, And The Orient, Zhaoming Qian

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Blue Veins And Black Bigotry: Colorism As Moral Evil In Charles Chesnutt's 'A Matter Of Principle', Earle V. Bryant

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Scriptural Allusion And Metaphorical Marriage In Charles Chesnutt's 'The Wife Of His Youth', Earle V. Bryant

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Poems The Big Cats Brought In (Review Article), John Gery

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Psychology Of Uncertainty: (Re)Inscribing Indeterminacy In Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure-Man Dies, Adrienne Gosselin

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Charles Chesnutt's Southern Black Jew: Rena Walden's Masquerade In The House Behind The Cedars, Earle V. Bryant

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Crime Of The Sign: Dashiell Hammett's Detective Fiction, Carl D. Malmgren

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The World Would Do Better To Ask Why Is Frimbo Sherlock Holmes?: Investigating Liminality In Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure-Man Dies, Adrienne Gosselin

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Remembering The Avant-Garde: Vision And Time In The Poetry Of Frank O'Hara, Graham Macphee

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Chinese Landscape Painting In Stevens's 'Six Significant Landscapes', Zhaoming Qian

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Taking A Perspective: Hawthorne's Concept Of Language And Nineteenth-Century Language Theory, Patricia M. Roger

English Faculty Publications

The Two Handles Of Israel Potter, Kris Lackey

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Ezra Pound's Encounter With Wang Wei: Toward The 'Ideogrammic Method' Of The Cantos, Zhaoming Qian

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The American Generational Autobiography: Malcolm Cowley And Michael Rossman, John D. Hazlett

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Women And Revolution In Dystopian Fiction: Nadine Gordimer's July's People And Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Nancy Topping Bazin

English Faculty Publications

Nadine Gordimer's July's People (1981) and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) are both dystopias, nightmare visions of the future. Both of the worlds depicted come into being because of revolutionary coups. However, in both cases, the revolutions were in progress long before the actual takeovers, and there were opportunities for citizens to have prevented these dystopian situations from coming to pass. Yet, because changing the direction of political events requires energy, solidarity, bravery or at least some self-sacrifice, most citizens are reluctant to become involved. Nadine Gordimer and Margaret Atwood understand this attitude because they have felt that way …

Self Myths And The Autobiography Of Renunciation In 20th Century North America, John D. Hazlett

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Holy Guide-Book And The Sword Of The Lord: How Melville Used The Bible In Redburn And White-Jacket, Kris Lackey

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Repossessing The Past: Discontinuity And History In Alfred Kazin's A Walker In The City, John D. Hazlett

English Faculty Publications

The structure of Kazin's A Walker in the City is based upon two quests: the child self is seeking an American identity and access to history; the adult self is seeking to recapture the lost, earlier self and to "escape" from history. The article discusses narrative strategy and the relationship between concepts of history and the re-creation of the self in twentieth century autobiography.

Literary Nationalism And Ambivalence In Washington Irving's The Life And Voyages Of Christopher Columbus, John D. Hazlett

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Comedy: The Uncertain Terrain Of John Hawkes, Peter Johnson

English Faculty Publications

This dissertation examines the nature and function of

John Hawkes' comic method. Although most critics acknowledge

that Hawkes writes comedy, very few of them

agree on the moral nature of this comedy. Chapter I

examines these differing responses to Hawkes' work and

offers an alternative way of evaluating his humor, based

on his own and other critics' comments on comedy. This

chapter also suggests that our responses to Hawkes' humor

occur on an uncertain terrain where two or more, sometimes

opposite, reactions to a text clash, forcing us into continuous

moments of indecision.

Chapter II deals with Hawkes' first novel, …

Conversion, Revisionism, And Revision In Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return, John D. Hazlett

English Faculty Publications

Malcolm Cowley's first edition of 'Exile's Return: A Narrative of Ideas' (1934) was an autobiographical narrative which traced Cowley and his friends on their ideological odyssey from bohemianism to Marxism. Cowley's 'Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s' (1951) was written because Cowley, like other writers of his generation, was embarrassed by his decade of Marxist enthusiasm and, coupled with a national mood increasingly hostile to Communism, he now perceived his view of history in the first book as a literary flaw. However, once that view was judged inaccurate, it was easy for Cowley to convince himself that "self" …

The Sexualization Of Racism In Richard Wright's 'The Man Who Killed A Shadow', Earle V. Bryant

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Sentimentalism In Dreiser's Heroines, Carrie And Jennie, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Theodore Dreiser is usually hailed as a pioneer of American realism who freed American literature from Victorian restraints, from nineteenth century idealism and optimism, and from the ever-present moralizing of domestic sentimentalism. It is interesting to note, however, that this shockingly modern trailblazer not only stands at the dawn of a new era in literature, but also at the twilight of the old, for in Dreiser is a mixture of both the new realism and naturalism and the old sentimentalism that had dominated American literature from its inception.