Literature in English, North America Commons^™

I Love You, Go Away (A Novel), John Matthew Steinhafel

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

I Love You, Go Away, a novel set in Milwaukee, tells the story of a twenty-two year-old nobody, Gabriel Driscoll, who meets and befriends a middle-aged, drug addicted, recluse actor, Beau Brooks. But less than six months into their friendship Beau commits suicide. At the funeral Gabriel meets a twenty-nine-year-old corporate executive, Michelle, the daughter of Beau’s long-time girlfriend. Gabriel and Michelle bond over their mutual grief and quickly strike up a romance. At the same time, Gabriel’s semi-estranged mother, Sadie, a recovering heroin addict, reaches out to him in an effort to rebuild their relationship. What follows for Gabriel …

Kentuckiana, And A Dash Of Cambodia: A Collection Of Short Stories, Brodie Lee Gress

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The following is a collection of five short stories set in regions familiar to me: “Dewberry Park,” “YouLead,” and “The Color Violet” in Indiana; “Mens Rea” in Kentucky; and “Tory Ride” in Cambodia. Gay identity plays a role in many of these stories, and other themes explored include family, region, socioeconomics, gender, mentality, and change. These stories are concerned with people on the brink, failing and surviving all the same. Some of them are intended to weigh, and some to satirize. I hope they all nick their readers.

Cultural And Narrative Shifts Of Nineteenth Century Children's Literature In Hawthorne's Wonder Book For Girls And Boys, Kristen Clark Brandt

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Both folklorists and literary critics have been drawn to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s body of work because of his distinctive style and incorporation of folk motifs. Such motif-spotting presents no challenge in Hawthorne’s juvenile literature like his retellings from Greek mythology in Wonder Book for Girls and Boys; however, contemporary folklore redirects the focus of this scholarship to “how particular literary uses of folklore fit into a larger, more fundamental concept of what folklore is and how and what folklore communicates” (de Caro & Jordan 2015:15). Hawthorne’s work interacts with other forms of cultural expression in the nineteenth century such as dominant …

Strange Things Keep Happening To Me: Postcolonial Identity And Henry James's Ghosts, Conor J. Scruton

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

While there have been many studies of Henry James's ghost stories, there has been surprisingly little scholarship written on postcolonial tensions in these works. In American literature, the figure of the Native American ghost is a common expression of Western settler guilt over native erasure and land seizure. In both his American and British ghost stories, though, James focuses more on the horror within the colonizer than the terrifying, ghostly other from the edge of the empire. As such, these ghost stories serve as a more significant critique of colonialism and imperialism than Gothic texts that merely demonstrate the colonizer’s …

Blood At The Root, April Schofield

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This is a coming of age story about two very different boys – Jason, a Northerner who ends up stuck in a small Southern town and Billy, a Southern boy with an abusive father. The boys become friends and grow up learning the dark secrets that are allowed to fester in a tiny southern town ruled by the Good Ol’ Boy System of justice. The story chronicles how their shared experiences change them in ways they never imagined and ultimately destroys their friendship and their lives. Through a history of violence and prejudice, Billy and Jason learn who they really …

Clockwork Heroines: Female Characters In Steampunk Literature, Cassie N. Bergman

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Steampunk is a progressive literary genre that evokes, imitates, and re-imagines the nineteenth century and favors the Industrial Revolution ideals of science and technology. In a historical framework, it mixes nineteenth-century conventions and retrofuturistic machinery with science fiction and fantasy elements. Steampunk authors are able to radically redefine socio-cultural implications that affect both past and contemporary societies. The following study explores the multitude of characteristics that define Steampunk literature as an interdisciplinary study. Chapter 1 explores the definitions and literary genres that construct Steampunk and includes a brief literary history of Steampunk works. Chapter 2 focuses on Cherie Priest’s novel …

How To Tell A Story: Mark Twain And The Short Story Genre, Richard Simpson

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study examines the short fiction of Mark Twain in relation to major theories concerning the short story genre. Despite his popularity as a novelist and historical figure, Twain has not been recognized as a major figure in the development of the short story genre. This study attempts to show that the short fiction produced by Twain deserves greater regard within studies specific to the short story, and calls for a reconsideration of Twain as a dynamic figure in the development of the genre. The introductory chapter lays the groundwork for understanding how the short story genre has developed since …

Museum-Making In Women's Poetry: How Sylvia Plath And Emily Dickinson Confront The Time Of History, Margaret Brown

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

In The Newly Born Woman, Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement note that Michelet and Freud "both thought that the repressed past survives in woman; woman, more than anyone else, is dedicated to reminiscence" (5). Whether or not this is true of woman, that expectation of her—as keeper of the past—has perhaps subsisted in the deepest realms of the collective unconscious. From the work of Cixous and Clement, Julia Kristeva and Angela Leighton, I ultimately deduce that there are two perceptions of time: man's time has been associated with the straight, the linear, the historical, and the prosaic; woman's time has …

A Spectre Is Haunting Samuel Clemens: A Marxist Critique Of Wealth As Resolution In Mark Twain's Novels, Jeff Carr

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The distribution of wealth occurs frequently in Mark Twain's novels, especially at the resolution. Indeed, Twain uses wealth as resolution in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Pudd'nhead Wilson. The repeated use of this formula in the author's approach to novel writing indicates the tremendous influence that capitalism had in shaping his worldview. In his early works, Twain appears to endorse capitalism in his use of wealth as resolution. Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, and Huckleberry Finn each conclude with the distribution of capital as a reward to …

Unsettling Identities In Two Novels By Leslie Marmon Silko, Olivia Smith

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Throughout Native American Literature the state of identity in connection to one’s tribal culture, nature, and spirituality is vital to understanding both the struggles that Native Americans have endured during contact with Europeans and then Americans and the current ongoing cultural negotiations of contemporary tribal peoples. Native American writers use literature as a venue to reclaim and reconstruct identity, particularly in relation to a rapidly changing and commercial world.

Grounded in identity theory and Native American literary criticism, this thesis explores how Native American author Leslie Marmon Silko “unsettles” identities in her two novels Almanac of the Dead and Gardens …

Southern Post-Modernism, Anti-Romanticism And Gender Difference In Flannery O'Connor And Some Other Southern Contemporaries, Ada Skillern

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Flannery O' Connor has long been an established southern writer of the mid-twentieth century. This paper discusses briefly the tenets of both Modernism and Post-Modernism as literary movements of the twentieth-century, then looks specifically at how O'Connor's fiction makes her a key hallmark figure in the movement known as Post-Modernism, but also as one of the first female southern writers to utilize very anti-Romantic themes and style. Further, this paper attempts to examine through a discussion of various contemporary male and female southern writers the depth of O'Connor's influence on their own works. Attention is also given to the differences …

Female Characterization In The Novels Of Robert Penn Warren: Variations On A Cinderella Theme, Martha Brent

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The psychological construction of Robert Penn Warren's characters is an established tenet among Warren critics as is the influence of Sigmund Freud's work upon Warren's fiction. Specifically the oedipal nature of Warren's male characters has been widely discussed especially in regard to plots culminating in patricide. Based upon this criticism of Robert Penn Warren's novels to date, Warren's female characters are revealed to be developed likewise upon an oedipal paradigm. The female paradigm which corresponds to Freud's Oedipus complex in women is the Cinderella tale. These stories, some at least a thousand years old, were critically divided into three main …

The Right Hand Of Light: Dark And Light Imagery In The Science Fiction Of Ursula K. Le Guin, Patricia Lynn Keister

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Ursula K. Le Guin uses dark and light imagery to emphasize her theme of dynamic equilibrium. This theme can be found throughout her work; the novels discussed are The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, and The Beginning Place. In each novel, Le Guin focuses on a different aspect of dynamic equilibrium. The themes are respectively, gender identity, chaos and order, and the individual versus the community. The final novel, The Beginning Place, unites and sums up all three themes. In each novel, one or more main characters suffers from imbalance …

Meet Me In The Semiotic Glen: The Evolution Of Gender Communication In The Early Novels Of Robert Penn Warren, Lisa Day

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Sexuality in the early novels of Robert Penn Warren is generally not appealing, intimate, or indicative of love between partners, in part due to the seeming coldness of the female characters and the near-asexuality of the males. However, when both social and personal interactions between the characters are analyzed semiotically according to the theories of Julia Kristeva, a pattern emerges which explains the harshness of the bond between men and women.

The Lost Tribalism Of Years Gone By: Function & Variation In Gay Folklore In Armistead Maupin's Tales Of The City Novels, Jimmy Browning

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This thesis intends to demonstrate that, because of the unusual circumstances of its writing - a semi-journalistic piece produced during a period of crisis in the real-life community fictionally depicted - Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series stands as an unusually accurate and reliable ethnographic source for information concerning the gay male subculture of San Francisco in the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, not only the practice and behavior themselves, but also reflecting their personal and communal function. The methodology employed in demonstrating this thesis is necessarily subjective. Like gay folklore scholar Joseph P. Goodwin in More Man Than …

Robin Becomes The Major: The Collision Between The Practical & The Ideal In Hawthorne's Life & Art, Daniel Shumer

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Nathaniel Hawthorne's life can be divided into four periods each containing a practical and ideal component. These components create a duality containing the dynamic Hawthorne confronted when moving between the practical world of work, family, and politics and the ideal world of art. This dynamic is used to explain the ambiguity of Hawthorne's works, particularly "My Kinsman, Major Molineaux," "The Artist of the Beautiful," and The Blithedale Romance. The movement present in these works between practical and ideal interests is connected to Hawthorne's view of the artist in society, the relationship of tradition and progress, and the issue of …

Zora Neale Hurston: The Voice Of The Goddess, Mella Davis

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Zara Neale Purston has re-emerged as an author of promise due to the re-appraisal of her works led by Alice Walker and Robert Hemenway. In both literary and folklore academic circles, Hurston's work has been reclaimed by African-American female scholars and writers, but still a significant study has yet to be done about her ethnographic contributions to folklore and her farsightedness in fieldwork methodology. This thesis seeks to validate her work as a folklorist, thereby dismissing the charges of popularization and amateurishness by re-examining her work. Mules and Men and Jonah's Gourd Vine are Hurston's two most influential folklore texts …

Feminism, Selfhood & Emily Dickinson, Regina York

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This paper will draw on the work of leading feminist critics and the works of Dickinson, her biographers, and her critics. No effort is being made to trace the history of feminist criticism; that has been done numerous times by critic after critic. Nor does this paper attempt to provide a concordance to critical thought on Dickinson. That, too, is unnecessary. Rather, this paper looks at the relationship between self-identity in Dickinson's poetry and the fundamental need for such a pronounced sense of identity to serve as the cornerstone of feminist criticism. Dickinson's courage to be female and the implications …

The Southern Misfit And The Dream Of Escape In The Fiction Of Carson Mccullers And Flannery O’Connor, Tammy Oberhausen

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The misfit and the dream of escape are popular motifs in American literature, particularly in the literature of the South. Critical studies of works employing these themes have largely ignored the connection between the two. The Southern misfit – the Southerner who fails to or refuses to conform to his society’s strict standards – often dreams of escaping the restrictions of the South for some Northern “promised land.” In the works of two Georgia writers, Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor, the related themes receive different treatments. Carson McCullers’s misfits in the novels The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The …

All Points Distant, Scott Earle

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Fictional story written by Scott Earle.

Wendell Berry’S Cyclic Vision: Traditional Farming As Metaphor, Morris Allen Grubbs

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Although Wendell Berry’s first book, a novel, appeared in 1960, he did not gain significant national attention until the publication of his nonfiction manifesto, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, in 1977. Since its publication, Berry has moved increasingly toward the prose of persuasion as he continues to sharpen his argument in support of a practical, continuous harmony between the human economy and Nature. His canon as a whole – the poems, essays, and novels – is an ongoing and thorough exploration of man’s use of and relationship to the land.

Arguing that the health of a culture …

The Short Fiction Of Bobbie Ann Mason: Exposing The Problems In American Society & Searching For Some Solutions, Melanie Allen

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Bobbie Ann Mason uses her fiction to portray the problems in American society. She devotes most of her time to average persons who are suffering from the rapid changes that society is going through. These characters at times seem lost and helpless, but ultimately they do not give up hope for a brighter future. Through social problems such as divorce, lack of communication, loss of identity and place, obsession with the past, submersion in rock music and TV, loss of ritual, proliferation of objects, lack of education, and the need to face mortality, these characters still seem to have hope …

River People, Ruth Madden

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

In the introduction to The World of the Short Story, Kay Boyle challenges the short story writer "to invest a brief sequence of events with reverberating human significance by means of style, selection and ordering of detail, and -- most important -- to present the whole action in such a way that it is at once a parable and a slice of life, at once symbolic and real, both a valid picture of some phase of experience, and a sudden illumination of one of the perennial moral and psychological paradoxes which lie at the heart of la condition humaine." …

Desire: An Essential Element In Wallace Stevens' Poetry, Barry Gary

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Man naturally pursues that which brings pleasure, and Wallace Stevens recognizes this inescapable desire, exploring it fully in his poetry, prose, and letters and depending upon it to build the foundation for many, if not most, of his major themes. For Stevens, one's world evolves through the use of poetry, and this world, complete with jubilations of fulfilled desire and frequent despair as illusions of fulfillment are destroyed, chronicles the life of every man. As a result, different kinds of desire and different attempts at satisfying these desires emerge as one reads Stevens--three of which will be advanced in this …

Waste Land Or Promised Land: T.S. Eliot's The Idea Of A Christian Society, Amy Wallace

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

In T. S. Eliot's The Idea of a Christian Society, the poet questions the nature of our society's foundations; he believes that Western culture is moving dangerously closer to the liberal and secular and that this shift could be disastrous. Instead, Eliot suggests that we return to what is at the very roots of Western tradition: Christianity. To facilitate this change in direction, Eliot stresses the importance of an educational system which takes a Christian perspective. Also important in his thinking is a Community of Christians, who would act as leaders, and the Christian community (encompassing most of the …

J.D. Salinger's Code Hero: The Moral Character In An Immoral World, Rebecca Hendrick

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

J.D. Salinger's fiction can be approached by looking at the various elements of fiction, but his largest statement rests in the ways that his characters interac within his world. This interaction leads to a code of behavior that the heroes follow, and can be used to determine the heroic character within a particular piece of fiction, much as the Hemingway code developed by Carlos Baker identified the characteristics of the Hemingway hero, Salinger's heroes are all aware of the phony which is in the world around them. They see this phoniness as something undesirable within the world, yet they must …

Superior Instants: Religious Concerns In The Poetry Of Emily Dickinson, Elisabeth Buckner

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

When I decided to write a thesis on Emily Dickinson's poetry, my intention was to show that she did, indeed, implement a concrete philosophy into her poetry. However, after several months of research, I realized that this poet's philosophy was ongoing and sometimes inconsistent. Emily Dickinson never discovered the answers to all of her religious and spiritual questions although she devoted her entire life to that pursuit. What Dickinson did discover was that orthodox religion had no place in her heart or mind and she must make her own choices where God was concerned. Immortality was an intense fascination to …

The Masculine Mind In The Portrait Of A Lady, Nora Neagle

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The strongest and best-developed supporting characters in The Portrait of a Lady are the men in Isabel Archer's life: Ralph Touchett, Caspar Goodwood, Lord Warburton, and Gilbert Osmond. Because it is largely through the eyes of these men that the reader sees Isabel, a thorough understanding of their personalities is essential for a clear interpretation of Isabel.

James shows the four men in vivid detail--their physical appearance, cultural background, intellect, moral convictions, sense of humor--everything from a habit of keeping hallas in pockets to having a wardrobe which seems to have come from a single bolt of cloth. This study …

Auden's Poetic Theory & The Child-Like Voice, Diana Graham

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

W. H. Auden shares with most of his contemporaries, including Yeats and Eliot, the goal of lighting modern man's way back to a sense of harmony with his universe--the certainty of identity which his ancestors enjoyed. In New Year Letter, Auden announces that the problem lies within man himself because each of us is possessed of a "double" nature, thus rendering us our own schismatics.

Auden finds that only with the help of divinity, specifically Christian, can the destructive element be overcome. To illustrate this solution in his poems then becomes Auden's great challenge. Employing a child-like voice or tone …

Stephen Crane & Ernest Hemingway: A Study In Affinities, Clara Metzmeier

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The affinities which appear in writing styles of Stephen Crane and manifest themselves in their works. raised in religious homes, rebelled the life styles and Ernest Hemingway Both writers were against their religious backgrounds, began newspaper careers as teenagers, traveled and reported war for their respective newspapers, believed that life was filled with violence, confirmed that belief through their experiences and observations, and developed corresponding literary credos. Both Crane and Hemingway believed the writer should experience present manner. the story Both men and observe what he wrote and should in a simple, direct, and truthful used short sentences, irony, dialogue, …