Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Inscribing The South For Harper's Weekly In 1866, Ashlyn Stewart

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The top weekly publication in the nineteenth-century United States, Harper’s Weekly, faced a new challenge after it had survived the Civil War: what would keep readers subscribing to the periodical in peacetime? To maintain their remarkably large readership, the editors looked southward and produced abundant content about the Reconstruction South for its primarily Northeastern readership. A noteworthy portion of that content was a series of powerful illustrated articles known as “Pictures of the South,” which ran from April to October 1866. Seasoned war correspondents Alfred R. Waud and Theodore R. Davis travelled through the rapidly rebuilding South on behalf of …

Hawthorne’S Faith, Cecelia Little

English Student Scholarship

Major: English and Philosophy

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Margaret Reid, English

This project is an examination of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writings, particularly focused on Hawthorne’s identity, philosophy, and spirituality. Placing these ideas in the context of early American history as well as in the context of Hawthorne’s biography, Cecelia Little focuses on how Hawthorne offers pieces of a new and complex philosophy of the individual human soul within the human community. This powerpoint includes a structured compilation of many, but by no means all, of her findings, and she plans to delve much further into Hawthorne’s life and works. The primary focus …

Blake’S Method: Blake Imagining Milton In The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell, Micaela Freeman

English Student Scholarship

Major: English

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Bruce Graver, English

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is William Blake’s articulation of his reaction to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. After analyzing Blake’s reaction to Paradise Lost, I will suggest how Blake’s reading of Milton helped shape 20th-century criticism, specifically post-war Miltonic criticism. My paper will begin by considering Blake’s rewriting of Milton in the ‘Argument’ of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, starting at the Adamic myth. I will continue my analysis with looking at the famous passage on Plate 6 when Blake writes, “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote …

Convents And Novices In Early Modern English Dramatic Works: In Medias Res, Vanessa L. Rapatz

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Texts: In Medias Res attends to the religious, social, and material changes in England during the century following the Reformation, specifically examining how the English came to terms with the meanings of convents and novices even after they disappeared from the physical and social landscape. In five chapters, it traces convents and novices across a range of dramatic texts that refuse easy generic classification: problem plays such as Shakespeare's Measure for Measure; Marlowe's comic tragedy The Jew of Malta; Margaret Cavendish's closet dramas The Convent of Pleasure and The Religious …

Caught In The Middle: Existentialism In A Contemporary Fantasy, Hannah Depauw 20

Honor Scholar Theses

No abstract provided.

Albert Camus's Absurd In 20th Century American Fiction, Alec V. Faiman

Honors Thesis

Out of the turmoil caused by significant intellectual and scientific developments during the 19th century, many people seem to believe that life has no inherent purpose. Albert Camus’s existential treatise The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) outlines his theory of the absurd. Using Camus’s thoughts on the absurd and various critical texts to supplement his theory, this thesis will show that the side effects of the humanity’s intellectual and scientific progress up to and including the late-20th century are documented at length in John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1961), Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters (1970), and Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction …

Thresholds Of Curating: Literary Space And Material Culture In The Works Of Harriet Prescott Spofford, Edith Wharton, Isabella Stewart Gardner, And Willa Cather 1870–1920, Lindsay N. Andrews

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation explores the polycentric intersections between material and literary culture in four case studies spanning 1870-1920. Harriet Prescott Spofford, Edith Wharton, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Willa Cather are four women whose work reflects a capacity to defy the genre-specific boundaries for which they are canonically renown. Harriet Prescott Spofford was an important contributor to the interior design movement in the early Gilded Age following challenges to finding publication resources for her fiction within a male-dominated publishing community. Edith Wharton’s ties to material culture are well known, but less attention is granted to the ways in which her own expertise …

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind: Edgar Allan Poe's Use Of Concealment, Alyssa Hubbard

Scholars Week

In his short stories “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Edgar Allan Poe uses the act and outcomes of concealment as a way to deal with guilt and introduce consequence. By examining each of these examples, we can see that how and where Poe's narrators hide the bodies of their victims directly impacts their mental health and how quickly their crimes are discovered.

Hawthorne’S Beautiful Women And Hideous Men: Ecofeminism In “The Birthmark” And “Rappaccini’S Daughter”, Olivia Shelton

Scholars Week

This paper aims to compare Georgiana and Beatrice’s beauty through an Eco-feminist lens. It examines how the men in each story set unrealistic beauty standards for women in order to be dominant. The men use science to create these standards and destroy nature or the women’s natural beauty and they kill them in the process. This paper argues that Hawthorne addresses Eco-feminist ideas within “The Birthmark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” through the destruction of Georgiana and Beatrice. The paper includes background information, a definition, and other key ideas involved with Ecofeminism. The paper focuses on the association of men with society …

On Ways Of Studying Tolkien: Notes Toward A Better (Epic) Fantasy Criticism, Dennis Wilson Wise

Journal of Tolkien Research

This article examines major academic approaches used in the study of J.R.R. Tolkien. It argues that certain themes from political philosopher Leo Strauss, by helping us to develop a new theoretical lens, can elucidate several politically salient aspects of Tolkien's work, including thymos and his dialectic between ancient and modern. Four previous (though flawed) Straussian interpretations of Tolkien are highlighted. Finally, by analyzing the tensions that arise when pairing critical theory and its attendant bias against nature with Tolkien and epic fantasy, this article argues for the timeliness of a Straussian lens for studying fantasy and Tolkien alike.

The Figure Of The Animal In Modern And Contemporary Poetry By Michael Malay, Brian Bartlett

The Goose

Review of Michael Malay's The Figure of the Animal in Modern and Contemporary Poetry

The Ethics And Politics Of Breastfeeding: Power, Pleasure, Poetics By Robyn Lee And Wild Child: Intensive Parenting And Posthumanist Ethics By Naomi Morgenstern, Gina M. Granter

The Goose

Book Review of:

The Ethics and Politics of Breastfeeding: Power, Pleasure, Poeticsby ROBYN LEE

and

Wild Child: Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethicsby NAOMI MORGENSTERN

River Woman By Katherena Vermette, Jessica I. Ruzek

The Goose

Review of Katherena Vermette's river woman

Powered By Social Energies: A New Historicism Approach To Gone With The Wind, Kimberly Taylor

Augsburg Honors Review

Gone with the Wind was a runaway bestseller in the 1930s due to Mitchell's ability to pull the circulating social energies of her own time period into a book ostensibly set in the Civil War and Reconstruction Period. Using Stephen Greenblatt's ideas from Shakespearean Negotiations, I trace these in Gone with the Wind with support from multiple sources. These swirling social energies provide a sense of inevitability to the story which underpins Scarlett's frantic survivalism, but they are not transformed. This lack of transformation creates a disturbing reality wherein Scarlett can learn nothing, change nothing and rail against her apparent …

Huck Finn And (Still) Racist America, Daniel Polaschek

Augsburg Honors Review

The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which the infamously banned book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn can be used in contemporary society and, more importantly, in schools. Ever since Mark Twain wrote the book, Huck Finn has received bombardments of criticism, both positive and negative. Unfortunately, for the most part the negative criticism has made itself more easily heard, causing the book to be banned from countless libraries and public and private schools. Given the ill treatment of the book, this paper will argue that the race discussion inherent in Mark Twain's The Adventures of …

The Others (2001) By Alejandro Amenábar In The Light Of Valentinian Thought, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The article offers a Valentinian interpretation of the Hollywood film The Others (2001). A particular attention is paid to the ways in which cinematic motifs and narrative elements of the film draw on myths, ideas and symbolic imagery present in Valentinian works, especially in the Gospel of Truth (NHC I, 3) and the Gospel of Philip (NHC II, 3). In the course of the heuristic analysis, the paper argues that although the film employs Valentinian ideas, it depicts different understanding of the world. This issue is addressed in the last part of the article by situating the film within broader …

Feminist Theology And The Fantastic In Jewish Poetics And Children's Literature (1960s–Present), Meira S. Levinson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the development of Jewish fantasy rhetoric in post-WWII British and American literature, focusing on three genres: kabbalistic Beat poetry, children’s fantasy, and graphic novels/comics. Despite increasing scholarly attention to all these areas, little work has focused on fantasy rhetoric or issues of gender and sexuality within non-canonical Jewish literature, or on interplays of religion and fantasy in children’s literature. Jewish kabbalistic poetry and children’s fantasy speak to each other in their mutual engagements with the otherworldly, mystical and monstrous, interrogations of gender, and complex portrayals of feminist theological potentialities. I identify and analyze Jewish-hermeneutic themes and methodologies …

Missing Time: Remembrances Of History’S Return, Marissa Brostoff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation chronicles a profound recent shift within the US political left from an essentially backward-looking orientation to one marked by an unfamiliar sense of timeliness. Presented chronologically, the essays included here approach the vertiginous American political landscape since 2016 through readings of cultural phenomena from Bernie Sanders’s short-lived career as an experimental writer to Caitlyn Jenner’s reality show. They make up a Trump-era diary haunted by the ghosts of twentieth-century social movements and an intellectual coming-of-age story about growing up at the end of the end of history.

Introduction To Creative Writing, Sheila Y. Maldonado

Open Educational Resources

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

Emerson's Idealist Poetics: Emerson, Rödl, And The Life Of Nature, Robert Darren Hutchinson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I articulate a hermeneutics for reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal text Nature through drawing on the insights of the contemporary philosopher Sebastian Rödl. Particularly, the performative, literary characteristics of Rödl’s quite conceptual work resonate with the poetic strategies that Emerson employs in Nature. In the section on the work of Rödl, I make the performative aspects of his philosophy explicit through a close reading of the way self-consciousness happens in his texts through the language he employs. Rödl refers to his elucidation of self-consciousness as idealism. In the section on Emerson, I show how Emerson’s project …

Imagining Wildernesses: Susan Howe’S Poetic Corrective, Samantha R. Walsh

Theses and Dissertations

This work explores language poet Susan Howe’s conceptualization of the natural world in her 1989 poem, Thorow. Conceptualization of a distinct and pure wilderness, inherited from Puritan settlers, is traced through Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and located in Howe’s experience at Lake George in 1987. This thesis describes Howe’s efforts to decolonize and open up closed historical narratives. Howe’s careful deconstruction of normative linguistic structures exposes the restrictive nature of standard syntax and canonical narratives.

Reacting To The Future: An Immersive Experience With The Hunger Games, Amanda Taylor

Q2S Enhancing Pedagogy

Description of an immersive, role-play based assignment centered on The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Designed for a ENG 1120 Speculative Fiction course focused on dystopian literature. The assignments adapts elements of Reacting to the Past pedagogy and was developed as part of a Q2S Enhancing Pedagogy Faculty Learning Community focused on large lecture literature courses.

Jessamyn West Collection, Whittier College

Finding Aids

The Jessamyn West Collection contains materials relating to author Jessamyn West (1902-1984). The collection includes West's manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, diaries, reviews, publications, and personal library.

Collection period: 1920-1990

Elizabeth Bishop's Perspectives On Marriage, Jeffrey Westover

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Marriage can never be renewed except by that which is always the source of true marriage: that two human beings reveal the You to one another.
- Martin Buber

In a number of texts, both published and unpublished, Elizabeth Bishop addresses the themes of marriage, love, and courtship. Such issues were vexed ones for her. As a young woman, she rejected Robert Seaver’s marriage proposal (Millier, Elizabeth Bishop 112). Later, her friend Pauline Hemingway wondered in a letter whether she and Tom Wanning were engaged (Millier, Elizabeth Bishop 201), and Robert Lowell famously confessed to her that she was the …

Blanche Matthias: Part I, Huntington Library Papers; Part Ii, A Portrait In Friendships, James Karman

Jeffers Studies

Blanche Matthias’s papers at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, include two documents of interest to Jeffers scholars: a memoir by Blanche that recounts experiences involving Robinson and Una, and a letter to Blanche from Charles Roberts Aldrich that mentions Jeffers, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and other mutual friends. The memoir and letters are published here for the first time, along with a portrait of Matthias that describes her relationship with seven noteworthy friends: Una Jeffers, Georgia O’Keeffe, Margery Latimer, Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Rosalind Rajagopal, Mima Porter, and Charles Roberts Aldrich.

Maladaptive Grief: Irish And American Experiences Of Loss, Mourning, And Trauma, Abby Hey

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Literature that responds to loss and expresses mourning, a genre referred to as the elegy, traditionally follows an adaptive pattern in which a mourner reaches consolation and comfort. In the modern period, however, mourning transformed into destructive experiences that were notably private. With this phenomenon of greater social and emotional isolation, writers like Sylvia Plath, Samuel Beckett, and Elizabeth Bishop expressed rumination and irresolution. In contrast, before the twentieth century, elegies were not only more consolatory, but there was a greater emphasis on shared feeling, and this communal type of mourning is more often adaptive. By grieving together in the …

Nine Stories And The Society Of The Spectacle: An Exploration Into The Alienation Of The Individual In The Post-War Era, Margaret E. Geddy

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the thematic links between three of J. D. Salinger’s short stories published in Nine Stories (“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Down at the Dinghy,” and “Teddy”), ultimately arguing that it is a short-story cycle rooted in the quandary posed by the suicide of Seymour Glass. This conclusion is reached by assessing the influence of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” on these stories, something that is understood through the Marxist frame of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle.

Aesthetics And Poetics Of The Novel In Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer And Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son, Frederick Feldman

West Chester University Master’s Theses

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son are both Pulitzer Prize-winning novels from the first half of the 2010s. Nguyen’s novel of a Vietnamese spy in America during the Vietnam war has been critically acclaimed and has attracted significant scholarly attention, a special issue of PMLA being dedicated to the work. Johnson’s novel about North Korea, while also a recipient of praise, has been comparatively less noticed and attracted little scholarly work. This thesis seeks to contribute to the scholarly literature on American literature and to literature on the poetics of the novel by reading …

William W. French. Maryat Lee's Ecotheater: A Theater For The Twenty-First Century (Book Review), Carole K. Harris

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

"They Shall Be A Kosmos:" Alexander Von Humboldt And The Ecopoetics Of Walt Whitman, Benjamin Theyerl

Honors Theses

Places the naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt's proto-ecological ideas in conversation with Walt Whitman's poetry to show how the poet developed an ecopoetics in conversation with the natural sciences of his time, with specific attention to Von Humboldt's theory of the "kosmos" - by which Whitman's poetic persona self-identified. These recognitions are combined with how Whitman's idealized version of the American poet as a “kosmos” creates a political ecology in Whitman’s work, placing his ecopoetics into environmental discourses that resonate from their origin in the nineteenth century to our present ecological moment today.