Why Speak of American Stories as Dreams?

The term American Dream conjures literary images of perseverance and promise on the one hand but disillusionment and defeat on the other: Ben Franklin pulling himself up by the bootstraps, Huck Finn lighting out for the territories, Gatsby insisting that he can repeat the past, Willy Loman burying his face in his hands. Whether one accepts it as a reality, punctures it as a myth, or presents it as a nightmare, the American Dream has maintained its powerful presence in scholarly conversations throughout the decades. Traditionally, scholars have referred to classic American Dream texts such as Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1791–1790), Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick (1868), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949). In their readings of these works, early critics tended to associate the dream with a pervasive American spirit, a belief in national innocence, and a vision of human perfectibility; while later scholars challenge these traditional mobility narratives, some contemporary critics deny that the dream ever existed in the first place

At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850-1930, by Betsy Klimasmith

Book review by Cara Erdheim. Klimasmith, Betsy. At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850-1930. Durham, New Hampshire: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005

Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature

Book review by Cara Erdheim: Robisch, S. K. Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature. Reno, Nevada: Uniiversity of Nevada Press, 2009

Private Fleming at Chancellorsville: The Red Badge of Courage and the Civil War

Book review by Cara Erdheim: Lentz, Perry. Private Fleming at Chancellorsville: The Red Badge of Courage and the Civil War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006

Writing the Northland: Jack London\u27s and Robert W. Service\u27s Imaginary Geography

Book review by Cara Erdheim. Giehmann, Barbara Stefanie. Writing the Northland: Jack London\u27s and Robert W. Service\u27s Imaginary Geography. Würzburg, Germany: Könighausen & Neumann, 2011

The Genesis of the Chicago Renaissance: Theodore Dreiser, Langston

Book review by Cara Erdheim. Hricko, Mary. The Genesis of the Chicago Renaissance: Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James T. Farrell. London & New York: Routledge, 2009

Simplicity, Sustainability, and a Greening of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition

This essay is in part academic and in part anecdotal, although, from my perspective, the two need not be mutually exclusive. A unique Service Learning experience last May has crystallized my personal reflections on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, as well as clarified my literary scholarship in the field of American environmental writing

Review of Prairie Visions by Hamlin Garland, ed. by Keith Newlin

Book review by Cara Erdheim

Is There a Place for Ecology in An American Tragedy ? Wealth, Water, and the Dreiserian Struggle for Survival

This essay discusses various writings of U.S. writer and naturalist Theodore Dreiser. It presents his views and socio-political position on the relationship between the environment, ecology and social classes. In his 1925 masterpiece, An American Tragedy, he writes of the life and struggles of the young Clyde Griffiths amidst America\u27s nobility. In the novel, there are allusions of injustice amongst social classes as to access to natural resources, such as water. Dreiser\u27s other writings on the same theme are also reviewed

Naturalism’s Dietary Discourse: From Fasting Fads to Sinclair’s Social Reforms

This paper examines the literature of Upton Sinclair, famed American author of The Jungle, and how this 1906 novel led to the formation of Theodore Roosevelt’s Food and Drug Administration. I am particularly interested in Sinclair’s fascination with fasting fads, which reflect a larger Progressive-era preoccupation with physical fitness and the white male body. American literary naturalism, the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century movement to which Sinclair contributes, is a literature of and about human hunger. Many scholars have focused on The Jungle, a seminal book that revolutionized the food industry; however, little work has been done on the narratives about fasting and fitness that followed. My work therefore draws attention to a dietary discourse that reveals a great deal about early twentieth-century conceptions of masculinity, health, and the body. This paper is part of a larger effort to reconcile a counter-narrative of culturally disordered eating and self-restraint on the one hand with the ecological ethics so central to naturalism’s politically radical sentiments on the other