The Day Ernest Hemingway Died

Examines the details and various accounts of Hemingway\u27s wounding in World War I and the decades-long record of self-generated falsehoods about his wartime experiences. Erroneously dates-more than once-the mortar explosion at Fossalta di Piave to July 8, 1917, instead of 1918

Broken English, broken morality: English as virtue in Equiano's interesting narrative

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written By Himself, is one of the earliest and most widely published slave narratives. It is an abolitionist text as well as a conversion narrative. Equiano, a cultural hybrid, has two major conversions that mirror each other in the text: his conversion to evangelical Christianity and his conversion to speaker and writer of English. In early transatlantic literature, non-native speakers of "proper" English are often portrayed as virtuous while speakers of "broken English" are portrayed as barbarous. I argue that English language acquisition in early transatlantic literature is a significant marker of whether the audience is meant to view a person of color as a "savage" or as a "noble savage." If a character can speak and write English fluently, then he or she is likely to have assimilated in other ways as well, thus furthering the probability that he or she can fit the European idea of "good." If a character continues to speak "broken English," it is a sign of resistance to English colonization and, thus, "bad" moral character. I also argue that Equiano uses his newfound religion and language to establish himself as a moral authority on slavery. By convincing his English readers of his conversion to both Christianity and English, he is able to situate himself in the sympathetic "noble savage" category, thus garnering sympathy for his abolitionist cause. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

Elsie Dinsmore revisited: the utility of an outcast series

In this thesis, I argue that Martha Finley's Elsie Dinsmore series (1867-1905) deserves to be reconsidered for its potential utility in the broader arena of American literature. The series, popular during the latter half of the nineteenth century, is the special object of critical scorn amongst modern scholars despite having experienced a revival in popular circles. While other formerly-sidelined books, such as Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Maria Susanna Cummins' The Lamplighter (1854), have been reclaimed through sustained feminist scholarship, the Elsie series remains largely blacklisted from academic conversations. Scholars such as Nina Baym and Jane Tompkins, who worked to bring respect to female writings from the 1850s and 1860s, drew a sharp distinction between fictions written for adult audiences, like The Wide, Wide World and those written for adolescents, like Elsie Dinsmore and Little Women (1867) - a distinction that has caused juvenile fiction to be largely omitted from canon expansions benefitting adult domestic fiction. I argue that the Elsie Dinsmore series has a value within the American canon by acting as the best example of transitional literature between adult domestic fiction and the girls' series books that dominated the end of the century. To develop this argument, I first examine the textual and cultural factors that have contributed to Elsie's omission from academic conversations. I then examine the extent to which the Elsie series participates in tropes of adult domestic fiction and in tropes of girls' fiction to situate the series within the progression of American female writing in the nineteenth century. I contend that the Elsie series can make a valuable addition to courses on the development of female writing in America by acting as prime examples of texts that participate in both adult and juvenile genres. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

After Mary Prince: navigating 'authenticity' in 20th-century diasporic women's migration narratives

This project calls for a renewed consideration of Mary Prince's 1831 Caribbean slave narrative in critical readings of 20th-century women's migration novels. Specifically, I offer readings of how the signs "gender" and "labor" are strategically deployed and manipulated in contexts of migration. Such deployments and manipulations suggest that the notion of "authenticity," often used in feminist and postcolonial readings of women's narratives, is too narrow a construct to be as productive in literary scholarship as it has been assumed. To lend textual specificity to these elements, After Mary Prince examines the ways in which Prince's History establishes a precedent for 20th-century novels where migration shapes understandings of work and gender, effectively destabilizing labels of "authenticity." Published for the first time only two years before England put its 1833 Emancipation Bill into effect, Prince's narrative was both laden with the Anti-Slavery Society's editorial agenda and subjected to legal scrutiny that questioned the text's veracity as well as Prince's own "feminine" moral character. This series of textual and sociohistorical impediments is central to my consideration of agency and how it is simultaneously created and de-centered in 20th-century women's migration narratives. My focus lies within the Caribbean and the American South, where movement is cast in terms of escape and return, and where geographical context stages complicated formations of cultural expectation, memory, and identity. Specifically, in relation to Prince's History, the chapters focus on Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God; Gloria Naylor's Mama Day; Maryse Condé's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem; and, as an epilogue, Edwidge Danticat's recent work The Dew Breaker. These texts perpetuate key questions of how gender and labor mutually construct, even as they struggle against, each other. This project contends that these narratives are useful counter-examples to current strands of race and gender theory that, even in the name of empowerment and liberation, maintain problematically singular tropes of "authentic" identity categories. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries