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This survey follows the development of working-class poetry from Whitman to contemporary poets. It begins by considering how the need for working-class poetry emerged. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” sought to democratize poetry both my challenging previous poetic formal conventions and broadening the scope of included subjects. Williams also challenged formal expectations, but both were limited by their historical and socioeconomic position. To combat this, I include the twentieth-century poets Ignatow and Levine who began in the working class so they could speak truths that had not been published before. Ignatow includes the phrase “dream of completion” which encapsulates various feelings of the working class. This dream could include moments of temporary leisure, but also feeling completed by societal acceptance or understanding. Finally, I include the contemporary poets Laux, Addonizio, and Espada. They complicate the “dream of completion” narrative with issues surrounding gender and race, and do not seek to find resolution.

Contemporary Appalachian poetry offers a lens through which we can see the immense impact that the Tennessee Valley Authority has had in Appalachia. In this thesis, I explore the powerful presence of dams in Appalachian poetry by analyzing three poems. Jesse Graves’s “The Road into the Lake” centers on personal and familial loss, Jackson Wheeler’s “The TVA Built a Dam” mourns the loss of communities, and Rose McLarney’s “Imminent Domain” focuses on the ecological destruction that has occurred in Appalachia and around the globe as the result of the construction of TVA dams. Ultimately, all three poems serve as eulogies of time, land, and lives that have been stolen, offering warnings against further ecological and societal desecration.

Symptoms of a Cosmic Fluke is a book of poems.

For decades now, the Appalachian community has been internally combatting two equally strong feelings—an inherently rich love of the mountains and a conflicting urge to leave the mountains. In recent years, Appalachian writers have produced a new literary tradition of identifying, discussing, and remedying this dilemma. Jim Wayne Miller’s 1997 The Brier Poems unapologetically explores the Appalachian community’s complicated relationship to its region. bell hooks’ 2012 Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place and Savannah Sipple’s 2019 WWJD and Other Poems then expand Miller’s exploration as both hooks and Sipple collectively represent voices that have often been left out of the stereotypical Appalachian narrative; their literature widens the lens of Appalachian experience and repositions the importance of the Appalachian canon. hooks and Sipple are contemporaries in conversation with Miller as all three authors have declared the Appalachian experience to have never been hegemonic—reclaiming, embracing, and uniting a modern Appalachian identity.

When women are lured away from home, they become vulnerable and cannot survive the violence inflicted upon them by their ‘lovers.’ This thesis explores the ties between two distinct cultural regions, Arabic and Appalachian, to examine the violence against women and what allows these women to escape such situations by using Hanan al-Shaykh’s One Thousand and One Nights: A Retelling and three traditional Appalachian murdered girl ballads. Many of the women in these stories die at the hands of their ‘lovers,’ regardless of their culture of origin. Once removed from their fellow women, they lack a support system that would allow them the strength to survive. While most of the women in these tales die at the hands of their ‘lovers,’ Shahrazad of One Thousand and One Nights: A Retelling survives because she is able to take back some control of the situation by telling her own story, instead of allowing it to be told for her. She survives the bleak situation she has been put in through the support of her sister, who makes it possible for Shahrazad to continue telling her stories. The support Shahrazad receives from her sister allows her to not only save herself, but also to save the lives of other women. This thesis concludes that it is this “sister” support that enables women to survive the violence consistently thrown at them and allows them to take back control of their own narratives.

Ron Rash’s Serena and Ann Pancake’s Strange as This Weather Has Been are two contemporary Appalachian novels that have yet to be analyzed from a biblical ecocritical perspective. While some literary scholars acknowledge the environmental aspects of the novels, little of their research goes beyond examining the land and its resources as commodities or metaphorical extensions for the characters. In this thesis, I elaborate on those interpretations by scrutinizing the natural descriptions in both novels and comparing those findings to some of the landscapes and environmental verses located within the Bible. Unlike the pastoral ideal found in a portion of the literature preceding the twentieth century, contemporary Appalachian writers such as Rash and Pancake have moved away from such a bucolic, prelapsarian idealization in favor of limning a more industrialized, postlapsarian Appalachia. Following both analyses, I conclude by predicting how emerging Appalachian writers will portray the landscape in future works.

By 1929 and 1930 the popularity and the increasing use of the cluster form caught the attention of most careful readers of fiction. Its original adaptations, its unique technique, its clever appropriation of the best in the novel and in the short story forms, its use by leading novelists, its suggested similarity to age-old literary methods, and it's very apparent possibilities - all these make it a subject worthy of some detailed study. It shall be the aim in this discussion to search out the very early traces of fictional forms similar to the cluster type, to attempt to account for the present form of the cluster by comparing its technique and form with that of the short story and the conventional novel, to enumerate and analyze modern works of fiction with cluster tendencies, to discuss the characteristic features of the contemporary cluster novel, and to attempt a summary as to the permanence and possibilities of this new type.

A young, first generation immigrant Chinese man named Ray living in Honolulu, Hawaii falls in love with a language student named Jessika. After a series of awkward encounters in which Ray fails to find a chance to express the full extent of his affection, Jessika makes off to the mainland United States for a green-card marriage. Months later, after failing to secure either a marriage or a green card, alone and out of money, Jessika calls Ray from a remote town in California and asks for his help to bring her to the airport in San Francisco, where she will end her disastrous journey in America by returning to her hometown in China. Gripped by a sense of responsibility and regret, Ray reluctantly agrees, knowing well that this is the last opportunity he will have with the woman he loves.

These stories are markers of temporal planes, the physical and the emotional, the swift and the fell. They operate at two ends; they are written and so are finitely formed and they are read indefinitely and yet only exist when they are read again. As a writer, this is my means of extension, waiving at the future with my ghost in the voices of my characters. They are also my archive, preserving instances of personal observation in the description of the body, still and living, moving in scene. For accuracy, I've done my best to emulate their movement. The analogy might be of a puppeteer pretending she has strings or better, the sand castles she's made are first only etchings at the shore; their formations quickly washed away and begun again then built better inland. To push metaphor: the description of body and movement within these stories are one kind of mirror and the author is another. The simultaneity of the reader lies between both. Perhaps this is paradoxical: these stories are archival and yet emulate timeless human occasion. I've desired to push metaphor and yet keep clear. My place between clarity and complexity is yet to melt-down from its oasis and gather into something drinkable.