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Featured Articles
This page lists articles highlighted by our editors as noteworthy contributions to their particular issues. This gives each website visitor a brief sampling of the latest strong scholarship in American studies from around the world.
“Expect the Truth”: Exploiting History with Mandingo
By Andrew DeVos
American Studies
P. L. Travers, Walt Disney, and the Making of Mary Poppins
By M. Thomas Inge
Moravian Journal of Literature and Film
When Walt Disney decided to adapt Mary Poppins for the screen in 1944, he began a fifteen-year process of negotiation with the author, P. L. Travers, that would result in generous terms that would make her wealthy for the rest of her life. However, she also complained about the film for decades after because she thought he had radically altered her creation. Most Travers fans and critics would argue the same, with none of them specifying exactly what the damaging changes were. An examination of the film and an analysis of Disney’s Mary Poppins suggest that the British nanny is as mysterious a character as in the original and perhaps is even more subversive than critics have noted. Mary Poppins may arguably be not only a great Disney film but a fine motion picture that will continue to speak to generations.
"Almost a Western": The Deep South as the Mythic West in William Gay's The Long Home
By Thomas Ærvold Bjerre
Moravian Journal of Literature and Film
The essay outlines the workings of the Frontier Myth and shows how it has influenced contemporary southern writers, in this case the Tennessee writer William Gay. Gay is widely regarded as a southern writer, but in his debut novel The Long Home (1999) he draws heavily on traits from the American western. The essay discusses how elements of the Western myth fuse with characteristics of the southern Agrarian tradition. The western elements can be found in Gay’s depiction of landscape and characters, as well as in the larger thematic oppositions of civilization and wilderness. Ultimately, Gay succeeds in fusing the literary traditions of the South with the literary and filmic conventions of the popular western, thereby expanding the range of southern fiction.
Good Mob, Bad Mob: Violence and Community in The Cattle Queen of Montana (1894)
By David Rose
COPAS: Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies
Event{u}al Disruptions: Postmodern Theory and Alain Badiou
By Sebastian Huber
COPAS: Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies
- Introduction: Ceasefire or New Battle? The Politics of Culture Wars in Obama’s Time
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The Border Patrol and Their Migra Corridos: Propaganda, Genre Adaptation, and Mexican Immigration
- Video – Entrevista a Walter Prodencio Magne Veliz (Embajador Boliviano en Alemania)
- Detecting the (In)visible Woman: BarbaraNeely and Her Domestic Sleuth
- Everyday life in the memory: From I Remember by Joe Brainard to Je me souviens by Georges Perec
- Reconfiguring Gender Roles in Russian-German Imaginary Families
- ''What Town's this Boy?'': English civic politics, Virginia's urban debate, and Aphra Behn's The Widow Ranter
- Plunging into the Atlantic: The oceanic order of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick
- An Old Tale: The Marriage of Lodz and Los Angeles in David Lynch’s Inland Empire
- A History of Government Management of UFO Perceptions through Film and Television
- Post-American Literature
- The Horror of Dasein: Reading Steele's "The Days Between"