conference papers & publications
Copyright Jessica Mehr or Journal of Publication
conference paper
Written by Jessica Mehr
Presented at Early American Reading Group Colloquium
Purdue University
2011
Captivity, Conflict, and Ambiguity in Lydia Sigourney's "The Lost Lily"
In her 1854 poem, “The Lost Lily,” American sentimental poet Lydia Sigourney tells the story of a young girl who is kidnapped by the Miami Indians, then discovered by her siblings over fifty years later as a fully-integrated member of the tribe. The poem offers at least two possible readings. One is a Christian captivity narrative in which Native Americans are depicted as essentially inferior, noble but violent savages that need white Christians to civilize and redeem them. The other reading reveals Christian hypocrisy and questions the superiority of white America.
Book Review
Written by Jessica Mehr
Copyright Modern Fiction Studies, 2014
Copyright Louisiana State University Press 2014
Taylor Haygood. Faulkner, Writer of Dis-Ability. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P, 2014. xv + 214 pp.
As Taylor Haygood notes in his compelling new book, one of the primary goals of Disability Studies is to expose “ability as a construct against which disabled bodies and minds are juxtaposed and judged” (ix). In literary criticism, this often means revealing the ways that disabled bodies and minds are leveraged for symbolic and stylistic purposes, or introducing alternative ways of perceiving abnormality. Faulkner, Writer of Dis-ability deftly weaves biographical detail, close textual analysis, and theory from field pioneers such as Rosemary Garland-Thomson, Lennard Davis, Tobin Siebers, David Mitchell, Sharon Snyder, David Wills, and Leslie Fielder to offer a provocative depiction of William Faulkner as an “increasingly disabled” writer whose personal life, career, characters, and even fictional structures were “shaped in contexts and dynamics of disability” (184, 35).