Dr. Donna Campbell
Professor of English, Washington State University – Pullman
Email: campbelld@wsu.edu. Contact me to set up a Zoom meeting.
Lewis and Stella Buchanan Distinguished Professor of English, 2019-21
College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Faculty Award, 2023
Center for Arts and Humanities Faculty Fellow 2022-2023
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3432-9093
American Literature Site
Previous American Lit site is available here https://public.archive.wsu.edu/campbelld/public_html/amlit/aufram.html (No live link because it’s inaccessible to me & can’t be updated to WCAG guidelines) and here https://donnamcampbell.net.
Fall 2026
English 210 [HUM], Readings in American Literature: Immigrants, Outcasts, and Exiles. T – Th 12:05-1:20, Avery 104 (Pullman)
English 210, Readings in American Literature: Immigrants, Outcasts, and Exiles, is an introduction to short fiction, poetry, and nonfiction narratives from the nineteenth- through the twenty-first centuries. It has been approved as fulfilling the American literature requirement for English Education majors.
We won’t read work from all periods and movements in American literature, but you’ll learn about important movements and trends through our course theme “Immigrants, Outcasts, and Exiles,” since many works of American literature address the issues of inclusion and exclusion from a dominant culture.
Our class is a space for distraction-free discussions and writing about literature. All written work will be completed in class using pen and paper.
English 494 [CAPS]: Jazz Age/Harlem Renaissance (Pullman and Global Campus)
Like the 2020s, the 1920s, called “The Jazz Age” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, was a time of great cultural change brought about by technological advances, youth culture, the liberation of women, increasing voter rights, an emphasis on higher education, and increasing racial tolerance and respect for African American contributions to American culture (The Harlem Renaissance). Yet also like the 2020s, it was an era of vast income inequality and economic uncertainty with historical consequences that differed from the hope implied by “Jazz Age” and “Harlem Renaissance.” The basic principles of the course are to examine the mythology surrounding the era, to explore the cultural work that such a mythology has performed for later generations, and to investigate the ways in which such a mythology has obscured the political and racial tensions of the period.
Topics include the rise of modernism, post-WWI racial tensions, social unrest (the bonus marchers and the Palmer raids), race and the rise of the New Negro, ethnicity and restrictive immigration laws, Prohibition, the rise of gangster culture, cultural types (sheiks, flappers, and so on), freedom in sexual mores (including what critics are now calling the “gay Harlem Renaissance”), new technologies, the role of film as a disseminator of popular culture, and the emancipation of women. Although we will discuss modernism, this isn’t a course in modernism’s “greatest hits” with the usual suspects: T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and so on. Rather, our focus is on popular and literary culture: the fiction, poetry, movies, music, and art of the era.
Among the authors to be studied are the following: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jean Toomer, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Claude McKay, and Nella Larsen. Films include Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman and Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates, the earliest feature film by an African American director. We’ll also watch a recent film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s Passing. We’ll listen to the music of the era and identify its cultural references, including poems by Langston Hughes and others.
This is a 3-credit course that provides UCORE CAPS fulfillment upon completion.
Required Texts
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender is the Night. Scribner, 1995. ISBN 978-0684801544
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. Scribner, 1995. ISBN 0684800713 (see module for a free version)
Larsen, Nella. Quicksand. Penguin, 9781891396991) (see module for a free version)
Lewis, David Levering. The Harlem Renaissance Reader. Penguin, 1995. ISBN 0140170367
Toomer, Jean. Cane. Norton Critical Ed., 3rd ed. Norton,.
Recent Publications and Presentations
Lucasfilm biography of Edith Wharton for which I was interviewed (2007):
“The Reign of the Dolls: Violence and the Nonhuman in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.”
New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: Reading with and against the Grain, ed. Stephanie Palmer, Myrto Drizou and Cécile Roudeau (Edinburgh University Press, 2024).
“Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’s and Stephen Crane’s City Sketches”
- American Literary Realism
- University of Illinois Press
- Volume 55, Number 2, Winter 2023
- pp. 95-118
- https://muse.jhu.edu/article/872759
Excerpt: What the falling stories record is the crowd’s response to a private act that disorders public space by blurring the boundaries between public and private. The falling story occasioned by sudden disability upsets the implicit social contract that in the nineteenth century defined those with disabilities as possessing not only fewer implicit rights to be in the public sphere but also fewer explicit legal rights to be visible there. By returning the gaze, the person who has fallen challenges the strict demarcation between public and private, visible and hidden, and physical health and disability.
Falling stories signify larger naturalistic issues of human agency and the powerful forces aligned against the individual, yet the visual exchange between spectators and the fallen subject more specifically raises the issue of disability in naturalism, a literary form that traditionally valorizes strength. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/872759
“Edith Wharton and Film.”
(With Carol J. Singley and Frederick Wegener.) “The Complete Works of Edith Wharton: Preparing the First Authoritative Edition.”
The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton, Edited by Emily J. Orlando (Bloomsbury Press, 2022).
“Val Lewton’s Naturalism and Historical Trauma: No Bed of Her Own, Cat People, The Seventh Victim, and I Walked with a Zombie.” Studies in Amerian Naturalism, vol. 17, no. 2 (Winter 2022): 103-125. Special issue on Naturalism and the Visual.
Paul Laurence Dunbar: “When Malindy Sings,” The Sport of the Gods, and Black Lives Matter
The Frenchwoman Dépaysée: Edith Wharton and Gabrielle Landormy
Volume 35, Number 2, 2019, pp. 136-148
“Summers in Arcady: The Deep Time of Evolutionary Romance in James Lane Allen, Hamlin Garland, and Edith Wharton.” American Literary Realism 52.2 (Winter 2020): 95-113. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/745267
Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women’s Writing. University of Georgia Press, 2016. Paperback, 2018.
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book for 2017 * Honorable Mention, SSAWW Book Award, 2018
WSU Research Exchange (articles)
MLA Humanities Commons (articles)
