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Donna M. Campbell American Literature

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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

Spring 2026 Student Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays 12-1 in Zoom. (Note: This is not in Bold but in Heading 4)

 

Courses for Fall 2026:

English 210 [HUM], Readings in American Literature: Immigrants, Outcasts, and Exiles. T – Th 12:05-1:20, Avery 104.

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. Global Campus.

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

“Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’s and Stephen Crane’s City Sketches”

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton“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“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
Donna Campbell
American Literary Realism
Vol. 53, No. 2 (Winter 2021), pp. 106-111 (6 pages)
Published By: University of Illinois Press

 

 

 

 

 

 

“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.Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women's Writing. U Georgia P, 2016. Named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book for 2017.

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book for 2017 * Honorable Mention, SSAWW Book Award, 2018

WSU Research Exchange (articles)
MLA Humanities Commons (articles)