Browsing Auburn Theses and Dissertations by Department "English"
Now showing items 21-40 of 127
A Different Type of New Woman: The Life and Writing of Lady Mary Jeune
(2023-08-02)
Much work has been done in both the popular and academic presses over the last few decades to build the foundational knowledge of women’s activism through life writing, research, and the development of feminist methodologies ...
Discourses of Race and Disease in British and American Travel Writing about the South Seas 1870-1915
(2009-12-15)
The nineteenth century saw the islands of the South Pacific colonized by the Western powers, including the United States. Because of this relatively late date compared to other colonized regions of the world, the imperializing ...
Discovering Diversity: The Subversive Detective in Late Victorian and Edwardian Detective Fiction
(2023-10-18)
This dissertation examines the ways British detective fiction at the turn of the twentieth century undermined dominant ideological systems through the presentation of culturally, ideologically, and formally subversive ...
Disorderly Eating in Victorian England
(2013-07-19)
This dissertation investigates the gendered spaces of eating and consumption in Victorian England. In the nineteenth century, Dr. William Gull introduced the medical diagnosis of “anorexia nervosa,” which spawned a discourse ...
Drawn Into Unknown Lands: Frontier Travel and Possibility in Early American Literature
(2005-12-15)
This dissertation explores the symbolic meanings contained in literary depictions of journeys to the American frontier written during the late 1700s and early 1800s. I argue that these depictions work to create and advance ...
Eighteenth-Century Losers: Anxious Performances of Masculinity in Long Eighteenth- Century England
(2011-12-01)
My dissertation investigates how a group of male comedic figures (cuckolds, impotent men, and old bachelors) relate to an ongoing debate in the eighteenth century about the marriage problem. Largely ignored by scholars as ...
Elder Voices: Slavery and Aging in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
(2016-12-09)
This dissertation explores the ways in which nineteenth-century apologist writers sought to discount and silence the agency of African Americans through literary representations of enslavement in elder(ly) “Aunts” and ...
Embodiment and the African Diaspora in the Fiction of Paule Marshall
(2016-07-22)
Paule Marshall’s fiction is characterized by narration of the body in relation to African diasporic identity. My dissertation project, "Embodiment and the African Diaspora in the Fiction of Paule Marshall," seeks to examine ...
Enchanted Geographies of the New Republic, 1789 - 1846
(2022-04-27)
Rhetorical depictions of otherworldliness abound in antebellum American literature. Such images and tropes of otherworldly enchantment have recently been studied by scholars of nineteenth-century America in an effort to ...
The Evolution of the South: Eliza Frances Andrews, General William T. Sherman, and Green Interpretations of the Civil War
(2009-04-28)
This essay examines representations of nature in the journal written by Eliza Frances Andrews during the last year of the Civil War. Andrews utilizes an evolutionary metaphor to justify the Old South, explain the Civil ...
The Fabulous Nabob: Miscegenations of Empire and Vocation in Eighteenth Century British Literature
(2006-08-15)
This dissertation has grown out of my interest in literary representations of the Nabob, a British Returnee from India who appeared in the aftermath of the 1757 Battle of Plassey.The representations of the Nabob in popular ...
Fat Bob
(2007-08-15)
This is a fiction writing thesis consisting of four short stories. Each short story was originally conceived of by the author during the graduate fiction writing classes taken at Auburn University during the spring and ...
'Fellowship of sense with all that breathes': Eighteenth-Century Women Writers, War, and the Environment
(2011-04-29)
In “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” environmental historian William Cronon writes that in order to live responsibly with nature, we must learn to recognize nature in our own backyards. ...
Feminine Bits: The Passive Bodies and Active Revisions of Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, and Red Riding-hood
(2016-08-03)
Using an interdisciplinary approach that includes sociological data, feminist and postmodern theory, and historical context, I analyze gendered representations of violence and sexuality in contemporary fairy tales, arguing ...
Fighting Culture: Class and the Early English Boxing Novel in Late Victorian Society
(2013-12-19)
The early English boxing novel emerges at a critical point in the wider culture of
transition that typifies the later Victorian age in England. Evidencing the emergence of an
increasingly populist literature and popular ...
Flannery O'Connor and Mid-Century America
(2014-12-12)
Though the fiction of Flannery O'Connor has most often been studied from theological or psychological perspectives, her work is deeply entrenched in, and reflective of, the culture of the mid-twentieth-century United States. ...
'From Darwin to the Death Camps': A Collage of Holocaust Representation Focusing on Perpetrator Atrocity Discourse in Literature, Drama, and Film
(2007-08-15)
In this dissertation my plan is to take a collage of representational forms that deal with the subject of the Holocaust and to point at the discourse of the perpetrator as possibly a more postmodern form of representing ...
From Tonic to Toxin: Medicinal Plants in the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century
(2020-04-27)
My dissertation, From Tonic to Toxin: Medicinal Plants in the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century, explores the reclassification of herbs in nineteenth-century British literature and culture from potent allies to ...
From Trauma to Testimony: Resilience in Four Contemporary Novels
(2017-07-25)
As the work of eminent literary trauma theorists Cathy Caruth and Elaine Scarry has persisted as integral to the field, literary trauma studies now has a twenty-year legacy prioritizing the silencing and shattering impact ...
Gender on Paper: Gender Performances in American Women's Poetry 1650-Present
(2007-05-15)
Gender on paper is an act; it is performed. Using Judith Butler’s definition of gender as a basis for an analysis of how gender is constructed, I look at the “repeated acts” of particular language usage in poems written ...