Browsing by Department "English"
Now showing items 1-20 of 127
20th Century Feminism: A Jungian Exploration of The Feminine Self
(2012-07-31)
The following work uses the theories and methods provided by Carl Jung as a way of analyzing works by three women authors: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The ...
After Culloden: Anglo-Scottish Identity in the Wake of the 1745 Jacobite Rising
(2020-07-20)
This dissertation explores the literary representation and negotiation of Scottish identity and Anglo-Scottish Union during and immediately after the Jacobite Rising of 1745 (“the Forty-Five”). I argue that we can trace ...
Agency and Women’s Geographies: Tracking Spaces and Mobilities in Progressive-Era Women’s Writing
(2021-08-03)
This dissertation investigates dramatic changes in women’s geographic experience as represented in key literary texts from the Progressive Era. Focusing on the intersection between literature and material spaces in the ...
Alternate Futures: British Speculative Fiction and the Politics of Progress Between the Huxleys
(2022-11-29)
Alternate Futures examines the development of speculative fiction in British literature alongside the rise of the two-cultures debate in the late nineteenth century. When Matthew Arnold and Thomas Huxley debated the most ...
Ambassadors of Community: The History and Complicity of the Family Community in Midnight’s Children and the God of Small Things
(2009-04-27)
This thesis seeks to explore the usefulness of the family as a theoretical construct that serves to provide stability to characters in postcolonial literature in the absence of a stable national community. Benedict Anderson‟s ...
American Masculinity in Contemporary Adult Comics
(2011-05-04)
The connections between American comics and American men have been an interest to the academy since Frederic Wertham’s attack on comic’s influence on American youth in 1954. This study examines the current trends in ...
'And Yet God Has Not Said a Word': the Dramatic Monologue as Inverted and Secularized Prayer
(2008-05-15)
Nearly a decade ago, Dennis Taylor identified certain practical applications of religious criticism as a gap within the critical discourses of academia. This gap alarmed me as I read Robert Browning’s “Soliloquy of the ...
Anti-Catholic Polemic in Jacobean Print Culture: Contextualizing Westward for Smelts (1620)
(2006-08-15)
The 1620 anonymous prose fiction Westward for Smelts does not identify itself as a participant in the popular anti-Catholic polemic rampant in Jacobean England. Instead, Smelts relies heavily upon stereotyped caricatures ...
The Arbitress of Passion and of Contract: Eliza Haywood and the Legality of Love
(2006-12-15)
My dissertation is a cultural studies exploration of how the eighteenth-century British author Eliza Haywood legitimizes women’s presence in the legal landscape through illustrations of women’s experiences with contract, ...
'An Art of Speaking': A Study of Anzaldua’s Borderlands as a 'Tactical Discourse'
(2009-04-17)
The purpose of the present thesis has been to create a “de Certeauian” framework for studying resistance. The author situates Michel de Certeau’s work alongside other theorists, including Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin ...
Arthur Conan Doyle and British Cosmopolitan Identity: Knights, Detectives, and Mediums
(2014-08-19)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle embodies dual identities in most critical discussions of his works: 1) as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, a character whose influence far outspans his creator, and 2) as a staunch imperialist who ...
Being Neither and Both: The Liminal Nationality of Four Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Irish Women Writers, A Study of Genre, Gender, and Nation
(2011-07-14)
This dissertation examines the work of four Anglo-Irish women writers who published in the long eighteenth century, an integral voice in the development of Anglo-Irish nationality. These voices present a counter-perspective ...
“Being sexless, wilt thou be”: Nineteenth-Century British Poetry and the Challenge of the Androgynous Mind
(2019-04-24)
This dissertation occasions a recognition and discussion of androgyny by taking on the challenge of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s nineteenth-century claim that “a great mind must be androgynous.” Drawing on Judith Butler’s ...
Beyond Alterity: Narrative Ethics in Faulkner and Agee
(2010-04-08)
This thesis uses the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to examine the narrative structures of two literary works: William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Both texts feature dense ...
Common Law and Aesthetic Dissent: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Pragmatism, and the Jurisprudence of Agon
(2015-07-21)
This dissertation investigates Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s dissents that instantiate his evolutionary view of the common-law system. The style and rhetoric of his dissents drew attention to his legal propositions that ...
Conversations in Story(ality)
(2010-07-22)
In this dissertation, I introduce and define my new term, story(ality), which requires refocused attention on the truths available through nonfiction stories told, written, and performed in a contact zone, which is a social ...
Crossing Over: Interactions with(in) the Permeable Screen
(2017-04-20)
Within American culture, the television is arguably one of the more common modes of social discourse and entertainment. However, there are a number of literary responses to the medium (as well as other screen devices) that ...
Defying Categorization: Stray Objects and Women’s Material Practices in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
(2018-04-24)
This dissertation engages nineteenth century material objects that fall outside of established categorization and those objects’ associations with contemporary, women-authored texts. A common link between these “stray ...
Demons into Dandies: Comic Villains and Urban Economics in Victorian Literature
(2015-07-21)
This dissertation traces the evolution of comic villains through their antagonistic rapport with the most serious of Victorian enterprises: the economy. In particular, the development of villains is situated as a metaphoric ...
The Devolution of Irish Masculinity in Twentieth Century Irish Drama: Representations of Manliness in the Plays of John Millington Synge, Sean O'Casey and Martin McDonagh
(2015-05-07)
This project argues that prominent playwrights John M. Synge, Sean O’Casey and Martin McDonagh who are either native Irish or self-identify as Irish reject the various versions of masculinity proposed by nationalistic ...