Browsing by Author "Silverstein, Marc"

Now showing items 1-20 of 20

After Culloden: Anglo-Scottish Identity in the Wake of the 1745 Jacobite Rising

Dowling, Phineas (2020-07-20) ETD File Embargoed

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 ...

American Masculinity in Contemporary Adult Comics

Hill, Mark (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 ...

'An Art of Speaking': A Study of Anzaldua’s Borderlands as a 'Tactical Discourse'

Narayan, Madhu (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 ...

“Being sexless, wilt thou be”: Nineteenth-Century British Poetry and the Challenge of the Androgynous Mind

Haines, Leslie (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 ...

Common Law and Aesthetic Dissent: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Pragmatism, and the Jurisprudence of Agon

Mendenhall, Allen (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 ...

Crossing Over: Interactions with(in) the Permeable Screen

Frazer, Michael (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 ...

Elder Voices: Slavery and Aging in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Ferguson, Lydia E. (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 ...

Enchanted Geographies of the New Republic, 1789 - 1846

Williams, Bryan (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 ...

Feminine Bits: The Passive Bodies and Active Revisions of Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, and Red Riding-hood

Ross, Alyssa (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 ...

Invisible Tokens: Staging Cultural Anxieties about the Plague in the Plays of Shakespeare and Jonson

Thiele, Matthew (2011-03-30)

My study examines the influence of plague on six plays: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Timon of Athens by William Shakespeare, and Epicoene, Volpone, and The Alchemist by Ben Jonson. Between 1570 and ...

Justice You Shall Pursue: Jewish American Pragmatism

Ferriter, Courtney (2017-04-25)

Pragmatist thinkers like Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, and John Dewey advocated for greater inclusivity in our democracy, urging Americans to an understanding of democracy as process. Nevertheless, pragmatist philosophy has ...

Men Playing (at) Women: Categorical Consequences of Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern English Stage

Haberstroh, Amanda (2012-12-05)

Early modern English stage customs normalized the practice of cross-dressing boy actors to play female characters; the boys who portrayed female characters demonstrated the performativity of gender as an act that can be ...

'A Participant in the World': Identity, Change, and the Closet in Angels in America

Blair, Nancy (2008-05-15)

Tony Kushner’s Angels in America consists of two plays that examine the lives of a group of gay men living in New York City during the mid-1980s. Kushner revised Perestroika, the second play, in 1995, and made further ...

"The Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating": Sweeney Todd and the Modern Revenge Tragedy

Mechler, Mary M. (2010-04-02)

Revenge tragedies create a world where corruption leads to retribution through personal rather than civil channels. Although many have connected Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and the revenge tradition, few have explored ...

Reconfiguring Cultural Literacy: Multi-Authored Cultural Literacy Narratives in a Post-Hirsch Age

Pavletic, Heather (2012-08-03)

My dissertation argues that Hirsch’s definition of cultural literacy must be updated so that it focuses on the behaviors, practices, beliefs, and ideals of individuals (any individual) and how each of these areas connects ...

Staging and Upstaging Revolt: The Maternal Function in Twentieth Century Drama

Blake, Thomas (2009-07-24)

This dissertation explores the maternal role in subject formation and surveys varying depictions of this role in twentieth-century drama. While sifting through the genealogy of psychoanalytic theory, this project investigates ...

“That Girl of Yours, She's Pretty Hard-Boiled”: Film Noir and the Claiming and Performance of Gender in Veronica Mars

Mathis, Corine Elizabeth (2009-04-15)

Veronica Mars, a television series aired on the WB and CW networks from 2004-2007, presents a world in which violence and conspiracy abound. The series starts off with the conspiracy that has most closely touched Veronica’s ...

Towards in/Vention in the 21st Century: A Philosophical Case Study

Campbell, Trisha (2010-04-05)

This thesis offers a philosophical treatise on Invention in the 21st century, positing our current oppositional dialectic as problematic. Thus, I move to offer a way out of this dialectical negation in order to really ...

'Unstable Subjects': Gender and Agency in Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9

Whitaker, Laura (2007-05-15)

The work of Judith Butler raises important questions about subjectivity, and calls for a reconception of the subject as unstable. This instability is the result of the disruption of the sequence of desire following from ...

"Until the Thousand and First Generation": Generational Consciousness in the Contemporary Novel

Spence, Gavin (2011-04-26)

Generations, by their nature, stand at the crossroads of broad, collective experience (dividing national history into distinct decades) and personal experience (separating an entire lifespan into life phases). More than ...