Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons^™

Canadians In The Manichean Universe Of War: The Novels Of Ralph Connor, Anna Branach-Kallas

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The purpose of my article is an analysis of two war novels by Canadian best-selling author Charles W. Gordon, known to his readers under the pseudonym of Ralph Connor (1830-1937): The Major (1917) and The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land (1919). At the age of fifty-four, Connor was sent to the front as a preacher; only a fourth of his battalion survived, which made his determined to support the cause of the Empire in North America. His sentimental romances were written to support the war effort (The Major) or consolidate the myth of Canada’s valorous sacrifice in ...

Essex’S International Agenda In 1595 And His Device Of The Indian Prince, Linda Shenk

Linda Shenk

In the fall of 1595, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was poised to attain political greatness, and he knew it. The international political climate had become sufficiently precarious that a statesman with Essex‘s particular expertise in foreign intelligence and military matters possessed skills well-tailored to address England’s current crises. Spain was once again preparing to invade, this time with an armada greater than in 1588; relations with England’s key ally France were cooling; and the financial and military advantages of asserting a presence in the New World were becoming increasingly evident. Aware of this moment as opportune ...

Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Providential capitalism names the marriage of providential Christian values and market-oriented capitalist ideology in the post-revolutionary Atlantic through the mid nineteenth century. This is a process by which individuals permitted themselves to be used by a so-called “divine economist” at work in the Atlantic market economy. Backed by a slave market, capital transactions were rendered as often violent ecstatic individual and cultural experiences. Those experiences also formed the bases for national, racial, and classed identification and negotiation among the constellated communities of the Atlantic. With this in mind, writers like Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw presented market success ...

Locating Place And Landscape In Early Insular Literature, A. Joseph Mcmullen, Kristen Carella

Journal of Literary Onomastics

No abstract.

Comparative Literary History, Michael J. Griffin Ii

Criticism

Review of Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel by David James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 223. $95.00 cloth.

The Star-Spangled Banshee: Fear Of The Unknown In The Things They Carried, Mckay Hansen

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In this paper I discuss the nature of the fear that worked upon many of the soldiers of the Vietnam War, concentrating on a fear of the unknown. Drawing upon Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried as its central focus text, my analysis suggests that the fear of the unknown is a product of communities’ efforts to distance themselves from a cultural Other. As such, I posit that those in positions of societal influence employ fear to reinforce racial stereotypes and maintain domestic unity. Perceiving ethnic and linguistic misunderstandings as forces that cultural leaders often evoke deliberately, I ...

The Library In Literature, Hannah Madelene Richter Livant

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

The Adventure Of A Lifetime: Examining Life Lessons In Eighteenth Century Literature, Griffin Ferre

CMC Senior Theses

Embedded within various works of Eighteenth-Century literature lie themes regarding how the protagonists of these stories pursue their own versions of happiness. This thesis examines how characters from a wide variety of Eighteenth-Century novels engage with their surroundings, often resisting the dominant social structures of the time, to fashion more fulfilling lives for themselves. From Robinson Crusoe to Elizabeth Bennet to Frankenstein's monster, these characters come from a wide variety of backgrounds but all reveal several unifying themes. They seek out personal connections rather that striving to fulfill antiquated social expectations and they focus on their own agency, rather ...

Boundaries Of Knowledge: Expertise And Professionalism In British And Postcolonial Literature, Patrick Steven Herald

Theses and Dissertations--English

The social sciences have developed robust bodies of scholarship on expertise and professionalism, yet literary analyses of the two remain comparatively sparse. I address this gap in Boundaries of Knowledge by examining recent Anglophone fiction and showing that expertise and professionalism are central concerns of contemporary authors, both as subject matter in fiction and in their public identities. I argue that the novelists studied use and abuse expertise and professionalism: they critique professions as participant observers, and also borrow the mantle of expert credibility to bolster their own cultural capital while documenting the pitfalls of expertise in their fiction.

My ...

Representing Modern Female Villain: On Feminine Evil, Perverse Nationhood, And Opposition In Rómulo Gallegos’ Doña Bárbara And Salman Rushdie’S Midnight’S Children, Barbara Guerrero

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis aims to contribute to the scholarship on modern female villainy by further exploring the ways in which 20^th century female villains are represented as well as the functions they carry out in the text. In this study, I look at Rómulo Gallegos’ doña Bárbara from Doña Bárbara (1929) and Salman Rushdie’s Indira Gandhi from Midnight’s Children (1981). I argue that both villains are a combination of already-existing forms of evil in more recognizable contexts as well as a rejection of and opposition to modern values. Firstly, I examine how the villains both conform and resist ...

Global Ecologies And The Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches Edited By Elizabeth Deloughrey, Jill Didur, And Anthony Carrigan, Joshua Bartlett

The Goose

Review of Elizabeth Deloughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan's Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches.

Blind But Seeing: Post-Clinical Medicine In Jose Saramago's Blindness, Matthew J. Ftacek

All NMU Master's Theses

This project examines José Saramago’s Blindness (1996) in the context of two other narratives focused on plagues and epidemics – Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947) – each written at different points in time during the development of clinical medicine as chronicled by Michel Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic. The paper draws heavily upon Foucault’s work on clinical medicine, as well as a number of different theories of medical history, government policy, and cultural attitudes towards health and illness. The goal of the project is twofold: first, to examine ...

'Those Who Cling In Queer Corners To The Forgotten Tongues And Memories Of An Elder Day': J.R.R. Tolkien, Finns And Elves, Andrew Scott Higgins

Journal of Tolkien Research

Abstract

Those Who Cling in Queer Corners To The Forgotten Tongues and Memories of an Elder Day' J.R.R. Tolkien, Finns and Elves

Dr. Andrew Higgins

In this paper I will explore how several historic, literary and mythic associations of the Finnish people with elements of magic, the supernatural and the 'other' influenced J.R.R. Tolkien in imbuing the character and language of his own Elves with a similar quality of magic and 'arresting strangeness'.I will explore several characterisations of the Finns, the People of Kalevala, Tolkien would have encountered in his early study of the Kalevala ...

Norse "Loki" As Praxonym, William Sayers

Journal of Literary Onomastics

The still debated Old Norse theonym Loki is projected against the wide semantic field of the ON verb lúka "to close", not, as current scholarship would have it, as relevant to Ragnarǫk and the closing down of the divine world but in its judicial applications to successfull negotiated outcomes. The ingenious Loki, the bearer of a praxonym, would then be the inventive Fixer. While this aspect is well illustrated in tales of Loki's ruses and expedients, a more archaic figure emerges when Loki is associated with the reconstructed Indo-European verbal root *lok- "to accuse, blame, prohibit" (cf. Old Frisian ...

“The City Was Named After An Herb Called Mesas In Ancient Spanish”: Rabbi Yosef Mesas’ Testimony Concerning His Surname, Abraham Ofir Shemesh

Journal of Literary Onomastics

Yosef Mesas (1892–1974), a renowned Jewish Rabbi, claimed that the origin of his surname is the ancient city Mesas near Madrid, named for a medicinal herb common there. He assumes that "Mesas" became a common name in Morocco after the Jews were exiled from Spain in 1492. Mesas suggests that the herb is "Masasa" in Moroccan Arabic (Darija dialect). In the 12th century, Maimonides stated that Moroccans call the genus Plantago "Masasa". This fact refutes Mesas' assumption that the name was brought to Morocco after the Alhambra Decree.

"Mesas" apparently originates from the Spanish term "mesa", meaning "tableland" or ...

Dialect Reflecting Heritage, Class, And Dis/Entitlement And Creating Social Situations, Adobi Agbasi

ETD Collection for AUC Robert W. Woodruff Library

This study examines how dialect can reflect people's heritage, socioeconomic status, and dis/entitlement status. It also examines how dialect has the ability to create social situations through codeswitching and language borrowing. I use the novels A Lesson Before Dying, The Lunatic, and Anthills of the Savannah to best explain my study. The novels take place in the United States, Jamaica, and West Africa. The theory that dialect reflects people's heritage, class, and dis/entitlement status is revealed through people from Africa and the African Diaspora and through people from Europe and the European diaspora. A conclusion is ...

Junot Díaz’S The Brief, Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao And Its Punishment Of Failed Gender Performances, Bruno Yupanqui Tovar

Masters Theses

Junot Díaz’s renowned novel, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Oscar Wao), presents the brief and wondrous life of its main character, Oscar Wao, but also describes the exceptional lives of Lola and Belicia, his sister and mother, respectively. While the story’s title asserts an enthusiastic tone to the lives of Oscar—and the females in his family—the story actually reveals the victimization and demise of these characters. Though Díaz offers the spell of Fukú americanus, a Dominican superstition, Feminist Theorist Judith Butler provides a more advantageous, concrete explanation for the subjugation of these characters. Butler ...

"The Bride Of His Country": Love, Marriage, And The Imperialist Paradox In The Indian Fiction Of Sara Jeannette Duncan And Rudyard Kipling, Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

Introduction:

For many literary scholars and general readers, the expression 'Kipling's India' neatly delineates the imperialist society that existed on the Indian subcontinent in the late nineteenth century. The phrase, however, is deceptive in its simplicity. It does not reveal, or even imply, the internal workings behind what is certainly a vast imaginative construct, a construct that involves a specific political ideology, various cultural myths, and an extraordinary emotional investment. In the words of one critic, Kipling was "a mythmaker for a culture under protracted stress" (Wurgaft xx). He voiced the bewilderment and memorialized the tragic — and sometimes pathetic ...

"My Village My Mind": Prafulla Mohanti's Internal Landscape, Geoffrey Kain

Geoffrey Kain

“Toward the end of my 1998 interview with Prafulla Mohanti, I asked the rather innocuous question, ‘How would you like to be remembered?’ a question whose context implied an answer of either ‘as a painter’ or ‘as a writer’…”

Talkative Man: R.K. Narayan's Consummate Performance Of Narayan, Geoffrey Kain

Geoffrey Kain

“There is evidence that after publication of The Dark Room (1938) R.K. Narayan planned a literary excursion in another direction, but the novel set outside of Malgudi was simply never written…”