English Language and Literature Commons^™

Review Of Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, And Belief In Early Modern England, Amy Mallory-Kani

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

Review Of Teresa Barnard, Ed. British Women And The Intellectual World In The Long Eighteenth Century., Judith Dorn

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review of Teresa Barnard, ed. British Women and the Intellectual World in the Long Eighteenth Century.

Charlotte Charke’S Gun: Queering Material Culture And Gender Performance, Jade Higa

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This essay juxtaposes readings of material culture and gender performance in Charlotte Charke’s Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke (1755). It argues that the transient relationship Charke has to the objects in her life mirrors the fluidity of her gender. The essay ultimately uses Charke’s narrative as a case study in a questioning of a binarized gender matrix. The thesis suggest that, though we lack language to fully describe it, characters and historical figures like Charke move beyond and explode gender binaries.

General Editor's Note, Laura Runge

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

Restoration Raillery: The Use Of Witty Repartee To Gain Power Within Gendered Spaces Of Restoration London, Bonnie Soper

Madison Historical Review

“Restoration Raillery: The Use of Witty Repartee to Gain Power within Gendered Spaces in Restoration London,” examines the creation of gendered spaces to gain political and social power through the use of satire and wit in poetry, theater, and the court of Charles II in Restoration London. During the Restoration period, mentions of wit and incivility in print and theatre increased over previous eras due to the heightened importance placed on wit as a tool to gain popularity within the court of Charles II. At the same time, witty repartee and well-executed satire provided political power to men within Parliament, …

A Comparative Study Of War Metaphors In English And Chinese Business Media Discourse, Xian Zhong

Theses & Dissertations

Journalistic business discourse plays an indispensable role in people’s lives. It serves not only to inform the public about ongoing business activities and economic processes, but also influence the public in their strategic decision-making about investment options. Metaphor is a tool employed to help fulfill the communicative and persuasive functions of the popular business discourse, which is the target of this study.

Based on two self-compiled corpora of business news articles in English and Chinese, the study laid particular emphasis on the conceptual metaphor of BUSINESS IS WAR and showed that though the use of this conceptual metaphor was common …

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice of Black Uplift, 1890-1905 situates the queer-of-color cultural imaginary in a relatively small nodal point: the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and archival research on leading and marginal figures of Post-Reconstruction African American culture, this dissertation considers the progenitorial relationship of late-nineteenth century black uplift novels to modern-day queer theory. Bricolage Propriety builds on work about the sexual politics of early African American literature begun by women-of-color feminists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Hazel V. Carby, Ann duCille, and Claudia Tate. A new wave of …

A Girlhood Among Ghosts, An Experimental Project, Maple Wu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“If a woman is going to write a Book of Peace, it is given her to know devastation” – Maxine Hong Kingston, The Fifth Book of Peace.

I do not believe I know devastation. I think to be devastated means one has to experience extreme pain, and live in the aftermath of trauma. I think of this in terms of war, famine, and immigration. A little self-reflection shows that in the twenty-something years of my life, I have not encountered any of the three things listed.

What I do recall, however, is the first time I picked up Maxine …

The Art Of Cognition: British Empiricism And Victorian Aesthetics, Rachel Kravetz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The British are credited—or charged—with establishing empiricism, the view that all knowledge is embedded in sense experience. My project argues for and describes an undercurrent of idealism within British empiricism: the writers of my study investigated modes of thinking that transform sensory experience. To see their idealism at work, it is necessary to look closely at how they conceived of ideas in the mind as pictures. Given that the term “picture” was used to refer to both inner ideas and actual paintings, it is not surprising (though rarely noticed) that when empiricists wanted to consider how the mind shapes ideas, …

Lyrical Mysticism: The Writing And Reception Of Catherine Of Siena, Lisa Tagliaferri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lyrical Mysticism: The Writing and Reception of Catherine of Siena (https://caterina.io) affirms the 14th-century mystic Catherine of Siena as a writer through contextualizing her texts among the corpus of contemporary Italian literature, and studying her reception in the Renaissance period of Italy and England. Joining an increasing body of recent meaningful scholarship that has been making significant progress to recover many overlooked and peripheral female voices of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, this work serves to fully assert Catherine as a writer of work that is literarily significant and worthy of textual analysis alongside contemporary male Italian …

Between The Cloud And The Page: Repetition And Textuality In Post-Conceptual Poetics, Michael Kirby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

These three chapters take as their focus the emergent movement of post-conceptual poetry. The first chapter, “What is Post-conceptual Poetry?,” attempts to delineate the varying definitions of post-conceptualism offered by four critics (Felix Bernstein, Diana Hamilton, Vanessa Place, and Robert Fitterman). Finding none of these to be satisfactory, I turn towards the delineation of my own definition of post-conceptualism in the second chapter, “Beckett contra Sade: Two Kinds of Repetition,” which asserts that post-conceptualism may derive a sort of cohesive political agenda from its rejection of both Sadean and Beckettian repetition. “Between the Cloud and the Page,” the third chapter, …

Effects Of Multimedia Instruction On L2 Acquisition Of High-Level, Low-Frequency English Vocabulary Words, Euna Cho

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study examined the effects of multimedia enhancement in video form in addition to textual information on L2 vocabulary instruction for high-level, low-frequency English words among Korean learners of English. Although input-based incidental learning of L2 vocabulary through extensive reading has been conventionally believed to be appropriate for high-frequency words, intentional or explicit vocabulary learning is suggested to be more sensible or realistic for the acquisition of low-frequency academic words. Multimedia support in foreign language instruction has revealed benefits in promoting direct teaching and explicit learning of L2 vocabulary; moreover, adding textual information to video seems to boost students’ …

Collaboration Revisited: The Performative Art Of Claude Cahun And Hannah Weiner, Phillip L. Griffith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In its most common usage in the artistic context, collaboration refers to a practice of creation in which two artists work together to produce a single artwork or object. Collaboration Revisited: The Performative Art of Claude Cahun and Hannah Weiner focuses on the nexus of photography, writing, and performance in the work of six female avant-garde artists from the transatlantic twentieth century, informed by the important place of surrealism in that history, to reconsider this understanding of collaboration. Instead of the notion of collaboration as founded in the experience of two artists working together in each others’ presence, I examine …

Knowing Others, Or Not: Performing, Caring, Foreboding, And Acknowledging In Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, Meechal Hoffman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Knowing Others, Or Not makes two overarching claims about the nineteenth-century novel’s depictions of relations. First, they are overwhelmingly concerned with epistemological questions about knowing others, and second, more often than not, the problem of other minds is portrayed as productive of both pleasure and valuable negative affects. While much scholarship on the relational nineteenth century focuses on either sympathy or social responsibility within the framework of liberal individualism, I show instead that the authors in this study—Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot—repeatedly register doubt about the usefulness or possibility of authenticity, and posit the pleasure that …

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

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 …

Mechanized Identity: The Blood-Mill Of Richard Coer De Lyon, Andrew S. Thomas

The Hilltop Review

The seven-thousand-line Middle English romance, Richard Coer de Lyon, is not often read as a text fascinated with machinery. The semi-historical, superlative, titular character and his various marvelous and deeply disturbing deeds usually claim most attention, and not without reason. There is much to examine in the heroically cannibalistic Richard, who presents a complex and often troubling vision of the ways both Englishness and the Saracen Other can be constructed within romance. Alongside these well-studied qualities, however, is a strange attention within the text to sieges and siege engines. Richard’s army is accompanied by a large, named siege tower …

Experience And Authority: Knowledge, Gender, And The Creation Of The Self In The Book Of Margery Kempe And Late Medieval Travel Literature, Rebecca D. Fox

The Hilltop Review

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between written authority, experiential authority, travel, and gender in late medieval travel literature. By expanding Terrence M. Bowers’ discussion of travel as a masculine rite of passage beyond Margery Kempe to include Marco Polo, John Mandeville, and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, the relationships between the aims and experiences of each figure are clarified. Each figure claims that their travels have given them unique a experiential knowledge which allows them to both recreate themselves on their own terms and to assert their own authority in opposition to written authority. Variables such …

Glorious And Execrable: The Dead And Their Bodies In World War I Poetry, Rebecca E. Straple

The Hilltop Review

While many scholars of World War I poetry have identified aspects of soldier poets’ work that embody the change from enthusiastic support of the war to disillusioned criticism of it, in this paper I argue for an additional, and highly meaningful marker of this significant change: the use of the dead and their bodies in this poetry. The commonly held critical view of World War I poetry is that there is a clear divide between poetry of the early and late years of the war, usually located after the Battle of the Somme in 1916, where poetry moves from odes …

Combatting Human Extinction: Biblical Archetypes And Environmental Apocalypse In Contemporary Dystopian Fiction, Elizabeth Hurley

Honors Theses

This project examines through recreations of Biblical archetypes the cause and effect of environmental apocalypse and potential human extinction in contemporary dystopian novels. The goal of this thesis is, in part, to argue that near-future dystopian fiction is speculative, since the fictional reasons behind the downfall are akin to Anthropocenic (that is, pertaining to the age of the Anthropocene, the contemporary world where humans have severely altered the Earth) environmental and ecological concerns. In examining The Year of the Flood (2009) by Margaret Atwood, Parable of the Sower (1994) by Octavia Butler, and The Maze Runner (2009) by James Dashner, …

Living Within The Margins: The Constitutional Culture Of Irish Life Law And Literature, Meghan Keator

Honors Theses

Serving as a stepping stone to asserting independence from British authority and oppression, the Bunreacht Na hÉireann, Ireland’s modern constitution, allowed the nation and its people finally to shape themselves by their own legal standards, customs, and norms. Yet, after years of oppression from forced British standards, Ireland began the search for its own distinct voice as a newly liberated, competitive country. This thesis explores how the Irish Constitution contributes to shaping a homogenous society that promotes normative views and behaviors that damagingly marginalize minority groups–who differ from such social standards. By examining the specific language, diction, order and structure …