Digital Commons Network^™

Patristic Precedent And Vernacular Innovation: The Practice And Theory Of Anglo-Saxon Translation, Andrew Timothy Eichel

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation investigates Anglo-Saxon translation and interpretation during the reign of King Alfred of Wessex in the ninth century, and the Benedictine Reform of the tenth and eleventh centuries. These two periods represent a time of renaissance in Anglo-Saxon England, when circumstance and ambition allowed for a number of impressive reformation enterprises, including increased dedication to education of both clerical orders and the laity, which therefore augmented the output of writing motivated by scholarly curiosity, ecclesiastical inquiry, and political strategizing. At these formative stages, translation emerged as perhaps the most critical task for the vernacular writers. The Latinate prestige culture …

Sketches, Impressions And Confessions: Literature As Experiment In The Nineteenth Century, Andrew Ragsdale Lallier

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue for the existence and critical relevance of a program of experimental literature in the long nineteenth century, developed in the aesthetics of German Romanticism and adapted in a set of texts by Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. My introduction positions this argument in context of larger debates concerning form, theory and literary capacity, provides points of connection between these authors, and outlines the most prominent features of experimental literature. In the first chapter, I present an unorthodox reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, accompanied by a brief account of the literary-critical …

Old English Manuscripts In The Early Age Of Print: Matthew Parker And His Scribes, Robert Scott Bevill

Doctoral Dissertations

Covering the first dedicated program in the study of and publication of Anglo-Saxon texts, my dissertation examines the sixteenth-century origins of medieval studies as an academic discipline. By placing recent scholarship on media, materiality, cognition, and intellectual history in conversation with traditional paleographical methods on medieval and renaissance manuscript culture, I argue for a new way of understanding how early modern scholars studied and presented the medieval past. I take as my focus a corpus of emulative Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions produced under Elizabethan Archbishop Matthew Parker. Equal parts facsimile and edition, these transcriptions are a unique example of early modern …

Mozarab Readers Of The Bible, From The Córdoban Martyrs To The Glossa Ordinaria, Geoffrey Kyle Martin

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I offer four case studies in how medieval Iberia’s Arabic-speaking Christians (Mozarabs) appropriated Latin, Arabic, and Islamic culture. I have focused upon the Mozarabs’ reading of the Bible: (1) how they translated it from Latin to Arabic, (2) how they thought about the Last Days, (3) how they read it with a foremost interest in the meaning of individual words and phrases, and (4) how they employed biblical commentaries to understand scripture better. As the reader will see, the Mozarabs’ translations of the Bible into Arabic and the Latin manuscripts which they annotated in that language have …

Moral Margins: Ethics And Economics In American Northern Literature, 1837-1900, John Adam Stromski

Doctoral Dissertations

“Moral Margins: Slavery and Capitalism in American Northern Literature, 1837-1900,” focuses on the intersections of slavery, capitalism, and literature, building on recent historical scholarship on the myriad ways slavery impacted the growth of American capitalism. Nowhere is this relationship more prominent than in the nineteenth century, when slavery experienced its highest levels of economic and political influence. Scholars of capitalism and American slavery have tended to focus on the South, the obvious locus of slavery, but little attention is paid to the North, where this relationship is more veiled. I argue that Northern literature shows the ethical complexities of slavery-based …

Nepantla As Her Place In The Middle: Multilingualism And Multiculturalism In The Writings Of Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz, Nicole Lynn Gomez

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I analyze a selection of Sor Juana’s works in the context of bilingual and bicultural studies. I infer that the author’s language acquisition and cultural sensitivity were interrelated, both affecting the other and influencing her writing. I argue that her bilingualism correlated with her cultural sensitivity and sympathy towards marginalized groups. In her works, the author employs a variety of strategies to denounce discrimination and repression as well as rhetoric that promotes tolerance of other cultures and resistance to oppression. I explore these strategies in her texts and apply relevant theory in order to fully analyze their …

Experiencing Defeat, Remembering Victory: The Army Of Tennessee In War And Memory, 1861-1930, Robert Lamar Glaze

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the meaning of the Civil War in the South by examining white Southerners’ perceptions of the Army of Tennessee from 1861 to 1930. While scholarship on the war’s memory is immense and growing, little of this literature examines the memory of the Confederacy's war effort in the western theater—the area of operations military historians now deem central to the war's outcome. This project rectifies that oversight by examining white Southerners’ memory of the Army of Tennessee in the post-war decades. Unlike Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, the Confederacy’s primary western field army suffered a near …

Re-Mapping The Space Of The Sacred In The Nowell Codex, Teresa Marie Hooper

Doctoral Dissertations

The most recent codicological studies of London, British Library Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv, part 2, also known as the Nowell Codex or Beowulf-Manuscript, have looked to its many depictions of monsters as an explanation for why it was compiled. Nicholas Howe, however, proposed that the Nowell Codex functioned as a “book of elsewhere,” treating the five texts as a “gathering” particularly invested in a reappraisal of the cultural implications of geography. This dissertation describes the three prose texts of the Nowell Codex as one such “gathering” which explores alternative ideas of spiritual geography, specifically in regards to the religious …

God's Brush Arbor: Camp Meeting Culture During The Second Great Awakening, 1800-1860, Keith Dwayne Lyon

Doctoral Dissertations

In reference to the early national and antebellum eras, the term "camp meeting" signifies a rural Protestant revival held over several days and nights, wherein participants utilized temporary living accommodations--typically wagons or tents--and prepared food on the grounds in order to attend multiple outdoor services. Eventually dominated by Methodists and Cumberland Presbyterians, camp meetings routinely attracted several thousand people, thus creating temporary communities larger than most permanent ones in many regions. Considering the scarcity of such sizeable, collective events in the country’s rural areas during this period, the assemblies inevitably generated an exciting array of social opportunities and served as …

Virtue, Evidence, And Epistemic Justification, Alexander Steven Hallam

Doctoral Dissertations

Evidence is a central concept in epistemology and more narrowly, theories of epistemic justification. Evidence is commonly thought to be what justifies our beliefs. On this view, a belief is justified for a person if that belief fits that person’s total body of evidence. But it is also commonly thought that evidence isn’t the only thing that justifies a belief. Some epistemologists even think that evidence isn’t what justifies a belief at all. Virtue epistemologists give epistemic or intellectual virtues an important and fundamental role in theories of epistemic justification. On such views, for a belief to be epistemically justified, …

Repenser Une Double Altérité: Expérience Commune Et Trajectoires Plurielles De La Femme Étrangère En France Métropolitaine (Xviiie-Xxe Siècle), Joanna Merkel

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the figure of double alterity represented by foreign women living in metropolitan France, from the 18^th to the 20^th century. I argue that although these varied figures offer different trajectories, possess diverse origins, and have been described or described themselves through a variety of literary genres and non-literary genres; they share a common experience revealing unicity. My objectives are, first, to establish the outlines of this shared experience through the analysis of general trends and micro-events; and second, to explore what this analysis has to teach us about French society, past and present. The texts …

Nothing Stranger, Helen Mary Stead

Doctoral Dissertations

“Nothing Stranger” is a collection of dystopian short stories concerned with themes of motherhood and violence submitted for consideration as a creative dissertation at the University of Tennessee.

This City Is A Clock, Daniel D. Wallace

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation includes a novel, This City is a Clock, and a critical introduction, “Technologies of the Novel.”

This City is a Clock charts the construction of Edinburgh’s New Town and the development of the Scottish Enlightenment. The protagonist is a boy when the novel begins and has grown to old age by the final pages. As a child, he is put to work by the architects of the new town when they discover that he has unusual mathematical gifts. To them, his strange talent seems an emblem of the new rational order they are hoping to create. And …

Parables Of Love: Reading The Romances Of Chrétien De Troyes Through Bernard Of Clairvaux, Carrie D. Pagels

Doctoral Dissertations

In three romances Yvain, Lancelot, and Perceval, Chrétien de Troyes utilizes the intimate relationships of his courtly knights and their lady loves to explore and present the Christian ideology of Bernard of Clairvaux as expressed by his four degrees of love in the treatise, On Loving God. Previous scholarly works have only examined the Christian ideology and symbolism in Chrétien's romances as isolated occurrences specific to a single text. In contrast, I argue Chrétien's romances form a progression mirroring the Bernardian steps (or degrees) man must make in order to draw closer to and deepen his relationship …

Gothic Naturalism And American Women Writers, Stephanie Ann Metz

Doctoral Dissertations

Traditionally, naturalism and the Gothic have been seen as genres that have little to do with one another. However, Frank Norris, one of the practitioners and theoreticians of canonical naturalism, argued that the roots of naturalism lie not in realism (as is often argued) but in romanticism. This project seeks to explore Norris’s claim by positing a new genre—Gothic naturalism. Gothic naturalism is a hybrid genre that combines the Gothic’s haunting nature and representations of the abject, grotesque, and uncanny with canonical naturalism’s interrogation of making choices and the forces of chance, determinism, and heredity. Although naturalism is traditionally seen …

La Censura Católica Literaria Durante La Posguerra Española: Traspasando Las Fronteras De La Ideología Franquista., Ángela Pérez Del Puerto

Doctoral Dissertations

My research studies the literary censorship carried out by the Catholic Action Association through the Secretary of Bibliographic Orientation (SBO) in Spain during the 1940s. This secular institution paralleled, and in certain moments questioned, some Francoist values by judging and banning publications that had previously passed the official censorship. In particular, the censorship of the SBO focused, on the one hand, on Modernist Spanish authors who were accused of preaching strong anti-religious ideas and, on the other hand, on new texts published in that period that failed to reproduce the Catholic discourse. Through the analysis of this censorship activity, my …

Queen Of Spades, Michael Shou-Yung Shum

Doctoral Dissertations

Semblance—or parody—is, of course, the operative word when considering a text that strives to be subversive of both form (the “anti-realism” of minor literature) and social function. Regarding the latter, as stated before, my goal in the text is the reverse of the traditional moral fable’s: implanting a desire in readers to experience firsthand the world of risk as a means to live in a more vital way, outside the text, whether through gambling or another form of chance-taking. Uncertainty is troubling, unsettling, but it is also mysterious and enlivening—this is what gamblers, acolytes at the altar of luck, understand …

The Discursive Construction Of Language Teaching And Learning In Multiuser Virtual Environments, Douglas W. Canfield

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to broaden how researchers within computer-assisted language learning (CALL) make sense of and examine psychological and power constructs at play in language courses conducted in 3D multiuser virtual environments. 18 students and 2 teachers in 8 formal English as a Second Language (ESL) classes in the 3D multiuser virtual environment of Second Life participated in a discourse analysis study to explore the theoretical and analytic ways in which critical discursive psychology could function to explore how teaching and learning are performed as interactional events in a community of language teachers and learners in Second Life by investigating …

“/Entee Min Faine/? [Where Are You From?]": The Rhetoric Of Nationality Of Muslim Women In The American Southeast, Bushra Mohammad Malaibari

Doctoral Dissertations

Nationality is a powerful modern concept. It allows people legal and political rights, but nationality is also rooted in our language. Nationality is essential to designate populations together as an entity. But in America, where individualism is essential, nationality can be expressed in various ways. Historically, there is little research done on the construction of nationality from a rhetorical lens. This project aims to investigate that very issue. Moreover, the sampled population was Muslim women in the American Southeast to rarify and observe a marginalized group. The primary research question of this project is, “How do Muslim women articulate their …

Anthropocentrism And The Long-Term: Nietzsche As An Environmental Thinker, Andrew Nolan Hatley

Doctoral Dissertations

Nietzsche has been advanced as an authoritative support for nearly every political aim since his death in 1900. Recent work has focused on his potential to contribute to environmental ethics. I defend the view that Nietzsche can contribute to both environmental ethics and aesthetics, and moreover, that his philosophy cannot be fully understood without the conceptual resources of environmental philosophy. Nietzsche’s critique of morality and positive ethical views cannot be understood independent of conceptual distinctions of anthropocentrism and topics such as future generations and biocentric discussions of axiology. Nietzsche’s philosophy of nature emerges from his rejection of both metaphysical and …

The Hunt For Lost Blood: Nazi Germanization Policy In Occupied Europe, Bradley Jared Nichols

Doctoral Dissertations

Throughout the Second World War, the National Socialist regime enacted a wide-ranging campaign to enhance the German nation by assimilating conquered populations into its demographic structure. At the axis of this multifaceted enterprise stood the Re-Germanization Procedure, or WED – a special program designed to absorb “racially valuable” foreigners into the German body politic by sending them to live with host families in the very heart of the Third Reich. The following dissertation provides the first ever study of the Re-Germanization Procedure and examines the momentous influence this initiative exerted over Nazi policy-making in occupied Europe. It is a story …

Shelley's Delusive Flames: Self And Poetry In The Major Works, Brent Steven Robida

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores Percy Shelley’s ethical commitments in several of his major works. Its primary claim is that Shelley’s poetry is involved in the regulation and education of desire. As a fundamentally antinomian poet, Shelley grapples time and again with how moral progress will be guided absent the regulatory influences of law and religion. My dissertation offers an answer to this central impasse affecting scholarship on the ethical world Shelley imagines and attempts to realize through poetry. It argues for a dialectical movement observable in Shelley’s work of the programmatic breakdown, rather than fulfillment, of hope. This study reconsiders the …

Innocence Revisited: Nineteenth-Century Literature In The Works Of C. S. Lewis, Heather Louise Nation Hess

Doctoral Dissertations

Influence has long been a focus of scholarly work on C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), but this scholarly conversation largely neglects the nineteenth-century. In this project I will establish the profound influence of nineteenth-century texts, authors, and ideas on Lewis’s thought and work, arguing that the Romantic metanarrative—which traces the individual’s progression through innocence, experience, and higher innocence—provides the foundation for Lewis’s self-construction as well as his fictional work.

While the Romantics provide the initial concepts to Lewis, it is Victorian iterations of the Romantic metanarrative that Lewis most heavily revises. In his 2013 biography of Lewis, Alister McGrath suggests that …