Digital Commons Network^™

"And A Sad Ditty Of This Story Born": Regeneration Through Decay In John Keats's Isabella, Erica Van Schaik

Master's Theses

John Keats’s Isabella; or the Pot of Basil (1818) has been read, like many of Keats’s of works, as an allegory for the death that surrounded the poet and his life’s tragic circumstances. Isabella has also been studied in regard to its gothic horror elements. Such previous readings identify a theme of mortality and decay within the poem, but I argue these themes serve a larger purpose, one related to the possibilities created by regeneration. Isabella, a young woman whose lover, Lorenzo, is murdered by her own brothers, removes Lorenzo’s head from his corpse and places it in a potted …

The Legacy Of British Rule On Lgbt Rights In Jamaica And The Cayman Islands, Zachary Stewart

Master's Theses

This thesis explores the relationship between British colonial influence and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) rights in the Caribbean. Comparing the Cayman Islands, a British Overseas Territory, and Jamaica, an independent former colony of the United Kingdom, the situation for LGBT people is evaluated. While Jamaica has serious abuses and a concerning situation for the human rights of LGBT people, the Cayman Islands’ LGBT community’s position is far less concerning. Owing to its continued connection to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Cayman Islands’ LGBT rights situation is much less dire. Through British influence via …

Women In Wartime Shipyards: Operating A Drill Press Was Like Using An Egg Beater, Carol A. Strohmetz

Master's Theses

This research examines the duality of the roles of American women during World War II. The research draws upon oral histories, newspaper accounts and advertisements, music and films of the time, letters and family scrapbooks, and primary and secondary sources. Most prior research focuses on either women in the workforce or women in the home. This research synthesizes all aspects of the lives of women as they navigated the hostile terrain of the male workforce and continued to perform the duties assigned to them by society. This research highlights the multiple roles that women successfully executed as they cared for …

Correlations Between Religion And Book Sales In The Mississippi Gulf Coast Region, Ashley C. Yount

Honors Theses

This thesis will involve how local religious populations might affect the sales of books/book genres on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This paper will endeavor to answer this question: how would local religions affect book sales in the Mississippi Gulf Coast region? Firstly, it will explain the history behind religious literary censorship, as well as listing secular and religious institutions that protest or ban books. Secondly, it will define and categorize literature into genres, mainly fiction and nonfiction, with subgenres including fantasy and spiritual. Similarly, it will record what characteristics such as gender/sexuality, presence of intimate/sexual scenes, violence, supernatural phenomena/creatures, inappropriate …

Understanding The English Bible: A Comparative Analysis Of Four Bible Versions, Michael R. Coats

Honors Theses

Scholarship pertaining to the Bible accounts for a great deal of research. A search for “the Bible” on just the University of Southern Mississippi Libraries website archive results in 549,075 hits, and specifying “English Bible versions” only reduces those results to 70,000. My largest difficulty in discussing the Bible lies not in finding a conversation but in finding which part of the conversation to enter. In the past fifty years, one of the largest emphases has been on using the best translation style for the Bible, a topic that has dominated the field of biblical scholarship (Ryken, Understanding 15). I …

Dreadful Reality: Fear And Madness In The Fiction Of H. P. Lovecraft, Phillip J. Snyder

Honors Theses

The effectiveness of H. P. Lovecraft’s horror relies on an atmosphere of dread in his stories. Both the verisimilitude of Lovecraft’s stories and the dilemma many of his protagonists face in losing their sanity or being perceived to have lost their sanity play a large role in creating this atmosphere. By viewing Lovecraft’s fiction through the lens of recent psychological research on fear, this project shows how his intuitive understanding of fear and his vivid imagery and sensory descriptions conform to our understanding of unconscious automatic threat avoidance behaviors. Because Lovecraft’s behavioral descriptions accurately reflect these behaviors, they increase the …

Spectral Analysis And Comparison Of Analog And Digital Recordings, Hannah N. Frosch

Honors Theses

The music industry is constantly shifting and changing as new developments emerge. The biggest transition still discussed to this day is the shift from analog to digital. The digital world of media has opened many doors and created a simpler way of making and consuming media. However, the desire for a vintage/analog sound environment has grown increasingly popular over the years. The main research question I will be addressing in this thesis is: How do analog and digital recordings compare at a signal level? I will attempt to answer this research question through analyzing different audio signals. To do so, …

Villa-Lobos's Compositional Techniques And Treatment Of Folk Melodies In Cirandas For Piano, Gustavo Schafaschek

Dissertations

Despite his significance as the most important Latin American composer of the twentieth century, serious analytical studies on the music of the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos are still few and far between. Recent scholarship has started to demystify the figure of Villa-Lobos as an intuitive composer with no technique, revealing an artist that strove to develop an idiosyncratic musical language. The present document aims to contribute to this new trend in Villa-Lobos’s scholarship by analyzing pieces from the piano cycle Cirandas, W220, considered one of the most important works from the composer’s mature style. Each of the sixteen pieces …

A Legion Of Legacy: Tyrolean Militarism, Catholicism, And The Heimwehr Movement, Jason Engle

Dissertations

This study of the origins of the Heimwehr (Home Guard) movement offers insight into the conditions under which such groups gained their following. As such, its story is a valuable one that shows a society groping with the problem of a complex, multi-faceted identity that was, at the same time, wracked with substantial economic privation and politically polarized. The paramilitary Heimwehr movement that began in 1920 was the creation of Austria’s conservative provincial governments. It was intended to preserve the existing social and political order—that of the hegemonic social groups of the Habsburg Monarchy—against the growing threat of Marxist revolution, …

A Close Encounter With Death: Narration In Markus Zusak's The Book Thief, Erin M. Gipson

Master's Theses

While critics have discussed Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (2005) in terms of the Holocaust, its generic hybridity, and its crossover readership for child and adult audiences, I offer the first narratological reading of its unusual narrator: Death. This reading focuses on the rhetorical strategies underlying Death’s contradictory narration, which is at once anthropomorphized and constitutively nonhuman. Scholars of The Book Thief often assume the narrator’s omniscience, but I find that Death is crucially not omniscient; rather, he merely performs omniscience to mask his humanlike limitations. Since current terminology falls short of describing Zusak’s narration, I propose the new classification …

Exploitation Of Land And Labor In Appalachia: The Manipulation Of Men In Ann Pancake's Strange As This Weather Has Been, Britani W. Baker

Master's Theses

Ecofeminism is traditionally interested in the relationship between patriarchal domination of women and nature. Ann Pancake’s novel Strange As this Weather Has Been critiques the way the coal mining industry has affected the Appalachian people and land. The novel reflects natural ecofeminism, which views the connection between women and nature in essentialist terms. This outdated mode of ecofeminism leads to a reinforcement of gender stereotypes and a misrepresentation of the relationship between gender, nature, and culture. This study of Pancake’s novel employs a material ecofeminist approach to both critique and develop the novel’s gender politics. Material ecofeminism, even as it …

When We Were Monsters: Ethnogenesis In Medieval Ireland 800-1366, Dawn Adelaide Seymour Klos

Master's Theses

Ethnogenesis, or the process of identity construction occurred in medieval Ireland as a reaction to laws passed by the first centralized government on the island. This thesis tracks ethnogenesis through documents relating to change in language, custom, and law. This argument provides insight into how a new political identity was rendered necessary by the Anglo-Irish. Victor Turner’s model of Communitas structures the argument as each stage of liminality represents a turning point in the process of ethnogenesis.

1169 marked a watershed moment as it began the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. English nobles brought with them ideas of centralized power. In …

Austin (22tu549): Mississippian Emergence In The Northern Yazoo Basin, Elizabeth Kay Hunt

Master's Theses

The Austin Site (22TU549) is a known transitional Late Woodland to early Mississippian village located in Tunica County, Mississippi. Compared with the cultural phases that have been developed in other regions the northern Yazoo Basin lacks a clearly defined “Emergent Mississippian” phase. This study examined the ceramic assemblage (n=30,567) from a 25% random sample of pit features to measure transitional change as a way to define an early Mississippian phase. It also explored the ways in which this site experiences the Mississippian transition and how it fits into the larger trajectory of the Mississippian phenomenon in the Southeastern United States …

For King And Country: Reconsidering The Great War Soldier In Britain, 1914-1945, Nicholas John Schaefer

Master's Theses

In the postwar period historians argued that the horrors of the First World War created an irreparable disconnect between soldiers’ pre and postwar lives. Scholars led by Paul Fussell and Eric Leed presented the Great War as a futile waste of life for a meaningless cause. This historiography argues that the generation which survived the Western Front returned to Britain as jaded shells of their former selves unable to relate to their old lives and families. Bitterness and apathy replaced belief in cause and country. In contrast, recent historiography asserts that British soldiers maintained belief in their country’s cause and …

Knowledge And Practices Of Faculty At Nasm Accredited Institutions In The Southeast Region Regarding Standards-Based Instruction, Jonathan Leon Nelson

Dissertations

In 1993, Congress passed the mandate Goals 2000: Educate America Act, which established standards for K-12 education that outlined the core benchmarks of student achievement for individuals who have mastered the core curricula required to earn a high school diploma (Mark, 1995). Unfortunately, these curricular requirements did not include any criteria for music education, nor did they consider the curricular implications for higher education in providing NSME Standards based training for music educators.

The aim of this study was to determine if and to what extent music education faculty engage in NSME Standards-based instruction within the higher education classroom. Questionnaires …

“Gosh I Miss The Cold War”: Post-Cold War Foreign Policy Making In The United States, 1989-1995, Samantha A. Taylor

Dissertations

The end of the Cold War created a dilemma for American foreign policymakers as the strategy to contain the spread of communism became obsolete. The presidencies of George H. W. Bush and William “Bill” Jefferson Clinton were forced to create grand strategies for American national security and foreign policy to replace the forty-plus year strategy of containment that continued to rely on traditional themes and principles of US foreign policy. Both men had to overcome lingering Cold War attitudes about the United States role in the world and its national security interests. As they struggled to do this, they faced …

The Body Mends Itself, Hannah Elizabeth Dow

Dissertations

The following poems were completed by the author between September 2014 and April 2017.

Italian Fellas In Olive Drab: Exploring The Experiences Of Italian-American Servicemen In Sicily And Italy, 1943-1945, Guido Rossi

Master's Theses

Despite constituting the largest ethnic group in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II, the experiences of Italian-Americans have received scant attention by historians. In particular, the stories of the U.S. citizens of Italian descent or Italian-born but naturalized Americans who served in Italy, have received almost none. These soldiers, sailors, airmen, and coastguardmen who could often speak Italian, had grown up in Italian-American families and neighborhoods, and still had relatives in Italy, were asked to go fight in their country of origin. During the Allied advance, these men found themselves in close contact with a destitute Italian population …

Nick Fury, Will Smith, And Other Black Authority Figures Breaking The Racial Contract In Popular Films Of 2000-2015, Solai N. Wyman

Master's Theses

Film is arguably a model of reflection and reinforcement of cultural, social, and political values of audience members. Therefore, the images and messages displayed in films are of importance. In this study, film is analyzed in order to determine if Charles Mills’ racial contract is depicted in popular films of 2000-2015. The Racial Contract (1997) suggests that only some people, specifically white people, agree to form a state in which their absolute privileges in the political, economic, and social arenas are guaranteed by virtue of being white. This theory was used to understand the role of black people in American …

No Foreign Despots On Southern Soil: The American Party In Alabama And South Carolina, 1850-1857, Robert N. Farrell

Master's Theses

During the 1850s in the South, the American Party, also known as the Know Nothing Party, rallied southerners culturally and politically around nativism, an anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic ideology. This thesis studies nativism in the Deep South and challenges existing scholarship by Tyler Anbinder and William Darrell Overdyke. Anbinder claims that southern Know Nothings held little in common with their northern counterparts and exhibited only regional characteristics. Overdyke maintains that the American Party in the Deep South participated in the national organization, but he argues that nativism appeared only as an incidental component.

An analysis of private papers, speeches, and newspapers …

Maligned “Milish:” Mississippi Militiamen In The Civil War, Tracy L. Barnett

Master's Theses

Thousands of southern men avoided regular military service in the American Civil War and enlisted or were drafted into state organized militias. In Mississippi, these units were termed Mississippi State Troops or Minute Men. This thesis argues that Mississippi militiamen’s pre-war positions and localized conception of military service directly influenced their wartime experiences. Militiamen, often in their thirties and forties, were older than the average Confederate soldier, established community members, and heads of families who sought service near home. The Mississippi state government, however, visualized militia service as anything but local and developed a centralized militia system that removed men …

Sir Robert Thompson’S Better War: The British Advisory Mission And The South Vietnamese Strategic Hamlet Program, 1961-1963, Richard Sears Lovering

Master's Theses

This thesis examines the interactions between the British Advisory Mission to South Vietnam (BRIAM) and the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem and his American advisors. By studying BRIAM’s efforts—and those of its leader, Sir Robert Thompson—this thesis argues that many of the tactics Thompson advocated and Diem executed, especially the Strategic Hamlet Program, foreshadowed the techniques Americans used several years later under General Creighton Abrams, during the period historian Lewis Sorley termed the “better war.”

Sorley argued that the American strategy in the Vietnam War was flawed until Abrams implemented his “one war” plan. With this interpretation, however, …

Barfield, Kazik, Nazaykinskaya, And Beyond: A Discussion Of The Commission Process Regarding Trombone Literature, S. Kyle Moore

Honors Theses

There has historically been limited repertoire for trombonists to perform outside of orchestral writing—so limited that the first trombone solo recital was performed by Davis Shuman in 1947. The trombone has been present in the musical community since the mid-fifteenth century, yet it has only recently emerged as a unique, virtuosic instrument. Due to its delayed emergence and limited repertoire, the need to advance the instrument and its musical literature has led to the commission process between artists and composers: Interested parties approach composers with the prospect of writing music for compensation. In this manner, the composer is compensated for …

Metagames: Postmodern Narrative And Agency In The Video Games Of Davey Wreden, Richard J. Andrews

Honors Theses

This study aims to determine how contemporary video games utilize self-reflexive narrative techniques to explore the strengths and weaknesses of video games as an artistic narrative medium. This study combines emergent digital game theory with established literary theory about self-reflexive narrative (also known as ‘metafiction.’) This synthesis is further informed by observing first hand player interaction with self-reflexive gaming platforms. A focus on the problems of ontology and epistemology for both gamers and readers allows comparison between treatments of these problems in both digital game theory and metafictional studies. My study compares these concepts and applies them to the operations …

“Patriotism Is Not Enough”: Edith Cavell’S Life And Death In Anglo-American Context, Erin B. Blackledge

Honors Theses

In October 1915, British nurse Edith Cavell was killed by the Germans for aiding in the illegal liberation of Allied soldiers. In the wake of her death, the British government created a propaganda firestorm to garner both domestic and foreign support for the war. In particular, the propaganda featuring Cavell was highly gendered and over the course of multiple generations has generated a diverse, and often polarized series of social and political responses in both Britain and the United States. Through the examination of government documents, newspapers, and popular culture, such as film and children’s novels, this thesis examines the …

Dichotomy: A Creative Exercise In Theming Artistic And Emotional Dance Around Scientific Fitness Principles, John P. Davenport

Honors Theses

The creative dance work entitled Dichotomy investigated the following research question: is it possible to choreograph an artistic dance work that is firmly related to exercise science principles yet can still evoke an emotional response from the audience? This concert dance was performed in the Fall 2016 Studio 115 Dance Concert in Hattiesburg, MS by three Repertory Dance Company members. This paper seeks to explore the relationship between modern dance and exercise programming, to describe the methodology implemented to generate movement from exercise programming and testing, and to investigate the emotional response that the audience had to the work based …

Books And Bodies: A Collaborative Process Between Dance And Literature, Sarah Dexter Givens

Honors Theses

This senior choreographic project, Reading Response #6, was created and performed in the fall of 2016 in collaboration with five dancers, one apprentice, and the choreographer. The project was a collaboration of dance with literature by Emily Dickinson, Leo Tolstoy, Richard Wilbur, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, and Walt Whitman. The final product was performed in the Studio 115 Dance Concert in the University of Southern Mississippi’s Theatre and Dance Building in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. This paper investigates the relationship between dance and literature and explores methods of integration between the two art forms.

Autobiography And Authenticity: Writing Are You Sure?: Experiences Of A Gay Foster Youth, Zachary A. Clein

Honors Theses

The purpose of this study is to examine the importance of authenticity in autobiographical writing, then apply what has been discovered to the author’s own autobiographical play. Researching for the project involved reviewing various forms of autobiographical writing performed on the stage (including The Normal Heart, a straight play/ non-musical production, a musical, From Foster Care to Fabulous, and a “memory play” The Glass Menagerie). One thing became clear after reviewing these pieces of literature: emotional authenticity, not fact, was the driving force. This stems from the inherent power autobiographical writing possesses to inform audiences on important topics, which allows …

An Analysis Of Dvořák’S Symphony No. 6, Ii, Using Neo-Riemannian Transformation Techniques, Mary Hannah Mallett

Honors Theses

Music theory is often used to analyze compositions and provide insight into the inner workings of the literature. Any new type of analysis provides a different view of the work and they can all be used to better understand the work, composer, and performance practice. This analysis uses Neo-Riemannian Transformation Theory to highlight some of the voice leading within Dvořák’s Sixth Symphony. The Sixth Symphony currently has never been analyzed using Neo-Riemannian Transformation Theory. The entire second movement was analyzed using a traditional harmonic analysis and then the author selected three excerpts, containing voice leading that could be classified using …

The World’S Greatest Detectives: Analyzing The Relationship And Cultural Meaning Of Sherlock Holmes And Batman, Emma F. Reeves

Honors Theses

The characters Sherlock Holmes and Batman represent a Gothic archetype aimed at uncovering societal fears and tensions. The thesis analyzes four Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and four Batman-centered graphic novels from DC Comics. By looking at the two in conjunction with each other, this project develops a more comprehensive understanding of the Gothic detective hero in the historical contexts of Victorian England and modern United States of America. The two characters are first explained in terms of the Gothic and as archetypal figures before being examined in terms of their similar contemporary social contexts. Finally, the …