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Georgia Ghosts: History, Folklore, And The Roots Of The Southern Gothic, Katherine M. Mcdowell

Master's Projects

There is something quintessentially human about ghost stories, yet particular regions tend to be more powerfully associated with haunted folktales than others. One of the regions is the southeastern United States. In fact, these oral traditions appear to have influenced the area's best-known literary subgenre: the Southern Gothic.

Why is the South considered haunted? Are there particular qualities in historical events that make them more likely to engender ghost stories? What makes the South's folkloric spirits so powerful that they appear even in modern literature? Most of all, what connects the region's history and folklore with the Southern Gothic? By …

A Prosaic People? Literature, Propaganda, And National Identity In Second World War Britain, William L. Maines

Honors Theses

During the early years of the Second World War, a typically unofficial and loose coalition of British newspapers, publishers, propagandists, and booksellers mobilized Britain’s imagined literary past and present as a part of the war effort. They defined the nation through its imagined literary proclivities— its penchant for literary production and consumption, and its “unique” attitude toward literary freedom— and in opposition to the literary tyranny of Nazi Germany. Marshaling the nation’s mythological literary heritage, they enlisted Shakespeare and Milton in the war effort, portraying them as temperate and civilian English heroes. While the rhetoric of “British bookishness” hardly went …

"The Twilight-Colored Smell Of Honeysuckle:" William Faulkner, The South, And Literature As A Site Of Memory, Emily Innes

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This thesis examines the intersection of literature and historical memory, focusing on William Faulkner’s literature and the construction of memory and identity in the 1920s-1930s American South. Understanding the basic objective of memory as using the past to consolidate a social consciousness rooted in a shared identity and future, I examine how literature contributes to and enriches this process. I argue that because memory is deeply embedded in the social frameworks of a population, and dependent on the population’s cultural, political, and social identity, it is a fundamental component of understanding cultural identity. By interpreting literature through the lens of …

La Conquista RetóRica: La AutolegitimacióN De HernáN CortéS Y Su JustificacióN Del Colonialismo EspañOl A TravéS De Las Cartas De RelacióN (1519 - 1526), Kent Shi

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

"A Trained And Trustful Soul" : Life And Literature Of A Black Louisville Artist In Minstrel America., Emma Christine Bryan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the century-long theatrical expression of blackface minstrelsy within the larger context of the United States, but specifically studies its popularity in Louisville, Kentucky from 1878 to 1925. This study is meant to bring to the fore the pervasiveness of blackface minstrelsy, and how it was used to demean, degrade, and oppress African American populations before, during, and well after Emancipation. This work is not meant to memorialize the craft of minstrelsy, however, but rather attempts to show how black individuals of the time were actively working to both reclaim the detrimental stereotypes of blackface minstrelsy, while also …

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 …

Strangers With Cameras: The Consequences Of Appalachian Representation In Pop Culture, Chelsea L. Brislin

Theses and Dissertations--English

Representations of the Appalachia region in literature, art and pop culture have historically shifted between hyperbolic, colorful caricatures to grotesque, sensationalized, black and white photography. This wide spectrum of depictions continually resonates within the North American psyche due to its shared commonality of Appalachia as the cultural “other.” This othering frequently leaves audiences with a kind of relief that this warped representation of backwards, rural poverty is not their own progressive, present-day reality. Countless artists have exploited the region in order to show the impoverished side of rural Appalachia and spin a failed capitalistic way of life into a romanticized, …

"Do Not Fashion The Other": Representing Contemporary Haudenosaunee Literature 2016, Michael Patrick Brewster

Master's Theses

Historically, the issue of representation in postcolonial studies is one of some contention. While scholarship might recognize the necessity for highlighting the plights and struggles attendant to postcolonial societies, the primary literature being studied is most often written by natives of those societies themselves. This gap is especially evident with Indigenous cultures, because there are relatively few Indigenous scholars working in the academy. We are at the point now when we have a multiplicity (but not a plurality) of Indigenous voices writing literature (poetry, memoir, fiction, film, etc.) and academic criticism. However, there is value in non-Natives reading and writing …

The Cartography Of The New World: Hernán Cortés’S Literary Mapping Of America, Sarah Tietz

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

The Age of Discovery travel narratives from the fifteenth and sixteenth century, written by European explorers to the Americas, can be understood not only as narratives, but also as literary maps of the New World. Specifically, Hernán Cortés’s Second Letter in Cartas de Relación exemplifies the ways in which literary cartography helped write the Americas into existence in Europe. Cortés’s map does not reproduce the land he encounters, it creates the space known as America. His letters become a map in three ways. First, Cortés deliberately included descriptions of features of the land and natives that would impress the Christian …

Who We Are: Incarcerated Students And The New Prison Literature, 1995-2010, Reilly Hannah N. Lorastein

Honors Projects

This project focuses on American prison writings from the late 1990s to the 2000s. Much has been written about American prison intellectuals such as Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, who wrote as active participants in black and brown freedom movements in the United States. However the new prison literature that has emerged over the past two decades through higher education programs within prisons has received little to no attention. This study provides a more nuanced view of the steadily growing silent population in the United States through close readings of Openline, an inter-disciplinary journal featuring …

Distorsionados Por La Opresion, Leonard Cambra Jr.

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

The investigation will be carried out through a detailed analysis of the Book: Retahilas by Carmen Martin Gaite and will show both the author's affinity with the past and her rupture with it to demonstrate that it is only in self knowledge as the result of suffering that one can begin to authentically communicate with others.

Corn And Culture: The Influence Of Zea Mays Across Cultural And Historical Boundaries, Ginny Marie Mueller

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Corn's status as a critical food crop, and its location within indigenous new world cosmographies, illustrate the important sociocultural role the plant has played for millennia. However, modern society has elevated Zea mays far above the status of mere plant, fashioning it into a commodity intimately connected to systems of control and capitalism. Consequently, corn has played an essential role in colonization, industrialization, and the advent of overproduction. The beliefs and literature of numerous new world cultures, along with the literatures of modern Western cultures, offer a striking analysis of corn's current position in western society. The far-reaching impacts that …

Imagining Sri Lanka, Derick Kirishan Ariyam

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

Analyzes the works of three Sri Lankan expatriates, the writers, Shyam Selvadurai and Michael Ondaatje, and the artist, M.I.A., giving particular attention to Selvadurai's Funny Boy and Ondaatje's Running in the Family, Anil's Ghost, and The Cinnamon Peeler. Though all three have been charged as "inauthentic" due to their dislocated positions, uncovers the various productive and complicated ways Sri Lanka has been configured by those outside its shores.

Dismantling The Cult Of Manliness, Peter Capalbo

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

Explores the argument that several of Virginia Woolf's male characters, including Septimus Smith, Mr. Ramsay, and Bernard (in The Waves), challenge traditional male gender expectations in Britain after World War I. Examines Woolf's use of the concept of manliness in structuring her novels and her presentation of a series of men who do not conform to the British ideal of masculinity and who, thereby, allow her to expose the multiple fallacies of that ideal and a culture supported by such a concept. Posits that Woolf's work suggests that a new, more inclusive, understanding of gender is an important first step …