Digital Commons Network^™

Governing Boyhood In The Novels Of George Macdonald And Robert Louis Stevenson, Meredith Louise Hale

Honors Capstone Projects - All

In a literary world in which a girl is capable of passing herself off as a man and a young boy is pleased when others tell him that he is “as good...as if [he] were a girl,” one questions what defines masculinity (MacDonald, ABNW 146). These individuals are two characters created by the Scottish novelists George MacDonald and Robert Louis Stevenson in the late 1800s. This project analyzes how novels by MacDonald and Stevenson depict boyhood and includes MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and The Princess and Curdie (1883) as …

A Crucial Juncture: The Paracosmic Approach To The Private Worlds Of Lewis Carroll And The Brontës, Kristin Petrella

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Many famous authors have had paracosms—imaginary worlds created in childhood that are marked by very detailed conventions, like languages or dialects, history, culture, geography, publications, politics, military, and sometimes even deities. Three such authors are Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë and Lewis Carroll. These authors had an intense and lasting attachment to their paracosms, and this relationship influenced their later work.

Since the study of paracosms has just arisen in the last two decades or so, a majority of the work done on the paracosms of famous authors has been concentrated in three traditional spheres: literary, biographical, and psychological. When we …

Becoming A Boy: Disability & Masculinity In Rodman Philbrick’S Freak The Mighty, Courtney Cohen

Honors Capstone Projects - All

My Capstone thesis is a discussion of the various representations of disability in Rodman Philbrick’s children’s book and the film it was made into. In analyzing the characters, relationships between the characters and vernacular used within the text, I came to the conclusion that certain parts of the book, including the inclusion of not one, but two characters with impairments as main characters, serve to engage the book in a complex discourse with various concepts of disability and masculinity.

In order to place Philbrick’s text within a larger discourse of disability studies, I analyze it with regard to theories of …

More Than Meets The Eye: Technique And Themes In The Poetry Of Raymond Carver, Fletcher W.H. Schmidt

Honors Capstone Projects - All

This project examines the poetry of Raymond Carver, focusing on three areas: Carver’s poetic technique, the effects of alcoholism on Carver’s poetry, and representations of mortality in Carver’s poetry. I focus mainly on Carver’s collected poems, using interviews and other critical essays to contextualize my argument. Through careful close readings of a selection of poems, I show that, although prosaic, Carver’s poetry possesses key poetic components that set his poems apart from his prose. I argue that it may have been Carver’s transition into sobriety that was responsible for the eventual shift of his focus to writing poetry in 1984, …