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Stretching The Hard-Boiled Detective: From Hammett And Chandler To Paretsky And Himes, Chloe Moore
Stretching The Hard-Boiled Detective: From Hammett And Chandler To Paretsky And Himes, Chloe Moore
Undergraduate Honors Theses
This thesis investigates transformations of the hard-boiled crime fiction genre by analyzing the works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and how authors Sara Paretsky and Chester Himes adapt and manipulate the genre to suit their intentions and voices. By examining the construction of Hammett's Continental Op and Sam Spade, and Chandler's Philip Marlowe, the foundation is laid for understanding the defining characteristics of a hard-boiled detective in the 1930s and 40s. This thesis then explores how Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski and Himes' Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones adapt these qualities to suit new demographics of detectives: a white woman …
"My Daughter, Flee Temptation!" "O, Do Go, Dear Mother!": Gender, Race, And Body Politics In Charlotte Brontë’S Jane Eyre And Harriet Jacobs' Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl, Harper Mccall
Undergraduate Honors Theses
The following thesis explores the constructs of gender and race in relation to the bodies of Jane Eyre and Linda Brent in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Harriet Jacobs. Particularly, 19th Century sociopolitical forces (e.g., British Imperialism, Antebellum American life, and the legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade) constrict the womens' bodies as they progress through the novels' plots. By using Frederick Douglass' "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave," both intertextual references and resonant comparisons can be made between the oppression and resistance narratives characteristic of Jane Eyre and Incidents. Such communicative frameworks reveal larger …
A World Half Created: The Imaginative Power Of Sound In The Poetry Of William Wordsworth, Trinity Myers
A World Half Created: The Imaginative Power Of Sound In The Poetry Of William Wordsworth, Trinity Myers
Undergraduate Honors Theses
William Wordsworth has long been considered one of the greatest British Romantic poets, and critical interest in his use of sound has grown since the mid-twentieth century. This paper investigates Wordsworth's fascination with "poetic musicality"—a phrase developed by the researcher to describe a poem's sensitivity to sound—and its effect upon the active imagination of a poem’s listeners. Such aural receptivity is explored in several of Wordsworth's early works, namely: the 1805 Prelude and selections from Lyrical Ballads. Rather than limiting conceptions of musicality to song and instrumentation, this project investigates how the power of sound can be extended to …
Pastries And Plots: Food Rhetoric And Gender Struggles In Shakespeare’S Plays, Juliet Nierle
Pastries And Plots: Food Rhetoric And Gender Struggles In Shakespeare’S Plays, Juliet Nierle
Undergraduate Honors Theses
Food is a common motif across the Shakespearean cannon. From early plays to late plays, comedies to dramas, food appears in a variety of instances, functioning in numerous ways. Frequently representative of social class or serving as a cultural marker, food in Shakespeare can be innocent and passive, but it has the potential to contribute to scenes of violence. Foodstuffs in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, and Coriolanus contribute to the brutal harms committed in the plays, specifically in scenes of violence against women. Characters use foodstuffs as pejorative metaphors, like the subjugation of Volumnia in the context …
Beyond A Partnership Ethic: Evolutions Of Ecofeminism In The Post-Apocalyptic Landscapes Of Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy And Jean Hegland's Into The Forest, Catherine Lashley
Beyond A Partnership Ethic: Evolutions Of Ecofeminism In The Post-Apocalyptic Landscapes Of Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy And Jean Hegland's Into The Forest, Catherine Lashley
Undergraduate Honors Theses
In this paper, I analyze two contemporary post-apocalyptic novels, Jean Hegland’s novel Into the Forest and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, through an ecofeminist lens to argue that they establish a framework for an existence that decenters the human and rejects Eurocentric, masculinized conceptions of individualism. I put these novels in conversation with Eduardo Kohn’s book How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, and the ecofeminist works of Carolyn Merchant, Donna Haraway, and Val Plumwood. My paper is split into three sections, Women/Nature, Human/Nonhuman, and Individual/Collective. I use the slash as a glyph to denote moments of non-dualism, unquantifiable …
Sing Of Arms And Disobedience: Reading Vergil's Aeneid In Milton's Paradise Lost, Brooke Braden
Sing Of Arms And Disobedience: Reading Vergil's Aeneid In Milton's Paradise Lost, Brooke Braden
Undergraduate Honors Theses
This thesis examines the extent to which Vergil’s Aeneid influences the characters, themes, and epic style of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Focusing primarily on the Carthage episode of the Aeneid in which Aeneas meets and falls in love with queen Dido, this thesis explores how the figures of Aeneas, Creusa, Dido, and Sychaeus parallel those of Milton’s Satan, Sin, Eve, and Adam, respectively. This thesis also shows how the appearance of epic themes such as fate in both texts affects characters’ personal motivations in similar ways, such as Dido’s suicide and Eve’s consumption of the infamous apple. Through an exploration of …
Framing The Female Narrative: Male Audiences And Women's Storytelling Within Two Brontë Novels, Sammy Murphy
Framing The Female Narrative: Male Audiences And Women's Storytelling Within Two Brontë Novels, Sammy Murphy
Undergraduate Honors Theses
Since being published, both Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights have attracted scholarly and critical attention on account of their framed narratives. At the time of publication, some portion of this attention was negative; however, since the early 20th century, scholars have moved towards recognizing and analyzing potential purposes for the narrative structures of both texts. Within my thesis, I enter into this field of scholarship so as to analyze how the frame narrative functions as a tool for both simulation and subversion within the two texts. More specifically, I argue that Emily and …
The Written Word Bound By Devotion Unseen: Female Monasticism And Religiosity In The Visions Of Gertrud The Great Of Helfta, Jana Considine
The Written Word Bound By Devotion Unseen: Female Monasticism And Religiosity In The Visions Of Gertrud The Great Of Helfta, Jana Considine
Undergraduate Honors Theses
The mystical, religious writing of Gertrud the Great of Helfta expressed an erotic love of the Christ, presented in her Herald of God's Loving-Kindness through a series of visions centered around the interaction of the monastery's community and the liturgy. This Honors Thesis attempts to study this religiosity, discovering how Gertrud's visions communicated a sensual understanding of the Divine centered around the Eucharist. Contextualizing the fourth book of the Herald in monastic history, this paper examines the presence of the Liturgy, the Eucharist, wealth and materiality, and female spirituality in this High Medieval text, discovering a communal religiosity based upon …
"But A Contraband Is A Free Man:" Civil War Literature And The Figure Of The "Contraband", Mary A. Kardos
"But A Contraband Is A Free Man:" Civil War Literature And The Figure Of The "Contraband", Mary A. Kardos
Undergraduate Honors Theses
This thesis explores Civil War popular literature related to "contraband" individuals by Black and white authors. In May 1861, those who escaped from enslavement to Union territory were deemed "contrabands of war," a label placing them between freedom and property. This purgatorial category delayed freedom and depicts formerly enslaved persons as both intellectual and literal property of white America. Across various poems, essays, speeches, novels, illustrated envelopes, and sketches, Civil War authors debated the function of the “contrabands” within the American social order. Consequently, this thesis explores the patterns through which the uniquely transitory nature of the “contraband" allowed the …
'Carcern' And 'Wordcræft': Enclosure, Connection And Gender In Cynewulf's "Juliana" And "Elene", Katherine Grotewiel
'Carcern' And 'Wordcræft': Enclosure, Connection And Gender In Cynewulf's "Juliana" And "Elene", Katherine Grotewiel
Undergraduate Honors Theses
The scholarly narrative around monastic enclosure has centered on rigid gender divisions. But Cynewulf's Juliana and Elene reveal a more complex picture. Through images of enclosure, binding and the creation of words, Cynewulf unwinds these restrictive ties of gender in the epilogues of his poems and instead identifies with the figures in these poems not along lines of gender, but in their experiences of enclosure.
Feelings Of Fallenness: Affect And Gender In Victorian Fallen Woman Novels, Kate Kowalski
Feelings Of Fallenness: Affect And Gender In Victorian Fallen Woman Novels, Kate Kowalski
Undergraduate Honors Theses
A famous poem by Coventry Patmore articulated Victorian expectations for women: to be “the angel in the house.” The woman was the arbiter of morality, spiritual guide and helpmeet, and was worshiped almost as a goddess of purity— and goddesses need no legal protections. Chastity and submission were not only expected, but demanded of Victorian women. After all, these qualities were scientifically inherent in women (to the Victorian mind); the biological imperative of reproduction and maternity rendered women’s bodies a sacred space and prevented their minds from developing as a man’s could.The twin forces of Victorian patriarchal science and religion …
'Geomorlic' Or 'Eorlic?' Uncovering Early English Emotional Communities In "The Wanderer," "Deor," And "The Wife’S Lament", Hunter Phillips
'Geomorlic' Or 'Eorlic?' Uncovering Early English Emotional Communities In "The Wanderer," "Deor," And "The Wife’S Lament", Hunter Phillips
Undergraduate Honors Theses
In my honors thesis, I uncover what I consider to be a poetic trope governing emotional expression in three of the Old English 'elegies.' Narrators in these poems engage the emotional values of the Old English "Heroic Tradition"-namely the value of keeping silent in the face of adversity-through abstracted and idealized figures like the 'eorl' (warrior/man). The invocation in these poems of the eorl and eorl-like figures such as a hlaford (lord) or geong mon (young man) functions as a poetic trope that signals the speakers engagement with the heroic emotional community represented by that figure. I name this …
Laurence Sterne: A Different Way Of Approaching The Notion Of Life In The Early Novel, Robert Metaxatos
Laurence Sterne: A Different Way Of Approaching The Notion Of Life In The Early Novel, Robert Metaxatos
Undergraduate Honors Theses
This thesis employs the later philosophy of Michel Foucault to think through the unique set of socio-cultural problems that emerged alongside the early novel. I endeavor to explain the development of “biopower” and the concomitant (yet historically grounded) concept of a mass population in order to round off a nettlesome tendency among historicist rise-of-the-novel critics to focus on the creation of a bourgeois individual at this time. To that end, the texts of Anglo-Irish author Laurence Sterne bear out a unique narratorial response to biopower that begins with the ‘body’ of his work: i.e., Shandeism. Signaling the importance of the …
“Garden-Magic”: Conceptions Of Nature In Edith Wharton’S Fiction, Jonathan Malks
“Garden-Magic”: Conceptions Of Nature In Edith Wharton’S Fiction, Jonathan Malks
Undergraduate Honors Theses
I situate Edith Wharton’s guiding idea of “garden-magic” at the center of my thesis because Wharton’s fiction shows how a garden space could naturalize otherwise inadmissible behaviors within upper-class society while helping a character tie such behavior to a greater possibility for escape. To this end, Wharton situates gardens as idealized touchstones within the built environment of New York City, spaces where characters believe they can reach self-actualization within a version of nature that is man-made. Actualization, in this sense, stems from a character’s imaginative escape that is enabled by a perception of the garden as a kind of natural …
Flipping The Castle: Evolution Of Gothic Spaces In The Domestic Sphere, Kate Lucas
Flipping The Castle: Evolution Of Gothic Spaces In The Domestic Sphere, Kate Lucas
Undergraduate Honors Theses
"Flipping the Castle" explores topics of domesticity in Gothic literature over the course of three centuries. The Gothic is a genre with roots in 18th century British literature, but more broadly, it can be described as horror that has a social function, and it is the birthplace of some of the most successful narratives in horror fiction. The aspects of the Gothic this research is concerned with is its themes of unchecked masculine aggression versus repressed femininity, its ability to adapt over time, and its preoccupation with setting, specifically the home, whether that be a medieval castle, a haunted house, …
With Inviolable Voice, We Melt Into Each Other With Phrases: The Construction And Deconstruction Of Heteroglossia In T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land And Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Alexa Kelly
Undergraduate Honors Theses
This essay analyzes the ways in which T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf simultaneously construct and deconstruct linguistic environments that embody Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia. In The Waste Land and The Waves, Eliot and Woolf construct elements of Bakhtin's novel before dismantling those same elements through the formation of linguistic imbalance. Both authors generate heteroglossia by incorporating numerous speech types and speech genres into their texts through variations of idiolect, sociolect, and literary allusion. These speech types then dialogize each other within the texts. However, the works then diverge from heteroglossia through an imbalance of the centrifugal and centripetal …