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Resurrecting Speranza: Lady Jane Wilde As The Celtic Sovereignty, Heather Lorene Tolen

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the ways in which Lady Jane Wilde, writing under the pen name of Speranza, established ethos among a poor, uneducated, Catholic populace from whom she was socially and religiously disconnected. Additionally, it raises questions as to Lady Wilde's exclusion from the roster of Irish literary voices who are commonly associated with the Irish Literary Revival, inasmuch as Lady Wilde played a critical, inceptive role in that movement. Lady Jane Wilde, mother of Oscar Wilde, was an ardent nationalist who lived in Victorian Ireland. She contributed thirty-nine poems and several essays to the Nation newspaper—a nationalist publication—under the …

Book Review: Modernism, Drama, And The Audience For Irish Spectacle, Kathleen A. Heininge

Faculty Publications - Department of English

In a book about drama and Irish spectacle, one would naturally assume that the reactions to Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, Yeats's and Gregory's The Countess Cathleen, and O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars would be discussed, and one might be concerned - that this is all well-worn territory. While the reactions to these plays are discussed in Modernism, Drama. and the Audience for Irish Spectacle, by Paige Reynolds, and while the treatments of the plays and the concomitant situations themselves offer little that is really surprising or new, what is surprising and new is the context of …

Footnotes, Issue 2, Fall 2008, Department Of English

Footnotes: Department of English Newsletter (2008-2012)

No abstract provided.

The Tractarians' Political Rhetoric, Robert Ellison

English Faculty Research

This article examines the political speaking and writing of John Keble, John Henry Newman, and other leading figures of the Oxford Movement. It argues that while they were essentially conservative in the pulpit, where they spoke as official representatives of the Established Church, they were more critical and outspoken in other works, where they enjoyed more of the freedom afforded to private citizens.

Field Portrait: Poems, Jesse Kendall Graves

Doctoral Dissertations

This creative dissertation is a collection of original poems entitled Field Portrait. The poems in Field Portrait emerge from a long apprenticeship to the aesthetics of poetry, and to the study of how work, family, history, community, and landscape have been represented by poets in the western literary tradition. Many of the poems in Field Portrait are set in rural eastern Tennessee where I grew up, but several poems respond to other places I have lived and visited, such as upstate New York and New Orleans, Louisiana. My poems aspire to an integrated relationship between description and perception, in …

Embodied Vision: Sublimity And Mystery In The Fiction Of Flannery O’Connor, Andrew Patrick Hicks

Masters Theses

This thesis serves as a study of representative pieces of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction alongside three particular theories of the sublime, and offers an exploration of the ways in which O’Connor employs and modifies and aesthetics of sublimity throughout her fiction. Three particular theories of the sublime are considered throughout this study: Edmund Burke’s empiricist sublime, Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodern sublime, and Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt’s theological sublime. Burke’s theory is considered alongside both the early O’Connor story “The Turkey” and the later “Greenleaf,” while the story “Parker’s Back” is read in light of Lyotard’s theory and the novel The Violent Bear It …

Marina Carr's Hauntings: Liminality And The Addictive Society On And Off The Stage, Hillary Jarvis Campos

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an examination of the trapped lives of Marina Carr's female protagonists and their relevance to contemporary Irish women. In her six plays from The Mai to Woman and Scarecrow, each of Carr's female protagonists is trapped either in a liminal state, defined by Victor Turner as a phase in a rites of passage process, or in a patriarchal addictive society, defined by Anne Wilson Schaef as a society in which the power is maintained and perpetuated by white males with the help of all members of society including women. Portia (Portia Coughlan), Hester (By the Bog of …

Rights Of Passage: Immigrant Fiction, Religious Ritual, And The Politics Of Liminality, 1899-1939, Laura Patton Samal

Doctoral Dissertations

The novels written by immigrants to the United States during the great wave of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveal a preoccupation with religious ritual as a major means through which they depict the tensions and dynamics at work in the immigration experience and the confrontation with American culture. This dissertation establishes the significance of religious ritual in novels written by immigrants to the United States between 1899 and 1939, and delineates the important spiritual, social, and political functions such ritual served by way of its special properties. I argue that immigrant writers used ritual as …

Lack Of Proportion In Antic Hay : Understanding Aldous Huxley’S Early Aesthetic And Social Views, Sandy Reyes

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The polyphony of ideas expressed in Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay (1923), and the often fast pace in which these ideas are presented at times veils what is being said, what views are being satirized, as well as which, if any, position Huxley sides with. The novel is filled with many references and allusions to art. Understanding Huxley’s aesthetic and social views in the twenties helps to make sense of the comments about art and society that are both explicitly and inexplicitly expressed in the novel. Societal changes occurring in England, such as the decline in religious belief, industrial and technological …

Experiencing The Modern American City And Addressing The Slum In The United States And Brazil: 1890-1933, Nathaniel Z. Heggins Bryant

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the treatment of slum spaces in the US and Brazil spanning the period 1890-1933, seeking to understand better the ethics of representation regarding the slum as well as the varying aesthetic agendas and political engagements of four novelists. The works under consideration are A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) by William Dean Howells, The Slum (1890) by Aluísio Azevedo, Manhattan Transfer (1925) by John Dos Passos, and Industrial Park (1933), by Patrícia Galvão. I chart the varying methods of representation associated with each novel, from Howell’s critical realism to Azevedo’s unique version of naturalism to the fragmented …

Metoikos: Modernism's Resident Aliens, Justin Glen Williamson

Dissertations

This dissertation examines why D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce all conceived of themselves as cultural outsiders and how they used this ostensibly marginal social status to conceal a set of conservative core values they sensed were eroding. This otherwise disparate group shared a sense of cultural alienation, recognized the potentially powerful position of the exile, and demonstrated a keen willingness to exploit its possibilities. Although these writers have long been acknowledged and heralded for their experimentation, their technical and formal innovation, much of their work springs from essentially conservative impulses, beliefs, and values, aimed …

Life And Death In Joyce's Dubliners, Matthew Gallman

All Theses

This thesis is an examination of James Joyce's Dubliners as a collection of stories that is unified by an ongoing intersection between life and death. In the collection, the dead often serve to expose a deficiency in the living. The thesis explores four stories that share this theme in particular: 'The Sisters,' 'A Painful Case,' 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room,' and 'The Dead.' Each story is also presented in the context of how each relates to the progression from youth to public life within Dubliners. As such, the thesis also considers how Dubliners exhibits a progression towards isolation and …

"That Most Unselfish Man": George Sayer, 1914-2005: Pupil, Biographer, And Friend Of Inklings, Mike Foster

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

An appreciation of Inkling George Sayer, author of Jack: C.S. Lewis and His Times, widely regarded as one of the best biographies of Lewis. Includes personal reminiscences of his friendship with Sayer, as well as of Sayer’s friendships with Tolkien and Lewis.

Stable Identity: Horses, Inversion Theory, And The Well Of Loneliness, Mary A. Armstrong

English

No abstract provided.

Augustan American Verse, Chris Beyers

English Department Faculty Works

Augustan American verse is the essence of this article. The poetry composed by the colonial poets from New England are discussed in this article. Colonial poets often said they were imitating Alexander Pope, Virgil, and Horace. Joseph Addison, John Dryden, and John Milton were also frequently mentioned. A reader acquainted with James Thomson, Abraham Cowley, Samuel Butler, and John Pomfret's “The Choice” will find much familiar in colonial poetry—so much so that later critics have often complained that colonial verse is derivative. Like their European contemporaries, Augustan poets in the colonies believed the “polish'd Arts” could help control “wild Passions” …

Parnassus 2008

Parnassus

The 2008 edition of the student literary journal, Parnassus, published by Taylor University in Upland, Indiana.

Replacing The Native American With The "New American" In Margaret Fuller's Summer On The Lakes, In 1843, Laura M. Reilly

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In the summer of 1843, New Englander Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) set off with friends on a westward journey that would take her through the areas of the Great Lakes, Illinois and Wisconsin. Fuller kept copious notes during her trip, and during the eight months after her return home, she revised and enhanced her text and published it as a book, entitled Summer on the Lakes, In 1843.

Fuller’s book reflects a myriad of influences, especially from those most known for their Romantic writings. Jacques Jean Rousseau’s ideas of “The Noble Savage,” Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime, Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s …

Memory And Forgetting In A Time Of Violence: Brian Friel’S Meta-History Plays, Tony Crowley

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

In the 1980s, Brian Friel, one of Ireland’s most successful twentieth century dramatists, authored two plays – Translations and Making History – which were concerned with major events in colonial history. Given the context in which the plays were written – Northern Ireland was in a state of war at the time – ­the playwright’s choice of topics (the introduction of the National Schools and the Ordnance Survey in the nineteenth century and the failed Gaelic revolt against English rule and the Flight of the Earls in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) was both pointed and politically contentious. Yet, the …