Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- Literature (35)
- English literature (27)
- Gender (14)
- Novel (11)
- American Literature (10)
-
- Poetry (9)
- 19th century (8)
- American literature (8)
- Fiction (6)
- Shakespeare (6)
- 18th century literature (5)
- British and Irish Literature (5)
- Eighteenth century literature (5)
- Modern Literature (5)
- Politics (5)
- Rhetoric (5)
- Short stories (5)
- 18th century (4)
- British literature (4)
- Criticism (4)
- English department (4)
- Gender Studies (4)
- Illustration (4)
- Irish literature (4)
- Language Arts (4)
- Masculinity (4)
- Masculinity in literature (4)
- Women in literature (4)
- 16th century (3)
- American -- History and criticism (3)
- Publication Year
- Publication
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 30 of 188
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
“She Didn’T Know I Was In The Room”: The Effects Of Hatfield’S Illustrations On Readers’ Interpretations Of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Mason Repas
The Downtown Review
When Charlotte Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," was first published in New England Magazine in 1892, staff illustrator Joseph Hatfield created three realistic-style images to accompany the text. Research suggests that Gilman had no control or influence over these images, which altered readers' perception of her story about the dangers of the rest cure for female hysteria. While Hatfield faced artistic limitations and his intentions are not discoverable today, the choices and details in his illustrations support interpretations of the short story as a piece of horror fiction in which his cohesive series of images is a more reliable …
Review Of Andrew Hadfield, John Donne: In The Shadow Of Religion, Brooke Conti
Review Of Andrew Hadfield, John Donne: In The Shadow Of Religion, Brooke Conti
English Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
"I Need To Write About What I Believe": Journaling And Afrofuturism In Octavia E. Butler's Parable Of The Sower And Parable Of The Talents, Shlana E. Sims
"I Need To Write About What I Believe": Journaling And Afrofuturism In Octavia E. Butler's Parable Of The Sower And Parable Of The Talents, Shlana E. Sims
ETD Archive
Butler’s choice of using the diary of a young Black girl and of making that Black girl a leader is directly paralleled in real history via diaries, such as The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells. Butler’s use of the journaling technique via a Black woman ties the future to the past as the diaries of these influential Black women are read by later generations giving a glimpse of what dreams, hopes, and goals the women had for the Black Community. She further gives cautionary tales of “if-this-continues to-go-on” as a warning for the community to be on its guard, …
“Like Dying And Like Being Born”: The Portal, The Door, And The Closet In Mohsin Hamid’S Exit West, Lynn Nichols
“Like Dying And Like Being Born”: The Portal, The Door, And The Closet In Mohsin Hamid’S Exit West, Lynn Nichols
The Downtown Review
This paper analyzes Exit West by Mohsin Hamid through the lens of queer theory and LGBT symbolism. Scholarship surrounding Exit West has focused on the novel's magical realism as a commentary on xenophobia and colonialism. By drawing on noted texts in queer theory including Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet, this paper draws further connections between Hamid's portal plot and the experience of coming out. This argument considers the intersectionality of migration and coming out to demonstrate that for characters like Nadia, these experiences must overlap.
Argumentative Synthesis Essay On Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, Gwendolyn D. Wheatley
Argumentative Synthesis Essay On Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, Gwendolyn D. Wheatley
The Downtown Review
This essay discusses enhanced interrogation techniques. For reference, enhanced interrogation techniques are interrogation techniques that involve “physically coercive interventions” (Duke & Puyvelde, 2017). The U.S. government supported these techniques after the attacks on September 11, 2001. This essay argues that enhanced interrogation techniques should not be used in interrogations because they are unethical, ineffective, and negatively impact the mental health of the interrogators using these techniques. Additionally, the essay references articles on the varied viewpoints as well as explains information on these interrogation techniques. Also, the essay argues that enhanced interrogation techniques encourage people to be cruel and inhumane. Moreover, …
Increasing Faculty-Librarian Collaboration Through Critical Librarianship, Adrienne Gosselin, Mandi Goodsett
Increasing Faculty-Librarian Collaboration Through Critical Librarianship, Adrienne Gosselin, Mandi Goodsett
Michael Schwartz Library Publications
Through the lens of critical librarianship, librarians are becoming increasingly involved in social justice, civic engagement, and human rights issues. This paper examines the collaboration between a subject librarian and a faculty member in an assignment that engaged in Public Sphere Pedagogy (PSP), a teaching strategy with the goal of increasing students’ sense of civic agency and personal and social responsibility by connecting their classwork to public arenas; and project-based learning, wherein students develop a question to research and create projects that reflect their knowledge, which they share with a select audience.
Milton, Jerome, And Apocalyptic Virginity, Brooke Conti
Milton, Jerome, And Apocalyptic Virginity, Brooke Conti
English Faculty Publications
Milton’s youthful interest in virginity is usually regarded as a private eccentricity abandoned on his maturation. His “Mask” is often read, analogously, as charting the Lady’s movement from temporary virginity to wedded chastity. This essay challenges those claims, arguing that Milton’s understanding of virginity’s poetic and apocalyptic powers comes from Saint Jerome, whose ideas he struggles with throughout his career. Reading “A Mask” alongside Jerome suggests that Milton endorses the apocalyptic potential of virginity without necessarily assigning those powers to the Lady herself. In later works, Milton modifies and adapts Jerome before finally producing the perfect eremitic hero of “Paradise …
Prayer, Brooke Conti
Review Of Lara Crowley, Manuscript Matters: Reading John Donne’S Poetry And Prose In Early Modern England, Brooke Conti
Review Of Lara Crowley, Manuscript Matters: Reading John Donne’S Poetry And Prose In Early Modern England, Brooke Conti
English Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Tracing The Origins Of The Eighteenth-And Nineteenth-Century Rake Character To Depictions Of The Modern Monster, Courtney A. Conrad
Tracing The Origins Of The Eighteenth-And Nineteenth-Century Rake Character To Depictions Of The Modern Monster, Courtney A. Conrad
ETD Archive
While critics and authors alike have deemed the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary rake figure as a “monster” and a “devil,” scholars have rarely drawn the same connections between monsters to rakes. Even as critics have decidedly characterized iconic monsters like Victor Frankenstein and Dracula as rapists or seducers, they oftentimes do not make the distinction that these literary monsters originated from the image of the rake. However, the rake and the monster share overarching characteristics, particularly in the inherent qualities their respective authors attribute to them, which shape the way they treat women and offspring. A side-by-side comparison between the …
You Can Go Home Again: The Misunderstood Memories Of Captain Charles Ryder, Monica M. Krason
You Can Go Home Again: The Misunderstood Memories Of Captain Charles Ryder, Monica M. Krason
ETD Archive
Critics have frequently commented on the nostalgic tone of Brideshead Revisited. Their assessment has been largely negative, with most considering Brideshead too sentimental about England’s aristocratic past. This current characterization fails to recognize Waugh’s critiques of such thinking in Brideshead, wherein he upends the nostalgic tropes of popular Oxford novels, illustrates the dangers of both insulated upper class living and thoughtless presentism through his depictions of various characters, and proposes a greater metaphysical drama through memory is at play in the novel. Brideshead offers nostalgia as an enlivening force which allows Charles Ryder to maintain a vibrant understanding for who …
Review Of W. B. Patterson, Thomas Fuller: Discovering England’S Religious Past, Brooke Conti
Review Of W. B. Patterson, Thomas Fuller: Discovering England’S Religious Past, Brooke Conti
English Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Truth And The Language Of War, Kelly O'Melia
Truth And The Language Of War, Kelly O'Melia
ETD Archive
According to modernist Friedrich Nietzsche in On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense, language is a constructed system which fails to represent reality because of its inherent metaphorical nature. Modernist writer Virginia Woolf and postmodernist writer Tim O’Brien implicitly address Nietzsche’s belief as they warn against and represent the horrors of war in the novels Jacob’s Room and The Things They Carried. Nietzsche and Woolf develop new modernist styles, forsaking the conventions of nineteenth-century realism. O’Brien pays homage to high modernism and to Woolf in his novel through direct reference and through the modernist strategies utilized to present the …
First Person Plural: Short Stories, Justin R. Lazor
First Person Plural: Short Stories, Justin R. Lazor
ETD Archive
I decided to title this collection First Person Plural after observing that one of the most prominent motifs common among these stories concerns the instability and multiplicity of identity. Horror is one of the traditions that most influences my writing, particularly the claustrophobic psychological horror of writers like Edgar Allen Poe. I mainly deploy the tropes of horror in an effort to destabilize my characters’ inner and outer realities. Another important influence on my writing has been that brand of fiction which exists within the liminal space between horror and realism, such as Dan Chaon’s collection Stay Awake, Bringing Out …
The Sting In The Green City, Nicole Tsakoumagos
The Sting In The Green City, Nicole Tsakoumagos
ETD Archive
In an irradiated, alternate earth, where a mysterious supernatural phenomenon caused a near-apocalypse, the human race is back on it’s feet. Four major cities dominate the landscape: New Sparta, The Mel, The Nocturn and Oz. In the first installment of “The Sting” series, explore the emerald, Greene Mob run metropolis, Oz. Gun-slinging, Ex-mercenary Kyra `The Sting’ Lee is living quietly in the outer part of the city with her dog, Doogie. The only family she has are the Castellanoses, a Greek four-part ensemble that own Kyra’s favorite greasy spoon diner. Maria Castellanos is Kyra’s best friend and her seemingly unobtainable …
Contradictionary Lies: A Play Not About Kurt Cobain, Katie R. Wallace
Contradictionary Lies: A Play Not About Kurt Cobain, Katie R. Wallace
ETD Archive
Contradictionary Lies: A Play Not About Kurt Cobain is a one-act play that follows failed rocker Jimbo as he deals with aging, his divorce, and disappointment. As he and his estranged wife Kelly divvy up their belongings and ultimately their memories, Jimbo is visited by his guardian angel, the ghost of dead rock star Kurt Cobain. Part dark comedy, part docudrama, this play shows how closely man emulates their heroes, and how in the void of depression, music serves an escape.
“The Deepest Blush”: Bodily States Of Emotions In Jane Austen’S Novels, Nadya Abdelfattah
“The Deepest Blush”: Bodily States Of Emotions In Jane Austen’S Novels, Nadya Abdelfattah
ETD Archive
During the eighteenth-century, philosophers gave primacy to rationality specifying that reason could and should control emotions; they observed a friction between thought and feeling, rational and irrational, emotion and cognition, mind and body, which competed and united in a way that influenced the eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century thought and experience on many sides. As an early nineteenth-century novelist, Jane Austen explores the relationship between emotion and cognition. I argue that Austen shows the importance of bodily experience of emotion in moral development. Deploying affect theory will illuminate Austen’s depiction of emotions as a mode of understanding of how the body becomes …
Notes On Survival, Despite, Jason Harris
Notes On Survival, Despite, Jason Harris
ETD Archive
In this collection of poems, the issue of damage-based thinking and desire-based thinking is being examined. It is being examined through the use of several different types of poetry techniques. Within the poems, the past, the present, and the future are examined and asks a larger question: How can we, as people take the daily violence that we encounter and find – and/or work our way to – joy.
Not So Revisionary: The Regressive Treatment Of Gender In Alan Moore's Watchmen, Anna C. Marshall
Not So Revisionary: The Regressive Treatment Of Gender In Alan Moore's Watchmen, Anna C. Marshall
The Downtown Review
While Alan Moore’s comic book Watchmen is often hailed as a revisionary text for introducing flawed superheroes and political anxiety to the genre, it is also remarkably regressive in its treatment of gender. Some critics do argue that women are given a newfound voice in Watchmen, but this interpretation neglects to examine character Laurie Jupiter adequately, or the ways in which other female characters' appearance and dialogue are limited and/or based on their sexuality and relationships with male characters. Watchmen's main female characters, mother and daughter Sally and Laurie Jupiter, lack autonomy and their identities are completely intertwined …
Ophelia's Desire, James J. Marino
Ophelia's Desire, James J. Marino
English Faculty Publications
Psychoanalytic criticism renders Ophelia anomalous, no longer Hamlet's erotic object in her own right but a refraction of his cathexis on the Queen. This approach obscures how profoundly Ophelia, the only daughter in William Shakespeare to renounce the lover her father forbids, violates generic norms, and how structurally similar Hamlet's two examples of madness are. Hamlet and Ophelia go mad after sacrificing the independent (and expected) aims of adulthood at the commands of fathers whom the play links to figures of murderous aggression against children: the biblical Jephthah and Seneca's filicidal ghosts. Hamlet is a play haunted by fathers who …
Wharton's Library: For Born Readers Only, Christine Primisch
Wharton's Library: For Born Readers Only, Christine Primisch
ETD Archive
Edith Wharton is known for her depictions of the changing New York aristocracy and marriage market in the early twentieth-century. Critics have previously examined Wharton’s views on upper-class New York society and social climbers attempting to insert themselves into that society. What has not been studied as extensively in existing criticism is the way in which the exponential increases in the size of the reading public and the type of literature available at the time Wharton was publishing negatively impacted Wharton’s perception of the lower-class and nouveau riche readers and caused insecurities over her literary legacy. These insecurities influence her …
“Only A Sufficient Cause:" Bram Stoker's Dracula As A Tale Of Mad Science And Faustian Redemption, Leah Christiana Davydov
“Only A Sufficient Cause:" Bram Stoker's Dracula As A Tale Of Mad Science And Faustian Redemption, Leah Christiana Davydov
ETD Archive
While present Dracula scholarship has made an extensive examination of the ways in which the novel reflects apprehensions about late Victorian scientific advances, little work to date has been done to link these anxieties to fin de siecle fiction involving mad scientists or to Bram Stoker’s lifelong interest in the story of Dr. Faustus. In this work, I argue that the primary menace within Dracula is not actually the threat posed by the novel’s vampires but rather the threat posed by the biologically determined, materialist, and potentially “mad” science practiced by the characters of Dr. John Seward and his patient, …
Male Laguna Cultural Infulence In The Restoration Of Tayo, Peter Lee Parry
Male Laguna Cultural Infulence In The Restoration Of Tayo, Peter Lee Parry
ETD Archive
Scholars have understood Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony as a journey to restoration for her protagonist Tayo. The scholarly discussion focuses predominately on the female side of Silko’s novel. Yet Silko balances between the male and female side of Laguna Cutlture which has not been acknowledged enough by scholars. Silko uses three male characters, Robert, Ku’oosh, and Betonie to guide Tayo back to Laguna Culture, which is feminine. I intend to show importance of Silko’s male characters. Silko also intended to use her male characters to present a line that ranges from the family (Robert) to the community (Ku’oosh) to the …
Writing Through The Lower Frequencies: Interpreting The Unnaming And Naming Process Within Richard Wright's Native Son And Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Sarah M. Lacy
ETD Archive
The search for identity within Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man has long been analyzed, yet the fact that each protagonist’s search for self is brought to a point of crisis during an intimate interaction with a white woman has often been neglected. Here, I analyze each author’s strategic use of a nameless narrator by utilizing the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, arguing that the act of “literary unnaming” is used to critique the development of black American identity during the time of Jim Crow. The use of a nameless narrator is explored through …
"Tale As Old As Time": The "Beauty And The Beast" Narrative As Vehicle For Social Resistance, Monica Williams
"Tale As Old As Time": The "Beauty And The Beast" Narrative As Vehicle For Social Resistance, Monica Williams
ETD Archive
While current criticism has discussed various versions of the “Beauty and the Beast” tale individually, none have traced any particular trends that have emerged within the tale as it has been revised over the centuries. One particular trend began in the eighteenth century, when Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont streamlined the tale from the oral tradition in order to utilize it for the moral education of young French girls. Along with this pedagogical goal, Beaumont also managed to critique Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and the abuse Pamela often suffered at the hands of Mr. B by revising her Beast character to act …
Sympathy, Skepticism And Conversation In Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy And Henry Mackenzie's The Man Of Feeling, Ahoud Turki Al Ghmiz
Sympathy, Skepticism And Conversation In Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy And Henry Mackenzie's The Man Of Feeling, Ahoud Turki Al Ghmiz
ETD Archive
While Tristram Shandy and The Man of Feeling have received continuous literary attention, few has been done in reading the skeptical and sentimental aspects of the two novels. This thesis glances through “conversation”, a reader-author conversation may be defined as a dialogue with a reader which is mediated by text. Both Sterne and Mackenzie engage in a conversation with readers by making them laugh, question, criticize, sympathize, and reflect on the deeper meaning of the novels. Moreover, this author-reader conversation is impossible without the wide use of conversations in both novels, through which characters convey their emotions and thoughts. Both …
Eldritch Horrors: The Modernist Liminality Of H.P. Lovecraft's Weird Fiction, Dale Allen Crowley
Eldritch Horrors: The Modernist Liminality Of H.P. Lovecraft's Weird Fiction, Dale Allen Crowley
ETD Archive
In the early part of the twentieth century, the Modernist literary movement was moving into what was arguably its peak, and authors we would now unquestioningly consider part of the Western literary canon were creating some of their greatest works. Coinciding with the more mainstream Modernist movement, there emerged a unique sub- genre of fiction on the pages of magazines with titles like Weird Tales and Astounding Stories. While modernist writers; including Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, William Faulkner, and T.S. Elliot – among others – were achieving acclaim for their works; in …
Feminist Pedagogies In The Creative Writing Classroom: Possibilities And Reflections, Angela Lagrotteria
Feminist Pedagogies In The Creative Writing Classroom: Possibilities And Reflections, Angela Lagrotteria
ETD Archive
As a first-time student in a creative writing course and a long-time instructor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, I see possible paths that instructors in both fields could take in order to integrate creative writing and feminist pedagogy in ways that might increase students’ desire to write and to share their writing while at the same time helping students undertake feminist analyses. In the creative nonfiction writing class I took with Professor Lardner in the fall of 2015, I saw how many students (myself included) were writing about transformative personal experiences, but in this class, we never discussed these …
Shriekers, Jessica Leigh Johnson
Shriekers, Jessica Leigh Johnson
ETD Archive
In every horror sub-genre, there is a fear that the narrative exploits. In ghost stories, the fear is that of the unknown; in alien movies, it is the fear of the other; and in stories involving the undead we are confronted with the nature of living itself. In using creatures that were once human but now act only on instinct, we are forced to examine ourselves. Further, most stories involving zombies are set in a world where society is crumbling or has crumbled, and humans are forced to make difficult decisions, which brings us to question the nature of survival.
Towards A Synthesis: Tracing The Evolution Of Masculinity In The Eighteenth-Century Novel, Anthony Necastro Necastro
Towards A Synthesis: Tracing The Evolution Of Masculinity In The Eighteenth-Century Novel, Anthony Necastro Necastro
ETD Archive
Studies of eighteenth-century British novels are typically centered on the alleged “rise” of the novel; that is, the formation of the novel as a genre distinguished from the epics, dramas, romances, and satires of past centuries. These new novels betray the critical trajectory of masculinity throughout the politically turbulent long British eighteenth century (1688-1815). While critics have studied individual constructions of masculinity within particular novels, or masculinity presented by a single author’s corpus, this paper tracks the various constructions of masculinity and demonstrates the relationship between masculinity and political change. The novel’s century-long “rise” presents the reflection of the English …