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Flawed To Start : The Inconsequence Of Action In The Novels Of Brian O’Nolan, Christopher M. Mitchell

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Brian O’Nolan’s novels At Swim-Two-Birds, The Poor Mouth, and The Third Policeman present worlds where character actions are largely inconsequential. This discussion will focus on reflexive metanarrative elements, criticism of the Irish revivalist movements and authorship and creation as a means to survive these worlds. O’Nolan’s novels will be shown to be largely optimistic in their confrontation of nihilistic concerns. Much of his writing is comedic and playful even when dealing with serious topics. Repetition through both language and story structure are key components of the futility O’Nolan constructs for his characters and readers. This thesis examines the interplay between …

Rethinking Foreignness In The Works Of John Milton, Courtney Van Saders

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis contends that in John Milton’s early poems written between 1627 and 1639, he starts the process of developing an understanding of boundaries and borders he would use later in his career. Chapter one examines Milton’s Elegia Quarta and The Masque at Ludlow Castle. Within Elegia Quarta, Milton explores the relationship of borders between mainland Europe and England. He uses the image of his childhood mentor Thomas Young as a physical representation of borders. While in The Masque at Ludlow Castle, I concentrate on the complexity of the barriers and boundaries between England and Wales and the development of …

Lost Generations And The Problem Of American Identity : The Emergence Of Racial Nativism In American Culture (1890s-1920s), Gloria Lugo

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis problematizes traditional generic groupings (such as realism, naturalism, and modernism) since such categories segregate texts into literary periods defined largely by artificial formalist criteria. These ahistorical distinctions tend to deemphasize social and cultural import and also occlude analyses of texts as cultural products that express the dominant ideology of a particular epoch. A historical analysis focusing on cultural ideology can offer new insights to how various canonical texts perpetuate American mythologies and stereotypes. When interrogating texts of the Progressive and Modernist Eras, a pattern emerges that conflates racism and nativism in an effort to define Americans as elite …

In Our Defense : Sheridan's The Camp, The Glorious First Of June, Pizarro And The Fate Of The British Nation In Late Eighteenth-Century England, Patricia Mari Valatka

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In this thesis, I examine Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s plays The Camp (1778), and The Glorious First o f June (1794), and Pizarro (1799), and how they dealt with the British invasion crisis of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I investigate how Sheridan’s theatrical works confronted and presented British fears of national/racial annihilation and in turn how society used these plays to understand them. In particular, I want to consider the ways Sheridan’s works attempted to influence the audience members’ feelings about participating in the military to defend the British nation. Although Sheridan’s play Pizarro is often examined in …

The Transformative Power Of Voice In George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, Nicole L. Scimone

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion is first and foremost a play about voice, particularly about the voice of flower-girl-tumed-lady Liza Doolittle. Though the voice is not Liza’s true self, it is the way the Liza’s identity can be expressed, and thus an important marker of identity transformations in the play. This work explores three different ways in which Shaw discusses voice in the play: as singing instruction, scientific methods for recording voice, and vocalizing automata and dolls.

First, the play is deeply influenced by Shaw’s background in singing instruction from his childhood. Shaw learned voice study from his mother’s beau, a …

Paradox In Shakespeare's Tragicomedies : Pericles, Cymberline, The Winter's Tale, And The Tempest, Seamus Gilson

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Paradox in Shakespeare’s four tragicomedies - Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest - is employed to explore the human experience, a journey filled with contradictions that thrive together. Shakespeare’s use of paradox takes on a different dimension in each play and, therefore, this essay will look at the paradox, or paradoxes, specific to individual plays. The value, then, of paradox in Shakespeare’s four tragicomedies is that they forge boundaries and evoke thought.

The essay is divided into the following sections: Introduction; Tragicomedy, discusses the tragicomic form; Paradox, takes a brief look at the subject of paradox; the discussion …

The Struggle Between The Self And Not-Self : The Influence Of Zen Buddhism And The Upanishads In Yeats’S Later Poetry, William Paul Kadar

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis will examine questions about how William Butler Yeats was influenced by his exposure to eastern philosophical thinking. Yeats's work prior to 1927, before his significant and rather esoteric tome A Vision, could classify him as a proto-Romantic, but it was his work after this where we see the influence of an eastern way of thinking. Specifically, this thesis will focus on Yeats's poetry from 1927 on, with references to some of his earlier work to demonstrate how Yeats had already discovered some of the basic tenets of eastern thinking without having studied it. The initial analysis will locus …

Gendered Spaces In James Joyce’S Dubliners, Cynthia J. Hacker

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis paper, entitled Gendered Spaces in James Joyce’s Dubliners, will explore Joyce’s use of the special environment, both public and private. Joyce designed the built spaces in his stories to reflect the way space was gendered in his time. Each space, whether it was the home, the street, the pub, or a church, was indicative of a pattern of power relationships between men and women. Within these gendered spaces, power relationships were constructed, individual consciousness formed, and national identity debated.

In Joyce’s stories, women occupy the space of the home in a way that suggests it is their expected …

Problems Of Connection : The Critique Of Englishness, Empire, And Nationhood In E.M. Forster's A Passage To India, Virginia Woolf's Orlando And George Orwell's "England Your England", Alexandra Megan Schultz

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In the introduction to Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899-1939, Richard Begam and Michael Moses state that the “historical and cultural reality of modernism more often then not challenged the prevailing values of English culture, including its most powerful institution, the British Empire” (6). The problem of connection can be considered one of these troubled established ideologies. The English not only promoted relations between those of the same socioeconomic status and cultural upbringing, but actively discouraged connections of any other kind. This value system barred the English from any kind of social or political mobility because connections were …

Stressed Sexuality : How Props, Stage Directions And Setting Convey Tormented Male Protagonists In Selected Plays Of Tennessee Williams, Sara Temme

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis examines how the stage directions, props, and setting are patterned to create themes in character development in selected Tennessee Williams plays. This analysis focuses on four plays from a successful period in Williams’ life from 1955-1961 in which the playwright had established a pattern in developing sexually desirable male characters using symbolism and space: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). All four illustrate how Williams shapes the structure of the scenes by directing the space the characters reside in. Characters are …

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 …

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 …

O Great Beginning : Through The Ashes To The Masses, Louise Julia Cavallo

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The theme of death as a catalyst for the protagonist’s political awakening at the end of Jews Without Money has never been evaluated as a central idea in Michael Gold’s autobiographical novel. This paper focuses on Gold’s obsession with death through each chapter and how he systematically draws death closer and closer into his own family enclave, until the symbols of death become the symptoms of a decaying society.

Critics through the decades have not recognized the continuity of death as presented in this text. Alfred Kazin, Alan Wald, Marcus Klein, even Michael Folsom, who had a first-hand relationship with …