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Chance, Chaos, And Chloral: Lily Bart Gambles It All In The House Of Mirth, Stacey L. Fitzpatrick

Masters Theses

Much of traditional literary study of Lily Bart’s struggles and social failures depicted in The House of Mirth focuses on her fear of losing her freewill, her reliance on fate or Fortuna, and her dislike of the options set before her. In this paper I will use several important scenes to illustrate that Lily’s penchant for gambling more accurately explains her behavior and rejection of social and cultural expectations. Preferring her freedom and weighing her options of marriage for power or a financially secure lifestyle, Lily considers them as a gambler, balancing her marriage prospects against her love for excitement …

“Such Night Till This I Never Passed” : How The Dreams Of Adam And Eve Lead To The Decision To Fall In Paradise Lost, Robert B. Chapman

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the idea that the Fall in Paradise Lost by John Milton is not a sudden event, but rather Adam and Eve's adherence to temptations that begin long before, specifically in Eve's vision and Adam's thoughts on Eve. This project begins by challenging the ways in which readers of the poem often overlook Eve as they focus solely on Satan or Adam. By looking at Eve's depiction as truly Adam's equal in the poem, this thesis then moves to the idea that temptations are an individual experience that begins first in the mind. Often, readers and scholars explore …

Reading Vice: The Christian Text In Geoffrey Of Monmouth's Historia Regum Brittaniae, Nancy S. Bell

Masters Theses

Geoffrey of Monmouth claimed his purpose for writing Historia regum Britanniae was to record a history of the British kings and their great deeds. On the surface, his book is indeed a chronicle detailing the reigns of several important kings and glossing over many more. However, below the surface, Geoffrey includes layers of Christian text to motivate his audience to avoid vice. To clue his readers into the Christian meaning, Geoffrey makes use of shared beliefs, such as that vices should be avoided, that a king’s behavior affects his people, that disease can be a manifestation of sin, and that …

Roots And Repercussions Of Romantic Feeling: Sensation And Affect In The Poetry Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge And William Wordsworth, Mary K. Cotter

Theses and Dissertations

Enlightenment emphasis on rationalism in philosophy and the arts prefigures Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and William Wordsworth’s Romantic recovery of a subject’s empirical relationship to nature and the phenomenal world. Coleridge and Wordsworth respond to philosophical precedents that emphasize rationalism and the autonomy of a subject while introducing empiricism and sensation as primary components of the speaker’s experience. The poets delineate a fluid shift from the Enlightenment to Romanticism through an interchangeable reliance on Kantian and Burkean philosophical methods. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant follows the Cartesian cogito toward a similar end of reducing human experience to circumstance bereft of empirical …

Different Names For Bullying, Marco Poggio

Capstones

“There's all different forms of bullying,” says Steven Gray, a Lakota rancher and former law enforcement officer living in South Dakota. In this look into Gray’s life, we learn about two instances of bullying: the psychological and physical harassment that pushed his son, Tanner Thomas Gray, to commit suicide at age 12; And the controversial construction of an oil pipeline in an ancient tribal land that belongs to the Lakota people by rights of a treaty signed in 1851, which Gray sees as an institutional abuse infringing on the sovereignty of his people. Gray is involved in the movement that …

Verge, Jessica A. Collins

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This poetry thesis explores the relationship of the Buddhist concept of nonduality to polar mood disorders by employing motifs of bomb testing, war crimes, spiders, and seascapes. A critical preface credits Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, and Mary Ruefle as influences. The manuscript favors free-verse poetry and field composition, though also includes a lyric essay and two formal poems.

Innovative Techniques For Inspiring Efl Students' Enthusiasm And Participating In English Classroom Activities, Yinghung Natalie Chiang

Master's Projects and Capstones

Since 1990, the government of Taiwan has sought to position the country as an international economic and trading center. As a result, English became a compulsory subject for Taiwanese students in 2005 (Lu, 2011). The Taiwan Ministry of Education (MOE) is promoting communicative language teaching (CLT) and encouraging learners to develop and increased desire to improve their language skills. However, many Taiwanese English as Foreign Language (EFL) teachers still focus on memorization and the grammar translation method (Chung & Huang, 2009). The author discovered two major issues related to English language teaching in Taiwan. The first issue was many Taiwanese …

Case Study Of An English Program In A Multi-Ethnic Chinese Context: Feasibility Of Genred Task Instructional Approaches And Implications For Teacher Development, Merideth Hoagland Pitts

Faculty Dissertations

The current study examines the feasibility of task- and genre-based instruction in an English program located in an under-examined region of the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.), a demographically diverse setting to the far west of the developed coastal region. The study investigates how and to what extent genred task instruction (GTI), an innovative construct harmonizing SLA and genre-pedagogical recommendations, is implemented in this setting, considering local stakeholders’ perspectives with respect to local dynamics. The study further attempts to determine the nature of the teacher support in the target context, considering what additional support might be necessary to sustain GTI …

From Classic Novel To Broadway Musical Production: An Examination Of Little Women As An Adaptation, Meghan Skiles

HON499 projects

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott is a classic work of American literature that has been adapted into many different forms since its original publication in 1868. This essay analyzes the effects of adapting a novel, or written medium, to a visual medium such as a film or stage production. Particularly, it looks at Alcott’s Little Women in relation to Allan Knee’s 2005 Broadway musical adaptation of the story. This article begins with a discussion about the challenges that come with adapting a written medium to a visual medium, and then uses Little Women as a case study, examining the …

From Longinus To Tolkien: A Theory Of The Fantastic Sublime, Seth Wilson

English Department Theses

As concepts, the fantastic and the sublime share much in common. Both have the power to take a reader outside the scope of his or her own worldview and experience, and both share the paradoxical power to both elevate and humble the human spirit. So it is surprising that few scholars have explored the intersection between these two constructs, and none has attempted to systematically explore how this intersection operates in the context of literary theory. This thesis endeavors to build a theoretical framework for the fantastic sublime by exploring its constituent parts. First, I examine the contribution of the …

Living Subversive Narratives: Shahrazad’S Stories Of Women, Caleb Nicholas

Honors Projects

Though scholars have examined The 1001 Nights’ Entertainments or The Arabian Nights, few have thoroughly explored the function of Shahrazad’s tales as they relate to her position as a woman. Closely reading the stories of the Nights reveals that there are chiefly two types of female characters who emerge in her stories: the heroic, who have no apparent autonomy, and the villainous, who have overflowing autonomy. These depictions of women are problematic from the viewpoint of present-day feminism, but are understandable, and even genuinely subversive, in Shahrazad’s context. Although some scholars have dismissed questions about the function of the …

Exploring Psychological Territoriality Through The Domestic Gothic In Beloved And Mama Day, Lori L. Cook

English Department Theses

The novels, Beloved, by Toni Morrison, and Mama Day, by Gloria Naylor, contain narratives of families with a history of slavery that explore how their female protagonists claim their identities within the new boundaries of freedom. Using a framework of the Domestic Gothic, this paper explores how formerly enslaved female characters claim new psychological territory in bounded domestic spaces by using the chores they were forced to perform during their times of slavery as a means to independence. Domestic duties such as cooking and gardening along with magical and religious ceremonies and acts of violence are passed down through the …

Queering The Dick: Moby-Dick As Coming-Out Narrative, Ryan M. Brady

Student Research Submissions

Many contemporary critics read Ishmael, Moby-Dick's loquacious narrator, as a queer character. The words homosexual and heterosexual would not be coined until 1868, some eighteen years after the events of Moby-Dick; thus, Ishmael comes of age in a time when there was no language to express or even acknowledge same-sex attraction, and even if there had been, the rigid societal codes that regulated sexuality in the nineteenth century would have prevented him from doing so. Despite these disadvantages, Ishmael, through his "marriage" to Queequeg and, later, his admittance into the queer haven of the Pequod, not only manages to reconcile …

English Drama For Critical Pedagogy : Adapting Caryl Churchill’S Dramas As A Methodological Tool For Community-Engaged Theatre Workshopping In Post-Umbrella Movement Hong Kong, Hsiao Min Yu

Theses & Dissertations

Tertiary-level drama is often condescendingly perceived in Hong Kong as either vocational or leisure-related, and tends to be marginalized in many – though not all – curricula as an activity for extra-curricular inter-university competition. This research aims at re-imagining Drama and Community Theatre as a critical pedagogy in promoting community culture. The aim of the research project is to strengthen the social functions of drama as community experience and as a tool for empowerment in the ‘glocal’ sociopolitical context of today. The study examines the methodology of a semi-scripted, community-engaged, theatre workshopping initiative with scenes adapted from Caryl Churchill’s plays, …

“The Indians Gaping Before Us”: Anxieties Of Consumption In Mary White Rowlandson’S Sovereignty And Goodness Of God, Samantha Woodington

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This paper traces the theme of consumption throughout Mary White Rowlandson’s captivity narrative The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. From Rowlandson’s fear of actual cannibalism at the outset of the work, her obsession with recording the strange foods she consumes, her status as a consumer of Algonquin culture, and lastly, the consumption of the novel by both contemporary and modern readers alike, consumption becomes the leitmotif of the text. A closer analysis elucidates that the fear of consumption truly belies a fear of colonialism and the cultural exchanges taking place at the frontier.

Representing Modern Female Villain: On Feminine Evil, Perverse Nationhood, And Opposition In Rómulo Gallegos’ Doña Bárbara And Salman Rushdie’S Midnight’S Children, Barbara Guerrero

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis aims to contribute to the scholarship on modern female villainy by further exploring the ways in which 20^th century female villains are represented as well as the functions they carry out in the text. In this study, I look at Rómulo Gallegos’ doña Bárbara from Doña Bárbara (1929) and Salman Rushdie’s Indira Gandhi from Midnight’s Children (1981). I argue that both villains are a combination of already-existing forms of evil in more recognizable contexts as well as a rejection of and opposition to modern values. Firstly, I examine how the villains both conform and resist the formula …

Patristic Precedent And Vernacular Innovation: The Practice And Theory Of Anglo-Saxon Translation, Andrew Timothy Eichel

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation investigates Anglo-Saxon translation and interpretation during the reign of King Alfred of Wessex in the ninth century, and the Benedictine Reform of the tenth and eleventh centuries. These two periods represent a time of renaissance in Anglo-Saxon England, when circumstance and ambition allowed for a number of impressive reformation enterprises, including increased dedication to education of both clerical orders and the laity, which therefore augmented the output of writing motivated by scholarly curiosity, ecclesiastical inquiry, and political strategizing. At these formative stages, translation emerged as perhaps the most critical task for the vernacular writers. The Latinate prestige culture …

The Poet And The Polemist: Demystifying The Natural Law Theory Of John Milton, John J. Mazola

Theses and Dissertations

A summation of the influences behind Milton's Natural Law theory as found in the works of Aristotle, Grotius, Hobbes, and Thomas Aquinas. The essay's intent is to uncover this important thread that runs through both Milton's Poetic Verse as well as his Polemic tracts.

Virginia Woolf’S Fictional Biographies, Orlando And Flush, As Prefigures Of Postmodernism, Jacob C. Castle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the way in which the fictional biographies of Virginia Woolf, Orlando and Flush, prefigure central tenets of postmodern fiction. To demonstrate the postmodern elements present in Orlando and Flush, this thesis focuses on how the fictional biographies exhibit three postmodern characteristics: concern for historiography, extensive use of parody, and the denaturalization of cultural assumptions. Born from Woolf’s desire to revolutionize biography by incorporating elements of fiction alongside historical fact, these two novels parallel later works of historiographic metafiction in several key respects. Woolf’s extensive use of parody in Orlando and Flush prefigures how postmodern parody …

The Great Radical Dualism: Locating Margaret Fuller’S Feminism In Nathaniel Hawthorne’S Fiction, Renee Michele Vincent

Senior Honors Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to establish a foundation built on the congruencies between Margaret Fuller’s feminist theory and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction, with the aim of addressing two major points: first, the implications of universalizing gender in the context of identity politics; and second, to show how gender universality is challenged within Hawthorne’s fiction and Fuller’s prose. Given that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s characters depict a range of personal variability, the act of synthesizing Margaret Fuller’s feminist theory with Hawthorne’s fiction functions to link the personal with the political. The overall goal of this study is to substantiate both writers within …

Strindberg's Miss Julie: An Exploitation Of Genderlect And Liberatory Pedagogy, Jenava Moreau Harris

Theses and Dissertations from 2016

Navigating the complexities of naturalist dramatic literature proves to be a challenge under the best circumstances. How do we attempt to highlight the major themes and tenants of Naturalism through an educational theatre lens? What happens when the show is then double cast due to indecisiveness? How do we handle actors with personal trauma influencing their ability to work with vulnerability and physical contact? These questions and others were answered throughout this master’s thesis production of Miss Julie by August Strindberg. Through a process guided by social research and dramaturgical attention to detail, this director was able to explore a …

Perceval's Sister And Juliet Capulet As Disruptive Guides In Spiritual Quests, Joanna Benskin

Open Access Dissertations

Perceval’s sister in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and Juliet in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet act as disruptive guides in spiritual quests by contradicting the expectations placed on them as women characters.

Though women are banned from the quest for the Holy Grail, Perceval’s sister accompanies the Grail knights as an authoritative spiritual guide and a symbol of the Eucharist. Previous critics have not recognized Perceval’s sister as a fundamental disruption to the systemic misogyny of the Morte or her Eucharistic significance. She challenges both the chivalric misogyny that sees her as an object of rescue and the …

Sounding Sacred: The Adoption Of Biblical Archaisms In The Book Of Mormon And Other 19th Century Texts, Gregory A. Bowen

Open Access Dissertations

The Book of Mormon is a text published in 1830 and considered a sacred work of scripture by adherents of the Latter-day Saint movement. Although written 200 years later, it exhibits many linguistic features of the King James translation of the Bible. Such stylistic imitation has been little studied, though a notable exception is Sigelman & Jacoby (1996).

Three hypotheses are considered: that this is a feature of 19th century religious texts, and the Book of Mormon adopts the style of its genre as a religious text; that this is a feature of translations of ancient texts, and the Book …

Bad Girls In Corsets: Women And The Transgressive Body In The Nineteenth Century, Colleen Warwick Green

Open Access Dissertations

Women, and their bodies, posed an increasing anxiety for Victorian society. Culturally and outwardly, the Victorian era strove to maintain a level of decorum that, increasingly, the nineteenth-century woman were, rebelling against. The urge for women to break through social barriers and constraints binding them to the century created a divergence in thought from the traditional mores of the past, in turn affecting the ways in which womens’ bodies were portrayed, displayed and manipulated by the authors and artists of the century.

As women entered actively entered into spaces once closed to them, they furthered the rift of uncertainty and …

The Waiting House, Erika Marie Mueller

Theses and Dissertations

The poems in this collection, The Waiting House, use techniques associated with an evolving elegiac tradition in their portrayal of anticipatory grief born of terminal illness and impending loss. Like the melancholic mourning of modern elegies described by Jahan Ramazani, my poems often resist consolation even as they borrow from elegiac conventions like poetic substitution and repetition. Additionally, they utilize strategies and patterns of literary anger outlined by Alicia Suskin Ostriker as common in postwar American women’s poetry, to express anger that is also anticipatory grief. Finally, this collection uses illness metaphors to question the well being of a larger …

The Ontology Of Immanence: Arriving At Being In Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain, Rachel R. Gilman

Theses and Dissertations

In response to the economic and political upheaval of World War I, Scottish Modernism explored the cultural and linguistic changes of a nation trying to identify itself amidst a world-wide conflict. Scholars and critics have considered Nan Shepherd's fiction in this context—focusing on issues of gender, female identity, language, and land—but have yet to look seriously at her work The Living Mountain and its contributions to the Modernist movement. More recently, critics like Louisa Gairn and Robert MacFarlane have called attention to Shepherd's small but powerful text in an ecocritical and philosophical light, reframing her contribution to issues of Scottish …

Sketches, Impressions And Confessions: Literature As Experiment In The Nineteenth Century, Andrew Ragsdale Lallier

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue for the existence and critical relevance of a program of experimental literature in the long nineteenth century, developed in the aesthetics of German Romanticism and adapted in a set of texts by Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. My introduction positions this argument in context of larger debates concerning form, theory and literary capacity, provides points of connection between these authors, and outlines the most prominent features of experimental literature. In the first chapter, I present an unorthodox reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, accompanied by a brief account of the literary-critical …

Old English Manuscripts In The Early Age Of Print: Matthew Parker And His Scribes, Robert Scott Bevill

Doctoral Dissertations

Covering the first dedicated program in the study of and publication of Anglo-Saxon texts, my dissertation examines the sixteenth-century origins of medieval studies as an academic discipline. By placing recent scholarship on media, materiality, cognition, and intellectual history in conversation with traditional paleographical methods on medieval and renaissance manuscript culture, I argue for a new way of understanding how early modern scholars studied and presented the medieval past. I take as my focus a corpus of emulative Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions produced under Elizabethan Archbishop Matthew Parker. Equal parts facsimile and edition, these transcriptions are a unique example of early modern …

Ecological Approaches To Modernism, The U.S. South, And 20th Century American Literature, Justin Ford Tinsley

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks to draw from the insights of the emerging scholarly discipline known as ecocritism, study of the relationship between human and nonhuman in all arts and in all diverse forms, and apply them to the study of a specific regional art, that of the U.S. South. As an interrogation of the human / nonhuman binary, ecocriticism is intrinsically intertwined with the concept of place. Southern studies—having long explored the diversity (in terms of both human experience and geographical terrain) characterizing the region—offers ecocriticism a ripe testing ground for theoretical mergers and analytic applications. Both fields celebrate hybridity, multiplicity, …

Scholarship On Robert Burton's The Anatomy Of Melancholy, Matthew Bishop

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The history of scholarship on Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy will be explored in this thesis, beginning with a biographical background of Robert Burton and a brief description of The Anatomy of Melancholy. The overall arc of scholarship on Burton’s text began with a wave of early popularity in the seventeenth century, followed by a period of critical neglect in the eighteenth century when no new editions of the book were published. A renewed interest in the Anatomy in the nineteenth century led to a flurry of Burton studies in the twentieth century. The major trend in Burton …