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Romantic Transports: Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism In Transatlantic Context, Rachel Carnell, Alison Tracy Hale

English Faculty Publications

A literary criticism of several books including "Female Quixotism" by Tabitha Tenney, "The Female Quixote" by Charlotte Lennox, and "Angelina" by Maria Edgeworth is presented. According to the authors, these novels constitute a transatlantic genre which highlights the moral and cultural complexities faced by women in the 18th and 19th centuries. Particular focus is given to the novels' political contexts. Realism, the French Revolution, and republican government are also discussed.

Footnotes, Issue 10, Fall 2011, Department Of English

Footnotes: Department of English Newsletter (2008-2012)

No abstract provided.

“The Given Note” Traditional Music, Crisis And The Poetry Of Seamus Heaney, Seán Crosson Dr.

Seán Crosson

This paper proposes that at a time when Northern Ireland increasingly descended into civil strife and crisis, Seamus Heaney looked to landscape, and to a lesser but comparable, extent traditional music, to articulate a distinctive voice, beyond the claims of tradition and community, ‘to use the first person singular’ as he has remarked, ‘to mean me and my lifetime’. Indeed, Heaney has faced a crisis of identity that has preoccupied Irish poets since at least the time of Yeats, a crisis brought on by the discontinuity in the Irish literary tradition, by an unresolved postcolonial condition and a struggle between …

Secular Understanding And Shattering The Myth Of The American Dream: A Chronological Analysis Of Changing Attitudes And Depictions Of Murder Within The Twentieth-Century American Literary Canon, Tsipi Wagner

English Dissertations

Extreme violence, which often results in murder, is a prominent theme in the American literary canon; therefore, it deserves a wider and more focused lens in the study of Twentieth-Century American literature. Murder and entertainment seldom coexist in canonical literature, but the very nature of the murder, foreign to many readers, consequently piques one’s curiosity, and demands special attention.

The literary texts I have chosen to discuss are four novels and three plays. They all belong to the genre known in literature as ‘a crime novel or play.’ The murderers are easily identified, and their criminal acts have been carried …

Diasporic Designs Of House, Home, And Haven In Toni Morrison's Paradise, Cynthia Dobbs

Cynthia Dobbs

No abstract provided.

Life Among The Machines: James Joyce's Ulysses And Early Twentieth-Century Technology, Patrick Casey

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project investigates the cultural impact of the various technological innovations that appeared around the turn of the twentieth century, and how modernism contends with the increasing presence of technology in everyday life. It focuses on the work of James Joyce, whose attitudes toward technology differ significantly from many of his contemporaries, and on his novel Ulysses, which takes place in metropolitan Dublin and features many of the everyday technologies of the early twentieth century.

The first chapter examines the relationship between technology and the vitalist theories of Henri Bergson and Hans Driesch, arguing that the popularity these theories …

The Like Of Us Will Never Be Again" A Comparative Analysis Of The Contributions Of The Blasket Authors: Peig Sayers, Tomás O Criomhthain, And Muiris O Suilleabhain, Kelly Frances O'Donnell

Honors Scholar Theses

This paper will discuss, compare, and contrast the three main works of the Blasket Island authors: Peig, by Peig Sayers, The Islandman by Tomas O'Crohan, and Twenty Years A-Growing by Maurice O'Sullivan. It will seek to identify unique elements of style, content, and purpose among the three authors, and in doing so will illuminate each piece's contributions to Blasket lore. Collectively, the paper should serve as a thorough introduction to Blasket literature and its overall place in Irish literature

From Monsters To Victims: Vampires And Their Cultural Evolution From The Nineteenth To The Twenty-First Century, Caitlyn Orlomoski

Honors Scholar Theses

Vampires are the latest fad to appear on pop-culture’s radar, dominating literature, film, and television, but this is not the first time they have latched onto the public consciousness. These bloodsuckers have been a constant presence in literature and film since the 1897 publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, arguably the most influential vampire text of all time. Even before Dracula, vampires permeated Eastern European folklore, supposedly terrorizing small rustic communities in the dark of the night and acting as scapegoats for almost anything the locals could neither change nor understand. Since that time, vampires have represented society’s fears …

The Casualty Of Home, Molly Koeneman

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Casualty of Home is a novel-in-stories focusing largely on the displacement felt due to situation or family. Often, members of a family have trouble making connections with each other, for each has its own thoughts, desires and expectations. Still, they have something rudimentary in common: blood. Because they are related, family members are inclined to care for individuals they might not even know, much less love. Spanning three generations, the characters in Casualty of Home deal with the constraints of family, the pressures of adolescence, and the limitations of the rural Southern culture in which they live. The characters face …

Crisis And Contemporary Poetry, Seán Crosson Dr., Anne Karhio, Charles I. Armstrong

Seán Crosson

This collection of essays addresses poetic and critical responses to the various crises encountered by contemporary writers and our society. The essays included discuss a range of issues from the holocaust, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and their aftermath and the war on terror to the ecological crisis, poetry's relationship to place and questions of cultural and national identity. What are the means available to poetry to address the various crises it faces, and how can both poets and critics meet the challenges posed by society and the literary community? How can poetry justify its own role as a meaningful …

"Improving The Present Moment": John Wesley's Use Of The Arminian Magazine In Raising Early Methodist Awareness And Understanding Of National Issues (January 1778-February 1791), Barbara Prosser

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In March 1747, when defending the Methodist practice of lay preaching, John Wesley announced: "I am not careful for what may be an hundred years hence. He who governed the world before I was born shall take care of it likewise when I am dead. My part is to improve the present moment:'' The same thought was apparent thirty years later when counseling Ann Bolton: "Whatever our past experience has been, we are now more or less acceptable to God as we more or less improve the present moment."

Bad Girls And Biopolitics: Abortion, Popular Fiction, And Population Control, Karen Weingarten

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Encompassing The Intolerable: Laughter, Memory, And Inscription In The Fiction Of John Mcgahern, John Keegan Malloy

Dissertations (1934 -)

Encompassing the Intolerable examines John McGahern's depiction of individual consciousness struggling with postcolonial Ireland's three dominant and interconnected institutions: nation, family, and the Catholic Church. While McGahern's work, especially the early fiction, is often considered unremittingly bleak, this study argues that his exposure of abuse, repression, and disillusionment within these institutions does not finally entail a pessimistic vision. Instead, through close readings emphasizing character and epiphany, I contend that his texts use the motifs of laughter, memory, and inscription to demonstrate how consciousness can accommodate intolerable realities such as violence and loss rather than becoming defined or controlled by them. …

"What's A Goin' On?" People And Place In The Fiction Of Edythe Squier Draper, 1924-1941, Aubrey R. Streit Krug

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This essay is devoted to looking back into the life and fiction of Edythe Squier Draper, a twentieth-century writer in Oswego, Kansas. Many of Draper’s stories are set in southeastern Kansas. Through them, we gain a sense of how she attempted—and at times failed—to perceive, articulate, and adapt to her place on the Great Plains. Draper claimed the identity of a rural woman writer by writing herself into narratives of colonial, agricultural settlement, and she both complicated and perpetuated stereotypes of class and race in her fiction. By examining her and her characters’ perspective on their place in the Great …

Eng 2007-001: Creative Writing: Fiction, Letitia Moffitt

Spring 2011

No abstract provided.

Nothing But A Pack Of Cards: Semi-Fictitious Persons And Flopping Jellyfish In Elizabeth Bowen, Renée C. Hoogland

English Faculty Research Publications

Taking the wildly conflicting critical evaluations of Elizabeth Bowen's final novel, Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes (1969) as its starting-point, this essay argues against 'interpreting' both the novel and its 'monstrous' heroine in conventional representational terms, to argue, instead, for an appreciation, or experience, of both novel and protagonist as instantiations of a process of becoming along Deleuzian lines. Rather than seeing Bowen's final novel as a (failed) attempt to do what the Anglo-Irish writer's previous work would have suggested this text to do as well, the novel and its eponymous heroine are approached as Bowen's rigorously ethical effort to, …

Et Cetera, Marshall University

Et Cetera

Founded in 1953, Et Cetera is an annual literary magazine that publishes the creative writing and artwork of Marshall University students and affiliates. Et Cetera is free to the Marshall University community.

Et Cetera welcomes submissions in literary and film criticism, poetry, short stories, drama, all types of creative non-fiction, photography, and art.

Poor Old Horse: Tragicomedy And The Good Soldier, Matthew Christian

Senior Projects Spring 2011

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Irish Clergy And The Deist Controversy: Two Episodes In The Early British Enlightenment, Scott Breuninger

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

D uring the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, an important question facing Anglican divines was the relationship between reason and religion. Initiated by the publication of John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), the controversy concerning deism raged across both sides of the Irish Sea and called into question the sanctity of revealed religion, forcing believers to articulate more "rational" defenses of Christianity. Closely associated with the problematic origins of the "English Enlightenment;' Toland's provocative tract valorized reason in matters of religion and drew heavily upon the ideas of natural philosophy. Although viciously attacked for its heretical tenets, Toland's position …

More Light? Biblical Criticism And Enlightenment Attitudes, Norman Vance

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Goethe's dying words-his request for Mehr Licht, more light in the darkened sickroom-were meant literally, but they were immediately given metaphorical significance. What did they signify? Did they imply Olympian confidence that more intellectual light would keep flooding in-or frustration and despair at the lack of it? A similar ambiguity is reflected in the history of biblical criticism, an archetypal Enlightenment enterprise that somehow failed to obey the rules and deliver as hoped and failed to obey the rules, despite all the dry light shed upon it. When Jurgen Habermas responded to the award of the Adorno Prize in …

Full Issue

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

No abstract provided.

Sacrificial Acts: Martyrdom And Nationhood In Seventeenth-Century Drama, Kelley Kay Hogue

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sacrificial Acts: Martyrdom and Nationhood in Seventeenth-Century Drama posits that the importance of sixteenth-century martyrologies in defining England's national identity extends to the seventeenth century through popular representations of martyrdom on the page and stage. I argue that drama functions as a gateway between religious and secular conceptions of martyrdom; thus, this dissertation charts the transformation of martyrological narratives from early modern editions of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments to the execution of the Royal Martyr, Charles I. Specifically, I contend that seventeenth-century plays shaped the secularization of martyrdom in profound ways by staging the sacrificial suffering and deaths of …

Introduction: A Tale Of Our Own Times, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Catharine Sedgwick and the American Novel of Manners

In his preface to his novel of manners Home as Found (1838), James Fenimore Cooper repeats what were already commonplaces about American society as the subject matter for fiction. Lamenting "that no attempt to delineate ordinary American life, either on the stage or in the pages of a novel, has been rewarded with successful he admits Home as Found is another such attempt but professes he has "scarcely a hope of success. It would be indeed a desperate undertaking, to think of making anything interesting in the way of a Roman de …

"Show Me The Money!": A Pecuniary Explication Of William Makepeace Thackeray's Critical Journalism, Gary Simons

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Scholars have heretofore under-examined William Makepeace Thackeray's early critical essays despite their potential for illuminating Victorian manners and life. Further, these essays' treatments of aesthetics, class, society, history, and politics are all influenced by the pecuniary aspects of periodical journalism and frequently expose socio-economic attitudes and realities. This study explicates the circumstances, contents, and cultural implications of Thackeray's critical essays. Compensatory payments Thackeray received are reconciled with his bibliographic record, questions regarding Thackeray's interactions with periodicals such as Punch and Fraser's Magazine answered, and a database of the payment practices of early Victorian periodicals established.

Thackeray's contributions to leading London …

"We Endure Around Truths Immemorially Posited”: A Dramaturgical Research Analysis On Brian Friel’S Linguistic-Historical Drama “Translations”, Meredith Levy

Undergraduate Research Awards

A dramaturgical analysis of Friel's Translations intended to provide an overview of the play to a director staging it. The paper focuses on topics such as Friel's life, the history of Northern Ireland relevant to the play, and thematic analysis. The PDF includes the author's entry submission essay for the 2011 Undergraduate Research Awards.

Charlotte Brontë’S Villette, Mid-Victorian Anti-Catholicism, And The Turn To Secularism, Michael M. Clarke

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Although Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) is frequently interpreted as anti-Catholic, reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant plays a pivotal role in the novel, as Lucy Snowe’s perspective evolves from narrow sectarianism to a more open stance. Brontë accomplishes this reconciliation by elucidating the differences at their deepest level: at the point where Protestantism challenges and ultimately evolves into a separate set of institutions from Catholicism. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, this paper argues that, in its advocacy of the possibility of deep faith combined with religious pluralism, Villette anticipates modern secularism in the best sense of the word.

From Native To Nation: Copway’S American Indian Newspaper And Formation Of American Nationalism, David Shane Wallace

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that the publication of Copway’s American Indian (1851) challenges accepted representations of nineteenth-century American Native peoples by countering popular stereotypes. Interrogating a multiplicity of cultural artifacts at the moment of their meeting and investigating the friction created as they rub against one another within the columns of the periodical, I argue that the texts that contribute to the make-up of Copway’s American Indian are juxtaposed in such a way as to force nineteenth-century readers to reconsider the place of the indigenous inhabitants in the American nation. Seemingly disconnected tidbits of information, presented not individually but as components …

'Mass Of Madness': Jurisprudence In E.M. Forster's A Passage To India, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

Law-and-literature scholars have paid scant attention to E. M. Forster’s oeuvre, which abounds in legal information and which situates itself in a unique jurisprudential context. Of all his novels, A Passage to India (1924) interrogates the law most rigorously, especially as it implicates massive programs of ‘liberal’ imperialism and ‘humanitarian’ intervention, as well as less grand but equally dubious legal apparatuses – jail, bail, discovery, courtrooms – that police and pervert Chandrapore, the fictional Indian city in which the novel is set. The study of law in Anglo-India is particularly telling, if troubling, because India served as ‘a model for …