Digital Commons Network^™

J.R.R. Tolkien And The Music Of Middle Earth, Emily Sulka

Channels: Where Disciplines Meet

Often referred to as “the Father of Modern Fantasy,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings trilogy between 1937 and 1949. Selling millions of copies each year, the Lord of the Rings is one of the bestselling books to date, and between the four books, six movies have been produced in an effort to relay the story of Middle Earth. However, movies do not stand alone as the only other art based off the trilogy. Throughout the novels, Tolkien includes poems that his characters sing, and in 1967, Donald Swann, after collaborating with the author, published a song cycle …

With Great Power: Examining The Representation And Empowerment Of Women In Dc And Marvel Comics, Kylee Kilbourne

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Throughout history, comic books and the media they inspire have reflected modern society as it changes and grows. But women’s roles in comics have often been diminished as they become victims, damsels in distress, and sidekicks. This thesis explores the problems that female characters often face in comic books, but it also shows the positive representation that new creators have introduced over the years. This project is a genealogy, in which the development of the empowered superwoman is traced in modern age comic books. This discussion includes the characters of Kamala Khan, Harley Quinn, Gwen Stacy, and Barbara Gordon and …

Practical Christianity: Religion In Jane Austen's Novels, Erin R. Toal

Senior Honors Theses

A beloved English novelist of the late eighteenth century, Jane Austen captures the attention and emotion of readers through timeless insights into the inner workings of the human heart as characters navigate society, family life, and love. Her novels’ attention to practical morality but reticence toward explicitly religious subject matter raises conjecture concerning the religion behind her values; however, Austen’s Christian upbringing, Anglican practice, and Christian values suggest a foundation of faith from which the morality in her novels emanates. In Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park, Austen demonstrates her eighteenth-century Anglican worldview in …

The Absent Father In Jane Eyre, Lauren Megan Epperson

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

The novel Jane Eyre was originally published as an autobiography by Charlotte Brontë, under the pseudonym Currer Bell. The heroine of this novel is widely celebrated as a proponent of feminist ideals, and as such, this paper is designed to examine the role of the patriarchy in Victorian English through the novel. The focus of this inquiry is the importance of the “father figure,” for young women, as means of protection, developing social identities, and securing, financially, a future. This paper, then, is an examination of the ramifications, i.e. the physical and verbal abuse, gross negligence, and poverty, Jane faced …

Novel Buildings: Architectural And Narrative Form In Victorian Fiction, Ashley R. Nadeau

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation, “Novel Buildings: Architectural and Narrative Form in Victorian Fiction,” offers an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between the economic and social histories of built space and the Victorian literary imagination. At its most fundamental level, it claims that the spaces we inhabit shape the stories we tell. Reading Victorian literature through the architectural archive of the period, it argues that the nineteenth century’s rapidly evolving built environment resulted in a new set of narrative possibilities and laid the foundations for authorial innovations in genre, style, and form. Organized taxonomically around four architectural types reinvented in the nineteenth century—courthouses, …

The Importance Of Literature, Luke Hawley

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"We engage in story to better understand ourselves and the people around us."

Posting about experiencing literature and its value from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/the-importance-of-literature/

An Antidote To War? An Examination Of The Success Of The Once And Future King By T.H. White, Emily L. Ward

HON499 projects

This paper seeks to evaluate the level of success of The Once and Future King by T.H. White. It examines the financial success of the book and its popularity among readers, both immediately upon publication and in later years. It also considers the book within its historical context, during and after World War II, and hypothesizes that the war negatively impacted the success of the book since it has a pacifist agenda. Finally, the paper examines White’s own goals and intentions while writing the book, and whether the book achieved those purposes. In order to study these matters, the text …

The Body Subject To The Laws: Louise Erdrich’S Metaphorical Incarnation Of Federal Indian Law In "The Round House", Laurel Jimenez

Access*: Interdisciplinary Journal of Student Research and Scholarship

Author Louise Erdrich, a member of the Chippewa tribe in North Dakota, is renowned for addressing historical and current social justice issues facing Native Americans in many of her critically acclaimed novels. The Round House is no exception. Erdrich begins her novel by describing a violent attack against the young protagonist's mother; an attack that is only made possible by the systemic racism and lack of tribal sovereignty that underpins Federal Indian Law and policy. Erdrich transmutes the evil couched within those laws into one deplorable incident. The unfolding affects from that incident expose how-- not only historically, but even …

Performing Race Eng 450g, Jim Kinnie

Library Impact Statements

No abstract provided.

Arthur Conan Doyle's "Great New Adventure Story": Journalism In The Lost World, Amy Wong

Amy Wong

This essay discusses the critical engagements of Arthur Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) with the rise of journalistic professionalism at the turn of the century. With a focus on features from the novel’s serial publication in George Newnes’s illustrated periodical, the Strand Magazine, this essay argues that this popular work of fiction self-consciously positions itself against what had become a fairly mainstream ideological and generic split between literature and journalism. Through its masquerade as a first-person account mediated by a professional network of journalists and editors, The Lost World integrates conventions of literary romance and objective journalism to combat …

The Still Uproar Of Conrad's Press: A Breakdown Of "High" Literature In The Modern Metropolis, Alexandra Mulry

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Wilderness On The Page, John Steffler

The Goose

This essay explores the role that literature can play in a rethinking of Western culture's relationship with the natural environment.

Ecologies Of Embodied Minds Embedded: Radical Romantic Perspectives On Architectures Of Technology, Sharmaine Browne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores Romantic responses to the role of architectural technologies in the development of material being, consciousness, and culture by applying a critical approach in which I combine radical embodied cognitive theory, ecocritical perspectives, and a phenomenological lens to select Romantic texts written from 1789 to 1884 in response to industrial modernity. While scholarship has thoroughly explored technology as a cultural force which inevitably shapes consciousness, I propose that a slight shift of emphasis from technology’s external influence to the material internalization of its influence allows for new perspectives—particularly in light of recent proposals in cognitive philosophy which assert …

Text In The Natural World: Topics Of Evolutionary Theory Of Literature, Laurence A. Gregorio

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

The study of literature has expanded to include an evolutionary perspective. Its premise is that the literary text and literature as an overarching institution came into existence as a product of the same evolutionary process that gave rise to the human species. In this view, literature is an evolutionary adaptation that functions as any other adaptation does, as a means of enhancing survivability and also promoting benefits for the individual and society. Text in the Natural World is an introduction to the theory and a survey of topics pertinent to the evolutionary view of literature. After a polemical, prefatory chapter …

Neither Surrogate Nor Complement: The Long Life Of Visual Narratives, Ann L. D'Orazio

English Language and Literature ETDs

Visual narratives are contested territory. They require tools from a variety of academic disciplines, and they defy the usual sets of interpretive strategies and systems of nomenclature in traditional humanities disciplines. This dissertation fills in one of the missing approaches to visual narratives; that is the long historical, interconnected view that renders visible significant connections among graphic narratives from the medieval manuscript to the contemporary comic book and graphic novel. The project articulates a theory of the long material and cultural life of visual narratives in a variety of media forms, including the manuscript, the early printed book, the lithograph …

Shaking Up Shakespeare: Teaching For The Contemporary High School English Classroom, Megan Sampson

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Contemporary high school English students find Shakespeare distant because they believe Shakespeare is hard to understand. Pairing Shakespeare with thematically-similar contemporary texts can make his works more accessible to students. Using different angles on the same theme shows students that Shakespeare presented some universal issues that still have relevance today. The Literacy Design Collaborative modules included within this thesis use Shakespeare in cooperation with other texts to focus on a specific theme. Using the module structure, teachers can organize the unit’s overarching goals and can include all handouts and necessary materials. This structure of design incorporates literacy-centered practices in order …

Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Providential capitalism names the marriage of providential Christian values and market-oriented capitalist ideology in the post-revolutionary Atlantic through the mid nineteenth century. This is a process by which individuals permitted themselves to be used by a so-called “divine economist” at work in the Atlantic market economy. Backed by a slave market, capital transactions were rendered as often violent ecstatic individual and cultural experiences. Those experiences also formed the bases for national, racial, and classed identification and negotiation among the constellated communities of the Atlantic. With this in mind, writers like Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw presented market success …

An Annotated Critical Edition Of Wild Mike And His Victim By Florence Montgomery, Kristen Evans

Student Works

This paper is a critical edition of Wild Mike and His Victim by Florence Montgomery, a novel first published in 1875. This critical edition includes a critical introduction, footnotes, and appendices, as well as the original text.

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 …

Dinner At Eight, Anastasia M. Berkovich

MSU Graduate Theses

This creative thesis is comprised of six short stories of fiction in various styles and lengths, as well as a critical introduction wherein I discuss the various influences on my work, ranging from Charles Baxter and Karen Joy Fowler to Doležel and John Gardner. All of these stories share a theme of family and loss. Each story also grapples in some way with changing times and places. I have endeavored, by using rhyming action, repeating images, and melodrama, to give each story a great sense of emotion, a feeling both specific to the story but connects to the wider reading …

Racial Roots Of Romanticism: American And European Africanism Are The Creation Of Bio-Politics, James Flynn

Honors College Theses

The British Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the American Edgar Allan Poe shared a number of similarities in their writing styles. Both men came onto the scene early in their respective nation’s forays into Romanticism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was of the first generation of British literary Romantics, while Poe introduced his Gothic influences before the Renaissance of American Romanticism in the 1850s. In the work of both men there is an emphasis on color as it pertains to race, especially aspects of whiteness. This focus on race has been covered at length by authors such as Toni Morrison in her book …

Healing Through Bibliotherapy, Kristina N. Spinelli

Senior Honors Projects

Emotions that adolescents face while experiencing their parents’ divorce can be traumatic. They often feel as though they have no one else to turn to, and feel alone. There are different types of therapy that can help individuals cope with their emotions and bibliotherapy can be used as a self-coping technique.

Bibliotherapy is a method used to cope with certain feelings from different experiences. It is a reading program that includes a variety of literature to offer emotional therapy. It is effective by aiding the individual who is struggling with his or her feelings to identify with a particular character, …

Literary Pedagogies At Umsl: Combining Case Study With Personal Narrative, Elizabeth Miller

Theses

Through traditional scholarship and an analysis of survey data collected from undergraduate literature students at the university, I investigate the ways in which pedagogies of composition and disability studies can be incorporated into the teaching of literature. Historically, literary scholarship has not focused on issues of pedagogy to the degree that other divisions within English Studies have done, and it is therefore necessary to determine what gaps exist, if any, and how they might be bridged. For example, composition pedagogies often emphasize active, student-based teaching paradigms that are rooted in students’ personal experiences and the kind of writing that interests …

The Book That Made Me: A Girl, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In this installment of The Book That Made Me, a series from Public Books reflecting on the books that have changed our lives, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner reflects on the freedom he received—to become a whole other person, in a whole other place—from an unexpected source.

( Re ) Claiming History And Visibility Through Rhetorical Sovereignty: The Power Of Diné Rhetorics In The Works Of Laura Tohe, Jessica Marie Safran Hoover

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the intricate intersections of code switching, trickster discourse and rhetorical sovereignty in the scholarship of Diné author Laura Tohe, as Tohe operationalizes survivance and alliance in complex ways, ways that “actuate a presence” in the face of ongoing attempts to render American Indian peoples absent from American rhetorical, literary, and geographic landscapes. Existing research in American Indian literatures and rhetorics often focus on the need for reclaiming rhetorical sovereignty. Yet, little work has been done to emphasize connections between the use of code switching, translation, and trickster discourse in order to give visibility to past and contemporary …

Spring 2017 New Writing Series, The University Of Maine College Of Liberal Arts And Sciences

Cultural Affairs Distinguished Lecture Series

Please see Program description

Write What You Know: The Process Of Writing A Young Adult Novella, Grace Morgan

Honors Projects in English and Cultural Studies

One tragedy, two lives changed forever. This novella follows the paths of two characters coping with the death of loved ones. It examines the themes of grief, friendship, family, self-discovery and inner strength. Specifically, how these things manifest and change after experiencing extreme loss. The dual narrative compares and contrasts the varying ways people react to grief. This project on creative writing followed the writing process from brainstorming to final draft.

Don Quixote In Russia In The Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries: The Problem Of Perception And Interpretation, Slav N. Gratchev Phd

Dr. Slav N. Gratchev

This study examines the problem of the perception of Don Quixote in Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By using materials inaccessible to English-speaking scholars, I want to demonstrate that this process of appropriation was a long and a complex one, and there were specific reasons for that. The first modern novel, upon arrival in Russia, received minimal attention and was perceived as a simple, comical book; then, gradually, it started to gain significance. The majority of the materials that are used throughout this text are only available in Russian, are kept in the scientific libraries of Saint Petersburg …

The Oxford Handbook Of Environmental History Edited By Andrew C. Isenberg, Lorelei L. Hanson

The Goose

Review of Andrew C. Isenberg's The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History.

Winter Wren By Theresa Kishkan, Vivian M. Hansen

The Goose

Review of Theresa Kishkan's Winter Wren.