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Literature in English, British Isles

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2013

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Old English Ecologies: Environmental Readings Of Anglo-Saxon Texts And Culture, Ilse Schweitzer Vandonkelaar Dec 2013

Old English Ecologies: Environmental Readings Of Anglo-Saxon Texts And Culture, Ilse Schweitzer Vandonkelaar

Dissertations

Conventionally, scholars have viewed representations of the natural world in Anglo-Saxon (Old English) literature as peripheral, static, or largely symbolic: a “backdrop” before which the events of human and divine history unfold. In “Old English Ecologies,” I apply the relatively new critical perspectives of ecocriticism and placebased study to the Anglo-Saxon canon to reveal the depth and changeability in these literary landscapes. Overall, this interdisciplinary study of Anglo-Saxon texts brings together literary and environmental sources and modes of inquiry to explore the place of humans (and non-humans) within the natural environments of Anglo-Saxon England, as well as the ways in …


Dark Sympathy: Desiring The Other In Godwin, Coleridge, And Shelley, Jeffrey T. King Nov 2013

Dark Sympathy: Desiring The Other In Godwin, Coleridge, And Shelley, Jeffrey T. King

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Dark Sympathy: Desiring the Other in Godwin, Coleridge, and Shelley explores how Romantic writers took up and responded to eighteenth-century discourses of sympathy in the context of an increasingly influential materialist epistemology and ontology. In its formulation by David Hume and Adam Smith, sympathy plays a central role in society, using the imagination to smooth over uncertainties about the status of the self and its relation to the world that might otherwise paralyze human activity. Sympathy therefore carries a twofold purpose: on the one hand, it provides a feasible substitute for personal identity; on the other hand, it facilitates social …


The City In Mind: Environmental Literacy And Adaptation In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Adam Edward Watkins Oct 2013

The City In Mind: Environmental Literacy And Adaptation In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Adam Edward Watkins

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation argues that a new paradigm of selfhood emerged in nineteenth-century British literature, one that recognized the individual will and environmental influence not as antithetical but as dialectical forces in the formation of the self. The concept of an externally negotiated subject challenges both the inward and socially determined conceptions of self that have dominated the relevant criticism. Informed by empiricist, associationist, and evolutionary theories of the mind, the portrayals of subject-formation in this study highlight the radical changes occurring in the human environment in nineteenth-century, which catalyzed the conception of a malleable yet self-forming subject. Along with the …


Metaphor And Metanoia: Linguistic Transfer And Cognitive Transformation In British And Irish Modernism, Andrew C. Wenaus Aug 2013

Metaphor And Metanoia: Linguistic Transfer And Cognitive Transformation In British And Irish Modernism, Andrew C. Wenaus

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation contributes to the critical expansions that Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz identify as New Modernist Studies. This expansion is temporal, spatial, and vertical. I engage with the effects Modernist texts have “above” the page: lived experience. I examine the structural similarity of linguistic metaphor and the mind as considered by cognitive scientists. Identifying the human mind as linguistic and language as an artifact of the human mind, my research extrapolates upon what I call the “psycho-ecology” of reading, a self-representational knot between text and mind that constitutes lived experience. Far from being an abstraction, psycho-ecology is concrete: …


Strata, Soma, Psyche: Narrative And The Imagination In The Nineteenth-Century Science Of Lyell, Darwin, And Freud, Pascale M. Manning Aug 2013

Strata, Soma, Psyche: Narrative And The Imagination In The Nineteenth-Century Science Of Lyell, Darwin, And Freud, Pascale M. Manning

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation, “Strata, Soma, Psyche: Narrative and the Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Science of Lyell, Darwin, and Freud,” contributes new research to the diverse field mapping the intersections of science and literature in the nineteenth century. Although scholars such as Gillian Beer and George Levine have established ties between developments in the natural sciences and the scope of the nineteenth-century novel, there has not been a sustained effort to attend to the narrative structures of the primary texts that most influenced coterminous literary movements of the period. My work thus attends closely to the narrative and imaginative form of scientific …


Mina Loy And The Electric Body, Debra Elizabeth Cardell Aug 2013

Mina Loy And The Electric Body, Debra Elizabeth Cardell

Masters Theses

Abstract Mina Loy, modernist poet and artist, experimented with theories of feminism and class within her own artwork. This creates a complex point of interpretation for the reader because of overlap and contradiction. The concept of ekphrasis, when manipulated for Loy’s context, opens possibilities of understanding Loy’s many contradictions. Since the body and material world play a central role in Loy’s art, ekphrasis is a lens through which we can begin to see the relationship between Loy’s art and writing along with her feminism.


"My Words Fly Up, My Thoughts Remain Below": Community And Penance In Early Modern English Drama, Benedict John Whalen Aug 2013

"My Words Fly Up, My Thoughts Remain Below": Community And Penance In Early Modern English Drama, Benedict John Whalen

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation examines the vexed relationship between Christian doctrine, practice, and community in English Renaissance drama due to the abandonment of the sacrament of auricular confession during the Protestant Reformation. I argue that many English Renaissance dramatists were sensitive to the vast ramifications of the Reformers' theological understanding of penance, particularly in its emphasis upon a sinner's ability to accomplish unmediated contrition, and to be psychologically and emotionally satisfied thereby. By desacramentalizing and interiorizing penitential practices, the Protestant understanding of penance fundamentally changed the ways in which communities dealt with sins. As this dissertation demonstrates, many of the plays from …


Reading Parenthood And The Pregnant Body In Shakespeare’S A Midsummer Night’S Dream And Titus Andronicus, Martha Elaine Goddard Aug 2013

Reading Parenthood And The Pregnant Body In Shakespeare’S A Midsummer Night’S Dream And Titus Andronicus, Martha Elaine Goddard

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.


From Womb To Tomb: A Deconstructionist And Psychoanalytic Perspective Of Death In James Joyce's Dubliners, Bailey Gunn May 2013

From Womb To Tomb: A Deconstructionist And Psychoanalytic Perspective Of Death In James Joyce's Dubliners, Bailey Gunn

Senior Capstone Theses

Intentionally absent.


The Dixie Plantation State: Antebellum Fiction And Global Capitalism, Katharine Aileen Burnett May 2013

The Dixie Plantation State: Antebellum Fiction And Global Capitalism, Katharine Aileen Burnett

Doctoral Dissertations

“The Dixie Plantation State: Antebellum Fiction and Global Capitalism” connects the development of literature of the U.S. South to the ideological tensions inherent in the southern plantation economy before the Civil War. Southern literary form during this time reflects an economy that was sustained by international capitalism but which imagined itself as a version of provincial feudalism. The antebellum southern economy was defined by slavery and individual plantations, which created a culture that was isolated, rural, and oppressive. However, with global trade through cotton plantations as the driving force behind regional profit, the southern economy was also shaped by a …


When Family And Politics Mix: Female Agency, Mixed Spaces, And Coercive Kinship In Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, The Awntyrs Off Arthure At Terne Wathelyne, And “The Deth Of Arthur” From Le Morte Darthur, Lainie Pomerleau May 2013

When Family And Politics Mix: Female Agency, Mixed Spaces, And Coercive Kinship In Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, The Awntyrs Off Arthure At Terne Wathelyne, And “The Deth Of Arthur” From Le Morte Darthur, Lainie Pomerleau

Masters Theses

In this paper I will be examining the relationship and rivalry between Morgan and Guinevere, sisters by law, and the intricate combination of love, family loyalty, and political obedience they both elicit from their shared nephew, Gawain through the systemized use of coercive kinship. I will be arguing that Morgan and Guinevere are connected by a desire to exert control and influence on the masculine, chivalric world of Camelot. In order to do so, Guinevere accesses and utilizes the masculinized, political forms of influence available to her, while Morgan is dependent on the more traditionally female modes of access through …


Tied In Lusty Leese: Animalization And Agency In Troilus And Criseyde, Kendra Marie Slayton May 2013

Tied In Lusty Leese: Animalization And Agency In Troilus And Criseyde, Kendra Marie Slayton

Masters Theses

Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde is a tale fraught with ambiguity, and particularly so concerning issues of gender, agency, and free will. Critical readings often focus on depicting TC as Chaucer’s didactic portrayal of a flawed and transitory humanity, with Troilus’s death and transcendence taken as the primary lens through which to seek final meaning in the poem. However, I argue that Chaucer’s use of natural tropes, vocabulary, and artistry also reveal that the poem, before it reaches its transcendental ending, indicts not only the mortal world at large but more specifically the at-times misogynist conventions of the genre itself. Specifically, …


Pois'ned Ale: Gertrude's Power Position In Hamlet, Erin Elizabeth Lehmann May 2013

Pois'ned Ale: Gertrude's Power Position In Hamlet, Erin Elizabeth Lehmann

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Hamlet has over 4,000 lines, and Gertrude speaks less than 200 of those lines (about 4% of the entire play), but her roles as a widow, wife, and mother drive much of the play’s action. This document brings together scholarship surrounding Gertrude’s roles within the play and new research into the historical cultural milieu of early modern England focused on working women to learn more about the cultural patterns influencing the creation of this character. What results is the assertion that analogues to Gertrude and her situation in Hamlet can be found in early modern widows who worked as printers …


Towards A Hibernian Hybridity: Joycean Appropriations Of Celtic Mythology And The Realization Of A Modern Irish Identity, Robert C. Ware May 2013

Towards A Hibernian Hybridity: Joycean Appropriations Of Celtic Mythology And The Realization Of A Modern Irish Identity, Robert C. Ware

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In nineteenth-century Ireland, the Celtic Revival established an Irish identity in opposition to British colonialism through a nativist construction of true Irishness based on premodern, precolonial Celtic mythology, language, and culture. This created a primitive Irish identity situated in a binomial dialectic with a civilized British identity, establishing the Irish as an internal Other for the British imperial self. This effectively justified British colonialism as a necessary catalyst in a teleological progression intended to save Ireland from the uncivilized Irish. This thesis explores how Joyce’s appropriation of literary artifacts of Celtic mythology in “The Dead,” specifically the sovereignty goddess mythology …


After Orwell: Totalitarian Fears And The English Political Novel, 1950-2010, Jackson Ayres May 2013

After Orwell: Totalitarian Fears And The English Political Novel, 1950-2010, Jackson Ayres

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

After Orwell: Totalitarian Fears and the English Political Novel, 1950-2010 gives a coherent account of the English political novel after World War II, a critical narrative absent from current scholarship. I contend that George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a touchstone for political fiction, is underwritten by Orwell's conflicted attitude toward politics: despite embracing politics as the necessary means to genuinely improve people's lives, he also remained suspicious of politics' apparently inherent potential to diminish or even eliminate autonomy. Orwell's simultaneous attraction and vigorous resistance to politics, I argue, is tied to broader contemporaneous anxieties over political and cultural totalization. Such …


Jailbreakers, Villains, And Vampires: Representations Of Criminality In Early-Victorian Popular Texts, Elizabeth Fay Stearns May 2013

Jailbreakers, Villains, And Vampires: Representations Of Criminality In Early-Victorian Popular Texts, Elizabeth Fay Stearns

English - Dissertations

In Jailbreakers, Villains, and Vampires: Representations of Criminality in Early-Victorian Popular Texts, I analyze moments of discursive dissonance that emerge through the juxtaposition of early-Victorian theories of criminality and representations of criminals in popular culture. In the 1830s and 1840s in England, methods for managing criminals underwent a series of revisions that corresponded to shifts in prevailing theories about the nature and course of criminal behavior. Assumptions that criminality was volitional, or that it originated in an individual's deficient self-discipline, gradually shifted into perceptions that criminality was pathological, and that malefactors were naturally brutish and incorrigible. Predominant conceptions of …


Handling A Social Threat : The Fate Of Women Beyond Victorian Societal Definition., Alexandra Clifton May 2013

Handling A Social Threat : The Fate Of Women Beyond Victorian Societal Definition., Alexandra Clifton

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

No abstract provided.


James Joyce And Post-Imperial Bildung: Influences On Salman Rushdie, Tayeb Salih, And Tsitsi Dangarembga, Robert Michael Kirschen May 2013

James Joyce And Post-Imperial Bildung: Influences On Salman Rushdie, Tayeb Salih, And Tsitsi Dangarembga, Robert Michael Kirschen

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" functions as an axis around which writers from former British colonies--Salman Rushdie (India), Tayeb Salih (Sudan), and Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe)--construct their own Bildungsromans. This nodal point is possible because Joyce's Bildungsroman represents a unique rendering of the genre which has proven useful for narratives of growth and development in newly independent nations. This dissertation focuses on a single narrative paradigm which acts as a common thread among the four authors. In each text (Rushdie's "Midnight's Children", Salih's "Season of Migration to the North", and Dangarembga's "Nervous Conditions"), the use of …


Sexual Iconoclasm In Early Modern Drama, Lynnette Macomber Apr 2013

Sexual Iconoclasm In Early Modern Drama, Lynnette Macomber

Honors Theses and Capstones

My thesis examines the relationship between sexuality and the destruction of images – iconoclasm – in the context of post-Reformation English theatre by analyzing three plays: Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, and Aphra Behn’s The Rover. I argue that the idea of sexual iconoclasm is not only present in these plays but also contributes to the discussion of the religious and sociopolitical contexts (and perhaps commentary) of these plays and early modern theatre in general. So what exactly is sexual iconoclasm? In short, it describes the destruction of sexual images, and by sexual images I …


Transnational Influence In The Poetry Of Sarah Piatt: Poems Of Ireland And The American Civil War, Amy R. Hudgins Apr 2013

Transnational Influence In The Poetry Of Sarah Piatt: Poems Of Ireland And The American Civil War, Amy R. Hudgins

Global Honors Theses

Sarah Piatt, a recently recovered nineteenth century poet, is best known, where she is known at all, as an American poet. While this label is certainly appropriate, it should not obscure Piatt’s decidedly international focus, or more precisely, her transnational focus, especially in regard to Ireland. Piatt’s verse, considered by some to be the best poetry of her time second only to the work of Emily Dickinson, is remarkable for its quantity and breadth, but more importantly, for its subversive use of genteel style. Though her poems are generally divided into four overlapping categories, the two thematic classes of her …


Narrating Literary Transnationalism In Zake Smith And Dave Eggers, Nelson Shake Apr 2013

Narrating Literary Transnationalism In Zake Smith And Dave Eggers, Nelson Shake

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This work argues for a greater reception of transnationalism in literary studies. Though the steady rise of transnationalism has already been studied in many areas of academia, literary studies has only begun to pay attention to it, and scholars appear to remain largely rooted in postcolonial or nationalistic thought. Refusing to read current texts through the lens of transnationalism hinders the literary academy's relevancy since creative writers today are addressing changes to the national structure in their fictive works. This study suggests why a new theoretical construct is needed to understand those texts, and it uses two representative examples: Zadie …


Nothing More Delicious: Food As Temptation In Children's Literature, Mary A. Stephens Apr 2013

Nothing More Delicious: Food As Temptation In Children's Literature, Mary A. Stephens

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although many critics and theorists, including Roland Barthes, have discussed food in literature, little attention has been paid to the food-as-temptation story in children’s literature. In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline food is used as temptation for child protagonists, a tool to lure them into doing evil deeds or being generally mischievous. Some characters, like Alice, act as the tempters as well as the tempted, while others, like Edmund, wait passively for rescue. Coraline breaks this …


Uncommon Ecology: Reading The Romantic Oikos, Shalon Noble Mar 2013

Uncommon Ecology: Reading The Romantic Oikos, Shalon Noble

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project contributes to the field of ecocriticism by reconsidering the idea of nature in the Romantic period in order to explore a new mode of artistic ecological thought. Ecocriticism develops in tandem with the environmental urgency of recent decades, responding mostly with an intense focus upon material nature in order to remind an increasingly artificial society of its earthy foundations and to encourage, in some kind or degree, a return to nature. Though the call for return is a powerful story, modern scientific and philosophical developments indicate that it is not ecologically sound. The return narrative requires a stable …


Historical Butches: Lesbian Experience And Masculinity In Bryher's Historical Fiction, Haley M. Fedor Jan 2013

Historical Butches: Lesbian Experience And Masculinity In Bryher's Historical Fiction, Haley M. Fedor

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This project analyzes three of Bryher's historical novels, while also providing background on the shadowy figure of Bryher herself. Looking at Gate to the Sea, Roman Wall, and Ruan, each serves to represent lesbianism in a variety of coded or metaphorical ways. Various geographical locations or landscapes serve to either represent or depict homosexual desire, and also construct queer spaces for characters to traverse. Limited scholarship exists on any of Bryher's works, particularly that which looks at lesbian sexuality. The genre Bryher writes in allows for a cross-writing of lesbian characters, or gendering lesbian characters as male, and displays awareness …


The Interplay Of Authorial Control And Readerly Judgments In Ian Mcewan's Atonement, Marissa Danaé Nelson Jan 2013

The Interplay Of Authorial Control And Readerly Judgments In Ian Mcewan's Atonement, Marissa Danaé Nelson

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Mainly focusing on postmodern literary theory, I will analyze Ian McEwan’s Atonement and suggest how it becomes a simulacrum due to the protagonist, Briony Tallis taking control of authorship from McEwan and expressing how she is the author of the text. Because Briony negates an important aspect of the novel, hyperreality occurs. This thesis will look at the role McEwan plays as author of Atonement, how main characters Robbie and Cecelia take part within this fictional world and how they become aware of an authorial presence within their lives, how Briony takes ultimate control of the pen and appoints herself …


The Caustic Pen Is Mightiest: A Tradition Of Female Satire In The Novels Of Jane Austen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, And Muriel Spark, Jaclyn Andrea Reed Jan 2013

The Caustic Pen Is Mightiest: A Tradition Of Female Satire In The Novels Of Jane Austen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, And Muriel Spark, Jaclyn Andrea Reed

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Female satirists have long been treated by critics as anomalies within an androcentric genre because of the reticence to acknowledge women's right to express aggression through their writing. In Pride and Prejudice (1813), A House and Its Head (1935), and The Girls of Slender Means (1963), Jane Austen (1775-1817), Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969), and Muriel Spark (1918-2006) all combine elements of realism and satire within the vehicle of the domestic novel to target institutions of their patriarchal societies, including marriage and family dynamics, as well as the evolving conceptions of domesticity and femininity, with a subtle feminism. These female satirists illuminate …


"Something Old And Dark Has Got Its Way": Shakespeare's Influence In The Gothic Literary Tradition, Natalie A. Hewitt Jan 2013

"Something Old And Dark Has Got Its Way": Shakespeare's Influence In The Gothic Literary Tradition, Natalie A. Hewitt

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines Shakespeare’s role as the most significant precursor to the Gothic author in Britain, suggesting that Shakespeare used the same literary conventions that Gothic writers embraced as they struggled to create a new subgenre of the novel. By borrowing from Shakespeare’s canon, these novelists aimed to persuade readers and critics that rather than undermining the novel’s emergent, still unassured status as an acceptable literary genre, the nontraditional aspects of their works paid homage to Shakespeare’s imaginative vision. Gothic novelists thereby legitimized their attempts at literary expression. Despite these efforts, Gothic writers did not instantly achieve the type of …


Time, Distance, And Epic Memory In The Tempest, Andrew Nathan Kaplan Jan 2013

Time, Distance, And Epic Memory In The Tempest, Andrew Nathan Kaplan

Senior Projects Spring 2013

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


Pedagogy And Identity In "The Night Lessons" Of Finnegans Wake, Zachary Paul Smola Jan 2013

Pedagogy And Identity In "The Night Lessons" Of Finnegans Wake, Zachary Paul Smola

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores chapter II.ii of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939)—commonly called "The Night Lessons"—and its peculiar use of the conventions of the textbook as a form. In the midst of the Wake's abstraction, Joyce uses the textbook to undertake a rigorous exploration of epistemology and education. By looking at the specific expectations of and ambitions for textbooks in 19th century Irish national schools, this thesis aims to provide a more specific historical context for what textbooks might mean as they appear in Finnegans Wake. As instruments of cultural conditioning, Irish textbooks were fraught with tension arising from their investment …


The Epitome And Portrait Of Modern Society: Ouida As Social Barometer Of The Victorian Era, Lorraine Michelle Dubuisson Jan 2013

The Epitome And Portrait Of Modern Society: Ouida As Social Barometer Of The Victorian Era, Lorraine Michelle Dubuisson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Victorian Era was one of great social flux; tremendous advances in science and technology called into question deeply held religious beliefs while the changing legal status of women threatened to undermine traditional views of gender roles. Industrialization and the driving economic force of capitalism led to rapid urbanization as well as contributing to shifting class boundaries. In addition, the purpose and responsibilities of the Artist/Poet and, indeed, of art itself were closely scrutinized and hotly contested. Most frequently, historians and scholars of literature have looked to authors such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson …