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Robert Munford & Mercy Otis Warren : How Gender, Geography, And Goals Affected Their Playwrighting, Kylie A. Horney
Robert Munford & Mercy Otis Warren : How Gender, Geography, And Goals Affected Their Playwrighting, Kylie A. Horney
Master's Theses
This thesis analyzes the Revolutionary-era plays of Robert Munford and Mercy Otis Warren. Munford’s two comedies, The Candidates and The Patriots, are compared to Warren’s three earliest satires, The Adulateur, The Defeat, and The Group, in an effort to explain some of the differences between these two authors. The original printings of these plays from the Early American Imprints series, as well as more recent scholarship on Munford and Warren, are used to investigate the plays and lives of these playwrights. Munford’s and Warren’s backgrounds are explored to account for variations in their works. While the …
Grace Through Love : An Examination Of Milton's Monism, Mortalism, And The Puritan Ideals Of Desire As Reflected In Sonnet 23, Leslie Naomi Wyatt
Grace Through Love : An Examination Of Milton's Monism, Mortalism, And The Puritan Ideals Of Desire As Reflected In Sonnet 23, Leslie Naomi Wyatt
Master's Theses
This thesis examines Sonnet 23, especially in concern to: 1) Milton’s adherence to monism, a philosophical and theological position that he derived from his reading of Rabbinical approaches to the Old Testament; 2) His adherence to the related doctrine of mortalism, which held that death entailed the death, until resurrection of both body and soul; and 3) Milton’s interest in the way certain Puritan thinkers idealized desire for aspects of the world’s beauty, especially desire for one’s spouse, and how, particularly in the process of mourning, such desires could foster a stronger bond with God. The thesis also looks at …
The Endangered Representation Of Sexual Violence In Sarah Kane's Blasted, Dina Zhurba
The Endangered Representation Of Sexual Violence In Sarah Kane's Blasted, Dina Zhurba
Master's Theses
In Blasted, Kane represents how incidents of rape highlight, exacerbate and solidify the unevenness of power distribution between men and women in the modern world and provides a new perspective at what we might call “rape in general” – a transhistorical phenomenon of rape as a practice of violence towards the female victim. Through a detailed analysis of the unique representational circumstances of the multiple scenes of rape, such as Cate’s meaningful absence in Ian’s scene of rape, the author of the essay comes to a conclusion that rape is and remains an engendered practice. However, along with reaffirming …
Reconsidering African-American Identity: Aesthetic Experiments By Post-Soul Artists, Letitia Guran Tudorica
Reconsidering African-American Identity: Aesthetic Experiments By Post-Soul Artists, Letitia Guran Tudorica
Master's Theses
The present study attempts to offer an overview of the Post-Soul aesthetic and its role in re-writing African-American identity and focuses explicitly on three authors: Spike Lee, Touré, and Suzan-Lori Parks. My premise is that Post-Soul art is a direct result of the sweeping changes brought by the post-Civil Rights era in the African- American mentality, which inaugurated a new age in African-American art. Thus, the Post-Soul generation represents blackness as diverse, free to define itself in its own terms; they promote a critical take on black nationalism, and new perspectives on slavery. Most of the Post-Soul artists consider themselves …
Reworking "Seeming Trust" Into "Excellent Falsehood" : The Lying Heroes Of William Shakespeare's Dark Lady Sonnets And Antony And Cleopatra, Dorrie Turner Bishop
Reworking "Seeming Trust" Into "Excellent Falsehood" : The Lying Heroes Of William Shakespeare's Dark Lady Sonnets And Antony And Cleopatra, Dorrie Turner Bishop
Master's Theses
William Shakespeare reinvents the speaker of his Dark Lady sonnets as Antony of Antony and Cleopatra, with the former's hesitant appreciation of the benefits of a "lying," lustful relationship reconfigured into the latter's total embrace of an edifying, creative mutuality. This represents an important philosophical shift in Shakespeare's view of aesthetics: where in the Dark Lady sonnets, the speaker chastises himself for feeding his desire with lies and self delusions, Antony, his parallel, believes that the love he and his queen have created is somehow noble, even ideal. He rejects the "truth"- perhaps as the Romans would see it- …
Balancing The Power Of The Patriarchy : The Evolution Of Self-Determined Identity For Women In Josephine Humphreys' Dreams Of Sleep And Rich In Love, Mary Ramsey Evans
Balancing The Power Of The Patriarchy : The Evolution Of Self-Determined Identity For Women In Josephine Humphreys' Dreams Of Sleep And Rich In Love, Mary Ramsey Evans
Master's Theses
Fifty years after William Faulkner wrote Absalom, Absalom! Josephine Humphreys revisited the patriarchal metaphor of failure of the Old South in her first novel, Dreams of Sleep. In this novel, and again in her second novel, Rich in Love, Humphreys examines the ambivalent state of gender relations in the contemporary South brought on by the destabilization of a traditionally patriarchal society increasingly under economic, social, and political pressure to conform to a more egalitarian national standard. Using intergenerational relationships between women, Humphreys demonstrates how the devolution of patriarchal identity becomes the catalyst for the evolution of a self-determined …
The Lawrencian Becoming Of Deleuze, Saffana Manoun
The Lawrencian Becoming Of Deleuze, Saffana Manoun
Master's Theses
Gilles Deleuze and D.H. Lawrence, the philosopher with a poetic writing and the literary man with a philosophical project, invite us to consider their affinities and differences. An unavoidable trace of the Lawrence in Deleuze has not received the attention it should. This lack of critical attention makes the enterprise more worthy of initiation. To demonstrate something of the relationship between them, this essay is divided into three parts that gloss their main points of intersection and difference. I begin with the question of what is at stake in such a comparative endeavor. In the second section, I focus on …
Beyond Gender : The Pursuit Of Power In The Henriad And Coriolanus, James Aaron Beavers
Beyond Gender : The Pursuit Of Power In The Henriad And Coriolanus, James Aaron Beavers
Master's Theses
The feminine in Shakespeare's plays, like the Bakhtinian grotesque, often offers a critical perspective on patriarchal society. Shakespeare creates characters whose feminine perspective enables them to stand outside of the patriarchal paradigm and operate according to alternative modes of behavior. While the dominant system regards power solely as a masculine territory, Shakespeare suggests that true power can only be effectively pursued by those who are not bound to a particular gender identity, but are able to shift their personas in accordance with their ever-changing milieu. In Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, and Coriolanus, Shakespeare depicts …
Exploring Memory As A Narrative Strategy For Enabling Black Consciousness In Ezekial Mphahlele's Down Second Avenue And Mongane Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood, Christina Leigh Buckland
Exploring Memory As A Narrative Strategy For Enabling Black Consciousness In Ezekial Mphahlele's Down Second Avenue And Mongane Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood, Christina Leigh Buckland
Master's Theses
Ezekial Mphahlele in Down Second Avenue and Mongane Serote in To Every Birth Its Blood use the function of memory as a narrative strategy to illuminate the evolution of individual black consciousness. Mphahlele's novel is autobiographical, investigating the chronological memory of Zeke as his consciousness evolves. Serote's work is a collection of stories investigating several characters whose individual experiential memories create a collective consciousness. For Zeke in Down Second Avenue and the characters in To Every Birth Its Blood, memory is an active device which can recall apartheid experience in order to heighten black consciousness and analyze the current …
From Fancy Women To Demimondames : Working Class Women In Peter Taylor's Short Fiction, Frank Sung Cha
From Fancy Women To Demimondames : Working Class Women In Peter Taylor's Short Fiction, Frank Sung Cha
Master's Theses
In "The Fancy Woman" and "The Old Forest," Peter Taylor examines the identity of working class women in the southern social structure and the roles they play in revising class and gender perceptions. Josie Carlson, "The Fancy Woman's" protagonist, discovers the stifling nature of class divisions. The gap between the working and upper-middle-classes remains as the social hierarchy and Taylor himself lock Josie in a subordinate position. They prevent her from attaining any sense of liberation. However, the working class 'Demimondames' in "The Old Forest" exhibit a stronger independence spirit, compelling society to reevaluate traditional social perceptions. Although they too …
Didactic Anti-Didacticism : Aesthetics And Contradictions In Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Dominic Laron Finney
Didactic Anti-Didacticism : Aesthetics And Contradictions In Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Dominic Laron Finney
Master's Theses
Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray calls for a reinvention of aestheticism during the Victorian Age. Wilde felt that the Victorians had surrendered any ornamentation in art to the rules of formality in religion and politics. He also believed that art should teach solely through its existence that there is a realm above mankind. Art should not be used for anything else. Dorian curses himself when he uses his portrait to exchange his soul for eternal beauty. Wilde wrote this novel as his work of art. And, the novel is to "civilize" the Victorian public, to return them to …
Katherine Anne Porter's Notorious Virgins : Female Sexuality And Catholicism In "Virgin Violeta", "Flowering Judas", And "Old Mortality", Christine L. Grogan
Katherine Anne Porter's Notorious Virgins : Female Sexuality And Catholicism In "Virgin Violeta", "Flowering Judas", And "Old Mortality", Christine L. Grogan
Master's Theses
The intersection of Roman Catholic ideology and female sexuality remains at the heart of Katherine Anne Porter's short stories, "Virgin Violeta" (1924), "Flowering Judas" (1930), and "Old Mortality" (1937). In these works, Porter implicitly suggests that the Catholic ideology of the early twentieth century has been reduced to a matter of sexuality, particularly female sexual purity. Through her portraits of the young virgin Violeta in "Virgin Violeta" and the frigid adult Laura in "Flowering Judas," Porter challenges the Roman Catholic emphasis on female chastity. In tracing the development of Miranda in "Old Mortality," Porter subverts Roman Catholic ideology by presenting …
The Politics Of Theater And The Theater Of Law: The Legal And Cultural Implications In Langston Hughes And John Wexley's Dramatizations Of The Scottsboro Trials, Mosby Garland Perrow Iv
The Politics Of Theater And The Theater Of Law: The Legal And Cultural Implications In Langston Hughes And John Wexley's Dramatizations Of The Scottsboro Trials, Mosby Garland Perrow Iv
Master's Theses
Collectively, the charges and convictions of nine black youths in Scottsboro in 1931 became a symbol of corruption and oppression for those interested in reshaping America's political and legal landscapes. Scottsboro instigated a decade of trials and retrials, two landmark United States Supreme Court opinions, countless dramatic interpretations, and various artistic responses. In particular, Scottsboro, Limited by Langston Hughes and They Shall Not Die by John Wexley were cultural revisions of the trials in 1931 and 1933, respectively. While both works supported the defendants, they were distinguished by their form, production and ultimate statement about the meaning of Scottsboro. These …
A Following Sea : Charting Sea Imagery And Identity In Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John And Paule Marshall's Praisesong For The Widow, Melanie Clore
A Following Sea : Charting Sea Imagery And Identity In Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John And Paule Marshall's Praisesong For The Widow, Melanie Clore
Master's Theses
In Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, the sea incites a vital discourse on western influence, diasporic identity, and self-discovery. Both female protagonists, Annie John and Avey Johnson, purge their old identities and learn to embrace their cultural origins through the guidance, care, and persuasion of ancestral figures. The sea is not only a purifying agent, but also a catalyst for change as both women struggle to manage their multiple cultural influences, and achieve a unified, stable, independent self. The sea is also charged with socio-political controversy as colonization and tourism intrude upon the …
"What Was I Created For, I Wonder?" : Occupation For Women In Shirley And Cranford, Julie Anne Tignor
"What Was I Created For, I Wonder?" : Occupation For Women In Shirley And Cranford, Julie Anne Tignor
Master's Theses
Charlotte Brontë's Shirley and Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford unite in asking and answering the question of what unmarried women were supposed to do with their time and talents in Victorian England, considering the constraints of both gentility and economic conditions. In writing these novels, Brontë and Gaskell joined mid-nineteenth century feminists such as Francis Power Cobbe and Florence Nightingale in discussing women's occupation. Cranford, rather than presenting the typical young unmarried woman as its heroine, features a community of old maids as its "heroines," revealing their story through the narration of Mary Smith. Shirley's Caroline Helstone examines the socially accepted …
Going To Nowhere : Narratives Of Patagonian Exploration, Mark W. Bell
Going To Nowhere : Narratives Of Patagonian Exploration, Mark W. Bell
Master's Theses
Since its discovery on Magellan's circumnavigation, Patagonia has been treated differently than any other region in the world. Effectively, Patagonia has been left empty or vacated by the North. But this emptiness and blankness have compulsively attracted curious travel writers who have filled the emptiness of Patagonia with self-reflexive projections. From Charles Darwin and W.H. Hudson to Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux, Northern commentators have found in Patagonia a landscape that accommodates their desire for self-reflexivity and self-consciousness. Thus, Patagonia has been simultaneously filled and evacuated by the Northern mind. As a result, Patagonia has become increasingly about the self …
Existential Freedom And Bad Faith : Exploring The "Infinite Possibilities" In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man And Jean-Paul Sartre's Being And Nothingness, Robert Aubrey Mawyer
Existential Freedom And Bad Faith : Exploring The "Infinite Possibilities" In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man And Jean-Paul Sartre's Being And Nothingness, Robert Aubrey Mawyer
Master's Theses
J. Saunders Redding comments that "Existentialism is no philosophy to accommodate the reality of Negro life" (209). However, Ralph Ellison's concern in Invisible Man to explore his protagonist's freedom and the ways in which he deceives himself about his freedom invites a comparison with the ontological premises of Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, particularly his concept of "bad faith," in which individuals accept the identities that existing power structures force upon them. Both writers articulate the nature of selfhood in the modern world, and how easily one's true identity is lost when faced with absolute existential freedom. While Ellison …
John Donne's Sacred Aesthetics And Protestant Eschatology In La Corona, Karen R. Knudson
John Donne's Sacred Aesthetics And Protestant Eschatology In La Corona, Karen R. Knudson
Master's Theses
The operative figure for describing John Donne's religious poem, La Corona, is not a circle, as it has often been characterized, but a spiral. This figure incorporates the linear narrative and climax of the poem while maintaining the circularity of on-going spiritual experience. Scholars such as Patrick O'Connell and Elizabeth Hodgson are correct in viewing the poem as Donne's "ars poetica sacra" - his apologetic for the religious poet. But such scholars see either a climax and resolution for the speaker of La Corona or an unresolved question of his place as a poet. This paper argues that while …
Expressionist Playwrights From The Lost Generation : The Move Away From German Expressionism, Robert Andrew Ellis
Expressionist Playwrights From The Lost Generation : The Move Away From German Expressionism, Robert Andrew Ellis
Master's Theses
This thesis examines the use of Expressionism, and expressionist elements in the plays of four writers that were part of the Lost Generation. The thesis gives a brief history and definition of Expressionism. It also looks at the plays chronologically, and notes how the use of German Expressionism, present in the early works of Rice and Lawson, was discarded by the later authors in favor of the less-political elements of Expressionism that were originally developed by August Strindberg. Authors and plays include: Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine, John Howard Lawson's Roger Bloomer and Processional, Thomas Wolfe's Welcome to …
Uncertain Identities : Aristocratic Women Of English Renaissance Drama, Kimberly Ann Turner
Uncertain Identities : Aristocratic Women Of English Renaissance Drama, Kimberly Ann Turner
Master's Theses
Often, women stand out as being some of the most interesting and ambiguous characters in English drama. In this study, I examine moments in five Renaissance plays in which female characters reject the extreme dichotomies that were used by society to describe women. In the first portion of the paper, I look at the ways in which malcontents are similar to unconventional female characters in that they both challenge existing patriarchal structures. Secondly, I explore the characters of Mellida, Sophonisba, and Desdemona who begin to assert their own desires, while at the same time, they continue to embody more traditional …
"Fellow-Craftsmen" : A Study Of The Personal And Professional Relationship Between Mary Johnston And Ellen Glasgow, Catherine G. Costantino
"Fellow-Craftsmen" : A Study Of The Personal And Professional Relationship Between Mary Johnston And Ellen Glasgow, Catherine G. Costantino
Master's Theses
Biographers and critics tend to vary widely on the attention given to the personal, intellectual, and literary significance of the friendship between Ellen Glasgow and Mary Johnston. In this thesis, the author argues that the two women, obviously drawn together because of personal and professional similarities, shared intellectual interests, a passion for writing, and certainly nurtured each other's creativity. By providing extensive evidence from Mary Johnston's unpublished diaries, notebooks, and journals, as well evidence from the abundance of published and unpublished correspondence between the two women, this thesis refutes past critical assessments and establishes that the relationship between Glasgow and …
"A Tolerable Straight Line" : Non-Linear Narrative In Tristram Shandy, Daniel L. Hocutt
"A Tolerable Straight Line" : Non-Linear Narrative In Tristram Shandy, Daniel L. Hocutt
Master's Theses
The non-linear narrative of Laurence Sterne's Tri st ram Shandy demands attentive readers. Written under the influence of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the novel satirizes Lockean "associationism" and illustrates language's inability to express ideas accurately. In the novel, words seldom convey characters' intended meanings, yet Tristram uses language effectively to narrate "self" to his readers. Rather than having his mind's workings conform to the linear nature of traditional discourse, Tristram communicates associatively to intelligent, involved readers without imposing linearity. In this study I examine scholars' work to determine Tristram 's position on Locke's ideas and use Seymour Chatman …
Anna Letitia Barabauld's Poetic Vision: Community, Imagination, And The Quotidian, Carrie Ann Woods
Anna Letitia Barabauld's Poetic Vision: Community, Imagination, And The Quotidian, Carrie Ann Woods
Master's Theses
With the publication of her Poems in 1773, favorable reviews welcomed Anna Letitia Barbauld into the literary world. However, Barbauld has traditionally been left out of English literature anthologies, condemned to the murky depths of obscurity. Why has this talented British poet of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries been undeservedly marginalized? Perhaps she has never achieved the status of a major literary figure because her impulse towards community places her outside the mainstream Romantic tradition dominated by the "egotistical sublime." In the poetry of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats, an …
In Search Of A Female Self : The Masculinization Of May In Chaucer's Merchant's Tale, Kimberly Diane Whitley
In Search Of A Female Self : The Masculinization Of May In Chaucer's Merchant's Tale, Kimberly Diane Whitley
Master's Theses
This examination of Chaucer's Merchant's Tale was undertaken as a response to existing scholarship. While criticism in the past tended toward a literal reading of the text, viewing it as a misogynist Merchant's story attesting to the innate depravity of women, more recent feminist criticism has leaned toward a reading which endeavors to defend the actions of May, claiming an evolvement on her part towards autonomy and self-knowledge. This thesis, taking its cue from French feminist theoretical assertions concerning self, refutes both of these readings. While it acknowledges the subversive nature of May's actions, it is unable to recognize any …
A Glorious Feast For The Eyes : The Roles Of Iconography And Sight In Chaucer's The Prioress's Tale And The Second Nun's Tale, Kelly Marie Bruce
A Glorious Feast For The Eyes : The Roles Of Iconography And Sight In Chaucer's The Prioress's Tale And The Second Nun's Tale, Kelly Marie Bruce
Master's Theses
This thesis investigates Chaucer's use of iconography and sight in The Prioress's Tale and The Second Nun's Tale and how these elements symbiotically support and enhance the text so that the tales themselves become iconic. An overview of medieval religious practices and doctrines is followed by a discussion of The Prioress's Tale, in which Chaucer's direct reference to a Virgin icon is explored. Further, the analysis focuses on the way in which visual cues supplement the meaning of the written word. A discussion of The Second Nun's Tale follows, exploring the relationship between sight and faith. The importance of …
"Nothingness/ In Words Enclose" : Supplementarity And The "Veil" Of Language In Samuel Beckett's Murphy And Watt, Justin P. Jakovac
"Nothingness/ In Words Enclose" : Supplementarity And The "Veil" Of Language In Samuel Beckett's Murphy And Watt, Justin P. Jakovac
Master's Theses
Samuel Beckett has asserted that language is a "veil" in which he must "bore one hole after another..., until what lurks behind it - be it something or nothing - begins to seep through." This thesis employs Derrida's assertion that language involves the play of differance and the supplementarity of the sign. Since the supplement, in Derrida's words, "fills and marks a determined lack," language calls attention to the gap of nothingness already present in the play of differance. Murphy and Watt present both the desire for "semantic succour" of the veil and the awareness - more fully …
Myth And Myth-Making In James Branch Cabell's Jurgen : A Comedy Of Justice, Christopher Carson Crenshaw
Myth And Myth-Making In James Branch Cabell's Jurgen : A Comedy Of Justice, Christopher Carson Crenshaw
Master's Theses
Criticism extant on myth in Cabell's Jurgen has focused largely either on the presence of specific mythos in the text, or on the universal application of those myths to the modern world via the cultural-anthropological methods first described in Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough. The common thread in such criticism is that myth is always perceived as an authoritative structure for the transmission of the author's themes. This thesis proposes, however, that the satirical tone and self-conscious allegory of Jurgen systematically combine to strip myth of all authority, placing it in a role which conceals, rather than transmits, …
"Something For The Girls" : Demeter, Persephone, And Hecate In Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding And The Optimist's Daughter, Amy Davidson Grubb
"Something For The Girls" : Demeter, Persephone, And Hecate In Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding And The Optimist's Daughter, Amy Davidson Grubb
Master's Theses
Eudora Welty's novels of Southern women and ritual reveal her desire to convey a woman's world and to imbue it with a prelapsarian power of feminine self-knowledge. To create this world, Welty draws upon the mythological signifiers of Demeter, Persephone, and Hecate. Utilizing natural imagery of food and flowers, Welty develops a fecund, spring-like landscape and explores the relationship between character, author, and myth. What begins in Delta Wedding as a search to reaffirm the existence of a world spirit concludes in The Optimist's Daughter as a triumphant rebirth of the feminine spirit. Laurel McKelva Hand, unlike her predecessor Laura …
Voicing Manhood : Masculinity And Dialogue In Ernest J. Gaines's "The Sky Is Gray," "Three Men," And A Gathering Of Old Men, William T. Mallon
Voicing Manhood : Masculinity And Dialogue In Ernest J. Gaines's "The Sky Is Gray," "Three Men," And A Gathering Of Old Men, William T. Mallon
Master's Theses
Using concepts both from gender studies of literature and from discourse theory, this thesis explores the relationship between race, masculinity, and dialogue in Ernest Gaines's "The Sky is Gray," "Three Men," and A Gathering of Old Men. In these works, Gaines demonstrates that manhood can be achieved by a process of linguistic appropriation. His African-American male characters become men through the utterance, not the violent act. This thesis examines how Gaines's black men appropriate language among distinct groups: themselves, the extended black community, and the white community.
"Nothing But Gold Shall Charm My Heart" : Sexual Economics And The Courtesans Of Aphra Behn And Daniel Defoe, Anthony L. Ellis
"Nothing But Gold Shall Charm My Heart" : Sexual Economics And The Courtesans Of Aphra Behn And Daniel Defoe, Anthony L. Ellis
Master's Theses
Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe both manifest a strong interest in the courtesan, a female figure whose unusual success wins her autonomy from sexual and economic subjugation. In order to remain self-governing, Angellica Bianca and La Nuche of Behn's Rover plays and Defoe's Roxana must pay singular heed to their economic self-interest while forsaking the prospect of genuine romantic love. However, whereas Behn's courtesans undergo sexual "reformations"--figured as the acceptance of love (and marriage) and the resulting loss of independence--to their economic detriment, Roxana maintains the emotional reticence that allows her to continue capitalizing fully on her sexual allure. By …