Digital Commons Network^™

The Literary Fairy: Celtic Folklore’S Influence On Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Joshua Dobbs

Doctoral Dissertations

There is a dissonance between the folkloric fairies and those presented by pop-cultural institutions such as Disney which has effected modern literary criticism of nineteenth-century British literature. The Disnified fairy is feminine, small, capable of flight, often with insect-like wings, and equipped with a magic wand with which she does good deeds to help others. She is largely based on fairy tales and is the embodiment of the modern conceptualization of the fairy, but she bears little, if any, resemblance to the fearsome fairies of Celtic folklore. Although nineteenth-century literature is rife with folkloric fairy references, those references are frequently …

Supporting Characters: Prosthesis And Aesthetic Technologies Of Disability In The Victorian Novel, Rebecca L. Mccann

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the production of physical disability and the function of prosthesis in nineteenth-century British fiction. My intervention in disability studies readings of Victorian literature attends to the prosthetic object and prosthetic body not only as the dual products of medicine and art, but also as catalytic elements of fiction and culture. I read reciprocal developments in medical technology and disabled characterization in the Victorian novel to demonstrate how the artistic translation of the prosthetic object effected a set of criteria for defining people through both bodies and things and, in so doing, revealed the ways in which the …

Between The Visual And The Verbal: An Aesthetic Of Open Wounds In Post-Traumatic Experience Of The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), Maryam Ghodrati

Doctoral Dissertations

Trauma theory of the 1990s pioneered by Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Geoffrey Hartman has been criticized by postcolonial scholars such as Irene Visser, Michael Balaev, and Stef Craps for being neglectful of the trauma of the colonial world in adopting a deconstructivist approach and psychologization of experiences of trauma. This antagonism between the traditional and postcolonial trauma theory has resulted in even deeper isolation of the human subject at the center of this argument. In my research, I highlight the reality and materiality of traumatic suffering in the shared realm of the human body to suggest a need for …

A Genealogy Of Victimhood: Empathy And Memory In Recent German Fiction, Catherine E. Mcnally

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses literary representations of empathy and altruism in Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2015 novel Gehen, Ging, Gegangen and Bodo Kirchhoff’s 2016 novel Widerfahrnis. These novels demonstrate continuities and discontinuities between German literature of the postwar, reunification and contemporary contexts.Analyzing expressions of empathy by Erpenbeck and Kirchhoff’s protagonists, I locate them in historical and literary contexts, the roots of which can be traced to the first generation of postwar German literature (1945-1968), particularly Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass. In both Grass and Böll’s early postwar fiction, German experiences of the war and its aftermath are foregrounded, and focus is placed …

Development Of A Scale Designed To Measure Interest In Verbal And Written Expression, Jared Ian Goldman

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to create a scale that measures an individual’s interest in verbal and written expression. Psychological theorists have held that individuals benefit emotionally from articulating their thoughts and feelings; these theories have found support in empirical studies that suggest the psychological benefits of certain language-based behaviors and experience in language-rich environments. Moreover, theorists and researchers have identified differences in individuals’ relationships with language. In light of this literature, this scale is an attempt to create a measure that assesses an individual’s relationship with language in a novel way. This paper consists of two studies. The …

La Influencia De Boccaccio En La Literatura Catalana Medieval (1390-1495). Un Estudio De La Imitación Literaria En Bernat Metge, Bernat Hug De Rocabertí Y Joan Roís De Corella, Pau Cañigueral Batllosera

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation studies the impact of the works by Giovanni Boccaccio on Catalan medieval literature. The influence of Italian literature in medieval Iberian writing is traditionally understood as a key component of a wide-ranging cultural process of transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the tre corone, played a crucial role in that process. Boccaccio, in particular, became a model for the writing of a variety of literary genres, from misogynistic poetry to chivalric romances. His works, both in Latin and Italian, featured in the most remarkable libraries of the period …

From Faking It To Making It: The Art Of Cultural Adaptation In The Caribbean, Haley Lee Osborn

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates tendencies of cultural negotiation and adaptation within a Caribbean context. Appropriately, it examines adapted texts, such as novel to film or biography to musical, and looks at sociocultural adaptive mechanisms as a means of coping with a colonial past and neocolonial present. Through my analyses of a variety of original texts and their visual adaptations, I map evolving cross-cultural perceptions of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and cultural exploitation. While drawing theories from Adaptation Studies, I aim to promote a more inclusive, well-rounded logic of how cultural discourses in the Caribbean gain strength and are reified in …

Lessoning Fiction: Modernist Crisis And The Pedagogy Of Form, Matthew Cheney

Doctoral Dissertations

Writers committed to Modernist ideas of artistic autonomy may find that commitment challenged during times of socio-political crisis. This dissertation explores three writers who developed a similar literary strategy at such times: they pushed fictionality toward and beyond its limits, but ultimately preserved that fictionality, revealing new value in fiction after challenging it. Virginia Woolf, Samuel R. Delany, and J. M. Coetzee shaped their writings at these moments to provide readers with an experience that I argue is congruent with the goals of critical pedagogy as espoused by Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and others. Such a reading experience avoids an …

Alternative Biographies: (Re)Telling Feminine (Hi)Stories In Selected 20th-Century Texts By Québécois Women Writers, Jessica Mcbride

Doctoral Dissertations

The objective of this dissertation is to examine the tendency on the part of several québécois women authors from the 20^th century to create alternative feminine biographies for forgotten, undervalued, or misrepresented women from the past. Given the complex relationship the Québécois have with their provincial history, and the central role chauvinistic representations of women and the “Québec national text” play in safeguarding the québécois cultural identity, contemporary women writers from Québec are singularly poised to resurrect, recreate, revive, and rewrite the feminine historical experience into the traditional discourse of History. From Québec’s most famous woman writer, Anne Hébert, …

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, …

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 …

Deconstruction Of The Sacred, Ontologies Of Monstrosity: Apophatic Approaches In Late Modernist Cinema, Scott D. Vangel

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation I compare apophatic[i] approaches including those associated with Christian mysticism, early postmodern thought and the literature of Gothic monstrosity through their collective emergence in late-twentieth century modernist cinema. I identify confluences between these and related theoretical strains with regard to metaphysics, ontology, ethics and mimesis. The dissertation is structured around concepts relative to limit-experience including death’s impossibility, the gift and phenomenological excess culled from texts such as Jacques Derrida’s Donner la mort (1999), Emmanuel Levinas’ Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l'extériorité (1961), Maurice Blanchot’s L’écriture du désastre (1980), and Jean-Luc Marion’s De Surcroît: Études sur …

‘Misticall Unions’: Clandestine Communications From Tristan To Twelfth Night, George W. Eggers

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that important modes of self-definition in the Renaissance draw on the linguistic uncertainty in medieval literary constructions of lovers. Just as in Renaissance texts, medieval lovers such as Tristan and Isolde fashion themselves as a “misticall union”: a conglomerate self that shares one mind and erases all distinctions between sender and receiver as well as grammatical subject and object. This unity expresses itself in the lovers’ inexplicable ability to interpret correctly the most arbitrary of messages from one another while misleading those around them. Considering Shakespearean lovers in this context suggests how deeply this model of self-definition …

Who Do You Think You Are?: Recovering The Self In The Working Class Escape Narrative, Christine M. Maksimowicz

Doctoral Dissertations

This project considers how socioeconomic impoverishment and society's failure to recognize working class women as valued subjects impinge upon a mother's ability to afford recognition to her daughter's selfhood. Situated within the larger North American literary tradition of fiction animated by flight in search of freedom, the texts here explored constitutes a subgenre that I term the “working class escape narrative.” Combining close readings of fiction by Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, and Sigrid Nunez with sociological research and psychoanalytic theory, I explore a relationship between mother and daughter characterized not by mirroring and bonding but rather the absence of intimacy …

Tales That Tell All: A Political Analysis Of Folktales Of Iran, Yass Alizadeh

Doctoral Dissertations

This research presents an analytical study of the rewritten folktales of Iran in 20^th century, and investigates the ideological omissions and revisions of oral tales as textual productions in modern Iran. Focusing on the problematic role of folktales as tales about the unreal and the fantastic serving a political purpose, this study traces the creative exercises of Iranian storytellers who apply ideological codes and meanings to popular folk language. The works of Mirzadeh Eshqi (1893-1924), Sadegh Hedayat (1903-1951), Samad Behrangi (1939-1968) and Bijan Mofid (1935-1984) are examples of a larger collection of creative writing in Iran that through the …

Insurgent Spectacles: Spring Awakening, Woyzeck, Mother Courage And The ‘New’ Broadway Spectacle, Noah Porter Soltau

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the political and ideological work done by what I call "insurgent spectacles," which comprised a historical episode of American theater occurring primarily from 2006 to 2008. The spectacles had liberatory and redemptive potential not in spite of their identity as mass culture, but indeed precisely because of it. They functioned in a contested political and ideological space within the schema of mass culture. The insurgent spectacle is so-called because it superficially resembled other bits of Broadway fluff with its glitziness, over-production, and ham-fistedness that allow the audience to be intellectually disengaged. During this episode, it persisted (often …

The Naked Afterward: A Novel, Adam Blair Prince

Doctoral Dissertations

A novel taking place in Jakarta, Indonesia that explores the tension between ideal and actual, between spiritual and carnal, between who we are and who we would like to be. An American named John Dawke takes a job operating surveillance equipment for an independent security company based in Jakarta that is supposedly involved in counter-terrorism. Dawke’s wife has recently died, and he suspects suicide. Thus, he is trying to get away, to recreate himself in a place where each action reverberates with consequences unintended and unknown.

1960s Travel Fiction And Englishness During The Postimperial Turn, Matthew J. Hurwitz

Doctoral Dissertations

British travel writing has for centuries helped to construct English identity in relation to its others. The traditional function of travel narratives to define Englishness, however, faced a fundamental crisis of meaning when the British Empire starting falling apart after WWII. This crisis emerged as an explicit literary subject in several key 1960s novels: John Fowles's The Magus (1965), V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men (1967), and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). In these three novels, Fowles, Naipaul and Rhys critique British imperialism by engaging and reinventing the travel narrative form. Although many British writers publishing during the 60s …

"The Alien Within": Residual Catholicism And The Emerging National Identity Of Post-Reformation England, Melissa K. Siik (Femino)

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation contributes to the current critical discourse in Early Modern English Studies on the conceptions and literary representations of national and racial identity in 16th- and 17th-century England. Central to this discourse is an examination of how the English defined themselves in relation to those they deemed as "others": the foreign and marginalized members of society. My study is unique because I look at individual figures of "otherness"---the Irishman, the Turk, and the Jew---in light of their common characteristic: their shared significance as coded figures of Catholicism. Ultimately, my dissertation unifies disparate conversations about race, religion, and politics in …

Raping The Raced Body: Trauma In Asian North American Women's Literature, Amy Lillian Manning

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the representation of racial and sexual traumas in short fiction and novels by Asian American women writing post-WWII to the present. The central focus of this project is on Asian American literary representations of the lingering effects of physical, racial, and sexual traumas to Asian American women, specifically the nuances of narrating traumatic experiences. Each chapter explores various literary representations of post-traumatic psychological states of unrest, instability, and incoherence. Most importantly, this study examines the frequently simultaneous narrations of sexual trauma and racial awareness, of how personal narratives of trauma against the physical body become entangled with …

Competing Visions: Women Writers And Male Illustrators In The Golden Age Of Illustration, Jason Richard Williams

Doctoral Dissertations

In "Competing Visions," I examine the works of women writers and male illustrators during what has been termed the "Golden Age of Illustration" (1880--1920). Due to advances in printing technology and the proliferation of mass-market magazines just before the turn-of-the-last century, novels and short stories were often published with images by illustrators like Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth, who subsequently gained enormous popularity and developed wide followings. At the same time, women writers enjoyed an unprecedented period of widespread exposure and political influence. Looking closely at the intersection of images and texts from early twentieth century periodical publications reveals …

Beyond The Battlefield: Direct And Prosthetic Memory Of The American War In Viet Nam, Susan L. Eastman

Doctoral Dissertations

“Beyond the Battlefield: Direct and Prosthetic Memory of the American War in Viet Nam” examines shifts in American, Viet Namese, and Philippine memorial, literary, and cinematic remembrance of the war through the cultural lenses of later wars: the Gulf War (1990-1991) and the “War on Terror” that began in 2001. As opposed to earlier portrayals of the American War in Viet Nam (1964-1975), turn-to-the-twenty-first-century representations engage in an ever-broadening collected cultural memory—a compilation of multifaceted, sometimes competing, individual and group memories—of the war. “Beyond the Battlefield” begins with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) because it serves as the impetus for …

Corpses Revealed: The Staging Of The Theatrical Corpse In Early Modern Drama, N M. Imbracsio

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation examines the theatrical depiction of corpses as both stage-objects for theoretical speculation and as performance phenomena of the early modern English stage. Investigating popular drama on the London stage from 1587 -- 1683, I demonstrate that the performance of the dead body by the living actor (what I term the "theatrical corpse") is informed by early modern secular and religious polemics over the materiality of the body, the efficacy of performative behavior, and emerging theories of theatrical presence.

Previously, literary scholars have approached the performance of death on the stage using the insights of psychoanalysis or medical science, …

Excavating The Landscapes Of American Literature: Archaeology, Antiquarianism, And The Landscape In American Women's Writing, 1820--1890, Christina Healey

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the ways that women writers made use of the discourses of antiquarianism and archaeology between the years 1820 and 1890. Focusing especially upon the writings of Sarah Josepha Hale, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Celia Thaxter, and Constance Fenimore Woolson, the project examines depictions of artifacts, ruins, relics, and other antiquities in literary landscapes. Each of these women presents a unique way of knowing the world that is manifested in the ways their texts join different ways of understanding the landscape, its occupants, the artifacts it contains, its strata and geological history, and its aesthetic value. …

Absent Meaning: Fascination, Narrative, And Trauma In The Holocaust Imaginary, Christopher Scott Massey

Doctoral Dissertations

Examining post-1970 representations of the Holocaust and Nazism along with critical responses to these representations, the dissertation demonstrates how a use of the term "fascination" has shaped contemporary understandings of how the Holocaust should and should not be represented and remembered. My argument is that despite its pervasive and influential usage in the discourse of Holocaust representation, no critical attention has been given to what the term means. In as much as the term's usage draws the historical and ethical boundaries across which representations of the Holocaust cannot pass, this dearth of critical attention given to the term means that …

Arresting Beauty, Framing Evidence: An Inquiry Into Photography And The Teaching Of Writing, Kuhio Walters

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the uses and conceptualizations of photography in college Composition. Composition has long been conflicted over the relation between form and content---and since the 1970s, between aesthetics and politics. Today, this disciplinary tension manifests in how the visual is brought into pedagogy: either it is approached aesthetically, as something to beautify a text, or politically, as a source of cultural critique. The field's uses of photography have been positioned within this aesthetics/politics binary, but to understand the medium as only one or the other is to miss its full practical and theoretical potential.

Theoretically, photography is powerful and …

Going Beyond Our Borders : Global Literature And Teacher Choice, Guy Andrew Scott Roberts

Doctoral Dissertations

unavailable

Material Culture And Domestic Texts: Textiles In The Texts Of Warner, Adams, Wilson, Sadlier, Stoddard, And Phelps, Laura Smith

Doctoral Dissertations

In "Material Culture and Domestic Texts: Textiles in the Texts of Warner, Adams, Wilson, Sadlier, Stoddard, and Phelps," I draw from recently revised notions of the discourse of domesticity to argue that the imagery of textile production, consumption, and containment enables authors to configure experimental domestic forms. Mid-nineteenth-century authors used textiles---including their inherent "textility" and feminine associations---to play out new domestic configurations in response to exigencies of economy, race, intemperance, competitive desire, and labor. Their literature demystifies textiles' ability to invest social hierarchies of race, class, gender, and religion; it also enacts material changes of women's domestic spaces and roles …

Dirty Whites And Dark Secrets: Sex And Race In "Peyton Place", Sally Hirsh-Dickinson

Doctoral Dissertations

"Dirty Whites and Dark Secrets: Sex and Race in Peyton Place " suggests that Grace Metalious's 1956 potboiler Peyton Place contains a critique of race which may have been just as unsettling to a mid-century readership as the novel's famed critique of sexuality. Peyton Place is most often said to be "about" sex. In this study, I argue that it is also "about" race, and that it is the racing of the sex that may have provoked the scandalized outcry against the novel. My work posits that Peyton Place's controversial reputation resulted from Metalious's racialized representations of sexuality and the …

The Comradeship Of The "Happy Few": Henry James, Edith Wharton, And The Pederastic Tradition, Sharon Kehl Califano

Doctoral Dissertations

The recent scholarly reevaluation of Henry James in terms of queer theory has created a need to reexamine James' influence on Edith Wharton and her works. In this dissertation, I explore how James introduced Wharton to a circle of friends (the "Happy Few"), a group of queer men-of-letters who provided the author with both a literal and figurative space for discovering an interiorized, masculine queer self. Specifically addressing the years between 1905 and 1910, I show in this study how Wharton's initiation into queer culture and her introduction to the pederastic tradition, as reimagined through Walt Whitman's paradigmatic "comradeship," gave …