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Stretching The Hard-Boiled Detective: From Hammett And Chandler To Paretsky And Himes, Chloe Moore

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis investigates transformations of the hard-boiled crime fiction genre by analyzing the works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and how authors Sara Paretsky and Chester Himes adapt and manipulate the genre to suit their intentions and voices. By examining the construction of Hammett's Continental Op and Sam Spade, and Chandler's Philip Marlowe, the foundation is laid for understanding the defining characteristics of a hard-boiled detective in the 1930s and 40s. This thesis then explores how Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski and Himes' Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones adapt these qualities to suit new demographics of detectives: a white woman …

"My Daughter, Flee Temptation!" "O, Do Go, Dear Mother!": Gender, Race, And Body Politics In Charlotte Brontë’S Jane Eyre And Harriet Jacobs' Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl, Harper Mccall

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The following thesis explores the constructs of gender and race in relation to the bodies of Jane Eyre and Linda Brent in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Harriet Jacobs. Particularly, 19th Century sociopolitical forces (e.g., British Imperialism, Antebellum American life, and the legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade) constrict the womens' bodies as they progress through the novels' plots. By using Frederick Douglass' "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave," both intertextual references and resonant comparisons can be made between the oppression and resistance narratives characteristic of Jane Eyre and Incidents. Such communicative frameworks reveal larger …

Food As A Literary Device In The Hunger Games: World Building, Characterization, And Plot Momentum, Linzee Mitchell

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Food relates to the experience of life, survival, and memory. It impacts us every day, whether we have plenty of it or not. It influences our memories and connects us to one another, while structuring details of our identities and cultures. As a creative writer and English major, I recognize that food influences a story to accentuate literary concepts and unveil them, such as a character’s compassion or the poison that a villain uses to unfold the plot. The best example of food as an impactful device within a story is The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. From the first …

Sing Of Arms And Disobedience: Reading Vergil's Aeneid In Milton's Paradise Lost, Brooke Braden

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines the extent to which Vergil’s Aeneid influences the characters, themes, and epic style of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Focusing primarily on the Carthage episode of the Aeneid in which Aeneas meets and falls in love with queen Dido, this thesis explores how the figures of Aeneas, Creusa, Dido, and Sychaeus parallel those of Milton’s Satan, Sin, Eve, and Adam, respectively. This thesis also shows how the appearance of epic themes such as fate in both texts affects characters’ personal motivations in similar ways, such as Dido’s suicide and Eve’s consumption of the infamous apple. Through an exploration of …

Pastries And Plots: Food Rhetoric And Gender Struggles In Shakespeare’S Plays, Juliet Nierle

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Food is a common motif across the Shakespearean cannon. From early plays to late plays, comedies to dramas, food appears in a variety of instances, functioning in numerous ways. Frequently representative of social class or serving as a cultural marker, food in Shakespeare can be innocent and passive, but it has the potential to contribute to scenes of violence. Foodstuffs in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, and Coriolanus contribute to the brutal harms committed in the plays, specifically in scenes of violence against women. Characters use foodstuffs as pejorative metaphors, like the subjugation of Volumnia in the context …

Beyond A Partnership Ethic: Evolutions Of Ecofeminism In The Post-Apocalyptic Landscapes Of Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy And Jean Hegland's Into The Forest, Catherine Lashley

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In this paper, I analyze two contemporary post-apocalyptic novels, Jean Hegland’s novel Into the Forest and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, through an ecofeminist lens to argue that they establish a framework for an existence that decenters the human and rejects Eurocentric, masculinized conceptions of individualism. I put these novels in conversation with Eduardo Kohn’s book How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, and the ecofeminist works of Carolyn Merchant, Donna Haraway, and Val Plumwood. My paper is split into three sections, Women/Nature, Human/Nonhuman, and Individual/Collective. I use the slash as a glyph to denote moments of non-dualism, unquantifiable …

Say His Name: Othello, Paul Robeson, And Racism In America, Brett Strother

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In Shakespeare’s Othello, Othello faces societal pressures of racism as he marries Senator Brabantio’s White daughter Desdemona. This creates the main plot, and the villain of the play, Iago, plots against him which leads to the destruction of Othello’s reputable character. Othello is transformed into a violent, murderous husband by Iago’s villainous ploy fueled by using racial slurs, and Othello’s final form matches the name his enemies assign him. Stripping Othello of his name and portraying him as “the Moor”, a term used to describe a category of Black persons viewed as barbaric, is a tactic used throughout time …

The Impact Of Social Media On The Publishing Industry: A Case Study Of Author Colleen Hoover, Chloe Foster

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Thanks to the BookTok community, adult romance author Colleen Hoover has taken the world by storm. Anyone that has had access to TikTok within the past year has probably had a Colleen Hoover book appear in video on their “For You Page,” the page on TikTok where users can scroll through content that follows an algorithm which learns about the user’s specific interests. However, Hoover has been writing and publishing novels since 2012. She had already published more than a dozen novels by 2020, yet her popularity has only grown since she made her appearance on social media. Her book …

A World Half Created: The Imaginative Power Of Sound In The Poetry Of William Wordsworth, Trinity Myers

Undergraduate Honors Theses

William Wordsworth has long been considered one of the greatest British Romantic poets, and critical interest in his use of sound has grown since the mid-twentieth century. This paper investigates Wordsworth's fascination with "poetic musicality"—a phrase developed by the researcher to describe a poem's sensitivity to sound—and its effect upon the active imagination of a poem’s listeners. Such aural receptivity is explored in several of Wordsworth's early works, namely: the 1805 Prelude and selections from Lyrical Ballads. Rather than limiting conceptions of musicality to song and instrumentation, this project investigates how the power of sound can be extended to …

From “Calling” To “Just Talking": An Exploration Of Changing Relationship Terminology As A Linguistic Societal Phenomenon, Leora Wasserman

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis will explore the correlation between societal and linguistic change,
specifically relating to the usage of the colloquialism “Just Talking” in 21st Century courtship vernacular. The usage of this term seems to be relatively new and does not appear in many scientific articles. In 2019, at the beginning of the research project which prompted this paper, there were no scientific articles that attempted to discuss this phenomenon. Since then, only two articles on the subject have been published. This thesis will attempt to understand why this term is being used and how it relates to the terms which have …

A Valley Lost To Time, Washington C. Pearce

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis delivers a playable and functional module for the 5 th Edition of the World’s Greatest Role-Playing Game. The Critical Introduction uses reader response and performance theory to create a framework for reading role-playing games as literature, explains some of the recent scholarship surrounding role-playing games, and details the creative process and work of the creative thesis.

In A Valley Lost to Time, Adventurers recruited by the Trellin Prime Minister are sent westward, over the Drazlin mountain range, with a mission to discover the fate of a decades-lost failed colony. The route is long and treacherous, passing through a …

"But A Contraband Is A Free Man:" Civil War Literature And The Figure Of The "Contraband", Mary A. Kardos

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis explores Civil War popular literature related to "contraband" individuals by Black and white authors. In May 1861, those who escaped from enslavement to Union territory were deemed "contrabands of war," a label placing them between freedom and property. This purgatorial category delayed freedom and depicts formerly enslaved persons as both intellectual and literal property of white America. Across various poems, essays, speeches, novels, illustrated envelopes, and sketches, Civil War authors debated the function of the “contrabands” within the American social order. Consequently, this thesis explores the patterns through which the uniquely transitory nature of the “contraband" allowed the …

Framing The Female Narrative: Male Audiences And Women's Storytelling Within Two Brontë Novels, Sammy Murphy

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Since being published, both Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights have attracted scholarly and critical attention on account of their framed narratives. At the time of publication, some portion of this attention was negative; however, since the early 20th century, scholars have moved towards recognizing and analyzing potential purposes for the narrative structures of both texts. Within my thesis, I enter into this field of scholarship so as to analyze how the frame narrative functions as a tool for both simulation and subversion within the two texts. More specifically, I argue that Emily and …

'Carcern' And 'Wordcræft': Enclosure, Connection And Gender In Cynewulf's "Juliana" And "Elene", Katherine Grotewiel

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The scholarly narrative around monastic enclosure has centered on rigid gender divisions. But Cynewulf's Juliana and Elene reveal a more complex picture. Through images of enclosure, binding and the creation of words, Cynewulf unwinds these restrictive ties of gender in the epilogues of his poems and instead identifies with the figures in these poems not along lines of gender, but in their experiences of enclosure.

An Analysis Of And Guide To Tamora Pierce’S Protector Of The Small Quartet As Compared To The Established Young Adult Fantasy Canon, Emma Marie Gilbert

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Tamora Pierce’s work has been cited by many Young Adult fantasy authors as a major influence in recent years. Despite this, her work remains relatively obscure among librarians and readers of Young Adult literature. This paper examined one of Pierce’s Young Adult fantasy series, Protector of the Small, by comparing the series to existing works of Young Adult fantasy literature commonly accepted as classic or canonical literature. Among the comparative works were titles authored by C. S. Lewis, J. K. Rowling, and Philip Pullman. Comparison was character-focused, with emphasis on the representation of parents, other sympathetic adults, peers, and …

A Claiming Of Kin: A Linguistic Analysis Of Southern Appalachian English In Melissa Range's Scriptorium: Poems, Jolee White

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The research studies the Southern Appalachian dialect present in five poems in Melissa Range’s Scriptorium: Poems. The linguistic phenomena characteristic of Southern Appalachian English observed and analyzed in the poems include lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects. The research seeks to bring attention to this Appalachian woman writer as well as to bring understanding of her reasoning behind incorporating the dialect in her poetry. It establishes that the five poems by Range contain the lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects of the SAE dialect. It holds meaning both grammatically and pragmatically within the context of the poem and Appalachia.

Feelings Of Fallenness: Affect And Gender In Victorian Fallen Woman Novels, Kate Kowalski

Undergraduate Honors Theses

A famous poem by Coventry Patmore articulated Victorian expectations for women: to be “the angel in the house.” The woman was the arbiter of morality, spiritual guide and helpmeet, and was worshiped almost as a goddess of purity— and goddesses need no legal protections. Chastity and submission were not only expected, but demanded of Victorian women. After all, these qualities were scientifically inherent in women (to the Victorian mind); the biological imperative of reproduction and maternity rendered women’s bodies a sacred space and prevented their minds from developing as a man’s could.The twin forces of Victorian patriarchal science and religion …

'Geomorlic' Or 'Eorlic?' Uncovering Early English Emotional Communities In "The Wanderer," "Deor," And "The Wife’S Lament", Hunter Phillips

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In my honors thesis, I uncover what I consider to be a poetic trope governing emotional expression in three of the Old English 'elegies.' Narrators in these poems engage the emotional values of the Old English "Heroic Tradition"-namely the value of keeping silent in the face of adversity-through abstracted and idealized figures like the 'eorl' (warrior/man). The invocation in these poems of the eorl and eorl-like figures such as a hlaford (lord) or geong mon (young man) functions as a poetic trope that signals the speakers engagement with the heroic emotional community represented by that figure. I name this …

The Written Word Bound By Devotion Unseen: Female Monasticism And Religiosity In The Visions Of Gertrud The Great Of Helfta, Jana Considine

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The mystical, religious writing of Gertrud the Great of Helfta expressed an erotic love of the Christ, presented in her Herald of God's Loving-Kindness through a series of visions centered around the interaction of the monastery's community and the liturgy. This Honors Thesis attempts to study this religiosity, discovering how Gertrud's visions communicated a sensual understanding of the Divine centered around the Eucharist. Contextualizing the fourth book of the Herald in monastic history, this paper examines the presence of the Liturgy, the Eucharist, wealth and materiality, and female spirituality in this High Medieval text, discovering a communal religiosity based upon …

"I Don't Believe One-Half Of It Myself": The Role Of Folk Groups In Supernatural Legend Interpretation, Melanie Kimball

Undergraduate Honors Theses

A range of interpretations can characterize supernatural legends as religious or non-religious—or somewhere in between. Religious audiences quickly categorize supernatural religious legends as such, but they hesitate when interpreting supernatural non-religious legends and supply multiple interpretations. Folk group paradigms influence these interpretations, and a variety of factors in turn influence which paradigms are used. The most important of these factors is a hierarchy of folk groups, which each individual has uniquely created and to which they refer when interpreting stories and experiences. When the most important of these folk groups fails to fully interpret a narrative, individuals will use folk …

“I—I Can’T Talk About Things”: The Tragedy Of Post-Wwii Civilian Masculinity In Agatha Christie’S Taken At The Flood, Rebekah Olsen

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines the ways in which Agatha Christie’s Taken at the Flood serves to illustrate the fragility and ultimate destabilization of masculinity immediately following WWII. Christie illustrates this break by comparing two men, David Hunter and Rowley Cloade who represent types of men in Britain’s postwar landscape. Throughout the text, David Hunter is framed as a dangerous and dreadful young man, serving as a representation of post-war fears about demobbed soldiers attacking young women. However, the story really revolves around the civilian trauma that Rowley Cloade has sustained through his wartime role as a farmer, which comes from repression …

“The Only Story I’Ll Be Able To Tell”: An Analysis Of Shame And Queer Identity In Gothic American Campus Novels, Aubrey Dickens

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis analyzes shame and queerness in contemporary gothic American campus novels, also known as “dark academia” novels. The thesis looks specifically at the novels The Secret History by Donna Tartt, published in 1992 and considered to be the first dark academia novel, and Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas, published in 2020 and a more modern adaptation on the subgenre. The two novels deal explicitly with how shame constitutes identity, specifically in regards to individuals who are depicted as queer or outside of heteronormative expectations of sexuality. Queerness in the context of this paper is defined as any portrayal of …

What Is Literary? Teaching Diverse, Literary Young Adult Novels In The Secondary Classroom, Kathryn Taylor

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis defines what makes a novel literary and examines the benefits of introducing Young Adult literature into the English curriculum. The current classical canon that is taught in secondary classrooms consists almost entirely of books written by white, Eurocentric men with a few token novels from women, authors of color, or queer authors. While the books in the classical canon have earned their place there, the rapidly changing demographics in our secondary schools mean that the majority of our students no longer share the same characteristics as these authors. They have largely different life experiences and struggle to connect …

A Social Media Misinformation Label And The Postrhetorical Presidency, Ethan Mcginty

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In May 2020, presidential communication on social media was—for the first time—subject to a misinformation label applied by the social media site on which the communication originated. This development indicates a turning point in social media sites’ relationship with presidential communication and demands adaptation in the scholarly understanding of presidential rhetoric during the present era. Drawing from the theoretical framework of the postrhetorical presidency, I perform dual rhetorical analyses of this landmark artifact. The first round of analysis ignores the label and analyzes the presidential communication alone to understand its function, while the second analysis reveals the rhetorical impact of …

Flipping The Castle: Evolution Of Gothic Spaces In The Domestic Sphere, Kate Lucas

Undergraduate Honors Theses

"Flipping the Castle" explores topics of domesticity in Gothic literature over the course of three centuries. The Gothic is a genre with roots in 18th century British literature, but more broadly, it can be described as horror that has a social function, and it is the birthplace of some of the most successful narratives in horror fiction. The aspects of the Gothic this research is concerned with is its themes of unchecked masculine aggression versus repressed femininity, its ability to adapt over time, and its preoccupation with setting, specifically the home, whether that be a medieval castle, a haunted house, …

With Inviolable Voice, We Melt Into Each Other With Phrases: The Construction And Deconstruction Of Heteroglossia In T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land And Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Alexa Kelly

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This essay analyzes the ways in which T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf simultaneously construct and deconstruct linguistic environments that embody Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia. In The Waste Land and The Waves, Eliot and Woolf construct elements of Bakhtin's novel before dismantling those same elements through the formation of linguistic imbalance. Both authors generate heteroglossia by incorporating numerous speech types and speech genres into their texts through variations of idiolect, sociolect, and literary allusion. These speech types then dialogize each other within the texts. However, the works then diverge from heteroglossia through an imbalance of the centrifugal and centripetal …

The Impact Of Booktube On Book Publishing: A Study Of John Green's Looking For Alaska, Amanda Mitchell

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Around 2010, a group of online content creators, commonly referred to as "Youtubers" or "BookTubers," began to emerge on YouTube.com. This community's content revolves around many topics under the realm of literature including book discussions, reviews, genre discussions, and many more. While the group started off small, it has grown significantly over the past decade; some of the most prominent creators have several hundred thousand subscribers. In the ten years since its emergence, the creators and content have transformed, where many in the beginning made video discussions just for fun, and now many of them have grown their channel into …

A Trip Through The Divine Comedy: An Allegory For Depression And Its Role In Bibliotherapy, Matthew Curry

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Dante the Pilgrim, the main character of Dante Alighieri’s La Divina Commedia, has his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven recorded by Dante the Poet in poetic form. In the literal sense of things, readers follow Dante the Pilgrim’s journey downward into the infernal hellscape, upward onto a mountain of purgation and atonement, and into the metaphysical world of the divine. Allegorically, however, readers can also choose to view Dante the Pilgrim’s journey through The Divine Comedy as that of a person experiencing the hopelessness of depression, the challenging climb upward and outward of healing after spiraling deeply inward …

Laurence Sterne: A Different Way Of Approaching The Notion Of Life In The Early Novel, Robert Metaxatos

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis employs the later philosophy of Michel Foucault to think through the unique set of socio-cultural problems that emerged alongside the early novel. I endeavor to explain the development of “biopower” and the concomitant (yet historically grounded) concept of a mass population in order to round off a nettlesome tendency among historicist rise-of-the-novel critics to focus on the creation of a bourgeois individual at this time. To that end, the texts of Anglo-Irish author Laurence Sterne bear out a unique narratorial response to biopower that begins with the ‘body’ of his work: i.e., Shandeism. Signaling the importance of the …

“Garden-Magic”: Conceptions Of Nature In Edith Wharton’S Fiction, Jonathan Malks

Undergraduate Honors Theses

I situate Edith Wharton’s guiding idea of “garden-magic” at the center of my thesis because Wharton’s fiction shows how a garden space could naturalize otherwise inadmissible behaviors within upper-class society while helping a character tie such behavior to a greater possibility for escape. To this end, Wharton situates gardens as idealized touchstones within the built environment of New York City, spaces where characters believe they can reach self-actualization within a version of nature that is man-made. Actualization, in this sense, stems from a character’s imaginative escape that is enabled by a perception of the garden as a kind of natural …