Digital Commons Network^™

Troubling The Water: Dismantling The Ideology Of Separate Spheres, Lisa Weddell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines nineteenth century U.S. women’s maritime writings to re-evaluate and more accurately represent the roles women played in society. I contend that the nineteenth century ship is a microcosm of the United States and women’s sea experiences and maritime writings reveal their lived experiences and the visible roles they played in their relationships and in public politics. Women’s maritime writings, I argue, challenge ideologies of “True Womanhood” that define women as submissive and passive. Instead, these texts demonstrate how women equally contributed to establishing national identity in the United States by defining appropriate gender performance for men and …

An Intergalactic Diplomat, Arianna Marie Sanchez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This manuscript tells the story of Princess Luna McGlothen as she travels to the Eighth Galaxy Alliance as part of Earth’s first attempt at intergalactic diplomacy. Set in the distant future, Princess Luna is the heir to the throne of the Royal Republic of North America and is trying to prove to her authoritarian mother, and to herself, that she is worthy of her birthright. Across the universe she makes friends and enemies, experiences true betrayal, and realizes that she has what it takes to be a great leader.

The Gendering Of Death Personifications In Literary Modernism: The Femme Fatale Symbol From Baudelaire To Barnes, Amanda Mcnally

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The time of modernity, defined here as 1850-1940, contributed to massive changes in the representation of the feminine in literature. Societal paradigm shifts due to industrialism, advances in science, psychology, and a newfound push for gender equality brought transformation to the Western World. As a result of this, male frustrations revived the ancient trope of the femme fatale, but the modern woman—already hungry for agency, tired of maligned representation in heinous portrayals of skeletons, sirens, and beasts—saw a symbol begging for redemption rather than the intended insult. Women of the nineteenth century infused texture to a two-dimensional accusation that argued …

Unruly Matter: Masculine Consumption In English Restoration Literature, Shawn Watkins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Unruly Matter: Masculine Consumption in English Restoration Literature

Over the past several decades, material culture scholars working within the “Long 18^th Century” have identified how the figure of the woman consumer became an ideological nodal point that registered new enthusiasm for emerging economic dynamics (mercantilism, nascent capitalism, etc.) while also expressing masculine anxieties about consumerism and the role of consumable goods in English society. Although many scholars have noted that men functioned symbolically and ideologically as English society’s primary consumers of material goods in the later 17^th century, there is no scholarly work that aims to describe the …

"Within The Hollow Crown": Performing Kingship In Richard Ii And Henry Iv Part One, Angeline Morris

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the parallels and connections between Richard II and Prince Hal in Shakespeare’sRichard II and 1 Henry IV and what the results would be if the characters were cross-cast, or played by the same actor onstage, in performance. Criticism on the plays has often addressed the parallels between the two characters, but as of yet no one has examined ways to show this in performance. This paper acts as a form of critical introduction for a proposed combined performance text of both Richard II and 1 Henry IV, arguing that the textual parallels between the two …

Concerning The Perceptive Gaze: The Impact Of Vision Theories On Late Nineteenth-Century Victorian Literature, Lindsay Rushworth

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines two specific interventions in vision theory—namely, Herbert Spencer's theory of organic memory, which he developed by way of Lamarckian genetics and Darwinian evolution in A System of Synthetic Philosophy (1864), and the Aesthetic Movement (1870s–1890s), famously articulated by Walter Pater in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873 and 1893). I explore the impact of these theories on late nineteenth-century fiction, focusing on two novels: Thomas Hardy's Two on a Tower (1882) and Edith Johnstone's A Sunless Heart (1894). These two authors' texts engage with scientific and aesthetic visual theories to demonstrate their anxieties concerning the …

'A Dream Of Completion': The Journey Of American Working-Class Poetry, Lacy Snapp

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This survey follows the development of working-class poetry from Whitman to contemporary poets. It begins by considering how the need for working-class poetry emerged. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” sought to democratize poetry both my challenging previous poetic formal conventions and broadening the scope of included subjects. Williams also challenged formal expectations, but both were limited by their historical and socioeconomic position. To combat this, I include the twentieth-century poets Ignatow and Levine who began in the working class so they could speak truths that had not been published before. Ignatow includes the phrase “dream of completion” which encapsulates various feelings …

North Of Ourselves: Identity And Place In Jim Wayne Miller’S Poetry, Micah Mccrotty

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Jim Wayne Miller’s poetry examines how human history and topography join to create place. His work often incorporates images of land and ecology; it deliberately questions the delineation between place and self. This thesis explores how Miller presents images of water to describe the relationship between inhabitants and their location, both with the positive image of the spring and the negative image of the flood. Additionally, this thesis examines how the Brier, Miller’s most prominent persona character, grieves his separation from home and ultimately finds healing and reunification of the self through his return to the hills. In his poetry, …

Radical Empowerment And Evolution In Fay Weldon’S Menippean Satire: The Life And Loves Of A She-Devil (1983), Jackson A. Rivera

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This master’s thesis explores Fay Weldon’s implementation of Menippean satire in her 1983 novel, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. The present discussion argues Weldon utilizes this specific satiric mode within her novel in order to convey a story of radical female empowerment and evolution that critiques gendered stereotypes of marriage and female roles in society. To make this argument, this thesis applies satire theory, most prominently Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas about Menippean satire, as well as marriage and family psychology, to Weldon’s characterization of wives, husbands, and mistresses throughout the novel. Through this discussion, Rivera demonstrates the effectiveness of …

Wounds And Writing : Building Trauma-Informed Approaches To Writing Pedagogy., Michelle L. Day

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation builds a trauma-informed approach to writing pedagogy informed by writing studies scholarship about trauma and inclusive pedagogy, clinical social work literature on trauma-informed care, and interviews with nine current University of Louisville writing faculty about their experiences academically supporting distressed students. I identify three central touchstones—“students are coddled,” “teacher’s aren’t therapists,” and “institutions don’t support trauma-informed teaching”—in scholarly and public debates regarding what to do about student trauma/distress in higher education. After exploring the valid concerns and misconceptions underpinning these touchstones, I illustrate how clinical research offers a way forward to help writing instructors develop more complex understandings …

The Dangerous Women Of The Long Eighteenth Century: Exploring The Female Characters In Love In Excess, Roxana, And A Simple Story, Jillian Bailey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Long Eighteenth Century was a period in which change was constant and proceeding the Restoration Era; this sense of change continued throughout the era. Charles II created an era in which women were allowed on the theatre stage, and his mistresses accompanied him to court; Charles II set the stage for the proto-feminist ideas of the eighteenth century that would manifest themselves in Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, and Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story. These novels showcase the enlightenment of women and some of their male contemporaries and the beginning struggles of female …

When Process Becomes Processing: Managing Instructor Response To Student Disclosure Of Trauma In The Composition Classroom, Kelci Barton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In first-year composition courses, there are three aspects of teaching that are researched well so far: disclosure of trauma in student writing, instructor feedback, and emotional labor. The disclosure of trauma is almost completely unavoidable in first-year composition. We encounter an issue with instructor feedback; how do we provide feedback to student writing, like grammar and mechanics, when the student has disclosed trauma in the writing? Additionally, we can build off this with emotional labor, which already occurs consistently in teaching but is heightened in this instance. When providing feedback to a student who has disclosed trauma, this can be …

Introspections Into Rational Fanatics And Thoughtful Deceivers: Examining The Use Of Memoirs In The Works Of James Hogg And Charles Brockden Brown, Tucker Foster

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The memoir as a specific and unique literary genre has only recently been broached for in-depth critical study, with two major, book-length examinations of the genre appearing in the past decade. While the genre has been around in various formats with various conventions for as long as humans have written, only the memoir boom of the late twentieth and early twenty-first-century called for a more sophisticated look at the genre. This thesis will use these recent observations on the memoir as a genre to shed new light on two classics of gothic literature: Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland and …

Coming To Terms With Gonzo Journalism : An Analysis In Russian Formalism., Beau Kilpatrick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gonzo journalism is notoriously difficult to define because of its ambiguous nature. To date, scholarly definitions focus on historical interpretations of Gonzo’s content, its connection to social and political contexts, or the biography of Hunter S. Thompson. These definitional attempts neglect the formal devices of the composition. This thesis aims to redefine Gonzo as its own genre by using the nearly forgotten methods of Russian formalism—specifically the works of Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp, and Boris Tomashevsky—to analyze the formal devices and components of its form. The results are twofold; first, it acts to rejuvenate an unpopular literary theory by illustrating …

Reading The Readers : Analyses Of Shakespearean And Cervantine Characters As (Dys)Functional Readers., Erin Shannon O'Reilly

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes how the protagonists of Don Quixote and The Tempest perform the act of reading. It explores how the authors create interpretive communities within their works and bring them into conflict in order to foreground the dysfunctionality of particular types of reading. While functional readers are capable of reading among and beyond diverse interpretive communities, dysfunctional readers operate within a single community to the exclusion of other possible interpretations. Chapter One examines Cervantes’s creation of multiple interpretive communities within the first six chapters of Don Quixote, and how Don Quixote acts as dysfunctional reader through his inability …

Remaking Identities, Reworking Graduate Study : Stories From First-Generation-To-College Rhetoric And Composition Phd Students On Navigating The Doctorate., Ashanka Kumari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation responds to the decreasing number of first-generation-to-college doctorates in the humanities and the limited scholarship on graduate students in Rhetoric and Composition. Scholars in Rhetoric and Composition have long been invested in discussions of academic and/or disciplinary enculturation, yet these discussions primarily focus on undergraduate students, with few studies on graduate students and far fewer on the doctoral students training to become the next wave of a profession. In this dissertation, I argue that if we engage intersectional identities as assets in the design of doctoral programs, access to higher education and academic enculturation can become more manageable …

Resonances Of Love And Social Complexity In The Circadian Novel: Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, And Mulk Raj Anand, Mikayla Marie Peters

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Both Mulk Raj Anand and Christopher Isherwood admired and borrowed from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway to build their own circadian novels. This thesis attempts to apply three major theories from three different disciplines - narrative theory, sociology, and psychology - to three major circadian novels to explain how societal pressures and the past influence the protagonists' connections with others. Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Anand's Untouchable (1935), and Isherwood's A Single Man (1964) all use a circadian (single-day) structure to explore how the past influences every decision in a single day. This thesis combines Michel de Certeau's Theory of the Everyday …

Disturbing The Ecological Pastoral: An Examination Of Willa Cather's Fictional Spaces In My Ántonia And Death Comes For The Archbishop, Anne Carter Stowe

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Willa Cather is universally lauded for her ability to render landscape into prose. Critics have observed for years that the landscape often functions as the main character in her fiction, or that her characters can easily be evaluated in terms of how deep and successful their relationships to the land are. In an attempt to evaluate Cather’s treatment of two different “Western” landscapes, I will focus first on My Ántonia, one of her most famous Nebraska novels, and second on Death Comes for the Archbishop, whose narrative unravels on the New Mexican landscape. I argue that Cather treats …

Hong & Ramona, Amy Lam

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is a novel set in frontier California.

Vicar Victoria: Writing The Church Of England In Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Rachel Elizabeth Cason

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Vicar Victoria: Writing the Church of England in Nineteenth-Century Fiction shows how the organizing force of the Anglican Church and the figure of the Anglican clergyman were used to interrogate social, legal, and historical developments in nineteenth-century fiction. The project outlines how authors reacted to events such as Pluralism reform, the opening of training schools for clergy, and the Oxford Movement. There was a growing importance of institutions (including new physical buildings and Anglican reform movements). Further, the clergy, pushed by the increased expectation to modernize and professionalize, became a specialist career, with raised training and performance requirements. As a …

We Know Where You Belong At: Institutions And Marginalized Bodies In The Literature Of Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, And Eudora Welty, Michelle Lynn Ayers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis portfolio explores how three southern authors used fiction to push back against social norms. The literary works of Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty depict the ways in which marginalized bodies are socially regulated and punished. By using Michel Foucault’s theories about power and knowledge, I explore how each of these works uses surveillance to regulate social behavior and what happens to marginalized bodies that refuse to conform to the norm. In Chesnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition, Dr. Miller uses his “medical gaze” to diagnose problems within the black community while also elevating himself above his …

Of Mules And Mamas: Four Women, Africana Mothering, And Resistance, Ebony Olivia Lumumba

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The black woman’s humanity is unjustly linked to domestic responsibility and, thus, the traditional constraints of mothering. The roles of the mother and the created archetype of the mammy often become marred with the latter role overtaking the former—leaving black children without full benefit and access to their biological maternal parent. With the pervasive threat to black lives present in spaces all over the globe, for women of the African Diaspora, simply deciding to accept the role of a mother to a life that is physically, socially, and economically under siege is revolutionary. Considering this, the act of mothering, especially …

From Wanderer To Warrior: Martin's Journey To Sainthood In Brian Jacques's Redwall Series, Marie A. Bliemeister

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Children’s fantasy series have been set in the Medieval Era, a way to explore contemporary themes. This use of the Medieval Era is known as medievalism, where authors can explore contemporary issues by comparing them to the past (Bradford 3). Brian Jacques, the author of the popular children’s series Redwall, uses many aspects of the Medieval Era such as prophecies, glory, and battle, and visions or dreams to effectively spin a good yarn while commenting on the religious development of England in the late twentieth century. English moral was down due to the devastation of World War Two and …

From Beyond The Grave: Dead Narrators In Young Adult Literature, Jessica L. Branton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While scholars and critics have explored various aspects of young adult literature, few have focused on the popular, but odd, use of dead narrators. When examining the dead narrators of Veronica Roth’s Allegiant, Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why, Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall, and Jess Rothenberg’s The Catastrophic History of You and Me, it becomes clear that the dead narrators are used as a foil for adolescent growth and maturation, and they also allow young readers to empathize with and accept death through the protagonists. These protagonists experience a proto-adulthood as they die too soon to …

Activist Modernisms: Human Rights And Anti-Totalitarianism In Mid-Twentieth Century Literature, Mary Ellen Gray

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The period after World War II saw the emergence of a new discourse of human rights, with the signing of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the postwar period and throughout the twentieth century, human rights would often be vieas a set of self-evident, monolithic, and timeless values that had merely reached their full realization after the horrors of the war. This study examines a body of literature from the 1930s and 40s, the wartime moment just before the foundation of the twentieth century universal rights ideology, to explore the process by which theories of human rights are …

Road Trippin': Twentieth-Century American Road Narratives From On The Road To The Road, Scott M. Obernesser

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Road Trippin:’ Twentieth-Century American Road Narratives and Petrocultures from On The Road to The Road" examines late-twentieth century U.S. road narratives in an effort to trace the development of American petrocultures geographically and culturally in the decades after World War II. The highway stories that gain popularity throughout the era trace not simply how Americans utilize oil, but how the postwar American oil ethos in literature, film, and music acts upon and shapes human interiority and vice versa. Roads and highways frame my critique because they are at once networks of commerce transportation and producers of a unique, romantic …

"Solace For [The] Very Soul": The Role Of Trees Within The American Short-Story Cycle, Breanna B. Harris

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Over the last couple of centuries, the American short-story genre became characterized by its observations of life and human nature—specifically by using scenes of nature to highlight characters’ development and the underlying theme. While much critical attention has been given to the role of nature in the American short-story cycle, very little consideration has been given to the purpose of trees and their specific breeds within the genre. This project focuses on three distinct pedagogical approaches to analyzing trees in three short-story cycles. Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the rhizome and Freud’s theory of dream-thoughts are applied to Mary Wilkins …

Poetically Composed, Educationally Imposed: Exploring Imagination And Poetics In Curriculum—A Memoir, Whitney J. Presnal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Through the use of memoir, my work centers on how poetry is situated within public education curriculum. I explore the curricular context of poetry through the lenses of my lived experiences in early childhood, as a K-12 student, and as an early career classroom teacher. My dissertation draws upon a wide array of literature, honing in on the poetic perspectives of philosophers (Aristotle, 1996; Heidegger, 1947 & 1971/2013; Plato, 1955/2007), poets (Hall, 2003; Eliot, 1920 & 2009), and curriculum theorists (Leggo, 1997 & 2018; Pinar, 1994; Sameshima, 2007). The foundation of my work is drawn from my own circular experiences, …