Digital Commons Network^™

Georgia Ghosts: History, Folklore, And The Roots Of The Southern Gothic, Katherine M. Mcdowell

Master's Projects

There is something quintessentially human about ghost stories, yet particular regions tend to be more powerfully associated with haunted folktales than others. One of the regions is the southeastern United States. In fact, these oral traditions appear to have influenced the area's best-known literary subgenre: the Southern Gothic.

Why is the South considered haunted? Are there particular qualities in historical events that make them more likely to engender ghost stories? What makes the South's folkloric spirits so powerful that they appear even in modern literature? Most of all, what connects the region's history and folklore with the Southern Gothic? By …

Witchy Politics: Witches And Witchcraft As Political Tropes From Malleus Malleficarum (1487) To Les Sorcières De La République (2016) And The Mercies (2020), Mallaury Joëlle Marie Gauthier

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The focus of this thesis are two recent novels featuring witches: Chloé Delaume’s Les Sorcières de la République(The Witches of the Republic, 2016) and Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Mercies (2020). The first is a futuristic dystopia set in 2062, during the witch trial of the Sibyl of Cumae. The second is a work of historical fiction based on witch trial records and set in seventeenth-century Finnmark (Norway). Both are feminist novels, and both emphasize the political valence of the witch as a gendered figure. This figure emerged from the misogyny of early modern demonology but acquired its contemporary contours …

Beyond Words: Exploring History Through The Lens Of Literary Theory And Research, Andrea Weaver

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

The narrative of this Master's portfolio reflects on the academic journey of Andrea Weaver. The three projects showcased in this portfolio reflect her experience during the Master of Arts in English with a Specialization in English Teaching program. It includes a rhetorical Ohio Suffragist unit plan created for high school sophomores, a seminar paper critically analyzing the film Interview with the Vampire (1994), and a digital presentation of artifacts and research about literary theorist Wolfgang Iser and his work in Reader Response Theory presented on the platform Microsoft Sway. The framework of New Historicism is threaded throughout each project, linking …

Trans-Atlantic Composition: The History Of British Academic Writing, Gareth George Rees-White

Theses and Dissertations

I author a revisionary comparative history of British Academic Writing and American Composition studies. My core argument is that the Composition story has always, ultimately, been a Trans-Atlantic one. This project serves two key goals: 1) it offers a comprehensive history of UK writing education; while 2) simultaneously offering a revisionist US history that fights the claim that uniquely American exigencies led to a uniquely American education system that therefore has little to learn from other global Compositions. This project tracks the history of university level writing education in the UK from the 1200s to the modern day, and follows …

The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer

English Theses and Dissertations

The Rise of an Eco-Spiritual Imaginary reveals a shared ecological aesthetic among contemporary U.S. ethnic writers whose novels communicate a decolonial spiritual reverence for the earth. This shared narrative focus challenges white settler colonial mythologies of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism to instantiate new ways of imagining community across socially constructed boundaries of time, space, nation, race, and species. The eco-spiritual imaginary—by which I mean a shared reverence for the ecological interconnection between all living beings—articulates a common biological origin and sacredness of all life that transcends racial difference while remaining grounded in local ethnicities and bioregions. The novelists representing …

Uniting England’S Two Nations: The Victorian Social Problem Novel As A Medium For Sociopolitical Change, Kat Gibson

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

Victorian social problem novels created narratives that revealed systemic sociopolitical issues present in England beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. This thesis focuses on understanding the major concerns of social problem novels centered around the English poor and working class and how they understood and communicated these issues, generated sympathy, and offered potential solutions to their readership. By analyzing a selection of these novels published from the 1830s-1850s and contextualizing them historically, this piece argues for the validity of these novels’ political commentary and different ways of approaching societal issues. This analysis targets two critical areas of concern within social problem …

Affective Histories Of Southern Trauma: Shame, Healing, And Vulnerability In Us Southern Women’S Writing, 1975–2006, Faune Albert

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the affective impacts of historical trauma around slavery and segregation in the US South, arguing for the importance of understanding US Southern history through the ways in which it has lived and continues to live in and on the bodies of Southerners marked by race and gender and class and within emotional life in the South. The texts in this study—Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975), Dorothy Allison’s Trash (1988), Ellen Gilchrist’s Net of Jewels (1992), and Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2006)—engage the affective impacts of intergenerational and insidious trauma through portrayals of Southern women struggling to give voice …

The Poetry Of History: Irish National Imagination Through Mythology And Materiality, Ryan Fay

English Honors Theses

The thesis culminates in the twentieth century and yet it begins with the Ulster Cycle, a period of Irish mythological history that occurred around the first century common era. Indeed, since the time frame was before the arrival of the Gaels, Normans, or Christianity, the extent of this mythology’s relevance today is whatever extent it is conceptualized as “Irish.” As such, the first chapter locks onto an aspect that could feasibly transcend time and resonate with modern Irish society: gender. Of course, the epistemological dynamics of gender^[1] in the first-century common era are vastly different than the twentieth century …

Lost Voices: William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, And The Nature Of History, Luke Hardin

Undergraduate Theses

The novels of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison are nothing if not haunted. Though the authors themselves remain, in many ways, diametrically opposed, their works remain inextricably entangled due to the looming specter of history that hangs over their pages. Perhaps more-so than any other writers in the 20th Century, these two towering figures of American fiction took seriously the task of unpacking the migrainous burden of history. Read together, they offer differing perspectives on the nature of writing one's own past, and how this is informed by race and class. Specifically, Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! has long been regarded …

The Roadmap: Exploring T.S. Eliot’S The Waste Land With World War One Literature, Matthew Bennett

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Through careful analysis paired with poetry, war memoirs, and novels from the same period, one can break down T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to recognize the impact of The Great War on the world's modern memory while pondering the possibility of memory as a tool to overcome trauma.

Dissecting The Man Of Steel: The Evolution Of Superman As A Reflection Of American Society, Marie Gould

Undergraduate Theses

Since his debut during the Great Depression in 1938, Superman has become an American cultural icon. His symbol is not only known throughout the nation, but the world as well. Despite this, many consider Superman to be irrelevant and unrelatable to reality because he is written as an outrageously overpowered being with “boy scout” morals. However, he has not always been written this way. This research seeks to uncover the connections between Superman’s various narratives and the changing social and political ideas of American Society throughout history. Specifically, the objective of this study is to establish whether Superman has changed …

Counterfactuals And Prefactuals In Shakespeare: Understanding The Human Mind And Human Behavior Through The Literary Analysis Of Conditional Mental Simulation Thoughts In The Narratives Of Plays, Cierra R. Cowan

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

On The Edge Of Inclusion: A Look At The Shifting Of Representation In Museum Display And Archival Cataloging, Natalie Ray

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project, entitled "On The Edge of Inclusion: A Look at the Shifting of Representation in Museum Display and Archival Cataloging" by Natalie Ray delves into how the growing trend of social justice has raised new questions about how to better represent marginalized populations and how museum work has followed this pursuit. The digital age continues to impact the dynamism of exhibiting. Accurate representation becomes more imperative now that representative texts are able to reach more people than ever before. This increasing access coupled with the expanding interest in social justice and cultural reconciliation renders it necessary for curators and …

Creating Herstory: Female Rebellion In Arundhati Roy’S "The God Of Small Things" And "The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness", Priyanka Tewari

Theses and Dissertations

In The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness novels, the author Arundhati Roy is not only attempting to give feminist weight to the multiplicity of locations in which gender is articulated by recasting her female characters in their quest for selfhood, she is also focusing on women and women-identified characters as agents of history, thereby contributing to an ongoing project of feminist historiography.

Speaking Truth To Power: Writing (Against) History In "The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao" And "The Things They Carried", Karen Chau

Theses and Dissertations

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and The Things They Carried subvert dominating historical narratives by challenging the frameworks that construct them through introducing alternate narratives. By reframing the ethics of truth, they rupture central narrative space with marginal perspectives, rewriting History in service of their own truths.

The Leap In Place: Rethinking Key Concepts In The History Of Composition And The Return Of Lore., David Stubblefield

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation attempts to affirm a key set of practical terms in order to guide Composition Pedagogy. These terms include error, language, voice, teacher neutrality, and rationality. In recent years, many of these terms have been discredited theoretically; however, they remain dominant in textbooks and in our actual teaching practice. The result has been a significant divide between theory and practice, resulting in a cognitive dissonance between our classroom activities and our scholarly activity. However, by presenting each of these terms as dynamic and performative, this dissertation invites the field to find productive practical possibilities inside of them. Moreover, the …

Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky

Theses and Dissertations

This paper theorizes that authors, in an act I have termed “literary exorcism,” project and expunge parts of their identities that are in conflict with the overriding political agenda of their texts, into the figure of the villain. Drawing upon theories of power put forth by Judith Butler, I argue that this sort of projection arises in reaction to dominant ideas and institutions, but that authors find ways to manipulate this process over time. By examining a broad cross-section of English-language literature over several centuries, this phenomenon and its evolution can be observed, as well as the means by which …

"History Real Or Feigned": Tolkien, Scott, And Poetry's Place In Fashioning History, Kaleigh Jean Spooner

Theses and Dissertations

Most critics of The Lord of the Rings correlate Tolkien's work to ancient texts, like Beowulf, the Elder Edda, and medieval romances. While the connection between these traditional materials and Tolkien is valid, it neglects a key feature of Tolkien's work and one of the author's desires, which was to fashion a sort of history that felt as real as any other old story. Moreover, it glosses over the rather obvious point that Tolkien is writing a novel, or at any rate a long work of prose fiction that owes a good deal to the novel tradition. …

Magical Politicism: History And Identity In Gabriel García Márquez’S Fiction, Isabel C. Henao

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Gabriel García Márquez establishes the importance of identity, names, and narrative in order to highlight the importance of recognizing the past for a country that has allowed history to be rewritten and, as a result, forgotten. Márquez writes about what happens to a character with no history, for whom it then becomes imperative that the other characters orchestrate a narrative, thereby allowing Márquez to critique the neocolonialism and imperialism that occurred in Colombia. This strategy can be seen in several of his most well-known works—the short stories “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” and “The Handsomest Drowned Man in …

The Founding Farce, Or, The Lost Debates Of The Constitutional Convention: Being An Account Of The Discovery Of An Overlooked Document, And The Loss Again, And Rediscovery Of Said Document, Wherein Is Written Unheard Proceedings In The Crafting Of The Glorious Constitution Of These 13 Colonies (Which Has Lately Been Misplaced), Alexander W. Pickens

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

The Constitutional Convention was shrouded in mystery, yet America has been confidently given a narrative of what went on behind closed doors in Philadelphia. Though most of our authentic records of what went on were written by men assumed to be reliable, the deeper one reads into history the more unreliable they become, recent evidence even suggesting that James Madison altered his notes on the Convention years after it was concluded. What if our perception of history is flawed and the Convention was not the glorious meeting of intellectual giants but instead a town hall full of immature behemoths who …

Re-Calling The Past: Poetry As Preservation Of Black Female Histories, Rachel Miller-Haughton

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper discusses the poetry of Audre Lorde and Natasha Trethewey, and the ways in which they bring to attention the often-silenced histories of African American females. Through close readings of Lorde’s poems “Call” and “Coal,” and Trethewey’s “Three Photographs,” these histories are brought to the present with the framework of the words “call” and “re-call.” The paper explores the ways in which Lorde creates a new mythology for understanding her identity as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” in her innovative, intersectional feminist poetry. This is used as the framework for understanding modern poets like Trethewey, whose identity as a …

King Arthur And The Historical Myth Of England : A Child’S Guide To Nationalism And Identity In The Victorian Era., Natalie Clare Smith

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

"Don't Read This!": Lemony Snicket And The Control Of Youth Reading Autonomy In Late-Nineteenth-Century Britain, Brittany A. Previte

Senior Independent Study Theses

This independent study investigates adult authority in youth literature in late-nineteenth-century Britain. Examining both sensational literature known as “penny dreadfuls” and the didactic magazines The Boy’s Own Paper and The Girl’s Own Paper, this project analyzes how rhetoric enforced middle class ideology outside of the classroom and shaped the youth reading experience. In an urbanizing, industrializing Britain, anxiety about social mobility ran high, and youth consumption of penny dreadfuls received suspicion due to their supposedly subversive content. This study argues that penny dreadfuls actually reinforced the social order, mirroring didactic literature in their construction of conservative adult authority. In …

The Black Death And Giovanni Bocaccio's The Decameron's Portrayal Of Merchant Mentality, Rachel D. Rickel

ETD Archive

Giovanni Boccaccio was a contemporary witness to the effects of the Black Death pandemic, the Yersinia pestis bacterial pandemic in Europe between the years 1346-53, causing 75 million to 200 million deaths across the continent alone. In The Decameron, Boccaccio depicts the outbreak’s high-mortality rates and how that was a catalyst for many social and cultural changes within fourteenth-century Europe. He also goes on to portray the devastating effects of death on, not only the physical bodies of people and animals, but also on their mental, emotional, and spiritual states, and how this accelerated their acceptance of the rising …

The System Of Subjectivity: Societal Systems And Literary Pardigms, Alyssa Rittinger

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

Patterns aid in deepening humanity's understanding of the world and what is cultivated within it. Patterns emerge in interactive disciplines such as language, literature, science, visual arts, and even mathematics. The existence of patterns assists the human need to understand a complicated world. Beyond simply seeing patterns as they are presented, I am interested in exploring how these patterns manifest into paradigmatic structures that affect the way in which society. Particularly, I am interested in the socialized perceptions of literature, and the role that systems plays in their interaction and development.

This thesis project: 1) introduces the fundamentals of systems …

Memory, History, And Forgetting In The Sandra Allen Collection Of Papers On Mormonism: A Feminist Rhetorical Historiography Of Institutional Intervention In The Equal Rights Amendment, Valerie Kinsey

English Language and Literature ETDs

This dissertation leverages archival theory, public memory theory, feminist historiography, and rhetorical theory to argue that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reinterpreted the Mormon past to engender identification and foster political action during the Equal Rights Amendment ratification period (1976-1981). Chapter One provides readers with an orientation to the Sandra Allen Collection of Papers on Mormonism and argues that its creator, Sandra Allen, marshaled her understanding of archiving, history writing, and institutional archives to make her history public. Chapter Two: On Memory uses theories of public memory to explain why the Mormon Church built the Nauvoo Monument …

Sexualizing The Body Politic: Narrative The Female Body And The Gender Divide In Secret History, Eileen A. Horansky

ETD Archive

Recent studies of eighteenth-century women writers have focused on the role of women as developers and proponents of the secret history. The secret history, recently defined by scholars such as Rebecca Bullard, Melinda Alliker Rabb, Ros Ballaster, Marta Kvande, and Rachel Carnell, among others, occupies space within several genres, including political satire and historiography. The genre's secretive nature and reliance on gossip and anecdotal evidence creates a new space for women writers that allows them to enter political discourse and offer a distinctly gendered social commentary. As public became private and private became secret, secret historians sought to expose the …

The Highland Clearances And The Politics Of Memory, Daniel Guy Brown

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the ways that the Highland Clearances of Scotland have entered into public consciousness through primary and secondary sources. My dissertation argues first that the Highland Clearances fall within the sphere of colonial intervention, and secondly that there exists a robust body of cultural production that reflects the postcolonial nature of the Highlands. This cultural production is the subject of my dissertation, which examines primary and secondary histories, historical novels, drama and public memorials that preserve and reconstruct the memory of the Clearances. The first chapter examines a number of primary and secondary histories of the Highland Clearances. …

Illusion Of Control: The Struggle For History And Humanity, Samantha R. Nystrom

Honors Theses

Through the increased amount of documentation occurring in the individual’s everyday life, through the government, through social media, etc., the question of history’s place in contemporary culture arises—who is the author of history, how is the struggle over authorship played out within contemporary literature, and where does humanity fit within this struggle? I argue that the struggle for authorship within contemporary society has suspended history. Contending authors constantly rewrite the pre-narrative, the event history records, prohibiting society from moving forward. Whoever gains the ultimate authorial role, whoever becomes the author of history, controls humanity. To examine this occurrence within contemporary …

Primitivism And The Black Form: The Effect On Contemporary Black Culture Through Hip Hop, Paryss A. Sherman

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.