Digital Commons Network^™

Patristic Precedent And Vernacular Innovation: The Practice And Theory Of Anglo-Saxon Translation, Andrew Timothy Eichel

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation investigates Anglo-Saxon translation and interpretation during the reign of King Alfred of Wessex in the ninth century, and the Benedictine Reform of the tenth and eleventh centuries. These two periods represent a time of renaissance in Anglo-Saxon England, when circumstance and ambition allowed for a number of impressive reformation enterprises, including increased dedication to education of both clerical orders and the laity, which therefore augmented the output of writing motivated by scholarly curiosity, ecclesiastical inquiry, and political strategizing. At these formative stages, translation emerged as perhaps the most critical task for the vernacular writers. The Latinate prestige culture …

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 …

Old English Manuscripts In The Early Age Of Print: Matthew Parker And His Scribes, Robert Scott Bevill

Doctoral Dissertations

Covering the first dedicated program in the study of and publication of Anglo-Saxon texts, my dissertation examines the sixteenth-century origins of medieval studies as an academic discipline. By placing recent scholarship on media, materiality, cognition, and intellectual history in conversation with traditional paleographical methods on medieval and renaissance manuscript culture, I argue for a new way of understanding how early modern scholars studied and presented the medieval past. I take as my focus a corpus of emulative Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions produced under Elizabethan Archbishop Matthew Parker. Equal parts facsimile and edition, these transcriptions are a unique example of early modern …

A Crisis Of Friendship: Calculation And Betrayal In Shakespeare’S The Merchant Of Venice And Othello, The Moor Of Venice, Kristi Rene Sexton

Masters Theses

The idea that friendship is an illusory connection that may only exist in philosophers’ writings was a subject of interest for many of the early modern writers. Writers like Thomas Elyot, Thomas Churchyard, and Michel de Montaigne attempted to uphold idealized traditions of friendship; conversely, Shakespeare, along with writers such as Francis Bacon, presented early modern perceptions of idealized friendship only to confront and challenge the precepts. In The Merchant of Venice and Othello, the Moor of Venice, Shakespeare expresses a sometimes cynical yet realistic approach toward idealized friendship. He exposes the problem of upholding the idealized early modern …

Moral Margins: Ethics And Economics In American Northern Literature, 1837-1900, John Adam Stromski

Doctoral Dissertations

“Moral Margins: Slavery and Capitalism in American Northern Literature, 1837-1900,” focuses on the intersections of slavery, capitalism, and literature, building on recent historical scholarship on the myriad ways slavery impacted the growth of American capitalism. Nowhere is this relationship more prominent than in the nineteenth century, when slavery experienced its highest levels of economic and political influence. Scholars of capitalism and American slavery have tended to focus on the South, the obvious locus of slavery, but little attention is paid to the North, where this relationship is more veiled. I argue that Northern literature shows the ethical complexities of slavery-based …

Re-Mapping The Space Of The Sacred In The Nowell Codex, Teresa Marie Hooper

Doctoral Dissertations

The most recent codicological studies of London, British Library Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv, part 2, also known as the Nowell Codex or Beowulf-Manuscript, have looked to its many depictions of monsters as an explanation for why it was compiled. Nicholas Howe, however, proposed that the Nowell Codex functioned as a “book of elsewhere,” treating the five texts as a “gathering” particularly invested in a reappraisal of the cultural implications of geography. This dissertation describes the three prose texts of the Nowell Codex as one such “gathering” which explores alternative ideas of spiritual geography, specifically in regards to the religious …

Nothing Stranger, Helen Mary Stead

Doctoral Dissertations

“Nothing Stranger” is a collection of dystopian short stories concerned with themes of motherhood and violence submitted for consideration as a creative dissertation at the University of Tennessee.

Poor Metaphors: How Language Makes, And How Analyzing Popular Stereotypes Can Challenge, Social Attitudes That Question The Value Of The Economically Oppressed In A Democratic Society, Jacob Patrick Sharbel

Masters Theses

This rhetorical project analyzes the historical and contemporary prevalence of some of the popular metaphors that have come to characterize recipients of government assistance programs such as food stamps, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. By synthesizing the metaphor theory of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson with the sociological concepts of doxa, habitus, and heretical discourse posited by Pierre Bourdieu, this project not only spotlights these negative metaphors but also offers ways of disrupting their tacit influence over people’s perceptions, which otherwise are in danger of reproducing themselves. The metaphors discussed seek to reduce the poor on …

Gothic Naturalism And American Women Writers, Stephanie Ann Metz

Doctoral Dissertations

Traditionally, naturalism and the Gothic have been seen as genres that have little to do with one another. However, Frank Norris, one of the practitioners and theoreticians of canonical naturalism, argued that the roots of naturalism lie not in realism (as is often argued) but in romanticism. This project seeks to explore Norris’s claim by positing a new genre—Gothic naturalism. Gothic naturalism is a hybrid genre that combines the Gothic’s haunting nature and representations of the abject, grotesque, and uncanny with canonical naturalism’s interrogation of making choices and the forces of chance, determinism, and heredity. Although naturalism is traditionally seen …

Innocence Revisited: Nineteenth-Century Literature In The Works Of C. S. Lewis, Heather Louise Nation Hess

Doctoral Dissertations

Influence has long been a focus of scholarly work on C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), but this scholarly conversation largely neglects the nineteenth-century. In this project I will establish the profound influence of nineteenth-century texts, authors, and ideas on Lewis’s thought and work, arguing that the Romantic metanarrative—which traces the individual’s progression through innocence, experience, and higher innocence—provides the foundation for Lewis’s self-construction as well as his fictional work.

While the Romantics provide the initial concepts to Lewis, it is Victorian iterations of the Romantic metanarrative that Lewis most heavily revises. In his 2013 biography of Lewis, Alister McGrath suggests that …

Shelley's Delusive Flames: Self And Poetry In The Major Works, Brent Steven Robida

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores Percy Shelley’s ethical commitments in several of his major works. Its primary claim is that Shelley’s poetry is involved in the regulation and education of desire. As a fundamentally antinomian poet, Shelley grapples time and again with how moral progress will be guided absent the regulatory influences of law and religion. My dissertation offers an answer to this central impasse affecting scholarship on the ethical world Shelley imagines and attempts to realize through poetry. It argues for a dialectical movement observable in Shelley’s work of the programmatic breakdown, rather than fulfillment, of hope. This study reconsiders the …

Embodied Social Death: Speaking And Nonspeaking Corpses In Hannah Crafts’S The Bondwoman’S Narrative And Solomon Northup’S Twelve Years A Slave, Rachel Jane Dunsmore

Masters Theses

Hannah Crafts and Solomon Northup share remarkable similarities in their constructions of social death portrayed through characters’ bodies in images that not only represent this social death but do so in ways that illuminate the forced inbetweenness of slave life in antebellum America. This study looks at how the authors represent social death with figures that I term “speaking corpses” and “nonspeaking corpses” and portray embodiments of a unique type of social nonexistence. In Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative, the author constructs these images of speaking corpses in characters that are trapped in states of liminality and an existence that …

Female Warriors: Judith, Grendel's Mother, And Gender In Anglo-Saxon England, Honor Lundt

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Rewriting Rebellions: The Manichean Allegory And Imperial Ideology In The Works Of H.G. De Lisser, Rachael Mackenzie Maclean

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.