Digital Commons Network^™

Occupying The Pedestal: Gender Issues In Ellen Gilchrist, Karon Reese

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Ellen Gilchrist's works shows the struggles of women living in a postmodern South. This dissertation explores Gilchrist's representations of southern women as they transition from the old South to modernity. Gilchrist's work depicts women who attempt to break off the pedestal of white Southern womanhood, but never quite do, often simultaneously disrupting and confirming traditional notions of a "good Southern lady." Gilchrist shows how women occupy the pedestal as a form of refuge and also as a form of protest. These are women who, as they navigate the transition to a new South, are reluctant to surrender the privilege of …

Brendan Behan’S France. Encounters In Saint-Germain-Des-Prés., Jean-Philippe Hentz

Journal of Franco-Irish Studies

No abstract provided.

Unruly Catholics From Dante To Madonna: Faith, Heresy, And Politics In Cultural Studies, Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

"During the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church went through a period of liberal reform under the stewardship of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI. Successive popes sharply reversed course, enforcing conservative ideological values and silencing progressive voices in the Church. Consequently, those Catholics who had embraced the spirit of Vatican II were left feeling adrift and betrayed. In Unruly Catholics from Dante to Madonna, scholars of literature, film, religion, history, and sociology delve into this conflict–and historically similar ones–through the examination of narratives by and about rebellious Catholics.

Essays in Unruly Catholics explore how renowned Catholic literary figures …

Emaciated Identities In William Trevor's Short Story "Lost Ground" And Charlotte Brontë'S Jane Eyre, Catherine O'Brien

Journal of Franco-Irish Studies

No abstract provided.

Home And Away: Imagining Ireland Imagining America, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

From the Editor's Note by Padraig O'Malley: Shaun O’Connell has lost none of his touch. In “Home and Away: Imagining Ireland Imagining America,” O’Connell juxtaposes two novels: Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy (1998) and Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (2009) and reveals the parallels and contrasts that enrich the discussion of Irish and Irish American identities. Toibin, an Irish writer, would have us see an America, land of the free, as an open, inviting place but exacting in redeeming promises made; McDermott, an American writer, portrays an Ireland that is magical, a little bit of heaven, but finally a closed and bitter place. …

For "The Prosperity Of Scotland": Mediating National Improvement In The Scots Magazine, 1739-49, Alex Benchimol

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses the early years the the Scots Magazine, founded in Edinburgh in 1739, examining the aims of its publishers, and the development of its political and economic views before and after the Jacobite Rising of 1745-46, in light of contemporary Scottish ideas of social and economic improvement.

"And The Roadside Fire": Portrayals Of Home Through National Song In Stevenson's Scottish Adventures, Christy Danelle Di Frances

Studies in Scottish Literature

This article considers allusions to popular Scottish song in Stevenson’s work, especially in Kidnapped, to interrogate Stevenson’s broader configuration of home, as both personal and engaged with the Scottish national consciousness, exploring how he preserves home within his modern adventure aesthetic through reference to popular Scottish song, ballads and folk songs.

Critiquing Academic Culture With Satire Through Lady Lazarus, A Fictional Biography, Amber R. Perry

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In the tradition of academic satire, Lady Lazarus is the fictional biography of the daughter of American rock musicians. In her late teens she rises to fame as confessional poet, who, despite only publishing one collection of poems during her brief life, becomes an overnight sensation. Author Andrew Altschul is satirizing academia’s need to be a part of popular culture and in doing so, privileges the ability to use controversy and conventional beauty to sell books as opposed to creating quality art. By focusing on how the author uses Hans Robert Jauss’ horizons of expectations, unreliable narrators, anecdotes in biography …

'She Had Suffered So Many Humiliations For Want Of Money’: The Quest For Financial Independence In Sarah Grand’S The Beth Book, Melissa Purdue

English Department Publications

Melissa Purdue analyzes Sarah Grand’s semi-autobiographical The Beth Book (1897), “a New Woman novel deeply concerned with money—particularly women’s lack of it,” which finds its central metaphor in the book’s “discourse about hungry bodies, food, and consumption.” Grand celebrates her protagonist Beth’s proactive attitude toward money, indicating a larger shift in New Woman literature towards an endorsement of women earning their own money while also caring for others. As The Beth Book demonstrates, Purdue writes, “financial independence and what one does with money, rather than one’s distance from money, become important signals of feminine virtue in New Woman literature.”

From Womb To Tomb: A Deconstructionist And Psychoanalytic Perspective Of Death In James Joyce's Dubliners, Bailey Gunn

Senior Capstone Theses

Intentionally absent.

Stepping Into Nationhood: The Threat Of Emasculation In Irish Society, Lauren Baker

Honors Program Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Beyond Maidens, Minxes, And Mothers: The Female Vampire And Gothic Other In Dracula, Hellsing, And Chibi Vampire, Brianna Murch

Honors Program Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Representations Of Gothic Children In Contemporary Irish Literature: A Search For Identity In Patrick Mccabe's The Butcher Boy, Seamus Deane's Reading In The Dark, And Anna Burns' No Bones, Kelly Ratte

HIM 1990-2015

Ireland is not a country unfamiliar with trauma. It is an island widely known for its history with Vikings, famine, and as a colony of the English empire. Inevitably, then, these traumas surface in the literature from the nation. Much of the literature that was produced, especially after the decline in the Irish language after the Great Famine of the 1840s, focused on national identity. In the nineteenth century, there was a growing movement for Irish cultural identity, illustrated by authors John Millington Synge and William Butler Yeats; this movement was identified as the Gaelic Revival. Another movement in literature …

The Transformative Power Of Voice In George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, Nicole L. Scimone

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion is first and foremost a play about voice, particularly about the voice of flower-girl-tumed-lady Liza Doolittle. Though the voice is not Liza’s true self, it is the way the Liza’s identity can be expressed, and thus an important marker of identity transformations in the play. This work explores three different ways in which Shaw discusses voice in the play: as singing instruction, scientific methods for recording voice, and vocalizing automata and dolls.

First, the play is deeply influenced by Shaw’s background in singing instruction from his childhood. Shaw learned voice study from his mother’s beau, a …

Encounters Of The Arabian Kind: Cultural Exchange And Identity The Tristans Of Medieval France, England, And Spain, Annie Knowles

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This work examines multiple versions of the medieval Tristan story in France, England, and Spain. Beginning with a strong historical situation for the literary analysis, the work uses elements of Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny, Edward Said’s Orientalism, and Roland Barthes’s Mythologies to identify and understand the rhetorical employment of “Oriental” flourishes in the Tristans studied. The work focuses on these Eastern influences as manifested in the characterizations of the Saracen knight Sir Palomides and in the construction, depiction, and commentary upon elements of fin’ amor that permeate the texts.

This study establishes the feasibility of intercultural exchange in the …

When Family And Politics Mix: Female Agency, Mixed Spaces, And Coercive Kinship In Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, The Awntyrs Off Arthure At Terne Wathelyne, And “The Deth Of Arthur” From Le Morte Darthur, Lainie Pomerleau

Masters Theses

In this paper I will be examining the relationship and rivalry between Morgan and Guinevere, sisters by law, and the intricate combination of love, family loyalty, and political obedience they both elicit from their shared nephew, Gawain through the systemized use of coercive kinship. I will be arguing that Morgan and Guinevere are connected by a desire to exert control and influence on the masculine, chivalric world of Camelot. In order to do so, Guinevere accesses and utilizes the masculinized, political forms of influence available to her, while Morgan is dependent on the more traditionally female modes of access through …

Portrayals Of The Dehumanization Of The American Prisoner In Miguel Piñero's “Short Eyes” And Tom Fontana's “Oz”, Gerardo C. Martinez

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This thesis analyzes the way in which Miguel Piñero, through his 1974 play Short Eyes, and Tom Fontana, through his television series Oz, portray the way in which American prisoners are transformed by a racially-defined code of behavior. This code of behavior, defined by Miguel Piñero as “the program” encourages inmates to over-identify themselves in terms of race and leads them to engage in behavior that contributes to their dehumanization. In the first chapter, the introduction, I establish the social, political, and theoretical concepts through which it is possible to analyze the process of prisoner identity transformation in these two …

My Life Examined & Tweaked, Shana-Kay Smith

Honors Projects in English and Cultural Studies

My project is an exploration into my love of poetry. It consists of a collection of twenty-seven poems that I have written and revised over the course of a year. Over that time period, I have worked on approximately forty-five poems, but I chose only twenty seven for my final portfolio. To demonstrate what my writing process is like, I have kept a book (separate and apart from the final portfolio) of all my thoughts, inspirations, drafts and revisions for the poems I write, so that the growth of each can be seen.

The majority of my poems are in …

Reviews, Emily E. Auger, Carl Badgley, Nicholas Birns, Joe R. Christopher, Janet Brennan Croft, Troels Forchhammer, Scott Mclaren, Holly Ordway, Harley Sims

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

C.S. Lewis, Poetry, and the Great War 1914-1918. John Bremer. Reviewed by Joe R. Christopher.

Collected Poems. Hope Mirrlees. Ed. and intro. Sandeep Parmar. Reviewed by Nicholas Birns.

Fantasy, Art and Life: Essays on George MacDonald, Robert Louis Stevenson and Other Fantasy Writers. William Gray. Reviewed by Scott McLaren.

C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages. Robert Boenig. Reviewed by Holly Ordway.

Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century: Essays on New Adaptations. Edited by Lynnette Porter. Reviewed by Janet Brennan Croft.

Dancing the Tao: Le Guin and Moral Development. Sandra J. Lindow. Reviewed by Carl Badgley.

Hobbit Place-names: A Linguistic …

Gender & Genre, Sharon Harrow

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

Juba’S “Black Face” / Lady Delacour’S “Mask”: Plotting Domesticity In Maria Edgeworth’S Belinda, Sharon Smith

English Faculty Publications

In Belinda (1801), Maria Edgeworth forges parallel subplots between Juba, a former African slave residing in England, and Lady Delacour, a wealthy and dissipated London socialite, both of whom undergo a process of domestication during the course of the novel. The connection Edgeworth creates between these characters allows her to explore a version of womanhood that promotes domesticity by negotiating the boundary between domestic and public life; at the same time, however, it reveals the anxieties surrounding this understanding of womanhood. Edgeworth’s novel configures Lady Delacour as a plotting woman who bridges the public/private divide, revealing domesticity to be as …

Transnational Influence In The Poetry Of Sarah Piatt: Poems Of Ireland And The American Civil War, Amy R. Hudgins

Global Honors Theses

Sarah Piatt, a recently recovered nineteenth century poet, is best known, where she is known at all, as an American poet. While this label is certainly appropriate, it should not obscure Piatt’s decidedly international focus, or more precisely, her transnational focus, especially in regard to Ireland. Piatt’s verse, considered by some to be the best poetry of her time second only to the work of Emily Dickinson, is remarkable for its quantity and breadth, but more importantly, for its subversive use of genteel style. Though her poems are generally divided into four overlapping categories, the two thematic classes of her …

Catch-22 And The Triumph Of The Absurd, Matthew H. Mainuli

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Nothing More Delicious: Food As Temptation In Children's Literature, Mary A. Stephens

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although many critics and theorists, including Roland Barthes, have discussed food in literature, little attention has been paid to the food-as-temptation story in children’s literature. In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline food is used as temptation for child protagonists, a tool to lure them into doing evil deeds or being generally mischievous. Some characters, like Alice, act as the tempters as well as the tempted, while others, like Edmund, wait passively for rescue. Coraline breaks this …

Fifty Years Of ‘The Barracks’, Eamon Maher

Articles

John McGahern’s first novel, The Barracks , was published 50 years ago, thus marking the arrival of one of Ireland’s most significant writers of the latter half of the20th century. The following year, 1964, saw the book awarded the prestigious Macauley Fellowship, which allowed McGahern to avail of a one-year sabbatical from his teaching duties in Scoil Eoin Baiste in Clontarf.

Translation As Katabasis And Nekyia In Seamus Heaney's "The Riverbank Field", Gerrit Van Dyk

Theses and Dissertations

Translation has been at the heart of Seamus Heaney's career. In his poem, "The Riverbank Field," from his latest collection, Human Chain, Heaney engages in metatranslation, "Ask me to translate what Loeb gives as / 'In a retired vale...a sequestered grove' / And I'll confound the Lethe in Moyola." Curiously, with a broad spectrum of classical works at his disposal, the poet chooses a particular moment in Virgil's Aeneid as an image for translation. What is it about this conversation between Aeneas and his dead father, Anchises, at the banks of the Lethe which makes it uniquely fitting for …

Wuthering Heights And Jane Eyre: Deadly Versus Healing Fantasy In The Lives And Works Of The Brontes, Jeanne Moose

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

In lieu of an abstract, below is the article's first paragraph.

Dreams and fantasies provide humans with a means of escape from everyday reality. According to Sigmund Freud, dreams carry one "off into another world" (Strachey, 1900, 7). Their aim is to free us from our everyday life (Burdach, 1838, 499) and to provide us with the opportunity to fantasize about how we would like our lives to be or to imagine our lives as worse than they are so that we can cope with our current situation. Dreams can also serve as wish-fulfillments, or the embodiments of fear (Strachey, …

Among School Children, Kelly Matthews

Kelly Matthews

No abstract provided.

22.1 Re-Recorded Histories

Rampike

Rampike Vol. 22 / No. 1 (Re-recorded Histories): Carol Stetser, Phil Hall, Diane Schoemperlen, Collete Broeders & Samantha Therrien, Niels Hav, Alison Dilworth, Stephen Bett, Faruk Ulay, Brenda F. Pelkey, Norman Lock, Vittori Baroni, Christopher Prendergast & Joseph Hubbard, Hélène Samson & Guy Sioui-Durand & Norman Cornett & Edward Sheriff Curtis, Holly Anderson, Paulo da Costa, M.A.C. Farrant, Joanna Katchutas & Christina Spina, Kye Kocher, Brian Aldiss & Misha Nogha & Richard Truhlar, Orchid Tierney, Gerry Smith, Beatriz Hausner, Robert Dawson, Len Gasparini, Vicky Reuter, Nicole Markotić & Meredith Quartermain & Fred Wah, Eldon Garnet.

Cover Art: Diane Schoemperlen

Surviving The City: Resistance And Plant Life In Woolf’S Jacob’S Room And Barnes’ Nightwood, Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

In Jacob’s Room (1922) and Nightwood (1936), Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes use plant life to express a profound ambivalence about the masculine-inflected ordering functions of art and morality. They show that these processes codify lived experience and distance it from the feminine and sexual. To counter this turn towards the urban inauthentic, both novels depict non-urban spaces to upend conventional notions of usefulness. They fixate on evanescent flowers, wild forests, and untillable fields as sites of resistance whose fragility and remoteness are strengths. In Jacob’s Room, I argue that the eponymous protagonist is destroyed by his conventional education …