Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Digital Commons Network

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network

Shells, Joline L. Scott Jan 2010

Shells, Joline L. Scott

ETD Archive

This thesis combines four short stories which revolve around themes of loss and disorientation. The first three stories, "Costa Rica," "Greece," and "On the Way Down to Florida" are derived from a larger work entitled GhostShells, and are connected by character development and a common mystery. The fourth piece, "Car Crash," is an independent piece that centers around a minor auto accident and the community activity it creates. All four pieces are linked by a central assertion that our physical bodies are merely shells for the souls within, and may be empty or full depending on the state of the …


Accounting For Mysteries: Narratives Of Intuition And Empiricism In The Victorian Novel, Brooke Taylor Jan 2010

Accounting For Mysteries: Narratives Of Intuition And Empiricism In The Victorian Novel, Brooke Taylor

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

This dissertation explores the tensions between an empirical epistemology and an intuitive method of knowing the world as depicted in popular Victorian novels. These narratives attempt to assimilate alternate modes of understanding; however, the uneasiness of the relationship between empiricism and intuition speaks to larger cultural tensions about the possibility of reconciling fact and feeling in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. I argue that intuitive and imaginative modes of cognition are continually privileged in novels that explicitly claim to adhere to empirical forms of knowledge. As I examine the work of Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and George …


Impossible Whiteness: Race, Gender, And American Identity In Early Twentieth-Century American Literature, Tarah Demant Jan 2010

Impossible Whiteness: Race, Gender, And American Identity In Early Twentieth-Century American Literature, Tarah Demant

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

In Impossible Whiteness, I reveal whiteness--though oftentimes still an implicit critical assumption of normalcy--as a complex, shifting category in the literature of early twentieth-century America, and show how gender, particularly, disrupts American whiteness. I deconstruct the various ways in which whiteness is defined legally, culturally, and in the marketplace, and demonstrate how Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, and F. Scott Fitzgerald trace these standards of whiteness and the inevitable failure of such racial: and implicitly gendered) refinement. Though critical literature has been slow to consider the role of race for these authors, I reveal them as actively participating in contemporary dialogues …