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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: Veiled Criticism Through Extreme Entertainment, Thoby Jeanty Dec 2022

Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: Veiled Criticism Through Extreme Entertainment, Thoby Jeanty

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This thesis examines the writings of Meiji novelists living during a time of transition. Their writings became known as part of a genre called Erotic Grotesque Nonsense. The genre became defined as engaging in extremes to entertain an audience captivated by the eroticism, grotesque, or even the nonsensical nature of the stories being told. The thesis discovers there is a pressing social commentary on the tumultuous transition to modernity hidden within these works. The traditions established during the Tokugawa era starting from 1603 and lasting until 1867 came under pressure with the start of the Meiji era in 1868. Each …


Breaking Free: Detectives Let The Guilty Walk, Cassandra Holcombe Jan 2022

Breaking Free: Detectives Let The Guilty Walk, Cassandra Holcombe

All Master's Theses

In a genre like detective fiction, known for affirming social order, the refusal to enforce rule of law seems like an anomaly. The number of famous detectives who have let a perpetrator go suggests that release of suspects is not a break in genre conventions, but is a wider pattern that needs to be acknowledged. This study investigates that pattern by measuring the complexity of thirteen detectives: eleven of whom release perpetrators and two of whom do not, to serve as a control group. The higher the complexity of the character, the more human the character seems to be. The …