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Rewrite The Past And Remember The Future: How Expatriates Built An Independent Ireland, Morgan Grabowski

English Honors Papers

This paper seeks to answer the question “How did Ireland create a unique identity after gaining independence from England?” In order to answer that question, I analyzed five different Irish authors who wrote in a timeframe spanning the first half of the twentieth century. These authors are W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Elizabeth Bowen, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. These authors, at one point or another, wrote texts which are considered Irish, while living abroad. Because of this, this paper focuses on their status as expatriates, and how that influenced their contributions to the Irish Literary Revival, which is the literary …

‘To “Meddle Wi’ The Thistle”’: C. M. Grieve’S Scottish Chapbook, The Little Magazine, And The Dilemmas Of Scottish Modernism, Scott Lyall

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines C. M. Grieve’s (Hugh MacDiarmid’s) most important journal enterprise, The Scottish Chapbook, which critics have assumed marks the beginning of a modernist Scottish renaissance. Against this view, this article argues that the range of contributions to the Chapbook were generally not modernist in their formal characteristics, many recalling the Victorian or fin-de-siècle periods. While the Chapbook’s brief lifespan (1922–23) was typical for modernist little magazines, the dilemmas encountered by Grieve’s periodical – restricted finances, lack of avant-garde contributors – are explained here as a side-effect of ‘localist modernism’, a concept defined by Eric B. White.

Trapped In Time: Examining The Academy's Temporal Confines In The Works Of James Joyce And Sally Rooney, Alice Condry-Power

English Honors Theses

In this paper, I propose that James Joyce reveals the ways in which artists registered the rising imposition of public time within schools which subsequently contributed to the mechanization of art and an emphasis on original production. Then, Sally Rooney helps us to see that these anxieties are still present in what Ian Kidd has labeled our “culture of speed” (339). Like the literary modernists, we are afraid that humans have been mechanized with the sole motivation of efficient production which leaves no time for creative thought and innovation. In response to these concerns, we have placed a great amount …

Capacious Feminism: Intimacy And Otherness In Mina Loy's Poetry, Elise Ottavino

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores Loy’s interest in the “woman’s cause” to interrogate how the poet was recaptured as an early feminist figure by the academy. After Virginia Kouidis “rediscovered” Loy’s work in the 1980s, the poet has been consistently drafted as a central feminist figure despite her lack of commitment to organized feminist movements of her time. This retrospective lens offers a catachrestic view of Loy’s feminism. I use “catachresis” to refer to the slightly inaccurate use of “feminism,” tinted by current perceptions of the term, but also to hint at Loy’s capacious feminine poetics. While the rise of feminist theories …

Claude Mckay's Protest Sonnets, Lily Jensen

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

The sonnet tradition is rich with change. It is a genre forged in strict conventions: fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, a volta (or even multiple turns), and themes of praise and unrequited love. Because of these rules, sonneteers from Petrarch to Shakespeare, Donne to Rosetti, and Hopkins to Hughes have used this form and bent it to their own personal uses. The sonnet has an intense social, cultural, and political history. This paper analyzes how Claude Mckay both used the conventions of the sonnet tradition and broke from the sonnet tradition in the poems “If We Must Die” and “The Lynching” …

Exploring The Matriarchal Past To Forge A Modern Identity: Maternal Origins In Woolf And Ihimaera, Kirsten W. Burningham

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Though the writings of Virginia Woolf and Witi Ihimaera are “incommensurable” in many ways, I find “commesurablilities”––the kind of commensurabilities the Susan Stanford Friedman seeks out across the planetary landscape of modernism––in the way they negotiate a new creative identity in a modern environment with the bang clash of history and present ringing in their ears. I see this commensurability in at least three key features: 1) Woolf and Ihimaera each gave birth to new literary movements: Woolf was mother to high British Modernism with experimental techniques such as free indirect discourse and the relegation of plot to the background; …

Love On The Spectrum: Djuna Barnes’S Case Against Categorization In Nightwood, Kaitlyn A. Alford

Masters Theses

Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is a challenging and beautiful text that continues to confound readers almost 100 years after its original publication. Though the text is often read as a “lesbian” novel, I consider the possibilities available when we read this text instead with a more open queerness in mind. By looking at the novel’s treatment of image, time, history, gender, sexuality, and identity, a new way of reading is revealed which rejects moves of taxonomization and categorization. This thesis explores how Barnes challenges dominant modes of representation and understanding, not to be a simple contrarian, but to present a new …

Fragments Of A Writer’S Mind: Virginia Woolf In Her Own Words, Baheya Zeitoun

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a thematic reading of select autobiographical and theoretical works by Virginia Woolf. It utilizes Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of the rhizome as a methodological framework. The rhizome does not have a hierarchal structure but is rather interconnected. In the same way, the chapters interweave the multi-disciplinary theoretical approaches to connect the disparate factions of the modernist writer’s mind and life.

The early twentieth century saw the rise of post-suffrage writers with narratives that diverged from male-centric values. Woolf is one of the writers who makes a clear distinction between male and female values by championing women’s experiences …

Gender And Colonialism: An Intergenerational Conversation In African Literature, Khadizatul Kubra

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

It is thought that African literature tends to be dominated by the masculine-oriented politics that also characterizes African public political life. In some cases, this is true, but there is a feminist movement in Africa, and many African women writers are using global feminist principles and global anti-colonial principles to write a different kind of literature. As a consequence, recent novels such as Yvonne Vera’s Nehanda (1993), set in Zimbabwe, and Petina Gappah’s Out of Darkness, Shining Light (2019), revise past, often male, African writers’ approaches to depicting the genders, even as they also criticize, implicitly or explicitly, still-widespread colonialist …

The Postmodern And The Personal In Edna St. Vincent Millay’S Aria Da Capo, Roxanne Rankin

Munn Scholars Awards

Aria Da Capo, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1919 play, has thus far been largely ignored in literary criticism. This essay, through a historical survey of Millay’s previous critical reception followed by a close reading of Aria Da Capo, attempts to explain and then bridge this gap in academic scholarship. A postmodernist reading of the play will then illustrate why Millay’s work still confounds scholars today and how Aria Da Capo specifically continues to be relevant more than 100 years after it was first produced.

“Decorate The Dungeon With Flowers And Air-Cushions:” Virginia Woolf And War, Claire Dumont

Scripps Senior Theses

Virginia Woolf was particularly interested throughout her career in writing about war, ranging from the perspective of a depressed World War I veteran and his wife in Mrs. Dalloway, a dinner party held during an air raid in 1917 in The Years, an argument for the connections between patriarchal society and war in Three Guineas, and a pageant of British history held before World War II in Between the Acts. Woolf specifically writes of war as it impacts spheres away from the battlefield, in a way that is inherently gendered to her experience as a woman …

“What Do Any Of Us Really Know About Love:” A Discussion Of Irony Within Raymond Carver’S Short Story Cycle What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Niyonna Johnson

Honors College Theses

With minimalist technique, Raymond Carver manages to accurately depict a depressed working-class America. Current contemporary criticism has focused on the main themes of Carver’s work such as the struggle with identity, alcoholism, disconnection, and domesticity hardships; the one ideal that has seemed to be missing is the irony that lies within the lives of the characters. This paper will analyze, in depth, short stories from a short story cycle of Raymond Carver and detail how their current situations are directly juxtaposed by their occupations and how this benefits the currently discussed themes of his work.

To The Lighthouse Or To Mrs. Ramsay? A Study Of Materialization Through The Symbolism Of The Lighthouse In Virginia Woolf’S To The Lighthouse, Virginia Moscetti

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In this paper, I argue that the “lighthouse” in Virginia Woolf’s novel To The Lighthouse operates as a symbol for Mrs. Ramsay’s “self-hood” and for Mr. Ramsay’s obscure desire for sanctuary and domesticity in Mrs. Ramsay. Through this symbolism I further contend that Woolf renders the ambiguous processes associated with self-hood and desire materially legible and, in doing so, demonstrates how metaphor and symbolism reconstitute our material world into representation. Moreover, I argue that we can conceptualize the lighthouse symbolism revolving around and centered in Mrs. Ramsay in terms of T.J. Clark’s “dual figure”; a figure with two symbolic connotations …

There Can Be But The One Ezra Pound: Rearticulating Hugh Selwyn Mauberley As Modernist Autobiography, Joshua H. Moore

Masters Theses

Ezra Pound took Eliot’s theory of Literary Impersonality seriously and rejected biographical readings of his poetry. Yet, his poem Hugh Sewlyn Mauberley contains explicitly autobiographical material, which is directly related to the poem’s meaning and has been referenced repeatedly in historical criticism of the poem. This creates a paradox of interpretation, in which the poem’s interpretive meaning stands in contrast with the author’s preferred style of interpretation. The intent of this Thesis is to work within this paradox by applying new criticism on literary autobiography to the poem; specifically the work of Max Saunders, Kevin Wong, and Hannah Sullivan. As …

Ghosts And Ethics In The Early Works Of James Joyce, Michael Menase

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the last 20 years, critics have contributed new insights into the character development, overall messages, themes, and other literary aspects of James Joyce’s works by focusing on their ethical implications. By following an intertextual method and by performing close readings of Joyce’s texts, I try to fill a gap in the scholarly literature by adding a related focus on ghosts to the conversation about Joyce’s ethics and those of his characters. Focusing on Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I hope to show that the ghosts in Joyce’s corpus motivate characters and readers to …

Intimacy, Unity, And Shared Consciousness In The Novels Of Virginia Woolf, Meghan Rose Condas

Scripps Senior Theses

In the novels of Virginia Woolf, the difficulties of deep intimacy are troubled by the limitations of language and the fear of shame and vulnerability. What can characters express, and do words have the ability to appropriately describe their feelings of love and desire? Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves grapple with the penetrability of the mind and the potential for shared thought between characters. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf utilizes Clarissa and her relationship with men to highlight how eroticism and affection are inhibited by shame. To evade the anxieties of articulating romantic feelings and …

Femininity Reclaiming Chivalry In The Harry Potter Series, Ashley M. Watson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper focuses on the reclaiming of chivalric values by female characters in the Harry Potter series by comparing them to Arthurian characters. Scholars have extensively compared the narrative of the Knights of the Round Table to the global phenomenon of the Harry Potter series, but in this paper I explore, through a feminist lens, a character comparison of the Harry Potter novels and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. I will show how female characters in modern literature reclaim chivalry. This is important because it exemplifies a shift in the position of women into a more active role. I …

The Spooky Vein: The Reparative Gothic-Modern In The Works Of Richard A.W. Hughes, Corwin R. Baden

English Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores the dual nature of Richard A.W. Hughes as a marginalized Gothicist and modernist. This duality facilitated the development of the author’s reparative vision for a 20th-century world traumatized by planetary war. The present study utilizes close readings—both surface and symptomatic—combined with archival research to assert that Hughes fashions this reparative imperative consistently across his corpus: in his short stories, poems, novels, stage plays, and screenplays. In his short stories, this vision includes an embrace of the Stranger, a shadowy Gothic figure whose possessions, power, difference, and familiarity lead the human subject from contestation, through representation, and toward …

Feminist Modernist Dance, Melissa Bradshaw, Jessica Ray Herzogenrath

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This is the first of two special issues of Feminist Modernist Studies dedicated to feminist modernist dance (the second will be Summer, 2022). We have wrestled in our joint editorial work here, as well as in our own work, over the disjunctions embodied in these three terms conjoined. Though feminist scholars have been doing important work in modernist studies for half a century, the term modernism remains mired in gatekeeping canon formations that center white male artists, primarily writers, with few exceptions. The continued need to specify “feminist modernism” signals an exasperating truism that modernism persists in its reliable male-orientation. …

Between The Visual And The Verbal: An Aesthetic Of Open Wounds In Post-Traumatic Experience Of The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), Maryam Ghodrati

Doctoral Dissertations

Trauma theory of the 1990s pioneered by Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Geoffrey Hartman has been criticized by postcolonial scholars such as Irene Visser, Michael Balaev, and Stef Craps for being neglectful of the trauma of the colonial world in adopting a deconstructivist approach and psychologization of experiences of trauma. This antagonism between the traditional and postcolonial trauma theory has resulted in even deeper isolation of the human subject at the center of this argument. In my research, I highlight the reality and materiality of traumatic suffering in the shared realm of the human body to suggest a need for …

Modernist Amateur Economists: Heterodox Economic Theory And British Literary Modernism, Samuel Smith

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Modernist Amateur Economists: Heterodox Economic Theory and British Literary Modernism, I argue that a range of British writers of literary modernism responded to a moment of institutional and economic instability by engaging with heterodox economic theories in their literary works. Paying close attention to the institutional history of the academic disciplines of Literary Studies and Economics and to the state of heterodox economic theorization in the first half of the twentieth century, I assemble a group of writers I term “Modernist Amateur Economists,” who rejected the tendency of professional economists to abstract economic questions from broader cultural contexts. In …

Woolf As Window: A View Into Martín Gaite’S Treatment Of Alienation In El Cuarto De Atrás, Elizabeth Cornick

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

In this article, I explore the Spanish writer Carmen Martín Gaite’s affinity with Virginia Woolf’s modernism. In particular, I analyze the modernist theme of alienation so prominent in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse that Martín Gaite expresses in her novel El cuarto de atrás (The Back Room). To do so, I provide historical analysis of Woolf’s and Martín Gaite’s respective cultures to contextualize the ways in which the writers treat modernization as an alienating condition of modernity in the novels. I focus on Woolf’s depiction of estrangement experienced by the characters Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe from To the …

(In)Hospitable Modernity: Hospitality And Its Discontents (1920–1953), Daniel A. Hengel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation discusses the tacit forms of political activity operating through the performance and space of hospitality in modern fiction. I read the habitus, praxis, and dissemblages of hospitality in modern fiction as conduits that reveal dialectics of submission and resistance to Victorian and Edwardian markers of normativity. This is ultimately an infrapolitical work. I locate fulcrums of dissent, cloaked in a guise of hospitality, in the domestic sphere and the politicization of formerly private spaces into sites with the potential to reorder legitimated forms of agency. This project attempts to uncover veiled forms of sociopolitical resistance in and through …

T.S Eliot And The Impersonal Theory Of Poetry, Brahim Houban

Dirassat

Literary theories and movements have different phases and characteristics. Modernism as a literary movement has been seen as a remarkable one that shaped the English literature as a whole. Thanks to T.S. Eliot and many others, modernism has become a unique phenomenon and abackbone in English literature especially when it comes to the poetic diction and the role of the poet in society. In the Romantic Era, the poet is attached to his poem and the productions are merely spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. For modernism in general and T.S. Eliot I particular, the poet should be detached from any …

Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton

Publications and Research

This article historicizes musical symbolism in Melvin B. Tolson’s poem “Dark Symphony” (1941). In a time when Black writers and musicians alike were encouraged to aspire to European standards of greatness, Tolson’s Afro-modernist poem establishes an ambivalent critical stance toward the genre in its title. In pursuit of a richer understanding of the poet’s attitude, this article situates the poem within histories of Black music, racial uplift, and white supremacy, exploring the poem’s relation to other media from the Harlem Renaissance. It analyzes the changing language across the poem’s sections and, informed by Houston A. Baker Jr.’s study of “mastery …

Dorothy Richardson’S Pilgrimage: Text And Contexts, Nathan Mcivor

HON 499 Honors Thesis or Creative Project

This honors thesis emphasizes how Pilgrimage represents literary Modernism, a major artistic movement in the twentieth century, by pioneering representations of subjective temporality in fiction through the stream of consciousness technique.

Virginia Woolf And Her World, Václav Paris

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

To Reach The Unreachable Stars: Reexamining The Shared Arthurian Vision Of C. S. Lewis's Science Fiction Trilogy And Raymond Chandler's Marlowe Novels, Hollis Thompson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although Raymond Chandler and C. S. Lewis seem to be a rather strange pairing, the ways in which they both borrow from Arthurian literature and use the myth to speak to their cultural moment are strikingly similar. Following T. S. Eliot’s use of the Grail quest in The Waste Land (which set a standard for the use of such material in Modern literature), these authors use Arthurian elements as a means of exposing hidden connections between the fragments of the literary past and the present within Chandler’s Marlowe novels and Lewis’s science fiction trilogy. Both men present Western identity as …

Samuel Daniel’S Lyric Reception: The Role Of Poet-Critics From Wordsworth To Winters, Caleb Mcghee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Elizabethan poet Samuel Daniel was popular in his day, producing lyric, dramatic, and narrative poems. Contemporary anthologies, however, memorialize him primarily as a lyric poet, one that usually gets few entries. My thesis shows how Daniel had a minor reputation as a lyric poet by the 1960’s, despite having high-profile admirers. These well-known poet-critics who engaged with his work are essential to analyzing his lyric reputation: owing to the Romantic emphasis on the lyric, I begin with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s reception of his lyrics in the 19th century. I then analyze the turn of the century …

Making Room For One's Own: Literal And Literary Feminine Space In The Works Of Virginia Woolf, Annika Hawkinson

Honors Projects

In this project I explore Virginia Woolf’s modernist preoccupation with representing ordinary, female life in her fiction. Reading her novel Mrs. Dalloway alongside some of her more explicitly feminist essays, I analyze the way that her female protagonist, Clarissa, navigates the physical world around her, and why the spaces she occupies are so crucial to her character. Because I am primarily interested in the question of feminine space, this project is divided in two parts that respectively explore Clarissa’s relationship with the “outside” world of the city and the “inside” world of her home. It is my belief that by …