Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Adventuring In The Winds: An Exploration Of Water Accessibility, Keystone Species, Environmental Justice, And Forest Fires In The Wind River Range, Rhianna Giron

Honors Theses

This thesis is a braided narrative that incorporates personal experience, ecological research, and poetry to explain some of the impacts of human interaction in wild spaces and of climate change. The specific areas of study in this essay are the Wind River Range, Wyoming and Nebraska. The purpose of this paper is to discuss topics related to water availability and quality, forest fires, keystone species, and social injustices related to people and environments in the Wind River Range. It is important to learn about other places than the ones we are already familiar with as it helps to instill a …

From Erotic Conquest To The Ravishing Other: Imperial Intercourse In Shakespeare's Drama And Anglo-Spanish Rivalry, Eder Jaramillo

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines how shifts in Anglo-Spanish relations from attraction to fear fashioned early modern cross-cultural encounters in imperialist terms. In discussion with recent inter-imperial studies of Mediterranean rivalries, I argue that as Anglo-Spanish relations engaged in what I refer to as imperial intercourse, one country’s expansionist ambitions become a double-edged sword, namely as said country is subsequently haunted by the threat of invasion from other rivals. This dissertation focuses on dramatic and colonialist texts representing the threat of invasion in the trope of the ravishing Other—a term with a play on words that illustrates the shift in …

Aspects Of Character: Quantitative Evidence And Fictional People, Jonathan Cheng

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

“Aspects of Character” uses quantitative evidence to trace new timelines in the literary history of characterization. The guiding premise of this work is that digital libraries and mathematical perspectives can shed new light on the practices used to configure fictional people. Using texts from the nineteenth to twenty-first century, this dissertation analyzes how different aspects of characters have transformed throughout history, coordinating quantitative experiments with the critical perspectives of literary scholars. This project begins by analyzing the characterization used in works of fiction that were reviewed by prestigious publications. This first experiment pushes back on a historical truism about “well-crafted” …

Gendering Art History In The Victorian Age: Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, And George Eliot In Florence, Antje Anderson

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

This thesis investigates how three professional Victorian women writers, Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, and George Eliot, wrote about Renaissance art in Florence. As nineteenth-century women, they were excluded from certain realms of knowledge, agency, and influence. This exclusion (complicated by their privilege in terms of class, nationality, and education) influenced the way they experienced and wrote about art. The introduction addresses how changing modes of travel, broader access to publication, and art history’s gradual emergence as an academic discipline helped shape their careers as women art writers—the well-known “Mrs. Jameson” as a popularizer of art history for a broad readership; …

The Meaning Of Peace: William Faulkner, Modernism, And Perpetual Civil War, Jason Luke Folk

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Much of scholarship regarding the presence of war in literary modernism has foregrounded psychic trauma endured by veterans of World War I. The returning soldier is often figured as representative of the war’s infiltration of the homefront. The common argument claims that the erosion of the distinction between war and peace (as well as private and public) is a mirror image of the veteran’s wounded psyche. This thesis, however, argues that peace and war in the West have always been indistinct. The body politic is, in actuality, constituted by a perpetual civil war. Furthermore, the novels of William Faulkner, because …

Inscribing The South For Harper's Weekly In 1866, Ashlyn Stewart

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The top weekly publication in the nineteenth-century United States, Harper’s Weekly, faced a new challenge after it had survived the Civil War: what would keep readers subscribing to the periodical in peacetime? To maintain their remarkably large readership, the editors looked southward and produced abundant content about the Reconstruction South for its primarily Northeastern readership. A noteworthy portion of that content was a series of powerful illustrated articles known as “Pictures of the South,” which ran from April to October 1866. Seasoned war correspondents Alfred R. Waud and Theodore R. Davis travelled through the rapidly rebuilding South on behalf of …

"You Have Witchcraft In Your Lips": Sensory Witchcraft In Shakespeare's Antony And Cleopatra And Macbeth, Hannah Kanninen

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Scholarship on witches and witchcraft within Shakespeare’s plays has been a popular subject for many scholars. But one of Shakespeare’s most famous characters has not yet been integrated into this scholarship: Cleopatra from Antony and Cleopatra. Although scholars have often noted her “witchiness,” none have argued for an interpretation of Cleopatra as a witch. This is because traditional definitions of witchcraft have not been able to include Cleopatra. In comparison, Lady Macbeth from Macbeth has often been cited as the fourth witch in the play. But this interpretation relies upon examining Lady Macbeth’s perceived masculinity, which subsequently also makes her …

The George Eliot Archive: Current Reception & Comparison Of Dh Projects 2020, Mackenzie Burch, Beverley Rilett

UCARE Research Products

• Current legal gray area for digital collections: An exception for public libraries and archives as educational tools exists for copyright infringement, but digital archives are not currently protected by this exception unless they can prove that the content is transformative.

• Benefits of archiving scholarship together: Grouping like scholarship together regardless of genre or authorship allows for unique cross-purpose or interdisciplinary connections to be drawn from the collection.

• Humanists of today must devote time and resources to the educational tools and platforms of tomorrow: Without the successful building and completion of means to ensure digital archives can be …

Time And The Bibliographer: A Meditation On The Spirit Of Book Studies, Matt Cohen

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In light of the global return of tribalism, racism, nationalism, and religious hypocrisy to power’s center stage, it is worth returning to the question of the relevance of bibliography. It is a time when, at least at the seats of power in the United States and some other places, books seem to have become almost meaningless. Bibliographic pioneer D.F. McKenzie’s strategy was not to constrain bibliography in self-defense, but to expand it, to go on the offense. What is our course? This essay explores bibliography’s past in order to suggest ways in which it can gain from an engagement with …

The Art Of The Game: Issues In Adapting Video Games, Sydney Baty

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

On the face of things, movies and video games are similar mediums. Both engage extensively in visuals and audio, both can indulge in speculative fiction, and there is a healthy amount of sharing of inspiration and content. However, this does not guarantee successful adaptations from one form to another. Movies adapted from video games are notorious for being simply terrible, but little academic attention has been paid as to why these adaptations in particular seem so unsuccessful in every way, from audience reception, critical response, and monetary returns. This issue is based on fundamental differences in the medium. Games are, …

I Know These Things & Other Lies, Jordan Elliott Charlton

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

I KNOW THESE THINGS AND OTHER LIES is a thesis comprised of an Ars Poetica essay and a collection of poems. The essay addresses my history with poetry, thoughts on how I view the act of writing, my reading inspirations, and how this collection began to be formed. The poems in this collection delve into the realities of black identity to observe the tensions between speech and silence, between memory and perpetuity. These poems address my cultural and personal history and take aim at the silences attributed to masculinity, black masculinity specifically. A sample of these poems is included here. …

Thresholds Of Curating: Literary Space And Material Culture In The Works Of Harriet Prescott Spofford, Edith Wharton, Isabella Stewart Gardner, And Willa Cather 1870-1920, Lindsay N. Andrews

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation explores the polycentric intersections between material and literary culture in four case studies spanning 1870-1920. Harriet Prescott Spofford, Edith Wharton, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Willa Cather are four women whose work reflects a capacity to defy the genre-specific boundaries for which they are canonically renown. Harriet Prescott Spofford was an important contributor to the interior design movement in the early Gilded Age following challenges to finding publication resources for her fiction within a male-dominated publishing community. Edith Wharton’s ties to material culture are well known, but less attention is granted to the ways in which her own expertise …

The George Eliot Archive: Current Reception & Comparison Of Dh Projects, Mackenzie Burch

Honors Theses

As the field of Digital Humanities continues to grow, the projects also continue to develop their own identities with unique goals. The interdisciplinary nature of multimedia projects has allowed DH to develop in a number of different directions. As a research assistant for the George Eliot Archive digital project launched in early 2019 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, it is essential for us to stay current this development in the field of DH.

Through exploring twenty digital projects and archives at various stages of development or establishment, I have gained a cohesive and current snapshot of Digital Humanities projects, and …

Book Reviews- Joanna Wharton, Material Enlightenment: Women Writers And The Science Of Mind, 1770–1830, Stephen C. Behrendt

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Joanna Wharton’s Material Enlightenment: Women Writers and the Science of Mind, 1770–1830 is a recent addition to the interdisciplinary series Studies in the Eighteenth Century that Boydell Press (Boydell & Brewer Publishers) is publishing in association with the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies. It is a welcome addition to the growing body of work that addresses the contributions of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British women writers to areas of scientific, philosophical, and otherwise “learned” discourse that have historically been associated primarily—and in many cases exclusively—with male thinkers and writers. Wharton’s study therefore helps to flesh out the picture …

“What Do I Think Of Glory?”: On Middlemarch By George Eliot, Beverley Park Rilett

Department of English: Faculty Publications

What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory?”1 This is the famous reply Emily Dickinson wrote to her bookish cousins in 1873 after her first reading of George Eliot’s novel. Dickinson’s sentiments were also my own when I completed my first reading of Middlemarch (1871–1872), about thirty-five years ago. Middlemarch is the book that made me realize literature could be more than a source of entertainment, that it could be Art with a capital A. Here was a text with fascinating and seemingly limitless possibilities for interpretation that would continue to reward scrutiny. Of course, …