Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Act Of Seeing And Being Seen: Visual Explorations Of Queerness And Memory In Alison Bechdel’S Fun Home, Vanessa Lopez

Theses and Dissertations

In the autobiographical illustrated novel Fun Home, Alison Bechdel uses various art styles and comic techniques to examine her father’s life as a closeted gay man and his tragic suicide, as well as her own childhood and experience with homosexuality. This thesis explores how Bechdel uses the medium of the graphic novel to showcase different visual perspectives and ways of bearing witness to the past, memory, trauma, and interpersonal relationships, showing how they converge to create the story of how one generation’s model of queer identity can impact and shape the next. Bechdel presents multiple points-of-view in her exploration …

Agatha Christie: A Look Into Criminal Procedure And Gender, Carmella Monico

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

With 2020 being the 100^th year since Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published, it seems fitting to celebrate such an accomplished author with a deeper look into the inner workings of her novels. While she wrote mystery novels that involved many detectives, the two most popular are Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. This paper will examine these two detectives in regard to the criminal procedure each uses to solve their respective cases. Would her detectives’ work hold up in court then or even today? Additionally, the difference in gender between Poirot and Marple …

Adapting Animals: Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Science, And Media, Kristen Layne Figgins

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin and other proponents of evolutionary theory provided a theoretical framework for discussing the question of humanity’s place in the world. These nascent theories emphasized the shared animal nature of humans and the nonhuman creatures who had once occupied a distinctly lower place on the chain of being. My dissertation addresses the question of how nineteenth-century scientific attitudes about animals were reflected in the literature of the period. By examining culture-texts from the nineteenth century, it is clear that literature was an active participant in extending scientific knowledge, often by playing with the blending categorical …

Noisy Transgressions: Gendered Noise, Female Voices, And Noisy Narration In Anne Bronte's The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall, Brianna Phillips

English MA Theses

This thesis re-evaluates Anne Brontë’s critically undervalued novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) through its noisy women. By joining the fields of narratology and noise studies, I argue for the subversive noisiness of a novel that has been overwhelmingly dismissed by critics as a text of female silence, subjugation, and subordination. However, by offering a soundscape of gendered noise and proliferating female voices, Brontë privileges the sounds of women’s voices in such a way that female noise “re-voices” the masculine origins of the novel (Gilbert Markham’s frame narrative). Contrary to traditional readings of Brontë’s heroine, Helen Huntingdon proves subversively …

“It Could Have Happened To Any Of You”: Post-Wounded Women In Three Contemporary Feminist Dystopian Novels, Abby N. Lewis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My goal for this thesis is to investigate the concept of (mis)labeling female protagonists in contemporary British fiction as mentally ill—historically labeled as madness—when subjected to traumatic events. The female protagonists in two novels by Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure (2018) and Blue Ticket (2020), and Jenni Fagan’s 2012 novel The Panopticon, are raised in environments steeped in trauma and strict, hegemonic structures that actively work to control and mold their identities. In The Panopticon, this system is called “the experiment”; in The Water Cure, it is personified by the character King and those who follow him; …

The Fragility Of White Masculinity: An Exploration Of The White, Heterosexual Male Fantasy Of Gender In Horror, Allison D. Clark

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Keats And Shelley: A Pursuit Towards Progressivism, Serenah Minasian

Theses and Dissertations

An analyzation of the poems, letters, and works of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley from a perspective focusing on the history of sexuality, breaking gender binaries, and pushing towards progressivism. This thesis proves how John Keats is both an effeminate man who displays exemplary ways of breaking gender expectations but also a man who possess misogynistic tendencies. Also, this thesis analyzes Percy Shelley’s use of gender expectations and how he breaks them with the use of his characters. Studying these two British Romantics shows how these two cisgender, straight, white men provide an ability to push back on their …

Simulating America: Ludocapitalism Of The 1990s In Wall Street Kid And Animal Crossing, Emily C. Byrne

English Honors Theses

The 1990s witnessed a rapid and unprecedented growth in technology. People watched more television and film, conversed with strangers in anonymous chat rooms, messaged each other on personal pagers, and increased their consumption of video games. The 1990s mark the third decade of the video game industry’s existence. Similar to other forms of digital media, the video game industry participated in rapid technological development during the decade. Home and handheld consoles became increasingly widespread, driving players away from the arcades of the past. Genres such as the first person shooter, fighting games, and survival horror started gaining significant popularity. These …

Transgressive Migrations: Gender Roles, Space, And Place In American Novels, 1900-1999, Selena Gail Larkin

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I examine how gender roles combine with changes in space and place to affect women protagonists in twentieth-century American literature. I argue that as these characters migrate, the (self-)perception of their identities shift. Particularly, their outward performances as well as their internal awareness change. My analysis concentrates on the novel genre because of specific characteristics—plot, characterization, and narration. The chosen literary works on which I focus are The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Quicksand (1928), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), The Dollmaker (1954), and Under the Feet of Jesus (1996).

Concepts that I …

Sacrificial Bodies And Hegemonic Femininity: The Creation Of The Heroine In The Twilight, The Hunger Games, & Divergent Series, Tiffany R. Boyles

Senior Theses

Within this thesis, I analyze The Twilight Saga, The Hunger Games Trilogy, and The Divergent Trilogy and how the portrayal and treatment of the protagonists’ bodies within these texts uphold tenets of white, hegemonic femininity. I discuss first how their bodies are feminized, in part by their whiteness and smallness, but also through the comparison to the bodies of male characters. While the men are strong and physically capable, the protagonists are weak and physically incapable. As a result, the protagonists cannot act in the way a traditional hero might, using offensive action for self-preservation. Instead, the protagonists …

“What Can There Be But Witchcraft?”: History, Women, And Witches In Sylvia Townsend Warner’S Lolly Willowes And Graham Swift’S Waterland, Thomas Bedenbaugh

Theses and Dissertations

The ambiguous relationship between history, women and witchcraft in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes and Graham Swift’s Waterland foregrounds the constructedness of historical narratives while also recuperating women’s marginalized positions within history. Both novels link historical narratives with the received ideas upon which norms of gender, sexuality, and the nation are constructed. In recognizing this, both authors challenge the monolithic male gaze of history, revealing it to be a story which, totalizing as it may be, is not in fact “natural.” While many women in both novels are configured as haunting figures - women who confuse the boundary separation presence …