Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Antisemitism & Vampires: The Surprising Roots Of A Popular Cultural Monster, Hannah Ross

English

This essay was for Justin Shaw’s fall 2023 English major capstone class. The essay examines antisemitism and vampires, specifically Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, John Polidori’s short story The Vampyre; A Tale, and the episode “Monster Movie” from the TV show Supernatural through the lens of antisemitic stereotypes. By looking at the literary history of the vampire one can trace its physical antisemitic stereotypes and the influence of fear of the “other” with reverse-colonization by Jews. Starting with historically classic 19th century texts and ending with a modern day television show, it is evident that the antisemitic physical stereotypes …

Veiled Victorian Vampires: What Literary Antagonists Reveal About Societal Fears Of 19th Century England, Jenna Harford

Honors Theses

In my thesis paper I look at three primary texts, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to analyze their main antagonists through a vampiric lens. I explain how the characters of Bertha Mason, Miss Havisham, and Dorian Gray are all written with veiled vampiric traits that revolve around themes of sexuality, secrecy and seclusion, and unbridled physical and emotional violence. Although none of these texts is obviously a “vampire novel”, the authors lean into vampire tropes including eerie physical description, doubled relationships, and other vampire lore that can be best …

Eng 150 U. S. Literature And Thought (19th C. American Literatue), Susan Amper

Open Educational Resources

Why do so many women in 19^th c. American fiction end up dead? Why are so many men in 19^th c. American fiction single or why do they murder their wives to gain that status? Why does no superhero have a wife? The answers to all these questions and more can be found in this class. America, in the 19^th c. had a literary Renaissance—a kind of rebirth. Most of the works we are going to study were produced in the short span of 35 years from 1835 to 1850. And not only was there a lot …

Writers In Retrospect: The Rise Of American Literary History, 1875-1910, Claudia Stokes

Claudia Stokes

In the aftermath of America's centennial celebrations of 1876, readers developed an appetite for chronicles of the nation's past. Born amid this national vogue, the field of American literary history was touted as the balm for numerous "ills"—from burgeoning immigration to American anti-intellectualism to demanding university administrators—and enjoyed immense popularity between 1880 and 1910. In the first major analysis of the field's early decades, Claudia Stokes offers important insights into the practices, beliefs, and values that shaped the emerging discipline and have continued to shape it for the last century. She considers particular personalities—including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Dean Howells, …

Refiguring George Macdonald: Science And The Realist Novel, Karl Hoenzsch

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This article analyzes George MacDonald’s realist novels. It looks at how David Elginbrod, Alec Forbes of Howglen, and Lilith engage with scientific discourse and epistemological concerns of the period. These scientific and epistemological dealings include a positive evaluation of evolution, a resistance to pseudoscience and Calvinism, an endorsement of non-dualism, and an analysis of scientific models and methods. The generic classification of Lilith as a realist novel with fantastical elements is discussed.

Living In An (Im)Material World: Consuming Exhausted Narratives In New Grub Street, Emma C. Eisenberg

Honors Papers

Journalists often write about the death of various print and media forms—deaths that have yet to occur, but which we continually anticipate in deference to a tacit law which discards the past as a “useless encumbrance” of outmoded styles of consumption. But is that encumbrance necessarily useless? In this paper, I argue that George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), which narrates the deaths of two realist novelists and has been called an “epitaph for Victorian fiction,” lives out its own virtual death to good purpose. I discuss how Gissing uses the realist novel’s transitional or partially exhausted state to conserve …

Marcus Clarke: Confronting Spectacle With Spectacle In For The Term Of His Natural Life, Mary E. Perkins

English 502: Research Methods

While Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life is unquestionably a valuable contribution to Australian literature, his journalism career also deserves equal attention, particularly as an influential antecedent to the creation of his seminal text not only on a technical basis as John Conley details in “Marcus Clarke: The Romance of Reality”, but also as a social platform. In “Marcus Clarke and the Society of the Spectacle: Reflections on Writing and Commodity Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Melbourne,” Andrew McCann demonstrates how the “Peripatetic Philosopher”— one of Clarke’s more successful journalistic endeavors—and other selections reveal Clarke’s critique of the colonial …

Quantitative Patterns Of Stylistic Influence In The Evolution Of Literature, James M. Hughes, Nicholas J. Foti, David C. Krakauer, Daniel N. Rockmore

Dartmouth Scholarship

Literature is a form of expression whose temporal structure, both in content and style, provides a historical record of the evolution of culture. In this work we take on a quantitative analysis of literary style and conduct the first large-scale temporal stylometric study of literature by using the vast holdings in the Project Gutenberg Digital Library corpus. We find temporal stylistic localization among authors through the analysis of the similarity structure in feature vectors derived from content-free word usage, nonhomogeneous decay rates of stylistic influence, and an accelerating rate of decay of influence among modern authors. Within a given time …

Opium Use In Victorian England: The Works Of Gaskell, Eliot, And Dickens, Jessica Rae Henderson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

England’s opium trade with China in the nineteenth century, often conjures up images of a powerful nation, for financial gain and heedless of the damage caused, nefariously thrusting addictive drugs on an unwitting Chinese people and unwilling Chinese government. But this image hides the English side of the story, i.e. England’s own problem with opium. The English imported thousands of pounds for domestic use each year in the 19^th century, and until the late 1860s its sale was completely unrestricted. It was used as a veritable cure-all for various diseases, as well as a relief for any kind of …

Performing Remediation: The Minstrel, The Camera, And The Octoroon, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Merely A Pictorial Subject: The Turn Of The Screw, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Shaping A Body Of One’S Own: Rebecca Harding Davis’S Life In The Iron Mills And Waiting For The Verdict, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Shaping A Body Of One’S Own: Rebecca Harding Davis’S Life In The Iron Mills And Waiting For The Verdict, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Painting, Photography And Fidelity In The Tragic Muse, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

Photographs can approach the elegance of paintings, but reproductions can show the distortion of photographs - so The Tragic Muse (1890) suggests, complicating critical understandings of James and visual art. Dramatizing artists' fidelity, James resists assuming that families, races, and genders provide similar options. Fidelity in art can mean 'infidelity' in life, lead to 'adulterated' reproductions, and impugn understandings of inherited and performed identities - concerns which resurface in The American Scene (1907) when James contemplates immigrant populations and in A Small Boy and Others (1913) when a family daguerreotype becomes evidence of his own fidelity.

Church, Chapel And Clergy In Margaret Oliphant's Chronicles Of Carlingford, Karen A. King

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis examines the fictional works of Magaret Oliphant’s Chronicles of Carlingford in order to explain her understanding of the significance of Church and Chapel communities and their clergymen within an insular and atypical provincial community in mid-nineteenth century England. By drawing on a variety of examples in the novels and in real life, the thesis argues that Oliphant was a serious commentator on religious matters and controversies and not just a teller of tales. The thesis will address the significance of Oliphant’s engagement with a range of religious and social matters concerning the Church of England with a qualified …

Mormon Culture Meets Popular Fiction: Susa Young Gates And The Cultural Work Of Home Literature, Lisa Olsen Tait

Theses and Dissertations

The few studies of Mormon home literature that have been published to date dismiss it as inferior artistry, an embarrassing if necessary step in the progression towards true Mormon literature. These studies are inadequate, however, because they divorce the texts from their context, holding them up to standards that did not exist for their original audience. Jane Tompkins' theory of texts as cultural work provides a more satisfactory way of looking at these narratives.

Home literature is thoroughly enmeshed in the cultural discourse of its day. Beneath the surface, these didactic stories about young Mormons finding love with their foreordained …

Cultures Of Letters: Scenes Of Reading And Writing In Nineteenthcentury America. By Richard H. Brodhead., Steven J. Mailloux

English Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Changing Role And Portrayal Of 'The Individual' In Historical Context In Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice And Emma, George Eliot's Middlemarch And Daniel Deronda, And Thomas Hardy's The Mayor Of Casterbridge And Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Juliana Payne

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

In an analysis of six novels published in the nineteenth century, the thesis examines the changing role and portrayal of the 'individual' in Victorian fiction. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1816), George Eliot's Middlemarch (1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876), and Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) are analysed in depth. The discussion focuses on how the social and historical context shapes the development of theme, character and plot in the novels, especially focusing on literary conceptions of character as an individualistic being within the wider framework of society. The emphasis is …

The 'Vanity Fair' Of Nineteenth-Century England: Commerce, Women, And The East In The Ladies’ Bazaar, Gary Dyer

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Victorian Ideology And The Discourse Of Gender In Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders And The Return Of The Native, Juliana Payne

Theses : Honours

This analysis will focus on the perceived harmony or disjunction between Hardy's representation of women in his fiction, and the middle class ideologies of gender difference and sexuality during what is referred to as the Victorian period, roughly the 1840s to the 1880s. The parameters of the dominant middle class ideology are established, as certain ideas will be held to be predominant or widely accepted at a given time. The aim of this thesis is to ascertain to what extent Hardy subverts the dominant ideology, and how he is involved in contesting the conventional contemporary representations of women. Part of …

Doubling, Splitting And Fragmentation In Bleak House, Mary Cleopatra Lloyd Da Silva

Theses : Honours

This thesis draws mainly on psychoanalytic theories, and explicates the doubling leitmotiv in Bleak House (1971), which portrays Victorian personality as split and its society as fragmented. This is seen as a suggestion of Dickens' conception of human identity as fragile and vulnerable. Each autonomous character represents a single aspect of personality, so that conflict, when it occurs, is in fact intra-psychic, rather than inter-psychic. The study investigates the problem of the dual or split personality via the quest for identity, and addresses Dickens' perceived need to reward self-effacing characters and punish the assertive. It explores the psychological ramifications of …

Carnival And Loitering In The Waggoner, Gary Dyer

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Unwitnessed By Answering Deeds: 'The Destiny Of Nations' And Coleridge's Sibylline Leaves, Gary Dyer

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Agenda: External Development Affecting The National Parks: Preserving "The Best Idea We Ever Had", University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center

External Development Affecting the National Parks: Preserving "The Best Idea We Ever Had" (September 14-16)

Conference organizers and/or faculty included University of Colorado School of Law professors Lawrence J. MacDonnell and Daniel Magraw.

The conference will be held at the Aspen Lodge, adjacent to Rocky Mountain National Park near Estes Park, Colorado.

It was Wallace Stegner who called the national parks "the best idea we ever had." The continuing increases in usage attest to their popularity. National parks are created to preserve areas of special scenic and cultural value for enjoyment and use. Managing the parks in a manner that protects the important values and purposes for which they were created presents important and difficult …

The Crucible Of Conversation: A Study Of Jamesean Dialogue, Betsy B. Aswad

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

My own initial bemused reaction to the language of Henry James I can place in a classroom in 1960 where, with a class of fellow English majors—-old hands, all of us, at Faulkner and Joyce–I was, in the first chapters of The Wings of the Dove, as “awfully at sea” as Merton Densher was when he first met Kate Croy. A timid question drew from the professor probably the best advice that can be given to a novice at reading James: “You can't just skim James, you know; you have to read every word.” Later, teaching The Turn of the …

Bayard Taylor's The Prophet: Mormonism As Literary Taboo; Calaveras County Comes Of Age; The Erosion Of Belief In The Poetry Of Clinton F. Larson, Thomas D. Schwartz

Theses and Dissertations

The three papers included in this thesis reflect my development as a graduate student during the course of my master's program at Brigham Young Universtiy. I came to Brigham Young University interested in creative writing and developed a love for research and criticism. My work in nineteenth century American literature led to the first two papers. Both deal with literary history, the first narrow in scope, devoted to a study of the significance of a single play, the second broad in scope, devoted to a study of the unifying thread of anti-sentimentalism in the writings of the major American realists. …

A Critical Study Of The Seven Major Victorian Pessimistic Poets, Frank W. Childrey

Master's Theses

The following thesis is a critical study of seven sig­ nificant Victorian pessimistic poets. Having as its basis a seminar paper for Dr. Lewis F. Ball in which four of the Victorian pessimists were discussed, the original study was expanded in order to include the remaining three.

In this critical study, the emphasis has been placed mainly upon the themes characteristic of these pessimistic poets, and the poems that I consider to be the best examples of their various attitudes have been incorporated, either partially or in full, into the text of this thesis. Fur­thermore, though these chapters are not …

An Introduction To The Victorian Woman : A Comparative Study Dealing With Poetical And Historical Sources, Lois Iffert Rudge

Master's Theses

The purpose of studying the Victorian women in poetry has been to find some relation between the historical woman and the literary woman. Louise E. Rorabacher in a similar thesis considered only the novels of the day (Victorian Women in Life and Fiction, University of Illinois, 1942). Her purpose was to determine the validity of the concept of the woman in the novel in terms of historical fact. She concluded that the fictional woman was real, in a narrow, myopic sense, but that she did not reflect the social change. The picture of her social and conservative home life was …

Emerson, A Transcendental Propagandist, Hilda Turner Darensbourg

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation

No abstract provided.