Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Georgia Ghosts: History, Folklore, And The Roots Of The Southern Gothic, Katherine M. Mcdowell

Master's Projects

There is something quintessentially human about ghost stories, yet particular regions tend to be more powerfully associated with haunted folktales than others. One of the regions is the southeastern United States. In fact, these oral traditions appear to have influenced the area's best-known literary subgenre: the Southern Gothic.

Why is the South considered haunted? Are there particular qualities in historical events that make them more likely to engender ghost stories? What makes the South's folkloric spirits so powerful that they appear even in modern literature? Most of all, what connects the region's history and folklore with the Southern Gothic? By …

Noticing The Brush Strokes: Literary Markers In Hebrew Narratives, Shelbey Hunt

Masters Theses

As the people who set out to write, edit, and form the Bible may have used embellishments to enhance their narratives, could they also have left literary markers to help the reader chart a course between the historical and the enhanced? The purpose of this thesis is to find these literary markers. Exposing any potential grammatical or syntactical signpost can help the reader understand how they should view a given Biblical story and help reveal the messages the authors behind the scripture were sharing. The book of Jonah will be used as a case study to both discover and elaborate …

Witchy Politics: Witches And Witchcraft As Political Tropes From Malleus Malleficarum (1487) To Les Sorcières De La République (2016) And The Mercies (2020), Mallaury Joëlle Marie Gauthier

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The focus of this thesis are two recent novels featuring witches: Chloé Delaume’s Les Sorcières de la République(The Witches of the Republic, 2016) and Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Mercies (2020). The first is a futuristic dystopia set in 2062, during the witch trial of the Sibyl of Cumae. The second is a work of historical fiction based on witch trial records and set in seventeenth-century Finnmark (Norway). Both are feminist novels, and both emphasize the political valence of the witch as a gendered figure. This figure emerged from the misogyny of early modern demonology but acquired its contemporary contours …

Beyond Words: Exploring History Through The Lens Of Literary Theory And Research, Andrea Weaver

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

The narrative of this Master's portfolio reflects on the academic journey of Andrea Weaver. The three projects showcased in this portfolio reflect her experience during the Master of Arts in English with a Specialization in English Teaching program. It includes a rhetorical Ohio Suffragist unit plan created for high school sophomores, a seminar paper critically analyzing the film Interview with the Vampire (1994), and a digital presentation of artifacts and research about literary theorist Wolfgang Iser and his work in Reader Response Theory presented on the platform Microsoft Sway. The framework of New Historicism is threaded throughout each project, linking …

Speculative Constitutions In Ursula K. Le Guin’S Hainish Cycle And The Rights Of Nature, Ted Hamilton

Faculty Journal Articles

This paper examines two speculative examinations of humanity as a unified species and agent of ecological change: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle and the rights of nature movement. Le Guin’s Cycle imagines the slow interplanetary reintegration of human polities against a backdrop of cultural and environmental difference. I read the novels of the Cycle as an allegory for the rights of nature movement, which seeks to synthesize traditional and modern knowledge in a legal solution to ecological crisis. Both discourses, I argue, productively imagine a new historical understanding of humanity’s place on Earth, but they provide a weak theory …

One Last Month, Or Clancy's Time-Box, Safiyya Bintali

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

One Last Month is a young adult (YA) novella of roughly forty-three thousand words aimed at readers in middle school and in early high school grades. Structurally, it is an “ensemble Bildungsroman”, wherein all the main characters—rather than just one—embark on journeys of emotional growth and are given significant plot focus. Through the characters, One Last Month focuses on the importance and influence of non-romantic love, specifically through homosocial relationships between the novella’s male characters. It also touches on the process of grief beyond the Kübler-Ross structure and, though more subtly, emotional expression in young men. Through one of the …

Trans-Atlantic Composition: The History Of British Academic Writing, Gareth George Rees-White

Theses and Dissertations

I author a revisionary comparative history of British Academic Writing and American Composition studies. My core argument is that the Composition story has always, ultimately, been a Trans-Atlantic one. This project serves two key goals: 1) it offers a comprehensive history of UK writing education; while 2) simultaneously offering a revisionist US history that fights the claim that uniquely American exigencies led to a uniquely American education system that therefore has little to learn from other global Compositions. This project tracks the history of university level writing education in the UK from the 1200s to the modern day, and follows …

The Malleability Of Home: A Genealogy Of Clark University's English House, Christina Rose Walcott, Justin Shaw

English

This essay details the history of the land and structures that occupy the property currently located at the corner of Hawthorne and Woodland Streets in Worcester, Mass. Covering over 300 years, it begins with the legacies of the Nipmuc and the early English colonialist settlers before moving into a discussion of Worcester's 19th Century industrialists and 20th Century acquisition by the University. The essay builds on extensive archival research using materials from both physical and digital collections such as atlases, censuses, biographies, directories, criticism, and more. To further develop the story of the English Department and its home, the essay …

Song Of Exile: A Cultural History Of Brazil’S Most Popular Poem, 1846–2018, Joshua Alma Enslen

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

Song of Exile: A Cultural History of Brazil’s Most Popular Poem, 1846–2018 is the first comprehensive study of the influence of Antônio Gonçalves Dias’s “Canção do exílio.” Written in Coimbra, Portugal, in 1843 by a homesick student longing for Brazil, “Song of Exile” has inspired thousands of parodies and pastiches, and new variations continue to appear to this day. Every generation of Brazilian writers has adapted the poem’s Romantic verses to glorify the wonders of the nation or to criticize it via parody, exposing a litany of issues that have plagued the country’s progress over the years. Based on a …

Experiencing History: A Roundtable Discussion Of Architecture, Theatre, And Culture Of England, Elyse Lamszus, Andrew Hoag, Riley Basick, Katherine Bosma, Autumn Bruens, Alaina Durr, Cynthia Morales, Madelynn Norton, Laura Rankin, Benjamin Ridler, Remington Ross, Lia Shomaly, Anna Shoup, Kaitlyn Tibbetts, Becca Witvoet, Emily Yerge

Scholar Week 2016 - present

This presentation features a roundtable discussion among students who traveled to England during Spring Break, March 5-11, 2022. This presentation seeks to share primary and secondary research about England’s architecture and theatre, as well as additional insights about England’s culture and history gained through first-hand experiences of traveling within the city of London and to Stonehenge and Bath.

The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer

English Theses and Dissertations

The Rise of an Eco-Spiritual Imaginary reveals a shared ecological aesthetic among contemporary U.S. ethnic writers whose novels communicate a decolonial spiritual reverence for the earth. This shared narrative focus challenges white settler colonial mythologies of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism to instantiate new ways of imagining community across socially constructed boundaries of time, space, nation, race, and species. The eco-spiritual imaginary—by which I mean a shared reverence for the ecological interconnection between all living beings—articulates a common biological origin and sacredness of all life that transcends racial difference while remaining grounded in local ethnicities and bioregions. The novelists representing …

Archives And Literary History: English House, Christina Rose Walcott, Justin Shaw

English

This presentation is part of a Directed Study project and was given at Clark FEST 2022. It is also associated with the longer paper, "The Malleability of Home: A Genealogy of Clark University's English House," composed collaboratively by the authors. It is about the history of Clark's English Department and, particularly, about the House it occupies. This presentation was presented orally by Christina Rose Walcott for a public audience as a culminating project in the Directed Study, and includes visual and interactive educational components. It also utilizes and showcases the project's extensive use of Open Access Resources from various digital …

Uniting England’S Two Nations: The Victorian Social Problem Novel As A Medium For Sociopolitical Change, Kat Gibson

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

Victorian social problem novels created narratives that revealed systemic sociopolitical issues present in England beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. This thesis focuses on understanding the major concerns of social problem novels centered around the English poor and working class and how they understood and communicated these issues, generated sympathy, and offered potential solutions to their readership. By analyzing a selection of these novels published from the 1830s-1850s and contextualizing them historically, this piece argues for the validity of these novels’ political commentary and different ways of approaching societal issues. This analysis targets two critical areas of concern within social problem …

The Impact Of Women On The Life And Legacy Of Mark Antony, Lauren E. Yaple

Honors Theses

Throughout the life of Mark Antony, the women he became involved with had a large impact on his political career, life, and legacy. These women, such as Fulvia and Cleopatra, used Antony as a means to achieve their own political, economic, and personal goals and were able to gain power in a very anti-feminist society through their relationships with and manipulations of him, affecting the career of Antony in many ways including his politics and his actions as a military commander, as showcased by the examination of primary sources from the late Roman Republic and early Roman empire periods. This …

Women Can Step Out Of The Shadows Of Time And Take Their Rightful Place Next To The Men Who Blazed A Trail Through The Wilderness., Bonnie Swenson

Research on Capitol Hill

Bonnie, attending USU’s statewide campus from her home in Orangeville, decided to pursue her bachelor’s degree after retirement and is studying English. In her coursework, Bonnie came across accounts of the Hole-in-the-Rock pioneer expedition in San Juan County in the late 1800s. Most research on this arduous trek has focused on the men of the expedition and the engineering innovations required to build a road into the side of a cliff. Bonnie’s work is unearthing previously disregarded accounts in library archives and amplifying the stories of the 100 women and girls who accompanied the expedition and contributed to its success. …

Transimperial Networks And East Asia: Timeline, Menglu Gao, Sophia Hsu, Waiyee Loh, Hyungji Park, Jessica R. Valdez, Adrian S. Wisnicki, Rae X. Yan

English and Literary Arts: Faculty Scholarship

To help instructors and students who may be unfamiliar with the history of East Asia and its transimperial exchanges with the Anglophone world, the creators of the “Transimperial Networks and East Asia” lesson plan cluster built this timeline, which includes some major historical events from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. This timeline comes out of our many discussions about the methodological issues that arise when the field of Victorian Studies seeks to expand its traditional geographical scope. As we quickly realized in the process of creating our cluster, the usual boundaries of the long nineteenth century (the French Revolution …

Forgotten History: The Stonewall Riots, Kaitlin Comfort

ESL for Academic Purposes

This unit covers the underrepresented history of LGBTQ+ people in the United States by exploring the landmark event: The Stonewall Riots. It primarily focuses on listening and writing domains supported by jigsaw and vocabulary acquisition activities. The use of prepositions, identifying supporting details, and summarizing are also covered. As a final project, students will have the chance to explore an underrepresented event from their own culture. This unit is targeted at high school, college, or adult students at a B2 level or higher on the CEFR scale and incorporates the use of technology. The content in the unit will serve …

Historical Figure And Literary Hero In Walter Scott’S Novels, Makhliyo Umarova

Mental Enlightenment Scientific-Methodological Journal

This article illustrates the analysis of Walter Scott’s historical novels. The aim of this work is to determine the peculiarities of the use of real historical figures in the works of the famous English writer Walter Scott. Achieving this goal led to the solution of the following tasks: consider the depiction of history in Walter Scott’s novels, to identify the description of English historical figures and literary hero in Scott’s novels. The focus of the research are the English historical novels “Waverly or Tis sixty years since” and “Ivanhoe”. The main research method is comparative analysis. The relevance of the …

Review: Heart And Soul: The Story Of America And African Americans, Rachel Schwedt, Janice A. Delong

Ages 10-12

No abstract provided.

Animal-Human Vocabulary Builder, Domenick Acocella, Rene Cordero

Open Educational Resources

The assignment helps students individually build a usable, expanding vocabulary of terms and concepts, enabling each to further contribute to the ongoing, evolving written, oral, and visual conversations centered on the use of and thought about animals for food, clothing, work, entertainment, experimentation, imagery, and companionship.

Review: Genevieve’S War, Rachel Schwedt, Janice A. Delong

Ages 10-12

No abstract provided.

Review: George Muller: The Guardian Of Bristol’S Orphans, Rachel Schwedt, Janice A. Delong

Ages 10-12

No abstract provided.

Affective Histories Of Southern Trauma: Shame, Healing, And Vulnerability In Us Southern Women’S Writing, 1975–2006, Faune Albert

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the affective impacts of historical trauma around slavery and segregation in the US South, arguing for the importance of understanding US Southern history through the ways in which it has lived and continues to live in and on the bodies of Southerners marked by race and gender and class and within emotional life in the South. The texts in this study—Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975), Dorothy Allison’s Trash (1988), Ellen Gilchrist’s Net of Jewels (1992), and Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2006)—engage the affective impacts of intergenerational and insidious trauma through portrayals of Southern women struggling to give voice …

The Poetry Of History: Irish National Imagination Through Mythology And Materiality, Ryan Fay

English Honors Theses

The thesis culminates in the twentieth century and yet it begins with the Ulster Cycle, a period of Irish mythological history that occurred around the first century common era. Indeed, since the time frame was before the arrival of the Gaels, Normans, or Christianity, the extent of this mythology’s relevance today is whatever extent it is conceptualized as “Irish.” As such, the first chapter locks onto an aspect that could feasibly transcend time and resonate with modern Irish society: gender. Of course, the epistemological dynamics of gender^[1] in the first-century common era are vastly different than the twentieth century …

Sexual And Erotic Transgression Through Aesthetic History: A Study Of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Ronny F. Ford

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

This article examines the relationship between Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetic writing and history, especially in regards to how he explores sexual transgressions. The article begins with how aestheticism works in tangent with history to further these transgressions within a historical context and especially within the realm of Victorian Christianity. Next, Swinburne’s medieval aesthetics in “The Leper” will be analyzed in regards specifically necrophilia and the taking care of a leper, and how the writing of this poem was both a condemnation of Christianity and an accidental upholding of it. The violent homoeroticism and monstrous femininity of “Anactoria” are also looked …

Lost Voices: William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, And The Nature Of History, Luke Hardin

Undergraduate Theses

The novels of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison are nothing if not haunted. Though the authors themselves remain, in many ways, diametrically opposed, their works remain inextricably entangled due to the looming specter of history that hangs over their pages. Perhaps more-so than any other writers in the 20th Century, these two towering figures of American fiction took seriously the task of unpacking the migrainous burden of history. Read together, they offer differing perspectives on the nature of writing one's own past, and how this is informed by race and class. Specifically, Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! has long been regarded …

The Roadmap: Exploring T.S. Eliot’S The Waste Land With World War One Literature, Matthew Bennett

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Through careful analysis paired with poetry, war memoirs, and novels from the same period, one can break down T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to recognize the impact of The Great War on the world's modern memory while pondering the possibility of memory as a tool to overcome trauma.

Dissecting The Man Of Steel: The Evolution Of Superman As A Reflection Of American Society, Marie Gould

Undergraduate Theses

Since his debut during the Great Depression in 1938, Superman has become an American cultural icon. His symbol is not only known throughout the nation, but the world as well. Despite this, many consider Superman to be irrelevant and unrelatable to reality because he is written as an outrageously overpowered being with “boy scout” morals. However, he has not always been written this way. This research seeks to uncover the connections between Superman’s various narratives and the changing social and political ideas of American Society throughout history. Specifically, the objective of this study is to establish whether Superman has changed …

An Emergent Literary Theory: The Darker Haptic Counterpart, Micala Nitz

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Victorian society viewed physical appearance and internalized habit as direct manifestations of a person’s shame, history, and identity. This makes any attempt to understand a Victorian literary character a simultaneous attempt to understand their body’s habitus. Wilkie Collins, a prominent serial novelist from the era, capitalized on habitus’ importance by using it as a central plot tool throughout his novels The Woman in White (1859), Armadale (1864), The Moonstone (1868), and Poor Miss Finch (1872). Each of these works reveals his affinity for writing fictional characters whose bodies’ habitus link them to a double, or an alternate self, leading to …

Genesis Of The Genre Of Tales, Umida Rasulova Phd, An Associate Professor

Philology Matters

The article deals with the problem of the increasing emphasis on the genre of tales, a deeper analysis of reality, a look at the deep and dark pits of the human soul, and the essence of life. When we research the nature of the genre of tales, we can observe the versatility of images, the intensity of conflict, the depth of psychological analysis, the diversity of artistic and visual means, and the diversity of themes. Studying the development of the genre of the story, the stages of development further strengthens the view of the genre.
Allah, possessor of the Exalted …