Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Impact Of Emma: Destroying Stereotypes Through Nuanced Characters In Text And Film, Julia Mccool

English MA Theses

This paper explores Jane Austen’s Emma as a response to stereotypes in 18th century novels and moral tales, and Autumn De Wildes’s Emma. from a feminist lens. Examining both of these works reveals that Emma was originally, and still is over 200 years later, transforming stereotypes in literature and film adaptations. The novel seems to be responding to a common stereotypical female villain found in many 18th century novels. In viewing Emma as a subversion of this stereotype, it is clear that Austen was responding to the sexist notions behind the character type, and writing a heroine more in line …

This Passing Shadow: The Role Of Trauma In Reforming Individual And Cultural Identity In The Lord Of The Rings And Anglo-Saxon Literature, Benjamin C. Benson

English MA Theses

Many scholars focus on J.R.R. Tolkien's personal history and attempt to locate his own trauma in the texts of his works. However, this focus often overlooks the role that trauma plays in the reshaping of individual and cultural identity within the works of Tolkien. Tolkien uses a number of methods to communicate trauma throughout his works, but these methods often have roots in Anglo-Saxon Literature. This study analyzes the various ways that Tolkien adapts Anglo-Saxon works to communicate trauma while simultaneously using the traumatic events to help communicate healing through the interaction of the traumatized with their community.

Mrs. Dalloway As A Window For Understanding Life, Kristen Venegas

English (MA) Theses

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway may be dismissed as fiction, and fiction consequently is dismissed as fantasy. However, the novel enables readers to practice an intellectual exercise of meta-awareness that extends beyond the pages and onto real world phenomena. Under a cognitive neuroscience perspective, Mrs. Dalloway is a literary masterpiece due to its hyper- realistic execution of the intimacies of life. Through the narrative style of free-indirect discourse, Woolf illustrates what occurs in the minds of characters as they develop their own perceptions of reality and identity, exposes the fear and inadequacies of mankind’s distress in times of chaos and disorder …

Likeness In Utopia: Situation And Metaphor From Thomas More To Edward Bellamy, Sage Rachmiel Bard Gilbert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As a literary genre, utopia is notably didactic. It seeks to teach desire and to educate hope. As such, utopia provides a unique site to examine the way metaphor and imagination enable one to be convinced, and the way those same elements facilitate misunderstanding. Following the theorization of Ernst Bloch, the goal of critiquing these literary utopias is not to reject hope but, rather, to educate our own daydreams, to learn and move forward. These chapters examine didacticism and the development of colonial metonymy in Thomas More’s Utopia, the way metaphor operates through time in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: …

Her Precious White Body/Her Tender Black Flesh: The Gothic Link To Black Women's (Mis)Treatment In Real Life And On The Page, Madisty R. Thomas

English Theses & Dissertations

As a work in progress, this thesis explores the interplay between historical and contemporary devaluation of and violence against Black women, materially and discursively, including visual mediums and written text. Specifically, I focus on the gothic novel to illuminate the impact race-based inventions such as chattel slavery and human exhibitions, as well as the generic tropes of the Gothic, have had on Black women’s representation and lived experience via a wide-ranging introduction and close examination of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. Additionally, the conclusion attempts to suggest how Black women and girls might survive in this antiblack world, thus escape …

A Game Of Hazard, Per Chance: Reading Dice Games And Predestined Action In Troilus And Criseyde And Troilus And Cressida, Emma O. Corbin

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the references to the dice game Hazard in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the Folio version of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida as means to expand the understanding of Troilus’s ability to act as an agent of change within his predetermined story. Utilizing Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens as the foundation for game and play, this work focuses on Hazard as a game of chance present in both works. As a dice game that relies entirely on chance, Hazard is a game and a place of moral and religious anxiety as demonstrated through a survey of dice-based divination and …

Fortune, Fate, And Free Will: Chaucer’S Encounters With Providence, Ciara Jane Turula

Masters Theses

It’s easy to assume that the world is innately unstable as Chaucer seems to do in the short poems “Truth”, “Lak of Stedfastnesse”, “The Forger Age” and “Gentilesse”, and yet we are called to wonder with the Black Knight in The Book of the Duchess how any divine authority could let this be the case. As Lady Philosophy informs readers in Boece, the world is not really Fortune’s chaotic kingdom of unreliability. Instead, the Earth and all that happens within it has already been laid out in the plan of Providence, which unravels regardless of whether individuals are aware …

Perspective, Invention, And Metatheater In Renaissance Literature, William Roudabush

English Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation challenges the misconception of post-Reformation England as iconophobic. On the contrary, it argues that early modern English poets and playwrights adapt Continental theories and techniques from painting, translating them into their own poetic and dramatic forms. It explores how allusions to contemporary perspectival images serve as governing metaphors and structural devices for the works in which they appear. Particularly in the genre of the Elizabethan epyllion and in works by Shakespeare, it suggests that texts are designed to be read “perspectively,” to borrow Shakespeare’s coinage, so that they are open to ambiguity and multiplicity, and capable of being …

Appropriated Voices: William Blake’S “The Little Black Boy” And British Antislavery Poetry, Brett J. Mattson

All NMU Master's Theses

British antislavery poetry in the late 1700s is well characterized by the first stanza of William Blake’s poem “The Little Black Boy” when his black speaker says “o! my soul is white; … But I am black as if bereav’d of light” (2-4). These statements that seem to exclude each other exemplify the discussions and arguments that antislavery poets had been publishing and would continue to deliberate after “The Little Black Boy” was printed in 1789. Other poets, while appropriating the voices of enslaved people or Africans, as Blake does in “The Little Black Boy,” often emphasize differences between their …

"A Shadow Of A Magnitude": The Parthenon Marbles Through The Eyes Of Keats And Byron, Annie Griffin

Honors Projects

In 1817, The British Museum put on display a collection of sculptures taken by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon in Greece, and the controversy of the so-called “Elgin Marbles” began. The event of the marbles’ removal from Greece and display in Britain inspired poets such as John Keats and Lord Byron, who wrote of the beauty of the sculptures and the loss for Greece. The subject of the Marbles and the poets have been critically discussed at length—one need only type “Elgin Marbles” into a search bar to be met with countless recent articles about them. On the other hand, …

The Queer Ecology Of Clouds In Nineteenth-Century British Poetics, Lucien Darjeun Meadows

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the nineteenth century, British writers were interested in the emergent science of meteorology, and their lyrical writing (their “poetics”), from poetry to creative and scientific prose, often turns to clouds as both meteorological formations and as material metaphors for human-environment interactions. These writers frequently invoke clouds to disrupt or “queer” depictions of human-environment relationships built on human domination of environmental beings. Clouds, in poetic writing, help writers (and readers) instead experience subject-subject relationships of reciprocity—a collaborative, non-hierarchical way of existing with and learning from our ecological relatives.

Dwelling in the confluence of literary studies, queer studies, and ecology, The …

Haunting At Troy: Troy Narratives, Trauma, And Desire For The Past In Late Medieval English Literature, Woo Ree Heor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The mythical city of Troy functioned as an imagined point of origin for many medieval nations, providing a tangible connection to the legendary past and nation-building tools useful for the ruling class. Troy provided a convenient foundation narrative upon which ideas of collective identity could be built for these nations, and England, where construction of a homogeneous past was difficult due to frequent ruptures in its development of communal identity, was an eager producer and consumer of such a legitimizing device. However, the trauma of war and destruction intrinsic in Troy narratives also generates potent political anxiety about the reanimated …

Muscling Through: Athletic Women In Victorian Popular Representation, 1864–1915, Julia G. Fuller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Muscling Through” reconstructs an overlooked history of strong female bodies in the nineteenth century. It argues that popular representations of athletic women introduced a new category of identity that was distinct from women’s traditional relational and social roles. The project’s central figure is the hyper-able “Sportswoman,” who bridges the gap between two familiar versions of the Victorian woman’s body: the mid-century ideal of docile, domesticated femininity and the sturdy, capable women who enter universities, professions, and public spaces en masse just before the turn of the century. Representationally, the Sportswoman figures a range of attitudes, from anxious to aspirational, toward …

Angels Of Many Houses: Reconciling Domesticity In 19th-Century Victorian Literature, Amanda Vierra

College Honors Program

The rise of the Victorian middle class is known for solidifying a separation of gender roles, with women operating in the private, domestic sphere and men in the public sphere. This historical value placed on domesticity is reflected in the rise of domestic fiction, the dominant genre of Victorian literature, which commonly depicts young, middle-class women making their way in the world. The plot of these narratives revolves around women perfecting or contending with their place in the domestic sphere through courtship, marriage, and family. Scholars on domestic fiction have continued to argue over whether domestic fiction reflected the oppressive …

The Dark House And Its Inhabitants, Emily Bielski

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

From the inception of the genre, Gothic horror has been fixated on the domestic space in distress. This essay explores domestic archetypes and roles of the Gothic novel, serving as a “tour of the house”, analyzing the iconography of the dark castle, and how it externalizes and exacerbates the fears and behaviors of its inhabitants. The power dynamic of the household is starkly divided by the expectations and authority of masculine and feminine figures. In turn the “house” becomes a vehicle for the anxieties of the inhabitants—both experienced and inflicted—regarding gender, sexuality, isolation, and abuse. Exploration of the visual and …

Legends Of Light: Crafting Middle Grade Fantasy In The Tradition Of Catholic Philosophy And Medieval Visual Culture, Bernadette Lamb

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay promotes the writing and illustrating of middle grade literature that mirrors the wonder-inducing experiences of leafing through an illuminated manuscript and stepping into a Gothic cathedral. An examination of Catholic medieval visual culture moves into a discussion on its underlying philosophy and theology, which are profoundly centered on relational healing and the dignity of the human person. Christian writers including St. Pope John Paul II, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Josef Pieper, Madeline L’Engle, Dr. Bob Schuchts, Makoto Fujimura, and Andrew Peterson inform an exploration of mercy, forgiveness, and love as self-gift in the context of illustration and storytelling …

The Revolting Monster - A Consideration Of Existentialist Themes In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Through A Comparison To Albert Camus' The Stranger, Felipe Rodriguez Ii

Theses and Dissertations

This Master’s thesis is concerned with analyzing key themes and ideas in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through an existentialist lens which is made possible through a comparison to themes and ideas in Albert Camus’ The Stranger. I aim to make a contribution to my field by fulfilling a comparison that has long been made since the late 1960s when conversations about British Romanticism and Existentialism were still common. The purpose of my first chapter is to elucidate a new argument about the relationship between these two novels. There is a discernable element of Camusian Revolt exhibited by the Creature in …

“Henrietta And Harriet:” Considering The Marginalized Best Friend In Burney’S Cecilia And Austen’S Emma, Elena Goodenberger

English (MA) Theses

Although much has been said about the authorial relationship between Frances Burney and Jane Austen generally, there is a gap in scholarship discussing Austen’s Emma in context with the Burney’s Cecilia. This paper argues that there are notable threads—heiresses with absent or inadequate father figures, charity-case best friends, and rushed endings—connecting Emma and Cecilia. Tracing these threads allows us to examine the possible influence of Burney’s writing on Austen and also calls attention to the author’s different approaches to female agency and minor character space. To accomplish this task, I look at the narrative space given to minor …

Neurodiversity In Sense And Sensibility And Emma: Jane Austen’S Heroines And Their Cognitive Difference, Alexandra Sausa

Masters Theses

There is a dearth of criticism that analyzes Jane Austen’s characters through the lens of neurodivergence — that is, an umbrella term for neurological difference, or behavior and cognitive processing that differs from what is “typical”. Although Austen has male characters that have been read as neurodivergent, this thesis will principally focus on two of Austen’s neurodivergent heroines: Marianne Dashwood and Emma Woodhouse. To support neurodivergent interpretations of these heroines, I will supplement close readings of Sense and Sensibility and Emma with social science and psychological literature. Marianne exhibits numerous traits that characterize Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and Emma exhibits …

The Bard’S Precursors To Psychology: Exposing Dark Sides Of Human Nature, Rebecca Parsons '23

Honor Scholar Theses

No abstract provided.

“It’S Alive!” The Birth And Afterlife Of The Gothic Genre, Tanner Linkous

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the development of the Gothic novel in England throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This thesis establishes the Gothic as a literary mode of middle-class terror by analyzing Gothic novels within the historical context of the Industrial and Democratic revolutions. This requires an in-depth understanding of politics throughout both centuries and this thesis engages with several sources such as Maggie Kilgour’s The Rise of the Gothic Novel which adds important context to my claims. Additionally, I use several contemporary sources such as Godwin’s Caleb Williams, the writings of Edmund Burke, and On the Pleasure Derived from Objects …

A World Half Created: The Imaginative Power Of Sound In The Poetry Of William Wordsworth, Trinity Myers

Undergraduate Honors Theses

William Wordsworth has long been considered one of the greatest British Romantic poets, and critical interest in his use of sound has grown since the mid-twentieth century. This paper investigates Wordsworth's fascination with "poetic musicality"—a phrase developed by the researcher to describe a poem's sensitivity to sound—and its effect upon the active imagination of a poem’s listeners. Such aural receptivity is explored in several of Wordsworth's early works, namely: the 1805 Prelude and selections from Lyrical Ballads. Rather than limiting conceptions of musicality to song and instrumentation, this project investigates how the power of sound can be extended to …

Pastries And Plots: Food Rhetoric And Gender Struggles In Shakespeare’S Plays, Juliet Nierle

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Food is a common motif across the Shakespearean cannon. From early plays to late plays, comedies to dramas, food appears in a variety of instances, functioning in numerous ways. Frequently representative of social class or serving as a cultural marker, food in Shakespeare can be innocent and passive, but it has the potential to contribute to scenes of violence. Foodstuffs in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, and Coriolanus contribute to the brutal harms committed in the plays, specifically in scenes of violence against women. Characters use foodstuffs as pejorative metaphors, like the subjugation of Volumnia in the context …

Sing Of Arms And Disobedience: Reading Vergil's Aeneid In Milton's Paradise Lost, Brooke Braden

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines the extent to which Vergil’s Aeneid influences the characters, themes, and epic style of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Focusing primarily on the Carthage episode of the Aeneid in which Aeneas meets and falls in love with queen Dido, this thesis explores how the figures of Aeneas, Creusa, Dido, and Sychaeus parallel those of Milton’s Satan, Sin, Eve, and Adam, respectively. This thesis also shows how the appearance of epic themes such as fate in both texts affects characters’ personal motivations in similar ways, such as Dido’s suicide and Eve’s consumption of the infamous apple. Through an exploration of …

Steps Toward Healing From The Possessive Other: The Vital Role Of Fantastical Literature In Trauma Theory, Rebekah Izard

English (MA) Theses

Fantastical narratives such as fairy tales and magical realist literature utilizes fantastic and intangible spaces to unpack that which is often beyond the limitations imposed on our understanding by reality: the stunting experience of individual and generational traumas. This study aims to contribute to the current literary discourse’s understandings of fantastic literature and its subgenres as a tool for healing from trauma through the application of ontological notions of Selfhood and Otherness supplied by 20th century philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, and the notion of Orientalism by postcolonial scholar, Edward Said. The dialogue generated by these schools of thought provide a space …

Men, Women, And Italians: The Masquerade Of Narrative And Identity In Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, Ruth A. Holmes

English Theses & Dissertations

The chaotic masquerades that proliferated during the British long eighteenth century punctuated the period’s preoccupation with order and categorization. The identity categories that the masquerade disrupted, the novel reinforced, or perhaps even created. It was in the middle of this period, in the political center of Britain, that Samuel Richardson published his third and final novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), a novel which centers England and was also centered by England, a national treasure entangled in literary and cultural history. Tracing the nexus of gender and nationalism in Grandison then becomes important given the novel’s active entanglement …

Dorian And The Double: Repressed Homosexual Desire In The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Alexandra Wohlford

Student Research Submissions

Written for Dr. Chris Foss’s English 478 Seminar on Oscar Wilde, “Dorian and the Double: Repressed Homosexual Desire in The Picture of Dorian Gray” examines one of Wilde’s most infamous and beloved works through the lens of both psychoanalytic and queer theory. Drawing on the Romantic and Gothic traditions’ concept of the “literary double,” this research paper explores the dynamic portrait of Dorian Gray as a double for multiple characters in the text, serving as a representation of their repressed homosexual desire. Namely, Basil Hallward and Dorian Gray himself emerge as the primary focus of this analysis. In addition, …

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 …

"Cabined, Cribbed, Confined": Tyrannical Anxiety And Maternal Power In Shakespeare, Elle J. Nieuwsma

Masters Theses

The tyrannical king, a common trope in Shakespearean plays, is on the surface a powerful and confident character. He is motivated, though, by overwhelming anxiety and fear about losing his power and the freedom he experiences through it. In other words, he suffers from a metaphorical claustrophobia and is terrified of being confined to physical, social, and sexual inadequacy. In order to protect himself and maintain his freedom, the tyrant must project his anxiety onto someone else, and interestingly, the Shakespearean tyrants choose a shared target: mothers.

Through a series of close-readings and analysis, this article explores how several different …

Dismantling Dualisms: Jane’S Liminal Agency In Charlotte Brontë’S Jane Eyre, Nicole Baniukaitis

Masters Theses

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a complex and, at times, seemingly paradoxical novel. Through Jane’s journey, I argue that Charlotte Brontë offers possibilities that can be explained and understood through Val Plumwood’s ecofeminist lens of dismantling or escaping dualisms in order to make these crucial changes and rewrite the traditional story. Jane’s liminality throughout the novel empowers her, offers her access to alternative modalities, and allows her to notice the oppressive dualistic structures governing all aspects of life. Due to her unique liminal positioning, Jane is aligned with nature and fights against oppressive dualisms to shape her life in a …