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Articles 1 - 29 of 29
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Chaucer’S Contradictory Representations Of Fourteenth Century Knighthood In The Canterbury Tales, Nicholas Cabrera
Chaucer’S Contradictory Representations Of Fourteenth Century Knighthood In The Canterbury Tales, Nicholas Cabrera
Theses and Dissertations
Differences in interpretation have long dominated scholarship regarding knighthood in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. But these differences fail to consider the nuance of the text and the historical realities of the period in which Chaucer wrote. Chaucer’s depiction of knighthood represents the institution as filled with tensions and contradictions.
The Revolting Monster - A Consideration Of Existentialist Themes In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Through A Comparison To Albert Camus' The Stranger, Felipe Rodriguez Ii
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 …
"Where Sex Is Directly Concerned" Agatha Christie And The Feminization Of Detective Fiction, Barbara Javori
"Where Sex Is Directly Concerned" Agatha Christie And The Feminization Of Detective Fiction, Barbara Javori
Theses and Dissertations
Agatha Christie’s name is synonymous with the Whodunit. She is without a doubt one the most popular and best selling authors of all time. Christie’s work built upon the first examples of detective fiction, including Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. However, Christie’s embrace of the traditionally female spaces, her subversion of expectations, and her unlikely detectives set her apart from her predecessors with their focus on male intellect, patriarchal superiority, and absent female characters. Christie’s novels established recognizable patterns still used today in books, television and movies. This project examines the arc of detective fiction …
The Worst Horror Of All: Greene’S Political And Salvific Imagination In Brighton Rock, James C. Mcguire
The Worst Horror Of All: Greene’S Political And Salvific Imagination In Brighton Rock, James C. Mcguire
Theses and Dissertations
An evaluation of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock as it apprehends the Catholic novel as form. With ample assistance from Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, Robert Hugh Benson's The Lord of the World, and select works of Fredric Jameson—most notably The Political Unconscious—this analysis seeks to clarify the politico-spiritual "horizon" evident in Greene's first "Catholic novel." By reviewing the novel through the lens of both Catholic theology and modern historical dialectic material criticism, this evaluation reclaims Graham Greene's early political radicalism that critics identify better in his later, less-religious texts. Discovered most clearly in the ending …
Sexual Exploration Of The Pastoral: Analyzing Queer Desire In “Goblin Market” And In Memoriam, Amanda Rajnauth
Sexual Exploration Of The Pastoral: Analyzing Queer Desire In “Goblin Market” And In Memoriam, Amanda Rajnauth
Theses and Dissertations
The term “queer pastoral” was coined by Vin Nardizzi to refer to the use of the pastoral setting to normalize homosexuality. While the queer pastoral has primarily remained within Renaissance studies, I seek to expand the reach of this concept by applying it to Victorian literature. This thesis argues that Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam both use the pastoral as a space to explore queer desire.
Gloria Naylor’S Conversation With The Tempest, Kelly Mcavoy-Giarrusso
Gloria Naylor’S Conversation With The Tempest, Kelly Mcavoy-Giarrusso
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis focuses on how Gloria Naylor used Caliban from Shakespeare's The Tempest as inspiration for her character George, and how her evolution of the character reveals issues within the literary and academic community at the time of her writing. George fulfills Caliban’s limitations in that he has more power and autonomy than Caliban, but the tragedy of his death reveals that he has lost part of himself in order to gain that power. This idea that education and society can cause a loss of self is personal for Naylor, who encountered only white male authors in school and struggled …
Snapshots Of A Fictional Past: Photographic Nostalgia In The Early 20th Century Art Novel., Harry A. Jones Iv
Snapshots Of A Fictional Past: Photographic Nostalgia In The Early 20th Century Art Novel., Harry A. Jones Iv
Theses and Dissertations
In this dissertation I argue that the proliferation of a mass codependent relationship with nostalgia in the twentieth century shares a parallel history with the widespread adoption of the reproducible image being used by collective audiences as a supplement for natural memory, or what Proust names “voluntary memory.” This conflict between nostalgia-hungry consumers and artists inspired groups such as Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionists and artistically minded authors like Henry James, who employed increasingly complex photographic and literary practices to resist the images’ tendency to debase the aesthetic quality of their own work. Authors such as Marcel Proust and William Faulkner used …
The “Muddle” Of Landscape And Machinery In E.M. Forster’S Howard’S End And A Passage To India: An Ecocritical Reading, Ryan Ignatius Vera
The “Muddle” Of Landscape And Machinery In E.M. Forster’S Howard’S End And A Passage To India: An Ecocritical Reading, Ryan Ignatius Vera
Theses and Dissertations
This is an ecocritical reading of E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and Howard's End. I argue that Forster is concerned with imperial power structures that damaged the environment, as well as the looming aftereffects of the Industrial Revolution on both landscape and the people that reside in it.
Broken Harts: Mourning The Human/Animal Divide In Shakespeare’S As You Like It And Wordsworth’S “Hart-Leap Well”, Jennifer Jourlait
Broken Harts: Mourning The Human/Animal Divide In Shakespeare’S As You Like It And Wordsworth’S “Hart-Leap Well”, Jennifer Jourlait
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis compares the deer scenes in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Wordsworth’s “Hart-Leap Well.” Both raise questions about man’s right to hunt animals with impunity. Shakespeare’s Jaques superficially takes up the issue of animal rights whereas Wordsworth’s personification of the stag evokes the reader’s sympathy for the animal.
Female Torture Poetry: Petrarchan Love And Carpe Diem, Luke C. Widlund
Female Torture Poetry: Petrarchan Love And Carpe Diem, Luke C. Widlund
Theses and Dissertations
My MA thesis examines sixteenth and seventeeth-century lyric poetry by the male poets Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Thomas Carew, and Andrew Marvell. These poets make use of different lyric genres and forms, including Petrarchan sonnets and carpe diem arguments, to torture the purported female mistresses. A close examination of specific works, including Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Donne’s “The Apparition”, Carew’s “Song: Persuasion to Enjoy”, and Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” demonstrates that they all share a preoccupation with weaponizing poetry in their depiction of mistresses and female lovers in pain and punishment. Poetry functions as a tool for imposing …
Taming The Beast: Heathcliff As Dog In Wuthering Heights, Anna Cittadino
Taming The Beast: Heathcliff As Dog In Wuthering Heights, Anna Cittadino
Theses and Dissertations
This paper examines the human/animal distinction in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, focusing specifically on the animal within Heathcliff, and the way this animal undermines his ability to be human as a result of the violence and abandonment he endured in childhood.
The Scientific Romances Of Jules Verne And H.G. Wells: Imperialism Disguised As Progress In The Early Days Of Science Fiction, Timothy Ferris
The Scientific Romances Of Jules Verne And H.G. Wells: Imperialism Disguised As Progress In The Early Days Of Science Fiction, Timothy Ferris
Theses and Dissertations
Frequently in their respective oeuvres, Verne and Wells write in a rhetoric of conquest that almost always translates to discovering a more efficient means of taming wild, non-European environments. These goals extend not only to the lands that their protagonists explore, but also to human beings and other life that may populate them. Indeed, the underlying focus—the one that is masked behind the thrill and adventure of both Wells and Verne—is none other than the march of progress as understood by middle-class Europeans in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Progress can produce positivistic optimism, and it can also …
Enclosures And Dichotomies: Coexistence Vs. Distance In The Poems Of John Clare, Jordan P. Finn
Enclosures And Dichotomies: Coexistence Vs. Distance In The Poems Of John Clare, Jordan P. Finn
Theses and Dissertations
John Clare’s poetry emphasizes an affinity with environment by suspending the distinction between the inside (subject) and the outside (object). Clare’s identification with objects and perception rather than subjects and aesthetics renders his work as a prescient and radical example of ecological poetry in the Romantic period. Raymond Williams’ “green language” and Timothy Morton’s ambient poetics both cite Clare as an ideal figure for their above theories and evoke Clare as a writer who positions the environment as governing thought rather than thought governing the environment. This thesis especially relates Clare to Morton’s Ecology without Nature, a study of …
Thornfield, Wragby, And Their Discontents: Nature And Civilization In Jane Eyre And Lady Chatterley’S Lover, Marianna Alvarado Teuscher
Thornfield, Wragby, And Their Discontents: Nature And Civilization In Jane Eyre And Lady Chatterley’S Lover, Marianna Alvarado Teuscher
Theses and Dissertations
In Jane Eyre and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Charlotte Brontë and her literary inheritor, D.H. Lawrence, locate the potentially revolutionary romance between their protagonists in natural settings, distant from the social sphere, in order to demonstrate the un-naturalness of an administered capitalist society in which class distinctions work in dehumanizing ways.
“The Healing Balm Of Sympathy Denied”: Moral Sense Philosophy, Patriarchy, And Monstrosity In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein, Estefania Velez
“The Healing Balm Of Sympathy Denied”: Moral Sense Philosophy, Patriarchy, And Monstrosity In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein, Estefania Velez
Theses and Dissertations
Though Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein produces an ideology of sympathy consistent with the literary and philosophical aims of Romanticism, this essay examines Shelley’s critique of patriarchy which posits that though sympathetic companionship in Frankenstein remains an ethical necessity, it is unattainable within a social order marred by misogynist structures of power.
"To Conceive With Child Is The Earnest Desire If Not Of All, Yet Of Most Women": The Advancement Of Prenatal Care And Childbirth In Early Modern England: 1500-1770, Victoria E.C. Glover
"To Conceive With Child Is The Earnest Desire If Not Of All, Yet Of Most Women": The Advancement Of Prenatal Care And Childbirth In Early Modern England: 1500-1770, Victoria E.C. Glover
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis analyzes medical manuals published in England between 1500 and 1770 to trace developing medical understandings and prescriptive approaches to conception, pregnancy, and childbirth. While there have been plenty of books written regarding social and religious changes in the reproductive process during the early modern era, there is a dearth of scholarly work focusing on the medical changes which took place in obstetrics over this period. Early modern England was a time of great change in the field of obstetrics as physicians incorporated newly-discovered knowledge about the male and female body, new fields and tools, and new or revived …
Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky
Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky
Theses and Dissertations
This paper theorizes that authors, in an act I have termed “literary exorcism,” project and expunge parts of their identities that are in conflict with the overriding political agenda of their texts, into the figure of the villain. Drawing upon theories of power put forth by Judith Butler, I argue that this sort of projection arises in reaction to dominant ideas and institutions, but that authors find ways to manipulate this process over time. By examining a broad cross-section of English-language literature over several centuries, this phenomenon and its evolution can be observed, as well as the means by which …
The Second Pen, Nicholas D. Brennan
The Second Pen, Nicholas D. Brennan
Theses and Dissertations
"The Second Pen" evaluates the historical relevancy of prevalent monikers for William Shakespeare-- namely, "The Bard," "Swan of Avon," and "Upstart Crow." While Brennan finds the general concept of the moniker to encapsulate Shakespeare's current historical legacy, he equally finds the aforementioned monikers to misrepresent this. Brennan offers "The Second Pen" as a moniker for Shakespeare that redresses the distortions of the others. He concentrates his defense of its relevancy around a defense of William Shakespeare as the "second pen" which Ben Jonson's 1605 Sejanus quarto names as a collaborator in the writing of a preceding stage version of the …
William Hazlitt: On The Silencing Effect Of Public Opinion In Nineteenth-Century England, J M Tessa Freeman
William Hazlitt: On The Silencing Effect Of Public Opinion In Nineteenth-Century England, J M Tessa Freeman
Theses and Dissertations
“William Hazlitt: On the Silencing Effect of Public Opinion in Nineteenth-Century England” investigates the social interactions that fostered the circulation of misinformation. Hazlitt depicts how silencing portions of the population benefited those in power and how many within society were unknowingly compliant and in fact facilitating this manipulation of information.
Dogs, Cats, And A Lambkin: Speechlessness And The Animal In Ulysses, Pierce R. Watson
Dogs, Cats, And A Lambkin: Speechlessness And The Animal In Ulysses, Pierce R. Watson
Theses and Dissertations
This essay explores the status of the animal and the consequences of animal speechlessness in Ulysses, mainly focusing on encounters with dogs and cats. Through these animal encounters, Joyce provides a foundation for understanding the complications faced by the Bloom family in grieving their deceased infant son.
Relocations Of The 'Outraged Slave': Transatlantic Reform Conversations Through Douglass's Periodical Fiction, Nikki D. Fernandes
Relocations Of The 'Outraged Slave': Transatlantic Reform Conversations Through Douglass's Periodical Fiction, Nikki D. Fernandes
Theses and Dissertations
Through their editorial arrangements of African-American, Euro-American and European poetry, fiction and news, Frederick Douglass’s anti-slavery periodicals (The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper) imagine a cosmopolitan discourse that predates the segregated realities of the antebellum United States. In spite of Southern blockades against the infiltration of Northern texts, Douglass’s material space uniquely capitalized on the limited restrictions of his reprinting culture to relocate the voice of the ‘outraged slave’ onto a global stage. From the poems of Phillis Wheatley and William Cowper to Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Douglass’s own novella “The Heroic Slave,” this project considers how …
The Odcombian Climber: How Thomas Coryate Employed Media For Social Advantage, Julian T. Neuhauser
The Odcombian Climber: How Thomas Coryate Employed Media For Social Advantage, Julian T. Neuhauser
Theses and Dissertations
Thomas Coryate (1577?-1617), the writer, traveler and social climber, embraced various media in order to achieve social gains. This thesis surveys the content and materiality of writings by and about Coryate to investigate the nature of his sociability. The study begins by drawing on John Hoskyns’ (1566–1638) poem, “Convivium philosophicum,” to explore how Coryate used oral and social performance to create a unique form of sociability through which mockery is transmuted into praise. This thesis then addresses how Coryate’s sociability factored into the conflation of aspects of manuscript and print media in the production of the “Panegyricke Verses” that were …
“The Heighe Worthynesse Of Love”: Visions Of Perception, Convention, And Contradiction In Chaucer’S Troilus And Criseyde, John J. Hertz
“The Heighe Worthynesse Of Love”: Visions Of Perception, Convention, And Contradiction In Chaucer’S Troilus And Criseyde, John J. Hertz
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines three images associated with the manuscripts and early printed editions of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde which I have dubbed “Prostrate Troilus,” “Pandarus as Messenger,” and “Criseyde in the Garden.” These images are artifacts of contemporary textual interpretation that “read” Chaucer’s text and the tale of Troilus. They each illustrate the way in which Troilus, Pandarus, and Criseyde “read” images, gestures, symbols, and speeches within the narrative, and they show how these characters are constrained and influenced by their individual primary modes of perception. Troilus reads but does not analyze. Pandarus actively reads his own meanings into messages. …
Roots And Repercussions Of Romantic Feeling: Sensation And Affect In The Poetry Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge And William Wordsworth, Mary K. Cotter
Roots And Repercussions Of Romantic Feeling: Sensation And Affect In The Poetry Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge And William Wordsworth, Mary K. Cotter
Theses and Dissertations
Enlightenment emphasis on rationalism in philosophy and the arts prefigures Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and William Wordsworth’s Romantic recovery of a subject’s empirical relationship to nature and the phenomenal world. Coleridge and Wordsworth respond to philosophical precedents that emphasize rationalism and the autonomy of a subject while introducing empiricism and sensation as primary components of the speaker’s experience. The poets delineate a fluid shift from the Enlightenment to Romanticism through an interchangeable reliance on Kantian and Burkean philosophical methods. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant follows the Cartesian cogito toward a similar end of reducing human experience to circumstance bereft of empirical …
The Poet And The Polemist: Demystifying The Natural Law Theory Of John Milton, John J. Mazola
The Poet And The Polemist: Demystifying The Natural Law Theory Of John Milton, John J. Mazola
Theses and Dissertations
A summation of the influences behind Milton's Natural Law theory as found in the works of Aristotle, Grotius, Hobbes, and Thomas Aquinas. The essay's intent is to uncover this important thread that runs through both Milton's Poetic Verse as well as his Polemic tracts.
The Transition From The Psychical To The Psychological: An Examination Of William James’ Influence On Henry James’ “The Turn Of The Screw”, Harry A. Jones Iv
The Transition From The Psychical To The Psychological: An Examination Of William James’ Influence On Henry James’ “The Turn Of The Screw”, Harry A. Jones Iv
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis will show that, in its original form, “The Turn of the Screw” acted as a monument to the intellectual unity shared between Henry James and his brother William. Through evaluating James’ biography, memoirs, and letters with William, this thesis will illustrate the subtle collaborative inspirations that initially helped James write the first twelve-part serial edition of “The Turn of the Screw” for Collier’s Weekly, which ran from January 27, 1898 until April 16, 1898. I will also demonstrate the effect of William’s philosophy and his death on the revisions James’ made to his story as published in the …
Narrative And The Reconfiguration Of The Humanist Subject In Robbe-Grillet, Ballard, And Ligotti, Zachary L. Acosta-Lewis
Narrative And The Reconfiguration Of The Humanist Subject In Robbe-Grillet, Ballard, And Ligotti, Zachary L. Acosta-Lewis
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines the utility of the novels, short stories, critical writing, and generically indistinct work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, J.G. Ballard, and Thomas Ligotti in developing a critique of the contemporary manifestations of liberal humanist social, economic, and political subjectivities. To this end, the concurrence of formal fragmentation and sublime aesthetics in early Gothic fiction models the manner in which narrative structures can appropriate structural tropes of dominant institutions, critically reflecting ideological fracture. Read according to the assemblative approach outlined by Deleuze and Guattari, these authors serve as a productive and incisive response to the hegemony of capitalist territorialization with …
Absolving The Sin: Redemptive Feminine Figures In Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Wife Of Bath's Prologue" And John Milton's Paradise Lost, Rory Griffiths
Absolving The Sin: Redemptive Feminine Figures In Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Wife Of Bath's Prologue" And John Milton's Paradise Lost, Rory Griffiths
Theses and Dissertations
Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton have been ceaselessly studied in isolation to one another, but undergraduate students must begin to study them in conjunction. Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” serves as social critique of medieval misogynist practices that allows students to study social practices as they study his language. Milton’s Eve in Paradise Lost reflects the religious and social instability that marked the Interregnum of the English Civil War, allowing Eve to embody the culture’s desire to return to a virtuous Church. Students will learn to examine the space of the authorial paradox, primarily the questions of authority that …
Angels And Demons: Christina Rossetti’S Goblin Market As A Social Critique Of The Victorian Ideal Of The “Angel In The House” And The Pre-Raphaelites’ Response To That Ideal, Melissa Adams
Theses and Dissertations
Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market presents a subversive critique on the socially constructed dichotomy of Angel versus Demon as depicted in Pre-Raphaelite artwork, Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s poetry, and Coventry Patmore’s poem Angel in the House. An analysis of Goblin Market in relation to Patmore’s poem and the Pre-Raphaelite paintings The Annunciation, Ophelia, Lady Lilith, Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses, and Sibylla Palmifera and Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s poems “Soul’s Beauty” and “Body’s Beauty” illustrate the ways in which Rossetti presents a counter-image that breaks down this socially constructed dichotomy. This is additionally supported by an exploration …