Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Impacts Of Dune And The Lord Of The Rings On American Culture, Nick Collins

4610 English: Individual Authors: J.R.R. Tolkien

The middle third of the 20th century was a time of hyper-aggressive industry, invention, and progressivism. This portion of the 1900s was instrumental toward shaping modern popular culture. Two of the predominant works were J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings and Frank Herbert’s political science fiction novel Dune. Both works inspired massive cult followings upon their release and grew in popularity largely due to the anti-war movement of the 1960s and ‘70s. They have each inspired countless works of inspiration that include some of the most popular movies and games from the 1970’s through the modern …

Discarding Dreams And Legends: The Short Fiction Of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, And Eudora Welty, Katy L. Leedy

Dissertations (1934 -)

This project examines four Southern women writers—Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty—who use the genre of the short story and the setting of the farm or insular living space to critique Southern regional identity. I argue that the social critiques of these southern female short story writers have been overlooked because stereotypes rooted in the fantasy of the idealized southern woman has limited critical perceptions of these authors’ engagements with cultural or political issues, when in reality their short fiction helped to influence the shifting expectations of the mid-twentieth century South. This study provides a …

The Literary Significance Of Herman Melville’S Benito Cereno: An Analytical Reflection On Benito Cereno As A Fictional Narrative, Dani Kaiser

4997 English: Capstone

In Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), Captain Amasa Delano discovers a distressed slave ship in need of aid, only to later find out that his perception of the dire situation was completely incorrect. Melville’s novella is derived from Delano’s nonfiction account of the experience, titled Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817). This paper focuses on three questions that demonstrate why Melville wrote a novella almost completely derived from a nonfiction account of the events aboard the ship. In order to understand why Melville’s novella is powerful, one must ask, as an overarching question why …

Biography And Broken Barriers: Melville’S Use Of Personal Experience And Social Groups To Achieve Commentary In Typee And Redburn, Katelyn Quigley

4997 English: Capstone

Melville’s texts continue to be relevant to a contemporary readership well over a century since original publication, as his words not only illuminate and examine nineteenth century experiences, but also present concepts and ideas that continue to be worthy of consideration by modern audiences. One such issue that is regularly addressed in Melville’s works is that of identity: of the individual, of society, and of the individual as he navigates between the fabrics of various social worlds. This paper examines Social Identity Theory and its components that both achieve identification of the individual and the aggregate in society and define …

Interpretations Of Herman Melville’S Moby-Dick In The Field Of Visual Arts, Madeline Kudlata

4997 English: Capstone

Artistic adaptations of literary classics allow readers to visualize and contextualize some of the most important themes, motifs, scenes, and images in a story that may be difficult to grasp through verbal text alone. From these adaptations, one can analyze the stylistic and thematic similarities or differences in the way an artist portrays elements of Melville’s Moby-Dick. Through their varying artistic styles and media, abstract impressionist Frank Stella, self-taught artist Matt Kish, and award-winning children’s book illustrator Allan Drummond express how Melville’s novel can manifest itself in a multitude of contexts: emotional, literal, and theoretical. By analyzing the way …

The Pulpit's Muse: Conversive Poetics In The American Renaissance, Michael William Keller

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation focuses on the interaction between poetic form and popular religious practice in the nineteenth century United States. Specifically, I aim to see how American poets appropriated religious tropes—and especially religious conversion—in their poetry with specific designs on their audience. My introduction analyzes the phenomenon of religious conversion up through the nineteenth century with help from psychologists and historians of religion, including William James and Sydney Ahlstrom. In the introduction, I also explore how revivalist conversion helped inform the poetics of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Chapter one focuses on Emerson’s poetry, particularly as it enacts Emerson’s poetic …

From Pastorals To Paterson: Ecology In The Poetry And Poetics Of William Carlos Williams, Daniel Edmund Burke

Dissertations (1934 -)

Modernist poet William Carlos Williams died in 1962 - a landmark year in the history of the modern environmentalist movement. He did not live to see contemporary culture come to the deeper appreciation of humanity's place in the world which we now know as ecology. This dissertation will argue, however, that supporting his entire oeuvre of poetry are philosophical and poetic underpinnings which resonate strongly with - and usefully anticipate - our modern understanding of the interpenetrative relationship between natural and culture, human and nonhuman. I begin by tracing the roots of Williams's "ecopoetics" back to the father of Williams's …

Deterring A Critical Catharsis: An Inquiry Into The Rhetoric And Ethics Of Punishment In Wieland; Or The Transformation, Mike Haen

Maria Dittman Library Research Competition: Student Award Winners

From Hammurabi’s Code to modern-day penitentiaries, a society’s chosen punishment models contribute to that society’s ethics. In Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or the Transformation (1798), characters interact with one another in an isolated community. These interactions center on Wieland’s murder of his family, and how his mind was influenced toward murder by Carwin, an ex-convict. Here, a reader is faced with deciding who to blame. However, solely focusing on criminal culpability ignores a rhetorical problem left unexamined by past scholars—that of criminal punishment in the novel. This problem involves two issues—first, the factors that motivate a society to choose …

Brides, Department Stores, Westerns, And Scrapbooks--The Everyday Lives Of Teenage Girls In The 1940s, Carly Anger

Dissertations (1934 -)

This study establishes a more nuanced look at fictional teenage girls of the 1940s. With the beginning of World War II many teenage girls took on jobs that were left vacant by men. With these new jobs came the opportunity to gain financial independence. However, teenage girls, along with their mothers, were expected to leave their jobs once soldiers returned from war. Thus, there was a gap between the actual experiences of teenage girls and what they were expected to be--Rosie the Riveters who were willing to become housewives at the end of the war.

This gap between actual experiences …

Regional Consciousness In American Literature, 1860-1930, Kelsey Louise Squire

Dissertations (1934 -)

This study establishes a conversation between regional literary theory, ecocriticism, and places studies as a necessary component of a more nuanced understanding of regionalism as depicted by mobile American authors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1860 and 1930, regional writers faced the challenge of making place relevant in an increasingly mobile world. In contrast to scholarly studies that situate the relevance of regionalism as a vehicle for a larger cause (for example, nationalism or feminism), or conversely, studies that focus on articulating an overly rigid "regional identity" of places or authors, I employ the term "regional …

Cognitive Architectures: Structures Of Passion In Joanna Baillie's Dramas, Daniel James Bergen

Dissertations (1934 -)

The burgeoning Industrial Revolution, coupled with the scent of a far different revolution briskly blowing across the English Channel, nourished a significant amount of aristocratic anxiety throughout late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain. The stratifying effects of inherited wealth were dissolving and an ascending middle class was making its way into traditionally upper class social circles, political discussions, and capitalistic ventures. In a letter, written to Sir Walter Scott in the late spring of 1812, Joanna Baillie, the Scottish playwright best known for her Plays on the Passions, 1798 and her theoretical notion of sympathetic curiosity, references the Luddite …

On Trial: Restorative Justice In The Godwin-Wollstonecraft-Shelley Family Fictions, Colleen M. Fenno

Dissertations (1934 -)

William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary and Percy Shelley wrote during an era of democratic possibility and intense legal and penal reforms, when changes to criminal justice procedures were adopted that would have far reaching consequences, even for contemporary practices. Their fictions - Caleb Williams (1794), Maria: Or the Wrongs of Woman (1798), Frankenstein (1818), Falkner (1837), and The Cenci (1818) - raise questions and seek answers to questions at the heart of these reforms: What happens to individuals falsely accused of a crime without the resources to defend themselves? What happens to victims of crimes associated with guilt or …