Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Tolkien's Unnamed Deity Orchestrating The Lord Of The Rings, Lisa Hillis

Masters Theses

The epic world created by J.R.R. Tolkien in the Lord of the Rings trilogy is one in which secular and religious elements are intertwined and the relationship between the two is intentionally kept vague. Within this created world, known as Middle Earth, good and evil are apparent, but the standard by which they are determined remains undefined. The free creatures living in Tolkien's world appear to have an intuitive ability to discern between good and evil, and each being generally exercises its free will in pursuit of one or the other though some personalities do combine the qualities. This innate …

A Woman's Quest For Happiness: O'Neill's "Private Myth", Andrea Ximena CampañA Garcia

Masters Theses

Following the approach used by James Hurt in his book Catiline's Dream to determine Henrik Ibsen's "private myth" which he retold in play after play, I have delineated O'Neill's "private myth" in a narrower way concentrating on his female characters. Examining parallel motifs in the lives of the dominant women in Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, and Mourning Becomes Electra, I have detected this mythic pattern involving the O'Neillian woman: She goes through an early innocent and submissive state guided by an initial vision of happiness which can be regarded as fairly conventional. But when her …

Oedipal Identity And The Freudian Construction Of Orality In Okot P'Bitek's Song Of Lawino And Song Of Ocol, Paul Kent Oakley

Masters Theses

In Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, Ocol and Lawino, presenting themselves as a university-educated man and his non-literate village wife, argue the various merits and failings of traditional, Acholi village life and modern, Westernized life. Accompanying this sociopolitical argument is the personal, emotional conflict between the two: Ocol is rejecting Lawino in favor of a Westernized second-wife, but Lawino refuses to leave him, trying instead to coerce him into returning, body and soul, to her bed. The scenario seems straightforward. But below this superficial reading is a more complex one in which Lawino is Ocol’s …

Like He Would Jump Me With A Book: Black Humor In Sanctuary And Oliver Twist, Deborah Leclaire

Masters Theses

Although many critics have compared William Faulkner and Charles Dickens, no one has fully developed the resemblance between their uses of black humor. Using several critics' definitions of black humor, I examine several aspects of black humor in Faulkner's Sanctuary and Dickens' Oliver Twist: the presence of the wasteland in society, the irreverent treatment of death and religion, the presence of grotesques and perverse sexuality.

Like the humour noir of the French surrealist movement, black humor in both of these books is very much involved in these authors' indictment of society. Both Faulkner and Dickens use black humor to …