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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Bloodied Hearts And Bawdy Planets: Greco-Roman Astrology And The Regenerative Force Of The Feminine In Shakespeare’S The Winter’S Tale, Christina E. Farella Jun 2020

Bloodied Hearts And Bawdy Planets: Greco-Roman Astrology And The Regenerative Force Of The Feminine In Shakespeare’S The Winter’S Tale, Christina E. Farella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis offers a new reading of William Shakespeare’s late play The Winter’s Tale (1623), positing that in order to understand this complex and eccentric work, we must read it with a complex and eccentric eye. In The Winter’s Tale, planets strike without warning, pulling at hearts, wombs, and blood, impacting the health and emotional experience of characters in the play. This work is renowned for its inconsistent formal structure; the first half is a tragedy set in winter, but abruptly shifts to a comedy set in spring/summer in its latter half. What’s more, is that planets, luminaries, and …


Furious: Myth, Gender, And The Origins Of Lady Macbeth, Emma King Sep 2019

Furious: Myth, Gender, And The Origins Of Lady Macbeth, Emma King

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis attempts to understand the fabulously complex and poisonously unsettling Lady Macbeth as a product of classical reception and intertextuality in early modern England. Whence comes her “undaunted mettle” (1.7.73)? Why is she, like the regicide she helps commit, such a “bloody piece of work” (2.3.108)? How does her ability to be “bloody, bold, and resolute” (4.1.81), as Macbeth is commanded to be, reflect canonical literary ideas, early modern or otherwise, regarding women, gender, and violence? Approaching texts in the literary canon as the result of transformation and reception, this research analyzes the ways in which Lady Macbeth’s gender, …


Tragedy And Theodicy: The Role Of The Sufferer From Job To Ahab, Nora Carroll Feb 2018

Tragedy And Theodicy: The Role Of The Sufferer From Job To Ahab, Nora Carroll

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The character of Job starts in literature, a trope and archetype of the suffering man who potentially gains wisdom through suffering. Job’s characterization informs a comparison to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and finally Melville’s Moby-Dick. These versions of Job rally, fight, and rebel against a universe that was once loving and fair towards a more chaotic and nihilistic one. Job’s suffering is on the mark of all tragedy because he not only experiences a downfall, he gains wisdom through universalizing his torment. The Job trope not only stresses the role of suffering, it …


Writing Indigenous Identity In Herman Melville And Joseph Conrad's Polynesian And Malay Archipelago Novels, Catherine L. Black Jan 2018

Writing Indigenous Identity In Herman Melville And Joseph Conrad's Polynesian And Malay Archipelago Novels, Catherine L. Black

Dissertations and Theses

The thesis of this paper is that cross-cultural writing can be done with the right methods of communication, such as engaging narrator and education—or simply sensitive, imaginative writing. Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad’s five books set in the Polynesian and Malay Archipelagos—Typee and Omoo and the Malay Trilogy (Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and The Rescue)— are used as master models of how to write indigenous characters with rich characterization in pivotal roles, even circa 1846 and 1896. The unique perspective and technique by which they did this is explored, a technique and perspective not …


A Passage From Brooklyn To Ithaca: The Sea, The City And The Body In The Poetics Of Walt Whitman And C. P. Cavafy, Michael P. Skafidas Feb 2016

A Passage From Brooklyn To Ithaca: The Sea, The City And The Body In The Poetics Of Walt Whitman And C. P. Cavafy, Michael P. Skafidas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This treatise is the first extensive comparative study of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy. Despite the abundant scholarship dealing with the work and life of each, until now no critic has put the two poets together. Whitman’s poetry celebrates birth, youth, the self and the world as seen for the first time, while Cavafy’s diverts from the active present to resurrect a world whose key, in Eliot’s terms, is memory. Yet, I see the two poets conversing in the crossroads of the fin de siècle; the American Whitman and the Greek Cavafy embody the antithesis of hope and dislocation …


Variations On A Theme: Contemporary Memorials To Harriet Tubman, Elise Anne Geltzer Jan 2015

Variations On A Theme: Contemporary Memorials To Harriet Tubman, Elise Anne Geltzer

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.