English Language and Literature Commons^™

Problematic Advocacy And Victorian Public Health In Gatherings From Graveyards By Dr. George A. Walker, Olivia Ladner

Honors Theses

This thesis focuses on the problematic advocacy of Dr. George A. Walker in his public health pamphlet, Gatherings from Graveyards. In his work, Walker calls for the removal of urban cemeteries from within London and other cities in Great Britain due to concerns about public health safety. He cites miasmatic theory as the reason for the spread of disease from rotting corpses and unkept cemeteries in the British metropolis. Though he blames Parliament for the state of urban cemeteries, he continuously cites poor communities and neighborhoods as the sole sources of disease and does not conduct investigations into the …

“Precios Perle Wythouten Spotte”: Accepting The Unknowable In Pearl, Jana Ishee

Master's Theses

The fourteenth-century Middle English poem Pearl, authored by the anonymous Pearl-poet, survives in a manuscript known as London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A.x. This dream vision, narrated by a grieving father, tells the story of his journey to Paradise, where he encounters his infant daughter, now older, regal, and wise, proffering admonishments with the authority of God to her tearful father. meeting with her in Paradise. Drawing on Caroline Walker Bynum’s work on medieval European conceptions of death and resurrection, J. Stephen Russell’s work on the dream vision genre, and Karl Steel’s work on oysters as liminal figures, …

“I’Ll Make A Captain Among Ye, And Do Somewhat To Be Talk Of Forever After”: Female Civic Agency In Sir Thomas More’S Staged Insurrection, Heather Miller

Master's Theses

Sir Thomas More is an English chronicle play that has received far less critical attention than generically similar histories written by Shakespeare. Doll Williamson, the play’s strongest female character, assumes a leadership position in initiating, as well as ultimately quelling, the Evil May Day riots, which provide the play’s initial dramatic impetus. Despite the critical tendency to overlook or diminish the seriousness of her dramatic role in the play, including in the staged insurrection scene, I argue in this thesis that we should take the concerns that Doll articulates and embodies seriously from a feminist perspective. Furthermore, I place Doll’s …

“An Oak In A Flower-Pot”: The Brontë Sisters’ Depictions Of Female Agency During The Victorian Era, Jessica Dunn

Honors Theses

This thesis discusses the most popular novels written by the Brontë sisters – Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – in the context of the overbearing patriarchal culture of the Victorian era, specifically through the characterization of feminine agency displayed in each novel. By engaging with the novels as a trinity, this thesis uniquely reveals the more nuanced aspects of the novels through the sisters’ respective depictions of female agency following the lives of their respective protagonists – Jane Eyre, Catherine Earnshaw, and Helen Graham. Additionally, this thesis seeks to engage in conversation …

Containing The Blemmye: Anxiety Towards Congenital Difference In The Old English Wonders Of The East, Jessica L. Carrell

Master's Theses

This thesis aims to illuminate early medieval anxieties about sex, procreation, and congenital physical difference by applying a lens of critical disability theory to the Old English Wonders of the East, primarily as it survives in the eleventh-century manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B.v. This thesis focuses on the textual and illustrative representation of one Wonder, the Blemmye—an approximately eight-foot-tall, eight-foot-wide androgynous humanoid, whose eyes and mouth are in their chest and who does not possess a head—as a historic embodiment of what disability meant in relation to the early medieval English worldview. This thesis considers the …

Oh, My Stars: A New Map Of The Universe In Paradise Lost, Michael R. Coats

Master's Theses

Milton’s geographical descriptions in Paradise Lost are heavily influenced by his fascination with maps. Furthermore, his design of the universe in Paradise Lost follows a cartographic style that has led to several attempts at mapping it. These attempts, however, have followed the erroneous assumption that Earth centers the universe. As a result, cosmographical maps of Paradise Lost are inaccurate. I argue that Milton’s universe is Deocentric and provide a new map with a pyramid design that places God at the center of Milton’s universe.

A Psychoanalysis Of Rebecca West’S Unfinished Novel The Sentinel, Taylor Vesely

Honors Theses

This thesis applies a psychoanalytic lens to a little-known and unfinished manuscript by Rebecca West. There is little scholarship on The Sentinel but a wealth of knowledge to be gained from it about the complicated psychological dilemmas the suffragists suffered. West was writing at a critical period in feminist history that is still relevant today, and this novel, which would have been her first, lays the groundwork for many of her future works. Her depictions of sexuality, violence, religion, and motherhood provide an excellent framework for both her protagonist’s self-suppression and a compelling psychoanalysis. This thesis argues that the many …

T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land", And Yoga Philosophy, Jessica Cloud

Master's Theses

While pursuing his graduate studies at Harvard, T.S. Eliot put a year into deep study of the Yoga Sutras with renowned scholar James Haughton Woods. Yoga, defined in the Sutras as the practice of stopping “the fluctuations of the mind-stuff” (Patañjali 8), provides the possibility of hope and equanimity in Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922), which depicts a world seemingly devoid of meaning. Not only can the influence of the Yoga Sutras be seen in the poetic form, style, and voice of The Waste Land and in the explanatory notes to the poem provided by Eliot, but classical yoga …

"And A Sad Ditty Of This Story Born": Regeneration Through Decay In John Keats's Isabella, Erica Van Schaik

Master's Theses

John Keats’s Isabella; or the Pot of Basil (1818) has been read, like many of Keats’s of works, as an allegory for the death that surrounded the poet and his life’s tragic circumstances. Isabella has also been studied in regard to its gothic horror elements. Such previous readings identify a theme of mortality and decay within the poem, but I argue these themes serve a larger purpose, one related to the possibilities created by regeneration. Isabella, a young woman whose lover, Lorenzo, is murdered by her own brothers, removes Lorenzo’s head from his corpse and places it in a potted …

"Her Splendid Children Will Be Born Here”: Anglo-American Relations And Sexual Selection In Transatlantic Fiction, 1870–1914, Jennifer Lynn Robertson

Dissertations

In recent decades, scholars have sought to examine the discourse of evolutionary theory in the realist novel. This dissertation examines the ways in which the novel form embodied evolutionary theory by examining Anglo-American courtship plots. In chapter 2, I examine Charles Glascock’s courtship of Caroline Spalding in Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right. During their courtship, Caroline’s dominant behaviors subvert traditional hierarchies between nations, classes, and genders. However, the open plot of evolutionary change hints at a revolutionary restructuring of social relations. I argue that Caroline and Glascock’s relationship reverts to a more traditional power structure upon their …

Separate Ways Or Til Death Do Us Part?: Divorce In Victorian Literature, Ashley L. Felder

Honors Theses

Divorce laws changed radically across the Victorian period (1837-1901), making divorce more accessible, particularly for men. Considering how those changes affected the portrayal of divorce in early, mid, and late Victorian novels, this study analyzes the literary representation of divorce in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), and George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways (1885), contextualizing this analysis with literary criticism and legal history. No matter how accessible divorce became during the nineteenth century and no matter a character’s reason for wanting to end his/her marriage, divorce is not presented as a legitimate option for characters …

Moving Words/Motion Pictures: Proto-Cinematic Narrative In Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, Kara Marie Manning

Dissertations

In the broadest sense, this project is about nineteenth-century narrative texts and optical toys, or those devices that were originally created to demonstrate scientific knowledge related to vision but that would also become popular for home and public consumption. I argue that nineteenth-century British writers borrowed and adapted the visual effects of such toys, making fiction as participatory as the toys themselves in the development of image culture and the viewing practices that would become necessary for the production and dissemination of cinema in the early twentieth century. Narrative fiction, then, should be considered along with the other precursors of …

"Your Reclamation”: The Gothic Child And Moral Restoration In Charles Dickens’S A Christmas Carol, Ashten Roberts

Master's Theses

Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), an example of Victorian Gothic literature, portrays spirits escorting Ebenezer Scrooge on a journey through time in order to transform him from a miser to a benefactor. Dickens’s text has received much critical attention, and while most critics agree that the novella includes various elements of the gothic, few draw attention to the possibility of the child characters as gothic elements. I argue that Carol’s child characters can be read in terms of what Margarita Georgieva calls “the gothic child.” According to Georgieva, the gothic child can be an adult’s memory from childhood …

The Poet's Corpus: Memory And Monumentality In Wilfred Owen's "The Show", Charles Hunter Joplin

Master's Theses

Wilfred Owen is widely recognized to be the greatest English “trench poet” of the First World War. His posthumously published war poems sculpt a nightmarish vision of trench warfare, one which enables Western audiences to consider the suffering of the English soldiers and the brutality of modern warfare nearly a century after the armistice. However, critical readings of Owen’s canonized corpus, including “The Show” (1917, 1918), only focus on their hellish imagery. I will add to these readings by demonstrating that “The Show” is primarily concerned with the limitations of lyric poetry, the monumentality of poetic composition, and the difficulties …

Robert Frost’S Ulteriority: Saying One Thing In Terms Of Another – The Inexpressible, Nicolette S. Stackhouse

Honors Theses

Robert Frost’s poetry, which is famously rich in double meaning—saying one thing but meaning something else—is also concerned with pragmatism. Pragmatism implies that there is no one fundamental universal truth. I contend that Robert Frost’s poetry says that duplicity of meaning, or ulteriority, is something to be embraced. Frost wants the uncertainty of meaning to be understood by the reader as vital to life and the mind’s processes. The simple fact that so many readers search for the hidden meanings in his poetry justly proves this point. As a pragmatist, Frost was aware that the process of getting to a …

Robert Frost’S New Hampshire, Philip Larkin’S England, And Seamus Heaney’S Ireland: Non-Urban Place And Democratic Poetry, Faisal I. Rawashdeh

Dissertations

In Anglo-American Modernist poetry, place is reduced to an analogue for the cultural degradation brought forth by the disruptive experience of modernity. This demotion stands in sharp contrast to the representation of place as a center of value in the poetry of Robert Frost, Philip Larkin, and Seamus Heaney. In this dissertation, I shall explain this value in terms of its connection to a particular cultural substance which Frost, Larkin, and Heaney deem foundational for their non-ideological terms of belonging to place. Frost embraces New England vernacularism first as the basis for his egalitarianism and second as the core substance …

The Self-(Un)Made Mother: Jungian Archetypes In Dickens's Little Dorrit, William David Love Jr.

Master's Theses

Charles Dickens’s novel Little Dorrit (1857) depicts an abundance of surrogate mothers while simultaneously revealing an absence of biological motherhood. The primary female characters become surrogate mothers in their own ways in order to bypass the legal and physical dangers associated with biological motherhood. To do this, they embrace various alternate forms of femininity—the crone, the maiden, the woman warrior, and the seductress. These women negate themselves willingly in actions that would seem to reinforce the gender norms of their time, but their self-negation actually leads to empowerment and sustainability for themselves and for others. Furthermore, a Jungian interpretation of …

Shakespeare And Boyhood: Early Modern Representations And Contemporary Appropriations, Marvin Tyler Sasser

Dissertations

This dissertation demonstrates that Shakespearean boyhood, both in early modern plays and contemporary reimaginings for young readers, critiques patriarchal and hegemonic ideals through the rhetoric and behavior of boy characters. Although critics have called Shakespeare’s boy characters indistinguishable, I find that they provide Shakespeare a unique resource to offer persuasive skepticism about heroic conventions, education, and political instability. This project begins by examining the lexical network of boy in order to chart its uses in early modern England. The subsequent three chapters establish how Shakespeare uses boys to comment on a range of ideal manhoods, such as the chivalrous …

The Queer Gothic Hero's Journey In Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Kyle Leon Ethridge

Master's Theses

This study of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray argues that the novel participates in a Gothic subversion of the archetypal hero’s journey. The novel employs Gothic devices to supplant heroic narremes. As the novel progresses, both Dorian (as a type of hero-character) and the narrative repeatedly deny or subvert the normative idea of heroism later reified in Joseph Campbell’s archetypal theory. While Campbell’s hero attempts to secure and universalize a heterosocial story, Wilde’s hero is recuperated through a reconfiguring of normative failure as queer success. What is ostensibly a failure of the normative hero to achieve his quest …

A Document In Death And Madness: A Cultural And Interdisciplinary Study Of Nineteenth-Century Art Song Settings On The Death Of Opelia, Jennifer Leigh Tipton

Dissertations

In the nineteenth century the character of Ophelia transformed from a minor role in Hamlet into one of the great muses of the Romantic period. Ophelia’s rise to an archetype of feminine madness was not a result of Shakespeare’s pen alone, but of the accumulation of interpretations of her character from actresses, artists, critics, writers, musicians, and social attitudes toward women. This paper focuses on nineteenth-century interpretations of her death, specifically art song.

A brief survey of the nineteenth-century European cultural and social climate pertaining to Ophelia is included in the paper:

*Shakespeare in France and Germany

*Nineteenth-Century Actresses in …

Wit In The Early Modern Literary Marketplace, Danny Childers

Dissertations

The concept of wit undergoes a transformation in the sixteenth century from having associations with the intellect, with its cultural productions, and with classical study towards more direct associations with the writing trade and with clever wordplay. This transition, as I will demonstrate, relates specifically to tensions between humanist culture and the early modern literary marketplace. This dissertation begins by examining the early sixteenth century humanists' concept of wit and goes on to examine the presentation of the concept by four late sixteenth century writers—John Lyly (1553-1606), Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), Robert Greene (1560-1592), and William Shakespeare (1564-1616). I argue that …

"When The Eternal Can Be Met": Bergsonian Time In The Theologies Of C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, And W.H. Auden, James Corey Latta

Dissertations

C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden all converted to the Christian faith and, upon conversion, turned to the theme of time in their post-conversion works. Interestingly, these Christian authors employed the secular philosophical framework of Henri Bergson’s theory of duration to construct their theologies of time. As texts fostered by Bergson’s ideas of intuition, the dualistic self, and durative force, Lewis’s The Great Divorce, Eliot’sFour Quartets, and Auden’s “Kairos and Logos” are theological works that depict time as an agent.

Metaphasia: Shelley And The Language Of Remoter Worlds, Michael Andrew Howell

Master's Theses

The aim of this project was to trace the evolution of Percy Shelley's metaphasic narrative, or language of the dead, chronologically through the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Mont Blanc, and Prometheus Unbound. Proceeding from Earl Wasserman's detailed map of Shelley's mythopoeic structure, I charted this evolution while identifying a fifth discrete entity within the mythological hierarchy of what Harold Bloom has characterized as a "mythopoeic trilogy" (36). Concurrently, I examined the ongoing debate concerning Shelley's influences, as well as the early formation of his personality, as it pertains to the poems in question, and his fascination with worlds beyond the …

"I Unsex'd My Dress": Lord Byron's Seduction Of Gender In "The Corsair", "Lara", And "Don Juan", Alexis Spiceland Lee

Dissertations

The goal of this project is to posit a theory of how Byron’s texts, specifically through the development of his hero, construct gender and sexuality as styles of seduction that resist easy classification by binary systems. I propose that Byron’s works characterize gender through ironic performances of seduction that, because they reveal that binary structures lack a stable core, dissolve systemic differentiation and thus fatally complicate any attempt to force the individual into rigid categories of gender or sexual identity. Byron’s works deploy seduction as a tactic of ironic representation of both gender and sexual practice that is necessarily multiplicitous …

Metoikos: Modernism's Resident Aliens, Justin Glen Williamson

Dissertations

This dissertation examines why D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce all conceived of themselves as cultural outsiders and how they used this ostensibly marginal social status to conceal a set of conservative core values they sensed were eroding. This otherwise disparate group shared a sense of cultural alienation, recognized the potentially powerful position of the exile, and demonstrated a keen willingness to exploit its possibilities. Although these writers have long been acknowledged and heralded for their experimentation, their technical and formal innovation, much of their work springs from essentially conservative impulses, beliefs, and values, aimed …