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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

From “Calling” To “Just Talking": An Exploration Of Changing Relationship Terminology As A Linguistic Societal Phenomenon, Leora Wasserman May 2023

From “Calling” To “Just Talking": An Exploration Of Changing Relationship Terminology As A Linguistic Societal Phenomenon, Leora Wasserman

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis will explore the correlation between societal and linguistic change,
specifically relating to the usage of the colloquialism “Just Talking” in 21st Century courtship vernacular. The usage of this term seems to be relatively new and does not appear in many scientific articles. In 2019, at the beginning of the research project which prompted this paper, there were no scientific articles that attempted to discuss this phenomenon. Since then, only two articles on the subject have been published. This thesis will attempt to understand why this term is being used and how it relates to the terms which have …


Dominance And Radical Submission In Seventeenth-Century Drama: Chastity, Fairness, And Silence In Portrayals Of Mar(R)Iam(Ne), Sophonisba, And Cleopatra, Laura S. Deluca May 2022

Dominance And Radical Submission In Seventeenth-Century Drama: Chastity, Fairness, And Silence In Portrayals Of Mar(R)Iam(Ne), Sophonisba, And Cleopatra, Laura S. Deluca

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This thesis conducts an extensive reading of early modern English playwrights’ interpretation of ancient royalty. I survey a series of seventeenth-century plays concerning Mariamne I, the Carthaginian noblewoman Sophonisba, and Cleopatra VII. I argue that the English stage produced two models of ancient royalty. Mar(r)iam(ne) and Sophonisba personify one model, functioning as white, seemingly obedient figureheads. I document playwrights portraying their men as reducing them to their chastity and fairness, or lack thereof. Despite the inactivity of these objectified women, the qualities that these men obsess over catalyze masculine irrationality. The other model, which Cleopatra embodies, encompasses blackness and defiance. …


Egyptian Stasis And Imperial Quick-Time: Recursive Xenophobia Cloaked In Mysticism, Laura S. Deluca Apr 2021

Egyptian Stasis And Imperial Quick-Time: Recursive Xenophobia Cloaked In Mysticism, Laura S. Deluca

Undergraduate Honors Theses

I will be examining temporality in British texts about Egypt across time. In order to achieve this, I analyze the play Antony and Cleopatra (1606) by William Shakespeare, and put it in conversation with Pharos, the Egyptian (1899) by Guy Newell Boothby. I will also be discussing Alexandria (2009) by Lindsey Davis, as a demonstration that the pattern in my findings is enduring. I will be dissecting the portrayal of Egyptian temporality, which I have found to be conveyed as a stasis, as contrasted by the quick-time of dominating imperial powers. These sources will allow me to compare depictions of …


Obscure, Unclassed And Undefinable: Social Immobility For Mixed Races In The Nineteenth Century Presented In Jude The Obscure And Of One Blood, Kendall Geed May 2018

Obscure, Unclassed And Undefinable: Social Immobility For Mixed Races In The Nineteenth Century Presented In Jude The Obscure And Of One Blood, Kendall Geed

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This paper examines the problematic nature of western reliance on class-based societies through looking at postbellum United States and Victorian England through a transatlantic lens. I prove how the classification system produces a group of “unclassed” peoples based on a racial and intellectual status, by looking at Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood. These two nineteenth-century novels expose the production of unclassifiable who are outcast based on what I call a “class-race-intellect disagreement.” By revealing the life and struggles of the mixed-raced individual, I will show how the class systems used by western nations not …


Enemy Life: Theorizing Exile Through Milton, Shelley And Byron, Robert L. Berger May 2018

Enemy Life: Theorizing Exile Through Milton, Shelley And Byron, Robert L. Berger

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation investigates the contemporary discourse and conceptions of exile as it is presented by Milton, Shelley and Byron. Utilizing biopolitical theory as a lens, it posits that the Satanic iteration or narrative of exile embodies the reality of worldly exile. As such the dissertation explores the complex framing and subsequent deconstruction of Satanic and human subjectivities found in Paradise Lost, Prometheus Unbound, Manfred and Don Juan. The dissertation examines Paradise Lost for its competing narratives of exile, Adam and Satan, and explores notions of home, transgression, the purification rituals which are the origin of sovereign Power and the …


Place And Displacement: The Unsettling Connection Of Women, Property, And The Law In British Novels Of The Long Nineteenth Century, Claudia J. Martin Feb 2018

Place And Displacement: The Unsettling Connection Of Women, Property, And The Law In British Novels Of The Long Nineteenth Century, Claudia J. Martin

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This study examines how British novels produced during the long nineteenth century, the period from 1750 to 1919, represent thetenuous connection of women to property and place. A paradox of the era was that while women tended to be relegated to theconfines of the domestic realm as daughters, sisters, wives, or widows, it was also a home that they could not or did not own, and in which their continued residence was dependent upon the largesse of others, making them vulnerable to displacement. Thedichotomy between home and homelessness creates the dynamic tension that drives many plots of the long nineteenth …


The Crucible Of Conversation: A Study Of Jamesean Dialogue, Betsy B. Aswad Jan 1973

The Crucible Of Conversation: A Study Of Jamesean Dialogue, Betsy B. Aswad

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

My own initial bemused reaction to the language of Henry James I can place in a classroom in 1960 where, with a class of fellow English majors—-old hands, all of us, at Faulkner and Joyce–I was, in the first chapters of The Wings of the Dove, as “awfully at sea” as Merton Densher was when he first met Kate Croy. A timid question drew from the professor probably the best advice that can be given to a novice at reading James: “You can't just skim James, you know; you have to read every word.” Later, teaching The Turn of the …


An Examination Of The Sacramental Vision Of Dylan Thomas: Its Sources, Analogues And Its Expression In His Poetry, Margaret A. Hardesty Jan 1973

An Examination Of The Sacramental Vision Of Dylan Thomas: Its Sources, Analogues And Its Expression In His Poetry, Margaret A. Hardesty

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Amid the twentieth-century prophets of man’s total and final disintegration, against the age’s portrayers of the incurable malaise and disease gripping society, the voice of Dylan Thomas sounds as a counterpoint, evincing a note of optimism for man and society, expressing a hope that both might achieve reintegration, and, thereby, a new life. This optimistic note, this expression of hope evolved from a vision which gradually possessed Thomas and became the lodestar of all his poetic endeavors. He moved away from an uneasy, pessimistic pantheism in his youth to a firm joyousness in the conviction that all things are holy …


A Critical Study Of William Nevill's The Castell Of Pleasure; The Delusions Of Amor., Thomas Hardy Miles May 1970

A Critical Study Of William Nevill's The Castell Of Pleasure; The Delusions Of Amor., Thomas Hardy Miles

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Few English poems have been neglected more than William Nevilll's The Castell of. Pleasure. Following Henry Pepwell' s reprint ( 1518) of Wynkyn de Worde' s original edition, the poem has been reprinted only twice. Scholarly criticism of the poem is even rarer than are its editions.