English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Texture Of Everyday Life: Carceral Realism And Abolitionist Speculation, Shea Hennum

English Theses and Dissertations

Exploring the ways in which prisons shape the subjectivity of free-world thinkers, and the ways that subjectivity is expressed in literary texts, this dissertation develops the concept of carceral realism: a cognitive and literary mode that represents prisons and police as the only possible response to social disorder. As this dissertation illustrates, this form of consciousness is experienced as racial paranoia, and it is expressed literary texts, which reflect and help to reify it. Through this process of cultural reification, carceral realism increasingly insists on itself as the only possible mode of thinking. As I argue, however, carceral realism actually …

Perspective, Invention, And Metatheater In Renaissance Literature, William Roudabush

English Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation challenges the misconception of post-Reformation England as iconophobic. On the contrary, it argues that early modern English poets and playwrights adapt Continental theories and techniques from painting, translating them into their own poetic and dramatic forms. It explores how allusions to contemporary perspectival images serve as governing metaphors and structural devices for the works in which they appear. Particularly in the genre of the Elizabethan epyllion and in works by Shakespeare, it suggests that texts are designed to be read “perspectively,” to borrow Shakespeare’s coinage, so that they are open to ambiguity and multiplicity, and capable of being …

“Þer Watz Mete, Þer Watz Myrþe, Þer Watz Much Ioye”: The Manipulative Sotilte Of Middle English Romance, Kelly Evans

English Theses and Dissertations

The Middle English sotilte and its Middle French counterpart, the entremet, refer to the elements during a feast that conjure wonder. Like “feast” and “banquet,” both terms have been used interchangeably, with the entremet coming to signify a sweet dessert at the end of a meal in modern usage of the term. In Middle English romance, the sotilte of the feast builds upon the connotations that “subtlety” carry—guile, artifice, craft, even deceit.

Perhaps the most well-known of all Middle English sotiltes is the sudden intrusion of the Green Knight during the Christmastide feast in Sir Gawain and the Green …

Blue Mondays: A Woman’S Life In The East End, Rosanne Brooks

Michael Pueppke Writing Prize

No abstract provided.