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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Staging Sex Or Fighting Foreignness? Marlowe's Edward Ii As Xenophobic Drama, James D. Baker Dec 2015

Staging Sex Or Fighting Foreignness? Marlowe's Edward Ii As Xenophobic Drama, James D. Baker

Master's Theses

Christopher Marlowe’s drama Edward II has long been known for its representation of a close male, arguably homosexual, friendship between King Edward II and his favorite, the French Piers Gaveston, as well as their union’s negative effects on the court. Indeed much criticism exists on the common belief that the characters’ relationship is problematic in early modern England both because the two characters are male and because there is an obvious class divide. However, critics have seemed to overlook Gaveston’s being French, even in light of the massive immigration to England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This …


Robert Frost’S New Hampshire, Philip Larkin’S England, And Seamus Heaney’S Ireland: Non-Urban Place And Democratic Poetry, Faisal I. Rawashdeh Dec 2015

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 …


"Equal Partners In Crime": Narration In The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Rebecca Mae Holder Aug 2015

"Equal Partners In Crime": Narration In The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Rebecca Mae Holder

Master's Theses

This reading of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao argues that narrator Yunior’s failure to capture the authentic speech of Beli illuminates the failure of narrative generally to speak authentically for the subaltern. The writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, Gayatri Spivak, and Scott McCloud work together to uncover the political and ethical implications of Yunior’s willful erasure of Beli’s voice. In the sections detailing her early life, Yunior draws attention to the gaps in the information he gives readers and thus reminds them that all narrative excludes and distorts details to fulfill an objective. This reading argues that …


Performativity And Jazz In The Fiction Of James Baldwin And Ralph Ellison, Drako P. Wells Aug 2015

Performativity And Jazz In The Fiction Of James Baldwin And Ralph Ellison, Drako P. Wells

Honors Theses

Since slavery in the seventeenth century, African Americans have been politically and economically oppressed in the United States. Even in recent times, it seems as if simply being black is enough to have a person criticized by society, convicted of crimes, or even killed. However, the frustration that oppression causes has, in many ways, catalyzed the evolution of African American culture and the African American identity. In this study, I examine how two postwar African American authors, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, portray the African American struggle with racial injustice and the means of overcoming its negative effects. In this …


Protecting Dixie: Southern Girlhood In Children's Literature, 1852-1920, Laura Anne Hakala Aug 2015

Protecting Dixie: Southern Girlhood In Children's Literature, 1852-1920, Laura Anne Hakala

Dissertations

Most scholarship about girlhood in children’s literature tends to rely on national models of girlhood. My project complicates those models by demonstrating how region shapes distinct forms of American girlhood. In particular, I examine representations of southern girlhood in children’s literature published between 1852 and 1920, drawing on the four types of literature that most featured southern girls during this time period: abolitionist literature, Confederate literature, postbellum plantation fiction, and family stories. Using a historicist methodology and spatial analysis, I place these texts in relation to information about the spatial arrangements and protocols of southern domestic sites. By viewing girlhood …


A Queen’S Reputation: A Feminist Analysis Of The Cultural Appropriations Of Cleopatra, Chamara Moore May 2015

A Queen’S Reputation: A Feminist Analysis Of The Cultural Appropriations Of Cleopatra, Chamara Moore

Honors Theses

While there is no doubt that Cleopatra is considered a notable historical figure and popularly regarded character throughout modern media, there is a distinct pattern in her portrayal throughout time as a woman whose power is defined by her sexual promiscuity. Even throughout periods of powerful female monarchs, political change, and social progress her prowess as a leader has been assumingly attributed to her affairs with Julius Caesar and Marc Antony. The purpose of this study is to examine how literature and media has contributed to this sexualized reputation of a queen who yielded authority over such a prosperous nation. …


The Implementation Of Common Core: Graphic Novels In The Classroom, Chesnie R. Keeler May 2015

The Implementation Of Common Core: Graphic Novels In The Classroom, Chesnie R. Keeler

Honors Theses

The Common Core State Standards are alive and thriving in schools across the nation, and teachers are constantly looking for the best possible ways to implement these rigorous standards with student interests in mind. These standards set goals, or benchmarks, for students to reach at any specified grade level throughout their primary and secondary education; school districts, administrators, and teachers have the choice of deciding how students meet these standards. As a pre-service teacher who will enter the teaching profession, I examine how graphic novels can be implemented into the English Language Arts classroom by analyzing Maus, Persepolis, …


The Self-(Un)Made Mother: Jungian Archetypes In Dickens's Little Dorrit, William David Love Jr. May 2015

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 …


The Importance Of Appearances In Literature: What Does It Mean To Be A Redhead In Literature?, Chelsea J. Anderson May 2015

The Importance Of Appearances In Literature: What Does It Mean To Be A Redhead In Literature?, Chelsea J. Anderson

Honors Theses

In literature, appearances always seem to play a major part of each character. The physical descriptions of each character are important to the development of the story. Therefore, it seems that a character’s physical appearance becomes an important part of character development, and his/her physical traits help to determine the type of character he/she will be. Often times, different hair colors carry associations along with them. Redheads have been associated with certain temperaments and personality traits throughout history. In literature, red-headed characters often have the temperaments, traits, and negative connotations associated with redheads. One of the major assumptions made about …


Bakhtin’S Problems Of Dostoevsky’S Poetics And The Ideological Problem Of The Brothers Karamazov, Natalie N. Griner May 2015

Bakhtin’S Problems Of Dostoevsky’S Poetics And The Ideological Problem Of The Brothers Karamazov, Natalie N. Griner

Honors Theses

Dostoevsky’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, strives to resolve the question of God’s existence. But many critics have acknowledged that Dostoevsky seems to present Ivan’s skeptical voice with equal, if not greater, force than Alyosha’s affirmative voice—a feature of the novel that is difficult to explain in the context of Dostoevsky’s avowed Christianity. There is an overwhelming consensus among critics that The Brothers is a thesis-novel. But in order to establish the novel as a defense of faith, the critic must ultimately dismiss the strength of Ivan’s voice; and in attempting to demonstrate that the voice of doubt prevails, …


Out Of The Attic: Agency And Narratives Of Mental Illness By David Foster Wallace And Lauren Slater, Erin L. Mcleod May 2015

Out Of The Attic: Agency And Narratives Of Mental Illness By David Foster Wallace And Lauren Slater, Erin L. Mcleod

Honors Theses

Studies of Prozac Diary and Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir illustrate how Slater adapts conventions of fiction to the memoir form to create agency for the mentally ill subject. This study will apply this approach of narrative therapy to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest to determine if the autobiographical conventions of mental illness may be adapted to fiction. An analysis of these primary texts seeks to address issues related to the therapeutic dimensions of autobiography as these are complicated by the narrative conventions that distinguish memoir and fiction.


The Pandemonium Of Change: Endurance Of The Carnivalesque Mode, Jeremy K. Horton May 2015

The Pandemonium Of Change: Endurance Of The Carnivalesque Mode, Jeremy K. Horton

Honors Theses

The carnivalesque is a literary mode that takes the characteristics of medieval carnivals and brings them to literature. Academic study of the carnivalesque has thus far been relatively limited, leaving the researcher to explore a largely untapped field of literary analysis. The carnivalesque is most easily observable in the more celebrated mode of literature known as magical realism, which is a mode generally associated with Latin American authors, including several Nobel laureates. Magical realism deals with the insertion of traditional supernatural elements into otherwise natural worlds, which is the point where this mode intersects with the carnivalesque (though the two …


Shakespeare And Boyhood: Early Modern Representations And Contemporary Appropriations, Marvin Tyler Sasser May 2015

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 …