English Language and Literature Commons^™

Veiled Victorian Vampires: What Literary Antagonists Reveal About Societal Fears Of 19th Century England, Jenna Harford

Honors Theses

In my thesis paper I look at three primary texts, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to analyze their main antagonists through a vampiric lens. I explain how the characters of Bertha Mason, Miss Havisham, and Dorian Gray are all written with veiled vampiric traits that revolve around themes of sexuality, secrecy and seclusion, and unbridled physical and emotional violence. Although none of these texts is obviously a “vampire novel”, the authors lean into vampire tropes including eerie physical description, doubled relationships, and other vampire lore that can be best …

The Enigmatic Self: An Ongoing Exploration Of Literary Selfhood From The American Renaissance To Contemporary Young Adult Literature, Helene Leichter

Honors Theses

Assuming the near impossible task of sorting through and delineating various conceptions of the self in and throughout literary and civil history, literary critic Irving Howe adopts a highly perceptive and profoundly analytical approach to the enigmatic individual. In the article quoted above, "The Self in Literature," Howe consolidates what he believes to be the most promising attempts at coding and decoding abstractions of the self across numerous literary, philosophical, and sociological texts. The success of Howe’s analysis lies in his ability to simultaneously embrace and scrutinize seemingly incompatible notions of bodily and spiritual discourse. With the knowledge that such …

Reflections: A Meditation On Ballet And Pain, Claire Madeline Silverman

Honors Theses

The defining details of the character of Giselle are that she loves to dance even though she knows it could kill her (for she has a frail heart), and that she is in love with a peasant boy named Loys, though she knows her mother dislikes him. She is defiant, determined to follow her desires.

Giselle wasn’t one of the ballets that stuck out to me when I was younger. I loved the Tchaikovsky ballets — Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker — and later Romeo and Juliet (Macmillan’s version) became my favorite. Giselle existed at my periphery. It’s …

Literature, Pandemic, And The Insufficiency Of Survival: Boccaccio’S Decameron And Emily St. John Mandel’S Station Eleven, Anthony P. Russell

Interdisciplinary Journal of Leadership Studies

The question of literature’s utility in relation to the “real world” has been asked since at least the time of Plato. This essay examines an extreme instance of this problem by investigating two works, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349-1353) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2016), that argue for the value of art in the midst of catastrophe. Boccaccio’s collection of 100 tales, written in the context of the Black Plague, and Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel about a world devastated by a killer flu, overlap and diverge in instructive ways in making their cases for the important role of literature in …

The Messenger - Spring 2020

The Messenger

The objective of The Messenger is to encourage the appreciation and exploration of the creative arts on the University of Richmond campus. Since 1876, The Messenger has celebrated student work by publishing submissions in a literary and visual arts magazine. More information on the magazine, as well as past publications since 1987, can be found on messengerur.wordpress.com.

MEMORY

the act or fact of retaining and recalling impressions, facts, etc.

to draw from memory.

- -

“I think it is all a matter of love:

the more you love a memory,

the stronger and stranger it is.”

Vladimir Nabokov

[Introduction To] Writing Centers At The Center Of Change, Joe Essid, Brian Mctague

Bookshelf

Writing Centers at the Center of Change looks at how eleven centers, internationally, adapted to change at their institutions, during a decade when their very success has become a valued commodity in a larger struggle for resources on many campuses.

Bringing together both US and international perspectives, this volume offers solutions for adapting to change in the world of writing centers, ranging from the logistical to the pedagogical, and even to the existential. Each author discusses the origins, appropriate responses, and partners to seek when change comes from within a school or outside it. Chapters document new programs being formed …

A Twisted Skein Of Desire: Confession, Gaze, And Time In Andre Aciman’S Call Me By Your Name, Anthony Isenhour

Honors Theses

In interacting with others, and particularly in intimate relationships with others, desire becomes a complex emotion entangled with the specific identifications of each person. These complications are also often shaped by social conventions, internal thoughts, and the ability to communicate. In all its narrative structures, themes, and plot points, Andre Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name is framed by one question on this topic, stated in a time of deep conflict by the narrator: “Are ‘being’ and ‘having’ thoroughly accurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone’s body to touch and being that someone we’re longing to …

[Introduction To] Constructing The Adolescent Reader In Contemporary Young Adult Fiction, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

Bookshelf

This book examines the way young adult readers are constructed in a variety of contemporary young adult fictions, arguing that contemporary young adult novels depict readers as agents. Reading, these novels suggest, is neither an unalloyed good nor a dangerous ploy, but rather an essential, occasionally fraught, by turns escapist and instrumental, deeply pleasurable, and highly contentious activity that has value far beyond the classroom skills or the specific content it conveys. After an introductory chapter that examines the state of reading and young adult fiction today, the book examines novels that depict reading in school, gendered and racialized reading, …

[Introduction To] I And You, J. David Stevens

Bookshelf

The four stories in J. David Stevens’s I and You focus on immigrants and their families, characters trying to find the merge point between the China of a previous generation and America today. A teenage son puzzles over his father’s obsession with American football. A Texas lesbian falls for an international graduate student. A divorced middle-aged woman tries to right an old wrong in the life of a man for whom she serves as caregiver. Through episodes where intimacy falters in the face of palpable distance, characters must confront unknowable details in the lives of even those closest to them: …

[Introduction To] Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, And The Politics Of Humanism, Nathan Snaza

Bookshelf

In Animate Literacies Nathan Snaza proposes a new theory of literature and literacy in which he outlines how literacy is both constitutive of the social and used as a means to define the human. Weaving new materialism with feminist, queer, and decolonial thought, Snaza theorizes literacy as a contact zone in which humans, nonhuman animals, and nonvital objects such as chairs and paper all become active participants. In readings of classic literature by Kate Chopin, Frederick Douglass, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Mary Shelley, and others, Snaza emphasizes the key roles that affect and sensory experiences play in literacy. Snaza upends …

Pocahontas Looks Back And Then Looks Elsewhere: The Entangled Gaze In Contemporary Indigenous Art, Monika Siebert

English Faculty Publications

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, various genres of visual art in North America feature Indigenous subjects looking from the canvas or the screen at the viewers to interpellate them as implicated in the gaze framing the artwork. In this article, I provide an historical genealogy of this returned gaze, starting with Simon van de Passe’s 1616 engraving, Matoaka als Lady Rebecca. I show how subsequent depictions of Pocahontas depart from the reciprocal gaze of de Passe’s portrait and how contemporary art returns to this theme of the returned gaze, using Shelley Niro’s video work The Shirt (2003) …

[Introduction To] Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism And Colonial Entanglements, Julietta Singh

Bookshelf

In Unthinking Mastery Julietta Singh challenges a core, fraught dimension of geopolitical, cultural, and scholarly endeavor: the drive toward mastery over the self and others. Drawing on postcolonial theory, queer theory, new materialism, and animal studies, Singh traces how pervasive the concept of mastery has been to modern politics and anticolonial movements. She juxtaposes destructive uses of mastery, such as the colonial domination of bodies, against more laudable forms, such as intellectual and linguistic mastery, to underscore how the concept—regardless of its use—is rooted in histories of violence and the wielding of power. For anticolonial thinkers like Fanon and Gandhi, …

[Chapter 1 From] No Archive Will Restore You, Julietta Singh

Bookshelf

At once memoir, theory, poetic prose, and fragment, No Archive Will Restore You is a feverish meditation on the body. Departing from Antonio Gramsci’s summons to compile an inventory of the historical traces left in each of us, Singh engages with both the impossibility and urgent necessity of crafting an archive of the body. Through reveries on the enduring legacies of pain, desire, sexuality, race, and identity, she asks us to sense and feel what we have been trained to disavow, to re-member the body as more than itself.

Manifest Destiny, American Domesticity, And The Role Of The Immigrant In Ruiz De Burton's Novels, Madison Rose Martinez

Honors Theses

Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novels Who Would Have Thought It?And The Squatter And the Donare important works of literature due to their representation of the MexicanExperience in the redefined expanding United States of the nineteenth century. The novelsprovide two perspectives of the time period by delving into the lives of Americans and Mexicans on both sides of the country.

"Authentic Tidings": What Wordsworth Gave To William James, David E. Leary

Psychology Faculty Publications

It is widely recognized that William James had a profound and pervasive impact upon literary writers, works, styles, and genres, not to mention upon the encompassing frameworks of modernism and post-modernism, throughout the 20th century. Much less recognized is the impact of literature upon James’s life and work, whether in psychology or philosophy. This article looks at the influence of one particular author, William Wordsworth, primarily through his long 1814 poem The Excursion, from which James drew “authentic tidings” that helped him weather some early storms and create his distinctive way of thinking about the human mind and its …

[Introduction To] Feeding The Flock: The Foundations Of Mormon Thought: Church And Praxis, Terryl L. Givens

Bookshelf

Feeding the Flock, the second volume of Terryl L. Givens's landmark study of the foundations of Mormon thought and practice, traces the essential contours of Mormon practice as it developed from Joseph Smith to the present. Despite the stigmatizing fascination with its social innovations (polygamy, communalism), its stark supernaturalism (angels, gold plates, and seer stones), and its most esoteric aspects (a New World Garden of Eden, sacred undergarments), as well as its long-standing outlier status among American Protestants, Givens reminds us that Mormonism remains the most enduring-and thriving-product of the nineteenth-century's religious upheavals and innovations. Because Mormonism is founded …

[Introduction To] In Search Of Annie Drew: Jamaica Kincaid's Mother And Muse, Daryl Cumber Dance

Bookshelf

There is perhaps no other person who has been so often and obsessively featured in any writer’s canon as Jamaica Kincaid’s mother, Annie Drew. In this provocative new book, Daryl Dance argues that everything Kincaid has written, regardless of its apparent theme, actually relates to Kincaid’s efforts to free herself from her mother, whether her subject is ostensibly other family members, her home nation, a precolonial world, or even Kincaid herself. A devoted reader of Kincaid’s work, Dance had long been aware of the author’s love-hate relationship with her mother, but it was not until reading the 2008 essay "The …

[Introduction To] Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms And Curriculum Studies, Nathan Snaza, Debbie Sonu, Sarah E. Truman, Zofia Zaliwska

Bookshelf

This edited collection takes up the wild and sudden surge of new materialisms in the field of curriculum studies. New materialisms shift away from the strong focus on discourse associated with the linguistic or cultural turn in theory and toward recent work in the physical and biological sciences; in doing so, they posit ontologies of becoming that re-configure our sense of what a human person is and how that person relates to the more-than-human ecologies in which it is nested. Ignited by an urgency to disrupt the dangers of anthropocentrism and systems of domination in the work of curriculum and …

The Filial Dagger: The Case Of Hal And Henry Iv In 1 & 2 Henry Iv And The Famovs Victories, Kristin M.S. Bezio

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

English culture and politics in the last decade of the sixteenth century were both patriarchal and patrilineal, in spite of— or, perhaps, in part, because of—the so-called bastard queen sitting on the throne. The prevailing political questions of the day concerned Elizabeth’s successor and the fate of the nation that, so many believed, hung precariously in the balance. Questions of legality, legitimacy, and fitness formed the crux of these debates, but almost all claimants attempted to justify their right by tracing their bloodlines back to either Henry VII or Edward III, the respective patriarchs of the Tudor dynasty and the …

[Introduction To] Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, Bertram D. Ashe

Bookshelf

In Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, professor Bert Ashe delivers a witty, fascinating, and unprecedented account of black male identity as seen through our culture's perceptions of hair. It is a deeply personal story that weaves together the cultural and political history of dreadlocks with Ashe's own mid-life journey to lock his hair.

After leading a far-too-conventional life for forty years, Ashe began a long, arduous, uncertain process of locking his own hair in an attempt to step out of American convention. Black hair, after all, matters. Few Americans are subject to snap judgements like those in the African-American community, …

[Introduction To] Apocalyptic Sentimentalism: Love And Fear In U.S. Antebellum Literature, Kevin Pelletier

Bookshelf

In contrast to the prevailing scholarly consensus that understands sentimentality to be grounded on a logic of love and sympathy, Apocalyptic Sentimentalism demonstrates that in order for sentimentality to work as an antislavery engine, it needed to be linked to its seeming opposite—fear, especially the fear of God’s wrath. Most antislavery reformers recognized that calls for love and sympathy or the representation of suffering slaves would not lead an audience to “feel right” or to actively oppose slavery. The threat of God’s apocalyptic vengeance—and the terror that this threat inspired—functioned within the tradition of abolitionist sentimentality as a necessary goad …

[Introduction To] Posthumanism And Educational Research, Nathan Snaza, John A. Weaver

Bookshelf

Focusing on the interdependence between human, animal, and machine, posthumanism redefines the meaning of the human being previously assumed in knowledge production. This movement challenges some of the most foundational concepts in educational theory and has implications within educational research, curriculum design and pedagogical interactions. In this volume, a group of international contributors use posthumanist theory to present new modes of institutional collaboration and pedagogical practice. They position posthumanism as a comprehensive theoretical project with connections to philosophy, animal studies, environmentalism, feminism, biology, queer theory and cognition. Researchers and scholars in curriculum studies and philosophy of education will benefit from …

[Introduction To] Indians Playing Indian: Multiculturalism And Contemporary Indigenous Art In North America, Monica Siebert

Bookshelf

Contemporary indigenous peoples in North America confront a unique predicament. While they are reclaiming their historic status as sovereign nations, mainstream popular culture continues to depict them as cultural minorities similar to other ethnic Americans. These depictions of indigenous peoples as “Native Americans” complete the broader narrative of America as a refuge to the world’s immigrants and a home to contemporary multicultural democracies, such as the United States and Canada. But they fundamentally misrepresent indigenous peoples, whose American history has been not of immigration but of colonization. Monika Siebert’s Indians Playing Indian first identifies this phenomenon as multicultural misrecognition, explains …

A Note On 'Roderick Hudson' And 'La Traviata': Who Has Gone Astray?, Rodney Stenning Edgecombe

Verdi Forum

No abstract provided.

Modern American Myth-Making In Mass Media Texts, Kassandra Andreadis

Honors Theses

What is an American myth? “Myth” can have many meanings and can refer to many different types of works. For example, Edwards and Klosa refer to Frankenstein as “an important mythic text” (Edwards and Klosa 34), which provides a middle point between ancient myths (e.g. the Odyssey) and current myths, showing that myths have continued to be produced and establishing myth-making as a continuous process. This process continues into the present, all over the world, so it stands to reason that the United States of America has its own myths. The identity of those myths is less certain. While ideas …

"Wood For The Coffins Ran Out": Modernism And The Shadowed Afterlife Of The Influenza Pandemic, Elizabeth Outka

English Faculty Publications

Here’s what we already know—during the First World War, soldiers and civilians often had remarkably different experiences of the war corpse. Dead bodies were omnipresent on the front line and in the trenches, an inescapable constant for the living soldier. As critic Allyson Booth notes, “Trench soldiers . . . inhabited worlds constructed, literally, of corpses.”¹ In Britain and America, however, such corpses were strangely absent; unlike in previous conflicts, bodies were not returned. This dichotomy underscores some of our central assumptions about the differences between the front line and the home front: in the trenches, dead bodies and …

[Introduction To] The Cambridge Companion To Paradise Lost, Louis Schwartz

Bookshelf

This Companion presents fifteen short, accessible essays exploring the most important topics and themes in John Milton's masterpiece, Paradise Lost. The essays invite readers to begin their own independent exploration of the poem by equipping them with useful background knowledge, introducing them to key passages, and acquainting them with the current state of critical debates. Chapters are arranged to mirror the way the poem itself unfolds, offering exactly what readers need as they approach each movement of its grand design. Essays in Part I introduce the characters who frame the poem's story and set its plot and theological dynamics …

Bringing Down The Island: Rebellion, Colonial Hierarchy, And Individualized Leadership In Nuñez’S Novel Prospero’S Daughter, Kristin M.S. Bezio

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

“Bringing Down the Island: Rebellion, Colonial Hierarchy, and Individualized Leadership in Nuñez’s novel Prospero’s Daughter” offers an analysis of Elizabeth Nuñez’s (2006) novel Prospero’s Daughter and Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (1969), both of which draw upon multicultural tradition of European and Caribbean literatures, retelling Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611). The paper is concerned with the ways in which leadership has been transformed from the original story, through Césaire’s text, and into Nuñez’s. Each work acts as an agent of leadership in literary and social terms, attempting to enact paradigmatic shifts away from hierarchy and classification and toward individualized transformational leadership.

David Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe And The Logic Of Sentimental Terror, Kevin Pelletier

English Faculty Publications

With few exceptions, contemporary criticism reads nineteenth-century sentimental fiction as a literature of love. When Harriet Beecher Stowe famously asserted that the moral growth of the nation depended on each citizen’s ability to “feel right,” she voiced a sentiment shared by many of her contemporaries. It is no surprise, then, that scholars have assumed Stowe’s injunction to “feel right” was a call to feel compassion and love, for it was ostensibly through a rhetoric of Christian love that Stowe was able to foment a passionate outcry against slavery from many of her Northern readers. Indeed, sentimentalism’s transformative potential is best …

Life In The Hopeless Emptiness : The Search For Authenticity In Revolutionary Road, Austin Marie Carter

Honors Theses

Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road opens, appropriately, with the “final dying sounds” of the Laurel Players’ dress rehearsal of The Petrified Forest. The suburban community theater is preparing for its inaugural show, and from these opening words, it is clear that this is a novel of performance—of failed performance, specifically. Even though the Players have little theatrical experience, both they and the community have allowed themselves to begin to believe in the “brave idea” of the show (7), and they “let the movement of the play come and carry them and break like a wave” (6). Revolutionary Road is populated by …