English Language and Literature Commons^™

Rædende Iudithðe: The Heroic, Mythological And Christian Elements In The Old English Poem Judith, Judith Caywood

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This project, devoted to the Old English epic fragment Judith, argues that the title character arises from the complex multicultural forces that shaped Anglo-Saxon society, positing that she exists between the mythological, the heroic and the Christian. Simultaneously Christian saint, Germanic warrior and pagan demi-goddess or supernatural figure, Judith arbitrates amongst the seemingly incompatible forces that shaped the poet’s world, allowing the poem to serve as an important site for the making of a new Anglo-Saxon mythos, one which incorporates these disparate yet co-existing elements. Judith becomes a single figure who is able to reconcile these opposing forces within …

John Milton’S Orphic Dependency, Magenta S. Reynolds

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The 17th-century poet John Milton invokes Ovid’s Orpheus as a source of strength and security in overcoming barriers of instability and insecurity, ultimately enabling Milton to claim his own authority as both a prophesizing poet and a bounds-breaking seeker of Classical knowledge. It is my argument that Milton’s dependency on Orpheus has been overlooked, and that it is only through an Orphic foundation that Milton is able to reach beyond artistic creativity, into higher registers of inspiration.

Milton repeatedly invokes the Orpheus in both his prose and poetry, including: Paradise Lost, Ad Patrem, Lycidas, and various sonnets and elegies. These …

Making The Vision A Reality: Staging The Unreal In Realist Theatre, Sarah Zentner

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper seeks to understand why visionary elements are sometimes implemented in otherwise realist works of theatre. Beginning with the father of realism, Henrik Ibsen, and discussing some of the social and domestic conventions present in his work, the paper then moves through an analysis of visionary elements, as they have been implemented in the following works: August Wilson's The Piano Lesson (1987) and Two Trains Running (1990), Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949), and Elizabeth Egloff's The Swan (1993). In doing so, the paper investigates how visionary elements can be effective …

More Awesome Than Infinity: Explorations Of Sea Imagery And Sexual Deviance, Kelly Lonergan

Undergraduate Honors Theses

More Awesome Than Infinity: Explorations of Sea Imagery and Sexual Deviance