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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Moral Margins: Ethics And Economics In American Northern Literature, 1837-1900, John Adam Stromski
Moral Margins: Ethics And Economics In American Northern Literature, 1837-1900, John Adam Stromski
Doctoral Dissertations
“Moral Margins: Slavery and Capitalism in American Northern Literature, 1837-1900,” focuses on the intersections of slavery, capitalism, and literature, building on recent historical scholarship on the myriad ways slavery impacted the growth of American capitalism. Nowhere is this relationship more prominent than in the nineteenth century, when slavery experienced its highest levels of economic and political influence. Scholars of capitalism and American slavery have tended to focus on the South, the obvious locus of slavery, but little attention is paid to the North, where this relationship is more veiled. I argue that Northern literature shows the ethical complexities of slavery-based …
Shelley's Delusive Flames: Self And Poetry In The Major Works, Brent Steven Robida
Shelley's Delusive Flames: Self And Poetry In The Major Works, Brent Steven Robida
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation explores Percy Shelley’s ethical commitments in several of his major works. Its primary claim is that Shelley’s poetry is involved in the regulation and education of desire. As a fundamentally antinomian poet, Shelley grapples time and again with how moral progress will be guided absent the regulatory influences of law and religion. My dissertation offers an answer to this central impasse affecting scholarship on the ethical world Shelley imagines and attempts to realize through poetry. It argues for a dialectical movement observable in Shelley’s work of the programmatic breakdown, rather than fulfillment, of hope. This study reconsiders the …
Guiding Transhumanism: The Necessity Of An Ethical Approach To Transhumanism, Marian L. Laforest
Guiding Transhumanism: The Necessity Of An Ethical Approach To Transhumanism, Marian L. Laforest
Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects
No abstract provided.
The "Vast And Terrible" Trauma: American Literary Naturalism, Ethics, And Levinas, Tyler Joseph Efird
The "Vast And Terrible" Trauma: American Literary Naturalism, Ethics, And Levinas, Tyler Joseph Efird
Doctoral Dissertations
In an 1896 essay, Frank Norris wrote that the reading world should abandon those “teacup tragedies” to which it had grown accustomed and embrace a new literature that would depict a “vast and terrible drama.” Realism, Norris claimed, could not be used to achieve an earnest portrait of the conditions that mark individual lives under capitalism. Instead, the world needed a romantic wrestling with the forces of existential inscrutability. Also, the perceived need for literature to depict a clear ethical system needed revising from the perspective of American literary naturalism, a school long denigrated for apparent moral vacuity. Through excruciating …
Collateral: Poems, Joshua Jon Robbins
Collateral: Poems, Joshua Jon Robbins
Doctoral Dissertations
In the lyric tradition of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Terrible Sonnets and James Wright’s odes to the Midwest, the poems in Collateral interrogate the complexities of faith and doubt in middle-class America and present a witness compelled to translate suburbia’s landscapes and evangelical banalities into a testimony of hard truths. These poems explore the emotional exhaustion that accompanies language’s broken connection to ideal meaning and how both are unable to fully correspond to our lives. The manuscript is also an exploration of my own corresponding lyric struggle to reconcile what is and what should be, the personal and the political …