English Language and Literature Commons^™

Female Pleasure And Theories Of Desire In Narrative Structure: Evolution, Futurity, And Species Survival In The Post-Human And Science Fiction Imaginary, Laura L. S. Bauer

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores the complex relationship between an expanded narratological theory of narrative desire, inseparable in its relation to evolution and biological reproduction, and the future survival of humanity imagined across the narrative structures of three 21st-century works of dystopian science fiction. By examining the genre's potential to address species survival specifically through female forms of desire identified as narrative recurrence, prolonged duration, and emotional resolution, this study concurrently develops a metatextual methodology that cultivates the overlooked liminal space of quiescence. This analytical framework emphasizes narrative structure over theme-based analysis to unlock the radical imagination present in the texts …

How Epistolary Novelists’ Literalizations Of Moral Sense Philosophy Dramatize The Long-Eighteenth Century’S Gender Battles, Melissa Stacey Bishop-Magallanes

CGU Theses & Dissertations

While some might consider epistolary novels of the long-eighteenth century as the sentimental purview of women readers, this research proposes that many of these epistolary novels serve as powerful markers in the gender wars of this era. While an overall sense of optimism pervaded Britain’s long-eighteenth century, people still grappled with foundational moral questions. These questions came to be addressed in increasingly secular ways by moral philosophy. As these philosophers occupied influential government, law, and publishing positions, their ideas and works greatly influenced the public imagination. The publications of moral philosophers—such as John Locke, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Joseph …

Jemimas, Jockeys, And Jolly Banks: The Racial Discourse Of Black Collectibles, Conrad Pruitt

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Over the last thirty years, an industry in black racist memorabilia has resurged. Bolstered by online commerce, social media trade, and a robust reproduction market, racist collectibles continue to circulate despite their functional obsolescence or presumed incongruity with current views of race. Many of these objects originated in the late nineteenth century, where the emergence of black citizenship was seen as a threat to a racial caste structure that ensured white supremacy. Following the impetus for supremacy that defined the Jim Crow era, the collectibles sought to crystallize conceptions of inherent black inferiority. The presumption that these originary conditions and …

Shakespeare’S Cosmology On The Supernatural: All Is Illusion, Yiju Liao

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines how Shakespeare approached elements of the supernatural – ghosts, madness, and witchcraft – in his plays. The aftermath of the England’s break from the Catholic Church led to societal upheaval in the way early modern England viewed the supernatural. Prior to this break, Europeans interpreted the supernatural through the religious explanations provided by the Church. However, the Reformation opened the gates for scholars, physicians, and theologists to offer up non-religious explanations for supernatural phenomena. In England in particular, tropes and fears towards the supernatural were colored by the foreign threats against Queen Elizabeth I by the Catholic …

A Web Of Connections: How Early Twentieth-Century American Women Writers And Photographers Situated A New Way Of Seeing, Kristina Krause

CGU Theses & Dissertations

While there are several studies of the relationships and influences between American male photographers and writers, this study examines the lesser known and understudied collaborations and connections between early, twentieth-century American women photographers and writers, beginning around the end of the nineteenth century and extending into the 1930s. The web of connections between women writers and photographers, connections created through influence, through mentorship, through friendship, or through collaboration, provided a space in which they could situate a new way of seeing and defining each other as women and as artists, and it manifested in the empathetic manner in which they …

“An Unquiet Soul”: Despair And Doubt Of God’S Benevolence In The Novels Of Charlotte Brontë, Heidi Zameni

CGU Theses & Dissertations

As a nineteenth-century writer, Charlotte Brontë lived during a tumultuous time of

challenges to previously incontrovertible mores, leading to a refashioning of societal beliefs and attitudes. Challenges to the Church of England, such as the split by the newly formed Free Church of Scotland and an increase in Dissent, disputes against the historical accuracy of the Bible, the loss of nature as a source for spiritual replenishment, and political and economic strife permeated the lives of the Victorians. All institutions within the British system—law, medicine, prisons, civil service, army—were subject to challenges during this period. The criticism led to a …

"The Island Has Two Sides": Female Subjectivity In Postcolonial Adaptation, Teah Goldberg

CGU Theses & Dissertations

My dissertation is entitled: “The Island has two sides: Female Subjectivity in Postcolonial Adaptation.” In it I will argue that many postcolonial narratives either consciously or unconsciously adapt Shakespeare’s The Tempest in an effort to resurrect repressed female narratives of resistance. Through an examination of Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter (2006), J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1988), and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), this dissertation will contribute to the fields of feminist and postcolonial studies by arguing that the kinds of female critical voices that we find embedded within these postcolonial texts, either …

The Role Of Cognitive Dissonance In Fin De Siècle Jamesian Narratives, Mona Moin Syed

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Henry James once described emergent self—awareness of individual consciousness as an “illimitable power” that enables personal survival within a world that is, by default, unpredictable and volatile. Subsequent analyses of narrative subtleties and character evolution in James’s major works of fiction have often been considered through constructs of psychological realism. One particular aspect of the majority of early Jamesian criticism highlights the connections between stringent Victorian social mores and contemporaneously shifting perceptions of life in England toward the end of the 19th century. In the decades that followed, correlations between the Jamesian narrative and psychoanalytical theory became more prominent within …

"Something Old And Dark Has Got Its Way": Shakespeare's Influence In The Gothic Literary Tradition, Natalie A. Hewitt

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines Shakespeare’s role as the most significant precursor to the Gothic author in Britain, suggesting that Shakespeare used the same literary conventions that Gothic writers embraced as they struggled to create a new subgenre of the novel. By borrowing from Shakespeare’s canon, these novelists aimed to persuade readers and critics that rather than undermining the novel’s emergent, still unassured status as an acceptable literary genre, the nontraditional aspects of their works paid homage to Shakespeare’s imaginative vision. Gothic novelists thereby legitimized their attempts at literary expression. Despite these efforts, Gothic writers did not instantly achieve the type of …

Covenant Nation: The Politics Of Grace In Early American Literature, Justin M. Scott-Coe

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The argument of this dissertation is that a critical reading of the concept of "covenant" in early American writings is instrumental to understanding the paradoxes in the American political concepts of freedom and equality. Following Slavoj Zizek's theoretical approach to theology, I trace the covenant concept in early American literature from the theological expressions and disputes in Puritan Massachusetts through Jonathan Edwards's Freedom of Will and the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, showing how the covenant theology of colonial New England dispersed into more "secular" forms of what may be called an American political theology. The first chapter provides an …

Debating Difference: Haitian Transnationalism In Paul Gilroy’S Black Atlantic, Jamella N. Gow

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Blacks who have descended from the nineteenth century Atlantic slave trade have historically debated and worked to claim a sense of cultural identity that reflects their African heritage and their identity as diasporic. I am particularly interested in how people of the black Atlantic claim their multiple identities since, for people of a diaspora, one main factor is the fact that they inhabit multiple spaces but cannot call any home. How does transnationalism become a better way to describe the cultural identity of those in the "black Atlantic" since these people have to create new or adapted identities as they …