English Language and Literature Commons^™

Bureaucratic Sorceries In The Third Policeman: Anthropological Perspectives On Magic & Officialdom, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

This article discusses The Third Policeman through the lens of a dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment that is firmly anchored in the history of anthropological discourse on bureaucracy (Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, Tambiah, Herzfeld, Graeber, Jones). From this angle, Flann O’Brien’s novel is examined as an aesthetic illustration of an essentially anthropological argument: although bureaucracy has been described as an eminently rational form of social systematisation, regulation, and control (since Weber), it also functions, paradoxically, as a symbolic site for irrationality and supernatural occurrences, haunted by madness, mystery, and delusion. The novel is intriguing partly due to its nonchalant, humorous entwining of …

Wave By Wave: A Fantasy Author's Guide For Refining A Creative Writing Style, Michael Bose

Senior Honors Theses

Writing a novel is a great undertaking. Many would-be writers have set out to create a novel and give up halfway through, uncertain where or how they failed. This project aims to help prospective authors get past that barrier. By analyzing one’s own writing style, a writer can ascertain greater insight into the strengths and weaknesses of one’s own work and therefore help rectify mistakes one might make otherwise, or learn to see a chapter from a new angle. The author will demonstrate this method on himself first by way of focused revisions. A sample chapter of a fantasy novel, …

Virginia Woolf And Her World, Václav Paris

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

The Mango Snores, Michael S. Garcia

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

THE MANGO SNORES

by

Michael S. Garcia

Florida International University, 2021

Miami, Florida

Professor John Dufresne, Major Professor

Set in Miami at the start of the twenty-first century, THE MANGO SNORES is a seriocomic crime novel chronicling a week in the life of Sam Espada, Cuban-American writing professor and author of the Mango series of detective fiction. Reeling from the sudden dissolution of his marriage and the abject failure of his latest book, Sam finds himself embroiled in a plot right out of one of his novels when his newest pupil, private investigator Leonard Cobb, is …

I Love You, Go Away (A Novel), John Matthew Steinhafel

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

I Love You, Go Away, a novel set in Milwaukee, tells the story of a twenty-two year-old nobody, Gabriel Driscoll, who meets and befriends a middle-aged, drug addicted, recluse actor, Beau Brooks. But less than six months into their friendship Beau commits suicide. At the funeral Gabriel meets a twenty-nine-year-old corporate executive, Michelle, the daughter of Beau’s long-time girlfriend. Gabriel and Michelle bond over their mutual grief and quickly strike up a romance. At the same time, Gabriel’s semi-estranged mother, Sadie, a recovering heroin addict, reaches out to him in an effort to rebuild their relationship. What follows for Gabriel …

Aspects Of Character: Quantitative Evidence And Fictional People, Jonathan Cheng

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

“Aspects of Character” uses quantitative evidence to trace new timelines in the literary history of characterization. The guiding premise of this work is that digital libraries and mathematical perspectives can shed new light on the practices used to configure fictional people. Using texts from the nineteenth to twenty-first century, this dissertation analyzes how different aspects of characters have transformed throughout history, coordinating quantitative experiments with the critical perspectives of literary scholars. This project begins by analyzing the characterization used in works of fiction that were reviewed by prestigious publications. This first experiment pushes back on a historical truism about “well-crafted” …

Dark Magic Part 1, Rachel Quaid

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Dark Magic is a novel that mixes old folklore with fantasy and a splash of modern day. This first part of the novel readies the readers to enter the world of the old Irish Aos Sì. Ophelia is a witch, living in the land of the fae. She signs up to help with a research study to better her chances at succeeding as a healer. Rhea is a member of the Tuatha de Danann, the fae folk who rule the land from their courts of old. She is sent by her caretaker to observe this study. Everyone knows witches and …

Slow Metadata, Rachel Sagner Buurma, J. Shaw

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Run Me Dusk, Zane Truman Dezeeuw

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This is a full-length novel with a critical afterward. Run Me Dusk is a falling-out of love narrative about twenty-seven-year-old Milo who, after being broken up with by his boyfriend Red, flees from Illinois back to his hometown in southwestern Colorado to meditate on his place and purpose in life. The themes covered in this book are gay relationships, family relationships, mortality, and the natural world.

Curriculum Vitae: Transsexual Life Writing And The Biofictional Novel, Pamela Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The complex relation between bio and fiction, life and writing, is central to the project I am currently working on, a comparative scholarly edition of Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex (1933), the life narrative of Lili Elbe, formerly Einar Wegener, the Danish artist who became Lili Elvenes (her legal name) through a series of surgeries in 1930. In chapter six, Andreas Sparre (the fictional name used for Wegener in the narrative) offers to tell his life story to his friends, Niels and Inger, on the night before his first surgery, his last night as …

Comparing Cultural Context Through New Historicism: The Impact Of Form Upon Content In The Serialized And Novelized Versions Of F. Scott Fitzgerald’S The Beautiful And Damned, Anna Sweeney

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I analyzed the differences between the serialized portions and subsequent novelization of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. To conduct this research, I studied the seven issues of Metropolitan magazine from September 1921 to March 1922 in which the serialized portions of The Beautiful and Damned were published, and read them against the novel. I found that the omissions and additions between the two modes of text, including the advertisements and illustrations present within the serialized portions, greatly altered the nuances and meanings of the finished novelized product. This project revealed that there is currently a …

A.S. Byatt And The ‘Perpetual Traveller’: A Reading Practice For New British Fiction, Nicole Flynn

English Faculty Publications

While most readers enjoyed, or at least admired A.S. Byatt’s Booker prize-winning novel Possession, many are puzzled by her work before and since. This essay argues that the problem is not the novels themselves, but rather the way that reader approaches them. Conventional reading practices for experimental or postmodern fiction do not enable the reader to understand and enjoy her dense, dizzying work. By examining the intertexts in her novella “Morpho Eugenia,” in particular two imaginary texts written by the protagonist William Adamson, this essay demonstrates how the novella generates a different kind of reading practice. Using Byatt’s metaphor, the …

We See Things With Our Eyes And We Want Them, Ann Ward

MFA Program for Poets & Writers Masters Theses Collection

WE SEE THINGS WITH OUR EYES AND WE WANT THEM is a novel is stories following a female narrator, Janine, through adolescence and adulthood. Whether inspired by a spark of sexual tension over snack cakes, a broken down purple ‘96 Saturn named Lydia, a child’s pool party, or an ill-advised journey through a hospital air-vent system, Janine finds herself obsessed with trying to understand those she loves, and attempts to share the deeper parts of herself in the process.

The Preparation Of The Topic Model, Rachel Sagner Buurma

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

"Sinful Creature, Full Of Weakness": The Theology Of Disability In Cummins's The Lamplighter [Review], Claudia Stokes

English Faculty Research

After several decades of scholarship that discerned general patterns in literary representations of disability, recent years have seen a turn toward the specific and the particular, with a focused concentration on the ways in which individual texts and literary moments limn bodily difference. In a recent essay about disability in the early American novel, Sari Altschuler made a compelling case for this transition by showing that some of the standard claims about literary representations of disability simply failed to apply to the specific nature of early American fiction, and she consequently called for more particularized, historically grounded analyses of literary …

Faces In A Sea Of Suffering: The Human Predicament In Saul Bellow’S The Victim, Victoria Aarons

English Faculty Research

Saul Bellow’s 1947 novel The Victim has, as its frontispiece, two epigraphs that frame and set the stage for the fraught condition of its protagonist, Asa Leventhal, as he navigates a tortuous course through the physical and psychic landscape that threatens to be his undoing. The novel’s first epigraph narrates the brief but portentous “Tale of the Trader and the Jinni,” from The Thousand and One Nights, in which a lone merchant, traveling on business and oppressed by the heat, takes shelter beneath a tree. There he breaks fast, relieving his weariness and his hunger with bread and dates. …

Mary Hallock Foote: Reconfiguring The Scarlet Letter, Redrawing Hester Prynne, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

It took 28 years after Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850 for Mary Hallock Foote to render drawings for one of the novel’s first illustrated editions, which was probably the first ever to be illustrated by a woman.(1) It took 130 years after the publication of Foote’s illustrated edition in 1878 for Project Gutenberg to digitize and disseminate Hawthorne’s novel with Foote’s illustrations.(2) It has taken seven years for Hawthorne scholarship to commence addressing and examining Foote’s edition, and theorize what her drawings suggest about the act of seeing, for the heroine’s audiences in the book, and for …

Appropriating The Restoration: Fictional Place And Time In Rose Tremain’S Restoration: A Novel Of Seventeenth-Century England, Judith Bailey Slagle

ETSU Faculty Works

Excerpt: It was the sixties—albeit the 1660s—a time for tricksters, rakes, subversive women and sexual energy on the stage. It was a time of fun for those with the means to partake of it. The “good old days” are, of course, always better from a distance, but writers on through the twentieth century found the Restoration an apt setting for their fictions about prostitution, political intrigue, and tragic or comic historical events, especially for the cinema.

Recalling Anna, Reclaiming Trauma: A Psychoanalytic Approach To Jean Rhys's "Voyage In The Dark", Emily Duffy

English Independent Study Projects

A psychoanalytic reading of Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark, which compares the experiences, dreams and memories of the character Anna with that of Freud's protagonist, Dora, in his Portrait of Dora.

Illustrations And Text: Storyworld Space And The Multimodality Of Serialized Narrative, Laura Daniel Buchholz

English Faculty Publications

This essay examines the interaction between picture and text in the construction of the narrative spaces in George W. M. Reynolds's Mysteries of London (1844–45) and William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard (1839) . Building on previous discussions from Gabriel Zoran (1984) and David Herman ( Story Logic, 2002) concerning the process by which space is constructed in verbal/written texts, this essay examines how such theories function in conjunction with the illustrations that often accompanied Victorian serialized narratives in their original publication. Specifically, I consider the interaction between the verbal and visual channels in the construction of interior rooms presented in …

The Arrest Of Caleb Williams: Unnatural Crime, Constructive Violence, And Overwhelming Terror In Late Eighteenth-Century England, Gary Dyer

English Faculty Publications

In the later eighteenth century, the twelve justices of the supreme English common law courts ruled repeatedly that blackmailing a man by threatening to accuse him of sodomitical practices constituted the capital offense of robbery; the judges focused on the overwhelming terror they claimed was unique to this threat. This legal doctrine is a covert presence in William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams (1794). Ferdinando Falkland, fearing that his secret is about to be revealed by Caleb, accuses him of having 'robbed' him, and even though Falkland's secret is literally murder, the mutual persecution and mutual terrorizing that ensue evoke the …

Jane Austen And Genre: Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, And The Triumph Of The Realistic Novel, Megan E. Hilands

Student Publications

This paper analyzes Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey in terms of genre. In particular, it examines the theatrical in Mansfield Park and the Gothic in Northanger Abbey. The production of Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows and Catherine’s Gothic novel reading are key to the analysis of these genres. However, the use of subgenres goes far beyond the Bertrams’ production and Catherine’s books. Rather, the characters themselves adopt theatrical and Gothic characteristics throughout the novel. Furthermore, when these subgenres appear, they are presented in a manner that is harmful to the main characters. In this sense, Austen invokes the …

The Dutch Smuggler's Story [Abstract Only], Devin Murphy

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The Dutch Smuggler’s Story, is a novel about Jacob Jonker, a Sea Captain, whose secret, early life comes to light in the wake of his arrest for human trafficking. Jacob grew up in a fishing family in Holland, and was conscripted into the German Navy as a teenager in 1943. Due to his seafaring ability, he was used as a test dummy for a new Nazi weapon, a one person midget submarine. When Jacob has success as a midget sub operator, he is bestowed The Knight’s Cross by the Germans as a propaganda ploy to lore more Dutch youth …

Up Too Late: A Novel Excerpt, Peter Bayless

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Tyler Sexton is a male in his mid-twenties whose life seems to have ground to a halt before it truly began. Despite the opportunities afforded him by a successful college education and an upper-middle-class family background, Tyler's life since the death of his father from heart disease has become one dominated by malaise, living alone and working a dead-end job as a grocery store customer-service manager, clinging to the family members he has left. Now, with his mother suffering from a debilitating fight with cancer and his sisters either starting their own families or withdrawing even further into episodes of …

Film Review: Gulliver's Travels, Karen Gevirtz

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

(De)Constructing Jane: Converting Austen In Film Responses, Karen Gevirtz

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

Realism And The Irish Victorian Novel, Lorcan Sirr

Other Resources

SAMENVATTING Deze thesis onderzoekt de aard van Realisme in negentiende-eeuwse Ierse fictie. De nadruk ligt hierbij op het testen van de algemeen aanvaarde vooronderstelling dat Realisme opvallend afwezig was in de Ierse werken van die periode. De negentiende eeuw kende een grote toename in geletterdheid doorheen alle klassen en vormde op die manier een ideaal beginpunt voor het ontstaan van een nieuwe markt, zowel voor auteurs als uitgevers. Vooral in het Engeland van die periode werd dit duidelijk. Er speelde zich ook verschuivingen in stijl en literaire smaken af waarbij Realisme zichzelf als het meest populaire vooropstelde. De Ierse schrijvers …

The Transatlantic Pocahontas, Gary Dyer

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Discreetly Depicting "An Outrage": Graphic Illustration And "Daisy Miller"'S Reputation, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

Rendering the first illustrated edition of "Daisy Miller" in 1892, Harry Whitney McVickar had to reconcile the novella's scandalous reputation with the polite medium of graphic illustration. McVickar highlights insignificant scenery, shows solitary figures instead of social interaction or playful flirtation, and nearly omits the heroine. His depictions and omissions contain the characters' indiscretions, and ensure that aspiring flirts and would-be Winterbournes who view his images do not "get the wrong idea." Cinematic adaptations amplify Daisy's public displays and encourage Winterbourne's voyeurism, but "Daisy Miller"'s first graphic illustrations strove instead to redeem the reputation of James's "outrage on American girlhood."

Can’T Afford The Manolos? Buy The Book!: Chick Lit & Contemporary Consumerism, Allison Cole

Undergraduate Research Symposium (UGRS)

At the airport, across from the magazines at Wal-Mart, and probably somewhere near the front of local bookstores — chick lit is everywhere. One would probably recognize it from a distance as a sea of shiny pink1, the small glossy paperbacks cheerfully beckoning from their carefully constructed display. Chick lit has exploded into the western2 market over the last decade, captivating millions of readers with their tales of young, urban professional women navigating the worlds of careers, relationships, and of course, shopping. By the end of the novel, each of these components is generally resolved in somewhat formulaic fashion