English Language and Literature Commons^™

Of Method: A Propaedeutic To Coleridge's Prose Works, Michael A. Granger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Coleridge’s prose works, published and unpublished, demonstrate a thorough and critical testing and understanding of British and German philosophical responses to skepticism and the ability of philosophy to progress by maintaining a double-minded and conflicted suture of both the practical or imaginative eclipse of knowledge and theorizing the hypothetical epistemological absolute that explains the relativity of facticity. Any inadequate method of inquiry stagnates within attempting a purely figurative or purely demonstrative solution to skepticism. Thus, the appropriate way to approach Coleridge’s understanding of philosophy is the struggle to make inquiry adequate though progression. Coleridge’s methodological impulse originates explicitly in a …

The Literary Fairy: Celtic Folklore’S Influence On Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Joshua Dobbs

Doctoral Dissertations

There is a dissonance between the folkloric fairies and those presented by pop-cultural institutions such as Disney which has effected modern literary criticism of nineteenth-century British literature. The Disnified fairy is feminine, small, capable of flight, often with insect-like wings, and equipped with a magic wand with which she does good deeds to help others. She is largely based on fairy tales and is the embodiment of the modern conceptualization of the fairy, but she bears little, if any, resemblance to the fearsome fairies of Celtic folklore. Although nineteenth-century literature is rife with folkloric fairy references, those references are frequently …

The Battle Of The Sexes: Montagu V. Swift, Madison Savoie

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Two of the most interesting “guardians” of eighteenth-century sociocultural standards were the satirists Jonathan Swift and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Swift is remembered by scholars as one of the “greatest prose satirists in the history of English Literature,” but Montagu, until recent decades, has been less well-known. This thesis will look at the satirical poetic dialogue between the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Swift and the Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and provide insights into the sociocultural dynamics of gender in eighteenth-century British print life as revealed by the individual texts.

The Fantastic And The First World War, Brian Kenna

Dissertations (1934 -)

This study argues that the First World War was a key event in the formation of the modern fantasy genre. It asserts that academic literary criticism formed around a set of assumptions that left it ill-equipped to conceptualize the fantastic as a modern mode of writing. By studying veteran English authors of World War I, including Siegfried Sassoon, David Jones, and J. R. R. Tolkien, it identifies the fantastic as an essential means of representing and responding to a set of events that were experienced as incomprehensible, even impossible. Because it offered a safe means of engaging the events of …

The Non-Identical Anglophone Bildungsroman: From The Categorical To The De-Centering Literary Subject In The Black Atlantic, Jarad Heath Fennell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My goal with this dissertation was to discover more about how the Bildungsroman genre in English or the coming-of-age story became a staple of post-colonial and ethnic minority writing. I grew up reading novels like these and feel a great deal of affection for them, and I wanted to understand how authors writing in these other traditions represented a broader response to colonialist Western culture. My method was to survey philosophical approaches to subjectivity and subject-formation, read a wide variety of texts I understood as engaging with the Bildung tradition, and examining how they represented subject-formation.

While I originally saw …

Metafiction, Fairy Tale, And Female Desire In A.S. Byatt‘S Possession: A Romance, Susan Marie Kieda

Masters Theses

Analysis of the novel Possession: A Romance by A.S. Byatt, in which Byatt contributes to a metamorphosis of the fairy tale genre through a reappropriation of individual tales and characters, such as the Grimm Brothers‘ Little Snow White and The Glass Coffin; Hans Christian Andersen‘s The Snow Queen; and the French fairy story Melusine. Analysis of the metafictional devices Byatt uses to achieve this reappropriation such as the writing and reading of letters, journals, and works of fiction within the novel, as well as an intertextuality created by repeating fairy tale allusions. Analysis of Byatt‘s character development …

The Search For Authentic Travel In Early Twentieth-Century British Magazines, Christina Bertrand Firebaugh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Edwardian travel writing between roughly 1905 and 1914 serves as a bridge between the closing of the long Victorian period, the beginnings of modernism, and the changes to come in the twentieth century. The search for authentic experience characterizes travel writing in the Edwardian era. Significant cultural, technological, and social changes caused Edwardians to examine their perceptions about possibilities for authentic engagement with other places and people in their travels. As a result, Edwardian travel writers explore various methods by which to engage authentically with other cultures. Drawing on literary theory, anthropology, and cultural studies, this dissertation examines a number …

British Fascism In The 1930s In Life And Literature, Jennifer M. Janes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Political and economic turmoil in 1930s Britain gave rise to a home-grown fascist movement led by the controversial Oswald Mosley. Literature of this period by Joseph O’Neill and Rex Warner mirrored the internal nature of the British fascist movement by depicting fascist-like societies embedded under or entrenched within the English countryside. Their metaphors of fascism rising as a solution to fear and disorder conjure the threat of fascism that was rising in Europe in that period. The metaphors are made more particularly relevant by the fact that the forces of Italian, German, and British fascism were not invasions from without, …

Striving For Salvation : Margaret Anna Cusack, Sainthood, Religious Foundations And Revolution In Ireland, 1829-1899, Sean Heather K. Mcgraw

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Margaret Anna Cusack, later Sister Mary Frances Clare, and also known as Mother Clare, (6 May 1829 - 5 June 1899) was an Anglo-Irish Protestant who became a Catholic Nun and the foundress of a still existent Catholic religious order, the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace. She was also a vociferous champion for the poor, for Irish political rights, for Irish nationalism, and was the first Irish nationalist woman historian and a prolific writer who wrote more than one hundred works. She was a radical, a revolutionary, a champion and hero, a source of conflict and …

Innocent Artists: Creativity And Growing Up In Literatures Of Maturation, 1850-1920, Whitney Elaine Jones

Doctoral Dissertations

This project combines three subgenres of the novel—children’s literature, the Bildungsroman, and the Künstlerroman—under a new comprehensive category I term “literatures of maturation,” or texts that share a concern with the inner and outer formation of the individual, with growing up, and with childhood. By reading British literatures of maturation from both the Victorian and modern eras (that is, within the time frame of the Golden Age of children’s literature), I reveal that, creativity disrupts literary plots of growth and development, and that social integration and artistic maturation battle for dominance in the child’s journey to adulthood, resulting …

Going Into The Word-Hoard: The Writing Process, Language, And Its Implications In The Poetry Of Medbh Mcguckian And Paul Muldoon, Elizabeth Peele

Theses and Dissertations

As two prominent figures of Northern Irish poetry, Medbh McGuckian and Paul Muldoon are often discussed as being "difficult" and "oblique." However, I argue that this categorization of their poetry is too simplistic and overlooks the dissimilarities in their writing process and view of language, and ultimately, in their poetry itself. By going back to the fundamentals of their works, I claim that the basis for this dissimilarity is, in fact, a differing view of the founding blocks of poetic language. McGuckian sees syntax as being the important factor while Muldoon focuses on the individual lexical meaning of words. These …

Public Parks And Private Ideologies: Building Nineteenth-Century British National Identity Through Landscape, Laura Swaim Witherington

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project examines how nineteenth-century landscape theories shaped national identity and were influenced by it. Predominant is an investigation of how the desire for a more egalitarian class structure underlies the changes in British landscape design from an attachment to classical exclusivity through pastoral tropes to a limited acceptance of middle and working classes within public landscapes that represented patriotic values. Although poetic works inform the study, novel-length fiction and non-fiction prose and periodicals are also a primary source of consideration. Novels demonstrate how fictional geography generates the constructs of national ideology, and although canonical works typically referenced in studu …

Gothic Journeys: Imperialist Discourse, The Gothic Novel, And The European Other, Charles Michael Bondhus

Open Access Dissertations

In 1790s England, an expanding empire, a growing diaspora of English settlers in foreign territories, and spreading political unrest in Ireland and on the European continent all helped to contribute to a destabilization of British national identity. With the definition of “Englishperson” in flux, Ireland, France, and Italy—nations which are prominently featured in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—could be understood, similar to England’s colonies, as representing threats to the nation’s cultural integrity. Because the people of these European …

Speaking Of Myself: Independence, Self-Representation, And The Speeches Of Rudyard Kipling, Jacob M. Wilkes

Theses and Dissertations

Rudyard Kipling is a man of immense diversity. He successfully managed to write for over half a century in a variety of genres: short story, travelogue, ballad, personal narrative, and news reporting, to name only a few. While doing so, Kipling readily interacted with a range of subjects and created a multitude of ideas. Likewise, on a personal level, Kipling led an immensely diverse life. He could easily claim four separate continents as home, living variously in India, the United States, England, and South Africa. By profession he was a writer, but as an observer he was so skilled that …

Marginally Male: Re-Centering Effeminate Male Characters In E. M. Forster's A Room With A View And Howards End, Damion Clark

English Theses

In this thesis I argue that understanding Forster’s effeminate male characters is central to understanding the novels that they appear in. Tibby in Howards End and Cecil in A Room with a View are often viewed as inconsequential figures that provide comic relief and inspire pity. But if, instead of keeping them at the margins, readers put Tibby and Cecil in direct contact and conflict with the dominant themes of gender identity, gendered power structures, and gender equality in these novels, these characters develop a deeper significance that details the fin de siècle’s ever-changing attitudes regarding prescribed gender roles for …

Keeping The Money Under The Soap : Constructions Of The English And English Migrants In Australian Nationalist Texts, Ann Rule

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Where does an Englishman hide his money?' 'I don't know. Where does an Englishman hide his money?' 'Under the soap'. This thesis interrogates representations of ‘Englishness’and by extension, English migrants, in a variety of Australian cultural texts, including film, television, newspapers and academic publications. Underlying this investigation are two major research questions: What are the factors informing the ambivalent place accorded 'Englishness' in Australian cultural texts? and What can this form of investigation tell us about Australian culture and associated national myths? I have attempted to reinterpret these national myths through the texts/ narratives of Englishness and class. One of …