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Articles 1 - 30 of 40
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Portraits Of Children Of Alcoholics: Stories That Add Hope To Hope, Meagan Lacy
Portraits Of Children Of Alcoholics: Stories That Add Hope To Hope, Meagan Lacy
Publications and Research
This literary analysis examines the emergence of children of alcoholics narratives and their growth from "resource" texts to literary subgenre. While early texts offer useful information about parental alcoholism, they are also limited. Namely, they do not adequately mirror the diversity of children, families, and problems associated with parental alcoholism nor do they offer alternatives for children whose parents do not, or cannot, seek treatment for their addiction. Literature, on the other hand, in inviting what philosopher Martha Nussbaum refers to as "narrative play," can help children learn to understand and empathize with others, nourish their inner curiosity, and, most …
Anthology And Absence: The Post-9/11 Anthologizing Impulse, Anne Lovering Rounds
Anthology And Absence: The Post-9/11 Anthologizing Impulse, Anne Lovering Rounds
Publications and Research
The decade after the attacks of 9/11 and the fall of the World Trade Center saw a proliferation of New York-themed literary anthologies from a wide range of publishers. With titles like Poetry After 9/11, Manhattan Sonnet, Poems of New York, Writing New York, and I Speak of the City, these texts variously reflect upon their own post-9/11 plurivocality as preservative, regenerative, and reconstructive. However, the work of such anthologies is more complex than filling with plurivocality the physical and emotional hole of Ground Zero. These regional collections operate on the dilemma of all anthologies: that between collecting and editing. …
Recovering The Beauty Of Medusa, Alexander M. Schlutz
Recovering The Beauty Of Medusa, Alexander M. Schlutz
Publications and Research
This essay presents a close analysis of P.B. Shelley’s fragmentary ekphrastic poem “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery.” It places Shelley’s text in its aesthetic, mythological and historico-political contexts to demonstrate how Shelley aims to undo the ideological and representational structures of power that inform human language, art, and history, and which turn Medusa into the monstrous Other as which she appears. In Shelley’s text by contrast, Medusa becomes a figure for a revelatory beauty that cannot become visible in the distorting parameters of a discourse of power that informs our very perception of what …
Gender And Trauma From World War I To The War In Iraq: Narrative In The Aftermath Of Loss, Jenny Young Kijowski
Gender And Trauma From World War I To The War In Iraq: Narrative In The Aftermath Of Loss, Jenny Young Kijowski
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Trauma Studies is predicated on the idea of unspeakability: events that are experienced as deep psychic wounds break the frameworks for understanding, resulting in an inability to translate the experience into language. Scholars who study the literature of trauma are thus faced with this central paradox: how do writers speak the unspeakable? Trauma literature is generally regarded as texts that not only are thematically centered on a traumatic event or series of traumatic events, but also structurally reflect the symptoms of trauma. Thus the formal qualities of trauma narratives include fragmentation, contradiction, repetition, circularity, and intrusion, such that these texts …
A Man To Preserve Or Reform The Nation: Masculinity As Political Rhetoric In English Novels During The Revolution Controversy, Janne Burger Gillespie
A Man To Preserve Or Reform The Nation: Masculinity As Political Rhetoric In English Novels During The Revolution Controversy, Janne Burger Gillespie
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The English literary responses to the French Revolution have been given thorough critical attention as has the Revolution's impact on women writers and femininity. However, the Revolution's impact on and engagement with standards of manliness have been left relatively unexplored. This dissertation examines how a critique of masculinity is positioned in the space of contemporary political considerations in the quarter-century following the French Revolution. Thus, this dissertation argues that there is a dialectical engagement between masculinity and political views in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century English novels such as Maria Edgeworth's Belinda and Leonora, Charlotte Smith's Emmeline and Desmond …
Theater Matters: Female Theatricality In Hawthorne, Alcott, Brontë, And James, Keiko Miyajima
Theater Matters: Female Theatricality In Hawthorne, Alcott, Brontë, And James, Keiko Miyajima
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation examines the ways the novelists on both sides of the Atlantic use the figure of the theatrical woman to advance claims about the nature and role of women. Theater is a deeply paradoxical art form: Seen at once as socially constitutive and promoting mass conformity, it is also criticized as denaturalizing, decentering, etiolating, queering, feminizing. These anxieties coalesce around the image of the actress. In nineteenth century fiction, the image of a woman performing on stage is a powerful one, suggestive of ideal femininity, but also of negative traits including deception, artificiality and an unfeminine appetite for public …
Reframing Romantic Nature: Towards A Social Ecocriticism, Matthew Rowney
Reframing Romantic Nature: Towards A Social Ecocriticism, Matthew Rowney
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Reframing Romantic Nature: Towards a Social Ecocriticism is an attempt to offer a new way of thinking about ecological approaches to literature. Rather than separate ecology from the movement of history, or support an anthropocentric historicism, my approach aims to merge the interests of both environmental and historical criticism in order to provide a more interdisciplinary view of conceptions of the natural and the social. The process of history owes much more to the non-human than has been generally allowed, especially in the face of contemporary ecocrisis.
In the more than two hundred years since the advent of Romanticism in …
The Heterotopia Of Flight: Resisting The Domestic, Sarah Elizabeth Davis
The Heterotopia Of Flight: Resisting The Domestic, Sarah Elizabeth Davis
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The familiar image of a woman fleeing danger is a well-worn convention of heroine-centered fiction, a plot device inevitably resolved when the heroine returns safely to her home and family. This dissertation proposes a new reading of that narrative by asserting that rather than serving as a space of protection, the home poses the greatest threat to an individual's autonomy. If we understand the domestic as a space in which bodies are ordered and, more specifically, gendered, classed, and raced, the trope of flight from the domestic can be read as an act of resistance to subjugation. This act is …
On The Threshold: Breadwinning, Capitalism And The Absent/Present Father In The Works Of Three Late 20th-Century U.S. Novelists, Nancy J. Hoch
On The Threshold: Breadwinning, Capitalism And The Absent/Present Father In The Works Of Three Late 20th-Century U.S. Novelists, Nancy J. Hoch
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
As society industrialized in the nineteenth century and jobs moved outside the home, a figure which I call the absent/present father began to make his appearance in American literature. This figure, hovering physically or emotionally on the threshold of family life, never completely present but never completely absent either, has filled the pages of fiction from that time until recently when, as the U.S. becomes postindustrial, depictions of the absent/present father decline.
Bringing a socio-economic as opposed to the usual psychological perspective to my close readings of the fictional family, I explore the cultural work the absent/present father does in …
Touching Brains, Jason Tougaw
New York City Street Theater: Gender, Performance, And The Urban From Plessy To Brown, Erin Nicholson Gale
New York City Street Theater: Gender, Performance, And The Urban From Plessy To Brown, Erin Nicholson Gale
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation investigates the ordinary, public performances of fictional female characters in novels set on the streets of Manhattan during the years of legal segregation in the United States. I examine a range of actions from bragging to racial passing, and I argue these ordinary performances are central to our ability to interpret race, gender, and class relations. I detect race, class, and gender-based impulses to segregate and exclude others that overlap with the motives guiding the national, legal edict to segregate people by race. These guiding inclinations, legible through the history of Manhattan's grid, zoning laws, and the city …
Errant Memory In African American Literature Of The Long Nineteenth Century, Tristan Alexander Striker
Errant Memory In African American Literature Of The Long Nineteenth Century, Tristan Alexander Striker
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In this dissertation, I trace the complex black literary trope of errant memory through American and African American literature. Authors of African descent are constantly subjected to what I call Africanity, or the paratextual historicizing elements provided by white interlocutors that seek to impose specific caricatures and stereotypes on them and their works to force them into the American historical narrative that depends on their dehumanized and commodified status. These caricatures and stereotypes are rooted in an Africa imagined by these white interlocutors, one that does not match any reality. Authors of African descent transcend this paratextual Africanity through what …
Aviation Cinema, Kevin L. Ferguson
Finding Private Suhre: On The Trail Of Louisa May Alcott’S “Prince Of Patients”, John Matteson
Finding Private Suhre: On The Trail Of Louisa May Alcott’S “Prince Of Patients”, John Matteson
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
Ni Francaise, Ni Juive, Ni Arabe: The Influence Of Nineteenth Century French Judaism On The Emergence Of Franco- Jewish- Arab Literature, Deborah Rosalind Gruber
Ni Francaise, Ni Juive, Ni Arabe: The Influence Of Nineteenth Century French Judaism On The Emergence Of Franco- Jewish- Arab Literature, Deborah Rosalind Gruber
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This study proposes that the influence of nineteenth century French Judaism on the Jewish communities of the Middle East from approximately 1910‐1956 has had an indelible influence on the evolution of Franco- Jewish‐Arab literature today. From the late nineteenth century, the education of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire was provided by the Paris based Alliance Israélite Universelle, an organization established by French Jews with the purpose of emancipating disadvantaged Jewish communities outside of France. The result was the establishment of Franco‐Jewish-Arab communities that regarded French education as a means of both social and economic advancement. Although the curriculum of …
Dark Matter: Susan Howe, Muriel Rukeyser, And The Scholar's Art, Stefania Heim
Dark Matter: Susan Howe, Muriel Rukeyser, And The Scholar's Art, Stefania Heim
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Instead of describing poetry as a set of constraints or history of practices, Muriel Rukeyser calls it "one kind of knowledge." Dark Matter heeds Rukeyser's call, theorizing a poetics of the "scholar's art," in which documentary investigation, autobiographical exploration, and formal innovation are mutual, interwoven concerns. The dissertation pairs American poets Susan Howe (b. 1937) and Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), reading their hybrid works not through the received categories of American poetry, or through common generic and disciplinary divisions, but using an inductive methodology that takes its lead from the poets. Understanding Howe and Rukeyser's literary experiments as serious interventions in …
The Sadistic Reader: Gender And The Pleasures Of Violence In The Novel, Pamela Burger
The Sadistic Reader: Gender And The Pleasures Of Violence In The Novel, Pamela Burger
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This project seeks to explain the prevalence of narratives that feature sexual violence against women in the tradition of the Anglophone novel. To this end, it posits the existence of a sadistic reading practice that coincides with readers' sympathetic identification. A sadistic reader takes pleasure in the bodily violation of the woman at the center of a novel; such a reader enters the text expecting violence, and experiences a sense of narrative gratification when the inevitable violation plays out. These expectations emerge from repeated interactions with a literary tradition in which victimized heroines are routine. To explore such sadism, I …
Loosening The Critical Corset: New Approaches To The Short Fiction Of Kate Chopin And Ruth Stuart, Kathryn Erin O'Donoghue
Loosening The Critical Corset: New Approaches To The Short Fiction Of Kate Chopin And Ruth Stuart, Kathryn Erin O'Donoghue
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
My dissertation uses the works and lives of two popular late-nineteenth-century writers, Ruth McEnery Stuart and Kate Chopin, as a heuristic to solve the literary mystery of how "fiction by women" became "women's fiction." While feminist scholars resuscitated Chopin, Stuart remains ignored. The realism and irony of Chopin's novel The Awakening resonate with modern readers, but the sentimental aspects of Stuart's work and Chopin's short fiction remain problematic. The aesthetic movements of realism and naturalism influenced literary taste to the extent that sentimentalism is anathema to contemporary critics. I participate in recent scholarship that explores how sentimentalism has been used …
The Mystification Of Christian Salvation: On The Anxiety Of Redemption In Renaissance Poetry And Drama, Kimberly Paige Ambroziak
The Mystification Of Christian Salvation: On The Anxiety Of Redemption In Renaissance Poetry And Drama, Kimberly Paige Ambroziak
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
"The Legend of the Red Crosse Knight," "Doctor Faustus," "Hamlet," and "Samson Agonistes" are secular poetic explorations with a common idea: the possibility of Christian salvation. These examples of the redemptive quest seem to reveal the uneasiness of salvation which is representative, if only broadly, of the atmosphere in which their authors were writing. More specifically, the intention of this study is to reveal the possibility and nature of Christian uncertainty as it is firmly rooted in the early modern period. As Christian doctrine proves protean from its beginnings in the first century to Protestant tracts in the sixteenth, these …
The Ties That Bind: Gender, Race, And Empire In Caribbean Indenture Narratives, Alison Joan Klein
The Ties That Bind: Gender, Race, And Empire In Caribbean Indenture Narratives, Alison Joan Klein
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation traces the ways that oppressive gender roles and racial tensions in the Caribbean today developed out of the British imperial system of indentured labor. Between 1837 and 1920, after slavery was abolished in the British colonies and before most colonies achieved independence, approximately 750,000 laborers, primarily from India and China, traveled to the Caribbean under indenture. This is a critical but under-explored aspect of colonial history, as this immigration dramatically altered the ethnic make up of the Caribbean, the cultural norms and traditions of those who migrated, and the structure of British imperialism. I focus on depictions of …
Pierre Matthieu En España. La Biografía Política En Las Traducciones De Juan Pablo Mártir Rizo Y Lorenzo Van Der Hammen., Adrian M. Izquierdo
Pierre Matthieu En España. La Biografía Política En Las Traducciones De Juan Pablo Mártir Rizo Y Lorenzo Van Der Hammen., Adrian M. Izquierdo
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This Dissertation studies how history is construed in the 17th century through the reception, translation and adaptation in Spain of French historiographer Pierre Matthieu's historical writings, and particularly, the use of biography as a means to illustrate the political landscape of 17th-century France and Spain. We demonstrate how the biographical tradition inherited from the classics and the early Italian Renaissance is adapted to Counter-Reformation Catholicism to produce a political biography intended not only to advise kings and ministers on the dangers of political power, but also to warn those in power about their current excesses.
The appeal of Matthieu's biographies …
The Trickster In Nella Larsen's Passing (1929): Performing And Masquerading An American Identity, Rachael Miller Benavidez
The Trickster In Nella Larsen's Passing (1929): Performing And Masquerading An American Identity, Rachael Miller Benavidez
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This thesis examines Nella Larsen's novel Passing (1929) and the performative nature of `passing' as white through the perspective of the archetypal trickster myth. I read the novel as a trickster tale that challenges gender roles and the construct of race in defiance of the dominant power structure that defines the American identity. I position the character Clare Kendry Bellew as a trickster figure, who performs an identity to defy race and gender roles. My argument challenges the general theory that black passing novels are solely tragic, and the perception that humor is not a pedagogical tool or representation of …
The Literary Legacy Of The Federal Writers' Project, Sara Rendene Rutkowski
The Literary Legacy Of The Federal Writers' Project, Sara Rendene Rutkowski
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Established by President Roosevelt in 1935 as part of the New Deal, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) put thousands of unemployed professionals to work documenting American life during the Depression. Federal writers--many of whom would become famous, including Ralph Ellison, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, and Dorothy West--collected reams of oral histories and folklore, and produced hundreds of guides to cities and states across the country. Yet, despite both the Project's extraordinary volume of writing and its unprecedented support for writers, few critics have examined it from a literary perspective. Instead, the FWP has …
Educating Desire: Auto/Bio/Graphical Impressions Of Addiction In/And Alcoholics Anonymous (Aa), Peter Waldman
Educating Desire: Auto/Bio/Graphical Impressions Of Addiction In/And Alcoholics Anonymous (Aa), Peter Waldman
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation is an attempt to connect the personal with the socio-historical--addiction with Addiction, respectively. It is also an attempt to demonstrate that knowledge production can be generated through radically non-traditional means.
What follows is an interpretive, impressionistic, exploratory narrative about addiction in/and Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). It is also a narrative about Narrative. I 'tell' a semi-fictional auto/bio/graphical tale of one 'open' AA meeting in order to disclose what it's like to be an addict and a newcomer in AA. In the 'notes' sections after all but one of the chapters the sober researcher takes over. These 'made-up' aspects of …
Safety And Silence In A Shakespearean Space, Cheryl Hogue Smith
Safety And Silence In A Shakespearean Space, Cheryl Hogue Smith
Publications and Research
This article describes a homophobic incident in a Shakespeare community college class and explains how the teacher then tried to create a safe space for all students.
"The Problem Of Locomotion": Infrastructure And Automobility In Three Postcolonial Urban Nigerian Novels, Danica B. Savonick
"The Problem Of Locomotion": Infrastructure And Automobility In Three Postcolonial Urban Nigerian Novels, Danica B. Savonick
Graduate Student Publications and Research
This essay analyzes automobility in three postcolonial urban Nigerian novels: the fantasy of self-propulsion that subtends a colonial modernity materialized through the erection of urban infrastructure. Tracing the disjuncture between automobility and infrastructure—the “problem of locomotion” (Achebe)—reveals the inextricability of mobility, modernity, urbanism, and colonial violence even into Nigeria’s formally postcolonial period. By exploring how characters both invest in and move beyond inherited colonial narratives, these novels challenge top-down images of Lagos, instead depicting it as a city “otherwise fashioned” (Abani) from their characters’ perspectives on what it feels like to dwell and sell on the streets.
The Impact Of Colonialism In Moll Flanders And The Belle’S Stratagem, Tamara Kathwari
The Impact Of Colonialism In Moll Flanders And The Belle’S Stratagem, Tamara Kathwari
Dissertations and Theses
No abstract provided.
Protofeminist Women In Bronte’S Jane Eyre And Braddon’S Lady Audley’S Secret, Allison Wong
Protofeminist Women In Bronte’S Jane Eyre And Braddon’S Lady Audley’S Secret, Allison Wong
Dissertations and Theses
No abstract provided.
The Odds And The Ends: What To Do With Some Letters Of Catharine Macaulay, Olivera Jokic
The Odds And The Ends: What To Do With Some Letters Of Catharine Macaulay, Olivera Jokic
Publications and Research
Biographers of Catharine Macaulay (1731–91), much like her contemporaries, often agreed that the woman’s reputation was shaped by the peculiar company she kept: prominent, intellectual, political, radical, revolutionary, and occasion- ally “foolish.”3 This essay examines why it matters what company a writer keeps, especially when that writer is a woman and her reputation is tied to the status of her letters and her correspondents.
“The Problem Of Locomotion”: Infrastructure And Automobility In Three Postcolonial Urban Nigerian Novels, Danica Savonick
“The Problem Of Locomotion”: Infrastructure And Automobility In Three Postcolonial Urban Nigerian Novels, Danica Savonick
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.