English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Dystopian Dickens: Expectant Of Hard Times, Micaela L. Hamid

Senior Honors Theses

As part of this thesis, the novel Expectant will parody different elements of two of Charles Dickens’ novels with their dystopian, futuristic setting. Expectant replicates the themes of disappointment and emotional deprivation from Great Expectations (1860-61), and dehumanization and the struggle between fancy and reason from Hard Times (1854). The parody will draw parallels from the plotlines, characters, and symbols of these novels to further cement the similarities of the themes employed with themes popularized more recently by novels of the dystopian genre.

The mission of the project is to sell the novel, Expectant, to publishers on the basis …

Holy Places, Dark Paths: Till We Have Faces And The Spiritual Conflicts Of C.S. Lewis, Joshua G. Novalis

Senior Honors Theses

Although Till We Have Faces (1956) was written late in C.S. Lewis’s life (1898-1963), during the peak of his literary renown, the novel remains one of Lewis’s least known and least accessible works. Due to its relatively ancient and obscure source material, as well as its tendency towards the esoteric, a healthy interpretation of the novel necessitates a wider look at Lewis’s life-long body of work. By approaching Till We Have Faces through the framework of Lewis and the corpus of his work, the reader can see two principal conflicts that characterize the work as a whole, and, more specifically, …